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Humans Never Ask Who is Paying for this Paradise?
Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the stage to write an autobiography. Today unconscious adaption is no longer adequate. Faced with the power to alter the gene, to create new species, to populate the planets or depopulate the Earth, humans must now assume conscious control of evolution itself. As the number of social components grows and change and makes the whole system less stable, it becomes less and less possible to ignore the demands of political minorities. The best way to deal with angry or recalcitrant minorities is to open the system further, bringing them into it as full partners, permitting them to participate in social goal-setting, rather than attempting to ostracize or isolate them. Young people forced into prolonged adolescence and deprived of the right to partake in social decision-making will grow more and more unstable until they threaten the overall system. In short, in politics, in industry, in education, goals set without the participation of those affected will be increasingly hard to execute. The continuation of top-down technocratic goal-setting procedures will lead to greater and greater social instability, less and less control over the forces of change; an ever-greater danger of cataclysmic, human-destroying upheaval. To master change, we shall therefore need both a clarification of important long-range social goals and a democratization of the way in which we arrive at them. And this means nothing less than the next political revolution in the techno-societies—a breathtaking affirmation of popular democracy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Avoiding future shock as one rides the waves of change, one must master evolution, shaping tomorrow to human need. Instead of rising in revolt against it, one must, from this historic moment on, anticipate and design the future. Our first and most pressing need, therefore, before we can begin to gently guide our evolutionary destiny, before we can build a humane future, is to halt the runaway acceleration that is subjecting multitudes to the threat of future shock while, at the very same moment, intensifying all the problems they must deal with—war, ecological incursions, racism, the obscene contrast between rich and poor, the revolt of the young, and the rise of a potentially deadly mass irrational. There is no facile way to treat this wild growth, this cancer in history. There is no magic medicine, either, for curing the unprecedented disease it bears in its rushing wake: future shock. We must take radically curative procedures for the society—new social services, a future-facing education system, new ways to regulate technology, and a strategy for capturing control of change. Other ways must also be found. Yet the basic thrust is diagnosis. For diagnosis precedes cure, and we cannot begin to help ourselves until we become sensitively conscious of the problem. By making imaginative use of change to channel change, we cannot only spare ourselves the trauma of future shock, we can reach out and humanize distant tomorrows. When the light of truth seems to depart from humans, there will be souls looking for light, and who are filled with perplexity and sorrow. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Seeking salvation, people will be thirsting for the knowledge of the living God, for some assurance of life beyond the grave. A rational individual is not subject to envy, at least when the differences between oneself and others are not thought to be the result of injustice and do not exceed certain limits. Nor are the parties influenced by different attitudes toward risk and uncertainty, or by various tendencies to dominate or to submit, and the like. These special psychologies I have also imagine to be behind the veil of ignorance along with the parties’ knowledge of their conception of the god. One explanation for these stipulations is that as far as possible, the choice of a conception of justice should not be affected by accidental contingencies. The principles adopted should be invariant with respect to differences in these inclinations for the same reason that we want them to hold irrespective of individual preferences and social circumstances. These assumptions tie in with the Kantian interpretation of justice as fairness and greatly simplify the argument from the standpoint of the original position. The parities are not swayed by individual differences in these propensities, thereby avoiding the complications in the bargaining process that would result. If any, without rather definite information about which configuration of attitudes existed, one might not be able to say what agreement would be reached. In each case it would be contingent upon the particular hypothesis laid down. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Unless we could show some distinctive merit from a moral point of view in the postulated array of special psychologies, the principles adopted would be arbitrary, no longer the outcome of reasonable conditions. And if possible, since envy is generally regarded as something to be avoided and feared, at least wen it becomes intense, it seems desirable that the choice of principles should not be influenced by this trait. Therefore, for reasons both of simplicity and moral theory, I have assumed an absence of envy and lack of knowledge of the special psychologies. Nevertheless these inclinations do exist and in some way they must be reckoned with. First of all, we proceed on the presumptions just mentioned, and it is illustrated by most of the argument so far; secondly, we must ask whether the well-ordered society corresponding to the conception adopted will actually generate feelings of envy and patterns of psychological attitudes that will undermine the arrangements it counts to be just. At first we reason as if there is no problem of envy and the special psychologies; and then having ascertained which principles would be settled upon, we check to see whether just institutions so defined are likely to arouse and encourage these propensities to such an extent that the social system becomes unworkable and incompatible with human good. If so, the adoption of the conception of justice must be reconsidered. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
However, should the inclinations engendered support just arrangements, or be easily accommodated by them, the first part of the argument is confirmed. The essential advantage of the two-step procedure is that no particular constellation of attitudes is taken as given. We are simply checking the reasonableness of our initial assumptions and the consequences we have drawn from them in the light of the constraints imposed by the general facts of our World. The reasons why envy poses a problem, namely the fact that the inequalities sanctioned by the difference principle may be so great as to arouse envy to a socially dangerous extent. The envy experienced by the least advantaged towards those better situated is normally general envy in the sense that they envy the more favoured for the kinds of good and not for the particular objects they possess. The upper classes say are envied for their greater wealthy and opportunity; those envying them want similar advantages for themselves. By contrast, particular envy is typical of rivalry and competition. Those who lose out in the quest for office and honour, or for the affections of another, are liable to envy the success of their rivals and to covet the same thing that they have won. Our problem then is whether the principles of justice, and especially the difference principle with fair equality of opportunity, is likely to engender in practice too much destructive general envy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
The definition of envy that seems appropriate for this question deals with fixed ideas. Suppose that the necessary interpersonal comparisons are made in terms of the objective primary goods, liberty, and opportunity, income and wealth, which for simplicity I have normally used to define expectations in applying the difference principle. Then we may think of envy as the propensity to view with hostility the greater good of others even though their being more fortunate than we are does not detract from our advantages. We envy persons whose situation is superior to ours (estimated by some agreed index of goods as noted above) and if it is necessary to five up something of ourselves, we are willing to deprive them of their greater benefits. When others are aware of our envy, they may become jealous of their better circumstances and anxious to take precautions against the hostile acts to which our envy makes us prone. So understood envy is collectively disadvantageous: If only the discrepancy between them is sufficiently reduced, the individual who envies another is prepared to do things that make them both worse off. Thus Kant, whose definition I have pretty much followed, quite properly discusses envy as one of the vices of hating humankind. Envy and spite are passions; their names already imply badness. As Kant observers, there are many occasions when we openly speak of the greater good of others as enviable. Thus we may remark upon the enviable harmony and happiness of a marriage or a family. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
Similarly, one might say to another that one envies one’s greater opportunities or attainments. In these cases, those of benign envy, there is no ill will intended or expressed. We do not wish, for example, that the marriage or family should be less happy or harmonious. By these conventional expressions we are affirming the value of certain things that others have. We are indicating that, although we possess no similar good of equal value, they are indeed worth striving for. Those to whom we address these remarks are expected to receive them as a kind of praise and not as a foretaste of our hostility. A somewhat different case is that of emulative envy which leads us to try to achieve what others have. The sight of their greater good moves us to strive in socially beneficial ways for similar things for ourselves. Thus envy proper, in contrast with benign envy which we freely express, is a form of rancor that tends to hard both its object and its subject. It is what emulative envy may become under certain conditions of defeat and sense of failure. A further point is that envy is not a moral feeling. No moral principle need be cited in its explanation. It is sufficient to say that the better situation of others catches our attention. We are downcast by their good fortune and no longer value as highly what we have; and this sense of hurt and loss arouses our rancor and hostility. Thus one must be careful not to conflate envy and resentment. For resentment is a moral feeling. If we resent our having less than others, it must be because we think that their being better off is the result of unjust institutions, or wrongful conduct on their part. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
Those who express resentment must be prepared to show why certain institutions are unjust or how others have injured them. What marks off envy from the moral feelings is the different way in which it is accounted for, the sort of perspective from which the situation is viewed. We should note also the nonmoral feelings connected with envy but not to be mistake for it. In particular, jealousy and grudgingness are reverse, so to speak, to envy. A person who is better off may wish those less fortunate than one to stay in their place. One is jealous of one’s superior position and begrudges them the greater advantages that would put them on a level with oneself. And should this propensity extend to denying them benefits that one does not need and cannot use oneself, then one is moved by spite. Spite is characterizes as being pleased at the bad fortune of others, whether deserved or not. For the idea that jealousy, grudgingness, and spite are the reverse of envy, the feelings of those who envied and who possess what is wanted. These inclinations are collectively harmful in the way that envy is, since the grudging and spiteful human is willing to give up something to maintain the distance between oneself and others. Envy and grudgingness are vices. As we have seen, the moral virtues are among the broadly based traits of character which it is rational for persons to want in one another as associates. Thus vices are broadly based traits that are not wanted, spitefulness and envy being clear cases, since they are to everyone’s detriment. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
He parties will surely prefer conceptions of justice the realization of which does not arouse these propensities. We are normally expected to forbear from the actions to which they prompt us and to take the steps necessary to rid ourselves of them. Yet sometimes the circumstances evoking envy are as compelling that given human beings as they are no one can reasonably be asked to overcome one’s rancorous feelings. A person’s lesser position as measured by the index of objective primary goods may be so great as to wound one’s self-respect; and given one’s situation, we my sympathize with one’s sense of loss. Indeed, we can resent being made envious, for society may permit such large disparities in these goods that under existing social conditions these differences cannot help but cause a loss of self-esteem. For those suffering this hurt, envois feelings are not irrational; the satisfaction of their rancor would make the better off. When envy is a reaction to the loss of self-respect in circumstances where it would be unreasonable to expect someone to feel differently, this is excusable. Since self-respect is the main primary good, the parties would not agree, I shall assume, to count this sort of subjective loss as irrelevant. Therefore the question is whether a basic structure which satisfies the principles of justice is likely to arouse so much excusable envy that the choice of these principles should be reconsidered. As the dialectical discussion proceeds, a point is reached when an evaluation of these individual impulses becomes necessary. By that time the individual should have acquired enough certainty of judgment to enable one to act on one’s own insight and decision and not from the mere wish to copy convention—even if one happens to agree with the collective opinion. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Unless one stands firmly on one’s own feet, the so-called objective values profit one noting, since they then only serve as a substitute for character and so help to suppress one’s individuality. Naturally, society has an indisputable right to protect itself against arrant subjectivisms, but, in so far society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individuals. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes—it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individua personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A millions zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally shortsighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the World has seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman. Unfortunately, this realization does not seem to have penetrated very far—and our blindness is extremely dangerous. People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans. Curiously enough, the Churches too want to avail themselves of mass action in order to cast of the devil with Beelzebub—the very Churches whose care is the salvation of the individual soul. They do not appear to have heard of the elementary axiom of mass psychology that the individual becomes morally and spiritually inferior in the mass, and for this reason they do not bother themselves overmuch with their real task of helping the individual to achieve a metanoia, a rebirth of the spirit—Deo concedente. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
If the individual is not truly a regenerated spirit, it is, unfortunately, only too clear that society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption. I can therefore see it only as a delusion when the Churches try—and they apparently do—to rope the individual into some social organization and reduce one to a condition of diminished responsibility, instead of raising one out of the torpid, mindless mass and making clear to one that one is the one important factor and that the salvation of the World consists in the salvation of the individual soul. It is true that mass meetings parade these ideas before one and seek to impress them on one’s mind by dint of mass suggestion, with the melancholy result that once the intoxication has worn off the mass human promptly succumbs to another even more obvious and still louder slogan. One’s individual relation to God would be an effective shield against these pernicious influences. Did Christ, perchance, call his disciples to him any followers who did not afterwards cry with the rest, “Crucify him!” when even the rock named Peter showed signs of wavering? And are not Jesus and Paul prototypes of those who, trusting their inner experience, have gone their individual ways in defiance of the World? This argument should certainly not cause us to overlook the reality of the situation confronting the Church. When the Church tries to give shape to the amorphism mass by uniting individuals into a community of believers and to hold such an organization together with the help of suggestion, it is not only performing a great social service, but it also secures for the individual the inestimable boon of a meaningful form life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
These, however, are gifts which as a rule only confirm certain tendencies and do not change them. As experience unfortunately shows, the inner human remains unchanged however much community one has. One’s environment cannot give one as a gift something which one can win for oneself only with effort and suffering. On the contrary, a favourable environment merely strengthens the dangerous tendency to expect everything from outside—even that metamorphosis which external reality cannot provide. By this I mean a far-reaching change of the inner man, which is all the more urgent in view of the mass phenomena of today and the still greater problems of overpopulation looming in the future. It is time we asked ourselves exactly what we are lumping together in mass organizations and what constitutes the nature of the individual human being, id est, of the real human not the statistical human. This is hardly possible except by a new process of self-reflection. All mass movements, as one might expect, slip with the greatest ease down an incline plane made up of large numbers. Where the many are, there is security; what the many believe must of course be true; what the many want must be worth striving for, and necessary, and therefore good. In the clamour of the many resides the power to snatch wish-fulfilments by force; sweetest of all, however, is that gentle and painless slipping back into the kingdom of childhood, into the paradise of parental care, into happy-go-luckiness and irresponsibility. All the thinking and looking after are done from the top; to all questions there is an answer, and for all needs the necessary provision is made. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
The infantile dream state of the mass human is so unrealistic that one never thinks to ask who is paying for this paradise. The balancing of accounts is left to a higher political or social authority, which welcomes the task, for its power is thereby increased; and the more power it has, the weaker and more helpless the individual becomes. Whenever social conditions of this type develop on a large scale, the road to tyranny lies open and the freedom of the individual turns into spiritual and physical slavery. Since every tyranny is ipso facto immoral and ruthless, it has much more freedom in the choice of its methods than an institution which still takes account of the individual. Should such an institution come into conflict with the organized State, it is soon made aware of the very real disadvantage of its morality and therefore feels compelled to avail itself of the same methods as its opponent. In this way the evil spreads almost of necessity, even when direct infection might be avoided. The danger of infection is greater when decisive importance is attached to larger numbers and to statistical values, as is everywhere the case in our New World. The suffocating power of the mases is paraded before our eyes in one form or another every day in the newspapers, and the insignificance of the individual is rubbed into one so thoroughly that one loses all hope of making oneself heard. The outworn ideals of liberte, egalite, fraternite help one not at all, as one can direct this appeal only to one’s executioners, the spokesman of the masses. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the person who is as well organized in one’s individuality as the mass itself. I fully realize that his proposition must sound well-neigh unintelligible to the human of today. The helpful medieval view that humans are a microcosm, a reflection of the great cosmos in miniature, has long since dropped away from one, although the very existence of one’s World-embracing and World-conditioning psyche might have taught one better. Not only is the image of the macrocosm imprinted upon one’s psychic nature, but one also creates this image for oneself on an ever-widening scale. One bears this cosmic “correspondence” within one by virtue of one’s reflecting consciousness on the one hand, and, on the other, thanks to the hereditary, archetypal nature of one’s instincts, which bind one to one’s environment. However, one’s instincts not only attach one to the macrocosm, they also, in a sense, tear one apart, because one’s desires pull one in different directions. In this way one falls into continual conflict with oneself and only very rarely succeeds in giving one’s life an undivided goal—for which, as a rule succeeds in giving one’s life an undivided goal—for which, as a rule, one must pay very dearly by repressing other sides of one’s nature. One often has to ask oneself whether this kind of single-mindedness is worth forcing at all, seeing that the natural state of the human psyche consists in a jostling together of its components and their contradictory behaviour—that is, in a certain degree of dissociation. The Buddhist name for this is attachment to the “ten thousand things.” Such a condition cries out for order and synthesis. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Just as the chaotic movements of the crowd, all ending in mutual frustration, are impelled in a definite direction by a dictatorial will, so the individual in one’s dissociated state needs a directing and ordering principle. Ego-consciousness would like to let its own will play this role, but overlooks the existence of powerful unconscious factors which thwart its intentions. If it wants to reach the goal of synthesis, it must first get to know the nature of these factors. It must experience them, or else it must possess a numinous symbol that expresses them and leads to their synthesis. A religious symbol that comprehended and visibly represented what is seeking expression in modern humans might possibly do this; but our conception of the Christian symbol to date has certainly not been able to do so. On the contrary, that frightful World split runs right through the domains of the “Christian” American man, and our Christian outlook on life has proved powerless to prevent the recrudescence of an archaic social order like Communism. This is not to day that Christianity is finished. I am, on the contrary, convinced that it is not Christianity, but our conception and interpretation of it, that has become antiquated in the face of the present World situation. The Christian symbol is a living thing that carries in itself the seeds of further development. It can go on developing; it depends only on us, whether we can make up our minds to mediate again, and more thoroughly, on the Christian premises. This requires a very different attitude towards the individual, towards the microcosm of the self, from the one we have adopted hitherto. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
That is why nobody knows what ways of approach are open to humans, what inner experiences one could still pass through and what psychic facts underlie the religious myth. Over all this hangs so universal a darkness tat no one can see why one should be interested or to what end one should commit oneself. Before this problem we stand helpless. This is not surprising, since practically all the trump cards are in the hands of our opponents. They can appeal to the big battalions and their crushing power. Politics, science, and technology stand ranged on their side. The imposing arguments of science represent the highest degree of intellectual certainty yet achieved by the mind of humans. So at least it seems to the human of today, who has received hundred-fold enlightenment concerning the backwardness and darkness of past ages and their superstitions. That one’s teachers have themselves gone seriously astray by making false comparisons between incommensurable factors never enters one’s head. All the more so as the intellectual elite to whom one puts one’s questions are almost unanimously agreed that what science regards as impossible today was impossible at all other times as well. Above all, the facts of faith, which might give one the chance of an extramundane standpoint, are treated in the same context as the facts of science. Thus, when the individual questions the Churches and their spokesperson, to whom is entrusted the cure of souls, one is informed that to belong to a church—a decidedly Worldly institution—is more or less de rigueur; that the facts of faith which have become questionable for one were concrete historical events; that certain ritual actions produce miraculous effects; and that the sufferings of Christ have vicariously saved one from sin and its consequences (id est, eternal damnation). #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
If, with the limited means at one’s disposal, one begins to reflect on these things, one will have to confess that one does not understand them at all and that only two possibilities remain open to one: either to believe implicitly, or to reject such statements because they are flatly incomprehensible. Whereas the humans of today can easily think about and understand all the “truth” dished out to one by the State, one’s understanding of religion is made considerably mire difficult owing to the lack of explanations. (“Do you understand what you re reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” Acts 8.30.) If, despite this, one has still not discarded all one’s religious convictions, this is because the religious impulse rests on an instinctive basis and is therefore a specifically human function. You can take away human’s gods, but only to give one others in return. The leaders of the mass State could not help being deified, and wherever crudities of this kind have not yet been put over by force, obsessive factors arise in their stead, charged with demonic energy—money, work, political influence and so forth. When any natural human function gets lost, id est, is denied conscious and intentional expression, a general disturbance results. Hence, it is quite natural that with the triumph of the Goddess of Reason a general neuroticizing of modern humans should set in, a dissociation of personality analogous to the splitting of the World today by the Iron Curtain. This boundary line bristling with barbed wire runs through the psyche of modern humans, no matter on which side one lives. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
And just as the typical neurotic is unconscious of one’s shadow in one’s neighbour or in the human beyond the great divide. It has even become a political and social duty to apostrophize the capitalism of the one and the communism of the other as the very devil, so as to fascinate the outward eye and prevent it from looking within. However, just as the neurotic, despite unconsciousness of one’s other side, has a dim premonition that all is not well with one’s psychic economy, so Western humans have developed an instinctive interest in one’s psyche and in “psychology.” Thus it is that the psychiatrist is summoned willy-nilly to appear on the World stage, and questions are addressed to one which primarily concern the most intimate and hidden life of the individual, but which in the last analysis are the direct effects of the Zeitgeist. Because of its personal symptomatology this material is usually considered to be “neurotic”—and rightly so, since it is made up of infantile fantasies which ill accord with the contents of an adult psyche and are therefore repressed by our moral judgment, in so far as they reach consciousness at all. Most fantasies of this kind do not, in the nature of things, come to consciousness in any form, and it is very improbable, to say that the least of it, that they were ever conscious and were consciously repressed. Rather, they seem to have been present from the beginning or, at any rate, to have arisen unconsciously and to have persisted in that state until the psychologist’s intervention enabled them to cross the threshold of consciousness. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
The activation of unconscious fantasies is a process that occurs when consciousness find itself in a situation of distress. Were that not so, the fantasies would be produced normally and would then bring no neurotic disturbances in their train. In reality, fantasies of this kind belong to the World of childhood and give rise to disturbances only when prematurely strengthened by abnormal conditions of conscious life. This is particularly likely to happen when unfavourable influences emanate from the parents, poisoning the atmosphere and producing conflicts which upset the psychic balance of the child. When a neurosis breaks out in an adult, the fantasy World of childhood reappears, and one is tempted to explain the onset of neurosis causally, as due to the presence of infantile fantasies. However, that does not explain why the fantasies did not develop any pathological effects during the interim period. These effects develop only when the individual is faced with a situation which one cannot overcome by conscious means. The resultant standstill in the development of personality opens a sluice for infantile fantasies, which, of course, are latent in everybody but do not display any activity so long as the conscious personality can continue on its way unimpeded. When the fantasies reach a certain level of intensity, they begin to break through into consciousness and create a conflict situation that becomes perceptible to the individual oneself, splitting one into two personalities with different characters. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
The dissociation, however, had been prepared long before in the unconscious, when the energy flowing off from consciousness (because unused) reinforced the negative qualities of the unconscious and particularly the infantile traits of the personality. Since the normal fantasies of a child are nothing other, at bottom, than the imagination of instincts, and may thus be regarded as preliminary exercises in the use of future conscious activities, it follows that the fantasies of the neurotic, even though pathologically altered and perhaps perverted by the regression of energy, contain a core of normal instinct, the hallmark of which is adaptedness. A neurotic illness always implies an unadapted alteration and distortion of normal dynamisms and of the “imagination” proper to them. Instincts, however, are highly conservative and of extreme antiquity as regards both their dynamism and their form. Their form, when represented to the mind, appears as an image which expressed the nature of the instinctive impulse visually and concretely, like a picture. If we could look into the psyche of the yucca moth, for instance, we would find in it a pattern of idea, of a numinous or fascinating character, which not only compels the moth to carry out its fertilizing activity on the yucca plant but helps it to “recognize” the total situation. Instinct is anything but a blind and indefinite impulse, since it proves to be attuned and adapted to a definite external situation. This latter circumstance gives it its specific and irreducible form. Just as instinct is original and hereditary, so, too, its form is age-old, that is to say, archetypal. It is even older and more conservative than the human form. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
These biological considerations naturally apply also to Homo sapiens, who still remain within the framework of general biology despite the possession of consciousness, will, and reason. The fact that our conscious activity is rooted in instinct and derives from it its dynamism as well as the basic features of its ideational forms has the same significance for human psychology as for all other members of the animal kingdom. Human knowledge consists essentially in the constant adaptation of the primordial patterns of ideas that were given us a priori. These need certain modifications, because in their original form, they are suited to an archaic mode of life but not to the demands of a specially differentiated environment. If the flow of instinctive dynamism into our life is to be maintained, as is absolutely necessary for our existence, then it is imperative that we should remould these archetypal forms into ideas which are adequate to the challenge of the present. The Overself is not something imagined or supposed. Its presence is definitely felt. If a human asks why one can find no trace of God’s presence in oneself, I answer that one is fully of evidence, not merely traces. God is present in one as consciousness, the state of being aware; as thought, the capacity to think; as activity, the power to move; and as stillness, the condition of ego, emotion, intellect, and body which finally and clearly reveals what these other things simply point to. “Be still, and know that I am God” is a statement of being whose truth can be tested by experiment and whose value can be demonstrated by experience. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
When we realize that the intellect can put forth as man arguments against this theme as for it, we realize that there is in the end only one perfect proof of the Overself’s existence. The Overself must prove itself. This can come about faintly through the intuition or fully through the mystical experience. Whoever needs proofs of the authenticity of this experience has not had it. The difficulty of collecting and studying, sifting and describing the varieties of mystical experience which may be found is a barrier to the expansion of scientific psychology. For those persons who are most eager to talk about their own experiences are the most dubious and unreliable source. Those who are the least eager, feeling the matter to be too private, personal, intimate, and sacred, are able to offer valuable evidence. The human whose mind is rounded out to perfection knows full well truth cut in half and things do not exist apart from the mind. We know ourselves to be made from this Earth. We know this Earth is made from our bodies. For we see ourselves. And we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature. The Earth is the Lord’s and all its fulness, the World, and they that dwell thereon. For He hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods. Who shall ascend the mountains of the Lord? And who shall stand in His holy place? One that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not set one’s mind on what is false, and hath not sworn deceitfully. One shall receive a blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of one’s salvation. Such is the generation of them that seek God, that seek the presence of the God of Jacob. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Bear in Mind that Even Impossibility is Often Temporary!
