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Nothing Less than Spiritual Renewal Can Save the New World!
When a person begins to act logically according to others, then one has left one’s youth behind. Rational principles can focus our judgments and set up guidelines for reflection, and we must finally choose for ourselves in the sense that the choice rests on our direct self-knowledge not only of what things we want but also of how much we want them. Sometimes there is no way to avoid having to assess the relative intensity of our desires. Rational principles can help us to do this, but they cannot always determine these estimates in a routine fashion. To be sure, there is one formal principle that seems to provide a general answer. This is the principle to adopt that plan which maximizes the expected net balance of satisfaction. Or to express the criterion less hedonistically, if more loosely, one is directed t take that course most likely to realize one’s most important aims. However, this principle also fails to provide us with an explicit procedure for making up our minds. It is clearly left to the agent oneself to decide what it is that one most wants and to judge the comparative importance of one’s several ends. The notion of deliberative rationality is one that characterizes a person’s future good on the whole as what one would now desire and seek if the consequences of all the various courses of conduct open to one were, at the present point of time, accurately foreseen by one and adequately realized in imagination. An individual’s good is the hypothetical composition of impulsive forces that results from deliberative reflection meeting certain conditions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
We can say that the intelligible plan for a person is the one (among those consistent with the counting principles and other principles of rational choice once established) which one would choose with deliberative rationality. It is the plan that would be decided upon as the outcome of careful reflection in which the agent reviewed, in the light of all the relevant facts, what it would be like to carry out these plans and thereby ascertained the course of action that would best realize one’s more fundamental desires. In this definition of deliberative rationality it is assumed that there are no errors of calculation or reasoning, and that the facts are more correctly assessed. I suppose also that the agent is under no misconceptions as to what one really wants. “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out,” reports Proverbs 25.2. In most cases anyway, when one achieves one’s aim, one does not find that one no longer wants it and wishes that one had done something else instead. Moreover, the agent’s knowledge of one’s situation and the consequences of carrying out each plan is presumed to be accurate and complete. No relevant circumstances are left out of account. Thus the rational plan for an individual is on that one would adopt if one possessed full information. It is the objectively rational plan for one and determines one’s real good. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
As things are, of course, if we follow this or that plan, our knowledge of what will happen is incomplete. Often we do not know what is the rational plan for us; the most that we can have is a reasonable belief as to where our good lies, and sometimes we can only conjecture. However, if the agent does the best that a rational person can do with the information available to one, then the plan one follows is a subjectively rational plan. One’s choice may be an unhappy one, but if so it is because one’s beliefs are understandably mistaken or one’s knowledge insufficient, and not because one drew hasty and fallacious inferences or was confused as to what one really wanted. In this case a person is not to be faulted for any discrepancy between one’s apparent and one’s real good. The notion of deliberative rationality is obviously high complex, combining many elements. One could if necessary classify the kinds of mistake that can be made, the sorts of tests that the agent might apply to see if one has the adequate knowledge, and so on. It should be noted, however, that a rational person will not usually continue to deliberate until one has found the best plan open to one. Often one will be content if one forms a satisfactory plan (or subplan), that is, one that meets various minimum conditions. Rational deliberation is itself an actively like any other, and the extent to which one should engage in it is subject to rational decision. The formal rule is that we should deliberate up to the point where the likely benefits from improving our plan are just worth the time and effort of reflection. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Once we take the costs of deliberation into account, it is unreasonable to worry about finding the best plan, the one that we would choose had we complete information. It is perfectly rational to follow a satisfactory plan when the prospective returns from further calculation and additional knowledge do not outweigh the trouble. There is even nothing irrational in an aversion to deliberation itself provided that one is prepare to accept the consequences. Goodness as rationality does not attribute any special value to the process of deciding. The importance to the agent of careful reflection will presumably vary from one individual to another. Nevertheless, a person is being irrational if one’s unwillingness to think about what is the best (or a satisfactory) thing to do leads one into misadventures that on consideration one would concede that one should have taken thought to avoid. In this account of deliberative rationality I have assumed a certain competence on the part of the person deciding: one knows the general features of one’s wants and ends both present and future, and one is able to estimate the relative intensity of one’s desires, and to decide if necessary what one really wants. Moreover, one can envisage the alternatives open to one and establish a coherent ordering of them: given any two plans one can work out which one prefers or whether one is indifferent between them, and these preferences are transitive. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Once a plan is settled upon, one is able to adhere to it and one can resist present temptations and distractions that interfere with its execution. These assumptions accord with the familiar notion of rationality that I have used all along. Keeping in mind that our overall aim is to carry out a rational plan (or subplan), it is clear that some features of desires make doing this impossible. For example, we cannot realize ends the descriptions of which are meaningless, or contradict well-established truths. Since pie (3.14) is a transcendental number, it would be pointless to try to prove that it is an algebraic number. To be sure, a mathematician in attempting to prove this proposition might discover by the way many important facts, and this achievement might redeem one’s efforts. However, insofar as one’s end was to prove a falsehood, one’s plan would be open to criticism; and once one became aware of this, one would no longer have this aim. The same thing holds for desires that depend upon our having incorrect beliefs. It is not excluded that mistake opinions may have a beneficial effect by enabling us to proceed with our plans, being so to speak useful illusions. Nevertheless, the desires that these beliefs support are irrational to the degree that the falsehood of these beliefs makes it impossible to execute the plan, or prevents superior plans from being adopted. (I should observe here that in the thin theory the value of knowing the facts is derived from their relation to the successful execution of rational plans. So far at least there are no grounds for attributing intrinsic value to having true beliefs.) #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
We may also investigate the circumstances under which we have acquired our desires and conclude that some of our aims are in various respects out of line. Thus a desire may spring from excessive generalization, or arise from more or less accidental associations. This is especially likely to be so in the case of aversions developed when we are younger and do not possess enough experience and maturity to make the necessary corrections. Other wants may be inordinate, having acquired their peculiar urgency as an overreaction to a prior period of severe deprivation or anxiety. The study of these processes and their disturbing influence on the normal development of our system of desires is not our concern here. They do however suggest certain critical reflections that are important devices of deliberation. Awareness of the genesis of our wants can often make it perfectly clear to us that we really do desire certain things more than others. As some aims seem less important in the face of critical scrutiny, or even lose their appeal entirely, others may assume an assured prominence that provides sufficient grounds for choice. Of course, it is conceivable that despite the unfortunate conditions under which some of our desires and aversions have developed, they may still fit into and even greatly enhance the fulfillment of rational plans. If so, they turn out to be perfectly rational after all. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
If overstimulation at the sensory level increases the distortion with which we perceive reality, cognitive overstimulation interferes with our ability to “think.” While some human responses to novelty are involuntary, others are preceded by conscious thought, and this depends upon our ability to absorb, manipulate, evaluate and retain information. Rational behaviour, in particular, depends upon a ceaseless flow of data from the environment. It depends upon the power of the individual to predict, with at least fair success, the outcome of one’s own actions. To do this, one must be able to predict how the environment will respond to one’s acts. Sanity, itself, thus hinges on human’s ability to predict one’s immediate, personal future on the basis of information fed one by the environment. When the individual is plunged into a fast and irregular changing situation, or a novelty-loaded context, however, one’s predictive accuracy plummets. One can no longer make the reasonably correct assessments on which rational behaviour is dependent. To compensate for this, to bring one’s accuracy up to the normal level again, one must scoop up and process far more information than before. And one must do this at extremely high rates of speed. In short, the more rapidly changing and novel the environment, the more information the individual needs to process in order to make effective, rational decisions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Yet just as there are limits on how much sensory input we can accept, there are in-built constraints on our ability to process information. In the words of psychologist George A. Miller of Rockefeller University, there are “severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process, and remember.” By classifying information, by abstracting and “coding” it in various ways, we manage to stretch these limits, yet ample evidence demonstrates that our capabilities are finite. To discover these outer limits, psychologist and communications theorists have set about testing what they call the “channel capacity” of the human organism. For the purposes of these experiments, the regard humans as a “channel.” Information enters from the outside. It is processed. It exists in the form of actions based on decisions. The speed and accuracy of human information processing can be measured by comparing the speed of information input with the speed and accuracy of output. Information has been defined technically and measure in terms of units called “bits.” (A bit is the amount of information needed to make a decision between two equally likely alternatives. The number of bits needed increases by one as the number of such alternatives doubles.) By now, experiments have established rates for the processing involved in a wide variety of tasks from reading, typing, and playing the piano to manipulating dials or doing mental arithmetic. And while researcher differ as to the exact figures, they strongly agree on two basic principles: first, that humans have limited capacity; and second, that overloading the system leads to serious breakdown of performance. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Imagine, for example, an assembly line worker in a factory making childrens’ blocks. One’s job is to press a button each time a red block passes in front of one on the conveyor belt. So long as the belt moves at a reasonable speed, one will have little difficulty. One’s performance will approach 100 percent accuracy. So long as the belt moves at a reasonable speed, one will have little difficulty. One’s performance will approach 100 percent accuracy. We know that if the pace is too slow, one’s mind will wander, and one’s performance will deteriorate. We also know that is the belt moved too fast, one will falter, miss, grow confused and uncoordinated. One is likely to become tense and irritable. One may even take a swat at the machine out of pure frustration. Ultimately, one will give up trying to keep pace. Here the information demands are simple, but picture a more complex task. Now the blocks streaming down the line are of many different colours. One’s instructions are to press the button only when a certain colour pattern appears—a yellow block, say, followed by two reds and a green. In this task, one must take in and process far more information before one can decide whether or not to hit the button. All other things being equal, one will have even greater difficulty keeping up as the pace of the lines accelerates. In a still more demanding task, we not only force the worker to process a lot of data before deciding whether to hit the button, but we then can force one to decide which of several buttons to press. We can also vary the number of times each button must be pressed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Now one’s instructions might read: For colour pattern yellow-red-red-green, hit button number two once; for pattern green-blue-yellow-green, hit button number six three times; and so forth. Such tasks require the worker to process a large amount of data in order to carry out one’s task. Speeding up the conveyor now will destroy one’s accuracy even more rapidly. Experiments like these have been built up to dismaying degrees of complexity. Test have involved flashing lights, musical tones, letters, symbols, spoken words, and a wide array of other stimuli. And subjects, asked to drum fingertips, speak phrases, solve puzzles, and perform an assortment of other tasks, have been reduced to blithering ineptitude. The results unequivocally show that no matter what the task, there is a speed above which it cannot be performed—and not simply because of inadequate muscular dexterity. The top speed is often imposed by mental rather than muscular limitations. These experiments also reveal that the greater the number of alternative courses of action open to the subject, the longer it takes one to reach a decision and carry it out. Clearly, these findings can help us understand certain forms of psychological upset. Managers plagued by demands for rapid, incessant and complex decisions; pupils deluged with facts and hit with repeated tests; housewife or househusbands confronted wit squalling children, jangling telephone, over flowing email, broken washing machines, the wail of rock and roll from the teenager’s loft areas on the second floor of the house, and the whine of the television set in the parlor—may well find their ability to think and act clearly impaired by the waves of information crashing into their senses. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
It is more than possible that some of the symptoms noted among battle-stressed soldiers, disaster victims, and culture shocked travelers are related to this kind of information overload. One of the men who has pioneered in information studies, Dr. James G. Miller, director of the Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan, states flatly that “Glutting a person with more information than one can process may lead to disturbance.” Dr. Miller suggests, in fact, that information over load may be related to various forms of mental illness. One of the striking features of schizophrenia, for example, is “incorrect associative responses.” Ideas and words that ought to be linked in the subject’s mind are not, and vice versa. The schizophrenic tends to think in arbitrary or highly personalized categories. Confronted with a set of blocks of various kinds—triangles, cubes, cones, et cetera—the normal person is likely to categorize them in terms of geometric shape. The schizophrenic askes to classify them is just as likely to say, “They are all soldiers” or “They all make me feel sad.” In the volume Disorders of Communication, Dr. Miller describes experiments using word association test to compare normals and schizophrenics. Normal subjects were divided into two groups, and asked to associate various words with other words or concepts. One group worked at its own pace. The other worked under time pressure—id est, under conditions of rapid information input. The time-pressed subject camp up with responses more like those of schizophrenics than of self-paced normals. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Similar experiments conducted by psychologist G. Usdansky and L.J. Chapman made possible a more refined analysis of the types of errors made by subjects working under forced-pace, high information-input rates. They, too, concluded that increasing the speed of response brought out a pattern of errors among normals that is peculiarly characteristic of schizophrenics. “One might speculate,” Dr. Miller suggests, “that schizophrenia (by some as-yet-unknow process, perhaps a metabolic fault which increases neural ‘noise’) lowers the capacities of channels involved in cognitive information processing. Schizophrenics consequently have difficulties in coping with information inputs at standard rates likes the difficulties experienced by normals at rapid rates. As a result, schizophrenics make errors at standard rates like those made by normals under fast, forced-input rates.” Dr. Miller argues, the breakdown of human performance under heavy information loads may be related to psychopathology in ways we have not yet begun to explore. Yet, even without understanding its potential impact, we are accelerating the generalized rate of change in society. We are forcing people to adapt to a new life pace, to confront novel situations and master them in ever shorter intervals. We are forcing them to choose among fast-multiplying options. We are, in other words, forcing them to process information at a far more rapid pace than was necessary in slowly-evolving societies. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
There can be little doubt that we are subjecting at least some of them to cognitive overstimulation. What consequences this may have for mental health in the techno-societies has yet to be determined. Now whether it is a question of understanding a fellow human being or of self-knowledge, I must in both cases leave all theoretical assumptions behind me. Since scientific knowledge not only enjoys universal esteem but, in the eyes of modern humans, count as the only intellectual and spiritual authority, understanding the individual obliges me to commit the lese majeste, so to speak, of turning a blind eye to scientific knowledge. This is a sacrifice not lightly made, for the scientific attitude cannot rid itself so easily of its sense of responsibility. And if the psychologist happens to be a doctor who wants not only to classify one’s patient scientifically but also to understand one as a human being, one is threatened with a conflict of duties between the two diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive attitudes of knowledge on the one had and understanding on the other. This conflict cannot be solved by an either/or but only by a kind of two-way thinking: doing one thing while not losing sight of the other. In view of the fact that, in principle, the positive advantages of knowledge work specifically to the disadvantage of understanding, the judgement resulting therefrom is likely to be something of a paradox. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Judged scientifically, the individual is nothing but a unit which repeats itself ad infinitum and could just as well be designated with a letter of the alphabet. For understanding, on the other hand, it is just the unique individual human being who, when stripped of all those conformities and regularities so dear to the heart of the scientist, is the supreme and only real object of investigation. The doctor, above all, should be aware of this contradiction. On the one hand, one is equipped with the statistical truths of one’s scientific training, and on the other, one is faced with the task of treating a sick person, who especially in the case of psychic suffering, requires individual understanding. The more schematic the treatment is, the more resistances it—quite rightly—calls up in the patient, and the more the cure is jeopardized. The psychotherapist sees oneself compelled, willy-nilly, to regard the individuality of a patient as an essential fact in the picture and to arrange one’s methods of treatment accordingly. Today, over the whole field of medicine, it is recognized that the task of the doctor consists in treating the sick person, not an abstract illness. This illustration from the realm of medicine is only a special instance of the problem of education and training in general. Scientific education is based in the main on statistical truths and abstract knowledge and therefore imparts an unrealistic, rational picture of the World, in which the individual, as a merely marginal phenomenon, plays no role. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The individual, however, as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic carrier of reality, the concrete human as opposed to the unreal ideal or “normal” human to whom the scientific statements refer. What is more, most of the natural sciences try to represent the results of their investigations as though these had come into existence without human’s intervention, in such a way that the collaboration of the psyche—an indispensable factor—remains invisible. (An exception to this is modern physics, which recognize that the observed is not independent of the observer.) So, in this respect as well, science conveys a picture of the World from which a real human psyche appears to be excluded—the very antithesis of the “humanities.” Under the influence of scientific assumptions, not only the psyche but the individual human and, indeed, all individua events whatsoever suffer a levelling down and a process of blurring that distorts the picture of reality into a conceptual average. We ought not to underestimate the psychological effect of the statistical World-picture: it thrusts aside the individual in favour of anonymous units that pile up into mass formations. Instead of the concreter individual, you have the names of organizations and, at the highest point, the abstract idea of the State as the principle of political reality. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The moral responsibility of the individual is then inevitably replaced by the policy of the State (raison d’etat). Instead of moral and mental differentiation of the individual, you have public welfare and the raising of the living standard. The goals and meaning of the individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself. The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to how one should live one’s own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed, educated as a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance wit the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses. The rulers, in their turn, are just as much social units as the ruled, and are distinguished only by the fact that they are specialized mouthpieces of the State doctrine. They do not need to be personalities capable of judgment, but throughgoing specialists who are unusable outside their line of business. State policy decides what shall be taught and studied. This is why religion is important. It is a way that we are able to retain our identity for God is the highest authority and in control and we cannot allow our minds to be solely focused on the material World and forget our true purpose. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Humankind now has three choices: to remain divorced from the transcendent; to construct a rational order to preserve society without recourse to real or imagined gods; or to establish the viable influence of the Kingdom of God in the kingdoms of humans. The first option invites chaos and tyranny, as the bloodshed, repression, and nihilism of this century testify. We are then left with the second and third choices. These opposing arguments were well presented by two of the great thinkers of the twentieth century: the eminent journalist, Walter Lippmann, and Nobel laureate, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Before writing A Preface to Morals, Lippmann concluded that modern humans could no longer embrace a simple religious faith. For Lippmann, the goal was to create a humanistic view in which “mankind, deprived of the great fictions, is to come to terms with the needs which created those fictions.” For himself, Lippmann came to a rather fatalistic conclusion: “I take the humanistic view because, in the kind of World I happen to live in, I can do no other.” Lippmann thus set about to extract the ethical ideals of religious figures from their theological and historical context. Humans in one’s own rational interest, he believed, could sustain a human-made religion. Some religion, even if it was a religion that denied religion, had to be followed. On the other side of the spectrum from this religion of humanism stands Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a lonely and often outspoken profit. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard commencement address, Solzhenitsyn listed a litany of woes facing the West: the loss of courage and will, the addiction to comfort, the abuse of freedom, the capitulation of the intellectuals to fashionable ideas, the attitude of appeasement with evil. The cause for all this was the humanistic view Lippman had embraced. “The humanistic way of thinking,” thundered Solzhenitsyn, “which had proclaimed itself as our guide, did not admit the existence of evil in man, nor did it seek any task higher than the attainment of happiness on Earth. It started modern western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs…gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today.” In American democracy, said Solzhenitsyn, rights “were granted on the ground that man if God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility.” Solzhenitsyn lamented that over two hundred years ago, as the Constitution was being written, or even nearly seventy years ago, when Walter Lippman was tying to preserve the husk of Western virtue, “it would have seemed quite impossible…that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims…The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society had grown simmer and dimmer.” Like MacArthur, Solzhenitsyn was saying that nothing less than spiritual renewal could save the New World. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
If we reject the nihilism that denies all meaning and hope, we must believe human society has purpose. We are forced to choose, therefore, belief in humans, in faith in faith, hope in hope, and love of love; or we must look for a point beyond ourselves to steady our balance. The view that humans in their own rational interest can sustain a humanmade religion is voiced regularly on op-ed pages, on television specials, even from church pulpits. It remains fashionable because it offers a beneficial view of human nature, filled with hopeful optimism about human’s capacities. However, it ignored the ringing testimony of a century filled with terror and depravity. If the real benefits of the Judeo-Christian ethic and influence in secular society were understood, it would be anxiously sought out, even by those who repudiate the Christian faith. The influence of the Kingdom of God in the public arena is god for society as a whole. Everything else can be known, as things and ideas are known, as something apart or processed, but the Overself cannot be truly known in this way. Only by identifying oneself with It can this happen. From the ordinary human point of view the Overself is the Ever-Still: yet that is our own conceptualization of it, for the fact is that all the Universe’s tremendous activity is induced by its presence. That out of which we draw our life and intelligence is unique and indestructible, beginning less and infinite. Each of us feels that there is something which directs one’s will, controls one’s movements, and constitutes the essence of one’s awareness. This something expresses itself to us as the “I.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
It is not only the hidden and mysterious source of their own little self but also the unrecognized source of the only moments of real happiness that they ever have. At some time, to some degree, and in some way, everything else in human experience can be directly examined and analysed. However, this is the one thing that can never be treated in this way. For it can never acknowledge itself without objectifying itself, thus making something other than itself, some simulacrum that is not its real self. The Overself is a fountain of varied forces. What does the coming of Overself consciousness means to humans? It means, first of all, an undivided mind. Listen to the Roman Stoics’ definition of the Overself: “the divinity which I planted in his heart” of Marcus Aurelius; “your guardian spirit” of Epictetus. This is the “UNDIVIDED MIND” where experience as subject and object, as ego and the World, or as higher self and lower self does not break consciousness. At the center of every human’s being there is one’s imperishable soul, one’s guardian angel. What can I render unto the Lord for all His bountiful dealings toward me? Some would say it begins with the mind, or perhaps above on the astral plane that our souls embrace the wonder Spirit of the Lord in His merry chase. That is where we become blessed by speech and freedom and begin to give our thanks. In the chase on pace toward grace and freedom, I will lift up the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord. My vows will I pay unto the Lord, yea, in the presence of all His people. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Grievous in the sight of the Lord is the death of His faithful one. Ah, Lord, I am indeed Thy servant: I am Thy servant, the son of Thy handmaid; thou hast loosed my bonds. I will offer to Thee a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and call upon the name of the Lord. Lord, will you hold me close enough to hear the beating of your heart? There is but ne Heart with a single pulse. May I be lucky enough, one day, to be with Thou and feel it beating for us both. I will pray my vows unto the Lord, yea, in the presence of all His people; in the courts of the Lord’s house, in the midst of America. Hallelujah. Thy depth of range, O Lord, makes Thou so strong and wonderful. I stay charmed in Thy race. There is nothing better than to make life’s journey with Thou. O praise the Lord, all ye nations; laud Him, all ye peoples. For great is His mercy toward us; and the faithfulness of the Lord is everlasting. Hallelujah. O give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good, for His lovingkindness endureth forever. O let now America say: His lovingkindness endureth forever. Let now the house of Aaron say: His loving kindness endureth forever. Let them that revere the Lord say: His lovingkindness endureth forever. Bind me your will, tie me to your grace, chain me to your mercy, lock me to your forgiveness. Let us live eternally, in your Heavenly Kingdom. Even in ten thousand years our life shall not break, even for a single breath, enterally in your arms shall I stay. Out of my straits I called upon the Lord; He answered me and set me free. The Lord is with me as my helper, I shall see my adversaries discomfited. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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If the Morals are Not Strengthened, How is Society to Escape Destruction?
