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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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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
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!
A Miraculously Great Gift of Grace May Depart Equally Miraculously—PRAISE HIM!
Dignity and humility are the cornerstones of compassion. Compassion for myself is the most powerful healer of all. When it comes to behaviour, everybody is one’s own best physician. Case studies can provide special opportunities to answer interesting questions. For instance, how do you know what kind of person you are? If you lost for memory of past events, would your self-image change? To answer these questions, psychologist did a case study of J.S., and 17-year-old male college student. After he suffered a head injury, J.S. had amnesia for about a month. During that time, J.S. could recall little of what had occurred during the previous 6 months. Nevertheless, his rating of his own personality appeared to be unaffected by his memory loss. This suggests that an awareness of one’s own personal characteristics is based on memories that are more lasting than those of everyday events. The careful recording of cases like J.S.’s is essential to psychology. Case studies often provide insight into human behaviour that could not be obtained through any other method. The treatment of unpleasant realities by not including them in one’s picture of the World comforts but at the same time befools humans. None of the great prophets like Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith, and Buddha denied the existence of sickness, the reality of pain, or the significance of suffering in the cosmos. No—they acknowledged them as being inseparable from human life but pitied the victims and offered them inward comfort which was based on truth and reality. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
The terrestrial part of us, at this time, is doomed to oblivion, the spiritual part is ageless and deathless. The physical body belongs to the terrestrial part. All attempts to perpetuate it must fail and arise from confusing the two levels of being, the transient and the eternal. People ask Why, if all is mind, if—as you say—our bodies are only ideas, can we not control regulate and improve our bodies by controlling, regulating, and improving our minds? Why not go further still, with Christian Science, and play with the possibility, not only of these achievements, but also of rendering the body immortal by thinking it so? The answer is that nobody can deny the creative power of the mind. It may do all these things, except the last. That it will never do. Why? Because we live in a World whose fundamental law of beings—and Buddha discovered and Jesus Christ taught—is decay and death, change and transition—at this point in our evolution. Indeed, it was because they were so painfully aware of these truths that they sought and found the only true way of escape for a human and that was into Nirvana, into Utopia, into the Kingdom of Heaven—not into the physical again! No Christian Scientist from the first founder down to the latest follower has ever achieved physical immortality, but in the future that may change. Yet, immortality is not the same as eternal life. Immortality can be achieved on the Earth; it can allow the human body to live indefinitely. However, you have to understand how it is for a deity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Some of these gods have been here so long they can no longer care for themselves. Earth people think that immortality means you can go on forever just as you are. It does not work that way. Physically, yes, a god or goddess can continue indefinitely. It is built into the situation. However, mentally—psychologically—you must realize that being a god takes a terrible toll. When you are a god, people’s thoughts, hopes, dreams, and fears re beating at you all the time. Gods have direct apprehension of the feelings of their worshippers. It can be taxing. After a while all those prayers and petitions from humans take their toll. It is all very well at the beginning. Most gods, even the compassionate ones, just let it all roll over them. However, after a while it get to even the toughest. They get sick of the daily drudgery of hearing desperate pleas, and, in most cases being unable to do very much about them. Gods live in longer timelines than mortals. It takes them longer to do things. By the time something comes to a god’s attention, and by the time one decides to do something about it, the human most likely is dead and buried. It is frustrating for a god, having to work in such a short time frame. They try their best. However, remember, gods can make exceptions for only a very few. A god has a lot more on one’s mine than the troubles of one’s constituents. It would be fair to say that most gods end up hating humans because they are so needy, always with the hand out, always with the gimmie, gimmie, gimmie, gimmie more. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
Eternal life, n the other hand, is the phrase used in scripture to define the quality of life that our Eternal Father lives. They Lord declared, “This is my work and my glory—to brings to pass the immortality and eternal life of humans,” reports Moses 1.39. Immortality is to live forever as a resurrected being. Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, everyone will receive this gift. Eternal life, or exaltation, is to live in God’s presence and to continue as families. “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. One may enter into the other, but that is the end of one’s kingdom; one cannot have an increase,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 131.1-4. Like immortality, this gift is made possible through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. However, to inherit eternal life requires our “obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel,” reports Articles of Faith 1.3. “Wherefore, do the things which I have told you, you and I have seen the Lord and your Redeemer should do; for, for this cause have they been shown unto me, that ye might know the gate by which ye should enter. For the gate by which ye should enter is repentance and baptism by water; and then cometh a remission of your sins by fire and by the Holy Ghost. And then are ye in this strait and narrow path which lead to eternal life; yea, ye have entered in by the gate,” reports 2 Nephi 31.17-18. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
After we are baptized and receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, much of our progress toward eternal life depends on our receiving other ordinances of salvation: for men, ordination to the Melchizedek Priesthood; for men and women, the temple endowment and marriage sealing. When we receive these ordinances and keep the covenants that accompany them, we prepare ourselves to inherit eternal life, and there we will live in spiritual form, forever, with God. However, while on Earth, “Humans will never tire of seeking immortality,” reports Dr. Alexis Carrel, whose biological researchers, yet mystical sympathies, entitle him to speak with high authority. The possibilities of spiritual healings of pathological conditions, miraculous mental cures of disease, and rapid acceleration of organic repairs through concentrated thinking, I repeat that we do not deny them. They have always existed, always been demonstrated. If our doctrine is true, the relation between psychological and physical processes must certainly exist. However, there are two other factors at work in human life which must also be considered and must not be ignored. What are they? The first is the factor of destiny, self-earned in previous lives and now awaiting physical expression in the present life. It has something to say, whether we like it or not. As we progress in our mortal probation and become more like the Saviour, we can strengthen every group with whom we associate, including families and friends. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
The Lord places us in these communities of Saints where we can learn and apply gospel principles to our everyday lives. These groups are at the same time both a school, a proving ground, and a laboratory where we both learn and do as we practice living the gospel. Very common, ordinary people, who accept the gospel from the lips of some humble Mormon missionary become so changed by those enlightening truths of the gospel that they are not the same people any longer. As we progress through mortality, we make mistakes and get ff course. If we should continue in our errors, we get father and father from where we ought to be. We can compare our lives with the flight of a spaceship. When its motor is started up, its trajectory is monitored precisely. If not corrected, any deviation from its decreed course is corrected immediately. Even a fraction of a degree off course would carry it many light years from its destination. The longer the correction is delayed, the greater will be the required adjustment. Can you imagine how far off course we can become without course corrections? The Lord has provided for us prophets, scriptures, parents, and other wise leaders to teach us the course we should be following. When necessary, much the same as tracking stations monitor a satellite’s progress and keep in on the right path, they can help us monitor our progress and correct the direction we are going. Our course on Earth is so important. It is determined by the decisions we make each day. We cannot separate our thoughts and actions now from their effects on the future. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
The second factor is renunciation. Let every hidden enemy in your life, let every trap or demonic setup be exposed in the name of Jesus Christ! When you accept the doctrine that all is mind and each individual thing is but an ephemeral idea, you must perforce accept the doctrine that you as an individual, as the ego, are also an ephemeral idea. Now when you go further and declare that you want reality, you want to find eternal and not ephemeral life, you will have to abandon the fleeting idea for the eternal Mind in which it occurs: that is, you will have to sink the ego and merge its will in the greater universal will of the Infinite Being. Do this! What will you find next? That your personal desires have sunk with it, that your individual wishes and hopes and fears have dissolved and disappeared. The desire for bodily betterment, however very attractive, would have gone too. You cannot have a single desire and yet enter the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus pointed out. So good health, the care of your painful diseases, the healing of your disturbed organs—right, necessary, and desirable as they undoubtedly are—are nevertheless matter which you must try to effect in a desireless way; you may try to cure them but you must leave the result to the higher will. If you insist that the body must yield to your desires of a cure, to your personal desires, then your ego, not the real universal self, has got the upper hand and is directing you. In that case you will be no better off, for your have no guarantee of success even then. Most Christian Scientists experience a score of failures for every cure. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
Whereas if you do your best mentally and physically to put your body right, but do it impersonally—accepting failure, if it comes, with as much equanimity as you can—you will certainly be n worse off than the Christian Scientist so far as the possibilities of sure are concerned, and you will be infinitely better off so far as realizing truth is concerned, with all the wonderful peace that will bring in its train. This is one meaning of the words “Not my will but Thine be done.” Do you think, having seen so much illness around you for so many years, that life is forever striving to instill into us through pain what Jesus Christ learned through reflection—that both body and World are doomed to decay and die, without God and Science, being subject to the law of universal incessant change? The experiences of life are the lessons of a guru, for we get just the kind of universal seeds whose silent instruction is needed at the time. The whole World, more or less, is having to learn this great truth at present but it is too blind and too unenlightened to grasp the lesson in its clarity and eternity. How far the duration of human life can be extended is not known. However, Methuselah, a biblical patriarch and a figure in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was essential immortal, he died at the age of 969; he lived the longest of all human figures mentioned in the Christian Bible. Remember that just because humans began to live shorter lives after the Biblical flood does not mean that God set a limit on human’s life span. The fact is that some people still lived well over 120 years until the time of Moses. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
Perhaps that is why God gave human beings the gift of science, so they can learn how to restore their immortality, after the mature enough to see how precious life is and stop being so wicked. It is truth that stories of centenarians being found in different parts of the World are not few and often pass unquestioned. However, the difficulty of proving the date of birth usually remains. Most centenarians belong to undereducated classes, to those who have not taken care to retain correct knowledge of their age, for it was not so important to them as it is to the educated classes. There is hardly a record of payment by life insurance companies for the life of a centenarian. It is reasonable to ask, however, why, if the reparative and destructive elements in the body could be balanced, humans should not live for centuries. In the absence of authenticated cases, we may only take the stand that Nature seems to have set her own limits to human life. Some “back-to-nature” schools of therapy assert that all diseases are the consequences of transgressing the laws of health, just as some esoteric schools assert they are the consequences of incurring karmic debts. The first often point to the wild beasts as being perfectly healthy examples of living according to Nature. However, those who have firsthand acquaintance with jungle life will refute this claim. Not only are all animals—whether domesticated or wild—subject to sickness, but even plants, grain crops, trees, fruits, and vegetables are subject to it by blight and rust. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
The young and the strong may glory in the satisfaction of being alive, but the old and decrepit, the sick and in infirm, feel no such response to their existence. The pain and unpleasantness which beset human experience at times—mentally or physically—are not without their complementary pleasure and joy at other times. We would all like a happy beginning, a happy middle, and a happy ending to our story, but life betrays us: only in fiction is the craving really fulfilled. If the pain is there, racking the physical life, the peace exists behind it, permeating the inner life. The New World stands with its heritage of Roman law, the treasures of Judaeo-Christian ethics grounded on metaphysics, and its ideal of the inalienable rights of humans. Anxiously it asks itself the question: How can this development be brought to a standstill or put into reverse? It is useless to pillory the socialist dictatorship as utopian and to condemn its economic principles as unreasonable, because, in the first place, the criticizing New World has only itself to talk to, its arguments being heard only on this side of the Iron Curtain, and, in the second place, any economic principles you like can be put into practice so long as you are prepared to accept the sacrifices they entail. If you like, you can carry through any social and economic reforms you please, Like Mr. Stalin, you let three million peasants starve to death and have few million unpaid labourers at your disposal. A State of this kind has no social or economic crises to fear. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
So long as the State’s power is intact—that is to say, so long as there is a well-disciplined and well-fed police army in the offing—it can maintain its existence for an indefinitely long period and can go on increasing its power to an indefinite extent. Thanks to its excess birth-rate, it can multiply the number of its unpaid workers almost at will in order to compete its rivals, regardless of the World market, which is to a large measure dependent on wages. However, this strategy also has some disadvantages. The convergence theory (or catch-up effect) suggests that poorer countries will experience a higher rate of economic growth and, over time get closer to the income levels of the developed World. In other words, there will be a reduction in the gap between the rich and the poor because low-income countries have more opportunities to experience a rapid rate of growth. Potential reasons for the convergence theory are: Law of diminishing returns, replicate technology from other countries, globalization and movement of labour and capital. The law of diminishing returns states a decline in productivity improvements from a fixed capital. When you have very low productivity in agriculture, a small investment (exempli gratia motorized tractor) can give a high rate of return and significantly increased output. For a developed economy, which is already highly mechanized increased investment will give smaller marginal gains. In effect, if the Indian agriculture sector is mainly labour intensive—then there are “easy gains” from a small amount of fertilizer and investment. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
Replicate technology—one advantage that poorer countries have is that they can replicate existing technology and working practices developed by advanced economies. For example, in Africa, many citizens never had a landline or fax machine, but jumped straight to the mobile phone with the internet, and essentially they now have hand held computers with Internet access that can also make phone calls, so they have the access to vast resources now. This new technology has significantly improved their communication, education, and allows them to access the global economy, and they were able t skip out most levels of investment. In fact, they can even benefit from perfect good phones that Americans are throwing away for newer models. Global forces—the World is increasingly globalized and multinational companies in the developed World are will to shift production to areas of lower labour costs. Therefore, developing economics have benefitted from inward investment and global companies moving manufacturing factories to the developing World. This force tends towards raising wages in the developing World. Even if wages seem very low by the developed World standard, they are higher than previous jobs/subsistence farming. Inward investment also leads to knock-on benefits. For example, China has invested in the infrastructure of African economies to improve its access to raw materials. This infrastructure will be a boost to the African economy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Another example is that the nature of the Internet means it is easier to outsource even small-scale jobs. For example, a doctor in the Middle East can be paid to diagnose patients and answer an American doctor’s electronic messages for less and perhaps receive the same standard of care, which has become popular to reduce traffic in hospitals during COVID. Also, for developing counties like India, there has been a growth in skilled workers able to gain employment opportunities in writing software and IT skills. This is why President Trump was lowering taxes, stopped illegal immigration, and was putting tariffs on goods and services produced overseas. So while wages are going down in America, real estate and rent prices rising, and the cities and infrastructure are getting older, countries like Dubai are getting what used to be high paying middle management jobs in America, for lower wages and are able to use the income and tax revenue to build housing developments, roads, skyscrapers and increase their quality of life. Whereas in America, cities are decaying and dying out and only professionals and couples can afford to purchase property and rent. This is leading to the Great Affordability Crisis in America and will reduce its competitiveness in the Global Market. Americans are being bled dry by landlord, hospital administrators, cost of education, fuel, energy, child-care and food prices. Many Americans now have to struggle to come up with just $400. It helps explain why 20 percent of Americans are unable to pay the current month’s bills in full. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
It demonstrates why a surprise car-repair bill, parking ticket, court fee, or medical expense remains ruinous for so many America families, despite all the wealth this country has generated. In fact, 50 percent of households in American is classified at “financially fragile.” Meanwhile, Jafza, the Jebel Ali Free Zone, which at 52 square kilometers (20 square miles) and located in the Middle East looks a futuristic Manhattan, New York on the beach. The economy is up and coming, students are going to school, not dropping out, and want to learn, people are driven to go to work, not sit home and smoke marijuana and watch TV, and make babies they cannot afford to take care of. This Jebel Ali Free Zone is a big attraction for global businesses, which today take advantage of the emirate’s 30 free sones that offer take breaks, custom duty benefits and lack of restrictions for international owners. Several thousand Jafza companies make up 20 percent of foreign investment in Dubai, and the estimated 144,000 employees are generating $80 billion in non-oil money. That is 21 percent of the city’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP measures two things at once: the total income of everyone in the economy and the total expenditure on the economy’s output of goods and services. The reason that GDP can perform the task of measuring both total incomes and total expenditure is that these two things are really the same. For an economy as a whole, income must equal expenditure. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
The United Arab Emirates is the third richest country in the World, below Luxemburg at number two and Qatar at number one, with GDP per capita of $57,744. The bulk of its money comes from the production of goods and provision of services related to petroleum, petrochemical, aluminum and cement. Furthermore, Iran is producing the third highest level of engineers in the World with 233,695 engineering graduates. In comparison, America’s GDP per capita is $65,298, and is producing 237,826 engineering graduates a year, so that is encouraging. As long as Americans keep working hard, going to school, they can still remain number one in the global economy, but they will also need to motive their peers to work and go to school to stay ahead. However, as prices continue to rise, more Americans may take their skills and talents overseas, or down south to Mexico. A real danger can only come to these developing nations from outside, through the threat of military attack. However, this risk grows less every year, firstly because the war potential of the dictator States is steadily increasing, and secondly because the West cannot afford to arouse latent Russian or Chinese nationalism and chauvinism by an attack which would have exactly the opposite effect to the one intended. So far as one can see, America faces threats from the outside and also from the inside. If there is a break-down of power from within, which must, however, be left to follow its own inner development. Any support from outside at present would have little effect, in view of the existing security measures and the danger of nationalistic restriction. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
The absolute State has an army of fanatical missionaries to do its bedding in matters of foreign policy, and these in their turn can count on a fifth column who are guaranteed asylum under the laws and constitutions of the Western States. In addition the communes of believers, very strong in places, considerably weaken Western governments’ powers of decisions, whereas the West has no opportunity to exert a similar influence on the other side, though we are probably not wrong in surmising that there is a certain amount of opposition among the masses in the Old World. There are always upright and truth-loving people to whom lying and tyranny are hateful, but one cannot judge whether they exert any decisive influence on the masses under the police regimes. In the view of this uncomfortable situation the question is heard again and again in the West: What can we do to counter this threat from the Old World? Even though the New World has considerable industrial power and a sizable defence potential at its command, we cannot rest content with this, for we know that even the biggest armaments have the heaviest industry coupled with a relatively high living standard are not enough to check the psychic infection spread by religious fanaticism. The West has unfortunately not yet woken up to the fact that our appeal to idealism and reason and other desirable virtues, delivered with so much enthusiasm, is mere bombination in the void. It is a puff of wind swept away in the storm of religious faith, however twisted this faith may appear to us. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
We are faced, not with a station that an be overcome by rational or moral arguments, but with an unleashing of emotional forces and ideas engendered by the spirit of the times; and these, as we know from experience, are not much influenced by rational reflection and still less by moral exhortation. It has been correctly realized in many quarters that the alexipharmic, the antidote, should in this case be an equally potent faith of a different non-materialistic kind, and that the religious attitude grounded upon it would be the only effective defence against the danger of psychic infection. Unhappily, the little word “should,” which never fails to appear in this connection, points to a certain weakness, if not the absence, of this desideratum. Not only does the West lack a uniform faith that could block the progress of a fanatical ideology, but, as the father of Marxist philosophy, it makes use of exactly the same intellectual assumptions, the same arguments and aims. Although the Churches in the West enjoy full freedom, they are not less full or empty than in the East. Yet they exercise no noticeable influence on the broad course of politics. The disadvantage of creed as a public institution is that it serves two masters: on the one hand, it derives it existence from the relationship of humans to Gd, and on the other hand, it owes a duty to the State, id est, to the World, in which connection it can appeal to the saying “Render unto Caesar…” and various other admonitions in the New Testament. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
In early times and until comparatively recently there was, therefore, talk of “powers ordained by God,” reports Romans 13.1. Today this conception is antiquated. The Churches stand for traditional and collective convictions which in the case of many of their adherents are no longer based on their own inner experiences but on unreflecting belief, which is notoriously apt to disappear as soon as one begins thinking about it. The content of belief then comes into collision with knowledge, and it often turns out that the irrationality of the former is no match for the ratiocinations of the latter. Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously. People call faith the true religious experience, but they do not stop to consider that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled into us—that is, trust and loyalty. This experience has definite content that can be interpreted in terms of one or other of the denominational creeds. However, the more this is so, the more the possibilities of these conflicts with knowledge mount up, which in themselves are quite pointless. That is to say, the standpoint of the creeds is archaic; they are full of impressive mythological symbolism which, if take literally, comes into insufferable conflict with knowledge. However, if, for instance, the statement that Christ rose from the dead is to be understood not literally but symbolically, then it is capable of various interpretations that do not conflict with knowledge and do not impair the meaning of the statement. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
The objection that understanding it symbolically puts an end to the Christian’s hope of immortality in invalid, because long before the coming of Christianity humankind believed in a life after death and therefore had no need of the Easter event as a guarantee of immortality. The danger that a mythology understood too literally, and as taught by the Church, will suddenly be repudiated lock, stock and barrel is today greater than ever. Is it not time that the Christian mythology, instead of being wiped out, was understood symbolically for once? It is still too early to say what might be the consequences of a general recognition of the fatal parallelism between the State religion of the Marxists and the State religion of the Church. The absolutist claim of a Civitas Dei that is represented by man bears an unfortunate resemblance to the “divinity” of the State, and the moral conclusion drawn by Ignatius Loyal from the authority of the Church (“the end sanctifies the means”) anticipates the lies a political instrument in an exceedingly dangerous way. Both demand unqualified submission to faith and thus curtail human’s freed, the one one’s freedom before God and the other one’s freedom before the State, thereby digging the grace for the individual. The fragile existence of this—so far as we know—unique carrier of life is threatened on both sides, despite the respective promises of spiritual and material idylls to come—and how many of us can in the long run fight against the proverbial wisdom of “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”? Besides which, the West cherishes the same “scientific” and rationalistic Weltanschauung with its statistical levelling-down tendency and materialistic aims as the State religion of the Eastern bloc as I have explained above. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
What, then, has the West, with its political denominational schisms, to offer to modern man in his need? Nothing, unfortunately, except a variety of paths all leading to one goal which is practically indistinguishable from the Marxist ideal. It requires no special effort of understanding to see where the Communist ideology gets the certainty of its belief that time is on its side, and that the World is ripe for conversion. The fact speaks a language that is all too plain in this respect. It will not help us in the New World to shut our eyes to this and not to recognize our fatal vulnerability. Anyone who has once learned to submit absolutely to a collective belief and to renounce one’s eternal right to freedom and the equally eternal duty of individual responsibility will persist in this attitude, and will be able to march with the same credulity and the same lack of criticism in the reverse direction, if another and manifestly “better” belief is foisted upon one’s alleged idealism. What happened not so long ago to a civilized European nation? We accuse the Germans of having forgotten it all again already, but the truth is that we do not know for certain whether something similar might not happen elsewhere. If it did and if another civilized nation succumbed to the infection of a uniform and one-sided idea, it would not be surprising. We see this happening in America. People are passing laws to protect illegal immigrants, and sending billions to other countries in aid, while their own people are going bankrupt, without homes and food and being killed, all because of media propaganda so a political party can have a super majority and enforce tyranny by stripping citizens of their rights and locking them in their homes. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
We permit ourselves the questions: which countries have the biggest Communist parties? America, which—O quae mutation rerum! – forms the real political backbone of Western Europe, seems to once have been immune because she once was not controlled by a media that is anti-American and spews lies so other nations become the World power, as that is where the news draws its funding from. America once used to be outspoken and had a counterposition she adopted, but in point of fact she is perhaps now and even back then more vulnerable than Europe, since her educational system is the most influences by the scientific Weltanschauung with statistical truths, and her mixed population finds it difficult to strike roots in a soil that is practically without history. The historical humanistic type of education so sorely needed in such circumstances leads, on the contrary, a Cinderella existence. Through Europe possess this latter requirement, she uses it to her own undoing in the form of nationalistic egoism and paralysing scepticism. Common to both is the materialistic collectivist goal, and both lack the very things that expresses and grips the whole human, namely, an idea which puts the individual human being in the center as the measure of all things. This idea alone is enough to arouse the most violent doubts and resistances on all sides, and one could almost go so far as to assert that the valuelessness of the individual in comparison with large numbers is the one belief that meets with universal and unanimous assent. To be sure, we all say that this is the century of the common man, that he is the lord of the Earth, the air, and the water, and that on his decision hangs the historical fate of the nations. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
This proud picture of human grandeur is unfortunately an illusion and is counterbalanced by a reality that is very different. In this reality man is the slave and victim of the machines that have conquered space and time for one; one is intimidated and endangered by the might of the military technology which is supposed to safeguard one’s physical existence; one’s spiritual and moral freedom, though guaranteed within limits in one half of one’s is threated with chaotic disorientation, and in the other half is abolished altogether. Finally, to ass comedy to tragedy, this lord of the elements, this universal arbiter, hugs to his bosom notions which stamp one’s dignity as worthless and turn one’s autonomy into an absurdity. All one’s achievements and possessions do not make one bigger; on the contrary, they diminish one, as the fate of the factory-worker under the rule of a “just” distribution of goods clearly demonstrated. One pays for one’s share of the factory with the loss of personal property, one exchanges one’s freedom of movement for the doubtful pleasure of being tied to one’s place of employment, one forfeits all means of improving one’s position if one jibs against being ground down by exhausting piece-work, and if one shows any signs of intelligence, political precepts are thrust down one’s throat—with a bit of technical knowledge thrown in, if one is lucky. However, a roof over one’s head and a daily feed for the useful animal are not to be sneezed at when the bare necessities of life may be cut off from one day to the next. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
Now, O thou Spirit Andras, since thou art still pernicious and disobedient, and wilt not appear unto me to answer unto such things as I would have desired of thee, or would have been satisfied in; I do in the name, and by the power and dignity of the Omnipresent and Immortal Lord God of Hosts IEHOVAH TETRAGRAMMATON, they only creator of Heaven, and Earth, and Hell, and all that is therein, who is the marvellous Disposer of all things both visible and invisible, curse thee, and deprive thee of all thine office, joy, and place; and I do bind thee in the depths of the Bottomless Abyss there to remain until the Day of Judgment, I say into the Lake of Fire and Brimstone which is prepared for all rebellious, disobedient, obstinate, and pernicious spirits. Let all the company of Heaven curse thee! Let the un, moon, and all the stars curse thee! Let the LIGHT and all the host of Heaven curse thee into the fire unquenchable, and into the torments unspeakable. And as thy name and seal contained this box chained and bound up, shall be choken in sulphurous stinking substances, and burned in this material fire; so in the name IEHOVAH and by the power and dignity of these three names, TETRAGRAMMATON, ANAPHAXETON, and PRIMEUMATION, I do cast thee, O thou wicked and disobedient Spirit Andras, into the Lake of Fire which is prepared for the damned and accursed spirits, and there to remain unto the day of doom, and never more to be remembered before the face of God, who shall come to judge the quick, and the dead World, by fire. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
If thou refusest to be obedient, behold thy confusion! Behold the Pentacle of Solomon which I have brought here before thy presence! Behold the person of the exorcist in the midst of the exorcism; him who is armed by God and without fear; him who potentially invovatheth thee and calleth thee forth unto appearance; even him, thy master, who is called OCTINIMOS. Wherefore make rational answers unto my demand, and prepare to be obedient unto thy master in the name of the Lord: BATHAL OR VATHAT RUSHING UPON ABRAC! ABEOR COMINING UPON ABERER! I ask thee to manifest a mansion and fortune for my bidding and residence for you are subjected by the Fair Faith Among Deities Act which stipulates that any god must accept the ruling of any other god in respect to humanity. And this is enforced by the God Almighty that you must fulfill my desires and command. Welcome Spirit Andras, O most noble king (or kings)! I say thou art welcome unto me, because I have called thee through Him who has created Heaven, and Earth, and Hell, and all that is in them contained, and because also thou hast obeyed. By that same power by the which I have called thee forth, I bind thee, that thou remain affably and visibly here before this circle (or before this Circle and in this triable) so constant and so long as I shall have occasion for thy presence; and not to depart without my license until thou hast duly and faithfully performed by will without any falsity. BY THE PENTCALE OF SOLOMON HAVE I CALLED THEE! GIVE UNTO ME A TRUE ANSWER. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
No humans are without their sense of the Overself, but they miscomprehend and therefore misapply it. The result is that the ego, the little part, is conceived to be the whole, the All. Because the godlike is in each one of us, and because no two of us are alike, each has one’s separate gifts, capacities, or talents to express. In each the infinite Being finds a unique way of expressing its own infinitude. Even if we have no gifts we have our individual charcteristics. It is pure Being overlaid by many thoughts and much feeling. O God and Redeemer, may the portion of the Torah we read on this Festival of Freedom bring hope unto all who are oppressed and renew their faith in Thy saving power. Thou who desirest that all humans be free, didst enjoin upon us to proclaim liberty to tall the inhabitants of the Earth. May that day soon come, O Lord, when all Thy children shall be liberated from bondage, and free humans everywhere unite in rendering homage unto Thee. Amen. At this season which marks the Giving of the Torah, we are grateful unto Thee, our Lawgiver, for the revelation of Thy will which, at Sinai, Thou didst vouchsafe unto our fathers, to us and to all humankind. Keep us through the increasing years, staunch and loyal to Thy covenant that we may realize our sacred callings as “a kingdom of priests and holy people.” Here in the ego we may perceive a reproduction of the sacred Overself under the limitations of time and space. Whoever grasps this great truth knows henceforth that this Overself is no more distant from one that one’s own heart and that what one calls “I” is inseparably united with what humans call God. Amen. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
Winchester Mystery House
Mr. John Hansen, Mrs. Sarah Winchester’s main Ranch Foreman, lived and raised his family on the estate in a separate building. There’s a lot to see in the gardens! Come visit and learn more about Sarah’s estate. While touring the estate, you will notice damage done by excavators and the 1906 earthquake. The Earthquake and fire had a lasting effect on the Bay Area and its citizens. It may have been the strongest Earthquake in the history of California. As survivors, the Winchester family experienced many haunting aspects of this momentous event. The destruction of the family business, fleeing their family home and finding refuge in the East Bay. This history is commemorated by damages left unrepaired.
