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God is Any Respecter of Persons—Understand the Pleasures of the Other!
For centuries sermons have been preached on the terror of death in order to frighten people into believing in eternal life. And the result? Numbness, numbness. What a strange and fateful phenomenon! In all sphere of life, anything repeated over and over again loses its effect. A ball bounced hundreds and hundreds of times will finally not bounce anymore. The best medicine, taken day in, day out, will not longer be effective. A truth constantly repeated, generation after generation, is eventually disbelieved. That is what has happened all around us. People are no longer moved by fear of death or by the hope of eternal life. All they ask is that death not be mentioned. And thus is seems a conspiracy of silence has been descended. We all pretend toward our neighbour that the possibility of one’s death could never happen. If we want to grow into really good people, we must all become familiar with the thought of death. We need not think of it every day or every hour. However, when the path of life leads us to some vantage point where the scene around us fades away and we contemplate the distant view right to the end, let us not close our eyes. Let us pause for a moment, look at the distant view, and then carry on. Thinking about death in this way produces true love for life. When we are familiar with death, we accept each week, each day, as a gift. Only if we are able thus to accept life—bit by bit—does it become precious. God has spoken and ordained that a season of incredible favour is coming your way. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
How can death be overcome? By regarding, in moments of deepest concentration, our lives and those who are part of our lives as though we already had lost them in death, only to receive them back for a little while. “Whom He predestined, them He also called,” reports Romans 8.30. It is fitting that God should predestine humans. For all things are subject to His providence. Now it belongs to providence to direct things towards their end. The end towards which created things are directed by God is twofold; one which exceeds all proportion to created nature, to which end created being can attain accord to the power of its nature. Now if a thing cannot attain to something by the power of its nature, it must be directed thereto by another; thus, an arrow is directed by the archer towards a mark. Hence, properly speaking, a rational creature, capable of eternal life, is led towards it, directed as it were, by God. The reason of the direction pre-exists in God; as in Him is the type of the order of all things towards an end, which we proved above to be providence. Now the type in the mind of the doer of something to be done, is a kind of pre-existence in one of the thing to be done. Hence the type of aforesaid direction of a rational creature towards the end of life eternal is called predestination. For to destine or send. Thus it is clear that predestination, as regards its objects, is a part of providence. Damascene calls predestination an imposition of necessity, after the manner of natural things which are predetermined toward the end. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
This imposition of predestination is clear from his adding: “He does not will malice, nor does He compel virtue.” Whence predestination is not excluded by God. Irrational creatures are not capable of that end which exceeds the faculty of human nature. Whence they cannot be properly said to be predestined; although improperly the term is used in respect of any other end. Predestination applies to angels, just as it does to humans, although they never been unhappy. For movement does not take its species from the term “wherefrom” but from the term “whereto.” Because it matters nothing, in respect of the notion making white, whether one who is made white was before black, yellow, or red. Likewise it matters nothing in respect of the notion of predestination whether one is predestined to life eternal from the state of misery or not. Although it may be said that every conferring of good above that which is due pertains to mercy; as was shown preciously. Even if by a special privilege their predestination were revealed to some, it is not fitting that it should be revealed to everyone; because, if so, those who were not predestined would despair; and security would beget negligence in the predestined. When so many others fall victim at some time to sickness or accident, there is no certainty that one will remain indefinitely immune. The truth is with Jesus Christ, who said that flesh and blood will no inherit eternal life. Life brings its sufferings to every quester, as to every nonquester, as to all beings who move on this Earth. Successful completion of the quest may free one from some of them but could it ever free one from all of them? The happiness one may find cannot be an absolute; it must be qualified. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The characteristic stamped upon Earthly life are in part unpleasant, miserable, and painful. Sickness and struggle are not merely the result of wrong thinking, as Christian science avers, but native to and almost inevitable in our existence. Were it otherwise, we would be so satisfied that we would never aspire to a higher existence, but anxieties goad us eventually into seeking inner peace, Worldly troubles stir us to seeking unworldly refuge, fated frustrations drive us to seeking diviner satisfactions, and bodily illness to seeking spiritual joy. Ours is the World of the imperfect. The perfect reality could never be expressed amid its limitations. No one has ever “demonstrated” conquest over death, or complete freedom from human afflictions before death. These things are inherent in out lot. Through death’s presence we are aroused to the need of eternal life; through afflictions to the need of eternal serenity. They exist only in the spirit. So the health and prosperity we can demonstrate are essentially spiritual. Out of this physical suffering one should have learned the lessons of a deep wisdom: first, that this Earth is not one’s home but only a camp; second, that this body is not one’s true self but only a garment; third, that suffering, disappointment, or discontent is inseparable from Earthly life, real happiness is to be found only in the super-Earthly life; fourth, that the full force of the mind must be developed by renunciation, sacrifice, concentration, and aspiration so that it can even here to a large extent create an inner life that continues peacefully in whatever state the body may find itself. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The pains and maladies which accompany and punctuate physical existence are not taken away from the spiritually aware human. Their presence continues to act as a reminder—as much to one as to all other humans—that just because they do accompany the body’s life, that life is an imperfect and unsatisfying one. One’s five senses are working like all other human’s and so must report the painful as well as pleasurable sensations. However, what one does gain is a peace deeper than the body’s sensations, and unbreakable by their painful nature. One part of one—the lesser—may suffer; but the other part—the greater—remains undisturbed. In one’s higher and spiritual nature one is well fortified against these afflictions, sustained by Heavenly forces denied to other people. The Buddha was not immune from disease. The austerities he practiced during his search for enlightenment permanently affected his health, and his ceaseless activity for forty-five years greatly weakened him towards the end of his life. He often suffered from a severe headache and in his old age he suffered from severe backache which sometimes forced him to stop a sermon halfway and ask one of one’s disciples to continue from where he left off. The unsuitable meals which we was sometimes force to eat were responsible for a dyspepsia which persisted throughout his life, culminating in his last fatal illness of dysentery. However, none of these ailments prevented him from being always ready with help for those who needed it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Will humans ever be able to retain and maintain the same physical form permanently? To some it would be the height of happiness to realize such an aim, whereas to others it would be a sentence of captivity without hope of release. If the self-actualized able to prolong one’s physical life far beyond the normal period? Is there any truth in the Indian legends of yogis who lived for a thousand years or more? If not, why should such advanced humans lack this power? The answer to the first question is in the negative; to the second question probably in the negative. The answer to the third question is that transiency is the law governing all formed things; that death is the inevitable complement of birth because, as Buddha pointed out, whatever has a beginning in time must likewise have an end in time; and that the truth is that the self-actualized does not really die for one persistently is reborn in Christ in order to help humankind. We need the body—all of us, not materialists nor ordinary persons only—therefore we must respect it. It is with the ears that we listen to Beethoven: that is, with the body. It is with the eyes that we read beautiful poetry: again with the body. Let us not decry the body. If enlightenment is to be full, and completely balanced, it must not only occur in the thinking intellect and emotional feeling; it must also occur in the acting physical body. The physical body is each person’s responsibility. One has to live with it as well as live in it. The failure to care properly for it makes it complain. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
The only language in which the body can complain with most men and women is that of sickness, disease, or malfunction; with others, a silent intuitive feeling is enough. However, in the first case although its speech is heard, its message is often misunderstood, ignored, or rejected. One can and may transcend the body and the body’s World or deny them in mystical meditation, metaphysical speculation. However, this does not get rid of them. They are a fact which confronts one as soon as the speculation passes, or the meditation ebbs. It is then that the value of health must be recognized, the conditioning by surroundings properly appraised. Only on such a physical foundation can the mental exercises have enough good results; otherwise it is too hard a struggle to aspire and try to mediate. The modern civilized environment is artificial, is hostile to spiritual development, and periodic retreat or flight from it is essential. Those who feel they are making no progress at all and those who find what little they do make is slow and tedious, should look to neglected factors in their individual case. The physical body, for instance: does it get right diet, exercise, breathing, and relaxing, or does it sin against the laws of hygienic living? Sane and balanced life commands us to keep physically fit so far as doing so is within our power—which means so far as Universal laws permit. Physical fitness is the harmonious and efficient functioning of each part of the body. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The yoga of body control must be broadly interpreted to mean not postural exercise alone, but the discipline of the whole physical organism. It is better for instance, to eat brown bread that to be able to contort the body in yoga posture number 57! Not only mind, not only hear, but also body is a chamber in which a master must work. Although one taught humans to give up the World and its ways, although one persuaded whoever would respond to adopt the inner life as a full-time occupation, Buddha was balanced enough to declare that a healthy body was a great benefit to everyone. Although one rejected the unnecessary, the greedy, or the imprudent gratification of the body’s desires and appetites, one commanded the satisfaction of is essential needs. Although one taught a strict discipline of the body, one did not teach humans to despise it. One’s praise of good health showed one’s wisdom. We have to live wit the body for the rest of our lives, and therefore must accommodate it in this quest. It is not to be denounced as a tomb if, by careful and pure living, it can be turned into a temple. It must be ruled, disciplined, used as an instrument. In needs to learn to sit still without fidgets when we wish it to do so for meditation periods. It needs to learn to like pure natural foods. Its lusts must be dealt with and mastered, not accepted feebly. Everyone who wans to reject these purifying disciplines of habits and progressive reforms of regime is perfectly entitled to do so, and on any grounds that appeal to one. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
However, if one chooses to do so, one ought to reject these purifying disciplines of habits modestly and quietly and humbly for, as personal hygienes, they represent the tested ideas and practices of thousands of years of experience among thousands of mystics, holy people, stains, self-actualized, and in continents far apart from one another. We are spiritually saved only when the whole of our being is cleansed and renewed, when body, mind, and feeling are purified and reborn. It is not enough to cleanse the moral character only. Most students know that the preparatory work includes purifying the heart of base feelings and clearing the mind of negative thoughts—arduous but necessary work. Few students know that it also includes cleansing the body of toxic matter. The body is to be brought under one’s command, made accustomed to do one’s higher will, that which serves one’s best, one’s purer consciousness. There is a wise use of the body and an unwise one. The philosopher increases its value as a servant by improving its health and increasing its vital force. These energies will be used to strengthen concentration and sustain mediation on one side of one’s being, and to cultivate will and rule the passions of the other. The unwise way is to drive the body into fanatic asceticism and foolish extremes. It should become a useful ally. Regeneration of the inner being must be begun or completed by attention to the outer being—the body. Those who are so captivated by the inner work that they fail to see the importance of the other, make a mistake. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The faulty use of the body is a consequence of the failure to bring both awareness and refection into it. This is to be guarded against because civilized living has substituted artificial habit for natural ones of the savage. The bad results of this failing make their appearance most often after the age of fifty. The human who starts to seek for God with little more than one’s earnestness or eagerness, has not started with enough. One need also a cleaner body and a clearer mind. To deny any organ of the body its legitimate function is to deny harmony, coordination, total well-being to the body. They have forced habits, foods, and environments on the body which it not only would never have freely chosen for itself but would instantly rejected if given the chance to be heard. The human being who tries to ignore one’s physical conditions, and especially one’s physical body, does not in the end usually succeed in doing so. This is true in the New World and to a lesser degree in the Old World. If cancer makes its appearance in that body, as a result of one’s disposition—which it mostly is—one is compelled to reckon with it. This thing, this fleshly body, which ascetics have hated and saints have despised, is a holy temple. The divine Life-force is always latently present in it and, aroused, can sweep through every cell, making it sacred. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
If the Word was made flesh, if the Cosmic Mind manifested this vast Universe out of its own substance, if the World is divine, why should we be stopped from enjoying our life in it? The body in itself is not evil, could not be if it expressed divine intelligence. Life in it is an inevitable phase of the entity’s development; the experiences garnered from it led to lessons learned and truths understood. Whereas every human personality is different in its characteristics from every other one, no human Overself is different in its characteristics from any other one. The seekers of all times and all places have always found one and the same divine being when they found the Overself. This Overself is everywhere one and the same for all humans. The experience of rising into awareness of it does not differ in actuality from one human to another, but the purity with which one absorbs it, interprets it, understand it, does. Hence, the varieties of expression used about it, the clash of revelations concerning it. This is the paradox, that the Overself is at once universal and individual. It is the first because it overshadows all humans as a single power. It is the second because it is found by each human within oneself. It is both space and the point in space. It is infinite Spirit and yet it is also the holy presence in everyone’s heat. This other being is outside the “I” yet, paradoxically, and in another sense, it is inside the “I.” It is not oneself yet also it is oneself. If these statements cannot be understood at first reading, do not therefore denounce them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
If you are really in earnest, approach them prayerfully or, if your feelings cannot be made to run on that line, aspiringly at the precise moments when you approach the mysterious moment that transmutes your waking state into the sleep state. However, do not expect to receive satisfaction with the first trial nor even a twentieth—although this is always possible. If you do not desert the enterprise though impatience, you will find one day that you re at last able to read, clearly and correctly, the meaning of these mystical words. Other people have done it, have emerged from the mind’s obscurity into the intuition’s clarity, although at varying pace. They have succeeded because the constitution of humans, being double, makes it possible. If you lack any wisdom, let one ask of God. And it shall be given. Sometimes it is nice to pray on a beautiful spring day. Everyone sometimes has the desire to be alone—away from people—surrounded by God’s beautiful outdoors. On some occasions when one is praying, one can immediately feel a power overcome one and we are unable to express what we are feeling. Darkness may gather around until one thinks one will have to stop, but with all one’s strength it is important to remember to call upon God. When is seems as though one will have to give up, that is when a pillar of light will appear over one’s head. Gradually the light comes down from Heaven until it falls upon one, and the darkness will be gone. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Many draw near to God with their lips, but their hearts are far from Him; they teach for the doctrine the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof. Prayers seek to heal the division that has grown between us and the rest of nature. They tell us: Pay attention. Attend to the relationships alive among all forms of life. Use imagination to explore the binding curve that joins us together. Seek to know the other. Join it with care. Care for it as for yourself. When the human spirit is understood in this sense, as the mode of consciousness in which we are connected to the planet as a whole, it become clear that our entire life is an Earth Prayer. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises, hymns and blessings that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who hast selected good prophets, taking delight in their words which were spoken in truth Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hast chosen the Bible, Thy servant Moses, Thy people America, and the prophets of truth and righteousness. The mountain, I become part of it. The herbs, the fir tree, I become part of it. The morning mists, the clous, the gathering waters, I become part of it. The wilderness, the dew drops, the pollen, I become part of it. I am the one whose prases echoes on high I adorn all the Earth. I am the breeze that nurtures all things green I encourage blossoms to flourish with ripening fruits, I am led by the spirit to feed the purest streams. I am the rain coming from the dew that causes the graces to laugh with the joy of life. I am the yearning for good. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
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The Popular Idea that “You Cannot Legislate Morality” is a Myth!