The only absolute rule is: Never lose control of the show. Principles of rational choice are to be given by enumeration so that eventually they replace the concept of rationality. The relevant features of a person’s situation are identified by these principles and the general conditions of human life to which plans must be adjusted. Let us assume that choice situation relates to the short term. The question is how to fill in the more or less final details of a subplan to be executed over a relatively brief period of time, as when we make plans for a holiday. The larger system of desires may not be significantly affected, although of course some desires will be satisfied in this interval and others will not. Now for short-term questions anyway, certain principles seem perfectly straightforward and not in dispute. The first of these is that of effective means. Suppose that there is a particular objective that is wanted, and that all the alternatives are means to achieve it, while they are in other respects neutral. The principle holds that we are to adopt that alternative which realizes the end in the best way. More fully: given the objective, one is to achieve it with the least expenditure of means (whatever they are); or given the means, one is to fulfill the objective to the fullest possible extent. This principle is perhaps the most natural criterion of rational choice. Indeed, there is some tendency to suppose that deliberation must always take this form, being regulated ultimately by a single final end. Otherwise it is thought that there is no rational way to balance a plurality of aims against one another. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The second principle of rational choice is that one (short-term) plan is to be preferred to another if its execution would achieve all of the desired aims of the other plan and one or more further aims in addition. This criterion is referred to as the principle of inclusiveness. Thus, if such a plan exists, we are to follow the more inclusive plan. To illustrate, suppose that we are planning a trip and we have to decide whether to go to Rome or Paris. It seems impossible to visit both. If on reflection it is clear that we can do everything in Paris that we want to do in Rome, and some other things as well, then we should go to Paris. Adopting this plan will realize a larger set of ends and nothing is left undone that might have been realized by the other plan. Often, however, neither plan is more inclusive than the other; each may achieve an aim which the other does not. We must invoke some other principle to make up our minds, or else subject our aims to further analysis. A third principle we may call that of the greater likelihood. Suppose that the aims which may be achieved by two plans are roughly the same. Then it may happen that some objectives have been a greater chance of being realized by one plan than the other, yet at the same time none of the remaining aims are less likely to be attained. For example, although one can perhaps do everything one wants to do in both Rome and Paris, some of the things one wishes to do seem more likely to meet with success in Paris, and for the rest it is roughly the same. If so, the principle holds that one should go to Paris. A greater likelihood of success favours a plan just as the more inclusive end does. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
When these principles work together the choice is as obvious as can be. Suppose that we prefer a Titian to a Tintoretto, and that the first of two lottery tickets gives the larger change to Titian while the second assigns it to the Tintoretto. Then one must prefer the first ticket. So far we have been considering the application of the principles of rational choice to the short-term case. Now, let us examine the other extreme in which one has to adopt a long-term plan, even a plan of life, as when we have to choose a profession or occupation. It may be thought that having to make such a decision is a task imposed only by a particular form of culture. In another society this choice might not arise. However, in fact the question of what to do with our life is always there, although some societies force it upon us more obviously than others and at a different time of life. The limit decision to have no plan at all, to let things come as they may, is still theoretically a plan that may or may not be rational. Accepting the idea of a long-term plan, then, it seems clear that such a scheme is to be assessed by what it will probably lead to in each future period of time. The principle of inclusiveness in this case, therefore, runs as follows: one long-term plan is better tan another for any given period (or number of periods) if it allows for the encouragement and satisfaction of all the aims and interests of the other plan and for the encouragement and satisfaction of some further aim or interest in addition. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The more inclusive plan, if there is one, is to be preferred: it comprehends all the ends of the first plan and at least one other end as well. If this principle is combined with that of effective means, then together they define rationality as preferring, other thins equal, the greater means for realizing our aims, and the development of wider and more varied interests assuming that these aspirations can be carried through. The principle of grater likelihood supports this preference even in situations when we cannot be sure that the larger aims can be executed, provided that the chances of execution are as great as with the less comprehensive plan. The application of the principles of effective means and the greater likelihood to the long-term case seems sound enough. However, the use of the principle of inclusiveness may seem problematical. With a fixed system of ends in the sort run, we assume that we already have our desires and given this fact we consider how best to satisfy them. However, in long-term choice, although we do not yet have the desires which various plans will encourage, we are nevertheless directed to adopt that plan which will develop the more comprehensive interests on the assumption that these further aims can be realized. Now a person may say that since one does not have the more inclusive interests, one is not missing anything in not deciding to encourage and to satisfy them. One may hold that the possible satisfaction of desires that one can arrange never to have is an irrelevant consideration. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Of course, one might also content that the more inclusive system of interests subjects one to a greater risk of dissatisfaction; but this objection is excluded since the principle assumes that the larger pattern of ends is equally likely to be attained. There are two considerations that seem to favour the principle of inclusiveness in the long-term case. First of all, assuming that how happy a person is depends in part upon the proportion of one’s aims that are achieved, the extent to which one’s plans are carried through, it follows that pursuing the principle of inclusiveness tends to raise this proportion of one’s aims that are achieved, the extent to which one’s plans are carried through, it follows that pursuing the principle of inclusiveness tends to raise this proportion and thereby enhance a person’s happiness. This effect is absent only in the case where all of the aims of the less inclusive plan are already safely provided for. The other consideration is that, in accordance with the Aristotelian Principle, I assume that human beings have a higher-order desire to follow the principle of inclusiveness. They prefer the more complex comprehensive long-term plan because its execution presumably involves a more complex combination of abilities. The Aristotelian Principle states that, others things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and that this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
A person takes pleasures in doing something as one becomes more proficient at it, and of two activities which one performs equally well, one prefers the one that calls upon the greater number of more subtle and intricate discriminations. Thus the desire to carry out the larger pattern of ends which brings into play the more finely developed talents is an aspect of the Aristotelian Principle. And this desire, along with the higher-order desires to act upon other principles of rational choice, is one of the regulative ends that moves us to engage in rational deliberation and to follow its outcome. Many things in these remarks call for further explanation. It is clear, for example, that these three principles are not in general sufficient to rank the plans open to us. Means may not be neutral, inclusive plans may not exist, the aims achieved may not be sufficiently similar, and so on. To apply these principles we view our aims as we are inclined to describe them, and more or less count the number realized by this or that plan, or estimate the likelihood of success. For this this reason I shall refer to these criteria as counting principles. They do not require a further analysis or alteration of our desires, nor a judgment concerning the relative intensity of our wants. These matters I put aside for the discussions of deliberative rationality. It seems best to conclude this preliminary account by nothing what seems to be reasonably clear: namely that we can choose rational plans of life. And this means that we can choose now which desires we shall have at a later time. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
One might suppose at first that this is not possible. We sometimes think that our major desires at least are fixed and that we deliberate solely about the means to satisfy them. Of course, it is obvious that deliberation leads us to have some desires that we did not have before, for example, the desire to avail ourselves of certain means that we have on reflection come to see as useful for our purposes. Furthermore, it is clear that taking thought may lead us to make a general desire more specific, as when a desire for music becomes a desire to hear a particular work. However, let us suppose that, except for these sorts of exceptions, we do not choose now what to desire now. Nevertheless, we can certainly decide now to do something that we know will affect the desires that we shall have in the future. At any given time rational persons decide between plans of action in view of their situation and beliefs, all in conjunction with the present major desires and the principles of rational choice. Thus we chose between future desires in the light of our existing desires, including among these the desires to act on rational principles. When an individual decides what to be, what occupation or profession to enter, say, one adopts a particular plan of life. In time one’s choice will lead one to acquire a definite pattern of wants and aspirations (or the lack thereof), some aspects of which are peculiar to one while others are typical of one’s chosen occupation or way of life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
These considerations appear evident enough, and simply parallel in the case of the individual the deep effects that a choice of a conception of justice is bound to have upon the kinds of aims and interests encouraged by the basic structure of society. Convictions about what sort of person to be are similarly involved in the acceptance of principles of justice. Yet, overstilmulation may lead to bizarre and anti-adaptive behaviour. We still know too little about this phenomenon to explain authoritatively why overstimulation seems to produce maladaptive behaviour. Yet we pick up important clues if we recognize that overstimulation can occur on at least three different levels: the sensory, the cognitive, and the decisional. The line between each of these is not completely clear, even to psychologist, but if we simply, in commonsense fashion, equate the sensory level with perceiving, the cognitive with thinking, and the decisional with deciding, we will not go too far astray. The easiest to understand is the sensory level. Experiments in sensory deprivations, during which volunteers are cut off from normal stimulation of their senses, have shown that the absence of novel sensory stimuli can lead to bewilderment and impaired mental functioning. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
By the same token, the input of too much disorganized, patternless or chaotic sensory stimuli can have similar effects. It is for this reason that practitioners of political or religious brainwashing make use not only of sensory deprivation (solitary confinement, for example) but of sensory bombardment involving flashing lights, rapidly shifting patterns of colour, chaotic sound effects—the whole arsenal of psychedelic kaleidoscopy. The religious fervour and bizarre behaviour of certain hippie cultists may arise not merely from drug abuse, but from group experimentation with both sensory deprivation and bombardment. The chanting of monotonous mantra, the attempt to focus the individual’s attention or interior, bodily sensation to the exclusion of outside stimuli, are efforts to induce the weird and sometimes hallucinatory effects of understimulation. At the other end of the scale, we note that glazed stares and numb, expressionless faces of youthful dancers at the great rock music auditoriums where light shows, split-screen movies, high decibel screams, shouts and moans, grotesque costumes and withering, painted bodies create a sensory environment characterized by high input and extreme unpredictability and novelty. An organism’s ability to cope with sensory input is dependent upon its physiological structure. The nature of its sense organs and the speed with which impulses flow through its neural system set biological bounds on the quantity of sensory data it can accept. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
If we examine the speed of signal transmission within various organism, we find that the lower the evolutionary level, the slower the movement. Thus, for example, in a sea urchin egg, lacking a nervous system as such, a signal moves along a membrane at a rate of about a centimeter an hour. Clearly, at such a rate, the organism can respond to only a very limited part of its environment. By the time we move up the ladder to a jellyfish, which already has a primitive nervous system, the signal travels 36,000 times faster: ten centimeters per second. In a worm, the rate leaps to 100 cps. Among insects and crustaceans, neural pulses race along at 1,000 cps. Among anthropoids the rate reaches 10,000 cps. Crude as these figures no doubt are, they help explain why humans are unquestionably among the most adaptable of creatures. Yet even in human, with a neural transmission rate of about 30,000 cps, the boundaries of the system are imposing. (Electrical signals in a computer, by contrast, travel billions of times faster.) The limitations of the sense organs and nervous system mean that many environmental events occur at rates too fast for us to follow, and we are reduced to sampling experience at best. When the signals reaching us are regular and repetitive, this sampling process can yield a fairly good mental representation of reality. However, when it is highly disorganized, when it is novel and unpredictable, the accuracy of our imagery is necessarily reduced. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Our image of reality is distorted. This may explain why, when we experience sensory overstimulation, we suffer confusion, a blurring of the line between illusion and reality. Most people confuse “self-knowledge” with knowledge of their conscious ego-personalities. Anyone who has any ego-consciousness at all takes it for granted that one knows oneself. However, the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious and its contents. People measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of oneself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them. In this respect the psyche behaves like the body, of whose physiological and anatomical structure the average person knows very little too. Although one lives in it and with it, most of it is totally unknown to the layperson, and special scientific knowledge is needed to acquaint consciousness with what is known of the body, not to speak of all that is not known, which also exists. What is commonly called “self-knowledge” is therefore a very limited knowledge, most of it dependent on social factors, of what goes on in the human psyche. Hence one is always coming up against the prejudice that such and such a thing does not happen “with us” or “in our family” or among our friends and acquaintances. On the other hand, one meets with equally illusory assumptions about the alleged presence of qualities which merely serve to cover up the true fact of the case. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
In this broad belt of unconsciousness, which is immune to conscious criticism and control, we stand defenseless, open to all kinds of influences and psychic infections. As with all dangers, we can guard against this risk of psychic infection only when we know what is attacking us, and how, where and when the attack will come. Since self-knowledge is a matter of getting to know the individual facts, theories are of very little help. For the more a theory lays claim to universal validity, the less capable it is of going justice to the individual facts. Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean. This means is quite valid, though it need not necessarily occur in reality. Despite this it figures in the theory as an unassailable fundamental fact. The exceptions at either extreme, though equally factual, do not appear in the final result at all, since they cancel each other out. If, for instance, I determine the weight of each stone in a bed of pebbles and get an average weight of give ounces, this tells me very little about the real nature of the pebbles. Anyone who thought, on the basis of these findings, that one could pick up a pebble of five ounces at the first try would be in for a serious disappointment. Indeed, it might well happen that however long one searches one would not find a single pebble weighting exactly five ounces. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The statistical method shows the facts in the light of the ideal average but does not give us a picture of their empirical reality. While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way. This is particularly true of theories which are based on statistics. The distinctive thing about real facts, however, is their individuality. Not to put too fine a point on it, one could say that the real picture consists of nothing but exceptions to the rule, and that, in consequence, absolute reality has predominantly the character of irregularity. These considerations must be borne in mind whenever there is talk of a theory serving as a guide to self-knowledge. There is and can be no self-knowledge based on theoretical assumptions, for the object of this knowledge is an individual—a relative exception and an irregular phenomenon. Hence it is not the universal and the regular that characterize the individual, but rather the unique. One is not to be understood as a recurrent unit but as something unique and singular which in the last analysis can be neither known nor compared with anything else. At the same time humans, as members of a species, can and mist be described as a statistical unit; otherwise nothing general could be said about one. For this purpose one has to be regarded as a comparative unit. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
This results in a universally valid anthropology or psychology, as the case maybe, with an abstract picture of the human as an average unit from which all individual features have been removed. However, it is precisely these features which are of paramount importance for understanding humans. If I want to understand an individual human being, I must lay aside all scientific knowledge of the average human and discard all theories in order to adopt a completely new and unprejudiced attitude. I can only approach the task of understanding with a free and open mind, whereas knowledge of a him, or insight into human character, presupposes all sorts of knowledge about humankind in general. Most dangerous to the consequence of the naked public square is the loss of community. Community is a gathering of people around shared values, a commitment to one another and to common ideals and aspirations that cannot be created by government. We have forgotten that constitutions work only as they reflect an actual sense of community. Without commitment to community, individual responsibility quickly erodes. One vivid illustration of this was a Princeton student’s protest after President Jimmy Cater proposed reinstating the draft registration in 1977. Newspapers across the country showed the young man defiantly carrying a placard proclaiming: “Nothing is worthy dying for.” To many, these words seem an affirmation of life, the ultimate assertion of individual worth. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
What they fail to reckon with, however, is the reverse slogan: if nothing is worth dying for, is anything worth living for? A society that has no reference points beyond itself “increasingly becomes a merely contractual agreement,” says sociologist Peter Berger. The problem with that, he continues, is that human beings will not die for a social contract. And “unless people are prepared, if necessary, to die for it,” a society cannot long survive. In these first twenty-one years of the twenty first century, we are sailing uncharted waters. Never before in the history of the New World civilization has the public square been so devoid of transcendent values. The notion of law rooted in transcendent truth, in God Himself, is not the invention of Christian fundamentalists calling naively for America to return to its Christian roots. The roots of American law are as much in the works of Cicero and Plato as in the Bible. However, if fundamentalists are guilty of distorting American history, their critics are guilty of distorting the whole history of the New World. Plato, in terms as religious as Moses or David, claimed that transcendent norms were the true foundations for civil law and order. He taught that “there exist divine moral laws, not easy to apprehend, but operating upon all humankind.” He refuted the argument of some Sophists that there was no distinction between virtue and vice, and he affirmed that “God, not man, is the measure of all things.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Cicero, to whom the American Found Fathers looked for guidance, maintained that religion is indispensable to private morals and public order and that it alone provided the concord by which people could live together. “True law,” wrote Cicero, “is right reason in agreement with Nature; it is of universal application and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrong-doing by its prohibitions.” Augustine wrote The City of God to defend the role of Christianity as the essential element in preserving society, stating that what the pagans “did not have the strength to do out of love of country, the Christian God demands of [citizens] out of love of Himself. Thus, in a general breakdown of morality and of civic virtues, divine Authority intervened to impose frugal living, continence, friendship, justice, and concord among citizens.” Augustine contended that without true justice emanating from a sovereign God there could never be the concord of which Cicero wrote. During the French Revolution, Edmund Burke acknowledged that the attempt to build a secularized state was not so much irreverent as irrational. “We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason, but out instincts; and that it cannot prevail long.” Religion has always been a decisive factor in the shaping of the American experience. According to one modern scholar, it was the Found Fathers’ conviction that “republican government depends for its health on values that over the not-so-long run must come from religion.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
John Adams believed that the moral order of the new nation depended on biblical religion. “If I were an atheist….I should believe that chance ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all humankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the Universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.” Tocqueville, the shrewd observer of American democracy, maintained that “religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions…How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?” In considering such lessons from the past, historians Will and Ariel Durant cited the agnostic Joseph Renan, who in 1866 wrote, “What would we do without [Christianity]? If rationalism wish wishes to govern the World without regard to the religious needs of the soul, the experience of the French Revolution is there to teach us the consequences of such a blunder.” The Durants concluded, “There is no significant example in history before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.” Although awareness is the first way in which we can regard the soul or Overself, the latter is also that which makes awareness possible and hence a sub- or super-conscious thing. This explains why it is that we do not know our souls, but only our thoughts, our feelings, and our bodies. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
It is because we are the soul and hence we are the knower as well as the act of knowing. The eyes see everything outside yet do not see themselves. The Overself is certainly the Way (within humans), the Truth (knowing the Real Being), and the Life (applying this knowledge and practising this way in the midst of ordinary everyday activity). The supreme irony of our century is that in those nations that still enjoy the greatest human freedoms, this traditional role of religion is denigrated; while in nations that have fallen under the oppressor’s yoke, the longing for the spiritual is keenest. The West intellectuals widely disdain religion; in the Soviet Union they cry out for its return. In a wave of articles, three popular contemporary Soviet writers, Vasily Bykov, Viktor Astafyev, and Chinghiz Aytamatov, have blamed Russia’s moral degradation upon the decline of religion. “Who extinguished the light of goodness in our soul? Who blew out the lamp of conscience, toppled it into a dark, deep pit in which we are groping, trying to find the bottom, a support and some kind of guiding light to the future?” asks Astafyev, a Christian, in Our Contemporary, a popular Moscow journal. Though a Muslim, Aytmatov centers his writings on Christ, whom he admires as a greater influence than Mohammad. He and his fellow writers have boldly attacked Communism for creating “an all-encompassing belief” that has plunged the Russian people into a moral abyss. Bykov, winner of every Soviet literary award, declares there can be no morality without faith. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Yet our twenty first century has set itself apart as the first to explicitly reject the wisdom of the ages that religion is indispensable to the concord and justice of society. We cannot accurately and strictly define the Overself. It is really indescribable, but its effects are not. The feeling of the Overself’s presence and the way to awaken it may both be described for the benefit of those who have neither experienced the one nor learned the others. If the Overself could be expressed in words there would be no need for Its silence. We can know the Overself only by being it, not by thinking it. It is beyond thoughts for it is Thought, Pure Mind, itself. Return, O my soul, unto thy tranquility, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee. Many places my heart sings for you, chamber by chamber, beat by beat. Please be deep in love and reap the love every day. For the Lord hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from ears, and my feet from stumbling. I shall walk before the Lord in the land of the living. I trusted in God even when I cried out: “I am greatly afflicted.” Even when I said in my distraction: “All men are untrustworthy,” I placed my faith in God. As my faith becomes more radiant, each day becomes more precious than the last, and more perfect. It is rewarding work to contemplate a lifetime on the Scriptures. “And it came to pass that Nephi and Lehi did preach unto the Lamanites with such great power and authority, for they had power and authority given unto them that they might speak, and they also had what they should speak given unto them,” reports Helaman 5.18 #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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There Will be No More Tuesday Morning Meetings or Everyone Will be Fired!
Life’s unfairness is not irrevocable; we can help balance the scales for others, if not always for ourselves. “It is bad to live under a prince who permits nothing, but much worse to live under one who permits everything,” reports John Calvin. Before the War of the Crosses erupted in the streets of Poland in 1984, a similar battle had already been lost in the United States of America. In 1980 the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a Kentucky law requiring that the Tend Commandments be posted in public-schools. In Poland the outcry against removal of the crucifixes led to mass defiance. The crucifixes were reinstated. However, in Kentucky, when the offending commandments were taken down, the few holdouts, threatened with court action, soon capitulated. What a repressive government could not force upon Poland was quietly accepted in an indifferent West. The Kentucky case is less important on its own merits than as a symbol of a growing movement in the courts that is narrowing the influence of religion in American life. Some churches actually require their members to live right or they place them on probation and may suspend their membership to the church because people agree to abide by its doctrine and adhere to scriptural mandates. And they should know, or should have known, the consequences of their actions. After all, people do not join the church blindly, not knowing what is expected of them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
And if the church cannot hold its members to a biblical standard, what is it allowed to do? Research suggests that bad behaviour is contagious. Like a yawn or chicken pox, there are behaviours that (for good and bad) can be passed between children, youth, and adults, among peers. And while that may work for beneficial behaviours such as kindness, behaviours we do not want to spread include anything that violates the Ten Commandments, and things like aggression, depression, and stress, yet studied have shown that these are susceptible to what research calls “peer contagion.” This is a process in which two or more people’s behaviours and emotions influence each other and (in these negative situations) undermine development and cause harm. So the church is against intimate relationships outside the marriage, and other things like drug use and the use of alcohol. They also abide by the biblical mandate that the church has a distinct responsibility not to associate with immoral people, and that rebuking their sin must be public so that others may take the warning. Nonetheless, the church’s principal task is a spiritual one—to proclaim the Good News and to cultivate holy living among its members. If a church cannot do this, it no longer has a purpose for existing. Let us dare to be different from the ways of the World when its ways are not the ways of God. In a World troubled with selfish greed, dishonesty, and dishonour, let us set ourselves on a higher path. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
As children of God, we must constantly be striving to develop and strengthen the qualities of unselfish service with wholehearted effort, dependability, honesty, morality, and every other good attribute that would lead us to integrity of character. We begin, then, with our thoughts and end with our eternal destiny. Our destiny is determined by our character, and our character is the sum and expression of our habits. Character is won by hard work. However, at Harper Elementary School in Evansville, teacher’s assistant Mary May and several Christian co-workers had met before classes every Tuesday morning for prayer, Bible reading, and discussion. Students were not allowed to participate. After two years of meetings, the principal told Mrs. May and her seven fellow Christians that there were to be no more Tuesday-morning meetings—or they would all be fired. Mary may eventually sued the board of education and the superintendent of schools, claiming that the school bord had violated her First Amendment rights to free speech, free association, and the free exercise of religion. She also argued that other teachers and assistants discussed politics, economics, and sports over their morning coffee before school; why could she and her friends not talk about God? A school-board representative replied that impressionable elementary-school kids might see “her carry a Bible to and from a meeting in their school, even if it is before classes. To children, teachers are very strong figures” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The school board representative also added, school officials would be forced to make sure that no Bibles or other religious materials were left behind. “We do not want the children exposed to them,” he concluded ominously. Character is not something to be obtained by ease and indolence or being socially agreeable. It cannot be acquired by absorption or by proxy or on the auction block. It is a reward derived from honest toil in overcoming difficulties. We grow by mastering tasks which others consider impossible. Yes, the character required to attain eternal life must be formed in this life with good habits supplying the building material. When the qualities that are desirable in individuals become universal in the people of a nation, that nation also will have good character. Goodness either in a person or in a nation is not simply the absence of wrongdoing. It is a love of and practice of all things that are true, honest, lovely, and of good reports. However, a number of zoning cases have affected the right of worship in private homes. In Colorado Springs, minister Richard Blanche has been repeatedly cited for holding religious meetings in his home in violation of a city zoning ordinance. In Fairhaven, Massachusetts, local zoning officials ruled that Bible studies were home occupations and therefore prohibited under the town’s property-use ordinances. In Los Angeles, California, officials ruled that home-occupancy regulations forbade orthodox Jews from holding prayer meetings in their homes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
As civil-liberties lawyers could not help but note in a Stratford, Connecticut, case, prayer in home Bible studies is penalized while Tupperware parties enjoy full protection of the Constitution of the United States of America. During the spring of 1986 a last-minute decision by the Los Angeles Board of education took God off the programs of area high-school commencements. A law suit filed by an area atheist successfully barred prayers, invocations, or religious observances from graduation ceremonies. Even as local schools made sure that offending prayers were removed from programs, one principal noted, however, that students will, God forbid, occasionally mentioned Him during a speech. “If you happen to get a kid who’s religious, they frequently thank God. That is all right. I am not going to censor the kids’ speeches.” We can be grateful for that at least. Where religious symbols have been spared, it has been on grounds that offer little solace to the religious. The celebrated Pawtucket creche decision is a case in point. For forty years, one of the highlights for Pawtucket’s predominantly Catholic citizenry was the annual Christmas display that included something for everyone: Santa Claus, reindeer, Christmas trees, and a creche scene with baby Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and assorted barn animals. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The creche was challenged, however, because it was paid for ($1,365, with another $20 a year to maintain it) by tax money; this was said to be an infringement on the separation of church and state. In the 1984 Supreme Court decision, it was 5-6 that upheld the city’s right to display the creche—because, as Chief Justice Warren Burger expressed it, the creche served a “legitimate secular purpose.” After all, he noted, the creche was merely “a neutral harbinger of the holiday season, useful for commercial purposes, but devoid of any inherent meaning.” Chief Justice Burger’s words are significant beyond the Pawtucket case: religion “devoid of any inherent meaning” defines that which is legally and culturally acceptable in contemporary culture. However, religion has been a crucial aspect of human experience since the founding of America, and government’s sole purpose is to protect individual, personal values. As it stands, self-discipline and self-motivation in modern society are being replaced by negative peer pressure as the primary determinant of American character. Let us set high goals for ourselves and achieve those goals by making God the center of our lives. He is the fountainhead of all truth, justice, and peace. Let us remember that God’s laws are eternal. They do not change. There is no moral or spiritual code that grants permissiveness of conduct nor condones selection of evil or bad habits as a way to joyful living. Humans may assume the right to revise the ways of God, but the Lord remains the same yesterday, today, and forever. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
God’s standards and truths for His people will ever point the true way of life for all of His children. Maintaining good personal habits which are pleasing to our Heavenly Father will strengthen our character, increase our influence for good, improve our example, bless our loved ones and friends, enrich our lives, and enable us to accomplish those things that yield true personal satisfaction and build peace and happiness in our hearts. We will have joy eternally, possessing a treasure to be much desired and sought after, for the Lord gives this assurance: “Inasmuch as humans do good, they shall in nowise lose their reward,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 58.28. It all starts with a single step—we decide that we can do it. May we forsake all evil and take the first step to share our lives for eternity through good habits and righteous standards of good character. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. The future holds only opportunity. The ultimate support for any social system is the acceptance by the population of a moral justification of authority. With this support removed, it will cause all authority to be questioned. America is becoming a victim of an education adrift in relativity that doubts all values, and a degrades science that shirks the spiritual issues. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Once the goal of education was allowing the student to learn and discover the truth, but now each student is allowed to decide the truth for oneself. Doctrine and Covenants, not ignorance, has become the enemy. The youth culture of most universities take what they are taught to heart, and develop a visceral sense that all forms of established authority, all rules, all demands for obedience, are inherently illegitimate. Autonomy and rebellion and vulgarity have become the god of many modern Americans, and the seek meaning in pleasures of the flesh and illegal barbiturates. Many people, instead of worshipping God believe, one who dies with the most toys wins. Separated from God, humans seek satisfaction in their senses. This is more than mindless hedonism; it is a World view in which the self has become the modern substitute for the soul. This is a reflection of the inevitable consequences of ten decades of steady erosion of absolute values. As a result, we lie with a massive case of schizophrenia. Outwardly many people are religious, but inwardly their religious beliefs make no difference in how they live. Several people are obsessed with self; they live, raise families, govern, and die as though God does not exist, just as Nietzsche predicted a century ago. This cultural revolution, rendering God irrelevant, has permeated the media in the New World, the instrument that not only reflects, but often shapes social attitudes. God is tolerated in the media only when He is bland enough to pose no threat. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Some people take offense in talking about God and religion, and they will begin to steer the conversation to things they are more comfortable with such as sleezy gossip, prisons, criminal justice, and current news events. When someone brings the conversation back to one’s experiences with Jesus Christ, they usually appear aghast. The print medium does the same thing. It has been discovered that one major U.S. daily, as a matter of policy, will not print the two words Jesus Christ together; when combined, the editor says, it represents and editorial judgement. Such reporting is not always a matter of hostility; it often reflects the reporter’s lack of knowledge in spiritual matters. It can also be the result of the very nature of news itself. By definition, the media report events that are out of the ordinary—the bizarre, the hostile, the aberrant; otherwise news is not news. Thus, coverage of Christianity, when it occurs at all, is most often the outlandish exception rather than the norm practiced by millions of Christians daily. The news is more like a morbid parody of life. Rarely informative, never anything new and good. As God is stripped away from society, orthodox faith is treated the way clandestine intimate preferences that were not considered traditional love once were: it is tolerated as long as it is practiced only by consenting adults and is not flaunted in public. Religion appears to be relevant only in remote points in history. Pictures of pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving are bountiful—without any mention of to whom thanks is being giving. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
One mother reported that her son’s social-studies book made no mention of religion s part of the pilgrims’ life. Her son told her that “Thanksgiving was when the pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians.” When the mother called the principal of her son’s suburban New York City school to point out that Thanksgiving originated when the pilgrims thanked God, the principal responded, “That is your opinion.” He continued by saying that the schools could only teach what is in the books. A psychological motive behind the obvious censorship of religion presented in these books appears to be a deep-seated fear of any form of active contemporary Christianity, especially serious, committed Protestantism. This fear could have led the authors to deny and repress the importance of this kind of religion in American life. The prevailing notion is that the state should be neutral as to religion, and furthermore, that the best way to be neutral about it is to avoid all mention of it. By this sort of logic, nudism is the best compromise among different styles of dress. The secularist various of “pluralism” amounts to nudism. We are dismantling the church bit by bit and where necessary we are using economic means to do so. Statues of Christ have been hauled away from downtown squares, and replaced by oversized gummy bears and rocket ships. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Many believe that religious values and liberties have fallen victim to some sinister conspiracy in which the ACLU, humanist educators, and the media meet in darkened corridors of CBS headquarters to plot the demise of religion in America. God designed life for believers to be an abundant life, God designed for you to live in overflow of blessings. American government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith. Without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure. “The Earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the World, and they that dwell therein,” reports Psalms 24.1. It has always interested me to note that in the scriptures when the Lord talks about righteousness, we hear Him declare abundance, fullness, and plenty. Shortage and scarcity are not from Him, but are humanmade because of our failure to follow his original instructions to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over it,” reports Genesis 1.28. Now to maximize our potential, God has given us direction from the beginning on our behaviour while we sojourn here as mortals on Earth. God asked us first to love Him by believing His words, and secondly to love our fellow humans enough to help bring them to a realization and a testimony of Him. Born of God, people can change from their carnal and fallen state, to a state of righteousness, being redeemed of God, becoming His sons and daughters. “And thus they become new creatures; and unless they do this [the warning], they can in nowise inherit the kingdom of God,” reports Mosiah 27.24-26. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