When you look directly at an insane person, all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that one is insane, which is not to see one at all. To see one, you must see what one saw. In a World of accelerant change, next year is nearer to us than next month was in a more leisurely era. This radically altered fact of life must be internalized by decision-makers in industry, government and elsewhere. Their time horizons must be extended. To plan for a more distant future does not mean to tie oneself to dogmatic programs. Plans can be tentative, fluid, subject to continual revision. Yet flexibility need not mean shortsightedness. To transcend technocracy, our social horizons must reach decades, even generations, into the future. This requires more than a lengthening of our formal plans. It means an infusion of the entire society, from top to bottom, with a new socially aware future-consciousness. One of the healthiest phenomena of recent years has been the sudden proliferation of organizations devoted to the study of the future. This recent development is, in itself, a homeostatic response of society to the speed-up of change. Within a few year we have seen the creation of future-oriented think tanks like the Institute for the Future; the Commission on the Year 2000, and the Harvard Program on Technology and Society; the appearance of futurist journals in England, France, Italy, Germany and the United States of America; the spread of university courses in forecasting and related subjects; the spread of university courses forecasting and related subjects; the convocation of international futurist meetings in Oslo, Berlin, and Kyoto; the coalescence groups like Futuribles, Europe 2000, Mankind 2000, the World Future Society. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Future centers are to be found in West Berlin, in Prague, in London, in Moscow, Rome and Washington, in Caracas, even in the remote jungles of Brazil at Belem and Belo Horizonte. Unlike conventional technocratic planners whose horizons usually extend no further than a few years into tomorrow, these groups concern themselves with change fifteen, twenty-five, even fifty years in the future. Every society faces not merely a succession of probable futures, but an array of possible futures, and a conflict over preferable futures. The management of change is the effort to convert certain possibilities into probables, in pursuit of agreed-on preferables. Determining the probably calls for science of futurism. Delineating the possible calls for an art of futurism. Defining the preferable calls for a politics of futurism. The Worldwide futurist movement today does not yet differentiate clearly among these functions. Its heavy emphasis is on the assessment of probabilities. Thus in many of these centers, economists, sociologists, mathematicians, biologist, physicists, operations researchers and others invent and apply methods for forecasting future probabilities. At what date could aquaculture feed half the World’s population? What are the odds that electric cars will supplant gasoline automobile in the next fifteen years? What changes are most probably in leisure patterns, urban governments, race relations? Stressing the interconnectedness of disparate events and trends, scientific futurists are also devoting increasing attention to the social consequences of technology. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The Institute for the Future is, among other things, investigating the probable social and culture effects of advanced communications technology. The group at Harvard is concerned with social problems likely to arise from bio-medical advances. Futurists in Brazil examine the probable outcomes of various economic development policies. The rationale for studying probable futures is compelling. It is impossible for an individual to live through a single working day without making thousands of assumptions about the probable future. The commuter who calls to say, “I will be home at six” bases one’s prediction on assumptions about the probability that the train will run on time. When mother sends Johnny to school, she tacitly assumes the school will be there when he arrives. Just as a pilot cannot steer a ship without projecting its course, we cannot steer our personal lives without continually making such assumptions, consciously or otherwise. Societies, too, construct an architecture of premises about tomorrow. Decision-makers in industry, government, politics, and other sectors of society could not function without them. In periods of turbulent change, however, these socially-shaped images of the probable future become less accurate. The breakdown of control in society today is directly linked to our inadequate images of probable futures. Of course no one can “know” the future in any absolute sense. We can systematize and deepen our assumptions and attempt to assign probabilities to them. Even this is difficult. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Attempts to forecast the future inevitably alter it. Similarly, once a forecast is disseminated, the act of dissemination (as distinct from investigation) also produces a perturbation. Forecasts tend to become self-fulfilling or self-defeating. As the time horizon is extended into the more distant future, we are forced to rely on informed hunch and guesswork. Moreover, certain unique events—assassinations, for example—are, for all intents and purposes, unpredictable at present (although we can forecast classes of such events). Despite all thus, it is time to erase, once and for all, the popular myth that the future is “unknowable.” The difficulties ought to chasten and challenge, not paralyze. We should admit into our thinking the idea of approximations, that is, that there are varying degrees of accuracy and inaccuracy of estimate. A rough idea of what lies ahead is better than none, and for many purposes extreme accuracy is wholly unnecessary. We are not, therefore, as helpless in dealing with future probabilities as mist people assume. The British social scientist Donald G. MacRae correctly assert that “modern sociologists can in fact make a number of comparatively short term and limited predictions with a good deal of assurance.” Apart from the standard methods of social science, however, we are experimenting with potentially powerful new tools for probing the future. These range from complex ways of extrapolating existing trends, to the construction of highly intricate models, games and simulations, the preparation of detailed speculative scenarios, the systematic study of history for relevant analogies, morphological research, relevance analysis, contextual mapping and the like. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
In comprehensive investigation of technological forecasting, Dr. Erich Jantsch, formerly a consultant to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and a research associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has identified scores of distinct new techniques either in use or in the experimental stage. The Institute for the Future in Middletown, Connecticut, a prototype of the futurist think tank, is a leader in the design of new forecasting tools. One of these is Delphi—a method largely developed by Dr. Olaf Helmer, the mathematician-philosopher who is one of the founders of the IFF. Delphi attempts to deal with very distant futures by making systematic use of the “intuitive” guesstimates of large numbers of experts. The work Delphi has led to a further innovation which has special importance in the attempt to prevent future shock by regulating the pace of change. Pioneered by Theodore J. Gordon of the IFF, and called Cross Impact Matrix analysis, it traces the effect of one innovation on another, making possible, for the first time, anticipatory analysis of complex chains of social, technological and other occurrences—and the rates at which they are likely to occur. We are, in short, witnessing a perfect extraordinary thrust toward more scientific appraisal of future probabilities, a ferment likely, in itself, to have a powerful impact on the future. It would be foolish to oversell the ability of science, as yet, to forecast complex events accurately. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Yet the danger today is not that we will overestimate our ability; the real danger is that we will under-utilize it. For even when our still-primitive attempts at scientific forecasting turn out to be grossly in error, the very effort helps us identify key variables in change, it helps clarify goals, and it forces more careful evaluation of policy alternatives. In these ways, if no others, probing the future pays off in the present. If we are to shift the planner’s time horizon and infuse the entire society with a greater sense of tomorrow, anticipating probably futures, however, is only part of what needs doing. For we must also vastly widen our conception of possible futures. To the rigorous discipline of science, we must add the flaming imagination of art. Today as never before we need a multiplicity of visions, dreams and prophecies—images of potential tomorrows. Before we can rationally decide which alternative pathways to choose, which cultural styles to pursue, we must first ascertain which are possible. Conjecture, speculation and the visionary view thus become as coldly practical a necessity as feet-on-the-floor “realism” was in an earlier time. This is why some of the World’s biggest and most touch-minded corporations, once living embodiment of presentism, today hire intuitive futurists, science fiction writers and visionaries as consultants. A gigantic European chemical company employs a futurist who combines a scientific background with training as a theologian. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
An American communications empire engages a future-minded social critic. A glass manufacturer searches for a science fiction writer to imagine the possible corporate forms of the future. Companies turn to these “blue-skyers” and “wild birds” not for scientific forecasts of probabilities, but for mind-stretching speculations about possibilities. Corporations must not remain the only agencies with access to such services. Local government, schools, voluntary associations and others also need to examine their potential futures imaginatively. One way to help them do so would be to establish in each community “imaginetic centers” devoted to technically assisted brainstorming. These would be places where people noted for creative imagination, rather than technical expertise, are brought together to examine present crises, to anticipate future crises, and to speculate freely, even playfully, about possible futures. What, for example, are the possible futures of urban transportation? Traffic is a problem involving the movement of humans and objects through spaces? To speculate about this question, an imaginetic center might enlist artists, sculptors, dancers, furniture designers, parking lot attendants, and a variety of other people who, in one way or another, manipulate space imaginatively. Such people, assembled under the right circumstances, would inevitably come up with ideas of which the technocratic city planners, the highway engineers and transit authorities have never dreamed of. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Musicians, people who live near airports, jackhammer people and subway conductors might well imagine new ways to organize, mask or suppress noise. Groups of young people might be invited to ransack their minds for previously unexamined approaches to urban sanitation, crowding, ethic conflict, care of the aged, or a thousand other present and future problems. In any such effort, the overwhelming majority of ideas put forward will, of course, be absurd, funny or technically impossible. Yet the essence of creativity is a willingness to play the fool, to toy with the absurd, only later submitting the stream of ideas to harsh critical judgment. The application of the imagination to the future thus requires an environment in which it is safe to err, in which novel juxtaposition of ideas can be freely expressed before being critically sifted. We need sanctuaries for social imagination. While all sorts of creative people ought to participate in conjecture about possible futures, they should have immediate access—in person or via telecommunications—to technical specialists, from acoustical engineers to zoologists, who could indicate when a suggestion is technically impossible (bearing in mind that even impossibility is often temporary). Scientific expertise can employ skilled specialists not to predict the future, but examine alternative futures to show the choices open. An appropriate model, for example, could help a group of imagineers visualize the impact on a city if its educational expenditures were to fluctuate—how this would affect, let us say, the transportation system, the theaters, the occupational structure and healthy of the community. Conversely, it could show how changes in these other factors might affect education. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
The rushing stream of wild, unorthodox, eccentric or merely colorful ideas generated imagination must, after they have been expressed, be subjected to merciless screening. Only a tiny fraction of them will survive this filtering process. These few, however, could be of the utmost importance in calling attention to new possibilities that might otherwise escape notice. As we move from poverty toward affluence, politics changes from what mathematicians call a zero sum game into a non-zero sum game. In the first, if one player wins another must lost. In the second, all players can win. Finding non-zero sum solutions to our social problems requires all the imagination we can muster. A system for generating imaginative policy ideas could help us take maximum advantage of the non-zero opportunities ahead. If congruence fails for a well-ordered society, it seems bound to fail everywhere. On the other hand, it is by no means a foregone conclusion even in this instance that the right and the good are congruent. For this relation implies that the members of a well-ordered society, when they appraise their plan of life by the principles of rational choice, will decide to maintain their sense of justice as regulative of their conduct toward one another. The requisite match exists between the principles of justice that would be agreed to in the absence of information and the principles of rational choice that are not chosen at all and applied with full knowledge. Principles accounted for in strikingly different ways nevertheless fit together when those of justice are perfectly realized. Of course, this congruence has its explanation in how the contract doctrine is set up. However, the relation is not a matter oof course and its basis needs to be worked out. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
When we reflect on their psychological origins, we sometimes doubt the soundness of our moral attitudes. Thinking that these sentiments have arisen in situations marked say by submission to authority, we may wonder whether they should not be rejected altogether. Since the argument for the good of justice depends upon the members of a well-ordered society having an effective desire to act justly, we must allay these uncertainties. Imagine then that someone experiences the promptings of one’s moral sense as inexplicable inhibitions which for the moment one is unable to justify. Why should one not regard them as simply neurotic compulsions? If it should turn out that these scruples are indeed largely shaped an accounted for by the contingences of early childhood, perhaps by the course of our family history and class situation, and that there is nothing to add on their behalf, then there is surely no reason why they should govern our lives. However, of course to someone in a well-ordered society there are many things to say. One can point out to one the essential features of the development of the sentiment of justice and how eventually the morality of principles is to be understood. Moreover one’s moral education itself has been regulated by the principles of right and justice to which one would consent in an initial situation in which all have equal representation as moral persons. As we have seen, the more conception adopted is independent of natural contingencies and accidental social circumstances; and therefore the psychological process by which one’s moral sense has been acquired conform to principles that one oneself would choose under conditions that one would concede are fair and undistorted by fortune and happenstance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Nor can someone in a well-ordered society object to the practices of moral instruction that inculcate a sense of justice. For in agreeing to principles of right the parties in the original position at the same time consent to the arrangements necessary to make these principles effective in their conduct. Indeed, the adaptability of these arrangements to the limitations of human nature is an important consideration in choosing a conception of justice. Thus no one’s moral convictions are the result of coercive indoctrination. Instruction is throughout as reasoned as the development of understanding permits, just as the natural duty of mutual respect requires. None of the ideals, principles, and precepts upheld in the society takes unfair advantage of human weakness. A person’s sense of justice is not a compulsive psychological mechanism cleverly installed by those in authority in order to insure one’s unswerving compliance with rules designed to advance their interests. Nor is the process of education simply a casual sequence intended to bring about as an end result the appropriate moral sentiments. As far as possible each stage foreshadows in its teaching and explanations the conception of right and justice at which it aims and by reference to which we will later recognize that the moral standards presented to us are justified. These observations are evident consequences of the contract doctrine and the fact that its principles regulate the practices of moral instruction in a well-ordered society. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Following the Kantian interpretation of justice as fairness, we can say that by acting from these principles persons are acting autonomously: they are acting from principles that they would acknowledge under conditions that best express their nature as free and equal rational beings. To be sure, these conditions also reflect the situation of individuals in the World and their being subject to the circumstances of justice. However, this simply means that the conception of autonomy is that fitting for human beings; the notion suited to superior or inferior natures is most likely different. Thus moral education is education for autonomy. In due course everyone will know why one would adopt the principles of justice and how they are derived from the conditions that characterize one’s being an equal in a society of moral persons. It follows that in accepting these principles on the basis we are not influenced primarily by tradition and authority, or the opinions of others. However necessary these agencies may be in order for us to reach complete understanding, we eventually come to hold a conception of right on reasonable grounds that we can set out independently for ourselves. Now on the contract view the notions of autonomy and objectivity are compatible: there is no antinomy between freedom and reason. Both autonomy and objectivity are characterized in a consistent way by reference to the original position. The idea of the initial situation is central to the whole theory and other basic notions are defined in terms of it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Thus acting autonomously is acting from principles that we would consent to as free and equal rational beings, and that we are to understand in this way. Also, these principles are objective. They are the principles that we would want everyone (including ourselves) to follow were we take up together the appropriate general point of view. The original position defines this perspective, and its conditions also embody those of objectivity: its stipulations express the restrictions on arguments that force us to consider the choice of principles unencumbered by the singularities of the circumstances in which we find ourselves. The veil of ignorance prevents us from shaping our moral view to accord with our own particular attachments and interests. We do not look at the social order from our situation but take up a point of view that everyone can adopt on an equal footing. In this sense we look at our society and our place in its objectively: we share a common standpoint along with others and do not make our judgments from a personal slant. Thus our moral principles and convictions are objective to the extent that they have been arrived at and tested by assuming this general standpoint and by assessing the arguments for them by the restrictions expressed by the conception of the original position. The judicial virtues such as impartiality and considerateness are the excellences of intellect and sensibility that enable us to do these things well. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
If it moves the minds and hearts of an increasing number of humans, Christian faith may work wonders. However, if professed Christians forsake Heaven as their destination and come to fancy that the state may be converted into the terrestrial paradise—why they are less wise than Marx. Christians in politics can make a difference. Human plant, and God, using many people, brings the crop. In recent years many Christians have urged a more direct approach for bringing needed social change: simply elect Christians to political office. One spokes persons has even suggested a religious version of affirmative action; if, for example, 24 percent of the people are born again, then at least 24 percent of the officeholders should be born again. Others have argued that Christians should “take dominion” over government, with those in public office speaking “for God as well as for the American people.” On the surface this shortcut might seem to some an appealing answer to America’s declining morality. It is, however, simplistic and dangerous triumphalism. To suggest that electing Christians to public office will solve all public ills is not only presumptuous and theologically questionable, it is also untrue. Today’s misspent enthusiasm for political solutions to the moral problems of our culture arises from a distorted view of both politics and spirituality—too low a view of the power of a sovereign God and too high a view of the ability of humans. The idea that human systems, reformed by Christian influence, pave the road to the Kingdom—or at least, to revival—has the same utopia n ring that one finds in Marxist literature. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
This idea about human systems, which are reformed by Christian influence being the path to the Kingdom of God also ignores the consistent lesson of history that shows that laws are most often reformed as a result of powerful spiritual movements. I know of no case where a spiritual movement was achieved by passing laws. In addition, history puts the lie to the notion that just because one is devout, one will be a just and wise ruler. Take the nineteenth-century leader who forged a unified Germany from a cluster of minor states. Otto von Bismarck-Schonhausen was a committed Christian who regularly read the Bible, spoke openly of his devotion to God, and claimed divine guidance in response to prayer. “If I were no longer a Christian, I would not serve the king another hour,” he once declared. Yet Mr. Bismarck was also the ruthless architect of Deutaschland Uber Alles (Germany Over All), a Worldview that allegedly started two World wars. Historians describe Mr. Bismarck as a Machiavellian master of political duplicity who specialized in blood and iron. Power can be just as corrupting—or confusing—to the Christian as to the non-Christian. And the results in some ways are more horrible when power corrupts men or women who believe they have a divine mandate. Their injustices are then committed in God’s name. This is why an eminent conservative historian has suggested that “religious claims in politics should vary inversely with the power or prospects for power one has.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
It is a fair distinction: Prophets should make religious claims. Political leaders should not—otherwise they can become ayatollahs. So the first test for public office should not be a spiritual one. The celebrated claim that “the ability to hear from God should be the number one qualification of U.S. presidency” is dangerously misguided. The Church’s mission is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, not to elect politicians. The Church is neutral in matters of party politics. This applies in all of the many nations in which it is established. The Church encourages its members to play a role as responsible citizens in the communities, including become informed about issues and voting in elections. It expects its members to engage in the political process in an informed and civil manner, respecting the fact that members of the Church come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences and may have differences of opinion in partisan political matters. Request candidates for office not to imply that their candidacy or platforms are endorsed by the Church, and reserves the right as an institution to address, in a nonpartisan way, issues that it believes have significant community or moral consequences or that directly affect the interest of the Church. Politicians, like those in any other specialized field, should be selected on the basis of their qualifications and abilities as well as on their moral character. Even in Israel’s theocracy, Jethro advised Moses to select “capable men…who fear God,” to help in governing the Jewish nation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Mr. Jethro’s advice makes sense. If terrorists were to take control of an airport, would we want police officers who were merely devout Christians handling the situation, or would we choose those who had specialized training in hostage negotiations? Luther had it right when he said he would rather be ruled by a competent Turk than an incompetent Christian. The triumphalist mindset also fails to make the crucial distinction between a Christian’s function as a private citizen and as an officeholder. As private citizens, Christians are free to advocate their Christian view in any and every form. In American that is a fundamental constitutional right. Christian citizens should be activists about their faith, striving by their witness to “Christianize” their culture—not by the force of the sword, but by the force of their ideas. However, Christians elected to public office acquire a different set of responsibilities. Now they hold the power of the sword, which God has placed with government to preserve order and maintain justice. Now they act not for themselves but for all whom they serve. For this reason, they cannot use their office to evangelistically “Christianize” their culture. Their duty is to ensure justice and religious liberty for all citizens and beliefs. This does not mean they can compromise their faith or their first allegiance to God; they should speak freely of their Christian faith and witness Christian values in their lives. However, they cannot use their offices to seek a favoured position for Christianity of the church. “We have this treasure in Earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us,” reports 2 Corinthians 4.7. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The Christian state is one that gives no special public privilege to Christian citizens but seeks justice for all as a matter of principle. At the turn of the century a towering Dutch theologian, Abraham Kuyper, was elected prime minister of the Netherlands. His opponents voiced fears of theocratic oppression. Instead, his administration was a model of tolerance and public pluralism as Kuyper affirmed proportional representation, that the legitimate rights of all be fully represented. If we Christians today understood this distinction between the role of the private Christians citizen and the Christian in government, they might sound less intimidating. If secularists understood correctly the nature of Christian public duty they would not fear, but welcome responsible Christian political involvement. If they keep the commandments of the Lord, I believe many of today’s adults will be active participants in temporal blessings. With prosperity will come a unique challenge—a test that will try many to their spiritual core. As you step into this new World of property and engage in converting your education and skills into financial success, you will always have to distinguish between wants and needs. You will have two choices. Will your motivation to build and acquire the blessings of the Lord be for personal gratification, for the recognition of humans, and for power, influence, and self-aggrandizement? Or will your motivation be to glorify God, to work to help usher in the growth and expansion of His Church? #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The Lord is not telling us that we should not be prosperous or that prosperity is a sin. On the contrary, He has always blessed His obedient children However, He is telling us that we should seek prosperity only after we seek, find, and serve Him. Then, because our hearts are right, because we love Him first and foremost, we will choose to invest our resources wisely in preparing for the Kingdom of God. If you choose to seek riches for the sake of riches, you will fall short. You will never be satisfied. You will be empty, never finding true joy and lasting happiness. The trial of your faith in the next few years will likely not be that you lack the material things of this World. Rather it will be in choosing what to do with the temporal blessing you receive. Every situation in human life can be approached from two possible points of view. The first is the limited one and is that of the personal self. The second is the larder one and is that of Universal Self. The larger and longer view always justifies itself in the end. Each Overself is like a circle whose center is in some individual but whose circumference is not in any individual. We must not imagine that the subordination of this personal identity leads to any loss of consciousness—rather the reverse. Humans become more, not less, for one emerges into the fullness and freedom of one Universal life. One thinks of oneself as: “I, A. B., am a point within the Overself,” whereas before one only thought: “I am A.B.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The higher self keeps the same kind of individuality without being separate that each facet of diamond keeps. The light which shines through it shines equally through all facets alike, remaining one and the same. The individuality is beyond personality—its level is higher. The one must prompt while the other must watch the pitiless destruction of its wishes and hopes, its values and desires, until only the pure being of individuality is left. It is a kind of impersonal being but it is not utterly devoid of all individuality. As a wave sinks back into the sea, so the consciousness which passes out of the personal self sinks back into its higher individuality. This is the general mind being our small personal minds, the one behind the many. God has saved for the final inning some of His strongest children, who will help bear off the Kingdom triumphantly. Birds nest in my arms, on my shoulder, behind my knees, by my heart there are quail, they must think I am a tree. The swans think I am a fountain, they all come down and drink when I walk. When sheep stroll by, they pass over me, and perched on my fingers, the sparrows eat, the ants think I am the Earth, and humans think I am nothing. Believers shall declare the glory of Thy Kingdom, and talk of Thy might; to make known to the sons of man His mighty acts, and the glorious majesty of His Kingdom. Thy Kingdom is an everlasting Kingdom, and Thy dominion endureth throughout all generation. The Lord upholdeth all who fall, and raiseth up all who are bowed down. God will put you on the heart of someone to restore you and bless you big time, in the name of Jesus Christ! Amen. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Those Who Can Give Justice are Owed Justice!
There is no yesterday, so what is left is today. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. The signs of the Kingdom of God are like a human planting a seed. We do our part; but then God makes the seed grow. For it is God who produces the signs of His Kingdom on this Earth. We are merely the instruments. The Kingdom of God will transform places of hopelessness in the kingdom of man. Justice and hope will be found where there was once only inequity and despair. When we consider the basis of equality, the features of human beings in virtue of which they are to be treated in accordance with the principles of justice, what are our relationships with other human persons supposed to be like? We examine what determines the range of application of conceptions of justice. We may distinguish three levels where the concept of equality applies. The first is to the administration of institutions as public systems of rules. In this case equality is essentially justice as regularity. It implies the impartial application and consistent interpretation of rules according to such precepts as to treat similar cases similarly (as defined by statutes and precedents) and the like. Equality at this level is the least controversial element in the commonsense idea of justice. The second and much more difficult application of equality is to the substantive structure of institutions. Here the meaning of equality is specified by the principles of justice which require that equal basic rights be assigned to all persons. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Presumably this excludes animals; they have some protection certainly but their status is not that of human beings. However, this outcome is still unexplained. We have yet to consider what sort of beings are owed the guarantees of justice. This brings us to the third level at which the question of equality arises. The natural answer seems to be that it is precisely the moral persons who are entitled to equal justice. Moral persons are distinguished by two features: first they are capable of having (and are assumed to have) a conception of their good (as expressed by a rational plan of life); and second they are capable of having (and are assumed to acquire) a sense of justice, a normally effective desire to apply and to act upon the principles of justice, at least to a certain minimum degree. We use the characterization of the persons in the original position to single out the kind of beings to whom the principles chose apply. After all, the parties are though of as adopting these criteria to regulate their common institutions and their conduct toward one another; and the description of their nature enters into the reasoning by which these principles are selected. Thus equal justice is owed to those who have the capacity to take part in and to act in accordance with the public understanding of the initial situation. One should observe that moral personality is here defined as a potentiality that is ordinarily realized in due course. It is this potentiality which brings the claims of justice into play. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
We see, then, that the capacity for moral personality is a sufficient condition for being entitled to equal justice. This fact can be used to interpret the concept of natural rights. For one thing, it explains why it is appropriate to call by this name the rights that justice protects. These claims depend solely on certain natural attributes the presence of which can be ascertained by natural reason pursuing common sense methods of inquiry. The existence of these attributes and the claims based upon them is established independently from social conventions and legal norms. The propriety of the term “natural” is that is suggests the contrast between the rights identified by the theory of justice and the rights includes the idea that these rights are assigned in the first instance to persons, and that they are given a special weight. Claims easily overridden for other values are not natural rights. Now the rights protected by the first principle have both of these features in view of the priority rules. This justice as fairness has the characteristic marks of a natural rights theory. Not only does it ground fundamental rights on natural attributes and distinguish their bases from social norms, but it assigns rights to persons by principles of equal justice, these principles having a special force against which other values cannot normally prevail. Although specific rights are not absolute, the system of equal liberties is absolute practically speaking under favourable conditions. Nothing beyond the essential minimum is required. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Whether moral personality is also a necessary condition, I shall leave that aside. I assume that the capacity for a sense of justice is possessed by the overwhelming majority of humankind, and therefore this question does not raise a serious problem. That moral personality suffices to make one a subject of claims is the essential thing. We cannot go far wrong in supposing that the sufficient condition is always satisfied. Even if the capacity were necessary, it would be unwise in practice to withhold justice on this ground. The risk to just institutions would be too great. It should be stressed that the sufficient condition for equal justice, the capacity for moral personality, is not all stringent. When someone lacks the requisite potentiality either from birth or accident, this is regarded as a defect or deprivation. There is no race or recognized group of human beings that lacks this attribute. Only scattered individuals are without this capacity, or its realization to the minimum degree, and the failure to realize it is the consequence of unjust and impoverished social circumstances, of fortuitous contingencies. Furthermore, while individuals presumably have varying capacities for a sense of justice, this fact is not a reason for depriving those with a lesser capacity of the full protection of justice. Once a certain minimum is met, a person is entitled to equal liberty on a par with everyone else. A greater capacity for a sense of justice, as shown say in a greater skill and facility in applying the principles of justice and in marshaling arguments in particular cases, is a natural asset like any other ability. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
The special advantages a person receives for its exercises are to be governed by the difference principle. Thus is some have a preeminent degree the judicial virtues of impartiality and integrity which are needed in certain positions, they may properly have whatever benefits should be attached to these offices. Yet the application of the principle of equal liberty is not affected by these differences. It is sometimes thought that basic rights and liberties should vary with capacity, but justice as fairness denies this: provided the minimum for moral personality is satisfied, a person is owed all the guarantees of justice. First of all, when considering the basis of equality, it may be objected that equality cannot rest n natural attributes. There is no natural feature with respect to which all human being are equal, that is, which everyone has (or which sufficiently many have) to the same degree. If we wish to hold a doctrine of equality, it might appear we must interpret it in another way, namely as a purely procedural principle. Thus to say that human beings are equal is to say that none has a claim to preferential treatment in the absence of compelling reasons. The burden of proof favours equality: it defines a procedural presumption that persons are to be treated alike. Departures from equal treatment are in each case to be defended and judged impartially by the same system of principles that hold for all; the essential equality is thought to be equality of consideration. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
There are several difficulties with this procedural interpretation. For one thing, it is nothing more than the precept of treating similar cases similarly applied at the highest level, together with an assignment of the burden of proof. Equality of consideration puts no restrictions upon what grounds may be offered to justify inequalities. There is no guarantee of substantive equal treatment, since slave and caste systems (to mention extreme cases) may satisfy this conception. The real assurance of equalities lies in the content of the principles of justice and not in these procedural presumptions. The placing of the burden of proof is not sufficient. However, further, even if the procedural interpretation imposed some genuine restrictions on institutions, there is still the question why we are to follow the procedure in some instances and not others. Surely it applies to creatures who belong to some class, but which one? We still need a natural basis for equality so that this class can be identified. Moreover, it is not the case that founding equality on natural capacities is incomplete with an egalitarian view. All we have to do is to select a range property (as I shall say) and to give equal justice to those meeting its conditions. For example, the property of being in the interior of the unit circle is a range of property points in the plane. All points inside this circle have this property although their coordinates vary within a certain range. And they equally have this property, since no point interior to a circle is more or less interior to it than any other interior point. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
Now whether there is a suitable range property for singling out the respect in which human beings are to be counted equal is settled by the conception of justice. However, the description of the parties in the original position identifies such a property, and the principles of justice assure us that any variations in ability within the range are to be regarded as any other natural asset. There is no obstacle to thinking that a natural capacity constitutes the basis of equality. How then can it seem plausible that founding equality on natural attributes undermines equal justice? The notion of a range property is too obvious to be overlooked. There must be a deeper explanation. The answer, I think, is that a teleological theory is often taken for granted. Thus, if the right is to maximize the net balance of satisfaction, say, then rights and duties are to be assigned so as to achieve this end. Among the relevant aspects of the problem are human’s different productive skills and capacities for satisfaction. It may happen that maximizing aggregate welfare requires adjusting basic rights to variations in these features. Of course, given the standard utilitarian assumptions, there is a tendency to equality. The relevant thing, however, is that in either case the correct natural basis and the appropriate assignment of rights depend upon the principle of utility. It is the content of the ethical doctrine, and the fact that it is a maximizing notion, that allows variations in capacity to justify unequal fundamental rights, and not the idea that equality is founded on natural attributes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
An examination of perfectionism would, I believe, lead to the same conclusion. However, justice as fairness is not a maximizing theory. We are not directed to look for differences in natural features that affect some maximand and therefore serve as possible grounds for different grades of citizenship. Although agreeing with many teleological theories in the relevance of natural attributes, the contract view needs much weaker assumptions about their distribution to establish equal rights. It is enough that a certain minimum is generally fulfilled. First of all, when considering some other points, it should be noted that the conception of moral personality and the required minimum may often prove troublesome. While many concepts are vague to some degree, that of moral personality is likely to be especially so. However, these matters are, I think, best discussed in the context of definite moral problems. The nature of the specific issue and the structure of the available general facts may suggest a fruitful way to settle them. In any case, one must not confuse the vagueness of a conception of justice with the thesis that basic rights should vary with natural capacity. The minimal requirements defining moral personality refer to a capacity and not to the realization of it. A being that has this capacity, whether or not it is yet developed, is to receive the full protection of the principles of justice. Since infants and children are thought to have basic rights (normally exercised on their behalf by parents and guardians), this interpretation of the requisite conditions seems necessary to match our considered judgments. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Moreover, regarding the potentiality as sufficient accords with the hypothetical nature of the original position, and with the idea that as far as possible the choice of principles should not be influenced by arbitrary contingencies. Therefore it is reasonable to say that those who could take part in the initial agreement, were it not for fortuitous circumstances, are assured equal justice. Now of course none of this is literally argument. I have not set out the premises from which this conclusion follows, as I have tried to do, albeit not very rigorously, with the choice of conceptions of justice in the original position. Nor have I tried to prove that the characterization of the parties must be used as the basis of equality. Rather this interpretation seems to be the natural completion of justice as fairness. The problem of those who have lost their realized capacity temporarily through misfortune, accident, or mental stress can be regarded in a similar capacity of children in connection with paternalism. However, those are more or less permanently deprived of moral personality may present a difficulty. It is assumed that the account of equality would not be materially affected. First of all, the simplicity of the contract view of the basis of equality is worth emphasizing. The minimum capacity for the sense of justice insures that everyone has equal rights. The claims of all are to be adjudicated by the principles of justice. Equality is supported by the general facts of nature and not merely by a procedural rule without substantive force. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Nor does equality presuppose an assessment of the intrinsic worth of persons, or a comparative evaluation of their conceptions of the good. Those who can give justice are owed justice. When other accounts of equality are examined, the advantages of these straightforward proposition become more evident. For example, one might think that equal justice means that society is to make the same proportionate contribution to each person’s realizing the best life which one is capable of. Offhand this may seem an attractive suggestion. It suffers however from serious difficulties. For one thing it not only requires a method of estimating the relative goodness of plans of life, but it also presupposes some way of measuring what counts as an equal proportionate contribution to persons with different conceptions of their good. The problem in applying this standard are obvious. A more important difficulty is that the greater abilities of some may give them a stronger claim on social resources irrespective of compensating advantages to others. One must assume that variations in natural assets will affect what is necessary to provide equal proportionate assistance to those with different plans of life. However, in addition to violating the principle of mutual advantage, this conception of equality means that the strength of human’s claims is directly influenced by the distribution of natural abilities, and therefore by contingencies that are arbitrary from a moral point of view. The basis of equality in justice as fairness avoids these objections. The only continency which is decisive is that of having or nor having the capacity for a sense of justice. By giving justice to those who can give justice in return, the principle of reciprocity is fulfilled at the highest level. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