When the human mind is made obsolete by advancing technology, the soul may not be far behind. The pace of events is moving so fast that unless we can find some way to keep our sights on tomorrow, we cannot expect to be in touch with today. Every society faces not merely a succession of probable futures, but an array of possible futures, and a conflict over preferable futures. Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future. In the quickening race to put humans and machines on the planets, tremendous recourses are devoted to making possible a “soft landing.” Every sub-system of the landing craft is exquisitely designed to withstand the shock of arrival. Armies of engineers, geologists, physicists, metallurgists and other specialists concentrate years of work on the problem of landing impact. Failure of any sub-system to function after touch-down could destroy human lives, not to mention billions of dollars worth of apparatus and tens of thousands of human-years of labour. Today over seven billion human beings, the total population of technology-rich nations, are speeding toward a rendezvous with the super-age of information. Must we experience mass future shock? Or can we, too, achieve a “soft landing?” We are rapidly accelerating our approach. The craggy outlines of the new society are emerging from the mists of tomorrow. Yet even as we speed closer, evidence mounts that one of our most critical sub-systems—education—is dangerously malfunctioning. What passes for education today, even in our “best” school and colleges, is hopeless anachronism. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Parents look to education to fit their children for life in the future. Teachers warn that lack of an education will cripple a child’s chances in the World of tomorrow. Government ministries, churches, the mass media—all exhort young people to stay in school, insisting that now, as never before, one’s future is almost wholly dependent upon educations. Yet for all this rhetoric about the future, our schools face backward toward a dying system, rather than forward to the emerging new society. Their vast energies are applied to cranking out people who focus on information technology tooled for survival in a system that will long out live most people. The Information Age is the ideal that access to and the control of information is the defining characteristic of this current era in human civilization. The Information Age, also called the Computer Age, The Digital Age, and the New Media Age, is coupled tightly with the advent of personal computers. Companies whose businesses are built on digitized information have become valuable and powerful in a relatively short period of time. Just as land owners held the wealthy and wielded power in the Agrarian Age and manufacturers such as Henry For and Cyrus McCormick accumulated fortunes in the Industrial Age, the current Information Age has spawned its own breed of wealthy influential brokers, from Microsoft’s Bill Gates, John Tu and David Sun who are the founders of Kingston Technology, Patrick Soon-Shiong, founder and CEO of NantWorks, Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell, and of course Jeff Bezos, co-founder and CEO of Amazon. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
To help avert future shock, we must create a super-age of information educational system. And to do this, we must search for our objectives and methods in the future, rather than in the past. Every society has its own characteristic attitude toward past, present and future. This time-bias, formed in response to the rate of change, is one of the least noticed, yet most powerful determinants of social behaviour, and it is clearly reflected in the way the society prepares its young for adulthood. In stagnant societies, the past crept forward into the present and repeated itself in the future. In such a society, the most sensible way to prepare a child was to arm one with the skills of the past—for these were precisely the same skills one would need in the future. “With the ancient is wisdom,” the Bible admonished. Thus farther handed down to son all sorts of practical techniques along with a clearly defined, highly tradition set of values. Knowledge was transmitted not by specialist concentrated in schools, but through the family, religious institutions, and apprenticeships. Learner and teacher were dispersed throughout the entire community. The key to the system, however, was its absolute devotion to yesterday. The curriculum of the past was the past. The mechanical age smashed all this, for industrialism required a new kind of human. It demanded skills that neither family nor church could, by themselves, provide. It forced an upheaval in the value system. Above all, it required that humans develop a new sense of time. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Mass education was the ingenious machines constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adult it needed. The problem was inordinately complex. How to pre-adapt children for a new World—a World of cognitive kills such as conducting independent research, assessing information for credibility, applying concepts to new situations, and self-critiquing one’s own abilities are central to our success in today’s working World—and, more important, to our lives as human beings. People have to get used to machines, computers, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a World in which time is to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the computer and the clock. The solution is an educational system that, in its very structure, simulates this new World. This system did not emerge instantly. Even today it retains throwback elements from pre-industrial society. Yet the whole idea of assembling masses of stents (raw material) to be processed by teachers (workers) in a centrally located school (factory) is a stoke of industrial genius. Although this is the age of information, many of the same concepts in industrialism apply. The whole administrative hierarchy of education, as it has grown up, follows the model of industrial bureaucracy. The very organization of knowledge into permanent disciplines is grounded on the drive to learn, for its own sake. Bells ring to announce the change of time, but schools are not bound by bells and walls. The inner life of the school thus becomes an anticipatory mirror, a perfect introduction to the age of information. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
The most criticized features of education today—the regimentation, lack of individualization, the rigid systems of seating, grouping, grading, and marking, the authoritarian role of the teacher—are precisely those that made the mass public education so effective an instrument of adaptation for its place and time. Young people passing through this educational machine emerge into an adult society whose structure of jobs, roles, and institutions resemble that of the school itself. The schoolchild does not simply learn facts that one could use later on; one lives, as well as learns, a new way of life modeled after one one would lead in the future. The primary goal is now to help one incorporate the computer into K-12 curriculum. To this extent the book cannot be taken in isolation. The ideas and skills have changed to engage the latest digital technologies. The method of distribution is now a blend between face-to-face and some other combination of virtual interfaces, and a text-plus-multimedia based learning. Thus the focus of education itself has begun to shift, ever so slowly, away from the past and toward the present. An educated workforce can help lift people out of poverty, recue premature mortality, strengthen gender equality, and promote civic participation. Works need breadth of skills such as literacy and numeracy as well as the ability to think critically and to solve problem collaboratively. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
In the digital age, citizens must be prepared to respond to the challenges presented by globalization, climate change, health epidemics, and economic uncertainty. Employers will be seeking out a workforce of possessing analytical skills and interpersonal skills. For example, children will no longer be asked why does it rain, but expected to memorize and recite a series of steps for ow precipitation occurs. As our planet speeds toward 10 billion people (likely 9.5 billion or so by 2050), it is not hard to believe that all life will look differently. We will likely see a lot more new food based programs and recycling degrees, and we will also see 1 in 6 adults on our planet over the age of 65. So, medicine and health degrees will be even more valuable than today, especially when you include the administration of new systems that do truly personalize medicine and connect patients to care anywhere. Most campuses will be commuter campuses as 90 percent of people will use the Internet to obtain their classes. You will likely see schools in places unseen today, like the Harvard office suite atop a London office building or a Michigan State food science degree on a farm in Iowa. There will still be some campuses, but the idea is already being practiced. When we went to study abroad in China, we took our own professors and had our classes in hotel conference rooms, as well as in classes Beijing Language and Culture University, as well as at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics because we were travelling while in China. #Randolphharris 6 of 23
Students will also go to corporation colleges to get their education. Like the University of BMW or Samsung college for the promise of a job upon graduation. The landscape will look different than it does today, and hopefully everyone will be ready for the changes. Education is perhaps one of the most ingredients to a happy, successful, and constructive life. In fact, having access to a good education during childhood and your early adulthood can make a real difference in your later life. Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the World. The technology of tomorrow requires millions of lightly lettered humans, ready to work in unison at endlessly repetitious jobs, it requires not humans who take orders in unblinking fashion, aware that the price of bread is mechanical submission to authority, but humans who can make critical judgments, who can weave their way through novel environments, who are quick to spot new relationships in the rapidly changing reality. It requires people who have the future in their bones. Education’s lesson is clear: its prime objective must be to increase the individual’s “cope-ability”—the speed and economy with which one can adapt to continual change. And the faster the rate of change, the more attention must be devoted to discerning the pattern of future events. It is no longer sufficient for Johnny to understand the past. It is not even enough for him to understand the present, for the here-and-now environment will soon vanish. Johnny must learn t anticipate the direction and rate of change. He must, to put it technically learn to make repeated, probabilistic, increasingly long-range assumptions about the future. And so must Johnny’s teachers. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
It is only by projecting what will be in demand 50 years in the future, the kind of vocations that may be needed, assumptions about the kind of family forms and human relationships that will prevail; the kinds of ethical and moral problems that will arise; the kind of technology that will surround us and the organizational structures with which we must mesh that successful people will survive the accelerative thrusts. We must create a “Council of the Future” in every school and community: Teams of men and women devoted to probing the future in the interests of the present. By projecting “assumed futures,” be defining coherent educational responses to them, by opening these alternatives to activate public debate, such councils—similar in some ways to the “prognostic cells” advocated by Robert Jungk of the Technische Hochschule in Berlin—could have a powerful impact on education. The creation of future-oriented, future-shaping task forces in education could revolutionize the revolution of the young. For those educators who recognize the bankruptcy of the present system, but remain uncertain about next steps, the council movement could provide purpose as well as power, through alliance with, rather than hostility toward, youth. And by attracting community and parental participation—business people, trade unionists, scientists, and others—the movement could build broad political support for digital age revolution in education. It would be a mistake to assume that the present-day educational system is unchanging. On the contrary, it is undergoing rapid change. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
However, much of this change is no more than an attempt to refine the existent machinery, making it every more efficient in pursuit of obsolete goals. The rest is a kind of Brownian motion, self-canceling, incoherent, directionless. What has been lacking is a consistent direction and a logical starting point. The council movement could supply both. The direction is the super age of information. The starting point: the future. As we become acquainted with truth in good sources of all kinds, we are better prepared to work in the World and serve in the kingdom of God. The Lord revealed, “The Glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 93.36. All truth comes from Heavenly Father and is designed for the good of His children. God wants us to educate our minds, improve our skills, and perfect our abilities so we can be a better influence for good in the World, provide for ourselves, our family, and those in need, and build God’s Kingdom. All truth, whether religious or secular, is included in God’s plan for our salvation and happiness. The Prophet Joseph Smith taught, “Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection. And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life, one will have s much the advantage in the World to come.” The Lord has given each of us gifts and encourages us to improve upon them and seek other gifts. He has also instructed us to seek learning, even by study and also by faith. Work for an education. Get all the training you can. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Who is to day religion and politics should not mix? Whose Bible are they reading? There is an implication that Christians are immune to corruption. Of course not. While Christians know that their faith requires high standards of righteousness, they are human and often capitulate to the same temptations as anyone else. In fact, Christians may well face more problems than others when they become involved in the political process. How does a Christian deal with the inherent divided loyalties: duty to God and duty to the national interest? Can a Christian successfully avoid the subtle snares of power? Can a Christian make the compromises necessary for the everyday business of politics? What about the question of candor, for example? At times national security may well require not only concealing the true, but lying. When in the White House, politicians often go through elaborate lengths to conceal essential secret negotiations. Henry Kissinger had a bad cold when he visited Pakistan in 1971—or so the press was told. Actually he had been flown to Beijing to conduct clandestine meetings in preparation for Mr. Nixon’s historic visit to China. Or take the day Nixon announced a major troop withdrawal in Vietnam. He immediately ordered Kissinger to bring Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin to a secret meeting room in the White House basement. “Henry,” he roared, “You shake him up. Tell him not to believe these news stories. We are only pulling out a few troop—and if the Russians do not back off in sending supplies to Hanoi, we will bomb the daylights out of that city. Tell him the president is uncontrollable, a madman—that he will do anything. Let us keep them off balance.” That such meetings took place was flatly denied in order to protect the lives of the withdrawing troops. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
