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Eco-Technological Development is Firmly Convinced that Human Nature is Eternal and Stability Will Return!
The human task is to make of oneself a work of art. It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief. There are four chief ways in which guidance may be given. They are: intuitive feeling, giving in a general ways approbation or rejection of a proposed course of action; direct and precise inner message; the shaping of outer circumstances; and the teaching of inspired texts. If all four exist together, and if they all harmonize, then you may step forward in the fullest assurance. However, if there are contradictions between them, then great caution and some delay is certainly advisable. It is also needful to remember that the higher self can only be known by the higher part of the mind, that is, the intuition. The emotions are on a lesser and lower level, however noble or religious they may be. The immense satisfaction which the ecstatic raptures give is no indication that one is directly touching reality, but only that one is coming closer to it. They may seem purely spiritual, but they still belong to the ego’s feeling nature and if one believes otherwise one will fall into self-deception. Only through the pure intuition, freed from emotional egoism and transcending intellectual illusion, can one really make a contact with the Overself. And that will happen in a state of utter and perfect tranquillity; there will be none of the emotional excitement which marked the successful practice of the earlier stage of meditation exercises. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
When the deliverance of intuition cancels the deliverance of reason, one may trust oneself to the first, but only when one is sure it is what it purports to be. When one finds some of one’s own intuitions formulated and printed in someone else’s book, one feels their truth is confirmed and one’s own mind confronted. One has the right to judge an intuition rationally before submitting to it, but what if one’s judgment is itself wrong? Intuition may support reason but must supplant it only on the gravest occasions. The sudden revelation of correct understanding, whether in certain situations or about uncertain problems, may come unexpectedly or abruptly anytime during the day. It springs up of its own accord or it appears in a dream message. If the intuitive feeling leads one gently at some times, it also leads one firmly at other times. An intuition is directly self-revealing; it does not depend on what kind of thought and study were done before it appeared. It is also self-evident: the correctness of the receiving conscious is very calm, and when the lapse of time tends to strengthen its authority. The intuitive answer may come in one of several ways, but the commonest is either a self-evident that one cannot help thinking it. This is how intuition usually appears and is usually recognized for what it is. Develop them that another sign to recognize intuitions is the unexpectedness. #RandolphHrris 2 of 21
The mysterious appearance of an intuition may well make us ask where it comes from. At one moment it is no there; at the next it is lodged in the mind. Sometimes we are wiser than we know and utter involuntary answers which surprise us with their unexpected wisdom or unknown Truth in one way intuitions are born. Because it comes from within, it comes with its own authority. When it is “the real thing,” the seeker will not have to question examine or verify its authenticity, will not have to run to others for their appraisal of its worth or its rejection as a pseudo-intuition. One will know overwhelmingly what it is in the same way that one knows who one is. Education and experience alone do not make the mind; there is something higher that mixed itself in now and again with disconcerting incomprehensible spontaneity. One reason why an intuition is so often missed is that it flashes into the mind as disjointedly, as abruptly, and as inconsequentially as a person or s thing sometimes comes momentarily into the field of vision through the corner of an eye. Today the human with a pacemaker or a plastic aorta is still recognizably a human. The inanimate part of one’s body is still relatively unimportant in terms of one’s personality and consciousness. However, as the proportion of machine components rise, what happens to one’s awareness of self, one’s inner experience? If we assume that the brain is he seat of consciousness and intelligence, and that no other part of the body affects personality or self very much, then it is possible to conceive of a disembodied brain—a brain without arms, legs, spinal cord or other equipment—as a self, a personality, an embodiment of awareness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
It may then become possible to combine the human brain with a whole set of artificial sensors, receptors, and effectors, and to call that tangle of wires and plastic a human being. All this may seem to resemble medieval speculation about the number of angels who can pirouette on a pinhead, yet the first small seps toward some form of human-machines symbiosis are already being taken. Moreover, they are being taken not by a lone mad scientist, but by thousands of highly trained engineers, mathematicians, biologists, surgeons, chemists, neurologists and communications specialists. Dr. W. G. Walter’s mechanical “tortoises” are machines that behave as though they had been psychologically conditioned. These tortoises were early specimens of a growing breed of robots ranging from the “Perceptron” which could learn (and even generalize) to the more recent “Wanderer,” a robot capable of exploring an area, building up in its memory an “image” of the terrain, and able even to indulge in certain operations comparable, at least in some respects, to “contemplative speculation” and “fantasy.” Experiments by Ross Ashby, H. D. Block, Frank Rosenblatt and others demonstrate that machines can learn from their mistakes, improve their performance, and, in certain limited kinds of learning, outstrip human students. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Reports Dr. Block, professors of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University: “I do not think that there is a task you can name that a machine cannot do—in principle. If you can define a task and a human can do it, then a machine can, at least in theory, also do it. The converse, however, is not true.” Intelligence and creativity, it would appear, are not a human monopoly. Robotology may be the new wave of the future. Technicians at Disneyland have created extremely life-life computer-controlled humanoids capable of moving their arms and legs, grimacing, smiling, glowering, simulating fear, joy and a wide range of other emotions. Built of clear plastic, that according to one reporter, “does everything but bleed,” the robots chase girls, play music, fire pistols, and so closely resemble human forms that visitors routinely shriek with fear, flinch and otherwise react as though they were dealing with real human beings. The purposes to which these robots are put may seem trivial, but the technology on which they are based is highly sophisticated. It depends heavily on knowledge acquired from the space program—and this knowledge is accumulating rapidly. There appears to be no reason, in principle, why we cannot go forward from these present primitive and trivial robots to build humanoid machines capable of extremely varied behaviour, capable of even “human” error and seemingly random choice—in short, to make them behaviourally indistinguishable from humans except by means of highly sophisticated or elaborate tests. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
At that point we shall face the novel sensation of trying to determine whether the smiling, assured humanoid behind the airline reservation counter is a pretty young lady or a carefully wired robot. (This raises a number of half-amusing, half-serious problems about the relationships between humans and machines, including emotional and even relationships involving pleasure of the flesh. Professor Block at Cornell speculates that human-made relationships involving pleasures of the flesh may not be too far distant. Pointing out that people often develop emotional attachment to the machines they use, he suggests that we shall have to give attention to the “ethical” questions arising from our treatment of “these mechanical objects of our affection and passion.”) The likelihood the that flight attendant with be both human and robot is likely. The thrust toward some form of human-machine symbiosis is furthered by out increasing ingenuity in communicating with machines. A great deal of much-publicized work is being done to facilitate the interaction of humans and computers. However, quite apart from this, Russian and American scientists have both been experimenting with the placement or implantation of detectors that pick up signals from the nerve ends at the stub of an amputated limb. These signals are then amplified and used to activate an artificial limb, thereby making a machine directly and sensitively responsive to the nervous system of a human being. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
The human need not “think out” one’s desires; even involuntary impulses are transmittable. The respon 89sive behaviour of the machine is as automatic as the behaviour of one’s own hand, eye or leg. In Flight to Arras, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, novelist, poet and pioneer aviator, described buckling himself into the seat of a fighter plane during World War II. “All this complication of oxygen tubes, heating equipment; these speaking tubes that form the ‘intercom’ running between the members of the crew. This mask through which I breathe. I am attached to the plane by a rubber tube as indispensable as an umbilical cord. Organs have been added to my being, and they seem to intervene between me and my heart.” We have come far since those distant days. Space biology is marching irresistibly toward the day when the astronaut will not merely be buckled into one’s capsule, but become a part of it in the full symbiotic sense of the phrase. One aim is to make the craft itself a wholly self-sufficient Universe, in which algae is grown for food, water is recovered from body waste, air is recycled to purge it of the ammonia entering the atmosphere from urine, et cetera. In this totally enclosed fully regenerative World, the human being becomes an integral part of an on-going micro-ecological process whirling through the vastness of space. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Thus Theodore Gordon, author of The Future and himself a leading space engineer, writes: “Perhaps it would be simpler to provide life support in the form of machines that plug into the astronaut. One could be fed intravenously using a liquid food compactly stored in a remote pressurized tank. Perhaps direct processing of body liquid wastes, and conversion to water, could be accomplished by a new type of artificial kidney built in as part of the spaceship. Perhaps sleep could be induced electronically…to lower one’s metabolism.” Und so weiter. One after another, the body functions of human become interwoven with, dependent on, and part of, the machine functions of the capsule. The ultimate extension of such work, however, is not necessarily to be found in the outer reaches of space; it may well become a common part of everyday life here on the mother planet. This is the direct link-up of the human brain—stripped of its supporting physical structures—with the computer. Indeed, it may be that the biological component of the supercomputers of the future may be massed human brains. The possibility of enhancing human (and machine) intelligence by linking them together organically opens enormous and exciting probabilities, so exciting that Dr. R. M. Page, director of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, has publicly discussed the feasibility of a system in which human thoughts are fed automatically into the storage unit of a computer to form the basis for machine decision-making. Furthermore, research from countless sources contributes toward the eventual symbiosis. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
In one of the most fascinating, frightening and intellectually provocative experiments ever recorded, Professor Robert White, director of neurosurgery at the Metropolitan General Hospital in Cleveland, has given evidence that the brain can be isolated from its body and kept alive after the “death” of the rest of the organism. The experiment, described in a brilliant article by Oriana Fallaci, saw a team of neurosurgeons cut the brain out of a rhesus monkey, discard the body, then hook the brain’s carotid arteries up to another money, whose blood then continued to bathe the disembodied organ, keeping it alive. Said one of the members of the medical team, Dr. Leo Massopust, a neurophysiologist: “The brain activity is largely better than when the brain had a body…No doubt about it. I even suspect that without his senses, he can think more quickly. What kind of thinking, I do not know. I guess he is primarily a memory, repository for information stored when he had his flesh; he cannot develop further because he no longer has the nourishment of experience. Yet this, too, is a new experience.” The brain survived for five hours. It could have lasted much longer, had it served the purposes of research. Professor White has successfully kept other brains alive for days, using machinery, rather than a living monkey, to keep the brain washed with blood. “I do not think we have reached the stage,” he told Miss Fallaci, “where you can turn humans into robots, obedient sheep. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
“Yet…it could happen, it is not impossible. If you consider that we can transfer the head of a man onto the trunk of another man, if you consider that we can isolate the brain of a human and make it work without its body…To me, there is no longer any gap between science fiction and science…We could keep Dr. Einstein’s brain alive and make it function normally.” Not only, Professor White implies, can we transfer the head of one person to the shoulders of another, not only can we keep a head or a brain “alive” and functioning, but it can all be done, with “existing techniques.” Indeed, he declares, “The Japanese will be the first to [keep an isolated human head alive]. I will not, because I have not resolved as yet this dilemma: Is it right or not?” A devout Catholic, Dr. White is deeply troubled by the philosophical and moral implications of his work. As of the year 2018, a team of scientists recently revealed they had successfully conducted experiments on hundreds of pigs that involved keeping their brains alive for up to 36 hours after the animals had been decapitated. Researcher Dr. Nenad Sestan, who lead the team of Yale University scientists, disclosed the nature of the research in a meeting at the National Institutes of Health to discuss the ethical concerns surrounding edge research with the human brain. In essence they were able to successfully remove the pigs’ heads and resuscitate their brains while no longer connected to a body. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Through a delicate, complex process they were able to keep the brains alive by connecting them to a closed-loop system called “BrainEX” that pumps oxygen-rich artificial blood through the necessary areas of the brain to sustain life. The researchers intent, reportedly, is to create a complete atlas of the connections between human brain cells, a monumental undertaking that has never been done. By keeping the pig brains alive, they are able to study them in ways that will contribute to further breakthroughs. This could lead to a radical enhancement of our understanding of the human brain. The research itself is remarkable and, it could change everything. We may have to evolve the way we think about death, consciousness, souls, and what it means to be human. As the brin surgeons and he neurologist probe further, as the bio-engineers and the neurologists probe further, as the bio-engineers and the mathematicians, the communications experts and robot-builders become more sophisticated, as the space humans and their capsules grow closer and closer to one another, as machines begin to embody biological components and humans come bristling with sensors and mechanical organs, the ultimate symbiosis approaches. The work converges. Yet the greatest marvel of all is not organ transplantation or symbiosis or underwater engineering. It is not technology, nor science itself. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The greatest and most dangerous marvel of all is the complacent past-orientation of the race, its unwillingness to confront the reality of acceleration. Thus humans move swiftly into an explored Universe, into a totally new stage of eco-technological development, firmly convinced that “human nature is eternal” or that “stability will return.” He stumbles into the most violent revolution in human history muttering, in the words of one famous, though myopic sociologist, that “the processes of modernization…have been more or less ‘completed.’” He simply refuses to imagine the future. In 1865 a newspaper editor told his readers that “Well informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that, were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.” Barely a decade later, the telephone erupted from Mr. Bell’s laboratory and changed the World. One the very day that the Wright brothers took wing, newspapers refused to report the event because their sober, solid, feet-on-the-ground editors simply could not bring themselves to believe it had happened. After all, a famous American astronomer, Dr. Simon Newcomb, had not long before assured the World that “No possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which humans shall fly long distances.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Not long after this, another expert announced publicly that it was “nothing less than feeblemindedness to expect anything to come of the horseless carriage movement.” Six years later the one-millionth Ford automobile rolled off an assembly line. And then there was the great Dr. Rutherford, himself, the discoverer of the atom, who said in 1933 that the energy in the atom’s nucleus would never be released. Nine years later: the first chain reaction. Again and again the human brain—including the first class scientific brain—has blinded itself to the novel possibilities of the future, has narrowed its field of concern to gain momentary reassurance, only to be rudely shaken by the accelerative thrust. This is not to imply that all the scientific or technological advances so far discussed will necessarily materialize. Still less does it imply that they will all occur between now and the turn of the century. Some will, no doubt, die a-borning. Some may represent blind alleys. Others will succeed in the lab, but turn out to be impractical for one reason or another. Yet all this is unimportant. For even if none of these developments occur, others, perhaps even more unsettling, will. We have scarcely touched on the computer revolution and the far-ramifying changes that must follow in its churning wake. We have barely mentioned the implications of the thrust into outer space, an adventure that could, before the new millennium arrives, change all our lives and attitudes in radical and as yet unpredicted ways. (What would happen if an astronaut or space vehicle returned to Earth contaminated with some fast-multiplying, death-dealing microorganism or space ghost?) #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
We have said nothing about the laser, the holograph, the powerful new instruments of personal and mass communication, the new technologies of crime and espionage, new forms of transport and construction, the developing horror of chemical and bacteriological warfare techniques, the radiant promise of solar energy, the discovery that life can be conceived in a test tube, the startling new tools and techniques for education, and an endless list of other fields in which high-impact changes lie just ahead or are already here. In the coming years, advances in all these fields will fire off like a series of rockets carrying us out of the past, plunging us deeper into the new society. Now will this new society quickly settle into a steady state. It, too, will quiver and crack and roar as it suffers jolt after jolt of high-energy change. For the individual who wishes to live in one’s time, to be a part of the future, the super-industrial revolution offers no surcease from change. It offers no return to the familiar past. It offers only the highly combustible mixture of transience and novelty. This massive injection of speed and novelty into the fabric of society will force us not merely to cope more rapidly with familiar situations, events and moral dilemmas, but to cope at a progressively faster rate with situations that are, for us, decidedly unfamiliar, “first-time” situations, strange, irregular, unpredictable. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
This will significantly alter the balance that prevails in any society between the familiar and unfamiliar elements in the daily life of its people, between the routine and non-routine, the predictable and unpredictable. The relationship between these two kinds of daily-life elements can be called the “novelty ratio” of the society, and as the level of newness or novelty rises, less and less of life appears subject to our routine forms of coping behaviour. More and more, there is a growing weariness and wariness, a pall of pessimism, a decline in our sense of mastery. More and more, the environment comes to seem chaotic, beyond human control. Thus two great social forces converge: the relentless movement toward transience is reinforced and made more potentially dangerous by a rise in the novelty ratio. Nor, as we shall next see, is this novelty to be found solely in the technological arrangements of the society-to-be. In its social arrangements, too, we can anticipate the unprecedented, the unfamiliar, the bizarre. All things which are as they ought to be are conformed unto this second law eternal; and even those things which to this eternal law are not conformable are notwithstanding in some sort ordered by the first eternal law. There is a paradox about tribulation in Christianity. Blessed are the poor, but by “judgment” (id est, social justice) and alms we are to remove poverty wherever possible. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Blessed are we when persecuted, but we may avoid persecution by flying from city to city, and may pray to be spared it, as Our Lord prayed in Gethsemane. However, if suffering is good, ought it not to be pursued rather than avoided? I answer that suffering is not good in itself. What is good in any painful experience is, for the sufferer, one’s submission to the will of God, and, for the spectators, the compassion aroused and the acts of mercy to which it leads. If wholeness or integration consists in the union of opposites, symbolized by the emergence of quaternities and mandalas, it follows that the most obvious pair of opposites, good and evil, are to be found in the self. Yet the self, as we have seen, is a God-image, or at least cannot be distinguished from one. The conventional Christian view of God is dualistic, in that God is entirely good (the doctrine of the Summum Bonum), while evil is contained in Satan. However, earlier Christian belief was monotheistic. Clement of Rome taught that God rules the World with a right and a left hand, the right being Christ, the left Satan. All of our lives, many of us has wrestled with the problem of the origin of evil. Just as we have to remember the gods of antiquity in order to appreciate the psychological value of the anima/animus archetype, so Christ is our nearest analogy of the self and its meaning. It is naturally not a question of a collective value artificially manufactured or arbitrarily awarded, but of one that is effective and present per se, and that makes its effectiveness felt whether the subject is conscious of it or not. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Yet, though the attributes of Christ (consubstantiality with the Father, co-eternity, filiation, parthenogenesis, crucifixion, Lamb scarified between opposites, One divided into Many, et cetera) undoubtedly mark Him out as an embodiment of the self, looked at from the psychological angle He corresponds to only one half of the archetype. The other half appears in the Antichrist. The latter is just as much a manifestation of the self, except that one consists of its dark aspect. Both are Christian symbols, and they have the same meaning as the image of the Saviour crucified between two thieves. This great symbol tells us that the progressive development and differentiation of consciousness leads to an ever more menacing awareness of the conflict and involves nothing less than a crucifixion of the ego, its agonizing suspension between irreconcilable opposites. However, it is fitting that one of these two extremes, and the best, should be called the Son of God because of His excellence, and the other, diametrically opposed to him, the son of the evil demon, of Satan and the devil. The opposites even condition one another. Where there is evil…there must needs be good contrary to the evil. The one follows from the other; hence we must either do away with both, and deny that good and evil exist, or if we admit the one, and particularly evil, we must also admit good. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Evil spirits and impure demons do not have the contrary virtue substantially, and they were not created evil but chose the condition of wickedness (malitiae gradus) of their own free will. For it is certain that to be evil means to be deprived of good. To turn aside from good is nothing other than to be perfected in evil. However, who can accurately judge what is good and evil because in some cases it is subjective. Take for instance, The Queen of the Damned, the movie by Warner Brothers, which is based on an Anne Rice novel Queen of the Damned. The vampire Queen, Akasha is 6,000 years old and trying to preserve her race and the planet by feeding on humans. Some might see this as an evil act, where others might she it as a benevolent act. After all, how much different is it from humans trying to preserve their race from feeding on animals and plant life? Food is food, right? This shows clearly that an increase in either good or evil means a diminution of the other, so that good and evil represent equivalent halves of an opposition. Naturally there can be no question on a total extinction of the ego, for then the focus of consciousness would be destroyed, and the result would be complete unconsciousness. The relative abolition of the ego affects only those supreme and ultimate decision which confront us in situations where there are insoluble conflicts of duty. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
This means, in other words, that in such cases the ego is a suffering bystander who decides nothing but must submit to decision and surrender unconditionally. The “genius” of humans, the higher and more spacious part of one whose extent no one knows, has the final word. It is therefore well to examine carefully the psychological aspects of the individuation process in the light of Christian tradition, which can describe it for us with an exactness and impressiveness far surpassing our feeble attempts, even through the Christian image of the self—Christ—lacks the shadow that properly belongs to it. In the fallen and partially redeemed Universe we may distinguish the simple good descending from God, the simple evil produced by rebellious creatures, and the exploitation of the evil by God for His redemptive purposes, which produced the complex good to which accepted suffering and repented sin contribute. Now the fact that God can make complex good out of simple evil does not excuse—though by mercy it may save—those who do the simple evil. And this distinction is central. Offences must come, but woe to those why whom they come; sins do cause grace to abound, but we must not make that an excuse for continuing to sin. The crucifixion itself is the best, as well as the worst, of all historical events, but the role of Judas remains simply evil. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Love is a feeling of deep devotion, concern, and affection. The greatest example of God’s love for His children is found in the infinite Atonement of Jesus Christ. Love for God and fellow humans is a characteristic of disciples of Jesus Christ. Have you recognized the love of God in your life? We manifest our love for Heavenly Father by keeping His commandments and serving His children. Our expressions of love for others may include being kind to them, listening to them, mouring with them, comforting them, serving them, praying for them, sharing the gospel with them, and being their friend. When we remember that we are all children of God—that we are spirit brothers and sisters–our love for those around us increases. The love that results from this realization has the power to transcend all boundaries of nation, creed, and colour. Dear Lord in Heaven, please remind me on my drive that my anger harms me more than that which angers me. Lord of Peace, in ultimate calm sitting, please pass on to me some of your beatific pose. Please remind us that we have the power to overcome anger, as our Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave his life for us and love us and is not angry that our sins before he was born, while he was born, and after his death is the toll he paid for us to cross over into this mortal realm and he still love us. May even my commute be done in beauty. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Land folk, I am here, newly arrived to this place. I have come from my previous home, where I lived under the protecting gaze of the Land Spirits there. In this new place, then, I wish to establish peace again between my people and the people of the land, as it as been done since the unremembered time. I bring gifts to you, I bring offerings, as a suppliant should when entering a chieftain’s hall. Please accept the from me and, with them, my friendship. Please establish between us peace. Please encompass me about with your protection, Holy Ones of ancient times. Please stand about me on all sides, warding away from me all dangers, keeping away from me all harm. Who may be compared to Thee, Father of mercy, who in love rememberest Thy creatures unto life? Faithful art Thou to grant eternal life to the departed. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who callest the dead to life everlasting. Holy art Thou and holy is Thy name and unto Thee holy beings render praise daily. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the Holy God. We sanctify Thy name on Earth even as it is sanctified in the Heavens above, as described in the vision of Thy Prophet: And the seraphim called one unto another saying: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole Earth is full of His glory. Whereupon the angels in stirring and mighty chorus rise toward the seraphim and with resounding acclaim declare: Blessed by the glory of God from His Heavenly abode. From Thy Heavenly abode, please reveal Thyself, O our King, and reign over us, for we wait for Thee. O when wilt Thou reign in America? Speedily, even in our days, do Thou establish Thy dwelling here forever. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
You made it past Wednesday! Time to kick back and relax in your #Riverside Residence 1 home. Grab some loungewear from your spacious Primary Bedroom closet and head downstairs to the kitchen to make plans for the weekend. 😄
Or you could learn more about this residence on our website! And with approximately 2,300 square feet, all on one level, you will likely find all the space you need. Link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/residence-1/
The Last Infirmity of Noble Mind–To Scorn Delights and Live Labourious Day!