A further observation is that we can now more fully reconcile two conceptions of equality. Some writers have distinguished between equality as it is invoked in connection with the distribution between equality as it is invoked in connection with the distribution of certain goods, some of which will almost certainly give higher status or prestige to those who are more favoured, and equality as it applies to the respect which is owed to persons irrespective of their social position. Equality of the first kind is defined by the second principle of justice which regulates the structure of organizations and distributive shares so that social cooperation is both efficient and fair. However, equality of the second kind is fundamental. It is defined by the first principle of justice and by such natural duties as that of mutual respect; it is owed to human beings as moral persons. The natural basis of equality explains its deeper significance. The priority of the first principle over the second enables us to avoid balancing these conceptions of equality in an ad hoc manner, while the argument from the standpoint of the original position shows how this precedence comes about. The consistent application of the principle of fair opportunity requires us to view persons independently from the influences of their social position. However, how far should this tendency be carried? It seems that even when fair opportunity (as it has been defined) is satisfied, the family will lead to unequal chances between individuals. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Is the family to be abolished then? Taken by itself and given a certain primacy, the idea of equal opportunity inclines in this direction. However, within the context of the theory of justice as a whole, there is much less urgency to take this course. The acknowledgment of the difference principle redefines the grounds for social inequalities as conceived in the system of liberal equality; and when the principle of fraternity and redress are allowed their appropriate weight, the natural distribution of assets and the contingencies of social circumstances can more easily be accepted. We are more ready to dwell upon our good fortune now that these differences are made to work to our advantage, rather than to be downcast by how much better off we might have been had we had an equal chance along with others if only all social barriers had been removed. The conception of justice, should it be truly effective and publicly recognized as such, seems more likely than its rivals to transform our perspective on social World and to reconcile us to the dispositions of natural order and the conditions of human life. Last of all, we should recall here the limits of a theory of justice. Not only are many aspects pf morality left aside, but no account is given of right conduct in regard to animals and the rest of nature. A conception of justice is but one part of a moral view. While I have not maintained that the capacity for a sense of justice is necessary in order to be owed the duties of justice, it does seem that we are not required to give strict justice anyway to creatures lacking this capacity. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
However, it does not follow that there are no requirements at all in regard to them, not in our relations with the natural order. Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the forms of life which of animals are capable clearly imposes duties of compassion and humanity in their case. These beliefs, however, are outside the scope of the theory of justice, and it does not seem possible to extent the contract doctrine so as to include them in a natural way. A correct conception of our relations to animals and to nature would seem to depend upon a theory of the natural order and our place in it. One of the tasks of metaphysics is to work out a view of the World which is suited for this purpose; it should identify and systematize the truths decisive for these questions. How far justice as fairness will have to be revised to fit into this larger theory it is sound as an account of justice among persons, it cannot be too wrong when these broader relationships are taken into consideration. Technocrats, experts in science or technology who have a lot of power in or influence with the government of industry, suffer from econo-think. They look at the World and analyze the way the World works by comparing the cost of an action with the benefit generated. Except during war and dire emergency, they start from the premise that even non-economic problems can be solved with economic remedies. Social futurism challenges this root assumption of both Marxist and Keynesian managers. In its historical time and place, industrial society’s single-minded pursuits of material progress served the human race well. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
As we hurtle toward the super age of information, however, a new ethos emerges in which other goals begin to gain parity with, and even supplant those of economic welfare. In personal terms, self-fulfillment, social responsibility, aesthetic achievement, hedonistic individualism, and an array of other goals vie with and often overshadow the raw drive for material success. Affluence serves as a base from which humans begin to strive for varied post-economic ends. At the same time, in societies arrowing toward super-age of information, economic variables—wages, balance of payments, productivity—grow increasingly sensitive to change in the non-economic environment. Economic problems are plentiful, but a whole range of issues that are only secondarily economy break into prominence. Racism, the battle between the generations, crime, cultural autonomy, violence—all these have economic dimensions; yet none can be effectively treated by econocentic measures alone. The move from manufacturing to health-care and social assistance, the psychologization of both goods and services, and ultimately the shift toward experiential production all tie the economic sector much more tightly to non-economic forces. Consumer preference turn over in accordance with rapid life style changes, so that the coming and going of subcults is mirrored in economic turmoil. Super-age of information production requires workers skilled in symbol manipulation, and computer information science, so that what goes on in their heads becomes much more important than in the past, and much more dependent upon computers, technology, and algorithm. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Because many more American corporations are investing part of their sizeable portfolios in companies selected not for economic payout alone, but for their potential contribution to solving urban problems, providing jobs for hard-core unemployed, in organizing literacy and job-training programs, and scores of other unfamiliar activities, including worrying about water, air, and noise pollution, improving the aesthetic appearance of the company’s trucks and equipment, and fostering experimental preschool learning programs in underserved communities, and supporting cultural groups; although this is accurately signaling the direction of change, none of this necessarily implies that big companies are growing altruistic; it merely underscores the increasing intimacy of the links between the economic sector and powerful cultural, psychological, and social forces. While these forces batter at our doors, however, most technocratic planners and managers behave as though nothing had happened. They continue to act as though the economic sector were hermetically sealed off from social and psychocultural influences. Indeed, econocentric premises are buried so deeply and held so widely in both capitalist and communist nations, that they distort the very information systems essential for management of change. For example, all modern nations maintain elaborate machinery for measuring economic performance. We know virtually day by day the directions of change with respect to productivity, prices, investment, and similar factors. Through a set of “economic indicators” we gauge the overall health of the economy, the speed at which it is changing, and the overall directions of change. Without these measures, our control of the economy would be far less effective. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
By contrast, we have no such measures, no set of comparable “social indicators” to tell us whether the society, as distinct from the economy, is also healthy. We have no measures of the “quality of life.” We have no systematic indices to tell us whether people are more or less alienated from one another; whether education is more effective; whether art, music and literature are flourishing; whether civility, generosity or kindness are increasing. Gross National Product is our Holy Grail, but we have no environmental index, no census statistics to measure whether the country is more livable from year to year. On the surface, this would seem a purely technical matter—something for statisticians to debate. Yet it has the most serious political significance, for lacking such measures it becomes difficult to connect up national or local policies with appropriate long-term social goals. The absence of such indices perpetuates vulgar technocracy. Little known to the public, a polite, but increasingly bitter battle over this issue has begun in Washington. Technocratic planners and economists see in the social indicators idea a threat to their entrenched position at the ear of the political policy maker. In contrast, the need for social indicators has been eloquently argued by such prominent social scientists as Dr. Bertram M. Gross and Wayne State University, Eleanor Sheldon and Wilbert Moore of the Russell Sage Foundation, Daniel Bell and Raymond Bauer of Harvard. We are witnessing, says Gross, a “widespread rebellion against what has been called the ‘economic philistinism’ of the Untied States government’s resent statistical establishment.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
This revolt has attracted vigorous support from political and government officials who recognize our desperate need for a post-technocratic social intelligence system. In the near future, we can expect the same revolt to break out in other World capitals as well, once again drawing a line between technocrats and post-technocrats. The danger of future shock, itself, however, points to the need for new social measures not yet even mentioned in the fast-burgeoning literature on social indicators. We urgently need, for example, techniques for measure the level of transience in different communities, different populations groups, and in individual experience. It is possible, in principle, to design a “transience index” that could disclose the rate at which we are making and breaking relationships with the things, places, people, organizations and informational structures that comprise our environment. Such an index would reveal, among other things, the fantastic differences in the experiences of different groups in society—the static and tedious quality of turnover in the lives of others. Government policies that attempt to deal with both kinds of people in the same way are doomed to meet angry resistance from one or the other—or both. Similarly, we need indices of novelty in the environment. How often do communities, organizations or individual have to cope with first-time situations? How many of the articles in the home of the average working-class family are actually “new” in function or appearance; how many are traditional? #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
What level of novelty—in terms of things, people or any other significant dimension—is required for stimulation without over-stimulation? How much more novelty can children absorb than their parents—if it is true that they can absorb more? In what way is gaining related to lower novelty tolerances, and how do such differences correlate with the political and intergenerational conflict now tearing the techno-societies apart? By studying and measuring the invasion of newness, we can begin, perhaps, to control the influx of change into our social structures and personal lives. And what about choice and over choice? Can we construct measures of the degree of significant choice in human lives? Can any government that pretends to be democratic not concern itself with such an issue? For al the rhetoric about freedom of choice, no government agency in the World can claim to have made any attempt to measure it. The assumption simply is that more income or affluence means more choice and that more choice, in turn, means freedom. Is it not time to examine these basic assumptions of our political systems? If we are to prevent future shock and build a humane super-age of informational society, post-technocratic planning must deal with precisely such issues. A sensitive system of indicators geared to measuring the achievement of social and cultural goals, and integrated with economic indicators, is part of the technical equipment that any society needs before it can successfully reach the next stage of eco-technological development. It is an absolute precondition for post-technocratic planning and change management. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
This humanization of planning, moreover, must be reflected in our political structures as well. To connect the super-age of information social intelligence system with the decisional centers of society, we must institutionalize a concern for the quality of life. Thus it has been proposed by people in the social indicators movement that there is a creation of a Council of Social Advisers to the President. Such a Council, as they see it, would be modeled after the already existing Council of Economic Advisers and would perform parallel functions in the social field. The new agency would monitor key social indicators precisely the way the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) keeps its eye on economic indices, and interpret changes to the President. It would issue an annual report on the quality of life, clearly spelling out our social progress (or lack of it) in terms of specified goals. This report would thus supplement and balance the annual economic report prepared by the CEA. By providing reliable, useful data about our social condition, the Council of Social Advisers would begin to influence planning generally, making it more sensitive to social costs and benefits, less coldly technocratic and econocentric. Proponents differ as to whether the Council of Social Advisers ought to be organizationally independent or become a part of a larger Council of Economic and Social Advisers. All sides agree, however, on the need for integrating economic and social intelligence. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
The establishment of such councils, not merely at the federal level but at state and municipal levels as well, would not at the federal level but at state and municipal levels as well, would not solve all our problems; it would not eliminate conflict; it would not guarantee that social indicators are exploited properly. In brief, it would not eliminate politics from political life. However, it would end recognition—and political force—to the idea that the ais of progress reach beyond economics. The designation of agencies to watch over the indicators of change in the quality of life would carry us a long way toward that humanization of the planner which is the essential first stage of the strategy of social futurism. Replace fear with faith—faith in God and the power of the Atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. As we think of the future, we should be filled with faith and hope. Always remember that Jesus Christ—the Creator of the Universe, the architect of our salvation, and the head of this Church—is in control. He will not permit His work to fail. He will be victorious over all darkness and evil. And He invites us all, members of His church and others who are the honest in heart, to join in the battle for the souls of God’s children. Along with all else we will do in life, we must also dedicate and consecrate our heart, might, mind, and strength to His cause, walking in faith and working with conviction. Face the future with optimism. I believe we are standing on the threshold of a new era of growth, prosperity, and abundance. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
I think the next few years will bring a resurgence in the World economy as new discoveries are made in communication, medicine, energy, transportation, physics, computer technology, and other fields endeavor. Many of these discoveries, as in the past, will be the result of the spirit whispering insights into and enlightening the minds of truth-seeking individuals. With these discoveries and advances will come new employment opportunities and prosperity for those who work hard and especially for those who strive to keep the commandments of God. This has been the case in other significant periods of national and international economic growth. People, we rainclouds closer to the sun and full of life soaking up the knowledge of the Earth and storing it within ourselves, moving on to spread truth through the World. We clouds are loved and feared, ready to explore and give new life to a dying planet. Beautiful clouds, casting shadows of love, shadows of dignity, shadows of healing. Giving of ourselves to promote life, while realizing our ability to destroy rainclouds, we are nature, natural! People, we rainclouds are closer to the run and full of life. May the Father of mercies who dwells on high, in His mighty compassion, remember the loving, upright and blameless souls and all the holy communities in America who laid down their lives for the sanctification of the divine name. Even as they were devoted and faithful in life, so in death they were not parted. They were swifter than eagles and stronger than lions to do the will of their Master and the desire of their Rock. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
May our God remember them for good with other righteous of the World, and bring retribution for blood of His servants which has been shed, in accordance with the promise given in the in the Law of Moses, reiterated in the Books of the Prophets and again stated in the Sacred Writings: Sing aloud, O ye nations, for God des bring to judgment those who shed the blood of His servants. Wherefore should the nations say, “Where is their God?” Let the retribution of Thy servants’ blood be made known among the nations in our sight. For God, the Avenger of bloodshed, will not forget the cry of the humble. He will judge among the nations, and crushing evil, will emerge triumphant. Happy are they that dwell in Thy house; they will ever praise Thee. Happy is the people who thus fare; yea, happy is the people whose God is the Lord. I will extol Thee, my God, O King, and I will bless Thy name for ever and ever. Every day will I bless Thee, and I will praise Thy name for ever and ever. Great is the Lord, and highly to be praised; His greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall laud Thy works to another, and shall declare thy might acts. On the majestic glory of Thy splendor, and on Thy wonderous deeds will I meditate. And humans shall proclaim the might of Thy tremendous acts, and I will recount Thy greatness. They shall make known the fame of Thy great goodness, and shall exult in Thy righteousness. The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, long forbearing, and abundant in kindness. The Lord is good to all, and His tender mercies are over all His works. All Thy works shall praise Thee, O Lord, and Thy faith one shall bless Thee. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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In the Hearts of the People Today there is a Deep Longing for Peace!
A gift to the wrong person is darkness, and when darkness is gone, it it best to forget it. Write out of love; write out of instinct; write out of reason. However, always for money. In an atomic war, there would be neither conqueror nor vanquished. During such a bombardment, both sides would suffer the same fate. A continuous destruction would take place and no armistice nor peace proposals would bring it to an end. In the hearts of people today there is a deep longing for peace. When the true spirit of peace is thoroughly dominant, it becomes an inner experience with unlimited possibilities. It is only when this really happens, that the spirit of peace awakens and takes possession of human’s hearts, that humanity can be saved from perishing. Before Constantine’s Christianizing of the Roman empire, all Christians were advised to avoid civil office because of the idolatrous emperor worship it demanded. (In some instances that concern is as relevant today as it was in ancient Rome.) Even after Constantine, church policy restricted members of the clergy from holding office. The American colonists wrote similar prohibitions into several state constitutions, which remained in effect until 1978, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Tennessee restrictions as a violation of a minister’s First Amendment right. There were few exceptions over the centuries; when they were made, it was to protect religious liberty, as, for example, when anti-Catholic legislation was being enacted in Hungary; the priests were released to engage in politics “for the sake of safeguarding religion or promoting the common good.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Despite the Tennessee case and the fact that the United States Constitution contains no such prohibition, the tradition remains strong. Few clergy have held major offices in Western democracies. In the Catholic church, Pope John Paul’s rejection of the tiara of temporal authority was a clear signal: ecclesiastical goals would not be sought through political means. Thus it was consistent that John Paul II in 1980 ordered priests out of secular office entirely. Five-term Congressman Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest and outspoken liberal, quietly resigned. In Nicaragua, however, three priests defined the papal order. This has been a major cause of the rift not only within the church, but it has compromised the integrity of the church. Those priests may say they are acting in civil capacity but can they really disavow responsibility for the expulsion of missionaries, restriction on the free press, including Iglesia, the official Catholic newspaper? The cleric in public office can hardly avoid such doublemindedness. And presenting two faces to the World inevitably damages the work that should be of primary concern: the witness of the church. Regardless of one’s stand on abortion, for example, no one could seriously imagine Sister Agnes Mary Mansour as commissioner of Health and Welfare in Michigan, supervising state-funded abortions while in conscience maintaining her vows to a church that forbids abortion. Definitions of integrity have been stretched in recent years, but not that far. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Any priest or minister who feels called to seek public office should, as a citizen, be free to undertake that vocation. However, doing so means that one must leave the pulpit, resigning all ecclesiastical functions. One must make it clear that one is acting as a private citizen seeking office to fulfill civic, not spiritual goals. (In many denominations, however, the priestly office cannot actually be resigned.) However, if the clergy should not hold office, should the institutional church be silent on political issues? This is perhaps the most sensitive question of all. The Church acts as the conscience of society. The soul of the New World civilization is Christianity. So the Church must address moral issues in society and measure public actions by biblical standards of justice and righteousness. However, there are pitfalls. One of the greatest is the tendency Christians have to believe that because the Bible is “on their side” they can speak with authority on every issue. Many church bureaucracies have succumbed to this temptation in recent decades, spewing out position papers on everything from public toilet facilities to nuclear war. The New Right has engaged in such excesses with its scorecards covering the gamut of issues from trade legislation to the Panama Canal. When Christians use the broad brush, they become simply another political interest group, pontificating on matters about which they are often woefully uninformed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
A case in point was the United States Catholic bishops’ position paper on nuclear war. It hardly seems necessary to convene a conference to announce that it is a moral issue to unleash weapons that would annihilate millions. The bishops did, however, and they went on to conclude that the deterrent posture of the United States of America was unsatisfactory from a moral point of view. That could be true—particularly if one realizes that our missiles are aimed at Soviet cities, just as Soviet missiles are aimed at U.S. cities, and Korean often launches missiles over Japan to try to see how close they can come to hitting the United States of America as their nuclear technology increases, then there is also a threat from the Middle East directed at America. However, deterrence itself is not immoral by definition; deterrence is impeding another nation’s hostile act. The existence of a nuclear weapon (as with a police officer’s gun) may prevent a much greater evil. At this stage we have the choice of two risks: the one lies in continuing the mad atomic-arms race with its danger of an unavoidable atomic war in the near future; the other in the renunciation of nuclear weapons, and in hope that the United States of America and the Soviet Union, and the peoples associated with them, will manage to live in peace. The first holds no hope of a prosperous future; the second does. We must risk the second. Any moral analysis must take into account the complexity of modern nuclear strategy and the actual efficacy to deterrence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
To determine the efficacy, one cannot simply consider just numbers of bombs or throw-weight, but targeting studies and the whole range of strategic options; what would remain after a surprise attack; what defenses neutralize attacking missiles; what would the communications capacity be, and the like. Ironically, the country that renounces a first strike (the more moral position, as the bishops would no doubt agree) has need for a much larger deterrent capability (which the bishops decry as immoral). The logical consequences of their paper is a Catch-22. At the present time when violence, clothed in life, dominates the World more cruelly than it ever has before, I still remain convinced that truth, love, peaceableness, meekness, and kindness are the violence which can master all other violence. While the bishops certainly could have commented on the immorality of unleashing nuclear war, they simply did not have all the facts necessary to render an authoritative judgment beyond that. This was summed up by a University of Chicago professor who agreed personally with the bishops’ position, but concluded that they could not determine whether deterrence was immoral because such judgment depended on facts “which are secret—and thus, unknown to the bishops.” In the hearts of the people today there is a deep longing for peace. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
When the true spirit of peace is thoroughly dominant, it becomes an inner experience with unlimited possibilities. It is only when this really happens, that the spirit of peace awakens and takes possession of human’s hearts, that humanity can be saved from perishing. Is the human spirit able to achieve those things which, in our distress, we must expect of it? We must not underestimate its strength. Through human history this strength has made itself manifest. It is to the strength of the human mind that we owe the humanitarianism that is at the origin of a progress towards a higher way of life. When we are animated by humanitarianism, we are faithful to ourselves and capable of creation. Russell Kirk, a Catholic layman himself, has described the delegates to such conferences as “utopians…wondrously unaware of the limits of politics.” Certainly the heated controversy resulting from the bishops’ attempt to formulate United States of America’s defense policy called their own competence into question of policy, must about which the church demonstrably lacked expertise, bishop Kirk mused that he would “as soon go to a bartender for medical advice as to a church secretary for political wisdom.” Poland’s Catholic bishops seem to have understood the need to deal with issues within their particular competence better perhaps than the United States counterparts. When Polish government engaged in one of its periodic purges of political dissidents in 1985, the bishops quickly condemned the persecution. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
A clear issue of human rights was at stake, and the moral question was unambiguous. They added, however, that “the Church is not and does not, want to be a political force [but it] has the right to give moral assessments, even in questions of political affairs when the basic rights of the individual or the salvation of the soul demands it. The Polish bishops understood the restraints imposed on the church when it speaks as the church. This is a crucial distinction. It is one thing for an individual Christian to address whatever issue one’s conscience dictates, but the church as a body, which purports to speak God’s truth, should speak only to those matters in which fidelity to holy Scripture itself makes it necessary to speak out: Issues where human life or dignity, religious liberty, or justice are involved. Even then, the church should claim no superior wisdom except in those areas where it is uniquely able to bring biblically informed truth to the debate. There are controversial issues in which the principle is unmistakable and the command of the hour comes through loud and clear. On these issues the church must make pronouncements. However, there are other general issues in which facts and motives are mixed consequences contradict the principles involved and equally dedicated and knowledgeable Christians disagree. In these cases the church should remain silent, letting individual Christians and Christian groups decide for themselves what Christian witness means. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
For the church to sponsor a political party, engage in lobbying, form coalitions with secular pressure groups and become entangled in the decisions of private business corporation, would be to take a position on precisely those issues in which the religious significance is unclear, ambiguous or non-existent. An excellent example, one that stands in distinct contrast to the pastoral letter on nuclear policy, was the 1987 Vatican statement on human life and biomedical ethics. It spoke forthrightly to a clear biblical issue on which the church has special competence and about which the secular World was grossly confused. It has been perhaps the single most useful document issued thus far to clarify moral questions in the growing debate over reproductive technology. Politics is not the church’s first calling. Evangelism administering the sacraments, providing discipleship, fellowship, teaching the Word, and exhorting its members to holy living are the heartbeat of the church. When it addresses political issues, the church must not do so at the risk of weakening its primary mission. As mainline churches discovered in the sixties, the faster they churned out partisan statements, the faster they emptied their pews. And while the Christian citizens can afford to be as partisan as they wish, Christian pastors cannot. If they are, they may soon discover they have compromised both their own witness and that of the church. An extreme example was the case of the bishop who presided at the May 1987 funeral of former CIA Director William Casey. Because President Reagan, former President Nixon, and a host of other government officials were in the congregation, this bishop used the occasion to attack U.S. foreign policy in Central America, for which the deceased Mr. Casey was an outspoken proponent. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
It was in such a deplorably bad taste that the incident, reported Worldwide, resulted in an adverse reaction not against U.S. policy, but against the church. Grieving families should receive spiritual comfort, not a political harangue against their loved one’s views. Admittedly a fine line exists here. It is clearly partisan for a pastor to stand in a pulpit and endorse a particular candidate, as some clergymen endorsed Jimmy Carter in 1980, and others endorsed Ronald Reagan 1984. However, what about Cardinal O’Connor’s statement in the same campaign that a Catholic could not in conscience vote for a candidate who supported abortion? His remarks were reported as a partisan rebuke of the views of two of his New York parishioners, Governor Mario Cuomo and vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro. Admittedly, the cardinal’s timing made his remarks suspect, but they could also be regarded as no more than a statement of elementary logic. Since the Catholic church believes that the taking of unborn lives violates God’s law, could a Catholic in conscience logically vote for one who willfully violated that law? While I believe an open pulpit endorsement of a candidate is improper, I also feel that—if made responsibly from the right motivations—a cleric’s statement that Christians should not support candidates who reject basic human rights is justified. Within these limits, then, we can conclude that Christians, both individually and institutionally, have a duty, for the good of society as a whole, to bring the values of the kingdom of God to bear within the kingdoms of man. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
It is fair to say, however, that Christians have not done a particularly good job at this task. Often they have terrified their secular neighbours, who see Christian political activists as either backwoods bigot or religious ayatollahs attempting to assault them with Bible verses or religious magisteriums. In a pluralistic society it is not only wrong but unwise for Christians to shake their Bibles and arrogantly assert that “God says…”That is the quickest way for Christians, a distinct growing majority in civil affairs, to lose their cases altogether. Instead, positions should be argued on their merits. If the case is sound, a majority can be persuaded; that is the way democracies and free nations are supposed to work. I am often asked to meet with government officials concerned with criminal-justice policies. They are frustrated. The more prisons are built—at great expense—the more the crime rate goes up. So whenever I suggest restitution as an inexpensive and effective alternative to prison for nonviolent offenders, politicians are receptive. However, only after I have cited the facts of the position (for instance, only one tenth of the cost of incarceration is statistically effective in reducing recidivism) do I explain that the source of restitution was God’s laws prescribed to Moses at Sinai. Christians are to do their duty as best they can. However, even when they feel that they are making no difference, that they are failing to bring Christian values to the public arena, success is not the criterion. Faithfulness is. For in the end, Christians have the assurance that even the most difficult political situations are in the hands of a sovereign God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
This assurance comes from the teaching of Christ. Jesus likened the Kingdom to the humble act of a farmer sowing seeds. The farmer tills the soil, but the seeds sprout and grow because of a power beyond the farmer’s control. What Jesus was saying is that Christians are to do their part, of course, as best as they are able, but the manifestation of the Kingdom comes through God’s power, not theirs. I saw this firsthand over a fourteen-year span in one of the toughest neighbourhoods in Midtown Sacramento, California USA. It all began with moving to one of the most dangerous communities in Sacramento. For more than two thousand and five hundred years Mormons and Jewish people and many others have awaited the Saviour’s coming. Upon this event they had rested their brightest hopes. In song and prophecy, in temple rite and household prayer, they had enshrined His name. And yet at His coming they knew Him not. The Beloved of Heaven was to the an angel from Heaven; and they saw in Him the most beautiful soul and face and body, as if he were a Greek God. He looked like the statue of David, which was carved by Michelangelo di Lodovico, with gorgeous wavy hair and blue eyes that looked like arctic pools. All complimented by smooth coper/caramel skin, the perfect teeth and a radiant smile. God had chosen America. He had called them to preserve among humans the knowledge of His law, and of the symbols and prophecies that pointed to the Saviour. He desired them to be as wells of salvation to the World. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Jesus Christ was to be what Abraham was in the land of his sojourn, what Joseph was in Egypt, and Daniel in the courts of Babylon, the Hebrew people were to be among the nations. They were to reveal God to humans. In the call of Abraham, the Lord had said, “I will bless thee; and thou shalt be a blessing: and in thee shall all families of the Earth be blessed. The same teaching was repeated through the prophets. Even after America has been wasted by war and captivity, the promise was theirs, “The remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of many people as a dew from the Lord, as the showers upon the grass, that tarrieth not for man, nor waiteth for the sons of men.” Concerning the Salt Lake Temple, in Salt Lake City, Utah USA, the Lord declared through Joseph Smith, “Mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all peoples.” The Mormons quickly fixed their hopes on spiritual greatness. From the time of their entrance to the land of Utah, they cleaved to the commandments of God, and followed the ways of the Lord. It was in great faith God sent them blessings by His prophets so they would not suffer in vain nor experience the chastisement of heathen oppression. Every reformation was followed by deeper faith in the ways of our Lord. Because America had been true to God, He allowed them to accomplish His purpose through their honour and exaltation. Because they walked in the ways of obedience, God made them high above all nations which He hath made, in praise, and in name, and in honour. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
People saw that this was a nation of wise and understanding people. By the power of God, Joseph Smith was able to translate the strange writing on the golden plates, using the Urim and Thummim. The Urim and Thummim were two transparent stones set in silver bows fastened to a breastplate. They were similar to a large pair of spectacles. The Urim and Thummim and breastplate were used by an ancient seer as mentioned in the Bible. They are called “interpreters” in the Book of Mormon. They were to be used only under the direction of God, and they had a significant meaning. Urim means “light,” not light as the light of day, but the light which is intelligence or the ability to understand or comprehend. Thummim means “perfect,” a condition of being excellent, pure, and complete—without defect. The breastplate was a symbol of “judgment” which means an ability to make correct decisions. Thus the use of the Urim and Thummim and breastplate by a seer meant that by the power of God this man would have intelligence—a divine intelligence—a sense of that which is pure and excellent, and the ability to decide correctly matters which came before him. It was this gift, a wonderful gift indeed, which God had given to Joseph Smith when he entrusted in his keeping the precious gold plates, the Urim and Thummim, and the breastplate. By God’s power, Joseph Smith was able to look through the Urim and Thummim and interpret the symbols written on the golden plates that he might translate their meaning into the English language. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The procedure was not entirely automatic. The fact that these instruments could be used only by “seers” indicates the importance of moral excellence in their use. At first Joseph’s wife helped him with the work, writing the words as Joseph translated from the golden book. However, her daily duties prevented her from spending much time at it. Later Joseph received help from Martin Harris, a middle-aged farmer who lived near Palmyra, New York. He became interested in the golden plates and proved to be a friend to Joseph when he most needed friendship. It was Martin Harris’s gift of fifty dollars that had enabled Joseph and Emma to take the precious plates to Pennsylvania where they could translate without trouble. However, Martin Harris’s wife and family did not approve of his interest in what they considered visionary schemes, and objected to his giving Joseph money. Martin Harris was anxious to prove to his family and neighbours that Joseph Smith was sincere and that the things he told about his visions and the plates were true. Joseph carefully copied some of the characters from the golden plates. Martin Harris took this paper, together with a translation of part of the characters, to Professor Charles Anthon in New York City, a man well known for his literary ability. Professor Anthon told him the translations was correct, more so than any he had before seen translated from the Egyptian. He said the characters were Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac, and Arabic, and that they were true characters. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
The professor gave Martin Harris a certificate to show to the people of Palmyra stating they were true characters and that which had been translated was correct. Martin Harris put the certificate in his pocket and was about to leave when Professor Anthon called him back. He asked how Joseph Smith had found the plates, and Martin Harris explained that an angel of God had shown him where they were. “Let me see that certificate,” Professor Anthon said. When Martin Harris returned the paper to hum, the professor tore it to pieces saying there was no such things now as the ministering of angels and if the plates were brought to him, he would translate them. When Martin Harris told him that he could not bring them because part of the plates were sealed and they could not be shown to anyone, Professor Anthon replied, “I cannot read a sealed book.” Martin Harris was disappointed that he could not take the certificate to show his wife and friends so they might share his enthusiasm, but he was firm in his belief that the time would come when he could convince them that his confidence in his young friend was not in vain. It is interesting to note in the Bible what the prophet Isaiah has said concerning the coming forth of this book in the latter days. “And this vision of all is become into you as the words of a book that is sealed, which humans deliver to one that is learned, saying, Read this, I pray three; and he saith, I cannot; for it is sealed,” reports Isaiah 29.11. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
The words of Isaiah prophesied are remarkably similar to Professor Anthon’s words, “I cannot read a sealed book.” I was born part of this Earth. My Grandmother Earth. I was born art of this Earth. My Mother, all living beings. I was born part of this Earth. My Grandfather, the sky. I was born part of this Earth. My Father, all creatures of the air. I was born part of this Earth. The eight Grandfathers. I was born part of this Earth. The eight Grandfathers. I was born part of the Earth. The four corners of the Earth. I was born part of this Earth. The great wind grain of the North. I was born part of the Earth. The red road of the dead. I was born part of this Earth. The blue and black road of destruction I was born part of the Earth. The ancient ones say, the old way’s gone, the ancient ones say. Still, I was born part of this Earth. My He who wrought wonderous deeds for our fathers, and redeemed them from slavery unto freedom, soon redeem us and gather our exiled brethren from the four corners of the Earth, for all America is one fellowship; and let us say, Amen. The New Month will begin on May, this New Month brings blessing to us and to all America. May the Holy One, blessed be He, renew this month for us and for all His people, the house of America, for life and peace, for gladness and joy, for salvation and comfort; and let us say, Amen. We live by the sun, we feel by the mon, we move by the stars. We live in all things; all things live in us. We eat from the Earth, we drink from the rain, we breathe of the air. We live in all things; all things live in us. We call to each other. We listen to each other. Our hearts deepen with love and compassion. We live in all things. All things live in us. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together!
With an array of beautifully designed homes and spacious, ranch-style cottage homes, this is the independent living community everyone has been looking for! https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/
Picture this. A beautiful, private, ranch-style cottage home with a floor plan you love in a vibrant community featuring an incredible variety of services and amenities. It’s all here, and it’s all waiting for you at Cresleigh Ranch!