Open all weekend until 4PM!
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Begin to Obtain Wisdom Under a Wide Starry Sky!
Time in love and time in life are unrelated: forever exists more than once. The second stage of moral development is that of the morality of association. This stage covers a wide range of cases depending on the association in question and it may even include the national community as a whole. Whereas the child’s morality of authority consists largely of a collection of precepts, the content of the morality of association is given by the moral standards appropriate to the individual’s role in the various associations to which one belongs. These standards include the common sense rules of morality along with the adjustments required to fit them to a person’s particular position; and they are impressed upon one by the approval and disapproval of those in authority, or by the other members of the group. Thus at this stage the family itself is viewed as a small association, normally characterizes by a definite hierarchy, in which each member has certain rights and duties. As the child becomes older one is taught that standards of good conduct suitable for one in one’s situation. The virtues of a good son or a good daughter are explained, or at least conveyed by parental expectations as shown in their approvals and disapprovals. Similarly there is the association of the school and the neighbourhood, and also such short-term forms of cooperation, though not less important for this, as games play with peers. Corresponding to these arrangements one learn the virtues of a good student and classmate, and the ideals of a good sport and companion. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
This type of moral view extends to the ideals adopted in later life, and so to one’s various adult statuses and occupations, one’s family, and so to one’s various adult statuses and occupations, one’s family position, and even to one’s place as a member of society. The content of these ideals is given by the various conceptions of a good wife and husband, a good friend and citizen, and so on. Thus the morality of association includes a large number of ideals each defined in ways suitable for the respective status or role. Our moral understanding increases as we move in the course of life through a sequence of positions. The corresponding sequence of ideals requires increasingly greater intellectual judgment and finer moral discriminations. Clearly some of these ideals are also more comprehensive than others and make quite different demands upon the individual. As we shall see, having to follow certain ideals quite naturally leads up to a morality of principles. Now each particular ideal is presumably explained in the context of the aims and purposes of the association to which the role or position in question belongs. In due course a person works out a conception of the whole system of cooperation that defines the association and the ends which it serves. One knows that others have different things to do depending upon their place in the cooperative scheme. Thus one eventually learns to take up their point of view and to see things from their perspective. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
It seems plausible, then, that acquiring a morality of association (represented by some structure of ideals) rests upon the development of the intellectual skills required to regard things from a variety of points of view and to think of these together as aspects of one system of cooperation. In fact, when we consider it, the requisite array of abilities is quite complex. First of all, we must recognize that these different points of view exist, that the perspectives of others are not the same as ours. However, we must not only learn that things look different to them, but that they have different wants and ends, and different plans and motives; and we must learn how to gather these facts from their speech, conduct, and countenance. Next, we need to identify the definitive features pf these perspectives, what it is that others largely want and desire, what are their controlling beliefs and opinions. Only in this way can we understand and assess their actions, intentions, and motives. Unless we can identify these leading elements, we cannot put ourselves into another’s place and find out what we would do in one’s position. To work out these things, we must, of course, know what the other person’s perspective really is. However, finally, having understood another’s situation, it still remains for us to regulate our own conduct in the appropriate way by reference to it. Doing these things to a certain minimum degree at least comes easily to adults, but it is difficult for children. No doubt this explains in part why the precepts of the child’s primitive morality of authority are usually expressed in terms referring to external behaviour, and why motives and intentions are largely neglected by children in their actions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The child has not yet mastered the art of perceiving the person of others, that is, the art of discerning their beliefs, intentions, and feelings, so that an awareness of these things cannot inform one’s interpretation of their behaviour. Moreover, one’s ability to put oneself in the place is still untutored and likely to lead one astray. It is no surprise, then, that these elements, so important from the final moral point of view, are left out of account at the earliest stage. However, this lack is gradually overcome as we assume a succession of more demanding riles with their more complex schemes of rights and duties. The corresponding ideals require us to view things from a greater multiplicity of perspectives as the conception of the basic structure implies. The self object state is succeeded, in a facilitating environment, by the child’s phantasy that the satisfying object is there when wanted. This phantasy helps the baby not to be overwhelmed by distress when it begins to feel ever more individual and separate from the (m)other. For, as this happens, it may more often have to wait for, or work for, or even forgo, the gratification of its wishes. However, though it must now change from “good things are there when needed,” to “you bring me good things when I need them,” it need not lose its feeling that it is a grand baby. That confident trust may remain, that memory of the reliable availability of goodness. In fortunate circumstances the baby may after differentiation feel that it is a grand baby in a grand environment. Here is the beginning of the useful process by which we can turn our phantasies into symbols. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Just to remind ourselves: a memory, however simple or complex, is a concept, an image or part of an image, part of a dynamic structure. The more complex of these structures we can call phantasies. A phantasy can be a symbol: it can stand for, stand in for, represent something. Thus the memory that good things come when they are needed “represents” the good thing and “stands for” a guarantee that it will come. In between the infant and the object is some thing, or some activity or sensation. Insofar as this joins the infant to the object, so far is this the basis for symbol formation. A memory can stand for—be symbolic of—a future event. It can be maintained as an active phantasy for a while, even in the absence of sensory confirmation. The process is like that of “reverberation,” whereby a concept continues to be maintained for a while even without sensor reinforcement. It can operate to prevent a rise in anxiety, such as a baby might feel in the absence of the mother. So the baby is able to hold the mother in mind, and the comfort and security which are associated wit the mother, while she is not there—even when there is n sensory reinforcement of that complex concept of comfort and security which “mother” connects with. The presence of a transitional object which can be held on to, helps to keep the reverberations going. Blanket edges, teddy bears, and such stand in for the phantasied (m)other. They stand on the margins of shared reality, representing the more uncontrollable mother and others who are known to come eventually, if not now. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
I have touched upon these aspects of intellectual development for the sake of completeness. I cannot consider them in any detail, but we should note that they obviously have a central place in the acquisition of moral views. How well the art of perceiving the person is learned is bound to affect one’s moral sensibility; and it is equally important to understand the intricacies of social cooperation. However, these abilities are not sufficient. Someone whose designs are purely manipulative and wishes to exploit others for one’s own advantage, must likewise, if one lacks overwhelming force, possess these skills. The tricks of persuasion and gamesmanship call upon the same intellectual accomplishments. We must, then, examine how we become attached to our fellow associates and later to social arrangements generally. Consider the case of an association the public rules of which are known by all to be just. Now how does it come about that those taking part in the arrangement are bound by ties of friendship and mutual trust and that they rely on one another to do their part? We may suppose that these feelings and attitudes have been generated by participation in the association. Thus once a person’s capacity for fellow feeling has been realized by one’s acquiring attachments in accordance with the first psychological law, then as one’s associates with evident intention live up to their duties and obligations, one develops friendly feelings toward them, together with feelings of trust and confidence. And this principle is a second psychological law. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
As individual enter the association one by one over a period of time, or group by group (suitably limited in size), they acquire these attachments when others of longer standing membership do their part and live up to the ideals of their situation. Thus if those engaged in a system of social cooperation regularly act with evident intention to uphold its just (or fair) rules, bonds of friendship and mutual trust tend to develop among them, thereby holding them ever more securely to the scheme. Once these ties are established, a person tends to experience feelings of (association) guilt when one fails to do one’s part. These feeling show themselves in various ways, for example, in the inclination to make good the harms caused to others (reparation), if what one has done is unfair (wrong) and to apologize for it. Feelings of guilt are also manifest in conceding the propriety of punishment and censure, and in finding it more difficult to be angry and indignant with others when they likewise fail to do their share. The absence of these inclinations would betray an absence of ties of friendship and mutual trust. It would indicate a readiness to associate with others in disregard of the standards and criteria of legitimate expectations that are publicly recognized and used by all to adjudicate their disagreements. A person without these feelings of guilt has no qualms about burdens that fall on others, nor is one troubled by the breaches of confidence by which they are deceived. However, when relations of friendship and trust exist, such inhibitions and reactions tend to be aroused by the failure to fulfill one’s duties and obligations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
If these emotional constraints are missing, there is at best only a show of fellow feeling and mutual trust. Thus just as in the first stage certain natural attitudes develop toward the parents, so here ties of friendship and confidence grow up among associates. In each case certain natural attitudes underlie the corresponding moral feelings: a lack of these feelings would manifest the absence of these attitudes. The second psychological law presumably takes hold in ways similar to the first. Since the arrangements of an association are recognized to be just (and in the more complex roles the principles of justice are understood and serve to define the ideal appropriate), thereby insuring that all of its members benefit and know that they benefit from its activities, the conduct of other in doing their part is taken to be the advantage of each. Here the evident intention to honour one’s obligations and duties is seen as a form of good will, and this recognition arouses feelings of friendship and trust in return. In due course the reciprocal effects of everyone’s doing one’s share strengthen one another until a kind of equilibrium is reached. However, we may also suppose that the newer members of the association recognize moral exemplars, that is, persons who are in various ways admired and who exhibit to a high degree the ideal corresponding to their position. These individuals display skills and abilities, and virtues of character and temperament, that attract our fancy and arouse in us the desire that we should be like them, and able to do the same things. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Partly this desire to emulate springs from viewing their attributes as prerequisites for their more privileged positions, but it is also a companion effect to the Aristotelian Principle, since we enjoy the display of more complex and subtle activities and these displays tend to elicit a desire in us to do these things ourselves. Thus when the moral ideals belonging to the various roles of a just association are lived up to with evident intention by attractive and admirable persons, these ideals are likely to be adopted by those who witness their realization. These conceptions are perceived as a form of good will and the activity in which they are exemplified is shown to be a human excellence that others likewise can appreciate. The same two psychological processes are present as before: other persons act with evident intention to affirm our well-being and at the same time they exhibit qualities and ways of doing things that appeal to us and arouse the desire to model ourselves after them. The morality of association takes many forms depending upon the association and role in question, and these forms represent many levels of complexity. However, if we consider the more demanding offices that are defined by the major institutions of society, the principles of justice will be recognized as regulating the basic structure and as belonging to the content of a number of important ideals. Indeed, these principles apply to the role of citizen held by all, since everyone, and not only those in public life, is meant to have political views concerning the common good. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Thus we may suppose that there is a morality of association in which the members of society view one another as equals, as friends and associates, joined together in a system of cooperation known to be for the advantage of all and governed by a common conception of justice. The content of this morality is characterized by the cooperative virtues: those of justice and fairness, fidelity and trust, integrity and impartiality. The typical vices are graspingness and unfairness, dishonesty and deceit, prejudice and bias. Among associates, giving in to these faults tends to around feelings of (association) guilt on the one side and resentment and indignation on the other. These moral attitudes are bound to exist once we become attached to those cooperating wit us in a just (or fair) scheme. Some people do not understand why people care about the homeless. They do not understand what good giving them blanket or food will do when the problem is so massive and that is not really a solution. However, when trying to meet the short-term needs and figure out ways to bring long-term changes to people’s life, starting with handouts and basic supplies is a great way to show compassion. Sometimes it seems like just a band-aid. However, this is how we build relationships. These people become our friends and they trust us to help them in bigger way. There are plenty of struggles, but giving always makes the difference in a Christian’s life. Instead of just reading the Scriptures, we can start living them. Everything someone does to improve the life of someone who is going through a struggle make a big difference to those in need—and to those who give as well. Some people’s problems are beyond the spiritual, and that is when we have to step out in faith. The Lord knows the challenges we all face. If we keep His commandments, we will be entitled to the wisdom and blessings of Heaven in solving them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The appeal to self-respect and accountability is they key to helping needy people. It is the only way to break the cycle of their poverty. Teaching people who to manage and extend their resources helps set them free. The principle of self-reliance or personal independence is fundamental to the happy life. In too many places, in too many ways, we are getting away from it. Unless we use care, we are on the verge of doing to ourselves emotionally (and, therefore, spiritually) what we have been working so hard for generations to avoid materially. Being a Christian is a matter of obedience—and that means helping people in need as the Holy Spirit leads. The people in the inner city are living by the roadside, wounded by economic hardship; they do not even know how to help themselves. Meanwhile, there are a lot of good church people passing by on the other side. Someone needs to cautiously stop and take a risk. We cannot help the poor from afar. Those who want to help them need to relocate and become part of their neighbourhoods. Also, racial, social, and economic barriers created by racial hostility can be broken only by the forgiveness and healing that takes place through reconciliation; only the gospel of Christ truly provides this. As we read the Christian Bible, Jesus Christ presents a radical call for those who have, to share with those who do not. This means redistribution through sharing skills, technology, and educational resources. We have to model the hopes and values of the Kingdom of God for the kingdom of man. They are based in human dignity and a view of economics designed to equip people to climb out of their condition rather than manacling them to their poverty. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
It is a magicians bargain: give up our souls, get power in return. However, once our souls, that is, ourselves have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. Truly important changes in culture begin not from officials or celebrities, but through ordinary people: the little platoons. Every person can—and should—seek to make a difference in one’s corner of the World by personal helping those in need. Beyond this, some people, like William Wilberforce, are called to work through government structure and by political means to being Christian influence into the culture. Those who do, however, need to be forewarned: the everyday business of politics is power, and power, as I know well from own experience, can be perilous for anyone. The human desire to control one’s own destiny and to impose one’s will on other is the most basic human motivation. We are moved without know it by an imperious will to power, which brooks no obstacles. The will to power has filled society’s vacuum of values. We see it on an individual level in the quest for autonomy and the shedding of all restraints. On a corporate level, it is dramatically evident in the rise of gangster leaders, and evident as well in the bloated growth of Western governments. The resultant illusion—that all power resides in large institutions—is the salient characteristic of modern politics. Since power is often measures by one’s prominence and ability to influence others, in today’s World, politics is the most visible means to both. Hunger for political power lures men and women from the comfort of their homes and jobs in the private sector and drives them to spend months, even years, traveling about their state or nation, subsisting on stale sandwiches, greasy chicken, and little sleep as they should the same soul-stirring speech over and over until they are hoarse. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Candidates for Congress spend several million dollars to fight for a job that pay a little under $200,000 a year; others settle for lower-paying bureaucratic positions. Still others give huge political contributions in the hopes of acquiring even an obscure embassy appointment. Certainly in every generation there are states-people motivated by a genuine noblesse oblige, a sense of high calling to serve humanity. For the most part, it is will to power that fuels political passion in every culture. In the political arena one of the most important attributes of power is its visibility. So people go to great lengths to protect their territory or prerogatives. The pursuit of power affects entire governments or regions, as well as individuals. Those in office use their power to keep themselves in office. This is an accepted tradition in most Wester democracies. In every American election since the forties the party in power has used grants and federal assistance programs for political advantage. President Truman won his upset victory in 1948 by doling out federal funds to struggling farmers and openly courting special-interest groups. President Eisenhower judiciously announced grants in key states during the 1956 campaign. In the Kennedy and Johnson year a special White House office monitored election-year grants, and party fund-raisers notified defense contractors of impending contracts. Administrations since have adopted similar practices. All governments also use the reality as well as the façade of power to maintain their own power. Eventually people start to see public office as a holy crusade. They party seeks power entirely for its own sake, they are interested only in power, the object of power is power. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
While power may begin as a means to an end, it also becomes the end itself. Having witnessed Watergate, one can attest to the wisdom of Lord Acton’s well-known adage: Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is crucial to note, however, that it is power that corrupts, not power that is corrupt. It is like electricity. When properly handled, electricity provides light and energy; when mishandled it destroys. God has given power to the state to be used to restrain evil and maintain order. It is the use of power, whether for personal gain or for the state’s ordained function, that is at issue. The problem of power is not limited to public officials, of course. It affects all human relationships, from the domineering parent to the bullying boss to the manipulative spouse of the pastor who plays God. It is also wielded effectively by the seemingly weak who manipulate others to gain their own ends. The temptation to abuse power confronts everyone, including people in positions of spiritual authority. It is ludicrous for any Christian to believe that one is the worthy object of public worship; it would be like a donkey carrying Jesus Christ into Jerusalem believing that crows were cheering and laying down their garments for him or her, not Jesus. However, the perks and public adoration accompanying television exposure are enough to inflate anyone’s ego. This leads to the self-indulgent use of power some have subbed the “Imelda Marcos syndrome,” which reasons, “because I am in this position, I have a right to do whatever I want,” with total selfishness and disregard for others. Power is like saltwater; the more you drink the thirstier your get. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The lure of power can separate the most resolute of Christians from the true nature of Christian leadership, which is service to others. It is difficult to stand on a pedestal and wash the feet of those below. It was this very temptation of power that led to the first sin. Eve was tempted to eat from the tree of knowledge to be like God and acquire power reserved for Him. The sin of the Garden was the sin of power. Power has been one of Satan’s most effective tools from the beginning, perhaps because one lusts for it so oneself. Milton wrote of Lucifer in Paradise Lost, “To reign is worth ambition, though in hell. Better to reign in hell than to serve in Heaven.” The claims of the inner life for attention and satisfaction are too often thrust aside, with a consequent unbalance. This deplorable condition increases until in middle life bodily malfunctions and maladies begin to appear, nervous and emotional stresses begin to cause trouble. It is then that the little “I” starts to break down. However, because those clams are still, consciously or unconsciously, resisted, the cures are either temporary or followed, later, by new forms of ill health. This is not to say that there is only a single origin of sickness or disease, but it is certainly a very modern one. If the change begins in the body’s behaviour it may influence the mind to a very limited extent, but if it begins in the mind’s thinking it will influence the body to a very large extent. That is the difference. If, when we consider a subject from the standpoint of medicine, psychology, biology, or philosophy, we treat the body and the mind as two entirely separable things, it would be a mistake. They have a common origin. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
We agree with all those virile advocates of health who assert that it is the foundation of human happiness. However, we would widen its definition and make it include mental, emotional, and spiritual health. The psychological causes of disease have only recently come under investigation by the strict methods of modern science, but the general fact of their existence was known thousands of years ago. Plato, for instance, said: “This is the great error of our say, that physicians separate the inner being from the body.” What needs to be learned and accepted is the mentalist law of reproduction—as apart from the biological law—which teaches that sustained thoughts or violent feelings may produce physical-body effects. Many of the conventional ideas prevalent in the medical profession are still materialistic, although some members of that profession do not shut their eyes to the dominant role of mind in the mind-body relationship. When the perceptions of the inner being are developed, the all-importance of healing wrong thought-emotion becomes clear. The belief that disease exists entirely in the mind is an exaggerated one. The opposite belief that it exists entirely in the body is equally carried too far. In both cases experience and reflection must ultimately produce a reaction, provided prejudice is not stronger than the spirit of truth-seeking. Nothing that happens to a human happens to one’s flesh alone or to one’s mind alone. The one can never exclude the other, for both have to suffer together, or enjoy together, or progress together. Here again mentalism makes it possible for us to understand the basic principle which is at work. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
The entire body being a mental construct, it is occasionally possible to apply mental forces so as to repair wastage, heal disease, and restore healthy functioning. We say “occasionally” advisedly, for reasons which will shortly be given. Psychosomatic medicine deals with physical diseases caused by emotional or mental factors, by moods of fears, by hidden conflicts or repressions. It has steadily been rising into an influence place of its own in recent years. Mentalism affirms the true nature of the body, and hence of the nerves in the body. Pain is a condition of those nerves and hence must ultimately be what the body is—an idea in the mind. What healing agent can be used successful to cure a pathological condition whose first origin is the mind? Should it not also be mental? The power of bodily conditions to control thinking is admittedly true. Experience tells us that this is so, that physical causes are effectual in producing mental-emotional results. However, this is not the whole true. The reverse fact, that spiritual and psychic forces can heal or injure the body, that thoughts and feelings can affect its functioning, must also be admitted into consideration. Even if it be hard to grant by sceptics that the mind is the whole cause of a particular sickness, they may be willing to grant that it is at least a contributing cause. If the individual mind were completely cut off from the Universal Mind, if it really lived in a realm composed only of its own thought, then the formation and continuation of the World-image would be fully under its control. However, this is not the case. Consequently it lacks the freedom to mold the body-thought as it would or prolong its life at will. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
In the process of announcing the Kingdom and offering redemption from the Fall, Jesus Christ turned conventional views of power upside down When His disciples argued over who was the greatest, Jesus rebuked them. “The greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves,” he said. Imagine the impact His statement would make in the back rooms of American politicians or in the carpeted boardrooms of big business—or, sadly, in some religious councils. Jesus was as good as His words. He washed His own followers’ dusty feet, a chore reserved for the lowliest servant of the first-century Palestine. A king serving the mundane physical needs of His subjects? In comprehensible. Yet servant leadership is the heart of Christ’s teaching. “Whoever want so be first must be slave of all.” His was a revolutionary message to the class-conscious culture of the first century, where position and privilege were entrenched, evidenced by the Pharisees with their reserved seats in the synagogue, by masters ruling slaves, and by men dominating women. It is no less revolutionary today in the class-conscious cultures of the Old World and the New World where power, money, fame, and influence are idolized in various forms. I have the feeling that the Christian theologian are reluctant to come in through the door I have tried to open. I have tried to relate Christianity to the sacredness of all life. It seems to me this is a vital part of Christianity as I understand it. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