We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists in the loved one, perfection. A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime. The types of skills which an anxious child develops are characteristic of one’s situation. Children with a sense of security and competence, and an interest in the World of challenging unyielding things, are likely to look for new things and enjoy the challenge. Children with a more insecurely-based self will feel more dependent on others, unsure whether they will be given good things and unsure whether they are allowed to get good things for themselves; they will therefore have less practice in developing the skills which lead to control over the environment in any direct way. The skills they develop are more likely to be in the area of getting others to comfort or approve or achieve for them. They may be a good deal more perceptive than their mores secure friends, their sensitivity to others developing from the time when voice and body-language might yield clues on what others were good for and how they could be got to be kind, pleased, not offended. Other people’s expectations can become of overriding importance, overlaying or contradicting the original sense of self, the one connected to the very roots of one’s being, the homunculi and the very earliest memory-traced. This kind of development, a compensatory structure, is called the False Self. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
In fact, all of us have a collection of overlapping selves or roles, some of us more so, some of us less. Some of these selves are falser than others: more strongly linked with being acceptable, less strongly linked with our deeper feelings. One of my friends has “George,” a robot bit of her very nice personality, whom she switches on at formal do’s and occasions when genuineness and spontaneity are very much not called for! It makes it pleasant for the rest of her to have her around, false self or not. In any case, the False Self is not a structure that should be unthinkingly denigrated. All of us need protective defences and devices against hurt. Some developments of the self are primarily defensive, deriving from the need to carry on when life no longer feels like a continuous stream of satisfying (or at least manageable) experiences. In the analysis of a False Personality the fact must be recognized that the analyst can only talk to the False Self of the patient about the patient’s True Self. It is as if a nurse brings a child, and at first the analyst discusses the child’s problem, and the child is not directly contacted. Analysis does not start until the nurse has left the child with the analyst, and the child has become able to remain with the analyst and has started to play. Normal healthy development starts with a strong biologically determined attachment to a mother figure, while exploration of the environment comes naturally at a later stage, exactly because the growing young individual feels secure and safe, not terrified, starving or desperate. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Lack of secure attachment forces the immature organism into action, but the action is accompanied by terror and stereotyping. Real understanding is lack when the infant has had no opportunity for a leisurely and secure playful exploratory phase, during which it has a chance to familiarize itself gradually with the fascinating World of other people and things. Mental representations of the self-in-the-World will have had to form prematurely for the sake of avoiding distress; because of this, a lot of enriching connections which might otherwise have been linked to these representations, will be missing. If the baby has been too worried to linger and enjoy, the adult will think, “Never mind the sunset, let’s go home before something goes wrong.” We ding either that individuals live creatively and feel that life is worth living, or else that they cannot live creatively and are doubtful about the value of living. This variable in human beings is directly related to the quality and quantity of environmental provision at the beginning of each baby’s living experience. Some unfortunate people have almost no complex ego-functioning, they just react. As soon as a need appears or an alarm is signalled, the instant any meaning or pattern begins to emerge, they respond with scarcely a moment of reflection. Premature development of the ego-functions means doing too much, being too little. Premature ego-development is experiences as a continual pressure to respond and react, a sense of straining. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
In many ways similar to ecstatic destructiveness is the chronic dedication of a person’s whole life to hate and destructiveness. Not a momentary state as in ecstasies, it has nevertheless the function of taking hold of the whole person, of unifying one in the worship of one goal: to destroy. This state is a permanent idolatry of the god of destruction; one’s devotee has, as it were, given over one’s life to him. Some people have a special pleasures in destruction, thus they can feel in the midst of the daily pain an absorbing pleasure in seeing how the baggage of ideas and values has diminished, how the arsenal of idealisms has been ground piece by piece until nothing remains but a bundle of flesh with raw nerves; nerves that like taut strings renders each tune vibrantly and doubly so in the thin air of isolation. These people want power. They want an aim that fills their day, they want life with all the sweetness of this World, they want t know that the sacrifices are worth while. People who find pleasure in destructiveness do not fight so that the nation is happy, they fight to force it into its line of fate. Their intense masochism by which they make themselves a willing subject of a higher power is fueled by a unifying force of hate and the wish for destruction that they worship something they are willing to give their lives for. These types of individuals do not want to forget the pain they suffered for they believe forgetting will damn them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
By visualizing hurt and pain from the past every day and every hour, it creates a potent hate destructive people thrive on. They do not want to forget any humiliation, and slighting, any arrogant gesture, they want to think of every meanness done to them, every word that caused them pain and was meant to cause pain. They want to remember every face and every experience and every enemy. They want to load their whole life with the whole disgusting dirt, with this a piled-up mass of disgusting memories. They do not want to forget; but the little good that happened to them, that they want to forget. They hate not only their enemies, but they hate life itself. This is very clear from their disposition and how they feel about others, the environment, and animals. These types of individuals feel utterly unrelated and unresponsive to anybody or anything alive. One condition of their worship of hate is because their whole World had been broken down, morally and socially. Their thirst for revenge, the meaninglessness of their present existence, their social uprootedness, goes far to explain their worship of hate. What triggers the effect of their destructive behaviour? A person may first react with defensive aggression against a threat; by this behaviour one has shed some of the conventional inhibitions to aggressive behaviour. This makes it easier for others kinds of aggressiveness, such as destruction and cruelty, to be unleashed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Once this aggressive destruction is unleashed, it may lead to a kind of chain reaction in which destructiveness becomes so intense that when a critical mass is reached, the result is a state of ecstasis in a person, and particularly in a group. There is so much more to psychology than most people realize. And while it is important to be kind and show respect to others, there are just some people we should stay away from. People also have to realize that they cannot fix others and it is not always a great idea to reach out to others it pain, they may be baiting you into a situation that allow them to attach their pain and darkness to you and they may never want to let go. Therefore, follow the usual rules. Do not talk to strangers, and if someone makes you uncomfortable, stay away from them. We are creating and using up ideas and images at a faster and faster pace. Knowledge, like people, places, things, and organizational forms, is becoming disposable. If our inner images of reality appear to be turning over more and more rapidly, one reason may well be an increase in the rate at which image-laden messages are being hurled at our senses. Little effort has been made to investigate this scientifically, but there is evidence that we are increasing the exposure of the individual to image-bearing stimuli. The external environment showers stimuli upon us. Signals originating outside ourselves—sound waves, light, et cetera—strike our sensory organs. Once perceived, these signals are converted, through a still mysterious process, into symbols of reality, into images. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
The waves of coded information turn into violent breakers and come at a faster and faster clip, pounding at us, seeking entry, as it were, to our nervous system. Many schools of thought encourage us to shift the responsibility for our behaviour from our own shoulders to some inherent necessity in the nature of human life, and thus, indirectly, to the Creator. Popular forms of this view are the evolutionary doctrine that what we call badness is an unavoidable legacy from our animal ancestors, or the idealistic doctrine that it is merely a result of our being finite. Now Christianity, if I have understood the Pauline epistles, does admit that perfect obedience to the moral law, which we find written in our hearts and perceive to be necessary even on the biological level, is not in fact possible to humans. This would raise a real difficulty about our responsibility if perfect obedience had any practical relation at all to the lives of most of us. Some degree of obedience which you and I have failed to attain in the last twenty-four hours is certainly possible. The ultimate problem must not be used as one more means of evasion. Most of us are less urgently concerned with the Pauline question than with William Law’s simple statement: “If you will here stop and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
If our depravity were total, we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us so much goodness in human nature. Nor is there a universal gloom. The emotion of shame has been valued not as an emotion but because of the insight to which it leads. I think that insight should be permanent in each human’s mind: but whether the painful emotions that attend it should be encouraged, is a technical problem of spiritual direction on which I have little cause to speak. My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying he apostolic injunction to “rejoice” as much as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue: it is the high minded unbeliever, desperately trying in the teeth of repeated disillusions to retain one’s faith in human nature, who is really sad. I have been aiming at an intellectual, not an emotional, effect: I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a human is, the more fully one is aware of that fact. Perhaps you have imagined that his humility in the saints is a pious illusion at which God smile. That is a most dangerous error. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
It is theoretically dangerous, because it makes you identify a virtue (id est, a perfection) with an illusion (id est, an imperfection), which must be nonsense. It is practically dangerous because in encourages a human to mistake one’s first insights into one’s own corruption for the first beginnings of a halo round one’s own silly head. No, depend upon it; when the saints say that they—even they—are vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy. The principle of perfection is a fascinating concept. There are two variants: in the first it is the sole principle of a teleological theory directing society to arrange institutions and to define the duties and obligations of individuals so as to maximize the achievement of human excellence in art, science, and culture. The principle obviously is more demanding the high the relevant ideal is pitched. Humankind must continually strive to produce great individuals. We give values to our lives by working for the good of highest specimens. For the questions is this: how can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? Only by your living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens. The second variant is a more moderate doctrine in which perfection is accepted as but one standard among several in n intuitionist theory. The principle is to be balanced against others by intuition. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
The extent to which such a view is perfectionist depends, then, upon the weight given to the claims of excellence and culture. If for example it is maintained that in themselves the achievements of the Greeks in philosophy, science, and art justified the ancient practice of slavery (assuming that this practice was necessary for these achievement), surely the conception is highly perfectionist. Th requirements of perfection override the strong claims of liberty. On the other hand, one may use the criterion simply to limit the redistribution of wealth and income under a constitutional regime. In this case it serves as a counterpoise to egalitarian ideas. Thus it may be said that distribution should indeed be more equal if this is essential for meeting the basic needs of those less favoured and only diminishes the enjoyments and pleasures of those better off. However, the greater happiness of the less fortunate does not in general justify curtailing the expenditures required to preserve cultural values. These forms of life have greater intrinsic worth than the lesser pleasures, however widely the latter are enjoyed. Under normal conditions a certain minimum of social resources must be kept aside to advance the ends of perfection. The only exception is when these claims clash with the demands of the basic needs. Thus given improving circumstances, the principle of perfection acquires an increasing weight relative to a greater satisfaction of desire. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
No doubt many have accepted perfectionism in this intuitionist form. It allows for a range of interpretations and seems to express a far more reasonable view than the strict perfectionist theory. Persons in the original position are asked to consider which principles one would select for the basic structure of society, but one must select as if one had no knowledge ahead of time what position one would end up having in that society. This choice is made from behind a “veil of ignorance,” which prevents one from knowing the individual’s ethnicity, social status, gender, and crucially, the individual’s idea of how to lead a god life. Ideally, this would force participants to select principles impartially and rationally. Individuals in the original position take no interest in one another’s interests, they know that they have (or may have) certain moral and religious interests and other cultural ends which they cannot put in jeopardy. Moreover, they are assumed to be committed to different conceptions of the good and they think that they are entitled to press their claims on one another to further their separate aims. The parties do not share a conception of the good by reference to which the fruition of their powers or even the satisfaction of their desires can be evaluated. They do not have an agreed criterion of perfection that can be used as a principle for choosing between institutions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
If it did not lead to a loss of freedom altogether to advance many of one’s spiritual ends, to acknowledge any such standard would be, in effect, to accept a principle that might lead to a lesser religious or other liberty. If the standard of excellence is reasonably clear, the parties have no way of knowing that their claims may not fall before the higher social goal of maximizing perfect. Thus is seems that the only understanding that the persons in the original position can reach is that everyone should have the greatest equal liberty consistent with a similar liberty for others. They cannot risk their freedom by authorizing a standard of value to define what is to be maximized by teleological principle of justice. Very often it is beyond question that the work of one person is superior to that of another. Indeed, the freedom and well-being of individuals, when measured by the excellence of their activities and works, is vastly different in value. This is true not only of actual performance but of potential performance as well. Comparison of intrinsic value can obviously be made; and although the standard of perfection is not a principle of justice, judgments of value have an important place in human affairs. They are not necessarily so vague that they must fail as a workable basis for assigning rights. The argument is rather that in view of their disparate aims the parties have no reason to adopt the principle of perfection given the conditions of the original position. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
In order to arrive at the ethic of perfectionism, we should have to attribute to the parties a prior acceptance of some natural duty, say the duty to develop human persons of a certain style and aesthetic grace, and to advance the pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of the arts. However, this assumption would drastically alter the interpretation of the original position. While justice as fairness allows that in a well-ordered society the values of excellence are recognized, the human perfections are to be pursed within the limits of the principle of free associations. Persons join together to further their cultural and artistic interests in the same way that they form religious communities. They do not use coercive apparatus of the state to win for themselves a greater liberty or larger distributive shares on the grounds that their activities are of more intrinsic value. Perfectionism is denied as a political principle. Thus the social resources necessary to support associations dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences and culture generally are to be won as a fair return for services rendered, or from such voluntary contributions as citizens wish to make, all within a regime regulated by the two principle of justice. On the contract doctrines, then, equal liberty of citizens does not presuppose that the ends of different persons have the same intrinsic value, nor that their freedom and well-being is of the same worth. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
It is postulated though that the parties are moral persons, rational individuals with a coherent system of ends and a capacity for a sense of justice. Since they have the requisite defining properties, it would be superfluous to add that the parties are equally moral persons. We can say if we wish that humans have equal dignity, meaning by this simply that they all satisfy the conditions of moral personality expressed by the interpretation of the initial contractual situation. And being alike in this respect, they are to be treated as the principles of justice require. Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all; social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: they are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society. However, none of this implies that their activities and accomplishments are of equal excellence. To think this is to conflate the notion of moral personality with the various perfections that fall under the concept of value. Persons’ being of equal value is not necessary for equal liberty. Their being of equal value is not sufficient either. Sometimes it is said that equality of basic rights follows from the equal capacity of individuals for the higher forms of life; but it is not clear why this should be so. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Intrinsic worth is a notion falling under the concept of value, and whether equal liberty or some other principle is appropriate depends upon the conception of right. Now the criterion of perfection insists that rights in basic structure be assigned so as to maximize the total of intrinsic value. Presumably the configuration of rights and opportunities enjoyed by individuals affects the degree to which they bring to fruition their latest powers and excellences. However, it does not follow that an equal distribution of basic freedom is the best solution. The situation resembles that of classical utilitarianism: we require postulates parallel to the standard assumptions. Thus even if the latent abilities of individuals were similar, unless the assignment of right is governed by a principle of diminishing marginal value (estimated in this case by the criteria for excellence), equal rights would not be insured. Indeed, unless there are bountiful resources, the sum of value might be best increased by very unequal rights and opportunities favouring a few. Doing this is not unjust n the perfectionist view provided that it is necessary to produce a greater sum of human excellence. Now a principle of diminishing marginal value is certainly questionable, although perhaps not so much as that of equal value. There is little reason to suppose that, in general, rights and resources allocated to encourage and to cultivate highly talented persons contribute less and less to the total beyond some point in the relevant range. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
To the contrary, this contribution may grow (or stay consistent) indefinitely. The principle of perfection provides, then, an insecure foundation for the equal liberty and it would presumably depart widely from the difference principle. The assumptions required for equality seem extremely implausible. To find a firm basis for equal liberty, it seems that we must reject the traditional teleological principles, both perfectionism and utilitarian. Justice as fairness requires us to show that modes of conduct interfere with the basic liberties of others or else violate some obligation or natural duty before they can be restricted. For it is when arguments to this conclusion fail that individuals are tempted to appeal to perfectionist criteria in an ad hoc manner. When it is said, for example, that certain kinds of relations involving pleasures of the flesh are degrading and shameful, and should be prohibited on this basis, if only for the sake of the individuals in question irrespective of their wishes, it is often because a reasonable case cannot be made in terms of the principle of justice. Instead we fall back on notions of excellence. However, in these matters we are likely to be influenced by subtle aesthetic preferences and personal feelings of propriety; and individual, class, and group differences are often sharp and irreconcilable. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Since these uncertainties plague perfectionist criteria and jeopardize individual liberty, it seems best to rely entirely on the principles of justice which have a more definite structure. Thus even in its intuitionistic form, perfectionism would be rejected as not defining a feasible basis of social justice. Eventually of course we would have to check whether the consequences of doing without a standard of perfection are acceptable, since offhand it may seem as if justice as fairness does not allow enough scope for ideal-regarding considerations. Yet, public funds for the arts and sciences may be provided through the exchange branch. In this instance there are no restrictions on the reasons, citizens may have for imposing upon themselves the requisite taxes. They may assess the merits of these public goods on perfectionist principles, since the coercive machinery of government is used in this case only to overcome the problems of isolation and assurance, and no one is taxed without one’s consent. The criterion of excellence does not sere here as a political principle; and so, if it wishes, a well-ordered society can devote a sizable fraction of its resources to expenditures of this kind. However, while the claims of culture can be met in this way, the principles of justice do not permit subsidizing universities and institutes, or opera and the theater, on the grounds that these institutions are intrinsically valuable, and that those who engage in them are to be supported even at some significant expense to others who do not receive compensating benefits. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Taxation for these purposes can be justified only as promoting directly or indirectly the social conditions that secure the equal liberties and as advancing in the appropriate way the long-term interests of the least advantaged. This seems to authorize those subsidies the justice of which is least in dispute, and so in these cases anyway there is no evident need for a principle of perfection. The contract doctrine may serve well enough as an alternative moral conception. When we check its consequences for institutions, it appears to match our common sense convictions more accurate than its traditional rivals, and to extrapolate to preciously unsettled cases in a reasonable way. Outreach is one essential task of Christ’s people, and among them there will always be those especially gifted for evangelism. However, the most successful work of outreach would be the work of inreach that that turns people, wherever they are, into lights in the darkened World. A simple goal for the leaders of a particular group would be to bring all those in attendance to understand clearly what it means to be a disciple of Jesus and to be solidly committed to discipleship in their whole life. That is, when asked who they are, they first words out of their mouth would be, “I am an apprentice of Jesus Christ.” This goal would have to be approached very gently and lovingly and patiently with existing groups, where the people involved have not understood this to be part of their membership commitment. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
We are not talking about purifying the church, by getting all the “tares” or (Matthew 13). Even tares, real or apparent, are to be loved and served—and called to apprenticeship to Jesus. “Purifying” the church, on the other hand, has always been part of the illusion of being perfectly “right.” Instead of pursing that illusion, we are trying to clarify the local congregation itself in the light of Christ’s call to it. We are trying to make clear what it is that even a false professor must profess in order to participate fully in the congregation. They would, namely have to profess to be disciples or apprentices of Jesus. However, the Lord is the only purifier of groups, and one has one’s own schedule for it. Our task is to be fruitful wheat and to cultivate others to be so. Who we are in our inmost depths is the most basic issue. God’s first concern is not what the church does, it is what the church is. Being must always precede doing, for what we do will be according to what we are. To understand the moral character of God’s people is a primary essential in understanding the nature of the church. As Christians we are to be a moral example to the World, reflecting the character of Jesus Christ. In our present context, to be sure, serious work will have to be done, and there is a strong likelihood of failure. The genuine intuition gets mixed up with guesses and speculations about the matter, with reasonings and ruminations about it. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
One’s intuition is unavoidably condition by one’s own personality, inevitably shaped as it is because one is the kind of human one is. It is not only one’s wishes and hopes which interfere with correct receptivity to intuition but also one’s fears and suspicions. One’s normal everyday mind is slow to heed the Higher Power of God and confused in interpretation of the prompting received. One whose mind is too sharply critical to be sensitive to finer mental radiations may fail to recognize the inner happening. This may be because one oneself is not sufficiently in tune with the high frequency represented by God, or it may be because one is too impatient and wants something which in one’s case can only be had with sufficient time. When intuition points to something unwelcome to the ego, the intellect looks for and usually finds an excuse to reject it. A human who really and sincerely wants to find the Truth should be on the lookout for hints, clues, and signs which would be useful to one’s Quest, for they constitute the response from God to one’s aspiration. God can furnish one with the Truth and puts these signals in one’s way. Manifestation implies the necessity of manifesting. However, it might be objected that any sort of necessity existing in the divine equally implies its insufficiency. The answer is that the number One may become aware of itself as being one only be becoming aware of the presence of Two—itself and another. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
However, the figure Nought is under no compulsion. Here we have a mathematical hint towards understanding the riddle of manifestation. Mind as Void is the supreme inconceivable unmanifesting ultimate whereas the World-Mind is forever throwing forth the Universe-series as a second, an “other” wherein it becomes self-aware. God-active, the Unseen Power, is (for us humans) the World-Mind. God-in-repose is Mind. The creative power or energy which comes from World-Mind is not the ultimate essence-consciousness which is God. It is needful to point out the difference between the divine essence and the divine energies. The latter may be several and varied, but the former is always single. It is the difference between Mind as it is in itself, and Mind as it expresses through the cosmos. It would, however, be a mistake to consider the World-Mind as one entity and Mind as another separate from it. It would be truer to consider World-Mind as the active function of Mind. Mind cannot be separated from its powers. The two are one. In its quiescent state it is simply Mind. In its active state it is World-Mind. Mind is in it inmost transcendent nature is the inscrutable mystery of Mysteries but when expressing itself in act and immanent in the Universe, it is the World Mind. We may find in the attributes of the manifested God—that is, the World-Mind—the only indications of the quality, existence, and character of the unmanifest Godhead that it is possible for human to comprehend all. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
All this is a mystery which is perhaps forever will remain an incomprehensible paradox. Mind is active and mind is quiescence are not two separate beings, but two aspects of one and the same being as they appear to human inquiry. Mind active expressed itself in the heart of humans as one’s higher self and in the Universe as the World-Mind. The World-Mind is a radiation of the forever incomprehensible Mind. It is the essence of all things and all beings, from the smallest to the largest. Mind id the Real; matter is the appearance it takes on. The Universe comes by degrees out of the ultimate Being, beyond which nothing is or could possibly be. It is Mind, measureless, with a Power equally measureless. World-Mind is this power in operation, creating, maintaining, and in the end destroying what it has brought forth. If it be true that absolute divine Mind knows nothing of the Universe, nothing of mortal humans, then it is also true that the World-Mind, which is its other aspect, does know them. May God of my people hear my prayers; as we go to the polls to choose our leaders, may it be with wisdom. Lord, please bless my country. Please guide its governors, show them the path to take, make their actions conform to the way of nature. Please knit together the many peoples into one tribe; unite us, make us a family, as indeed we are under your loving gaze. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
God’s chief hosts are holy beings that exalt the Almighty and continually declare God’s glory and holiness. Be Thou praised, O Lord our God, for the excellence of Thy handiwork and for the luminaries which Thou hast made and which render Thee glory. The Heavens are envisioned as the scene of a symphony of worship and song in which all the celestial beings, obedient servants of the divine will, join in a harmonious melody of praise to the Creator. Be Thou blessed, O our Rock, our King and Redeemer; praised by Thy name forever, Creator of ministering beings who stand in the heights of the Universe and with awe proclaim in unison the words of the living God and everlasting King. All of them act with harmonious accord, with purity of purpose and with united strength to perform reverently the will of their Creator. They all break forth into song of pure and holy praise, while they bless, glorify, and proclaim the sovereignty of the name of God, the great, mighty, awe-inspiring King; holy is He. They all pledge before one another to accept willingly the rule of the Kingdom of God. Each grants leave to the other to join in hallowing their Creator. In tranquil spirit with pure speech and sacred melody, they all exclaim in unison and reverently declare: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole Earth is full of His glory. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Every soul speaks that same language. Know that language of love that swells within the human temple. Our presence in a place of need is more powerful than a thousand sermons. Being there is our witness. As we love God through our love for others, seemingly insurmountable barriers fall before us. When we are at perfect peace with God, our warm smiles show it. It is a reflection of our one hope for breaking down barriers and for restoring the sense of community, of caring for one another, that our decadent, impersonalized culture has sucked out of us. It is the most urgent challenge for the holy nation, perhaps the most important principle. It is the nature of human beings to organize. Probably since the Tower of Babel we have been setting up hierarchies, organizational flow charts, orders of authority, and all the other structural schemes dreamed up through the ages. The more advanced the civilization, the more refined the organizational schemes. However, though structures are essential to hold society together, they are there to serve, not be served. The marvels of modern technology have produced a sophistication in systems and structures that encourage the political illusion, the misguided belief that all problems can be solved by structures—namely, institutions. So for each new problem, a new institution is created. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
However, the church is a living organism and its function is to love the God who created it—to care for others out of obedience to Christ, to heal those who hurt, to take away fear, to restore community, to belong to one another, to proclaim the Good News while living it out. The church is the invisible made visible. In happy circumstances, the baby sees its own charm, worth, and lovability when one looks into the (m)other’s face. The first definitions of the self are influenced on the one hand by the internal climate and, on the other, by what you discover about yourself from the mirror of the other. All this is very relevant to the process of psychotherapy, in which people discover parts of themselves which hitherto had been hidden. This uncovering makes people feel unsure and vulnerable. They are not as they thought they were. How will other people react now? Can they accept their new discoveries? The recognition and acceptance found in other people’s eyes (in some circumstances the psychotherapist’s) may make all the difference between renewed defensiveness and a change for the better. When (m)others are sensitive and living, the infant sense of the love of God and is able to experience a smooth sequence from feeling-a-need to having-that-need-met. This smooth sequence makes for the integration in at least three way. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