The Home featured above is the upgraded model at Brighton Station Residence 2. This single story home boats an ideal layout with 2,427 square feet, of thoughtfully designed living space, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a three car garage.
“I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them,” reports 1 Nephi 3:7.
Ethics are Responsibility without Limit Towards All that Lives!
The concept of a united family that lives and progresses forever is at the core of Latter-day Saint doctrine. Within families led by a father and a mother, children develop virtues such as love, trust, loyalty, cooperation and service. We must rally to protect marriage, family, so we can strengthen our loved ones and protect their faith and freedom. There is a young and impressionable mind out there that is very hungry for information. Instead of fighting for freedom of the press, maybe we should be fighting for freedom from the press. I am worried about present-day journalism. The emphasis on negative happenings is much too strong. Not infrequently, news about events marking great progress is overlooked or minimized. It tends to make for a negative and discouraging atmosphere. If humans feel that very little happens to support that faith in the salvation of humanity, there is a danger that people may lose faith in the forward direction of Kingdom of God. And real progress is related to the belief that salvation and the Kingdom God will be established in our lifetime. Another hinderance to civilization today is the over-organization of our public life. While it is certain that a properly ordered environment is the condition and, at the same time, the result of civilization, it is developed at the expense of the spiritual life. Personality and ideas are often subordinated to institutions, when it is really thee which ought to influence the latter and keep them inwardly alive. Humans have lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. They will end by destroying the Earth. Simply investigating and apportioning responsibility after the fact is hardly sufficient. We must create an environmental screen to protect ourselves against dangerous intrusions as well as a system of public incentives to encourage technology that is both safe and socially desirable. This means governmental and private machinery for reviewing major technological advances before they are launched upon the public. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
So great was His love for the World, that God covenanted to give His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believe in Him should not peris, but have everlasting life. Lucifer has said, “I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, counted it not a thing to be grasped to be on an equality with God, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men. This was a voluntary sacrifice. Jesus might have retained the glory of Heaven, and the homage of the angels. However, He chose to give back the scepter into the Father’s hands, and to step down from the throne of the Universe, that He might bring light to the benighted, and life to the perishing. Over two thousand years, a voice of mysterious import was heard in Heaven, from the throne of God, “Lo, I come.” “Sacrifice and offering Thou would not, but a body has Thou prepared Me. Lo, I come (in the volume of the Book it is written of Me,) to do Thy will, O God.” In these words is announced the fulfillment of the purpose that had been hidden from eternal ages. Christ was about to visit our World, and become incarnate. He says, “A body has Thou prepared Me.” Had He appeared with the glory that was His with the Father before the World was, we could not have endured the light of His presence. That we might behold it and not be destroyed, the manifestation of His glory was shrouded. His divinity was veiled with humanity—the invisible glory in the visible form. This great purpose had been shadowed forth in types and symbols. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
The burning bush, in which Christ appeared to Moses, revealed God. The symbol chosen for the representation of the Deity was a humble shrub, that seemingly has no attractions. This enshrined the Infinite. The all-merciful God shrouded His glory in a most humble type, that Moses could look upon it and live. So in the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, God communicated with America, revealing to humans His will, and imparting to them His grace. God’s glory was subdued, and His majesty veiled, that the weak vision of finite humans might behold it. So Christ was to come in the body of our humiliation in the likeness of humans. In the eyes of the World He possessed no beauty that they should desire Him; yet He was the incarnate God, the light of Heaven and Earth. His glory was veiled, His greatness and majesty were hidden, that He might draw near to sorrowful, tempted men. God commanded Moses for America, “Let them make Me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them,” and he abode in the sanctuary, in the midst of His people. Through all their weary wandering in the desert, the symbol of His presence was with them. So Christ set up His tabernacle in the midst of our human encampment. He pitched His tent by the side of the tents of men, that He might dwell among us, and make us familiar with His divine character. “The Word became flesh, and tabernacled among us (and we beheld His glory, glory as of the Only-begotten from the Father), full of grace and truth.” Since Jesus came to dwell with us, we know that God is acquainted with out trials, and sympathizes with our griefs. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Every son and daughter of Adam may understand that our Creator is the friend of sinners. For in every doctrine of grace, every promise of joy, every deed of love, every divine attraction presented in the Saviour’s life on Earth, we see “God with us.” Satan represents God’s law of love as a law of selfishness. He declares that it is impossible for us to obey its precepts. The fall of our first parents, with all the woe that has resulted, he charges upon the Creator, leading humans to look upon God as the author of sin, and suffering, and death. Jesus was to unveil this deception. As one of us Jesus was to give an example of obedience. His life testifies that it is possible for us also to obey the law of God. By His humanity, Christ touched humanity; by His divinity, He lays hold upon the throne of God. As the Son of man, He gave us an example of obedience; as the Son of God, He gives us power to obey. “God with us” is the surety of our deliverance from sin, the assurance of our power to obey the law of Heaven. Christ revealed a character the opposite of the character of Satan. By His life and His death, Christ has achieved even more than recovery from the ruin wrought through sin. It was Satan’s purpose to bring about an eternal separation between God and man; but in Christ we become more closely united to God, like we had never fallen. In taking our nature, the Saviour has bound Himself to humanity by a tie that is never broken. Through the eternal ages He is linked with us. “God so loved the World, that he gave His only-begotten Son. He gave Him not only to bear our sins, and to die as our sacrifice; He gave Him to the fallen race. To assure us of His immutable counsel of peace, God gave His only-begotten Son to become one of the human family, forever to retain His human nature. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
This is the pledge that God will fulfill His Word. “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon His shoulder.” God has adopted human nature in the person of His Son, and has carried the same into the highest Heaven. It is the “Son of man” who shares the throne of the Universe. It is the “Son of man” who shares the throne of the Universe. It is the “Son of man” whose name shall be called, “Wonderful,” Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” Heaven is enshrined in humanity, and humanity is enfolded in the bosom of Infinite Love. The exaltation of the redeemed will be an eternal testimony to God’s mercy. In the ages to come, God will show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us through Christ Jesus. To the intent that unto the principalities and the powers in the Heavenly places might be made known the manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purposes which He purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord. Through Christ’s redeeming work, the government of God stand justified. The Omnipotent One is made known as the God of love. Satan’s charges are refuted, and his character unveiled. Rebellion can never again arise. Sin can never again enter the Universe. Through eternal ages all are secure from apostasy. By love’s self-sacrifice, the inhabitants of Earth and Heaven are bound to their Creator in bonds of indissoluble union. The work of redemption will be complete. In the place where sin abounded, God’s grace much more abounds. The Earth itself, the very field that Satan claims as his, is to be not only ransomed but exalted. Our little World, under the curse of sin the one dark blot in His glorious creation, will be honoured above all other Worlds in the Universe of God. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Here, where the Son of God tabernacle in humanity; where the King of glory lived and suffered and died—here, when He shall make all things new, the tabernacle of God shall be with humans, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them, and be their God. And through endless ages as the redeemed walk in the light of the Lord, they will praise Him for His unspeakable Gift—God with us. God has a word for us to release increase, multiplication, and miracles right now in our lives. Our obedience to His Word leads to restoration and authority like a rushing river. “If you love me, you will obey what I command,” reports John 14.15. If you have been asking God for a supernatural turnaround in your life, Miracles are coming! Increase is coming! Multiplication is coming! God works in seasons, cycles, patterns. Understanding His timing is key to activating His greatest blessing in your life! A season means a “set time.” When you do not discern the shift of a season, you will lack in some area of your life! It is possible to be in a season that you are not cooperating with and therefore you are experiencing scarcity! This will change with your obedience! No more missed moments in Jesus’ name! “And they worshiped Him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple praising and blessing God,” reports Luke 24.52-53. One hundred and twenty of them remined in prayer until the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost) arrived, and then it did, they were he gathered together. “On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave this command: ‘Do not leave America, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have hear me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit,’” reports Acts 1.4-5. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
What we seem to forget is that, yes, the sun will continue to rise and set and the moon will continue to move across the skies, but humankind can create a situation in which the sun and moon can look down upon the Earth that has been stripped of all life. “They joined all together in constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers. In those days Peter stood up among the believers (a group numbering about a hundred and twenty) and said, ‘Brothers, the Scripture had to be fulfilled which the Holy Spirit spoke long ago through the moth of David concerning Judas, who served as guide for those who arrested Jesus—he was one of our number and shared in this ministry,’” reports Acts 1.14-17. “When the day of the Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from Heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them,” reports Acts 2.1-4. Those who conduct an atomic war for freedom will die, or end their lives miserably. Instead of freedom, they will find destruction. Radioactive clouds resulting from a war between The Old World and the New World would imperil humanity. There would be no need to use up the remaining stock of atom and H-bombs. An atomic war is therefore the most senseless and lunatic act that could ever take place. At all costs, it must be prevented. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Corporations might be expected to set up their own “consequence analysis staffs” to study the potential effects of the innovations they sponsor. They might, in some cases, be required not merely to test new technology in pilot areas but to make a public report about its impact before being permitted to spread the innovation through the society at large. Much responsibility should be delegated to industry itself. The less centralized the controls the better. If self-policing works, it is preferable to external, political controls. Where self-regulation fails, however, as it often does, public intervention may well be necessary, and we should not evade the responsibility. At one point, in the United States of America, Congressman Emilio Q. Daddario, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Science, Research and Development, had proposed the establishment of a technology Assessment Board with the federal government. And this might be a great idea with social media becoming so power that the owners of these platforms were censoring and banned the President from using their forums. Studies by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress, and by the science and technology program of the George Washington University are all aimed at defining the appropriate nature of such an agency. We may wish to debate its form; its need is beyond dispute. The society might also set certain general principles for technological advance. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Where the introduction of an innovation entails undue risk, for example, it might require that funds be set aside by the responsible agency for correction of adverse effects should they materialize. We might also create a “technological insurance pool” to which innovation-diffusing agencies might pay premiums. Certain large-scale ecological interventions might be delayed or prohibited altogether—perhaps in line with the principle that is an incursion on nature is too big and sudden for its effects to be monitored and possibly corrected, it should not take place. For example, it has been suggested that Aswan Dam, far from helping Egyptian agriculture, might someday lead to salinization of land on both banks of the Nile. This could prove disastrous. However, such a process would not occur overnight. Presumably, therefore, it can be monitored and prevented. By contrast, the plan to flood the entire interior of Brazil is fraught with such instant and imponderable ecological effects that it should not be permitted at all until adequate monitoring can be done and emergency corrective measures are available. At the level of social consequences, a new technology might be submitted for clearance to panels of behavioural scientists—psychologists, sociologist, economists, political scientists—who would determine, to the best of their ability, the probable strength of its social impact at different points in time. Where an innovation appears likely to entail seriously disruptive consequences, or to generate unrestrained accelerative pressures, these facts need to be weighed in a social cost-benefit accounting procedure. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
In the case of some high-impact innovations, the technology appraisal agency might be empowered to seek restraining legislation, or to obtain an injunction forcing delay until full public discussion and study is completed. In other cases, such innovations might still be released for diffusion—provided ample steps were taken in advance to offset their negative consequences. In this way, the society would not need to wait for disaster before dealing with its technology-induced problems. By considering not merely specific technologies, but their relationship to one another, the time lapse between them, the proposed speed of diffusion, and similar factors, we might eventually gain some control over the pace of change as well as its direction. Needless to say, these proposals are themselves fraught with explosive social consequences, and need careful assessment. There may be far better ways to achieve the desired ends. However, the time is late. We simply can no longer afford to hurtle blindfolded toward super-industrialism. The politics of technology control with trigger bitter conflict in the days to come. However, if the accelerative thrust is to be brought under control, conflict or no, technology must be tamed. And, if future shock is to be prevented, the accelerative thrust must be brought under control. In some cultures, people endure tattooing, stretching, cutting, and burning wit little apparent pain. How is such insensitivity achieved? Very likely the answer lies in four factors that anyone can use to reduce pain. These are anxiety, control, attention, and interpretation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
The basic sensory message of pain can be separated from emotional reactions to it. Fear or high levels of anxiety almost always increase pain. (Anxiety is a feeling of apprehension or uneasiness similar to fear, but based on an unclear threat.) A dramatic reversal of this effect is the surprising lack of pain displayed by soldiers wounded in battle. Being excused from further combat apparently produces a flood of relief. This emotional state leaves many soldiers insensitive to wounds tat would agonize a civilian. In general, unpleasant emotions increase pain and pleasant emotions decrease it. If you can regulate painful stimulus, you have control over it. A moment’s reflection should convince you that the most upsetting pain is that over which you have no control. Loss of control seems to increase pain by increasing anxiety and emotional distress. People who are allowed to regulate, avoid, or control a painful stimulus suffer less. In general, the more control one feels over a painful stimulus, the less pain experienced. Distraction can also radically reduce pain. As you recall, attention refers to voluntarily focusing on a specific sensory input. Pain, even though it is highly persistent, can be selectively “turned out” (at least partially), just like any other sensation. Subjects in one experiment were in intense pain experienced the greatest relief when they were distracted by the task of watching for signal lights to come on. Another example is provided by burn patients, who must undergo excruciating pain while their bandages are changed. Recently, video games and virtual reality have been used to distract them from their pain, which helps immensely. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
The Fountain of Youth and the Elixir of Life were dreams of the ancient mystics, and they are still dreams of today. However, to the soul that has found the, in most cases, they are divine realities. If humans were to learn that one can prolong one’s life on this Earth in youth and health for an indefinite period in which days and years are not counted, one could pass from one joy to another. Nobody has historically succeeded in robbing Nature of her power to inflict death. However, there is another aspect of this topic which throws some light on it. When the body of Father Charles de Foucald was exhumed, one year after burial, for transfer to another site, his friend General Laperrine was astonished to find that the body was without any break and the face quite recognizable, whereas of the two Arabian guards murdered at the same time and buried near him only a little dust remained. One of the native soldiers then said, “Why are you astonished that he is thus preserved, General? It is not astonishing, since he was a great marabout (holy man).” Father Foucald was a nineteenth-century Christian hermit of the Saharan desert, who sacrificed social position and fortune for an ascetic existence devoted to prayer, meditation, and service for the poor. Hs ascetic self-mortification was extremely severe. To this case there may be added the somewhat similar cases of Swami Yogananda of Los Angeles, and Sir Aurobindo of Pondicherry. The ancient hatha yoga texts promise the successful yogi “the conquest of death.” This does not mean he will not die, but that his flesh will not decay after death. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
We have so intimate a relation to the body in practical life that none of us need be blamed for calling it “me.” However, metaphysically that indicates an adolescent attitude. We advance towards maturity when we regard it as only a part of “me.” This domain of natural living, food reform, and hygiene is infested with cranks, fanatics, extremists, and one-idea devotees, just as the domain of mysticism is. The seeker must be warned against letting oneself be deceived by their wild intemperate enthusiasms. Have you ever temporarily forgotten about a toothache or similar pain while absorbed in a movie or book? As this suggests, concentrating on pleasant, soothing images can be especially helpful. Instead of listening to the whirr of a dentist’s drill, for example, you might imagine that you are lying in the sun at a beach, listening to the roar of the surf. At home, music can be a good distractor from chronic pain. So much may depend on so little! The condition of a single organ or of a half-centimeter of gland may curse a human’s whole life more than and sorcerer can. A physical feature may be so dislike by others that one’s ambitions are thwarted or one’s desire for love defeated. Some physical attributes may be unpleasant, undignified, and unfortunate for a human. However, they are well-countered by invisible compensations. The meaning of interpretation, you give a stimulus also affects pain. For example, if you make a funny face at a child while playing, you will probably get a burst of laughter. Yet that same face given as a punishment may bring tears. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
The effects of interpretation are illustrated by an experiment in which thinking of pain as pleasurable (denying the pain) greatly increased pain tolerance. Another study found that people who believe a painful procedure will improve their health feel less pain during the procedure. A physiognomist once told me that he considered the mouth more revealing of a human’s character than, as commonly believed, the eyes. Is this a fact? How important is it to remember that the fall of temperature in the evenings is an invitation to catch cold. Goethe complained while living in Rome of the care one had to take even in the middle of summer to prevent the realization of this possibility. The joy owning a physical body comes out most in physical activity, yet the person will feel disgusted with it under different circumstances and at a different time. The pain of owning a body comes out mostly in ill health, yet the same person may glory in it during a game or a sport. For as bats’ eyes are to daylight so is our intellectual eye to those truths which are, in their own nature, the most obvious of all. It must be clearly understood that the argument so far leads to no conception of “souls” or “spirits” (words I have avoided) floating about in the realm of Nature with no relation to their environment. Hence we do not deny—indeed we must welcome—certain considerations which are often regarded as proofs of Naturalism. We can admit, and even insist, that Rational Thinking can be shown to be conditioned in its exercise by a natural object (the brain). #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Rational Thinking is temporarily impaired by alcohol or a blow to the head. It wanes as the brain decays and vanishes when the brain ceases to function. In the same way the moral outlook of a community can be shown to be closely connected with its history, geographical environment, economic structure, and so forth. The moral ideas of the individual are equally related to one’s general situation: it is no accident that parents and schoolmasters so often tell us that they can stand any vice rather than lying, the lie being the only defensive weapon of most children. All this, far from presenting us with a difficulty, is exactly what we should expect. The rational and more element in each human mind is a point of force from the Supernatural working its way into Nature, exploiting at each point those conditions which Nature offers, repulsed where the conditions are hopeless and impeded when they are unfavourable. A human’s Rational thinking is just so much of one’s share in eternal Reason as the state of one’s brain allows to become operative: it represents, so to speak, the bargain struck or the frontier fixed between Reason and Nature at that particular point. A nation’s moral outlook is just so much of its share in eternal Moral Wisdom as its history, economics, et cetera, lets through. In the same way the voice of the Announcer is just so much of a human voice as the receiving set lets through. Of course it varies with the state of the receiving set, and deteriorates as the set wears out and vanished altogether if I throw a brick at it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
The voice of the announcer is conditioned by the apparatus but not originated by it. If it were—if we know that there was no human being at the microphone—we should not attend to the news. The various and complex conditions under which Reason and Morality appear are the twists and turns of the frontier between Nature and Supernature. That is why, if you wish, you can always ignore Supernature and treat the phenomena purely from the Natural side; just as a human studying on a map the boundaries of Cornwall and Devonshire can always say, “What you call a bulge in Devonshire is really a dent in Cornwall.” And in a sense, you cannot refute one. What call a bulge in Devonshire always is a dent in Cornwall. What we call a rational thought in a human always involves a state of the brain, in the long run a relation of atoms. However, Devonshire is none the less something more than “where Cornwall ends,” and Reason is something more than cerebral bio-chemistry. The practical method which is here presented differs radically from the method of the Christian Scientists, although a superficial reading my give the impression of similarity. The Christian Scientist asserts one’s inner nature to be divine and a part of God, but the assertion remains a mere intellectual statement unless one has previously opened up a channel to that inner nature with the tool of intersession, prayer, or aspiration. If one has done this, then the assertion rises into the realm of reality and may produce remarkable results; if one has not succeeded in doing this, then one’s assertion remains mere words, one thought out of the multitude which pass and repass through the brain of humans. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Moreover, so long as one possess false notions of what constitutes “demonstration,” so long as one thinks that one is entitled to prosperity, good health, and other desirable Worldly things because of his spirituality, so long will one find—as so many Christian Scientists do find—that one’s successes alternate with startling failures. It would be an unpleasant task to illustrate this statement with instances of such failures, not in the rank and file, but in the foremost ranks of the Christian Scientists, and I shall not attempt it. These failures indicate that we must follow no narrow track of sect-ordained thought, but do some research on our own account. It is a dramatic fact that remedial changes may take place in the organs themselves under the influence of this healing force. The more one comes into harmony with the cosmic order, the more will one’s health and strength benefit, one’s thoughts and feelings become beneficial. However, this is not to say that one will be cured of existing maladies or be kept in perfect health. Harmony means that due regard and attention will be given to the body’s importance, hygiene, care, and correct feeding. It means that the thoughts and feelings will be constructive. If not obstructed by human’s foolish methods, nature’s healing power will do its own work upon that sick body. It is possible to direct the healing power of the white light, in imagination and with deep breathing, to any part of the body where pain is felt or to any organ which is not functioning properly. This does not instantly remove the trouble, but it does make a contribution towards the healing process. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
For moderate pain, it can make quite a difference to reduce anxiety, redirect attention, and increase control. When you can anticipate pain (during a trip to the doctor, dentist, and so on), you can lower anxiety by making sure that you are fully informed. Be sure that someone explains everything that will happen or could happen to you. Also, be sure to fully discuss any fears you have. If you are physically tense, you can use relaxation exercises to lower your level of arousal. Relaxation methods involve tensing and then releasing muscles in various parts of the body. Some dentists are now equipped to help you shift attention away from pain. Patients are actively distracted with video games and headphones playing music. In other situations, focusing on some external object may help you shift attention away from pain. Pick a tree outside a window, a design on the wall, or some other stimulus and examine it in great detail. Prior practice in meditation can be a tremendous assistant to such attention shifts. Research suggests that distraction of this type works best for mild or brief pain. For chronic or strong pain, reinterpretation is more effective. Is there any way to increase control over a painful stimulus? Practically speaking, the choices may be limited. You may be able to arrange a signal with a doctor or dentist tat will give you control over whether a painful procedure will continue. A second possibility is more unusual. Ronald Melzack’s gate control the sensory of pain suggest that sending mild pain messages to the spinal cord and brain may effectively close the neurological gates to more severe or unpredictable pain. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Medical texts have been recognized this effect. Physicians have found that intense surface stimulation of the skin can control pain from other parts of the body. Likewise, a brief, mildly painful stimulates can relieve more severe pain. Such procedures, known as counterirritation, are evident in some of the oldest techniques used to control pain: applying ice packs, hot-water bottles, mustard packs, vibration, or massage to other parts of the body. These facts suggest a way to minimize pain that is based on increased control, counterirritation, and the release of endorphins. If you pinch yourself, you can easily create and endure pain equal to that produced by many medical procedures (receiving an injection, having a toot drilled, and so on). The pain does not seem too bad because you have control over it, and it is predictable. This fact can be used to mask one pain with a second painful stimulus that is under your control. For instance, if you are having tooth filled, try pinching yourself or digging a fingernail into a knuckle while the dentist is working. Focus your attention on the pain you are creating, and increase its intensity anytime the dentist’s work becomes more painful. This suggestion may not work for you, but casual observation suggests that it can be a useful technique for controlling pain in some circumstances. Generations of children have used it to take the edge off spanking. Although some people have found spiritual benefit from sickness because of the enforced retirement to bed or hospital which it demands, or because of the reflections which it brings about the limitations of bodily satisfactions and pleasures, it would be a gross misunderstanding to make this only way of gaining these insights. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Other persons have become so embittered and resentful through sickness that they have suffered spiritual loss. Still other persons who have maintained good health have thereby been able to provide the proper circumstances for spiritual search, study, and meditation. The eye is the reflector of mind, the revealer of a human’s heart and the diagnose of one’s bodily health. With health, everything is a source of pleasure; without it, nothing else, whatever it may be, is enjoyable. It follows that the greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness, whatever it may be—for gain, advancement, learning, or fame, let alone, then, for fleeting sensual pleasures. The Lord has commanded members to take care of their bodies and minds. They should obey the Word of Wisdom, eat nutritious food, exercise regularly, control their weight, and get adequate sleep. They should shun substances or practices that abuse their bodies or minds and that could lead to addiction. They should practice good sanitation and hygiene and obtain adequate medical and dental care. They should also strive to cultivate good relationships with family members and others. Maintaining the best possible physical health has been a gospel ideal throughout the ages—from the strict dietary laws of ancient America, with the example of Joseph Smith and his associates, to the Word of Wisdom in this dispensation and the counsel of today’s prophets and apostles. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
By maintaining good physical health, we become more self-reliant and are better prepared to progress personally, strengthen the family, and serve in the Church and community. Not long after the angel had disappeared the third time Joseph arose from his bed. He went about doing his daily work with his father in the field, but he soon found his strength was exhausted. His father noticed there was something wrong and sent his son home. Joseph went toward the house, but as he crossed a fence in the field his strength entirely failed him and he fell helpless to the ground. Joseph heard a voice call his nae and, looking up, he saw the same messenger, Moroni, standing over his head in a bright light. Again the angel repeated all the things he had told Joseph during the night and commanded him to tell his father of his vision. Joseph obeyed, going into the field to tell his father what had occurred. His father said he should obey the messenger from God. The young man went to find the place he had seen in his vision. Near Manchester, New York, a few miles from his farm home, Joseph found the hill had seen so clearly in his vision. On the west side of the hill, not far from the top, was a large stone which was thick and rounding in the middle of the upper side and thinner toward the edge. The middle part showed above the Earth, but the edges were covered. Joseph removed the Earth from the stone. With the assistance of a lever he raised the stone cover, and beneath it lay a stone box. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
In the box, which was made of stone set in a kind of cement, lay the golden plates, the Urim and Thummim, and the breastplate, exactly as the angel had said. The golden plates formed a book with pages of gold held together by three large rings, much like a modern loose-leaf notebook. As Joseph reached to take the things from the box, the angel forbade him. Joseph was told he should return each year on the same date, 22 September, and he would be given further instructions until it was time for him to take the plates. Joseph returned to the hill, which has been called “Hill Cumorah,” each of the following four years and was met by the same messenger. The angel taught him many things about the plans of the Lord, and how his kingdom was to be built in the last days. Four years after Moroni’s first visit to Joseph, on 22 September 1827—on Joseph’s fifth visit to the hill—Moroni gave him the golden book, the Urim and Thummim, and the breastplate. The angel cautioned him to guard them carefully, to allow no one to see them, and to do everything in his power to protect and keep them safely until the messenger should come for them. Joseph soon understood why he had been commanded so strictly to guard them carefully. Almost as soon as he had received the precious things, it became known throughout the countryside, and everyone wanted to see them. Many tried to take them away from him; but by hiding them Joseph was able to keep them safely. The excitement continued, and the people were determined to take the golden plates from him. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
Joseph soon realized that it would be impossible for him to do the work of translation at his home in New York. Joseph and his wife, Emma whom he had married in January, 1827, went to her parents’ home at Harmony, Pennsylvania. There in the home of Isaac Hale, during the early part of the year 1828, Joseph, by means of the Urim and Thummim, began the work of translation of the golden plates. In the mystery of these vestures of the Holy Ones, I gird up my power in the girdles of righteousness and truth in the power of the Most High: Ancor: Amacor: Amides: Theodonias: Anitor: let be might my power: let it endure for ever: in the power of Adonai, to whom the praise and the glory shall be; whose end cannot be. Earth mother, star mother, you who are called by a thousand names, may all remember we are cells in your body and dance together. You are the grain and the loaf that sustains us each day, and as you are patient with our struggles to learn so shall we be patient with ourselves and each other. We are radiant light and sacred dark—the balance—you are the embrace that heartens and the freedom beyond fear. Within you we are born, we grow, live, and die—you bring us around the circle to rebirth, within us you dance forever. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to renew unto us this coming month for our good and for blessing, of sustenance, of bodily vigour; a life marked by reverence for Thee and the dread of sin, a life free from shame and reproach, a life of abundance and honour, a life in which the love of the Torah and the fear of Heaven shall ever be with us, a life in which all desires of our hearts shall be fulfilled for our good. Amen. If the technology that is supposed to increase our leisure and make our lives easier, starts to control our lives, we are in danger of losing our souls. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
