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My God Sits in the Back of the Limousine, My God Has the House on the Cover of the Magazine!
When choosing between two evils, I always like to take the one I have never tried before. The justification for majority rule rests squarely on the political ends that the constitution is designed to achieve, and therefore on the two principles of justice. As a reminder, the first principle of justice states that 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. The second principle of justice states that 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 (the difference principle). The first principle of equal basic liberties is to be embodied in the political constitution, while the second principle applies primarily to economic institutions. Fulfillment of the first principle takes priority over fulfillment of the second principle, and within the second principle fair equality of opportunity takes priority over the difference principle. The first principle affirms that all citizens should have the familiar basic rights and liberties: liberty of conscience and freedom of association, freedom of speech and liberty of the person, the rights to vote, to hold public office, to be treated in accordance with the rule of law, and so on. The first principle accords these rights and liberties to all citizens equally. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Unequal rights would not benefit those who would get a lesser share of the rights, so justice requires equal rights for all, in all normal circumstances. The second distinctive feature of the first principle is that it requires fair value of the political liberties. The political liberties, concerned with the right to hold public office, the right to affect the outcome of national elections and so on. For these liberties, citizens who are similarly endowed and motivated should have similar opportunities to hold office, to influence elections, and so on regardless of how rich or poor they are. This fair value proviso has major implications for how elections should be funded and run. The second principle of justice has two parts. The first part, fair equality of opportunity, requires that citizens with the same talents and willingness to use them have the same educational and economic opportunities regardless of whether they were born rich or poor. In all parts of society there are to be roughly the same prospects of culture and achievement for those similarly motivated and endowed. So, for example, if we assume that natural endowments and the willingness to use them are evenly distributed across children born into different social classes, then within any type of occupation (generally specified) we should find that roughly one quarter of people in that occupation were born into the top 25 percent of the income distribution, one quarter were born into the second-highest 25 percent of the income distribution, one quarter were born into the lowest 25 percent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Since class of origin is a morally arbitrary fact about citizens, justice does not allow class origin to turn into unequal opportunities for education or meaningful work. The second part of the second principle is the difference principle, which regulates the distribution of wealth and income. Allowing inequalities of wealth and income can lead to a larger social product: higher wages can cover the costs of training and education, for example, and can provide incentives to fill jobs that are more in demand. The difference principle allows inequalities of wealth and income, so long as these will be to everyone’s advantage, and specifically to advantage of those who will be worst off. The difference principle requires, that is, that any economic inequalities be to the greatest advantage of those who are advantaged least. The difference principle is partly based on the negative thesis that the distribution of natural assets is undeserved. A citizen does not merit more of the social product simply because one was lucky enough to be born with the potential to develop skills that are currently in high demand. Yet this does not mean that everyone must get the same shares. The fact that citizens have different talents and abilities can be used to make everyone better office. In a society governed by the difference principle, citizens regard the distribution of natural endowments as a common asset that can benefit all. Those better endowed are welcome to use their gifts to make themselves better off, so long as their doing so also contributes to the good of those less well endowed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The difference principle this expresses a positive ideal, an ideal of deep social unity. In a society that satisfies the difference principle, citizens know that their economy works to everyone’s benefit, and that those who were lucky enough to be born with greater natural potentials are not getting richer at the expense of those who were less fortunate. In justice as fairness, humans agree to share one another’s fate. I have assumed that some form of majority rule is justified as the best available way of insuring just and effective legislation. It is compatible with equal liberty and possesses a certain naturalness; for if minority rule is allowed, there is no obvious criterion to select which one is decide and equality is violated. A fundamental part of the majority principle is that the procedure should satisfy the conditions of background justice. In this case these conditions are those of political liberty—freedom of speech and assembly, freedom to take part in public affairs and to influence by constitutional means the course of legislation—and the guarantee of the fair value of these freedoms. When this background is absent, the first principle of justice is not satisfied; yet even when it is present, there is no assurance that legislation with be enacted. One problem with this procedure of majority rule is that it may allow cyclical majorities. However, the primary defect from the point of view of justice is that it permits the violation of liberty. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
There is nothing to the view, then, that what the majority wills is right. In fact, none of the traditional conceptions of justice have held this doctrine, maintaining always that the outcome of the voting is subject to political principles. Although in given circumstances it is justified that the majority (suitably defined and circumscribed) has the constitutional right to make law, this does not imply that the laws enacted are just. The dispute of substances about majority rule concerns how it is best defined and whether constitutional constraints are effective and reasonable devices for strengthening the overall balance of justice. These limitations may often be used by entrenched minorities to preserve their illicit advantages. This question is one of political judgment and does not belong to the theory of justice. It suffices to note that while citizens normally submit their conduct to democratic authority, that is, recognized the outcome of a vote as establishing a binding rule, other things equal, they do not submit their judgment to it. A justice constitution is defined as a constitution that would be agreed upon by rational delegates in a constitutional convention who are guided by the two principles of justice. When we justify a constitution, we present considerations to show that it would be adopted under these conditions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Similarly, just laws and policies are those that would be enacted by rational legislators at the legislative stage who are constrained by a justice constitution and who are conscientiously trying to follow the principles of justice as their standard. When we criticize laws and policies, we try to show that they would not be chosen under this ideal procedure. Now since even rational legislators would often reach different conclusions, there is a necessity for a vote under ideal conditions. The restrictions on information will not guarantee agreement, since the tendencies of the general social facts will often be ambiguous and difficult to assess. The Lord has said that “there is a law, irrevocably decreed in Heaven before the foundations of this World, upon which all blessings are predicated—and when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 130.20-21. It would seem from this declaration that there is no permanent progress made in any field or in any place except it be through obedience to the governing law. We know this is true in the Heavens, because the Lord said: “That which is governed by law is also preserved by law and perfected and sanctified by the same. That which breaketh a law, and abideth not by law, but seeketh to become a law unto itself, and willeth to abide in sin [sin, being the breaking of the law], and altogether abideth in sin, cannot be sanctified by law, neither by mercy, justice, nor judgment. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
“For judgement goeth before the face of one who sitteth upon the throne and governeth and executeth all things. And one hath given a law unto all things, by which they move in their times and their seasons; and their courses are fixed, even the courses of the Heavens and the Earth, which comprehend the Earth and all the planets,” Doctrine and Covenants 88.34-35, 40, 42-43. This scripture tells us that all things in God’s economy, even those which to us seem inanimate, obey the laws by which they are governed. “The Earth [for example] abideh the law of a celestial kingdom, for it filleth the measure of its creation, and transgresseth not the law,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 88.25. Therefore, it shall be crowned with glory, even with the presence of God the Father; that bodies who are of the celestial kingdom may possess it forever and ever; and they who are not sanctified through the law which I have given unto you, even the law of Christ [which is His gospel—the perfect law of liberty] must inherit another kingdom, for one who is not able to abide the law of the celestial kingdom cannot abide a celestial glory. And one who cannot abide the law of a terrestrial kingdom cannot abide a terrestrial glory. And one who cannot abide the law of a telestial kingdom cannot abide a telestial glory,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 88.19-24. How blessed are Latter-day Saint to be assured by the revealed word of God that there will be no capriciousness in the World to come. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
We are so blessed that every soul will be rewarded according to the law that one has obeyed; all divine law is as immutable as the law of gravity; it is the same yesterday, today, and forever; judgment will be mercifully administered, but it will be administered pursuant to law, and it will not rob justice. Not only are we blessed by having this knowledge concerning the rule of law; we are twice blessed by having both a knowledge and an understanding of the laws by which we are to be judged. If we were to fail to obey the law, in our light of our knowledge of the perfect law of liberty, how shortsighted, how foolish, how tragic that would be. Latter-day Saints should strictly obey the laws of the government in which they live. By our own declaration of faith we are committed to do so, for we declare to the World that “we believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honouring, and sustaining the law,” reports Articles of Faith 1.12. This we do in harmony with the Lord’s command: “Let no human break the laws of the land, for one that keepeth the laws of God hath no need to break the laws of the land. Wherefore, be subject to the powers that be, until one reigns whose right it is to reign, and subdues all enemies under one’s feet,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 58.21-22. Civil authority is of divine origin. It may be more or less adapted to the needs of humans; more or less just and benevolent, but, even at its worst, it is better than anarchy. Revolutionary movements that aim at the abolition of government itself are contrary to the law of God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
When the rule of law breaks down in a family, a community, a state, or a nation, chaos reigns. The kingdoms of Heaven are to be free from chaos, because no one will be in any one of them who does not by one’s own free will obey the laws thereof. Here on Earth, some people steadfastly refuse to face such facts. We avoid them by stubbornly refusing to recognize the speed of change. It makes us feel better to defer the future. Even those closet to the cutting edge of technology and scientific research can scarcely believe the reality. Even they routinely underestimate the speed at which the future is breaking on our shores. Thus Dr. Richard J. Cleveland, speaking before a conference of organ transplant specialists, announced in January, 1967, that the first human heart transplant operation will occur “within five years.” Yet before the same year was our Dr. Christiaan Barnard had operated on a fifty-five-year-old grocer named Louis Washkansky, and a staccato sequence of heart transplant operation exploded like a string of firecrackers into the World’s awareness. In the meantime, success rates are rising steadily in kidney transplants to 97 percent. Successful liver, pancreas, and ovary transplants are also reported. Scientists and doctors are getting so good that they even have the ability to do face transplants now. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Such accelerating medical advances must compel profound changes in our ways of thinking, as well as our way of caring for the sick. Startling new legal, ethical and philosophical issues arise. What, for instance, is death? Does death occur when the heart stops beating, as we have traditionally believed? Or does it occur when the brain stops functioning? Hospitals are becoming more and more familiar with cases of patients kept alive through advanced medical techniques, but doomed to exist as unconscious vegetables. What are the ethics of condemning such a person to death to obtain a healthy organ needed for transplant to save the life of a person with a better prognosis? Lacking guidelines or precedents, we flounder over the moral and legal questions. Ghoulish rumors race through the medical community. There has been speculation about the possibility of future murder rings supplying healthy organs for unofficial surgeons whose patients are unwilling to wait until natural sources have supplied the heart or liver or pancreas they need. In Trenton, New Jersey USA—an Israeli citizen living in Brooklyn, New York USA, admitted to brokering three illegal kidney transplants for payments of $120,000.00 UDS or more before he was caught conspiring to organize another illegal sale. Levy Izhak Rosenbaum also known as Isaac Rosenbaum, age 60 at the time he brought to trial in 2011 (now age 70), plead guilty to an information charging him with three counts of acquiring, receiving, and otherwise transferring human organs for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation; and one count of conspiracy to do the same. Mr. Rosenbaum was originally charged with the conspiracy by Complain in July 2009. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
The defendant entered his guilty plea before U.S. District Judge Anne E. Thompson in Trenton federal court. Mr. Rosenbaum’s convictions were the first under the federal statue involving illegal market sales of kidneys from paid donors. “Mr. Rosenbaum admitted he was not new to the human kidney business when he was caught brokering what he thought was an organ trafficking,” U.S. Attorney Fishman said. “Trafficking in human organs is not only a grave threat to public health, it reserves lifesaving treatment for those who can best afford it at the expense of those who cannot. We will not tolerate such an affront to human dignity.” According to documents filed in this case and statements made in court: Mr. Rosenbaum admitted that from January 2006 through February 2009, he conspired with other to provide a service, in exchange for large payments, to individuals seeking kidney transplants by obtaining kidneys from paid donors. Specifically, Mr. Rosenbaum admitted to arranging three transplants on behalf of New Jersey residents that took place in December 2006, September 2008, and February 2009. Mr. Rosenbaum admitted that he was paid approximately $120, 000.00 USA, $150,000.00 USA, and $140,000.00 USD, respectively on behalf of these three recipients. Mr. Rosenbaum’s kidney business was exposed through the use of cooperating criminal defendant Solomon Dwek and an undercover FBI agent (the “UC”) who was posing as an employee of Dwek and who represented to Mr. Rosenbaum that her uncle was in need of a kidney transplant. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Dwek and the UC first met with Mr. Rosenbaum in mid-February 2008 at which time Mr. Rosenbaum informed them that “it’s illegal to buy and sell organs,” but assured them that “I’m doing this a long time.” Mr. Rosenbaum explained to Dwek and the UC that he would help the recipient and the donor concoct a fictitious story to make it appear that the transplant was the product of a genuine donation and that he would be in charge of babysitting the donor upon the donor’s arrival from overseas. In Washington, the National Academy of Science, backed by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, has been studying social policy issues springing from advances in the life sciences. At Stanford, a symposium, also funded by Russell Sage, examines methods for setting up transplant organ banks, the economics of an organ market, and evidence of the economics of an organ market, and evidences of class or racial discrimination in organ availability. The possibility of cannibalizing bodies or corpses for usable transplant organs, grisly as it is, will serve to accelerate further the pace of change by lending urgency to research in the field of artificial organs—plastic or electronic substitutes for the heart or liver or spleen. (Eventually, even these may be made unnecessary when we learn how to regenerate damaged organs or severed limbs, growing new ones as the lizard now grows a tail.) #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
And it is totally possible that the human body could be advanced to regrow limbs, organs, and other healthy tissues as it already replaces blood, hair, teeth, nail, skin and you see how can manifest and growth tumors and cancer. So if scientists are able to unlock the secrets of the human body, stopping death and loss of organs and life is totally possible. The drive to develop spare parts for failing human bodies will be stepped up as demand intensified. The development of an economical artificial heart, Professor Lederberg says, “is only a few transient failures away.” Professors R. M. Kenedi of the bio-engineering group at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow believes that “artificial replacements for tissues and organs may well have become commonplace.” For some organs, this is in fact, a reality. Already more than 3 million cardiac patients Worldwide—including a former Supreme Court justice—are alive because they carry, stitched into their chest cavity, a tiny pacemaker—a device that sends pulses of electricity to activate the hearts. Each year 600,000 pacemakers are implanted. Approximal 90,000 heart valve substitutes are now implanted in the United States of America and 280,000 Worldwide each year; it is estimated that nearly half are mechanical valves and half are bioprosthetic valves. Implanting hearing aids, artificial kidneys, arteries, hip joints, lungs, eye sockets and other parts are all in various stages of early development. We shall, before many decades are past, implant tiny, aspirin-sized sensors in the body to monitor blood pressures, pulse, respiration and other functions, and tiny transmitters to emit a signal when something goes wrong. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Such signals will feed into giant diagnostic computer centers upon which the medicine of the future will be based. Some of us will carry a tiny platinum plate and a dime-sized “stimulator” attached to the spine. By turning a midget “radio” on and off we will be able to activate the stimulator and kill the pain. Initial work on these pain-control mechanisms is already under way at the Case Institute of Technology. Push button pain killers are already being used by certain cardiac patients. Such developments will lead to vast new bio-engineering industries, chains of medical-electronic repair stations, new technical professions and a reorganization of the entire health system. They will change life expectancy, shatter insurance company life tables, and bring about important shifts in the human outlook. Surgery will be less frightening to the average individual; implantation routine. The human body will come to be seen as modular. Through application of the modular principle—preservation of the whole through systematic replacement of transient components—we may add two or three decades to the average life span of the entire population. Imagine that, people living to be an average of 100 to 120 and strong and healthy. Unless, however, we develop far more advanced understanding of the brain than we now have, this could lead to one of the greatest ironies in history. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Sir George Pickering Regius professor of medicine at Oxford, has waned that unless we watch out, “those with senile brains will form an ever increasing fraction of the inhabitants of the Earth. I find this,” he added unnecessarily, “a terrifying prospect. With President Joe Biden being the 46th President of the United States and the oldest President so far, being 78 years of age, many feel this is why Speaker on the United States House, Nancy Pelosi fought to remind the people about the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The 25th Amendment deals with Presidential Disability and Succession, which says that is a President becomes unable to do his or her job, the Vice President shall become President. This amendment was passed by Congress 6 July 1965, and ratified 10 February 1967. Such terrifying prospects will drive us toward more accelerated research into the brain—which, in turn, will generate still further radical changes in the society. Today we strive to make heart valves or artificial plumbing that imitate the original they are designed to place. We have even been able to use valves from the hearts of pigs into human beings. We strive for functional equivalence. Once we have mastered the basic problems, however, we shall not merely install plastic aortas in people because their original aorta is about to fail. We shall install specially-designed parts that are better than the original, and then we shall move on to install parts that provide the user with capabilities that were absent in the first place. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Just as genetic engineering holds out the promise of producing “super-people,” so, too, does organ technology suggest the possibility of track stars with extra-capacity lungs or hearts; sculptors with a neural device that intensifies sensitivity to texture; students with super computer brains. We will no longer implant merely to save a life, but to enhance it—to make possible the achievement of moods, states, conditions or ecstasies that are presently beyond us. Under these circumstances, what happens to our ago-old definitions of “human-ness?” How will it feel to be part protoplasm and part transistor? Exactly what possibilities will it open? What limitations will it place on work, play, socialism, intellectual or aesthetic responses? What happens to the mind when they body is changed? Questions like these cannot be long deferred, for advanced fusions of human and machine—called “Cyborgs”—are closer than more people suspect. We are constantly faced by the hoariest of all problems, which is “Why did the Universe arise out of the depth and darkness of the Absolute Spirit?” The Seer can offer us a picture of the way in which this Spirit has involved itself into matter and is evolving itself back to self-knowledge. That is only the How and not the Why of the World. The truth is not only that nobody has ever known, that nobody knows, and that nobody will ever know the final and fundamental purpose of creation, but that God Himself does not even know—for God too has arisen out of the Absolute no less than the Universe, has found Himself emanated from the primeval darkness and utter silence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Even God must be content to watch the flow and not wonder why, for both God and humans must merge and be absorbed when they face the Absolute for the last time. (In the symbolic language of the Bible, “For humans cannot meet God face to face and live.”) That which IS can be none other than Final Being itself, not dependent on anything or anyone, mysteriously self-sufficient without a shape, yet all shaped things and creature have emerged from elements which trace back to it. Forever alone, there was none to witness the Beginning. As Mind the Real is static, as World-Mind it is dynamic. As Godhead It alone is in the stillness of being; but as God it is the source, substance, and power of the Universe. As Mind there is no second thing, no second intelligence to ask the question why it stirred and breathed forth World-Mind, hence why the whole World-process exists. Only humans ask this question and it returns unanswered. For all of us, for the witless and for the wise, there are unanswerable questions in life and we must learn to live with them. None of us is a full and finalized encyclopedia, for however, far we may penetrate into the meaning of things we are always confronted in the end by the Unknowable Mystery. We do not know why the whole process of involution and evolution ever started at all: because we find that there is in the deepest metaphysical sense no becoming and process at all, there is only the Real. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
At the ultimate level there is neither purpose nor plan because there is no creation. Mind, which forever is, can undergo n change in itself and no multiplication of itself. If it could, it would not be what it is—the Ultimate, the Unconditioned, and the Unique. Nor, being perfect, complete, could it have desire, purpose, aim, or motive for itself. Therefore it could not have projected the Universe on account of any benefit sought or gain needed. There is no answer to the question why the Universe was sent forth. It is to impose human limitation upon the transcendental Godhead to say that It has any eternal purpose to fulfill for Itself in the cosmos, whether that purpose be the establishment of a perfect society on Earth or the training of individuals to enter into fellowship with It and participate in Its creative work. Purpose implies a movement in times whereas the Godhead is also the Timeless. Neither this Earth nor the societies upon it can be necessary to God’s serenely self-sufficient being. Yet these fallacies are still taught by the theology of theistic orthodox. We know as much, and as little, about the Primal Mind as we know why there was a beginning of the Universe—that is, precisely nothing. If being asked how to prevent oneself from being deceived by these pseudo-intuitions, it can be said that a useful rule is to check them against other sources on the same subject and see if they all harmonize. If, for example, fifty inspired humans who have written on the subject teach what contradictions the alleged intuition, then there is something wrong on one side or the other and careful investigation is called for. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
It is always safer to ascertain what the great scriptural texts or the classic mystical testaments have to tell on the matter and not depend solely on what one’s intuition tells. We need more. And most of us—deep down—cannot deny it. There is a core of truth buried in every heart, a truth that we cannot escape. All-Father God, protector of travelers, please guards us, please guide us, please bring us through in safety and ease on our journey today. As I enter your realm, spirits of the air, as I mount to the clouds in this airplane, I place myself in your hands. There, among the vagaries of the winds, I will not be afraid, because I know you are my allies. As I fly today, please be at my side. Please protect me until I land again safely. Who is like unto Thee, O Lord, among the mighty? Who is like unto Thee, glorious in holiness, revered in praises, doing wonders? At the shore of the Red Sea, the redeemed offered praise unto Thy name. Singing a new song, they proclaimed Thy sovereignty: “The Lord shall reign for ever and ever.” O Rock of America, arise to help Thy scattered folk; deliver all who are crushed beneath oppression’s heel. Thou art our Saviour: the Lord of Hosts is Thy name; blessed art Thou, O Lord, Redeemer of America. O Lord, please open Thou my lips and my mouth shall declare Thy praise. Expand your faith so you can access everything God has in store. Allow God to be present in your life and have faith in Him, and you will see God make miracles and blessings that you can only imagine in your best dreams! #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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The Sun Had Risen, but the Glimmer Barely Penetrated the Thick Darkness!