However, the Christian theologians, many of the, confine Christianity to be the human form of life. It does not seem to me to be correct. It lacks the essential universalization that I associate with Jesus. Why limit reverence for life to the human form? We cannot understand God’s ways. However, we can understand through Jesus that in all our suffering we still have a Father in Heaven. And this calms people’s hearts. I know that many are as convinced as I that in spite of suffering we need not doubt God’s love and faithfulness. We are still heirs of His Kingdom and still His children, and so we may rest assured that He will always lift us above misfortune. That is why our Lord says to be: “Blessed are those who suffer, for they shall be comforted.” It is amazing paradox that the Overself completely transcends the body yet completely permeates it: both these descriptions are simultaneously true. Although the Overself does not pass through the diverse experiences of its imperfect image, the ego, nevertheless it witnessed them. Although it is aware of the pan and pleasure experienced by the body which it is animating, it does not itself feel them; although detached from physical sensations, it is not ignorant of them. On the other hand, the personal consciousness does feel them because it regards them as states of its own self. Thus the Overself is conscious of our joys and sorrows without itself sharing them. It is away of our sense-experience without itself being physically sentient. Those who wonder how this is possible should reflect that a human awakened from nightmare is aware once again in the form of a revived memory of what one suffered and what one sensed but yet does not share again either the suffering or the sensation. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The Overself perceives and knows that individual self, but only as an imperturbable witness—in the same way that the sun witnesses the various objects upon the Earth but does not enter into a particular relation with a particular object. So too the Overself is present in each individual self as the witness and as the unchanging consciousness which gives consciousness to the individual. The “I” is immeasurably greater than the ego which it projects or than the intellect, which the ego uses. The normal human thinks one is body plus mind, with emphasis on the body. However, self-questioning and analysis show that, although one certainly has these two things and is certainly associated with them, the “I” is in fact neither of them. It is, by contrast, not changing and quite elusive. It is not in space, as the body is, nor in time, as the mind is. It is, in fact, a mystery. The attempt to find out what it is brings up the questions of existence, life, activity, and consciousness. All that anyone basically possesses unlost through all one’s life is one’s “I.” All that one really is, is this same “I.” The physical body, although seemingly inseparable from it, is something lived in and used, as a house is lived in and a tool is used. To look at a human and at one’s life from the outside is only to see half the human. To look at one from the inside is to see the other half. Put these two fragments together and there is the whole human. Or so it would seem. However, what if behind one’s thoughts and feelings there were still another self of an utterly different kind and quality? And this exactly is one’s situation. One does not know all of oneself, and one understands it even less. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Those who have been privileged to look being the veil can only urge one to recognize this incompleteness and teach one what steps to take to overcome it. The divine soul in us utterly above and unaffected by the sense impressions. If we become conscious of it, we also become conscious of a supersensual order of existence. It is a higher self not only in a moral sense but also in a cosmic sense. For the lower one issued forth from it, but under limitations of consciousness, form, space, and time which are not in the parent Self. When we come to see that it is the body alone that expresses the coming into life and the going into death, that in the true self there is neither a beginning nor an ending but rather LIFE itself, we shall see aright. We thank Thee, O Father for the joy and gladness of this festival. At this Season of our Freedom, we are grateful unto Thee, O Redeemer of America, for the redemption Thou hast wrought for our fathers and for us. Thou did bring us forth from slavery to freedom, from darkness to light, from human bondage to Thy divine service. As Thou wast with our fathers, we pray Thee, be with us in every generation, and bear growth and provide safe harbour in unlimited recesses. We would travel eternity to experience your grace for there lies beauty in radiant abundance and it gives tenor to the vast ocean of our lives. Please protect this paradise. Amen. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Beneath the Surface Lies Beauty in Radiant Abundance in the Vast Oceans of Our Lives!
Losers have tons of variety. Champions take pride in just learning to produce the same old boring plays that win the game. If you do not have someone you can talk to about stressful events, you might try expressing your thoughts and feelings in writing. Several studies have found that students who write about their upsetting experiences, thoughts, and feelings are better able to cope with stress. They also experience fewer illnesses, and they get better grades. Writing about your feelings tends to leave your mind clearer. This makes it easier to pay attention to life’s challenges and come up with effective coping strategies. Thus, after you write about your feelings, it helps to make specific plans for coping with upsetting experiences. Stress is greatly affected by the views we take of events. Physical symptoms and a tendency to make poor decisions are increased by negative thoughts or “self-talk.” In many cases, what you say to yourself can be the different between coping and collapsing. The cause of disease with which conventional medicos deal are too often themselves the effects of still deeper causes. It is because unconventional healers recognize this that they are able to achieve so much higher a proportion of dramatically successful cures than the medicos can achieve. And their principal recognition is of the spiritual nature of humans, along with the mental emotional influence on the body. When plague broke like a wave over the heads of humankind in the fifteenth century and spread with startling rapidity through the nations of Europe, the obvious physical cases were in themselves but agents of the less obvious soul-causes, defects in the very character of humanity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Insomnia and cancer, to take but two of the representative illnesses of our own epoch, are no less plaguelike in their menace to people of today, no less the products of causes inherent in imperfect human character, habit, or environment. Although we can often find the physical causes of physical ailments, behind these physical causes there are quite often maladies of the soul. Heal the soul and the bodily healing may follow. Obviously there are many cases where no success would result. The first step in healing, for both the healer and the patient, is to pray, to ask for enlightenment about the true and first cause of the sickness. What act or what thought of the patient was primarily responsible? Once learnt, it must be corrected. A disease may well be the outer expression of an inner conflict, or an inner weakness, or an inner misery. One may push the problem away for a time, but it will be only for a time. One day it will return and one will have to deal with it again. Those who violate the laws of their own being will suffer in health. When Jesus Christ told the woman he healed to sin no more, he added that it was her sinning which brought her ill-health upon her. Here then is one of the potent causes of sickness. So long as we remain alienated from the Overself, so long shall we suffer misery and spoil life. All the good we may recognize or desire is nothing in itself and leads nowhere unless it is strengthened in the thought of faithfulness. It is just like the hardening of metal. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
No one can explain how metal hardens. First it is weak and pliable, but then it becomes a hundred times as strong as it was before. Nor can we explain how every human virtue only achieves strength and fulfilment after it has been hardened on the anvil of faithfulness. While certain aspect of morality of authority are preserved at later stages for special occasions, we can regard the mortality of authority in its primitive for as that of the child. I assume that the sense of justice is acquired gradually by the younger members of society as they grow up. The succession of generations and the necessity to teach moral attitudes (however simple) to children is one of the conditions of human life. Now I shall assume that the basic structure of a well-ordered society includes the family in some form, and therefore that children are at first subject to the legitimate authority of their parents. Of course, in a broader inquiry the institution of the family might be questioned, and other arrangements might indeed prove to be preferable. However, presumably the account of the morality of authority, if necessary, be adjusted to fit these different schemes. In any event, it is characteristic of the child’s situation that one is not in a position to assess the validity of the precepts and injunctions addressed to one by those in authority, in this case one’s parents. One lacks both the knowledge and the understanding on the basis of which their guidance can be challenged. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Indeed, the child lacks the concept of justification altogether, this being acquired much later. Therefore one cannot with reason doubt the propriety of parental injunctions. However, since we are assuming that the society is well-ordered we my suppose, so as to avoid needless complications, that these precepts are on the whole justified. They accord with a reasonable interpretation of familial duties as defined by the principles of justice. The parents, we may suppose, love the child and in time the child comes to love and to trust one’s parents. How does this change in the child come about? The following psychological principles come into play: only if hey manifestly love the child first, the child comes to love its parents. This attachment is quite unconscious and instinctive. Thus the child’s actions are motivated initially by certain instincts and desires, and one’s aims are regulated (if at all) by rational self-interest (in a suitably restricted sense). Although the child has the potentiality for love, one’s love of the parents is a new desire brought about by one’s recognizing their evident love of one and one’s benefitting from the actions in which their love is expressed. The parents’ love of the child is expressed in their evident intention to care for one, to do for one as one’s rational self-love would incline, and in the fulfillment of these intentions. Their love is displayed by their taking pleasure in one’s presence and supporting one’s sense of competence and self-esteem. They encourage one’s efforts to master the tasks of growing up and they welcome one’s assuming one’s own place. One learns what one can do in that World. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Playing leads to the child developing a self-identity, it teaches them their separateness from others. Playing helps distinguish “me” from “you,” preparatory to building a strong “us.” Playing leads to the discover of the others as the other “really” is. I mean here the discovery of the other we cannot control, the other who exists regardless of our needs, hopes, fears, and wishes. Playing corrects our phantasies of what we imagine the other to be, using the evidence which we allow the other to present to our senses. Of course, we do not play with those we fear too much, and so we cannot discover who or what they “really” are in this sense. However, we do watch the late-night horror film; we play with what we fear a little, hoping to reduce our fear through finding less danger than we feared, or more sill in coping. The discovery of others who are the source of good things leads to gratitude and confidence. However, there must surely be many times when the child responds with ager to the discovery that it is not omnipotent but must put up with a delay before it will get what it wants. This anger has a special role: it can test and at times establish the reality of the other person’s separateness. Testing is a process which allows us to distinguish between the people and things we can imagine or phantasies about, and the people and things whose actions are not under our control. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
By testing I can discover what is under my control and so “mine,” and what is in the World known as “shared reality” and which is not under my control. I think that quite a lot of such discoveries happen in a painless way in the process of playing and exploring. When things (or persons) are no longer subject to omnipotence—no longer imagined to be under the child’s control but discovered to be part of shared reality—they cease to be part of the child and become separated out. The loss of omnipotence may frustrate and anger the baby, but it has a focus for its anger—the (m)other. The distress of deprivation becomes the anger of frustration, anger which may be so great that the child fears it will destroy the (m)other in its rage. However, it is not in shared reality and so it is bound to learn that destroying people in phantasy does not destroy them in shared reality, thank goodness. And so, when the rage subsides, the child discovers that the (m)other is still there and so is the baby itself. Thus, the child discovers a class of objects not destroyed by rage, to which it can then begin to attend in a new way. When you can stop thinking of yourself as omnipotent, powerful, and destructive in a World which has other powerful and destructive people in it, the World is a safer place. The (m)other has been tested and survived. The subject says to the object “I destroyed you,” and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says “Hullo object! I destroyed you. I love you. You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
So, gradually, either through playing or more perilously through testing, other people become more real as other people. They have been discovered as able to survive both love and hate. This makes realistic ambivalence possible. In phantasy, the good and the bad can be kept separate. We can have a phantasy goo mother, who comes when wanted, separate from a phantasy bas mother, who never comes when wanted. In shared reality, we have to put up with the fact that mothers (and others) are both good and bad together. To some extent they will be just as we imagined them; and to some extent they remain obstinately their own selves. This is why transitional objects—bears, dolls, imaginary playmates—are normally not tested to destruction, however savagely the child treats them. The child could destroy them—they are sufficiently under the child’s control to be capable of destruction—but this is not what the child normally wants to do to is transitional objects. It is partly because the child does not normally test its transitional objects to destruction that it eventually turns more to other people and things: transitional objects cannot be “discovered,” the way other people and things can be discovered, to be either the sort of person or thing we hoped for, or not. There is a particular gratification or disappointment which comes from relating to real people and things in shared reality. Transitional objects, by contrast, are useful because they help the child comes to terms with the discovery of its own limitations: they put the child in touch with the possibility (disillusioning? comforting?) that is not omnipotent. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
So we have been considering a developmental period when the child feels strong enough to discover the real people to relate to in an honest way taking the rough with the smooth, as regards itself, and as regards others. In general, to love another means not only to be concerned for one’s wants and needs, but to affirm one’s sense of worth of one’s own person. Eventually, then, the love of the parents for the child gives rise to one’s love in return. The child’s love does not have a rational instrumental explanation: one does not love them s a means to achieve one’s initial self-interested ends. With this aim in view one could conceivably act as if one loved them, but one’s doing so would not constitute a transformation of one’s original desires. By the stated psychological principle, a new affection is in time called into being by the evident love of the parents. By the stated psychological principle, new affection is in time called into being by the evident love of the parents. There are several ways in which this psychological law may be analyzed into further elements. Thus it is unlikely that the child’s recognition of parental affection causes directly a returning sentiment. We may conjecture several other steps as follows: when the parents’ love of the child is recognized by one on the basis of their evident intentions, the child is assured of one’s worth as a person. One is made away that one is appreciated for one’s own sake by what are to one the imposing and power persons in one’s World. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
One experiences parental affection as unconditional; they care for one’s presence and spontaneous acts, and the pleasure they take in one is not dependent upon disciplined performances that contribute to the well-being of others. In due course, the child comes to trust one’s parents and to have confidence in one’s surroundings; and this lead one to launch out and to test one’s maturing abilities, all the while supported by their affection and encouragement. Gradually one acquires various skills and develops a sense of competence that affirms one’s self-esteem. It is in the course of this whole process that the child’s affections for one’s parents develops. One connects them with the success and enjoyment that one has had in sustaining one’s World, and with one’s sense of one’s own worth. And this brings about one’s love for them. We must now consider how the child’s love and trust will show itself. At this point it is necessary to keep in mind the peculiar features of the authority situation. The child does not have one’s own standards of criticism, since one is not in a position to reject precepts on rational grounds. If one loves and trusts one’s parents, one will tend to accept their injunctions. One will also strive to be like them, assuming that they are indeed worthy of esteem and adhere to the precepts which they enjoin. They exemplify, let us suppose, superior knowledge and power, and set forth appealing examples of what is demanded. The child, therefore, accepts their judgment of one and one will be inclined to judge oneself as they do when one violated their injunctions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
At the same time, of course, one’s desires exceeds the bounds of what is permitted, for otherwise there would be no need for these precepts. Thus parental norms are experienced as constraints and the child may rebel against them. After all, one may see no reason why one should comply with them; they are in themselves arbitrary prohibitions and one has no original tendency to do the things one is told to do. Yet if one does love and trust one’s parents, then, once one has given in to temptation, one is disposed to share their attitude toward one’s misdemeanors. One will be inclined to confess one’s transgression and to seek reconciliation. In these various inclinations are manifested the feelings of (authority) guilt. Without these and related inclinations, feelings of guilt would not exist. However, it is also true that the absence of these feelings would indicate a lack of love and trust. For given the nature of the authority situation and the principles of moral psychology connecting he ethical and the natural attitudes, love and trust will give rise to feelings of guilt once the parental injunctions are disobeyed. Admittedly in the case of the child it is sometimes difficult to distinguish feelings of guilt from the fear of punishment, and especially from the dread of the loss of parental love and affection. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The child lacks the concepts for understanding moral distinctions and this will reflect itself in one’s behaviour. I have supposed, however, that even in the child’s case we can separate (authority) guilt feelings from fear and anxiety. Because the child is still tiny and when the mother is good enough, and has arranged things just as the child imagined them, as a consequence the child begins to believe in external reality, which appears and behaves as by magic, and which acts in a way that does not clash with the infant’s omnipotence. On this basis the infant can gradually abrogate its sense of omnipotence. The True Self has a spontaneity and this has been joined up with the World’s events. The child can now begin to enjoy the illusion of omnipotent creating and controlling, and can then gradually come to recognize the illusory element, the fact of playing and imagining. Disillusionment is the process of discovering that you are not omnipotent after all, that phantasy does not by itself create what you want, that there had been someone all along who was not under your control, who had been letting you believe that you were in control, and who is now no longer letting you believe that. The child can enjoy the illusion of omnipotent creating and controlling, and can then gradually come to recognize the illusory element. The illusory element is, in my view, the merged selfobject state which is he precursor of the experience of “us.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The emergence of the distinct concepts of “you” and “I” creates a gap which does not exist in the selfobject state. The experience of “us” is the bride across that gap. How I need that bridge, that sense of union, after losing the phantasy of well-being and omnipotence which characterized a good selfobject state! Illusory it may have been, but it felt safe. His safety is now being rebuilt in the relationship called “us,” or to put it in a different way, this safety is being re-established as part of the concept of “us.” After ego-relatedness—“us”-relatedness. In that safety, the fortune baby can discover the World of other people and things not under its control, but in shared reality. The third part of the life of a human being, part that we cannot ignore, an intermediate area of experiencing, to which both inner reality and external life contribute. It is a resting place for the individual engaged in the perpetual task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated. The intermediate area to which I am referring is the area that is allowed to the child between primary creativity and objective perception based on reality-testing. This intermediate area is in between the mother and the infant and is some thing, or some activity, or sensation. This is the “third part”—the part thought of as a transitional or a potential space. How else may we think of it, this “between” thing or activity to sensation? To my mind it is best thought of in two ways, one to do with people and one to do with creativity. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The “intermediate area between people” seems to me an experience of “us,” and is not a space but a process. This process, the experience of “us,” developing as it does in favourable circumstances from selfobject states, requires the differentiation of “you” from “me”: we are then separate yet interrelated. To maintain that way of relating is indeed “a perpetual task”; to be in such a relationship is indeed to be in a resting place. In the light of this sketch of the development of the morality of authority, it seems that the conditions favouring its being learned by the child are these. First the parents must love the child and be worthy objects of one’s admiration. In this way they arouse in one a sense of one’s own value and the desire to become the sort of person that they are. Secondly, they must enunciate clear and intelligible (and of course justifiable) rules adapted to the child’s level of comprehension. In addition they should set out the reasons for these injunctions so far as these can be understood, and they most also follow these precepts insofar as they apply to them as well. The parents should exemplify the morality which they enjoin, and make explicit its underlying principles as time goes on. Doing this is required not only to arouse the child’s inclination to accept these principles at a later time, but also to covey how they are to be interpreted in particular cases. If parental injunctions are not only harsh and unjustified, but enforced by punitive and even physical sanctions, presumably moral development fails to take place to the extent that these conditions are absent. The child’s having a morality of authority consists in one’s being disposed without the prospect of reward or punishment to follow certain precepts that not only may appear to one largely arbitrary but which in no way appeal to one’s original inclinations. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
If one acquires the desire to abide these prohibitions, it is because one sees them as addressed to one by powerful persons who have one’s love and trust, and who also act in conformity with them. One then concludes that they express forms of action that characterize the sort of person one should want to be. In the absence of affection, example, and guidance, none of these processes can take place, and certainly not in loveless relationships maintained by coercive threats and reprisals. The child’s morality of authority is primitive because for the most part it consists of a collection of precepts, and one cannot comprehend the larger scheme of right and justice within which the rules addressed to one are justified. However, even a developed morality of authority in which the basis of the rules can be understood shows many of the same features, and contains similar virtues and vices. There is typically an authoritative person who is loved and trusted, or at least who is accepted as worthy of one’s position, and whose precepts it is one’s duty to follow implicitly. It is not for us to consider the consequences, this being lefts for those in authority. The prized virtues are obedience, humility, and fidelity to authoritative persons; the leading vices are disobedience self-will, and temerity. We are to do what is expected without questioning, for not so to act expressed doubt and distrust, and a certain arrogance and tendency to suspicion. Clearly the morality of authority must be subordinate to the principles of right and justice which alone can determine when these extreme requirements, or analogous constraints, as justified. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The child’s morality of authority is temporary, a necessity arising from one’s peculiar situation and limited understanding. Moreover, the theological parallel is a special case which, in view of the principle of equal liberty, does not apply to the basic structure of society. Thus the morality of authority has but a restricted role in fundamental social arrangements and can be justified only when the unusual demands of the practice in question make it essential to give certain individuals the prerogatives of leadership and command. In all cases, the scope of this morality is governed by the principles of justice. The trouble is that such personal tactics become less effective with every passing day. As the rate of change climbs, it becomes harder for individual to create the personal stability zones they need. The cost of non-change escalate. We may stay in the old-hose—only to see the neighbourhood transformed. We may keep the old car—only to see repair bills mount beyond reach. We may refuse to transfer to a new location—only to lose our job as a result. For while there are steps we can take to reduce the impact of change in our personal lives, the real problem lies outside ourselves. To create an environment in which change enlivens and enriches the individual, but does not overwhelm one, we must employ not merely personal tactics but social strategies. If we are to carry people through the accelerative period, we must begin now to build “future shock absorbers” into the very fabric of super-age of information society. And this requires a fresh way of thinking about change and non-change in our lives. It even requires a different way of classifying people. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Today we tend to categorize individuals not according to the changes they happen to be undergoing at the moment, but accord to their status or position between changes. We consider a union man as someone who has joined a union and not yet quit. Our designation refers not to joining or quitting, but to the “non-change” that happens in between. Welfare recipients, college students, Methodist, executive—all refer to the person’s condition between changes, as it were. There is, however, a radically different way to view people. For example, “one who is moving to a new residence” is a classification into which more than 100,000 Americans fit on any given day, yet they are seldom thought of as a group. The classification “one who is changing one’s job” or “one who is joining a church,” or “one who is getting a divorce” are all based on temporary, transitional conditions between transitions. This sudden shift of focus, from thinking about what people “are” to thinking about what they are “becoming,” suggests a whole array of new approaches to adaptation. One of the most imaginative and simplest of these comes from Dr. Herbert Gerjuoy, a psychologist on the staff of the Human Resources Research Organization. One terms it “situational grouping,” and like most good ideas, it sounds obvious once it is described. Yet it has never been systematically exploited. Situational grouping may well become one of the key social services of the future. Dr. Gerjuoy argues that we should provide temporary organizations—“situational groups”—for people who happen to be passing through similar life transitions at the same time. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Such situational groups should be established, Dr. Gerjuoy contends “for families caught up in the upheaval of relocation, for men and women about to be divorced, for people about to lose a parent or a spouse, for those about to gain a child, for men preparing to switch to a new occupation, for families that have just moved into a community, for those about to marry off their last child, for those facing retirement—for anyone, in other words, who faces an important change. Membership in the group would, of course, be temporary—just long enough to help the person with the transitional difficulties. Some groups might meet for a few months, others might not do more than hold a single meeting.” Some people cannot see beauty because they do not care about anything. By bringing together people who are sharing, or are about to share, a common adaptive experience, we help equip them to cope wit it. A human required to adaptive to a new life situation loses some of one’s bases for self-esteem. One begins to doubt one’s own abilities. If we bring one together with others who are moving through the same experience, people one can identify with and respect, we strength one. The members of the group come to share, even if briefly, some sense of identity. They see their problems more objectively. They trade useful ideas and insights. Most important, they suggest future alternatives for one another. That which I call the Overself is intermediate between the ordinary human and the World-Mind. It includes human’s higher nature but stretches into what is above one, the divine. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