The smooth sequence welds the arousal of the infant’s needs strongly to the satisfaction to an idea of the World as a-place-where-needs-are-met. So the satisfaction of experienced needs contributes to the infant’s expanding imagery of itself and of the World. The child who has been fortunate in its parents is supported by the confidence that one can do the things which-it-and-the mother did while they were at one, and that the environment is benevolent and not frustrating or hostile. Such a child’s self-imagery is replete with confident self-congratulatory feelings, such as some socially successful parents’ children have who—although they themselves have not yet achieved anything—nevertheless feel that they are somehow more meritorious than the children of parents who are less well off. At a later stage, good parenting brings about not only the infant’s experience that it can cope, but also the experience that it can cope with occasional times when it either is not getting that gratification it is looking for, or is not getting it straight away or not so well. If things have gone well, the child can absorb a certain amount of strain of this kind and can put up with the discovery that the World is sometimes less than entirely beneficent. The “right” amount of anxiety has been generated for the child one’s own powers. Not too little, not too much, but just the right: “optimal” frustration. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Learning to deal with frustrations early on is very important. Most of us feel bad about inflicting hurt. However, some people go through life causing a great deal of hurt to other people, including their romantic partners and even their own children. They might fall under the label of narcissistic or borderline personality disorder. When one is on the receiving end of dealing with a person’s ill will, it can be extremely frustrating. When people do not like themselves—no matter how good of a front they put on—they are likely to project this self-dislike onto others. Particularly if this self-dislike stems from abusive behaviour which they have experiences in their past, they will engage in hurtful behaviours towards those people they love—replicating their own lived experiences. They may be driven by a desire to hurt you in the same way they have been hurt, to bring you down and cause you pain in the same way they have experienced it. These individuals need to seek help, but often will not and no one will usually point out to them that they have a problem and hurting others gives them the energy they need to boost their own self-esteem. Hurting others can be part of a strategy to weaken another individual. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Very different from destructiveness are certain deeply buried archaic experiences that often appear to the modern observer as proof of human’s innate destructiveness. Yet a closer analysis can show that while they result in destructive acts, their motivation is not the passion to destroy. One should be warned against the hasty interpretation of all destructive behaviour as the outcome of a destructive instinct, rather one must reorganize the frequency of religious and nondestructive motivations behind such behaviour. Destructiveness, however, can be spontaneous, or bound in the character structure. By the former I refer to the outburst of dormant (not necessarily repressed) destructive impulses that are activated by extraordinary circumstances, in contrast to the permanent, although not always expressed, presence of destructive traits in the character. However, these destructive explosions are not spontaneous in the sense that they break out without any reason. In the first place, there are always external conditions that stimulate them, such as wars, religions or political conflicts, poverty, extreme boredom and insignificance of the individual. Secondly, there are subjective reasons: extreme group narcissism in national or religious terms, as in India, a certain proneness to a state of trance, as in parts of Indonesia. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
It is not human nature that makes a sudden appearance, but the destructive potential that is fostered by certain permanent conditions and mobilized by sudden traumatic events. Without these provoking factors, the destructive energies in these population seems to be dormant, and not as with the destructive character, a constantly flowing source of energy. Vengeful destructiveness is a spontaneous reaction to intense and unjustified suffering inflicted upon a person or the members of the group with whom one is identified. It differs from normal defensive aggression in two ways: It occurs after the damage has been done, and hence is not a defense against a threatening danger. It is of much greater intensity, and is often cruel, lustful, and insatiable. Language itself expresses this particular quality of vengeance in the term “thirst for vengeance.” It hardly needs to be emphasized how widespread vengeful aggression is, both among individuals and groups. All forms of punishment—from primitive to modern—are an expression of vengeance. The Bible continually mandates restitution for property offenses. The Old Testament in the Christian Bible contains repeated references; and in the New Testament is found the example of Zacchaeus giving back fourfold what had been wrongly taken. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Nowhere in Scripture are prisons instituted as punishment for crimes, however. They are referred to as place for detaining people and for political purposes. The use of prisons for rehabilitation or punishment following conviction is a very recent invention, the result of Quaker-initiated reforms two centuries ago. The word “penitentiary” comes from the Quaker idea that the criminal needed to be penitent and repent and reform themselves. The first state prison in American was the Walnut Street jail in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, opened in 1790. The program drew national attention and has been duplicated many times since. However, punishment as an expression of vengeance, the classic example is the lex talionis of the Old Testament. The threat to punish a misdeed up to the third and fourth generation must also be considered an expression of revenge by a God whose commands have been disobeyed, even though it seems that the attempt was made to weak the traditional concept by adding “and who will be merciful until the thousandth generation.” The same idea can be found in many primitive societies—for instance, the law of the Yakuts which says events which cause the loss of life require atonement. The atonement was attached to the aggressor’s descendants for nine generations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
It cannot be denied that criminal law has a certain social function in upholding social stability. However, why is vengeance such a deep-seated and intense passion? I can only offer some speculations. Let us consider first the idea that vengeance is in some sense a magic act. By destroying the one who committed the atrocity one’s deed is magically undone. (However, that is not very rational and one never wants another person to suffer the same as one did. That is why we have the justice system.) Yet, the former is still expressed today by saying that “the criminal has paid one’s debt”; at least in theory, one is now like someone who never committed a crime. Vengeance may be said to be a magic reparation; but even assuming that this is so, why is this desire for reparation so intense? Perhaps humans are endowed with an elementary sense of justice; this may be because there is a deep-rooted sense of “existential equality”: we all are born from mothers, we were once powerless children, and we shall one day return to Heaven. Although no human can often not defend oneself against the harm others inflict upon one, in one’s wish for revenge one tries to wipe the sheet clean by denying, magically, that the damage was ever done. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
It seems that envy has the same root. Cain could not stand the fact that he was rejected while his brother was accepted. The rejection was arbitrary, and it was not in his power to change it; this fundamental injustice aroused such envy that the score could only be evened out by terminating Abel. However, there must be more to the cause of vengeance. When God and secular authorities fail, humans seem to take justice into their own hands. It is as if in one’s passion for vengeance one elevates oneself to the role of God, and of the Angels of vengeance. The act of vengeance may be one’s greatest hour just because of this self-elevation. While vengeance is indeed widespread there are great differences in degree, up to the point that certain cultures and individuals seem to have only minimal traces of it. There must be factors that explain the difference. One such factor is that of scarcity versus abundance. The person—or group—who has confidence in life and enjoys it, whose material resources may not be ample but sufficient not to elicit stinginess, will be less eager for the reparation of damage than an anxious, hoarding person who is afraid that one can never made up for one’s losses. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
This much can be stated with some degree of probability: the thirst for revenge can be plotted on a line at ne end of which are people in whom nothing will arouse a wish for revenge; these are humans who have reached a degree of development which in Buddhist or Christian terms is the ideal for all humans. On the other end would be those who have an anxious, hoarding, or extremely narcissistic character, for whom even a slight damage will arouse an intense craving for revenge. This type would be exemplified by a human from who a thief has stolen a few dollars and who wants one to be severely punished; or a professor who has been slighted by a student and therefore writes a negative report on him when he is asked to recommend the student for a good job; or a customer who has been treated “wrongly” by a salesperson and complains to the management, wanting the individual to be fired. In these cases we are dealing with a character in which vengeance is constantly present trait. The spontaneous outbreak of lust for revenge, with which we are here mainly concerned, occurs in people who do not have a vengeful character, but in whom extraordinary provocations can whip up intense and sometimes almost compulsive vengefulness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Of course, we do not want to be vengeful, nor do we want to hurt others. The goal is to be law abiding citizens, express the love of Christ, and allow the law to enforce the rules of the land. When humans attempt to be Christian without this preliminary consciousness of sin, the result is almost bound to be a certain resentment as to one who is always inexplicably angry. Every human, not very holy or very arrogant, has to live up to the outward appearance of other humans: one knows there is that within one which falls far below even one’s most careless public behaviour, even one’s loosest talk. In an instant of time—while your friend hesitates for a word—what things have passed through your mind? We have never told the truth. We may confess ugly fact—the meanest cowardice or the shabbiest and most prosaic impurity—but the toke is false. The very act of confessing—an infinitesimally hypocritical glance—a dash of humour—all this contrives to dissociate the facts from your very self. No one could guess how familiar and, in a sense, congenial to your soul these things were, how much of a piece with all the rest: down there, in the dreaming inner warmth, they struck no such discordant note, were not nearly so odd and detachable from the rest of you, as they seem when they turned into words. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues—like the bad tennis player who calls one’s normal form one’s “bad days” and mistakes one’s rare success for one’s normal. I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth about ourselves; the persistent, life-long, inner murmur of spite, jealousy, prurience, greed and self-complacence, simply will not go into words. However, the important thing is that we should not mistake out inevitably limited utterances for a full account of the worst that is inside. A reaction—it itself wholesome—is not going on against purely private or domestic conceptions of mortality, a reawakening of the social conscience. We feel ourselves to be involve in an iniquitous social system and to share a corporate guilt. This is very true: but the enemy can exploit even truths to our deception. Beware lest you are making use of the idea of corporate guilt to distract your attention from those humdrum, old-fashioned guilts of your own which have nothing to do with “the system” and which can be dealt with without waiting for the future. For corporate guilt perhaps cannot be, and certainly is not, felt with the same force as personal guilt. For most of us, as we now are, this conception is a mere excuse for evading the real issue. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
When we have really learned to know our individual corruption, then indeed we can go on to think of the corporate guilt and can hardly think of it too much. However, we must learn to walk before we run. We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. As if they were no concern of the present speaker’s and even with laughter, I have heard myself recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood. However, mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the prince of our forgiveness and be humble. As for the fact of a sin, is it probably that anything cancels it? All times are eternally present to God. It is not at least possible that along some one line of His multi-dimensional eternity He sees you forever in the nursery pulling the playing with your cute little toes and singing a song, forever toadying, lying, and lusting as a schoolboy or schoolgirl, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a subaltern? It may be that salvation consists not in the cancelling of these eternal moments but in the perfected humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to God’s compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the Universe. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Perhaps in that eternal moment St. Peter—he will forgive me if I am wrong—forever denies his Master. If so, it would indeed be true that the joys of Heaven are for most of us, in our present condition, “an acquired taste”—and certain ways of life may render the taste impossible of acquisition. Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a public place. Of course I do not know that this is true; but I think the possibility is worth keeping in mind. Here we are learning to understand and do the things Jesus gave us in specific commandments and teachings. We are studying his words and deeds in the four gospels. This “learning” is primarily developed through the teaching ministry of our church as we gather. We must learn to trust ourselves wholly to Christ. It is necessary to attribute providence to God. For all the good that is in created things has been created by God. In created things good is found not only as regards their substance, but also as regards their order towards an end and especially their last end, which, is the divine goodness. This good of order existing in things created, is itself created by God. Since, however, God is the cause of things by His intellect, and this it behooves that the type of every effect should pre-exist in Him, as is clear from what has gone before, it is necessary that the type of the order of things towards their end should be pre-exist in the divine mind: and the type of things ordered towards an end is, properly speaking, providence. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
For it is the chief part of prudence, to which two other parts are directed—namely, remembrance of the past, and understanding of the present; inasmuch as from the remembrance of what is past and the understanding of what is present, we gather how to provide for the future. Now it belongs to prudence, according to the Philosopher, to direct other things towards an end whether in regard to oneself—as for instance, a human is said to be prudent, who orders well one’s own acts towards the end of life—or in regard to others subject to one, in a family, city or kingdom; in which sense it is said, “a faithful and wise servant, whom one’s lord hath appointed over one’s family,” reports Matthew 24.45. In this way prudence or providence may suitably be attributed to God. For in God Himself there can be nothing ordered towards an end, since He is the last end. This type of order in things towards an end is therefore in God called providence. Whence Boethius says (De Consol. Iv, 6) that {Providence is the divine type itself, seated in the Supreme Ruler; which disposeth all thing”; which disposition may refer either to the type of the order of things towards an end, or to the type of the order of parts in the whole. The intuitive feeling or the seminal idea may be planted in a human’s heart today but it may need twenty to thirty years before it comes to sufficient growth in one’s conscious mind. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Providence resides in the intellect; but presupposes the act of willing the end. Nobody gives a precept about things done for an end; unless one will that end. Hence prudence presupposes the moral virtues, by means of which the appetitive faculty is directed towards good. Even if Providence has to do with the divine will and intellect equally, this would not affect the divine simplicity, since in God both the will and intellect are one and the same thing. No one was or could have been present at creation. Moreover, while we have an idea of who God is and wants, He wants, He is utterly incomprehensible to finite humans. The World-Mind is forever attempting to reflect its qualities and attributes in the Universe. The Universe is already and eternally within God. No decision was needed nor could there have been one, any ore than a human may decide to be kind. Bringing the Universe out of Himself is a function, quality, or attribute—none of these terms is quite correct but a better is hard to find—an obedience to the law of God’s own being. The movement which brings the Universe into being out of the World-Mind’s stillness is a spontaneous, not a deliberate, one. It just happens because it is the very nature of the World-Mind to make this movement. It is an inner compulsion rather than an inner necessity that moves the World-Mind to bring about these repeated reincarnations of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
If we try to consider the inner necessity which makes the World-Mind manifest Itself to Itself through an other, a cosmos, we find ourselves on the threshold of a mystery. How could compulsion, limit, or desire arise in the desireless one? Human intellect can only formulate such a question, but cannot answer it. The moment we assert that this infinite Power has a motive in making the cosmos, a purpose in creating the World, in that moment we limit it and ascribe need or want or lack to it. The World-Mind has the power of vigorous creativeness as an essential attribute of its nature. It will stop its work of sustaining the Universe when it stops being what it is. There is no other purpose behind creation than that of continuing its own existence. To understand this is to understand that the question as to purpose is not at all applicable to the World-Mind but only to an imagined and inferior being, one which could start or discontinue. We know that the mask of the unconscious is not rigid—it reflects the face we turn towards it. Hostility lends it a threatening aspect, friendliness softens its features. It is not a question of mere optical reflection but of an autonomous answer which reveals the self-sufficing nature of that which answers. Christian symbolism is particularly concerned with healing, or attempting to heal the wound of the gaping rift in this World. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
It would be more correct to take the open conflict as a symptom of the psychic situation of humans in the New World, and to deplore their inability to assimilate the whole range of the Christian symbol. As a doctor I cannot demand anything of my patients in this respect, also I lack the Church’s means of grace. Consequently I am faced with the task of taking the only path open to me—bringing the hidden into consciousness. At the same time I must leave my patient to decide in accordance with one’s assumptions, one’s spiritual maturity, one’s education, origins, and temperament, so far as this is possible without serious conflicts. As a doctor it is my takes to help the final decisions, because I know from experience that all coercion—be it suggestion, insinuation, or any other method of persuasion—ultimately proves to be nothing but an obstacle to the highest and most decisive experience of all, which is to be alone with one’s own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. If one is to find out what it is that supports one when one can no longer support oneself, the patient must be alone. I would be only too delighted to leave this anything but easy task to the theologian, were it not that it is just from the theologian that many of my patients come. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
They ought to have hung on to the community of the Church, but they were shed like dry leaves from the great tree and now find themselves “hanging on” to the treatment. As if they or the thing they cling to would drop off into the void the moment they relaxed their hold, something in them clings, often with the strength of despair. They are seeking firm ground on which to stand. Since no outward support is of any use to them they must finally discover it in themselves—admittedly the most unlikely place from the rational point of view, but an altogether possible one from the point of view of the unconscious. We can this this from the archetype of the “lowly origin of the redeemer.” The way to the goal seems chaotic and interminable at first, and only gradually do the signs increase that it is leading anywhere. The way is not straight but appears to go round in circles. More accurate knowledge has proved it to go in spirals: the dream-motifs always return after certain intervals to definite forms, whose characteristic is to define a center. And as a matter of fact the whole process revolves about a certain point or some arrangement round a center, which may in certain circumstances appear even in the initial dreams. As manifestations of unconscious processes the dreams rotate or circumambulate round the center, drawing closer to it as the amplifications increase in distinctness and in scope. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Owning to the diversity of the symbolical material it is difficult at first to perceive any kind of order at all. Nor should it be taken for granted that dream sequences are subject to any governing principle. However, as I say, the process of development proves on closer inspection to be cyclic or spiral. We might draw a parallel between such spiral courses and the processes of growth in plants; in fact the plant motif (tree, flower, et cetera) frequently recurs in these dreams and fantasies and is also spontaneously drawn or painted in Mandala symbolism. In alchemy the tree is the symbol of Hermetic philosophy. Harmonicists believe that true theology exists in all religions, and that it was given by God to humans in antiquity. When the inner voice says what we do not like to hear, we are apt to ignore it in modern times. However, in its manifestation, an intuitive idea is too often such a tiny spark that we are more likely to miss it than not. It is prudent to obey warning premonitions than to ignore them. Take time over problems, let your final decisions wait until they are fully ripe. Where is the wisdom in forcing a quick decision, which could easily be a wrong one, merely to get a decision at all? Intuition is the voice which is constantly calling one to this higher state. However, if one seldom or never pauses amid the press of activity to listen for it, one fails to benefit by it. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Such intuitions manifest themselves only on the fringe of consciousness. They are tender shoots and therefore need to be tenderly nurtured. The more one follows a course contrary to intuitive leading, the more will errors of mishaps follow one. These feelings may be cultivated as a gardener cultivates flowers. Their visitation may be brought on again, their delight renewed. If one listens humbly, in the end one will rely on this little inner voice which speaks and tells one which way to turn. Do not deny your intuitive self as Judas denied his master, as Peter denied him. There is also one’s subconscious mind, one’s brilliant and seemingly effortless hunches. One’s judgements come forth spontaneously like lightning, with no supporting brief of argument. One follows one’s own subconscious with blind faith but insists that to have a hunch, one must first have all the facts at one’s command, and one’s intelligence must be working at full speed. Then suddenly and without conscious effort you think of a solution which is really based on facts, but is not achieved by deliberate cerebrations. With it comes an unexampled feeling of well-being. One will learn sooner or later by the test of experience to defer to this intuitive feeing whenever its judgement, guidance, or warning manifests itself. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Thomas Alva Edison, an American inventor and businessman who has been described as America’s greatest inventor developed many devices such as the phonograph and incandescent electric light and power, telephony and telegraphy sound recording. He said that all his inventions grew out of initial flashes which welled up from within. The rest was a matter of research. The intuitive element has to be awaited wit much patience and vigilant attention. Is one fully open to intuitive feelings that originate in one’s deeper being, one’s sacred self? Or does one’s ego get in the way by its rigidities, habits, and tendencies? The importance of these feelings is that they are threadlike clues which need following up, for they can lead one to a blessed renewal or revelation. The capacity to respond to spiritual intuitions is latent in all humans but trained and developed in few humans. From this hidden source comes at times guidance, warnings, attractions, or aversions which ought to be construed as intuitive messages. However, for this they must first best recognized and believed: they pass too quickly. It is not that one put out the antenna of one’s intuition, so much as that one insulates its end and thus provides clear receptivity. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
We may not forecast how quickly or how well every student will progress in this art. For one may naturally possess much sensitivity but another may posses little. And even when an intuition is recognized immediately, the will may respond to it very slowly. It is true that conscious is the voice of God in the moral life of humans, but it is also true that one seldom hears its pure sound. Most often one hears it mixed with much egotism. Do you hear me, Earth spirits, as I go walking? Do you hear my footfalls, drumming on the dirt? Do you hear my breathing, mixing with the air? Do you hear my heart beating, weaving in the rhythms? Do you hear my words of prayer, asking your attention? Do you hear me, Earth Spirits? Please hear me, please hear me, please hear my voice. Please hear the one who walks among you. Please hear my words of peace and friendship. Please hear my plea, please grant my wish. In mercy Thou bringest light to the Earth and to those who dwell thereon, and in Thy goodness renewest continually each day the work of creation. How great are Thy works, O Lord! In wisdom has Thou made them all; the Earth is full of Thy creatures. O King, Thou alone hast been exalted from the days of old, praised, glorified and extolled from of yore. O everlasting God, in Thine abundant mercy, please have compassion on us. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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For Thou Shall Hear this Secret–Mathematics Possesses Not Only Truth, but Supreme Beauty!
United States policy on the World scene is viewed as being neutral toward our enemy, friendly toward the neutrals, and unfriendly toward our friends. Geography of super industrial society can be expected to become increasingly kinetic, filled with turbulence and change. The more rapidly the environment changes, the shorter the life span of organization forms. In administrative structure, just as in architectural structure, we are moving from long-enduring to temporary forms. From permanence to transience. We are moving from bureaucracy to Ad-hocracy. In this way, the accelerative thrust translates itself into organization. Permanence, one of the identifying characteristics of bureaucracy, one of the identifying characteristics of bureaucracy, is undermined, and we are driven to a relentless conclusion: human’s ties with the invisible geography of organization turn over more and more rapidly, exactly as do one’s relationships with things, places, and the human beings who people these ever-changing organizational structures. Just as the new nomads migrate from place to place, humans increasingly migrate from organizational structure to organizational structure. Something else is happening, too: a revolutionary shift in power relationships. Not only are large organizations forced to create temporary units, but they are also finding it increasingly difficult to maintain their traditional chains-of-command. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
It would be pollyannish to suggest that workers in industry or government today truly “participate” in the management of their enterprises—either in capitalist or, for that matter, in socialist and communist countries. Yet there is evidence that bureaucratic hierarchies, separating those who “make decisions” from those who merely carry them out, are being altered, side-stepped or broken. This process is noticeable in industry where irresistible pressures are battering hierarchical arrangements. The central, crucial and important business of organizations is increasingly shifting from up and down to sideways. What is involved in such a shift is a virtual revolution in organizational structure—and human relations. For people communicating in sideways—id est, to others at approximately the same level of organization—behave differently, operate under very different pressures, than those who must communicate up and down a hierarchy. To illustrate, let us look at a typical work setting in which a traditional bureaucratic hierarchy operates. While still a young man, I worked for a couple of years as a millwright’s helper in a foundry. Here, in a great dark cavern of a building, thousands of men laboured to produce automobile crankcase castings. The scene was Dantesque—smoke and soot smeared our faces, soot covered the floors and filled the air, the pungent, choking smell of sulphur and burnt sand seared our nostrils. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Overhead a creaking conveyor carried red hot castings and dripped hot sand on the men blow. There were flashes of molten iron, the yellow flares of fires, and a lunatic cacophony of noises: men shouting, chains rattling, pug mills hammering, compressed air shrieking. To a stranger the scene appeared chaotic. However, those inside knew that everything was carefully organized. Bureaucratic order prevailed. Men did the same job over and over again. Rules governed every situation. And each man knew exactly where he stood in a vertical hierarchy that reached from the lowest-paid core paster up to the unseen “they” who populated the executive suits in another building. In the immense shed where we worked, something was always going wrong. A bearing would burn out, a belt snap or a gear break. Whenever this happened in a section, work would screech to a halt, and frantic messages would begin to flow up and down the hierarchy. The worker nearest the breakdown would notify his foreman. He, in turn, would tell the production supervisor. The production supervisor would send the word to the maintenance supervisor. The maintenance supervisor would dispatch a crew to repair the damage. Information in this system is passed by the worker “upward” through the foreman to the production supervisor. The production supervisor carries it sideways to a man occupying a niche at approximately the same level in the hierarchy (the maintenance supervisor), who, in turn, passes it downward to the millwrights who actually get things going again. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The information thus must move a total of four steps up and down the vertical ladder plus one step sideways before repairs can begin. The process is a lot like taking a tour through the Winchester mansion. This system is premised on the unspoken assumption that the dirty, sweaty men down below cannot make sound decisions. Only those higher in the hierarchy are to be trusted with judgment or discretion. Officials at the top make the decisions; men at the bottom carry them out. One group represents the brains of the organization; the other, the hands. This typically bureaucratic arrangement is ideally suited to solving routine problems at a moderate pace. However, when things speed up, or the problems cease to be routine, chaos often breaks loose. It is easy to see why. First, the acceleration of the pace of life (and especially the speed-up of production brought about by automation) means that every minute of down time cost more in lost output than ever before. Delay is increasingly costly. Information must flow faster than ever before. At the same time, rapid change, by increasing the number of novel, unexpected problems increases the amount of information needed. It takes more information to cope with a noel problem than one we have solved a dozen or a hundred times before. It is this combined demand for more information at faster speeds that is now undermining the great vertical hierarchies so typical of bureaucracy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
A radical speed-up could have been effected in the foundry described above simply by allowing the worker to report the breakdown directly to the maintenance supervisor or even to a maintenance crew, instead of passing the news along through his foreman and production supervisor. At least one and perhaps two steps could have been cut from the four-step communication process in this way—a saving of from 25 to 50 percent. Significantly, the steps that might be eliminated are the up-and-down steps, the vertical ones. Today such savings are feverishly sought by managers fighting to keep up with change. Shortcuts that by-pass the hierarchy are increasingly employed in thousands of factories, offices, laboratories, even in the military. The cumulative result of such small changes is a massive shift from vertical to lateral communication systems. The intended result is speedier communication. This leveling process, however, represents a major blow to the once-sacred bureaucratic hierarchy, and it punches a jagged hole in the brain and hand analogy. For as he vertical chain of command is increasingly by-passed, we find “hands” beginning to make decisions, too. When the worker by-passes his foreman or supervisor and calls in a repair team, he makes a decision that in the past was reserved for these higher ups. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
This silent but significant deterioration of hierarchy, now occurring in the executive suite as well as at the ground level of the factory floor, is intensified by the arrival on the scene of hordes of experts—specialists in vital fields so narrow that often the men on top have difficulty understanding them. Increasingly, managers have to rely on the judgment of these experts. Solid state physicists, computer programmers, systems designers, operation researchers, engineering specialists—such humans are assuming new decision-making function. At one time, they merely consulted with executives who reserved unto themselves the right to make managerial decisions. Today, the managers are losing their monopoly on decision-making. The specialists do not fit neatly together into a chain-of-command system and cannot wait for their expert advice to be approved at a higher level. With no time for decisions to wend their leisurely way up and down the hierarchy, advisors stop merely advising and begin to make decisions themselves. Often they do this in direct consultation with the workers and ground-level technicians. As a result, you no longer have the strict allegiance to hierarchy. You may have five or six different levels of the hierarchy represented in one meeting. You try to forget about salary level and hierarchy, and organize to get the job done. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Such facts represent a staggering change in thinking, action, and decision-making in organizations. Quite possibly, the only truly effective methods for preventing, or coping with, problems of coordination and communication in our changing technology will be found in the new arrangements of people and tasks, in arrangements which sharply break with the bureaucratic tradition. It will be a log time before the last bureaucratic hierarchy is obliterated. For bureaucracies are well suited to task that require masses of moderately educated humans to perform routine operations, and, no doubt, some such operations will continue to be performed by humans in the future. It is clear that in super-industrial society many such tasks will be performed by great self-regulating systems of machines, doing away with the need for bureaucracy on civilization more tightly than before, automation leads to its overthrow. As machines take over routine tasks and the accelerative thrust increases the amount of novelty in the environment, more and more of the energy of society (and its organizations) must turn toward the solution of non-routine problems. This requires a degree of imagination and creativity that bureaucracy, with its human-on-a-slot organization, its permanent structures, and its hierarchies, is not well equipped to provide. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Thus it is not surprising to find that wherever organizations today are caught up in the stream of technological or social change, wherever research and development is important, wherever humans must cope with first-time problems, the decline of bureaucratic forms is most pronounced. In these frontier organizations a new system of human relations is springing up. To live, organizations must cast off those bureaucratic practices that immobilize them, making them less sensitive and less rapidly responsive to change. We are moving toward a working society of technical co-equals in which the line of demarcation between the leader and the led has become fuzzy. Super-industrial Humans, rather than occupying a permanent, cleanly-defined slot and performing mindless routine tasks in response to orders from above, finds increasingly that one must assume decision-making responsibility—and must do so within a kaleidoscopically changing organization structure built upon highly transient human relationships. Whatever else might be said, that is not the old, familiar Weberian bureaucracy at which so many of our novelists and social critics are still, belatedly, hurling their rusty javelins. The sum of transfers and benefits from essential public goods should be arranged so as to enhance the expectations of the least favoured consistent with the required saving and the maintenance of equal liberties. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