he real superstar is a man or a woman raising kids on $150 a week. The question is not at what age I want to retire, it is at what income. Each generation must not only preserve the gains of culture and civilization, and maintain intact those just institutions that have been established, but it must also put aside in each period of time a suitable amount of real capital accumulation. This saving may take various forms from net investment in leaning and education. Assuming for the moment that a just savings principle is available which tells us how great investment should be, the level of the social minimum is determined. Suppose for simplicity that the minimum is adjusted by transfer paid for by proportional expenditure (or income) taxes. In this case raising the minimum entails increasing the proportion by which consumption (or income) is taxed. Presumably as this fraction becomes larger there comes a point beyond which one of two things happens. Either the appropriate savings cannot be made or the greater taxes interfere so much with economic efficiency that the prospects of the least advantaged in the present generation are no longer improved but begin to decline. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
That human-thing relationship is growing more and more temporary may be illustrated by examining the culture surrounding the little girl or boy who trades in one’s Barbie doll. This child soon learns that Barbie dolls are by no means the only physical objects that pass into and out of one’s young life at a rapid clip. Pampers, bibs, paper napkins, Kleenex, towels, non-returnable soda bottles—all are used up quickly in one’s home and ruthlessly eliminated. Corn muffins come in baking tins that are thrown away after one use. Spinach is encased in plastic sacks that can be dropped into a pan of boiling water for heating, and then thrown away. TV dinners are cooked and often served on throw-away trays. One’s homes is a large processing machine through which objects flow, entering and leaving, at a faster and faster rate of speed. From birth on, one is inextricably embedded in a throw-away culture. The idea of using a product once or for a brief period and then replacing it, runs counter to the grain of societies or individuals steeped in a heritage of poverty. However, some people are not used to disposable products. They like to keep their things, even old things, rather than throw them away. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
We represented one company that wanted to introduce a kind of plastic throw-away curtain. We did a marketing study for them and found the resistance too strong. This resistance, however, is dying all over the developed World. From cardboard milk containers to the rockets that power space vehicles, products created for short-term or one-time use are becoming more numerous and crucial to our way of life. The recent introduction of paper and quasi-paper clothing carried the trend toward disposability a step further. Fashion boutiques and working-class clothing stores have sprouted whole departments devoted to gaily coloured and imaginatively designed paper apparel. Fashion magazines display breathtakingly sumptuous gowns, coats, pajamas, even wedding dresses made of paper. The bride pictured in one of these wears a long white train of lace-like paper that, the caption writer notes, will make “great kitchen curtains” after the ceremony. Like the reverse of what happened in the film The Sound of Music. Paper clothes are particularly suitable for children. Writes one fashion expert: “Little girls and boys will soon be able to spill ice cream, draw pictures and make cutouts on their clothes while their mothers smile benignly at their creativity.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
And for the adults who want to express their own creativity, there is even a “paint-yourself-dress or suit” complete with brushes. Price: $20.00. Price, of course, is a critical factor behind the paper explosion. Thus a department store features simple A-line dresses and men’s breathable underwear, made of what it calls “devil-may-care cellulose fiber and nylon.” The dresses start off at about $50.00 dollars and the men’s underwear about $55.00 a pair. It is almost more cost effective for the consumer to buy and discard a new one than to send an ordinary dress to the cleaners. Soon it will be. However, more than economics is involved, for the extension of the throw-away culture has important psychological consequences. We develop a throw-away mentality to match our throw-away products. This mentality produces, among other things, a set of radically altered values with respect to property. However, the spread of disposability through the society also implies decreased durations in human-thing relationships. Instead of being linked with a single object over a relatively long span of time, we are linked for brief periods with the succession of objects that supplant it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Thus it seems evident, for example, that the classical principle of utility leads in the wrong direction for questions of justice between generations. For if one takes the size of the population as variable, and postulates a high marginal productivity of capital and a very distant time horizon, maximizing total utility may lead to an excessive rate of disposal (at least in the near future). However, since from a moral point of view there are no grounds for discounting future well-being on the basis of pure time preference, the conclusion is all the more likely that the greater advantages of future generations will be sufficiently large to compensate for present sacrifices. This may prove true if only because with more capital and better technology it will be possible to support a sufficiently large population. Thus the utilitarian doctrine may direct us to demand heavy sacrifices of the less affluent generations for the sake of greater advantages, which balance the losses of some against the benefits to others, appears even less justified in the case of generations than among contemporaries. Even if we cannot define a precise just savings principle, we should be able to avoid this sort of extreme. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
When people are poor and saving is difficult, a lower rate of saving should be required; whereas in a wealthier society greater saving may reasonably be expected since the real burden is less. Eventually once just institutions are firmly established, the net accumulation required falls to zero. At this point a society meets its duty of justice by maintaining just institutions and preserving their material base. Each passes on to the next a fair equivalent in real capital as defined by a just saving principle. (It should be kept in mind there that capital is not only factories and machines, and so on, but also the knowledge and culture, as well as the techniques and skills, that make possible just institutions and the fair value of liberty.) This equivalent is in return for what is received from previous generations that enables the later ones to enjoy a better life in a more just society. Only those in the first generation do not benefit, let us say, for while they begin the whole process, they do not share in the fruits of their provision. Nevertheless, since it is assumed that a generation cares for its immediate descendants, as fathers say care for their sons, a just savings principle, or more accurately, certain limits on such principles, would be acknowledged. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
It is also characteristic of the contract doctrine to define a just state of society at which the entire course of accumulation aims. The ethical problem is that of agreeing on a path over time which treats all generations justly during the whole course of human history. What seems fair to persons in the original position defines justice in this instance as in others. Thus imagining themselves to be fathers, say, people are to ascertain how much they should set aside for their sons by noting what they would believe themselves entitled to claim of their fathers. When they arrive at an estimate that seems fair from both side, with due allowance made for the improvement in their circumstances, then the fair rate (or range of saving rates) for that stage is specified. Now once this is done for all stages, we have defined the just saving principle. When this principle is followed, adjacent generations cannot complain of one another; and in fact no generation can find fault with any other no matter how far removed in time. Justice does not require that early generations save so that later ones are simply more wealthy. Saving is demanded as a condition of brining about the full realization of just institutions and the fair value of liberty. If additional accumulation is to be undertaken, it is for other reason. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
It is a mistake to believe that a just and good society must wait upon a high material standard of life. When humans want is meaningful work in free association with others, these associations regulating their relations to one another within a framework to just basic institutions. To achieve this state of things great wealth is not necessary. In fact, if not a temptation to indulge and emptiness, beyond some point it is more likely to be an absolute hindrance, a meaningless distraction. The shift toward transience is even manifest in architecture—precisely that part of the physical environment that in the past contributed mostly heavily to human’s sense of permanence. The child who trades in his or her Barbie doll cannot but also recognize the transience of buildings and other large structures that surround one. We raze landmarks. We tear down whole streets and cities and put new ones up at a mind-numbing rate. The average age of dwellings has steadily declined from being virtually infinite in the days of caves to approximately a hundred years for houses built in the United States of America’s colonial days, to about forty years at present. The American made one’s World yesterday, and one knows exactly how fragile, how shifting it is. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Buildings in New York, New York USA literally disappear overnight, and the face of a city can change completely in a way. The horror of living in New York is living in a city without a history. All eight of my great-great grand-parents lived in the city, and only one of the houses they lined in is still standing. That is what I mean by the vanishing past. Less patrician New Yorkers, whose ancestors landed n America more recently, arriving there from the barrios of Puerto Rico, the villages of Eastern Europe or the plantations of the South, might voice their feelings quite differently. Yet the vanishing past is a real phenomenon, and it is likely to become far more widespread, with Trump Tower being stripped of its name, engulfing many of the history-drenched cities of Europe. New York and even now California is a continual evolutionary process of evacuations, demolitions, removals, temporarily vacant lots, new installations and repeat. This process is identical in principle to the annual rotation of crops in farm acreage-plowing, planting the new seed, harvesting, plowing under, and putting in another type of crop. Most people look upon the building operations blocking New York’s streets as temporary annoyances, soon to disappear in a static peace. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Many people still think of permanence as normal, a hangover from the Newtonian view of the Universe. However, those who have lived in and with New York since the end of the century have literally experienced living with Einsteinian relativity. That children, in fact, internalize this “Einsteinian relativity” was brought home to me forcibly by a personal experience. Some time ago my wife sent my son, age twelve, to 725 5th Avenue to get the 5th Avenue Filet Mignon, steak fires, sauteed spinach, cobb salad without avocado, Trump’s Ice Cream. It is just five blocks from our 50-story apartment on the Upper East Side. Our little boy had been there at least six or seven times before. An hour and a half later he returned perplexed. “It must have been torn down,” he said, “I could not find it.” It had not been. New to the neighbourhood, Rickey had merely looked on the wrong block. But he is a child of the Age of Transience, and his immediate assumption—that the building had been razed and replaced—was a natural one for a twelve-year-old growing up in the United States at this time. Such an idea would probably never have occurred to a child faced with a similar predicament even a century ago. The physical environment was far more durable, our links with it less transient. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
It is a natural fact that generations are spread out in time and actual exchanges between them take place only in one direction. We can do something for posterity but it can do nothing for us. What is just or unjust is how institutions deal with natural limitations and the way they are set up to take advantage of historical possibilities. Obviously if all generations are to gain (except perhaps the first), they must choose a just savings principle if followed brings it about that each receives from its predecessors and does its fair share for those which come later. It is now clear why the difference principle does not apply to the saving problem. There is no way for later generations to improve the situation of the least fortunate first generation. Either earlier generations have saved or they have not; there is nothing the parties can do to affect it. It seems best to preserve the present time of entry interpretation and therefore to adjust the motivation condition. We can now see that persons in different generations have duties and obligations to one another just as contemporaries do. The present generation cannot do as it pleases but is bound by the principles that would be chosen in the original position to define justice between persons at different moments of time. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
In addition, humans have a natural duty to uphold and to further just institutions and for this the improvement of civilization up to a certain level is required. An examination of the history of humanity suggested that humans in our epoch are so different from humans in previous ties that it seems unrealistic to assume that humans in every age have had in common something that can be called “human nature.” It seems simple to know when a human individual comes into existence, but in fact it is not quite as simple as it seems. The answer might be: at the time of conception, when the fetus has assumed definite human form, in the act of birth, at the end of weaning; or one might even claim that most humans have not yet been fully born by the time they die. We would best decline to fix a day or an hour for “the birth” of an individual, and speak rather of a process in the course of which a person comes into existence. Indeed, if we look at human’s individual development in terms of historical tie, we might say that human proper was born only a few minutes ago. Or we might even think one is still in the process of birth, that the umbilical cord has not yet been served, and that complications have arisen that make it appear doubtful whether humans will ever be born or whether they are to be stillborn. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Does the extraordinary development of the human’s brain make up for one’s instinct deficit? To some degree it does. Humans are guided by their intellect to make right choices. However, we know also how weak and unreliable this instrument is. It is easily influenced by human’s desires and passions and surrenders to their influence. Human’s brain is insufficient not only as a substitute for the weakened instincts, but it complicates the task of living tremendously. By this I do not refer to instrumental intelligence, the use of thought as an instrument for the manipulations of objects in order to satisfy one’s needs. Human’s thinking has acquired an entirely new quality, that of self-awareness. Gifted with self-awareness and reason, humans are aware of oneself as a being separate from nature and from others; one is aware of one’s powerlessness, of one’s ignorance; one is aware of one’s end: death. Self-awareness, reason, and imagination have giving the terrestrial being a different kind of existence. Their emergence has made humans into an anomaly, the deviation of the Universe. They are part of nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to change them, yet they transcend nature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Humans are set apart while being a part; they are homeless, yet not chined to the home they share with all creatures. Cast into this World at an accidental place and time they are forced out of it accidentally and against their will. Being aware of oneself, one realizes one’s powerlessness and the limitations of one’s existence. One is never free from the dichotomy of one’s existence: one cannot rid oneself of one’s mind, even if ne would one to; one cannot rid oneself of one’s body as long as one is alive—and one’s body makes one want to be alive. Human’s live cannot be lived by repeating the pattern of their species; one must live. Humans are the only beings that do not feel at home in nature, who can feel evicted from paradise, the only terrestrial being for whom one’s own existence is a problem that one has to solve and from which one cannot escape. One cannot go back to the prehuman state of harmony with nature, and one does not know where one will arrive if one goes forward. So many people are worried about climate change, but what is more worrisome about the future is corruption. If the Constitution of the United States of America is not enforced and human right are ignored, no matter what the climate is like, it will not be a safe place your future generations. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Human’s existential contradiction results in a state of constant disequilibrium. This disequilibrium distinguishes one from the animal, which lives, as it were, in harmony with nature. This does not mean, of course, that the animal necessarily lives a peaceful and happy life, but that it has its specific ecological niche to which its physical and mental qualities have been adapted by the process of evolution. Human’s existential, and hence unavoidable disequilibrium can be relatively stable when one has found, with the support of one’s culture, a more or less adequate way of coping with one’s existential problems. However, this relative stability does not imply that the dichotomy has disappeared; it is merely dormant and becomes manifest as soon as the conditions for this relative stability change. Indeed, in the process of human’s self-creation this relative stability is upset again and again. Humans, in their history, change their environment, and in this process one changes oneself. One’s knowledge increases, but so does one’s awareness of one’s developing state; one experiences oneself as an individual, and not only as a member of one’s tribe, and with this one’s sense of separateness and isolation grows. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Humans create larger and more efficient social units, led by powerful leaders—and one becomes frightened and submissive. One attains a certain amount of freedom—and becomes afraid of this very freedom. One’s capacity for material production grows, but in the process one becomes greedy and egotistical, a slave of the things one created. Every new state of disequilibrium forces humans to seek for new equilibrium. Indeed, what has often been considered human’s innate drive for progress is one’s attempt to find a new if possible better equilibrium. The new forms of equilibrium by no means constitute a straight line of human improvement. Something more painful than fire often times consumes the human body and it begins to burn within one’s soul. One starts to understand that no matter what one has done or not done, no matter what the circumstances, no punishment comes to us in this life on Earth which is undeserved. We are all guilty of putting Jesus Christ to death because of our fallen nature and our need of the atonement His death made. We either recognize our sinful selves, or our sentence of death, and our deserving of that sentence, which leads us to repent and believe—or we curse God and die. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Sin is within us. For if there is anything worse than our sin, it is our infinite capacity to rationalize it away. The evil deep within all of us is sometimes thrust before us by the conviction of the Holy Spirit, forcefully and painfully. And it makes us feel unclean. We become the helpless thief nailed to that cross, and what we see within us is so ugly that we can do nothing but cry out to God for help. Without the conviction of the Holy Spirit and the repentance that must follow, there is no way out of our predicament. We have the capacity to change anything about our lives—careers, jobs, homes, cars, Barbie dolls, even spouses—but we cannot change our own sinful nature. There must be an answer to the dilemma of evil within, because I have seen lives changed among the Christian inmates. However, for the rest of us and all the freedom we have, what a desperate plight. Trapped in and by our own sin. Thankfully, there is an answer to the wrenching dilemma. Loving God. When we see the reality of our sin, when we come to face to face with it and look into the raging fires of hell itself, and when we then repent and believe and are delivered from that plight, our entire being is filled with unspeakable gratitude to the God who sent His Son to that cross for us. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
We must express that gratitude. But how? Simply stated: by living the way God commands us. By obedience. That is what the Scriptures mean by holiness or sanctification—believers are set apart for holy living. Therefore, holiness is the only possible response to God’s grace. Holy living is loving God. However, everyone who has tried to live a holy life knows, holiness is the toughest, most demanding, vocation in the World. Our progress in holiness depends on God and ourselves—on God’s grace and on our will to be holy. God loves the human nature assumed by the Word of God in the person of Christ more than He loves all the Angels; for that nature is better, especially on the ground of the union with the Godhead. However, of speaking of human nature in general, and comparing it with the angelic, the two are found equal, in the order of grace and of glory; since according to Revelation 21.17 the measure of a human and of an Angel is the same. Yet so that, in this respect, some Angels are found nobler than some humans, and some human nobler than some Angels. However, as to natural condition an Angel is better than a human. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
God therefore did not assume human nature because He loved humans, absolutely speaking, more; but because the needs of humans were greater; just as the master of a house may give some costly delicacy to a sick servant, that one does not give to one’s own son in sound health. And now we can begin to speak of “sanctification,” as a condition of the human soul established in imparted (not just imputed) righteousness. It is the condition of soul in the mature children of light. What are we to make of it? Especially, is it to be taken as a goal for every apprentice of Jesus? Is sanctification sensible, or is it magical? What exactly is sanctification anyway? This is a matter that used to be much better understood than it is now. The work of Jesus Christ in the World is twofold. It is a work accomplished for us, destined to effect reconciliation between God and humans; it is work accomplished in us, with the object of effecting our sanctification. By the one a right relation is established between God and us; by the other, the fruit of the reestablished order is secured. By the former, the condemned sinner is received order is secured. By the former, the condemned sinner is received into the state of grace; by the latter the pardoned sinner is associated with the life of God. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
How many express themselves as if, when forgiveness with the peace which it procures has been once obtained, all is finished and the work of salvation is complete! They seem to have no suspicion that salvation consists in the health of the soul, and that the health of the soul consists in holiness. Forgiveness is not the reestablishment of health; it is the crisis of convalescence. If God thinks fit to declare the sinner righteous, it is in order that one may by that means restore oneself to holiness. Christ designs to make us both safe and sound. Justification gives the first—safety; sanctification gives the second—soundness. Sanctification does not mean perfection reached, but the progress of the divine life toward perfection. Sanctification is the Christianizing of the Christian. Any human who thinks oneself is a Christian, and that one has accepted Christ for justification, when one did not at the same time accept one for sanctification, is miserably deluded in that very experience. Not culture, but crucifixion, is what the Holy Spirit prescribes for the natural human. Sanctification is not a matter of course, which will go on whatever we do, or o not do. It requires a direct superintendence and surgery on the one hand, and, on the other hand a practical hatred of evil on our part that cooperates with the husbandry of God. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
The Holy Spirit enables the Christian, through increasing faith, more fully and consciously to appropriate Christ, and this progressively to make conquest of the remaining sinfulness of one’s nature. These comments fill out the meaning of the definition of sanctification as that continuous operation of the Holy Spirit, by which the holy disposition imparted in regeneration is maintained and strengthened. The intuition should be accorded the highest place among human’s faculties. It should always lead or direct them. Knowledge of the facts concerning humans and their nature, their general destiny and spiritual evolution, can be gained by the intuition; but information concerning the details of one’s personal history must be gleaned, if at all, by the physical faculty. The intuition appears indirectly in aesthetic ecstasy and intellectual creativity, in the pricking of conscience, in the longing for relief from anxieties, or peace of mind. It appears directly only in mystical realization. The intuition comes from, and leads to, God. It is the strength or feebleness of our intuition which determines the grace of our spiritual evolution. What begins as a gentle surrender to intuition for a few minutes, one day resolves into a complete surrender of the ego to God for all time. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