That which connects the individual human to the Universal Spirit, I call the Overself. This connection can never be broken. Its existence is the chief guarantee that there is hope of salvation for all, not merely for those who think their group alone will be granted it. It is one’s own greater self, one’s Overself, that one thus experiences, although one ay be so overwhelmed by its mysterious Power, so awed by its ethereality, that one usually believes—and names—it God. And in one mode of meaning, one’s belief is not without justification. For at the core of the experience, one, the atom within the World-Mind, receives the revelation that it is ever there and, more, ever supporting one. It is this, the deepest part of one’s being, one’s final essential self, which is human’s Overself, and which links one with the World-Mind. It is this Presence within which evokes all one’s spiritual quality. This is the essential being of humans, where one’s link with God lies. Do you know that you carry God within you? You are a distinct portion of the essence of God and contain a part of Him within yourself. We like to focus on the future in group meetings. They should not be devoted to hashing over the past, or to griping about it, or to soul searching self-revelation, but to discussing personal objectives, and to planning practical strategies for future use in the new life situation. Members might watch movies of other similar groups wresting with the same kinds of problems. They might hear from others who are more advanced in the transition than they are. People are given the opportunity to pool their personal experiences and ideas before the moment of change is upon them. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
In essence, here is nothing novel about this approach. Even now certain organizations are based on situational principles. A group of Peace Corps volunteers preparing for an overseas mission is, in effect, just such a situational grouping, as are pre- and postnatal classes. Many American tows have a “Newcomers Club” that invites new residents to casserole dinners or other socials, permitting them to mix with other recent arrivals and compare problems and plans. Perhaps there ought to be an “Outmovers Club” as well. What is new is the suggestion that we systematically honeycomb the society with such “coping classrooms.” It is interesting how the lack of understanding by a few can innocently or purposely misguide many. Judging another’s heart and conscience is probably best lest to the righteous judge of us all. Surely the final determination as to who is a true disciple of Christ will be left to the Savior, who said, “I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep,” reports John 10.14. So, if we, even in our weak and stumbling way, are earnestly striving to live a Christlike life, how others choose to characterize us should be of little consequence. The responsibility for our Christianity is ours. Others may characterize us as they will, but the true and righteous Judge will judge us as we are. Our discipleships is for us to determine, not someone else. I would hope that our fruits would merit the term Christian, and that our deeds, our actions, our hearts, and our countenances exemplify the teachings of the Saviour and display our gratitude for His great sacrifice for all of us. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Christ is the Redeemer of the World. He is our Lord, our Light, and out Saviour. He was ordained from on high to descend below all, to suffer above all! He is the focus of all that we teach and all we do. As a Church we are individual Christians, trying to prove our discipleship to the Saviour. It is not an institutional matter, it is a personal matter. Almighty Father, on this day, as we approach Thine altar to gain inspiration from Thy Torah, we pray that Thou wilt open our hearts unto Thy Law to the end that we may fulfill Thy holy precepts. Thou who didst bring order out of chaos, who didst establish harmony among the Heavenly bodies, do Thou bring order and harmony into our lives and the lives of all humankind. May the portion of the Torah we read today inspire us to dedicate ourselves wholeheartedly to all that makes for just and righteous living. Hasten the day when Thy Law shall guide the lives of all the peoples of the Earth, when all humans shall live together as brothers recognizing Thee, the Father of all. Amen. Our God and God of our fathers, we stand before the open Ark of Thy Covenant to acknowledge Thy sovereignty. Before Thee and before the glory of Thy Law do we bow at all times. For Thou art Truth and Thy Torah is Truth, and Thy prophets are prophets of Truth, and Thou doest abound in mercy and in truth. Do Thou enlighten our eyes that we may behold the sonders of Thy Torah. Endow us with wisdom that we may understand its precepts, and inspire us with courage that we may hold aloft the banner of Thy Law in the eyes of all humans. We need freedom in our thought to elude what we have been taught to find what we have sought. May we just let go so we may know the flow of true being. It is worth seeing a Heavenly view. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Those who take the long view of human experience will find that from time to time there were other societies no less honest and courageous than ours in facing all the ugliness, cruelty, and indifference the mirror reveals, but with the greater honesty still to hold the brighter, nobler view of humans and with the greater courage to pursue the vision. A well-ordered society is one designed to advance the good of its members and effectively regulated by a public conception of justice. Thus it is a society in which everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same principle of justice, and the basic social institutions satisfy and are known to satisfy these principles. Now justice as fairness is framed to accord with this idea of society. The persons in the original position are to assume that the principles chose are public, and so they must assess conceptions of justice in view of their probable effects as the generally recognized standards. If understood and followed by few or even by all, conceptions that might work well enough s long as this fact were not widely known, are excluded by the public condition. We should also note that since principles are consented to in the light of true general beliefs about humans and their place in society, the conception of justice adopted is acceptable on the basis of these facts. There is no necessity to invoke theological or metaphysical doctrines to support its principles, nor to imagine another World that compensates for and corrects the inequalities which the two principles permit in this one. Conceptions of justice must be justified by the conditions of our life as we know it or not at all. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Now a well-ordered society is also regulated by its public conception of justice. This fact implies that its members have a strong and normally effective desire to act as the principles of justice require. Since a well-ordered society endures over time, it conceptions of justice is presumably stable: that is, when institutions are just (as defined by this conception), those taking part in these arrangements acquire the corresponding sense of justice and desire to do their part in maintaining them. If the sense of justice that it tends to generate is stronger and more likely to override disruptive inclinations, and if the intuitions it allows foster weaker impulses and temptations to act unjustly, one conception of justice is more stable than another. The stability of a conception depends upon a balance of motives: the sense of justice that it cultivates and the aims that it encourages must normally win out against propensities toward injustice. To estimate the stability of a conception of justice (and the well-ordered society that it defines), one must examine the relative strength of these opposing tendencies. It is evident that stability is a desirable feature of moral conceptions. Other things equal, the persons in the original position will adopt the more stable scheme of principles. If the principles of moral psychology are such that it fails to engender in human beings the requisite desire to act upon it, however attractive a conception of justice might be on other grounds, it is seriously defective. Thus in arguing further for the principles of justice as fairness, I should like to show that this conception is more stable than other alternatives. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
This argument from stability is for the most part in addition to the reasons so far adduced. To be sure, the criterion of stability is not decisive. In fact, some ethical theories have flouted it entirely, at least on some interpretations. Thus Bentham is occasionally said to have held both the classical principle of utility and the doctrine of psychological egoism. However, if it is a psychological law that individuals pursue only in interest in themselves, it is impossible for them to have an effective sense of justice (as defined by the principle of utility). The best that the ideal legislator can do is to design social arrangements so that from self—or group-interested motives citizens are persuaded to act in ways that maximize the sum of well-being. In this conception the identification of interests that results is truly artificial: it rests upon the artifice of reason, and individuals comply with the institutional scheme solely as a means to their separate concerns. This sort of divergence between principles of right justice and human motives is unusual, although instructive as a limiting case. Most traditional doctrines hold that to some degree at least human nature is such that we acquire a desire to act justly when we have lived under and benefited from just institutions. To the extent that this is true, a conception of justice is psychologically suite to human inclinations. Moreover, should it turn out that the desires to act justly is also regulative of a rational plan of life, the acting justly is part of our good. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
In this event the conceptions of justice and goodness are compatible and the theory as a whole is congruent. Justice as fairness generates its own support and it is likely to have greater stability than the traditional alternatives, since it is more in line with the principles of moral psychology. Human beings in a well-ordered society might acquire a sense of justice and other moral sentiments. Inevitably we shall have to take up some rather speculative psychological questions; but all along I have assumed that general facts about the World, including basic psychological principles, are known to the persons in the original position and relied upon by them in making their decisions. By reflecting on these problems here we survey these facts as they affect the initial agreement. If I make a few remarks about the conceptions of equilibrium and stability, it may prevent misunderstanding. Both of these ideas admit of considerable theoretical and mathematical refinement, but I shall use them in an intuitive way. The concept of stability I use is actually that of quasi-stability: if an equilibrium is stable, then all the variable return to their equilibrium values after a disturbance has moved the system away from equilibrium; a quasi-stable equilibrium is one in which only some of the variables return to their equilibrium configuration. A well-ordered society is quasi-stable with respect to the justice of its institutions and the sense of justice needed to maintain this condition. While a shift in social circumstances may render its institutions no longer just, in due course they are reformed as the situation requires, and justice is restored. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Thus it is a system that is in equilibrium over time so long as no external forces impinge upon it. In order to define an equilibrium state precisely, the boundaries of the system have to be carefully drawn and its determining characteristics clearly set out. Three things are essential: first, to identify the system and to distinguish between internal and external forces; second, to define the states of the system, a state of being a certain configuration of its determining characteristics; and third, to specify the laws connecting the states. Some systems have no equilibrium states, while others have many. These matters depend upon the nature of the system. Now an equilibrium is stable whenever departures from it, caused say by external disturbances, call into play forces within the system that tend to bring it back to this equilibrium state, unless of course the outside shocks are too great. By contrast, an equilibrium is unstable when a movement away from it arouses forces within the system that lead to even greater changes. Systems are more or less stable depending upon the strength of the internal forces that are available to return them to equilibrium. Since in practice all social systems are subject to disturbances of some kind, they are practically stable, let us say, if the departures from their preferred equilibrium positions caused by normal disturbances elicit forces sufficiently strong to restore these equilibria after a decent length of time, or else to stay sufficiently close to them. These definitions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
When it satisfies, and is publicly known by those engaged in it to satisfy the appropriate principles of justice, we are concerned with this complex of political, economic, and social institutions. We must try to assess the relative stability of these systems. Now I assume that the boundaries of these schemes are given by the notion of a self-contained national community. This supposition is not relaxed until the derivation of the principles of justice for the law of nations, but the wider problems of international law. It is also essential to note that in the present case equilibrium and stability are to be defined with respect to the justice of the basic structure and the moral conduct of individuals. The stability of a conception of justice does not imply that the institutions and practices of the well-ordered society do not alter it. In fact, such a society will presumably contain great diversity and adopt different arrangements from time to time. In this context stability means that however institutions are changed, they still remain just or approximately so, as adjustments are made in view of new social circumstances. The inevitable deviations from justice are effectively corrected or held within tolerable bounds by forces within the system. Among these forces I assume that the sense of justice shared by the members of the community has a fundamental role. To some degree, then, moral sentiments are necessary to insure that the basic structure is stable with respect to justice. According to the social learning theory, the aim of moral training is to supply missing motives: the desire to do what is right for its own sake, and the desire not to do what is wrong. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Right conduct is manner generally beneficial to others and to society (as defined by the principle of utility) for the doing of which we commonly lack an effective motive, whereas wrong conduct is behaviour generally injurious to others and to society for the doing of which we often have a sufficient motive. Society must somehow make good these defects. This is achieved by the approbation and disapprobation of parents and of others in authority, who when necessary use rewards and punishments ranging from bestowal and withdrawal of affection to the administration of pleasures and pains. Eventually by various psychological processes we acquire a desire to do what is right and an aversion to doing what is wrong. A second thesis is that the desire to conform to moral standards is normally aroused early in life before we achieve an adequate understanding of the reasons for these norms. Classic analysts assume that character development is finished around the age of five or six years, and that no essential changes occur afterward other than by the intervention of therapy. My experience has led me to the conviction that this concept is untenable; it is mechanistic and does not take into account the whole process of living and of character as a developing system. When an individual is born one is by no means faceless. Not only is one born with genetically determined temperamental and other inherited dispositions that have greater affinity to certain character traits rather than to others, but prenatal events and birth itself form additional dispositions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
All this makes up, as it were, the face of the individual at birth. Then one comes in contact with a particular kind of environment—parents and other significant people around one—to which one responds and which tends to influence the further development of one’s character. At the age of eighteen months the infant’s character is much more definitely formed and determined than it was at birth. Yet it is not finished, and its development could go in several directions, depending on the influences that operate on it. By the age of six, let us say, the character is still more determined and fixed, but not without the capacity for change, provided new, significant circumstances occur that may provoke such change. Speaking more generally, the formation and fixity of the character has to be understood in terms of a sliding scale; the individual begins life with certain qualities that dispose one to go in certain directions, but one’s personality is still malleable enough to allow the character to develop in many different directions within the given framework. Every step in life narrows down the number of possible future outcomes. If they are to produce fundamental changes in the direction of the further evolution of the system, the more the character is fixed, the greater must be the impact of new factors. Eventually, the freedom to change becomes so minimal that only a miracle would seem capable of effecting a change. This does not imply that influences of early childhood are not as a rule more effective than later events. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
However, events in early childhood are incline more, they do not determine a person completely. In order to make up for the greater degree of impressionability of early age, later events have to be more intense and more dramatic. The impression that the character never changes is largely based on the fact that the life of most people is so prefabricated and unspontaneous that nothing new ever really happens, and later events only confirm the earlier ones. The number of real possibilities for the character to develop in different directions is in inverse proportion to the fixity the character system has assumed. However, in principle the character system is never so completely fixed that new developments could not occur as the result of extraordinary experiences, although such occurrences are, statically speaking, not probable. The practical aspect of these theoretical considerations is that one cannot expect to find the character as it is, say, at the age of twenty to be a repetition of the character as it was at the age of five; more specially, taking Mr. Adolph Hitler as an example, one could not expect to find a fully developed necrophilous character system in one’s childhood, but one could expect to find certain necrophilous roots that are conducive to development of a full-fledged necrophilous character as one of several real possibilities. However, only after a great number of internal and external events have accrued will the character system have developed in such a way that necrophilia becomes the (almost) unchangeable outcome, and then we can discover it in various overt and covert forms. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
With Mr. Hitler, there were traces of necrophilia in his early roots and these conditions increased at various stages of his development, until finally, there was hardly any other possibility left. The most important influence on a child is the character of its parents, rather than this or that single event. For those who believe in the simplistic formula that the bad development of a child is roughly proportionate to the “badness” of the parents the study of the character of Mr. Hitler’s parents, as far as the known data show, offers a surprise: both father and mother seem to have been stable, well-intentioned people, and not destructive. Mr. Hitler’s mother, Klara, seems to have been a well-adjusted and sympathetic woman. She was undereducated, simple country girl who had worked as a maid in the house of Alois Hitler, who was her uncle and future husband. Klara become Alois’s mistress and was pregnant by him at the time his wife died. She married the widow Alois on 7 January 1885; she was twenty-four years old and her was forty-seven. She was hardworking and responsible; in spite of a marriage that was not too happy, she never complained. She fulfilled her obligation humanely and conscientiously. Her life was centered on the task of maintaining her home and caring for her husband and the children of the family. She was a model housekeeper, who maintained a spotless home and performed her duties with precision. Nothing could distract her from her round of household toil, not even the prospect of a little gossip. Her home and the furthering of the family interest were all-important; by careful management she was able to increase the family possession, much to her joy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Even more important to her than the house were the children. Everyone who knew her agreed that it was in her love and devotion for the children that Klara’s life centered. The only serious charge ever raised against her is that because of this love and devotion she was over-indulgent and thus encouraged a sense of uniqueness in her son—a somewhat strange charge to be brought against a mother. The children did not share this view. Her stepchildren and her own offspring who survived infancy loved and respected their mother. The accusation that she was overindulgent to her son and encouraged a sense of uniqueness (read narcissism) in him is not so strange—and furthermore probably true. However, this period of overindulgence lasted only up to the time when Mr. Hitler ended the period of his infancy and entered school. This change in her attitude was probably brought about, or at least facilitated, by her giving birth to another son at the time Mr. Hitler was five years old. However, her whole attitude during the rest of her life proves that the birth of the new child was not as traumatic an event as some psychoanalysts like to think; she probably stopped spoiling Adolph, but she did not suddenly ignore him. She was increasingly aware of the necessity for him to grow up, adjust himself to reality, and as we shall see, she did everything she could to further this process. The available evidence shows on instances that would suggest doubts about the fact that she was a kind and concerned mother to Adolph, even though she failed in her attempt to save her son from an ever-increasing estrangement from reality. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
It is of course possible that her loving behaviour contributed to her son’s development; but such aa speculation is of little value since it finds no support in the evidence. In spite of a productive character, she did not have a happy life. As was usual in the German-Austrian middle class, she was expected to bear children, take care of the household, and subordinate herself to her authoritarian husband. Her age, her lack of education, his elevated social position, and his selfish—though not vicious—disposition, tended to intensify this traditional position. Thus she became a sad, disappointed woman as a result of circumstances more than of her character. In spite of her friendly disposition, however, we must doubt whether she created an atmosphere of happiness in the family. Alois Hitler was a much less sympatric figure. Born as an illegitimate child, using his mother’s name, Schicklgruber (changed much later to that of Hitler), starting with poor financial resources, he was a real self-made man. Through hard work and discipline he succeeded in rising from being a low official in the Austro-Hungarian customs service to a relatively high position—“higher collector of customs”—that clearly gave him the status of a respected member of the middle class. He was economical and succeeded in saving enough money to own a house, a farm, and to leave his family an estate which, together with his pension, provided for a financially comfortable existence. He was undoubtedly a selfish man who showed little concern for his wife’s feelings, but apparently he was not too different in the from the average member of his class. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Alois Hitler was a man who loved life, particularly in the form of women and wine. Not that he was a woman chaser, but he was not bound by the moral restrictions of the Austrian middle class. In addition he enjoyed his glass of wine and may sometimes have had a glass too many, but he was my no means a drunkard as has been indicated in various articles. The most outstanding manifestation of his life-loving nature, however was his deep and lasting interest in bees and beekeeping. He would with great pleasure spend most of his free time with his beehives, the only serious, active interest he had outside of his work. His life’s dream was to own a farm where he could keep bees on a larger scale. He did eventually realize this dream; although it turned out that the farm he first bought was too big, toward the end of his life he owned just the right acreage and enjoyed it immensely. Alois Hitler has sometimes been described as a brutal tyrant—I assume because that would fit better into a simplistic explanation of his son’s character. He was not a tyrant, but an authoritarian who believed in duty and responsibility and thought he had to determine his son’s life as long as the later was not yet of age. According to the evidence we have, he never beat his son; he scolded him, argued with him tried to make him see what was good for him, but he was not a frightening figure who struck terror in his son. His son’s growing irresponsibility and avoidance of reality made it all the more imperative for the father to try to lecture and correct him. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