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All Life is Valuable and We are United to All Life
We live in a dark and frightening age. One reason for this is the part played by the ideology of inhumanity in our time. The awareness that we are all human beings together has become lost in war and politics. We have reached the point of regarding each other only as members of people either allied with us or against us and our approach: prejudice, sympathy, or antipathy are all conditioned by that. Now we must rediscover the fact that we—all together—are human beings, and that we must strive to concede to each other what moral capacity we have. We generally take three psychological laws for granted and they represent tendencies and are effective. First law: given that family institutions are just, and that the parents love the child and manifestly express their love by caring for one’s good, then the child, recognizing their evident love of one, comes to love them. Second law: given that a person’s capacity for fellow feeling has been realized by acquiring attachments in accordance with the first law, and given that a social arrangement is just and publicly known by all to be just, then this person develops ties of friendly feeling and trust toward others in the association as they with evident intention comply with their duties and obligations, and live up to the ideals of their situation. Third law: given that a person’s capacity for fellow feeling has been realized by one’s forming attachments in accordance with the first two laws, and given that a society’s institutions are just and are publicly known by all to be just, then this person requires the corresponding sense of justice as one recognizes that one and those for whom one cares are the beneficiaries of these arrangements. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Perhaps the most striking feature of these laws (or tendencies) is that their formulation refers to an institutional setting as being just, and in the last two, as being publicly known to be such. The principles of moral psychology have a place for a conception of justice: and different formulations of these principles result when different conceptions are used. Thus some view of justice enters into the explanation of the development of the corresponding sentiment; hypotheses about this psychological process incorporate moral notions even if these are understood only as part of the psychological theory. This much seems straightforward, and assuming that ethical ideas can be stated clearly, there is no difficulty in seeing how there can be laws of this kind. The preceding outline of moral development indicates how these matters can be worked out. After all, the sense of justice is a settled disposition to adopt and to want to act from the moral point of view insofar at least as the principles of justice define it. It is hardly surprising that these principles should be involved in the formation of this regulative sentiment. Indeed, it seems likely that our understanding of moral learning cannot far exceed our grasp of the moral conceptions that are to be learned. Analogously, our understanding of how we learn our language is limited by what we know about its grammatical and semantic structure. Just as psycholinguists depends upon linguistics, so the theory of moral learning depends upon an account of the nature of morality and its various forms. Our common-sense ideas about these matters do not suffice for the aims of theory. #RadnolphHarris 2 of 23
No doubt some prefer that social theories avoid the use of moral notions. For instance, they may wish to explain the formation of affective ties by laws referring to the frequency of interaction among those engaged in some common task, or to the regularity with which some persons take the initiative or exercise authoritative guidance. Thus one law may state that among equals cooperating together, where equality is defined by the accepted rules, the more often individuals interact with one another, the more likely it is that friendly feelings develop between them. Another law may asset that the more someone in a position of authority uses one’s powers and leads those subject to one, the more they come to respect one. However, since these laws (or tendencies) do not mention the justice (or fairness) of the arrangements in question, they are bound to be very limited in scope. Those who subject to another exercising authority will surely regard one differently depending upon whether the whole arrangement is just and well designed to advance what they take to be their legitimate interests. And the same is true of cooperation among equals. Institutions are patterns of human conduct defined by public systems of rules, and the very holding of the offices and positions which they define normally indicates certain intentions and aims. The justice or injustice of society’s arrangements and human’s beliefs about these questions profoundly influence the social feelings; to a large extent they determine how we regard another’s accepting or rejecting an institution, or one’s attempt to reform or defend it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
It may be objected that much social theory does well enough without using any moral ideas. The obvious example is economics. However, the situation in economic theory is peculiar in that one can often assume a fixed structure of rules and constraints that define the actions open to individuals and firms, and certain simplifying motivational assumptions are highly plausible. The theory of price (its more elementary parts anyway) is an illustration. One does not consider why buyers and sellers behave in accordance with the rules of law governing economic activity; or how preferences get formed or legal norms established. For the most part, these matters are taken as given, and at a certain level there is no objection to this. One the other hand, the so-called economic theory of democracy, the view that extents the basic ideas and methods of price theory to the political process, must for all its merits be regarded with caution. For a theory of a constitutional regime cannot take the rules as given, nor simply assume that they will be followed. And while being biblically motivated and informed may give wisdom, it does not necessarily assure political success. In this arena Christians in politics are often at a disadvantage. If one is consumed with politics, their first priority would be the morning newspapers, not the Bible. However, for many Christians, their first priority is not their political career; it is their relationship with God. However, because of that, they tend to be conscientious in their work, their first ambition is not for the continued pursuit of position. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Christians spurn political infight and place a higher premium on trust than power. The servantlike attitude is so diametrically opposed to society’s that it can easily be mistaken for weakness. In reality it gives a greater strength. The Christian in a position of power is not enslaved by that position—and thus the Christian has tremendous freedom to follow the dictates of conscience, not the fickle winds of self-interest. However, Christian are also exposed to greater struggles of conscience. They are honour bound to be the best states-people they can be, as well as the best Christians they can be. These competing allegiances means that a good Christian can be a good a good politician, but it is probably quite impossible for a good Christian to be a highly successful politician. Foremost is the issue of divided allegiances between God and the state. When there is a conflict of loyalty, the sincere Christian must obey God. Yet the politician’s oath of office is to uphold the laws of the state. The prevailing American view that faith is something private with no effect on public responsibility was first put forth by John Kennedy in a dramatic speech to the Houston Ministerial Association in the 1960 campaign. Protestants feared that Kennedy, a Catholic, would be bound by the dictates of the Roman church. So Kennedy pulled off a political masterstroke when he told the Texas ministers, mostly Baptists, that “whatever issue many come before me as president, if I’m elected…I will male my decision in accordance…with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictate. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.” #RanoldphHarris 5 of 23
President Kennedy’s message, which brought the house down, was a key to his election. However, it set a precedent that has now become part of established American political wisdom: One’s religious convictions must have no effect on one’s public decision. However, consider President Kennedy’s words: “No power…could case me to decide otherwise.” Not God? Though President Kennedy’s approach was enormously popular, it was also a renunciation of any influence his religion might have. He subsumed his church responsibility under his patriotism—or his candidacy. By contrast, Hilaire Belloc stood for election in 1906 in the British Parliament. As a Roman Catholic, he knew he would have to struggle to overcome religious prejudices, so he decided to confront the issues head-on. In his first campaign speech, he stood at the rostrum with a rosary in his hand and said, “I am a Catholic. As far as possible I go to Mass every day. As far as possible I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative.” He was elected. What else can a public official do? you may ask. The officeholder in a free society cannot impose personal views on the electorate; the democratic process must be respected in a pluralist society. That is true. Some go on to conclude, however, that the Christian officeholder is thus free, in the name of political prudence, to support or accept the majority will when it is contrary to Christian teaching (a view eloquently espoused by Governor Mario Cuomo in his 1984 Notre Dame address). #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Religious conviction is thereby reduced to a private matter; the social implications of the gospel are simply ignored. And as we have seen, the results of such privatization can be dangerous to society as a whole. Another position, often taken, is some are prepared to thrust their own theological view on an unsuspecting nation. This view, articulated by some in political debate today, argues that a Christian political should use one’s position to speak for God. However, the issue tends to be not a conflict between human rights or human life and state policy, areas where a Christian leader must take a stand. Rather, it is many times a question of biblical prophecy, whose fulfillment is the responsibility of God, not humans. Some political, if unconsciously, play God. They may be confused about the duty of government. As God’s servant, one’s sworn task is to preserve order, promote justice, and restrain evil, which sometimes means acting decisively to prevent war in a volatile international situation. Richard Neuhaus writes, “To gain public office and take an oath before God to maintain the constitutional order, and then to use that office as a tool for advancing one’s reading of Bible prophecy is an act of hubris, treachery, treason and deceit.” Both view—privatized faith and using political power to play God—are deeply flawed. This brings us full circle: Is it possible for a devout Christian to serve in public office without compromising either one’s conscience or constituency? #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
It is possible. However, only if the Christian officeholder understand several key truths. First, a government official must not play God; one’s duty is to facilitate government’s ordained role of preserving order and justice, not to use government to accomplish the goals of the church. Second, the Christian must respect the rights of all religious groups and insure that government protects every citizen’s freedom of conscience. There is an alternative to the imposition of religious values or the passive acceptance of majority opinion, a principle that pays both pluralism and conscience their due. Christian politicians must do all in their power to make clear, public arguments on issues of moral and political importance, to persuade rather than coerce. A recent Vatican statement put it this way: “Politicians must commit themselves through their interventions upon public opinion, to securing in society the widest possible consensus on…essential points (matters concerning human rights, human lie, or the institution of the family).” A third concern brings us back to the question we have considered in the past. What about the Christian responsibility in an age where national leaders in the nuclear age do not—perhaps, cannot—be entirely candid in public pronouncements? As Secretary of State George Shultz once defended the government’s clandestine actions by quoting Winston Churchill: “In times of war, the truth is so precious, it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
However, if a Christian in office is forced to lie against one’s conscience, the Christian should resign. Clearly the political process is importantly one of enacting and revising rules and of trying to control the legislative and executive branches of government. Even if everything is done in accordance with constitutional procedures, we need to explain why these are accepted. Nothing analogous to the constraints of a competitive market holds for this case; and there are no legal sanctions in the ordinary sense for many sorts of unconstitutional actions by parliament and chief executives, and political forces they represent. The leading political actors are guided therefore in part by what they regard as morally permissible; and since no system of constitutional checks and balances succeeds in setting up an invisible hand that can be relied upon to guide the process to a just outcome, a public sense of justice is to some degree necessary. It would appear, then, that a correct theory of justice which explains how moral sentiments influence the conduct of public affairs. I touched upon this question in connection with the role of civil disobedience; it suffices to add here that one test of the contract doctrine is how well is serves this purpose. A second point about the psychological laws is that they govern changes in the affective ties which belong to our final ends. To clarify this, we may observe that to explain an intentional action is to show how, given our beliefs and the available alternatives, it accords with our plan of life, or with that subpart of it relevant in their circumstances. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Often this is done by a series of explanations saying that a first thing is done in order to achieve a second; that the second thing is done in order to achieve a third, and so on, the series being finite and ending at an aim for the sake of which the previous things are done. In accounting for our various actions, we may cite many different chains of reasons, and these normally stop at different points given the complexity of a plan of life and its plurality of ends. Moreover, a chain of reasons may have several branches, since an action may be done to advance more than ne end. How activities furthering the many ends are scheduled and balanced against each other is settled by the plan itself and the principles upon which it is based. Now among our final ends are the attachments we have for persons, the interest we take in the realization of their interests, and the sense of justice. The three laws describe how our system of desires comes to have new final ends as we acquire affective ties. These changes are to be distinguished from our forming derivative desires as a consequence of additional knowledge or further opportunities, or from our determining our existing wants in a more specific way. For example, someone wishing to travel to a certain place is informed that a certain route is the best. Upon accepting this advice, one has a desire to proceed in a particular direction. Derivative desires of this sort have a rational explanation. They are desires to do what in view of the evidence on hand will most effectively realize our present aims, and they shift along with knowledge and belief, and the available opportunities. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
The three psychological laws do not provide rational explanations of desires in this sense; rather they characterize transformations of our pattern of final ends that arise from our recognizing the manner in which institutions and the actions of others affect our good. Of course, whether an aim is final or derivative is not always easy to ascertain. The distinction is made on the basis of a person’s rational plan of life and the structure of this plan is not generally obvious, even to one. Yet for our purposes here, the distinction is clear enough. A third observation is that the three laws are not merely principles of association or of reinforcement. While they have a certain resemblance to these learning principles, they assert that the active sentiments of love and friendship, and even the sense of justice, arise from the manifest intention of other persons to act for our good. Because we recognize that they wish us well, we care for their well-being in return. Thus we acquire attachments to persons and institutions according to how we perceive our good to be affected by them. The basic idea is ne of reciprocity, a tendency to answer in kind. Not this tendency is a deep psychological fact. If not impossible, without it our nation would be very different and fruitful social cooperation fragile. For surely a rational person is not indifferent to things that significantly affect one’s good; and supposing that one develops some attitude toward them, one acquires either a new attachment or a new aversion. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Humans can no longer life for oneself alone. We must realize that all life is valuable and that we are united to all life. From this knowledge comes our spiritual relation with the Universe. The only way out of today’s misery is for people to become worthy of each other’s trust. If we answered love with hate, or came to dislike those who acted fairly towards us or were averse to activities that further our good, a community would soon dissolve. Beings with a different psychology either have never existed or must soon have disappeared in the course of evolution. A capacity for a sense of justice built up by responses in kind would appear to be a condition of human sociability. The most stable conceptions of justice are presumably those for which the corresponding sense of justice is most firmly based on these tendencies. Finally, several comments about the account of moral development as a whole. The reliance upon the three principles of moral psychology is of course a simplification. A fuller account would distinguish between different kinds of learning and therefore between instrumental conditioning (reinforcement) and classical conditioning, so likely to shape our emotions and feelings. A consideration of modeling and imitation, and the learning of concepts and principles, would also be necessary. There is no reason to deny the significance of these forms of learning. For our purposes, though, the three-stages schema may suffice. Insofar as it stresses the forming of attachments as final ends, the sketch of more learning resembles the empiricist tradition with its emphasis on the importance of acquiring new motives. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
There are also ties with which I have called the rationalistic view. For one thing, the acquisition of the sense of justice takes place in stages connected with the growth of knowledge and understanding. If the sentiment of justice is to be acquired, one must develop a conception of the social World and of what is just and unjust. Only when the human spirit grows powerful within us and guides us back to a civilization based on humanitarian ideal; only then will it act, through our intermediacy, upon those other peoples. All humans are endowed with the faculty of compassion, and for this reason can develop the humanitarian spirit. There is light shining in them, let them manifest an idea and it will radiate. Because I have confidence in the power of Truth and of the spirit, I believe in the future of humankind. The manifest intentions of others are recognized against a background of public institutions as interpreted by one’s view of the elf and its situation. I have not maintained, however, that the stages of development are innate or determined by psychological mechanisms. Whether various native propensities influence these stages is a matter I have left aside. Rather a theory of right and justice is used to describe what the expected course of development might be. The manner in which a well-ordered society is arranged, and the full system of principles, ideals, and precepts that govern the compete scheme, provide a way of distinguishing thee levels of morality. It seems plausible that, in a society regulated by the contract doctrine, moral learning would follow the order presented. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
The stages are determined by the structure f what is to be learned, proceeding from the simpler to the more complex as the requisite capacities are realize. By founding the account of moral learning explicitly upon a particular ethical theory, it is evident in what sense the sequence of stages represents a progressive development and not simply a regular sequence. Just as persons gradually formulate rational plans of life that answer to their deeper interests, so they come to know the derivation of moral precepts and ideals from the principles that they would accept in an initial situation of equality. Ethical norms are no longer experienced merely as constraints, but are tied together into one coherent conception. The connection between these standards and human aspirations is now comprehended, and persons understand their sense of justice as an extension of their natural attachments, and as a way of caring about the collective good. The many chains of reasons with their various stopping points are no longer simply distinct but are seen as elements of a systematic view. Those who espouse a different one will favour another account of these matters. However, in any case, some conception of justice surely has a place in explaining moral learning, even if this conception belongs solely to the psychological theory and is not itself accepted as philosophically correct. When we observe contemporary society one thing strikes us. We debate but make no progress. Why? Because as peoples we do not yet trust each other. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
It is astounding that humans, the instigator, inventor and vehicle of all these developments, the originator of all judgments and decisions and the planner of the future, must make oneself such a quantie negligeable. The contradiction, the paradoxical evaluation of humanity by humans oneself, is in truth a matter for wonder, and one can only explain it as springing from an extraordinary uncertainty of judgment—in other words, humans are an enigma to themselves. This is understandable, seeing that they lack the means of comparison necessary for self-knowledge. One knows how to distinguish oneself from animals in point of anatomy and physiology, but as a conscious, reflecting being, gifted with speech, one lacks all criteria for self-judgment. One is on this planet a unique phenomenon which ne cannot compare with anything else. The possibility of comparison and hence of self-knowledge would arise only if one could establish relations with quasi-human mammals inhabiting other stars. Until then humans must continue to resemble a hermit who knows that in respect of comparative anatomy one has affinities with the anthropoids but, to judge by appearances, is extraordinarily different from one’s cousins in respect of one’s psyche. It is just in this most important characteristic of one’s species that one cannot know oneself and therefore remains a mystery to oneself. The differing degrees of self-knowledge within one’s own species are of little significance compared with the possibilities which would be opened out by an encounter with a creature of similar structure but different origin. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Our psyche, which is primarily responsible for all the historical changes wrought by the hand of humans on the face of this planet, remains an insoluble puzzle and an incomprehensible wonder, an object of abiding perplexity—a feature it shares with all Nature’s secrets. In regard to the latter will still have hope of making more discoveries and finding answers to the most difficult questions. However, in regard to the psyche and psychology there seems to be a curious hesitancy. Not only is it the youngest of the empirical sciences, but it has great difficulty in getting anywhere near its proper object. In the same way that our picture of the World had to be freed by Copernicus from the prejudice of egocentricity, the most strenuous efforts of a well-nigh revolutionary nature were needed to free psychology, first from the spell of mythological ideas, and then from the prejudice that the psyche is, on the one hand, a mere epiphenomenon of a biochemical process in the brain and, on the other hand, a purely personal matter. The connection with the brain does not in itself prove that the psyche is an epiphenomenon, a secondary function casually dependent on biochemical processes in the physical substrate. Nevertheless, we know only too well how much the psychic function can be disturbed by verifiable processes in the brain, and this fact is so impressive that the subsidiary nature of the psyche seems an almost unavoidable inference. The phenomena of parapsychology, however, warn us to be careful, for they point to a relativization of space and time through psychic factors which casts doubt on our naïve and overhasty explanation in terms of psychophysical parallelism. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
For the sake of this explanation people deny the finding of parapsychology outright, either for philosophical reasons or for intellectual laziness. This can hardly be considered a scientifically responsible attitude, even though it is a popular way of a quite extraordinary intellectual difficulty. To assess the psychic phenomenon, we have to take account of all the other phenomena that go with it, and accordingly we can no longer practise any psychology that ignores the existence of the unconscious or of parapsychology. The structure and physiology of the brain furnish no explanation of the psychic process. The psyche has a peculiar nature which cannot be reduced to anything else. Like physiology, it presents a relatively self-contained field of experience, to which we must attribute a quite special importance because it includes one of the two indispensable conditions for existence as such, namely, the phenomenon of consciousness. Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no World, for the World exists for us only in so far as it is consciously reflected by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position co-equal with the principle of physical beings. The carrier of this consciousness in the individual, who does not produce the psyche of one’s own volition but is, on the contrary, preformed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. If therefore the psyche is of overriding empirical importance, so also is the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
This fact must be expressly emphasized for two reasons. Firstly, the individual psyche, just because of its individuality, is an exception to the statistical rule and is therefore robbed of one of its main characteristics when subjected to the levelling influence of statistical evaluation. Secondly, the Churches grant it validity only in so far as it acknowledges their dogmas—in other words, when it submits to a collective category. In both cases the will to individuality is regarded as egotistic obstinacy. Science devalues this as subjectivism, and the Churches condemn it morally as heresy and spiritual pride. As to the latter charge, it should not be forgotten that, unlike other religions, Christianity holds up before us a symbol whose content is the individual way of life of a man, the Son of Man, and that it even regards this individuation process as the incarnation and revelation of God Himself. Hence the development of man into a self acquires a significance whose full implications have hardly begun to be appreciated, because too much attention to externals blocks the way to immediate inner experience. Were not the autonomy of the individual the secret longing of many people it would scarcely be able to survive the collective suppression either morally or spiritual. All these obstacles make it more difficult to arrive at a correct appreciation of the human psyche, but they count for very little beside one other remarkable fact that deserves mentioning. This is the common psychiatric experience that the devaluation of the psyche and other resistances to psychological enlightenment are based in large measure on fear—on panic fear of the discoveries that might be made in the realm of the unconscious. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
These fears are not found only among persons who are frightened by the picture Dr. Freud painted of the unconscious; they also troubled the originator of psychoanalysis himself, who confessed to me that it was necessary to make a dogma of his sexual theory because this was the sole bulwark of reason against a possible “eruption of the black flood of occultism.” In these words of Dr. Freud was expressing his conviction that the unconscious still harboured many things that might lend themselves to “occult” interpretation, as is in fact the case. These “archaic vestiges,” or archetypal forms grounded on the instincts and giving expression to them, have a numinous quality that sometimes arouses fear. They are ineradicable, for they represent the ultimate foundations of the psyche itself. They cannot be grasped intellectually, and when one has destroyed one manifestation of them, they reappear in altered form. It is this fear of the unconscious psyche which not only impedes self-knowledge but is the gravest obstacle to a wider understanding and knowledge of psychology. Often this fear is so great that one dares not admit it even to oneself. This is a question which every religious person should consider very seriously; one might get an illuminating answer. We behold God in Jesus. Looking unto Jesus we see that it is the glory of God to give. “I do nothing of Myself,” said Christ; “the living Father hath sent Me, and I live by the Father.” “I seek not Mine own glory, but the glory of Him that sent Me.” John 8.28; 6.57; 8.50; 7.18. In these words is set forth the great principle which is the law of life for the Universe. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
All things Christ received from God, but He took to give. So in the Heavenly courts, in His ministry for all created beings; through the beloved Son, the Father’s life flows out to all; through the Son it returns, in praise and joyous service, a tide of love, to the great Source of all. And thus through Christ the circuit of beneficence is complete, representing the character of the great Giver, the law of the great character. Moroni said that with this golden book were two stones in silver bows called the Urim and Thummim, which were fastened to a breastplate. These were prepared by God to be used in translating the book. He explained that in ancient times, as related in the Bible, prophets possessed and used Urim and Thummim and breastplate. Those who used them were called “seers.” The angel explained that many prophecies of the Bible were about to be fulfilled. He quoted Scripture after Scripture from the Bible concerning these prophecies. Joseph Smith was cautioned that after he received the plates, the Urim and Thummim, and breastplate, he must not show them to anyone. As the angel talked, Joseph saw in a vision the place where the plates were hidden. Then the light in the room gathered around the angel Moroni and he disappeared from Joseph’s sight. As Joseph lay on his bed thinking about this wonderful experience, the room suddenly became bright again and the same Heavenly messenger stood at his bedside. He told the young man exactly the same things he had on his first visit, and showed the same vision. Then he disappeared in the same manner. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
After having been told these things twice, Joseph thought he could not forget them, but to his amazement the same messenger returned and repeated the same things as before. This time he cautioned Joseph that Satan would tempt him to obtain the plates for the purpose of getting rich. Joseph was forbidden to do this and was told that he must have no other reason for obtaining the plates than to glorify God; otherwise he could not have them. Almost immediately after the angel Moroni has ascended into Heaven following his third visits, and while Joseph lay thinking of the experiences of the night, he heard the cock crow in the barnyard. He realized then that morning had arrived and that his interviews with the Heavenly messenger had occupied the whole night. Predestination is the foreknowledge of God’s benefits. However, foreknowledge is not the things foreknown, but in the person who foreknows them. Therefore, predestination is in the one who predestines, and not in the predestined. Predestination is not anything in the predestined; but only in the person who predestines. Predestination is a part of providence. Now providence is not anything in the things provided; but is a type in the mind of the provider. However, the execution of providence which is called government, is in a passive way the thing governed, and in an active way the governor. Whence it is clear that predestination is type the ordering of some persons toward eternal salvation, existing in the divine mind. The execution, however, of this order is in a passive way in the predestined, but actively in God. The execution of predestination is the calling and magnification; accord to the Apostle (Romans 3.30): “Whom He predestined, them He also called and whom He called, them He also magnified.” #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Actions passing out to external matter imply of themselves passion—for example, the actions of warming and cutting; but not so actions remaining in the agent, as understanding and willing. Predestination is an action of this latter class. Wherefore, it does not put anything in the predestined. However, its execution, which passes out to external thing, has an effect in them. Destination sometimes denotes a real mission of someone to a given end; thus, destination can only be said of someone actually existing. It is takes, however, in another sense a mission which a person conceives in the mind; and in this manner we are aid to destine a thing which we firmly propose in our mind. In this latter way it is said that Eleazar “determined not to do any unlawful things for the love of life,” reports 2 Maccabees 6.20. Thus destination can be of a thing which does not exist. Predestination, however, by reason of the antecedent nature it implies, can be attributed to a thing which does not actually exist; in whatsoever ways destination is accepted. Preparation is twofold: of the patient in respect to passion and this is in the thing prepared; and f the agent to action, and this is in the agent. Such a preparation is predestination and as an agent by intellect is said to prepare itself to act, accordingly as it preconceives the idea of what is to be done. Thus, God from all eternity prepared by predestination, conceiving the idea of the order of some towards salvation. Grace does not come into the definition of predestination, as something belonging to its essence, but inasmuch as predestination implies a relation to grace, as of cause to effect, and of act to its object. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
Whence it does not follow that predestination is anything temporal. We may take comfort in the fact that the Overself never at any moment abandons or obliterates the human personality, however debased it becomes. Nor could it do so, whatever foolish cults say to the contrary, for through this medium it finds an expression in time-space. When we say that the Overself is within the heart, it would be a great error to think that we mean it is limited to the heart. For the heart is also within it. This seeming paradox will yield to reflection and intuition. The mysterious relationship between the ego and the Overself has been expressed by Jesus Christ in the following words: “The Father is in the Son, and the Son is in the Father.” Do not day that I will depart tomorrow because even today I still arrive. Look deeply: I arrive in every second to be a bud on a spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone. We invoke Thy divine assistance upon this entire congregation, its men and women as well as its children. May there by a vouchsafed unto them salvation from Heaven, grace, lovingkindness, and mercy, long life, ample sustenance, health of body and enlightenment of the mind. May you be blessed with children who will not neglect the Scripture. May the Ruler of the Universe bless you, prolong your lives, increase your days, and add to your years. May you be saved and delivered from every trouble and misfortune. May the Lord of Heaven be your help at all times and reasons; and let us say, Amen. I declare every barrier to the promise of God for you is being broken in the name of Jesus! The floodgates are being opened! #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Mr. William Wirt Winchester Believes in the Sanctity of Property Because He is a Millionaire!