All sides seem to agree upon two general facts. First, the terms “good” and “bad” and the like are typically used in giving advice and counsel, and to praise and extol, and so on. To be sure these terms are not always used in this manner, since they may appear in conditional statements, in commands and questions, as well as in other remarks that have no practical bearings. Still, their role in giving advice and counsel and in praising and extolling is characteristic. Second, the criteria for evaluation vary from one kind of thing to another. What is wanted in dwellings is not what is wanted in clothes. A satisfactory definition of goodness must fit these two facts. Despite the variation in criteria from object to object, the term “good” has a constant sense (or meaning) that, for philosophical purposes, is of the same kind as that of other predicates normally counted as descriptive. Indeed, this constant sense enables us to understand why and how the criteria for evaluation vary from one kind of thing to another. The other thesis is that the propriety using the term “good” (and its relatives) in giving advice and counsel, and in expressions of commendation, is explained by this constant sense together with a general theory of meaning. It is assumed that this theory includes an account of speech, acts, and illocutionary forces that considers the total situation in which utterance is issued. A descriptive theory holds that the constant descriptive meaning of good accounts for its being used, when in fact it is properly used, to praise and to advise, and the like. There is no necessity to assign “good” a special kind of meaning which is not already explained by its constant descriptive sense and the general theory of speech acts. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Goodness as rationality is a descriptive theory in this sense. In the required way, it explains the two general facts which everyone recognizes. The constant sense of “good” is characterized by the definition in its several stages. Thus something’s being good is its having the properties that it is rational to want in things of its kind, plus further elaborations depending on the case. In the light of this definition it is easy to account for the fact that the criteria of evaluation differ from one kind of thing to another. Since we want things for different purposes, it is obviously rational to assess them by different features. It is helpful to think of the sense of “good” as being analogous to that of a function sign. We can then view the definition as assigning to each kind of thing a set of properties by which instances of that kind are to be assessed, namely, the properties which it is rational to want in things of that kind. Furthermore, the account of goodness as rationality explains why the term “good” appears in statements of advice and counsel and in remarks of praise and approval. Thus, for example, when we are asked for advice someone wishes to have our opinion as to which course of action, say, is best for one. One wants to know what we think is rational for one to do. A climber who advises another about the equipment and route to use on a difficult pitch takes up the other’s standpoint and recommends what one thinks is a sensible plan of attack. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The meaning of “good” and of related expression does not change in those statements that are counted as advisory. It is the context that converts what we say into advice even though the sense of our words is the same. Climbers, for example, have a duty of mutual assistance to help one another, and hence they have a duty to offer their considered opinion in urgent circumstances. In these situations their words become advisory. And so as the situation warrants, what we say may be, and in some cases must be, reckoned as advice and counsel. Accepting the theory of right already sketched, the constant descriptive sense together with the general reasons why persons seek out the view of others explain these characteristic uses of “good.” At no point must we appeal to a special kind of prescriptive or emotive meaning. It may be objected to these remarks that the theory of illocutionary forces allows all that has been claimed by those who have proposed a prescriptive or an emotive theory of meaning. If so, there may be no disagreement. I have not denied that the understanding of the illocutionary forces of the various uses of “good,” its being employed in statements of praise and advice, and the like, is relevant to grasping the meaning of the term. Nor do I oppose the view that a certain illocutionary force is central to “good,” in the sense that one cannot accept as true the statement that something is good and at the same time dissent from its illocutionary force (assuming this force to obtain in the context). The question is how these facts are to be explained. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Thus the descriptive theory maintains that “good” is characteristically used with the force of a recommendation or advice, and the like, precisely because of its descriptive sense as given by the definition. The descriptive meaning of “good” is not simply a family of lists of properties, a list for each kind of thing to convention or preference. Rather in the way that the definition explains, these lists are formed in the light of what it is rational to want in objects of various kinds. Therefore understanding why the word “good” (and its relatives) is employed in these speech acts is part of understanding this constant sense. Similarly, certain illocutionary forces are central to “good” as a result of its descriptive meaning, just as the force of factual narration belongs to some utterances in virtue of their descriptive meaning. For if we assent to the statement that something is best for us when it is offered as advice, say, we will indeed accept this advice and act upon it if we are rational. The dispute, if there is one, is not about these recognized facts but concerns the place of the descriptive meaning of “good” in explaining them. The descriptive theory holds that conjoined to a general theory of speech acts the definition of “good” yields an adequate account of these facts. There is no occasion to introduce a distinct kind of meaning. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
This is really Real, its moral directions the rightest of the Right. They joy that emanates from the Overself has a healing quality It dissipates anxieties and eradicates neuroses. Its power can carry one through a grave crisis with unfaltering steadiness. Do not think so much of looking for outside help. Your Higher self is with you. If you could have enough faith in its presence, you could look inwards. With persistence and patience, it would guide you. Without this awareness one is not a whole human, for one is not functioning in all one’s being. It is a truth by whose light a human lives nobly and in whose comfort one may die serenely. Where the ego fails or falters, the Overself proves equal to every occasion. Enfolded by that inner strength, one ceases to fear, to be anxious, or to dread the future. For one the most worthy achievement is to live in this state of being and to love it. It is always there, always present in one although not always easily reachable. It is the secret center of one’s being. This conscious contact with it gives a feeling of marvelous security, of mountain-like strength. One feels as sheltered by its presence inside one as the seed by the Earth outside it. In its warm glow, humans find a holy therapy for their suffering, a healing remedy for their disordered and dismembered selves. In its sacred presence fear and suffering must take their inevitable departure. One can assert this protective truth against whatever evils and dangers may appear from time to time. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
The Overself is there and in its presence, one becomes indifferent to the praise of friends or the venom of enemies. One dwells in some inner fortress—safe, protected, and sure of oneself. One is hardly touched by the turmoil of passing events. One will gain with time the sense of a Presence which walks with one and dwells in one. It is a guide with practical value, too, for it warns one what not to do if one would live ethically and avoid additional suffering. Even if one does not advance so far as perfect realization, one will advance. The early Christian Fathers believed that only a few privileged souls ever received this Grace of direct divine illumination. In this healing presence the past is washed away and old sins with it. It is the part of one’s being which, being worth most to one, deserves most from one. Quite a number get a mysterious support and consolation from simply knowing at second hand that the Overself is there, even though they themselves cannot make any contact with it. It is real, it is present and active in our very midst, its power and its guidance can be felt and recognized. Why look to any human who is outside you—when IT is inside you? And why forget that all humans are imperfect whereas It alone is perfect? In our present plight we cannot give ourselves too many supports, and there is none better than that which is to be found in the Overself. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
All of the abundance, fullness, and plenty of this Earth was given to us by God to be enjoyed in righteousness. We in turn are expected to love Him; to be converted to Him and His ways, and to feed His sheep; to multiply, replenish, and strengthen our human beings. I pray that we may all catch the vision of what conversion means and focus our service on the effort to build the kingdom of God here on Earth; that we may catch sight of God’s marvelous work and proceed to dedicate our lives for its purpose. God lives, and Jesus Christ is the Saviour of this World. Be assured there is a real craving for your companionship and a genuine need for your unique strengths. However, do not look too deeply into the eyes of the pleasure-seekers about you, for if you do, you will see a certain sadness in sensuality, and you will hear artificiality in the laughter and licentiousness. Do not look too deeply, either, into the motives of those who deny God, for you may notice their doubts of doubt. Do not risk thinking the unthinkable, lest you find yourself drawn with a deep and powerful pull toward the reality that God does exist, that He loves you, and that finally there is no escaping Him or His love! There is some life-power from which we derive our capacities and our intelligence. It is hidden and intangible. No one has ever seen it but everyone who thinks deeply enough can sense that it is there, always present and always supporting us. It is the Overself. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
This is the ultimate beauty behind life, which all people seek blindly and unknowingly in such varied external forms that merely and momentarily hint, suggest, or herald its existence. The Overself is a term to indicate that the holy front of our being and root of our consciousness is still ourselves, and is indeed our true self. The picture is of the higher element in humans controlling the lesser self, and goodwill to all beings. It is this grandeur of self that is the magnetic pole drawing us to the Good, the Beautiful, the True, and the Nobel. Yet itself is above all these attributes for it is the Attributeless, the Ineffable, and the Infinite that human thought cannot grasp. Not for us, O Lord, not for us, but for Thy name give glory for Thy mercy, and for Thy truth’s sake. Wherefore should the nations taunt us, saying: “Where is not their God?” Our God is in the Heavens, doing all that He willeth. Their idols are mere silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not: they have ears, but they hear not; noses have they, but they inhale not; they have hands, but they touch not; feet have they, but they walk not; neither can they make sound with their throats. Whoever makes them shall become like them; yea, every one that trusts in them. But America, trust in the Lord! He is your help and your shield. O house of Aaron, trust in the Lord! He is your held and your shield. You who revere the Lord, trust in the Lord! He is your help and your shield. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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One Lesson Already Seems Vividly Clear: Change Carries a Physiological Price Tag!
Our ability to speak is just one aspect of the evolutionary drive to create a more accurate World in our Heads. Eons ago the shrinking seas cast millions of unwilling aquatic creatures onto the newly created beaches. Deprived of their familiar environment, they died, gasping and clawing for each additional instant of eternity. Only a fortunate few, better suited to amphibian existence, survived the shock of change. Today, says sociologist Lawrence Suhm of the University of Wisconsin, “We are going through a period as traumatic as the evolution of man’s predecessors from sea creatures to land creatures. Those who can adapt will; those who cannot will either go on surviving somehow at a lower level of development or will perish—washed up on the shores.” To assert that humans must adapt seems superfluous. They have already shown themselves to be among the most adaptable of life forms. They have survived Equatorial summers and Antarctic winters. Humans have survived Dachau and Vorkuta. They have walked the lunar surface and travel to Mars. They have invented vaccines overnight. Such accomplishments give rise to the glib notion that their adaptive capabilities are “infinite.” Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Afterall, as hard as humans work, they have not even evented a silent leaf blower to stop disturbing the peace with the sound of its engine that seems to be having an extremely loud, painful and agonizing death, which is probably the most annoying sound in the World. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
For despite all their heroism and stamina, humans remain a biological organism, a “biosystem,” and all such systems operate within inexorable limits. Temperature, pressure, caloric intake, oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, all set absolute boundaries beyond which humans, as presently constituted, cannot venture. Thus when we hurl a human into outer space, we surround one with an exquisitely designed microenvironment that maintains all these factors within livable limits. How strange, therefore, that when we hurl a human into the future, we take few pains to protect them from the shock of change. It is as though NASA had short Armstrong and Aldrin naked int the cosmos. There are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb, and by endlessly accelerating change without first determining these limits, we may submit masses of humans to demands they simply cannot tolerate. We may define future shock in different ways. Its symptoms also vary according to the stage and intensity of the disease. These symptoms range all the way from anxiety, hostility to helpful authority, and seemingly senseless violence, to physical illness, depression and apathy. Its victims often manifest erratic swings in interest and life style, followed by an effort to “crawl into their shells” through social, intellectual and emotional withdrawal. They feel continually “bugged” or harassed, and want desperately to reduce the number of decisions that must make. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
As to the conditions that contribute to the develop of future shock and necrophilia, our knowledge is still developing in this field of research and as we expand our understanding, we will throw more light on the problem. We may safely assume that a very unalive, necrophilous family environment will often be a contributing factor in the formation of necrophilia and future shock (as well as in the formation of schizophrenia). Lack of enlivening stimulation, the absence of hope, and a destructive spirit of the society as a whole are certainly of real significance for fostering these conditions. That genetic factors play a role in the formation of necrophilia is, in my opinion, very likely. These people tend to be very jealous—they must keep their unique position—and they are simultaneously insecure and anxious whenever they have to perform a real task; while they might not fail, their performance can never really equal their narcissistic conviction of superiority over any human (while having at the same time a nagging, unconscious feeling of inferiority to all), so one can see how dealing with necrophiles can produce future shock in other individuals. It is hardly necessary to stress that severely necrophilous persons are very dangerous. They are the haters, the racists, those in favour of war, bloodshed, and destruction. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Necrophilous persons are dangerous not only if they are political leaders, but also as the potential cohorts for a dictatorial leader. They become the executioners, terrorists, torturers; without them no terror system could be set up. However, the less intense necrophiles are also politically important; while they may not be among its first adherents, they are necessary for the existence of a terror regime because they form a solid basis, although not necessarily a majority, for it to gain and hold power. It is the efforts of Eros to combine organic substance and disintegrate living structure. The relationship of the death instinct with necrophilia hardly needs any further explanation. In order to elucidate the relation between life instinct and biophilia, however, a short explanation of the latter is necessary. Biophilia is the passionate love of life and of all that is alive; it is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, and idea, or a social group. The biophilous person prefers to construct rather than to retain. One is capable of wondering, and one prefers to see something new rather than to find confirmation of the old. One loves adventure of living more than one does certainty. One sees the whole rather than only the parts, structures rather than summations. One wants to mold and to influence by love, reason, and example; not by force, by cutting things apart, by the bureaucratic manner of administering people as if they were things. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Because one enjoys life and all its manifestations, the biophilous person is not a passionate consumer of newly packaged “excitement.” Biophilic ethics have their own principle of good and evil. Good is all that serves life; evil is all that serves death. Good is reverence for life, all that enhances life, growth, unfolding. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, cuts it into pieces. Biophilia is understood to refer to a biologically normal impulse, while necrophilia is understood as a psychopathological phenomenon. The latter necessarily emerges as the result of stunted growth, of physical “crippledness.” It is the outcome of unlived life, of the failure to arrive at a certain stage beyond narcissism and indifference. Destructiveness is not parallel to, but the alternative to biophilia. Love of life or love of the dead is the fundamental alternative that confronts every human being. Necrophilia grows as the development of biophilia is stunted. Humans are biologically endowed with the capacity for biophilia, but psychologically they have the potential for necrophilia as an alternative solution. Considering these facts, would it now be of great social and political significance to know what percentage of the population can be considered to be predominantly necrophilous or predominantly biophilous? The las of history will eventually bring justice to the oppressed and wipe away every tear. It is a system that an atheist can put one’s faith in. Lenin, Stalin, and Rakosi recognized that a renewed and purified Christianity was the only force that could move the masses as powerfully as the Marxist ideal could. They attacked it as the enemy that it was and is to them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Trosky, Tito, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro—and the Sandinistas of the eighties—all the tyrants who have followed Marx have believed substantially the same thing about Christianity. Nothing has changed. Despite his shrewd public effort to picture himself as a benign and progressive reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev adhered to the same ideology. As recently as November 1986, he descried the struggle with traditional religion as “decisive and uncompromising” and called for more aggressive atheistic education. Like Lenin, Gorbachev knew who his enemies were. The greatest obstacle to the Marxist ideal of total control is the Christian faith, which is not simply a set of intellectual beliefs or weekly worship services, but involves personal submission to a King whose culture is incompatible with Lenin’s. The Christian church and the Marxist state may work out an accommodation for a time, but they will always be adversaries. The very nature of each makes any lasting accommodation impossible. They are the two great contenders for the soul of humankind. The people of Jaworzyna had had enough. For years they had petitioned the party authorities in the Silesia region of Poland for permission to build a church. Their repeated applications were denied. The people on the church-building committee tried pulling strings with higher party officials in Crakow and Warsaw. No luck. When they angrily protested the refusal, the petty bureaucrats turned a deaf ear. Now, other measures were required. #RandolphHarri 6 of 20
Months before, the authorities had issued a permit to build an auto-repair garage on a site near a highway. Now workers moved into the site, erected a tall fence, and began to build a garage. The building progressed slowly over a period of two years, but no one paid much attention. The party authorities in Jaworzyna were busy people. Then, on Sunday, February 5, 1978, the fence came down and the garage turned out to be a new church—its wide portals adorned with a picture of Our Lady of Czestochowa, the protector of Poland. Masses celebrated until late in the evening; thousands of people came to worship and rejoice. That spring, Cardinal Karol Wojtlya of Crakow came to Jawrzyna to dedicate the church. Soon afterward the authorities tried to close it, but hundreds of angry Poles organized a twenty-four-hour guard. The church building committee was taken to court and fined. Their clever lawyers tied up the case up in procedural disputes. The World saw that the church possessed the soul of the Polish people and embodied the essence of Polish nationhood. By contrast, the Polish Communists who operated the machinery of the state were alien usurpers who did the bidding of Russian masters. Though he went out of his way to avoid a direct confrontation with the Communist regime, John Paul’s message was widely understand by the restive Polish masses, and he lit a fuse during his triumphant nine-day visit to his homeland. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
“Christ would never approve that man be considered merely as a means of production,” he told workers in his old archdioceses in Mogila. At Czestochowa, John Paul urged the government to honour “the cause of fundamental human rights, including the right to religious liberty.” At Novy Targ, he told the Poles to set a Christian example, “even if it means risking danger.” The election of a Polish pope is surely why the church is so much stronger in Poland than almost anywhere else in the World, certainly strong than in Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. So is the fact that Christianity has become firmly established in Poland for a thousand years. However, a primary reason is the church’s long tradition of resistance to secular power. When the Communist imprisoned him in 1953, Cardinal Wyszynski reflected that of his seventeen seminary classmates, only he had thus far escaped being sent to German or Russian concentration camps. Cardinal Wyszynski confided a somewhat wry reflection to his diary: “Most of the priests and bishops with whom I worked had experienced prisons. Something would have been wrong if I had not experienced imprisonment. What was happening to me was very appropriate.” Collaboration with power, whether Communist or not, is always ruinous for the church. If the church exists, if it is to have legitimacy in the eyes of the people, it must always stand erect as a counter-power to political power. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Cardinal Wyszynski understood this. In prison in 1953, alone but supremely confident, he wrote a prophetic comment in his diary: “Any form of government, no matter how ruthless, will slowly cool and wane as it runs up against difficulties that the bureaucrat cannot resolve without cooperation from the people. Somehow the people must be taken into account. When the time came to reach the people, the Polish state found the church already there. It had been there for centuries. The only way to love God, whom we do not see, is by contributing to the advancement of this revolutionary process of biblical faith in the most sensible and radical way possible. Only then shall we be loving others, whom we do see. Therefore, we say that to be a Christian is to be a revolutionary. Do not legitimize tyranny. Remain aloof from the enticements and threats of the secular authority. Be faithful to God alone. At no other time in human history, than currently, has so much of the World come under the dark cloud of an oppressive regime consciously determined to eliminate religious influence from culture. However, we can be grateful that the Kingdom of God does not depend on the structures of humans. Though a third of the World, and growing, lives under tyranny and the official “religion” of atheism, the Kingdom of God remains visible. We must pull together from such scattered fields of psychology, neurology, communications theory and endocrinology, what science can tell us about human adaptation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
There is, as yet, no science of adaptation per se. Nor is there any systematic listing of the diseases of adaption. Yet evidence now sluicing in from a variety of disciplines makes it possible to sketch the rough outlines of a theory of adaptation. For a while researchers in these disciplines often work in ignorance of each other’s efforts, their work is elegantly compatible. Forming a distinct and exciting pattern, it provides solid underpinning for the concept of future shock. What actually happens to people when they are asked to change again and again? To understand the answer, we must begin with the body, the physical organism, itself. Fortunately, a series of startling, but as yet unpublicized, experiments have cast revealing light on the relationship of change to physical health. These experiments grow out of the work of the late Dr. Harold G. Wolff at the Cornell Medical Center in New York. Dr. Wolff repeatedly emphasized that the health of the individual is intimately bound up with the adaptive demands placed on one by the environment. One of Dr. Wolff’s followers, Dr. Lawrence E. Hinkle, Jr. has termed this the “human ecology” approach to medicine, and has argued passionately that disease need not be the result of any single, specific agent, such as a germ or virus, but a consequence of many factors, including the general nature of the environment surrounding the body. Dr. Hinkle has worked for years to sensitize the medical profession to the importance of environmental factors in medicine. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Today, with spreading alarm over air pollution, water pollution, urban crowding and other such factors, more and ore health authorities are coming around to the ecological notion that the individual needs to be seen as part of a total system, and that one’s health is dependent upon many subtle external factors. It was another of Dr. Wolff’s colleagues, however, Dr. Thomas H. Holmes, who came up with the idea that change, itself—not this or that specific change but the general rate of change in a person’s life—could be one of the most important environmental factors of all. Originally from Cornell, Dr. Holmes also taught at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and it was there, with the help of a young psychiatrist named Richard Rahe, that he created an ingenious research tool named the Life-Change Units Scale. This was a device for measuring how much change an individual has experienced in a given time span of time. Its development was an important methodological breakthrough, making it possible, for the first time, to qualify, at least crudely, the rate of change in individual life. Reason that different kinds of life-changes strike us with different force, Dr. Holmes and Dr. Rahe began by listing as many such changes as they could. A divorce, a marriage, a move to a new home—such events affect each of differently. Moreover, some carry greater impact than others. A vacation trip, for example, may represent a pleasant break in the routine. Yet it can hardly compared in impact with, say, the death of a parent. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Dr. Holmes and Dr. Rahe next took their list of life-changes to thousands of men and women in many walks of life in the United States of America and Japan. Each person was asked to rank order the specific items on the list according to how much impact each had. Which changes required a great deal of coping or adjustment? Which ones were relatively minor? To Dr. Holmes’ and Dr. Rae’s surprise, it turned out that there was widespread agreement among people as to which changes in their lives require major adaptations and which ones are comparatively unimportant. This agreement about the “impact-fullness” of various life events extends even across national and language barriers. (The work in the United States of America and Japan was also supplemented by studies in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.) People tend to know and to agree on which changes hit the hardest. Given this information, Dr. Holmes and Dr. Rahe were able to assign a numerical weight to each type of life change. Thus each item on their list was ranked by its magnitude and given a score accordingly. For example, if the death of one’s spouse is rated as one hundred points, then moving to a new home is rated by most people as worthy only twenty points, a vacation thirteen. (The death of a spouse, incidentally, is almost universally regarded as the single most impactful change that can befall a person in the normal course of one’s life.) #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Now Dr. Holmes and Dr. Rahe were ready for the next step. Armed with their Life-Change Units Scale, they began to question people about the actual pattern of change in their lives. The scale made is possible to compare the “changefulness” of one person’s life with that of another. By studying the amount of change in a person’s life, could we learn anything about the influence of change itself on health? To find out, Dr. Holmes, Dr. Rahe, and other researchers compiled the “life change scores” of literally thousands of individuals and began the labourious task of comparing these with the medical histories of these same individuals. Never before had there been a way to correlate change and health. Never before had there been such detailed data on patterns of change in individual lives. And seldom were the results of an experiment less ambiguous. In the United States and Japan, among servicemen and civilians, among pregnant women and the families of leukemia victims, among college athletes and retirees, the same striking pattern was present: those with high life change scores were more likely than their fellows to be ill in the following year. For the first time, it was possible to show in dramatic form that the rate of change in a person’s life—one’s pace of life—is closely tied to the state of one’s health. The results were spectacular, but Dr. Holmes, at first, hesitated to publish them. So when you doctor says you are allergic to something in your environment and it is causing an illness, it could be more than just the known allergen. There could be other precipitating factors contributing to the illness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
In every case in which it has been applied, the Life-Change Units Scale and the Life Changes Questionnaire have been applied to a wide variety of groups of people. In every case, the correlation between change and illness has held. It has been established that “alteration in life style” that require a great deal of adjustment and coping, correlate with illness—whether or not these changes are under the individual’s own direct control, whether or not one sees them as undesirable. Furthermore, the higher the degree of life change, the higher the risk that subsequent illness will be severe. So strong is this evidence, that it is becoming possible, by studying life change scores, actually to predict levels of illness in various populations. Thus Commander Ransom J. Arthur, head of the United States Navy Medical Neuropsychiatric Research Unit at San Diego, and Dr. Richard Rahe, a the time a Captain in Commander Arthur’s group, sat out to forecast sickness patterns in a group of 3,000 Navy Men Drs. Arthur and Rahe began by distributing a Life Change Questionnaire to the sailors on three cruisers in San Diego harbour. The ships were about to depart and would be at sea for approximately six months each. During this time it would be possible to maintain exact medical records on each crew member. Could information about a human’s life change pattern tell us in advance the likelihood of one’s falling ill during the voyage? #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Each crew member was asked to tell what changes had occurred in one’s life during the year preceding the voyage. The questionnaire covered an extremely broad spectrum of topics. Thus it asked whether the man had experienced either more or less trouble with superiors during the twelve-month period. It asked about alterations in one’s eating and sleeping habits. It inquired about change in one’ circle of friends, one’s dress, one’s forms of recreation. It asked whether one had experienced any change in one’s social activities, in family get-togethers, in one’s financial condition. Has one been having more or less trouble with one’s in-laws? More or fewer arguments with one’s wife? Had one gained a child through birth or adoption? Had one suffered the death of one’s wife, a friend or relative? The questionnaire went on to probe such issues as the number of times one had moved to a new home. Had one been in trouble with the law over traffic violations or other minor infractions? Had one spent a lot of time away from one’s wife as a result of a job-related travel or marital difficulties? Had one changed jobs? Won awards or promotions? Had one’s living conditions changes as a consequence of home remodeling or the deterioration of one’s neighbourhood? Had one’s wife started or stopped working? Had one taken out a loan or mortgage? How many times had one taken a vacation? Was there any major change in one’s relations with one’s parents as a result of death, divorce, remarriage, et cetera? #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
The questionnaire tried to get at the kind of life changes that are part of normal existence. It did not ask whether a change was regarded as “good” or “bad,” simply whether or not it had occurred. For six months, the three cruisers remained at sea. Just before they were scheduled to return, Drs. Arthur and Rahe flew new research teams out to join the ships. These teams proceeded to make a fine-tooth survey of the ships’ medical records. Which men had been ill? What diseases had they reported? How many days had they been confined to sick bay? When the last computer runs were completed, the linkage between changefulness and illness was nailed down more firmly that ever. Men in the upper ten percent of life change units—those who had had to adapt to the most change in the preceding year—turned out to suffer from one-and-a-half to two times as much illness as those in the bottom ten percent. Moreover, once again, the higher the life change scored, the more severe the illness was likely to be. The study of life change patterns—of change as an environmental factor—contributed significantly to success in predicting the amount and severity of illness in widely varied populations. “For the first time,” says Dr. Arthur, appraising life change research, “we have an index of change. If you have had many changes in your life within a short time, this places a great challenge on your body…An enormous number of changes with a short period might overwhelm its coping mechanisms. #RandolphHrris 16 of 20
“It is clear,” he continues, “that there is a connection between the body’s defenses and the demands for change that society imposes. We are in a continuous dynamic equilibrium…Various “noxious” elements, both internal and external, are always present, always seeking to explode into disease. For example, certain viruses live in the body and cause disease only when the defenses of the body wear down. There may well be generalized body defense system that prove inadequate to cope with the flood of demands for change that come pulsing through the nervous and endocrine systems. Or the body may overreact to something in the environment and start attacking its self because it detects something foreign. The stakes in life-change research are high, indeed, for not only illness, but death itself, may be linked to the severity of adaptational demands placed on the body. Thus a report by Drs. Arthur, Rahe, and a colleague, Dr. Joseph D. Mckean, Jr., begins with a quotation from Somerset Maugham’s literary autobiography, The Summing Up: My father…went to Paris and became solicitor to the British Embassy…After my mother’s death, her maid became my nurse…I think my father had a romantic mind. He took it into his head to build a house to live in during the summer. He bought a piece of land on the top of a hill at Suresnes…It was to be like a villa on the Bosphorous and on the top floor it was surrounded by loggias. It was a white house and the shutters were painted red. The garden was laid out. The rooms were furnished and then my father died. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
“The death of Somerset Maugham’s father,” they write, “seems at first glance to have been an abrupt unheralded event. However, a critical evaluation of the events of a year or two prior to the father’s demise reveals changes in his occupation, residence, personal habits, finances and family constellation.” These changes, they suggest, may have been precipitating events. This line of reasoning is consistent with reports that death rates among widows and widowers, during the first year after loss of a spouse, are higher than normal. A series of British studies have strongly suggested that the shock of widowhood weakens resistance to illness and tends to accelerate aging. The same is true for men. Scientists at the Institute of Community Studies in London, after reviewing the evidence and studying 4,486 widowers, declare that “the excess mortality in the first six months is almost certainly real…[Widowerhood] appears to being in its wake a sudden increment in mortality-rates of something like 40 percent in the first six months.” Why should this be true? It is speculated that grief, itself, leads to pathology. Yet the answer may lie not in the state of grief at all, but in the very high impact that loss of a spouse carries, forcing the survivor to make a multitude of major life changes within a short period after the death takes place. The work of Drs. Hinkle, Holmes, Rahe, Arthur, McKean and others now probing the relationship of change to illness is still in its early stages. Yet one lesson already seems vividly clear: change carries a physiological price tag with it. And the more radical the change, the steeper the price. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
If we say that the Overself resides in each human we say something that is not quite true nor quite false. It would be better to say that each human first feels the Overself—when one does have the good fortune to feel it—as residing within one’s heart, but the result of further development is to show one that the contrary, although a paradox, is also correct, which is that one resides in the Overself! The godlike abides in each of us but only the master knows and feels it. The mind keeps on moving about until sleep overcomes it…and because it never stopped to collect itself, it still does not know the higher and better part of itself—the Overself. The divine presence is constant, it does not go away: but humans themselves are too often absent, heedless, interested elsewhere. However, each return gives one a glimpse which one calls a grace. The soul is present and active in every human. This is why it is quite possible for every human to have a direct glimpse of the truth about one’s own inward non-materiality. Nothing can ever exist outside God. Therefore, no human is bereft of the divine presence within oneself. All humans have the possibility of discovering this fact. And with it they will discover their real selfhood, their true individuality. This is the truth that must be proclaimed to our generation, that the Soul is with us here and now—not in some remote World or distant time, not when the body expires—and that it is our joy and strength to find it. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
There is no pint of seawater in which salt is not present in solution. There is no human entity in whom a divine soul is not present in secret. Not even a solitary Crusoe passes through life alone. Everyone passes through it in fellowship with one’s higher self. That such fellowship is, in most cases, an unconscious one, is not enough to nullify it. That humans may deny in faith or conduct even they very existence of their soul is likewise not enough to nullify it. This, the real I, is always accessible to one in prayer and always is the half-known background of one’s conscious self at other times. So long as the Overself is sought elsewhere than were It is, as apart from the seeker oneself, so long will the quest for its end in failure. The divine being is present in all people, from the crudest to the most cultured. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast sanctified us by Thy precepts and hast enjoined upon us the taking of the Lulav. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast kept us in life, and hast sustained us, and enabled us to reach this festive season. As we wave the Lulav in all directions, we acknowledge as did our forefathers that Thou, O Lord, art everywhere. From the north and from the south, from the east and from the west, praise the Lord. The shining Heavens praise Thee. All the Earth praises Thy name. The eyes, represented by the leaves of the myrtle, the lips, represented by the leaves of the willow, the spine, by the palm branch, and the heart, by the citron,–all render praise unto Thee, O Lord on high. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA |
Now Selling!