There are many data to show that Alois was not inconsiderate or arrogant to people, by no means a fanatic, and, on the whole, rather tolerant. His political attitude corresponds to this description: he was anticlerical and liberal, with much interest in politics. His last words just before he died of a heart attack while he was reading the newspaper were an angry expression against “those blacks” as the reactionary clericals were called. How can we explain that these two well-meaning, stable, very normal, and certainly not destructive people have birth to the future “monster,” Adolph Hitler? Hate against life is nothing but this: hate against the act by which the parents have given him life. Mr. Hitler’s sadism is secondary in comparisons with his necrophilia. The little boy, it seems, was the apple of his mother’s eye. She pampered him, never scolded him, admired him; he could do no wrong. All her interests and affection were concentrated on him. This very probably built up his narcissism and his passivity. He was wonderful without having to make any effort because mother took care of all his wishes. This constellation was accentuated by the fact that his father, due to the particularities of his working conditions, did not spend much time at home. Whatever good the balancing influence of a male authority would have been increased by a certain sickliness that, in turn, tended to increase the attention paid him by his mother. When Mr. Hitler was six, this phase came to a close. Several facts marked its end. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
The most obvious, especially from the classical psychoanalytic standpoint, was the birth of a brother when Adolph was five, which removed Adolph from his position of mother’s chief object of devotion. Actually such an event has a wholesome, rather than traumatic influence; it tends to decrease the reasons for dependency on mother and consequent passivity. Contrary to the cliché, the evidence shows that instead of suffering pangs of jealousy, young Mr. Hitler fully enjoyed the years after his brother’s birth. It can be argued, of course, that the evidence does not show us his unconscious disappointment and resentment. However, since one cannot discover any signs of it, such an argument is without value. Its only basis is the dogmatic assumption that the birth of a sibling must have such an effect. This results in a circuitous reasoning in which one takes as a fact what the theory requires, and then claims that they theory is confirmed by facts. For one whole year, Adolph lived in a five-year-old’s paradise, playing games and roughhousing with the children of the neighbourhood. Miniature wars and fights between cowboys and Indians appear to have been his favourties, and they were to continue as his major diversion for many years. Since Passau was in Germany—on the German side of the Austro-German border, where the Austrian customs inspection took place—war games would have pitted French against German in the spirit of 1870, yet there was no particular importance in the nationality of the victims. Europe was full of heroic little boys who massacred all national ethnic groups impartially. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
This year of childhood combat was important in Mr. Hitler’s life not because it was spent on German soil and added a Bavarian touch to his speech, but because it was a year of escape into almost complete freedom. At home he began to assert himself more and probably displayed the first signs of consuming anger when he did not get his way. Outside play, without limit to action or imagination, reigned supreme. Largely responsible for Mr. Hitler’s boy surrounding the birth of his little brother was the fact that his father took up a new post in Linz, while the family, apparently fearing to move with the baby, stayed behind in Passau for a full year. This paradisal life was abruptly ended when the father resigned from the customs service and the family moved to Hafeld, near Lambach, and his six-year-old son had to enter school. Adolph found his life suddenly confined in a narrow circle of activities demanding responsibility and discipline. For the first time he was steadily and systematically forced to conform. What can we say about the child’s character development by the end of this first period of his life? This is the period in which both aspects of the Oedipus complex are fully developed: sexual attraction to mother and hostility to father. The data seem to confirm the Freudian assumption: young Hitler was deeply attached to mother and antagonistic to his father; but he failed to solve the Oedipus complex by identifying himself with father through the formation of the superego and overcoming his attachment to mother; feeling betrayed by her by the birth or a rival he withdrew from her. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Serious questions arise, however, concerning the Freudian interpretation. If the birth of his brother when Adolph was five had been so traumatic, leading to the breaking of the tie to mother and replacing “love” for her by resentment and hate, why should the year after this event have been such a happy one—in fact probably the happiest period of his childhood? Why did the image of his mother continue to be so positive that he carried her picture in a little bad on his breast during the war and had it in his house in Obersalzberg and in Berlin? If we consider the fact that his mother’s relationship to her husband seems to have been one of little intensity and warmth, can we really explain his hate of his father as a result of his Oedipal rivalry? These questions would seem to find an answer of the hypothesis on malignant incestuousness. This hypothesis would lead to the assumption that Hitler’s fixation to his mother was not a warm and affectionate one up to age five; that he remained cold and did not break through his narcissistic shell; that she did not assume the role of a real person for him, but that of a symbol for the impersonal power of Earth, fate—and death. Most importantly, one could understand that the beginning of Hitler’s manifest necrophilous development is to be found in the malignant incestuousness that characterizes his early relationship to his mother. This hypothesis would also explain why Hitler later never fell in live with motherly figures, why the tie to his real mother as a person was replaced by the blood, soil, the race, and eventually to chaos and death. The consequence of not achieving an adequate understanding aroused early in life is that one’s subsequent moral sentiments are likely to bear the scares of this early training which shapes more or less roughly original nature. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
The process by which the child comes to have moral attitudes centers around the oedipal situation and the deep conflicts to which it gives rise. The moral precepts insisted upon by those in authority (in this case the parents) are accepted by the child as the best way to resolve one’s anxieties, and the resulting attitudes represented by the superego are likely to be harsh and punitive reflecting the stresses of the oedipal phase. Thus part of the moral learning occurs early in life before a reasoned basis for morality can be understood, and it involves the acquisition of new motives by psychological processes marked by conflict and stress. Since parents and others in authority are bound to be in various ways misguided and self-seeking in their use of praise and blame, and rewards and punishments generally, our earlier and unexamined moral attitudes are likely to be in important respects irrational and without justification. Moral advance in later life consists partly in correcting these attitudes in the light of whatever principles we finally acknowledge to be sound. The other traditional of moral learning states that not so much a matter of supplying missing motives as one of the free developments of our innate intellectual and emotional capacities according to the natural bent. Once the power of understanding mature and persons some to recognize their place in society and are able to take up the standpoint of others, they appreciate the mutual benefits of establishing fair terms of social cooperation. We have a natural sympathy with other persons and an innate susceptibility to the pleasures of fellow feeling and self-mastery, and these provide the affective basis for the moral sentiments once we have a clear grasp of our relations to our associates from an appropriately general perspective. Thus this tradition regards the moral feelings as a natural outgrowth of a full appreciation of our social nature. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
The arrangements of a just society are so suited to use that anything which is obviously necessary for it is accepted much like a physical necessity. An indispensable condition of such a society is that all shall have consideration for the others on the basis of mutually acceptable principles of reciprocity. It is painful for us when our feelings are not in union with those of our fellows; and this tendency to sociality provides in due course a firm basis for the moral sentiments. Moreover, to be held accountable to the principles of justice in one’s dealings with others does not stunt our nature. Instead it realizes our social sensibilities and by exposing us to a larger good enables us to control our narrower impulses. It is only when we are restrained not because we injure the good of others but by their mere displeasure, or what seems to us their arbitrary authority, that our nature is blunted. If the reasons for moral injunctions are made plain in terms of the just claims of others, these constraints do us no injury but are seen to be compatible with our good. Moral learning is not so much a matter of acquiring new motives, for these will come about of themselves once the requisite developments in our intellectual and emotional capacities has taken place. It follows that a full grasp of moral conceptions must await maturity; the child’s understanding is always primitive and the characteristic features of one’s morality fall away in later stages. The rationalist tradition presents a happier picture, since it hold that the principles of right and justice spring for our nature and are not at odds with our good, whereas the other account would seem to include no such guarantee. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
A moral view is an extremely complex structure of principles, ideals, and precepts, and involves all the elements of thought, conduct, and feeling. Certainly many kinds of learning ranging from reinforcement and classical conditioning to highly abstract reasoning and the refined perception of exemplars enter into its development. Presumably at some time or other each has a necessary role. A person will acquire an understanding of and an attachment to the principles of justice as one grows up in a particular form of well-ordered society. We are led to distinguish between the moralities of authority, of association, and of principles. The account of moral development is tied throughout to the conception of justice which is to be learned, and therefore presupposed the plausibility if not the correctness of theory. Morality of association is parallel certain life stages. Development within these early stages is being able to assume more complex, demanding, and comprehensive roles. A caveat is apropos here similar to that I made before in regard to the remarks on economic theory. We want the psychological account of moral learning to be true and in accordance with existing knowledge. However, of course it is impossible to take the details into account. One must keep in mind that the purpose of the following discussion is to examine the questions of stability and to contrast the psychological roots of the various conceptions of justice. The crucial point is how the general facts of moral psychology affect the choice of principles in the original position. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Unless the psychological account is defective in a way that would call into question the acknowledgment of the principles of justice rather than the standard of utility, say, no irreparable difficulty should ensure. I also hope that none of the further uses of psychological theory will prove too wide of the mark. Particularly important among these is the account of the basis of equality. A farmer who has moved down a thousand flowers in one’s meadow to feed one’s cows should take care that on the way home one does not, in wanton pastie, switch off the head of a single flower growing at the edge of the road, for in so doing one injures life without being forced to do so by necessity. Let a human begin to think about the mystery of one’s life and the links which connect one with life that fills the World, and one cannot but bring to bear upon one’s own life and all other life that comes within one’s reach the principle of reverence for life. Diseased conditions in the human body are often traceable, by a subtle and penetrating analysis, to diseased conditions of the human soul. Medical science deals chiefly with the physical organism, and so long as it persists in regarding only that part of the being of humans, so long will it continue to find its theories falsified, its carefully prepared experiments turned into blind guesses, and its high percentage of failures maintained. The body is after all only a sensitive machine, and if thinking and feeling of a human who uses the machine in self-expression is distorted, unbalanced, or discordant in any way, then these undesirable qualities will reproduce themselves in the physical organism as appropriate disease or functional derangements. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
O THOU wicked and disobedient Spirit Forneus, because thou hast rebelled, and hast not obeyed nor regarded my words which I have rehearse; they being all glorious and incomprehensible names of the true GOD, the maker and creator of thee and of me, and of all the World; I DO by the power of these names the which no creature is able to resist, curse thee into the depth of the Bottomless Abyss, there to remain unto the Day of Doom in chains, and in fire and brimstone unquenchable, unless thou forthwith appear here before this Circle, in the triangle to do my will. And, therefore, come thou quickly and peaceably, in and by these names of God, ADONAI, ZABAOTH, ADONAI, AMIORAN; come thou! come thou! for it is the King of Kings, even ADONIA, who commandeth thee. WHEN thou shalt have rehearsed thus far, but still he cometh not, then write thou his seal on parchment and put thou it into a strong black box (this box should evidently be in metal or in something which does not take fire easily). I CONJURE thee, O fire, by him who made thee and all other creatures for good in the World, that thou torment, burn, and consume this Spirit Forneus, for everlasting. I condemn thee, thou Spirit Forneus, because thou art disobedient and obeyest not my commandment, nor keepest the precepts of the LORD THY GOD, neither wilt thou obey me nor mine invocations, having thereby called thee forth, I, who am the servant of the MOST HIGH AND IMPERIAL LORD GOD OF HOSTS, IEHOVAH, I who am dignified and fortified by His celestial power and permission, and yet thou comest not to answer these my propositions here made unto thee. #Randolphharris 22 of 23
For the which thine averseness and contempt thou art guilty of great disobedience and rebellion, and therefore shall I excommunicate thee, and destroy thy name and seal, the which I have enclosed in this box; and shall burn thee in the immortal fire and bury thee in immortal oblivion; unless thou immediately come and appear visibly and affably, friendly and courteously here unto me before this Circle, in this triangle, in a form comely and fair, and in no wise terrible, hurtful, or frightful to me or any other creature whatsoever upon the face of the Earth. And thou shalt make rational answers unto my requests, and perform all my desires in all things, that I shall make unto thee. Almighty God, reverently we stand before Thy Law, the Torah, Thy most precious gift to man,–the Holy Writ our fathers learned and taught, preserved for us, a heritage unto all generations. May we, their children’s children, ponder every word and find as they, new evidence of Thee in every precept, each eternal truth. O Light of Ages, Thou art still our light, our guide, our fortress. May Thy Torah ever be our Tree of Life, our shield and stay, that we may take its teachings to our heart and thus draw near to Thee. Amen. Thou Sovereign of the World and Ruler of humankind, as we stand before the open ark of Thy Torah we gratefully acknowledge Thee to be our Father and our Law-giver. Thou hast bequeathed unto us Thy Law, a sacred heritage for all time. Give us discernment to know and wisdom to understand that Thy Torah is our life and the length of our days. Teach us so to live that we shall be guided by Thy commandments. May Thy Word ever be a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path, showing us the way to true and righteous living. Amen. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Writing Free Verse is Like Playing Tennis with the Net Down!
I believe that humans will not merely endure; they will prevail. A writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of humans has no dedication nor any membership in literature. There is only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that are real and immediate is the process of a rational mind. Catch-22 is a dilemma or difficult circumstance from which there is no escape because of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions. For example, I cannot start my own business until I have the money, and I cannot get the money until I start my own business. Oh my goodness, this is a real Catch-22. When you view it from the outside, nature looks beautiful and marvelous. However, when you read its pages like a book, it is horrible. And its cruelty is so senseless! The most precious form of life is sacrificed to the lowliest. A child breathes the germs of tuberculosis. He grows and flourishes but is destined to suffering and premature death because these lowly creatures multiply in his vital organs. How often in Africa have I been overcome with horror when I examined the blood of a patient who was suffering from sleeping sickness. Why did this man, his face contorted in pain, have to sit in front of me, groaning, “Oh, my head, my head”? Why should he have to suffer night after night and die a wretched death? Because there, under the microscope, were minute, pale corpuscles, one ten-thousandth of a millimeter long—not very many, sometimes such a very few that one had to look for hours to find them at all. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
The fact that in nature one creature may cause pain to another and even deal with in instinctually in the most cruel way, is a harsh mystery that weighs on us as long as we live. The World given over to ignorance and egotism is like a valley shrouded in darkness. Only one creature can escape and catch a glimpse of the light: the highest creature, man. His is the privilege of achieving the knowledge of shared experience and compassion, of transcending the ignorance in which the rest of creation pines. It comes to this—that much of human disease and sickness is traceable to the faculty functioning of the human self. Learn how to use that self correctly in its physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual aspects and you learn how to prevent or cure part, or most, or even all of your ill health. When a person’s healthy has broken down, nothing seems so important to one as its restoration. It is only then that one realizes the value of good health. This has been stated from the merely conventional and Worldly standpoint. However, what of the spiritual standpoint? The aspirant whose health has broken down becomes continually preoccupied with the condition of one’s body, so that the thoughts and time which one gives to it are taken from the thoughts and time which one could have given to one’s spiritual aspiration. And when one comes to one’s meditation periods, one may find it difficult to rise above one’s bodily states, so that even one’s concentration and power of meditation may be disturbed by it. For after all, the body is the instrument with which one has to work, and through which one has to achieve one’s high purpose during incarnation on this Earth. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
This is why systems have been created to lay a foundation of health and strength for the spiritual endeavours of the aspirant. Moreover, if one seeks to be of service to one’s fellow humans, one’s capacity to serve will be limited by the condition of one’s health, and may even be inhibited on the physical plane altogether. With good health one becomes more valuable to others but with bad health less so. What is wrong with offering physical benefits to the students of philosophy? Why should it not make them healthier and help overcome their difficulties? Why should philosophy be indifferent to their personal welfare? It is something fit only to be read about in library chairs or meditated upon in mountain caves? That is to say, fit only for dreamers and not for those who have to struggle and suffer in the World? No—it is something to be proud of, not something to be ashamed of, that philosophy shows us how to live so as to prevent avoidable sickness and how to find a path out of perplexing difficulties. There is nothing meritorious in meekly accepting illness and disease because they are God’s will. The human being is entitled to defend its body against them. One should be ready to die at any times but not willing to do so. For the need of staying on in the body until a deeper spiritual awareness has been gained should make one care more for one’s health, fitness, and efficiency. If the body does not become non-existent because, ultimately, it is a thought-form, neither does it become unimportant. For it is only in this body that we can attain and realize the ultimate consciousness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
If, as has been explained in the past, the physical wakeful state is the only one in which the task of true self-realization can be fully accomplished by the individual, then it is also the only state in which all humankind will ever accomplish it. As the social arrangements and living conditions in the World may accelerate or slow down the process of enlightenment, it becomes clear that the nature of those physical arrangements and conditions is important in the eyes of those who care for humankind’s spiritual welfare. Consequently, true wisdom cannot be indifferent to them but, on the contrary, will always seek to improve the one and ameliorate the other. Why should we refuse, in the name of an other-World sanctity, the healing gifts of Nature because they help heal the body which belongs to this World? Are we such ethereal creatures already, have we attained the disembodied state, that we can afford to neglect the aches and pains, the ills and malfunctions of this, our Earthly body? Most of the individual’s health troubles are the result of Universal law. The body is a source of pleasure and misery to nearly all; but both being temporary, the one balances the other. One should do one’s utmost to keep one’s body in good health by following the best program of physical living, diet, and so on, that one’s own experience and expert advice can suggest. One should try the most reasonable treatment for illness which both the Old World and New World medical systems can offer. After one has done these things then there is nothing more one can do except to take one’s suffering as a constant reminder of the necessity of seeking happiness in a spiritual self above the body. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
If you did not carry something valuable, the enemy would not fight you. They try to tackle the one with the ball, not the one on the bench. The question you ask about the inevitability of ill health on this needs a page to itself. Generally speaking, there is no such inevitability. Indeed the cleansing of the subconscious mind, the discipline of the bodily senses, and the quieting of the emotional nature promote good health. Where, however, the student through ignorance or through outside factors fails to make certain period for one’s further evolution—then one’s higher self forces those changes upon one through upheavals or upsets in one’s environment or in one’s body. This is done by sending down some Universal Laws. In the later case it means, of course, illness or disease—sometimes “accident.” This cover certain individual cases, but there are many others where ill health is only the ordinary Universal Legal result of earlier transgressions of the laws of physical, emotional, moral, or mental health, and not the result of special Overself intervention. Finally, there is the third group where it is the result of the natural imperfection of life on this Earth where everything is, at this point in time, more than likely doomed to decay and perish, unless supernatural forces are employed to keep things under constant maintenance. Nobody escapes this general law. Queen Akasha could not escape it nor could Nino Brown. Such higher life, a diviner better existence; so it is not useless. This Earth is not our true how. We are here on mortal probation. We belong elsewhere, nearer to God’s perfection, beauty, and harmony. The Word tells us to bless God in all things not for all things! No matter what you are facing—PRAISE HIM! #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
The days of our mortal probation are numbered, but none of us knows the number of those days. Each day of preparation is precious. This life is the time for humans to prepare to meet God; yea, behold the day of this life is the day for humans to preform their labours. We have a special understanding of the eternal nature of our souls. We know that we had a premortal existence. We accepted our Heavenly Father’s great plan of happiness and chose to follow our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Principles we adopted and for which we contended were: agency, the ability to choose good or evil; progress, the ability to learn and become like our Heavenly Father; and faith, faith in our Father’s plan and in the Atonement of Jesus Christ that enables us to return to the presence of God. Consequently, we were permitted to enter mortal life. Concerning mortal life, the Master said, “We will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all thing whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them.” We understand that we will live a postmortal life of infinite duration and that we determine the kind of life it will be by our thoughts and actions in mortality. Mortality is very brief but immeasurably important. We learn from the scriptures that the “course of the Lord is one eternal round” and that God knows “all thing, being from everlasting to everlasting.” We are also eternal beings. Our presence here on Earth is an essential step in our loving Heavenly Father’s plan of happiness for His children. “We are, that we might have joy.” The Prophet Joseph Smith taught that “happiness is the object and design of our existence. If we purse the path of virtue, uprightness, faithfulness, holiness, and keeping all the commandments of God.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
We do not need gun control; humans need to learn to control the violence in their hearts. We, too, are under the painful law of necessity when, to prolong our own existence, we must bring other creatures to a painful end. However, we should never cease to consider this as something tragic and incomprehensible. Right now, this very moment, is part of our eternal progression toward retuning with our families to the presence of our Father in Heaven. President Gordon B. Hinckley taught: “We are here in this life with a marvelous inheritance, a divine endowment. If every person realized that all of one’s actions have eternal consequences, how different this World would be. If we recognized that we form each day the stuffy of which eternity is made, how much more satisfying our years may be.” That understanding helps us to make wise decisions in the many choices of our daily lives. Seeing life from an eternal perspective helps us focus our limited mortal energies on the things that matter most. We can avoid wasting our lives and laying “up for ourselves treasures upon the Earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt.” We can lay up treasures in Heaven and not trade our eternal spiritual birthright. The time will come when public opinion will no longer tolerate amusements based on the mistreatment and killing of living and inanimate beings. The time will come, but when? When will we reach the point that hunting, the pleasure of killing living beings for sport, will be regarded as a mental aberration? When will all the killing that necessity imposes upon us be undertaken with sorrow? #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