The intuitive method should not be asked to solve problems which can easily solved by the reason; otherwise it may fail to respond. On the other hand, when intuition is working, intellect should retire. No human idea can account for its own existence without testifying to the prior existence of a human mind. The World as idea can only account for its own existence by pointing to a World-Mind. And it is equally a fact that the highest kind of existence discoverable to us in the Universe is mental existence. In using the name “Mind” for God, I but follow some of the highest examples from antiquity, such as Aristotle in Greece, Hermes Trismegistus in Egypt, Asvaghosha in India, and the Patriarch Hui Neng in China. For us who are philosophically minded, the World-Mind truly exists. For us it is God, and for us there is a relationship with it—the relationship of devotion and aspiration, of communion and meditation. All the abstract talk about nonduality may go on, but in the end the talkers must humble themselves before the infinite Being until they are nothing and until they are lost in the stillness—Its stillness. Blessed one, please come near to me and hear my prayer. You who have, since ancient times, listened to my people’s words, please hear my prayer now. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
Great is your power, and perfectly is it applied, with artful skill, with respect for beauty. My own might is little indeed; yours is beyond imagining. Please use your power in my interests: please grant me my wishes, please accomplish my objectives. Let us praise the name of God for the Lord takes delight in His people; He adorns the humble with salvation. Let the faithful exult in glory; let them sing for joy ere they go to sleep. Praises of God are on their lips, and a two-edged sword in their hand; to bring judgment upon the wicked nations, and chastisement upon the peoples; to bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron; to execute upon them the prescribed judgment; He is the glory of all His faithful. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Praise God in His sanctuary; praise Him in the firmament of His power. Praise Him for His mighty deeds; praise Him according to His abundant greatness. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Hallelujah Blessed be the Lord forevermore. Amen, Amen. Blessed be the Lord out of America, one who dwells in the United States. Hallelujah. Blessed be the Lord God, the God of America who alone does wondrous things. Blessed by His glorious name forever; and let the whole Earth be filled with His glory. Amen, Amen. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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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
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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.
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I Have a Little Shadow that Goes in and Out with Me
The knights-errant, who wandered about to clear the World of dragons and giants, never entertained the least doubt with regard to the existence of these monsters. What is a human? This is the most important question which has ever been put before the mind. The idea of a human which exists in and is eternally known by the World-Mind is a master-idea. When we can learn what the true worth of a human is and wherein lies one’s real salvation, we shall learn the most practical of all things. For this, more than anything else, will show us how to live on Earth peacefully, prosperously, healthily, and usefully. If a human does not know what one is in the very essence of one’s human beingness, one does not really know what one is talking about. Scientific concepts of the nature of humans which leave out the intuitive and spiritual element in it as existing independently and in its own level, will always remain inadequate to explain humans, however brilliant they themselves admittedly often are. If a human’s life were nothing more than a physiochemical process, then human’s highest aspirations and intuitions, unselfishness and aestheticism would still need an explanation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
For more than a century we have been listening to what humans think about the Universe. It might be more illuminating, now, to learn what the Universe thinks about humans. The more one perceives the immensity of intelligence behind the World-Idea, the more one perceives the insignificance of one’s own entity in relation to it. This increasing humility is in striking contrast to the increasing pride which so many intellectuals develop. It is not arrogantly to overrate the function of humans in the Universe to say that one has a co-operative and creative role to play in it. Those who point to one’s insignificance and helplessness do well, but they do not do enough. If experience teaches anything at all, it teaches the littleness of humans but the greatness of Humans. Science frightened humans when, in the last century, it told them that they were not the constant attention of God, as they believed but a most insignificant particle in an immense Universe. Against this immense cosmic background, we may see the paltriness of human pride, the ridiculousness of human conceit. Although it is not possible to offer irrefutable scientific prof of the doctrine of spiritual evolution, it can be shown to be as reasonable a doctrine as any of is rivals. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
And for those who have had mystical experience of the divine presence behind the mind, of divine wisdom being the cosmos, it is the only acceptable doctrine. For a while after birth, the infant has experiences and memory-traces of experiences, but these are isolated and not connected with each other. The infant’s mind is then like the first map of an unexplored country, mostly blank spaces. Or, since that is too static a picture, the infant’s mind would have a number of what is called units of experience floating around in it, more or less connected with each other but as yet in no ordered or meaningful fashion. Slowly they become organized in gradually more enduring ways. As experiences continue to happen, and repeatedly have common elements, connections begin to be made. These connections are like threads—nerve fibers. The processes referred to are similar but the pictures are different because people need different elements to enliven their imagination. As further experiences become introjected, units of experience can begin to merge, to integrate. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
This integration is complex business. There is both fusion and fission, both merging and separation as things begin to sort themselves out. Some units of experience will merge with others into more general organizations, but others will separate out (or more accurately will have followings) before merging elsewhere. How this will happen will depend on what “followings” the experiences have in common. Experiences, at this very early stage in life, integrate and develop toward conceptual status, but we can safely say that these experiences are very different form their adult equivalent. Infants cannot organize their World in adult fashion because not enough has happened yet to get more than some very blurry-edged units of experience, each rather separate from the others in some ways, and each incorporating that the observer might call inappropriate (that is misclassified) components. We may think of a sea with floating bits of seaweed, shipwreck wood, fishes, and birds. Slowly, under the impact of further experiences, the flotsam and jetsam of events begin to fit together and to merge into more complex islands, floating in the sea. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
This merging is accompanied by all kinds of differentiation: all fishes are organized under the heading “fish,” all seaweed—wherever it is and of whatever kind—with seaweed, all gulls with gulls and separate from albatross, and so on. In at least one way, the metaphor of “islands” is a dangerous one, for the early clusters of memory-traces do not disappear upon reorganization, the way islands would disappear if they were magically shunted elsewhere to join up with others. We should rather say new followings both give new significance to the experience and also submerge it in the new contexts, just as a figure may be harder to find once it has been put into a new context. Meanings depend on context. However, the original meanings are not destroyed in the process of further organization—in regression something like the original experiences can be re-experienced. To return from these imaginative flights back to more sedate metaphors: from the beginning of life, experiences leave their mark. That is from the beginning of life, an experience becomes an internalized object-relation with potentially three elements: a sense of self, a sense of other people and things, and a sense of what goes on between the two. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
And almost from the beginning, some aspects of some experiences have something in common with what has already been experienced. And almost from the beginning, some aspects of some experiences have something in common with what has already been experienced. The common factor may lie mainly in the regions of self-imagery, or in the regions representing other people and things, or in the regions registering relating and feeling, or in all of them, of course. Because of this, our experiences of ourselves are affected by the structures we already have, although of course the later experience may modify them. Similarly our experiences of other people and things are affected by already established structures reflecting our sense of other people and things, although these are, in turn, modified. From the earliest days on, then, differentiating and integrating processes are expanding, solidifying, attenuating, structuring, organizing. The boundaries between self and other (ego-boundaries) become ever more delineated, what the ego (or the self) exerts increasingly more central control over perception and action. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
As life unfolds, experiences are integrated into more and more complex structures. More object-relations are continually acquired, internalized, differentiated, integrated, made part of the person. This complex reorganizing and integrating does not proceed evenly: there will be some highly organized structures, and others less highly organized: some experiences will be more tightly integrated (that is with many connections to other structures) and some will be connected very loosely indeed. The more easily new experiences are absorbed into structures which already exist (that is the more easily they are connected with them, and organized and integrated with them), the less we notice them. We hardly ever seen experiences for what they are at first glance—our existing structures are so tightly organized that we do not allow the actual information to reach us consciously. Concepts that are strongly connected with other structures and ideas are more difficult to abstract out again. However, things that are more tightly organized as structured patterns (that is they are less integrated with the surrounding structures and less embedded in them), are more easily noticed or understood. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Of course, readers who have made a hobby of looking deeper at puzzling things and deceptions will already have strongly established structures with programmes to look for the catch, and they will see exactly what is in the message—but that is just the point I am making. Stronger and more tightly organized structures will act as a context for new experiences, giving meaning which depend on the established context. A slap in the face can be experienced: purely as pain (non-integrated), or as mother attacking me, or as mother angry because I spilled honey all over the tablecloth, or as mother inadvertently hitting me as she whirled round while playing rounders with us. The “slap” can be integrated in different ways. In the final example the “slap” may not have “hurt” at all. Meaning depends more on the context in more integrated structures. It will become less important later that we can use consciousness, words, and language to reassess the context and hence the meaning of an experience. By these means we can abstract even well-absorbed experiences from the context in which they have become embedded. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
The process by which an experience is integrated into an existing psychic structure is called “metabolizing.” This means the transformation of an experience so that it becomes part of a person, in the same way that we metabolize a biscuit by eating it and it becomes part of our bodies. I used to amuse Leo by saying it is raining cats and dogs. This metaphor of “metabolizing” is useful, providing that we do not lose sight of the fact that the process may also be described by other metaphors, such as “organizing” and “integrating.” The faculties, as we have seen, enabled humans to know and to act. Humans acquired knowledge because learning and knowing in themselves give satisfaction and pleasure. Humans also desire to know because they want to act better, that is, to conduct themselves more effectively and acceptably among their fellows and before their God. Voluntary movement is the kind that humans themselves have control over; they decide whether to act or not to act, to believe or not to believe. Appetite is held to be the efficient cause of actions that are affective or emotional, and nonreflective. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The will, distinct from the appetite, is the efficient cause of reflective behaviour. It is the power of saying yes or no prior to action. It is heralded in consciousness by moments of choice. All movement has to have causes, one of which is the efficient cause—that which makes effective all other casual conditions of motion. That which originates any and all human movement is called appetite or desire. It is originative in the sense that it literally starts or triggers off a motion. There are other less immediate causative conditions—material, formal, and final—but they are ineffective without the trigger. Furthermore, appetite is itself best thought of as a kind of conduct-oriented motion. It is the last of a series of events that prompts action, and hence could be have been moved or nudged by forces temporally prior to it. In turn it moves, and thus set things into motion, as for example, the muscles involved in gesturing and speaking. The motion of appetite is like that of a ball and socket joint, having a convex and concave side. There is both a receiving aspect and an impelling aspect, a notion used when postulating a receiving and giving force in the appetites of inanimate things, in their consents and sympathies, and the like. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The receiving aspect of notion we still have in our idiom, as when we refer to the moving of the appetite, or to the moving of the will. The impelling aspect of the idea lingers in phrases such as strength of will, strength of appetite, and one had the will to do so-and-so. The idea that the appetite is itself moved prior to moving something else has an important consequence. It is easier to analyze the means of moving the appetite than to describe the impelling aspect of appetite; hence in most analyses of appetite as a force in voluntary movement one discovers much talk and description of the means of moving the appetite and will, and little about the mechanism involved when the appetite and will are movers. There are two forms of appetite. One is the sensitive appetite, which is the efficient cause of all action and conduct that is habitually associated with the senses and emotion. The guides of appetite are pleasure and pain as features or outcomes of the immediate behaviour in prospect. The vision of pleasure is enough to initiate a pleasurable act; the specter of pain is sufficient to inhibit a painful act. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The other form of appetite is rational in character, and is best verbalized in English as will. The will is the efficient cause of deliberative or calculative behaviour. As a movement, it is preceded by activity of the rational faculties, notably reason and judgment, when they are directed to practical matters entailing choice and decision. In consciousness it is marked by feelings pleasant and unpleasant and by designations of right and wrong, good and bad. Human action, the sensitive appetite beholds apparent good; the will always takes into account the real good. In the one case, conduct looks good, because the image promises pleasure; in the other case, conduct is good, because it rests on the solid ground of valid and true judgment. Apparent good is that which passes the test of sense experience; real good is that which passes the test of reason. Rational knowledge to moral knowledge is signaled by the announcement, “We proceed now to that knowledge which considers of the Appetite and Will of Humans.” Voluntatem humanam is voluntary movement, id est, all conduct over which the human being can exercise control. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The will is governed by right reason, seduced by apparent good, having for its spurs that passions, for its ministers the organs and voluntary motions. We also find that pictures of good, virtue, duty, and felicity are the true objects for the will and desires of humans to aim at. The word desire here and elsewhere refers most often to the appetite of living things, although it is applied metaphorically as in the desire of the magnet for iron particles. “Now I, Moroni, write somewhat as seemeth me good; and I write unto my brethren, the Lamanites; and I would that they should know that more than four hundred and twenty years have passed away since the sign was given of the coming of Christ. And I seal up these records, after I have spoken a few words by way of exhortation unto you. Behold, I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, that ye would remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of humans, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things, and ponder it in your hearts. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
“And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost. And by power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things. And whatsoever thing is good is just and true; wherefore, nothing that is good denieth the Christ, but acknowledge that he is. And ye may know that he is, by the power of the Holy Ghost; wherefore I would exhort you that ye deny not the power of God; for he worketh by power, according to the faith of the children of humans, the same today and tomorrow, and forever. And again, I exhort you, my brethren, that ye deny not the gifts of God, for they are many; and they come from the same God. And there are different ways that these gifts are administered; but it is the same God who worketh all in all; and they are given by the manifestations of the Spirit of God unto humans, to profit them. For behold, to one is given by the Spirit of God, that he may teach the word of wisdom; and to another, that one may teach the word of knowledge by the same spirit. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
“And to another, exceedingly great faith; and to another, the gifts of healing by the same Spirit; and again, to another, that one may work mighty miracles; and again, to another, that one may prophesy concerning all things; and again, to another, the beholding of Angels and ministering spirits; and again, to another, all kinds of tongues; and again, to another, the interpretation of languages and of divers kinds of tongues. And all these gifts come by the Spirit of Christ; and they come unto every human severally, according as he will. And I would exhort you, my beloved brethren, that ye remember that every good gift cometh of Christ. And I would exhort you, my beloved brethren, that ye remember that he is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and that all these gifts of which I have spoken, which are spiritual, never will be done away, even as long as the World shall stand, only according to the unbelief of the children of men. Wherefore, there must be faith; and if there must be faith there must also be hope; and if there must also be hope; and if there must be hope there must also be charity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
“And except ye have charity ye can in nowise be saved in the kingdom of God; neither can ye be saved in the kingdom of God; neither can ye be saved in the kingdom of God if ye have not faith; neither ye can do all things which are expedient unto me. And now I speak unto all the ends of the Earth—that is the day cometh that the power and gifts of God shall be done away among you, it shall be because of unbelief. And wo be unto the children of men if this be the case; for there shall be none that doeth good among you, no not one. For if there be one among you that doeth god, one shall work by the power and gifts of God. And wo unto them who shall do these things away and die, for they die in their sins, and they cannot be saved in the kingdom of God; and I speak it according to the words of Christ; and I lie not. And I exhort you to remember these things; for the time speedily cometh that ye shall know that I lie not, for ye shall see me at the bar of God; and the Lord God will say unto you, which were written by this man, like as one crying from the dead, yea, even as one speaking out of the dust? #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
“I declare these things unto the fulfilling of the prophecies. And behold, they shall proceed forth out of the mouth of the everlasting God; and his word shall hiss forth from generation to generation. And God shall show unto you, that which I have written is true. And again I would exhort you that ye would come unto Christ, and lay hold upon every good gift, and touch not the evil gift, nor the unclean thing. And awake, and arise from the dust, O Jerusalem; yea, and put on thy beautiful garments, O daughter of Zion; and strengthen thy stakes and enlarge thy borders forever, that thou mayest no more be confounded, that the covenants of the Eternal Father which he hath made unto thee, O house of Israel, may be fulfilled. Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
“And again, if ye by the grace of God are perfect in Christ, and deny not his power, then ye sanctified in Christ by the grace of God, through the shedding of the blood of Christ, which is in the covenant of the Father unto the remission of your sins, that ye become holy, without spot. And now I bid unto all, farewell. I soon go to rest in the paradise of God until my spirit and body shall again reunite, and I am brought forth triumphant through the air, to meet you before the pleasing bar of the great God Almighty, the Eternal Judge of both quick and dead. Amen,” Moroni 10.7-34. So, to heal the open sore of social existence, there is no doubt we must start with the marriage relationship—or, more inclusively, with how men and women are together in our World. If that relationship is wrong in its many dimensions, all who come through it will be seriously damaged. And they will be further damaged by a surrounding World of similarly damaged people, who are trying to manage their ways of being together on the assumption that assault and withdrawal are just the facts of life. Consequently, spiritual formation, and all our efforts as Christians to minister to people, must focus on this humanly most central relationship. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Frankly, however, we sometimes see families arriving at church frozen in coldness or seething in anger about many things, even about what it took to get them there on times. And then we may have people conducting the services who can hardly endure one another because of disagreements and painful incidents that have occurred between them—even in the process of determining how the service should be done. Do we need a bumper sticker that says, “There is no excuse for hostility and coldness among Christians”? Yes, that might help. Obviously it is relevant. However, we can only begin to recover the correct social dimension of our lives under Christ by unshakable recognition that there is no human answer to human problems, not even a “religious” answer—which is why the various humanistic “spiritualities” of our day are dead ends. Of course they may offer some help to the distressed human condition. However, they are powerless to dissolve the pervasive structures of assault and withdrawal that characterize our individual and corporate existence. Or, if they are not, then let them do it. They in turn can rightly say to the church, “You do it.” And that too is fair enough. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The visible churches, congregations of apprentices to Jesus, must return to the transcendent power of Christ for which they stand. They must drain the assault and withdrawal, the attack and coldness, from the individual men and women who form families under their ministry of Jesus and his kingdom. We must affirm, and make clear by teaching and example, both that and how it takes “three to get married.” (The “Third” of course is God.) That is the true meaning of the union “with benefit of the clergy” that the people of Christ offer. From this basis in the home, established through the church of Jesus Christ, the power of God on Earth can break up the deadly hold of assault and withdrawal over the entire social dimension of the human self. Please rise up, Judge of the Earth, render to the arrogant their recompense. Deliverance comes from the Lord; Thy blessing be upon Thy people. The Lord of hosts be with us; the God of Jacob be our high tower. O Lord of hosts, happy is the human that trusts in Thee. Save, O Lord; O King, please answer us on the day that we call. Save Thy people, and bless Thine inheritance; tend them, and sustain them forever. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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With Every Morn their Love Grew Tender, with Every Eve Deeper and Tenderer Still!