Cresleigh Meadows is now selling! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.
Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes.
Homeowners will love the convenient commuter access to nearly Sacramento and Yuba City.
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 Go. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/
Humans are Good and there is No Evil that the Mind Cannot Overcome!
There are only three sins—causing pain, causing fear, causing anguish. The rest is window dressing. A somewhat less drastic expression of necrophilia is a marked interest in sickness in all its forms, as well as in death. An example is the parent who is always interested in one’s child’s sicknesses, one’s failures, and makes dark prognoses for the future; and the same time one is unimpressed by a favourable change, one does not respond to the child’s joy or enthusiasm, and one will not notice anything new that is growing within the child. One does not harm the child in any obvious way, yet one may slowly strangle one’s joy of life, one’s faith in growth, and eventually one will infect the child with one’s own necrophilous orientation. Anyone who has occasion to listen to conversations of people of all social classes from middle age onward will be impressed by the extent of their talk about sickness and death of other people. To be sure, there are a number of factors responsible for this. For many people, especially those with no outside interest, sickness and death are the only the only dramatic elements in their lives; it is one of the few subjects about which they can talk, aside from events in the family. However, granting all this, there are many persons for whom these explanations do not suffice. They can usually be recognized by the animation and excitement that comes over them when they talk about sickness or other sad events like death, financial troubles, and so forth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
The necrophilous person’s particular interest in the dead is often shown not only in one’s conversation but in the way one reads the newspapers. One is most interested—and hence reads first—the death notices and obituaries; one also like to talk about death from various aspects: what people died of, under what conditions, who died recently, who is likely to die, and so on. One likes to go to funeral parlors and cemeteries and usually does not miss an occasion to do so when it is socially opportune. It is easy to see that this affinity for burials and cemeteries is only a somewhat attenuated form of the more gross manifest interest in morgues and graves. A somewhat less easily identifiable trait of the necrophilous person is the particular kind of lifelessness in one’s conversation. This is not a matter of what the conversation is about. A very intelligent, erudite necrophilous person may talk about things that would be very interesting were it not for the way in which one presents one’s ideas. One remains stiff, cold, aloof; one’s presentation of the subject is pedantic and lifeless. One the other hand the opposite character type, the life loving-person, may talk of an experience that in itself is not particularly interesting, but there is life in the way one present it; one is stimulating; that is why one listens with interest and pleasure. The necrophilous person is a wet blanket and joy killer in a group; one is boring rather than animating; one deadens everything and makes people feel tired, in contrast to the biophilous person who makes people feel more alive. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Interior Word—it speaks not through uttered words clairaudiently heard as in spiritistic phenomena but through the higher form of spontaneous intuitively formulated thoughts. A voice comes to one’s hearing but not with the ordinary kind of audibility. It is within one for it is only a mental voice yet it speaks with a strange authority. It says to one, “I am the Way, the Truth, the Life.” However, still another dimension of necrophilous character only the past is experienced as quite real, not the present or the future. What has been, id est, what is dead, rules one’s life: institutions, laws, property, traditions, and possessions. Briefly, things rule the human; having rules being; the dead rule the living. In the necrophile’s thinking—personal, philosophical, and political—the past is sacred, nothing new is valuable, drastic change is a crime agist the “natural” order. Another aspect of necrophilia is the relation to colour. The necrophilous person generally has a predilection for dark, light-absorbing colours, such as black or brown, and a dislike for bright, radiant colours. (This colour preference is similar to the one often found in depressed persons.) One can observe this preference in their dress or in the colours they choose if they pain. Of course, in cases when dark clothes are worn out of tradition, the colour has no significance in relation to character. As we have already seen in the clinical material above, the necrophilous person is characterized by a special affinity to bad odors—originally the odor of decaying or putrid flesh. They have a frank enjoyment of bad odors. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
That form of enjoyment leads to the repression of the desire to enjoy bad odor that in reality does not exist. (This is similar to the overcleanliness of the anal character.) Whether of the one form or the other the necrophilic person’s fascination with bad odors frequently gives such persons the appearance of being “sniffers.” Not infrequently this sniffing tendency even shows in their facial expression. Many necrophilous individuals give the impression of constantly smelling a bad odor. Anyone who studies the many pictures of Hitler, for instance, can easily discover this sniffing expression in his face. This expression is not always present in necrophiles, but when it is, it is one of the most reliable criteria of such a passion. Another characteristic element in the facial expression is the necrophile’s incapacity to laugh. One’s laughter is actually a kind of smirk; it is unalive and lacks the liberating and joyous quality of normal laughter. In fact it is not only the absence of the capacity for “free” laughter that is characteristic of the necrophile, but the general immobility and lack of expression in one’s face. One can observe that such people in reality never “laugh” but only “grin.” While watching television one can sometimes observe a speaker whose face remains completely unmoved while one is speaking; one grins only at the beginning or the end of one’s speech when, according to American custom, one knows that one is expected to smile. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Such persons cannot talk and smile at the same time, because they can direct their attention only to the one or the other activity; their smile is not spontaneous but planned, like the unspontaneous gestures of the poor actor. The skin is often indicative of necrophiles: it gives the impression of being lifeless, “dry,” sallow; when we sense sometimes that a person has a “dirty” face, we are not claiming that the face is unwashed, but are responding to the particular quality of a necrophilous expression. The necrophilous person is characterized by the predominant use of words referring to destruction and to feces and toilets. They frequently use foul language, one word in particular. They live in a deadened, joyless atmosphere. Mussolini and Hitler were, perhaps, rebels (Hitler more than Mussolini), but they were not revolutionaries. They had no genuinely creative ideas, nor did they accomplish any significant changes that benefited humans. They lacked the essential criterion of the revolutionary spirit: love of life, the desire to serve its unfolding and growth, and a passion for independence. However, some people disagree with that. They believe that Hitler’s belief that blonde, blue eyed, Germans were God’s chosen people and a master race is what lead to genetic editing and the idea of the American dream. The American Dream is more than just owning a beautiful house in the suburbs, a college education, successful career, a married couple with two kids and a car. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
The American dream also includes being beautiful or handsome and having blonde hair and blue eyes, fairly tall, and thin. Also loving things like red meat, barbeque, apple pie, milk, baseball, church, and American cars. There is also a love for the colour blue because it signifies intelligence. America is supposed to be the baby of Germany. “For any government deliberately to deny to their people what must be their plainest and simplest right, to live in peace and happiness without the nightmare of war, would be to betray their trust, and to call down upon their heads the condemnation of all humankind. I do not believe that such a government anywhere exists among civilized peoples. I am convinced that the aim of every state’s person worthy of the name, to whatever country one belongs, must be the happiness of the people for whom and to whom one is responsible, and in that faith I am sure that a way can and will be found to free the World from the curse of armaments and the fears that give rise to them, and to open up a happier, and wiser future for humankind,” reports Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, November 1937. Interior Word: Something within begins to speak to one, some mind beings to find its own expression. It is one’s, and yet not one’s. Government is a natural vocation for those raised in Unitarian tradition, with its belief in the universal goodness of all humans, growing out of a sense of duty to humankind and a deep-seated belief that reasonable, fair-minded humans can work together to solve any difficulty. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
The Overself issues its commands and exacts its demands in the utter silence and privacy of a human’s heart. Yet they are more powerful and more imperious in the end than any which issue from the noisy bustling World. If one comes under the tutelage of the Interior Word, one may count oneself fortunate. However, one’s good fortune will last only as long as one faithfully obeys it. The failure to do so will bring painful but educative retribution. It is as if no one existed but these two—the listening mind and the soundless voice. This is real solitude; this is the true cloister to which a human may retire in order to find God; this is the desert, cave, or mountain where, mentally, one renounces the World’s business and abandons friends, family, and all humanity. The Germans believed themselves, on the whole, to be the most powerful humans of the most powerful empire in the history of the World. His Majesty’s Government could not take responsibility of advising the chancellor to take any course of action that might expose his country to dangers against which His Majesty’s Government was unable to guarantee protection. Nancy Astor, a devout Christian Scientist, always had Christian Science lectures at her weekend gatherings. Lord Astor and Lord Lothian were Christian Scientists too. Their sympathetic view of Germany was strengthened by the Christian Science doctrine that humans are good, that there is no evil that the mind cannot overcome. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
If human beings can sit down and reason together, it would be possible to ease tensions overnight. Yet some people are intent on singing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. They glorify war as they believe in is the World’s only hygiene, and want to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every kind, and want to fight moralism, feminism, and every opportunistic individual. Nancy Astor said in one of her wild, stabbing protests, “It’s madness. War will destroy Western civilization. Europe will be destroyed. Then certainly Communism will spread, for it always feeds on death like a vulture.” Unquestionably! We would not be fighting to preserve something. Unless war is averted now there will be no one left who knows the meaning of the words right and wrong. This is no longer an affair of national pride and laws of right and wrong. It is a case of our whole civilization going under. A darkness hangs over America. Trenches are being dug in secret locations. Children are expected to be herded into trains, evacuating cities that everyone expects to be annihilated by COVID-19. Our first duty is not to avoid confrontations with evil but to restrain it. Place your faith in the innate goodness and reasonableness of humans. Christian Scientists believe that all evil is an illusion that can be eliminated by the exercise of the mind. We need an independent moral voice for the country. God Himself speaks exclusively through international gatherings. However, many people are putting more faith in progressive politics and economics and the fictional news media than in God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Many churches, representing the Kingdom of God, are caught up in the trendy issue of the time, surrendering its influence as an independent moral voice. This failure of both the state and the church contributed to the disaster that has befell the World. However, peace may be restored. It is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all humankind that from this solemn occasion a better World shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past—a World founded upon faith and understanding—a World dedicated to the dignity of humans and the fulfillment of their most cherished wish—for freedom, tolerance, and justice. Nietzsche was not saying that God does not exist, but the God had become irrelevant to people because they are closing the church, partaking in evil, worshipping fictional news and political, not God. Men and women may assert that God’s exists or that He does not, but it makes littler difference either way. God is dead not because He does not exist, but because we live, play, procreate, govern, and die as though He does not. The effect of this widespread notion can be seen in the despair that followed the COVID-19 pandemic. Churches were forced to close, but you see people out in the streets eating expensive restaurant food, but no accommodations like that being made for people who want to worship God. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
This militant atheism that has claimed countless lives Worldwide and caused the death of God has had profound implications for individuals as well as for society and politics because it is the philosophic context in which modern governments operate. In the New World civilization, God has traditionally played the role of legitimizing government. In classical and Christian political philosophy He was the author of natural law—that body of just and reasonable standards that guided human rulers and by which the ruled were bound to respect and obey those given charge over them. Even atheistic political philosophy acknowledged that the idea of God was useful: a little dose of religion would keep the masses quiet. As Napoleon said, “Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.” Atheism has become militant…insisting it must be believed. Atheism has felt the need to impose its views, to forbid competing visions. Without Gd there will be wars of a kind that have never happened on the Earth, this is more serious the climate change. The devaluation of all values is what the death of God has meant to politics. Distinctions between right and wrong, justice and injustice have become meaningless. No objective guide is left o choose between “all men are created equal” and “the weak to the wall.” In Year Zero no one could have predicted the consequences that the void at the heart of nations would produce. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
However, this spiritual vacuum means that humans can only pursue two options: first to imagine that they are gods themselves, or second, to seek satisfaction in their senses. “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler and Stalin,” reports T.S. Eliot. God remains dead. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? Today, 33 percent of the World’s population and growing lives in the viselike grip of states that are the product of such gangster-state’s people who established governments that attempt to fill the vacuum of values with secular ideology or the cult of personality. The goal of these massive bureaucracies is to preside over the death of God; their system for achieving it is most often called Marxist Leninism. It carries out its policies with surgical efficiency, as millions of Christians and Jews who have passed through Communist gulgas would testify. If they could. However, sometimes the system performs with comic clumsiness. We live in a Cairo bazaar of competing models. In this psychological phantasmagoria we search for a style, a way of ordering our existence, that will fit our particular temperament and circumstances. We look for heroes or mini-heroes to emulate. The style-seeker is like the lady who flips through the pages of a fashion magazine to find a suitable dress pattern by Paris Hilton. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
She studies ne after another, settles on one that appeals to her, and decide to purchase that dress. Next she begin to collect the necessary materials, thinks about how many hours she will have to work to earn the dress, imagines the cloth, thread, piping, buttons, et cetera. In precisely the same way, the life style creator acquires the necessary props One lets one’s hair grow. One buys art nouveau paintings and hardcovers of Anne Rice’s novels. One learns to discuss Marcuse, Guevara, Edith Warton, and Frantz Fanon. One picks up a particular jargon, using words like “relevance” and “establishment.” None of this means that one’s political actions are insignificant, or that one’s opinions are unjust or foolish. One may (or may not) be accurate in one’s views of society. Yet the particular way in which one chooses to express them is inescapable part of one’s search for personal style. The lady, in constructing the work hours to pay for her dress, alters her habits here and there, deviating from the usual pattern in minor ways to make sure she has enough money saved up to buy that high quality dress. If she buys one a month, in a year she will have 12 fancy dresses that may last a lifetime. The end product is she has a truly custom-made wardrobe; enough dresses to wear a new one everyday for nearly two weeks. In quite the same way we individualize our style of living, yet usually winds up bearing a distinct resemblance to some life style model previously packaged and marketed by a subcult. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
People know how to make themselves look rich. They do not waste money, but they save up and buy the things they desire. Often we are unaware of the moment when we commit ourselves to one life style model over all others. The decision to “be” and Executive or Militant Atheists or a West Side Intellectual is seldom the result of purely logical analysis. Nor is the decision always made cleanly, all at once. The research scientist who switches from Ocean Spray Cranberry 100 percent juice to R. W. Knudsen 100 percent cranberry juice may do so for health reasons without recognizing that the trat taste of cranberry juice is part of a whole life style toward which one finds oneself drawn to. The couple who choose the Tiffany Magnolia Nouveau Floral 73” floor lamp think they are furnishing their Cresleigh Home; they do no necessarily see their actions as an attempt to flesh out an overall style. Most of us, in fact, do not think of our own lives in terms of life style, and we often have difficulty in talking about it objectively. We have even more trouble when we try to articular the structure of values implicit in our style. The task is doubly hard because many of us do not adopt a single integrated style, but a composite of elements drawn from several different models. We may emulate both Hippie and Surfer. We may choose a cross between West Side Intellectual and Executive—a fusion that is, in fact, chose by many publishing officials in Manhattan, New York USA. When one’s personal style is a hybrid, it is frequently difficult to disentangle the multiple models on which it is based. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Once we commit ourselves to a particular model, however, we fight energetically to build it, and perhaps even more so to preserve it against challenge. For the style becomes extremely important to us. This is doubly true of the people of the future, among whom concern for style is downright passionate. This intense concern for style is not, however, what literary critics means by formalism. It is not simply an interest in outward appearances. For style of life involves not merely the external forms of behaviour, but the values implicit in that behaviour, and one cannot change one’s life style without working some change in one’s self-image. The people of the future are not “style conscious” but “life style conscious.” This is why little things often assume great significance for them. If it challenges a hard-worn life style, if it threatens to break up the integrity of the style, a single small detail of one’s life may be charged with emotional power. Aunt Wendy gives us a wedding present. We are embarrassed by it, for it in in a style alien to our own. It irritates and upsets us, even the we know that “Aunt Wendy does not know any better.” We banish the Sophia 35-Light Candle Style Tiered Chandelier with Crystal Accents by Schonbek to the attic of the house. Aunt Wendy’s Amana MXP22TLT Menumaster Higher Speed Combination Oven – WiFi ready or the set of eight Prestige Gala Charger Dinner Plates is not important in and of itself. However, it is a message from a different subcultural World, and unless we are weak in commitment to our own style, unless we happen to be in transition between styles, it represents a potential threat. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
The psychologist Leon Festinger coined the term “cognitive dissonance” to mean the tendency of a person to reject or deny information that challenges one’s preconceptions. We do not want to hear things that may upset our carefully worked out structure of beliefs. Similarly, Aunt Wendy’s gift represents an element of “stylistic dissonance.” It threatens to undermine our carefully worked out style of life. Why does the life style have this power to preserve itself? What is the source of our commitment to it? A life style is a vehicle through which we express ourselves. It is a way of telling the World which particular subcult or subcults we belong to. Yet this hardly accounts for its enormous importance to us. The real reason why life styles are so significant—and increasingly so as the society diversifies—is that, above all else, the choice of a life style model to emulate is a crucial strategy in our private war against crowing pressures of overchoice. Deciding, whether consciously or not to be “like” William Buckley or Joan Baez, Lionel Trilling, Paris Hilton, Jet Li, Aaliyah Haughton, E40, or his surfer equivalent, J. J. Moon, rescues us from need to make millions of minute life-decisions. Once a commitment to a style is made, we are able to rule out many forms of dress and behaviour, many ideas and attitudes, as inappropriate to our adopted style. The college boy who chooses to give it the Ole American try wastes little energy agonizing over whether who to vote for in the presidential election, carry an attache case, or invest in mutual funds. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
By zeroing in on a particular life style we exclude a vast number of alternatives from further consideration. The fellow who opts for a BMW M8 need no longer concern oneself with the hundreds of types of automobiles available to one on the open market, but which violate the spirit of one’s style. One need only choose among the far smaller repertoire of M8 Competition Ultimate Driving Machines from Niello BMW in Sacramento, California that fit within the limits set by one’s model. And what is said of BMW M8 Competition Ultimate Driving Machines is equally applicable to one’s ideas and social relationships as well. The commitment to one style of life over another is thus a super-decision. It is a decision of a higher order than the general run of everyday life-decisions. It is a decision to narrow the range of alternatives that will concern us in the future. So long as we operate within the confines of the style we have chosen, our choices are relatively simple. It is painful because, freed of our commitment to any given style, cut adrift from the subcult that gave rise to it, we no longer “belong.” Worse yet, our basic principles are called into question and we must face each new life-decision afresh, alone, without security of a definite, fixed policy. We are, in short, confront with the full, crushing burden of overchoice again. The Interior Word: When another personality speaks from the entranced or semi-entranced body, be the latter a spiritualist medium, a hypnotized person, or a psychologically auto-suggested one, we have a phenomenon in which no true mystic would take part. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
When this same personality announces itself to be Jesus, Krishna, Saint Francis, Mrs. Eddy, or Mme. Blavatsky, it may immediately be labelled as spurious. Whether the phenomenon be produced by actual spirit-possession (when usually a lying spirit is the operating agent) or by psychological self-obsession, with the wakeful personality unconscious of what the other has said, in both cases it is one which ought to be avoided. The Catholic Church, with its very wide experience in such matters, has cautioned its adherents against being seduced either into allowing the thing to happen or into believing the teaching given by the mysterious visitor. Pope Benedict XIV went so far as to ascribe a diabolic origin in the voice. From the standpoint of philosophy it may be said that the Inner Word speaks only to a human, never through one to others. Nor is it heard clairaudiently and therefore psycho-physically; it is heard only mentally and inwardly. The phenomenon of the Interior Word does not ordinarily appear before one is able to carry the mind to a certain depth or intensity of concentration, and to hold it there continuously for not less than about a half hour. In that state of inspired communion when the Interior Word is heard, thoughts keep coming into consciousness from a source deeper than the personal mind. The ego is not directly thinking them but instead experiences them as being impressed upon it or released into it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
The utterance of the Interior Word can be heard only in Heaven, only in a state detached from the animality and triviality of the common state. It is as if another being spoke inside me—not with audible voice but with mental voice—and imposed itself strongly on my own mind. Interior Word: Out of this blankness something will begin to speak to one. It will not be a sound heard with the body’s ears. If it happened, that would be a low psychic manifestation which must be stopped at once. Until the internal Word speaks in one one is really incapable of helping others spiritually. One may be able to do so intellectually or to comfort them emotionally but that is a different and inferior thing. If the Interior Word bids one move in any direction which seems encompassed by difficulties or blocked by obstacles so that one can see no way before one, let one not doubt or fear. A way will be made by the power of the Overself. One need only obey, relax, and trust the guidance. When the Inner Word begins to speak to one, one may begin to speak to others—not before. For only then will what one says bear any creative power, spiritual inspiration, enlightenment, or healing in it. The Interior Word carries an authoritative and commanding tone. Adults have some control over their environment, but children depend on adults to provide a home for them. In addition to love, security, understanding, and encouragement, reverence plays an important part in a safe and happy home. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Reverence is respect, honour, and love for our Heavenly Father, for His Son, Jesus Christ, and for all of His creations. It is more than just holding bodies still and being quiet during meetings; it is an attitude. It can become a way of life for each of us as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Reverent habits often precede reverent feelings. Prayer is a source of great peace for all of us. Habits of reverence can begin early in our home when we help children learn to pray. The way we pray with our children can be a teaching and building experience. In general, the divine beings like us. That is one of the reasons they want our prayers and offerings; if they did not care about us, they would not care about our prayers. That is why they respond well to petitionary prayers; they want to help us. They really do. Some of them are ambivalent, however. Why should the Land Spirits feel warmly toward us when we cut down their forests and pave over their meadows? Do not feel too smug because you have protested against logging in old growth forest or rain forest. Where do you think the land your house is built on came from? What kind of land was there before it was plowed under to grow your food? There used to be rain forests in the Bay Area. Dealing with Land Spirits can be difficult. We have to show them we are grateful for their sacrifice. We do this by giving something back. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Dear Lord in the shining Heaven, I offer you my thanks and condolences for your sacrifices. I know you are here, and I wish for your friendship, for me and my people. Please accept what I give you, and please do not forget me. The Interior Word is not heard with the reasoning mind, even though its statements may be very reasonable. It is not connected with the intellect at all, as are all our ordinary words. It is received in the heart, felt intensively and deeply. Now that one has developed the capacity to hear, there are sounds forth out of the obscure recesses of one’s being a silent voice, a messenger without name or form. It is the Word. The Interior Word is never enigmatic and puzzling but always direct and simple. Only the revelations of occultism are obscure, never the revelations of truth itself. What the German mystics called “the Interior Word” is precisely the same as what two thousand years earlier the Mandarin Chinese mystics called the “Voice of Heaven.” The Interior Word cannot speak frequently until there is complete silence within the human’s being. The ideas which come to one’s mind through the Interior Word come stamped with the certitude of truth. Internal Word: In the New Testament, John introduces the idea of the logo, the Word which speaks in every human who comes into the Word. Every human is not able to hear it although it is always there, always immanent. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
The Interior Word is referred to in the Bible: “I will hear what the Lord God will speak to me,” reports Psalms 84.9. To corrupt nature is not the work of providence. However, it is the nature of some things to be contingent. Divine providence does not therefore impose any necessity upon things so as to destroy their contingency. Divine providence imposes necessity upon some things; not upon all, as some formerly believed. For to providence it belongs to order things towards an end. Now after the divine goodness, which is an extrinsic end to all things, the principal good in things themselves is the perfection of the Universe; which would not be, were not all grades of being found in things. Whence it pertains to divine providence to produce every grade of being. And thus it has prepared for something necessary causes, so that they happened of necessity; for others contingent causes, that they may happen by contingency, according to the nature of their proximate cause. The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow; but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the plan of divine providence conceives to happen from contingency. The order of divine providence is unchangeable and certain, so far as all things foreseen happen as they have been foreseen, whether from necessity or from contingency. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
That indissolubility and unchaneableness of which Boethius speaks, pertain to the certainty of providence, which fails not to produce its effect, and that in the way foreseen; but they do not pertain to the necessity of the effects. We must remember that properly speaking “necessary” and “contingent” are consequent upon being, as such. Hence the mode both of necessity and of contingency falls under the foresight of God, who provides universally for all being; not under the foresight of causes that provide only for some particular order of things. Our God and God of our fathers, please bless us with the threefold blessing 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. Please grant peace, well-being and blessing unto the World, with grace, lovingkindness and mercy for us and for all America, Thy people. Bless us, O Father, all of us together, with the light of Thy presence; for by that light Thou hast given us, O Lord our God, the Torah of life, lovingkindness and righteousness, blessing and mercy, life and peace. O may it be good in Thy sight at all times to bless Thy people America with Thy peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, wo blesses Thy people American with peace. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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The Touch of the Untouchable—All Were Re-animated and there Arose a Noise of Harmony!