President Regan did that same thing in 1983. When reporters asked about a rumored invasion of Grenada, official White House spokesmen dismissed such questions as “preposterous.” Actually, troops were at that moment disembarking on the island’s beaches. A “no comment” to the press, however, would have been tantamount to a “yes”—an admission that would have endangered lives. In these days of delicate international tensions and the instant communications ability of an almost omnipresent press, such deceit is a common instrument of foreign policy. The press even accepts it. In a 1987 Newsweek interview, crack ABC interviewer Ted Koppel acknowledge that government official must be “prepared to mislead and sometimes even to lie.” Deliberate lies, the corruption of power, compromise with ideological opponents, temptations on all dies—these appear to be the mechanism of modern government. Should the Christian circumvent the messy business of politics altogether? The answer must be an emphatic no. As Robert L. Dabney wrote, “Every Christian…whether law-maker or law executor or voter, should carry one’s Christian conscience, enlightened by God’s Word, into one’s political duty. We must ask less what party caucuses and leaders dictate, and more what duty dictates.” There are at least three compelling reasons Christians must be involved in politics and government. First, as citizens of the nation-state, Christians have the same civic duties all citizens have: to serve on juries, to pay taxes, to vote, to support candidates they think are best qualified. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Christians are commanded to pray and respect governing authorities. (For years many Christian fundamentalists shunned the “sinful” political process, even to the extent of not voting. Whatever else may be said about it, the Moral Majority performed a valuable public service in bringing these citizens back into the mainstream.) Second, as citizens of the Kingdom of God they are to bring God’s standards of righteousness and justice to bear on the kingdom of this World. This is the cultural commission. As former Michigan state senator and college professor Stephan Monsma says, Christian political involvement has the “potential to move the political system away from the brokering of the self-interest of powerful persons and groups into a renewed concern for the public interest.” Third, Christians have an obligation to being transcendent moral values into public debate. All law implicitly involves morality; the popular idea that “you cannot legislate morality” is a myth. Morality is legislated every day from the vantage point of one value system or another. The question is not whether we will legislate morality, but whose morality we will legislate. Law is but a body of rules regulating human behaviour; it establishes, from the view of the state, the rightness or wrongness of human behaviour. Most laws, therefore, have moral implications. The more you know who you are in God, the easier it is to manifest the truth about yourself! #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Statutes prohibiting murder, mandates for seat belts, or regulations for industrial safety are all designed to protect human life—a reflection of the particular moral view that values the dignity and worth of human life. And efficacy does not affect morality If in American we have more homicides per capita than any other country, it is not reason t repeal the laws making murder a crime. The common argument against the legislation of morality is Prohibition, which conjures up such caricatures as Billy Sunday waving a chair over his head and Carrie Nation chopping up whiskey barrels. The church has taken an undeserved bad rap for this. No one entity imposed Prohibition; it was voted in by a clear majority after a lengthy national debate. Admittedly, over the years of its existence Prohibition became increasingly difficult to enforce; it encouraged organized crime and ultimately led to widespread disrespect for the law. Eventually the costs outweighed the benefits. However, was it morally justified? Certainly one’s personal decision to drink alcohol is a private matter. When millions do it to such excess that public safety is endangered, however, it becomes a public concern. That was the case in the pre-Prohibition era. Thousands reported to their factory jobs under the influence and were maimed or killed by heavy industrial machines then being introduced in the American economy. The tavern trade spawned harlotry rings at a time, like today, when there was no cure for the raging epidemic of certain contagious and socially transmitted viral deception was being transmitted. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Though many write off Prohibition as a complete failure, the facts are that industrial safety improved dramatically as per capita drinking, particular among working people, dropped precipitously, and the VD epidemic slowed. Not until 1970 did per capita consumption of alcohol again reach pre-Prohibition levels. Everyday, 29 people in the United States of America die in motor vehicle crashes that involve an alcohol-impaired driver. This is one death every 50 minutes. The annual cost of alcohol-related crashes totals more than $44 billion. And with the majority of crimes being committed by people under the influence of drugs or alcohol, can anyone really argue realistically today that moral issues are not matter of public interest? The real issue for Christians is not whether they should be involved in politics or contend for laws that affect moral behaviour. The question is how. The greatest relationship you will ever have is with God! There is nothing like it! There is a further aspect of moral attitudes that I have noted in the sketch of the development of the sense of justice, namely, their connection with certain natural attitudes. Thus in examining a moral feeling we should ask: what if any are the natural attitudes to which it is related? Now there are two questions here, one the converse of the other. The first asks about the natural attitudes that are sown to be absent when a person fail to have certain moral feelings. Where as the second asks which natural attitudes are evidences to be present when someone experiences a moral emotion. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
The first asks about the natural attitudes that are shown to be absent when a person fails to have certain moral feelings. Whereas the second askes which natural attitudes are evidenced to be present when someone experiences a moral emotion. In context of the authority situation, the child’s natural attitudes of love and trust for those in authority lead to feelings of (authority) guilt when one violates the injunctions addressed to one. The absence of these moral feelings would evidence a lack of these natural ties. Similarly, within the framework of the morality of association, the natural attitudes of friendship and mutual trust give rise to feelings of guilt for not fulfilling the duties and obligations recognized by the group. The absence of these feelings would imply the absence of these attachments. These propositions must not be mistaken for their converses, for while feelings of indignation and guilt, say, can often be taken as evidence for such affections, there may be other explanations. In general, moral principles are affirmed for various reasons and their acceptance is normally sufficient for the moral feelings. To be sure, on the contract theory principles of right and justice have a certain content, and as we have just seen, there is a sense in which acting in accordance with them can be interpreted as acting from a concern for humankind, of for the good of other persons. Whether this fact shows that one acts in part from certain natural attitudes, especially as these involve attachments to particular individuals, and not simply from the general forms of sympathy and benevolence, is a question I shall leave aside here. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Certainly the preceding account of the development of morality supposes that affection for particular persons plays an essential part in the acquisition of morality. However, how far these attitudes are required for later moral motivation can be left open, although it would, I think, be surprising if these attachments were not to some degree necessary. Now the connection between the natural attitudes and the moral sentiments may be expressed as it follows: these sentiments and attitudes are both ordered families of characteristic dispositions, and these families overlap in such a manner that the absence of certain moral feelings evidences the absence of certain natural ties. Or alternatively, the presence of certain natural attachments gives rise to a liability to certain moral emotions once the requisite moral development has taken place. We can see how this is so by an example. If A cares for B, then failing a special explanation A is afraid for B when B is in danger and tries to come t B’s assistance. Again, if C plans to treat B unjustly, A is indignant with C and attempts to prevent one’s plans from succeeding. In bot cases, A is disposed to protect B’s interests. Further, unless there are special circumstances, A is joyful when together with B, and when B suffers injury or dies. A is stricken with grief. If the injury to B is A’s responsibility, A will feel remorse. Love is a sentiment, a hierarchy of dispositions to experience and to manifest these primary emptions as the occasion elicits and to act in the appropriate way. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
To confirm the connection between the natural attitudes and the moral sentiments one simply notes that the disposition on A’s part to feel remorse when one injures B, or guilt when one violates B’s legitimate claims, or A’s disposition to feel indignation when C seeks to deny B’s right, are as closely related psychologically with the natural attitudes of love as the disposition to be joyful in other’s presence, or two feel sorrow when one suffers. The moral sentiments are in some ways more complex. In their complete form they presupposed an understanding and an ability to judge in accordance with them. However, assuming these things, the liability to moral feelings seems to be as much a part of the natural sentiments as the tendency to be joyful, or the liability to grief. Love sometimes expresses itself in sorrow, at other times indignation. Either one without the other would be equally unusual. The content of rational moral principles is such as to render these connections intelligible. Now one main consequence of this doctrine is that the moral feelings are a normal feature of human life. We could not do away with them without at the same time eliminating certain natural attitudes. Among persons who ever acted in accordance with their duty of justice except as reasons of self-interest and expediency dictated there would be no bonds of friendship and mutual trust. For when these attachments exist, other reasons are acknowledged for acting fairly. This much seems reasonably obvious. However, it also follows from what has been said that, barring self-deception, egoists are incapable off feeling resentment and indignation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
If either of two egoists deceives the other and this is found out, neither of them has a ground for complaint. They do not accept the principles of justice, or any other conception that is reasonable from the standpoint of the original position; nor do they experience any inhibition from guilt feelings for breaches of their duties. As we have seen, resentment and indignation are moral feelings and therefore they presuppose an explanation by reference to an acceptance of the principles of right and justice. However, by hypothesis the appropriate explanations cannot be given. To deny that self-interested persons are incapable of resentment and indignation is not of course to say that they cannot be angry and annoyed with one another. A person without a sense of justice may be enraged at someone who fails to act fairly. However, anger and annoyance are distinct from indignation and resentment; they are not, as the latter are, moral emotions. Nor should it be denied that egoists may want others to recognize the bonds of friendship and to treat them in a friendly way. However, these desires are not to be mistaken for ties of affection that lead one to make sacrifices for one’s friends. No doubt there are difficulties in distinguishing between resentment and anger, and between apparent and real friendship. Certainly the overt manifestations and actions may seem the same when viewing a limited span of conduct. Yet in the longer run the difference can usually be made out. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
One may say, then, that a person who lacks a sense of justice, and who would never act as justice requires except as self-interest and expediency prompt, not only is without ties of friendship, and affection, and mutual trust, but is incapable of experiencing resentment and indignation. One lacks certain natural attitudes and moral feelings of a particularly elementary kind. Put another way, one who lacks a sense of justice lacks certain fundamental attitudes and capacities included under the notion of humanity. Now the moral feelings are admittedly unpleasant, in some extended sense of unpleasant; but there is no way for us to avoid a liability to them without disfiguring ourselves. This liability is the price of love and trust of friendship and affection, and of a devotion to institutions and traditions from which we have benefited and which serve the general interests of humankind. Further, assuming that persons are possessed of interests and aspirations of their own, and that they are prepared in the pursuit of their own ends and ideals to press their claims on one another—that is, so long as the conditions giving rise to questions of justice obtain among them—it is inevitable that, given temptation and passion, this liability will be realized. And since being moved by ends and ideals of excellence implies a liability to humiliation and shame, and an absence of liability of a liability to humiliation and shame a lack of ends and such ideals, one can say of shame and humiliation also that they are a part of the notion of humanity. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Now that fact that one who lacks a sense of justice, and thereby a liability to guilt, lacks certain fundamental attitudes and capacities is not to be taken as a reason for acting as justice dictates. However, it has this significance: by understanding what it would be to lack part of our humanity too—we are led to accept our having this sentiment. It follows that the moral sentiments are a normal part of human life. One cannot do away with them without at e same time dismantling the natural attitude as well. And we have also seen that the moral sentiments are continuous with these attitudes in the sense that the love of humankind and the desire to uphold the common good include the principle of right and justice as necessary to define their objective. None of this is to deny that our existing moral feelings may be in many respects irrational and injurious to our good. Dr. Freud is right in his view that these attitudes are harsher aspects of the authority situation in which they were first acquired. Resentment and indignation, feelings of guilt and remorse, a sense of duty and the censure of others, often take perverse and destructive forms, but blunt without reason human spontaneity and enjoyment. When I say that moral attitudes are part of our humanity, I mean those attitudes that appeal to sound principles of right and justice in their explanation. The reasonableness of the underlying ethical conception is a necessary condition; and so the appropriateness of moral sentiments to our nature is determined by the principles that would be consented to in the original positions. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
These principles regulate moral education and the expression of moral approval and disapproval, just as they govern the design of institutions. Yet even if the sense of justice is the normal outgrowth of natural human attitudes within a well-ordered society, it is still true that our present moral feelings are liable to be unreasonable and capricious. However, one of the virtues of a well-ordered society is that, since arbitrary authority has disappeared, its members suffer much less from the burdens of oppressive conscience. It is reason which helps to get beyond the trivialities of our daily life. We become concerned about all that is happening, with all the questions that beset our times. It makes us participate in the World and feel personally what is happening on Earth. Our happiness or unhappiness is not determined by what happens to us in everyday life. However favourable our circumstances, however successful our enterprises, however much envied we are by our fellow humans, we still may not be happy. For peace alone is the source of happiness. The more our reasoning throws us unto the turmoil of life’s problems, the more we yearn for peace. We are led up to the mountains until the glaciers begin to glitter before us. Then reasoning bids us climb still higher, still further into the light, still further into peace and quietude. The older we grow the more we realize that true power and happiness come to us only from those who spiritually mean something to us. Whether they are near or far, still alive or dead, we need them if we are to find our way through life. Only when they are near to us in spirit can the good we bear within us can be turned into life and action. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
What tremendous inner power exists in spiritual communion with another human! How pitiable and destitute humans are when they are spiritually alone, when they have no one to understand and encourage them. If they do not even feel the need for it, doubly pitiable. Blessed the Lord who is to be praised. Praised be the Lord who is blessed for all eternity. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who didst choose us from among all the peoples by giving us Thy Torah. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Giver of the Torah. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who in giving us a Torah of truth, hast planted everlasting life within us. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Giver of the Torah. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who in bestowing good upon humans beyond their deserving, hast dealt graciously with me. May He, who hath dealt graciously with you, continue to bestow His favour upon you. We recognize that our identity is inextricably entwined with lives beyond our own. This sense of expanded identity goes beyond human relationships. We depend upon trees, trees depend upon grasses, grasses depend upon animals, mountains depend upon oceans, the dolphin depends upon the farther star. Physically and spiritually, we all are woven into the living process of the Earth. We take part in—as science now tells us—a planet-sized living system. Our breathing, our acting, our thinking arise in interaction with our shared World. Our own hearts constantly beat out the cosmic rhythm within us. We cannot escape our involvement any more than we can escape breathing the air that has traveled from plants thousands of miles away. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
There is only one Overself for the whole race, but the point of contact with it is special and unique, and constitutes human’s higher individuality. The mountains, I become part of it. The herbs, the fir tree, I become part of it. The morning mists, the clouds, the gathering water, I become part of it. When we ground our spiritual awareness in this ecological context, then the strength and wisdom of the living Earth, in all its manifestations, flows through us. Our Earth Prayer becomes a means of acting upon ourselves. It helps us to empty the self and to open our hearts to be filled with empathy and creativity. The ecological self, like any notion of selfhood, is simply a metaphor, but it is a dynamic one. It involves our choice. We can choose at different moments to identify with different aspects of our interrelated existence—be they hunted whales, or humans without a home, or the planet itself. The prayers we recite remind us of this deep kinship—our boundedness with all of creation. Look deeply: I arrive in every second to be a bund on a spring branch, to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone. Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up, and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion. Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the World which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His Kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all the house of America, speedily, yea, soon; and say ye, Amen. May His great name be blessed for ever and ever. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Remember, the E in East Matches the E in Early!