When the basic structure takes this form the distribution that results will be just (or at least not unjust) whatever it is. Each receives that total income (earnings plus transfers) to which one is entitled under the public system of rules upon which one’s legitimate expectations are founded. A central feature of this conception of distributive justice is that it contains a large element of pure procedural justice. If the notion of pure procedural justice is to succeed, it is necessary to set up and to administer impartially a just system of surrounding institutions. The reliance on pure procedural justice presupposes that the basic structure satisfies the two principles. The first principle of justice is that: Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same arrangement of liberties for all; the second principle of justice is: Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions—they are to be attached to offices and position open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle). This account of distributive shares is simply an elaboration of the familiar idea that income and wages will be just once a (workably) competitive price system is properly organized and embedded in a just structure. These conditions are sufficient. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The distribution that results is a case of background justice on the analogy with the outcome of a fair game. However, we need to consider whether this conception fits our intuitive ideas of what is just and unjust. Consider the case of wages in a perfectly competitive economy surrounded by a just basic structure. Assume that each firm (whether publicly or privately owned) must adjust its rates of pay to the long-run forces of supply and demand. The rates of pay cannot be so high that they cannot afford paying those rates or so low that a sufficient number will not offer their skills in view of the other opportunities available. In equilibrium the relative attractiveness of different jobs will be equal, all things considered. It is easy, then, to see how the various precepts of justice arise. They simply identify features of jobs that are significant on either the demand or the supply side of the market, or both. A firm’s demand for workers is determined by the marginal productivity of labour, that is, by the net value of the contribution of a unit of labour measured by the sale price of the commodities that it produces. The worth of this contribution to the firm rests eventually on market conditions, on what households are willing to pay for various goods. Experience and training, natural ability and special know-how, tend to earn a premium. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Firms are willing to pay more to those with special skills, knowledge, talent and ability because these characteristics mean their productivity is greater. This fact explains and gives weight to the precept to each according to one’s contribution, and as special cases, we have the norms to each according to one’s training, or one’s experience, and the like. However, also, viewed from the supply side, a premium must be paid if those who may later offer their services are to be persuaded to undertake the costs of training and postponement. Similarly jobs which involve uncertain or unstable employment, or which are performed under hazardous and unpleasantly strenuous conditions, tend to receive more pay. Otherwise humans cannot be found to fill them. From this circumstance arise such precepts as to each according to one’s effort, or the risk one bears, and so on. Even when individuals are assumed to be of the same natural ability, these normal will still arise from the requirement of economic activity. Given the aims of productive units and of those seeking work, certain characteristics are singled out as relevant. At any time the wage practices of firms tend to recognize these precepts and, allowing time for adjustment, assign them the weights called for by market conditions. All of this seems reasonably clear. At the height of the energy crisis in 1977, the governor of Virginia ordered energy use restricted in non-essential buildings. No one seemed particularly surprised that churches headed his list. In the eyes of the World, as well as many church-goers, the church is only a building, and an expensive, under-used one at that. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The only time the church is used is usually on Saturday or Sunday, for a few hours, and an occasional mid-week service or function, the temple of God sits empty. SO why use scarce resources to heat it? These same people consider the church just another institution with its own bureaucracy, run by ministers and priests who, like lawyers and doctors, are members of a profession (though not so well-paid). And while this parochial institution fulfills a worthwhile social and inspirational function, rather like an arts society or civic club, most people could get along fine without it. In many ways, of course, the church has allowed itself to become what the World says it is. (This seems to be a common human bent—to become what others consider us to be.) However, that sad fact has not dulled or changed God’s definition of, and intention for, His church. For biblically the church is an organism not an organization—a movement, not a monument. It is not a part of the community; it is a whole new community. It is not an orderly gathering; it is a new order with new values, often in sharp conflict with the values of the surrounding society. The church does nor draw people in; it sends them out. It does not settle into a comfortable niche, taking its place alongside the Rotary, the Elks, and the Hilton country club. Rather, the church is to make society uncomfortable. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Like yeast, the temple of God unsettles the masses around it, changing it from within. Like salt, it flavours and preserves that into which it vanishes. However, as yeast is made up of many particles and salt composed of multiplied grains, so the church is many individual believers. For God has given us each other; we do not live the Christian life alone. We do not love God alone. To believe Jesus means we follow Hum and join what He called the “kingdom of God” which He said was “at hand.” This is a new commitment…a new companionship, new community established by conversion. The young church, made up of believers of every country, race, and language of the World as a Holy Nation. Being part of the Holy Nation requires an understanding and practice of certain truths. When I came first to the University, I fell among a set of young men and women, who believed in chastity, truthfulness, self-sacrifice. We were sufficiently close in intellect and imagination, which allowed us to secure immediate intimacy and they taught me to obey the moral law. God’s goodness differs from ours; but one needs have no fear that, as one approached it, one will be asked simply to reverse one’s moral standards. Christ calls humans to repent—a call which would be meaningless if God’s standards were sheerly different from that which they already knew and failed to practise #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
God appeals to our existing moral judgments. By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness—the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness. There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness (in the sense given above) is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object—we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to give animals homes so they do not suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our relationships, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, God has never regarded us with contempt. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense. The relation between Creator and creature is, of course, unique, and cannot be paralleled by any relations between one creature and another. God is both further from us, and nearer to us, than any other being. He is further from us because the sheer difference between that which has Its principle of being in Itself and that to which being is communicated, is one compared with which the difference between an archangel and a worm is quite insignificant. God makes, we are made: God is original, we derivative. However, as the same time, and for the same reason, the intimacy between God and even the meanest creature is closer than any that creatures can attain with one another. Our life is, at every moment, supplied by God: our tiny, miraculous power of free will only operates on bodies which God’s continual energy keeps in existence—our very power to think in His power communicated to us. Such a unique relation can be apprehended only by analogies: from the various types of love known among creatures we reach an inadequate, but useful, conception of God’s love for humans. MIND is the Real, Energy is tis appearance. Matter is the form taken by radiation or energy. It is not that the truth lies between two extremes but that it lies above both. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
It is not a miracle that physical objects, minerals like coal and oil, can be turned into heat and light and power, that is, into energies, as humans are doing today?—that matter can be transmuted into electrical energy, which can be turned into sounds, pictures, sounds, and words as it is thrown across the World? However, what is the essence of this energy, whence does it come ultimately? Where else but from the Great Mind which activated the Universe? Physics derives the World of continents and creatures from energies; these in turn derive from a mysterious No-thing. There is no room here for materialism. For if nothing material can be found at that deep level, mathematical evidence points to Mind. The substance of matter has shifted from the visible World to an invisible one but precise, if difficult, mathematical formulas tell us that it is there, while exploding atomic bombs demonstrate its power. At this point matter disappears; its substance becomes its source. All things and all energies come from this source. It is the ONE, unique. It is life for us all and death for us all. Mind has its own energy, which mysteriously constructs forms in space and time, forms of planets, sun galaxies, the cosmos. Energy is expression in movement of the unseen substance. Matter is its apparent form. All things are made from it. We are a part of it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
At the very end of all their explorations of the atom, what do the scientists find? Empty space, no thing-in-itself, a gap out of which pour flashes of energy. The World-Mind acts by its own power, underived from any other source. This entire Universe is a tremendous manifestation—the One turned into the Many—of a single Energy, which in its turn is an aspect of a single Mind. Whatever its nature, every other force derives from this Energy, as every other form of consciousness derives from this Mind. The statement “Light is God” is meant in two sense: first, as the poetical and a physical fact that, in the present condition of the human being, one’s spiritual ignorance is equivalent to darkness and one’s discovery of God is equivalent to light; second, as the scientific fact that has verified in light, and since God has made the Universe out of His own substance, the light-waves are ultimately divine. The Light is World-Mind’s active and creative force. The Light of the World-Mind is the Source of the physical Universe; the Love of the World-Mind is its structural basis. All the forces of the physical World are derived from a single source—the solar energy. This energy which is within the cosmos, from which it is drawn by humans, this Life-Force, may be called “bio-electric” for its shows itself on one level as light, on another as the whole spectrum of colours. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Biology does not know or explain Life-Power, only its manifestations. What the scientist formerly called “radiant light” became the stuff of which Worlds are made; what the mystic visionary called “the body of God” and actually saw a mysterious light, is still present in the World in hence in all terrestrial life forms. If we seek an origin for the consciousness, however small finite and limited it may be, that a human possesses, none other can be found except the universal consciousness which informs the entire Universe and guides its development. All the different kinds of consciousness come from this Universal Mind. All the highest ideals and virtues of human consciousness come from it too. Even the simple religious faith indirectly has its rise there. It is the mysterious essence of all things and of nothing, the infinite presence that is everywhere and yet nowhere. Above all, it is at the very root of human’s inward being. Our roots are in the World-Mind. In that sense, our whole life is born and grows from it—physical and non-physical alike. There is our true Parent. Without this constant listening for intuitive guidance, and submission to it, we waste much time putting right the mistakes made or curing the sickness which could have been prevented or bemoaning the calamity which willpower could have averted. None of these are God’s will, but our own causation. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Being guided intuitively does not mean that every problem will be solved instantly as soon as it appears. Some solutions will not come into consciousness until almost the very last minute before they are actually needed. One learns to be patient, to let the higher power take its own course. We can thank intuition for many of the inventions that surround us every day. I know that intuition has invariably set me on the right track. My hunches come to me most frequently in bed, in a plane, or while staring out of a pullman window. When a problem really has me stumped I am apt to write down all the details as far as I can go, then put it aside to cool for forty-eight hours. At the end of that time I often find it’s solved itself….In any case, the most interesting sensations are the elation that accompanies the hunch and the feeling of certainty it inspires that the solution which has been glimpsed is right. Learn to relax. Intuition cannot operate when your conscious mind is tied up in knots. Among the best ways to relax are hobbies, provided they are not taken too seriously. These intrusions from a realm beyond conscious thinking may be Heavenly ones. If so, to resist them would be to lose much and to accept them would be to fain much. However, they have to be caught on the wing. Their delicate beginnings must be recognized for what they are—precious guides. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The more one follows this intuitive leading the more one not only learns to trust it but also develops future response to it. Truth consists in the equation of mind and things. Now the mind, that is the cause of the thing, is related to it as its rule and measure; whereas the converse is the case with the mind that receives its knowledge from things. When therefore things are the measure and rule of the mind, truth consists in the equation of the mind to the thing, as happens in ourselves. For according as a thing is, or is not, our thoughts or our words about it are true or false. However, when the mind is the rule or measure of things, truth consists in the equation of the thing to the mind; just as the work of an artist is said to be true, when it is in accordance with one’s art. Now as work of art are related to art, so are works of justice related to the law with which they accord. Therefore God’s justice, which establishes things in the order conformable to the rule of His wisdom, which is the law of His justice, is suitably called truth. Thus we also in human affairs speak of the truth of justice. Justice, as to the law that governs, resides in the reason or intellect; but as to the command whereby our actions are governed according to the law, it resides in the will. Virtue whereby a human shows oneself in word and deed such as one really is. Thus it consists in the conformity of the sign with the thing signified; and not in that of the effect with its cause and rule: as has been said regarding the truth of justice. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
God Almighty, Lord, sitter in the doorway, God of equilibrium, lovingkindness, and mercy: Thy who hold the opposites apart, Thy in whom all opposites unite, my prayer goes to Thy to open the passage, to clear the threshold, to make the way clear. Please, with the next turn on the wheel of, Fortuna, bring me luck. “I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the Earth will bring their splendour into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and honour of the nations will be brought into it. Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life,” reports Revelation 21.22-27. It is the duty of all creatures towards Thee, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to give thanks unto Thee, to laud, adore and praise Thee, even beyond all the words of song and praise uttered by David, the son of Jesse, Thine anointed servant. Praise by Thy name forever, O our King, Thou God and King, great and holy, in Heaven on Earth. For unto Thee, O Lord our God and God of our father, it is fitting to render song and praise, hymn and psalm, ascribing unto Thee power and dominion, victory and glory, holiness and sovereignty. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Nobody Can Meddle with Fire or Poison without Being Affected in Some Vulnerable Spot!
Eggheads of the World unite; you have nothing to lose but your yolks. As my life entered it second half, I was already embarked on the confrontation with the contents of the unconscious. My work on this was an extremely long-drawn-out affair, and it was only after some twenty years of it that I reached some degree of understanding of my fantasies. First I had to find evidence for the historical prefiguration of my inner experiences. That is to say, I had to ask myself, “Where have my particular premises already occurred in history?” If I had not succeeded in finding such evidence, I would never have been able to substantiate my ideas. Therefore, my encounter with alchemy was decisive for me, as it provided me with the historical basis which I had hitherto lacked. Alchemy is the medieval forerunner of chemistry, based on the supposed transformation of matter. It was concerned particularly with attempts to convert base metal into gold or to fund a universal elixir. Necromancy is the practice of magic involving communication with the dead—either by summoning their spirits as apparitions, visions or raising them bodily—for the purpose of divination, imparting the means to foretell future events, discover hidden knowledge, to bring someone back from the dead, or to use the dead as a weapon. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Sometimes referred to as “Death Magic,” necromancy may also sometimes be used in a more general sense to refer to black magic or witchcraft. Necromancy and alchemy are semantically related in some cases. Some believe alchemy is a form of necromancy where energy is harvested to manipulate the souls of the dead and bring them back to life. Necromancers prefer to summon the recently departed based on the premise that their revelations were spoken more clearly. This timeframe was usually limited to the twelve months following the death of the physical body; once this period elapsed, necromancers would evoke the deceased’s ghostly spirit instead. The apparent value of their counsel may not have only been their physical form or ability in life, but information and knowledge the subjected learned while they were dead. The Book of Deuteronomy explicitly warns the Israelites against engaging in the Canaanite practice of divination from the dead. “When thou art come into the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do according to the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you any one who maketh one’s son or one’s daughter to pass through the fire, or who useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
“For all who do these things are an abomination unto the LORD, and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out before thee,” reports Deuteronomy 18.9-12. Though Mosaic Law prescribed the death penalty to practitioners of necromancy, this warning was not always heeded. “A man or a woman who is a medium or spiritist among you must be put to death. You are to stone them; their blood will be on their own heads,” reports Leviticus 20.27. One of the foremost explains is when King Saul had the Witch of Endor invoke the spirit of Samuel, a judge and prophet, from Sheol using a ritual conjuring pit (1 Samuel 28.3-25). However, the witch was shocked at the presence of the real spirit of Samuel for in I Samuel 28.12 it was reported, “When the woman saw Samuel, she cried out at the top of her voice and said to Saul, ‘Why have you deceived me? You are Saul!’ The king said t her, ‘Don’t be afraid. What do you see?’ The woman said, ‘I see a spirit coming from the ground,’” reports 1 Samuel 28.12-13. Saul did not receive a death penalty (his being the highest authority in the land) but he did receive it from God Himself as prophesied by Samuel during that conjuration—within a day he died in battle along with his son Jonathan. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Some Christians writers reject the idea that humans can bring back the spirits of the dead and believed that these are demons in disguise, thus conflating necromancy with demon summoning. It is also believed that even the working shells of these people provide benefit. Supposedly demons only act with divine permission and are permitted by God to test Christian people. Yet, some Christians believe that necromancy is real (along with other facets of occult magic) but that God has not allowed Christians to deal with those spirits. “The nations you will dispossess listen to those who practice sorcery or divination. However, as for you, the LORD your God has not permitted you to do so. The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him,” reports Deuteronomy 18.14-15. Still some believe the phantom of Samuel to be a trick. However, many people in the 18th and 19th centuries used to hold seances to assist them in the intellectual and spiritual affairs. One of these spiritualists was Sarah Winchester. Mrs. Winchester would go to the blue séance room in her mansion and consult with spirits. She used to planchette board to transmit messages from the dead and that is where she supposed receive the architectural blue prints for her mansion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Medieval practitioners believed they could accomplish things with the use of necromancy, and perhaps Mrs. Winchester was getting plans about her beautiful mansion from her late husband William Writ Winchester. It is believed that necromancers can manipulate the mind and will of another person, animal, or spirit. That they can summon demons to cause various afflictions on others, to drive them mad, inflame love or hatred, gain favour, or constrain one from a deed. The magic often involves reanimation of the dead, conjuring food, entertainment, or a mode of transportation. Also, knowledge is supposedly discovered when demons provide information about various things. This might involve identifying criminals, finding missing items, or revealing future events. Sacrifice was the payment for summoning; though it may involve the flesh of a human being or an animal, it could sometimes be as simple as offering a certain object. This is probably why God does not like humans to use witchcraft. Innocent lives were sometimes lost of personal gain. “When you enter the land of your LORD your God is giving you, do not learn to imitate the detestable ways of nations there. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
“Let no one be found among you who sacrifices one’s son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or cast spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead,” reports Deuteronomy 18.9-11. Analytical psychology is fundamentally a natural science, but it is subject far more than any other science to the personal bias of the observer. The psychologist must depend therefore in the highest degree upon historical and literacy parallels if one wishes to exclude at least the crudest errors in judgment. Between 1918 and 1926 I had seriously studied the Gnostic writers, for they had too been confronted with the primal World of the unconscious and had dealt with its contents, with images that were obviously contaminated with the World of instinct. Just how they understood these images remains difficult to say, in view of the paucity of the accounts—which, moreover, mostly stem from their opponents, the Church Fathers. It seems to me highly unlikely that they had a psychological conception of them. However, the Gnostics were too remote for me to establish any link with them in regard to the questions that were confronting me. As far as I could see, the tradition that might have connected Gnosis with the present seemed to have been severed, and for a long time it proved impossible to find any bridge that led from Gnosticism—or Neo-Platonism—to the contemporary World. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
However, when I begun to understand alchemy I realized that it represented the historical link with Gnosticism, and that a continuity there existed between past and present. Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed the bridge on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious. Light on the nature of alchemy began to come to me only after I had read the text of the Golden Flower, that specimen of Chinese alchemy which Richard Wilhelm sent me in 1928. I was stirred by the desire to become more closely acquainted with the alchemical text. I commissioned a Munich bookseller to notify me of any alchemical books that might fall into his hands. Soon afterwards I received the first of them, the Artis Auriferae Volumina Duo (1593), a comprehensive collection of Latin treatises among which are a number of the “classics” of alchemy. I let this book lie almost untouched for nearly two years. Occasionally I would look at the pictures, and each time I would think, “Good Lord, what nonsense! This stuff is impossible to understand.” However, it persistently intrigued me, and I made up my mind to go into it more thoroughly. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
The next winter I began, and soon found it provocative and exciting. To be sure, the texts still seemed to be blatant nonsense, but here and there would be passages that seemed significant to me, and occasionally I even found a few sentences which I thought I could understand. Finally I realized that the alchemist were talking in symbols—those old acquaintances of mine. “Why, this is fantastic,” I thought. “I simply must learn to decipher all this.” By now I was completely fascinated, and buried myself in the texts as often as I had the time. One night, while I was studying them, I suddenly recalled the dream that I was caught in the seventeenth century. At last I grasped its meaning. “So that is it! Now I am condemned to study alchemy from the very beginning.” It was a long while before I found my way about in the labyrinth of alchemical thought processes, for no Ariadne had put a thread into my hand. Reading the sixteenth-century text, “Rosarium Philosophorum,” I noticed that certain strange expressions and turns of phrase were frequently repeated. For example, “solve et coagula,” “unum vas,” “lapis,” “prima materia,” “Mercurius,” et cetera. I saw that these expressions were used again and again in a particular sense, but I could not make out what the sense was. I therefore decided to start a lexicon of key phrases with cross references. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
In the course of time I assembled several thousand such key phrases and words, and had volumes filled with excerpts. I worked along philological lines, as if I were trying to solve the riddle of an unknown language. In this way the alchemical mode of expression gradually yielded up its meaning. It was a task that kept me absorbed for more than a decade. I had very soon seen that analytical psychology coincided in a most curious way with alchemy. The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their World was my World. This was, of course, a momentous discovery: I had stumbled upon the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious. The possibility of a comparison with alchemy, and the interrupted intellectual chain back to Gnosticism, gave substance to my psychology. When I pored over these old texts everything fell into place: the fantasy-images, the empirical material I had gathered in my practice, and the conclusions I had drawn from it. I now began to understand what these psychic contents meant when seen in historical perspective. My understanding of their typical character, which had already begun with my investigation of myths, was deepened. The primordial images and the nature of the archetype took a central place in my researches, and it became clear to me that without history there can be no psychology, and certainly no psychology of the unconscious. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
A psychology of consciousness can, to be sure, content itself with material drawn from personal life, but as soon as we wish to explain a neurosis we require an anamnesis which reaches deeper than the knowledge of consciousness. And when in the course of treatment unusual decisions are called for, dreams occur that need more than personal memories for their interpretation. I regard my work on alchemy as a sign of my inner relationship to Prince Lestat. Lestat’s secret was that he was in the grip of that process of archetypal transformation which has gone on through the centuries. He was an opus magnum or divinum. This is his main business, and his whole life was enacted within the framework of this drama. Thus, what was alive and active within him was a living substance, a suprapersonal process the great dream of the mundus archetypus (archetypal World). I myself am haunted by the same dream, and from my eleventh year I have been launched upon a single enterprise which is my main business. My life has been permeated into the secret of personality. Everything can be explained from this central point, and all my works relate to this one theme. It is a remarkable fact, which we come across again and again, that absolutely everybody, even the most unqualified novice, thinks one knows all about psychology as though the psyche were something that enjoyed the most universal understanding. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
However, anyone who really knows that human psyche will agree with me when I say that it is one of the darkest and most mysterious regions of our experience. There is no end to what can be learned in this field. Hardly a day passes in my practice but I come across something new and unexpected. True enough, my experiences are not commonplaces lying on the surface of life. They are, however, within easy reach of every psychotherapist working in this particular field. It is therefore rather absurd, to say the least, that ignorance of the experiences I have to offer should be twisted into an accusation against me. I do not hold myself responsible for the shorting comings in the lay public’s knowledge of psychology. The treatment of neurosis opens up a problem which goes far beyond purely medical considerations and to which medical knowledge alone cannot hope to do justice. People are still very fond of describing a lengthy analysis as “running away from life,” “unresolved transference,” “auto-eroticism”—and by other equally unpleasant epithets. However, since there are two sides to everything, it is legitimate to condemn this so-called “hanging on” as negative to life only if it can be shown that it really does contain nothing positive. The very understandable impatience felt by the doctor does not prove anything in itself. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Only through infinitely patient research has the new science succeeded in building up a profounder knowledge of the nature of the psyche, and if there have been certain unexpected therapeutic results, these are due to the self-sacrificing perseverance of the doctor. Unjustifiably negative judgments are easily to come by and at times harmful; moreover they arouse the suspicion of being a mere cloak for ignorance if not an attempt to evade the responsibility of a thorough-going analysis. For since the analytical work must inevitably lead sooner or late to a fundamental discussion between “I” and “You” and “You” and “I” on a plane stripped of all human pretences, it is very likely, indeed it is almost certain, that no only the patient but the doctor as well will find the situation “getting under his skin.” Nobody can meddle with fire or poison without being affected in some vulnerable spot; for the true physician does not stand outside one’s work but is always in the thick of it. Christ can indeed be imitated even to the point of stigmatization without the imitator coming anywhere near the ideal of its meaning. For it is not a question of an imitation that leaves a person unchanged and makes ne int a mere artifact, but of realizing the ideal on one’s own account—Deo concedente—in one’s own individual life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
We must not forget, however, that even a mistake imitation may sometimes involve a tremendous moral effort which has all the merits of a total surrender to some supreme value, even though the real goal may never be reached and the value is represented externally. It is conceivable that by virtue of this total effort a human may even catch a fleeting glimpse of one’s wholeness, accompanied by the feeling of grace that always characterizes this experience. I for my part prefer the precious gift of doubt, for the reason that it does not violate the virginity of things beyond our ken. The Kingdom of God—Christians are taught that it is within you. However, Christ the ideal took upon himself the sins of the World. Therefore, if the ideal is wholly outside, then the sins of the individual are also outside, and consequently one is more fragmented than ever, since superficial misunderstanding conveniently enables one, quite literally, to “cast one’s sins upon Christ” and thus to evade one’s deepest responsibilities—which are contrary to the spirit of Christianity. Such formalism and laxity were not only one of the prime causes of the Reformation, they are also present within the body of Protestantism. If the supreme value (Christ) and the supreme negation (sin) are outside, then the soul is void: its highest and lowest are missing. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
People in the New World, whose soul is evidently of little worth, speak and think. If much were in one’s soul, one would speak of it with reverence. However, since one does not do so we can only conclude that there is nothing of value in it. Not that this is necessarily so always and everywhere, but only with people who put noting into their souls and have all God outside. An exclusive religious projection may rob the soul of its values so that through sheer inanition it becomes incapable of further development and gets stuck in an unconscious state. At the same time it falls victim to the delusion that the cause of all misfortune lies outside, and people no longer stop to ask themselves how far it is their own doing. So insignificant does the soul seem that it is regarded as hardly capable of evil, much less of good. However, if the soul no longer has any part to play, religious life congeals into externals and formalities. However we may picture the relationship between God and the soul, one thing is certain: that the souls cannot be nothing but. (Nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort.) On the contrary it has the dignity of an entity endowed with consciousness of a relationship to Deity. One’s first step is to detect the presence of the higher Power consciously in oneself through vigilantly noting and cultivating the intuitions it gives one. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