I want you all to stonewall it; let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up or anything else, if it will save it—save the plan. To support him they will have to affirm the divine right of kings. In grammar, sentences are built up basically from three things: a subject, a verb, and an object, with the subject acting upon the object through the verb. A sentence is not considered complete unless it has these three things, this relationship between the subject and the object. In metaphysics, every experience also requires a subject and an object—a person or a thing who is affected by or produces an action on a second entity. All statements about human experiences must include this subject-object relationship. Thus, in the relationship between a human and one’s thoughts, the human is the subject and the thoughts are the objects. In Old World metaphysics, a similar relationship holds good—except that the subject is there called the seer, the object is called the seen, and seeing describes the relationship between the two. All existence in time-space order as experienced by a human being necessarily has these three elements within it. There is no subject without an object, no seer without a seen plus the relationship or the action between them. They are always linked together. If however we look beyond this existence to the timeless spaceless Reality, it is obvious that there can be no such relationship therein, for it is completely nondual, the Reality which never changes, which has no second thing. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
We learn from mentalism that this Reality is Mind. If we are ever to find it, we know that it cannot be found as if it were a second thing, with us as subject and it as object. In that sense we can never find it, but only substitutes which themselves are in duality. We have indeed to set up a search for the kind of consciousness where there is no object to be experienced and therefore where there is no subject-ego to receive the experience. Such is the unified consciousness which is none other than Mind itself. We can use this criterion not only with reference to our experiences of the World but also with reference to our inner mystical experiences and check from this on what level they really are. Mind also has no second thing to know an experience, no World. Nor can anyone know and experience Mind and yet remain an individual, a person. Whoever finds one’s Overself and draws from it the will and desire to serve others, will radiate joy, confidence, and peace to them. From that high source of inspiration may come great actions, immense inner strength, superb artistic creativity, and a beautiful, delicate inner equilibrium. What inspired artist ever creates a new work expect in joy? Is this not a clue to the fact that the inspirational or best level of one’s mind is a happy one? One lives in the sunny light of one’s own inspired thoughts. When thought of the little self vanished, even gloating thought of its spiritual rapture, and That which is behind or beyond it in utter stillness is alone felt and known, then one is said to experience “the touch of the Untouchable,” as ancient self-actualized called it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The literal meaning is “non-touching” or, possibly “touching the Untouchable.” Everything is either related to, or in contact with, something else, that is, in touch with it. However, in the states of Asparsa there is no such possibility because nondual Brahman is alone acknowledged, THAT which is uncontacted by anything. If you believe that you have had the ultimate experience, it is more likely that you had an emotional, or mental, or mystic one. The authentic thing does not enter consciousness. You do not know that it has transpired. You discover it is already here only by looking back at what you were and contrasting it with what you now are; or what others recognize it in you and draw attention to it; or when a situation arises which throws up your real status. It is a permanent fact, not a brief mystic “glimpse.” The true union, completely authentic and completely beatific, where mind melts into Mind without the admixture of personal wish or traditional suggestion, cannot be properly described in words. For one who experiences it may know its onset or its end because of the enormous contrast with one’s ordinary self, but one will not know its full height simply because one will not even know that one is experiencing it. For to do so would be to re-introduce the ego and thus fall away from the purity of the union. There would then be admixture—which is the fate of unions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
All teachings which try to inform us what the Real is like can only honestly do so if they use negative terms: they can only say what it is not like. For where is the individual who can continue to exist in its discovery and note its nature or attributes? One’s limited consciousness has dissolved in the larger one. Only afterwards, when looking back at the experience, dare one say that the experience itself was ineffable but what it concerned was incomprehensible; it was luminous, but that which shone was an unseen power. “What other hath He appointed over the earth? or whom hath He set over the World which He Himself hath made,” reports Job 34.13. Two things belong to providence—namely, the type of things foreordained towards an end; and the execution of this order, which is called government. As regards the first of these, God has immediate providence over everything, because He has in His intellect the types of everything, even the smallest; and whatsoever He causes assigns to certain effects, He gives them the power to produce those effects. Whence it must be that God has before hand the type of those effects in His mind. As t the second, there are certain intermediaries of God’s providence; for He governs things inferior by superior, not on account of any defect in His power, but by reason of the abundance of His goodness; so that the dignity of causality is imparted even to creatures. Thus Plato’s opinion, as narrated by Gregory of Nyssa (De Provid. Vii, 3) is exploded. He taught threefold providence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
First, one which belongs to the supreme Deity, Who first and foremost has provision over spiritual things, and thus over the individuals of all that can be generated and corrupted, he attributed to the divinities who circulate in the Heavens; that is, certain separate substances, which move corporeal things in a circular direction. The third providence, over human affairs, he assigned to demons, who the Platonic philosopher placed between us and the gods, as Augustine tells us (De Civ. Dei, 1, 2: viii, 14). It pertains to a king’s dignity to have minster who execute his providence. However, the fact that one has not the plan of those things which are done by them arises from a deficiency in oneself. For every operative science is the more perfect, the more it considers the particular thing with which its action is concerned. God’s immediate provision over everything does not exclude the action of secondary causes; which are the executors of His order, as was said above. It is better for us not to know low and vile things, because by them we are impeded in our knowledge of what is better and higher; for we cannot understand many things simultaneously; because the thought of evil sometimes perverts the will towards evil. This does not hold with God, Who sees everything simultaneously at one glance, and whose will cannot turn in the direction of evil. When you speak of “an experience” you imply that first, there is an experiencer, and second, there is an object of which one has an experience. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
That is, you refer to the realm of duality. It may be lofty, inspiring, unusual, but it is an event with a beginning and an ending; it is inside time, however variously the sense of time changes. It is not to be identified with the Real. The ordinary person is quite incapable of penetrating the absolute. The extraordinary person—the genius—may get flashes of intuition which reflect some of truths that lift one above the little self. However, no one really attains the absoluteness without getting dissolved in it, without knowing and remembering nothing of it. Those who claim these “unions with God’ are really describing something quite different. Too often they are overwhelmed by their experience and quite naturally take it to be outside reality when it is in fact a higher degree of it. The question of “I” and of self-consciousness in any form, whether universal or personal, vanished when the truth is known because there is none then to mark out selfhood of any kind. When it is understood that the mind cannot become an object to itself, it will be understood that everything one may say about it will merely impose an illusory limitation upon it. There are not two thoughts, the ego and the universal self, to enter into relationship in the final stage. The ocean of infinite impersonal being closes over the human’s ego, and one is forever submerged in anonymity, never again to see or be seen. The final grade of inner experience, the deepest phase of contemplation, is one where the experience oneself disappears, the meditator vanishes, the knower no longer has an object—not even the Overself—to know for duality collapses. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Because this grade is beyond the supreme “Light” experience where the Overself reveals its presence visually as a dazzling mass, shaft, ball, or ray of unearthly radiance which is seen whether the bodily eyes are open or closed, it has been called the divine darkness. One can find nothingness within oneself only after one has evaluated the nothingness of oneself. They mystery of the Great Void does not disclose itself to the smugly satisfied or the arrogantly proud or the intellectually conceited. The truth becomes self-evident on this highest level and needs no endorsement from anything or anyone outside. It puts the searching intellect and the aspiring emotions back in their place as mere channels for its use. Here is the most private experience anyone can have—to be alone with the Alone! To return to the Source is to hold on until you immerse yourself in the threefold being of Time, Space, and Mind which together make the One, the Source of God. What the Self-Actualized Plotinus called the First Principle, the One, is as high as enlightenment can bring the seeker. In this astonishing revelation, one discovers that one oneself is the seeker, the teacher, and the sought-for goal. Without keeping steadily in view this original mentalness of things and hence their original oneness with self and Mind, the mystic must naturally get confused if not deceived by what one takes to be the opposite of Spirit and Mater. The mystic looks within, to self; the materialist looks without to the World. And each misses what the other finds. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
However to the philosopher neither of these is primary. One looks to that Mind of which both self and World are but manifestations and in which one find the manifestations also. It is not enough for one to receive, as the mystic receives, fitful and occasional illuminations from periodic intersessionary prayers. One relates this intellectual understanding to one’s further discovery got during mystical self-absorption in the Void that the reality of one’s own self is Mind. Back in the World once more one studies it again under this further light, confirms that the manifold World consists ultimately of mental images, conjoins with one’s full metaphysical understanding that it is simply Mind in manifestation, and thus comes to comprehend that it is essentially one with the same Mind which one experiences in self-absorption. Thus one’s insight actualizes, experiences, this Mind-in-itself as and not apart from the sensuous World whereas the mystic divides them. With insight, the sense of oneness does not destroy the sense of difference but both remain strangely present, whereas with the ordinary mystical perception each cancels the other. The myriad forms which make up the picture of this World will not disappear as an essential characteristic of reality nor will one’s awareness of them or one’s traffic with them be affected. Hence one possesses a firm and final attainment wherein one will permanently possess the insight into pure Mind even in the midst of physical sensations. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
One sees everything in this multitudinous World as being but the Mind itself as easily as one can see nothing, the imagesless Void, as being but the Mind itself, whenever one cares to turn aside into self-absorption. One sees both the outer faces of all humans and the inner depth of one’s own self as being but the Mind itself. Thus one experiences the unity of all existence; not intermittently but at every moment ne knows the Mind as ultimate. This is the philosophic or final realization. It is as permanent as the mystic’s is transient. Whatever one does or refrains from dong, whatever one experiences or fails to experience, one gives up all discriminations between reality and appearance, between truth and illusion, and lets one’s insight function freely as one’s thoughts select and cling to nothing. One experiences the miracle of undifferentiated being, the wonder of undifferenced unity. The artificial human-made frontiers melt away. One sees one’s fellow humans as inescapably and inherently divine as they are, not merely as the mundane creatures they believe they are, so that any traces of an ascetical holier-than-thou attitude fall completely away from one. Only after one has worked one’s way through different degrees of comprehension of the World whose passing one’s own development requires, and even after one has penetrated the mystery beyond it, does one come to the unexpected insight and attitude which frees one from both. In other words one is neither in the Void, the One, or the Many yet nor is one not in them. Truth thus becomes a triple paradox! #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
In the highest level there are utterly unalterable truths. They are not got by logic, worked out by intellect, or discovered by observation. They are announced. No one can know their mysterious source in the sense that we know anything else. It is unique, indescribable, and hence unnameable, unimaginable, and beyond all the forms of worship given to all other gods—nowhere to be found in place or time, history or commentary. It is more honest to let the Mystery of Mysteries remain as it is than to repeat ancient portrayals or create new ones—all the labour of the human ego’s trivial or even misleading ideation. Within that silent seeming void, which is as near as most are likely to come, they may be pacified, content, perhaps even dissolved during those utterly surrendered lapses. The application of statistical laws to processes of atomic magnitude in physics has a noteworthy correspondence in psychology, so far as psychology investigates the bases of consciousness by pursuing the conscious processes until they lose themselves in darkness and unintelligibility, and nothing more can be seen but effects which have an organizing influence on the contents of consciousness. Investigation of these facts yields the singular fact that they proceed from an unconscious, id est, objective, reality which behaves at the same time like a subjective one—in other words, like a consciousness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Hence the reality underlying the unconscious effect includes the observing subject and is therefore constituted in a way that we cannot conceive. It is, at one and the same time, absolute subjectivity and universal truth, for in principle it an be shown to be present everywhere, which certainly cannot be said of conscious contents of a personalistic nature. The elusiveness, capriciousness, haziness, and uniqueness that lay mind always associates with the idea of the psyche applies only to consciousness, and not to the absolute unconscious. The qualitatively rather than quantitatively definable units with which the unconscious works, namely the archetypes, therefore have a nature that cannot with certainty be designated as psychic. Although I have been led by purely psychological considerations to doubt the exclusively psychic nature of the archetypes, psychology sees itself obliged to revise its “only psychic” assumptions in the light of the physical findings too. Psychics has demonstrated, as plainly as could be wished, that in the realm of atomic magnitudes an observer is postulated in objective reality, and that only on this condition is a satisfactory scheme of explanation possible. This means that a subjective element attaches to the physicist’s World picture, and secondly that a connection necessarily exists between the psyche to be explained and the objective space-tie continuum. Since the physical continuum is inconceivable it follows that we can form no picture of its psychic aspect either, which also necessarily exists. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Nevertheless, the relative or partial identity of psyche and physical continuum is of the greatest importance theoretically, because it brings with it a tremendous simplification by bridging over the seeming incommensurability between the physical World and the psychic, not of course in any concrete way, but from the psychological side by means of empirically derived postulates—archetypes—whose content, if any, cannot be represented to the mind. Archetypes, so far as we can observe and experience them at all, manifest themselves only through their ability to organize images and ideas, and this is always an unconscious process which cannot be detected until afterwards. By assimilating ideational material whose provenance in the phenomenal World is not to be contested, they become visible and psychic. Therefore they are recognized at first only as psychic entities and are conceived as such, with the same right with which we based the physical phenomena of immediate perception on Euclidean space. Only when it comes to explaining psychic pehnomena of a minimal degree of clarity are we driven to assume that archetypes must have a nonpsychic aspect. Grounds for such a conclusion are supplied by the pehnomena of synchronicity, which are associated with the activity of unconscious operators and have hitherto been regarded, or repudiated, as “telepathy,” et cetera. Scepticism should, however, be levelled only at incorrect theories and not at facts which exist in their own right. No unbiased observer can deny them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Resistance to the recognition of such facts rests principally on the repugnance people feel for an allegedly supernatural faculty tacked on to the psyche, like “clairvoyance.” The very diverse and confusing aspect of these phenomena are, so far as I can see at present, complete explicable on the assumption of a psychically relative space-time continuum. As soon as a psychic content crosses the threshold of consciousness, the synchronistic marginal phenomena disappear, time and space rescue their accustomed sway, and consciousness is once more isolated in its subjectivity. We have here one of those instances which can best be understood in terms of the physicist’s idea of “complementarity.” When an unconscious content passes over into consciousness its synchronistic manifestation ceases; conversely, synchronistic phenomena can be evoked by putting the subject into an unconscious state (trance). The same relationship of complementarity can be observed just as easily in all those extremely common medical cases in which certain clinical symptoms disappear when the corresponding unconscious content are made conscious. We also know that a number of psychosomatic phenomena which are otherwise outside the control of the will can be induced by hypnosis, that is, by this same restriction of consciousness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
It rests with the free choice of the experimenter (or observer) to decide…which insights one will gain and which one will lose; or, to put it in popular language, whether one will measure A and ruin B or ruin A and measure B. It does not rest with one, however, to gain only insights and not lose any. This is particularly true of the relation between the physical standpoint and the psychological. Physics determine quantities and their relation to one another; psychology determines quantities and their relation to one another; psychology determines qualities without being able to measure quantities. Despite that, both sciences arrive at ideas which come significantly close to one another. The parallelism of psychological and physical explanations has already been pointed out. Moderne Physik—Moderne Psychologie explaines that both sciences have, in the course of many years of independent work, amassed observations and systems of thought to match them. Both sciences have come up against certain barriers which display similar basic characteristics. The object to be investigated, and the human investigator with one’s organs of sense and knowledge and their extensions (measuring instruments and procedures), are indissolubly bound together. That is complementarity in physics as well as in psychology. Between physics and psychology there is in fact a genuine and authentic relationship of complementarity. Even the best of humans are subject to the peculiarities of their temperament, to the form of their individuality; and even if they always seek to stay upon the level of inspiration they cannot help expressing the channel through which the inspiration has to come, which is human channel subject to human limitations. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The inspiration may be pure Spirit but, because it must come into a particular human, one receives it in a particular way, interprets, expresses, and communicates it in a personal way, so that the purity is at best a little adulterated, the integrity a little lost. One’s character may be as selfless as one can make it, but the colouring of one’s mind can only fade out to a piacular extent because one’s body is still there, one’s entire past history is there graven in the subconscious, and body is interfused with mind. All this will vanish with death, or some while after death if one is not fully advanced. Regardless of the fears and dreads, the hesitances and timidities of the lower ego, one must carry out whatever one’s newly found commander bids one do. However, this will not be so hard and unpleasant a task as it might seem to others. For one will now feel at least the same satisfaction in yielding to the higher self’s bidding that one formerly felt in yielding to the lower one’s desires. And with the bidding will come the needed strength, courage, and wisdom to obey it. The World’s opposition and danger may be recognized but will not deter one. It is not by one’s own will that one engages oneself in such work, but by a will that supports and guides one better than ever one could support or guide oneself. This one clearly comprehends and gladly accepts. It is a mistake to believe that to find the Overself is to find eternal monotony and boredom. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
On the contrary, it holds out the promise of life more abundant—of joy, happiness, and satisfaction physically as well as spiritually. All great poetic utterance is discovery. Its moments are angels’ visits. These experiences leave memory-traces—neural processes organized in structures which reflect the experience. Concepts form when similar patterns of experiences repeatedly leave similar structure of memory-traces. One will be an inspired human in one’s labours of spiritual service or artistic expression. One will be aware that a power greater than one’s own is working through one and affecting others. And ne will know that this power comes from the secret God within oneself. So immense is the security which the Overself enfolds one with that ne will not hesitate to take chances which prudence, caution, discretion, or fear would never take. However, one will do so only if the Overself guides one to. One who commands one’s thoughts and senses from one’s divine center commands life. A time some when these records of the past, built up from experiences, themselves affect new experiences, creatine expectations, directing attention, and so on. There is an interplay between more central processes and the sensory life: the very development of a True Self depends on whether the individual’s needs were met when one experienced them or at more arbitrary times. The Overself makes the being comfortable, and arranges a setting in which spiritual nourishment may happen, is all goes well. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
When the Overself is feeding the being, one is free and one’s soul can be felt, it is a warm and pleasant feeling. They are many reasons God provides humans with the things they want and ask for. No doubt the individual’s sensations in respects to God are very acute, and if they are acute we can be sure they are important. The individual first of all needs all these rather quiet experiences in prayer, and needs to feel held lovingly, that is, in an alive way, yet without fuss and anxiety and tenseness. This is the setting. Sooner or later there will be some kind of contact between the soul and God. It does not matter exactly what happens. God is there in the situation and part of it, and He particularly likes the intimacy of the relationship. He comes without preconceived notions as to how the human ought to behave. That is why even people who commit bad acts are blessed with the grace of God, He truly loves all His children. This grace of God gives the human ideas! “Perhaps there is something there outside in the World worth being righteous for.” Spiritual communion begins to flow; in fact, so many blessings are poured out that the individual is encouraged to obey God’s laws, and for a time hardly needs any other external joy. Gradually, God enables the human to build up in the imagination the very thing He has to offer, and the human begins to yield to His will and to get to the root of humanity. These sensory experiences, when repeated in the right emotional atmosphere, eventually build up expectations: phantasies. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
One then goes on to imagine how the fortunate spiritual experiences lead to desired sensory experiences, how one’s wish for salvation seems to bring it about: the human wants something, discovers the power of God, and discovers that God’s love is what one wants. Gradually an individual is enabled to build up the armour of God. Do you see how important this is? The wonder and joy of finding oneself to be a channel of blessing, teaching, healing, peace, and uplift to others will increase as the results themselves increase. The inspiration may be made manifest in a production, so that others may have the chance to feel its reflection; but there can be no guarantee that they will do so. It is true that inspiration comes at unpredictable times. However, if we prepare conditions advantageous to it, we are more likely to receive its visitation. In ancient recorded sayings of Jesus, we may trace one part of the history of human’s search after truth. However, there is another part, a joyous and happier part. The early experiences of people whose lives are governed by their instinctual drives and the early experiences of those whose lives are governed by their relationships with others form a personal possession lent for a moment to a person who knows what to do with it. At first the individual’s experience is concerned, the individual and God are merged into one another: God is a sensory experience of the human’s. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
However, someone not merged with the individual has to make actual what the individual is ready to find. There then follows a time of to-and-from while God is repudiated, reaccepted, and finally perceived as less under the person’s control than the person has assumed. It may seem paradoxical at first glance that, for the best development of a person’s autonomy and self-respect, there has to be this period of utter dependence. However, one will learn and have some actual experience of magical control, of omnipotence, of almightiness and creation. For what the person thinks of, there it is, and it is good. For example, a previously unhappy and disturbed little boy was asked what had helped him, he replied, “Reading about Job, and how he was stripped of everything, but kept his faith in God and had things even better restored to him.” The forces of heredity and the dominion of environment would appear to be the overwhelming impulsions of a human’s actions. However, let the Soul arise in its masterful urgency, and they vanish! Inspiration brings the mind to its most exalted pitch, whether it be a mystic’s mind or an artist’s. Such is the power of true inspiration that it lifts humans to the plane of hero in action, genius in art, or master in renunciation. This is the power that coaxes the unwilling personality to enter the fires of expiation; this is the urge that makes a human swim through bitter waters to find wisdom. The truth is that the source of human’s inspiration is always there, but one’s awareness of it is intermittent. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Most of us cannot turn on the tap of inspiration at will, cannot put Pegasus between the shafts. Often we deceive ourselves and imagine the presence of inspiration when it is really absent. The works we do then are our humble own, not fiery gifts from Heaven. Dear Lord in the shining Heaven, please speak to me as you follow the wind. Please follow perfectly the waves of their air-ocean, making known to me their invisible pattern. Out of the well of the World they flow, carrying the wisdom of her gift. Please carry it to me also, please give to me, God Almighty, the knowledge that you have, the knowledge I seek. We thankfully acknowledge Thee, O Lord our God, our fathers’ God to all eternity. Our Rock art Thou, our Shield that saves through every generation. We give Thee thanks and we declare Thy praise for all Thy tender care. Our live we trust into Thy loving hand. Our souls are daily with us, evening, morn, and noon. O Though who art all-good, whose mercies never fails us, Compassionate One, whose lovingkindness never cease, we ever hope in Thee. We thankfully acknowledge that Thou art the Lord our God and God of our fathers, the God of all that lives, our Creator and Creator of the Universe. We offer blessings and thanksgiving to Thy great and holy name because Thou hast kept us in life and sustained us; so mayest Thou continue to keep us in life and sustain us. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Like a Diamond in the Sky Discipline Must be Maintained!