The fine women of Salem had some extracurricular activities that were hardly orthodox. Men have been burned at the stake for speaking ill of the Christian creed. People fought, not only verbally but physically, over their religious beliefs. Most people of that day used alcohol liquors. In almost every home liquor could be found. If a man was drunk it was not considered indecent, nor was his reputation injured by such conduct. Ministers, as well as doctors, were given a drink whenever they made a call at a home. It was almost impossible for them to make their daily calls without becoming intoxicated. Wine was generously served at religious ceremonies–marriages, christenings, funerals, and ordinations. Joseph Smith might have noted the conduct of members in a revival meeting. People would come from miles around to attend these meetings, camping in cabins and tents. At daybreak a trumpet was sounded to awaken the people. Services were held almost all day long, scarcely allowing time to eat, and giving no time at all for recreation and play. Singing and shouting during sermons was common. Men, women, children often fell to the floor in trances, sometimes barking like dogs. Now and then some would get what was know as the “jerks” and their heads would jerk back and forth rapidly. There seemed no way to stop these “jerks” though persons would run, dance, pray to escape them. As they listened to the thundering voice of the evangelist, many would cry and scream. Some ministers believed that the wilder the crowd became the more successful was the revival. Meantime, the FBI could find no DNA material from the site which matched the material of any current missing persons. Nevertheless, they were deeply courteous about having been called in, and they did confirm that the DNA of several persons was present in the evil morass and that the whole resembled an antiquated but gruesome crime scene. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Were these some of the things which were displeasing in the sight of the Lord? Were these people drawing near to God with their lips but keeping their hearts from them. Undoubtedly these were puzzling questions of fourteen-year-old Joseph Smith. Listening to the bird’s sing on this cool spring morning, I was reminded of how excitement used to fill this time of the year because it was near the end of a school year, and ever closer to graduation and adult life. Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentations, laughter—to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the World of unrest to the World of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water. The work and the worry that fell to my lot through the practical interest I took in organ building, made me sometimes wish that I had never troubled myself about it, but if I do not give it up, the reason is that the struggle for the good organ is to me a part of the struggle for truth. An organ is like a cow; one does not look at its horns so much as its milk. God is with us. The light of the knowledge of glory of God is seen in the face of Jesus Christ. From the days of eternity, the Lord Jesus Christ was one with the father; He was the image of God, the image of His greatness and majesty, the outshining of His glory. It was it was to manifest this glory that He came into our World. To this sin-darkened Earth He came to reveal the light of God’s love–to be God with us. Therefore it was prophesied of Him. By coming to dwell with us, Jesus Christ was to reveal God both to humans and to angels. He was the Word of God—God’s thoughts made audible. If we are not grateful to God, we can never see the greatness in our lives. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
When we start to appreciate, we will begin to elevate! Some people regard logical thinking as the deadest and driest of our activities and may therefore be repelled by the privileged position. However, logical thinking—Reasoning—is valid and no one can deny it (philosophically speaking). You cannot, as we already know, prove that there are no proofs. However, if you wish to regard all human ideals as illusions and all human love as biological by-products, you can. That is, you can do so without running into flat self-contradiction and nonsense. Whether you can do so without extreme umplausibility—without accepting a picture of things which no one really believes—is another matter. Besides reasoning about matters of fact, humans also make moral judgments—“I ought to do this”—“I ought not to do that”—“This is good”—“That is evil.” Two views have been held about moral judgments. Some people think that when we make them we are not using our Reason, but are employing some different power. Other people think that we make them by our Reason. I myself hold this second view. That is, I believe that the primary moral principles on which all others depend are rationally perceived. We “just see” that there is no reason why my neighbour’s happiness should be sacrificed to my own, as we “just see” that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another. If we cannot prove either axiom, that is not because the irrational but because they are self-evident and all proofs depend on them. Their intrinsic reasonableness shines by its own light. It is because all morality is based on such self-evident principles that we say to a human, when we would recall one to right conduct, “Be reasonable.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
However, this is by the way. For our present purposes it does not matter which of these two views you adopt. The important point is to notice that moral judgments raise the same sort of difficulty for Naturalism as any other thoughts. We always assume in discussions about morality, as in all other discussions, if they can be fully accounted for by some non-moral and non-rational cause, that the other human’s views are worthless. When two humans differ about good and evil we soon hear tis principle being brought into play. “Mr. William Wirt Winchester believes in the sanctity of property because he is a millionaire”—“He believes in Pacifism because he is a coward”—“He approves of corporal punishment because he is a necrophile.” Such taunts may often be untrue: but the mere fact that they are made by the one side, and hotly rebutted by the other, shows clearly what principle is being used. Neither side doubts that if they were true, they would decisive. No one (in real life) pays attention to any oral judgment which can be shown to spring from non-moral and non-rational causes. The Freudian and the Marxist attack traditional morality precisely on this ground—and with wide success. All humans accept the principle. However, of course, what discredits particular moral judgments must equally discredit moral judgments as a whole. If that fact that humans have such ideas as ought and ought not at all can be fully explained by irrational and non-moral causes, then those ideas are an illusion. The Naturalist is ready to explain how the illusion arose. Chemical conditions produce life. Life, under the influence of natural selection, produces consciousness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Conscious organisms which behave in one way live longer than those which behave in another. Living longer, they are more likely to have offspring. Inheritance, and sometimes teaching as well, pass on their mode of behaviour to their young. Thus in every species a pattern of behaviour is built up. In the human species conscious teaching plays a larger part in the building it up, and the tribe further strengthens it by killing individuals who to not conform. They also invent gods who are said to punish departures from it. Thus, in time, there comes to exist a strong human impulse to conform. However, since this impulse is often at variance with the other impulses, a mental conflict arises, and the human expresses it by saying “I want to do A but I ought to do B.” This account may (or may not) explain why humans do in fact make moral judgments. It does not explain how they could be right in making them. It excludes, indeed, the very possibility of their being right. For when humans say “I ought” they certainly think they are saying something, and something true about the nature of the proposed action, and not merely about their own feelings. However, if Naturalism is true, “I ought” is the same sort of statement as “I itch” or “I am going to be sick.” In real life when a human says “I ought” we may reply, “Yes. You are right. That is what you ought to do,” or else, “No. I think you are mistaken.: However, in a World of Naturalists (if Naturalist really remembered their philosophy out of school) the only sensible reply would be, “Oh, are you?” All moral judgments would be statements about the speaker’s feelings, mistaken by him for statements about something else (the real moral quality of actions) which does not exist. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
Such a doctrine, I have admitted, is not flatly self-contradictory. The Naturalist can, if one chooses, brazen it out. One can day, “Yes. I quite agree that there is no such thing as wrong and right. I admit that no moral judgment can be ‘true’ or ‘correct’ and, consequently, that no one system of morality can be better or worse than another. All ideas of good and evil are hallucinations—shadows cast on the outer World by the impulses which we have been conditioned to feel.” Indeed many Naturalists are delighted to say this. However, then they must stick to it; and fortunately (though in consistently) most real Naturalists do not. A moment after they have admitted that good and evil are illusion, you will find them exhorting us to work for posterity, to educate, revolutionise, liquidate, live and die for the good of the human race. A Naturalist like Mr. H. G. Wells spent a long life doing so with passionate eloquence and zeal. However, surely this is very odd? Just as all the books about spiral nebulae, atoms and cave men would really have led you to suppose that the Naturalists claimed to be about to know something, so all the books in which Naturalists tell us what we ought to do would really make you believe that they thought some ideas of good (their own, for example) to be somehow preferable to others. For they write with indignation like humans proclaiming what is good in itself and denouncing what is evil in itself, and not at all like humans recording that they personally like concentrated cranberry juice, but some people prefer sweetened cranberry juice. Yet if the “oughts” of Mr. Wells and, say, Franco are both equally the impulses which Nature has conditioned each to have and both tell us nothing about any objective right or wrong, whence is all the fervour? Do they remember while they are writing thus that when they tell us we “ought to make a better World” the words “ought” and “better” must, on their own showing, refer to an irrationally conditioned impulse which cannot be true or false any more than a vomit or a yawn? #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
My idea is that sometimes they do forget. That is their glory. Holding a philosophy which excludes humanity, they yet remain human. At the sight of injustice they throw all their Naturalism to the winds and speak like humans and like human of genius. They know far better than they think they know. However, at other times, I suspect, they are trusting in a supposed way of escape from their difficulty. It works—or seems to work—like this. They say to themselves, “Ah, yes. Morality”—or “bourgeois morality” or some such addition—“Morality is an illusion. However, we have found out what modes of behaviour we are pressing you to adopt. Pray, do not mistake us for moralists. We are under an entirely new management” …just as if this would help. It would help if only we grant, firstly, that life is better than death and, secondly, that we ought to care for the lives of our descendants as much as, or more than, for our own. And both these are moral judgments which have, like all others, been explained away by Naturalism. Of course, having been conditioned by Nature in a certain way, we do feel thus about life and about posterity. However, the Naturalists have cured us of mistaking these feelings for insights into what we once called “real value.” Now that I know that my impulse to serve posterity is just the same kind of thing as my fondness for cheese—now that its transcendental pretensions have been exposed for a sham—do you think I shall pay much attention to it? When it happens to be strong (and it has grown considerably weaker since you explained to me its real nature) I suppose I shall obey it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
When it is weak, I shall put my money into cheese. There can be no reason for trying to whip up and encourage the one impulse rather than the other. Not now that I know what they both are. The Naturalists must not destroy all my reverence for conscience on Monday and expect to find me still venerating it on Tuesday. There is no escape along these lines. If we are to continue to make moral judgments (and whatever we say we shall in fact continue) then we must believe that the conscience of humans is not a product of Nature. Only if it is an offshoot of some absolute “on its own” and is not a product of non-moral, non-rational Nature. We must acknowledge the supernatural source for our ideas of good and evil. In other worse, we now know something more about God. If you hold that moral judgment is a different thing from Reasoning you will express tis new knowledge by saying “We now know that God has at least one other attribute than rationality.” If, like me, you hold that moral judgment is a kind of Reasoning, then you will say, “We now know more about the Divine Reason.” And with this we are almost ready to begin our main argument. However, before doing so it will be well to pause of the consideration of some misgivings of misunderstandings which may have already arisen. Happiness is related to good and bad life events, but the impact is smaller than you might imagine. The reason for this is that happiness tends to come from within a person. Subjective well-being is affected by our goals, choices, emotions, values, and personality. The way you perceive, interpret, and manage events is as important as the nature of the events themselves. People who are good a dodging the life’s rough, unsparing treatment (hard knocks) tend to create their own “luck.” As a result, they are happier and seem to negotiate life’s demands more smoothly. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
It is tempting to think that wealth brings happiness. However, does it? To a small degree wealthier people are happier than poorer people. Yet, the overall association between money and happiness is weak. In fact, people who win lotteries are often less happy than they were before, and imagine how much unhappier ill begotten gain might make them. Instant riches usually bring new stresses into a person’s life that tend to cancel out any beneficial effects of wealth. Essentially, money can make it possible to buy the good things in life, but money cannot buy a good life. Happiness usually must become from other sources More educated people tend to be a little happier than the less educated. However, this is most likely just another way of saying that there is a small connection between wealth and happiness. Higher education generally results in higher income and more social status. As education levels rise, more parents ae intellectually equipped to assume some responsibilities now delegated to schools. With the move toward knowledge-based industy and the increase of leisure, we can anticipate a small but significant tendency for highly educated parents to pull their children at least partway out of the public education systems, offering them home instruction instead. This trend will be sharply encouraged by improvements in computer-assisted education, Cisco Telepresence, electronic video recording, holography and other technical fields. Parents and students might sign short-term “learning contracts” with the nearby school, committing them to teach-learn certain courses or course modules. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Students might continue going to school for social and athletic activities or for subjects they cannot learn on their own or under the tutelage of parents or family friends. Mobile education is also a proposal, which would take students out of the classroom not merely to observe but to participate in significant community activity. Curricula would be shaped by students and community groups as well as professional educators. The former United States Commissioner of Education, Harold Howe, II, has also suggested the reverse: bringing the community into the school so that local stores, beauty parlors, prints shops, architecture firms, be given free space in the schools in return for free lessons by the adults who run this. President Trump and other want to keep the schools and class rooms open, so children are being supervised by adults during work hours, which allows the parents to work and the kids to get an education. This reduces crime rates and helps increase income earnings in the future for students. School also serves as a nice social club for children where they make life long friends and memories. Also, school provides nutrition for students and proper nutrition helps to raise the IQ of students and keeps them healthy. Children also learn how to respect authority figures and learn that behaviour has bad consequences, whereas good behaviour and hard work is rewarded. People who live in the age of information must have new skills in three crucial areas: learning, relating, and choosing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Students will need an enhanced human adaptability. By instructing students how to learn and unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education. Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the person who cannot read; one will be the human who has not learned how to learn. By speeding the turnover of people in our lives, we allow less time for trust to develop, less time for friendships to ripen. Thus we witness a search for ways to cut through the polite “public” behaviour directly to the sharing of intimacy. Presented with numerous alternatives, an individual chooses the one most compatible with one’s values. As overchoice deepens, the person who lacks a clear grasp of one’s own values (whatever these may be) is progressively disabled. Worse yet, students are seldom encouraged to analyze their own values and those of their teachers and peers. Millions pass through the education system without once having been forced to search out the contradictions in their own value systems, to probe their own life goals deeply, or even to discuss these matters candidly with adults and peers. Students hurry from class to class. Teachers and professors are harried and grow increasingly remote. Even the “bull session”—informal, extra-curricular discussion about pleasures of the flesh, politics, or religion that helps participants identify and clarify their values—grown less frequent and less intimate as transience rises. Married people report a greater happiness than people who are divorces, separated, or single. It could be that happiness people are simply more likely to get married than to remain sleepless in Seattle. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
However, better explanation for this association is that marriage partners can act as emotional and economic buffers against the hardships of life and a faithful marriage also helps keep people chaste in the eyes of the Lord, in most cases, as long as you are not sleeping with the enemy. There is a beneficial association between happiness and holding spiritual beliefs. Religious beliefs may add to feelings of purpose and meaning in life, resulting in greater happiness. Marriage between partners is a vital part of God’s plan. The Lord has said, “Whoso forbiddeth to marry is not ordained of God, for marriage is ordained of God unto man,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 49.15. Since the beginning, marriage has been a law of the gospel. Marriages are intended to last forever, not just for our mortal lives. Adam and Eve were married by God before there was any death in the World. They had an eternal marriage. They taught the law of eternal marriage to their children and their children’s children. As the years passed, wickedness entered the hearts of the people and the authority to perform this sacred ordinance was taken from the Earth. Through the Restoration of the gospel, eternal marriage has been restored to Earth. Many people in the World consider marriage to be only a social custom, a legal agreement between two people in love together. However, to Latter-day Saints, marriage is much more. Our exaltation depends on marriage, along with other principles and ordinances, such as faith, repentance, baptism, and receiving the gift of the holy Ghost. We believe that marriage is the most sacred relationship that can exist between two loving people. This sacred relationship affects our happiness now and in the eternities. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Heavenly Father has given us the law of eternal marriage so we can become like Him. The Lord has said: “In the celestial glory there are three Heavens or degrees: and in order to obtain the highest, a human must enter into this order of the priesthood [meaning the new and everlasting covenant of marriage]; and if one does not, one cannot obtain it,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 131.1-3. Another possibility is that church membership may simply provide social support that softens that impact of life’s negative events. Incubation is the term applied to the sleeping in a temple—usually a special shrine or sanctuary used for healing and healing-dreams and dream-oracles alone—as a means of healing. This was practiced by ancient Greek and Babylonians. It was also frequently practiced in ancient Egypt at the temples of Isis and Serapis with effects similar to those of hypnotism. Five hundred years before Christ at the temple of Epidaurus, where the inspiring spirit or god was Aesculapius (the patron saint of modern medicine still), sick patients were put to sleep by priests at the foot of the Aesculapius’ statue. In many cases, they awoke suddenly cured. That the real effectiveness of incubation was not the work of a departed spirit but of Nature in the sleep state combined with the sufferer’s faith, was shown by the custom which still prevails in Greece. Here sleep in a temple of Aesculapius was simply replaced by sleep in the church associated with a Christian saint. Consider a cut had and how Nature at once sets to work to repair the damage. The anatomist tells us that the leucocytes in the blood automatically build a bridge of tissue over the wound’s surface. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
However, what orders the leucocytes to make the needed adjustments? What shows them how to make it? There is obviously an intelligence behind them, a mind within the body outside and apart from the conscious mind. There are miracles in Nature, and at this time, happenings to which science possesses no key. The human consciousness, for instance, is capable of manifesting power which contradict psychological knowledge, just as the human body is capable of manifesting phenomena which contradict medical knowledge. Both powers and phenomena may seem miraculous, but they really issue forth from the hidden laws of human’s own being. The process take pace in the dark only to us. This life-force, this invisible energy, is behind and within, around and above the physical body. Under certain circumstances its rea can be seen and traced out and its recuperative healing power drawn upon. It forms an aura, the etheric or vital body of light, but not the still more elusive and subtle divine body of Light nor the aura of various colours, the astral body. The stereotype of the crotchety antiquated person who id dissatisfied with everything is inaccurate. Life satisfaction and happiness generally do not decline with age. People are living longer and staying healthier, which has greatly delayed age-related declines. When declines do occur, mature people seem better able to cope with them. The hindrances which wrong bodily regimes put in one’s Quest are not only physical but also psychic, emotional, and mental. The condition of a human’s health, the medical state of one’s body, may contribute to one’s spiritual outlook, may enfeeble or enliven one’s faith. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
If union with the Overself-consciousness is to be achieved, or progress to that goal made, the body ought also to share in the benefits received. It too ought to be freer from discordant elements, organs, or operations. The wise student will recognize that one gains more than one loses by such sacrifices as this discipline of the body calls for. The benefits of resisting custom’s dominance are both disproportionate and durable, with a value so high as to make the discipline bearable and the sacrifices smaller. Wen one hears about these ascetic-sound regimes a chill sets in. However, what is it that rebels against them? It is the ego, the weakness of human will. Yet the rebellion is ill-founded, for the body is not tortured by being brought under control—only its perverted, exaggerated, or enslaving appetites suffer by doing so. The regimes themselves are sensible and are not fantastical fads. They are simply indication of the quester’s need to live more carefully than other people, and to change habits which are bad. They are hygienic recommendations offered to those who want to advance their spiritual journey more quickly. The bodily cells are so pervaded with toxic materials, clogged with them, so contaminated by them, that this purificatory work is an essential preliminary to the mystical work, proper for most aspirants except those who have the inborn capability of quickly rising to an intense concentration which frees the cells from such poisons. There is a mass of improperly digested, half-decayed food material lying in the intestines in a fermenting condition, while farther on here are accumulated deposits of petrified impurities on the lining of the colon and the membrane of the bowels. These substances are rejected by they body, which suffers by their presence but is unable to free itself from the without conscious and willing co-operation on the part of its owner. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
The body’s physiological processes are clogged and encumbered by them and its nervous system and brain organ polluted by the inferior blood brought to nourish them. To achieve this aim, a certain preparation as well as purification of the body is required. The spine must be cleared of adhesions, congestions, distortions, shrinkings, and nerve branch pressures. The tissues and blood have to be cleansed of the toxic material accumulated in them. The salvation which frees a human from enslavement to one’s lower nature is necessary and good, but it goes only part of the way to fulfilling one’s needs. One’s fleshly body also requires salvation. It ought to be freed from its poisoned, clogged, and unnatural condition. If it is saturated wit destructive acids or clogged wit decaying material, the body cannot respond so freely to the subtle forces, nor can the brain and nervous system respond so freely if they are stupefied by alcohol or drugs. As the consciousness evolves to a higher level, so the body it functions through must become more refined in quality and purified in nature. Mental equilibrium, deep prayer, cannot be attained without changing the habits which obstruct it. Even if the requisite purification of the body’s cells and blood from all toxins has been achieved, a human must still refrain from starting on those ways which caused toxemia. There is a common error that drugs and medicines are enough to keep us in good health. They are not. The only things that can do so are correct living habits, righting thinking habits, and proper eating habits. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
A knowledge of personal hygiene will keep us in better health than a hundred boxes of pills. We must learn to conform to the laws of hygienic living—mental and physical—if we want to achieve a sound mind in a should body. We may not break those laws with impunity, nor believe that because we have been spiritually healed once we are exempt from the always. The desire to gain purity must provide the power to follow the regimes needed for it. The sediment of egotism in the mind and animality in the flesh cannot be cleared out unless this desire grows strong and remains enduring. The mental courage to cast out those wrong habits of living which unenlightenment of spiritual hygiene has allowed one to pick up, must show itself. People who are satisfied with their jobs tend to be happier, but the association is weak. If fact, it probably just reflects the fact that job satisfaction is a large part of greater life satisfaction. With respect to happiness and personality, it may be fair to paraphrase Paris Hilton, “I am a star and I was born to shine. I am happy, powerful, strong and confident.” To a degree, some people are more temperamentally disposed to be happy, regardless of life events. In general, happier people also tend to be extraverted (outgoing), optimistic, and worry-free. This combination probably influences the balance of beneficial and negative emotions. In general, if they are meeting their personal goals, people tend to be happy. If you feel you are making progress, on a day-to-day basis, on smaller goals that relate to long-term, life goals, this is especially true. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
However, achieving one’s goals does not always lead to happiness. Consider the highly successful person who is absorbed in one’s accomplishments. All it may take is a crisis, like a child’s illness or the death of a friend, to make life feel meaningless. However, if the person begins to act with integrity, meaning can be restored and the crisis resolved. Thus, optimal human functioning involves integrity as well as an ability to accomplish goals. “Doing well,” they say, is associated with happiness. In contrast, “being yourself” is associated with leading a meaningful life. In short, if we are to live with integrity, the goals we purse must express our core interests and values. Examples of the kinds of personal projects (short-term goals) and long-term goals that occupy us: for architect’s the job is usually spent on location. When a project is located nearby, architect may leave the office periodically to stop by the project site. Some short-term goals involved checking in with building developers and engineers to ensure the client’s objectives are met, review projects, and check on any potential obstacles in construction. Many architects believed that if they did great work, somehow society would recognize the contributions and value they were making to the World and reward them with an endless stream of passion projects to grow their firm. However, the truth when it comes to long term goals, running an architecture firm is exactly the same as running any other business. You have to work just as hard to win business as you do to deliver it. An important long-term goal to remember is that your costs of running a business increase over the years. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Your money goals should define the revenues and profits you will need to accommodate these increased costs, and support the growth you want. Also another long-term goal should be to become innovative and sometimes that requires a history lesson. For an architecture firm, stepping back into the past the Victorian America and seeing what was popular back them, like butler’s pantries, multiple parlors, patio spaces, and yards with green spaces, mixed with some modern style designs is a long-term way to stay relevant. People goals typically focus on who you want to work with. This can include the employees you want on your staff, and it may also include the type of clients you want to attract. Sometimes working with non-profits has provided some firms with not only a great sense of fulfillment but also a deeper connection to their local community. Working with one firm allowed the nonprofit client to connect with an ideal prospect and close a $6,000,000 group up non-profit project, at the height of the COVID-19 crisis pandemic. Who we work with can greatly affect our enthusiasm and motivation on the job, so setting goals around who we choose to work with can have an immense impact on our attitude towards our work. Such goals are crucial because overall well-being is a combination of happiness and meaning. Pursuing goals that are inconsistent with personal interests and values can leave a person feeling uneasy, bothered, and uncomfortable. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Happier persons tend to be married, comfortable with their work, extraverted, religious, optimistic, and generally satisfied with their lives. They also are making progress toward their goals. However, attain goals that do not express our deeper interests and values may add little to happiness. When, then, makes a good life? Purpose and meaning are important sources of well-being at any point in life. As we have seen, a good life is one that is happy and meaningful. We are most likely to experience a meaningful life when we act with integrity. It is interesting that while achievement and external goals may preoccupy younger persons, integrity becomes increasingly important later in life. “To thine own self be true” may seem like a cliché, but it is actually not a bad place to begin a search for a happy and a satisfying life. “God is not the author of confusion, but of peace. Let all things be done decently and in order,” reports 1 Corinthians 14.33 and 40. Our little World is the lesson book of the Universe. God’s wonderful purpose of grace, the mystery of redeeming love, is the theme into which “angels desire to look,” and it will be their study throughout endless ages. Both the redeemed and the unfallen beings will find in the cross of Christ their science and their song. It will be seen that the glory shining in the face of Jesus is the glory of self-sacrificing love. In the light from Calvary it will be seen that the law of self-renouncing love is the law of life for Earth and Heaven; that the love which “seeketh not her own” has its source in the heart of God; and that in the meek and lowly One is manifested the character of Him who dwelleth in the light which no human can approach unto. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Sometimes, when a bird cries out, or the wind sweeps through a tree, or an angel whispers in a far-off farm, I hold still and listen a long time. My World turns and goes back to the place where, a thousand forgotten years ago, the bird and the blowing wind were like me, and were my brothers. My soul turns into a tree, and an animal, and a cloud bank. Then changed and odd it comes home and asks me questions. What should I reply? Faithful art Thou, O Lord our God, and faithful are Thy words, for no word of thine shall remain unfulfilled. Thou art a faithful and merciful God and King. Blessed art Thou, O Lord God, who art faithful in fulfilling Thy words. Please be merciful unto America, for it is the fountain of our life, and mayest Thou soon in our day deliver Zion that is grieved in spirit. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who makest America rejoice with her children. Make us rejoice, O Lord our God, with Elijah the prophet, Thy servant, and with the kingdom of the house of David, Thine anointed. Soon may Elijah come and bring joy to our hearts. May no stranger occupy David’s throne and may no usurper inherit his glory. For by Thy holy name Thou hast promised unto one that one’s light will never be extinguished. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the Shield of America. We give Thee thanks and bless Thee, O Lord our God, for the Torah, and for the worship of this day and for the prophets, as well as for this Sabbath day which Thou, O Lord our God, hast given us for holiness and for rest, for glory and delight. Evermore may Thy name be continually praised by every living being. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hallowest the Sabbath. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Winchester Mystery House
It’s May 1st which means it’s halfway to Halloween! We are hard at work dreaming up a new experience for Halloween 2021 that will feature a projection mapped show on the front of the mansion. Stay tuned for more details coming soon!
“Lord God,” said Mrs. Sarah Winchester, as the flames rose and the fire crackled. “We got a dead girl, a huge mansion that is too big to heat, too big to maintain, too expensive to sale, a bunch of weird books, and a regular tomb of gold with an empty iron coffin in it, and a half-ghost boy standing here. Now this translation just arrived. ‘Here sleeps Annie Winchester, whose mortal hands once made the most beautiful cameos, even for emperors and and kings. Guard me, ye gods and goddesses whose images I render so well. A curse on those who attempt to disturb my resting place.'”
Watch your step in the séance room! There are three exits in this room, The main door, a secret passageway leading into an unfinished closet, and this door that opens to an 8-ft drop into the kitchen below.
Self-Guided Mansion Tour:
👉 Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com
When a Person Speaks, Please Listen, they are Revealing their Hearts!
No one can give a definition of the soul. However, we know what it feels like. The soul is the sense of something higher than our selves, something the stirs in us thoughts, hopes, and aspirations which go out to the World of goodness, truth and beauty. The soul is a burning desire to breathe in this World of light and never to lose it—to remain children of the light. We need also to remember that the attitude of the advanced soul towards personal suffering is not the same as the common one. One’s standpoint is different. So far as we know human history on this globe, all the facts show that sickness, pain, disease, and death are parts of the conditions governing the physical body’s experience because they are inescapable and inevitable parts of all physical-plane experience for highly organized forms, whether human or otherwise. That is, they are part of the divine plan for humans. We humans resent such experiences, but it may be that they are necessary to our rounded development and that the Illuminated who have approached closer to the infinite wisdom perceive this and drop their resentment. Here we may recall Sri Ramakrishna’s attitude towards the cancer in the throat from which he died, Saint Bernadette of Lourdes’ attitude towards her painful lingering and fatal disease of consumption, Ramana Maharshi’s fatalism about his bodily pains and ailments, and Sri Aurobindo’s reply to the physician who attended him for a broken knee after a fall: “How is it that you, a Mahatma, could not foresee and prevent this accident?” “I still have to carry this human body about me and it is subject to ordinary human limitations and physical laws.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Only familiarity with the thought of death creates true, inward freedom from material things. The ambition, greed, and love of power that we keep in our hearts, that shackle us to this life in chains of bondage, cannot in the long run deceive the human who looks death in the face. Rather, by contemplating one’s end, one eventually feels purified and delivered from one’s baser self, from material things, and from other humans, a well as from fear and hatred of one’s fellow humans. With time, as it stands at this point in our evolution, the body deteriorates, its youth and beauty vanish, its health becomes uncertain or, worse, precarious. The young Gautama, overwhelmed by this sudden realization, sought in the mind a better and more lasting condition. The natural contemplation of death can be comforting. If our lives had no appointed end but went on forever, have you ever considered how dreadful it would be, as we are living in a continuously changing World, full of corruption, and factions of authority figures that are out of control and insane? Can you imagine that as far as the eye can see into the future we should remain enmeshed in the desires and troubles of this life and that all the ensuing envy, hatred, and malice, our own and other people’s should continue to pile up undiminished? The vain delusion that death will have no power over the prophet, and over those followers who faithfully practise the prophet’s teaching, has appeared in modern times in the New World as well as the Old World. Even Gandhi shared and propagated the view that a sinless human would necessarily have a perfectly healthy body. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
When, later, Gandhi suffered from appendicitis, he blamed his own failure to control passion and thought for its appearance. However, we also know that our environment can affect our health. For instance, chemicals that people are exposed to like Agent Orange can kill them, alter their DNA, cause cancer, and birth defects in their children. It can also poison the environment. Or if one lives in a substandard home where mold grows in the carpets, on the windows and in the closets, they can become ill and die. Or if the landlord feels it is their right to expose you to deadly poisons and the state refuses to enforce the laws, one can become ill and die. So, sin may cause all illness, but it is not necessarily your sinning that is causing you to become ill and die. There are often other precipitating factors that we have no control over. However, if one can succeed in refusing to identify oneself with the suffering body, one will not suffer with it. All the high-sounding babble will not remove the stark fact staring them in the face; all the glib consolatory theorizing will not waft away the terrible spectacle of the guru stricken by cancer. The ordinary human feels that pain alone. The philosopher feels both the pain and its antidote—Being. Such is our unenlightened state that we weep when one human, who is weary with age, escapes from one’s body, and we preform a dismal ceremony of lament when another human, tired with sickness, separates oneself from it. We pretend to believe in God, in Mind infinitely wise, and yet we have not learned to accept death as a wise event in nature and as proper as birth. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
These cults which seek to perpetuate Earthly life thereby question the divine wisdom and reveal their own materialistic and egoistic attachments. The attainment of spiritual consciousness does not automatically bring with it the attainment of healing powers, any more than it brings mathematical powers or musical powers. The fallacy that the body is automatically healed of its diseases when the mind is healed of its unenlightened state, needs to be exposed because it is so specious and so attractive. It is a curious bifurcated kind of consciousness where ne is aware of what the body is suffering but where one can also feel the support of infinite peace at one’s center. Thus both pain and peace are within it. Fountaingrove was established in 1875 by Thomas Lake Harris, founder of the Brotherhood of the New Life and of the three colonies in New York between 1861 and 1867. Fountaingrove, described by its founder as a Theo-Socialist community was situated in Northern California on 700 acres two miles north of Santa Rosa, “the Eden of the West.” The charismatic Mr. Harris called himself the “primate” or “pivotal man” chosen by God, in whom forces of good and evil fought on Earth and from whom the announcement of Christ’s Second Coming would emerge. His spiritualist doctrine included teachings such as Divine Respiration, which enabled the brotherhood to commune with God through rhythmic breathing. In 1891, Mr. Harris’s complex theories of Spiritual Counterparts—each person has a counterpart in Heaven—and celibacy left Fountaingrove with a successful enterprise. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Even in the midst of bodily sufferings, one will still keep and not lose one’s beautiful serenity of mind. And one is able to do so precisely because one is able to differentiate the flesh from the mind. Inevitably, it must counteract, even though it may not obliterate, the body’s pain. Pain and suffering, sin and evil, disease and death, exist only in the World of thoughts, not in the World of pure thought itself. They are not illusions, however, but they are transient. Whoever attains to pure Thought will also attain in consciousness to a life that is painless, sorrow-free, sinless, undecaying, and undying. Beings above desires and fears, it is necessarily above the miseries caused by unsatisfied desires and realized fears, it is necessarily above the miseries caused by unsatisfied desires and realized fears. However, at the same time one will also have an accompanying consciousness of life in the body, which must obey the laws of its own being, natural laws which set limitations and imperfections upon it. This much can be said to the element of truth contained in some theoretical doctrines of Vedantic Advaita and Christian Science. You may think it strange that I have spoken so much about death and not a word about immortality, the word one generally uses to dispel one’s fears. Perhaps one has talked too much and too superficially about immortality, in order to comfort people in the face of death. Hence the word has been depreciated. Immortality believed in for the sake of comfort is not genuine immortality. The impression it makes on us is as fleeting as a picture pained on a wall in watercolour—the next shower of rain will wash it away. It is imposed on people from the outside. They soon forget about it, preferring to stifle their fear of death by refusing to think about it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
However, the human who dares to live one’s life with death before one’s eyes, the human who receives life back bit by bit and lives as though it did not belong to one by right but has been bestowed on one as a gift, the human who has such freedom and peace of mind that one has overcome death in one’s thoughts—such a human believes in eternal life because it is already one’s, it is a present experience, and one already benefits from its peace and joy. No one we know of, because Jesus Christ, has ever come back from the other World. I cannot console you, but one thing I can tell you as long as my ideals are alive, I will be alive. There is a single source of Life which envelops the Universe and pervades humans. By its presence in oneself, one is able to exist physically and function mentally. That Power which brought the body into existence originally maintains its involuntary functions, cures its diseases, and heals its wounds. It is within the body itself; it is the life-force aspect of the Soul, the Overself. Its curative virtue may express itself through various mediums—as herbs and foods, hot, cold, or mud baths, and deep breathings, exercise, and osteopathy—or it may express itself by their complete absence as in fasting, often the quickest and most effective medium. Or, disdaining physical methods entirely, it may act directly and almost miraculously as spiritual healing. The role of physical treatments of any kind is to supply favourable conditions for the action of the universal life-force which does the real healing work, just as food, water, and air supply materials to this same force for the repair of tissue and the regeneration of cells. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
If it is the heart’s activity which enables the whole body to exist and carry out its function in the World, it is the life-force’s activity which enables the heart to carry out its function in the body. The body has its own natural intelligence which serves it when the skin is cut or the flesh is wounded, coagulating the blood and forming new tissue. This intelligence heals, repairs, and re-energizes, provided you put no obstructions in its way through wrong diet, excessive activity, or bad habits. Nature is an expression of the Universal Mind. The plants are given to us for medicine or food. It is an insult to Nature to despise these remedies. The physical body attracts solar energies from the surrounding atmosphere, and vital elements from food, air, and water, and incorporates them into itself. This gives it the force whereby its limbs make their own movements. However, the ultimate sustaining strength is derived from the Overself. It is this intelligent life-force which regulates the hair’s growth, keeps the body at an even temperature, and regulates contracting and expanding of the lungs. Humans do not do these things consciously or ordinarily, but the fore is well able to take care of them. The life-force comes into play automatically when healing is required, but we put so much obstruction in its path that we prolong the disease until it may become chronic. The belief that the body is permeated by a power which heals it when sick was accepted by the Greeks before Christ. The medical person’s role is to co-operate with this power. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Just as there is one process in the body which decays it with the years and ultimately destroys it, so there is another process which beneficently recuperates and even heals it. After all and in the end, it is Nature which brought us to birth n this planet. Can we not therefore credit her with the power of restoring the health needful to maintain the lives she has taken the trouble to originate? Nature not only soothes troubled minds but heals troubled bodies. She provides them with curative herbs, barriers, barks waters, rays, leaves—the woos are sanitariums. The psychic poisons resulting from civilized human’s excessive, exciting, and ego-stimulating activities must be treated on different levels, the antidotes being sleep, mental quiet, diet, rest, and relaxation. The life-force displays one remarkable effect during sleep: it not only recuperates the body but—as in the cases of Napoleon and General Douglas MacArthur—keeps the body strong and tough even though never exercised. For these two men possessed the uncommon power of being able to fall asleep within a minute or two at will. There is nothing the blood of Jesus Christ cannot handle! He has already given you the victory! For every weary, worn out place in your mind, body and soul—I pray God is supernaturally giving you His strength to heal and fortify and repair right now in the name of Jesus! The Christian who recognizes the never-ceasing wonder and divine worth of one’s body, who accepts it as the stage on and through which one has to fulfill oneself and realize one’s ideal, is not degrading that ideal or falling back into bondage but is actually carrying out the high purpose which is held before humans in the cosmic scheme. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Every part of the body shows forth this infinite wisdom. The body gives us our existence in this time-spaced World but its service does not stop there; for, its flesh cleansed and its breathing quieted, it lends itself to higher purpose—no less than acting as a temple of the holy spirit for blissful prayer. Incarnation is an opportunity for salvation. The body is a holy temple. The flesh is a revelation of the World’s Mind working. And if humans are made in the image of God it is so in one’s whole person, and it is a ridiculous stand to denounce the flesh as worthless. We are not only spiritual beings, we are material beings and here to have a spiritual and material existence. Life should be beautiful. We should not want to badly to escape the flesh, but to end corruption and greed so we can better enjoy our finite experience on Earth. The spirit is interblend with the flesh. How close is our relationship to that other Self, that Godlike Overself! And not only one’s mind’s relationship but also one’s body’s. For in the center of every cell in blood, marrow, flesh, and bone, there is the void that holds, and is, pure Spirit. This physical life may seem like death to the inner life; yet it is our only means of developing the inner life. All these physical methods are only preliminary, are only disciplines to establish the proper bodily conditions for inner work. They can not o themselves bring about spiritual illumination. The body is our physical home. Though its five senses we may suffer pain and misery or enjoy satisfaction and pleasure. Therefore it should be well treated and well cared for, kept healthy as far as we can. This is not only a personal need but also a spiritual duty for its condition may obstruct or assist the inner work. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The earth is the scene where humans are placed to achieve their spiritual development. The body is the only direct contact one has with it: How foolish is it to mistreat the body through unenlightenment, abuse it through carelessness, or neglect it through laziness? The belief that any physical method can liberate humans spiritually or evolve one mystically is shallow and deceptive. However, if it cannot fulfill these aims it can indirectly promote them by providing more favourable conditions for their attainment. That this way of purer living leads to a higher vitality, a greater physical buoyancy than one would otherwise have had is a pleasant incidental result. However, the deeper result, which most concerns aspirants, is a more active intuitive life and a less active animal nature. If we will take sufficient care of the body and give sufficient thought to its experiences, if we will follow the counsel of reason rather than the impulse of appetite, its experiences, if we will follow the counsel of reason rather than the impulse of appetite, its health will be fostered, its life prolonged, and its functioning improves. If we treat the body carefully and heed the laws of health, we will have fewer obstacles in the way of spiritual efforts. Food is important for this purpose. Tensions in the muscle should be avoided, for there is an influence on the mind from the body. The body (like the soul) gives messages of counsel, warning or approval to one but too often one does not listen to them, does not understand them, or does not want one’s complacency (formed by tendencies, habits, and surroundings) disturbed. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The terrestrial inheritance—the body’s instincts, appetites, and passions—must be controlled and disciplined if these higher interests are to bear any fruit. Time, strength, attention, for, pleasures of the flesh, activity and nonactivity, sleep and waking must all be regulated. The mysterious character of the Overself inevitably puzzles the intellect. We may appreciate it better if we accept the paradoxical fact that it unites a duality and that therefore are two ways of thinking of it, both correct. There is the divine being which is entirely above all the temporal concerns, absolute and universal, and there is also the demi-divine being which is in historical relation with the human ego. It is possible for the fully illumined mystic to experience two different states of identification with one’s Higher Self. In one, one becomes conscious of the latter on IT’s own plane; in the other, which one experiences in deep trace only, even if that is transcended and there is only the ONE/Being. Yet this is not annihilation. What it is (infinite) is beyond human comprehension, and therefore beyond human description. It is hard to tell in words about the wordless, hard to formulate in intellect-born phrases what is beyond the intellect. To say that the higher self is or is not individualized is to distort meaning and arouse miscomprehension. However, a smile may help us here. The drop of water which, with the countless millions of other drops, makes up the ocean is distinct but not separable from them. It is both different from and yet the same as them. At the base of each human’s being stretches the one infinite life alone, but within it one’s center of existence rests. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
A miracle is an extraordinary event caused by the power of God. Miracles are an important element in the work of Jesus Christ. They include healings, restoring the dead to life, and resurrection. Faith is necessary in order for miracles to be manifested. “And after they had been received unto baptism, and were wrought upon and cleansed by the power of the Holy Ghost, they were numbered among the people of the church of Christ; and their names were taken, that they might be remembered and nourished by the good word of God, to keep the in the right way, to keep them continually watchful unto prayer, relying alone upon the merits of Christ, who was the author and the finisher of their faith,” reports Moroni 6.4. We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return, we become plants, trunks foliage, roots, bark, we are bedded in the ground, we are rocks, we are oaks, we grow in the opening side by side, we browse, we are two among the wild herds, spontaneous as any, we are two fishes swimming in the sea together, we are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes mornings and evenings, we are also the coarse smut of beats, vegetables, minerals, we are two predatory hawks, we soar above and look down, we are two resplendent suns, we it is who balance ourselves orbic and steller, we are as two comets, we prowl fang’d and four-footed in the woods, we spring on prey, we are two clouds forenoons and afternoons driving overhead, we are seas mingling, we are two of those cheerful waves rolling over each other and interewtting each other, we are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious, we are snow, rain, cold, darkness, we are each product and influence of the globe, we have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we too, we have voided all but freedom and al but our own joy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
It is lovely indeed, it is lovely indeed. I, I am the spirit within the Earth. The feet of the Earth are my feet; the legs of the Earth are my legs. The strength of the Earth is my strength; the thoughts of the Earth are my thoughts; the voice of the Earth is my voice. The feather of the Earth is my feather; all that belongs to the Earth belongs to me; all that surrounds the Earth surrounds me. I, I am the scared works of the Earth. It is lovely indeed, it is lovely indeed. Sometimes people deny the power of God; yet in the same breath they are according the Devil a power which is greater than one is willing to acknowledge the Lord can possess. There are many things that may be displeasing in the sight of the Lord. Some religious people believe that if people are of “of the elect” God will save them in one’s own due time regardless of the way they live or what they do. If there were “not of the elect,” it will do no good to preach to or teach them because a saving faith, or “regeneration” as it is called, is considered a gift from God by which one transformed the hearts of a few chosen. Various denominations attempt to confine their religious beliefs into definite molds. These rigid beliefs stand in the way of the forward march of truth. They give no opportunity for new truths nor for new or corrected interpretation of the doctrine. Let the love of God invade your heart, your head, your life and lead you in all that you do! Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, Rock of all ages, righteous in all generations. Thou art the faithful God, promising and performing, speaking and fulfilling, for all Thy words are true and righteous. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
WE BUILD THE PLACES WHERE LIFE’S BEST MOMENTS CAN HAPPEN
Imagine…you are in the kitchen cookin’ up dinner, your spouse is on the couch watching TV, while you teenager completes homework in the loft space upstairs. We love the togetherness accomplished with the open floorplan of Cresleigh Home. Within each Cresleigh neighborhood, you’ll find new homes thoughtfully designed to suit the needs of any generation and any lifestyle, with energy efficiency and reliability at their core.