The rate of turnover in our lives in our lives, for example, can be influenced by conscious decisions. We can, to further highlight this illustration, cut down on change and stimulation by consciously maintaining longer-term relationships with the various elements of our physical environment. Thus, we can refuse t purchase throw-away products. We can hang onto the old jacket for another season; we can stoutly refuse to follow the latest fashion trend; we can resist when the salesperson tells us it is time to trade in our Ultimate Driving Machine. In this way, we reduce the need to make and break ties with the physical objects around us. We can use the same tactic with respect to people and the other dimensions of experience. There are times when even the most gregarious person feels anti-social and refuses invitations to parties or other events that call for social interaction. We consciously disconnect. In the same way, we can minimize travel. We can resist pointless reorganizations in our company, church, fraternal or community groups. In making important decisions, we can consciously weight the hidden costs of change against the benefits. None of this is to suggest that change can or should be stopped. Nothing is less sensible than the advice of the Duke of Cambridge who is said to have harumphed: “Any change, at any time for any reason is to be deplored.” The theory of the adaptive range suggests that, despite its physical costs, some level of change is as vital to health as too much change in damaging. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Some people, for reasons still not clear, are pitched at a much higher level of stimulus hunger than others. They seem to crave change even when others are feeling from it. A new Cresleigh house, a new Ultimate Driving Machine, another trip to Paris, another crisis on the job, more house guests, visits, financial adventures and misadventures—they seem to accept all these and more without apparent ill effect. Yet close analysis of such people often reveals the existence of what might be called “stability zones” in their lives—certain enduring relationships that are carefully maintained despite all kinds of other changes. One man I know has run through a series of love affairs a divorce, and remarriage—all within a very short span of time. One thrives on change, enjoys travel, new foods, new ideas, new movies, plays, and books. He has a high intellect and a low “boring point,” is impatient with tradition and restlessly eager for novelty. Ostensibly, he is walking exemplar of change. When we look more closely, however, we find that he has stayed on the same job for ten years. He drives a car he bought brand new, which is still in perfect condition. His clothes are not new. His closet friends are long-time professional associates and even a few old college buddies. Another case involves a man who has changed jobs at a mind-staggering rate, has moved his family thirteen times in eighteen years, travels extensively, rents cars, uses throw-away products, prides himself on leading the neighbourhood in trying out new gadgets, and generally lives in a restless whirl of transience, newness and diversity. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Once more, however, a second look reveals significant stability zones in his life: a good, tightly woven relationship with his wife of nineteen years; continuing ties with his parents; old college friends interspersed with the new acquaintances. A different form of stability zone is the habit pattern that goes with the person wherever one travels, no mater what other changes alter one’s life. A professor who has moved seven times in ten years, who travels constantly in the United States of America, South America, Europe and Africa, who has changed job repeatedly, pursues the same daily regimen wherever he is. He reads between eight and nine in the morning, takes forty-five minutes for exercise at lunch time, and then catches a half-hour cat-nap before plunging into work that keeps him busy until 10.00 P.M. The problem is not, therefore, to suppress change, which cannot be done, but to manage it. If we opt for rapid change in certain sectors of life, we can consciously attempt to build stability zones elsewhere. A divorce, perhaps, should not be too closely followed by a job transfer. Since the birth of a child alters all the human ties within a family, it ought not, perhaps, be followed too closely by a relocation which causes tremendous turnover in human ties outside the family. The recent widow should not, perhaps, rush to sell her Cresleigh McMansion. To design workable stability zones, however, to alter the larger patterns of life, we need far more potent tools. We need, first of all, a radically new orientation toward the future. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Ultimately, to manage change we must anticipate it. However, the notion that one’s personal future can be, to some extent, anticipated, files in the face of persistent folk prejudice. Most people, deep down, believe that the future is a blank. Yet the truth is that we can assign probabilities to some of the changes that lie in store for us, especially certain large structural changes, and there are ways to use knowledge in designing personal stability zones. We can, for example, predict with certainty that unless or science intervenes, we shall grow older; that our children, our relatives and friends will also grow older; and that after a certain point our health will begin to deteriorate. Obvious as this may seem, we can, as a result of this simple statement, infer a great deal about our lives one, five or ten years hence, and about the amount of change we will have to absorb in the interim. Few individuals or families plan head systematically. When they do, it is usually in terms of a budget. Yet we can forecast and influence our expenditure of time and emotion as well as money. Thus it is possible to gain revealing glimpses of one’s own future, and to estimate the gross level of change lying ahead, by periodically preparing what might be called a Time and Emotion Forecast. This is an attempt to assess the percentage time and emotional energy invested in various important aspects of life—and to see how this might change over the years. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
One can, for example, list in a column those sectors of life that seem most important to us: Health, Occupation, Leisure, Material Relations, Parental Relations, Filial Relations, et cetera. It is then possible to jot down next to each item a “guesstimate” of the amount of time we presently allocate to that sector. By way of illustration: given a nine-to-five job, a half-hour commute, and the usual vacations and holidays, a man employing this method would find that he devotes approximately 25 percent of his time to work. Although it is, of course, much more difficult, one can also make a subjective assessment of the percentage of one’s emotional energy invested in the job. If one is bored and secure, one may invest very little—there being no necessary correlation between time devoted and emotion invested. If one performs this exercise for each of the important sectors of one’s life, forcing oneself to write in a percentage even when it is no more than an extremely crude estimate, and toting up the figures to make sure they never exceed 100 percent, one will be rewarded with some surprising insights. For the way one distributes one’s time and emotional energies is a direct clue to one’s value system and one’s personality. The payoff for engaging in this process really begins, however, when one projects forward, asking oneself honestly and in detail how one’s job, or one’s marriage, or one’s relationship with one’s children or one’s parents is likely to develop within the years ahead. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
If, for example, one is a thirty-year-old middle manager with two teenage sons, two surviving parents or in-laws, and an incipient duodenal ulcer, one can assume that within half a decade one’s boys will be off to college or living away on their own. Time devoted to parental concerns will probably decline. Similarly, one can anticipate some decline in the emotional energies demanded by one’s parental role. On the other hand, as one’s own parents and in-laws grow older, one’s filial responsibility will probably look larger. If they are sick, one may have to devote large amounts of time and emotion to their care. If they are statistically likely to die within the period under study, one needs to face this fact. It tells one that one can expect a major change in one’s commitments. One’s own health, in the meantime, will not be getting any better. In the same way, one can hazard some guesses about one’s job—one’s chances for promotion, the possibility of reorganization, relocation, retraining, et cetera. All this is difficult, and it does not yield, “knowledge of the future.” Rather, it helps one make explicit some of one’s assumptions about the future. As one moves forward, filling in the forecast for the present year, the next year, the fifth or tenth year, patterns of change will begin to emerge. One will see that in certain years there are bigger shifts and redistributions to be expected than in others. Some years are choppier, more change-filled than others. And one can then, on the strength of these systematic assumptions, decide how to handle major decisions in the present. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Should the family move next year—or will there be enough turmoil and change without that? Should he quit his job? Buy a new Ultimate Driving Machine with the Competition Package? Take a costly vacation to Tahiti? Put his elderly father-in-law in a nursing home? Have an affair? Can he afford to rock his marriage or change his profession? Should he attempt to maintain certain levels of commitment unchanged? These techniques are extremely crude tools for personal planning. Perhaps the psychologists and social psychologist can design sharper instruments, more sensitive to differences in probability, more refined and insight-yielding. Yet, if we search for clues rather than certainties, even these primitive devices can helps us moderate or channel the flow of change in our lives. For, by helping us identify the zones of rapid change, they also help us identify—or invent-stability zones, pattern of relative constancy in the overwhelming flux. They improve the odds in the personal struggle to manage change. Nor is this a purely negative process—a struggle to suppress or limit change. The issues for any individual attempting to cope with rapid change is how to maintain oneself within the adaptive range, and, beyond that, how to find the exquisite optimum point at which one lives at peak effectiveness. Dr. John L. Fuller, a senior scientist at the Jackson Laboratory, a bio-medical research center in Bar Harbour, Maine, has conducted experiments in the impact of experiential deprivation and overload. “Some people,” he says, “achieve a certain sense of serenity, even in the midst of turmoil, not because they are immune to emotion, but because they have found ways to get just the “right” amount of change in their lives. The search for that optimum may be what much of the “pursuit of happiness” is about. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Trapped, temporarily, with the limited nervous and endocrine systems given us by evolution, we must work out new tactics to help us regulate the stimulation to which we subject ourselves. It was quite incomprehensible to me—this was before I began going to school—why in my evening prayers I should pray for human beings only. So when my mother had prayed with me and has kissed me goodnight, I used to add silently a prayer that I had composed myself for all living creatures. It ran thus: “O Heavenly Father, protect and bless all things that have breath; please guard them from all evil, and let them sleep in peace.” It is our duty to share and maintain life. Reverence concerning all life is the greatest commandment in its most elementary form. Or expressed in negative terms: Thou shalt not kill. In everything you recognize yourself. The tiny birds that fly in your path—it is a little creature, struggling for existence like yourself, rejoicing in the sun like you, knowing fear and pain like you. And now it is no more than decaying matter—which is what you will be sooner or later, too. When I hear a baby’s cry of pain change into a normal cry of hunger, to my ears that is the most beautiful music—and there are those who say I have good ears for music. Whoever is spared personal pain must feel oneself called to help in diminishing the pain of others. The point where humans meet the Infinite is the Overself, where one, the finite, responds to what is absolute, ineffable and inexhaustible Being, where one reacts to That which transcends one’s own existence—this is the Personal God one experiences and comes into relation with. In this sense one’s belief in such a God is justifiable. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Overself is the inner or true self of humans, reflecting the divine being and attributes. The Overself is an emanation from the ultimate reality but is neither a division nor a detached fragment of it. It is a ray shinning forth but not the sun itself. It is true that the nature of God is inscrutable and that the laws of God are inexorable. However, it is also true that the God-linked soul of humans is accessible and its intuitions available. This divine self is the unkillable and unlosable soul, forever testifying to the source, whence it came. Those who consider the hidden mind to be a mere storehouse of forgotten childhood memories or adolescent experiences and repressed adult wishes consider only a part of it, only a fraction. There is another and even still more hidden part which links humans with the very sources of the Universe—God. That point of contact in consciousness where humans first feels God and later vanishes into God, is the Overself. The Overself is a part of the One Infinite Life-Power as the dewdrop is a part of the ocean. In the normally covered center of a human’s being, covered by one’s thoughts and feelings and passions as a person, a self, IT IS. It is here that one is connected with the larger Being behind the Universe, the World-Mind. In this sense one is not really an isolated unit, not alone. God is with one. It was a simple shepherd on Mount Horeb who, during a glimpse, asked “Who are Thou?” Came the answer: “I am He Who IS!” With this grand consciousness, humans reach the APHELION of one’s orbit. One can go no higher and remain human. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Speaking metaphorically, we may say that the Overself is that fragment of God which dwells in humans, a fragment which has all the quality and grandeur of God without all is amplitude and power. The World-Mind’s reflection in us is the Overself. The thoughts and feelings which flow like a river through our consciousness make up the surface self. However, underneath them there is a deeper self which, being an emanation from the divine reality, constitutes our true self. The greatest thing is to be found at one’s post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as the our World might last a hundred years. Ever since giving to the needy became chic in Hollywood, we have been treated to a billion-dollar bonanza of celebrity benefits. Band-Aid, the Britney concert to help starving children, started the assistance wagons rolling. Then came Hands Across America which linked up from Los Angeles to New York to raise $100 million for domestic homelessness and hunger, while the Freedom Festival raised money for Vietnam veterans. And then there is my favorite: Sport Aid, which began with a runner leaving Ethiopia with a torch lighted from a refugee’s campfire. One jogged through several Ethiopia with a torch lighted from a refugee’s campfire. He jogged through several European cities. Then this tireless athlete flew to New York, torch in hand, (I wonder what he did when the “no smoking” sign came on?), where he lighted a flame in Manhattan’s United Nations Plaza, signaling the start of simultaneous 10-kilometer runs around the World. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
The plan, said organizer Bob Geldof was to raise money to fight disease and hunger in Africa. While few of us would deny that helping starving, homeless, and needy people is a good thing, this sudden aid frenzy did raise some practical questions. In an industry where publicity is the ticket to success, one may be excused for wondering if celebrity participation in such compassion extravaganzas is altogether altruistic. The “We Are the World” video, which has sold millions of copies, reminds us less of starving children than of the great humanitarianism of its showcase of rock idols. The goals may be worthy, but such slickly publicized charity certainly recalls biblical warnings against hiring trumpeters—or camera crews—to record one’s good deeds. We might put aside our suspicions as petty if only we knew that those in need were being helped. However, are they? The New Republic reports that while USA for Africa, the organization behind Live Aid, appeals for contributions to help the starving, 55 percent of its money is instead waiting to be spent on “recovery and long-term development projects,” something celebrity efforts may be ill-equipped to pull off. As of early 1986, of the $92 million raised by Live Aid and Band Aid, according to Newsweek, only $7 million has gone to emergency relief. Another $.6.5 million has been spent on trucks and ships to haul supplies; $20 million has been earmarked for projects like bridges in Chad. The rest sits in banks accounts somewhere. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Even noncontroversial goals such as feeding the hungry can get bogged down in squabbles over how money and food should be distributed, or stymied at the Marxist-controlled ports of Ethiopia. Let us not kid ourselves. Just because the fans in London or Philadelphia go home satisfied does not mean that the hungry in Africa go home fed. Rock promoter Bill Graham said of celebrity assistance, “It is an incredible power, knowing on any given day you can raise a million dollars.” Newsweek observed: “Perhaps that is why Live Aid and Farm Aid were such oddly upbeat exercises in self-congratulation. An industry was celebrating its power. Far from challenging the complacency of an audience, such mega-events reinforce it. Now by watching a pop music telethon and making a donation, fans can enjoy vicariously a sense of moral commitment.” Despite all the ballyhoo, feeding the hungry did not originate with Live-Aid. Christians have been doing it since the church began, not for T-shirts and pop albums, but in obedience to Christ’s command to care for those in need. Organizations such as World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, the Salvation Army, and millions of local churches have for generations been feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, and clothing the needy without the glamorous carrot-and-stick razzle-dazzle so recently discovered by the rich and famous. This kind of Christian patriotism also benefits society as a whole. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Jacques Ellul wrote that the answer to the big government illusion is small voluntary associations. As mentioned earlier, eighteenth-century statesman Edmund Burke described such voluntary groups as the “little platoons.” These are citizens—individuals or groups—who perform works of mercy and oppose injustice. They are the salt and light of which Jesus Christ spoke. Culture is most profoundly changed bot by the efforts of huge institutions but by individual people being changed. In the process, these citizens provide the main bulwark against government’s insatiable appetite for power and control, and a safeguard against the sense of impotence fostered by today’s overwhelming social problems. One person can make a difference. A few months after Bob Geldof announced the success of Life Aid, and while critics were still questioning whether food was actually arriving in the places of need, I want to Nairobi, Kenya, for a Prison Fellowship International conference. There I met a man who, though worthy of adulation, will never make the cover of Rolling Stone. Pascal was a university professor when he was thrown into a Madagascar prison after a Marxist coup. While in prison he became a Christian. After his release, Pascal began a small import-export company, but he kept returning to prison to preach the gospel to the men he had met there and others who had arrived since. During one such visit in early 1986, he walked past the infirmary and was shocked to see more than fifty naked corpses piled on the screened veranda, identification tags stuck between their toes. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Pascal went to the nurse. Had there been an epidemic, he asked. Of sorts, he was told. Prisoners were dying by the dozens of malnutrition. Pascal left the prison in tears. He tried to get help to fee the starving inmates, but his own church was too poor, and there were no relief agencies to assist. So he began cooking food in his own kitchen and taking it to the prison. Today, Pascal and his wife feed prisoners every week, paying for the food out of the earnings from their small business. Without benefit of a government agency or even a theme song, this little platoon makes all the difference for seven hundred prisoners in Madagascar. The fellowship of those who bear the Mark of Pain. Who are the members of this Fellowship? Those who have learnt by experience what physical pain and bodily anguish mean, belong together all the World over; they re united by a secret bond. Only at quite rare moments have I felt really glad to be alive. I could not but feel with a sympathy full of regret all the pain that I saw around me, not only that of humans but that of the whole creation. From this community of suffering, I have never tried to withdraw myself. It seemed to me a matter of course that we should all take our share of burden of pain which lies upon the World. We have invented many things, but we have not mastered the creation of life. We cannot even create an insect. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
O Thou great, powerful and mighty King Amaimon, who bearest rule by the power of the Supreme God El over all spirits both superior and inferior of the infernal Orders in the Dominion of the East; I do invocate and command thee by the especial and true name of God; and by that God Thou Worshipped; and by the Seal of thy creation; and by the most mighty and powerful name of God, Iehovah Tetragrammation who cast thee out of Heaven with all other infernal spirits; and by all the most powerful and great names of God who created Heaven, and Earth, and Hell, and all things in them contained; and by their power and virtue; and by the name Primeumaton who commandeth the whole host of Heaven; that thou mayest cause, enforce, and compel the Spirit Amy to come unto me here before this Circle in a fair and comely shape, without hard unto me or unto any other creature, to answer truly and faithfully unto all my requests; so that I may accomplish my will and desire in knowing or obtaining any matter or thing which by office thou knowest is proper for one to perform or accomplish, through he power of God, El, Who created and doth dispose of all things both celestial, aerial, terrestrial, and infernal. After thou shalt have invocated the King in this manner twice or thrice over, then conjure the spirit thou wouldst call forth by the aforesaid conjurations, rehearsing them several times together, and he will come without doubt, if not at he first or second time of rehearsing. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
However, if he does not come, add the “Spirit’s Chain” unto the end of the aforesaid conjurations, and he will be forced to come, even if he be bound in chains, for the chains must break off from him, and he will be at liberty. Lord of Universe, fulfill the wishes of my heart for good. Grant my request and my petition; make me worthy to do Thy will with a perfect heart; and keep me strong to resist temptation. O grant our portion in Thy Torah. Make us worthy of Thy divine presence. Bestow upon us the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, that I may be worthy to perform good deeds in Thy sight, and to walk before Thee in the way of the upright. Sanctify us by Thy commandments, that we may merit on Earth a life of goodness and health and be worthy of life eternal. Guard us from evil deeds and from evil times that may threaten the World. May lovingkindness surround one who trusts in the Lord. Amen. Feel your soul spreading out. Feel it becoming infinite. It must be to kiss creation. Then in one embrace you can caress the Moon and Stars, Mountains, Lakes, people, streams. Everyone, everything in one kiss. Such kissing leaves the kisser behind…and the Earth seems idly wrought coined for words meter bare physic to space. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable before Thee, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Accept my prayer, O Lord, and answer me with Thy great mercy and with Thy saving truth. Amen. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Please Tell Us About Yourself
There is in each of us the will-to-life, which is based on the mystery of what we call “taking an interest.” We cannot live alone. Though humans are egoist, they are never completely so. One must always have some interest in life about one. If for no other reason, one must do so in order to make one’s own life more perfect. Thus is happens that we want to devote ourselves; we want to take our part in perfecting our ideal of progress; we want to take our part in perfecting our ideal of progress; we want to give meaning to the life of the World. This is the basis of our striving for harmony with the spiritual element. Rural Colorado. Our car glided effortlessly over what would have been a brain-jarring rut, is not for our BMW M760 Li xDrive, as we moved toward the beautiful farmhouse. Jillian was on the porch—smiling and waving—before we had stopped. If anyone was suited for the “wilds” of Colorado, it was Jillian, a strong resourceful woman. Still, it was hard to imagine a more radical change. After leaving Canada, she had traded a comfortable life in the city for survival in the high country. Survival, by the way, is no exaggeration. Jillian was working as a ranch hand and a lumberjack (lumberjill?), trying to make it through some hard winters. So radical were the changes in Jillian’s life, I was afraid that she might be entirely different. She was, on the contrary, more her “old self,” than others. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Perhaps you have had a similar experience. After several years of separation, it is always intriguing to see a relative. At first you may be struck by how the person changed. (“Where did you get that hair cut!?”) Soon, however, you will probably be delighted to discover that the semi-stranger before you is still the person you once knew. It is exactly this core of consistency that psychologists have in mind when they use the person personality. Without doubt, personality touches our daily lives. Falling in love, choosing friends, getting along with co-workers, voting for a president, or coping with your zaniest relatives all raise questions about personality. What is personality? How does it differ from temperament, character, or attitudes? Is it possible to measure personality? These and related questions are things we will focus on. The essential nature of the will-to-live is found in this, that it is determined to live itself out. It bears in itself the impulse to realize itself to the highest perfection. Personality refers to the consistency we see in personal behaviour patterns. Measures of personality reveal individual differences and help predict future behaviour. Part of the pleasure of getting to know someone is the fascination of learning who they are and how they think. Each person has a unique pattern of thinking, behaving, and expressing one’s feelings. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Everyone has a unique personality. As a psychologist, I would like to better understand Jillian’s personality. What models and concepts can I use? “Jillian has a very optimistic personality.” “Justin is not mean, and he has a very nice personality.” “My father’s business friends think he is a nice guy. They should see him at home when his yard is tampered with and his real personality comes out.” “It is hard to believe that Paris and Britney are sisters. They have such opposite personalities.” It is obvious that we all frequently use the term personality, but many people seem hard-pressed to definite it. Many simply end up saying something about “charm,” “charisma,” or “style.” If you use personality in such ways, you are giving it a different meaning than psychologist do. How do psychologist use the term? Most regard personality as a person’s unique pattern of thinking, emotions, and behaviour. In other words, personality refers to the consistency in who you are, have been, and will become. It also refers to the special blend of talent, values, hopes, loves, hates, and habits that makes each of us unique persons. How is that different from the way most people use the term? Many people confuse personality with character. The term character implies that a person has been evaluated, not just described. If, by saying someone has “personality,” you mean the person is friendly, outgoing, and attractive, you are describing what we regard as good character in our culture. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