Every time I open a book, I risk my life…Every work of imagination offers another view of life, an invitation to spend a few days inside someone else’s emotions. The wise person lets the Overself’s presence flow through one’s life, never blocks it by one’s ego nor turns it aside by one’s passions. The ego can no longer foresee what will happen to the outer course of its personal life when the Overself takes the lead, nor can it dictate what that course should be. With all one’s humility before the Overself, one will bear oneself among one’s fellow human beings with serene self-assurance and speak with firm conviction of that which one knows. When these experiences increase and multiply to such an extent that they accumulate into a large body of evidence, one will become convinced that some power is somehow using one as a beneficent channel. It is the real originator of these experiences, the real bestower of these blessing, the real illuminator of these other people. What is this power? Despite its seeming otherness, its apparent separateness, it is really one’s own higher self. Humanity is one, with psyche. Humility is a not inconsiderable virtue which should prompt Christians, for the sake of charity—the greatest of all virtues—to set a good example and acknowledge that though there is only one truth it speaks in many tongues, and that if we still cannot see this is simply due to lack of understanding. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
No one is so godlike that one alone knows the true word. All of us gaze into that “dark glass” in which the dark myth takes shape, adumbrating the invisible truth. In this glass the eyes of the spirit glimpse an image which we call the self, fully conscious of the fact that it is an anthropomorphic image which we have merely named but not explained. By “self” we mean psychic wholeness, but what realities underlie this concept we do not know, because psychic contents cannot be observed in their unconscious state, and moreover the psyche cannot know itself. The conscious can know the unconscious only so far as it has become conscious. We have only a very hazy idea of the changes an unconscious content undergoes in the process of becoming conscious, but no certain knowledge. The concept of psychic wholeness necessarily implies an element of transcendence on account of the existence of unconscious components. Transcendence in this sense is not equivalent to a metaphysical postulate or hypostasis; it claims to be no more than a borderline concept, to quote Kant. That there is something beyond the borderline, beyond the frontiers of knowledge, is shown by the archetypes and, most clearly of all, by numbers, which this side of the border are quantities but on the other side are autonomous psychic entities, capable of making qualitative statements which manifest themselves in a priori patterns of order. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
These patterns include not only causally explicable phenonmena like dream-symbols and such, but remarkable relativizations of time and space which simply cannot be explained causally. They are the parapsychological phenomena which I have summed up under the terms “synchronicity” and which have been statistically investigated by Rhine. The beneficial results of experiments elevate these phenomena to the rank of undeniable facts. This brings us a little nearer to understanding the mystery of psychophysical parallelism, for we know that a factor exists which mediates between the apparent incommensurability of body and psyche, giving matter a kind of “psychic” faculty and the psyche a kind of “materiality,” by means of which the one can work on the other. That the body can work on the psyche seems to be a truism, but strictly speaking all we know is that any bodily defect or illness also expresses itself psychically. Naturally this assumption only holds good if, contrary to the popular materialistic view, the psyche is credited with an existence of its own. However, materialism in its turn cannot explain how chemical changes can produce a psyche. Both views, the materialistic as well as the spiritualistic, are metaphysical prejudices. It accords better with experience to suppose that living matter has a psychic aspect, and the psyche a physical aspect. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
If we give due consideration to the facts of parapsychology, then the hypothesis of the psychic aspect must be extended beyond the sphere of biochemical process to matter in general. In that case all reality would be grounded on an as yet unknown substrate possessing material and at the same tie psychic qualities. In view of the trend of modern theoretical physics, this assumption should arouse fewer resistances than before. It would also do away with the awkward hypothesis of psychophysical parallelism, and afford us an opportunity to construct a new World model closer to the idea of the unus mundus. The “acausal” correspondence between mutually independent psychic and physical events, id est, synchronistic phenomena, and in particular psychokinesis, would then become more understandable, for every physical event would involve a psychic one and vice versa. Such reflections are not idle speculations; they are forced on us in any serious psychological investigation of the UF phenomenon. Undoubtedly the idea of the unus mundus is founded on the assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical World rests on an underlying unity, and that not two of more fundamentally different Worlds exist side by side or are mingled with one another. Rather, everything divided and different belongs to one and the same World, which is not the World of sense but a postulate whose probability is vouched for by the fact that until now one has been able to discover a World in which the known laws of nature are invalid. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
That even the psychic World, which is so extraordinarily different from the physical Word, does not have its roots outside the one cosmos is evidence from the undeniable fact that causal connections exist between the psyche and the body which point to their underlying unitary nature. All that is is not encompassed by our knowledge, so that we are not in a position to make any statements about its total nature. Microphysics is feeling its way into the unknow side of matter, just as complex psychology is pushing forward into the unknown side of the psyche. Both lines of investigation have yielded findings which can be conceived only by means of antinomies, and both have developed concepts which display remarkable analogies. If this trend should become more pronounced in the future, the hypothesis of the unity of their subject-matters would gain in probability. Of course there is little or no hope that the unitary Being can ever be conceived, since our powers of thought and language permit only of antinomian statements. However, this much we do know beyond all doubt, that empirical reality has a transcendental background—a fact which, as Sir James Jeans has shown, can be expressed by Plato’s parable of the cave. The common background of microphysics and depth-psychology is as much physical as psychic and therefore neither, but rather a third thing, a neutral nature which can at most be grasped in hints since in essence it is transcendental. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The background of our empirical World thus appears to be in fact a unus mundus. This is at least a probable hypothesis which satisfies the fundamental tenet of scientific theory: “Explanatory principles are not to be multiplied beyond the necessary.” The transcendental psychophysical background corresponds to a “potential World” in so far as all those conditions which determine the form of empirical phenomena are inherent in it. This obviously holds good as much for physics as for psychology, or, to be more precise, for macrophysics as much as for the psychology of consciousness. Only when we act in and from the Overself can we really be said to act aright, for only then shall our deeds be wise and virtuous, most beneficial in the ultimate sense both to our own self and to others. What the ego thinks and feels and does is to reflect the Overself’s dominion. The ego itself is now to be subsidiary. Every thought or feeling or act is to be dedicated one, every place where is finds itself a consecrated one. The Overself is not merely a transient intellectual abstraction but rather an eternal presence. For those who have awakened to the consciousness of this presence, there is always available its mysterious power and sublime inspiration. It is the divine moment; no longer foes speech come forth humanly not action individually: the God within has taken over. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
At some mysterious moment a higher power takes possession of one, dictates one’s thoughts, words, and acts. Sometimes one is amazed by them, by their difference from what one would normally have thought, spoken, or done. The unfoldment of intuitive action, intuitive thinking, and intuitive feeling means that the Overself and the personality are then in accord and working together. The little circle of the ego then lies within the larger circle of the Overself, in harmony and in co-operation. It does not matter than whether a human lives as a monk or as a householder, whether one is engaged in the World’s activity, or whether one is in retirement. Of course, such a condition is not attained without a full and deep transformation of the human. It is necessary to point out that the mere removal of thoughts by itself is not enough and could only give an illusory illumination and not the kind of peace which one feels after a dreamless sleep—passive, but not positive. There are various tricks. Some are of a hypnotic nature, whereby thoughts can be kept out of the mind and an apparent stillness obtained; but the mediator who only uses these tricks and nothing more deceives oneself. One might as well go to sleep and then wake up. The spiritual value is about the same, while the psychological value is definitely adverse to one. One will ten be in danger of becoming a dreamer with a dulled mind. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
One must look forward hopefully to the day when one can actually feel the higher self present within all one’s activity. It will reign in one’s inner World and thus be the real doer of one’s actions, not the ego in the outer World. It is not easy to subordinate oneself to this inner voice. However, where can one hide from it? We are to exalt life, not to degrade it. There are times when the Overself accepts no resistance, when it acts with such compelling force that the human is unable to disobey. However, such happenings are special ones. Some elf other than one’s familiar one will rise up within one, some force—ennobling, masterful, and divine—will control one. When a human’s consciousness, outlook, and character are so exalted as this, altruistic duty becomes not a burden to be carried irksomely but a part of one’s path of self-fulfillment from which one would not wish to be spared. There is a strange feeling that not one but somebody else is living and talking in the same body. It is somebody nobler and wiser than one’s own ego. The feeling of being possessed for a while by a holy other-Worldly presence comes over one. One is now under the influence, and later may be under the control, of a superior power. One becomes a vessel, filled from time to time with spiritual presence. One’s words, one’s feelings, and one’ actions will ten not only be expressions of one’s human self but also of that self united indissolubly with one’s divine self. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Mind is the aspect of reality. When this intellectual understanding is brough within one’s own experience as fact, when it is made as much one’s own as a bodily pain, then it becomes direct insight. Such thinking is the most profitable and resultful in which one can engage, for it brings the student to the very portal of Mind where it stops activity by itself and where the differentiations of ideas disappears. As the mental muscles strain after this concept of the Absolute, the Ineffable and Infinite, they lose their materialist rigidity and become more sensitive to intimations from the Overself. When thinking is able to reach such a profound depth that it attains utter impersonality and clam universality, it is able to approach the fundamental principle of its own being. When hard thinking reaches a culminating point, it then voluntarily destroys itself. Such an attainment of course can take place deep within the innermost recesses of the individual’s consciousness alone. One will arrive at the firm unshakable conviction that there is an inward reality behind all existence. If one wishes one may go farther still and seek to translate the intellectual idea of this reality into a conscious fact. In that case the comprehension that is the quest of pure Mind one is in quest of that which is alone the Supreme Reality in this entire Universe, must possess one. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
This mystery Mind is a theme upon which no aspirant can ever reflect enough: first, because of its importance, and second, because of its capacity to unfold one’s latent spirituality. One will doubtless feel cold on these lofty peaks of thought, but in the end one will find a Heavenly reward whilst still on Earth. We are not saying that something of the nature of mind as we humans know it is the supreme reality of the Universe, but only that it is more like that reality than anything else we know of and certainly more like it than what we usually call by the name of “matter.” The simplest way to express this is to say that Reality is of the nature of our mind rather than of our body, although it is Mind transcending the familiar phases and raised to infinity. It is the ultimate being the highest state. This is the Principle which forever remains what it was and will be. It is in the Universe and yet the Universe is in it too. It never evolves, for it is outside time. It has no shape, for it is outside space. It is beyond human’s consciousness, for it is beyond both one’s thoughts and senseless humans may enter into its knowledge, many enter into its Void, so soon as one can drop one’s thoughts, let go one’s sense-experience, but keep one’s sense of being. Then one may understand what Jesus meant when saying: “One that loseth one’s life shall find it.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Such an accomplishment may appear too spectral to be of any use to one’s matter-of-fact generation. What is their madness will one one’s sanity. One will know there is reality where they think there is nothingness. To keep this origin always at the back of one’s mind because it is also the end of all things, is a necessary practice. However, this can only be done if one cultivates reactionlessness to the happenings of every day. This does not mean showing no outward reactions, but it does mean that deep down indifference has been achieved—not an empty indifference, but one based on seeing the Divine essence in all things, all creatures, and a Divine meaning in all happenings. There is only this one Mind. All else is a seeming show on its surface. To forget the ego and think of this infinite and unending reality is the highest kind of meditation. First, remember that It is appearing as ego; then remember to think tat you are It; finally cease to think of It so you may be free of thoughts to be It! To attach oneself to a guru, an avatar, one religion, one creed, is to see stars only. To put one’s faith in the Infinite Being, and in its presence within the heart, is to see the vast empty sky itself. The stars will come and go, will disintegrate and vanish, but the sky remains. In a World of constantly changing scenes, fortunes, health, and relationships, a precious possession is the knowledge that there is the unseen Unchanging Real. Still more precious is awareness within oneself of ITS ever-presence. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
In the moment that there dawns on one’s understanding the fact of Mind’s beginninglessness and deathlessness, one gains the second illumination, the first being that of the ego’s illusoriness and transiency. Not to find the Energy of the Spirit but the Spirit itself is the ultimate goal—not its power or effects or qualities or attributes but the actuality of pure being. The aspirant is not to stop short with any of these but to push on. One will have gone far intellectually when one can understand the statement that mind is the seeker but Mind is the sought. One who puts one’s mind on the Unlimited instead of on the little parts, who does not deal with fractions but with the all-absorbing Whole, gains some of Its power. What we need to grasp is that although our apprehension of the Real is gradual, the Real is nonetheless with us at every moment in all its radiant totality. Modern science has filled our heads with the false notion that reality is in a state of evolution, whereas it is only our mental concept of reality which is in a state of evolution. Thinking can, ordinarily, only produce more thoughts. Even thinking about truth, about reality, however correct it be, shares this limitation. However, if properly instructed it will know its place and understand the situation, with the consequence that at the proper moment it will make no further effort, and will seek to merge into meditation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
When the merger is successfully completed, a holy silence will pervade the consciousness which remains. Truth will then be revealed of its own accord. When all thought are gone, when all vibration, movement, or activity of thinking faculty has ceased, then is the self-revealing possible of Mind-in-itself, of Consciousness with its states. Where the intellect is active it creates a double result—the thought and thinker. Where the enlightened human goes into the Stillness this duality does not appear but Consciousness remains. It contains nothing created by one. It is the Alone. Every creature, from the most primitive amoeba up to the most intellectual human, has some kind and degree of awareness; but only the Illuminate has that toward which awareness itself is striving to attain—Consciousness. The “Void” means void of all mental activity and productivity. It means that the notions and images of the mind have been emptied out, that all perceptions of the body and conceptions of the brain have gone. The Mind is here, now. However, as soon as any thought arises you miss it. It is like space…unthinkable. The great Emptiness is the Ultimate Being, without form, Matterless and Motionless, ineffable, and undescribable except by statements of what it is not. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Those who study can lead them to this high level must then let go of ward, abandon images, representations, symbols, numberings, divisions, and dualities; must be ready to enter the Stillness. This means being able to attain the utmost Vacuity. Cling single-heartedly to Quietude. Mentalism is the study of Mind and its product, thoughts. To separate the two, to disentangle them, is to become aware of Awareness itself. This achievement comes not by any process of intellectual activity but by the very opposite—suspending such activity. And it comes not as another idea but as extremely vivid, powerfully compelling insight. Nothing that the mind can think into mental existence is IT. Mind in its most unlimited sense is reality. A human can know it only be the intuitive process of being it, in the same manner in which one know one’s name, which is not an intellectual process but an immediate one. We shall never grasp that totality of being with out intellect, but we shall grasp it with the only thing capable of holding it, with Consciousness. The awareness of It as being It is something other, and more, than the mere emptiness of Mind. God in unfathomable and unknowable. Every idea of Him is a false idea, created to satisfy our little human mental need but also sharing our finite human limitations. That is, the idea describes something about humans, nothing about God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
We prefer to delude ourselves with such images and idols, rather than to take off our shoes at the very remembrance of God and enter the temple of the Silenced Mind. Here, at least, we get no untrue concepts which have to be discarded in the end. Here the wakened faint or strong intuition may bet intimations Godlike in quality, of THAT which must always remain incomprehensible to the intellect. Those who look to God as a healer, or as a mother, or as a father, or as a teacher are still looking for God within the ego. They are thinking of God only in relation to themselves because their first interest is in themselves. However, those who look to God in the Void, and not in any relationship or under any image or idea, really find God. Therefore they really find “the peace which passeth understanding.” If they begin and end in words, all attempts to explain the inexplicable, to describe the inscrutable, to communicate the ineffable must end in failure. For then it is merely intellect talking to intellect. However, let the attempts be made in the stillness, let “hear speak to heart,” and the Real may reveal itself. All talk of things being inside or outside the mind is submission to the spell of a vicious spatial metaphor. All language is applicable to things and thoughts, but not to the august infinite of mind. Here every word can be at best symbolic and at worst irrelevant, while remaining always as remote from definable meaning as unseen and unseeable Universes are from our own. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
We have lived in illusions long enough. Let us not yield the last grand hope of humans to the deceptive sway of profane words. Here there must and shall be SILENCE—serene, profound, mysterious, yet satisfying beyond all Earthly satisfactions. It is not possible for a finite human being to grasp the infinite significance of the Infinite Being, nor to gather any true idea about such Being. One can only think what It is not: otherwise one must retreat into utter silence, not merely of speech alone but also of mental imaginative and passional activity. Awareness alone is whatever it turns its attention to, seems to exist at the time: only that. If to Void then there is nothing else. If to World, then World assumes reality. What is it that is aware? The though of a point of awareness create, gives reality at the lowest level to ego, and at the highest to Higher Self but when the thought itself is dropped there is only the One Existence, Being, in the divine Emptiness. It is therefore the Source of all life, intelligence, form. The idea held becomes direct experience for the personality, the awareness becomes direct perception. Awareness is the very nature of one’s being: it is the Self. Every human credits oneself with having consciousness during the wakeful state. One never questions or disputes the fact. One does not need anyone else to till it to one, not does one tell it to oneself. It is the surest part of one’s knowledge. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Yet this is not a knowing which one brings into the field of awareness. It is known differently from the way other facts are known by one. The difference is that the ego is absent from the knowledge—the fact is not actually perceived. Reason tells us that pure Thought cannot know itself because that would set up a duality which would be false if pure though is the only real itself. Although all ordinary experience confirms it, extraordinary experience refutes it. Consciousness is the best witness to its own existence. When we experience Mind through the sense we call it matter. When we experience it trough imagination of thinking we call it idea. When we experience it as it is in its own pure being, we call it Spirit, or better Overself. Humans are not the authors of nature; but one uses natural things in applying art and virtue to one’s own use. Hence human providence does not reach to that which takes place in nature from necessity; but divine providence extends thus far, since God is the author of nature. Apparently it was this argument that moved those who withdrew the course of nature from the care of divine providence, attributing it rather to the necessity of matter, as Democritus, and others of the ancients. When it is said that God left humans to themselves, this does not mean that humans are exempt from divine providence; but merely that one has not a prefixed operating force determined to only the one effect; as in the case of natural things, which are only acted upon though directed by another towards an end; and do not act of themselves, as if they directed themselves towards an end, like rational creatures, though the possession of free will, by which these are able to take counsel and make choice. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Hence it is significantly said: “In the hand of one’s own counsel.” However, since the very act of free will is traced to God as to a cause, it necessarily follows that everything happening from the exercise of free will must be subject to divine providence. For human providence is included under the providence of God, as a particular universal cause. God, however, extends His providence over the just in a certain more excellent way than over the wicked; inasmuch as He prevents anything happening which would impede their final salvation. For “to them that love God, all things work together unto good,” reports Romans 8.28. However, from the fact that God does not restrain the wicked from the evil of sin, He is said to abandon them: not that He altogether withdraws His providence from them; otherwise they would return to nothing, if they were not preserved in existence by His providence. This was the reason that had weight with Tully, who withdrew from the care of divine providence human affairs concerning which we take counsel. Since a rational creature has, through its free well, control over its action, as was said above, it is subject to divine providence in an especial manner, so that something is imputed to it as a fault, or as a merit; and there is given it accordingly something by way of punishment or reward. In this way, the Apostle withdraws oxen from the care of God: not, however, that individual irrational creatures escape the care of divine providence; as was the opinion of the Rabbis Moses. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Dear Lord in the shining Heaven, during today’s negotiations, please make me eloquent. God, please ease the way, please remove all obstacles, opening the path for a smoothly accomplished deal, opening the path for a profitable outcome. I take up my pen and invoke the Spirit of God, the God of writing, please make my way smooth. I take up the pen and invoke Jesus Christ: Inspiring Saviour, please enflame my words. O Lord our God, please bestow upon us the blessing of Thy festivals for life and peace, for joy and gladness, even as Thou hast graciously promised to bless us. [Our God and God of our fathers, please accept our rest.] Please sanctify us through Thy commandments, and please grant our potion in Thy Bible; please give us abundantly of Thy goodness and please make us rejoice in Thy salvation. Please purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth. In Thy loving favour, O Lord our God, please let us inherit with joy and gladness Thy holy [Sabbath and] festivals; and may America who sanctifies Thy name, rejoice in Thee. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hallowest [the Sabbath and] America and the festivals. O Lord our God, please be gracious unto Thy people of America and please accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy sanctuary and receive in love the supplications of America; and may the worship of Thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. O may our eyes witness Thy return to America. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who restorest Thy divine presence unto America. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Some Things You Will Think of for Yourself, and Others a God Will Put into Your Heart!
Truth is the glue that holds the governments together. Compromise the oil that makes governments go. An aim of civil disobedience is to explain its roles within a constitutional system and to account for its connection with a democratic polity. As always, I assume that the society in question is one that is nearly just; and this implies that it has some form of democratic government, although serious injustices may nevertheless exist. In such a society I assumed that the principles of justice are for the most part publicly recognized as the fundamental terms of willing cooperation among free and equal persons. By engaging in civil disobedience one intends, then, to address the sense of justice of the majority and to serve fair notice that in one’s sincere and considered opinion the conditions of free cooperation are being violated. We are appealing to others to reconsider, to put themselves in our position, and to recognize that they cannot expect us to acquiesce indefinitely in the terms they impose upon us. Now the force of this appeal depends upon the democratic conception of society as a system of cooperation among equal persons. If one things of society in another way, this form of protest may be out of place. For example, if the basic law is thought to reflect the other nature and if the sovereign is held to govern only by divine right as God’s chosen lieutenant, then one’s subjects have only the right of suppliants. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
The citizens can plead their cause but they cannot disobey should their appeal be denied. To do this would be to rebel against the final legitimate moral (and not simply legal) authority. This is not to say that the sovereign cannot be in error but only that the situation is not one for one’s subjects to correct. However, once society is interpreted as a scheme of cooperation among equals, those injured by serious injustice need not submit. Indeed, civil disobedience (and conscientious refusal as well) is one of the stabilizing devices of a constitutional system, although by definition an illegal one. Along with such things as free and regular elections and an independent judiciary empowered to interpret the constitution (not necessarily written), civil disobedience used with due restraint and sound judgement helps to maintain and strengthen just institutions. By resisting injustice within the limits of fidelity to law, it serves to inhibit departures from justice and to correct them when they occur. A general disposition to engage in justified civil disobedience introduces stability into a well-ordered society, or one that is nearly just. It is necessary to look at this doctrine from the standpoint of the persons in the original position. There are two related problems which they must consider. The first is that, having chosen principles for individuals, they must work out guidelines for assessing the strength of the natural duties and obligations, and, in particular, the strength of the duty to comply with a just constitution and one of its basic procedures, that of majority rule. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
The second problem is that of finding reasonable principles for dealing with unjust situations, or with circumstances in which the compliance with just principles is only partial. Now it seems that, given the assumptions characterizing a nearly just society, the parties would agree to the presumptions (previously discussed) that specify when civil disobedience is justified. They would acknowledge these criteria as spelling out when this form of dissent is appropriate. Doing this could indicate the weight of the natural duty of justice in one important special case. It would also tend to enhance the realization of justice throughout the society by strengthening human’s self-esteem as well as their respect for one another. And the contract doctrine emphasizes, the principles of justice are the principles of willing cooperation among equals. To deny justice to another is either to refuse to recognize one as an equal (one in regard to whom we are prepared to constrain our actions by principles that we would choose in a situation of equality that is fair), or to manifest a willingness to exploit the contingencies of natural fortune and happenstance for our own advantage. In either case deliberate injustice invites submission or resistance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Submission arouses the contempt of those who perpetuate injustice and confirms their intention, whereas resistance cuts the ties of the community. If after a decent period of time to allow for reasonable political appeals in the normal way, citizens were to dissent by civil disobedience when infractions of the basic liberties occurred, these liberties would, it seems, be more rather than less secure. For these reasons, then, the parities would adopt the conditions defining justified civil disobedience as a way of setting up, within the limits of fidelity to law, a final device to maintain the stability of a just constitution. Although this mode of action is strictly speaking contrary to law, it is nevertheless a morally correct way of maintaining a constitutional regime. In a fuller account the same kind of explanation could presumably be given for the justifying conditions of conscientious refusal (again assuming the context of a nearly just state). I shall not, however, discuss these conditions here. I should like to emphasize instead that the constitutional theory of civil disobedience rests solely upon a conception of justice. Even the features of publicity and nonviolence are explained on this basis. And the same is true of the account of conscientious refusal, although it requires a further elaboration of the contract doctrine. At no point has a reference been made to other than political principles; religious or pacifist conceptions are not essential. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
While those engaging in civil disobedience have often been moved by convictions of the kind, there is no necessary connection between them and civil disobedience. For this form of political action can be understood as a way of addressing the sense of justice of the community, an invocation of the recognized principles of cooperation among equals. Being an appeal to the moral basis of civic life, it is a political and not a religious act. It relies upon common sense principles of justice that humans can require one another to follow and not upon the affirmations of religious faith and love which they cannot demand that everyone accept. I do not mean, of course, that nonpolitical conceptions have no validity. They may, in fact, confirm our judgement and support our acting in ways known on other grounds to be just. Nevertheless, it is not these principles but the principles of justice, the fundamental terms of social cooperation between free and equal persons, that underlie the constitution. Civil disobedience as defined does not require a sectarian foundation but is derived from the public conception of justice that characterizes a democratic society. So understood a conception of civil disobedience is part of the theory of free government. One distinction between medieval and modern constitutionalism is that in the former the supremacy of laws was not secured by established institutional controls. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
The check to the ruler who in his judgments and edicts opposed the sense of justice of the community was limited for the most part to the right of resistance by the whole society, or any part. Even this right seems not to have been interpreted as a corporate act; an unjust king was simply put aside. Thus the Middle Ages lacked the basic ideas of modern constitutional government, the idea of the sovereign people who have final authority and the institutionalizing of this authority by means of elections and parliaments, and other constitutional forms. Now in much the same way that the modern conception of constitutional government builds upon the medieval, the theory of civil disobedience supplements the purely legal conception of constitutional democracy. It attempts to formulate the grounds upon which legitimate democratic authority may be dissented from in ways that while admittedly contrary to law nevertheless express a fidelity to law and appeal to the fundamental political principles of a democratic regime. Thus to the legal forms of constitutionalism one may adjoin certain modes of illegal protest that do not violate the aims of a democratic constitution in view of the principles by which such dissent is guided. I have tried to show how these principles can be accounted for by the contract doctrine. Some may object to this theory of civil disobedience that it is unrealistic. It presupposes that the majority has a sense of justice, and one might reply that moral sentiments are not a significant political force. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
What moves humans are various interests, the desires for power, prestige, wealth, and the like. Although they are clever at producing moral arguments to support their claims, between one situation and another their opinions do not fit into a coherent conception of justice. Rather their views at even given time are occasional pieces calculated to advance certain interests. Unquestionably there is much truth in this contention, and in some societies it is more truth than in others. However, the essential question is the relative strength of the tendencies that oppose the sense of justice and whether the latter is ever strong enough so that it can be invoked to some significant effect. A few comments may make the account presented more plausible. First of all, I have assumed throughout that we have to do with a nearly just society. This implies that there exists a constitutional regimen and a publicly recognized conception of justice. Of course, in any particular situation certain individuals and groups may be tempted to violate its principles but the collective sentiment in their behalf has considerable strength when properly addressed. These principles are affirmed as the necessary terms of cooperation between free and equal persons. If those who perpetrate injustice can be clearly identified and isolated from the larger community, the convictions of the greater part of society may be of sufficient weight. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Or if the contending parties are roughly equal, the sentiment of justice of those not engaged can roughly equal, the sentiment of justice of those not engaged can be the deciding factor. In any case, should circumstances of this kind not obtain, the wisdom of civil disobedience is highly problematic. For unless one can appeal to the sense of justice of the larger society, the majority may simply be aroused to more repressive measures if the calculations of advantages points in this direction. Court should take into account the civilly disobedient nature of the protester’s act, and the fact that it is justifiable (or may seem so) by the political principle underling the constitution, and on these grounds reduce and in some cases suspend the legal sanction. Yet quite the opposite may happen when the necessary background is lacking. We have to recognize than that justifiable civil disobedience is normally a reasonable and effective form of dissent only in a society regulated to some considerable degree by a sense of justice. There may be some misapprehension about the manner in which the sense of justice is said to work. One may think that this sentiment expresses itself in sincere professions of principle and in actions requiring a considerable degree of self-sacrifice. However, this supposition asks too much. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
A community’s sense of justice is more likely to be revealed in the fact that the majority cannot bring itself to the steps necessary to suppress the minority and to punish acts of civil disobedience as the law allows. Ruthless tactics that might be contemplated in other societies are not entertained as real alternatives. Thus he sense of justice affects, in ways we are often unaware of, our interpretation of political life, our perception of the possible courses of action, our will to resist the justified protest of others, and so on. In spite of its superior power, the majority may abandon its position and acquiesce in the proposals of the dissenters; its desire to give justice weakens its capacity to defends its unjust advantages. The sentiment of justice will be seen as a more vital political force once the subtle forms in which it exerts its influence are recognized, and in particular its role in rendering certain social positions indefensible. In these remarks I have assumed that in a nearly just society there is a public acceptance of the same principles of justice. Fortunately this assumption is stronger than necessary. There can, in fact, be considerable differences in citizens’ conceptions of justice provided that these conceptions lead to similar political judgments. And this is possible, since different premises can yield the same conclusions. In the case there exists what we may refer to as overlapping rather than strict consensus. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