The biggest big business in America is not steel, automobiles, nor television. It is the manufacture, refinement, and distribution of anxiety. It is the only business based on the maxims, “The customer is always wrong,” “We aim to displease,” and “Send ‘em away unhappy.” Anxiety is the experience of Being affirming itself against Nonbeing. However, creative minds have always been able to survive any kind of bad training. The core of critical thinking is a willingness to actively evaluate ideas. True knowledge comes from constantly revising our understanding of the World. Admitting you are wrong is always hard—even though it is a skill that every psychologist has to learn. Few “truths” transcend the need for empirical testing. It is true that religious beliefs and personal values may be held without supporting evidence. However, most other ideas can be evaluated by applying the rules of logic and evidence. Judging the quality of evidence is crucial. Imagine that you are a juror in a courtroom, judging clams made by two battling lawyers. To decide correctly, you cannot just weigh the amount of evidence. You must also critically evaluate the quality of evidence. Then you can give greater weight to the most credible facts. Authority or claimed expertise does not automatically make an idea true. Just because a teacher, a guru, celebrity, or authority is convinced or sincere does not mean you should automatically believe them. Always ask, “What evidence convinced one? How good is it? It there a better explanation?” #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Critical thinking requires a veil of ignorance. One must imagine oneself in an original position being a veil of ignorance. Behind this veil, one knows nothing of oneself and one’s natural abilities, nor one’s position in society. Behind such a veil of ignorance all individuals are simply specified as rational, free, and morally equal beings. This prevents one from taking into account one’s ethical, social status, gender and, crucially, one’s individual idea of how to lead a good life. This is to insure impartiality of judgment by depriving parties of all knowledge of one’s personal characteristics and social and historical circumstances. Be prepared to consider daring departures and go wherever the evidence leads. However, do not becomes so “open-minded” that you are simply gullible. Critical thinkers strike a balance between open-mindedness and a healthy skepticism. They are ready to change their views when new evidence arises. Descriptions, or naming and classifying, is typically based on making detailed record of behavioural observations. However, a description does not explain anything, does it? Right. Useful knowledge begins with accurate descriptions, but descriptions fail to answer the important “why” questions. Why do more women attempt suicide, and why do more men complete it? When they are uncomfortable, why are more people aggressive? Why are bystanders often unwilling to help in an emergency? Psychology’s second goals is met when we can explain an event. This is, understanding usually means we can state the causes of behaviour. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Take our last “why” question as an example: Research on “bystander apathy” has shown that people often fail to help when other possible helpers are nearby. Why? Because a “diffusion of responsibility” occurs. Basically, no one feels personally obligated to pitch in. In general, the more potential helpers present, the less likely it is that help will be given. Now we can explain a perplexing problem. Psychology’s third goal, prediction, is the ability to forecast behaviour accurately. Notice that our explanation of bystander apathy makes a prediction about the chances of getting help. Anyone who has been stranded by car trouble on a busy freeway will recognize the accuracy of this prediction: Having many potential helpers nearby is no guarantee that anyone will stop to help. Behavioural predictions are quite useful. For instance, research predicts that if one flies east early in the say and west late in the day, one will suffer less jet lag. We have seen that moment-to-moment changes in activation can have major impact on performance. What about larger cycles of arousal? Do they also affect energy levels, motivation, and performance? Scientists have long known that the bodily activity is guided by internal “biological clocks.” Every 24 hours, your body undergoes a cycle of changes called circadian (SUR-kay-dee-AN) rhythms (circa: about; diem: a day). Throughout the day, large changes take place in body temperature, blood pressure, and amino acid levels. Also affected are the activities of the liver, kidneys, and endocrine glands. These activities, and many others, peak sometime each day. Output of the hormone adrenaline, which arouses the body, is often three to five times greater during the day. Most people are more energic and alert at that high point of their circadian rhythms. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
People with shorter circadian rhythms are “day people,” who wake up alert, peak early in the day, and fall asleep early in the evening. People with longer rhythms are “night people,” who wake up groggy, peak in the afternoon or early evening, and stay up late. Such differences are so basic that when a day person rooms with a night person, both are more likely to give the relationship a negative rating. This is easy to understand: What could be worse than having someone bounding around cheerily when you are half asleep, or the reverse? Circadian rhythms are most noticeable when there is a major shift in time schedules. Businesspersons, diplomats, athletes, and other time-zone travelers tend to make errors or perform poorly when their body rhythms are disturbed. If you travel great distances east or west, the peaks and valleys of your circadian rhythms will be out of phase with the sun and clocks. For example, you might find that you re wide awake and alert at midnight. Your low point, in contrast, occurs during the middle of the day. Shift work has the same effect, causing fatigue, inefficiency, irritability, upset stomach, and depression How fast do people adapt to tie shifts? For major time-zone shifts (5 hours or more) it can take from several days to 2 weeks to resynchronize. Adaptation to jet lag is slowest when you stay indoors, where you can sleep and eat on “home time.” Getting outdoors, where you must sleep, eat, an socialize on the new schedule, speeds adaptation. A 5-hour dose of bright sunlight early each day is particularly helpful for resetting your circadian rhythm in a new time zone. The same principle can be applied to shift work by bathing workers in bright light during their first few night shifts. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
The direction of travel also effects adaptation. If you fly west, adapting is relatively easy, taking an average of 4 to 5 hours. If you fly east, adapting takes 50 percent longer, or more. Why is there a difference? The answer is that when you fly east the sun comes up earlier (relative to your “home” time). Let us say that you live in Beverly Hills, California and Fly to Manhattan, New York. Getting up at 7AM in Manhattan will be like getting up at 4AM in Beverly Hills. If you fly west, the sun comes up later and it is easier for most people to “advance” (stay up later and sleep in) than it is to shift backward. Likewise, work shifts that “rotate” backward (night, evening, day) are more disruptive than those that advance (day, evening, night). Best of all are work shifts that do not change: Even continuous night work is less upsetting than rotating shifts. What does all of this have to do with those of us who are not shift workers or World travelers? There are few college students who have not at one time or another “burned the midnight oil,” especially for final exams. During any strenuous period, it is wise to remember that departing from your regular schedule is likely to cost more than it is worth. Often, you can do as much during 1 hour in the morning as you could have in 3 hours of work after midnight. The 2-hour difference in efficiency might as well be spent sleeping. If you feel you must deviate from your normal schedule, do it gradually over a few days. In general, if you can anticipate an upcoming body rhythm change (when traveling, before finals week, or when doing shift work), it is best to preadapt to your new schedule. Before traveling, for instance, you should go to sleep 1 hour later (or earlier) each day until your sleep cycle matches the time at your destination. If you are unable to do that, it at least helps to fly early in the day when you fly east. When you fly west, it is better to fly late. (Remember, the E in east matches the E in early.) #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
Studies of flight crews show that jet lag can also be minimized by a hormone called melatonin (mel-ah-TONE-in). Melatonin is normally produced at night by the pineal gland and suppressed during daylight. Melatonin has strong impact on the timing of body rhythms and sleep cycles. As far as the brain is concerned, it is bedtime when melatonin levels rise. Flight crews often suffer severe disruptions in their sleep cycles. For example, a crew that leaves Los Angeles at 4PM, bound for London, will arrive in 8 hours. Crew members’ bodes, which are on California time, will act as if it is 12AM. Yet in London, it will be 8AM. Recent studies confirm that melatonin can help people adjust more rapidly to such time-zone changes. To resent the body’s clock in a new time zone, a small amount of melatonin can be taken about an hour before bedtime. This dose is continued for as many days as necessary to ease jet lag. The same treatment can be used for rotating work shifts. Predication is especially important in psychometrics (mental measurement). Experts in this area use test to predict success in school, work, or a career. Description, explanation, and prediction seems reasonable, but is control a valid goal for psychology? Control may seem like a threat to your personal freedom. However, to a psychologist, control simply means altering conditions that influence behaviour in predictable ways. If I suggest changes in the classroom that help children learn better, I have exerted control. If a psychologist helps a person overcome a terrible fear of heights, control is involved. Clearly, psychological control must be used wisely and humanely. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
Psychology’s goals come from a natural desire to understand behaviour, which leads us to ask: What is the nature of this behaviour? (Description.) Why does it occur? (Understanding and explanation.) Can we predict when it will occur? (Prediction.) What conditions affect it? (Control.) The Christian understanding of power is that it is found most often in weakness. This paradox has been a thorn in the flesh of tyrants. The Judeo-Christian teaching that humans are vulnerable to the temptations of power has also caused democracies and free nations to build restraints and balances of power into their studies. Clearly this is what motivated the revolutionaries in England to guarantee a Parliament independent of the monarchy. And in American the Founding Fathers, influenced by Judeo-Christian teaching about the vulnerability of humans, wisely adopted the principle of the separation of powers. Within the government, power was diffused through a system of checks and balances so no one branch could dominate another. The Founders also assumed that the religious value system, evidenced through the separate institution of the church, would be the most powerful brake on the natural avarice of government. As Tocqueville observed, “Religion in America takes no direct path in the government or society but it must, nevertheless, be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country.” The most important restraint on power, however, is a healthy understanding of its true source. When power in the conventional sense is relinquished, one discovers a much deeper power. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
Prisoners often discover this, as did Mr. Jerry Levin and Mr. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In his memoirs of the gulag, Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote that as long as he was trying to maintain some pitiful degree of Worldly power in his situation—control of food, clothing, schedule—he was constantly under the heel of his captors. However, after his conversion, when he accepted and surrendered to his utter powerlessness, then he became free of even his captors’ power. Perhaps this is why Mr. Boris Pasternak once wrote that the only place one can be free in a communist society is in prison. The apostle Paul said, “My power is made perfect in weakness,” and concluded, “When I am weak, then I am strong.” And throughout Scripture God reveals a special compassion for the powerless: widows, orphans, prisoners, and aliens. Though the message of the Kingdom of God offers salvation for all who repent and believe, God does not conceal His disdain for those who repent and believe, God does not conceal His disdain for those so enamoured of their own power that they refuse to worship Him or to acknowledge His delight in the humble. A culture that exalts power and celebrity, that worships success and the fake news media, dismisses such words as nonsense. I have had reporters tell me that they do not have time to read the Bible. However, they sure have time to lie and conjure up chaos to keep people in a state of fear, hatred, and anxiety. Strong individuals rely on their own resources—which will never, ultimately speaking, be enough—but the so-called weak person knows one’s own limits and needs, and thus depends wholly on God. Perhaps this is why God so often confounds the wisdom of the World by accomplishing His purposes through the powerless and His most powerful work through human weakness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
I first learned this in school. When the frustration of my helplessness seemed the greatest, I discovered God’s grace was more than sufficient. And after I enrolled in college to study in China, I could look back and see how God used my powerlessness for His purposes. What God has chosen for my most significant witness was not my triumphs or victories, but my defeat. Similarly, counseling in schools has been effective not because of any power we may have as an organization, but because of the powerlessness of those we serve. During this COVID-19 pandemic, several millions of people, including a number of politicians, are crowded in abysmal conditions; hatred, hostility, and despair seeping out of their homes and offices. Yet within the darkness, the Kingdom of God is giving the thriving Christian community a reason to live—people who have finding Jesus Christ and experiencing renewed hearts and minds. The churches are shinning and blessed with the loving embraces of members of the Christian community, and they are addressing these officials at the highest levels of government—and they are listening intently. Had I gone to China specifically to meet with the key government leadership, I would have likely been stymied. They wanted to meet me not because of any power or influence I had, but because of our work in America. They knew that education, hard work, and faith in God was doing something to bring healing and restoration. Therefore, they were eager to listen to our recommendations, ready to discuss a biblical view of justice and educational issues. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
Whatever authority I had in speaking to these powerful men and women came not from my power but from serving the powerless. I have experienced this in country after country. It is the paradox of real power. Nothing distinguishes the kingdoms of humans from the Kingdom of God more than their diametrically opposed views of the exercise of power. One seeks to control people, the other to serve people; one promotes self, the other prostrates self; one seeks prestige and position, the other lifts up to lowly and despised. It is crucial for Christians to understand this difference. For through this upside-down view of power, the Kingdom of God can play a special role in the affairs of the World. As citizens of the Kingdom today practice this view of power, they are setting an example for their neighbours by modeling servanthood and exposing the illusions power creates. However, how does this paradoxical view of power apply to the Christian who is in a position of influence and control? Power involves the use of coercive force to make others yield to one’s wishes even against their own will. Authority is achieved—or is conferred upon one—by virtue of character that others are motivated to follow willingly. Therefore, the citizens of the Kingdom should seek authority that comes from one’s own spiritual strength. Never for self-advantage, but for the benefit of others. This does not mean that the Christians cannot use power. In positions of leadership, especially in government institutions to which God has specifically granted the power of the sword, the Christian can do so in good conscious. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
However, the Christian uses power with a different motive and in different ways: not to impose one’s personal will over others but to preserve God’s plan for order and justice for all. Those who accept the biblical view of servant leadership treat power as a humbling delegation from God, not as a right to control others. Moses offers a great role model. Though he had awesome power and responsibility as the leader of two million Israelites, he was described in Scripture as “a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the Earth.” He led by serving—intervening before God on his people’s behalf, seeking God’s forgiveness for their rebellion and caring for their needs above one’s own. The challenge for the Christian in a position of influence is to follow the example of Moses rather than fulfill Nietzche’s prophecy concerning the will to power. In doing so the citizen of the Kingdom has an opportunity to offer light to a World often shrouded by the dark pretensions of a devastating succession of power-mad tyrants. Someone attaining to the more complex forms of the morality of association, as expressed say by the ideal of equal citizen, has an understanding certainly of the principles of justice. One has also developed an attachment to many particular individuals and communities, and one is disposed to follow the moral standards that apply to one in one’s various positions and which are upheld by social approval and disapproval. Having become affiliated with others and aspiring to live up to these ethical conceptions, one is concerned to win acceptance of one’s conduct and aims. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
It would seem that whole the individual understands the principles of justice, one’s motive for complying with them, for some time at least, springs largely from one’s ties of friendship and fellow feeling for others, and one’s concern for the approbation of the wider society. Consider the process whereby a person becomes attached to these highest-order principles themselves, so that just as during the earlier phase of the morality of association one may want to be a good sport, say, one now wishes to be a just person. The conception of acting justly, and of advancing just institutions, comes to have for one an attraction analogous to that possessed before by subordinate ideals. In conjecturing how this morality of principles might come about (principles here meaning first principles such as those considered in the original position), we should note that the morality of association quite naturally leads up to a knowledge of the standards of justice. In a well-ordered society anyway not only do those standards define the public conception of justice, but citizens who take an interest in political affairs, and those holding legislative and judicial and other similar offices, are constantly required to apply and to interpret them. They often have to take up the point of view of others, not simply with the aim of working out what they will want and probably do, but for the purpose of striking a reasonable balance between competing claims and for adjusting the various subordinate ideals of the morality of association. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
To put the principles of justice into practice requires that we adopt the standpoints defined by the four-stage sequence. As the situation dictates, we take up the perspective of a constitutional convention, or of a legislature, of whatever. Eventually one achieves a mastery of these principles and understands the values they secure and the way in which they are to everyone’s advantage. Now this leads to an acceptance of these principles by a third psychological law. This law states that once the attitudes of love and trust, and of friendly feelings and mutual confidence, have been generated in accordance with the two preceding psychological laws, then the recognition that we and those for whom we care are the beneficiaries of an established and enduring just institution tends to engender in us the corresponding sense of justice. We develop a desire to apply and to act upon the principles of justice once we realize how social arrangements answering to them have promoted our good and that of those with whom we are affiliated. In due course we come to appreciate the ideal of just human cooperation. Now a sense of justice shows itself in at least two ways. First, it leads us to accept the just institutions that apply to us and from which we and our associates have benefited. We want to do out part in maintaining these arrangements. When we do not honour our duties and obligations, we tend to feel guilty, even though we are not bound to those of whom we take advantage by any ties of particular fellow feeling. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