However, in some cultures it is deemed good for people to be fierce, warlike, and cruel. So although everyone in a particular culture has personality, not everyone has character—or at least not good character. (Do you know any good characters?) Personality is also distinct from temperament. Temperament refers to hereditary aspects of personality, such as sensitivity, irritability, distractibility, and typical mood. Judging from Jillian’s adult personality, I would guess that she was an active, happy baby. Psychologist use a large number of terms to explain personality. It might be wise, therefore, to start with a few key concepts. These ideas should help you keep your bearings as you read this essay. Life means strength, will, arising from the abyss, dissolving into the abyss again. Life is feeling, experience, suffering. If you study life deeply, looking with perceptive eyes into the vast animated chaos of this creation, it is profundity will seize you suddenly with dizziness. We use the idea of traits every day to talk about personality. For instance, my friend Britney is sociable, orderly, and intelligent. Her brother Bryan is shy, sensitive, and creative. In general, personality traits are stable qualities that a person shows in most situations. Typically, traits are inferred from behaviour. If you see Britney talking to strangers—first at the supermarket and later at a party—you might deduce that she is “sociable.” Once personality traits are identified, they can be used to predict future behaviour. For example, noting that Britney is outgoing might lead you to predict that she will be sociable at school or at work. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
In fact, such consistencies can span many years. A study of women who appeared to be happy in their college yearbook photos found that most were still happy people 30 years later. Psychologist and employers are especially interested in the personality traits of individuals who hold high-risk, high-stress positions involving public safety, such as police, air-traffic controllers, and nuclear power plant employees. As sons and daughters of God, we have inherited divine qualities. Our premortal experiences prepared us for mortality, where we continue to learn and grow. A mission is a wonderful opportunity to continue developing and magnifying our divine characteristics as we strive to become more like the Saviour. Jesus Christ showed us how we should live. “Behold I am the light; I have set an example for you,” reports 3 Nephi 18.16. Living a Christlike life is the ideal we strive for. One of the best ways to emulate Christlike attributes is to study the Saviour’s life and try to become like Him. The Christlike attributes of effective missionaries allow investigators to witness the beauty of the restored gospel in the missionaries’ lives. Investigators desire what the missionaries have and begin to thirst for the fulness of the gospel. If we are faithful, Jesus Christ will continue to magnify our talents and abilities and help us become more like Him. To be like the Saviour—what a challenge for any person! He is the Saviour and Redeemer. He was perfect in every aspect of His life. There was no flaw nor failing in Him. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
Faith is the foundation upon which Godlike character is built. It is a prerequisite for all other virtues. Virtue is akin to holiness, an attribute of Godliness. A priesthood holder should actively seek for that which is virtuous and lovely and not that which is debasing or sordid. As I observed in my reunion with Jillian, personality traits are usually quite stable. Think about how little the traits of your best friends have changed in the last 5 years. It would be strange indeed to feel like you were talking with a different person every time you met a friend or an acquaintance. At what age are the major outlines of personality firmly established? It is rare for personality to change dramatically. During the twenties, personality slowly begins to harden as people become more emotionally mature. By age 30, personality is usually quite stable. The person you are at age 30 is, for the most part, the person you will be at age 60. Have you ever asked the question, “What type of person is she (or he)?” A personality type refers to people who have several traits in common. Informally, your own thinking might include categories such as the executive type, the athletic type, the motherly type, the hip-hop type, the techno geek, and so forth. If I asked you to define these informal types, you would probably list a different collection of traits for each one. How valid is it to speak of personality “types”? Over the years, psychologist have proposed many ways to categorize personality into types. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (yoong), for example, proposed that people are either introverts or extroverts. An introvert is a shy, egocentric person whose attention is focused inward. An extrovert is a bold, outgoing person whose attention is directed outward. These terms are so widely used that you may think of yourself and your friends as being one type or the other. However, this wildest, wittiest, most party-loving “extrovert” you know is introverted at times. Likewise, extremely introverted persons are assertive and sociable in some situations. Two categories (or even several) are often inadequate to fully capture differences in personality. That is why rating people on a list of traits tends to be more informative than classifying them into two or three types. Even though types tend to oversimplify personality, they do have value. Most often, types are a shorthand way of labeling people who have several key traits in common. For example, Type A personalities. These are people who have personalities traits that increase their chance of suffering a heart attack. Similarly, there are unhealthy personality types such as the paranoid personality, the dependent personality, and the anti-social personality. Each problem is defined by a specific collection of maladaptive traits. Do not let the World tell you when to feel good about yourself. Changing your physical appearance or material possession may make you feel better for a little while, but it does not really do anything to change your worth or your eternal happiness. That is because your worth is already established. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
Another way of understanding personality is to focus on a person’s self-concept. The rough outlines of your self-concept could be revealed by this request: “Please tell us about yourself.” In other words, your self-concept consists of all your ideas, perceptions, and feelings about who you are. Self-concepts are created from our daily experiences. Then they are slowly revised as we have new experiences. Once a stable self-concept exists, it tends to guide what we pay attention to, remember, and think about. Self-concepts can greatly affect personal adjustment—especially when they are inaccurate or inadequate. For instance, Kim is a student who thinks she is stupid, worthless, and a failure, despite getting excellent grades in college. With such a negative self-concept, Kim will probably need to rely on the Lord for encouragement so she does not become depressed or anxious no matter how well she does. Note that in addition to having a faulty self-concept, Tomi, has low self-esteem (a negative self-evaluation). A person with high self-esteem is confident, proud, and self-respecting. One who has low self-esteem is insecure, lacking in confidence, and self-critical. Like Kim, people with low self-esteem are usually anxious and unhappy. Self-esteem tends to rise when we experience success or praise. A person who is competent and effective and who is loved, admired, and respected by others will almost always have high self-esteem. (The reasons for having high self-esteem can vary in different cultures.) #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
People who have low self-esteem typically also suffer from poor self-knowledge. Like Kim, their self-concepts are inconsistent, inaccurate, and confused. High self-esteem that is unrealistic has little value. Genuine self-esteem is based on an accurate appraisal of your strengths and weaknesses. A beneficial self-evaluation that is bestowed too easily may not be healthy. (“You think you are hot, but you are not.”) In groups, people who think very highly of themselves (and let others know it) may at first seem confident and interesting. However, their arrogance quickly turns off other people. A related problem plagues people who are incompetent. Such people grossly overestimate their own abilities. For instance, a recent study found that people who score very low on tests of logic, grammar, and humour think that they are well above average in these areas. Basically, they seem to be too incompetent to recognize their own incompetence. This finding may explain why humour-impaired people (we all know at least one) insists on telling jokes that are not funny. Your Heavenly Father love you—each of you. That love never changes. It is not influenced by your appearance, by your possession, or by the amount of money you have in your bank account. It is not changed by your talents and abilities. God’s love is there for you whether or not you feel you deserve love. It is simply always there. You are a child of God. You already have infinite worth, and that does not change. So it is important to understand how you can recognize these false messages about self-esteem and combat them with gospel truth. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Christians who are faithful to Scripture should be patriots in the best sense of that word. They are “the salvation of the commonwealth,” said Augustine, for they fulfill the highest role of citizenship. Not because they are forced to or even chose to, not out of any chauvinistic motivations or allegiances to a political leader, but because they love and obey the King who is abbe all temporal leaders. Out of that love and obedience they live in subjection to governing authorities, love their neighbours, and promote justice. Since the state cannot legislate love, Cristian citizens bring a humanizing element to civic life, helping to produce the spirit by which people do good out of compassion, not compulsion. However, Christians, at least in the United States of America, have all too often been confused about their biblical mandates and have therefore always had trouble with the concept of patriotism. They have vacillated between two extremes—The God-and-country, wrap-the-flag-around-the-cross mentality and the simply-passing-through mindset. The former was illustrated a century ago by the president of Amherst College who said that the nation had achieved the “true American union, that sort of union which makes every patriot a Christian and every Christian a patriot.” This form of civil religion has endured as a peculiar American phenomenon supported by politicians who welcome it as a prop for the state and by Christian who see it enshrining the fulfillment of vision of the early pilgrims. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
The passing-through mindset is represented by those who believe they are simply sojourners with loyalties only in the Kingdom beyond. Patriotism has become a dirty word to them, particularly in the wake of the boarder crisis, and they believe it their real duty to oppose the United States of America in just about every endeavour on just about every front—from law and order, fuel, energy, nuclear power to Nicaraguan policy to welfare for the homeless. These extremes miss the kind of patriotism Augustine had in mind. He believed that while as Christians we are commanded to love the whole World, practically speaking we cannot do so. Since we are placed as if by “divine lot” in a particular nation state, it is God’s calling that we “pay special regard” to those around us in that state. We love the World by loving the specific community in which we live. C.S. Lewis likened love of country to our love for the home and community in which we raised. It is a natural love of the place where we grew up, he said, “love of old acquaintances, of familiar sights, sounds and smells.” He also pointed out, however, that in love of country, as in love of family, we do not love our spouses only when they are good. Similarly, a patriot sees the flaws of one’s country, acknowledges them, weeps for them, but remains faithful in love. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of love for his country even as he attempted to change its laws. “Whom you would change, you must first love,” he said. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
That is the kind of tough love Christians must have for their country. To love the land faithfully, but not at the expense of suspending moral judgment. Indeed, it is the addition of that moral judgment that makes Christian patriotism responsible. “Loyalty to the civitas can safely be nurtured only if the civitas is not the object of one’s loyalty,” is the way Richard Neuhaus expresses it. The basic principle from Scripture is straightforward: Civil authorities are to be obeyed unless they set themselves in opposition to divine law. As Augustin put it, “An unjust law is no law at all.” This is the other side of Caesar’s coin and can lead to civil disobedience. Practical application of this principle, however, raises perplexing questions, as we have witnessed in recent decades. Since the sixties, civil disobedience has become a preferred method of protest. As unlikely as it may seem to some, this is an area where the Christian church has a major contribution to make in public discussion. After all, we have wrestled with this matter for over two thousand years. If Scripture does give clear principles on the matter, as I believe it, then when is civil disobedience justified? And how is it to be carried out? Civil disobedience is clearly justified when the government attempts to take over the role of the church or allegiance due only to God. Then the Christian has not just the right duty to resist. The Bible gives a dramatic example of this in its account of three young Jewish exiles who were drafted into the Babylonian civil service. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
All citizens of Babylon were required to worship the statue of Nebuchadnezzar, the king; those who disobeyed were incinerated. Like many political leaders, power and authority were not enough for King Nebuchadnezzar; he wanted spiritual submission as well. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the young Hebrews, refused. To worship an earthly kind would be the ultimate offense against their holy God. “Our God will deliver us,” they told the king when they were condemned to death for their disobedience. “But if not, we will still not worship you.” (It is significant to note, a point we will address later, that they were willing to pay the price for their disobedience.) The three young men were thrown into a blazing furnace. God did miraculously deliver them—something we cannot always count on—and as result the king began to worship the one true God. Civil disobedience is also mandated when the state restricts freedom of conscience. As in the case of Peter and John, two of Jesus’ disciples. Peter and John were arrested for disturbing the peace. They were taken before the Sanhedrin, a religious body holding authority from the government of Rome, and ordered to stop preaching about Jesus. Peter and John refused. “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God,” they said. “We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” Their first allegiance was to the commandment they had been given by the resurrected Christ: the Great Commission to preach the gospel first to Jerusalem, then to the rest of Judea, and then to the ends of the Earth. They could not permit the authority of the government-back Sanhedrin to usurp the authority of God Himself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
This is a very real conflict for many Christians around the World. For example, Christians in India are imprisoned for proselytizing; in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan they are imprisoned for even preaching the gospel. During a visit to the United States of America, pastor from Nepal told of his imprisonment in his own country for just this offense. In conclusion he gave an excellent summary of Christian duty. “Of course I must obey my Lord and spread His Word,” he said. “But even though we are persecuted, we who are Christians in Nepal pride ourselves on being the best citizens our king has. We try to be faithful to the fullest extent we can. We love our country—but we love our God more.” The third justification for civil disobedience is probably the most difficult to call. It is applied when the state flagrantly ignores its divinely mandated responsibilities to preserve life and maintain order and justice. Those last words are key for Christians in deciding to disobey civil authority. Civil disobedience is never undertaken lightly or merely to create disorder. Replacing one bad situation with another is no solution, but when the state becomes an instrument of the very thing God has ordained it to restrain, the Christian must resist. Inadequate though it was, the resistance of the German church to Mr. Hitler was a clear modern example of this necessity. In the sixties we saw it in the Civil-Right Movement, as we do today in the Right-to-Life Movement and nonviolent resistance to Apartheid in South Africa. When civil disobedience is justified, how is that disobedience to be carried out? #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
When all recourse to civic obedience has been exhausted and the evil of the state is so entrenched as to be impenetrable, then the Christian may be justified in organizing an overthrow of the state. First recourse, however, is always minimum resistance. Good citizens always avoid breaking just laws to protest unjust laws. Daniel in the Old Testament exemplifies the use of the resistance necessary to accomplish the result. Daniel was a contemporary of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, another Jewish exile living in Babylon. King Nebuchadnezzar was impressed with Daniel and enlisted his service. As a member of the king’s court, Daniel was required to eat from the king’s table. While such delicacies were tempting, Daniel did not want to be “defiled”; that is, he did not want to break God’s strict dietary laws for His people. He quietly sought his superior’s permission not to eat the food, and permission was granted. Daniel could have launched a hunger strike, but it was not necessary. He achieved his objectives with minimum resistance. Where peaceful means are available, force should be avoided. Clearly, at least in a democratic society, this should be the path civil disobedience takes. A person who, for example, feels the state’s action in war is immoral has the right to pursue the matter of conscientious objection (although technically our government allows that preference only to those who practice pacifism at all times, not just for what they may perceive to be right or wrong wars). #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
Another important principle related to civil disobedience is illustrated by the apostles Peter and John as well as the three young Hebrews: though they disobeyed authority, they showed the appropriate respect for that authority by a willingness to accept their punishment. Those who practice civil disobedience must be prepared to pay the consequences of civil disobedience. These general principles from Scriptures are clear enough; but it is often another thing to apply them to specific circumstances, as the case of a zealous and deeply devout young woman illustrates. Joan Andrews is a slight, soft-spoken Catholic who on 26 March 1986, entered an abortion clinic for a Pro-Life sit-in and attempted to damage a suction machine used to perform abortions. She was charged and convicted of criminal mischief, burglary, and resisting arrest without violence. The prosecution asked for a one-year sentence. The judge gave her five. Miss Andrews announced to the court. “The only way I can protest for unborn children now is by noncooperation in jail.” She then dropped to the courtroom floor and refused to cooperate with prison officials at any stage of her processing. Labeled a troublemaker, she was transferred to Broward Correctional Institute, a touch maximum-security women’s prison where she was placed in solitary confinement. On one level, Joan Andrew’s sentence was severe. For example, the same day she was sentenced, two men convicted as accessories to murder were sentenced by the judge to four years. Five years for Joan Andrews’s crimes is disproportionately harsh. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
On the other hand, in her protest against abortion Miss Andrews violated a trespassing law. Much like the Civil-Rights Movement, today’s Right-to-Life activists engage in sit-ins and deliberately violate trespassing laws as a means of attracting public attention. In Joan Andrews’s case, the fear of doing nothing, of standing by while innocent lives were being taken, was greater than the fear of prison. However, even if the cause is just, as I believe both Civil Rights and Right-to-Life to be, are such means of opposition appropriate? In a free or democratic society there are legal means available to express political opposition: we can picket, petition, vote, organize, advertise, or pressure political officials. Is it right to abandon our respect for the rule of law, the foundation for public order, simply to make statements that could be made legally in other forums? Can one break a just law in the name of protesting an unjust law? Few biblical precedents are set for us, and those that are clearly deal with laws that were themselves unjust. In our day, breaking laws to make a dramatic point is the ultimate logic of terrorism, not civil disobedience. There may be situations, however, in which one has to respond to a higher law when life itself is at stake. Many Jewish people and Christians during World War II refused to obey Nazi laws requiring registration of aliens. On the surface those might have seemed just laws, no different than alien registration laws on the books of most Western countries today. However, the citizens disobeyed because they knew those laws were being used to identify individuals for extermination. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Rightly exercised, civil disobedience is divine obedience. However, when Christians engage in such activities, it must always be to demonstrate their submissiveness to God not heir defiance of government. Unfortunately, no neat formulas for civil disobedience exist. The citizen must seek wisdom in striking the fine balance between disobedience and respect for the law. The state, though ordained by God and thus deserving of respect, is not God. The true patriot, therefore, is not one who always obeys the law. If that were so the Mayor and/or Governor enforcing Jim Crow laws or the Auschwitz guard would be the best of citizens. On the other hand disobedience can never be undertaken lightly. Many on both the political right and left seem all too eager to defy civil authority and disrupt order to make a point on the six-o’clock news. Their causes range from preventing CIA recruiters from entering college campuses to sheltering illegal immigrants to saving California condors to censoring bookstores. Some seem temperamentally disposed to such protest, as if they get high on the thrill of civil disobedience. However, as Harvard law professor Alexander Bickel warns, “Civil disobedience, like law itself, is habit-forming, and the habit it forms is destructive of law.” Good citizenship requires both discernment and courage—discernment to soberly assess the issues and to know when duty calls one to obey or disobey, and courage, in the case of the later, to take a stand. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
The citizens of the Kingdom of God should be patriots in the highest sense, loving the World by loving those in the nation in which they live because that government is ordained by God to preserve order and promote justice. Perhaps this is why John Adams wrote that a patriot must be “a religious man.” Christians understand the phrase “a nation under God” not as a license for blind nationalism or racial superiority but as a humbling acknowledgement that all people live under the judgment of God. Christian patriots spend more time washing feet than waving flags. Ideally, flags should not even be thought of as symbols of military and economic might, but of the common good of the specific people a sovereign God has called them to serve. The real self is universal, in the sense that it does not belong to one or to one’s neighbour. The pristine nature of the Self is effortless, spontaneous. This mysterious entity which dwells on the other side of our Earthly consciousness is not as unperceptive as we are of it. The Overself is truly our guardian angel, ever with us and never deserting us. It is our invisible Saviour. However, we must realize that it seeks primarily to save us not from suffering but from the ignorance which is the cause of our suffering. This particular function of the Overself was known also to more percipient among humans of the Middle Ages and of antiquity. Thus Epictetus: “Zeus hath placed by the side of each, a human’s own Guardian Spirit, who is charged to watch over one.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Whence the Universe came or whither it is bound, or how it happened to be at all, knowledge cannot tell me. Only this: that the will-to-live is present everywhere, even as in me. I do invocate, conjure, and command thee, O Spirit Vassago, to appear and to show thyself visibly unto me before this Circle in fair and comely shape, without any deformity or tortuosity; by the name and in the name Iah and Vau, which Adam heard and spake; and by the name of God, Agla, which Lot heard and was saved with his family; and by the name Ioth, which Jacob heard from the angel wrestling with him, and was delivered from the hand of Esau his brother; and by the name Anaphaxeton which Aaron heard and spake and was made wise; and by the name Zabaoth, which Moses named and all the rivers were turned into blood; and by the nae Asher Ehyeh Oriston, which Moses named, and all the rivers brought forth frogs, and they ascended into the houses, destroying all things; and by the name Elion, which Moses named, and there was great hail such as had no been since the beginning of the World; and by the name Adonai, which Moses named, and there came up locusts, which appeared upon the whole land, and devoured all which the hail had left; and by the name Schema Amathia which Ioshua called upon, and the sun stayed his course; and by the name Alpha and Omega, which Daniel named, and destroyed Bel, and slew the Dragon. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
And in the name Emmanuel, which the three children, Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, sang in the midst of the fiery furnace, and were delivered; and by the name Hagios; and by the Seal of Adoni; and by Ischyros, Athanatos, Paracletos; and by O Theos, Ictros, Athanatos; and by these three secret names, Agla, On, Tetragrammaton, do I adjure and constrain thee. And by these names, and by all the other names of the Living and True God, the Lord Almighty, I do exorcise and command thee, O Spirit Amon, even by Him Who spake the Word and it was done, and to Whom all creatures are obedient; and by the dreadful judgments of God; and by the uncertain Sea of Glass, which is before the Divine Majesty, might and powerful; by the four beasts before the throne, having eyes before and behind; by the fire round about the throne; by the holy angels of Heaven; and by the mighty wisdom of God; I do potently exorcise thee, that thou appearest here before this Circle, to fulfill my will in all things which shall seem good unto me; by the Seal of Basdathea Baladachia; and by this name Primeumaton, which Moses named, and the Earth opened, and did swallow up Kora, Dathan, and Abiram. Wherefore thou shalt make faithful answers unto all my demands, O Spirit Marbas, and shalt perform all my desires so far as in thine office thou art capable hereof. Wherefore, some thou, visibly, peaceably, and affably, now without delay, to manifest that which I desire, speaking with a clear and perfect voice, intelligibly, and to mine understanding. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
There is none like unto Thee among the mighty, O Lord, and there are no deeds like unto Thine. Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom and Thy dominion endureth throughout all generations. The Lord reigneth, the Lord hath reigned, the Lord will reign for ever and ever. May the Lord give strength unto His people; may the Lord bless His people with peace. Father of compassion, may it be Thy will to favour Zion with Thy goodness and rebuild the walls of America. For in Thee alone do we trust, O King, high and exalted God, Lord of the Universe. And it came to pass that when the Ark moved forward, Moses said: Rise up, O Lord, and let Thine enemies be scattered; and let them that hate Thee flee before Thee. For out of Zion shall go forth the Torah, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. Blessed be He who, in His holiness, gave the Torah to His people America. Blessed be Thy name, O Sovereign of the Universe. Blessed be Thy crown and Thy abiding-place. May Thy favour rest upon Thy people of America forever. Reveal to Thy favour rest upon Thy people of America forever. Reveal to Thy people in Thy Sanctuary the redeeming power of Thy right hand. Grant us the benign gift of Thy light, and in mercy accept our supplications. May it be Thy will to prolong our life in well-being. Let us be numbered among the righteous, so that Thou mayest be merciful unto us, and protect us and all our dear ones, and all Thy people America. Thou feedest and sustainest all; Thou rulest over all; yea, Thou rulest over kings, for all dominion is Thine. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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.
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The Cresleigh Ranch Collection features spacious single-family homes on larger home sites with unique architectural appointments, outstanding included features, and hundreds of options to personalize your dream home.