In general, the overlapping of professed conceptions of justice suffices for civil disobedience to be a reasonable and prudent form of political dissent. Of course, this overlapping need not be perfect; it is enough that a condition of reciprocity is satisfied. Both sides must believe that however much their conceptions of justice differ, their views support the same judgment in the situation at hand, and would do so even should their respective positions be interchanged. Eventually, though, there comes a point beyond which the requisite agreement in judgment breaks down and society splits into more or less distinct parts that hold diverse opinions on fundamental political questions. In this case of strictly partitioned consensus, the basis for civil disobedience no longer obtains. For example, suppose those who do not believe in toleration, and who would not tolerate other had they the power, wish to protest their lesser liberty by appealing to the sense of justice of the majority which holds the principle of equal liberty. While those who accept this principle should, as we have seen, tolerate the intolerant as far as the free institutions permits, they are likely to resent being reminded of this duty by the intolerant who would, if positions were switched, established their own dominion. The majority is bound to feel that their allegiance to equal liberty is being exploited by others for unjust ends. #RandolphHaris 10 of 23
This situation illustrates once again the fact that a common sense of justice is a great collective asset which requires the cooperation of many to maintain. The intolerant can be viewed as free-riders, as persons who seek the advantages of just institution while not doing their share to uphold them. Although those who acknowledge the principles of justice should always be guided by them, in a fragmented society as well as in one moved by group egoisms, the conditions for civil disobedience do not still exist. Still, it is not necessary to have strict consensus, for often a degree of overlapping consensus allows the reciprocity condition to be fulfilled. There are, to be sure, definite risks in the resort to civil disobedience. One reason for constitutional forms and their judicial interpretation is to establish a public reading of the political conception of justice and an explanation of the application of its principles to social questions. Up to a certain point it is better than the law and its interpretation to be settled than that it be settled rightly. Therefore it may be protested that the preceding account does not determine who is to say when circumstances are such as to justify civil disobedience. It invites anarchy by encouraging everyone do decide for oneself, and to abandon the public rendering of political principles. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
They reply to this is that each person must indeed make one’s own decision. Even though humans normally seek advice and counsel, and accept the injunctions of those in authority when these seem reasonable to them, they are always accountable for their deeds. We cannot divest ourselves of our responsibility and transfer the burden of blame to others. This is true on any theory of political duty and obligation that is compatible with the principles of a democratic constitution. The citizen is autonomous yet one is held responsible for what one does. If we ordinarily think that we should comply with the law, this is because our political principles normally lead to this conclusion. Certainly in a state of near justice there is a presumption in favour of compliance in the absence of strong reasons to the contrary. The many free and reasoned decisions of individuals fit together into an orderly political regime. However, while each person must decide for oneself whether the circumstances justify civil disobedience, it does not follow that one is to decide as one pleases. It is not by looking to our personal interests, or to our political allegiances narrowly construed, that we should make up our minds. To act autonomously and responsibly a citizen must look to the political principles that underlie and guide the interpretation of the constitution. One must try to access how these principles should be applied in the existing circumstances. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
If one comes to the conclusion after due consideration that civil disobedience is justified and conducts oneself accordingly, one acts conscientiously. And though one ay be mistaken, one has not done as one pleased. The theory of political duty and obligation enables us to draw these distinctions. There are parallels with the common understandings and conclusions reached in the sciences. Here, too, everyone is autonomous yet responsible. We are to assess theories and hypotheses in the light of the evidence by publicly recognized principles. It is true that there are that there are authoritative works, but these sum up the consensus of many persons each deciding for oneself. The absence of a final authority to decide, and so of an official interpretation that all must accept, does not lead to confusion, but is rather a condition of theoretical advance. Equals accepting and applying reasonable principles need have no established superior. To the question, who is to decide? The answer is: all are to decide, everyone taking counsel with oneself, and with reasonableness, comity, and good fortune, it often works out well enough. In a democratic society, then, it is recognized that each citizen is responsible for one’s interpretation of the principles of justice and for one’s conduct in the light of them. There can be no legal or socially approved rendering of these principles that we are always morally bound to accept, not even when it is given by a supreme court or legislature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Indeed each constitutional agency, the legislature, the executive, and the court, puts forward its interpretation of the constitution and the political ideals that inform it. Although the court may have the last say in settling any particular case, it is not immune from powerful political influences that may force a revision of its reading of the constitution. The court presents its doctrine by reason and argument; its conception of the constitution must, if it is to endure, persuade the major part of the citizens of its soundness. The final court of appeal is not the court, nor the executive, nor the legislature, but the electorate as a whole. The civilly disobedient appeal in a special way to this body. There is no danger of anarchy so long as there is a sufficient working agreement in citizens’ conceptions of justice and the conditions for resorting to civil disobedience are respected. That humans can achieve such an understanding and honour these limits when the basic political liberties are maintained is an assumption implicit in a democratic polity. There is no way to avoid entirely the danger of diverse strife, any more than one can rule out the possibility of profound scientific controversy. Yet if justified civil disobedience seems to threaten civic concord, the responsibility falls not upon those who protest but upon those whose abuse of authority and power justifies such opposition. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
For to employ the coercive apparatus of the state in order to maintain manifestly unjust institutions is itself is a form of illegitimate force that humans in due course have a right to resist. This discussion of the principles of justice has described a scheme of institutions that satisfies these principles and indicates how duties and obligations arise. If the theory of justice put forward matches our considered judgments and extends them in an acceptable way, these things must be done to see. We need to check whether it defines a workable political conception and helps to focus our reflections on the most relevant and basic moral concerns. The account in this part is still highly abstract, but I hope to have provide some guidance as to how the principles of justice apply in practice. However, we should not forget the limited scope of theory presented. For the most part I have tried t develop an ideal conception, only occasionally commenting on the various cases of nonideal theory. To be sure the priority rules suggest directives in many instances if not pressed too far. Even so, they only question of nonideal theory examined in any detail is that of civil disobedience in the special case of near justice. If the ideal theory is worthy of study, it must be because, as I have conjectured, it is the fundamental part of the theory of justice and essential for the nonideal part as well. I shall not purse these matters further. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
We have still to complete the theory of justice by seeing how it is rooted in human thought and feeling, and tied in with our ends and aspirations. Turning to the meaning of that word “inspiration,” what more can one say than that it is “in-breathing”—the in-breathing of a spiritual quality that raises a work or a person above the common order of things? I do not mean a work is inspired when it is cheaply glamorous, or that a human is inspired when one is rhetorically aggressive, or that a mind is inspired when it indulges in clever intellectual jugglery. It is my standpoint that all inspired art is the expression at most or a product at least of spiritual experience, although the latter may not be well understood by its experiencer. The experience must come first. Art is a movement and noise, whereas the spirit out of which it rises is hushed stillness and invulnerable silence. When the goddess Athena, in Greek mythology, says that “some things you will think of for yourself, and others a god will put into your heart,” this is her way of describing what we, more simply, would call inspiration. Only the direct experience of this exalted state will supply the sense of actuality and the feeling of vividness in spiritual writing. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
When this exalted feeling is transferred to the intellect and there turned into thought, whether for expression in words for one’s own understanding or for communication to others, it is termed a truth. In this form it becomes a source of renewed inspiration, a help in darker times, and a guide to live by in ordinary times. Inspiration can come to any person. It is not reserved for artists and mystics alone. When intuition expressed itself through, or enters into, the creative arts, we call it inspiration. The two are the same in root, but different in leaf. It would be absurd to believe that the creative power of inspiration exhausts itself with the arts alone. It can appear in any and every kind of human activity, in the making of a home or of a decision. It is the difference between real beauty and mere prettiness, between divine inspiration and practiced competence, between a flower and the painting of it. There is a hidden light within humans. Sometimes its glow appears in one’s most beautiful art productions, one’s loftiest religious revelations, one’s most irreproachable moral decisions. America is tortured by uncertainty, law and order, race, religion, God, family and self. Nor is the United States of America alone in suffering from a kind of value vertigo. All the techno-societies are caught up in the same massive upheaval. This collapse of the values of the past has hardly gone unnoticed. Every priest, politician, and parent is reduced to a head-shaking anxiety by it. Yet most discussions of value change are barren for they miss two essential points. The first of these is acceleration. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Value turnover is now faster than ever before in history. While in the past a human growing up in a society could expect that its public value system would remain largely unchanged in one’s lifetime, no such assumption is warranted today, expect perhaps in the most isolated of pre-technology communities. This implies temporariness in the structure of both public and personal value systems, and it suggests that whatever the content of values that arise to replace those of the informational age, they will be shorter-lived, more ephemeral than the values of the past. There is no evidence whatsoever that the value system of the techno-societies are likely to return to a “steady state” condition. For the foreseeable future, we must anticipate still more rapidly value change. Within this context, however, a second powerful trend is unfolding. For the fragmentation of societies brings with it a diversification of values. We are witnessing the crack-up of consensus. Most previous societies have operated with a broad central core of commonly shared values. This core is now contracting, and there is little reason to anticipate the formations of a new broad consensus within the decades ahead. The pressures are outward toward diversity, not inward toward unity. This account for the fantastically discordant propaganda that assails the mind in the techno-societies. Home, school, corporations, church, peer group, mass media—and myriad subcults—all advertise varying sets of values. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
The result for many is “anything goes” or “live out loud” attitude—which is, itself still another position. We are a society that has lost its consensus…a society that cannot agree on standards of conduct, language and manners, on what can be seen and heard. Certain people no longer even have to follow the laws and city leaders are pushing to abolish laws that protect citizens. In the San Francisco Bay area, for example, city leaders want to allow people to cross or walk in the street or road unlawfully or without regard for approaching traffic. This picture of a cracked consensus is confirmed by findings of Walter Gruen, social science research coordinator at Rhode Island Hospital, who has conducted a series of statistical studies of what he terms “the American core culture.” Rather than the monolithic system of beliefs attributed to the middle class by earlier investigators, Dr. Gruen found—to his own surprise—that “diversity in beliefs was more striking than the statistically supported uniformities. It is,” he concluded, “perhaps already misleading to talk of an ‘American’ culture complex.” Dr. Gruen suggests that particularly among the affluent, educated group, consensus is giving way to what he calls “pockets” of values. We can expect that, as the number and variety of subcults continues to expand, these pockets will proliferate, too. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Faced with colliding value systems, confronted with a blinding array of new consumer goods, services, educational, occupational and recreational options, the people of the future are driven to make choices in a new way. They begin to “consume” life styles the way people of an earlier, less choice-choked time consumed ordinary products. Some of the seers even call it blasphemy to proclaim or write down a description of the Supreme Divinity. By this they mean that the mind of a consumer cannot bring Truth into any limited thought, so a description would be false. The most appropriate act is silent awestruck reverence. Word circumscribe meaning, confine it by the very act of defining it. However, the Real is infinite, outside all circumscription and beyond all inclusion. If you must express it, you may do so correctly only by silence. However, it is essentially inexpressible. Concepts, thoughts, and words would bring Him down from the plane of Being to that of thinking, which would not only be a descent but also a falsification at worst, or a deformation at best. The human who really believes that one can explain nothing of the highest truth to any other human ought to follow one’s theory into practice. One ought to write nothing and speak nothing about it, create nothing artistically to suggest it. One ought to act as if it does not exist. It is a fundamental error to turn the pure mind into an object of experience in an attempt to reach comprehension. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Mind can know everything else and is the inescapable condition of every experience, for by its light every object and every event is revealed, but it cannot itself be known in the same way that we know everything else. Ordinarily there is a knower and a known, and mind would have to transcend such a relation were it to become away of itself, which means that it would have to transcend thinking itself. Mind itself produces the categories of time, space, and cause which makes World experience possible and knowable—that is, thinkable—which is why it cannot be grasped in the same way. The nature of mind is unique, and before its sublime verity speech trembles into silence. In affirming that the One alone exists, they imply their own existence. The affirmation points to someone who affirms, so one must be added to the One, making Two. The more they prattle about the One, the more they proclaim, by inference, the Two. We may perceive how the highest truth turns all lesser doctrines into illusions and yet admits their validity on their own level. There is a beauty in the infinite reality which outshines whatever beauty there is in the imaginative phantasy. With the lamp of Word, one must go beyond Word. None of us can play with the pen for some years, or wield the painter’s brush, or practice any of the arts, without in time letting our minds dwell on the process of inspiration. The mysteries of human’s being must necessarily occupy us. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
And if we dare to be truly frank in our facing of the self, if we will put aside preconceived notions and ready-made theories in order to watch what really happens during those processes, we discover our feet upon the verge of a great discovery. For we shall discover—if we are both patient enough and yet persistent enough—that there is a Source within us which promises astonishing possibilities to the human race. That Source is loosely called the soul. The part of us that response to the truth and ideals is the best part. Great importance is to be placed on the guidance to be got from what psychoanalysis calls the unconscious elements within the human. How many a prominent orator’s delivery during public speeches shows that when one speaks out of one’s head one is quite undistinguished and uninspiring, whereas when one speaks out of one’s heart, without previous preparation and under the sway of one’s innermost feeling, one strongly impresses and affects one’s audience. It happens on a plane above human’s heads; most of them do not know of it explicitly at the moment. Yet they are truly rendering service through being used as channels. There are moods or periods when the ideas stream through one’s mind in swift succession or come in slow stately revelations. What is true of the World’s work is true of the arts. The secret of inspired action is also the secret of inspired art. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
If one will take the divine path, the temporary inspirations of the artist can become permanent. When genius discovers the mysterious source which inspires it, intermittent inspiration develops ultimately into continuous contact with the sublime. One is as intensely alive in the spirit as most humans are intensely alive in the flesh. King God, my Father in the shining Heaven, my Lord, since the creation of the Universe and beyond, since ancient ties the bringer of comfort, who mourned for your Son the Lord Jesus Christ: please be with me now in my time of loss. Please grieve with me now in my time of loss. Please comfort me now in my time of loss. Please wrap about me your soothing wings, blankets to warm me from sorrow’ cold hands. And Thou hast given us in love, O Lord our God, [Sabbaths for rest,] holidays for gladness, festivals and seasons for rejoicing. Thou hast granted us [this Sabbath day and] this Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Season of our Freedom, this Feast of Weeks, the Season of the Giving of our Grace, this Feast of Tabernacles, the Season of our Gladness, this Eighth Day Feast of Assembly, the Season of our Gladness, as a holy convocation, commemorating our liberation from Egypt. Our God and God of our fathers, may our remembrance and remembrance of our forefathers come before Thee. Please remember the Messiah of the house of David, Thy servant, and America, Thy holy city, and all Thy people, the house of America. Please grant us deliverance and wellbeing, lovingkindness, life and peace on this day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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The Apfelstrudel Which I Ate After the Training Session Was Marvelous!
The ultimate mystery is one’s own self. Many people believe that children who are loved and have a normal upbringing and who are involved in activities will turn out to be normal, but that is not always the case. Sometimes there are crucial elements that are still missing, which go beyond mental health. Children may sometimes lack a male role model and look for a source of masculine authority in the wrong place. No matter how loving a mother it, it may not be enough to create a balanced human being. Also, children who do not show any signs of sadism in their youth can grow up to become sadist because of a lack of something in their childhood development. Heinrich Himmler was a normal middle-class youth, who had a stable family home, and was active in college and social, but he still went on to admire Adolph Hitler and become the “bloodhound of Europe.” Many people wonder, how could this happen? Well, there are some key factors, including the economy that may have contributed to this behaviour. Mr. Himmler’s submission to a strong fatherly figure was accompanied by a deep and intense dependence on his mother, who loved hum and doted on this son. Mr. Himmler certainly did not suffer from a lack of love from his mother—a cliché to be found in a number of books and articles written about him. One might say, however, that her love was primitive; it lacked insight or vision into what the growing boy needed; it was the love a mother has for an infant, and it did not change its quality as the boy grew up. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Thus Mr. Himmler’s love spoiled him and blocked his growth and made him dependent on her. However, Mr. Himmler, as in so many others, the need for a strong father is generated by his helplessness, which in turn is generated by his remaining a little boy who longs for his mother (or a mother figure) to love him, protect him, comfort him, and not to demand anything from him. Thus he feels not like a man but like a child: weak, helpless, without will or initiative. Hence he will often look for a stronger leader to whom he can submit, who gives him a feeling of strength, and who—in an imitating relationship, becomes a substitute for the qualities he likes. There was a physical and mental flabbiness in Mr. Himmler that is frequently fund in such “mother’s boys” and that he tried to overcome by “practicing his will power”—but mainly by harshness and inhumanity. To him control and cruelty became the substitutes for strength; yet this attempt had to fail since no weakling becomes strong by being cruel; he only hides his weakness temporarily from himself and others, as long as he has the power to control them. There is abundant evidence to show that Mr. Himmler was a typical “mother’s boy.” At the age of seventeen when he was in military training, away from his parents, he wrote in the first month twenty-three letters home, and though he received ten or twelve in reply, he continually complained that the family did not write enough. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
The first sentence of his letter on 24 January 1917 is typical: “Dear Mommy, Many thanks for your dear letter. Finally I received something from you.” Two days later, having received another note from home, he starts off in the same vein and adds, “I have waited a painfully long time for it.” And two letters in three days did not stop him from lamenting on the 29th, “again today I got nothing from you.” His early letter combined pleas for mail with complaints about his living conditions: his room barren and cold, mold grew in the closets, condensations built up on the windows, it was drafty, the carpet was old, the walls were paper thin, and he suffered from the attentions of bedbugs; he found food sparse and uninviting and pleaded for packages of food and enough money to allow him to eat at the canteen or the beer-hall restaurant in town. Trivial mishaps, such as the inadvertent picking up of the wrong clothes at the bath, assumed the dimensions of minor tragedies and were reported in detail to the family. In part these complaints and lamentations were appeals for help from Frau Himmler. In response, his mother dispatched a succession of money orders and of parcels containing food, extra bedding, insect powder, and clean laundry. Apparently much advice and many expressions of worry accompanied the provisions that arrived from Landshut. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Under the impact of these messages, Heinrich, aware that he must maintain his stance as a brave soldier, would sometimes try to react the complaint that had set the whole operation in motion. However, he always waited until he received the package before changing his tune, and his reverse never lasted long. In the matter of food he was completely unashamed and his letters are filled with appreciative remarks about his mother’s cooking (“the Apfelstrudel which I ate after the training session was marvelous”) and with requests for snacks such as apples and cookies. As time went by, Mr. Himmler’s letters home became somewhat less frequent—although never falling below three a week—yet his requests for mail were as insistent as ever. Sometime he could get quite unpleasant when his mother did not write him as much as expected. “Dear Mother,” he began a letter of 23 March 1917, “Many thanks for your nice news (which I didn’t get). It is really mean of you not to have written. This need to share everything with his parents, especially with his mother, remained the same when he worked as a Praktikant (a student of agriculture who does practical work on a farm). Then nineteen years old, he sent home at least eight letters and cards in the first three and half weeks, although he often noted that he was too busy to write. When he fell sick with paratyphoid fever his mother was reduced almost to frenzy; on recovery, he spent a good deal of time in writing her all the details about his state of health, his temperature, bowel movements, aches, and pains. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
At the same time, Mr. Himmler was clever enough not to want to give the impression that he was a crybaby, interspersing his reports with reassurances that he was fine and chiding his mother for worrying. He even began his letters with three or four items of general interest and then added: “Now as to how it goes with me I can see you, dear mother, fidgeting with impatience.” This may have been true, but the sentence is one example of a method Mr. Himmler used throughout his life—to project his desires and fears on others. Thus far we have made the acquaintance of an obsessively orderly, hypochondriacal, opportunistic, narcissistic young man who felt like an infant and yearned for motherly protection while simultaneously attempting to follow and imitate a father image. Undoubtedly Mr. Himmler’s dependent attitude, partly generated by his mother’s overindulgent attitude toward him, was increased by certain real weakness, both physical and menta. Physically, Mr. Himmler was not a very strong child and suffered from ill health from the age of three. At that time he contracted a serious respiratory infection that seems to have settled in his lungs and from which some children have died. His parents were frantic and brought the physician who had delivered the child all the way from Munich to Passau to treat him. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
To give the child the best care, Frau Himmler went with him to a place with a better climate, and the father visited when he could take time from his work. In 1904 the whole family moved back to Munich for the sake of the child’s health. It is worth nothing that the father approved of all these measures, which were costly and inconvenient for him, apparently without protesting. (This is another factor that makes me assume that the father was not such a harsh and frightening disciplinarian as he is sometimes painted.) At the age of fifteen Mr. Himmler had began to have stomach trouble, which was to plague him for the rest of his life. From the whole picture of this illness it is likely that there was a strong psychogenic factor present. While he resented this stomach trouble as a symptom of weakness, it gave him the chance of being constantly occupied with himself and having people around him who listened to his complaints and fussed over him. (When he was in power Mr. Himmler found such a figure in Dr. Kersten, who seems to have had some influence on him, which is not surprising, considering Dr. Kersten’s function as a mother figure.) Another illness of Mr. Himmler’s was an alleged heart trouble that was supposed to have been the result of his work on the farm in 1919. The same Munich physician who had treated him for paratyphoid fever now made the diagnosis of a hypertrophied (enlarged) heart due to overexertion during his military service. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
It was also reported that Mr. Himmler suffered from exertion in the war, and insufficient nourishment and the aftermath of the paratyphoid fever. However, Mr. Himmler’s physical weakness went beyond these three groups of illnesses—lung, stomach, and heart. He had a soft and flabby appearance and was physically awkward and clumsy. For instance, when we got on a bicycle and could accompany his brother Gebhard on his outings, “Heinrich had a penchant for falling off his machine, tearing his clothes, and suffering other mishaps.” The same physical awkwardness showed in school and was probably even more humiliating. When G.W.F. Hallgarten, who later became an out standing historian, and was a co-student with Mr. Himmler during his school years, heard of his rise to power he could hardly imagine that this was the same person who had been his classmate. Mr. Hallgarten describes Mr. Himmler as an extraordinarily milk-faced, plump boy who already wore glasses and often showed a “half-embarrassed, half-vicious smile.” Mr. Himmler was very popular with all teachers and was an exemplary pupil during his school years, with the best qualifications in all essential subjects. In class he was considered to be overambitious (a Streber). There was only one subject in which Mr. Himmler was deficient, and that was gymnastics. Mr. Hallgarten describes in detail how humiliated Mr. Himmler was when he was not able to do relatively simple exercises, and was exposed not only to the ridicule of the teacher but also to that of his classmates, who were happy to see this ambitious boy in a position of inferiority. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
In spite of his orderliness, however, Mr. Himmler lacked discipline and initiative. He was a talker, and he knew it, berated himself for it, and tried to overcome it. Most of all, he almost completely lacked strength of will; thus, not surprisingly, he praised a strong will and hardness as ideal virtues, but never acquired them. He compensated for his lack of willpower by his coercive power over others. Mr. Himmler’s father required him to keep a daily diary and the young man was obsessively clean, consistently bathing. An illustration of his own awareness of his submissiveness and lack of will is an entry in his diary on 27 December 1919: “God will bring everything to a good end but I shall not submit without will, to fate but street it myself as best I can.” This sentence is rather tortuous and contradictory. He starts out acknowledging God’s will (at that time he was still a practicing Catholic); then he asses that he “will not submit,” but qualifies it by adding “without will”—thus solving the conflict between his actual submissiveness and his ideal of having a strong will by the compromise that he will submit but with his will; then he promises himself to steer his own fate, but qualified this “declaration of independence” with the lame addition of “as best I can.” Quite in contrast to Mr. Hitler, Mr. Himmler always remain a weakling, and he knew it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Mr. Himmler’s life was a struggle against this awareness, an attempt to become strong. Mr. Himmler was much like an adolescent who wants to be strong, but has limitations, who feels guilty and weak, accuses himself of his weakness, and is always trying to change and never succeeding. However, the circumstances and his cleverness permitted him to gain a position of such power over others that he could live with the illusion of having become “strong.” At the end of officers’ training, still seventeen, Mr. Himmler’s fear of being sent to the front was allayed, he assumed a position of self-confidence. The obvious question here is why, at this point, he was eager to go to the front when several months earlier he had been so frightened. There are several answers to this seeming contradiction. His brother Gebhard had been promoted in battle to full cadet, and that must have made Mr. Himmler very jealous and eager to show that he, too, was a hero. Mr. Himmler tries to deny his fears and loneliness and dependency by an assertion of his strong will. “Today, inside myself,” he says, “I have cut loose from everyone and now depend on myself alone. If I do not find a girl whose character suits mine and who loves me, I’ll go to Russian alone.” With or without a girl he will live far away from Germany, all by himself, and with this kind of talk he tried to convince himself that he is no longer a “mother’s boy.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Mr. Himmler, at the age of twenty, was in the same position as many others who became Nazis, he not only lacked the money to live the kind of life he wanted, but also the imaginativeness, endurance, and independence, and had nowhere to go socially or professionally, and yet were ambitions and have an ardent desire to rise. With the current COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment of over 20,000,000 Americans, and people being strung along by the government with relief payments that barely meet their needs, many may be understand where some of these Nazis were coming from. (Just an objective opinion, not as justification for tragedies.) Mr. Himmler also became a member of a fraternity and did everything to make himself popular. He visited sick fraternity brothers and sought out members and alumni wherever he went. So he was out going, but he was troubled that he was not very popular with his fellow members, some of whom expressed their lack of confidence in him quite openly. Despite his politicking, and his torment about himself and his future, many of his habits and old way, including church attendance, social calls, fraternity dances and shipments of dirty laundry to Ingolstadt [his mother], still held fast. By 1929, however, Mr. Himmler commanded three hundred men of the Schutz Staffeln, which by 1933 had grown to an army of fifty thousand. What disturbs us so profoundly is not the organization of the SS nor Mr. Himmler’s ultimate position as Reich police chief, but the torture of millions of human beings and extermination of millions more because no direct answer to these questions is to be found in Mr. Himmler’s childhood and youth besides a strong male role model. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
We all go through awkwardness, rejection, and have dreams we are not able to accomplish in our youth. Yet, many of us do not turn into monsters. Mr. Himmler’s sadism probably was deeply rooted in his character structure long before he had the occasion to practice it on the scale that made his name enter history as a bloody monster. We should keep in mind the broad definition of sadism, as the passion for absolute and unrestricted power over another human being; the infliction of physical pain is only one of the manifestations of this wish for omnipotence. We must also no forget that masochistic submissiveness is not the opposite of sadism, but part of the symbiotic system in which complete control and complete submission are manifestations of the same basic vital importance. From the age of twenty-one when Mr. Himmler felt somewhat more independent because he had begun to find new friends and father figures, he began to be slightly condescending toward his father, although he always couched his preaching in appropriate forms while the condescending preaching to his older brother became increasingly vicious. Gebhard was a hero to his brother Heinrich, as a child. However, Gebhard went into the war, was promoted on the battlefield, and received that Iron Cross 1st class. He fell in love and in love with an attractive girl and became engaged to her while his younger brother, possessing neither glory nor love, was awkward, weak, and unpopular. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
The girl did not fit Heinrich’s idea of a shy, retiring, and chaste fiancée, and not only that, but Paula was an attractive and distant cousin of theirs. There was some trouble between Paula and Gebhard, so Gebhard asked Heinrich to help him. After a couple instances of harlotry behaviour, Heinrich called off his brother’s engagement and ruined the young lady’s reputation to protect his family’s name. In a letter he stated: “If your union is to be a happy one for you two and for the health of das Volk—which must be built on sound, moral families—you must control yourself with barbaric [underlined in the original statement] strength. Since you do not handle yourself strongly and firmly, and only control yourself to a small degree, and since your future husband, as I have already said, is too good for you, and possesses too little understanding of people and can’t learn it since this age won’t let it be learned, someone else must do it. Since you both approached me on this affair and drew me in, I feel myself obligated to do it. When Gebhard agreed to go along and allowed the engagement to end, Heinrich was triumphant and at the same time scornful of his brother’s lack of resistance. “It was,” he said, “as if he [Gebhard] had absolutely no soul.” This twenty-four-year-old young mand succeeded in breaking down his father, his mother, his older brother, and in making himself the virtual dictator of the family. At this point the wish to control his brother and parents assumed features of pure sadistic viciousness. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Heinrich wrote a threatening letter to Paul to stop saying nasty things about the Himmler’s and adds the warning that, although he was a nice fellow, “I will be completely different if anyone forces me to it. Then, I will not be stopped by any false sense of pity until the opponent is socially and morally ousted from the ranks of society.” This was the height of vicious control that Mr. Himmler could exert under the circumstances. When by his cunning he was able to use the new political circumstances for his own purposes, he had the possibility to act out his sadism on a historical scale. “The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don’t ask for their love; only for their fear,” reports Heinrich Himmler. However, Mr. Himmler witnessed a mass execution in Minsk in the late summer of 1941 and was rather shaken by it. However, he said, “Nevertheless, I think it is right that we looked at this. Who is to decide over life and death must know what dying is like and what he askes the execution commanders to do.” Many of his SS men became sick after these mass executions; some committed suicide, became psychotic, or suffered from other severe mental damage. Nervous breakdowns were one possible consequence of his extermination campaign. However, one cannot speak of Mr. Himmler’s sadistic character without discussing what has often been described as his kindness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