We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the World. Time is not the fourth dimension, and should not be so identified. Time is only a relative observation. Existentialism of Personalism embraces interconnected attitudes of aesthetic, sacred consciousness with social, political awareness. Transpersonal and existential realities are captured in the sacred and profane events of life. The ecstasy and numinous awesomeness of an I-and-Thou encounter with the Supreme Personality can be experienced in any time and in any place and through any object, person, or event. It is not limited to an inner, individualistic mysticality, nor is it particular to community worship and ceremony. The personal relationship with Supreme Personality creates a “sense of being” and “becoming” that is spontaneous and goes on ceaselessly in a constant dialogue with self, other, and nature. It is contained in form and is experienced in existential, concrete, everyday life. Flora Jones, Wintu medicine woman, speaks about the spirits like they are living personalities in a partnership of existence with human beings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 27
Witness the following statement from Flora Jones: “This is what the spirit tells me—get my people together. Whoever has sacred places must wake them up, the same as I am doing here—to keep my old World within my heart and with the spiritual. For them to help me and for me to help my people.” The personalism expressed by Flora Jones is the basis of most Victorian, African-American and American-Indian traditions. All of these cultures have a dual theme of Being-in-the World and Being-beyond-the-World. The Supreme Personality is experienced as an integrated intelligence and love that is expressed through the archetypes of mythologies, rituals, worship, dreams, and visions. The archetypal spirituality of the meeting in the Between confirms that the Supreme Personality lies within the human personality and in the meeting as he Ground of Being. The Supreme Personality, as a living personality, offers love, knowledge, mystery, gift giving, and sharing in relationship with the human person. The I-and-Thou encounter bring to “awareness” constellations of fascination and fear, destiny and freedom, death and life, anxiety and joy, interest and surprise, love and shame, and guilt and excitement. #RandolphHarris 2 of 27
Existentialism of Personalism came out of my practice and theory in a circle of understanding and interpretation through dialogue with American Indians, Victorian people, and African-Americans. Alex Haley in his book Roots (1976) describes how the father of Kunta Kinte presented his infant son to the Universe. He writes, “Carrying little Kunta in his strong arms, he walked to the edge of the village, lifted his baby up with his face to the Heavens, and said softly….Behold—the only thing greater than yourself” (p.13). Haley is showing that the living Universe is the father/mother of Kunta Kinte and that the child’s personality is sacred. In the Navajo tradition, the man who holds his infant up to Father Sun and says, “Father Sun, this is your child,” is expressing that the Universe is personal and loving. The Navajo infant is a direct descendant of the living Universe, and, therefore, its personality is sacred. American-American, Victorian, and American Indian traditions demonstrate a continual dialogue between the human personality and the Supreme Personality that reveals the sacred and the profane as not separated but forming an interconnected metaphysical reality that is remythologized in every I-and-Thou meeting. #RandolphHarris 3 of 27
However, philosophy does not accept the Semitic belief in a World created for the first time by a personal creator, and this is as true of the highest Greek philosophy as expressed, for instance, in Aristotle’s work on metaphysics as in the highest Asiatic philosophy associated with Buddhism and Hinduism. The word “creation” is inadmissible here for it signifies producing something out of nothing. No one, not even God himself, can produce something out of nothing. Therefore, the orthodox Christian idea of a mysterious creation is completely untenable. That the existence of manufactured things indicates a manufacturer is sound logic, but to apply the same analogy to the World is not. For the World is something quite other than them; it is in a category not only altogether apart from them but altogether by itself. There was never a time when the Universe was created or fabricated by a Creator or Maker. This is a case of man making God in his own image. Through successive cycles of the Universe comes and goes, is born and dies, as the World-Mind rethinks the World-Idea or lets it lapse. #RandolphHarris 4 of 27
The Universe was never created for the first time for it has always and incessantly appeared and disappeared, activated and rested, come forth, evolved, and retreated into latency. There has never been a time when there was not a Universe, by which I do not mean our own. There is nothing arbitrary in this “creation.” It is really self-determined. Everything brings itself into existence under the necessity of its own being and the laws of its own possibilities. Where a circle begins it also ends; the Universe is like that: it has n real beginning or ending. It is not a creation in the Biblical sense but an intermittent continuation. Aristotle: “The Universe unfolds out of its own essence, not being made.” We could add that its pattern unfolds too out of the World-Idea. The Universe has never had a beginning, and cannot have an end, but its forms and states may change and therefore must have a beginning and end. It is more correct to speak of the Universe’s birth, not of its creation. The Universe was not made, in a workshop sense; it was emanated. It flowed out of the Original Source and it will flow back there at the appointed time. The cosmos is neither a phantom to be disdained nor an illusion to be dismissed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 27
The cosmos is more of a remote expression in time and space and individuality of that which is timeless, spaceless, and infinite. If it is not the it is not the Reality in its ultimate sense, it is an emanation of the Reality. Hence it shares in some way the life of its source. To find that point of sharing is the true object of incarnation for all creates within the cosmos. The World of external Nature, being eternal, is not brought into existence by an act of sudden creation out of nothing. Furthermore, this World is rooted in the divine substance and is consequently not an empty illusion but an indirect manifestation of divine reality. A thought exists in intimate relation with the World-Mind, God. The World is not bereft of reality although it does not possess ultimate reality. The World is neither a trap nor an illusion, neither a degradation of the divine essence nor an indication of the divine absence. What is the meaning of the World? If it is nothing more than an illusion, it can have no real meaning at all. However, if it is an expression of the infinite intelligence it must everywhere pervaded by immense meaning. #RandolphHarris 6 of 27
The truth is ever here, whether unwritten and bodiless or scripted and described. The image of it can be looked at by other generations long afterwards, but the reality of it remains always in the World-Idea and is never lost. If the World is sheer illusion, how could man—himself a part of this illusion—ever know the Real? Were humans merely an illusion man and woman could see only further illusions. Were one part of the Real one could see only further reality. Since our experience of illusion is itself in accordance with the World-idea, why should we be afraid of admitting its existence? What we should be afraid of is letting it blot out Reality. The whole Universe is a symbol, whose meaning can be read only when we have learned the alphabet of philosophic laws and experiences. Our World is but a fleeting symbol, yet we may not disdain it. For it is the arched entrance under which we must pass through to the infinite life. The World is a spectacle presented for our meditation in depth. It is a clue, a pointing sign, and even a mystery play. What is the Universe but a gigantic symbol of God? Its infinite variety hints at the infinite endless of the Absolute itself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 27
The World stands for something else: it is, first, a token that God exists, second, an image of God’s being. The Universe is a cipher which needs to be decoded. The scientist does this on one level of investigation, the metaphysician on a different level; the religionist does not attempt the effort but reveres the cipher’s Author. Was it not Goethe who wrote: “Everything which happens is only a symbol”? Is not the whole gigantic cosmic effect in the end only a symbolic expression indicating that paradoxically it is and is not? The more we learn about the Universe, the more mysterious it becomes. Once, in America, I was consulted by a business man about twenty-five, whose case is a good illustration of the sublimation of free energies. He was a typical American self-made man who had worked his way up from a novice to an expert. He had been very successful and had founded an immense business. He has also succeeded in organizing it in such a way that he was able to think of retiring. Two years before I saw him, he had in fact taken his farewell. #RandolphHarris 8 of 27
Until then he had lived entirely for his business and concentrated all his energies on it with the incredible intensity and one-sidedness peculiar to successful American business men. He had purchased a splendid estate where he thought of “living,” by which he meant horse, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Rolls Royce, Bentley, Porsche, golf, tennis, parties and what not. However, he had reckoned without his host. The energy which should have been at his disposal would not enter into these alluring prospects, but went capering off in quite another direction. A few weeks after the initiation of the longed-for life of bliss, he began brooding over peculiar, vague sensations in his body, and a few weeks more sufficed to plunge him into a state of extreme hypochondria. He had a complete nervous collapse. From a healthy man, of uncommon physical strength and abounding energy, he became a peevish child. That was the end of all his glories. He fell from one state of anxiety to the next and worried himself almost to death with hypochondriacal mopings. He then consulted a famous specialist, who recognized at once that there was nothing wrong with the man but lack of work. The patient saw the sense of this, and returned to his former work. #RandolphHarris 9 of 27
However, to his immense disappointment, no interest in the business could be aroused. Neither patience nor resolution was of any use. His energy could not by any means be forced back into the business. His condition naturally became worse than before. All that had formerly been living, creative energy in him now turned against him with terrible destroying force. His creative genius rose up, as it were, in revolt against him; and just as before he had built up great organizations in the World, so now his daemon spun equally subtle systems of hypochondriacal delusion that completely annihilated him. When I saw him, he was already a hopeless moral ruin. Nevertheless I tried to make clear to him that though such a gigantic energy might be withdrawn from the business, the question remained, were should I go? The finest horses, Porches, Mercedes and farms, even the most amusing parties may very likely fail to allure the energy, although it would be rational enough to think that a man who had devoted his whole life to serious work had a sort of natural right to enjoy himself. Yes, if fate behaved in a humanly rational way, it would certainly be so: first work, then well-earned rest. #RandolphHarris 10 of 27
However, fate behaves irrationally, and the energy of life inconveniently demands a gradient agreeable to itself; otherwise it simply gets dammed up and turns destructive. It regresses to former situations—in the case of this man, to the memory of an internal inflammatory condition of the medical nature. Yet even this was only a stage on the way to the resuscitation of infantile reminiscences which had all but vanished in the meantime. It was the original relation to his mother that mapped the course of his symptoms: there were an “arrangement” whose purpose it was to compel the attention and interest of is long-dead mother. Nor was this stage the last; for the ultimate goal was to drive him back, as it were, into his own body, after he had lived since his youth only in his head. He had differentiated one side of his being; the other side remained in an inert physical state. He would have needed this other side in order to “live.” The hypochondriacal “depression” pushed him down into the body he had always overlooked. Had he been able to follow the direction indicated by his depression and hypochondriacal illusion, and make himself conscious of the fantasies which proceed from such a condition, that would have been the road to my salvation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 27
My argument naturally met with no response, as was to be expected. A case so far advanced can only be cared for until death; it can hardly be cured. This example clearly shows that it does not lie in our power to transfer “disposable” energy at will to a rationally chosen object. The same is true in general of the apparently disposable energy which is disengaged when we have destroyed its unserviceable forms through the corrosive of reductive analysis. This energy, as we have said, can at best be applied voluntarily for a short time. However, in most cases it refuses to seize hold, for any length of time, of the possibilities rationally presented to it. Psychic energy is a very fastidious thing which insists on fulfillment of its own conditions. However much energy may be present, we cannot make it serviceable until we have succeeded in finding the right gradient. The question of the gradient is an eminently practical problem which crops up in most analyses. For instance, when in a favourable case the disposable energy, the so-called libido (psychic energy, which is equivalent to the intensity with which psychic contents are charged), does seize hold of a rational object, we think we have brought about the transformation through conscious exertion of the will. #RandolphHarris 12 of 27
However, we are deluded, because even the most strenuous exertions would not have sufficed had there not been present at the same time a gradient in that direction. How important the gradient is can be seen in the cases when, despite the most desperate exertions, and despite the fact that the object chosen or the form desired impresses everybody with its reasonableness, then transformation still refuses to take place, and all that happens is a new repression. It has become abundantly clear to me that life can flow forward only along the path of the gradient. However, there is no energy unless there is tension of opposites; hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind. It is interesting to see how this compensation by opposites also plays its part in the historical theories of neurosis: Dr. Freud’s theory espoused Eros, Dr. Adler’s the will to power. Logically, the opposite of love is hate, and of Eros, Phobos (fear); but psychologically it is the will to power. Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other: the human who adopts the standpoint of Eros finds one’s compensator opposite in the will to power, and that of the human who puts the accent on power is Eros. #RandolphHarris 13 of 27
Seen from the one-sided point of view the conscious attitude, the shadow is an inferior component of the personality and is consequently repressed through intensive resistance. However, the repressed content must be made conscious so as to produce a tension of opposites, without which no forward moment is possible. The conscious mind is on top, the shadow underneath, and just as high always longs for low and hot for cold, so all consciousness, perhaps without being aware of it, seeks its unconscious opposite, lacking which it is domed to stagnation, congestion, and ossification. Life is born only of the spark of opposites. It was a concession to intellectual logic on the one had and to psychological prejudice on the other that impelled Dr. Freud to name the opposite of Eros the destructive or death instinct. For in the first place, Eros is not equivalent to life; but for anyone who thinks it is, the opposite of Eros will naturally appear to be death. And in the second place, we all feel that the opposite of our own highest principle must be purely destructive, deadly, and evil. We refuse to endow it with any beneficial life-force; hence we avoid and fear it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 27
Before there are any outward disciplines of giving, there must be a disciplined understanding of giving. First, you must bear in mind that giving is not a meritorious work which will enhance your position before God. Similarly, giving will not make you better than other Christians. Second, you need to understand that while giving will not gain favour with God, giving does bring blessing! Jesus said: “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you,” reports Luke 6.38. Correspondingly, Paul wrote: “Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously,” reports 2 Corinthians 9.6. Admittedly these blessings are essentially spiritual. However, which would you rather have—a spiritual blessing or a bigger bank and bigger Benz (The bigger the bank, the bigger the Benz, the better the chance I have to get close to his rich friends, bank accounts in the Philippines, blank note to take everything! )—inner contentment or a new yacht? Third, you must keep in mind that giving which pleases God is generous and sacrificial. As we have seen, the Macedonians gave out of their deep poverty. #RandolphHarris 15 of 27
We can also profitably reflect on what Jesus said about the poor widow who humbly gave only a fraction of a penny: “I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others,” reports Mark 12.43. Fourth, you must understand that what you give is to be determined between you and God. Giving should never be decided casually or flippantly, but through serious prayer—asking God what He wants you to give. With the mental disciplines of giving firmly in mind, the way is ready for the act of giving. To begin with, the act of giving should be accompanied by offering oneself to the Lord, just as did the Macedonians who “gave themselves first to the Lord,” reports 2 Corinthians 8.5. This should be done silently, not so someone will see out pious act of worship. And giving oneself to God is need worship. “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship,” reports Romans 12.1. Second, it is strongly recommended, in light of the great giving requirements imposed on God’s ancient people Israel, that everyone should at least consider the first 10 percent as a starting point in giving—a minimum. #RandolphHarris 16 of 27
And in the case of the Macedonians’ grace giving, the amount must have been way over 10 percent because a tenth of their “extreme poverty” (1 Corinthians 8.2) would not have helped anyone. Third, your giving ought to be regular. Paul advised this same Corinthians church on another occasion, “On the first day of every week, each one of your should set aside a sum of money in keeping with one’s income, saving it up, so that when I come no collections will have to be made,” report 1 Corinthians 16.2. The apostle knew that regular, systematic giving would help the people meet their regular obligations and most emergencies. Fourth, you must begin giving now. The natural tendency is to put giving off until you feel able to give. Such thinking keeps many from ever giving. A preacher came to see a farmer and asked him, “If you had $2,00.00, would you give $1,000.00 or it to the Lord?” “I would.” “If you have two Ultimate Driving Machines, would you give one of them to the Lord?” “Sure.” “If you had two Cresleigh Homes, would you give one of them to the Lord?” The farmer said, “Now that is not fair! You know I have two Cresleigh Homes.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 27
Giving should not only be regular, but responsive to need, spontaneous, like that of the Macedonians and Mary of Bethany who in anointing Jesus so lavishly poured out her resources. High Heaven rejects the lore of nicely calculated les and more. Finally, your giving should be joyous—“for God loves a cheerful giver,” reports 2 Corinthians 9.7. As we have been so often reminded, “cheerful” can be translated “hilarious,” suggesting a joy which leaps over all restraints. The act of giving is a blessed state. We do well to remember that our Lord Jesus Himself said, “It is more blessed to give then to receive,” reports Acts 20.35. May we be faithful and disciplined in giving ourselves and all we have to God! What does the phrase “grace giving” mean to you? What does grace have to do with giving? When you give to the church or various Christian ministries, do you generally do so out of obligation or willingness? How much of your income do you believe God wants you to give to Him? Support your answers with Scripture; then ask God in prayer whether He agrees. “Will a human rob god? Yet you rob me. But you ask, ‘How do we rob you?’ In tithes and offerings. You are under a curse—the whole nation of you—because you are robbing me. #RandolphHarris 18 of 27
“Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the LORD Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of Heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it. I will present pests from devouring your crops, and the vines in your fields will not cause their fruit,” says the LORD Almighty. “Then all the nations will call you blessed, for yours will be a delightful land,” says the LORD Almighty,” reports Malachi 3.8-12. What did God speak to you about most specifically, most powerfully in this essay? Talk to Him about it right now! The World-idea has been represented by Churches and statues, and stained-glass windows. They are seen as places and refuge and the images tell a story. There are pictorial stories because people could not always read and also because they wanted the stories to pass on for generations. The statues also serve a purpose. The World-Mind has been embodied in images and idols. These things can be and are used in religious worship and mystic meditation. The idols act as reminders to its devotees; one is not a fool to confuse a piece of stone with the power of God. #RandolphHarris 19 of 27
We live in what appears as a multiverse, a timed and spaced existence—in a short, a finite one. However, those who can pierce through to its secret—and some have done so—find that it is actually the Unconditioned revealing itself as if it were the Conditioned. This Universe appearing in time and space under innumerable forms, its particles and planets ever in motion, hides as its supreme secret THAT which is timeless and placeless, without shape, intangible and immobile. Is this not the greatest paradox, this solid something whose essence is Nothing? Few humans know God even when they see Him, as they are unrealizingly do when they look around at the World or even when they merely look at it. “And now I, Moroni, proceed to give the record of Jared and his brother. For it came to pass after the Lord had prepared the stones which the brother of Jared had carried up into the mount, the brother of Jared came down out of the mount, and e did put forth the stones into the vessels which were prepared, one in each end thereof; and behold, they did give light unto the vessels. And thus the Lord caused stones to shine in darkness, to give light unto men, women, and children, that they might not cross the great waters in darkness. #RandolphHarris 20 of 27
“And it came to pass that when they had prepared all manner of food, that thereby they might subsist upon the water, and also food for their flocks and herds, and whatsoever beast or animal or fowl that they should carry with them—and it came to pass that when they had done all these things they got aboard of their vessels or barges, and set forth into the sea, commending themselves unto the Lord their God. And it came to pass that the Lord God caused that there should be a furious wind blow upon the face of the waters, towards the promised land; and this they were tossed upon the waves of the seas before the wind. And it came to pass that they were many times buried in the depths of the sea, because of the mountain waves which broke upon them, and also the great and terrible tempests which were caused by the fierceness of the wind. And it came to pass that when they were buried in the deep there was no water that could hurt them, their vessels being tight like unto a dish, and also they were tight like unto the ask of Noah; therefore when they were encompassed about by many waters they did cry unto the Lord, and he did bring them forth again upon the top of the waters. #RandolphHarris 21 of 27
“And it came to pass that the wind did never cease to blow towards the promised land while they were upon the waters; and thus they were driven forth before the wind. And they did sing praises unto the Lord; yea, the brother of Jared did sing praises unto the Lord, and he did thank and praise the Lord all the day long; and when the night came, they did not cease to praise the Lord. And thus they were driven forth; and no monster of the sea could break them, neither whale that could mar them; and they did have light continually, whether it was above the water or under the water. And thus they were driven forth, three hundred and forty and four days upon the water. And they did land upon the shore of the promised land. And when they had set their feet upon the shores of the promised land they bowed themselves down upon the face of the land, and did humble themselves before the Lord, and did shed tears of joy before the Lord, because of the multitude of his tender mercies over them. And it came to pass that they went forth upon the face of the land, and began to till the Earth. #RandolphHarris 22 of 27
“And Jared had four sons; and they were called Jacom, and Gilgah, and Maha, and Orihah. And the brother of Jared also begat sons and daughters. And the friends of Jared and his brothers were in number about twenty and two souls; and they also begat sons and daughters before they came to the promised land; and therefore they began to be many. And they were taught to walk humbly before the Lord; and they were also taught from on high. And it came to pass that they began to spread upon the face of the land, and to multiply and to till the Earth; and they did wax strong in the land. And the brother of Jared began to be old, and saw that he must soon go down to the grave; wherefore he said unto Jared: Let us gather together our people that we may number them, that we may know of them what they will desire of us before we go down to our graves. And accordingly the people were gathered together. Now the number of the sons and daughters of the brothers of Jared were twenty and two souls; and the number of sons and daughters of Jared were twelve, he having four sons. And it came to pass that they did number their people; and after that they had numbered them, they did desire of them the things which they would that they should do before they went down to their graves. #RandolphHarris 23 of 27
“And it came to pass that the people desired of them that they should anoint one of their sons to be a king over them. And now behold, this was grievous unto them. And the brother of Jared said unto them: Surely this thing leadeth into captivity. However, Jared said unto his brother: Suffer them that they may have a king. And therefore he said unto them: Choose ye out from among our sons a king, even whom ye will. And it came to pass that they chose even the firstborn of the brother of Jared; and has name was Pagag. And it came to pass that he refused and would not be their kind. And the people would that his father should constrain him, but his father would not; and he commanded them that they should constrain no human to be their king. And it came to pass that they chose all the brothers of Pagag, and they would not. And it came to pass that neither would the sons of Jared, even all save it were one; and Orihah was anointed to be king over the people. And he began to reign, and the people began to prosper; and they became exceedingly rich. And it came to pass that Jared died, and his brother also. #RandolphHarris 24 of 27
“And it came to pass that Orihah did walk humbly before the Lord, and did remember how great things the Lord had done for his father, and also taught his own people how great things the Lord had done for their fathers,” reports Ether 6.1-30. Winter is not just a single day. It takes time. Pay attention to its different stages, and adjust your prayers accordingly. As the cold time begins, I turn toward it with courage, knowing I do not face it alone. All the Holy Ones are with me; we will face it together. The leaves may fall, the grass may die, but the Land Spirits live, and to them I pray. Though some may sleep, others awake to face the cold, to bless the Earth with the gifts only they can give. Spirit of rock and tree, Spirits of running and still water, Spirits of Earth and sky: to the ones who now go to sleep, farewell until the warm time. To those who now awake, once again I greet you, as the Earth once again enters Winter. Cry the Winter rains to prepare the way, to mourn the darkness now enfolding. Cry the Winter rains to prepare the way, to wash pure the World as it lies here waiting. Cry the Winter rains, sky overarching, but soon the sorrows’ tears will turn to joy. Light will return to the covered Earth. #RandolphHarris 25 of 27
Cry, rain spirits, as this time demands. The sickle of reaping is low in the sky in the period just before down. The Sun’s halo soon will hide it, but it will be there, at the back of my mind, at the bottom my heart, poised to perform its acts of loving mercy. Waning Moon, passes over me, and pass on by. Please grant me your wisdom, but withhold your power. Sing joyously unto God our strength; sing along unto the God of Jacob. Take up the melody, and sound the timbrel, the sweet harp with the psaltery. Blow the Shofar at the New Moon, at the full Moon for our festival. For it is a statute for Israel, an ordinance of the God of Jacob, when God made a testimony for Joseph, when Her went forth against the land of Egypt. I hear a mysterious voice: “I, the Lord, removed the burden from your shoulder; your hands were freed from the heavy hod. O Israel, you called, and I delivered you; I answered you in the thunder; I tested you are the waters of Meribah, saying: ‘Hear, O My people, and I will admonish you; O America, if you would only Hearken unto Me! There shall be no strange god in your midst; nor shall you worship any foreign god. I am the Lord your God, Who brought you up out of the land of Egypt; open you mouth, and I will grant you of My bounty.’ #RandolphHarris 26 of 27
“But my people hearkened not to My Voice; and American would not obey. So I let them go after the stubbornness of their heart. Let them walk in their own evil counsels! Oh that My people would hearken unto Me, that America would walk in My ways! I would soon subdue their enemies, and place My hand upon their adversaries. The enemies of the Lord would cringe before Him, and their doom would be everlasting. However, you would I feed with the fat of wheat; and with the honey out of the rock would I satisfy you.” So the two brothers and their murdered man rode past fair Florence, to where Arno’s stream gurgles through straitened banks, and still doth fan itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream keeps head against the freshest. Sick and wan the brothers’ faces in the ford did seem, Lorenzo’s flush with love. They passed the water into a forest quiet for the slaughter. There was Lorenzo slain and buried in, there in that forest did his great love cease; ah! when a soul doth thus its freedom win, it aches in loneliness—is ill at peace as the break-covert blood-hounds od such sin: They dipped their swords in the water, and did tease their horses homeward, with convulsed spur, each richer by his being a murderer. #RandolphHarris 27 of 27
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Then Living Earth, with Labouring Thought Won from the Gaze of Many Centuries!
Many great things indeed have been achieved by those who choose not to leap into the mainstream. Although the World is very full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it. I do not see myself as a preacher on television at all….I see myself as a doctor in an emergency ward, and those people who are flipping their dials are in pain and dying….I heal through offering what American needs on TV—a philosophy of self-esteem that will make us great once more. The more I see her, the more convinced I am that she is an isolated person. This a man ought never to be, not even a young man, because, since his development depends essentially upon reflection, he must have contact with others. Therefore, a young woman should not be interesting either, for the interesting always involves a reflecting on oneself, just as for the same reason the interesting in art always includes an impression of the artist. A young woman who wants to be pleased by being interesting will, if anything, please herself. From the esthetic side, this is the objection to all kinds of coquetry. It is quite different with what is inappropriately called coquetry, which is nature’s own gesture—for example, feminine modesty, which is always the most beautiful coquetry. #RandolphHarris 1 of 26
An interesting young lady may very well be successful in pleasing, but just as she herself has surrendered her womanliness, so also the men whom she pleases are usually just as unmasculine. Such a young lady first becomes interesting in her relation with men. The woman is usually the more delicate of the two genders, and yet it is much more important for her to stand alone in her youth than for the man; she must be sufficient unto herself, but that by which and in which she is sufficient unto herself is an illusion; it is this dowry with which nature has endowed her like a king’s daughter. However, it is precisely this resting in illusion that isolates her. I have often pondered why it is that there is nothing more corrupting for a young lady than associating a great deal with other young women. Obviously the reason is that this association is neither one thing nor another; it unsettles the illusion but does not clarify it. The woman’s fundamental qualification is to be company for the man, but through association with her own gender she is lead to reflection upon it, which makes her a society lady instead of company. The language itself is very suggestive in this respect; the man is called “master,” but the woman is not called “maidservant” or anything like that—no, a definition of essence is used: she is company, not companymaid. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26
If I were to imagine an ideal young lady, she would always stand alone in the World and thereby be assigned to herself, but mainly she would not have friends among the young ladies. It is certainly true that the Graces were three, but it certainly never occurred to anyone to think of them as talking together; in their silent trinity they form a beautiful feminine unity. In this respect, I could almost be tempted to recommend the virgins’ bower (any of several usually small-flowered and climbing clematises, which is a leather flower within the buttercup family) again, if this constraint were not in turn damaging in its effects. It is always best that a young lady be allowed her freedom, but that the opportunity not be provided. She thereby becomes beautiful and is rescued from becoming interest. To give a virgin’s veil or a bridal veil to a young lady who spends much time in the company of other young women is futile, but one who has sufficient esthetic sensitivity will always find that an innocent young lady in the deeper and best sense of the word is brought to him veiled, even if it is not the custom to use a bridal veil. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26
She has been brought up strictly; I honour her parents in their homes for that; she leads a very reserved life, and in thanks I could hug her aunt for that. She has not become acquainted with Worldly delights, has not become jaded through indulgence. She is proud; she spurns what delights other you ladies, and this is as it should be. It is a falseness that I shall know how to turn my advantage. Frills and finery do not appeal to her as they do to other young women; she is somewhat polemic, but this is necessary for a young lady with her romanticism. She loves in a World of fantasy. If she fell into the wrong hands, it might bring out something very unwomanly in her precisely because there is so much womanliness in her. You may believe in miracles—like those the scripture tell about—but do you believe the Lord can work miracles in your own life? If you do your part, God can and will. A miracle is an extraordinary event caused by the power of God. miracles are an important element in the work of Jesus Christ. They include healings, restoring the dead to life, and resurrection. Faith is necessary in order for miracles to be manifested. Do you have some challenges in your life that seem overwhelming at times Would a miracle help you? How can a miracle come about? #RandolphHarris 4 of 26
The passion of surprise and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards the belief of those events, from which it is derived. And this goes so far, that even those who cannot enjoy this pleasure immediately, nor can believe those miraculous events, of which they are informed, yet love to partake of the satisfaction at second-hand or by rebound, and place a pride and delight in exciting the admiration of others. “For if there be no faith among the children of humans God can do no miracle among them; wherefore, one showed not oneself until after their faith,” reports Ether 12.12. We must have faith to have miracles, specifically faith in Jesus Christ. “And ither at any time hath any wrought miracles until after their faith; wherefore they first believed in the Son of God,” reports Ether 12.18. Trust in God is vital, as is confidence that He will do what He says He will do. For example, we pay tithing with faith. He says that He will open the windows of Heaven, and we have confidence that He will. “And all nation shall call you blessed: for ye shall be a delightsome land, saith the LORD of host,” reports Malac 3.11. This is our natural way of thinking. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26
Faith implies enough confidence to act on your belief and to conform your life to truth. The pleasure of telling a piece of news so interesting, of propagating it, and of being the first reporters of it, spreads the intelligence. Prodigies, omens, oracles, judgments, quite obscure the few natural events, that are intermingled with them. Having faith means doing our best to bring about a miracle, but it also requires having the patience to realize the Lord understands His eternal timetable better than we do. There is a memorable story related by Cardinal de Retz, which may well deserve our consideration. When that intriguing politician fled into Spain, to avoid the persecution of his enemies, he passed through Saragossa, the capitol of Arragon, where he was shown, in the cathedral, a man, who has served seven years as a door-keeper, and was well known to every body in town, that had ever paid his devotions at that church. He has been seen, for so long a time, wanting a leg; but recovered that limb by rubbing of holy oil upon the stump; and the cardinal assures us that he saw him with two legs. The use of medical science is not at odds with our prayers of faith and our reliance on priesthood blessings. #RandolphHarris 6 of 26
This miracle was vouched by all the canons of the church; and the whole company in town were appealed to for a confirmation of the fact; whom the cardinal found, by their zealous devotion, to be thorough believers of the miracle. And the cardinal cannot be suspected of any holy fraud. If we are sick, and ask the Lord to heal us, and to do all for us that is necessary to be done, according to my understanding of the Gospel of salvation, I might as well ask the Lord to cause my wheat and corn to grow, without my plowing the ground and casting in the seed. It appears consistent to me to apply every remedy that comes within the remedy that comes within the range of my knowledge, and then to ask my Father in Heaven to sanctify that application to the healing of my body. Of course we do not wait until all other methods are exhausted before we pray in faith or give priesthood blessings for healing. In emergencies, prayers and blessings come first. Most often we pursue all efforts simultaneously. This follows the scriptural teachings that we should “pray always” and that all things should be done in wisdom and order. This is one way we seek the way to transports ourselves into some new World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26
You have yourself heard many supernatural and marvellos relations. “Search diligently, pray always, and be believing, and all things shall work together for you good, if ye walk uprightly and remember the covenant wherewith ye have covenanted one another,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 90.24. Human’s inclination to the marvellous has full opportunity to display itself. And thus a story, which is universally exploded in the place where it was first started, shall pass for a certain at a hundred thousand miles distance, maybe even light years. It is reported that January 1600, there was total darkness over the whole Earth for eight days. It was also reported by historians who treat of England, that on the first of January 1600, Queen Elizabeth died; both before and after her death she was seen by her physicians and the whole court, as is usual with persons of her rank; that her successor was acknowledged and proclaimed by the parliament; and that, after being interred a month, she again appeared, resumed the throne, and governed England for three years: I must confess that I should be surprised at the concurrence of so many odd circumstances, but should not have the least inclination to believe so miraculous an event. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26