One must educate oneself to recognize the first faint beginners of the intuitive mood and train oneself to drop everything else when its onset is noticed. Intuitive feelings are so easily and hence so often drowned in the outer activity of the body, the passions, the emotions, or the intellect, that only a deliberate cultivation can safeguard and strengthen them. We may ardently want to do what is wholly right and yet not know just what this is. This is particularly possible and likely when confronted with two rads and when upon the choice between them the gravest consequences will follow. It is then that the mind easily becomes hesitant and indecisive. The search for the wisest choice may not end that day or that month. Indeed, it may not end until the last hour of the last day. This is how the aspirants are tested to see if they can humble the ego with the realization that they are no longer capable of making their own decision but must turn it over to the higher self and wait in quiet patience for the result. However, when finally the intuitive guidance does emerge after such deep, sincere, and obedient quest of God’s will, it will do so in a formulation so clear and self-evidence as to be beyond all doubt. One has to bring one’s problems and lay them at the feet of the higher self and wait in patience until an intuitive response does come. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
However, this is not to say that one has to lay them before one’s timid fears or eager wishes. The first step is to take them out of the hold of the anxious fretting intellect or the blind egoistic emotional self. Even if it were only the relationship of a drop of water to the sea, that sea would not exist but for the multitude of drops. The immortality of the soul insisted upon by strict and rigid doctrines exalts it above the transitoriness of mortal humans and cases it to partake of some supernatural quality. It thus infinitely surpasses the perishable, conscious individual in significance, so that logically the Christian is forbidden to regard the soul as “nothing but.” The strict and rigid doctrine that humans are formed in the likeness of God weigh heavily in the scales in any assessment of humans—not to mention the Incarnation. As the eye to the sun, so the soul corresponds to God. Since our conscious mind does not comprehend the soul it is ridiculous to speak of the things of the soul in a patronizing depreciatory manner. Even the believing Christian does not know God’s hidden ways and must leave one to decide whether one will work on humans from outside or from within, through the soul. So the believer should not boggle at the fact that there are somnia a Deo missa (dreams sent by God) and illuminations of the soul which cannot be traced back to any external causes. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
It would be blasphemy to asset that God can manifest oneself everywhere save only in the human soul. Indeed the very intimacy of the relationship between God and the soul precludes from the start any devaluation of the latter. The fact that the devil too can take possession of the soul does not diminish its significance in the least. It would be going perhaps too far to speak of an affinity; but at all events the soul must contain in itself the faculty of relationship to God, id est, a correspondence, otherwise a connection could never come about. It is therefore psychologically quite unthinkable for God to be simply the “wholly other,” for a “wholly other” could never be one of the soul’s deepest and closet intimacies—which is precisely what God is. The only statements that have psychological validity concerning the God-image are either paradoxes or antinomies. This correspondence is, in psychological terms, the archetype of the God-image. It may easily happen, therefore, that a Christian who believes in all the sacred figures is still undeveloped and unchanged in one’s inmost soul because one has all God outside and does not experience God in the soul. The great events of our World as planned and executed by humans do not breathe the spirit of Christianity but rather of unadorned paganism. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
These Worldly events originate in a psychic condition that has remained archaic and has not been even remotely touched by Christianity. The human soul is out of key with one’s beliefs; in one’s soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. One of the first steps is to watch out for those infrequent moments when deeply intuitive guidance, thoughts, or reflections make their unexpected appearance. As soon as hey are detected, all other mental activities should be thrown aside, all physical ones should be temporarily stilled, and one should sink oneself in them with the utmost concentration. Even if one falls into a kind of daze as a result, it will be a happy and fortunate event, possibly a glimpse. The secret is to stop, on the instant, whatever one is going just then, or even whatever one is saying, and reorient all one’s attention to the incoming intuition. The incompleted act, the broken sentence, should be deserted, for this is an exercise in evaluation. The whole of this quest is really a struggled toward a conception of life reflecting the surpreme values. Hence throughout its course the aspirant will feel vague intuitions which one cannot formulate. Only a master can do that. It is better to wait, if intuition is not at once apparent, till all favourable facts are found and till full knowledge is gained of the unfavourable ones before deciding an issue. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
The intuition grows by use of it and obedience to it. The intuitive faculty can be deliberately cultivated and consciously trained. Christian education has done all that is humanly possible, but it has not been enough. Too few people have experienced the divine image as the innermost possession of their own souls. Christ only meets them from without, never rom within the soul; that is why dark paganism still reigns there, a pasanism which, not in a form so blatant that it can no longer be denied and now in all too threadbare disguise, is swamping the World of the so-called Christian civilization. Thinking carefully, attempting clarity, I ask God for inspiration. If our lips were adorned was the spacious firmament, were our eyes radiant as the sun and the moon, our hands spread forth to Heaven like the wings of the eagles, and our feet swift as hinds, we would still be unable to thank and bless Thy name sufficiently, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, for even one measures of the thousands upon thousands of kindnesses which Thou hast bestowed upon our fathers and upon us. Thy tender mercies have helped us, Thy loving kindnesses have not failed us, and Thou wilt not ever forsake us, O Lord our God. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Therefore, the limbs which Thou hast fashioned for us, and the soul which Thou hast breathed into us, and the tongue which Thou has set in our mouth, lo, they shall thank, bless, exalt and revere Thee. They shall proclaim Thy sovereignty, O our King. The Godhead is a great Void and has no direct connection with the cosmos. When the hour ripens for the latter to appear, there first emanates from the Godhead a mediator which is the active creative agent. This is the World-Mind. From the Void emerges the Central Point. The Point spreads the All. So the World-Mind and the Grans Universe appear in existence together. No thing is exactly like any other nor is any individual history the same as any other. No entity or circumstance is perpetuated: each passes away and the entity reappears later in another form. If the divine activity ceases in one Universe it continues at the same time in another. If our World-Mind returns to its source in the end, there are other World-Minds and other Worlds which continue. Creation is a thing without beginning and without end, but there are interludes and periods of rest just as there are in the individual’s own life in and outside the body. Logos in Greek means not only the word through which mind communicates or expresses itself but also the thought behind the word. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
So the Biblical phrase “In the beginning was the Logos” means that first of all there was the MIND, here divine mind. Humans need and speak numerous words to express themselves, but God needed and uttered only the one creative silent Word to bring this infinitely varied cosmos into being. However far we trace back the line of cause and effects it must come to an end in the lone cause, the great mystery which is the unseen power. The sign for infinite is a circle. The sign for unity is a vertical dash. Hence 9, the figure nine, combines both and the figure six also, but reversed. Unity is the creative beginning of all things and infinite is that wherein they dissolve. The World-Mind is the conscious Power sustaining all life, the intelligent energy sustaining all atoms, the divine being behind and within the Universe. Just as the echo can have no reality, no existence even, without the sound which originally produced it, so this entire Universe can have none without the Infinite Power from which originate and on which it is still dependent. Call it God or Allah, the Creator or Tao, it is the First, the Source, the Origin from which all energies and things come into being. The World-Mind is the creative principle of the Universe. The World-Mind eternally thinks this Universe into being in a pulsating rhythm of thought and rest. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
The process is as eternal as the World-Mind itself. The energies which accompany this thinking are electrical. The scientists note and tap the energies, and ignore the Idea and the Mind they are expressing. There is a double alternating movement within Mind: the first spreading out from itself towards multiplicity, the second withdrawing inwards to its own primal unity. Hidden behind the so-called material Universe is the Power which emanated it, which it present in all atoms. Hidden behind the Power is the eternal Mind. There is no power in the material Universe itself. All its forces and energies drive from a single source—the World-Mind—whose thinking is expressed by that Universe. Intuitive guidance comes not necessarily when we seek it, but when the occasion calls for it. It does not usually come until it is actually needed. The intellect, as part of the ego, will often seek it in advance of the occasion because it may be driven by anxiety, fear, desire, or anticipation. Such premature seeking is fruitless. “Then the angel I has seen standing on the sea and on the land raised his right hand to Heaven. And he swore by him who lives forever and ever, who created the Heavens and all that is in them, the Earth and all this is in it, and the sea and all that is in it, and said, ‘There will be no more delay! But in the days when the seventh angel is about to sound his trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished, just as he announced to his servants the prophets,’” reports Revelation 10.5-7. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
It may seem that our intents have been to weave a clock of vindication and protection covering our Lady’s eccentricities, so many to this day still unexplainable. In truth, volumes could be written extolling her many virtues and justifying construction of this usually beautiful and mysterious estate. Still the question remains—Why? Why? The enigma of the Winchester Estate that tragedy and a rifle built is perhaps unanswerable. The present generation must weigh and drawn its own conclusions about this Valley’s most interest, most controversial, most unappreciated and surely our most mysterious Frist Lady! Prior to all the gossip and rumors, Mrs. Winchester was social and happy. Living today are descents of people who still tell of parties in those incomparable gardens lush with acres of blooming flowerbed, boarded with rare dwarf boxwood and shaded by imported ornamental trees and shrubs. At one time, the Winchester Mansion was the center of high society.
The Winchester Estate is Open Today! We are happy to offer an opportunity to enjoy the Victorian Gardens on this beautiful day with a zero-contact, self guided tour complimented by informative visuals and educational sound clips. The strongest precautions are being taken to ensure the safety and health of our guests and employees, in accordance with city, county and state guidelines and protocols. winchestermysteryhouse.com
Still Let Me Dive into the Joy I Seek—For Yet the Past Doth Prison Me!
Any time friends have to be careful of what they say to friends, friendship is taken on another dimension. While the intellect argues waveringly at length, the intuition affirms confidently in an instant. While the one gropes among the appearances and shadows of truth, the other walks straight toward the truth. Ordinarily, ample time is needed to accumulate data and deliberate properly before the correction decisions or judgments can be made. None of this is necessary to make them intuitively, for the intuition itself operates out of time and beyond thought. An intuitive idea is quite different from one derived from the customary process of logical thinking. Unless it is distorted or muddled by the individual oneself, it is always reliable. Can we say that of an intellectual idea? The best wisdom of a human does not come out of acuteness of thinking; it comes out of depth of intuition. It suits our hypertrophied and hybristic modern consciousness not to be mindful of the dangerous autonomy of the unconscious and to treat it negatively as an absence of consciousness. The hypothesis of invisible gods or daemons would be, psychologically, a far more appropriate formulation, even though it would be an anthropomorphic projection. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
However, since the development of consciousness requires the withdrawal of all the projections we can lay our hands on, it is not possible to maintain any non-psychological doctrine about the gods. If the historical process of World despiritualization continues as hitherto, then everything of a divine or daemonic character outside us must return to the psyche, to the inside of the unknown human, whence it apparently originated. The materialistic error was probably unavoidable at first. Since the throne of God could not be discovered among the galactic systems, the inference was that God had never existed. The second unavoidable error is psychologism: if God is anything, he must be an illusion derived from certain motives—from will to power, for instance or from repressed pleasures of the flesh. These arguments are not new. Much the same thing was said by the Christian missionaries who overthrew the idols of heathen gods. However, whereas the early missionaries were conscious of serving a new God by combating the old ones, modern iconoclasts are unconscious of the one in whose name they are destroying old values. Nietzsche thought himself quite conscious and responsible when he smashed the old tablets, yet he felt a peculiar need to back himself up with a revivified Zarathustra, a sort of alter ego, with whom he often identifies himself in his great tragedy Thus Spake Zarathustra. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Nietzsche was no atheist, but his God was dead. The result of this demise was a split in himself, and he felt compelled to call the other self “Zarathustra” or at times, “Dionysus.” In his fatal illness he signed his letters “Zagreus,” the dismembered god of the Thracians. The tragedy of Zarathustra is that, because his God died, Nietzsche himself became a god; and this happened because he was no atheist. He was of too positive a nature to tolerate the urban neurosis of atheism. It seems dangerous for such a man to asset that “God is dead”: he instantly becomes the victim of inflation. Far from being a negation, God is actually the strongest and most effective “position” the psyche can reach, in exactly the same sense in which Paul speaks of people “whose God is their belly,” (Phil. 3.19). The strongest and therefore the decisive factor in any individual psyche compels the same belief or fear, submission or devotion which a God would demand from humans. Anything despotic and inescapable is in this sense “God,” and it becomes absolute unless, by an ethical decision freely chosen, one succeeds in building up against this natural phenomenon a position that is equally strong and invincible. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
If this psychic position proves to be absolutely effective, it surely deserves to be named a “God,” and what is more, a spiritual God, since it sprang from the freedom of ethical decision and therefore from the mind. Humans are free to decide whether “God” shall be a “spirit” or a natural phenomenon like the craving of candy from a person with a sweet tooth, and hence whether “God” shall act as a beneficent or a destructive force. However, indubitable and clearly understandable these psychic events or decisions may be, they are very apt to lead people to the false, unpsychological conclusion that it rests with them to decide whether they will create a “God” for themselves or not. There is no question of that, since each of us is equipped with a psychic disposition that limits our freedom in high degree and makes it practically illusory. Not only is “freedom of the will” an incalculable problem philosophically, it is also a misnomer in the practical sense, for we seldom find anybody who is not influenced and indeed dominated by desires, habits, impulses, prejudices, resentments, and by every conceivable kind of complex. All these natural facts function exactly like an Olympus full of deities who want to be propitiated, served, feared, and worshipped, not the individual owner of this assorted pantheon, but by everybody in one’s vicinity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Bondage and possession are synonymous. Always, therefore, there is something in the psyche that takes possession and limits or suppresses our moral freedom. In order to hide this undeniable but exceedingly unpleasant fact from ourselves and at the same time pay lip-service to freedom, we have got accustomed to saying aporetically, “I have such and such a desire or habit or feeling of resentment,” instead of the more veracious “Such and such a desire or habit or feeling of resentment has me.” The later formulation would certainly rob us even of the illusions of freedom. However, I ask myself whether this would not be better in the end than fuddling ourselves with words. The truth is that we do not enjoy masterless freedom; we are continually threatened by psychic factors which, in the guise of “natural phenomena,” may take possession of us at any moment. The withdrawal of metaphysical projections leaves us almost defenceless in the face of this happening, for we immediately identify with every impulse instead of giving it the name of the “other,” which would at least hold it at arm’s length and prevent it from storming the citadel of the ego. “Principalities and powers” are always with us; even if we would, we have no need to create them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
It is merely incumbent on us to choose the master we wish to serve, so that one’s service shall be our safeguard against being mastered by the “other” whom we have not chosen. We do not create “God,” we choose him. Though our choice characterizes and defines “God,” it is always human-made, and the definition it gives is therefore finite and imperfect. (Even the idea of perfection does not posit perfection.) The definition is an image, but this image does not raise the unknown fact it designates into the realm of intelligibility, otherwise we would be entitled to say that we had created a God. The “master” we choose is not identical with the image we project of him in time and space. He goes on working as before, like an unknow quantity in the depth of the psyche. We do not even know the nature of the simplest thought, let alone the ultimate principles of the psyche. Also, we have no control over its inner life. However, because this inner life is intrinsically free and not subject to our will and intentions, it may easily happen that the living thing chosen and defined by us will drop out of its setting, the human-made image, even against our will. Then, perhaps, we could say with Nietzsche, “God is dead.” Yet it would be truer to say, “He has put off our image, and where shall we find him again?” #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The interregnum is full of danger, for the natural facts will raise their claim in the form of various—isms, which are productive of nothing but anarchy and destruction because inflation and human’s hybris between them have elected to make the ego, in all its ridiculous paltriness, lord of the Universe. That was the cast the case with Nietzsche, the uncomprehended portent of a whole epoch. The individual ego is much too small, its brain is much too feeble, to incorporate all the projections withdrawn from the World. Ego and brain burst asunder in the effort; the psychiatrist calls it schizophrenia. When Nietzsche said “God is dead,” he uttered a truth which is valid for the greater part of the World and it is characteristic of their behaviour. They choose to serve idols such as the fake news, pleasures of the flesh, and other such objects. People are influenced by that statement it not because he said so, but because they want it to be a widespread psychological fact to justify the dysfunction of humanity, and not take responsibility for their own maleficent actions. A way to just give up trying to life right. So the consequences are not long delayed, it created a catastrophe. The life of Christ is understood by the Church on the one hand as an historical, and on the other hand as an eternally existing, mystery. This is especially evident in the sacrifice of the Mass. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
From a psychological standpoint, the view of the reality of Christ can be translated as follows: Christ lived a concrete, personal, and unique life which, in all essential features, had at the same time an archetypal character. This character can be recognized from the numerous connections of the biographical details with Worldwide myth-motifs. These undeniable connections are the main reason why it is so difficult for researchers into the life of Jesus to construct from the gospel themselves factual reports, legends, and myths are woven into a whole. This is precisely what constitutes the meaning of the gospels, and if one tried to separate the individual from the archetypal with a critical scalpel, they would immediately lose their character of wholeness. The life of Christ is no exception in that not a few of the great figures of history have realized, more or less clearly, the archetype of the hero’s life with its characteristic changes of fortune. However, the ordinary human, too, unconsciously lives archetypal forms, and if these are no longer valued it is only because the prevailing psychological ignorance. Indeed, even the fleeting phenomena of dreams often reveal distinctly archetypal patterns. God who made the World still upholds it. He rules the entire Universe, this great Being, and regulates the Universal Laws of humans. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The World-Mind brings our Universe into being and governs it, too. The enormous number of objects and creatures which appear through Its agency, through Its power and wisdom, cannot be limited to what is visible alone, and must fill a thinking person with wonder at the possibilities—a wonder which Plato said must be the beginning of philosophy. The Infinite Intelligence knows and controls all things, all situations. “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shalt not fall on the ground without your Father,” (Matthew 10.29) puts simply that an infinite intelligence controls the entire Universe, and that it is as present in the smallest event as in the greatest. This is the Power that carries everything along, every entity, and which provides the Universe with its continuity. In the sense that the World-Mind is the active agent behind and within the Universe, it is carrying the whole burden of creation; it is the real doer carrying us and our actions too. There is a Mind which keeps that planets in their allotted orbit and the lives of humans in their largely self-earned destines. The World-Mind is God as universal intelligence and creative power. The World-Mind is Divine Ideation, the First Intelligence, the Universal Wisdom. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
We are frequently informed by religious and mystical sources that God is Love. It would be needful for those who accept this statement to balance and complete it by the affirmation that God is Pure Intelligence. Love is not the ultimate but only an attribute of the ultimate. The intelligence which works so untiringly in the World around us knows what to do without having to prepare a plan. It does not need to think in the way human beings think. Being infinite, its wisdom is infinite. The Intelligence which formulate the World-Idea is living and creative—in short, Divine. The so-called laws of nature merely show its workings. If the divine did not have real being, with all its attributes of consciousness, intelligence, power, and love, we ourselves would not exist. Those who cannot comprehend the infinite of intelligence behind the World around them can hardly be expected to comprehend that it has an independent existence as an attribute of pure Spirit. The World-Mind holds in one eternal thought the entire World-Idea. The World-Mind knows and experiences everything and everyone. It also knows the Supreme non-thing, the Real, while knowing the illusoriness of the cosmos. The World-Mind knows all because it is eternally in all. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
The mental activity of the World-Mind is not, and cannot be, an unconscious process. In the elemental, the mineral, and even the plant kingdom this may seem to us to be so; but if the first act of mentation which began the evolutionary process was not done unawares, then the entire project of the entire cosmos, at all the different stages of this process, also cannot be unknown, at any moment and in any point, to the World-Mind. In its own mysterious way, the World-Mind is all-embracing, aware of everything, every entity and every activity. The World-Mind is not only Lord and Governor of the World but also Lord and Governor of the illusion which makes the World so vivid to the unenlightened; that is, It is Itself the All-Knowing, the All-Seeing, Conscious of the Real. If that one Mind were behind all, only then could it be possible that One Mind could comprehend all. The World-Mind is common to all human minds and is the field of their interaction, and the notion that A and Be are independent and isolated minds are superficially correct but fundamentally fallacious. There is a common ground of mind, a hidden linkage, and the ideas of one can be transmitted to the other, albeit often unconsciously. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
No event could be outside the knowledge of God, no entity could be beyond the power of God. Were the World-Mind beyond, because outside, the finite Universe, then it would be limited by that Universe and thus lose its own infinitude. However, because it includes the Universe completely within itself while remaining completely unlimited, it is genuinely infinite. World-Mind is neither limited nor dissipated by its self-projection in the Universe. If World-Mind is immanent in the Universe, it is not confined to the Universe; if it is present in every particle of the All, its expression is not exhausted by the All. Inexplicable and incomprehensible though the fact must be to the human intellect, the One infinite Mind never loses its own character even though it is seemingly incarnated into the myriad forms of an evolving Universe, never loses itself in them. It is a wisdom expressed through the World-Idea, but not confined to it. Amid all this apparent self-division into innumerable selves, the World Mind remains as intact and inviolate as ever it was. When we think of holiness, great saints of the past like Francis of Assisi or George Muller spring to mind—or contemporary gains of the faith like Mother Teresa. However, holiness is not the private preserve of an elite corps of martyrs, mystics, and Nobel prize winners. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Holiness is the everyday business of every Christian. It evidences itself in the decisions we make and the things we do, hour by hour, day by day. You are going to be all right. God loves you. People love you. You are surrounded by a community who is praying for you. You are going to be all right. The good news of Jesus Christ is that such God’s love is available to all. Holiness is obeying God—loving one another as He loved us. God is the Judge, the lover of all, and Jesus is the Mediator of the new covenant. If a person is not ready to live by them, beliefs are not worth much. We must live by love, the law of kindness brought to light by the Gospel. What is this good for? To make all who receive it enjoy God and themselves: to make them like God; lovers of all; contented in they lives; and crying out at their death, in calm assurance, “O grave, where is they victory! Thanks be unto God, who gives me the victory, through my Lord Jesus Christ.” Holiness is obeying God—sharing His love, even when it is inconvenient. No talk here of the crushing burden of piety, as it has been called of religion as a life sentence instead of life. Our walk with Christ, well learned, is a burden only as wings are to a bird or the engines are to an airplane. The mature children of the light are like their Master. They know God and his Word, they think straight, and they live in the truth, because every essential dimension of the being has been transformed to serve God: heart, soul, mind, and strength. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Holiness is obeying God—finding ways to help those in need. “Look carefully then how you walk! Live purposefully and worthily and accurately, not as the unwise and witless, but as wise—sensible, intelligent people; making the very most of the time—buying up each opportunity—because the days are evil. Therefore do not be vague and thoughtless and foolish, but understanding and firmly grasping what the will of the Lord is,” reports Ephesians 5.15-17. Heroism is an extraordinary feat of the flesh; holiness is an ordinary act of the spirit. One may bring personal glory; the other always gives God the glory. The sure standard for holiness is Scripture. There God makes clear what He means by holy living or, as theologians call it, the process of sanctification. Then Ten Commandments, from which all other commandments flow, are the beginning; they apply today as much as they did when God engraved them on tablets of stone for Moses. Next, the life of Jesus provides holiness in the flesh; in His persevering self-denial, His unqualified obedience of the Father’s will, and the fullness of the Holy Spirit in His daily life, Jesus remains our example. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Then Paul gives explicit guidelines. Consider just this sampling of injunctions: Lay aside falsehood and speak the truth. DO not let the sun go down on your anger. Let one who steal, steal no longer but work. Let no unwholesome word come from your mouth. Be rid of bitterness and wrath and malice. Be kind to each other, forgiving. Walk in live. Be careful so you will not even be accused of immorality, greed, or any impurity Engage not in silly or coarse or filthy talk. Do not practice idolatry in any form nor associate with those who do. Abstain from immorality dealing with pleasures of the flesh and conquer lustful passions. Do not lead weaker humans to sin. Things we should practice: Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Things we should avoid: Immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, strife, outbursts of anger, drunkenness, jealousy. The faithful must become weary in doing good. A human reaps what one sows. The quest for holiness, then, should begin with a search of the Scriptures. Holiness consists in think as God thinks and willing as God wills. That thinking and willing is a process requiring discipline and perseverance and is a joint effort: God’s and ours. On the one hand, the Holy Spirit convicts of sin and sanctifies. However, that does not mean we can sit back, relax, and leave the driving to God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
God expects—demands—that we do our part. Our progress in holiness depends on God and ourselves—on God’s grace and on our will to be holy. Understanding this joint responsibility makes clear what is otherwise one of the most troublesome areas for many Christians, found in Paul’s letter to the church at Rome where on one hand he says we are dead to sin and in the next verse exhorts us not to let sin reign in our mortal bodies. Why should we turn away from sin that is already dead? The answer to this seeming contradiction underscores the joint responsibility for sanctification. We are dead to sin because Christ died to sin for us. He settled the ultimate victory. However, as we live day by day, sin still remains a constant reality. Though God gives us the will to be holy, the daily fight requires continuing effort on our part. Fighting off sin is like beating back continuing guerrilla attacks. Holy living demands constant examination of our actions and motives. However, in doing so we must guard against the tendency to focus totally on self which is easy to do—especially as the culture’s egocentric values invade the church. In fact, this self-indulgent character of our times is a major reason the topic of true holiness is so neglected today by Christian teachers, leaders, writers, and speakers. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
We have perhaps, unconsciously substituted a secularized self-centered message in the place of true holiness. For when we speak of “victory” in the Christian life, we all-too-often mean personal victory—how God will conquer sin for us (at least those sins we would like to be rid of—those extra ten pounds, that annoying habit, maybe a quick temper). This reflect not only egocentricity but an incorrect view of sin. Sin is not simply the wrong we do our neighbour when we cheat one, or the wrong we do ourselves when we abuse our bodies. Sin, all sin, is a root rebellion and offense against God, it is cosmic treason. We must understand that our goal as believers is to seek what we can do to please God, not what He can do for us. Personal victories may come, but they are a result, not the object. True Christian maturity—holiness, sanctification—is God-centered. So-called victorious Christian living is self-centered. It is time for us Christians to face up to our responsibility for holiness. Too often we say we are defeated by this or that sin. No, we are not defeated; we are simply disobedient. If we stopped using the terms “victory” and “defeat” to describe our progress in holiness, it might be well. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The Christian life begins with obedience, depends on obedience, and results in obedience. We cannot escape it. The orders from our commander-in-chief are plain: “Whoever has my commandments and obeys them, one is the one who loves me.” Loving God—really loving Him—means living out His commands no matter what the cost. God is real. Put your faith in the God of the Bible, not the God you made up in your head. Holiness is obeying God. Please listen to me, you who grant wisdom: The stories that have been told about you from the times when our race was young have taught me that you are the clearest of thinkers and the best at deciding the proper path. I find myself now with a choice to make and I do not know how to make it. Without a clear road before me, then, I turned you for help. Path-Maker, Way-Shower, God, what should I do? I ask that you please give me a sign to help me decide. Please some to me with clear counsel; please come to me with advice. Please come to me, whether in a dream, or in the chance remark of a stranger, or in my own deliberations. May my decision reflect your calm wisdom, and my life become thereby a pleasure for you to see. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
You alone are the Lord. God, you have made Heaven the Heavens of Heavens with all their host, the Earth and all that it contains, the seas and all that is in them. God, you reserve them all; and the host of Heaven render homage unto Thee. You art the Lord God, who did choose Abram You did bring him forth out of Ur of the Chaldees, and gave him the name of Abraham, finding his heart faithful before Thee. God, you made the covenant with him to give his descendants the land of the Canaanite, the Hittie, the Amorite, and the Perizzite, and the Jebusite, and the Girgashite, and Thou has fulfilled Thy words; for Thou art righteous. And Thou did see the affliction of our fathers in Egypt, and did hear their cry by the Red Sea; and did perform signs and wonders upon Pharaoh, and on all his servants, and on all the people of his land, knowing that they dealt arrogantly against them. Thus did Thou make Thy name great to this day. Thou did divide the sea before them, so that they crossed the sea on dry land, whereas their pursuers did Thou cast into the depths like a stone into mighty waters. The Lord is highly exalted. The Lord is my strength and song, and He has become my salvation; He is y God, and I will glorify Him; my father’s God, and I will exalt Him. The Lord is triumphant in battle, the Lord is His name. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together!