Every Cresleigh team member is passionate about building a new home that you can rely on and a new home that helps you to focus on what truly matters: creating memories with the people you love.
No matter what “home” means to you, there is surely something nostalgic about the place we call home. A Cresleigh Home is the place where we eat, the place with friends and family, where we enjoy our home goods and decor, and it’s the place we make our own.
There is nothing more important than a good, safe, secure home. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-ranch/
Welcome to the neighborhood.
The Popular Idea that “You Cannot Legislate Morality” is a Myth!
When the human mind is made obsolete by advancing technology, the soul may not be far behind. The pace of events is moving so fast that unless we can find some way to keep our sights on tomorrow, we cannot expect to be in touch with today. Every society faces not merely a succession of probable futures, but an array of possible futures, and a conflict over preferable futures. Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future. In the quickening race to put humans and machines on the planets, tremendous recourses are devoted to making possible a “soft landing.” Every sub-system of the landing craft is exquisitely designed to withstand the shock of arrival. Armies of engineers, geologists, physicists, metallurgists and other specialists concentrate years of work on the problem of landing impact. Failure of any sub-system to function after touch-down could destroy human lives, not to mention billions of dollars worth of apparatus and tens of thousands of human-years of labour. Today over seven billion human beings, the total population of technology-rich nations, are speeding toward a rendezvous with the super-age of information. Must we experience mass future shock? Or can we, too, achieve a “soft landing?” We are rapidly accelerating our approach. The craggy outlines of the new society are emerging from the mists of tomorrow. Yet even as we speed closer, evidence mounts that one of our most critical sub-systems—education—is dangerously malfunctioning. What passes for education today, even in our “best” school and colleges, is hopeless anachronism. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Parents look to education to fit their children for life in the future. Teachers warn that lack of an education will cripple a child’s chances in the World of tomorrow. Government ministries, churches, the mass media—all exhort young people to stay in school, insisting that now, as never before, one’s future is almost wholly dependent upon educations. Yet for all this rhetoric about the future, our schools face backward toward a dying system, rather than forward to the emerging new society. Their vast energies are applied to cranking out people who focus on information technology tooled for survival in a system that will long out live most people. The Information Age is the ideal that access to and the control of information is the defining characteristic of this current era in human civilization. The Information Age, also called the Computer Age, The Digital Age, and the New Media Age, is coupled tightly with the advent of personal computers. Companies whose businesses are built on digitized information have become valuable and powerful in a relatively short period of time. Just as land owners held the wealthy and wielded power in the Agrarian Age and manufacturers such as Henry For and Cyrus McCormick accumulated fortunes in the Industrial Age, the current Information Age has spawned its own breed of wealthy influential brokers, from Microsoft’s Bill Gates, John Tu and David Sun who are the founders of Kingston Technology, Patrick Soon-Shiong, founder and CEO of NantWorks, Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell, and of course Jeff Bezos, co-founder and CEO of Amazon. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
To help avert future shock, we must create a super-age of information educational system. And to do this, we must search for our objectives and methods in the future, rather than in the past. Every society has its own characteristic attitude toward past, present and future. This time-bias, formed in response to the rate of change, is one of the least noticed, yet most powerful determinants of social behaviour, and it is clearly reflected in the way the society prepares its young for adulthood. In stagnant societies, the past crept forward into the present and repeated itself in the future. In such a society, the most sensible way to prepare a child was to arm one with the skills of the past—for these were precisely the same skills one would need in the future. “With the ancient is wisdom,” the Bible admonished. Thus farther handed down to son all sorts of practical techniques along with a clearly defined, highly tradition set of values. Knowledge was transmitted not by specialist concentrated in schools, but through the family, religious institutions, and apprenticeships. Learner and teacher were dispersed throughout the entire community. The key to the system, however, was its absolute devotion to yesterday. The curriculum of the past was the past. The mechanical age smashed all this, for industrialism required a new kind of human. It demanded skills that neither family nor church could, by themselves, provide. It forced an upheaval in the value system. Above all, it required that humans develop a new sense of time. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Mass education was the ingenious machines constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adult it needed. The problem was inordinately complex. How to pre-adapt children for a new World—a World of cognitive kills such as conducting independent research, assessing information for credibility, applying concepts to new situations, and self-critiquing one’s own abilities are central to our success in today’s working World—and, more important, to our lives as human beings. People have to get used to machines, computers, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a World in which time is to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the computer and the clock. The solution is an educational system that, in its very structure, simulates this new World. This system did not emerge instantly. Even today it retains throwback elements from pre-industrial society. Yet the whole idea of assembling masses of stents (raw material) to be processed by teachers (workers) in a centrally located school (factory) is a stoke of industrial genius. Although this is the age of information, many of the same concepts in industrialism apply. The whole administrative hierarchy of education, as it has grown up, follows the model of industrial bureaucracy. The very organization of knowledge into permanent disciplines is grounded on the drive to learn, for its own sake. Bells ring to announce the change of time, but schools are not bound by bells and walls. The inner life of the school thus becomes an anticipatory mirror, a perfect introduction to the age of information. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
The most criticized features of education today—the regimentation, lack of individualization, the rigid systems of seating, grouping, grading, and marking, the authoritarian role of the teacher—are precisely those that made the mass public education so effective an instrument of adaptation for its place and time. Young people passing through this educational machine emerge into an adult society whose structure of jobs, roles, and institutions resemble that of the school itself. The schoolchild does not simply learn facts that one could use later on; one lives, as well as learns, a new way of life modeled after one one would lead in the future. The primary goal is now to help one incorporate the computer into K-12 curriculum. To this extent the book cannot be taken in isolation. The ideas and skills have changed to engage the latest digital technologies. The method of distribution is now a blend between face-to-face and some other combination of virtual interfaces, and a text-plus-multimedia based learning. Thus the focus of education itself has begun to shift, ever so slowly, away from the past and toward the present. An educated workforce can help lift people out of poverty, recue premature mortality, strengthen gender equality, and promote civic participation. Works need breadth of skills such as literacy and numeracy as well as the ability to think critically and to solve problem collaboratively. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
In the digital age, citizens must be prepared to respond to the challenges presented by globalization, climate change, health epidemics, and economic uncertainty. Employers will be seeking out a workforce of possessing analytical skills and interpersonal skills. For example, children will no longer be asked why does it rain, but expected to memorize and recite a series of steps for ow precipitation occurs. As our planet speeds toward 10 billion people (likely 9.5 billion or so by 2050), it is not hard to believe that all life will look differently. We will likely see a lot more new food based programs and recycling degrees, and we will also see 1 in 6 adults on our planet over the age of 65. So, medicine and health degrees will be even more valuable than today, especially when you include the administration of new systems that do truly personalize medicine and connect patients to care anywhere. Most campuses will be commuter campuses as 90 percent of people will use the Internet to obtain their classes. You will likely see schools in places unseen today, like the Harvard office suite atop a London office building or a Michigan State food science degree on a farm in Iowa. There will still be some campuses, but the idea is already being practiced. When we went to study abroad in China, we took our own professors and had our classes in hotel conference rooms, as well as in classes Beijing Language and Culture University, as well as at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics because we were travelling while in China. #Randolphharris 6 of 23
Students will also go to corporation colleges to get their education. Like the University of BMW or Samsung college for the promise of a job upon graduation. The landscape will look different than it does today, and hopefully everyone will be ready for the changes. Education is perhaps one of the most ingredients to a happy, successful, and constructive life. In fact, having access to a good education during childhood and your early adulthood can make a real difference in your later life. Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the World. The technology of tomorrow requires millions of lightly lettered humans, ready to work in unison at endlessly repetitious jobs, it requires not humans who take orders in unblinking fashion, aware that the price of bread is mechanical submission to authority, but humans who can make critical judgments, who can weave their way through novel environments, who are quick to spot new relationships in the rapidly changing reality. It requires people who have the future in their bones. Education’s lesson is clear: its prime objective must be to increase the individual’s “cope-ability”—the speed and economy with which one can adapt to continual change. And the faster the rate of change, the more attention must be devoted to discerning the pattern of future events. It is no longer sufficient for Johnny to understand the past. It is not even enough for him to understand the present, for the here-and-now environment will soon vanish. Johnny must learn t anticipate the direction and rate of change. He must, to put it technically learn to make repeated, probabilistic, increasingly long-range assumptions about the future. And so must Johnny’s teachers. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
It is only by projecting what will be in demand 50 years in the future, the kind of vocations that may be needed, assumptions about the kind of family forms and human relationships that will prevail; the kinds of ethical and moral problems that will arise; the kind of technology that will surround us and the organizational structures with which we must mesh that successful people will survive the accelerative thrusts. We must create a “Council of the Future” in every school and community: Teams of men and women devoted to probing the future in the interests of the present. By projecting “assumed futures,” be defining coherent educational responses to them, by opening these alternatives to activate public debate, such councils—similar in some ways to the “prognostic cells” advocated by Robert Jungk of the Technische Hochschule in Berlin—could have a powerful impact on education. The creation of future-oriented, future-shaping task forces in education could revolutionize the revolution of the young. For those educators who recognize the bankruptcy of the present system, but remain uncertain about next steps, the council movement could provide purpose as well as power, through alliance with, rather than hostility toward, youth. And by attracting community and parental participation—business people, trade unionists, scientists, and others—the movement could build broad political support for digital age revolution in education. It would be a mistake to assume that the present-day educational system is unchanging. On the contrary, it is undergoing rapid change. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
However, much of this change is no more than an attempt to refine the existent machinery, making it every more efficient in pursuit of obsolete goals. The rest is a kind of Brownian motion, self-canceling, incoherent, directionless. What has been lacking is a consistent direction and a logical starting point. The council movement could supply both. The direction is the super age of information. The starting point: the future. As we become acquainted with truth in good sources of all kinds, we are better prepared to work in the World and serve in the kingdom of God. The Lord revealed, “The Glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 93.36. All truth comes from Heavenly Father and is designed for the good of His children. God wants us to educate our minds, improve our skills, and perfect our abilities so we can be a better influence for good in the World, provide for ourselves, our family, and those in need, and build God’s Kingdom. All truth, whether religious or secular, is included in God’s plan for our salvation and happiness. The Prophet Joseph Smith taught, “Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection. And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life, one will have s much the advantage in the World to come.” The Lord has given each of us gifts and encourages us to improve upon them and seek other gifts. He has also instructed us to seek learning, even by study and also by faith. Work for an education. Get all the training you can. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Who is to day religion and politics should not mix? Whose Bible are they reading? There is an implication that Christians are immune to corruption. Of course not. While Christians know that their faith requires high standards of righteousness, they are human and often capitulate to the same temptations as anyone else. In fact, Christians may well face more problems than others when they become involved in the political process. How does a Christian deal with the inherent divided loyalties: duty to God and duty to the national interest? Can a Christian successfully avoid the subtle snares of power? Can a Christian make the compromises necessary for the everyday business of politics? What about the question of candor, for example? At times national security may well require not only concealing the true, but lying. When in the White House, politicians often go through elaborate lengths to conceal essential secret negotiations. Henry Kissinger had a bad cold when he visited Pakistan in 1971—or so the press was told. Actually he had been flown to Beijing to conduct clandestine meetings in preparation for Mr. Nixon’s historic visit to China. Or take the day Nixon announced a major troop withdrawal in Vietnam. He immediately ordered Kissinger to bring Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin to a secret meeting room in the White House basement. “Henry,” he roared, “You shake him up. Tell him not to believe these news stories. We are only pulling out a few troop—and if the Russians do not back off in sending supplies to Hanoi, we will bomb the daylights out of that city. Tell him the president is uncontrollable, a madman—that he will do anything. Let us keep them off balance.” That such meetings took place was flatly denied in order to protect the lives of the withdrawing troops. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
President Regan did that same thing in 1983. When reporters asked about a rumored invasion of Grenada, official White House spokesmen dismissed such questions as “preposterous.” Actually, troops were at that moment disembarking on the island’s beaches. A “no comment” to the press, however, would have been tantamount to a “yes”—an admission that would have endangered lives. In these days of delicate international tensions and the instant communications ability of an almost omnipresent press, such deceit is a common instrument of foreign policy. The press even accepts it. In a 1987 Newsweek interview, crack ABC interviewer Ted Koppel acknowledge that government official must be “prepared to mislead and sometimes even to lie.” Deliberate lies, the corruption of power, compromise with ideological opponents, temptations on all dies—these appear to be the mechanism of modern government. Should the Christian circumvent the messy business of politics altogether? The answer must be an emphatic no. As Robert L. Dabney wrote, “Every Christian…whether law-maker or law executor or voter, should carry one’s Christian conscience, enlightened by God’s Word, into one’s political duty. We must ask less what party caucuses and leaders dictate, and more what duty dictates.” There are at least three compelling reasons Christians must be involved in politics and government. First, as citizens of the nation-state, Christians have the same civic duties all citizens have: to serve on juries, to pay taxes, to vote, to support candidates they think are best qualified. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Christians are commanded to pray and respect governing authorities. (For years many Christian fundamentalists shunned the “sinful” political process, even to the extent of not voting. Whatever else may be said about it, the Moral Majority performed a valuable public service in bringing these citizens back into the mainstream.) Second, as citizens of the Kingdom of God they are to bring God’s standards of righteousness and justice to bear on the kingdom of this World. This is the cultural commission. As former Michigan state senator and college professor Stephan Monsma says, Christian political involvement has the “potential to move the political system away from the brokering of the self-interest of powerful persons and groups into a renewed concern for the public interest.” Third, Christians have an obligation to being transcendent moral values into public debate. All law implicitly involves morality; the popular idea that “you cannot legislate morality” is a myth. Morality is legislated every day from the vantage point of one value system or another. The question is not whether we will legislate morality, but whose morality we will legislate. Law is but a body of rules regulating human behaviour; it establishes, from the view of the state, the rightness or wrongness of human behaviour. Most laws, therefore, have moral implications. The more you know who you are in God, the easier it is to manifest the truth about yourself! #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Statutes prohibiting murder, mandates for seat belts, or regulations for industrial safety are all designed to protect human life—a reflection of the particular moral view that values the dignity and worth of human life. And efficacy does not affect morality If in American we have more homicides per capita than any other country, it is not reason t repeal the laws making murder a crime. The common argument against the legislation of morality is Prohibition, which conjures up such caricatures as Billy Sunday waving a chair over his head and Carrie Nation chopping up whiskey barrels. The church has taken an undeserved bad rap for this. No one entity imposed Prohibition; it was voted in by a clear majority after a lengthy national debate. Admittedly, over the years of its existence Prohibition became increasingly difficult to enforce; it encouraged organized crime and ultimately led to widespread disrespect for the law. Eventually the costs outweighed the benefits. However, was it morally justified? Certainly one’s personal decision to drink alcohol is a private matter. When millions do it to such excess that public safety is endangered, however, it becomes a public concern. That was the case in the pre-Prohibition era. Thousands reported to their factory jobs under the influence and were maimed or killed by heavy industrial machines then being introduced in the American economy. The tavern trade spawned harlotry rings at a time, like today, when there was no cure for the raging epidemic of certain contagious and socially transmitted viral deception was being transmitted. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Though many write off Prohibition as a complete failure, the facts are that industrial safety improved dramatically as per capita drinking, particular among working people, dropped precipitously, and the VD epidemic slowed. Not until 1970 did per capita consumption of alcohol again reach pre-Prohibition levels. Everyday, 29 people in the United States of America die in motor vehicle crashes that involve an alcohol-impaired driver. This is one death every 50 minutes. The annual cost of alcohol-related crashes totals more than $44 billion. And with the majority of crimes being committed by people under the influence of drugs or alcohol, can anyone really argue realistically today that moral issues are not matter of public interest? The real issue for Christians is not whether they should be involved in politics or contend for laws that affect moral behaviour. The question is how. The greatest relationship you will ever have is with God! There is nothing like it! There is a further aspect of moral attitudes that I have noted in the sketch of the development of the sense of justice, namely, their connection with certain natural attitudes. Thus in examining a moral feeling we should ask: what if any are the natural attitudes to which it is related? Now there are two questions here, one the converse of the other. The first asks about the natural attitudes that are sown to be absent when a person fail to have certain moral feelings. Where as the second asks which natural attitudes are evidences to be present when someone experiences a moral emotion. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
The first asks about the natural attitudes that are shown to be absent when a person fails to have certain moral feelings. Whereas the second askes which natural attitudes are evidenced to be present when someone experiences a moral emotion. In context of the authority situation, the child’s natural attitudes of love and trust for those in authority lead to feelings of (authority) guilt when one violates the injunctions addressed to one. The absence of these moral feelings would evidence a lack of these natural ties. Similarly, within the framework of the morality of association, the natural attitudes of friendship and mutual trust give rise to feelings of guilt for not fulfilling the duties and obligations recognized by the group. The absence of these feelings would imply the absence of these attachments. These propositions must not be mistaken for their converses, for while feelings of indignation and guilt, say, can often be taken as evidence for such affections, there may be other explanations. In general, moral principles are affirmed for various reasons and their acceptance is normally sufficient for the moral feelings. To be sure, on the contract theory principles of right and justice have a certain content, and as we have just seen, there is a sense in which acting in accordance with them can be interpreted as acting from a concern for humankind, of for the good of other persons. Whether this fact shows that one acts in part from certain natural attitudes, especially as these involve attachments to particular individuals, and not simply from the general forms of sympathy and benevolence, is a question I shall leave aside here. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Certainly the preceding account of the development of morality supposes that affection for particular persons plays an essential part in the acquisition of morality. However, how far these attitudes are required for later moral motivation can be left open, although it would, I think, be surprising if these attachments were not to some degree necessary. Now the connection between the natural attitudes and the moral sentiments may be expressed as it follows: these sentiments and attitudes are both ordered families of characteristic dispositions, and these families overlap in such a manner that the absence of certain moral feelings evidences the absence of certain natural ties. Or alternatively, the presence of certain natural attachments gives rise to a liability to certain moral emotions once the requisite moral development has taken place. We can see how this is so by an example. If A cares for B, then failing a special explanation A is afraid for B when B is in danger and tries to come t B’s assistance. Again, if C plans to treat B unjustly, A is indignant with C and attempts to prevent one’s plans from succeeding. In bot cases, A is disposed to protect B’s interests. Further, unless there are special circumstances, A is joyful when together with B, and when B suffers injury or dies. A is stricken with grief. If the injury to B is A’s responsibility, A will feel remorse. Love is a sentiment, a hierarchy of dispositions to experience and to manifest these primary emptions as the occasion elicits and to act in the appropriate way. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
To confirm the connection between the natural attitudes and the moral sentiments one simply notes that the disposition on A’s part to feel remorse when one injures B, or guilt when one violates B’s legitimate claims, or A’s disposition to feel indignation when C seeks to deny B’s right, are as closely related psychologically with the natural attitudes of love as the disposition to be joyful in other’s presence, or two feel sorrow when one suffers. The moral sentiments are in some ways more complex. In their complete form they presupposed an understanding and an ability to judge in accordance with them. However, assuming these things, the liability to moral feelings seems to be as much a part of the natural sentiments as the tendency to be joyful, or the liability to grief. Love sometimes expresses itself in sorrow, at other times indignation. Either one without the other would be equally unusual. The content of rational moral principles is such as to render these connections intelligible. Now one main consequence of this doctrine is that the moral feelings are a normal feature of human life. We could not do away with them without at the same time eliminating certain natural attitudes. Among persons who ever acted in accordance with their duty of justice except as reasons of self-interest and expediency dictated there would be no bonds of friendship and mutual trust. For when these attachments exist, other reasons are acknowledged for acting fairly. This much seems reasonably obvious. However, it also follows from what has been said that, barring self-deception, egoists are incapable off feeling resentment and indignation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
If either of two egoists deceives the other and this is found out, neither of them has a ground for complaint. They do not accept the principles of justice, or any other conception that is reasonable from the standpoint of the original position; nor do they experience any inhibition from guilt feelings for breaches of their duties. As we have seen, resentment and indignation are moral feelings and therefore they presuppose an explanation by reference to an acceptance of the principles of right and justice. However, by hypothesis the appropriate explanations cannot be given. To deny that self-interested persons are incapable of resentment and indignation is not of course to say that they cannot be angry and annoyed with one another. A person without a sense of justice may be enraged at someone who fails to act fairly. However, anger and annoyance are distinct from indignation and resentment; they are not, as the latter are, moral emotions. Nor should it be denied that egoists may want others to recognize the bonds of friendship and to treat them in a friendly way. However, these desires are not to be mistaken for ties of affection that lead one to make sacrifices for one’s friends. No doubt there are difficulties in distinguishing between resentment and anger, and between apparent and real friendship. Certainly the overt manifestations and actions may seem the same when viewing a limited span of conduct. Yet in the longer run the difference can usually be made out. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
One may say, then, that a person who lacks a sense of justice, and who would never act as justice requires except as self-interest and expediency prompt, not only is without ties of friendship, and affection, and mutual trust, but is incapable of experiencing resentment and indignation. One lacks certain natural attitudes and moral feelings of a particularly elementary kind. Put another way, one who lacks a sense of justice lacks certain fundamental attitudes and capacities included under the notion of humanity. Now the moral feelings are admittedly unpleasant, in some extended sense of unpleasant; but there is no way for us to avoid a liability to them without disfiguring ourselves. This liability is the price of love and trust of friendship and affection, and of a devotion to institutions and traditions from which we have benefited and which serve the general interests of humankind. Further, assuming that persons are possessed of interests and aspirations of their own, and that they are prepared in the pursuit of their own ends and ideals to press their claims on one another—that is, so long as the conditions giving rise to questions of justice obtain among them—it is inevitable that, given temptation and passion, this liability will be realized. And since being moved by ends and ideals of excellence implies a liability to humiliation and shame, and an absence of liability of a liability to humiliation and shame a lack of ends and such ideals, one can say of shame and humiliation also that they are a part of the notion of humanity. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Now that fact that one who lacks a sense of justice, and thereby a liability to guilt, lacks certain fundamental attitudes and capacities is not to be taken as a reason for acting as justice dictates. However, it has this significance: by understanding what it would be to lack part of our humanity too—we are led to accept our having this sentiment. It follows that the moral sentiments are a normal part of human life. One cannot do away with them without at e same time dismantling the natural attitude as well. And we have also seen that the moral sentiments are continuous with these attitudes in the sense that the love of humankind and the desire to uphold the common good include the principle of right and justice as necessary to define their objective. None of this is to deny that our existing moral feelings may be in many respects irrational and injurious to our good. Dr. Freud is right in his view that these attitudes are harsher aspects of the authority situation in which they were first acquired. Resentment and indignation, feelings of guilt and remorse, a sense of duty and the censure of others, often take perverse and destructive forms, but blunt without reason human spontaneity and enjoyment. When I say that moral attitudes are part of our humanity, I mean those attitudes that appeal to sound principles of right and justice in their explanation. The reasonableness of the underlying ethical conception is a necessary condition; and so the appropriateness of moral sentiments to our nature is determined by the principles that would be consented to in the original positions. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
These principles regulate moral education and the expression of moral approval and disapproval, just as they govern the design of institutions. Yet even if the sense of justice is the normal outgrowth of natural human attitudes within a well-ordered society, it is still true that our present moral feelings are liable to be unreasonable and capricious. However, one of the virtues of a well-ordered society is that, since arbitrary authority has disappeared, its members suffer much less from the burdens of oppressive conscience. It is reason which helps to get beyond the trivialities of our daily life. We become concerned about all that is happening, with all the questions that beset our times. It makes us participate in the World and feel personally what is happening on Earth. Our happiness or unhappiness is not determined by what happens to us in everyday life. However favourable our circumstances, however successful our enterprises, however much envied we are by our fellow humans, we still may not be happy. For peace alone is the source of happiness. The more our reasoning throws us unto the turmoil of life’s problems, the more we yearn for peace. We are led up to the mountains until the glaciers begin to glitter before us. Then reasoning bids us climb still higher, still further into the light, still further into peace and quietude. The older we grow the more we realize that true power and happiness come to us only from those who spiritually mean something to us. Whether they are near or far, still alive or dead, we need them if we are to find our way through life. Only when they are near to us in spirit can the good we bear within us can be turned into life and action. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
What tremendous inner power exists in spiritual communion with another human! How pitiable and destitute humans are when they are spiritually alone, when they have no one to understand and encourage them. If they do not even feel the need for it, doubly pitiable. Blessed the Lord who is to be praised. Praised be the Lord who is blessed for all eternity. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who didst choose us from among all the peoples by giving us Thy Torah. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Giver of the Torah. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who in giving us a Torah of truth, hast planted everlasting life within us. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Giver of the Torah. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who in bestowing good upon humans beyond their deserving, hast dealt graciously with me. May He, who hath dealt graciously with you, continue to bestow His favour upon you. We recognize that our identity is inextricably entwined with lives beyond our own. This sense of expanded identity goes beyond human relationships. We depend upon trees, trees depend upon grasses, grasses depend upon animals, mountains depend upon oceans, the dolphin depends upon the farther star. Physically and spiritually, we all are woven into the living process of the Earth. We take part in—as science now tells us—a planet-sized living system. Our breathing, our acting, our thinking arise in interaction with our shared World. Our own hearts constantly beat out the cosmic rhythm within us. We cannot escape our involvement any more than we can escape breathing the air that has traveled from plants thousands of miles away. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
There is only one Overself for the whole race, but the point of contact with it is special and unique, and constitutes human’s higher individuality. The mountains, I become part of it. The herbs, the fir tree, I become part of it. The morning mists, the clouds, the gathering water, I become part of it. When we ground our spiritual awareness in this ecological context, then the strength and wisdom of the living Earth, in all its manifestations, flows through us. Our Earth Prayer becomes a means of acting upon ourselves. It helps us to empty the self and to open our hearts to be filled with empathy and creativity. The ecological self, like any notion of selfhood, is simply a metaphor, but it is a dynamic one. It involves our choice. We can choose at different moments to identify with different aspects of our interrelated existence—be they hunted whales, or humans without a home, or the planet itself. The prayers we recite remind us of this deep kinship—our boundedness with all of creation. Look deeply: I arrive in every second to be a bund on a spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone. Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up, and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion. Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the World which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His Kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all the house of America, speedily, yea, soon; and say ye, Amen. May His great name be blessed for ever and ever. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Success Means Never Having to Admit You are Unhappy!