It may be that they have not yet had sufficient opportunity to display an evident intention to do their share, and are not therefore the objects of such feelings by the second law. Or, again, the institutional scheme in question may be so large that particular bonds never get widely built up. In any case, the citizen body as a whole is not generally bound together by ties of fellow feeling between individuals, but by the acceptance of public principles of justice. While every citizen is a friend to some citizens, no citizen is a friend to all. However, their common allegiance to justice provides a unified perspective from which they can adjudicate their differences. Secondly, a sense of justice gives rise to a willingness to work for (or at least not to oppose) the setting up of just institutions, and for the reform of existing ones when justice it requires. We desire to act on the natural duty to advance just arrangements. And this inclination goes beyond the support of those particular schemes that have affirmed our good. It seeks to extend the conception they embody to further situations for the good of the larger community. When we go against our sense of justice, we explain our feelings of guilt by reference to the principles of justice. These feelings, then, are accounted for quite differently than the emotions of authority and association of guilt. The complete moral development has now taken place and for the first time we experience feelings of guilt in the strict sense; and the same is true of the other moral emotions. In the child’s case, the notion of a moral ideal, and the relevance of intentions and motives, are not understood, and so the appropriate setting for feelings of (principle) guilt does not exist. And in the morality of association, moral feelings depend essentially on ties of friendship and trust to particular individuals or communities, and moral conduct is based in large part on wanting the approval of one’s associates. This may still be true even in the more demanding phases of this morality. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Individuals in their role as citizens with full understanding of the content of the principles of justice may be moved to act upon them largely because of their bonds to particular persons and an attachment to their own society. Once a morality of principles is accepted, however, moral attitudes are no longer connected solely with the well-being and approval of particular individuals and groups, but are shaped by a conception of right chosen irrespective of these contingencies. Our moral sentiments display an independence from the accidental circumstances of our World, the meaning of this independence being given by the description of the original position and its Kantian interpretation. Which means that the person is seen as free and equal agents with different rational and more capacities, and this conception of the person is the basis of a deliberative procedure incorporating different requirements of practical reason that is used to justify a set of normative principles. However, even though moral sentiments are in this sense independent from contingencies, our natural attachments to particular persons and groups still have an appropriate place. For within the morality of principles the infractions which earlier gave rise to (association) guilt and resentment, and to the other moral feelings, now occasion these feelings in the strict sense. A reference to the relevant principle is made in explaining one’s emotions. When the natural ties of friendship and mutual trust are present, however, these moral feelings are more intense if they are absent. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
Existing attachments heighten the feeling of guilt and indignation, or whatever feeling is called for, even at the stage of the morality of principles. Now granting that this heightening is appropriate, it follows that violations of these natural ties are wrong. For if we suppose that, say, a rational feeling of guilt (that is, a feeling of guilt arising from applying the correct moral principles in the light of true or reasonable beliefs) implies a fault on our part, and that a greater feeling of guilt implies a fault on our part, and that a greater feeling of guilt implies a greater fault, then indeed breach of trust and the betrayal of friendship, and the like, are especially forbidden. The violation of these ties to particular individuals and groups arouses more intense moral feelings, and this entails that these offenses are worse. To be sure, deceit and infidelity are always wrong, being contrary to natural duties and obligations. However, they are not always equally wrong. They are worse whenever bounds of affection and good faith have been formed, and this consideration is relevant in working out the appropriate priority rules. It may seem strange at first that we should come to have the desire to act from a conception of right and justice. How is it possible that moral principles can engage our affections? In justice as fairness there are several answers to this question. First of all, as we have seen, moral principles are bound to have a certain content. Since they are chosen by rational persons to adjudicate competing claims, they define agreed ways of advancing human interests. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
Institutions and actions are appraised from the standpoint of securing these ends; and therefore pointless principles, for example, that one is not to look up at the sky on Tuesdays, are rejected as burdensome and irrational constraints. In the original position rational persons have no reason for acknowledging standards of this kind. However, secondly, it is also the case that the sense of justice is continuous with the love of humankind. When the many objects of its love oppose one another, benevolence is at a loss. The principles of justice are needed to guide it. The difference between the sense of justice and the love of humankind is that the latter is supererogatory, going beyond the moral requirements and not invoking the exemptions which the principles of natural duty and obligation allow. Yet clearly the objects of these two sentiments are closely related, being defined in large part by the conception of justice. If one of them seems natural and intelligible, so is the other. Moreover, feelings of guilt and indignation are aroused by the injuries and deprivations of others unjustifiably brought about either by ourselves or third parties, and our sense of justice is offended in the same way. The content of the principles of justice accounts for this. Finally, the Kantian interpretation of these principles shows that by acting upon them humans express their nature as free and equal rational beings. Since doing this belongs to their good, the sense of justice aims at their well-being even more directly. It supports those arrangements that enable everyone to express one’s common nature. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
Indeed, without a common or overlapping sense of justice civic friendship cannot exist. The desire to act justly is not, then, a form of blind obedience to arbitrary principles unrelated to rational aims. I should not, of course, contend that justice as fairness is the only doctrine that can interpret the sense of justice in a natural way. A utilitarian never regards oneself as acting merely for the sake of an impersonal law, but always for the welfare of some being or beings for whom one has some degree of fellow feelings. The utilitarian view, and no doubt perfectionism as well, meets the condition that the sentiment of justice can be characterized so that it is psychologically understandable. Best of all, a theory should present a description of an ideally just state of affairs, a conception of a well-ordered society such that aspiration to realize this state of affairs, and to maintain it in being, answers to our good and is continuous with our natural sentiments. A perfectly just society should be part of an ideal that rational human beings could desire more than anything else once they had full knowledge and experience of what it was. The content of the principles of justice, the way in which they are derived, and the stages of moral development, show how in justice as fairness such an interpretation is possible. It would seem, then, that the doctrine of the purely conscientious act is rational. This doctrine holds, first, that the highest moral motive is the desire to do what is right and just simply because it is right and just, no other description being appropriate. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
And second, that while other motives certainly have moral value, for example the desire to do what is right because doing this increases human happiness, or because it tends to promote equality, these desires are less morally worthy than that to do what is right solely in virtue of its being right. The sense of right is a desire for a distinct (and unanalyzable) object, since a specific (and unanalyzable) property characterizes actions that are our duty. The other morally worthy desire, while indeed desires for things necessarily connected with what is right, are not desires for the right as such. However, on this interpretation the sense of right lacks any apparent reason; it resembles a preference for tea rather than coffee. Although such a preference might exist, to make it regulative of the basic structure of society is utterly capricious; and no less so because it is masked by a fortunate necessary connection with reasonable grounds for judgments of right. However, for one who understand and accepts the contract doctrine, the sentiment of justice is not a different desire from that to act on principles that rational individuals would consent t in an initial situation which gives everyone equal representation as a moral person. Nor is it different from wanting to act in accordance with principles that express human’s nature as free and equal rational beings. The principles of justice answer to these descriptions and this fact allows us to give an acceptable interpretation to the sense of justice. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
In the light of theory of justice, we understand how the moral sentiments can be regulative in our life and have the role attributed to them by the formal conditions on moral principles. Being governed by these principles means that we want to live with others on terms that everyone would recognize as fair from a perspective that all would accept as reasonable. The ideal of persons cooperating on the basis exercises a natural attraction upon our affections. Finally, we may observe that the morality of principles takes two forms, one corresponding to the sense of right and justice, the other to the love of humankind and to self-command. As we have noted, the latter is supererogatory, while the former is not. In its normal form of right and justice the morality of principles includes the virtues of the moralities of authority and association. It defines that last stage at which all subordinate ideals are finally understood and organized into coherent system by suitably general principles. The virtues of the other moralities receive their explanation and justification within the larger scheme; and their respective claims are adjusted by the priorities assigned by the more comprehensive conception. The morality of supererogation has two aspects depending upon the direction in which the requirements of the morality of principles are willingly surpassed. One the one hand, the love of humankind shows itself in advancing the common good in ways that go well beyond our natural duties and obligations. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
This morality is not one for ordinary persons, and its peculiar virtues are those of benevolence, a heightened sensitivity to the feelings and wants of others, and a proper humility and unconcern with self. The morality of self-command, on the other hand, in its simplest form is manifest in fulfilling with complete ease and grace the requirements of right and justice. It becomes truly supererogatory when the individual displays its characteristic virtues of courage, magnanimity, and self-control in actions presupposing great discipline and training. And this one may do either by freely assuming offices and positions which call upon these virtues if their duties are to be well performed; or else by seeking superior ends in a manner consistent with justice but surpassing the demands of duty and obligation. This the moralities of supererogation, those of the saint and the hero, do not contradict the norms of right and justice; they are marked by the willing adoption by the self of aims continuous with these principles but extending beyond what they enjoin. A “future shock absorber” of a quite different type is the “half-way house” idea already employed by progressive prison authorities to ease the convict’s way back into normal life. According to criminologist Daniel Glaser, the distinctive feature of the correctional institutions of the future will be the idea of “gradual release.” Instead of taking a human out of the under-stimulating, tightly regimented life of the prison and plunging one violently and without preparation into open society, one is moved first to an intermediate institution which permits one to work in the community by day, while continuing to return to the institution at night. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
The fact of the matter is prisons are overcrowded, and recidivism is so high because once people are released from correctional institutions, many of them are unemployable because of policies corporations have against hiring someone with a criminal record. Recidivism rates by state vary, but California is among the highest in the nation. According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, more than 65 percent of those released from California’s prison system return within three years. Now, many people are looking for affordable labour and skills. If there was a corporation that hired former prisoners and ensured clients that their workers are safe, many people may want to hire them at a discounted rate to save on labour cost, and it would decrease recidivism by at least 11 percent, which is substantial. Steady employment can lead to a reduction in criminal behaviour through the accumulation of conventional ties that accompany steady employment. In other words, stable employment is expected to deter offenders from crimes. When former prisoners find a job immediately after release and retain it during the 6-month follow-up, they will be able to accumulate bonds with their employer and co-workers (conventional others). Based on nations of social control theories, we therefore expect that former prisoners who are able to retain a job during the 6-month follow-up are less likely to reoffend than former prisoners who lose this job. With their housing situation, gradually restrictions are lifted until one is fully adjusted to the outside World. The same principle has been explored by various mental institutions. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
Similarly it has been suggested that the problems of rural populations suddenly shifted to urban centers might be sharply reduced if something like this half-way house principle were employed and they had someone to monitor them, entertain them, and enforce the rules like a parent would do because sometimes there people are not ready to live on their own and cannot handle the responsibility of being respectful and managing their own home or bodily functions. What cities need, according to this theory, are reception facilities where newcomers live for a time under conditions half-way between those of the rural society they are leaving behind and the urban society they are seeking to penetrate. If instead of treating city-bound migrants with contempt and leaving them to find their own way, they were first acclimatized, they would adapt far more successfully. A similar idea is filtering through the specialists who concern themselves with “squatter housing” in major cities in the technologically underdeveloped World. Outside Khartoum in the Sudan, thousands of former nomads have created a concentric ring of settlements. Those further from the city live in tents, much like the ones they occupied before the migration. The next-closer group lives in mud-walled huts with tent roofs. Those still closer to the city occupy huts with mud walls and tin roofs. When the police set out to tear down the tents, urban planner Constantions Doxiadis recommended that they not only destroy the, but that certain municipal services be provided to their inhabitants. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
Instead of seeing these concentric rings in wholly negative terms, he suggested, they might be viewed as a tremendous teaching machine through which individuals and families move, becoming urbanized step by step. The application of this principle, however, need not be limited to the less affluent, insane or criminal. The basic idea of providing change in controlled, graduated stages, rather than abrupt transitions, is crucial to any society that wishes to cope with rapid or social or technological upheaval. The veteran, for example, could be released from service more gradually. The student from a rural community could send a few weeks at a college in a medium-size city before entering the large urban university. The long-term hospital patient might ne encouraged to go home on a trial basis, once or twice, before being discharged. We are already experimenting with these strategies, but others are possible. Retirement, for example, should not be the abrupt, all-or-nothing, ego-crushing change that it now is for most humans. There is no reason why it cannot be gradualized. Military induction, which typically separates a young person from one’s family in a sudden and almost client fashion, could be done by stages. Legal separation, which is supposed to serve as a kind of half-way house on the way to divorce, could be made less legally complicated and psychologically costly. Trial marriage could be encouraged, instead of denigrated. Whenever a change of status is contemplated, the possibility of gradualizing it should be considered. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
I do not want to frighten you by telling you about the temptations life will bring. Anyone who is healthy in spirit will overcome them. However, there is something I want you to realize. It does not matter so much what you do. What matters is whether your soul is harmed by what you do. If your soul is harmed something irreparable happens, the extent of which you will not realize until it will be too late. And other harm their souls even without being exposed to great temptations. They simply let their souls wither. They allow themselves to be dulled by the joys and worries and distractions of life, not realizing that thoughts which earlier meant a great deal to them in their youth turned into meaningless sounds. In the end they have lost all feeling for everything that makes up the inner life. At this season of joyous thanksgiving, we are grateful unto Thee, O Keeper of America, for Thy many bounties with which Thou does bless us and for the protecting care with which Thy love doth watch over us. As Thou didst cause our fathers to dwell in Salt Lake City, Utah USA of Thy glory amid the perils of the wilderness, so spread Thou over us and over all America, the Salt Lake City of Thy love. O beneficent Father, as we recall this day the gratitude of the children of America for the harvest of their fields in Midwest, we, too, acknowledge Thee, the source of all our bounties. For all our blessings we give Thee thanks. May the Scriptures we read today teach us to share Thy gifts with those in need. Hasten that day when the children of America, in the land of their fathers, shall bring in their sheaves with rejoicing. We pray that Thou who didst protect our forefathers when they dwelt in the wilderness, wilt extend Thy blessing of peace over American and over all the peoples of the Earth. Amen. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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Success Means Never Having to Admit You are Unhappy!
As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future. They say in Hollywood if you want messages, you go to Western Union. The doctors thought you should really stay a few centuries more to be sure we have stabilized your condition. I really do not recommend you leaving us at this time. In Hollywood, success is relative. The closer the relative, the greater the success. Many people are recommending that California comes with a warning sign of the city limits: WARNING! PROCEED NO FURTHER! WARD O FOR BIPLOAR CONDITIONS. OCCUPANTS MAY BE VIOLENT. THEY NEED VRAYLAR However, I am telling you to ignore that and come on in. Look, buddy, it is dangerous to get out of bed in the morning. Are you a mortal in a desperate situation or are you not? Then come in here. This is your last resort, babe. However, of course it is up to you. The primary insight is a human’s awareness that one’s destiny is not synonymous with one’s daily experiences. You who have been through so much suffering, have tasted this inner freedom from outward events. You know there have been times when, according to the rules, you should have been smashed to the ground by what occurred. In such moments you were surprised by yourselves. You have the feeling you were being lifted up inwardly, as though the spiritual were triumphing over the material. You recognized a sort of happiness—if it can be called that—a happiness which would have been hidden by an unbroken succession of good days. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
You began to understand what the apostle Paul meant when he said, “Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” The peace of God begins when this fleeting experience can be preserved and turned into a permanent conviction. It is harder for us today to feel near God among the streets and houses of the city than it is for country folk. For them the harvested fields bathed in the autumn mists speak of God and His goodness far more vividly than any human lips. If we really want to labour in the true spirit, to hope, to keep silent, and to work alone—that is what we must learn to do. However, what exactly does it involve, this plowing? The plowman does not pull the plow. He does not push it. He only directs it. This is just how events move in our lives. We can do nothing but guide them straight in the direction which leads to our Lord Jesus Christ, striving toward him, and the furrow will plow itself. The paths into which God leads humankind are shrouded in darkness for us. There are only two ground rules. They go together, and each taken by itself is enigmatic. The first is that all sin requires atonement. The second is that all progress demands sacrifice, which has to be paid for by the lives of those chosen to be offered up. We sense this more than we understand. We do not subscribe to the belief that the divine soul has somehow gone astray and got enslaved by the terrestrial body. One’s higher self is not polluted by one’s own pollutions any more than sunlight is affected by the foul places in which it often shines. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