Cresleigh Ranch offers spacious home designs with flexible floor plans and hundreds of designer options to personalize your home. Enjoy an unparalleled lifestyle of luxury and convenience, with incredible amenities, shopping, and dining. https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-3/
Residence Three at Brighton Station boasts 2,757 square feet in this expansive two story home. There are four bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms, and a three car garage! Welcome to a community where each heart is whispering, “Home, Home at last.” #CresleighHomes
Arrogant Wrongdoing is the Deepest Possible Wound People Can Inflict on their Soul!
Life experiences become acting experiences, which in turn become life experiences. If there is anything to learn from the history of movies, it is that corruption leads to further corruption, not to innocence. We are told that in certain happy regions of the Earth, where nature provides in abundance everything that humans require, there are races whose life is passed in tranquility, and who know neither coercion nor aggression. I can scarcely believe it and I should be glad to hear more of these fortunate beings. The Manus are an illustration for a system which is clearly distinguished from system A, which is Life-Affirmative Societies. Where as in system A, which are Life-Affirmative Societies, the main emphasis of ideals, customs and institutions is that they serve the preservation and growth of life in all its forms. There is a minimum of hostility, violence, or cruelty among people, no harsh punishment, hardly any crime, and the institution of war is absent or plays an exceedingly small role. Children are treated with kindness, there is no severe corporal punishment; women are in general considered equal to men, or at least not exploited or humiliated; there is a generally permissive and affirmative attitude toward pleasures of the flesh. There is little envy, covetousness, greed and exploitativeness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
In system A there is also little competition and individualism and a great deal of cooperation; personal property is only in things that are used. There is a general attitude of trust and confidence, not only in others but particularly in nature; a general prevalence of good humour, and a relative absence of depressive moods. In it are societies with relatively abundant food supply and others characterized by a good deal of scarcity. However, in system B, which are Nondestructive-Aggressive Societies, this system shared with the first the basic element of not being destructive, but differs in that aggressiveness and war, although not central, are normal occurrences, and in that competition, hierarchy, and individualism are present. These societies are by no means permeated by destructiveness or cruelty of by exaggerated suspiciousness, but they do not have the kind of gentleness and trust which is characteristic of the system A societies. System B could perhaps be best characterized by stating that it is imbued with a spirit of male aggressiveness, individualism, the desire to get things and to accomplish tasks. On the other hand, the system of the Manus is very different from system which. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
System C, which characterizes Destructive Societies, is very distinct structure. It is marked by much interpersonal violence, destructiveness, aggression, and cruelty both within the tribe and against others, a pleasure in war, maliciousness, and treachery. The whole atmosphere of life is one of hostility, tension, and fear. Usually there is a great deal of competition, great emphasis on private property (if not in material things then in symbols), strict hierarchies, and a considerable amount of war-making. The main contrast lies between systems A and B on the one hand, which are both life affirming, and system C, which is basically cruel or destructive, id est, sadistic or necrophilous. The Manus are sea-dwelling, fish people living in villages built in the lagoons along the south coast of the Great Admiralty Islands in a system A structure. They trade their surplus catch with nearby agricultural land dwellers and obtain from them manufactured articles from more distant sections of the Archipelago. All their energy is completely dedicated to material success, and they drive themselves so hard that many men die in their early middle age. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
In fact, it is rare for a man to live to see his first grandchild. This obsession for relentless work is upheld not only because of the fact that success is the main value, but because of the shame related to failure. Not to be able to pay back one’s debts is a matter which leads to humiliation of the afflicted individual; not to have any economic success which promotes a certain amount of capital accumulation puts one in the category of a man without any social prestige. However, whatever social prestige a man has won by hard work is lost when he is no longer economically active. The main emphasis in the training of the young is laid upon the respect for property, shame, and physical efficiency. Individualism is enhanced by the fact that relatives compete with each other for the child’s allegiance, and the child learns to consider itself valuable. Their marriage code is a strict one, resembling nineteenth-century middle-class morality. The main vices are intimate partner offenses, scandalmongering, obscenity failure to pay debts, failure to help relatives, and failure to keep one’s house in repair. The training for hard work and competition seems to be contradicted by one phase in the life of young men before their marriage. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
The young unmarried men form a kind of community, living in a common clubhouse, sharing a common mistress (usually a war prisoner) and their tobacco and betel nut. They lie in a rather marry, roistering life on the borders of society. Perhaps this interval is necessary to produce a modicum of pleasure and contentment during one period of a male’s life. However, this idyllic life is interrupted for a good by the act of marriage. In order to marry, the young man has to borrow money, and for the first few years of his marriage there is only one goal for him, to repay the debt incurred to his financial backer. He must not even enjoy his wife too much as long as he owes part of her to his sponsor. Energy is so completely devoted to the overriding aim of success that personal motives of affection, loyalty, preference, dislike, and hatred are all barred. It is of crucial importance for the understanding of this system that while there is little love and affection, there is also little destructiveness or cruelty. Even within the fierce competition which dominates the whole picture, the interest is not to humiliate others but only to maintain one’s own position. Cruelty is relatively absent. In fact, those who do not succeed at all, who are failures, are left alone, not made the butt of aggression. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
In the system C, while they have no chiefs, they are a well-organized group arranged in concentric circles, within each of which specified traditional forms of hostility are allowed. Aside from a matrilineal grouping, the susu (“mother’s milk”), where one finds a certain amount of cooperation and trust, the Dobuans’ interpersonal relations, inhabitants of the Dobu Islands, have the principle of distrusting everybody as a possible enemy. Even marries does not lessen the hostility between the two families. A certain degree of peace is established by the fact that the couple live during alternate years in the village of the husband and in the village of the wife. The relationship between husband and wife is full of suspiciousness and hostility. Faithfulness is not expected, and n Dobuan will admit that a man and woman are every together even for the shortest period expect for purposes of pleasures of the flesh. Two features are the main characteristics of this system; the importance of private ownership and of malignant sorcery. The exclusiveness of ownership among them is characterized by its fierceness and ruthlessness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Ownership of a garden and its privacy is respected to such a degree that by custom, man and wife have intercourse within it. Nobody must know the amount of property anyone has. It is as secret as if it had been stolen. The same sense of ownership exists with regard to the ownership of incantations and charms. The Dobus have “disease-charms” which produce and cure illnesses and each illness has a special charm. Illness is explained exclusively as a result of malevolent use of a charm. Illness is explained exclusively as a result of malevolent use of a charm. Some individuals own a charm which completely controls the production and cure of a certain illness. This disease-and-cure monopoly for one illness naturally gives them considerable power. Their whole life is governed by magic since no result in any field is possible without it, and magical formulae quite aside from those connected with illness are among the most important items of private property. All existence is cutthroat competition and every advantage is gained at the expense f the defeated rival. However, competition is not as in other systems, open and frank, but secret and treacherous. The ideal of a good and successful man is one who has cheated another of his place. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The most admired virtue and the greatest achievement is “wabuwabu,” a system of sharp practices which stresses one’s own gains at the expense of another’s loss. The art is to reap personal advantage in a situation in which others are victims. (This is a system quite different from that of the market which, in principle at least, is based on a fair exchange by which both sides are supposed to profit.) Even more characteristic of the spirit in this system is their treachery. In ordinary relations the Dobuan is suave and unctuously polite. As one man puts if: “If we wish to kill a man we approach him, we eat, drink, sleep, work and rest with him it may be for several moons. We bide our time. We call him a friend.” As a result, in the not infrequent case of murder, suspicion falls on those who have tried to be friends with the victim. There is also an obsessional emphasis on pleasures of the flesh by otherwise joyless people can be observed in present-day Western society among the “swingers” who practice group sex and are extremely bored, unhappy, and conventional people clinging to sexual satisfaction as the only relief from continuous boredom and loneliness. The Dobu fosters and lives out without repression of man’s worst nightmares of the ill-will of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
It may not be too different from those sectors of the consumer society, including also many members of the younger generation, from whom sexual consumption has been freed from restrictions, and for whom sex (like drugs) is the only relief in an otherwise bored and depressed mental state. According to their view of life, virtue consists in selecting a victim upon whom one can vent the malignancy one attributes alike to human society and to the powers of nature. All existence appears to one as a cut-throat struggle in which deadly antagonists are pitted against one another in a contest for each one of the goods of life. Suspicious and cruelty are one’s trusted weapons in the strife and one gives no mercy, as one asks none. However, the fact that destructiveness and cruelty are not part of human nature does not imply that they are not widespread and intense. This fact does not have to be proven, not only can it be seen in modern life, but also in primitive society. Unfortunately, we ourselves have been and still are witnesses of such extraordinary acts of destruction and cruelty that we need not even look at the historical record. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Humans, during most of their history, have lived in a zoo and not “in the wild”—id est, under the condition of liberty conducive to human growth and well-being. Human’s often act cruelly and destructively even in situations that do not include crowding. Destructiveness and cruelty can cause one to feel intense satisfaction; masses of humans can suddenly be seized by lust for blood. Individuals and groups may have a character structure that makes them eagerly wait for—or create—situations that permit the expression of destructiveness. Animals, and even hunters, on the other hand, do not enjoy inflicting pain and suffering on other animals or their prey, nor do they kill “for nothing.” Sometimes an animal seems to exhibit sadistic behaviour—for instance, a cat playing with a rodent; but it is an anthropomorphic interpretation to assume that the cat enjoys the suffering of the rodent; any fast-moving object can serve as a plaything, whether it is a rodent or a ball of wool. The wish to destroy for the sake of destruction is different. Only some types of humans take pleasure in destroying life without any reason or purpose other than that of destroying. To put in more generally, only humans appear to be destructive beyond the aim of defense or of attaining what one needs. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Human’s destructiveness and cruelty cannot be explained in terms of animal heredity or in terms of a destructive instinct, but must be understood on the basis of those factors by which humans differ from their animal ancestors. The problem is to examine in what manner and to what degree the specific conditions of human existence are responsible for the quality and intensity of human’s lust for killing and torturing. There is no doubt about the presence of aggressiveness and destructive tendencies in the human psyche which are of the nature of biological drives. However, the most pernicious phenomena of aggression, transcending self-preservation and self-destruction, are based upon a characteristic feature of humans above the biological level, namely one’s capability of creating symbolic Universe in thought, language and behaviour. Biologically, nonadaptive, malignant aggression, id est, destructiveness and cruelty, is not a defense against a threat; it is not phylogenetically programmed; it is characteristic only of humans; it is biologically harmful because it is socially disruptive; its main manifestations—killing and cruelty—are pleasureful without needing any other purposes; it is harmful not only to the person who is attacked but also to the attacker. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Malignant aggression, though not an instinct, is a human potential rooted in the very conditions of human existence. Malignant parts of human’s aggression is not innate, and hence not ineradicable, but it admits that malignant aggression is a human potential and more than a learned pattern of behaviour that readily disappears when new patterns are introduced. A number of experiments have shown that male hormones tend to generate aggressive behaviour. For an answer to the question why this should be so, we must consider that one of the most basic differences between male and female is the difference in function during the act of pleasures of the flesh. The anatomic and physiological conditions of male pleasures of the flesh functioning require that the male be capable of piercing the hymen of the virgin, that he should not be deterred by the fear, hesitation, or even resistance she might manifest; in animals, the female in position during the act of mounting. Since the male capacity to function in pleasures of the flesh is a basic requirement for the survival of the species, one might expect that nature has endowed the male with some special aggressive potential. The expectation appears to be borne out by a number of data. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Of course, some aggression is needed in life. Mostly self-assertive aggression. A general lack in aggressiveness in this sense will be a hesitant and poor officer; an attacking soldier who lacks it will easily retreat. However, one must differentiate between aggression with the aim to damage and the self-assertive aggression that only facilitates the pursuit of a goal, whether it is to damage or to create. The connection between self-assertion, aggression, male hormones, and—possibly—Y chromosomes suggests the possibility that men may be equipped with more self-assertive aggression than women and may make them better general, surgeons, or hunters, while women may be more protective and caring and make better physicians and teachers. Yet, many men lack self-assertive aggressiveness, and many women perform excellently those tasks that require it. Obviously, there is not a simple relationship between maleness and the self-assertive aggressiveness, but a highly complex one about whose details we know almost nothing. This is no surprise to the geneticist who knows that a genetic disposition can be translated into a certain type of behaviour, but can be understood only in terms of its interconnection with other genetic dispositions and with the total life situation into which a person is born and has to live. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The person with unimpeded self-assertive aggression feels less easily threatened and, hence, is less readily in a position of having to react with aggression. The sadistic person is sadistic because one is suffering from an impotence of the heart, from the incapacity to move the other, to make one respond, to make oneself a loved person. One compensates for that impotence with the passion to have power over others. Since self-assertive aggression enhances the person’s capacity for achieving one’s aims, its possession greatly diminishes the need for sadistic control. The shy our inhibited person, as well as the one with compulsive obsessional tendencies, suffers from an impediment of this type of aggression. The therapeutic task is, first, to help the person to become aware of this impediment, then, to understand how it developed, and most importantly, to understand by what other factors in one’s character system and in one’s environment it is supported and supplied with energy. Perhaps the most important factor that leads to the weakening of self-assertive aggression is an authoritarian atmosphere in family and society, where self-assertion is equated with disobedience, attack, sin. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
For all irrational and exploitative forms of authority, self-assertion—the pursuit by another of one’s real goals—is the arch sin because it is a threat to the power of the authority; the person subject to it is indoctrinated to believe that the aims of the authority are also one’s, and that obedience offers the optimal chance for fulfilling oneself. The divine soul having somehow lost is consciousness is now seeking to become self-conscious again. It is supposed that the ego originates and ends on the same level—divinity—and therefore the question is often asked why it should go forth on such a long and unnecessary journey. This question is a misconceived one. It is not the ego itself which ever was consciously divine, but its source, God. The ego’s divine character lies in its essential but hidden being, but it has never known that. The purpose of gathering experience (the evolutionary process) is precisely to bring it to such awareness. The ego comes to slow birth in finite consciousness out of utter unconsciousness and, later, to recognition and union with its infinite source. That source, whence it has emanated, remains untouched, unaffected, ever knowing and serenely witnessing. The purpose in this evolution is the ego’s own advancement. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
When the Quest is reached, God revels its presence fitfully and brokenly at first but later the hide-and-seek game ends in loving union. On the other hand, sin or disobedience to what we know to be right distances us from God and forces us to live on our own. That means it makes soul rest impossible and is very destructive to the soul. “He who is partner with a thief hates one’s own soul,” Psalm 29.24. Those are surely right who have recognized in pride the root of all disobedience. We think we are “big enough” to take our life into our own hands and disobey, instead of “humbling ourselves under the mighty hand of God.” If we do not take things into our own hands, we will not get what we want—another blow to our pride, and this will certainly be driven by the thought. Our attitude should be, to the contrary, that there is no particular reason why I should get what I want, because I am not in charge of the Universe. The understanding of all this no doubt lies back of the warning already from Saint Peter: “abstain from fleshly lusts, which wage war against the soul,” reports 1 Peter 2.11. How do fleshy lusts war against the soul? Very simply, by enticing us to uproot our dependent life, pulling it away from God, which will deprive our soul of what it needs to function correctly in the enlivening and regulation of our whole being. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
To allow lust (or strong desire) to govern our life is to exalt our will over God’s That is why Saint Paul calls covetousness “idolatry” (Ephesians 5.5; Colossians 3.5). We are the idol, in that case, prepared to sacrifice the well-being and possessions of others to ourself. One also speaks of those whose God is their belly—that is, their desire center (Romans 16.18; Philippians 3.19). James also assigns the origin of sin to our strong desires or lusts (1.14), and now, perhaps, we see clearly how that works. So sin, through desire and pride, alienates the life in us (the soul) from the life that is in God and leaves us in the turmoil of a soul struggling with life on its own. Those who go so far as to abandon themselves to evil—consciously choosing evil as their goal (the “wicked” of Proverbs 21.10)—will be totally abandoned by God. Arrogant wrongdoing is the deepest possible wound people can inflict on their soul. Efforts at spiritual formation in Christlikeness obviously must reverse this process of distancing the soul from God and bring it back to union with Him. What can help us to do that? The Law of God. At this time of great change, I tell you the hard truth: you are the one who must undergo this task. I cannot do it for you, nor can any others do it for you. You magic lies within. You know what to do. Look deeply and you will see. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
A hard time lies before you, but you go under the protection of the Holy Ones and you go guarded by love. God of clear sight, God of the fierce change, please help your children in what they must do. Be beside them, be with them, be their unfailing assistant. Help them to do what they must. Let all the Earth revere the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the World stand in awe of Him. For God spoke, and the World came into being; He commanded, and it stood firm. The Lord brings the design of the heathens to naught; He makes their thoughts to be of no effect. The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the thoughts of His heart to all generations. Happy is the people whose God is the Lord; the people whom He hath chosen for His possession. The Lord looks down from Heaven; He beholds all the children of humans. From the place of His habitation, He gazes upon all the inhabitants of the Earth; He that fashions the hearts of them all, gives heed to all their doings. A king is not saved by the greatness of power; a mighty human is not delivered by sheer strength. A horse is a vain thing for safety; neither does it afford escape by its great strength. Behold, the eye of the Lord is upon them that revere Him, upon the that hope in His mercy, to deliver them from death, and to keep them alive in famine. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Our soul still waits for the Lord; He is our help and our shield. For in God does our heart rejoice, for we trust in His holy name. Let Thy loving kindness, O Lord, be upon us, for our hope is in Thee. Expressions of will are called divine wills, not as being signs that God wills anything; but because what in us is the usual expression of our will, is called the divine will in God. Thu punishment is not a sign that there is anger in God; but it is called anger in Him, from the fact that it is an expression of anger in ourselves. It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord, and to sing praises unto Thy name, O Most High; to declare Thy loving kindness each morning, and Thy faithfulness every night, with an instrument of ten strings and the lute, with sacred music upon the harp. For Thou, O Lord, hast made me rejoice in Thy work; I will glory in the works of Thy hands. How great are Thy deeds, O Lord! Thy thoughts are very deep. The ignorant human does not know, nor does the fool understand this—the wicked may spring up as the grass, and the workers of iniquity may flourish, only to be destroyed forever. However, Thou, O Lord, shalt be exalted forever. Thine enemies, O Lord, Thine enemies shall perish; all the workers of iniquity shall be scattered. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Cresleigh Homes
An open concept floor plan in this #BrightonStation Residence 2 home means you have a clear path from the kitchen to your outdoor fire pit — which also means that the s’mores are basically infinite.
Time to shake off the cobwebs of 2020 and embrace a shiny new year! Check out today’s blog post to learn a few handy tricks to ensure you accomplish all your home goals in 2021. https://cresleigh.com/blog/
Brighton Station residence 2 offers a magnificent open kitchen with a large island, plenty of counter space, and a spacious casual dining area; an expansive primary bedroom suite with a sumptuous primary bath with an enormous walk-in closet; a centrally located great room; a tucked-away office.
So Ended Saturn and the God of the Sea—The Heavens and the Earth were Manifest!