I believe that all of us can bear witness to these miracles. With Moroni of old, I believe in a God of miracles. Moroni wrote to the people of our dispensation, “Behold, I will show unto you a God of miracles, and it is that same God who created the Heavens and the Earth, and all things that are in them are,” reports Mormon 9.11. Moroni proclaimed that Jesus Christ did many mighty miracles, that many mighty miracles were wrought by the hands of the Apostles and that a God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever must be a God of miracles today. “And if there were miracles wrought then, why has Gd ceased to be a God of miracles and yet be an unchangeable Being? And behold, I say unto you he changeth not; if so he would cease to be God; and he ceaseth not to be God and is a God of miracles,” report Mormon 9.19. The World-Idea provides secret invisible patterns for all things that have come into existence. These are not necessarily the forms that our limited perceptions present to us but the forms that are ultimate in God’s Will. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26
The deeper thinkers among our astronomers see no beginning and no end to the Universe; it is t them a process and not a static thing. To this view a philosopher would echo assent, but in accordance with the World-Idea. Just as the wave of life prepares, enters, and leaves our human bodies, so does it prepare, enter, and leave each of the numerous Universes. The World-Idea permeates all existence, patterns all forms, and expresses itself in all evolution. When the revelation of the World-Idea came to religious mystics they could only call it “God’s Will.” When it came to the Greeks, they called it “Necessity.” The Indians called it “Karma.” When its echoes were heard by scientific thinkers, they called it “the laws of Nature.” What we call here the World-Mind’s master image is not quite different from, although not quite the same as, what Plato called the eternal idea and what Malebranche called the archetype of the Universe. Mahat, the divine ideation of the Egyptian teachings, may possibly be correlated with the World-Idea, but I have not examined the doctrine. Nor do I know whether Plato’s divine archetypes meet exactly the same definition. However, I do know that all three constitute the World as seen by the Universal Mind. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26
Plato’s doctrine of a timeless World of archetypal ideas which are copied imperfectly in the physical one may be compared with the doctrine of the World-Idea stated elsewhere in this teaching. Jung’s archetypes, as far as I know his thought, apply to the unconscious of the human being. If you wish to call them by this name, the archetypes of the World-Idea apply universally and are not concerned with the human species alone. The Stoics pointed to Reason (Logos) as the divine spirit which orders the cosmos. Plato pointed to Mind (Nous) in the same reference. There is a universal order, a way which Nature (God) has of arranging things. This is why what we see around us as the World expressed all-pervading meaning, intelligence, and purpose. However, we catch only a mere hint of these veiled qualities—they mystery which recedes from them is immeasurably greater. The intelligence displayed by Nature is an infinite one. This fact, once recognized, forces us to concede that there is a deeper meaning and a wiser purpose in life than our puny intellects can adequately fathom. The World-Idea is secret, its activity is silent, but its effects are everywhere visible and audible to us. #RandolphHarris 11 of 26
Immanuel Kant referred to “the hidden plan of Nature.” Thus, without benefit of any mystical revelation but with that of acutely concentrated deep thinking to guide him, he sensed the presence of the World-Idea. It is safe to assert that nearly all the activities of the cosmos are beyond ordinary human sense observations. Without the assistance of special apparatus or thinking power we are unaware of them. Just as important as these might miracles are the smaller private miracles that teach each of us to have faith in the Lord. These come as we recognize and heed the prompting of the Spirit in our lives. When we are trying to serve Him and do His will, the Lord will help us in every aspect of our lives. I believe that all of us can bear witness to these mighty and modest miracles. We know children who have prayed for their parents to get a new job and buy a home, and they have. We have seen children who pray for toys for Christmas and get them. We have seen adults who pray for a special phone call and it comes in. The World-Idea contains the pattern, intention, direction, and purpose of the cosmos in a single unified thought of the World-Mind. #RandolphHarris 12 of 26
Human understanding is too cramped and too finite to comprehend how this miraculous simultaneity is possible. The World-Idea is the whole idea that no human mind can grasp in its time-long entirety and its spiralled cyclers. In some way that the limited mind of human cannot understand by its ordinary processes, the Universe exists in the World-Idea out of passing time and in an unbroken Now. The World-Idea manifests itself by degree but the Idea itself is a perfect whole. The World-Idea not only includes everything existent but also everything which is yet to exist. We may think of the World-Idea as a kind of computer which has been fed with all possible information and therefore contains all possible potentialities. Just as its progenitor the World-Mind is all-powerful, all-present, and all-knowing, it is also possible to think of the World-Idea as being this all-knowing, omniscient aspect of the World-Mind. What is most extraordinary about the cosmos is that although it is a coherent Whole, yet it is one that is greater than, and different from, the sum of is parts. The World-Idea forever realizing itself in the actual, a process which is ceaseless and infinite, without known beginning or known end. #RandolphHarris 13 of 26
Life is in the highest degree properly in God. In proof of which it must be considered that since a thing is said to live in so far as it operates of itself and not as moved by another, the more perfectly this power is found in anything, the more perfect is the life of that thing. In things that move and are moved, a threefold order is found. In the first place, the end moves the agent: and the principal agent is that which acts through it form, and sometimes it does so through some instrument that acts by virtue not of its own form, but of the principal agent, and does no more than execute the action. Accordingly there are things that move themselves, not in respect of any form or end naturally inherent in them, but only in respect of the executing of the movement; the form by which they act, and the end of action being alike determined for them by their nature. Of this kind are plants, which move themselves according to their inherent nature, with regard only to executing the movements of growth and decay. The World-Idea is works itself out in time, which is the form wherein the thoughts appear, and in history, which is the record of time. In the larger workings of the World-Idea we may see the rise and fall of entire culture, civilizations, religions, and even whole continental areas with their inhabitants and races. #RandolphHarris 14 of 26
The World-Mind’s World-Idea unfold with absolute regularity and perfect sequence. The World-Idea is slowly expanding itself on Earth, incarnating itself. My hope is that this rather lengthy discussion of the place of the body in our life and of how the apostle Paul understood its transformation will make very clear why spiritual formation requires the transformation of the body. The proper retaining and nurturing of the body is absolutely essential to Christlikeness. The body is not just a physical thing. As it matures, it increasingly takes on the quality of “inner” life. That is, the body increasingly becomes a major part of the hidden source from which our life immediately flows. The outcome of spiritual formation is, indeed, the transformation of the inner reality of the self in such a way that the deeds and words of Jesus become a natural expression of who we are. However, it is the nature of the human being that the inner reality of the self settles into our body, from which that inner reality then operates in practice. Formed in sin, our character and its body is set against God and God’s ways, and as we look about us, we find it pretty much on its own—at least for a while. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26
When our heart (will, spirit) comes to new life in God, the old “programs” are still running contrary to our new heart, and for the most part they are running in our body and its parts or members. “So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good. Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means! However, in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it produced death in me through what was good, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful. We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out,” report Romans 7.12-18. “For when we were controlled by the sinful nature, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies, so that we bore fruit of death,” reports Romans 7.5. Because my identity before God has been shifted over to another life that is also now in me as God’s gift, my soul has been cleansed. #RandolphHarris 16 of 26
While the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, I may find myself doing the things I have. However, it really is no longer I who is doing it, but the sin still functioning as a living force in the members of my body. Nonetheless, this is only a transitional state for those who can say with David, “My soul follows hard after you,” reports Psalm 63.8. The law or force of the Spirit of life that is in Christ Jesus is now also a real presence in my body and it opens the way to liberation from the force of sin in my bodily parts. “Therefore, humans, we have an obligation—but it is not to the sinful nature, to live according to it. For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeed of the body, you will live, because those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of God. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory,” reports Romans 8.12-17. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26
My soul follows after God. The law or force of the Spirit life that is in Christ Jesus is now also a real presence in my body and it opens the way to liberation from the force of sin in my bodily parts. “Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin,” reports Romans 7.25. By not walking in terms of the flesh but in terms of the Spirit, we are increasingly able to do the things that Jesus did and taught. “And so he condemned sin in sinful humans, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature,” reports Romans 8.4. We move toward the place where both the spirit is willing and the flesh is strong for God because the Spirit has now occupied it. We have presented the members of our body “as slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification,” reports Romans 6.19. To deny the reality of miracles on the ground that the results and manifestations must be fictitious simply because we cannot comprehend the means by which they have happened is arrogant on the face of it. #RandolphHarris 18 of 26
Genuine miracle is the miracle worked though the power of faith, without specifically invoking the power of the priesthood. Most of us are acquainted with miracles that have occurred in our personal lives and the lives of those we love, such as miracles involving births and deaths and miraculous healings. All of these are fulfillments of the Lord’s modern promise to “show miracles, signs, and wonders, until all those who believe on my name,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 35.8. “And now, I speak also concerning those who do not believe in Christ. Behold, will ye believe in the day of your visitation—behold, when the Lord shall come, yea, even that great day when the Earth shall be rolled together as a scroll, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, yea, in that great day when ye shall be brought to stand before the Lamb of God—then will ye say that there is no God? Then will ye longer deny the Christ, or can ye behold the Lamb of God? Do ye suppose that ye shall dwell with him under a consciousness of your guilt? Do ye suppose that ye could be happy to dwell with that holy Being, when your souls are racked with a consciousness of guilt that ye have ever abused his laws? #RandolphHarris 19 of 26
“Behold, I say unto you that ye would be more miserable to dwell with a holy and just God under a consciousness of your filthiness before him, than ye would to dwell with the damned souls in hell. For behold, when ye shall be brought to see your nakedness before God, and also the glory of God, and the holiness of Jesus Christ, it will kindle a flame of unquenchable fire upon you. O then ye unbelieving, turn od who ye unto the Lord; cry mightily unto the Father in the name of Jesus, that perhaps ye may be found spotless, pure, fair, and clean, having been purified by the blood of the Lamb, at that great and last day. And again I speak unto you who deny the revelations of God, and say that they are done away, that there are no revelations, nor prophecies, nor gifts, nor healing, nor speaking with tongues, and the interpretation of tongues; behold I say uno you, one that denieth these things knoweth not the gospel of Christ; yea, one has not read the scriptures; if so, one does not understand them. For do we not read that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and in him there is no variableness neither shadow of changing? And now, if ye have imagined up unto yourselves a god who doth vary, and in whom there is shadow of changing, then have ye imagined up unto yourselves a god who is not a God of miracles. #RnadolphHarris 20 of 26
“However, behold, I will show unto you a God of miracles, even the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; and it is that same God who created the Heavens and the Earth, and all things that in them are. Behold, he created Adam, and by Adam came the fall of man came Jesus Christ, even the Father and the Son; and because of Jesus Christ came the redemption of man. And because of the redemption of man, which came by Jesus Christ, they are brought back into the presence of the Lord; yea, this is wherein all humans are redeemed because the death of Christ bringeth to pass the resurrection, which bringeth to pass a redemption from an endless sleep, from which sleep all humans will be awakened by the power of God when the trump shall sound; and they shall come forth, both small and great, and all shall stand before his bar, being redeemed of death, which death is a temporal death. And then cometh the judgment of the Holy One upon them; and then cometh the time that he that is filthy shall be filthy still. #RandolphHarris 21 of 26
“And one that is righteous still; one that is happy shall be happy still; one that is unhappy shall be unhappy still. And now, O all ye that have imagined up unto yourselves a god who can do no miracles, I would ask of you, have all these things passed, of which I have spoken? Has the end come yet? Behold I say unto you, Nay; and God has not ceased to be a God of miracles. Behold, are not the things that God hath wrought marvelous in our eyes? Yea, and who can comprehend the marvelous works of God? Who shall say that it was a miracle that by his word the Heaven and the Earth shall be; and by the power of his word man was created of the dust of the Earth and by the power of his word have miracles been wrought? And who shall say that Jesus Christ did not do many mighty miracles? And there were many mighty miracles wrought by the hands of the apostles. And if there were miracles wrought then, why has God ceased to be a God of miracles and yet be an unchangeable Being? And behold, I say unto you he changeth not; if so he would ceaseth not to be God, and is a God of miracles. #RandolphHarris 22 of 26
“And the reason why he ceaseth to do miracles among the children of men is because that they dwindle in unbelief, and depart from the right way, and know not the God in whom they should trust. Behold, I say unto you that whoso believeth in Christ, doubting nothing, whatsoever one shall ask the Father in the name of Christ it shall be granted him; and this promise is unto all, even unto the ends of the Earth. For behold, thus said Jesus Christ, the Son of God, unto his disciples who shall tarry, yea, and also to all his disciples, in the hearing of the multitude: God ye into all the World, and preach the gospel to every creature; and one that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but one that believe not shall be damned; and these signs shall follow them that believe—in my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover; and whosoever shall believe in my name, doubting nothing, until one will I confirm all my words, even unto the ends of the Earth. And now, behold, who can stand against the works of the Lord? #RandolphHarris 23 of 26
“Who can deny his sayings? Who will rise up against the almighty power of the Lord? Who can deny God’s sayings? Who will rise up against the almighty power of the Lord? Who will despise the works of the Lord? Who will despise the children of Christ? Behold, all ye who are despisers of the works of the Lord, for ye shall wonder and perish. O then despise not, and wonder not, but hearken unto the words of the Lord, and ask the Father in the name of Jesus for what things so ever ye shall stand in need. Doubt not, but be believing, and being as in times of old, and come unto the Lord with all your heart, and work out your own salvation with fear and trembling before him. Be wise in the days of your probation; strip yourselves of all uncleanness; ask not, that ye may consume it on your lusts, but ask with a firmness unshaken, that ye will yield to no temptation, but that ye will serve the true and living God. See that ye are not baptized unworthily; see that ye partake not of the sacrament of Christ unworthily; but see that ye do all things in worthiness, and do it in the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God; and if ye do this, and endure to the end, ye will in nowise be cast out. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26
“Behold, I speak unto you as though I spake from the dead; for I know that ye shall have my words. Condemn me not because of mine imperfection, neither my father, because of his imperfection, neither them who have written before him; but rather give thanks unto God that he hath made manifest unto you our own imperfections, that ye may learn to be more wise than we have been. And now behold, we have written this record according to our knowledge, in the characters which are called among us the reformed Egyptian, being handed down and altered by us, according to our manner of speech. And if our plates had been sufficiently large we should have written in Hebrew; but the Hebrew hath been altered by us also; and if we could have written in Hebrew, behold, ye would have no imperfection in our record. However, the Lord knoweth the things which we have written, and also that none other people knoweth our language; and because that none other people knoweth our language, therefore one hath prepared means for the interpretation thereof. And these things are written that we may rid our garments of the blood of our brethren, who have dwindled in unbelief. #RandolphHarris 25 of 26
“And behold, these things which we have desired concerning our brethren, yea, even their restoration to the knowledge of Christ, are according to the prayers of all the saints who have dwelt in the land. And may the Lord Jesus Christ grant that their prayers may be answered according to their faith; and may God the Father remember the covenant which he hath made with the house of Israel; and may he bless them forever, through faith on the name of Jesus Christ. Amen, reports Mormon 9.1-37. Queen of Night, your silver wheels roll silently through the darkness from sunset to sunrise on this night when you are full. I look on you in awe, and praise you. I look to you in love, and honor you. God in her palaces hath made Himself known as a tower of strength. For lo, the kinds assembled themselves, they came onward together. They saw, straightway they were amazed; they were affrighted, they hasted away. Trembling seized them there, shaking, as a woman in travail, as the east wind that breaks the ships of Tarshish. As we have heard, so have we seen in the city of the Lord of hosts, in the city of our God—God establish forever. We have meditated on Thy lovingkindness, O God, in midst of Thy Temple. #RandolphHarris 26 of 26
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Full Golden—In Her Eyes a Brighter Day Dawned Blue and Full of Love!