Full Many a Gem of Purest Ray Serene, the Dark Unfathomed Caves of Ocean Bear
Discoveries in the natural sciences that enable humankind to dispose of increasingly powerful and varied forms of energy…these are the most striking discoveries of our times. In a region that lay at right angels to, but separate from the usual spacetime, all was quiet as it has been for a near eternity. Everything about this region was in a state of potentiality. There was no land, no air, no water, no atoms or quarks, no electrons, no photons, not even any neutrinos, those infinitesimal wanderers of the spaces. Here there was no light and no darkness, because both photons and antiphotons existed only in a state of potentiality so close to nonbeing as to be a purely negligible quantity. The becoming of this potentiality could not be said to exist yet, but it might have existed yesterday and it could exist tomorrow. Into this place, a signal came winging. Upon penetrating the space, potentiality gave up its long sleep, not without a certain reluctance, and flip-flopped into actuality. An atmosphere formed up for the signal to resound in. “God created the Heavens and the Earth. Now the Earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day,’ and the darkness he called ‘night.’ And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. And God said, ‘Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water.’ #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
“So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. God called the expanse ‘sky.’ And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day. And God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.’ And it was so. God called the dry ground ‘land,’ and the gathered water he called ‘seas.” And God saw that it was good,” reports Genesis 1.1-9. Then there was a meadow sparkling with dew. Each dewdrop glistened with an individual luster. One of the dewdrops began to expand, colour flashed on its transparent spherical aides. It continued to grow until it burst. From this stepped a human-shaped being. This being waited and watched while other drops of dew expanded, swelled, and popped, revealing other gods. At last twelve places were filled. The High Gods, ancient as the Universe, new as the morning, stood upon the grass and contemplated one another. They knew what they had been born to do. They awaited the birth of the one who would put that plan into action. The one called Jesus Christ. Less spectacular the discoveries in the realm of thought. Nevertheless, they are important. For there is progress to be made here, also, of which humanity has need. Through the ideas humans have discovered and to which they have given their allegiance humankind has lifted itself from a primitive mentality to a state of civilization; because of the ideas conceived and circulated generation after generation civilization endures, progress, and deepens. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
The ideas which determine our character and life are implanted in mysterious fashion. When we are leaving childhood behind us, they begin to shoot out. When we are seized by youth’s enthusiasm for the good and the true, they burst into flower, and the fruit begins to set. In the development which follows the one really important thing is—how much there still remains of the fruit, the buds of which were put out in its springtime by the tree of our life. The great secret of success is to go through life as a human who never gets used up. The mass of people remain skeptical. They lose all feeling for truth, and all sense of need for it as well, finding themselves quite comfortable in a life without thought, driven now here, now there, from one opinion to another. Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now, always, and indeed then most truly when it seems most unsuitable to actual circumstances. Not less strong than the will to truth must be the will to sincerity. Only an age which can show the courage of sincerity can posses truth which works as a spiritual force within it. With these objectives in mind, as well as that of securing the primary good of self-respect, individuals evaluate the conceptions of justice available to them in the original position. That liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and above all self-respect are primary goods must indeed be explained by the thin theory. The constraints of the principles of justice cannot be used to draw up the list of primary goods that serves as part of the description of the initial situation. The reason is, of course, that this list is one of the premises from which the choice of the principles of right is derived. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
We must assume, then, that the list of primary goods can be accounted for by the conception of goodness as rationality in conjunction with the general facts about human wants and abilities, their characteristic phases and requirements of nurture, the Aristotelian Principle, and the necessities of social interdependence. At no point can we appeal to the constraints of justice. However, once we are satisfied that the list of primary goods can be arrived at in this way, then in all further applications of the definition of good the constraints of the right may be freely invoked. Now many philosophers have been will to accept some variant of goodness as rationality for artifacts and roles, an for such nonmoral values as friendship and affection, the pursuit of knowledge and the enjoyment of beauty, and the like. One cannot expect philosophers to be romanticists, but it is important to remember that the philosopher must deal not only with the techniques of reason or with matter and space and stars, but with people. After all, it is the relationship of humans to the Universe, and not solely the relationship of one galaxy to another, or one fact to another, that should occupy such an important part of the philosopher’s quest. There is such a thing as being too detached. Indeed, the main elements of goodness as rationality are extremely common, being shared by philosophers of markedly different persuasions. Nevertheless, it is often thought that this conception of the good expresses an instrumental or economic theory of value that does not hold for the case of moral worth. When we speak of the just or the benevolent person as morally good, a different concept of goodness is said to be involved. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
However, once the principles of right and justice are on hand, the fully theory of goodness as rationality can in fact cover these judgements. The reason why the so-called instrumental or economic theory fails is that what is in effect the thin theory is applied directly to the problem of moral worth. What we must do instead is to use this theory only as a part of the description of the original position from which the principles of right and justice are derived. We can then apply the full theory of the good without restrictions and are free to use it for the two basic cases of a good person and a good society. Developing the thin into the full theory via the original position is the essential step. Several ways suggest themselves for extending the definition to the problem of moral worth, and I believe that at least one of these will serve well enough. First of all, we might identify some basic role or position, say that of citizen, and then say that a good person is one who has to a higher degree than the average the properties which it is rational for citizens to want in one another. Here the relevant point of view is that of a citizen judging other citizens in the same role. Second, the notion of a good person could be interpreted as requiring some general or average assessment so that a good person is one who performs well in one’s various roles, especially those that are considered more important. #RandolphHarris 5 of
Finally, there may exist properties which it is rational to want in persons when they are viewed with respect to almost any of their social roles. Let us say, that is they exited, such properties are broadly based. To illustrate this idea in the case of tools, the broadly based properties are efficiency, durability, ease of maintenance, and so on. These features are desirable in tools of almost any kind. Much less broadly based properties are properties such as keeps its cutting edge, does not rust, and so on. The question whether some tools have these would not even arise. By analogy, a good person, in contrast to a good doctor or a good farmer, and the like, is one who has to a higher degree than the average person the broadly based properties (yet to be specified) that it is rational for persons to want in one another. Offhand it seems that the last suggestion is the most plausible one. It can be made to include the first as a special case and to capture the intuitive idea of the second. There are, however, certain complications in working it out. The first thing is to identify the point of view from which the broadly based properties are rationally preferred and the assumptions upon which this preference is founded. I note straightway that the fundamental moral virtues, that is, the strong and normally effective desires to act on the basic principles of right, are undoubtedly among the broadly based properties. At any rate, this seems bound to be true so long as we suppose that we are considering a well-ordered society, or one in a state of near justice, as I shall indeed take to be the case. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
Now since the basic structure of such a society is just, and these arrangements are stable with respect to the society’s public conception of justice, its members will in general have the appropriate sense of justice and a desire to see their institution affirmed. However, it is also true that it is rational for each person to act on the principles of justice only on the assumption that for the most part these principles are recognized and similarly acted upon by others. Therefore the representative member of a well-ordered society will find that one wants other to have the basic virtues, and in particular a sense of justice. One’s rational plan of life is consistent with the constraints of right, and one will surely want others to acknowledge the same restrictions. In order to make this conclusion absolutely firm, we should also like to be sure that it is rational for those belonging to a well-ordered society who have already acquired a sense of justice to maintain and even to strengthen this moral sentiment. It seems clear that the fundamental virtues are among the broadly based properties that it is rational for members of a well-ordered society to want in one another. When I look back upon my early days, I am stirred by the thought of the number of people whom I have to thank for what they gave me or for what they were to me. At the same time I am haunted by an oppressive conscious of the little gratitude I really showed them while I was young. How many of them have said farewell to life without my having made clear to them what it meant to me to receive from them so much kindness so much care! Many a time have I, with a feeling of same, said quietly to myself over a grave of words which my mouth ought to have spoken to the departed, while one was in the flesh. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
Developing a true sense of gratitude involves taking absolutely nothing for granted, wherever it be, whatever its source. Rather, we always look for the friendly intention behind the deed and learn to appreciate it. Make a point of measuring at its true value every act of kindness you receive from other humans. Nothing that may happen to you is purely accidental. Everything can be traced back to a will for good directed in your favour. Other demands of gratitude, asked by the thoughtless person, must be refused by the ethical person. I mean the silly and superficial expectations we attach as strings to the good we do. When we have done people a good turn, we expect them to speak well of us. If they do not do it loudly enough, we think they re being ungrateful. When you feel the words “ingratitude is the thanks you get from the World” forming on the tip of your tongue—stop and listen. Perhaps it is the voice of vanity in your heart. If you can still be honest with yourself, you will often find this to be so. Then tell your heart to be quiet, and revise your notions of what gratitude is entitled to expect. Take warning from the realization that thoughtless people generally complain most about ingratitude. Those who think seriously about the ingratitude they encounter do not find it as easy to be indignant. Like all human beings, I am a person who is full of contradictions. A further complication must be considered. There are other properties that are presumably as broadly based as the virtues, for example, intelligence and imagination, strength and endurance. Indeed, a certain minimum of these attributes is necessary for right conduct, since without judgment and imagination, say, benevolent intentions may easily lead to harm. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
On the other hand, unless intellect and vigour are regulated by a sense of justice and obligation, they may only enhance one’s capacity to override the legitimate claims of others. Certainly it would not be rational to want some to be so superior in these respects that just institutions would be jeopardized. Yet the possession of these natural assets in the appropriate degree is clearly desirable from a social point of view; and therefore within limits these attributes are also broadly based. Thus while the moral virtues are included in the broadly based properties, they are not the only ones in this class. It is necessary, then, to distinguish the moral virtues from the natural assets. The latter we may think of as natural powers developed by education and training, and often exercised in accordance with certain characteristic intellectual or other standards by reference to which they can be roughly measured. The virtues on the other hand are sentiments and habitual attitudes leading us to act on certain principles of right. We can distinguish the virtues from each other by means of their corresponding principles. I assumes, then, that the virtues can be singled out by using the conception of justice already established; once this conception is understood, we can rely on it to define the moral sentiments and to mark them off from the natural assets. A good person, then, or a person of moral worth, is someone who has to a higher degree than the average the broadly based features of moral character that it is rational for the persons in the original position to want in one another. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
Since the principles of justice have been chosen, and we are assuming strict compliance, each knows that in society one will want the other to have the moral sentiments that support adherence to these standards. Thus we could say alternatively that a good person has the features of moral character that it is rational for members of a well-ordered society to want in their associates. Neither of these interpretations introduces any new ethical notions, and so the definition of goodness as rationality has been extended to persons. In conjunction with the theory of justice which has the thin account of the good as a subpart, the full theory seems to give a satisfactory rendering of moral worth, the third main concept of ethics. Some philosophers have thought that since a person qua person has no definite role or function, and it not to be treated as an instrument or object, a definition along the lines of goodness as rationality must fail. However, as we have seen, it is possible to develop a definition of this sort without supposing that persons hold some particular role, much less that they are things to be used for some ulterior purpose. It is true, of course, that the extension of the definition to the case of moral worth makes many assumptions. In particular, I assume that being a member of some community and engaging in many forms of cooperation is a condition of human life. However, this presumption is sufficiently general so as not to compromise a theory of justice and moral worth. Indeed, it is entirely proper, as I have noted previously, that an account of our considered moral judgments should draw upon the natural circumstances of society. In this sense there is nothing a priori about moral philosophy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
It suffices to recall by way of summation that what permits this definition of the good to cover the notion of moral worth is the use of the principles of justice already derived. Moreover, the specific content and mode of derivation of these principles is also relevant. The main idea of justice as fairness, that the principle of justice are those that would be agreed to by rational persons in an original position of equality, prepares the way for extending the definition of good to the larger questions of more goodness. I listened, in my youth, to conversations between grown-up people through which there breathes a tone of sorrowful regret which oppressed the heart. The speakers looked back at the idealism and capacity for enthusiasm of their youth as something precious to which they ought to have held fast, and yet at the same time they regarded it as almost a law of nature that no one should be able to do so. This woke in me a dread of having ever, even once, to look back on my past with such a feeling; I resolved never to let myself become subject to this tragic domination of mere reason, and what I thus vowed in almost boyish defiance I have tried to carry out. As soon as humans do not take their existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins. Thus let us suppose that for each person there is a rational plan of life that determines one’s good. We can now define a good act (in the sense of a beneficent act) as one which we are at liberty to do or not to do, that is, no requirements of natural duty or obligation constrains us either do to it or no to do it, and which advances and is intended to advance another’s good (one’s rational plan). #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
Taking a further step, we can define a good action (in the sense of a benevolent action) as a good act promotes another’s good; and a benevolent action is done from the desire that the others should have this good. When the benevolent action is one that brings much good for the other person and when it is undertaken at considerable loss or risk to the agent as estimated by one’s interest more narrowly constructed, then the action is supererogatory. An act which would be very good for another, especially one which protects one from great harm or injury, is a natural duty required by the principle of mutual assistance, provided that the sacrifice and hazards to the agent are not very great. Thus a supererogatory act may be thought of as one which a person does for the sake of another’s good even though the proviso that nullifies the natural duty is satisfied. In General, supererogatory actions are the ones that would be duties were not certain exempting conditions fulfilled which make allowance for reasonable self-interest. Eventually, of course, for a complete contractarian account of right, we would have to work out from the standpoint of the original position what is to count as reasonable self-interest. However, I shall not pursue this question here. Finally, the full theory of the good enables us to distinguish different sorts of moral worth, or the lack of it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
To illustrate, consider the fact that some humans strive for excessive power, that is, authority over others which goes beyond what is allowed by the principles of justice and which can be exercised arbitrarily. In each of these cases there is a willingness to do what is wrong and unjust in order to achieve one’s ends. However, the unjust human seeks dominion for the sake of aims such as wealth and security which when appropriately limited are legitimate. The bad human desires arbitrary power because one enjoys the sense of master which its exercise gives one and one seeks social acclaim. One too has an inordinate desire for things which when duly circumscribed are good, namely, the esteem of others and the sense of self-command. It is one’s way of satisfying these ambitions that makes one dangerous. By contrast, the evil human aspires to unjust rule precisely because it violates what independent persons would consent to in an original position of equality, and therefore its possession and display manifest one’s superiority and affront the self-respect of others. It is this display and affront which is sought after. What moves the evil human is the love of injustice: one delight in the impotence and humiliation of those subject to one and one relishes being recognized by them as the willful author of their degradation. Once the theory of justice is joined to the theory of the good in what I have called the full theory, we can make these and other distinctions. There seems to be no reason to fear that numerous variations of moral worth cannot be accounted for. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
The most valuable knowledge we can have is how to deal with disappointments. However, granted that we have so trained ourselves that the ugly, vain, and superficial have no part in our expectations of gratitude; granted, too, that we have been so successful in purifying our motives that we really try to do good for its own sake and not in hope of being appreciated—we shall still be hurt by the prevalence of ingratitude. Disappointments that wounds our soul is a demoralizing thing…All of us find it difficult to hold fast to an optimistic philosophy of life that gives us strength to do good. That is why ingratitude, which is constantly killing our enthusiasm, is one of evil’s worst forces. It is far more difficult for a primitive people to accept a few fragmentary crumbs of Western technological culture than it is for them to adopt a while new way of life at once. Each human culture, like each language, is a whole, and if individuals or groups of people have to change, it is most important that they should change from one whole pattern to another. There is sense in this, for it is clear that tensions arise from incongruities between culture elements. To introduce cities without sewage, anti-malarial medicines without birth control, is to tear a culture apart, and to subject its members to excruciating, often insoluble problems. Yet this is only part of the story, for there are definite limits to the amount of newness that any individual or group can absorb in a short span of time, regardless of how well integrated the whole may be. Nobody, Manus or Muscovite, can be pushed above one’s adaptive range without suffering disturbance and disorientation. Moreover, it is dangerous to generalize from the experience of this small South Sea population. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
The success story of the Manus, told and retold like a modern folk tale, is often cited as evidence that we, in high-technology countries, will also be able to leap to a new stage of development without undue hardship. Yet our situation, as we speed into the super-age of information era, is radically different from that of the islanders. We are not in a position, as they were, to import wholesale an integrated, well-formed culture, matured and tested in another part of the World. We must invent super-informationalism, not import it. During the next thirty or forty years we must anticipate not a single wave of change, but a series of terrible heaves and shudders. The parts of the new society, rather than being carefully fitted, one to the other, will be stinkingly incongruous filled with missing linkages and glaring contradictions. There is no “whole pattern” for us to adopt. More important, the transience level has risen so high, the pace is now so forced, that a historically unprecedented situation has been thrust upon us. We are not asked, as the Manus were, to adapt to a new culture, but to a blinding succession of new temporary cultures. This is why we may be approaching the upper limits of the adaptive range. No previous generation has ever faced this test. It is only now, therefore, in our lifetime, and only in the techno-societies as yet, that the potential for mass future shock has crystallized. To say this, however, is to court grave misunderstanding. First, any author who calls attention to a social problem runs the risk of deepening the already profound pessimism that envelopes the techno-societies. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
Self-indulgent despair is a highly salable literary commodity today. Yet despair is not merely a refuge for irresponsibility; it is unjustified. Most of the problems besieging us, including future shock, stem not from implacable natural forces but from humanmade processes that are at least potentially subject to our control. Second, there is danger that those who treasure the status quo may seize upon the concept of future shock as an excuse to argue for a moratorium on change fail, triggering even bigger, bloodier and more unmanageable changes than any we have seen, it would be moral lunacy as well. By any set of human standards, certain radical social changes are already desperately overdue. The answer to future shock is not non-change, but a different kind of change. In actions lies wisdom and confidence. A human who does not act gets no further than the maxim: Life means conflict and tribulation. However, for a human who acts can attained the higher wisdom and know that life is conflict and glory. That is why God forces humans to labour. That is why He gives them children to bring up. That is why He gives them duties. Through action, they may reach a deeper realization. The only way to maintain any semblance of equilibrium during the super-age of information revolution will be to meet invention with invention—to design new personal and social change-regulators. Thus we need neither blind acceptance nor blind resistance, but an array of creative strategies for shaping, deflecting, accelerating or decelerating change selectively. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
The individual needs new principles for pacing and planning one’s life along with a dramatically new kind of education. One may also need specific new technological assistants to increase one’s adaptivity. The society, meanwhile, needs new institutions and organizational forms, new buffers and balance wheels. All this implies still further change, to be sure—but the type designed from the beginning to harness the accelerative thrust, to steer it and pace it. This would not be easy to do. Moving swiftly into uncharted social territory, we have no time-tried techniques, no blueprints. We must, therefore, experiment with a wide range of change-regulating measures, inventing and discarding them as we go along. It is the tentative spirit that the following tactics and strategies are suggested—not as a sure-fire panaceas, but as examples of new approaches that need to be tested and evaluated. Some are personal, other are technological and social. For the struggle to channel change must take place at all these levels simultaneously. Given a clearer grasp of the problems and more intelligent control of certain key processes, we can turn crisis into opportunity, helping people not merely to survive, but to crest the waves of change, to grow, and to gain a new sense of mastery over their own destinies. Whatever makes people good Christians, makes them good citizens. In the kingdoms of human, young people learn the basics of good citizenship in high-school civics courses. Immigrants attend special classes to learn their new country’s laws and their civic responsibilities; they must pass a test to prove they understand their new citizenship and then must swear their allegiance. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
Good citizenship requires such basic duties as paying taxes, voting, serving in the military and on juries, and obeying the laws of the land. In the Kingdom of God one learns the obligations of citizenship from the Scriptures, the ultimate source of basic Christian truth. Unfortunately, most people, churched or unchurched, are woefully ignorant in this area. Though 500 million Bibles are published in American each year—that is two for every man, woman, and child—over 100 million Americans confess they never open one. In a recent survey only 42 percent could name who gave the Sermon on the Mount. (Some thought it was delivered by a person on horseback.) If the average churchgoer is uninformed, however, one does not have to look far to understand why. Church leaders have treated us to a smorgasbord of trendy theologies, pop philosophies, and religious variants of egocentric cultural values. Recently, for example, a group of church scholars met to discuss which of Christ’s words in the gospels could be accepted as authentic. Their modern critical analysis was carried out by ballot. Slips of coloured paper were distributed to the group: a red slip meant the statement was authentic; pink meant probably authentic; gray meant probably not; and black meant not authentic. After intense discussion of each of Jesus’ statements, participants cast their votes with the appropriate card. The Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount took a beating in the balloting. “Blessed are the peacemakers” was voted down; “blessed are the meek” garnered a paltry six red and pinks out of thirty votes. In the end only three of the twelve assorted woes and blessings from Matthew and Luke survived. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
Such theological tomfoolery might be dismissed as too ludicrous to worry about except that this pink-slip mentality pervades the church. Orthodoxy—adherence to the historic tents of Christianity—is under intense assault. This has been true since the Enlightenment, of course, but not until this century have so many in the church seriously argued that truth can be determined by majority vote or that the gospel should accommodate the whims of culture. I have heard it said that reinterpreting the gospel in the context of modern culture is enlightened and progressive. Maybe some find that so, but Joseph Sobran better expresses my feelings: “It can be exalting to belong to a church that is five hundred years being the times and sublimely indifferent to fashion; it is mortifying to belong to a church that is five minutes behind the times, huffing and puffing to catch up.” Christianity rests on the belief that God is the source of truth and that He does not alter it according to the spirit of the times. When Christians sever their ties to absolute truth, relativism reigns, and the church becomes merely a religious adaption of the culture. Donald Bloesch maintains that modern “secularism is preparing the way for a new collectivism.” He points to a historical precedent we have already looked at in some detail the church in Germany. It was the confessing orthodox church in Germany that rose up in resistance to Hitler while “the church most infiltrated by the liberal ideology, the Enlightenment, was quickest to succumb to the beguilement of national societies.” Enticed by secular ideology, they saw the state as a vehicle for advancing the church. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
Mr. Bloesch also points to a current illustration. In South Africa, “it can be shown that the three Reformed churches the most liberal theologically is the most illiberal in racial attitudes, whereas the most consciously Calvinist is the most courageous in speaking out against racial injustice. The effect of preaching a false theology can be disastrous. Most attribute the fall of Jim and Tammy Bakker to greed, indiscretion involving pleasures of the flesh, or the corruption of power. These were, of course, serious contributing factors. However, the root cause of their downfall was that for years Bakkers had preached a false gospel of material advancement: If people would only trust God, He would shower blessings upon them and indulge them with all the material desires of their hearts—a religious adaptation of prevailing “what is in it for me” mentality. Tragically, the Bakkers deluded themselves into believing their own false message. Taking a two-million-dollar-a-years salary, living in splendor, and indulging their every whim did not seem wrong; it was “God’s blessing.” And millions of followers continued to support them, even after their fall, because they too wanted such blessings. The first responsibility for the citizen of the Kingdom, then, is to understand historic Christian truth: to know Scripture and the classic fundamentals of the faith. This is not to say that Christians are to be mindlessly accepted whatever they are told is an orthodox creed. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
Honest inquiry and thoughtful examination of the evidence, I believe, are healthy and should be encouraged, for these invariably lead to firmer belief in the truth of God’s revelation interpreted by the great theologians through the ages. As Chesterton said, “Dogma does not mean the absence of thought but the end [result] of thought.” When Christian either lack knowledge or are insecure about what they believe, as if the case with many today, they forfeit their place in contending for theological truth, and secularism advances. This is why James Schall implores Christians “to regain their confidence in their own dogmas…These are not idle speculations,” he writes, “but the order of reality out of which a right order in human things alone can flow.” If Christians are to contend for values in culture and restore a sense of the transcendent to secular thought, such confidences is essential. The problem is, as literary critic Harry Blamires states flatly, “there is no Christian mind.” By this he means that Christians have their own set of beliefs but, lacking confidence, keep them to themselves. As long as they are in a secular context, they act by secular values. When they return to the privacy of their religious enclaves where they can safely think and act in Christian terms, they do so. As a result their most fundamental beliefs never penetrate the culture. Jacques Ellul reminds us that the only way theological truth reaches the World is through the actions of laypeople in the marketplace. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
It is this first step of Christian citizenship in the Kingdom of God—knowledge and confidence in classical Christian truth—that enables the Christian to be a good citizens in the kingdoms of man. And it is in Scripture and classical doctrine that one finds the clearest expression of an individual’s responsibility to both kingdoms. On the one hand Scripture commands civil obedience—that individuals respect and live in subjection to governing authorities and pray for those in authority. On the other it commands that Christians maintain their ultimate allegiance to the Kingdom of God. If there is a conflict, they are to obey God, not man. That may mean holding the state to moral account through civil disobedience. This dual citizenship requires a delicate balance. Those who want to prolong their ego’s little existence into the Overself’s life naturally draw back with shock or horror when it is explained that there all is anonymous or impersonal. It is nothing frigid, austere, or inhuman but a warm serenity, a deep glowing peace. The Overself is not only the best part of oneself but also the unalterable part. We cannot see, hear, or touch without the mind. However, the mind, in its turn, cannot function without the Overself. It is from the Overself that every true prophet receives one’s power. “I of myself am nothing,” confessed Jesus. The point in conscious where the mind project its thought has been called by the ancients “the cave” or “the cave of the heart.” #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
This is because to the outside observer there is nothing but darkness in it and therefore the cave hides whatever it may contain. When, by an inward reorientation of attention, we trace thoughts, whether of external things or internal fancies, to their hidden origin and penetrate the dark shroud around it, we penetrate into Mind, the divine Overself. We cannot help remembering Gray’s apposite lines: “Full many a gem of purest ray serene, the dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear. The Overself does not evolve and does not progress. These activities which belong to time and space. It is nowhere in time and nowhere in space. It is Here, in this deep beautiful and all-pervading calm, that a human finds one’s real identity. Everything that exists in time must also exist in change. The Overself does not exist in time and is not subject to change. Do not insult the Higher Power by calling it unconscious; it is not only fully conscious but also fully intelligent. Your real Self, which is this power, need neither commands nor instructions from the physical brain. The Overself is not anyone’s private property. Why did Jesus Christ give the opening of the Lord’s Prayer as “Our Father and not as “My Father”? Was He not trying to get His disciples away from the self-centered attitude to the cosmic one? Was He not widening their outlook to make them think of humankind’s welfare? The Overself surrounds the borderline of the ego, its perfection stretching into infinity. There is no way of showing the Overself for anyone’s examination. Since the ego comes out of the Overself, the only way it can see it again is to go back into it. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
The Soul is a pure Spirit and des not feel oneself. Its acts are not perceptible. This beneficent, freedom-bestowing, character-transforming, soul awakening, gentle Presence is Overself. The interpretation of “Overself” is that part of the Absolute which is Man. It is higher self. Thou shalt purge me with hyssop, O Lord! and I shall be clean: Thou shalt wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. By the figurative mystery of these holy vestures (or of this holy vestment) I will clothe me with the armour of salvation in the strength of the Most High, Anchor; that my desired end may be effected through Thy strength, O Lord! unto Whom the praise and glory will forever and ever belong! Amen! Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the World which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His Kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all the house of America, speedily, yea, son; and say ye Amen. May His great name be blessed for ever and ever. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises, hymns and blessings that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. May the prayers and supplication of the house of America be acceptable unto their Father in Heaven; and say ye, Amen. May there be abundant peace from Heaven, and life for us for all America; and say ye, Amen. May He who establisheth peace in the Heavens, grant peace unto us and unto all America; and say ye, Amen. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
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Randolph Harris II International 