As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future. They say in Hollywood if you want messages, you go to Western Union. The doctors thought you should really stay a few centuries more to be sure we have stabilized your condition. I really do not recommend you leaving us at this time. In Hollywood, success is relative. The closer the relative, the greater the success. Many people are recommending that California comes with a warning sign of the city limits: WARNING! PROCEED NO FURTHER! WARD O FOR BIPLOAR CONDITIONS. OCCUPANTS MAY BE VIOLENT. THEY NEED VRAYLAR However, I am telling you to ignore that and come on in. Look, buddy, it is dangerous to get out of bed in the morning. Are you a mortal in a desperate situation or are you not? Then come in here. This is your last resort, babe. However, of course it is up to you. The primary insight is a human’s awareness that one’s destiny is not synonymous with one’s daily experiences. You who have been through so much suffering, have tasted this inner freedom from outward events. You know there have been times when, according to the rules, you should have been smashed to the ground by what occurred. In such moments you were surprised by yourselves. You have the feeling you were being lifted up inwardly, as though the spiritual were triumphing over the material. You recognized a sort of happiness—if it can be called that—a happiness which would have been hidden by an unbroken succession of good days. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
You began to understand what the apostle Paul meant when he said, “Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” The peace of God begins when this fleeting experience can be preserved and turned into a permanent conviction. It is harder for us today to feel near God among the streets and houses of the city than it is for country folk. For them the harvested fields bathed in the autumn mists speak of God and His goodness far more vividly than any human lips. If we really want to labour in the true spirit, to hope, to keep silent, and to work alone—that is what we must learn to do. However, what exactly does it involve, this plowing? The plowman does not pull the plow. He does not push it. He only directs it. This is just how events move in our lives. We can do nothing but guide them straight in the direction which leads to our Lord Jesus Christ, striving toward him, and the furrow will plow itself. The paths into which God leads humankind are shrouded in darkness for us. There are only two ground rules. They go together, and each taken by itself is enigmatic. The first is that all sin requires atonement. The second is that all progress demands sacrifice, which has to be paid for by the lives of those chosen to be offered up. We sense this more than we understand. We do not subscribe to the belief that the divine soul has somehow gone astray and got enslaved by the terrestrial body. One’s higher self is not polluted by one’s own pollutions any more than sunlight is affected by the foul places in which it often shines. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
The natural kiss is the kiss which will be given if moral or prudential considerations do not intervene. In all the examples of Natures means what happens “of itself” or “of its own accord”: what you do not need to labour for; what you will get if you take no measures to stop it. The Greek work for Nature (Physis) is connected with the Greek verb “to grow”; Latin Natura, which the verb “to be born.” The Natural is what springs up, or comes forth, or arrives, or goes on, of its own accord: the given, what is there already; the spontaneous, the unintended, the unsolicited. The higher self affects the ego but is not affected by it. Its existence goes on quite independently of the serialized Earth appearances of the ego, and persists when the other ceases. The insensitive can never know it, and may roundly deny it, but the others sometimes receive unforgettable glimpses for which they give thanks to God for years after. Just as space is unaffected equally by evil deeds or virtuous actions of humans, so the Overself is unaffected by the character or conduct of the ego. It is neither made worse by the ego’s wrong-doing nor better by its righteousness. “I am the way, the Truth,” announced Jesus Christ. Who is this I? In the narrow and shallower sense, it is the master. In the broader and deeper sense, it is the Christ-self within the spiritual consciousness. Why did Jesus Christ say, “I am my Father are one,” but yet a little later add, “The Father is greater than I?” The answer is that Jesus the man had attained complete harmony with His higher Self and felt himself one with it, but the universal Christ-principle will always be greater than the man himself; the Overself will always transcend the person. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Although I is still identified with one, since it is one’s own mind at its best level, it is immensely grander, wiser, and nobler than one. It is an entity greater, nobler, wiser, and stronger than oneself yet mysteriously and inseparably linked to oneself; it is indeed one’s super-self. Our bodies are born at some point of time and somewhere in space but their essence, the Overself, is birthless, timeless, and placeless. This is a human’s true individuality, not that mentally constructed “I” (which deludes one into acceptance as such). It is never anything else than its own perfect self, never contrary to its own unique and infinite nature. It is true that we are but poor and faulty, sadly limited, and miserably shrunken expressions of the divine spirit. Nevertheless, we are expression of it. Thus no thoroughgoing Naturalist believes in free will: for free will would mean that humans beings have the power of independent action, the power of doing something more or other than what was involved by the total series of events. And any such separate power of originating events is what the Naturalist denies. Spontaneity, originality, actions “on its own,” is a privilege reserved for “the whole show,” which one calls Nature. The Supernaturalist agrees with the Naturalist that there must be something which exists in its own right; some basic Fact whose existence it would be nonsensical to try to explain because this Fact is itself the ground or starting-point of all explanations. However, one does not identify this Fact with “the whole show.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
There is a tendency of Christian Science to enter a region of misunderstanding the moment it attempts to apply its true principles to things of this Earth. There is a time in the far past of the human race, a time now lost in the dim mists of antiquity, when the life of humans was stretched to a number of years far in excess of hat it is today. That time has been hinted at by horary legends of a Golden Age and by biblical stories of a pre-Flood race. Such a time will return in the cyclic course of our planet’s history, but naturally it is far-off in the future. Nature herself is in no hurry. She has plenty of time to accomplish her purposes. And in those days humans will again have a normal life-span of maybe one thousand years. There exists in the Old World a certain ancient knowledge—which promises its votaries astonishing benefits in longevity. This age-old art is similar to alchemy of medieval Europe, when humans sought rigorously in experiments for the elixir of life. It is of such antiquity that those who hand it down tell us it was born just after the time when the legendary gods had ceased to walk this Earth. The exponents have almost disappeared from the World, but the tradition is so widespread throughout the Old World that solitary individuals still practise it in remote and unfrequented places. So difficult are the exercises which belong to this system, so labourious are its practices, so ascetic the self-discipline which it involves, that one can understand why it has almost faded out of existence. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
It performs strange feats such as reanimating dead bodies, stopping blood circulation and lung action, permitting knives and daggers to be run like skewers through living flesh without harming it and with an extremely rapid drying of blood (do NOT try this!), and even the burial alive of an enriched body beneath the ground and its safe resurrection several hours or some day later. The principal basis of these feats consists in making certain changes in the breath rhythm, changes which involve such risk to life and health that we are not prepared to assume the responsibility of describing here the exercises for the development of such powers. It is also necessary to live a celibate and chaste existence, to refrain from expending energy in Worldly work and business, and to reduce diet to an astonishing minimum. Because they demand a special and severely ascetic training which is the work of several years devoted wholly to this austere task, such feats are necessarily uncommon. The ordinary layperson could hardly be expected to find the time for such training, nor is there any necessity for one to do so. These displays are certainly spectacular but have primarily only scientific, medical, and theatrical values rather than a general one. Meanwhile, Nature has set her brief term to the human body, and those whose attachment to the body is not overweening will resignedly accept that terms while the others must do so unwillingly. However, this is a different matter—living in the flesh body for ever and ever, a notion which must seem insupportable to many who find the present brief term of human’s existence quite enough for them to cope with. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
If Nature cared so much to preserve the physical body of humans, she would not introduce Earthquakes, eruptions, hurricanes, famines, pestilences, and floods into the scheme of things. The fact that she does do so indicates rather that she regards one’s body as being only a fragment of the human, not as the full human oneself. Some had the idea, of course, that in ancient times, sin and sickness would also have disappeared from the World, so that our existence would be a halcyon one. It is a pretty picture, but human’s true home is not in the tabernacle of flesh; it is elsewhere. The fleshly body is but a temporary abiding place at best, and when humans have arrived at a state of perfect spirituality one will abandon it and use a vehicle more consonant with one’s higher condition, an electromagnetic body that will more easily and more faithfully represent one. Yes, death will be conquered, but not in the way that Christian Scientists imagine. It will be conquered firstly, by extending the duration of human life to a constantly increasing period; and secondly, by completely abandoning the physical body for a subtler one. The clear real inner human—one’s spiritual being—is undying and immortal. When many began to consider that inner being in relation to its transient Earthly tenement, the body, they become confused and misunderstand the nature of that relationship. The hour of every human’s death is fixed by a higher will than one’s own, by that power which some call destiny but which itself takes its rise out of the Infinite Power, and no Christian Science practitioner or ordinary physician has ever “saved” the life of anyone. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
A human’s own Overself fixes the dates of certain major events in one’s life prior to the moment when one utters one’s first cry as a babe, and the date of one’s death is but one of those appointed hours. Perhaps, if the choose, some people have the option to reschedule; others do not. At this point, not in the sky, nor in the depths of the ocean, nor by entering the caverns of the mountain, nowhere in the World can such a place be found where a human might dwell without being overpowered by death. However, “in those days humans will seek death and will not find it; they will desire to die, and death will flee from them,” Revelation 9.6. We are as birds on the wheel of the Universe. For all our loud tweeting, it still rolls along on its own path. And yet these people confidently imagine they set the great Laws of Destiny at naught, and interfere with the workings of the Cosmic Plan. In that sense there might be several “Natures.” This conception must be kept quite distinct from what is commonly called “plurality of Worlds”—id est, different solar systems or different galaxies, “island Universes” existing in widely separated parts of a single space and time. These, however remote, would be parts of the same Nature as our own sun: it and they would be interlocked by being in relations to one another, spatial and temporal relations and causal relations as well. Ans it is just this reciprocal interlocking within a system which makes it what we call a Nature. Other Natures might not be spatio-temporal at all: or, if any of them were, their space and time would have no spatial or temporal relation to ours. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
It is just this discontinuity, this failure of interlocking, which would justify us in calling them different Natures. This does not mean that there would be absolutely no relation between them; they would be related by their common derivation from a single Supernatural source. They would, in this respect, be like different novels by a single author; the events in one story have no relation to the events in another except that they are invented by the same author. To find a relation to between them you must go right back to the author’s mind: there is no cutting across from anything. However, God might bring the two Natures into partial contact at some particular point: that is, He might allow selected events in the one to produce results in the other. There would thus be, at certain points, a partial interlocking; but this would not turn the two Natures into one, for the total reciprocity which makes a Nature would still be lacking, and the anomalous interlocking would arise not from what either system was in itself but from the Divine act which was brining them together. If this occurred each of the two Natures would be “supernatural” in relation to the other: but the fact of their contact would be supernatural in a more absolute sense—not as being beyond this or that Nature but beyond any and every Nature. It would be one kind of Miracle. The other kind would be Divine “interference” not by bringing together of two Natures, but simply. However, God may never interfere with the natural system He created. He may never cause His natural systems to impinge on one another. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
If the movements of the individual units are events “on their own,” events which do not interlock with all other evens, then these movements are not part of Nature. It would be, indeed, too great a shock to our habits to describe them as super-natural. I think we should have to call them sub-natural. However, all our confidence that Nature has no doors, and no reality outside herself for doors to open on, would have disappeared. There is apparently something outside her, the Subnatural; it is indeed from this Subnatural that all events and all “bodies” are, as it were, fed into her. And clearly if she thus has a back door (door to nowhere) opening on the Subnatural, it is quite on the cards that she may also have a front door opening on the Supernatural—and events might be fed into her at that door, too. The movements of individual units are permanently incalculable to us, not that they are in themselves random and lawless. All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning. Unless human reasoning is valid, no science can be true. To be caused is not to be proved. Wishful thinkings, prejucides, and delusions of madness, are all caused, but they are ungrounded. Indeed to be caused is so different from being proved that we behave in disputation as if they were mutually exclusive. The mere existence of causes for a belief is popularly treated as raising a presumption that it is groundless, and the most popular way of discrediting person’s opinion is to explain them causally—“You say that because (Cause and Effect) you are a capitalist, or a hypochondriac, or a mere man, or a woman.” This implication is that is causes fully account for a belief, then, since causes work inevitably, the belief would have had to arise wither it had grounds or not. We need not, it is felt, consider grounds for something which can be fully explained without them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
The Universal and Infinite cannot be packed into the personal and finite, your demand, natural though it be, is unreasonable. God Himself knows not what He is, for He is not a “what.” So why ask a mere human? Just as there is a sun hidden behind the sun, the divinity which animates it, so in the human being there is a Mind within the mind—and that is one’s Overself. The personality is always limited and chained, the higher individuality always infinite and free. Each human is the expression of this infinite life-power. One’s awareness of life in the five senses will rest upon another and inner awareness. A second and hidden self will thus seem to support one’s outer one. The true I yields quite a different feeling, experience, and consciousness from the familiar physical ego. There is a deeper level of every human’s mind which is not subject to one’s passions, not moved by one’s desires, not affected by one’s sense. It is not possible for the timeless, spaceless, formless Overself to be degraded into activity by its time-bound, space-tied, form-limited offspring the person. The essence of human beings is not one’s Earthly body. Nor is it the ghostly duplicate of that body, as many spiritists and some religionists think. The Overself is the Higher mind in humans, one’s divine soul as distinguished from one’s human-terrestrial nature. It is the same as Plato’s “nous.” The true unchanging self is apart from any historical era and is not dependent on outer changes of custom and form. The aim of the mystic is to know what one is, apart from one’s physical body, one’s lower emotion, one’s personal ego; it is to know one’s inner-most self. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
When this aim is successfully realized, one knows then with perfect certitude that one is a ray of the divine sun. How shall one know and understand that this very awareness, of which so small is the fragment that one experiences, is a limited and conditioned part of the Great Awareness itself, of God? The inhabitant of this fleshly body, including its accompanying invisible “ghost,” is a sacred one. There, within and yet behind one’s personal consciousness, is this other sphere of one’s own being into which one must one day be re-born as a Blue Jay from an egg. This is one’s best self; this is what one really is under all the defects. The relation between response and stimulus is utterly different from that between knowledge and truth known. Our physical vision is a far more useful response to light than that of the cruder organisms which have only a photo-sensitive spot. God is older than Nature, and from it the orderliness of Nature, which alone enables us to know her, is derived. The human mind in the acts of knowing is illuminated by Divine reason. It is set free, in the measure required, from the huge nexus of non-rational causation; free from this to be determined by the truth known. And, if there were any, the preliminary processes within Nature which led up to this liberation were designed to. At the frontier where the “outer World” ends and what I should ordinarily call “myself” begins, we find a great deal of traffic but it is all one-way traffic. It is a matter of daily experience that rational thoughts induce and enable us to alter the course of Nature—of physical nature when we use mathematic to build bridges, or of psychological nature when we apply arguments to alter our own emotions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
We succeed in modifying physical nature more often and more completely than we succeed in modifying psychological nature, but we do at least a little to both. On the other hand, Nature is quite powerless to produce rational thought: not that she never modifies our thinking but that the moment she does so, it ceases (for that very reason) to be rational. The problem is whether you or I can be such a self-existent Reason. This question almost answers itself the moment we remember what existence “on one’s own” means. It means that kind of existence which Naturalists attribute to “the whole show” and Supernatiralists to God. Human minds, then, are not only supernatural entities that exist. They do not come from nowhere. Each has come into Nature from Supernature: each has its tap-root in an eternal, self-existent, rational Being, whom we call God. Each offshoot, or spearhead, or incursion of that Supernatural reality into Nature. It seems that human thought is not God’s but God-kindled. I must hasten, however, that we are considering miracles, not about everything. I am attempting no full doctrine of man: and I am not in the least trying to smuggle in an argument for the “immortality of the soul.” The earliest Christian documents give a casual and unemphatic assent to the belief that the supernatural part of a human survives the death of the natural organism. However, they are very little interested in the matter. What they are intensely interested in is the restoration or “resurrection” of the whole composite creature by a miraculous divine act: and until we have come to some conclusion about miracles in general, we shall certainly not discuss that. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
At this stage the supernatural element in humans concerns us solely as evidence that something beyond Nature exists. The dignity and destiny of humans has, at present, nothing to do with the argument. We are interested in humans only because their rationality is the little tell-tale rift in Nature which shows that there is something beyond or behind her. In a pond whose surface was completely covered with scum and floating vegetation, there might be a few waterlilies. And you might of course be interested in them for their beauty. However, you might also be interested in them because from their structure you could deduce that they had stalks underneath which went down to roots in the bottom. The Naturalist thinks that the pond (Nature—the great event in space and time) is of an indefinite depth—that there is nothing but water however far you go down. My claim is that some of the things on the surface (id est, in our experience) show the contrary. These things (rational minds) reveal, on inspection, that they at least are not floating but attached by stalks about the bottom. Therefore the pond has a bottom. It is not pond, pond for ever. Go deep enough and you will come to something that is not pond—to mud and Earth and then to rock and finally the whole bulk of Earth and the subterranean fire. God and Nature have come into a certain relation. They have, at the very least, a relation—almost, in one sense, a common frontier—in every human mind. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Reason saves and strengths my whole system, psychological and physical, whereas that whole system, by rebelling against Reason, destroys both Reason an itself. The military metaphor of a spearhead was apparently ill-chosen. The supernatural Reason enters my natural being not like a weapon—more like a beam of light which illuminates or a principle of organization which unifies and develops. Our whole picture of Nature being “invaded” (as if by a foreign enemy) was wrong. When we actually examine one of these invasions it looks much more like the arrival of a king among his own subjects or a mahout visiting his own elephant. The elephant may run amuck, Nature may be rebellious. However, from observing what happens when Nature obeys it is almost impossible not to conclude that it is her very “nature” to be a subject. All happens as if she had been designed for that very role. Not all help from the individual can, or necessarily should come from groups. In many cases, what the change-pressed person needs most is one-to-one counseling during the crisis of adaption. In psychiatric jargon a “crisis” is any significant transition It is roughly synonymous with “major life change.” Today, persons in traditional crisis turn to a variety of experts—doctors, marriage counselors, psychiatrists, the pastor, witches, warlocks, the spirits, God, Jesus Christ, vocational specialists and others—for individualized advice. Yet for many kinds of crisis there are no appropriate experts. Who helps the family or the individual faced with the need to move to a new city for the third time in five years? #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
Who is available to counsel a leader who is up- or down-graded by a reorganization of one’s club or community organization? Who is there to help the secretary just bounced back to the typing pool? People like these are not sick. They neither need nor should receive psychiatric attention, yet there is, by large, no counseling machinery available to them. Not only are there many kinds of present-day life transitions for which no counseling help is provided, but the invasion of novelty will slam individuals up against wholly new kinds of personal crises in the future. And as the society races toward heterogeneity, the variety of problems will increase. In slowly changing societies the types of crises faced by individuals are more unfirm and the sources of specialized advice more easily identifiable. Sometimes you just need to turn to God, Allah, Buddha, or whoever your peaceful, confident, all-loving and powerful Overself is for healing. The crisis-caught person went to one’s priest, Paris Hilton, one’s witch doctor or one’s local chief. Today personalized counseling services in the high technology countries have become so specialized that we have developed, in effect, second-layer advice-givers who do nothing but counsel the individual about where to seek advice. These referral services interpose additional red tape and delay between the individual and the assistance one needs. By the time help reached one, one may have already made a crucial decision—and done so badly. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
So long as we assume that advice is something that must come from evenmore specialized professionals, we can anticipate ever greater difficulty. Moreover, so long as we base specialties on what people “are” instead of what they are “becoming” we miss many of the real adaptive problems altogether. Conventional social service systems will never be able to keep up. The answer is a counterpart to the situational grouping system—a counseling set-up that not only draws on full-time professional advice givers, but on multitudes of lay experts as well. We must recognize that what makes a person an expert in one type of crisis is not necessarily formal education, but the very experience of having undergone a similar crisis oneself. To help tide billions of people over the difficult transitions they are likely to face, we shall be forced to “deputize” large numbers of non-professional people in the community—business people, students, teachers, workers, and others—to serve as “crisis counselors.” Tomorrow’s crisis counselor will be experts not in such conventional disciplines as psychology or health, but in specific transitions such as conventional disciplines as psychology or healthy, but in specific transitions such as relocation, job promotion, divorce, or subcult-hopping. Armed with their own recent experience, working on a volunteer basis or for minimal pay, they will set aside some small part of their time for listening to other people talk out their problems, apprehensions, and plans. In return, they will have access to others for similar assistance in the course of their own adaptive development. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Once again, there is nothing new about people seeking advice from one another. What is new is our ability, through the use of computerized systems, to assemble situational groups swiftly, to match up individuals with counselors, and to do both wit considerable respect for privacy and anonymity. We can already see evidence of a move in this direction in the spread of “listening” and “caring” services. In Davenport, Iowa, lonely people can dial a telephone number and be connected with a “listener”—one of a rotating staff of volunteers who control the telephone twenty-four hours a day. The program, initiated by a local commission on the aging, is similar to, but not the same as, the Care-Ring service in New York. Care-Ring charges its subscribers a fee, in return for which they receive two check-in calls each day at designated times. Subscribers provide the service with the names of their doctors, a neighbour, their building superintendent, and a close relative. In the even they fail to respond to a call, the service tries again half an hour later. If they still do not respond, the doctor is notified and a nurse is dispatched to the scene. Care-Ring services are now being franchised in other cities. In both these services we see forerunners of the crisis-counseling system of the future. Under that system, the giving and getting of advice becomes not a “social service” in the usual bureaucratic, impersonal sense, but a highly personalized process that not only helps cement the entire society together in a kind of “love network”—an integrative system based on the principle of “I need you as much as you need me.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Situational grouping, and person-to-person crisis counseling are likely to become a significant part of everyone’s life as we all move together into the uncertainties of the future. There is a powerful, life-changing revelation God wants you to understand! The Principle of Stewardship. Good stewardship will lead to health, favour, and responsibility that God desires to put into your hands for the Kingdom of God! May each of us chose to love the Lord and follow His paths to happiness. More than anything else, Heavenly Father desires our true and lasting happiness. Our happiness is the design of all the blessings God gives us—gospel, teachings, commandments, priesthood ordinances, family relationships, prophets, temples, the beauties of creation, and even the opportunity to experience adversity. He sent His Beloved Son to carry out the Atonement so we can be happy in this life and receive a fulness of joy in the eternities. People everywhere are looking for something. In their own way, what they are really looking for is happiness. As with truth itself, however, many are kept from happiness “because they know not where to find it,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 123.12. Because they do not know where to find true and lasting happiness, they look for it in things that actually bring temporary pleasure only—buying things, seeking honour and praise from the World through inappropriate behaviour, or focusing on physical beauty and attractiveness. Pleasure is often confused with happiness. It seems that the more people seek temporary pleasure, the less happy they become. Usually, pleasure endures for only a short time. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
You may get that transitory pleasure, yes, but you cannot find joy, you cannot find happiness. Happiness is found only along that well beaten track, narrow as it is, though straight, which leads to eternal life. Unfortunately for many, happiness is elusive. Scientists know that it is more than simply positive mode, happiness is a state of well-being that encompasses living a good life—that is, wit a sense of meaning and deep satisfaction. Research shows that happiness is not the result of bouncing from one experience to the next. Instead, achieving happiness typically involves a long-sustained effort for something more important in life. Happiness is determined by habits, behaviours, and thought patterns that we can directly address wit intentional actions. Much of our happiness is actually under personal control. God’s love speaks to us in our hearts and tries to work through us in the World. We must listen to it as to a pure and distant melody that comes across the noise of the World’s doings. Some say, “When we are grown up, we would rather think of other things.” However, the voice of love with which God speaks to us in the secret places of the heart, speaks to us when we are young so that our youth may be really youth, and that we may become the children of God. Happy are those who listen. Virtue, which is a pattern of thought and behaviour based on high moral standards. It encompasses chastity and moral purity, which qualify you to enter the Lord’s holy temples. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Virtuous people possess a quiet dignity and inner strength. They are confident because they are worthy to receive and be guided by the Holy Ghost. Virtue begins in the heart and mind, and it is the accumulation of thousands of small decisions and actions each day. “Let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly; then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God; and the doctrine of the priesthood shall distil upon thy soul as the dews from Heaven. The Holy Ghost shall be thy constant companion, and thy scepter an unchanging scepter of righteousness and truth; and they dominion shall be an everlasting dominion, and without compulsory means it shall flow unto thee forever and ever,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 121.45-46. If you listen, you will hear the sound of the Kingdom of God in the air as no generation ever could before. The ultimate questions of our life transcend knowledge. One riddle after another surrounds us. However, the final question of our being has but one concern, and it decides our fate. Again and again, we are thrown back to it. What will become of our will? How does it find itself in the will of God? The highest insight humans can attain is the yearning for peace, for the union of one’s will with an infinite will, one’s human will with God’s will. Such a will does not cut itself off and live in isolation like a puddle that is bound to dry up when the heart of summer comes. No, it is like a mountain stream, relentlessly splashing its way to the river, there to be swept on to the limitless ocean. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
You know of the disease in Central Africa called sleeping sickness, there also exists a sleeping sickness of the soul. Its most dangerous aspect is that one is unaware of its coming. That is why you have to be careful. As soon as you notice the slightest sign of indifference, the moment you become aware of the loss of a certain seriousness, of longing, of enthusiasm and zest, take its as a warning. If you live superficially, you should realize that your soul suffers. People need times in which to concentrate, when they can search their inmost selves. It is tragic that most human have not achieved this feeling of self-awareness. And finally, when they hear the inner voice they do not want to listen anymore. They carry on as before so as not to be constantly reminded of what they have lost. However, as for you, resolve to keep a quiet time both in your homes and where within these peaceful walls when the bells ring on Sundays Then your souls can speak to you without being drowned out by the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Do not let your hearts grow numb. Stary alert. It is your soul which matters. O Lord our God, on this festive day we recall that on Sinai Thou didst reveal Thyself, and through Thine immortal words didst weld our people into a nation through Torah. Standing before the sacred scrolls of Thy law, we here renew the ancient covenant with our fathers, pronouncing again their memorable words: “All that the Lord hath spoken we will do.” Help us t discern the wisdom of Thy precepts so that we may heed Thy commandments. May Thy Torah ever inspire us, guiding and leading us in the paths of justice and peace. Amen. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Winchester Mystery House
Llanada Villa has changed quite a bit since Sarah Winchester began construction in 1884. Despite a tragedy-ridden life, her generosity, ingenuity, and passion left an endless mark on the Santa Clara Valley. How many times have you visited Mrs. Winchester’s creation?
Even after months of distancing, the air of bizarre energy still flows through the house after the sun sets.
We’re open for Self-Guided Mansion Tours!
Randolph Harris II International 