The more people have studied different methods of brining up children, the more they have come to the conclusions that what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all. My logic aims to teach and instruct the understanding, not that it may with the slender tendrils of the mind snatch at and lay hold of abstract notions (as the common logic does), but that it may in very truth dissect nature, and discover the virtues and actions of bodies, with their laws as determined in matter, so that one’s science flows not merely from the nature of the mind, but also from the nature of things. If humans are to enhance their powers of creativity, one has to try to control conditions of creative thought. Wonder is the child of rarity. Of course, nature and reliability of knowledge could not be divorced from the method of acquiring it. Acquisition can be managed only through the powers of the human being; hence, any improvement in knowledge must mean better control over human’s faculties of knowing. If humans were to uncover nature’s secrets, if one were to acquire new knowledge of the physical World, one must abandon old ways of search and inquiry and must devise new ways of querying nature directly. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
The will is the immediate and effective cause of voluntary behaviour. Appetite or desire is the immediate and effective cause of involuntary movement and action of the body. Appetite triggers physiological activity. Human desire reveals habits and patterns of conduct that have been learned under the guidance of the senses and affections. Will marks moments of deliberate choice. It is always associated with those forms of conduct that have both their origin and sanction in reason. An educated person in the days of Elizabeth and James never doubted that the origin of action—its efficient, not its final cause—is choice. The will governs, moderates, and overrules all of human’s behaviour. It is the imperium of conduct. It rules except when the passions engulf it. In its proper function, the will is responsive to two sources of influence: the “seeds” of God’s good in the Nature of humans to which the will is sensitive directly; and information supplied by the understanding. This faculty, playing the role of minister or councillor, supplies the will with right ends in keeping with right desires, and with right means conducible to the ends desired. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
The liberty, or choice of means is grounded on the Direction of the Judgment. So all the Acts in the Understanding, whereby they are proportioned to the Rules of right Reason. This I think evident—that we find ourselves a power to begin or forbear, continue or end several thoughts of our minds, and motions of our bodies, barely by the choice or preference of the mind. This power which the mind has to prefer the consideration of any idea, or the forbearing to consider it; or to prefer the motion of any part of the body to its rest is that which we call the Will. The actual preferring one to another that which we call volition or willing. The forbearance of that action, consequence to order or command of the mind, is called voluntary. And whatsoever action is performed without such a thought of the mind, is called involuntary. The will has power to control and direct thought. The will can demand, as it is, that the understanding supply all desires information prior to the act of choice. Confronted with a practical problem, the will can ask the understanding to think about, to reason, to judge the matter at hand, drawing upon the accumulated experience stored in memory. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
The power of will over mind will seem less strange to us when we reflect upon the implications of such modern expressions as “I am trying to remember,” “Try to think,” and “You can at least try to work out the problem.” The power of will over body movement is much more evident than the effect of will on mental activity. The idea of the beginning of motion we have from reflection of what passes in ourselves; where we find by experience, that, barely by willing it, barely by a thought of mind, we can move the parts of our bodies, which were before at rest. The detailed description of the life of primitive hunters and food gatherers has shown that humans—at least since they fully emerged fifty thousand years ago—was most likely not the brutal, destructive, cruel being and hence not the prototype of “man the killer” that we find in more-developed stages of their evolution. However, we cannot stop here. In order to understand the gradual development of humans the exploiter and the destroyer, it is necessary to deal with the development of humans during the period of early agriculture and, eventually, with their transformation into a builder of cities, a warrior, and a trader. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
From the emergence of humans, approximately half a million years ago to about 9000 B.C., humans did not change in one respect: humans lived from what they gathered or hunted, but did not produce anything new. Humans were completely dependent on nature and did not themselves influence or transform it. This relationship to nature changed radically with the invention of agriculture (and animal husbandry) which occurs roughly with the beginning of the Neolithic period, more precisely, the “Protoneolitihc” period as archeologist call it today—from 9000 to 7000 B.C.—in an area stretching over one thousand miles from western Iran to Greece, including parts of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Anatolian Plateau in Turkey. (It started later in Central and Northern Europe.) For the first time humans made themselves, within certain limits, independent of nature by using one’s inventiveness and skill to produce something beyond that which nature had thus far yielded to one. It was now possible to plant more seed, to till more land, and to breed more animals, as the population increased. Surplus food could be slowly accumulated to support craftsmen who devoted most of their time to the manufacture of tools, pottery, and clothing. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
The first great discovery made in this period was the cultivation of wheat and barley, which had been growing wild in this area. It was discovered that by putting seed of these grasses into the Earth, new plants would grow; that one could select the best seed for sowing, and eventually the accidental crossing of varieties was observed, which produced grains very much larger than the seeds of the wild grasses. The process of development from wild grasses to high-yielding modern wheat is not yet fully known. In involved gene mutations, hybridization, and chromosome doubling, and it has taken thousands of years to achieve the artificial selection by humans on the level of present-day agriculture. For humans in the industrial age, accustomed to looking down on nonindustrialized agriculture as a primitive and rather obvious form of production, the Neolithic discoveries may not seem comparable to the great technical discoveries of our day, of which they are so proud. Yet the fact that the expectation that seed would grow was proved correct by results gave rise to an entirely new concept: humans recognized that they could use this will and intention to make this happen, instead of things just “happening.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
It would not be exaggerated to say that the discovery of agriculture was the foundation for all scientific thinking and later technological development. After 5000 B.C. Catal Huyuk could afford luxuries such as obsidian mirrors, ceremonial daggers, and trinkets of metal beyond the reach of most of its known contemporaries. Cooper and lead were smelted and worked into beads, tubes and possibly small tools, thus taking the beginnings of metallurgy back int the seventh millennium. Its stone industry in local obsidian and imported flint is the most elegant of the period; its wooden vessels are varied and sophisticated, its woollen textile industry fully developed. Make-up sets for women and very attractive bracelets for men and women were found in the burial sites. They knew the art of smelting copper and lead. The use of a great variety of rocks and minerals shows that prospecting and trade formed a most important item of city’s economy. In spite of this developed civilization, the social structure seems to have lacked certain elements characteristic of much larger stages of evolution. Apparently there was little class distinction between rich and poor. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
Although the sizes of buildings, equipment, and burial gifts suggest social inequality, this is not a glaring observation. Furthermore, even more impressive evidence for the absence of violence, among the many hundred of skeletons unearthed, not a single one has been found that showed signs of violent death. The Earth’s and woman’s capacity to give birth—a capacity that men lack—quite naturally gave the mother a supreme place in the World of the early agriculturalist. (Only when men could create material things by intellect, id est, magically and technically—could they claim superiority.) The mother, as goddess (often identified with mother Earth), became the supreme goddess of the religious World, while the Earthly mother became the center of family and social life. The mother-goddess is often found to be accompanied by a leopard, clothed with a leopard skin, or symbolically represented by leopards, at the time the most ferocious and deadly animal of the region (or tiger). This would make her the mistress of wild animals, and it also indicated her double role as the goddess of life and death, like so many other goddesses. “Mother Earth,” who gives birth to her children and receives them again after their individual life cycle has ended is not necessarily a destroying mother. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
The relationship which stands at the origin of all culture, of every virtue, of every nobler aspect of existence, is that between mother and child; it operates in a World of violence as the divine principle of love, of union, of peace. Raising her young, the woman learns earlier than the man to extend her loving care beyond the limits of the ego to another creature, and to direct whatever gift of invention she possesses to the preservation and improvement of the other’s existence. Woman at this stage is the repository of all culture, of all benevolence, of all devotion, of all concern for the living and grief for the dead. Yet of the love that arises from motherhood is not only more intense, but also more universal. Whereas the paternal principle is inherently restrictive, the maternal principle is universal; the paternal principle implies limitation to definite groups, but the maternal principle, like the life of nature, knows no barriers. The idea of motherhood produces a sense of universal maternity among all men, which dies with the development of paternity. The family based on father right is a closed individual organism, whereas the matriarchal family bears the typically universal character that stands at the beginning of all development and distinguishes material life from higher spiritual life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Every woman’s womb, the mortal image of the Earth mother Demeter, will give brothers and sisters to the children of every other woman; the homeland will know only brother and sisters until the day when the development of the paternal system dissolves the undifferentiated unity of the mass and introduces a principle of articulation. Matriarchal states were particularly famed for their freedom from internecine strife and conflict. The matriarchal peoples—and this is no less characteristic—assigned special culpability to the physical injury of one’s fellow humans or even of animals. This picture of the mode of production and social organization of hunters and Neolithic agriculturalists is quite suggestive in regard to certain psychical traits that are generally supposed to be an intrinsic part of human nature. Prehistoric hunters and agriculturalist had no opportunity to develop a passionate striving for property or envy of the “haves,” because there was no private property to hold on to and no important economic differences to cause envy. On the contrary, their way of life was conducive to the development of cooperation and peaceful living. There was no basis for the formation of the desire to exploit other human beings. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
The idea of exploiting another person’s physical or psychical energy for one’s own purposes is absurd in a society where economically and socially there is no basis for exploitation. The impulses to control others also had little chance to develop. The primitive band society and probably prehistoric hunters since about fifty thousand years ago were fundamentally different from civilized society precisely because human relations were not governed by the principles of control and power; their functioning depended on mutuality. An individual endowed with the passion for control would have been a social failure and without influence. Finally there was little incentive for the development of greed, since production and consumption were stabilized at a certain level. In many highly developed societies, such as the feudal society in the Middle Ages, the members of one occupational group—such as the guilds—did not strive for increasing material profit, but for enough to satisfy the traditional standard of living. Even the knowledge that the members of social classes above them had more luxuries to consume did not generate greed for this surplus consumption. The process of living was satisfying, and hence, no greater consumption appeared desirable. The same holds true for the peasants. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
The rebellions of the peasants in the sixteenth century were not because they wanted to consume as much as the class above them, but they wanted the basis for a dignified human existence and fulfillment of the traditional obligations the land owners had towards them. Do the data on hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists suggest that the passion of possessiveness, exploitation, greed, envy did not yet exist and are exclusively products of civilization? We cannot make such a sweeping statement, but there is a great difference between cultures which foster and encourage greed, envy, and exploitativeness by their social structure, and cultures which do the opposite. Within a short period, historically speaking, humans learned to harness the physical energy of oxen and the energy of the winds. They invented the plough, the wheeled cart, the sailing boat, and one discovered the chemical processes involved in the smelting of copper ores (to some extent know earlier), and the physical properties of metals, and one began to work out a solar calendar. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
As a consequence, the way was prepared for the art of writing and standards and measures. In no period of history till the days of Galileo was progress in knowledge do rapid or far-reaching discoveries so frequent. But social change was not less revolutionary. The small villages of self-sufficient farmers were transformed into populous cities nourished by secondary industries and foreign trade, and these new cities were organized as city states. Human literally created new land. The great cities of Babylonia rose on a sort of platform of reeds, laid crisscross upon the alluvial mud. They dug channels to water the fields and drain the marshes, they built dykes and mounds to protect humans and cattle from the waters and raise them above the flood. This creation of tillable land required a great deal of labour and this capital in the form of human labour was being sunk in the land. Another result of this process was that a specialized labour force had to be used for this kind of work, and for cultivating the land necessary to grow food for those others who were specialized in crafts, public works, and trade. They had to be organized by the community and directed by an elite which did the planning, protecting, and controlling. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
This means that a much greater accumulation of surplus was needed than in the earlier Neolithic villages, and that this surplus was not just used as food reserve for times of need or growing population, but as capital to be used for an expanding production. The beginning of Neolithic agriculture humans had already developed made it possible for them to produce a small surplus, but this surplus only helped to stabilize their life. When, however, it grew, it could be used for an entirely new purpose; it became possible to feed people who did not directly produce food, but cleared the marshes, built houses and cities and pyramids, or served as soldiers. Of course, such use could only take place when technique and division of labour had reached a degree which made it possible for human labour to be so employed. At this point the surplus grew immensely. The more fields were ploughed, the more marshes were drained, the more surplus could be produced. This new possibility led to one of the most fundamental changes in human history. It was discovered that humans could be used as economic instruments, that they could be exploited, that they could be made a slave. War as an institution was a new invention, like kingdom or bureaucracy, made around 3000 B.C. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Then as now, war was not caused by psychological factors, such as human aggression, but, aside from the wishes for power and glory of the kinds and their bureaucracy, was the result of objective conditions that made war useful and which, as a consequence, tended to generate and increase human destructiveness and cruelty. One of the most significant features of the new urban society was that it was based on the principle of patriarchal rule, in which the principle of control is inherent: control of nature, control of slaves, women and children. The new patriarchal man literally “makes” the Earth. His technique is not simply modification of the natural processes, but their domination and control by man, resulting in new products which are not found in nature. Humans themselves came under the control of those who organized the work of the community, and hence the leaders had to have power over those they control. In order to achieve the aims of this new society, everything, nature and humans, had to be controlled and had to either exercise—of fear—power. Humans were aware of their faculties through their behaviour. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
God gave humans revelations so the use their will to discover God, but some people use religion to control other people. In order to become controllable, humans had to learn to obey and submit, and in order to submit they have to believe in the superior power—physical and/or magic—of their rulers. The new patriarchal system was one based on force and power; it was exploitative and mediated by the psychical mechanism of fear, “awe,” and submission. It was “irrational authority.” To exert power in every form was the essence of civilization; the city found a score of ways of expressing struggle, aggression, domination, conquest—and servitude. The new ways of the cities were rigorous, efficient, often harsh, eve sadistic, and the Egyptian monarchs and their Mesopotamian counterparts boasted on their monuments and tablets of their personal feats in mutilating, torturing, and killing with their own hands their chief captives. In addition to sadism, the passion to destroy life and the attraction to all that is dead (necrophilia) seem to develop in the new urban civilization. There was a destructive, death-oriented myth to be found in the new social order. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
Each historic civilization begins with a living, urban core, the polis, and ends in a common graveyard of dust and bones, a Necropolis, or city of the dead: fire-scorched ruins, shattered buildings, empty workshops, heaps of meaningless refuse, the population massacred or driven int slavery. Whether we read the story of the Hebrews’ conquest of Canaan or the story of the Babylonians’ wars, the same spirit of unlimited and inhuman destructiveness is shown. A good example is Dr. Sennacherib’s stone inscription on the total annihilation of Babylon: “The city and its houses from its foundation to its top, I destroyed, I devastated, I burned with fire. The wall and the outer wall, temples and gods, temple towers of brick and Earth, as many as they were, I razed and dumped them int the Arakhut Canal. Through the midst of that city I dug canals, I flooded its site with water, and the very foundations thereof I destroyed. I made its destruction more complete than that by a flood.” Nonaggressive societies are not as rare or puny as Dr. Freeman and other exponents of the Freudian theory indicate. Aggressiveness is not just one trait, but part of a syndrome; we find aggression regularly together with other traits in the system, such as strict hierarchy, dominance, class division, ex cetera. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
In other words, aggression is to be understood as part of the social character, not as an isolated behaviour trait. Societies are not simply differentiated in terms of more or less aggression, or more or less nonaggression, but in terms of different character systems distinguished from each other by a number of traits that form the system, some of which do not have any obvious connection with aggression. What we most learn in God’s yoke, beyond acting with him, is to abandon outcomes to God, accepting that we do not have in ourselves—in our own “heart, soul, mind, and strength”—the wherewithal to make this come out right, whatever “this” is. Even if we “suffer according to the will of God,” we simply “entrust our souls to a faithful Creator in doing what is right,” report 1 Peter 4.19. Now, this is a major part of that meekness and lowliness of heart that we also learn in his yoke. And what rest comes with it! Humility if the framework within which all virtue lives. Our Lord did not say: Learn of Me to despise the World and live in poverty…but only this: Learn of Me for I am gentle and lowly of heart. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
And one of the signs by which a human may know that one is in a state of grace is this—that one is never puffed up. Accordingly, we are to “clothe ourselves with humility,” reports 1 Peter 5.5, which certainly means loss of self-sufficiency. “God gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God that He may exalt you at the proper time, casting all your anxiety upon Him, because He cares for you,” reports 1 Peter 5.5-7. Humility is a great secret of rest of soul because it does not presume to secure outcomes. Here is a simple fact: We live in a World where, by God’s appointment, “the race is not to the swift, and the battle is not to the warriors, and neither is bread to the wise, nor wealth to the discerning, nor favour to humans of ability; for time and chance overtake them all,” reports Ecclesiastes 9.11. The Lord “does not delight in the strength of the horse; He does not take pleasure in the legs of a man,” reports Psalm 147.10. He has a plan for our life that goes far beyond anything we can work out and secure by means of strong horses and good legs. We simply have to rest in His life as he gives it to us. Knowledge, from Christ, that He is good and great enables us to cast outcomes on Him. We find this knowledge in the yoke of Christ. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Resting in God, we can be free from all anxiety, which means deep soul rest. Whatever our circumstance, taught by Christ we are enabled to “rest [be still] in the LORD and wait patiently [or longingly] for Him,” reports Psalm 37.7. We do not fret or get angry because others seem to be doing better than we are, even though they are less deserving than we. However, the Holy Spirit divided unto each one as He will, namely, according to the free choice of the will, not in obedience to necessity. We have free-will with respect to what we will not of necessity, nor be natural instinct. For our will to be happy does not appertain to free-will, but not natural instinct. Hence other animals, that are moved to act by natural instinct, are not said to be moved by free-will. Since then God necessarily wills His own goodness, but other things not necessarily. God has free will with respect to what He does not necessarily will. Since the evil of sin consists in turning away from the divine goodness, by which God wills all things, it is manifestly impossible for Him to will the evil of sin; yet He can make choice of one of two opposites, inasmuch as He can will a thing to be, or not to be. In the same way we ourselves, without sin, can will to sit down, and not will to sit down. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
In life, be there, do not panic in the face of the pathology; and hold out an optimistic vision of what can come from the pain. To become aware means to perceive one’s wholeness as a person defined by spirit; to perceive the dynamic center that stamps on all utterances, actions, and attitudes the recognizable sign of uniqueness. Such an awareness is impossible if, and as long, the other is for me the detached object of my observation, for that person will not thus yield one’s wholeness and its center. It is possible only when one become present in genuine dialogue. Individuals naturally seek equilibrium because disequilibrium, which is a mismatch between one’s way of thinking and one’s environment, is inherently dissatisfying. When individuals encounter new discrepant information, they enter into a state of disequilibrium. Spiritual experience is the encounter with one’s ground being. It is the moment of one’s life, one’s place in the Universe, and the values that characterize how one lives. Because these issues are central to the self-reflective life and because they are realized in moments of extraordinary clarity with an urgency and authority all their own, they demand attention in the articulation of any definitive psychological system. #RanndolphHarris 21 of 22
God of learning, please guide me in my intellectual quests today. Please keep my mind open and fill it with learning. Land of Spirits, please show yourself to me and teach me to love nature. God, please be true. Be strong. Please keep your promises. I seek wisdom. Please love your children. Please be at peace. Please bless your children. This is my request of you. May all the Holy One help you to make it true. God has given our lard a heritage, for his loving kindness endures forever. God has redeemed us from our foes, for His loving kindness endures forever. God gives food to all creatures, for His loving kindness endures forever. O please give thanks unto God of Heaven, for His loving kindness endures forever. Rejoice in the Lord, O ye righteous, it is befitting for the upright to praise Him. Give thanks unto the Lord with the harp, sing praises unto Him with the ten stringed psaltery. Sing unto Him a new song; play skillfully amid songs of joy, for the word of the Lord is just, and all His work is truth. God loves righteousness and justice; the Earth is full of loving kindness of the Lord. By the word of the Lord were the Heavens made, and all the host of them by His command. God gathered the waters of the sea as a heap; He lay up the deeps in the store-houses. God is Almighty. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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In a World where the Pulse of Time Beats Infinitely Slowly, Birth and Death Count for Little!
Hardships do not build character. They reveal it. Anyone who will tear down Victorian craftsmanship will tear down America. Victorian architecture and religion have made America what it is today. A World without Victorian architecture is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval prison. Just like the unconscious mind, Victorians have a lot of secrets that can take several lifetimes to reveal. Faith and the word of God fills our inner soul and is sufficient to sustain us—and allows us to access His power. The notion that God created this World spectacle for the benefit of the human alone is an absurd and unwarranted anthropolatry, but the notion that life first attains individual self-consciousness in humans is justified in philosophy and by experience. What is it of which one alone is conscious? It is of being oneself, one’s ego. In all earlier stages of evolution, consciousness is entirely veiled in its forms and never becomes self-aware. Only in the human state does individual consciousness of being first dawn. There may exist on other planets creatures infinitely more intelligent and more amiable than human beings. We may not be the only pebbles on the beach of life. Nevertheless the piece of arrogance which places humans highest in the scale of existence contains the dim reverberation of a great truth, for humans bear the divine within their hearts. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Human beings have made too much fuss about themselves, their own importance in the cosmic scale. Why should there not be other forms of life superior t them, conscious intelligent beings higher in mentality, character, and spiritual knowledge, better equipped with powers and techniques? Even a partial awareness of what it means to be a human—as above an animal—capable of thinking abstractly, conscious of the vastness of the Universe and the littleness of the ego, asking the ago-old questions about meaning and purpose in life, sometimes getting a glimpse of a few words of the answer through religion, art, Nature, mysticism, joy, suffering, or intelligence, even this is enough to make one wonder what follows in development after one, higher than oneself, if not here then perhaps on other planets or in a fourth dimension. Such beings must already exist somewhere. Are they the gods of ancient fable and myth, disfigured or miscomprehended in human narratives by passing of time? Were they visitors who helped infant humanity reach its tends and then left it, withdrew, except for rare appearances as avatars, angels, or lawgivers? There are existences for beings on levels and in times and space different from ours. The Level we know and the humans we see only partially manifest the World-Idea. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
The multibirthed nature of human experience fits in with the shimmering galaxies of the multiverse itself. “We are not alone,” could be echoed back by this planet Earth itself. There are beings not subject to the same laws as those governing humankind’s physical existence. They are normally not visible to humans. They are gods. The Gods are both symbols of particular forces and beings dwelling on higher planes. All these figures irrupt autonomously into consciousness as soon as it gets into a pathological state. With regard to the anima, I would particularly like to draw attention to the case described by Nelken. Now the remarkable thing is that these figures show the most striking connections with the poetic, religious, or mythological formulations, though these connections are in no way factual. That is to say, they are spontaneous products of analogy. One such case even led to the charge of plagiarism: the French writer Benoit gave a description of the anima and her classic myth in his book L’Atlantide, which is an exact parallel of Rider Haggard’s She. The lawsuit proved unsuccessful; Benoit and never heard of She. (It might, in the last analysis, have been an instance of cryptomnesic deception, which is often extremely difficult to rule out.) #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The distinctly “historical” aspect of the anima and Benoit’s condensation with the figures of the sister, wife, mother, and daughter, plus thus associated incest motif, can be found in Goethe (“You were in times gone by my wife of sister”), as well as in the anima figure of the regina and femina alba in alchemy. The English alchemist Eirenaeus Philalethes (“love of truth”), writing about 1645, remarks that the “Queen” was the King’s “sister, mother, or wife.” The same idea can be found, ornately elaborated, in Nelken’s patient and in a whole series of cases observed by me, where I was able to rule out with certainty any possibility of literary influence. For the rest, the anima complex is one of the oldest features of Latin alchemy. When one studies the archetypal personalities and their behaviour with the help of the dreams, fantasies, delusions of patients, one is profoundly impressed by their manifold and unmistakable connections with mythological ideas completely unknown to the layperson. They form a species of singular beings whom one would like to endow with ego-consciousness; indeed, they almost seem capable of it. And yet this idea is not borne out by the facts. There is nothing in their behaviour to suggest that they have an ego-consciousness as we know it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
The behaviours show, on the contrary, all the marks of fragmentary personalities. They are masklike, wraithlike, without problems, lacking self-reflection, with no conflicts, no doubts no sufferings; like gods, perhaps, who have no philosophy, such as the Brahma-gods of the Samyutta–nikaya, whose erroneous views needed correction by the Buddha. Unlike other contents, they always remain strangers in the World of consciousness, unwelcome intruders saturating the atmosphere with uncanny forebodings or even with the fear of madness. If we examine their content, id est, the fantasy material constituting their phenomenology, we find countless archaic and “historical” associations and images of an archetypal nature. This peculiar fact permits us to draw conclusions about the “localization’ of anima and animus in the psychic structure. They evidently live and function in the deeper layers of the unconscious, especially that phylogenetic substratum which I have called the collective unconscious. This localization explains a good deal of their strangeness: they being into our ephemeral consciousness an unknown psychic life belonging to a remote past. It is the mind of our unknown ancestors, their way of thinking and feeling, their way of experiencing life and the World, gods and humans. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The existence of these archaic strata is presumable the source of the human’s belief in reincarnations and in memories of “previous existences.” Just as the human body is a museum, so to speak, of its phylogenetic history, so too is the psyche. We have no reason to suppose that the specific structure of the psyche is the only thing in the World that has n history outside its individual manifestations. Even the conscious mind cannot be denied a history reaching back at least five thousand years. It is only our ego-consciousness that has forever a new beginning and an early end. The unconscious psyche is not only immensely old, it is also capable of growing into an equally remote future. It moulds the human species and is just as much a part of its as the human body, which, though ephemeral in the individual, is collectively of immense ago. The anima and animus live in a World quite different from the World outside—in a World where the pulse of time beats infinitely slowly, where the birth and death of individuals count for little. No wonder their nature is strange, so strange that their irruption into consciousness often amounts to a psychosis. They undoubtedly belong to the material that comes to light in schizophrenia. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
What I have said about the collective unconscious may give you give a more or less adequate idea of what I mean by their term. If we now turn back to the problem of individuation, we shall see ourselves faced with a rather extraordinary task: the psyche consists of two incongruous halves which together should form a whole. One is inclined to think that ego-consciousness is capable of assimilating the unconscious, at least one hopes that such a solution is possible. However, unfortunately the unconscious really is unconscious; in other words, it is unknown. And how can you assimilate something unknown? Even if you can form a fairly complete picture of the anima and animus, this does not mean that you have plumbed the depths of the unconscious. One hopes to control the unconscious, but the past masters in the art of self-control, the yogis, attain perfection in samadhi, a state of ecstasy, which so far as we know is equivalent to a state of unconsciousness. It makes no difference whether they call our unconscious a “universal consciousness”; the fact remains that in their case the unconscious has swallowed up ego-consciousness. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
They do not realize that a “universal consciousness” is a contradiction in terms, since exclusion, selection, and discrimination are the root and essence of everything that lays claim to the name “consciousness.” “Universal consciousness” is logically identical with unconsciousness. It is nevertheless true that a correct application of the methods described in the Pali Canon or the Yoga-sutra induces a remarkable extension of consciousness. But, with increasing extension, the contents of consciousness lose in clarity of detail. In the end consciousness becomes all-embracing, but nebulous; and infinite number of things merge into an indefinite whole, a state in which subject and object are almost completely identical. This is all very beautiful, but scarcely to be recommended anywhere north of the Tropic of Cancer. For this reason we must look for a different solution. We believe in ego-consciousness and in what we call reality. The realities of a north climate are somehow so convincing that we feel very much better off when we do not forget them. For us it makes sense to concern ourselves with reality. Our European ego-consciousness is therefore inclined to swallow up the unconscious, and if this should not prove feasible we try to suppress it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
However, if we understand anything of the unconscious, we know that it cannot be swallowed. We also know that it is dangerous to suppress it, because the unconscious is life and this life turns against us if suppressed, as it happens in neurosis. When one of them is suppressed and injured by the other, conscious and unconscious do not make a whole. If they must contend, let it at least be a fair fight with equal rights on both sides. Both are aspects of life. Consciousness should defend its reason and protect itself, and the chaotic life of the unconscious should be given the chance of having its way too—as much of it as we can stand. This means open conflict and open collaboration at once. That, evidently, is the way human life should be. It is the old game of hammer and anvil: between them the patient iron is forged into an indestructible whole, and “individual.” This, roughly, is what I mean by the individuation process. As the same shows, it is a process or course of development arising out of the conflict between the two fundamental psychic facts. The symbol of formation has the closet affinities with alchemical ideas, and especially with the conception of the “uniting symbol,” which yield highly significant parallels. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Naturally these are processes which have no meaning in the initial stages of psychological treatments. On the other hand, more difficult cases, such as cases of unresolved transference, develop these symbols. Knowledge of them is of inestimable importance in treating cases of this kind, especially when dealing with cultured patients. How the harmonizing of conscious and unconscious data is to be undertaken cannot be indicated in the form of a recipe. It is an irrational life-process which expressed itself in definite symbols. It may be the task of the analyst to stand by this process with all the help one can give. In this case, knowledge of the symbols is indispensable, for it is in them that the union of conscious and unconscious contents is consummated. Out of this union emerge new situations and new conscious attitudes. I have therefore called the union of opposites the “transcendent function.” This rounding out of the personality into a whole may well be the goal of any psychotherapy that claims to be more than a mere cure of symptoms. As experience piles up, self-structures gradually establish themselves and, in doing so, separate out more and more from other structures which have less to do with one’s identity. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
In the course of this process, as the self becomes more distinct, other people and things also gain coherence and individuality. There is a growing sense of “Ah yes, this is me, and that is that, and you are you, and this is what goes on between us.” Gradually, with further experiences, if all goes well, the personality develops a relatively stable sense of itself in its environment and a stable sense of what is not self but other people and things. Our life-experiences are increasingly reorganized and integrated, with more linkages to the more central regions of the self, and/or with more clearly delineated object-imagery. Our experiences can become more closely connected with (or, on the other hand, more distant from) the feelings or excitements which originally accompanied the experiences. This is a process through which our experiences can also become relatively less integrated with the person with whim we first experienced them, and relatively less integrated with the feelings or excitements with which we first experienced them. Thus feelings and excitements can be isolated from the structures in terms of which they were first experienced, isolated from structures of self and/or isolated from object-imagery. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
To give an imaginary illustration of a very complicated process, the experience may be of a child being hugged by the mother and enjoying it. In words: “I like being hugged by mother.” This may be broken up into such substructures as “hugging is lovely” (whoever hugs whom: the “depersonalized” relationship), as well as “I liked being hugged,” “I love mother,” “I like hugging,” “mother loves me,” “mother loves hugging me,” “mother likes hugging,” and so on. This example is also useful in letting us realize just how many structures can emerge out of one experience; it is a mistake to think of an experience being broken up into one self-concept, one object-concept, one relationship, one emotion. “Depersonalizing” is used to describe this process. Depersonalizing is a useful way of coping with distressing feelings, I shall often call it “distancing” or “disowning.” In depersonalizing, emotions and objects differentiate. My first experience of a dog may have been frightening, but “frightening” and “dog” will eventually probably differentiate from each other, so that in due course I can distinguish between the dog which scared me, and dogs in general which have no personal significance for me either frightening or lovable, and so on. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
At that level of abstraction, dogs remain dogs, whatever my experience of them: object-constancy has been achieved. In depersonalizing, the emotions and self differentiate. “I” and “frightened” differentiate. More generally, I learn that I am not wholly (always) good or wholly (always” bad, or wholly (always) happy or wholly (always) unhappy. Later I have to discover that my feeling hat someone or something is good or bad does not mean that it is so. And I have to discover that my feeling that someone or something is good or bad does not mean that other people think so. Subjectivity is thus turned into objectivity. This process of depersonalizing may be patchy or superficial. Underneath what we have learned about dogs which helps us say we know that not all dogs are frightening although we once knew a frightening puppy, there may be unconscious connections very tightly integrated with a feeling of good or bad about dogs. Part of psychotherapy is to being these unconscious connections into consciousness. When thinking about feelings, it is useful sometimes not to think in a “distancing” or depersonalized way of “love,” or “distress,” or “fear.” It can be instructive to think for a while in terms of “love-of,” and “distress-from,” and “fear-of,” and “hate-of,” and “greed-for,” and “bliss-with.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
If we think of feelings apart from who-feels-what-towards-whom, we risk being cut from out roots. Feeling are experienced as relational—once stated, it seems obvious, at least for a healthy functioning organism. Feelings are relational from the start except when something has gone wrong with our biochemistry. When feelings are detached from the experiences in which they were aroused, that is normally due to a later and defensive manoeuver. This component in the object-relation does not therefore separate out in an organized way, as self-structures or object-imagery do in the healthy infant. On the contrary, it looks as though health may consist in keeping feelings attached to the experiences with which they are bound up. Healthy people may have a clear sense of self and of the people and things around them, but they are not much visited by isolated waves of “fear-of” or “bliss-with.” Such feelings would normally be anchored in an experience. Depersonalized feelings are very weird. One of the many contributions made by Dr. Melanie Klein and her associates comes from their intuitive understanding that “I am angry (with a person or thing)” is very close to “Someone or something is very angry with me.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The feeling “angry-with” may be depersonalized, detached from particular experiences, and associated at random with self or with other. Similarly “I feel torn apart (by something in the course of hunger)” may become “I have torn apart (the breast associated with hunger).” For some people there is no differentiation between self-and-feeling; for others there is none between others-and-feeling. It seems that people vary in this respect. The former are likely to experience “I am fine, sad, content, frightened, furious,” et cetera. The latter are likely to experience “He is nice, she is frightening, that is nasty, this is sweet, the other wicked.” Only people who are very out of touch would be assailed by feelings of fear or well-being or anger or love without any clear connections with anything. Illustrating the extreme, a person mainly organized in terms of self-structures, and distant from the World of people and things, might say, “I was so worried when I did not hear…I wondered what I had done wrong. I felt so guilt and worried, then I remembered that I am always forgetting people’s birthdays. Are I not awful.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Another kind of person, mainly organized in terms of other people and things, and distant from one’s own feelings, might say, “They sent this letter which said they were closing down. With a cheque. The cheque was an insult. They have no right to send a notice like that through the post. I went to the Citizens’ Advice Bureau round the corner from where I used to live—not last year but the year before. Almost everyone there was new, much younger and two were Asian.” Yet another kind of person hardly experiences either self or other people, but picks up feelings without firmly attaching them to anyone: “It was really eerie, a dangerous atmosphere. There were a lot of booming noises and a lot of talk which I do not remember. It felt very heavy and threatening. It did not mater, though.” People differ in how they are aware, more in some ways, less in others. One wonders at which point thee types begin to become fixed. It is an interesting area to speculate in. Whole cultures or subcultures may be found which prefer one or other type, so that polite conventional speech requires more awareness of some aspect than another. Thus in some circles it is discourteous to talk about oneself, and in others it is band manners to talk about others, and in yet other circles one should not talk about impersonal matters. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Because I cannot deal with the soul here in a thorough and systematic manner that would address main issues (I refer again to the literature noted), my strategy will be twofold: First, I will elaborate a picture or image of the soul, and second, I will look at certain things said about the soul in the Bible. Now the image: Our soul is like an inner stream of water, which gives strength, direction, and harmony to every other element of our life. When that stream is as it should be, we are constantly refreshed and exuberant in all we do, because our soul itself is then profusely rooted in the vastness of God and His kingdom, including nature: and all else within us is enlivened and directed by that stream. Therefore we are in harmony with God, reality, and the rest of human nature at large. As is usual in biblical themes, a little child that has been allowed to develop naturally and have been natured in all the aspects of its being gives us the best presentation of that a life flooded with a healthy soul looks like. Now, beyond the image or picture of an inner stream is this reality: Life is self-initiating, self-directing, self-sustaining activity and power. In this full sense, of course, only God has life. That is the biblical view. Moreover, it his “hand is the soul of every living thing,” Job tells us (Job 12.10). #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Can it be truth that all this cast travail, all this long long ingathering of experience, all this travel to the farthest limit, is only to end in negation, in unlearning all knowledge and returning to where we started? My heart does not believe it, my reason cannot accept it. “The Father has life in Himself,” Jesus taught, and “gave to the Son also to have life in Himself,” reports John 5.26. “He alone possesses undying life,” reports 1 Timothy 6.16, according to Saint Paul, and is the one “who gives and preserves life to all things,” reports 1 Timothy 5.13. The individual living thing receives its relatively “self-initiating, self-directing, self-sustaining power” from the hand of God. This derivative life flows through the living being in the form of its own soul. As for the human, its peculiar form of soul is related to the unique spirit relationship it has to be God (Genesis 2.7). It is its peculiar form of soul that enlivens everything else in the creature, and its overall condition reflects the state of its soul. In the human being, spiritual life in the kingdom of God is central to its soul and its life. This, we seriously suggest, is not an image but a reality, and one that the image of a stream of water can portray with some force. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
When we speak of the human soul, then, we are speaking of the deepest level of life and power in the human being. On this land, please pour blessings, O Lord, pour blessings. On this house please pour blessings, O Lord pour blessings. Spirits of the Ancestors, do you see what has been done? A house has been born to continue your line. Once again, a link is forged in the ancient chain and we are all connected that much tighter. Bless this Victorian Mansion; it carries your memory forward to the future. Because God has set His love upon Sarah Winchester’s Mansion and estate, He will protect it; God will protect it because it knows His name. God will rescue the Winchester and its fine Victorian architecture and bring honour to it. Give will give Mrs. Winchester’s estate abundance of long life, and the Winchester mansion shall witness God’s salvation. Hallelujah. Praise the name of the Lord; give praise, ye servants of the Lord, who stand in the house of the Lord, in the courts of the house of God. Praise the Lord, for the Lord is good; sing praise unto the name of God, for it is pleasant. For the Lord hath chosen this estate as wonder of the World and a treasure for many generations to enjoy. Indeed I know that the Lord is great, that our Lord is above all who are worshipped as gods. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Winchester Mystery House
Sarah Winchester’s Daisy Bedroom – the room she was trapped in during the 1906 earthquake. Legend says that she had the front of the house boarded up after the earthquake.