If you wander around in enough confusion, you will soon find enlightenment. Life is an unanswered question, but let us believe in the dignity and importance of questions. When one finds one’s life unlivable, a person needs a place to go. When you want to be offstage, free from your usual roles, free to discover and define your being-for-yourself, society seems to conspire such that there is nowhere to go. Judges, critics, and commissars are omnipresent. If a human steps out of line and departs from one’s usual roles, someone is there to remind one of who one is, to define one, and to punish one for daring to define oneself. The upshot is many wives and mothers find they cannot face their families another moment without shrieking in protest against the sameness of their unappreciated daily grind. However, they stifle the shriek and carry on. Fathers and husbands become bored with the wives, infuriated by their children, and worn out by the work that lacks joy—continued only because there is no other work to do, and the bills fall due each day, week, month, quarterly, semi-annually, and annually. The children, in turn, cannot get along with each other, or with their parents. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles live a thousand miles away and cannot take the youngsters in for a day, week, or a month of respite. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Without anyone to help with housing, new employment opportunities, bills, nor child care, the trapped ones persist on their joyless, desperate treadmills until physical illness grants them a ticket admission to a hospital emergency room. Or they “blow up,” suffer from a case of neurosis, and are treated as “not in their right minds.” They may manifest a physical condition that takes years to recover from, or could lead to permeant disability, where they truly are unable to work. Or they many enter a mental hospital, there to be placed in storage until the regime of shock, tranquilizers, and periodic consultations with an overworked psychiatrist bring them “to their senses.” However, even in the hospital, there in no respite from roles; patients are cast into new ones and lack the freedom to choose their being. They return to the way of life they lived before, perhaps with the protest in them electroshocked or drugged out of existence. If new alternatives could be provided, before this drama reached its climax in the sickroom or the sanitarium, it would be helpful. If we had acceptable “checkout places,” what would life in our society be like? In moments of reverie, I have invented some. Let me describe one such, a healing-house that appeals to me. It is probably healing only for middle-class people. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
It is a place where one can enter and find confirmation for any way one has chosen to be, or any way that circumstances have brought to one. If a human wises solitude, one can find it there; and if one wishes to remain silent, no one will speak to one. If one wishes congenial and enlivening body-contact, a masseur or masseuse (one can choose which) is available to provide the physical therapy. If a housewife or househusband wants to paint, listen to music, or just sit and have intercessory prayer, there is a room for one to do so. The place would be like a brand-new mansion in the suburbs, with all the amenities one could imagine, and close to shopping centers. It would be like an upscale bed and breakfast, a social club, where people could check-in, their medical insurance, employer, or government subsidy would pay for the cost of the vacation to help reduce the strain on health care system. Each person would be entitled to a rom with inviolate privacy. There one could go, and stay for a day, a week, a month, or years. It would be like an extended family with people who actually like each other and can respect others. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
In this home, no one would enter your room without your invitation; and once a person closed the door, no one else could enter. There would be dinner, breakfast and lunch served as a group, or one could eat their mean in a private area of the house. Otherwise, the pantry would be always available, with abundant supplies of milk and honey, fruit, bread, raw vegetables, various kinds of meats, juice, water, and similar snacks. A resident could come and go, nibbling as one wished. If one wised conversation, one could go to the great room, where one could sit; and one’s presence alone would signify that one would be willing to talk. Or if one wished to enter into uninterrupted dialogue, one could invite someone to the privacy of the upstairs lobby, or home hub. The rule of the house would be freedom for the self, with respect for the freedom of the other. People who entered would leave their roles at the doorstep. No status, no rank, would interpose itself between the guests—who would have a first name, or surname, or no name, or a pseudonym, if that is what they chose. This would be a place where people could quite freely go out of their minds and roles, as these were known outside. All the paperwork would be handled by a confidential office before anyone reached the house so no one would know what anyone’s status and rank in society is, and all people would be screened to make sure they are safe. Also, office stand would be required to be bonded. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
It would be a place for people to unwind, relax, and get cozy before they had a nervous breakdown. Kind of like going home to your mother’s house and knowing you are safe and welcomed as long as you want to stay. It would also be a place where creative people—writers, painters, dancers, architects, lawyers, cooks, poet, et cetera—could go to live awhile and present their more tender creations in an accepting, or better, honest milieu, where commercial criteria for judging art and ideas are irrelevant. This would be a place where one could go to redefine oneself, apart from the people “back home,” who have a vested interest in keeping the person in the roles by which they knew one, but which were sickening to one. It would be a place where people could reach their ideal body image. The tense and nervous could find surcease and relaxation; the aimless might meet people with aims that could inspire and redirect their lives. These houses would be the place for one went for recreation. The directors would eschew drugs and medicines. They would heal by letting healing take place. The houses would be places where joy could be experienced, and peace. The staff of permanent residents, which would be the goal because people like stable communities, could include professional psychotherapists, resident artists, playwrights, dancers, masseurs, writers and teachers, and musicians. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Some of these residents might come and go; but all would provide seekers with an atmosphere of spiritual freedom, and examples of the quest for new avenues of being and expression. A working persons, professional person, wife or mothers, or lonely person could come daily for an hour or so, or weekly, and find relaxation, edification, or companionship. Much like a house-church, there could be a book club or house-coffee shop for friends. If they were on a private, pay-as-you-go basis, I have little doubt that such houses would pay for themselves. And I suspect that is they were underwritten by some grant, or by public-health moneys—but with their operation strictly in the hands of the director of each house—they would more than pay for themselves, in the for of physical breakdown that did not happen and a mental breakdown that would not materialize. I suspect that for the people who patronized such a house, intake of drugs and medicines would diminish radically. The mass invasion of physicians’ clinics and waiting-rooms would be reduced to manageable dimensions. And the waiting lists of practicing psychotherapists would doubtless be less packed with names. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Such houses of retreat and healing will, alas, not become part of every village, town, or city neighbourhood. However, sensible people will find ways to pool resources so that they can organize them by themselves. Or if they can afford it, they will buy or rent a “pad” on the other side of town, away from family and friends. Perhaps some organizational genius will find the necessary staff, and the capital to invest; and one will become a millionaire by providing what everyone needs, at a price all can afford to pay. If such places came into being as a normal part of society, I suspect psychotherapists would lose some of their present raison d’etre, and would have to apply their knowledge of how people sicken and become whole to teaching, and to living fulfilled lives themselves, so that by their being, they would represent viable ways. And I suspect that physicians would find their practices confined to delivering babies, setting broken bones, and stanching the flow of blood. Sales of drugs would diminish, and people could return to work or home refreshed. Transcendent-behaviour has been shown to occur most usually in persons who are committed to some goal to which they assign high value. Commitment implies price. The more fully a person is committed to some project, problem, or outcome, the more of one’s time, energy, and personal resources one freely devotes to the quest on which one is launched. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
The conditions under which people are able to become strongly committed to their work, or to truth, justice, beauty, or goodness, are not as yet fully understood. When there have been leaders or predecessors who provide an inspiring example to imitate, since values are created by humans, it is most likely that an individual will become committed to some goal, achievement. Another factor which seems to promote commitment is the promise of large rewards, whether immediate or remote, concrete or symbolic. The persons who become committed to some unpopular cause—who have to fight public opinion, poverty, and even danger to life without support—are more difficult to explain. People in whom transcendent behaviour is relatively frequent occurrence likely are persons who trust themselves and have developed some measure of confidence in their powers to themselves. Self-confidence seems to derive both from history of graduated successes in coping with increasingly difficult and complex problems, and from the experience of being seen by other people as competent and trustworthy. Lack of self-doubt, is often characteristic of explorers, daredevils, and others whose achievements transcend their own previous exploits, as well as the achievements of many of their fellow humans. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Any experiences which permit average people to diminish their distrust of their own capacities and their own worth, and which permit them to attribute power to themselves, probably would contribute to the frequency with which they transcend their own usual levels of functioning. The self-concept, which, as we have seen, is a limiting factor in behaviour, can also be a freeing factor for transcendent achievement. If it is true, as existential thinkers insist, that human cannot define oneself in any fixed way, but is always in process of creating and then re-creating oneself, then it follows that the most accurate self-concept is one which permits a human to see oneself as a being with relatively unplumed capacities for all modes of function. Humans have powers of survival and adaptation which they have never imagined. It seems likely that any person who formulates a fixed concept of oneself, including a concept of one’s powers to cope, is doing oneself an injustice. Since humans tend to behave in accordance with their concepts of themselves, then they will not rise to meet a challenge that calls for behaviour in conflict with one’s present self-concept. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
If a human sees oneself as weak, one will not take challenges posed by life, but will instead avoid them. If a human sees oneself as always in process of being challenged and “tested” by life, and one’s capacities as always in process of unfolding, one probably has a self-concept more closely in tune with reality. Transcendent-behaviour has been portrayed as the release of modes of behaviour that ordinarily are suppressed by habit. Challenges can release transcendent behaviour in a person, but so also can symbols like mandalas, cameos, metaphors such as the flag, the Star of David, the name God, or the image of a loved person to whose well-being one has pledged oneself. When he was in the army, my father said that a few of the things that inspired him to actions which kept him alive where thinking about God, his family, and house. Deeply religious people report that they experience God as a Being who perpetually challenges them; and under the instigation of this challenge, they continually bring forth from themselves achievements and feats of endurance which might be impossible for persons less challenged. It may be proposed as a hypothesis that challenge, however brought about, is a highly important condition for some types of transcendent behaviour. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
One of the aims of the field of personality hygiene, beyond that of preventing mental illness, should be to understand and master the conditions for transcendent-behaviour, so that, ultimately, the average person will not be a mere non-candidate for a psychiatric hospital, but instead a being who can release one’s capacities for transcendent functioning as needed. Therapists of personality then would not be experts at restoring those with neurosis or psychosis to “normal” levels of function; rather, they would be more like those few inspired and inspiring teachers who are able to elicit transcendent performance from their students, to the surprise and delight of all. I suspect that our heroes of the playing field, of the cultural arena, of the study, or of the laboratory are persons whose fulfillment is a proof or pledge of hidden potentiality in the broad mass of the population. Too few people have any idea of their latent possibilities. Perhaps their concepts of their powers are false, and perhaps they are false because our educational procedures and fake news media indoctrinate people with a view of themselves as beings with sclerosed possibility. However, we can, indeed, seek to learn more about helping humans to experience their will and to eschew resignation to the thrust of determining forces. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
If it is possible for multibillion-dollar education program to train people to see themselves as limited beings, it should be also possible for that program to encourage people to see themselves as embodiments of the capacity to transcend their present concepts of themselves and their powers. They can explore the path to those possibilities for optimal functioning that lie buried beneath habit and socialized being, so that more can realize the experience of liberation, satori, awakening, or the attainment of selfhood. I would like to see more psychotherapists functioning as gurus and as protectors of human freedom and enlightenment, as disclosers of humans to themselves, to balance the efforts of those of us whose work has served as guidance for industrial, business, political, and institutional leaders in ways to direct masses of little humans. I would like to see psychology leading psychiatry in the arts of evoking potentials for health and full functioning, rather than following psychiatry in its search for pockets of pathology. I think the concern for human possibilities that marks a humanistic psychologist makes one an important resource person to such agencies as the Office of Education, offering guidance and suggestions as to means for enriching our present institutions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
We need to have teachers who can guide, educate, and liberate people as well as presently they indoctrinate and socialize them. We are on the brink of new leaps in the evolution of humans—because of the fantastic development of technology. We must welcome this possibility, and those of us who study humans can help our fellows and ourselves to find our ways and our possibilities in an unprecedented era. It is either that, or be grim, soulless mortals, furiously busy with irrelevant issues in the backwaters of the swamp, not the crisp, clean, waters of the mainstream, of the human course. A person’s experience with one’s attachment figures during the years of immaturity—infancy, childhood, and adolescence—are the principal determinants of the pathway along which that person’s attachment develops. When things go wrong this is due to the psychological development having somehow followed a deviant pathway. It is not due to a fixation at, or a regression to, some earlier stage of development. Disturbed patterns of attachment behaviour can be present at any age, due to a deviant development. When attachment behaviour is overreadily called forth, resulting in over-anxious attachments, a common form of disturbance occurs. Another common form is the partial or total de-activation of attachment behaviour. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
However, children do suffer when removed from their parents, and this must be taken seriously. Even now, as those know who have been an inkling of what goes on in some nursery schools, day-centers and creches, there are many misconceptions about the norms of behaviour to be expected of young children when left, even briefly, in a strange place with strange people. Misconceptions persist, especially among professional people. Again and again it is implied that a healthy normal child should not make a fuss when mother leaves, and that is one does so it is an indication either that mother spoils one or that one is suffering from some pathological anxiety. When the natural history and function of attachment-behaviour are understood, it is hoped that such reactions will be seen in a new and more realistic light. When no special effort has been made to prepare and cushion the child: yearning and searching for the missing mother, sadness, increasing protest at her absence and growing anger with her for staying away, increase ambivalence on return home and evident fear of being separated again become ingrained in the child’s consciousness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Whenever young children who have had an opportunity to develop an attachment to a mother-figure are separated from her unwillingly, they show distress: and should they also be placed in a strange environment and cared for by strange people such distress is likely to be intense. The way they behave follows a typical sequence. At first they protest vigorously and try by all the means available to recover the mother. Later they seem to despair of recovering her but nonetheless remain preoccupied with her and vigilant for her return. Later they seem to lose interest in the mother and to become emotionally detached from her. Each of the three main phases of the response of a young child to separation is related to one or another of the central issues of psycho-analytic theory. Thus the phase of protest is found to raise the problem of separation anxiety; despair that of grief and mourning; detachment that of defence. In view of the damage done by this early separation is totally reparable, and always leaves some mark on the adult personality, in severe cases having so strong an effect as to be the main determinant of the adult’s thought and feeling. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Attachment behavior has deep biological roots, and therefore the anxieties which attend separation from an attachment figure must also have deep biological roots. The deepest anxieties with the currently more widely held view that the deepest anxieties concern the fear that the organized self may be disrupted when the nervous system has to handle more stimulus than it can manage at a time, so that the emerging neural structuring disintegrates. In that view, the mother’s function is to take the overload and prevent disintegration. (There is, of course, no reason why there should be just one basic anxiety: it can certainly be argued that both may be aspects of the same anxiety.) Many take for granted the stimulus-situations that arouse fear can be regarded as naturally occurring clues to events that constitute a potential danger to the species in question. This applies especially to situations that arouse fear on the first occasion that an individual encounters them. A number of these are strangeness, being unsupported on a height, being alone, having something zoom rapidly into view, and other such. None of these is intrinsically dangerous, but to the being they indicate the possibility of an increased risk of danger. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
A natural clue is associated as a rule with a raised degree of risk, and this can make a child’s behaviour appear phobic when it occurs in situations which appear incomprehensible to the adult World. Anxiety has a survival function for the species. Anxiety motivated action to remove the painful stimulus. The person would prefer less and less stimulation till the peace of death overs all. The human being is naturally equipped to relate, indeed, to cling, and naturally equipped to move about and explore and seek stimulus, always providing that there was a person or a place of safety to move back to. However, we are not done yet! Beyond contentment lies intelligent, energetic participation in accomplishing God’s will in our World. We are no longer spectators, but are caught up in a vivid and eternal drama in which we play an essential part. We embrace our imposed circumstances, no matter how tragic they seem, and act for the good in a power beyond ourselves. “We are reigning—exercising dominion—in life by One, Christ Jesus,” reports Romans 5.17. We are “looking toward an eternity of reigning with God through ages of ages,” reports Revelation 22.5. We take action to accomplish the will of God in his power. Our tiny “willpower” is not the source of our strength. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
We hardly notice any exercise of our willpower, though it is fully dedicated to carrying out God’s purposes in every respect. However, we are carried along by the power of the divine drama within which we live actively engaged. So far from struggling to resist sin, we are devoted to realization of righteousness all around us. This is the real meaning of “Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” The strongest human will is always the one that is surrendered to God’s will and acts with it. This progress toward full identification of our will with God’s will is one that, perhaps for most people, may not be fully realized in this life. However, that does not really matter. It is a progression that tis there for us to enter into now, through the power at work within us as disciples of Jesus Christ. It may be that at present we cannot even imagine what it would be like for us to have a will significantly identified with God’s will as just described. However, we must never forget that He “is able to do exceeding abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, in terms of the power that is working within us,” reports Ephesians 3.20. Our part is to begin as best we can. “Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him” reports Isaiah 64.4. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
At any given time there are several spiritual shepherds in the World, each with one’s own distinct and separate flock. It is inevitable and right that one should sieve humanity for those alone who need one or who were born to follow one or who seek the kind of guidance which one especially can give. One’s compassion is broad-based; it is for all. However, one’s personal work is extremely narrow for it is only for the few who will receive it most readily. This implies that one works among the sympathetic and mature, not among the hostile and immature. The reason for this is the need to practise economy of time and energy that one may not waste one’s arrows of effort on the vacant air. For a similar reason one prefers to enlighten the leaders, and let the flocks alone. “For behold, the day cometh that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble; and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of Hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch. However, unto you that fear my name, shall the Son of Righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth and grow up as calves in the stall. And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet in the day that I shall do this, saith the Lord of Hosts. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“Remember ye the law of Moses, my servant, which I commanded unto him in Horeb for all Israel, with that statues and judgments. Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord; and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their father, les I come and smite the Earth with a curse,” reports 3 Nephi 25.1-6. Darkness descends, as the Sun lowers itself behind the horizon and I stand facing the last light, with my shadow at my back. Farewell to you, Lord of Light, as you go to your rest. I turn to face the darkness and greet it without fear. O Lord and King who art full of compassion, in whose hand is the soul or every living thing and the breath of all flesh, to Thine all-wise care do we commit the souls of our dear ones, who have departed from this Earth. Teach all who mourn to accept the judgment of Thine inscrutable will and cause them to know the sweetness of Thy consolation. Quicken by Thy holy words those bowed in sorrow, that like all the faithful in Israel who have gone before, they too may be faithful to Thy Torah and thus advance the reign of Thy Kingdom upon Earth. In solemn testimony to that unbroken faith which links the generations to one another, let those who mourn now rise to magnify and sanctify Thy holy name. I bow to the setting Sun, lowering myself as it descends over the World’s edge. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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O, thus be it ever when free humans shall stand, between their loved homes and the war’s desolation; blest with victory and peace, may the heaven-rescued land. Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause is just, and this be our motto: “In God is our trust.” And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave!
I Roam in Pleasant Darkness, More Unseen than Saturn in His Exile!