The natural kiss is the kiss which will be given if moral or prudential considerations do not intervene. In all the examples of Natures means what happens “of itself” or “of its own accord”: what you do not need to labour for; what you will get if you take no measures to stop it. The Greek work for Nature (Physis) is connected with the Greek verb “to grow”; Latin Natura, which the verb “to be born.” The Natural is what springs up, or comes forth, or arrives, or goes on, of its own accord: the given, what is there already; the spontaneous, the unintended, the unsolicited. The higher self affects the ego but is not affected by it. Its existence goes on quite independently of the serialized Earth appearances of the ego, and persists when the other ceases. The insensitive can never know it, and may roundly deny it, but the others sometimes receive unforgettable glimpses for which they give thanks to God for years after. Just as space is unaffected equally by evil deeds or virtuous actions of humans, so the Overself is unaffected by the character or conduct of the ego. It is neither made worse by the ego’s wrong-doing nor better by its righteousness. “I am the way, the Truth,” announced Jesus Christ. Who is this I? In the narrow and shallower sense, it is the master. In the broader and deeper sense, it is the Christ-self within the spiritual consciousness. Why did Jesus Christ say, “I am my Father are one,” but yet a little later add, “The Father is greater than I?” The answer is that Jesus the man had attained complete harmony with His higher Self and felt himself one with it, but the universal Christ-principle will always be greater than the man himself; the Overself will always transcend the person. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Although I is still identified with one, since it is one’s own mind at its best level, it is immensely grander, wiser, and nobler than one. It is an entity greater, nobler, wiser, and stronger than oneself yet mysteriously and inseparably linked to oneself; it is indeed one’s super-self. Our bodies are born at some point of time and somewhere in space but their essence, the Overself, is birthless, timeless, and placeless. This is a human’s true individuality, not that mentally constructed “I” (which deludes one into acceptance as such). It is never anything else than its own perfect self, never contrary to its own unique and infinite nature. It is true that we are but poor and faulty, sadly limited, and miserably shrunken expressions of the divine spirit. Nevertheless, we are expression of it. Thus no thoroughgoing Naturalist believes in free will: for free will would mean that humans beings have the power of independent action, the power of doing something more or other than what was involved by the total series of events. And any such separate power of originating events is what the Naturalist denies. Spontaneity, originality, actions “on its own,” is a privilege reserved for “the whole show,” which one calls Nature. The Supernaturalist agrees with the Naturalist that there must be something which exists in its own right; some basic Fact whose existence it would be nonsensical to try to explain because this Fact is itself the ground or starting-point of all explanations. However, one does not identify this Fact with “the whole show.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
There is a tendency of Christian Science to enter a region of misunderstanding the moment it attempts to apply its true principles to things of this Earth. There is a time in the far past of the human race, a time now lost in the dim mists of antiquity, when the life of humans was stretched to a number of years far in excess of hat it is today. That time has been hinted at by horary legends of a Golden Age and by biblical stories of a pre-Flood race. Such a time will return in the cyclic course of our planet’s history, but naturally it is far-off in the future. Nature herself is in no hurry. She has plenty of time to accomplish her purposes. And in those days humans will again have a normal life-span of maybe one thousand years. There exists in the Old World a certain ancient knowledge—which promises its votaries astonishing benefits in longevity. This age-old art is similar to alchemy of medieval Europe, when humans sought rigorously in experiments for the elixir of life. It is of such antiquity that those who hand it down tell us it was born just after the time when the legendary gods had ceased to walk this Earth. The exponents have almost disappeared from the World, but the tradition is so widespread throughout the Old World that solitary individuals still practise it in remote and unfrequented places. So difficult are the exercises which belong to this system, so labourious are its practices, so ascetic the self-discipline which it involves, that one can understand why it has almost faded out of existence. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
It performs strange feats such as reanimating dead bodies, stopping blood circulation and lung action, permitting knives and daggers to be run like skewers through living flesh without harming it and with an extremely rapid drying of blood (do NOT try this!), and even the burial alive of an enriched body beneath the ground and its safe resurrection several hours or some day later. The principal basis of these feats consists in making certain changes in the breath rhythm, changes which involve such risk to life and health that we are not prepared to assume the responsibility of describing here the exercises for the development of such powers. It is also necessary to live a celibate and chaste existence, to refrain from expending energy in Worldly work and business, and to reduce diet to an astonishing minimum. Because they demand a special and severely ascetic training which is the work of several years devoted wholly to this austere task, such feats are necessarily uncommon. The ordinary layperson could hardly be expected to find the time for such training, nor is there any necessity for one to do so. These displays are certainly spectacular but have primarily only scientific, medical, and theatrical values rather than a general one. Meanwhile, Nature has set her brief term to the human body, and those whose attachment to the body is not overweening will resignedly accept that terms while the others must do so unwillingly. However, this is a different matter—living in the flesh body for ever and ever, a notion which must seem insupportable to many who find the present brief term of human’s existence quite enough for them to cope with. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
If Nature cared so much to preserve the physical body of humans, she would not introduce Earthquakes, eruptions, hurricanes, famines, pestilences, and floods into the scheme of things. The fact that she does do so indicates rather that she regards one’s body as being only a fragment of the human, not as the full human oneself. Some had the idea, of course, that in ancient times, sin and sickness would also have disappeared from the World, so that our existence would be a halcyon one. It is a pretty picture, but human’s true home is not in the tabernacle of flesh; it is elsewhere. The fleshly body is but a temporary abiding place at best, and when humans have arrived at a state of perfect spirituality one will abandon it and use a vehicle more consonant with one’s higher condition, an electromagnetic body that will more easily and more faithfully represent one. Yes, death will be conquered, but not in the way that Christian Scientists imagine. It will be conquered firstly, by extending the duration of human life to a constantly increasing period; and secondly, by completely abandoning the physical body for a subtler one. The clear real inner human—one’s spiritual being—is undying and immortal. When many began to consider that inner being in relation to its transient Earthly tenement, the body, they become confused and misunderstand the nature of that relationship. The hour of every human’s death is fixed by a higher will than one’s own, by that power which some call destiny but which itself takes its rise out of the Infinite Power, and no Christian Science practitioner or ordinary physician has ever “saved” the life of anyone. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
A human’s own Overself fixes the dates of certain major events in one’s life prior to the moment when one utters one’s first cry as a babe, and the date of one’s death is but one of those appointed hours. Perhaps, if the choose, some people have the option to reschedule; others do not. At this point, not in the sky, nor in the depths of the ocean, nor by entering the caverns of the mountain, nowhere in the World can such a place be found where a human might dwell without being overpowered by death. However, “in those days humans will seek death and will not find it; they will desire to die, and death will flee from them,” Revelation 9.6. We are as birds on the wheel of the Universe. For all our loud tweeting, it still rolls along on its own path. And yet these people confidently imagine they set the great Laws of Destiny at naught, and interfere with the workings of the Cosmic Plan. In that sense there might be several “Natures.” This conception must be kept quite distinct from what is commonly called “plurality of Worlds”—id est, different solar systems or different galaxies, “island Universes” existing in widely separated parts of a single space and time. These, however remote, would be parts of the same Nature as our own sun: it and they would be interlocked by being in relations to one another, spatial and temporal relations and causal relations as well. Ans it is just this reciprocal interlocking within a system which makes it what we call a Nature. Other Natures might not be spatio-temporal at all: or, if any of them were, their space and time would have no spatial or temporal relation to ours. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
It is just this discontinuity, this failure of interlocking, which would justify us in calling them different Natures. This does not mean that there would be absolutely no relation between them; they would be related by their common derivation from a single Supernatural source. They would, in this respect, be like different novels by a single author; the events in one story have no relation to the events in another except that they are invented by the same author. To find a relation to between them you must go right back to the author’s mind: there is no cutting across from anything. However, God might bring the two Natures into partial contact at some particular point: that is, He might allow selected events in the one to produce results in the other. There would thus be, at certain points, a partial interlocking; but this would not turn the two Natures into one, for the total reciprocity which makes a Nature would still be lacking, and the anomalous interlocking would arise not from what either system was in itself but from the Divine act which was brining them together. If this occurred each of the two Natures would be “supernatural” in relation to the other: but the fact of their contact would be supernatural in a more absolute sense—not as being beyond this or that Nature but beyond any and every Nature. It would be one kind of Miracle. The other kind would be Divine “interference” not by bringing together of two Natures, but simply. However, God may never interfere with the natural system He created. He may never cause His natural systems to impinge on one another. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
If the movements of the individual units are events “on their own,” events which do not interlock with all other evens, then these movements are not part of Nature. It would be, indeed, too great a shock to our habits to describe them as super-natural. I think we should have to call them sub-natural. However, all our confidence that Nature has no doors, and no reality outside herself for doors to open on, would have disappeared. There is apparently something outside her, the Subnatural; it is indeed from this Subnatural that all events and all “bodies” are, as it were, fed into her. And clearly if she thus has a back door (door to nowhere) opening on the Subnatural, it is quite on the cards that she may also have a front door opening on the Supernatural—and events might be fed into her at that door, too. The movements of individual units are permanently incalculable to us, not that they are in themselves random and lawless. All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning. Unless human reasoning is valid, no science can be true. To be caused is not to be proved. Wishful thinkings, prejucides, and delusions of madness, are all caused, but they are ungrounded. Indeed to be caused is so different from being proved that we behave in disputation as if they were mutually exclusive. The mere existence of causes for a belief is popularly treated as raising a presumption that it is groundless, and the most popular way of discrediting person’s opinion is to explain them causally—“You say that because (Cause and Effect) you are a capitalist, or a hypochondriac, or a mere man, or a woman.” This implication is that is causes fully account for a belief, then, since causes work inevitably, the belief would have had to arise wither it had grounds or not. We need not, it is felt, consider grounds for something which can be fully explained without them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
The Universal and Infinite cannot be packed into the personal and finite, your demand, natural though it be, is unreasonable. God Himself knows not what He is, for He is not a “what.” So why ask a mere human? Just as there is a sun hidden behind the sun, the divinity which animates it, so in the human being there is a Mind within the mind—and that is one’s Overself. The personality is always limited and chained, the higher individuality always infinite and free. Each human is the expression of this infinite life-power. One’s awareness of life in the five senses will rest upon another and inner awareness. A second and hidden self will thus seem to support one’s outer one. The true I yields quite a different feeling, experience, and consciousness from the familiar physical ego. There is a deeper level of every human’s mind which is not subject to one’s passions, not moved by one’s desires, not affected by one’s sense. It is not possible for the timeless, spaceless, formless Overself to be degraded into activity by its time-bound, space-tied, form-limited offspring the person. The essence of human beings is not one’s Earthly body. Nor is it the ghostly duplicate of that body, as many spiritists and some religionists think. The Overself is the Higher mind in humans, one’s divine soul as distinguished from one’s human-terrestrial nature. It is the same as Plato’s “nous.” The true unchanging self is apart from any historical era and is not dependent on outer changes of custom and form. The aim of the mystic is to know what one is, apart from one’s physical body, one’s lower emotion, one’s personal ego; it is to know one’s inner-most self. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
When this aim is successfully realized, one knows then with perfect certitude that one is a ray of the divine sun. How shall one know and understand that this very awareness, of which so small is the fragment that one experiences, is a limited and conditioned part of the Great Awareness itself, of God? The inhabitant of this fleshly body, including its accompanying invisible “ghost,” is a sacred one. There, within and yet behind one’s personal consciousness, is this other sphere of one’s own being into which one must one day be re-born as a Blue Jay from an egg. This is one’s best self; this is what one really is under all the defects. The relation between response and stimulus is utterly different from that between knowledge and truth known. Our physical vision is a far more useful response to light than that of the cruder organisms which have only a photo-sensitive spot. God is older than Nature, and from it the orderliness of Nature, which alone enables us to know her, is derived. The human mind in the acts of knowing is illuminated by Divine reason. It is set free, in the measure required, from the huge nexus of non-rational causation; free from this to be determined by the truth known. And, if there were any, the preliminary processes within Nature which led up to this liberation were designed to. At the frontier where the “outer World” ends and what I should ordinarily call “myself” begins, we find a great deal of traffic but it is all one-way traffic. It is a matter of daily experience that rational thoughts induce and enable us to alter the course of Nature—of physical nature when we use mathematic to build bridges, or of psychological nature when we apply arguments to alter our own emotions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
We succeed in modifying physical nature more often and more completely than we succeed in modifying psychological nature, but we do at least a little to both. On the other hand, Nature is quite powerless to produce rational thought: not that she never modifies our thinking but that the moment she does so, it ceases (for that very reason) to be rational. The problem is whether you or I can be such a self-existent Reason. This question almost answers itself the moment we remember what existence “on one’s own” means. It means that kind of existence which Naturalists attribute to “the whole show” and Supernatiralists to God. Human minds, then, are not only supernatural entities that exist. They do not come from nowhere. Each has come into Nature from Supernature: each has its tap-root in an eternal, self-existent, rational Being, whom we call God. Each offshoot, or spearhead, or incursion of that Supernatural reality into Nature. It seems that human thought is not God’s but God-kindled. I must hasten, however, that we are considering miracles, not about everything. I am attempting no full doctrine of man: and I am not in the least trying to smuggle in an argument for the “immortality of the soul.” The earliest Christian documents give a casual and unemphatic assent to the belief that the supernatural part of a human survives the death of the natural organism. However, they are very little interested in the matter. What they are intensely interested in is the restoration or “resurrection” of the whole composite creature by a miraculous divine act: and until we have come to some conclusion about miracles in general, we shall certainly not discuss that. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
At this stage the supernatural element in humans concerns us solely as evidence that something beyond Nature exists. The dignity and destiny of humans has, at present, nothing to do with the argument. We are interested in humans only because their rationality is the little tell-tale rift in Nature which shows that there is something beyond or behind her. In a pond whose surface was completely covered with scum and floating vegetation, there might be a few waterlilies. And you might of course be interested in them for their beauty. However, you might also be interested in them because from their structure you could deduce that they had stalks underneath which went down to roots in the bottom. The Naturalist thinks that the pond (Nature—the great event in space and time) is of an indefinite depth—that there is nothing but water however far you go down. My claim is that some of the things on the surface (id est, in our experience) show the contrary. These things (rational minds) reveal, on inspection, that they at least are not floating but attached by stalks about the bottom. Therefore the pond has a bottom. It is not pond, pond for ever. Go deep enough and you will come to something that is not pond—to mud and Earth and then to rock and finally the whole bulk of Earth and the subterranean fire. God and Nature have come into a certain relation. They have, at the very least, a relation—almost, in one sense, a common frontier—in every human mind. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Reason saves and strengths my whole system, psychological and physical, whereas that whole system, by rebelling against Reason, destroys both Reason an itself. The military metaphor of a spearhead was apparently ill-chosen. The supernatural Reason enters my natural being not like a weapon—more like a beam of light which illuminates or a principle of organization which unifies and develops. Our whole picture of Nature being “invaded” (as if by a foreign enemy) was wrong. When we actually examine one of these invasions it looks much more like the arrival of a king among his own subjects or a mahout visiting his own elephant. The elephant may run amuck, Nature may be rebellious. However, from observing what happens when Nature obeys it is almost impossible not to conclude that it is her very “nature” to be a subject. All happens as if she had been designed for that very role. Not all help from the individual can, or necessarily should come from groups. In many cases, what the change-pressed person needs most is one-to-one counseling during the crisis of adaption. In psychiatric jargon a “crisis” is any significant transition It is roughly synonymous with “major life change.” Today, persons in traditional crisis turn to a variety of experts—doctors, marriage counselors, psychiatrists, the pastor, witches, warlocks, the spirits, God, Jesus Christ, vocational specialists and others—for individualized advice. Yet for many kinds of crisis there are no appropriate experts. Who helps the family or the individual faced with the need to move to a new city for the third time in five years? #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