Explore in 360 http://ow.ly/280u50CXeNm
I Had Loved the Prairie as a Man with a Heart Shot Full of Pain Over Love!
I have not been calling the signals. I have been in the position of a lineman doing some of the downfield blocking. And although I have often been accused of putting my foot in my mouth, I will never put my hand in your pockets. When genuine love predominates in our gathers, all pretense will vanish from out lives. The is an important element in the spiritually transformed social dimension of the self. Love between Christians then would, as Saint Paul say to the Romans, “be genuine.” And that is the central factor in the beautiful picture of what the local gatherings of disciples into “churches” should be like, given by Saint Paul in Romans 12.1-21. Christ’s apprentices would be carrying out their particular work in the group life with a grace and power that is not from themselves, but from God. “Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honour one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with God’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
“Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord. On the contrary: ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed one; if he is thirsty, give one something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on one’s head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good,” reports Romans 12.9-21. Let love be completely real. Abor what is evil. Cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in family-like love (philostorgoi). Outdo one another in giving honour. Serve the Lord with ardent spirit and all diligence. Rejoice in hope. Be patient in trouble. Be devoted constantly to prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints. Pursue (run after) hospitality. Bless persecutors and not curse them. Be joyful with those who are rejoiceful and be sorrowful with those in sorrow. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Live in harmony with each other. Not be haughty, but fit right in with the “lowly” in human terms. Not see yourself as wise. Never repay evil for evil. Have due regard for what everyone takes to be right. Be at peace with everyone, so far as it depends on you. Never take revenge, but leave that to whatever God may decide. Provide for needy enemies. Not be overwhelmed by evil, but overwhelm evil with good. This is the most adequate biblical description of what the details of a spiritually transformed social dimension look like. We should pause to contemplate it. Just think for a moment what it would be like to be part of a group of disciples in which this list was the conscious, shared intention, and see, where it is actually lived out, even if with some imperfection. You can see, I think, how it would totally transform the marriage relation and the home and family. Its effect on the community would be incalculable, as it in fact has been wherever realized throughout the history of Christ’s people on Earth. The abandonment of all defensiveness and its many strategies would clearly be achieved in such a group. There would no longer be any need for them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
In their place would be receptiveness and blessing for all, even enemies. Certainly, to achieve this in our social dimension we must have heard and accepted the gospel of grace, of Jesus’ defenseless death on the cross on our behalf, and of his acceptance of us into his life beyond death and beyond the worst that could be done to him or to us. We must stand safe and solid in his kingdom. Another element of Godliness is an opening up of our broader social dimension to redemption. Not having the burden of defending and securing ourselves, and acting now from the resources of our new life from above, we can devote our lives to the service of others. This is the beneficial moment in redemption of the social side of the self. It is not just a matter of not attacking or withdrawing. That redemption will naturally and rightly be chiefly focused in blessing upon those closet to us, beginning with out family members and moving out from there, proportional to our degree of life involvement with others. The social World is set before us as an infinite task, which can only be carried out in the power of God. We accept that. Just as we cannot be husband or wife or parent God intends except in the power of God, so for our life as a whole. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
We do not even how to pray as we ought, Saint Paul tells us, “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And what who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will,” reports Romans 8.26-27. And, if we invite him, wait on him, and proceed as best we can, the Spirit of God will enter into all of our social connections. We have the promise of Jesus to those who live by his living water. That water “shall become in one as well of water springing up to eternal life,” reports John 4.14, and “from his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water,” (John 7.38; compare Isiah 58.11). Spiritual formation in Christ obviously requires that we increasingly be happily reconciled to living in and by the direct upholding of the hand of God. This is clearly what the entire biblical view of life calls for, and especially what Jesus himself lived and presented as the truth. Only from within this gospel outlook on life can we begin to approach the Godly reformation of the self in its social World. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
However, from within that outlook we can cease from assault and withdrawal can extend ourselves in blessing to all whose lives we touch. What circles of sufficiency have you enjoyed in your lifetime? Describe in detail some occasions when you experienced completeness in them. Or occasion when they were broken. How does rejection affect us? Why does it affect us as it does? Can you recall an occasion, perhaps as a child or youth, when you rejected someone and how they responded? Do assault and withdrawal cover the field of the evils people do to others? Think about the role these play in ordinary life. Is it possible to disagree with or correct others without assault or withdrawal? Consider violations of each of the last six of the Ten Commandments as forms of assault. Do you see how they are? What they do to people? How would love as Jesus loved eliminate assault and withdrawal withing familiar personal relationships? How does the Trinitarian nature of God cast light on what human relations could and should be? “One nation under God.” How could that possibly be realized? How do assault and withdrawal find the way into the lives of children? #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Must we accept coldness between people as normal now? Do you agree that redemption of the marriage relation is central to any hope for transforming our broader social situation today? Or is that just too much to put on a man-woman or more modern relationships? How can we come to see ourselves whole in God’s life, and how would that help heal our social dimension? Could Saint Paul’s picture of the redemptive fellowship of Christ’s people (Romans 12.1-21) be put int place in your group? “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, individual, with liberty and justice for all.” Now, if it is a kingdom of God that is to be established, it must be introduced by God. God must not only be the originator of it, but the controller also; and any means short of these must fail of the object designed. The great evils that now exist in the World are the consequences of human’s departure from God. This has introduced this degeneracy and imbecility, and nothing but a retracing of one’s steps, and a return to God can bring about a restitution. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
God gave humans a moral agency, as head of the World, under Himself to reign and rule without God physically being here. The natural consequence is, that we have inherited all the evils of which I have spoken, and nothing but the wisdom, goodness, power, and compassion of God, can deliver us therefrom, restore the Earth to its pristine excellence, and put humans again in possession of those blessings which they have forfeited by their transgression. Emperors, kings, princes, potentates, statemen, philosophers, and churches, have tried for ages to bring this state of things about; but they have all signally failed, not having derived their wisdom from the proper source. And all human means made use of at the preset time to ameliorate the condition of the World must fail, as all human means have always done. There are some who suppose that the influence of Christianity, as it is now preached and administered, will bring about a Millennial reign of peace. The ideas in a human’s mind are hidden and secret until one expresses them through actions, or as speech, or as the visible creations and productions of one’s hands, or in behaviour generally. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Those ideas are neither lost nor destroyed. They are a permanent part of the human’s memory and character and consciousness and subconsciousness, where they have been recorded as automatically and as durably as a master phonograph disc records music. Just as wax copy may be burnt but the music will still live on in the master disc, so the cosmos may be annihilated or disintegrate completely but the creative idea of it will still live on in the World-Mind. More, in the same ways a human’s body may die and disintegrate, but the creative idea of one will still remain in the World-Mind as one’s Soul. It will not die. It is one’s real Self, one’s perfect Self. It is the true Idea of one which is forever calling to be realized. It is the unmanifest image of God in which humans are made and which one has yet to bring into manifestation in one’s everyday consciousness. If the World is a thought in the mind of God, then humans are thoughts in the World-Mind, who is their God in reality and in logic. If all thoughts must go in the end, this is true also of the World-Mind, except that here millions of years are involved. The World-Mind works in and through everything. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The World-Idea reveals a mere hint of its wisdom and intelligence to that projection from Itself which is the human. Every law of the Universe and every principle of its operation can be found reflected in the nature and life of every human. In the complicated structure of the human personality, we find different levels of being, with different forces operating at each level. Humans are what they are. Nothing can alter that. Out of the immortal, benign, eternal Mind they came, to It they shall return. Meanwhile It is one’s very essence, that is, It is life. Humans are Mind individualized. We must see in each human the beginning of a fresh and unique attempt of the Infinite to express itself in the finite World of space-time. he Unseen Power (without beginning) and (without end), is One. Every other kind of power derives from It. And this holds true even of the little power which a little ant shows. Hence the energies of a human being are linked with It. From this we may deduce that one is unaware of, and not using, all one’s potential resources. Though it seems entirely our own faculty, this thought-making power is derived from a hidden one, The Universal Mind, in which all other human’s minds lie embedded. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
What one does with this power is a human’s own concern, for better or worse, yielding one more knowledge or more ignorance. The human who, according to the Bible, is made in the image of God is not the Earthly human, visible to all and speaking in a voice that sounds in physical ears. One is to be found in the deep center of consciousness, where there is a Void, and one speaks in silence to the attentive mind, not to other persons. The human that is made in the image of God is not physical human or desire-filled humans or thought-breeding humans but one who dwells behind all these—silent, serene, and unnoticed. Here, and here alone, is the real meaning and true portrait of humans. What is the inner purpose of human life as apart from its outer object? What is the highest end of the life of humans? We may not be able to comprehend the Universe’s meaning—why it should come into existence at all—simply because human capacity is too limited; but we should be able to comprehend some meaning—enough for practical purposes—in our own personal existences. To enquire into such matters is very far from being a remote and unimportant affair, for on its final result depend the answers to such questions as: “Does this Earthly life exhaust all possibilities of human life?” #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
“Is there anything more than death for humans to expect as the final experience life offers one?” “What are we here for?” If we begin at some time to wonder at the starred sky and go on to speculate at our human destiny, there will be moments when a feeling rises that there must be something behind it all. They pass and mystery engulfs us again. If we do not know the “why” of universal existence, we do know the “why” of human existence. It provides the field of experience for discovering the divine soul. The integral quest which ends in this discovery is, consequently, the greatest and mist important of human undertakings. Where is the possibility for the puny intellect of human beings to hold in its consciousness simultaneously and all-embracingly the innumerable stars, planets, suns, systems, galaxies, and Universes? Yet human’s curiosity cannot be stilled; one’s eager mind insists on knowing more and more, one’s ever-upwelling stream of questions never stops flowing. What do these two conflicting situations mean when put together? The answer is simply that there is something which one can and must know in order to fulfill oneself, but it is not a piling-up of numbered facts; it is nothing other than one’s relation to the source of the cosmos. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Human’s experience is so limited and one’s mental equipment so small that one’s attempt to understand the Universe would seem impertinent were it not for the assurance of great prophets and seers that where intellect and sense fail, intuition succeeds. The structure of the human being—one’s bodily senses and mental faculties—does not permit one to get more than a limited awareness of one’s environment. The remainder—which may be very large—is not only unknow but likely to remain unknowable. This means that what one does know, being neither complete nor completely true, concerns a World that is only relatively real. The World as it is really is in itself escapes one’s knowledge and remains the greatest mystery. Only those who are piqued by their ignorance of reality look beyond science, beyond the intellect even, for truth. If human life has any higher purpose, it is that the human ego should find its way back to that harmony with God which has become disturbed but never disrupted. We must all give life what it demands from the human—that it shall seek to transcend its present state, that is, transcend itself in the end. For life as we know it is only one expression of the World-Idea, the inexorable will of the World-Mind. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Everywhere in the advanced countries specialists, experts, and scientists are seeking more knowledge of the human body and its World or are applying this knowledge to practical use. Yet the highest work in which intellectual power can engage is to seek the reason for human existence. This will lead it to discover, and bow before, the World-Mind. If a creature is capable of conceiving the highest purpose for human life as something which transcends physical existence and even overpasses its ordinary thinking and image-making existence, there is here a phenomenon where this creature is either intuiting or predicting its own destiny. And it must be something glorious, something whose nature few cultures and civilizations have yet enjoyed. The goal of life is to be consciously united with Life. Human’s need is twofold: recollection of one’s divine nature and redemption from one’s Earthly nature. If it be asked whether there is any purpose in life, the answer must be “Yes!—to perfect ourselves and know ourselves; to find the happiness which comes as a fruit of such fulfillment.” Attaining to our humanity is good chiefly as it provides us with the chance, during subsequent years, of attaining to our higher selfhood. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The higher purpose of existence is to advance humans until one can live in the awareness of one’s divine selfhood. It is within the ultimate capacity of human and part of the higher purpose for one to achieve this awareness. Revelation establishes that the sequence of events in our Universe is an orderly one, while observation confirms it. They do not just happen by chance and chaos is not their background. Many will admit this but yet they are unable to admit that this orderliness is not limited to stars and planets alone, nor to the chemical elements also, nor to the physical forces of Nature in addition. They are unable to extend it to human life, to its birth, course, fortunes, and death. However, the philosophic revelation tells us that law and order are here not less than elsewhere. It is unreasonable to suggest that although they rule all the lower kingdoms, they do not touch us. Our experiences too are controlled by Heaven’s laws. There is order in the starry systems, on the planets, and on this Earth, because the World-Idea provides law and pattern. What is true of the Universe is also true of humans, of one’s body and one’s inner being. There is an orderly structure in the Universe and an orderly pattern in the lives of its creatures. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
If everything else is governed by laws, why not the growth of human’s spirituality? All personal fates are fulfilled within the larger predetermination of the World-Idea. And only within that larger meaning can humans find any real meaning in their own lives. The divine pattern is there not only in Nature but in Man, not only in inspired written revelations but in secret unwritten prayers. You are part of the World-Mind’s World-Idea. Therefore, you are a part of its purpose too. Seek to be shown what that is, and how you may realize it, rather than mope in misery, frustration, or fear. Looking upon your situation—personal, domestic, career, mental, emotional, spiritual—as having significance within that purpose, as teaching you some specific lesson or telling you what to do or not to do. It is nonsense to say that any human is lone in one’s trouble One is in the great World-Idea, part of it, belonging to it, sustained by it. Humans imagine they are acting for their own personal objectives only and for their own personal choices. They believe that they are moving through their life-scenes by their own freedom. However, the fact is that, all unwittingly, they are acting for the World-Idea and moving by the power which inheres in it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
What are we to say of the many whose lives evince no purpose, whose years show no progress? This judgment is a surface one. All people respond to the power of God, and perform their role in the idea of God, however alight be the measure of their response or however hidden be their role. Every person is unconsciously trying to fulfill a higher purpose set for one by God, and all the purposes fit together and combine to form a part of the World-Idea. Humans are part of the World-Idea; mist of what comes to them is within that part too: much of what comes from them likewise. They are free only within the World-Idea. Whether we like it or not we must submit to the World-Idea. It is there and must be accepted—reluctantly, resentfully, or blindly and devotedly. None of us has total freedom; that is an illusion, for it could never exist in a World based upon orderliness and equilibrium. However, the distinctive feature of will is the power of choice. The mind has a faculty of will and election. Appetitive movement revealed no such feature: it is involuntary, habitual, unconscious of itself. In a completely literal sense, will can move or not move, act or not act. The power of will is always evident in the power to stay action. If the will were to move it has to be moved; to act, it has first to be acted upon. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Will is like an artist. As the efficient cause of one’s picture, the artist can elect to paint, or not; one can exercise one’s power of reviewing one’s intentions, inspecting one’s materials, and apprising one’s manner of treating and forming them so as to realize one’s intentions. So with the will. Furthermore, the will could call for the delay of action. It could put brakes on the appetite. It need not respond at once to the recommendations of reason. It can temporize with reason, asking that noble faculty to review its processes; and it can expect imagination to do its proper work. Yet in checkmating ill-considered recommendations and impulses, the will can not expect either mind or body to do the impossible. It is restrained by a person’s innate limitations. It is my power and will to run; but to run faster than according to my lightness or disposition of body, is not in my power nor will. Knowledge of what is possible is derived from experience and reason; and what must not only teach what is good, but what is possible. Because a decision by the will is always necessary if rational thought are to result in action, classical and medieval tradition classifies will as an intellectual faculty. The doctrine concerning the Intellect and the doctrine concerning the Will of humans, are as it were twins at birth. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
For purity of illumination and freedom of will begins and falls together; and nowhere in the universal nature of things is there so intimate a sympathy as between truth and goodness. In thus alluding to Adam’s fall from perfect wisdom and perfect goodness, we recognize a sort of primordial intimacy between will and intellect. The actions of life and the determinations of will depend upon the intellect. There are a small number of ways of training and improving the understanding, reason, and memory, but there are a relatively large number of ways of molding will, appetite, and affections. The will of humans is most maniable and obedient and admitteth most medicines to cure and alter it. However, the intellectual powers have fewer means to work upon them than the will or body of humans. Clearly, will is not placed among things intellectual. Perhaps it is unimportant, perhaps impossible, to characterize the will with any precision. It may be important only that the will be placed in the service of the rational Angels and not at the command of the passions devils. Dear Lord in Heaven, may each loss be an addition to your power, a thread in the pattern woven by you in the secret places. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
It happened this way: When the time was right, when the season had come, one came to the deadly place and was sacrificed. Knowingly one came, willingly one came, in honour and sorrow one came, to do what had to be done. One’s death made life possible; from it sprang the food we eat. Grain grew where one’s blood flowed; animals walked forth from the shade of one’s fallen body. Like an ash felled by an axe, one’s body lay and, with its rotting, nourished the ground. This is the way it happened, and the way it happens today. For each moment dies and nourishes the next as it is birthed by God. Each year dies and nourishes the next as it is birthed by God. Each life ends and nourished the next as it is birthed by God. You who die and are reborn, in this season of death we remember you deeds. You who die and are reborn, in this season of life we remember your sacrifice. You who ide and are reborn, in this season of life and death we remember what happened, and we praise you in our living, and we praise you in our dying. Please keep back Thy servant also from willful sins, that they may not have dominion over me; then shall I be blameless, and I shall be clear from great transgression. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable before Thee, O Lord, my Rock, and my Redeemer. I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise shall continually be on my lips. My soul shall glory in the Lord; the humble shall hear of it and be glad. O exalt the Lord with me, and let us extol His name together. I sought the Lord, and He answered me, and delivered me from all my fears. The humble looked unto Him and were radiant; and their faces shall never be abashed. Here is a poor man who cried out; the Lord heard hum and saved him from all his troubles. The Angel of the Lord encamps round about them that revere Hum, and delivers them. O try and you shall see that the Lord is good; happy is the person that takes refuge in God. O revere the Lord, you who are His holy ones; for they who revere God suffer no want. They that deny God may lack, and suffer hunger; but they that seek the Lord shall not lack any good. Come, you children, hearken unto me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord. Who is the person that loves life, and desires long life filled with joy? Then keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking guile. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA |
Now Selling!
Cresleigh Meadows is now selling! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.
Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes.
Homeowners will love the convenient commuter access to nearly Sacramento and Yuba City.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Go.
The Owner’s ensuite in every #PlumasRanch home is fitted with a standing tub and large shower, meaning you get to choose what kind of spa experience you want each morning. 🧖♀️🧖♂️ https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/
Most Cresleigh homes can be personalized with options that add additional bedrooms, bathrooms, and square footage. Easily prepare meals from the gorgeous kitchen, further enhanced by a generous center island, plenty of cabinet space, and a desirable pantry.
Randolph Harris II International Institute 