There is beauty in everybody. You are born with it. It is just a matter of what you do with it, and if you lose it, it is like losing your soul. The experience of surprise is a sign of one’s readiness to grow. Amazement and wonder signify that one’s concepts of self and of the World and of other people are “loose,” ready to be re-formed. The “know-it-all,” the “cool” one, has pledged oneself never to be surprised. Everything that the World discloses is no more than an unfolding of what one has expected and predicted, or so one tries to convey to others. However, when a human can be dumbfounded and surprised at what comes out of one or at what one’s friend or spouse is capable of doing and disclosing, one is a growing person. In fact, if I intentionally adopt the “set” that all of my concepts are tentative and provisional, I invite others, myself, and the World to reveal surprisingly new facets of their being to me, so that even my daily life can be an unfolding of newness, where simply perceiving the World or the self is a source of endless variety and surprise. If I am with you, and I have willfully adopted the set that I do not know and cannot ever fully know all your possibilities, my very presence embodies an invitation to you to surprise, to show off, to transcend your (and my) previous concepts of your being. #RandolpHarris 1 of 23
I can tell when I am in the presence of a person with a closed mind. I feel constrained to shut off most of my possibilities. However, in the present of a wonder-er, I feel an absence of prejudgment, a permissive acceptance; and my terror and self-consciousness about revealing surprises is diminished. In short, if you and I retain our capacity for surprise, we assist and confirm one another’s growth. It seems to me that artists in society embody and disclose possibilities of experiencing that are available to everyone, but are generally stifled. If every mad-person is an ineffective revolutionary, and every sick person is an anarchist who failed, then each artist who produces art successfully points the way toward new modes of experience and action. The true revolutionary, who changes people’s minds and spirits, is not the political fanatic or the religious zealot, but the person who wields the painter’s brush or the poet’s pencil or one who composes and produces sounds no human has heard before. The World—Being—discloses itself without surcease. The World discloses itself in forms and patterns and as change. The being of the World is revealed in splendiferous variety, depending upon the nature of the “surface” from which it is refracted. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
The human race is a myriad of refractive surfaces staining the white radiance of eternity. Each surface refracts the refraction of refractions of refractions. Each self refracts the refractions of others’ refractions of self’s refraction of other refractions. Here is the glory and wonder and mystery, yet too often we simply wish to ignore or destroy those points of view that refract the light differently from ourselves. The World-for-human is a World refracted in human intentional consciousness. This magnificent and mysterious entity, consciousness, is but little understood. Indeed, it can only be understood by a being such as itself of by another consciousness; for understanding is given only to human consciousness. Being can be refracted by animals, and by human-made instruments; but understanding of the being revealed to an animal or machine is possibly only if the animal or machine somehow transmits its refraction of the being of the World to a human consciousness. And a consciousness can attain some measure of self-understanding by transmuting itself into a reflective consciousness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
All people are born with the capacity to distinguish between right and wrong. The ability, called conscience, is a manifestation of the Light of Christ. The light of Christ is the divine energy, power, or influence that proceeds from God through Christ and gives life and light to all things. The Light of Christ influences people for good and prepares them to receive the Holy Ghost. One manifestation of the Light of Christ is what we call conscience. The Light of Christ “proceedeth forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space.” It is “the light which is in all things, which giveth life to all things, which is the law by which all things are governed,” reports Doctrine and Covenants. This power is an influence for good in the lives of all people. “And that I am the true light that lighteth every human that cometh into the World,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 93.2. Conscience is a manifestation of the Light of Christ, enabling us to judge good from evil. The prophet Mormon taught: “The Spirit of Christ is given to every human, that one may know good from evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to judge; for every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of God. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
“And now, my brethren, seeing that ye know the light by which ye may judge, which light is the light of Christ, see that ye d not judge wrongfully; for with that same judgment which ye judge ye shall also be judged,” reports Moroni 7.16,18. The study of consciousness, at least from a disciplined, scientific standpoint, is still in its infancy. We are still in the descriptive and taxonomic stages, with a crude beginning at experimental analysis of experiential change. I shall draw on the little we now know and suspect about that marvelous being—my consciousness and yours—to discuss art, and its relation to human possibility. Reflections shows that any conscious of the World is subject to transmutations, which are miraculous as the alchemical transubstantiation base metal to gold. The differing modes for anything to appear to someone’s consciousness include: the perceptual mode—seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching something. The recollective mode refers to a person’s capacity to re-experience past consciousness; we call it remembering. The conceptual mode is the name for a “thinking” and abstracting consciousness, the awareness of the acts of thinking about something as one of a kind, and reasoning about it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
The imaginative mode is the name which refers to an experience of possibility. The fantasy mode is a paradoxical form of consciousness, because it is not conscious at the time of its occurrence, expect under rare and special circumstances. Yet it is always present as a kind of shadowy background to any and all conscious-modes. We know of our fantasy consciousness after it has just gone through a detectable change, as when we experience ourselves as empty, sucked dry, following an encounter with a very dependent bore. Another mode of being-conscious-of-something is the anticipatory consciousness: the experience or expectation that something is going to appear in perception, or memory. Probably this is a subclass of imagination. Construing, or giving-meaning can perhaps be regarded as a mode of experiencing the World, though it seems to be dependent upon the act of reflecting upon one’s perception, or other modes for experiencing. And it is perhaps meaningful to regard the experience of willing (trying to make something appear) as a mode of consciousness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Feeling and emotion may be designed as qualities of intentional experience. In a person with a unified consciousness, feelings are fused with every perception, memory, or imaginative act. The person feels alive because one feels. However, feelings and emotions arise only when an individual is committed to goals and projects in the World, when events and actions help or hinder one’s success. And feelings will be felt only if a person has not excluded them from one’s consciousness by acts of repression. Every mode of consciousness is dependent upon the basic, perceptual consciousness. Without inputs of intentional perception, the other modes of experiencing become static and irrelevant as guides to effective mastery of the World and successful adaptation of the self in the World. All modes of experiencing are fed by inputs of the World’s disclosure, refracted and detected by several sensory channels—the eyes, ear, nose, mouth, and skin. The power to abstract belongs to the understanding. It is of its own nature, prone to abstractions. Characteristically, it is most active when it is not restrained by sensory data. It loves to fly upwards to the highest generalities. It is unfettered movement is often evident in language behaviour when the notions behind words become confused and are over-hastily abstracted from the facts. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Indeed, the understanding, enjoying the serene tranquility of abstract wisdom, often leaves the real World so far away that the intellect seems so insubstantial as to be deemed immortal: we must see some of the philosophers which are least divine and most immersed in the senses and denied generally the immortality of the soul, yet come to this point, that whatsoever motions the spirit of humans can act and perform without the organs of the body they thought might remain after death; which are only those of the understanding and not of the affections. The power of abstracting enables and accompanies another characteristic activity of the understanding, namely, that of apprehending. This process seems to be to the understanding what sensing is to the sensorium. Abstracting and apprehending, mutually sport each other, enabling the human being to handle the forms and the formal aspects of things and to deal with the relationships among natural objects and events and among humanmade things, including speech and language. The senses produce organized bits of experience that in an older vocabulary are called “sensible species.” Every sense package goes into the memory whole, as individuals, to be used as the materials of imagining and thinking. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
The understanding produces what an older terminology labels “intelligible species.” The understanding produces forms and natures. The understanding, a faculty of the rational soul, refers to both the power and the act of apprehending. The sensible soul also is assigned an apprehensive power by which we perceive the species of sensible things, present or absent, and retain them as wax doth the prints of a seal. Consciousness of the World’s disclosure is always patterned and structured. The pattern and structure of your experienced World is a function of your projects, goals, needs, and values. This means that you and I, chronically pursuing security, wealth, fame, love, or whatnot, are cognizant only of those aspects of the World relevant to the attainment of these ends. To all else, we are effectively blind. It is not strictly true to say we are blind to aspects of the Word not relevant to our projects. Rather, the unattended aspects of experience blur into the background of our consciousness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
We have a subsidiary consciousness of them rather than a focal awareness. They are ground rather than figure, in the language of Gestalt psychology. Thus, the structure of a given mode of consciousness, say, the perceptual r imaginative mode, can be analyzed into its components of the focal awareness—that which is explicitly attended to—and the subsidiary awareness of the background experience. The possibility of our consciousness functioning in a unified, fully turned-on way is limited by our projects. If attainment of goals is impeded by attention to inputs from some sensory channels, we blot that face of the World out of being. Thus, most of us functionally amputate our noses, our tastes bunds, and our capacity to feel something when we touch it, because these experiences may divert us from attaining our goals in the World. If our imagination diverts from restless or anxious scanning of the World, as we seek the main chance or the chief danger, then we blot this possibility out of being. And if feelings, or a body-consciousness, diverts from our serious business, then we bolt that out. The upshot is that a typical human’s consciousness is a distorted, fragmented, disunified being, only half-functional. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
The fragmentation, compartmentalization, and mutilation of experience is undertaken by a human oneself. One effects various praxes upon one’s experience, such as I have alluded to. For example, one blots some of one’s consciousness from existence. One separates one’s experience of one’s mind from one’s experience of one’s body, and produces the pernicious and perennial dualism that impedes our attainment of harmony with our World. And by conceptualizing the World, humans freeze it. One must attend to constancies, and give the names, else one could not navigate or transact effectly. And many of us repress our feelings, such that perception, recall, or imagination are cold and lifeless. Every concept is an abstraction from a more global experiencing of the World; and this means that so soon as something is named, the person stops perceiving it: one closes off one’s reception of the being’s transmission of its essence. Thus, must of us live in a conceptual World, unrefreshed by new perceptual experiences of the beings we have named. This can get to be a stagnant World, one that sensitive humans feel to be suffocating and boring. And because the social World in which we live resists change—we are shaped and socialized, such that our imaginative consciousness becomes crippled. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Our feeling-consciousness becomes reduced in intensity and variety. Our willing-consciousness virtually vanishes; and we experience ourselves, not as creatures who live and decide, but as beings lived by social pressures, or glandular explosions. We construct barriers that separate our various modes one from the other, and allow ourselves to experience them serially, never in a unified, simultaneously active way. One minute we perceive; the next minute we imagine; the next we remember; the next we think. There is no reason for us to believe that serialized consciousness is natural, more God-given then unified experience, such as happens to average people in rare moments of ecstasy, in “peak experiences” and in so-called mystical or transcendental experiences. Indeed, there is some reason for suspecting that in young children, before they are socialized, a unified consciousness, fully turned-on, is the mode. And in certain mad-persons and outsiders—those who have “checked out” of the usual social games, or who have somehow escaped complete engulfment by their culture—we can suspect that their consciousness has eluded the fate that the average person is subject to, or has willingly submitted to. #Randolphharris 12 of 23
The capacity for a specialized consciousness, one usually atrophied in the average human—as in seeing, or imagining, or thinking and reasoning, or feeling—enter int the evolution of that human we call an artist. The dazzling images of the Church assault us again and again in the New Testament in an effort to raise our thinking to the proper height. As the Church, actually we are Christ’s body (Ephesians 1.22,23). He is the Head, and as members of His Body we have at the same time a profound unity, diversity, and mutuality. We are a temple (Ephesians 2.19-22). Jesus is the cornerstone, and we are living stones (1 Peter 2.5)—forming a living place of worship. We are the bride (Ephesians 5.25-33). And Christ, or groom, loves us with a holy love which will beings us to the Marriage Feast of the Lamb. We are his sheep, and He is the nurturing shepherd (John 10.14-16, 25-30). Jesus is the vine, as we are the branches. We are organically in Him, drawing all our sustenance for life from Him (John 15.5). What should the truth that we are the Church means to us? It should fill us with wonder and thanksgiving. We ought to sing, “I am His body, His temple, His bride, His sheep, His branch. I have come to His city—to Angels—to brothers and sisters—to God Himself—to the Church glorified—to Jesus—to forgiveness through Christ’s blood.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
The World is like a great express train hurtling towards disaster—perhaps towards total destruction. And in this truly desperate situation certain passengers are running up and down the corridors announcing to each other that the Church is in great danger! The irony of it would be laughable if it were not so searing. Why, most of the Church’s members have already got out at stations en route. And we ourselves shall be getting out soon anyway. And if the crash comes and the World is burn to askes, then the only thing that will survive the disaster will of course the Church. Personally, the doctrine of the Church ought to tell us that we are part of the grandest institution the Universe has ever know, and that we are tragically diminished by non-participation in Christ’s Body. Correspondingly, the Church is diminished by our nonparticipation as well. You and I need the Church! The Scriptures are most explicit regarding this: “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching,” reports Hebrews 10.25. This straightforward exhortation ought to be enough in itself. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
However, there are several other powerful reasons for faithful participation in the Church, not the least of which is that, as Cyprian argued, we all need a mother. The Church has certainly been that to me. It was the womb which warmed my soul till it was ready for birth which I was led to Christ. I was lovingly nurtured as a youth attending Church. The Church gave me the milk of the Word through strong teaching of my College Department teacher. The Church teaches us to dedicated our lives to God. I owe so much to Christ’s Church: my life, my character, my Worldview, my calling, my vision, my peace, my hope—everything. I believe in the Church! Understanding, then, is what we need the mothering of the Church, we may also understand that we will never benefit as we should from it apart from commitment to hear Head. The entire Christian life is about commitment—first and above all to Christ, but also to the Church, to family, to marriage, to friendship, to ministry. None of these will ever flourish apart from the commitment. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
For example, marriage can never produce the security, satisfaction, and growth that it promises unless there is commitment. This is why today’s provisional live-in arrangements are coming up short. Commitment through hood and bad times is what makes a marriage grown and brings the greatest fulfillment. Humans, on the most elementary level, you do not have to go to church to be a Christian. You do not have to go home to be married either. However, in both cases if you do not, you will have a very poor relationship. Among the growth-inducing benefits of commitment to the Church are: Worship—having your soul swept up to God in the unique elevating power of corporate worship. Hearing the Word—so that your soul can feed on its proper food, brining health to your whole being. Attendance at the Lord’s table—so that you are refreshed as you thank God for the atoning work of Christ. Discipleship—as one is committed to the Church through its ups and downs, an appropriate deepening takes place which the uncommitted heart can never know. Vision and mission—as one remains committed, a supernatural vision for life takes hold which results in mission. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Humans, you need the Church because the Scriptures say you do, because you need a mother and because without commitment to her you will not grow. “And now it came to pass that when Jesus had ascended into Heaven, the multitude did disperse, and every man did take his wife and his children home. And it was noised abroad among the people immediately, before it was yet dark, that the multitude had seen Jesus, and that he had ministered unto them, and that he would also show himself on the morrow unto the multitude. Yea, and even all the night it was noised abroad concerning Jesus; and insomuch did they send forth unto the people that there were many, yea, an exceedingly great number, did labour exceedingly all that night, that they might be on the morrow in the place where Jesus should show himself unto the multitude. And it came to pass that on the morrow, when the multitude was gathered together, behold, Nephi and his brother whom he had raised from the dead, whose name was Timothy, and also his son, whose name was Jonas, and also Mathoni and Mathonihah, his brother, and Kumen, and Kumenonhi and Jeremiah, and Shemnon, and Jonas, and Zedekiah, and Isaiah—now these were the names of the disciples whom Jesus had chosen—and it came to pass that they went forth and stood in the midst of the multitude. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
“And behold, the multitude was so great that they did cause that they should be separated into twelve bodies. And the twelve did teach the multitude; and behold, they did cause that the multitude should kneel down upon the face of the Earth, and should pray unto the Father in the name of Jesus. And the disciples did pray unto the Father also in the name of Jesus. And it came to pass that they arose and ministered unto the people. And when they had ministered those same words which Jesus had spoken—nothing varying from the words which Jesus had spoken—behold they knelt again and prayed to the Father in the name of Jesus. And they did pray for that which they most desired; and the desired that the Holy Ghost should be given unto them. And when they had thus prayed, they went down unto the water’s edge, and the multitude followed them. And it came to pass that Nephi went down into the water and was baptized. And he came up out of the water and began to baptize. And he baptized all those whom Jesus had chosen. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
“And it came to pass when they were all baptized and had come up out of the water, the Holy Ghost did fall upon them, and they were filled with the Holy Ghost and with fire. And behold, they were encircled about as if it were by fire; and it came down from Heaven, and the multitude did witness it, and did bear record; and Angels did come down out of Heaven and did minister unto them. And it came to pass that while the Angels were ministering unto the disciples, behold, Jesus came and stood in the midst and ministered unto them. And it came to pass that he spake unto the multitude, and commanded them that they should kneel down again upon the Earth and also that his disciples should kneel down upon the Earth. And it came to pass that when they had all knelt down upon the Earth, he commanded his disciples that they should pray. And behold, they began to pray; and they did pray unto Jesus, calling him their Lord and their God. And it came to pass that Jesus departed out of the midst of them and went a little way off from them and bowed himself to the Earth, and he said: Father, I thank thee that thou hast given the Holy Ghost unto these whom I have chosen; and it is because of their belief in me that I have chosen them out of the Word. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
“Father, I pray thee that thou wilt give the Holy Ghost unto all them that shall believe in their words. Father, thou hast given them the Holy Ghost because they believe in me; and thou seest that they believe in me because thou hearest them, and they pray unto me; and I pray unto me because I am with them. And now Father, I pray unto thee for them, and also for all those who shall believe on their words, that they may believe in me, that I ay be in them as thou, Father, art in me, that we may be one. And it came to pass that when Jesus had thus prayed unto the Father, he came unto his disciples, and behold, they did still continue, without ceasing, to pray unto him; and they did not multiply many words, for it was given unto them what they should pray, and they were filled with desire. And it came to pass that Jesus blessed them as they did pray unto him; and his countenance did smile upon them, and his countenance did smile upon them, and the light of his countenance did shine upon them, and behold they were as white as the countenance and also the garments of Jesus; and behold the whiteness thereof did exceed all the whiteness, yea, even there could be nothing upon the Earth so white as the whiteness thereof. And Jesus said unto them: Pray on; nevertheless they did not cease to pray. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
“And he turned from them again, and went a little way off and bowed himself to the Earth; and he prayed again unto the Father saying: Father, I thank thee that thou hast purified those whom I have chosen, because of their faith, and I pray for them, and also for them who shall believe on their words, that they may be purified in me, through faith on their words, even as they are purified in me. Father, I pray not for the World, but for those whom thou hast given me out of the World, because of their faith, that they may be purified in me, that I may be in them as thou, Father, art in me, that we may be one, that I may be glorified in them. And when Jesus had spoken these words he came again unto his disciples; and behold they did pray steadfastly, without ceasing, unto him; and he did smile upon them again; and behold they were white, even as Jesus. And it came to pass that he went again a little way off and prayed unto the Father; and tongue cannot speak the words which he prayed, neither can be written by humans the words which he prayed. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
“And the multitude did hear and do bear record; and their hearts were open and they did understand in their hearts the words which he prayed. Nevertheless, so great and marvelous were the words which he prayed that they cannot be written, neither can they be uttered by humans. And it came to pass that when Jesus had made an end of praying he came again to the disciples, and said unto them: So great faith have I never seen among all the Jews; wherefore I could not show unto them so great miracles, because of their unbelief. Verily I say unto you, there are none of them that have seen so great things as ye have seen; neither have they heard so great things as ye have heard,” reports 3 Nephi 19-1-36. Following your course, laid down in ancient times, you have come unerringly to the heights of the sky, there where you can survey the wide Earth with no obstruction. May all on which you gaze be to you liking! May all below follow its course as well as you! Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who createst the fruit of the vine. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, who didst choose us for Thy service from among all peoples. Thou didst exalt us above all tongues by making us holy through Thy commandments. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
In love hast Thou given us, O Lord our God [Sabbaths for rest] holidays for gladness, festivals and seasons for rejoicing. Thou hast granted us [this Sabbath day] this say of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Season of our Freedom, the Feast of Weeks. The Season of the Giving of our Torah, the Feast of Tabernacles, the Season of our Gladness, the Eighth Day Feast of Assembly, the Season of our Gladness, as a holy convocation, commemorating our liberation from Egypt. Thou didst choose us from among all peoples and didst sanctify us by giving us Thy holy [Sabbath and] Festivals as a joyous heritage. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hallowest [the Sabbath] Israel and the Festivals. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who creates the light of fire. Hail to you, Father, high as the Sun in the southern sky. A king in full power are you, sitting high in the Heavens’ throne room. And I come to you, as faithful subject, to ask you to please stretch forth your many shining hands, and please lay then on my head in benediction. Your heart fully open, shining. Your glory in full beauty, shining. Your grace in full radiance, shining. Please see me on high, Bright King, please watch over me, shining. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
Cresleigh Homes
When it comes to building homes, we do not cut corners — unless, of course, those corners will be turned into a window feature. Then it is totally acceptable. 😉 // #MillsStation Residence 1
The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters. The great room is spacious and full of natural light with a covered patio! The Owner’s suite is nestled in the rear of the home separate from the secondary bedrooms, providing maximum privacy. Enjoy a spa like experience in the Owner’s bathroom with a large walk in shower, dual vanities, and makeup counter. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-1/
This home is designed with Universal Design concepts meaning that its well equipped for life’s transitions and aging in place. Learn more about this unique feature by speaking with a sales associate today!
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 will gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together!
This masterfully designed home manages to include all the basics–then adds a little more. Note the transform and floor to ceiling windows, the slanted ceilings, the large great room, spacious kitchen. Special amenities makes this home stand-out from others in its class. Note all the natural light, the sliding glass door to the patio and the wealth of closet and storage space.
Randolph Harris II International Institute 