I have already mentioned that he tried to make himself popular by visiting sick fraternity brothers, but he did similar things also on other occasions. He gave an old woman cake and rolls and recorded in his diary: “If I could only do more, but we are ourselves poor devils,” (not true, because Mr. Himmler’s family was a well-to-do-middle-class family and far from being door devils). Mr. Himmler also organized a benefit with his friends and gave the proceeds to Viennese children, and he behaved in a “fatherly” way to his SS men, as many have commented. From the whole picture of Mr. Himmler’s character, however, I get the impression that most of these friendly acts were not expressions of genuine friendliness. He had a need to compensate for his own lack of feeling and cold indifference, and to convince himself and others that he was not what he was, or, to put it differently, that he felt what he did not feel. He had to deny his cruelty and coldness by a show of kindness and concern. Even his aversion to hunting animals, which he described as cowardly, could not have been very serious since he proposed in one of his letters that the hunting of big animals should be facilitated for the SS men as a reward for good conduct. He was friendly to children and animals, but even here skepticism must be permitted, because there is almost nothing this man did that did not have the purpose of furthering his own career. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Of course, even a sadist like Mr. Heinrich Himmler can have some beneficial human traits, like kindness to some people in some situations; one would expect him to have such traits. What makes it so difficult to believe in them in Mr. Himmler is his complete coldness and the exclusive pursuit of his selfish goals. There is also a benevolent type of sadism in which control over the other person does not have the aim of harming one, but is meant to work for one’s own good. It may be that Mr. Himmler has some of this benevolent sadism, which often gives the impression of kindness. However, Mr. Himmler’s end was much in line with his character as his life had been. When it was clear that Germany had lost the war, he was preparing negotiations with the Western powers, through Swedish intermediaries, which would leave him in a leading role, and offered concessions with regard to the fate of the Jews. In these negotiations he surrendered one by one the political dogmas to which he had clung do tenaciously. Of course, simply by initiating the, der treue Heinrich (loyal Heinrich), as he was called, committed the last act of treachery to his idol, Mr. Hitler. That he thought the Allies would accept him as the new German “Fuhrer” was a sign of his mediocre intelligence and lack of political judgment, as well as of his narcissistic grandiosity, which made him think that he was the most important man even in a defeated Germany. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
People in America should be weary about gun control because people like Heinrich Himmler still exist. In fact, one of his beliefs was, “Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA—ordinary citizens don’t need guns, as their having guns doesn’t serve the State. Nonetheless, Mr. Himmler declined the suggestion of General Ohlendorf to surrender to the Allies and to take responsibility for the SS. The man who had preached loyalty and responsibility now showed, true to character, complete disloyalty and irresponsibility. He fled with a black patch over his eye and without his moustache, with false papers, and in the uniform of a corporal. When he was arrested and brought into a prisoner of war camp, his narcissism apparently could not tolerate being treated like thousands of unknown soldiers. He asked to see the commander of the camp and told him, “I am Heinrich Himmler.” Sometime later he bit the cyanide capsule he carried in a hollow tooth. Only a few years earlier, in 1938, he had said in a speech to his officers, “I have no understanding of a person who throws away his life like a dirty shirt because he believes this way, he will evade difficulties. Such a person must be interred like an animal. Often times leaders, because they are in positions of power and wealth hold others to standards, they themselves would not tolerate, in that position. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Thus the circle of his life closed. He had to attain absolute power in order to overcome his own experience of weakness and vital importance. After he had achieved this aim, he tried to cling to this power by betraying his idol. That is why one always has to watch those closet to them, you never know what their true plans are When he was in a prison camps, as an ordinary soldier, one among hundreds of thousands, Mr. Himmler could not bear his reduction to complete powerlessness. He preferred to die, rather than to be thrown back to the role of the powerless man that was for him that of the weakling. Mr. Himmler is an example of the typical anal-hoarding, sadistic, authoritarian character. He was weak (and did not only feel weak); he found a certain sense of security in his orderliness and pedantry, by submitting to strong father images, and eventually he developed a passion for unlimited control over others as the one way to overcome his sense of vital impotence, shyness, uneasiness. He was extremely envious of others whom life had endowed with more strength and self-esteem. His vital impotence and the resulting envy led to the malicious wish to humiliate and destroy the, wither it was his brother Gebhard’s fiancée of the Jews. He was utterly cold and without mercy, which made him feel more isolated and more frightened. His sadistic character may have been due to his early insecurity, unmanliness, cowardice, sense of impotence, and these attributes would indicate the probability of sadistic compensations. #RandolphHaris 17 of 23
There are thousands of Heinrich Himmlers living among us. That is why it is important to have diversity in political power. Socially speaking, they do only minor harm in normal life, although one must not underestimate the number of people whom they damage and make thoroughly unhappy. However, when forces of destruction and hate threaten to engulf the whole body politic, such people become extremely dangerous; they are the ones who yearn to serve the government as its agents for terror, for torture and killing. Many people commit the severe error of believing that one can easily recognize a potential Himmler from far away. One of the purposes of characterological studies is to show that the potential Himmler looks like anyone else, a fallen senator, a wealthy actress, a housewife, a hardworking factory worker, a once prestigious doctor, a beautiful and rich news anchor, a successful police captain, maybe even a president, expect those who have learned to read character and who do not have to wait until circumstances permit the “monster” to show one’s colours. What are the factors that made Mr. Himmler a merciless sadist? Perhaps no one taught him the love of God? We must also consider that there may be genetically determined factors that, while not the source of sadism, are responsible for a disposition toward it. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
However, perhaps more than any other factor we must think of the pathogenic influence of the dry, banal, pedantic, dishonest, unalive atmosphere in which the Himmler family lived. There were no values except the insincere profession of patriotism and honesty, there was no hope except that of managing to hold on to their precarious position on the social ladder. There was no fresh air, spiritually or mentally, that could have encouraged the weak little boy to branch out and develop. And there was not only this family. The Himmlers were part of a social class on the lowest fringe of the imperial system that suffered from resentment, impotence, and joylessness. This was the soil on which Himmler grew—and he became increasingly more vicious as the revolution defeated his social status and values, and as it became clearer to him that he had no future in professional terms. “We, however, who must live in this time, wish to prove ourselves worthy, every day and every hour, of gifts which Fate has given us, through the fact that it sent us the Fuhrer, to start with, and after two thousand years, who was, we might say, sent by God. As German men and German women, we wish to be thankful that we were born in precisely this age, that we are able to live in this age,” reports Heinrich Himmler. Love is he measure of our faith, the inspiration for our obedience, and the true altitude of our discipleship. It is our goal to preserve life and love our neighbour’s as ourself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
As children of God, we have a tremendous responsibility to respect all life forms, animate or inanimate. The Saviour Himself provided the answer with this profound declaration: “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” This is the essence of what it means to be a true disciple: those who receive Christ Jesus walk with Him. We must love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind. We have compassion that provides direction not only for our lives but also for the Lord’s Church on both sides of the veil. Because love is the great commandment, it ought to be at the center of all and everything we do in our own family, in our Church callings, and in our livelihood. Love is the healing balm that repairs rifts in personal and family relationships. It is the bound that unites families, communities, and nations. Love is the power that initiates friendship, tolerance, civility, and respect. It is the source that overcomes divisiveness and hate. Love is the fire that warms our lives with unparalleled joy and divine hope. Love should be our walk and our talk. When we truly understand what it means to love as Jesus Christ loves us, the confusion clears and our priorities align. Our walk as disciples of Christ becomes more joyful. Our lives take on new meaning. Our relationship with our Heavenly Father becomes more profound. Obedience becomes a joy rather than a burden. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
God the Eternal Father did not give the first great commandment because He needs us to love Him. His power and glory are not diminished should we disregard, deny, or even defile His name. His influence and dominion extend through time and space independent of our acceptance, approval, or admiration. No, God does not need us to love Him. However, oh, how we need to love God! For what we love determines what we seek. What we seek determine what we think and do. What we think and do determines who we are—and who we will become. We are created in the image of our Heavenly parents; we are God’s spirit children. Therefore, we have a vast capacity for love—it is part of our spiritual heritage. What and how we love not only defines us as individuals; it also defines us as a church. Love is the defining characteristic of a disciple of Christ. Our insight reveals anything communicated can be affirmed in one way or negated in another, therefore it can be quite incorrect. For behind Nature is Mystery beyond all knowing, all thinking, all describing, absolute Being beyond all relativity, that is also Non-Being. All evaluative theories, opinions, judgments, interpretation are assemblages of thoughts. Insofar as religious theories depart from or lack direct insight into the Real, into what is, they are mere thoughts. Where these thoughts enter into the recording, or the communication, of the result of such insight they colour it, add to it, adulterate it. It is when the person attempts to report the Impersonal that this danger exists. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Do not attempt to describe what God is, for whatever you say would limit God, who would then become something inferior to God. This is why Hebrew and Hindu bible alike say he is the Nameless One. However, you may describe what God is not, you may draw illustrations from human mind, capacity, and character to suggest what some aspect of God may be like in a quite different degree and way. Since the beginning of time, love has been the source of both the highest bliss and the heaviest burdens. At the heart of misery from the days of Adam until today, you will find the love of wrong things. And at the heart of joy, you will find the love of good things. And the greatest of all good things is God. Our Father in Heaven has given us, His children, much more than any mortal mind can comprehend. God created this wondrous World we live in. God the Father watches over us, fills our hearts with breathtaking joy, brightens our darkest hours with blessed peace, distills upon our minds precious truths, shepherds us through times of distress, rejoices when we rejoice, and answers our righteous petitions. He offers to His children the promise of a glorious and infinite existence and has provided a way for us to progress in knowledge and glory until we receive a fulness of joy. He has promised us all that He has. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
If all that is not enough reason to love our Heavenly Father, perhaps we can learn from the words of the Apostle John, who said, “We love him, because he first loved us.” In the center of the storm, there is clam. In the center of confusion, there is peace. In the center of exhaustion, there is rest. God, sitting in the midst of the World, please lead me to the center and grant me the calm and peace and rest that is found there. Speedily, even in our days, do Thou establish Thy dwelling in America forever. Mayest Thou be exalted and sanctified in America, Thy city, throughout all generations and to all eternity. O please let our eyes behold the establishment of Thy kingdom, accord to the word that was spoken in the inspired Psalms of David, Thy righteous anointed: The Lord shall reign forever; Thy God, O Zion, shall be Sovereign unto all generations. Hallelujah! Unto all generations we will declare Thy greatness and to all eternity we will proclaim Thy holiness. Our mouth shall ever speak Thy praise, O our God, for Thou art a great and holy God and King. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the holy God. Thou didst choose us for Thy service from among all peoples, loving us and taking delight in us. Thou didst exalt us above all tongues by making us holy through Thy commandments. Thou hast drawn us near, O our King, unto Thy service and hast called us by Thy great and holy name. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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I Am the Resurrection, and the Life—Glory to God in the Shining Heavens and on Earth!
From Watergate we learned what generations before us have known; our Constitution works. And during Watergate years it was interpreted again so as to reaffirm that no one—absolutely no one—is above the law. The total rejection of any religious belief is so contrary to human’s natural instincts and so destructive of one’s peace of mind. However, the French revelation was a conscious effort to replace the Kingdom of God with the kingdoms of man. Thus Grace’s irreligion was soon replaced by a new faith—man’s worship of man. Meanwhile, in the New World a radical experiment opened another chapter in church-state relations. There a group of gentlemen farmers, who were neither naïve about human nature nor pretentious about human society, were drawing up the American Constitution. By refusing to assign redemptive powers to the state or to allow coercive power to the church, the American experiment separated these two institutions for the first time since Constantine. What might be considered the modern phase in church-state history has emerged in out live times. It is an amalgam of elements from the previous eras. The rise of totalitarian regimes has brought back the kind of persecution the church experienced in early Rome; like Herod, modern dictators tolerate no other kinds. In the West secularism has aggressively spread irreligion, turning Europe into a post-Christian culture and America into a battleground with orthodox religion in retreat. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
This is dangerous because of people like Heinrich Himmler, who is an excellent example of a vicious, sadistic character who illustrates what has been said about the connection between sadism and the extreme forms of the anal-hoarding, bureaucratic, authoritarian character. The “bloodhound of Europe,” as he was called by many, Mr. Himmler was, together with Adolph Hitler, responsible for the slaughter of between fifteen and twenty million unarmed and powerless Russians, Poles, and Jews. Mr. Himmler impressed one as of uncanny subalternity, narrow-minded conscientiousness, inhuman methodicalness, blended with an element of an automaton. This sadistic authoritarian character is not the description of a hater or of that of a monster as the latter is usually conceived, but of an extremely dehumanized bureaucrat. Mr. Himmler was the type of a cruel educator of the old school, strict against himself but stricter against others. The signs of compassion and especially friendly tone of his thank you letters were all a fake, as one often finds in clearly cold natures. He could be a tender family father, a correct superior and a good comrade. At the same time he was an obsessed fanatic, an eccentric dreamer and a will-less instrument in Mr. Hitler’s hands to whom he was tied in an ever increasing love/hate. The most extreme example of his submission was that to Mr. Hitler, although one must suspect that his opportunism may have induced him to use a degree of flatter that was not entirely genuine. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Mr. Hitler was for Mr. Himmler the god-man, to be compared to the significance of Christ in the Christian religion or of Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita. He writes of him: “He is destined by the Karma of the universal Germanness, to lead the fight against the east and to save the Germanness of the World; one of the very great figures of light has found its incarnation in him.” Mr. Himmler submitted to the new Krishna-Christ-Hitler as he had to the old Christ/God, except much more fervently. It must be noted, however, that under the circumstances the new gods offered greater opportunities for fame and power. Can we conclude from this cursory overview that the church and the state must inevitably be in conflict? To some extent the answer is yes. Dual allegiances always create tension. And in a sinful World the struggle for power, which inevitably corrupts, is unavoidable. When the church is not being persecuted, it is being corrupted. So as much as anything else, it is human’s own nature that has created centuries of conflict. While they know that they represent different nations each living under the normal circumstances of their own society, its power and strength in comparison with other nations, nor do they know their place in their own society. Once again the contracting parties, in this case representatives of states, are allowed only enough knowledge to make a rational choice to protect their interests but not so much that the more fortunate among them can take advantage of their special situation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, every generation has an obligation to seek anew a healthy relationship between church and state. Both are reflections of human’s nature; both have a role to play. Christ’s teaching clearly delineates these roles. Jesus was remarkably indifferent to those who held political power. He had no desire to replace Caesar or Pilate with His apostles Peter or John. He gave civil authority its due, rebuking both the Zealots and Peter for using the sword. This infuriated the religious right of His day. Eager to discredit Jesus, the Pharisees and Herodians tried trapping Jesus over the question of allegiance to political authority. “Tell us,” they asked, “is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” The question puts Jesus in the middle: If He said no, He would be a threat to the Roman government; if He said yes, He would lose the respect of the masses who hated the Romans. Jesus asked them for a coin. It was a Roman denarius, the only coin that could be used to pay the hated yearly poll tax. On one side was the image of the Emperor Tiberius, around which were written the words Tiberius, Caesar Augusts, son of the divine Augustus. “Whose portrait is this?” Jesus asked, rubbing His finger over the raised features of the Roman ruler. “And whose inscription?” “Caesar’s,” they replied impatiently. “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” replied Jesus, handing the coin back to them. They stared at Jesus in stunned silence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Not only had Jesus eluded the trap, but He has put Caesar in his place. Christ might simply have said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” That is all that was at issue. It was Caesar’s image on the coin, and Caesar had authority over the state. What made Jesus add the second phrase, “Give to God what is God’s”? The answer is found on the reverse face of the coin, which showed Tiberius’s mother represented as the goddess of peace, along with the words highest priest. The blasphemous words commanded the worship of Caesar; they thus exceeded the state’s authority. Jesus’ lesson was not lost on the early church. Government is to be respected, and its rule honoured. “It is necessary to submit to the authorities,” wrote the apostle Paul. “If you owe taxes, pay taxes.” However, worship is reserved solely for God. The distinction Christ made is clear; both the church and state have clear and distinct roles ordained by God. The issue is how to apply these teachings to each institution in today’s volatile World. Christ did not give the keys to of the Kingdom to Caesar nor the sword to Peter. In God’s provision the state is not to seize authority over ecclesiastical or spiritual matters, nor is the church to seek authority over political matters. Yet the constant temptation of each is to encroach upon the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The basic principle of the law of nations is a principle of equality. Independent peoples organized as states have certain fundamental equal rights. This principle is analogous to the equal rights of citizens in a constitutional regime. One consequence of this equality of nations is the principle of self-determination, the right of a people to settle its own affairs without the intervention of foreign powers. Another consequence is the right of self-defense against attack, including the right to form defensive alliances to protect this right. A further principle is that treaties are to be kept, provided they are consistent with other principles governing the relations of states. Thus treaties for self-defense, suitably interpreted, would be binding, but agreements to cooperate in an unjustified attack are void ab initio. Even in a just war certain forms of violence are strictly inadmissible; and where a country’s right to war is questionable and uncertain, the constraints on the means it can use are all the more severe. Acts permissible in a war of legitimate self-defense, when these are necessary, may be flatly excluded in a more doubtful situation. The ai of war is a just peace, and therefore the means employed must not destroy the possibility of peace or encourage a contempt for human life that puts the safety of ourselves and of humankind in jeopardy. The conduct of war is to be constrained and adjusted to this end. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
The representatives of states would recognize that their national interest, as seen from the original position, is best served by acknowledging these limits on the means of war. This is because the national interest of a just state is defined by the principles of justice that have already been acknowledged. Therefore such a nation will aim above all to maintain and to preserve its just institutions and conditions that make them possible. It is not moved by the desire for World power or national glory; nor does it wage war for purposes of economic gain or the acquisition of territory. These ends are contrary to the conception of justice that defines a society’s legitimate interests, however prevalent they have been in the actual conduct of states. Granting these presumptions, then, it seems reasonable to suppose that the traditional prohibitions incorporating the natural duties that protect human life would be chosen. Now if conscientious refusal in time of war appeals to these principles, it is founded upon a political conception, and not necessarily upon religious or other nations. While this form of denial may not be a political act, since it does not take place in the public forum, it is based upon the same theory of justice that underlies the constitution and guides its interpretation. Moreover, the legal order itself presumably recognizes in the form of treaties the validity of at least some of these principles of the law of nations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Therefore if a soldier is ordered to engage in certain illicit acts of war, one may refuse if one reasonably and conscientiously believes that the principles applying to the conduct of war are plainly violated. One can maintain that, all things considered, one’s natural duty not to e made the agent of grave injustice and evil to another outweighs one’s duty to obey. Conscription is a drastic interference with the basic liberties of equal citizenship, it cannot be justified by any needs less compelling than those of national security. Citizens agree to this arrangement as a fair way of sharing in the burdens of national defense. In a well-ordered society anyway, evils arise externally, that is, from unjustified attacks from the outside. It is impossible for just institutions to eliminate these hardships entirely. The most that they can do is to try to make sure that the risks of suffering from these imposed misfortunes are more or less evenly shared by all members of society over the course of their life, and that there is no avoidable class bias in selecting those who are called for duty. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
And, of course, it is unjust and contrary to the law of nations to attack the liberty of other societies without just cause. Therefore if a just case for war does not exist, and this may be sufficiently evident under some circumstances, a citizen is justified in refusing to discharge one’s legal duty. Both the law of nations and the principles of justice for one’s own society uphold one in this claim. It no more challenges the state’s authority than the celibacy of priest challenges the sanctity of marriage. Governments, with rare exceptions, seek to expand their power beyond the mandate to restrain evil, preserve order, and promote justice. Most often they do this by venturing into religious or moral areas. The reason is twofold: the state needs religious legitimization for its polices and an independent church is the one structure that rivals that state’s clam for ultimate allegiance. However, when the state has presumed on God’s role, whether in ancient Rome, in Germany, or modern America, the first liberty, freedom of conscience, suffers. On the other side of the coin, the church, whose principal function is to proclaim the Good News and witness the values of the Kingdom of God, must resist the tempting illusion that it can usher in that Kingdom through political means. Jesus provided the best example for the church in His wilderness confrontation with Satan when the Devil tempted Jesus to worship him and thus take dominion over the kingdom of this World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
No small temptation. With that kind of power, Christ could enforce the Sermon on the Mount; love and justice could reign. He might have reasoned that if He did not accept, someone else would. This rationalization is popular today, right up through the highest councils of government: compromise to stay in power because there you can do more for the common good. However, as the saying goes, “People who lie down with dogs, get flees.” It is just another way of achieving success by compromising one’s morals and yielding to coercive power. And think of the popularity Jesus could have gained. After all, the people wanted a Messiah who would vanquish their oppressors. However, Jesus understood His mission, and it could not be accomplished by taking over the kingdoms of the World in a political coup. The mission of the church is to build the kingdom of God on Earth, and the means of the mission is politics. We live with both good (the wheat) and evil (the tares), and cannot root out the tares. Only God is able to do that and He will—when the Kingdom comes in its final glory. However, citizens of the World have a duty to work through civil authority for the advancement of justice and human good. They may provide critical illumination, personal example and vocational leadership. There are proper ways as well for the institutional church to provide society with its moral vision and hold government to moral account. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Some Christian traditional similarly believe that they can best model Kingdom values not by involvement in politics but by the establishment of alternative communities in which they live out the teachings of the Kingdom. In its proper form, this is not a withdrawal from the World or abandonment of Christian responsibility; nor is it a privatization of Christian values as with those who profess to believe but live as they do not. Instead a different strategy to the same end of providing a witness in the kingdom of man to the values of the Kingdom of God. While I do not agree with the generally negative view of government held by such groups, I respect the faithfulness by which they live their convictions. This split up of the social order is precisely analogous to the process of growth in biology. Embryos differentiate as they develop, forming more and more specialized organs. The entire march of evolution, from the virus to the man, displays a relentless advance toward higher and higher degrees of differentiation. There appears to be a seemingly irresistible movement of living beings and social groups from less to more differentiated forms. Thus it is not accidental that we witness parallel trends toward diversity—in the economy, in politics, in religion, in art, in education and mass culture, in the social order itself. These trends all fit together forming part of an immensely larger historic process. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The Super-age of information Revolution can now be seen for what, in large measure, it is—the advance of human society to its next higher stage of differentiation. This is why it often seems to us that our society is cracking at the seams. It is. This is why everything grows increasingly complex. Where once there stood 1,000 organizational entities, there are now at least 21.6 million in America alone—interconnected by increasingly transient links. Where once there were a few relatively permanent subcults with which a person might identify, there are now thousands of temporary subcluts milling about, colliding, and multiplying. The powerful bonds that integrated industrial society—bons of law, common values, centralized and standardized education and cultural production—are breaking down. All this explains why cities suddenly seem to be “unmanageable” and states “ungovernable.” For the old ways of integrating a society, methods based on uniformity, simplicity, and permanence, are not as effective. For the individual, this leap to a new level of differentiation holds awesome implications. However, not for the ones most people fear. We have been told so often that we are heading for faceless uniformity that we fail to appreciate the fantastic opportunities for individuality that the Super-industrial Revolution brings with it. And we have hardly begun to think about the dangers of over-individualization that are also implicit in it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Therefore keep in mind that the common grace is God’s provision for the welfare of all His created beings, both those who believe in God and those who do not. The human race, far from being flattened into monotonous conformity, will become far more diverse socially than it ever was before. The new society, the super-age of informational society now beginning to take form, will encourage a crazy-quilt pattern of evanescent life styles. The critical dynamic in the church-state tension is separation of institutional authority. Religion and politics cannot be separated—they inevitably overlap—but the institutions of church and state must preserve their separate and distinct roles. In this regard, the American experiment merits closer examination. The Kingdom of God is universal, bound by neither race nor nation. The church was ordained principally for the conversion of men and women—conversion grounded in individual conscience wrought by the supernatural work of a sovereign God upon the soul. So that state could neither successfully establish nor destroy the church, since it could not rule conscience nor transform people’s hearts and soul. Each rational soul has an equal right to judge for oneself, every person has an unalienable right to act in all religious affairs according to the full persuasion of one’s own mind. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Thus two typically mortal enemies, the Enlightenment and the Christian faith, found a patch of common ground on American soil. Both agreed (for different reasons) that the new government should neither establish nor interfere with the church. The religion of every human must be left to the conviction and conscience of every human; and it is the right of every human to exercise it as these may dictate. It was this reasoning, not the right for the news reporters to spread lie, that led to the adoption of the First Amendment, expressly to protect the individual’s right to freedom of conscience and expression, and to prevent the establishment of a state church. However, contrary to the belief of many today, this separation of church and state did not mean that America was to be a nation free of religious influence. From the very beginning the American Revolution itself was seen by many as a rebellion fueled by the conviction that humans are creatures of God, and one’s political life is conditioned by that truth. As James Madison insisted, “This duty [homage to the Creator] is precedent, both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of civil society. Before any human can be considered as a member of civil society, one must be considered as a subject of the governor of the Universe.” A nation under God was no idle phrase. Nor did the separation of church and state mean religion and politics could be separated or religious values removed form the public arena. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
For one’s political life is an expression of values, and religion, by definition, most profoundly influences values. The concept of a “wall of separation,” a phrase incidentally first used by Jefferson fifteen years after the Constitution was adopted, applied to institutions of church and state, not religious and political values. The Founding Father were all aware that the form of limited government they were adopting could only succeed if there was an underlying consensus of values shared by the populace. I am reminded of this when I visit the House of Representatives. A beautiful fresco on the upper walls of the chamber itself contains the portraits of history’s great lawmakers. Standing at the speaker’s desk and looking straight ahead over the main entrance, one’s eyes meet the piercing eyes of the first figure in the series: Moses, the one who recorded the Law from the original Lawgiver. John Adams eloquently acknowledged the understanding of our constitutional framers when in 1798 he wrote: “We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passion unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made only for moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any others. Many of these original American visionaries believed that Christian citizens would actively bring their religious values to the public forum. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
George Washington faintly echoed Augustine when he asserted, “Of all the dispositions and habit which lead to a political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that men claim that tribute of patriotism, who should labour to subvert these great pillars of human happiness.” Thus, when laws were passed reflecting the consensus of Christian values in the land, no one panicked supposing that the Christian religion was being “established” or that a sectarian morality was being imposed on an unwilling people. The point of the First Amendment was that such convictions could only become the law of the land if a majority of citizens could be persuaded (without coercion), whether they shared the religious foundation or nor, of the merits of a particular proposition. Today’s widespread relegation of religion to merely something people do in the privacy of their homes or churches would be unimaginable to the founders of the republic—even those who personally repudiated orthodox Christian faith. Though America has drifted far from the vision of its founders, this system continues to offer one of the World’s most hopeful models in an otherwise contentious history of conflict #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
The record of the centuries should not cause despair, however. Tensions between church and state is inherent and inevitable. Indeed, it is perhaps the outworking of one of God’s great mysteries, part of the dynamic by which He governs His Universe. For from the constant tension—the chafing back and forth—a certain equilibrium is achieved. To maintain this balance the church and the state must fulfill their respective role. One cannot survive without the other; yet neither can do the work of the other. Both operate under God’s rule, each in a different relationship to that rule. Certainly one thing is clear. When they fail in their appointed tasks—that is, when the church fails to be the visible manifestation of the Kingdom of God and the state fails to maintain justice and concord—civic order collapses. The consequences can be catastrophic and tumultuous events demonstrate that. To confess that intellectually we know nothing about the Absolute is understandable. However, to say that therefore we should leave its existence entirely out of our intellectual World-view, is not. For although that exact definition and direct explanation of the spirit is unable to catch the whole of this subtle experience within our receiving range because it is turned into ordinary human intellectual, emotional, and physical experience, by studying the spirit we may nevertheless evoke an intuitive recognition of its beauty; we may be able to better understand the world of the soul and the spirit may arouse the first aspirations towards spiritual enlightenment. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Spiritual enlightenment is the topic most worth writing about yet least understood. Whoever has entered into a partial understanding—it would be too much to demand more—of it, bears some responsibility. One must communicate with one’s fellows. Because the Real is beyond the thinking intellect’s grasp, it cannot be formulated into ideas. Yet because we need signpost and a goal to give guidance and direction, we must tentatively and provisionally formulate it. Dear Lord in shining in Heaven, I drop my fears into your ocean and watch them sink from sight. I place my fears on your broad Earth and see them rot away. I put my fears into your hands and they are no more. When you offer your arms to me, Great Father, your hands hold nothing but love. We sanctify Thy name on Earth even as it is sanctified in the shining Heavens above, as described in the vision of Thy Prophet: And the seraphim called one unto another saying: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole Earth is full of His glory. Whereupon the angels in stirring and mighty chorus rise toward the seraphim and with resounding acclaim declare: Blessed be the glory of God from His Heavenly abode. From Thy Heavenly abide, please reveal Thyself, O our King, and reign over us, for we wait for Thee. O when wilt Thy reign in America? Speedily, even in our days, do Thou establish Thy dwelling here forever. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 