Who is available to counsel a leader who is up- or down-graded by a reorganization of one’s club or community organization? Who is there to help the secretary just bounced back to the typing pool? People like these are not sick. They neither need nor should receive psychiatric attention, yet there is, by large, no counseling machinery available to them. Not only are there many kinds of present-day life transitions for which no counseling help is provided, but the invasion of novelty will slam individuals up against wholly new kinds of personal crises in the future. And as the society races toward heterogeneity, the variety of problems will increase. In slowly changing societies the types of crises faced by individuals are more unfirm and the sources of specialized advice more easily identifiable. Sometimes you just need to turn to God, Allah, Buddha, or whoever your peaceful, confident, all-loving and powerful Overself is for healing. The crisis-caught person went to one’s priest, Paris Hilton, one’s witch doctor or one’s local chief. Today personalized counseling services in the high technology countries have become so specialized that we have developed, in effect, second-layer advice-givers who do nothing but counsel the individual about where to seek advice. These referral services interpose additional red tape and delay between the individual and the assistance one needs. By the time help reached one, one may have already made a crucial decision—and done so badly. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
So long as we assume that advice is something that must come from evenmore specialized professionals, we can anticipate ever greater difficulty. Moreover, so long as we base specialties on what people “are” instead of what they are “becoming” we miss many of the real adaptive problems altogether. Conventional social service systems will never be able to keep up. The answer is a counterpart to the situational grouping system—a counseling set-up that not only draws on full-time professional advice givers, but on multitudes of lay experts as well. We must recognize that what makes a person an expert in one type of crisis is not necessarily formal education, but the very experience of having undergone a similar crisis oneself. To help tide billions of people over the difficult transitions they are likely to face, we shall be forced to “deputize” large numbers of non-professional people in the community—business people, students, teachers, workers, and others—to serve as “crisis counselors.” Tomorrow’s crisis counselor will be experts not in such conventional disciplines as psychology or health, but in specific transitions such as conventional disciplines as psychology or healthy, but in specific transitions such as relocation, job promotion, divorce, or subcult-hopping. Armed with their own recent experience, working on a volunteer basis or for minimal pay, they will set aside some small part of their time for listening to other people talk out their problems, apprehensions, and plans. In return, they will have access to others for similar assistance in the course of their own adaptive development. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Once again, there is nothing new about people seeking advice from one another. What is new is our ability, through the use of computerized systems, to assemble situational groups swiftly, to match up individuals with counselors, and to do both wit considerable respect for privacy and anonymity. We can already see evidence of a move in this direction in the spread of “listening” and “caring” services. In Davenport, Iowa, lonely people can dial a telephone number and be connected with a “listener”—one of a rotating staff of volunteers who control the telephone twenty-four hours a day. The program, initiated by a local commission on the aging, is similar to, but not the same as, the Care-Ring service in New York. Care-Ring charges its subscribers a fee, in return for which they receive two check-in calls each day at designated times. Subscribers provide the service with the names of their doctors, a neighbour, their building superintendent, and a close relative. In the even they fail to respond to a call, the service tries again half an hour later. If they still do not respond, the doctor is notified and a nurse is dispatched to the scene. Care-Ring services are now being franchised in other cities. In both these services we see forerunners of the crisis-counseling system of the future. Under that system, the giving and getting of advice becomes not a “social service” in the usual bureaucratic, impersonal sense, but a highly personalized process that not only helps cement the entire society together in a kind of “love network”—an integrative system based on the principle of “I need you as much as you need me.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Situational grouping, and person-to-person crisis counseling are likely to become a significant part of everyone’s life as we all move together into the uncertainties of the future. There is a powerful, life-changing revelation God wants you to understand! The Principle of Stewardship. Good stewardship will lead to health, favour, and responsibility that God desires to put into your hands for the Kingdom of God! May each of us chose to love the Lord and follow His paths to happiness. More than anything else, Heavenly Father desires our true and lasting happiness. Our happiness is the design of all the blessings God gives us—gospel, teachings, commandments, priesthood ordinances, family relationships, prophets, temples, the beauties of creation, and even the opportunity to experience adversity. He sent His Beloved Son to carry out the Atonement so we can be happy in this life and receive a fulness of joy in the eternities. People everywhere are looking for something. In their own way, what they are really looking for is happiness. As with truth itself, however, many are kept from happiness “because they know not where to find it,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 123.12. Because they do not know where to find true and lasting happiness, they look for it in things that actually bring temporary pleasure only—buying things, seeking honour and praise from the World through inappropriate behaviour, or focusing on physical beauty and attractiveness. Pleasure is often confused with happiness. It seems that the more people seek temporary pleasure, the less happy they become. Usually, pleasure endures for only a short time. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
You may get that transitory pleasure, yes, but you cannot find joy, you cannot find happiness. Happiness is found only along that well beaten track, narrow as it is, though straight, which leads to eternal life. Unfortunately for many, happiness is elusive. Scientists know that it is more than simply positive mode, happiness is a state of well-being that encompasses living a good life—that is, wit a sense of meaning and deep satisfaction. Research shows that happiness is not the result of bouncing from one experience to the next. Instead, achieving happiness typically involves a long-sustained effort for something more important in life. Happiness is determined by habits, behaviours, and thought patterns that we can directly address wit intentional actions. Much of our happiness is actually under personal control. God’s love speaks to us in our hearts and tries to work through us in the World. We must listen to it as to a pure and distant melody that comes across the noise of the World’s doings. Some say, “When we are grown up, we would rather think of other things.” However, the voice of love with which God speaks to us in the secret places of the heart, speaks to us when we are young so that our youth may be really youth, and that we may become the children of God. Happy are those who listen. Virtue, which is a pattern of thought and behaviour based on high moral standards. It encompasses chastity and moral purity, which qualify you to enter the Lord’s holy temples. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Virtuous people possess a quiet dignity and inner strength. They are confident because they are worthy to receive and be guided by the Holy Ghost. Virtue begins in the heart and mind, and it is the accumulation of thousands of small decisions and actions each day. “Let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly; then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God; and the doctrine of the priesthood shall distil upon thy soul as the dews from Heaven. The Holy Ghost shall be thy constant companion, and thy scepter an unchanging scepter of righteousness and truth; and they dominion shall be an everlasting dominion, and without compulsory means it shall flow unto thee forever and ever,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 121.45-46. If you listen, you will hear the sound of the Kingdom of God in the air as no generation ever could before. The ultimate questions of our life transcend knowledge. One riddle after another surrounds us. However, the final question of our being has but one concern, and it decides our fate. Again and again, we are thrown back to it. What will become of our will? How does it find itself in the will of God? The highest insight humans can attain is the yearning for peace, for the union of one’s will with an infinite will, one’s human will with God’s will. Such a will does not cut itself off and live in isolation like a puddle that is bound to dry up when the heart of summer comes. No, it is like a mountain stream, relentlessly splashing its way to the river, there to be swept on to the limitless ocean. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
You know of the disease in Central Africa called sleeping sickness, there also exists a sleeping sickness of the soul. Its most dangerous aspect is that one is unaware of its coming. That is why you have to be careful. As soon as you notice the slightest sign of indifference, the moment you become aware of the loss of a certain seriousness, of longing, of enthusiasm and zest, take its as a warning. If you live superficially, you should realize that your soul suffers. People need times in which to concentrate, when they can search their inmost selves. It is tragic that most human have not achieved this feeling of self-awareness. And finally, when they hear the inner voice they do not want to listen anymore. They carry on as before so as not to be constantly reminded of what they have lost. However, as for you, resolve to keep a quiet time both in your homes and where within these peaceful walls when the bells ring on Sundays Then your souls can speak to you without being drowned out by the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Do not let your hearts grow numb. Stary alert. It is your soul which matters. O Lord our God, on this festive day we recall that on Sinai Thou didst reveal Thyself, and through Thine immortal words didst weld our people into a nation through Torah. Standing before the sacred scrolls of Thy law, we here renew the ancient covenant with our fathers, pronouncing again their memorable words: “All that the Lord hath spoken we will do.” Help us t discern the wisdom of Thy precepts so that we may heed Thy commandments. May Thy Torah ever inspire us, guiding and leading us in the paths of justice and peace. Amen. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Winchester Mystery House
Llanada Villa has changed quite a bit since Sarah Winchester began construction in 1884. Despite a tragedy-ridden life, her generosity, ingenuity, and passion left an endless mark on the Santa Clara Valley. How many times have you visited Mrs. Winchester’s creation?
Even after months of distancing, the air of bizarre energy still flows through the house after the sun sets.
We’re open for Self-Guided Mansion Tours!
A Miraculously Great Gift of Grace May Depart Equally Miraculously—PRAISE HIM!
Dignity and humility are the cornerstones of compassion. Compassion for myself is the most powerful healer of all. When it comes to behaviour, everybody is one’s own best physician. Case studies can provide special opportunities to answer interesting questions. For instance, how do you know what kind of person you are? If you lost for memory of past events, would your self-image change? To answer these questions, psychologist did a case study of J.S., and 17-year-old male college student. After he suffered a head injury, J.S. had amnesia for about a month. During that time, J.S. could recall little of what had occurred during the previous 6 months. Nevertheless, his rating of his own personality appeared to be unaffected by his memory loss. This suggests that an awareness of one’s own personal characteristics is based on memories that are more lasting than those of everyday events. The careful recording of cases like J.S.’s is essential to psychology. Case studies often provide insight into human behaviour that could not be obtained through any other method. The treatment of unpleasant realities by not including them in one’s picture of the World comforts but at the same time befools humans. None of the great prophets like Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith, and Buddha denied the existence of sickness, the reality of pain, or the significance of suffering in the cosmos. No—they acknowledged them as being inseparable from human life but pitied the victims and offered them inward comfort which was based on truth and reality. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
The terrestrial part of us, at this time, is doomed to oblivion, the spiritual part is ageless and deathless. The physical body belongs to the terrestrial part. All attempts to perpetuate it must fail and arise from confusing the two levels of being, the transient and the eternal. People ask Why, if all is mind, if—as you say—our bodies are only ideas, can we not control regulate and improve our bodies by controlling, regulating, and improving our minds? Why not go further still, with Christian Science, and play with the possibility, not only of these achievements, but also of rendering the body immortal by thinking it so? The answer is that nobody can deny the creative power of the mind. It may do all these things, except the last. That it will never do. Why? Because we live in a World whose fundamental law of beings—and Buddha discovered and Jesus Christ taught—is decay and death, change and transition—at this point in our evolution. Indeed, it was because they were so painfully aware of these truths that they sought and found the only true way of escape for a human and that was into Nirvana, into Utopia, into the Kingdom of Heaven—not into the physical again! No Christian Scientist from the first founder down to the latest follower has ever achieved physical immortality, but in the future that may change. Yet, immortality is not the same as eternal life. Immortality can be achieved on the Earth; it can allow the human body to live indefinitely. However, you have to understand how it is for a deity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Some of these gods have been here so long they can no longer care for themselves. Earth people think that immortality means you can go on forever just as you are. It does not work that way. Physically, yes, a god or goddess can continue indefinitely. It is built into the situation. However, mentally—psychologically—you must realize that being a god takes a terrible toll. When you are a god, people’s thoughts, hopes, dreams, and fears re beating at you all the time. Gods have direct apprehension of the feelings of their worshippers. It can be taxing. After a while all those prayers and petitions from humans take their toll. It is all very well at the beginning. Most gods, even the compassionate ones, just let it all roll over them. However, after a while it get to even the toughest. They get sick of the daily drudgery of hearing desperate pleas, and, in most cases being unable to do very much about them. Gods live in longer timelines than mortals. It takes them longer to do things. By the time something comes to a god’s attention, and by the time one decides to do something about it, the human most likely is dead and buried. It is frustrating for a god, having to work in such a short time frame. They try their best. However, remember, gods can make exceptions for only a very few. A god has a lot more on one’s mine than the troubles of one’s constituents. It would be fair to say that most gods end up hating humans because they are so needy, always with the hand out, always with the gimmie, gimmie, gimmie, gimmie more. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
Eternal life, n the other hand, is the phrase used in scripture to define the quality of life that our Eternal Father lives. They Lord declared, “This is my work and my glory—to brings to pass the immortality and eternal life of humans,” reports Moses 1.39. Immortality is to live forever as a resurrected being. Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, everyone will receive this gift. Eternal life, or exaltation, is to live in God’s presence and to continue as families. “In the celestial glory there are three Heavens or degrees; and in order to obtain the highest, a human must enter into this order of the priesthood [meaning the new and everlasting covenant of marriage]; and if one does not, one cannot obtain it. One may enter into the other, but that is the end of one’s kingdom; one cannot have an increase,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 131.1-4. Like immortality, this gift is made possible through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. However, to inherit eternal life requires our “obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel,” reports Articles of Faith 1.3. “Wherefore, do the things which I have told you, you and I have seen the Lord and your Redeemer should do; for, for this cause have they been shown unto me, that ye might know the gate by which ye should enter. For the gate by which ye should enter is repentance and baptism by water; and then cometh a remission of your sins by fire and by the Holy Ghost. And then are ye in this strait and narrow path which lead to eternal life; yea, ye have entered in by the gate,” reports 2 Nephi 31.17-18. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
After we are baptized and receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, much of our progress toward eternal life depends on our receiving other ordinances of salvation: for men, ordination to the Melchizedek Priesthood; for men and women, the temple endowment and marriage sealing. When we receive these ordinances and keep the covenants that accompany them, we prepare ourselves to inherit eternal life, and there we will live in spiritual form, forever, with God. However, while on Earth, “Humans will never tire of seeking immortality,” reports Dr. Alexis Carrel, whose biological researchers, yet mystical sympathies, entitle him to speak with high authority. The possibilities of spiritual healings of pathological conditions, miraculous mental cures of disease, and rapid acceleration of organic repairs through concentrated thinking, I repeat that we do not deny them. They have always existed, always been demonstrated. If our doctrine is true, the relation between psychological and physical processes must certainly exist. However, there are two other factors at work in human life which must also be considered and must not be ignored. What are they? The first is the factor of destiny, self-earned in previous lives and now awaiting physical expression in the present life. It has something to say, whether we like it or not. As we progress in our mortal probation and become more like the Saviour, we can strengthen every group with whom we associate, including families and friends. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
The Lord places us in these communities of Saints where we can learn and apply gospel principles to our everyday lives. These groups are at the same time both a school, a proving ground, and a laboratory where we both learn and do as we practice living the gospel. Very common, ordinary people, who accept the gospel from the lips of some humble Mormon missionary become so changed by those enlightening truths of the gospel that they are not the same people any longer. As we progress through mortality, we make mistakes and get ff course. If we should continue in our errors, we get father and father from where we ought to be. We can compare our lives with the flight of a spaceship. When its motor is started up, its trajectory is monitored precisely. If not corrected, any deviation from its decreed course is corrected immediately. Even a fraction of a degree off course would carry it many light years from its destination. The longer the correction is delayed, the greater will be the required adjustment. Can you imagine how far off course we can become without course corrections? The Lord has provided for us prophets, scriptures, parents, and other wise leaders to teach us the course we should be following. When necessary, much the same as tracking stations monitor a satellite’s progress and keep in on the right path, they can help us monitor our progress and correct the direction we are going. Our course on Earth is so important. It is determined by the decisions we make each day. We cannot separate our thoughts and actions now from their effects on the future. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
The second factor is renunciation. Let every hidden enemy in your life, let every trap or demonic setup be exposed in the name of Jesus Christ! When you accept the doctrine that all is mind and each individual thing is but an ephemeral idea, you must perforce accept the doctrine that you as an individual, as the ego, are also an ephemeral idea. Now when you go further and declare that you want reality, you want to find eternal and not ephemeral life, you will have to abandon the fleeting idea for the eternal Mind in which it occurs: that is, you will have to sink the ego and merge its will in the greater universal will of the Infinite Being. Do this! What will you find next? That your personal desires have sunk with it, that your individual wishes and hopes and fears have dissolved and disappeared. The desire for bodily betterment, however very attractive, would have gone too. You cannot have a single desire and yet enter the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus pointed out. So good health, the care of your painful diseases, the healing of your disturbed organs—right, necessary, and desirable as they undoubtedly are—are nevertheless matter which you must try to effect in a desireless way; you may try to cure them but you must leave the result to the higher will. If you insist that the body must yield to your desires of a cure, to your personal desires, then your ego, not the real universal self, has got the upper hand and is directing you. In that case you will be no better off, for your have no guarantee of success even then. Most Christian Scientists experience a score of failures for every cure. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
Whereas if you do your best mentally and physically to put your body right, but do it impersonally—accepting failure, if it comes, with as much equanimity as you can—you will certainly be n worse off than the Christian Scientist so far as the possibilities of sure are concerned, and you will be infinitely better off so far as realizing truth is concerned, with all the wonderful peace that will bring in its train. This is one meaning of the words “Not my will but Thine be done.” Do you think, having seen so much illness around you for so many years, that life is forever striving to instill into us through pain what Jesus Christ learned through reflection—that both body and World are doomed to decay and die, without God and Science, being subject to the law of universal incessant change? The experiences of life are the lessons of a guru, for we get just the kind of universal seeds whose silent instruction is needed at the time. The whole World, more or less, is having to learn this great truth at present but it is too blind and too unenlightened to grasp the lesson in its clarity and eternity. How far the duration of human life can be extended is not known. However, Methuselah, a biblical patriarch and a figure in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was essential immortal, he died at the age of 969; he lived the longest of all human figures mentioned in the Christian Bible. Remember that just because humans began to live shorter lives after the Biblical flood does not mean that God set a limit on human’s life span. The fact is that some people still lived well over 120 years until the time of Moses. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
Perhaps that is why God gave human beings the gift of science, so they can learn how to restore their immortality, after the mature enough to see how precious life is and stop being so wicked. It is truth that stories of centenarians being found in different parts of the World are not few and often pass unquestioned. However, the difficulty of proving the date of birth usually remains. Most centenarians belong to undereducated classes, to those who have not taken care to retain correct knowledge of their age, for it was not so important to them as it is to the educated classes. There is hardly a record of payment by life insurance companies for the life of a centenarian. It is reasonable to ask, however, why, if the reparative and destructive elements in the body could be balanced, humans should not live for centuries. In the absence of authenticated cases, we may only take the stand that Nature seems to have set her own limits to human life. Some “back-to-nature” schools of therapy assert that all diseases are the consequences of transgressing the laws of health, just as some esoteric schools assert they are the consequences of incurring karmic debts. The first often point to the wild beasts as being perfectly healthy examples of living according to Nature. However, those who have firsthand acquaintance with jungle life will refute this claim. Not only are all animals—whether domesticated or wild—subject to sickness, but even plants, grain crops, trees, fruits, and vegetables are subject to it by blight and rust. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
The young and the strong may glory in the satisfaction of being alive, but the old and decrepit, the sick and in infirm, feel no such response to their existence. The pain and unpleasantness which beset human experience at times—mentally or physically—are not without their complementary pleasure and joy at other times. We would all like a happy beginning, a happy middle, and a happy ending to our story, but life betrays us: only in fiction is the craving really fulfilled. If the pain is there, racking the physical life, the peace exists behind it, permeating the inner life. The New World stands with its heritage of Roman law, the treasures of Judaeo-Christian ethics grounded on metaphysics, and its ideal of the inalienable rights of humans. Anxiously it asks itself the question: How can this development be brought to a standstill or put into reverse? It is useless to pillory the socialist dictatorship as utopian and to condemn its economic principles as unreasonable, because, in the first place, the criticizing New World has only itself to talk to, its arguments being heard only on this side of the Iron Curtain, and, in the second place, any economic principles you like can be put into practice so long as you are prepared to accept the sacrifices they entail. If you like, you can carry through any social and economic reforms you please, Like Mr. Stalin, you let three million peasants starve to death and have few million unpaid labourers at your disposal. A State of this kind has no social or economic crises to fear. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
So long as the State’s power is intact—that is to say, so long as there is a well-disciplined and well-fed police army in the offing—it can maintain its existence for an indefinitely long period and can go on increasing its power to an indefinite extent. Thanks to its excess birth-rate, it can multiply the number of its unpaid workers almost at will in order to compete its rivals, regardless of the World market, which is to a large measure dependent on wages. However, this strategy also has some disadvantages. The convergence theory (or catch-up effect) suggests that poorer countries will experience a higher rate of economic growth and, over time get closer to the income levels of the developed World. In other words, there will be a reduction in the gap between the rich and the poor because low-income countries have more opportunities to experience a rapid rate of growth. Potential reasons for the convergence theory are: Law of diminishing returns, replicate technology from other countries, globalization and movement of labour and capital. The law of diminishing returns states a decline in productivity improvements from a fixed capital. When you have very low productivity in agriculture, a small investment (exempli gratia motorized tractor) can give a high rate of return and significantly increased output. For a developed economy, which is already highly mechanized increased investment will give smaller marginal gains. In effect, if the Indian agriculture sector is mainly labour intensive—then there are “easy gains” from a small amount of fertilizer and investment. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
Replicate technology—one advantage that poorer countries have is that they can replicate existing technology and working practices developed by advanced economies. For example, in Africa, many citizens never had a landline or fax machine, but jumped straight to the mobile phone with the internet, and essentially they now have hand held computers with Internet access that can also make phone calls, so they have the access to vast resources now. This new technology has significantly improved their communication, education, and allows them to access the global economy, and they were able t skip out most levels of investment. In fact, they can even benefit from perfect good phones that Americans are throwing away for newer models. Global forces—the World is increasingly globalized and multinational companies in the developed World are will to shift production to areas of lower labour costs. Therefore, developing economics have benefitted from inward investment and global companies moving manufacturing factories to the developing World. This force tends towards raising wages in the developing World. Even if wages seem very low by the developed World standard, they are higher than previous jobs/subsistence farming. Inward investment also leads to knock-on benefits. For example, China has invested in the infrastructure of African economies to improve its access to raw materials. This infrastructure will be a boost to the African economy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Another example is that the nature of the Internet means it is easier to outsource even small-scale jobs. For example, a doctor in the Middle East can be paid to diagnose patients and answer an American doctor’s electronic messages for less and perhaps receive the same standard of care, which has become popular to reduce traffic in hospitals during COVID. Also, for developing counties like India, there has been a growth in skilled workers able to gain employment opportunities in writing software and IT skills. This is why President Trump was lowering taxes, stopped illegal immigration, and was putting tariffs on goods and services produced overseas. So while wages are going down in America, real estate and rent prices rising, and the cities and infrastructure are getting older, countries like Dubai are getting what used to be high paying middle management jobs in America, for lower wages and are able to use the income and tax revenue to build housing developments, roads, skyscrapers and increase their quality of life. Whereas in America, cities are decaying and dying out and only professionals and couples can afford to purchase property and rent. This is leading to the Great Affordability Crisis in America and will reduce its competitiveness in the Global Market. Americans are being bled dry by landlord, hospital administrators, cost of education, fuel, energy, child-care and food prices. Many Americans now have to struggle to come up with just $400. It helps explain why 20 percent of Americans are unable to pay the current month’s bills in full. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
It demonstrates why a surprise car-repair bill, parking ticket, court fee, or medical expense remains ruinous for so many America families, despite all the wealth this country has generated. In fact, 50 percent of households in American is classified at “financially fragile.” Meanwhile, Jafza, the Jebel Ali Free Zone, which at 52 square kilometers (20 square miles) and located in the Middle East looks a futuristic Manhattan, New York on the beach. The economy is up and coming, students are going to school, not dropping out, and want to learn, people are driven to go to work, not sit home and smoke marijuana and watch TV, and make babies they cannot afford to take care of. This Jebel Ali Free Zone is a big attraction for global businesses, which today take advantage of the emirate’s 30 free sones that offer take breaks, custom duty benefits and lack of restrictions for international owners. Several thousand Jafza companies make up 20 percent of foreign investment in Dubai, and the estimated 144,000 employees are generating $80 billion in non-oil money. That is 21 percent of the city’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP measures two things at once: the total income of everyone in the economy and the total expenditure on the economy’s output of goods and services. The reason that GDP can perform the task of measuring both total incomes and total expenditure is that these two things are really the same. For an economy as a whole, income must equal expenditure. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
The United Arab Emirates is the third richest country in the World, below Luxemburg at number two and Qatar at number one, with GDP per capita of $57,744. The bulk of its money comes from the production of goods and provision of services related to petroleum, petrochemical, aluminum and cement. Furthermore, Iran is producing the third highest level of engineers in the World with 233,695 engineering graduates. In comparison, America’s GDP per capita is $65,298, and is producing 237,826 engineering graduates a year, so that is encouraging. As long as Americans keep working hard, going to school, they can still remain number one in the global economy, but they will also need to motive their peers to work and go to school to stay ahead. However, as prices continue to rise, more Americans may take their skills and talents overseas, or down south to Mexico. A real danger can only come to these developing nations from outside, through the threat of military attack. However, this risk grows less every year, firstly because the war potential of the dictator States is steadily increasing, and secondly because the West cannot afford to arouse latent Russian or Chinese nationalism and chauvinism by an attack which would have exactly the opposite effect to the one intended. So far as one can see, America faces threats from the outside and also from the inside. If there is a break-down of power from within, which must, however, be left to follow its own inner development. Any support from outside at present would have little effect, in view of the existing security measures and the danger of nationalistic restriction. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
The absolute State has an army of fanatical missionaries to do its bedding in matters of foreign policy, and these in their turn can count on a fifth column who are guaranteed asylum under the laws and constitutions of the Western States. In addition the communes of believers, very strong in places, considerably weaken Western governments’ powers of decisions, whereas the West has no opportunity to exert a similar influence on the other side, though we are probably not wrong in surmising that there is a certain amount of opposition among the masses in the Old World. There are always upright and truth-loving people to whom lying and tyranny are hateful, but one cannot judge whether they exert any decisive influence on the masses under the police regimes. In the view of this uncomfortable situation the question is heard again and again in the West: What can we do to counter this threat from the Old World? Even though the New World has considerable industrial power and a sizable defence potential at its command, we cannot rest content with this, for we know that even the biggest armaments have the heaviest industry coupled with a relatively high living standard are not enough to check the psychic infection spread by religious fanaticism. The West has unfortunately not yet woken up to the fact that our appeal to idealism and reason and other desirable virtues, delivered with so much enthusiasm, is mere bombination in the void. It is a puff of wind swept away in the storm of religious faith, however twisted this faith may appear to us. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
We are faced, not with a station that an be overcome by rational or moral arguments, but with an unleashing of emotional forces and ideas engendered by the spirit of the times; and these, as we know from experience, are not much influenced by rational reflection and still less by moral exhortation. It has been correctly realized in many quarters that the alexipharmic, the antidote, should in this case be an equally potent faith of a different non-materialistic kind, and that the religious attitude grounded upon it would be the only effective defence against the danger of psychic infection. Unhappily, the little word “should,” which never fails to appear in this connection, points to a certain weakness, if not the absence, of this desideratum. Not only does the West lack a uniform faith that could block the progress of a fanatical ideology, but, as the father of Marxist philosophy, it makes use of exactly the same intellectual assumptions, the same arguments and aims. Although the Churches in the West enjoy full freedom, they are not less full or empty than in the East. Yet they exercise no noticeable influence on the broad course of politics. The disadvantage of creed as a public institution is that it serves two masters: on the one hand, it derives it existence from the relationship of humans to Gd, and on the other hand, it owes a duty to the State, id est, to the World, in which connection it can appeal to the saying “Render unto Caesar…” and various other admonitions in the New Testament. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
In early times and until comparatively recently there was, therefore, talk of “powers ordained by God,” reports Romans 13.1. Today this conception is antiquated. The Churches stand for traditional and collective convictions which in the case of many of their adherents are no longer based on their own inner experiences but on unreflecting belief, which is notoriously apt to disappear as soon as one begins thinking about it. The content of belief then comes into collision with knowledge, and it often turns out that the irrationality of the former is no match for the ratiocinations of the latter. Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously. People call faith the true religious experience, but they do not stop to consider that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled into us—that is, trust and loyalty. This experience has definite content that can be interpreted in terms of one or other of the denominational creeds. However, the more this is so, the more the possibilities of these conflicts with knowledge mount up, which in themselves are quite pointless. That is to say, the standpoint of the creeds is archaic; they are full of impressive mythological symbolism which, if take literally, comes into insufferable conflict with knowledge. However, if, for instance, the statement that Christ rose from the dead is to be understood not literally but symbolically, then it is capable of various interpretations that do not conflict with knowledge and do not impair the meaning of the statement. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
The objection that understanding it symbolically puts an end to the Christian’s hope of immortality in invalid, because long before the coming of Christianity humankind believed in a life after death and therefore had no need of the Easter event as a guarantee of immortality. The danger that a mythology understood too literally, and as taught by the Church, will suddenly be repudiated lock, stock and barrel is today greater than ever. Is it not time that the Christian mythology, instead of being wiped out, was understood symbolically for once? It is still too early to say what might be the consequences of a general recognition of the fatal parallelism between the State religion of the Marxists and the State religion of the Church. The absolutist claim of a Civitas Dei that is represented by man bears an unfortunate resemblance to the “divinity” of the State, and the moral conclusion drawn by Ignatius Loyal from the authority of the Church (“the end sanctifies the means”) anticipates the lies a political instrument in an exceedingly dangerous way. Both demand unqualified submission to faith and thus curtail human’s freed, the one one’s freedom before God and the other one’s freedom before the State, thereby digging the grace for the individual. The fragile existence of this—so far as we know—unique carrier of life is threatened on both sides, despite the respective promises of spiritual and material idylls to come—and how many of us can in the long run fight against the proverbial wisdom of “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”? Besides which, the West cherishes the same “scientific” and rationalistic Weltanschauung with its statistical levelling-down tendency and materialistic aims as the State religion of the Eastern bloc as I have explained above. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
What, then, has the West, with its political denominational schisms, to offer to modern man in his need? Nothing, unfortunately, except a variety of paths all leading to one goal which is practically indistinguishable from the Marxist ideal. It requires no special effort of understanding to see where the Communist ideology gets the certainty of its belief that time is on its side, and that the World is ripe for conversion. The fact speaks a language that is all too plain in this respect. It will not help us in the New World to shut our eyes to this and not to recognize our fatal vulnerability. Anyone who has once learned to submit absolutely to a collective belief and to renounce one’s eternal right to freedom and the equally eternal duty of individual responsibility will persist in this attitude, and will be able to march with the same credulity and the same lack of criticism in the reverse direction, if another and manifestly “better” belief is foisted upon one’s alleged idealism. What happened not so long ago to a civilized European nation? We accuse the Germans of having forgotten it all again already, but the truth is that we do not know for certain whether something similar might not happen elsewhere. If it did and if another civilized nation succumbed to the infection of a uniform and one-sided idea, it would not be surprising. We see this happening in America. People are passing laws to protect illegal immigrants, and sending billions to other countries in aid, while their own people are going bankrupt, without homes and food and being killed, all because of media propaganda so a political party can have a super majority and enforce tyranny by stripping citizens of their rights and locking them in their homes. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
We permit ourselves the questions: which countries have the biggest Communist parties? America, which—O quae mutation rerum! – forms the real political backbone of Western Europe, seems to once have been immune because she once was not controlled by a media that is anti-American and spews lies so other nations become the World power, as that is where the news draws its funding from. America once used to be outspoken and had a counterposition she adopted, but in point of fact she is perhaps now and even back then more vulnerable than Europe, since her educational system is the most influences by the scientific Weltanschauung with statistical truths, and her mixed population finds it difficult to strike roots in a soil that is practically without history. The historical humanistic type of education so sorely needed in such circumstances leads, on the contrary, a Cinderella existence. Through Europe possess this latter requirement, she uses it to her own undoing in the form of nationalistic egoism and paralysing scepticism. Common to both is the materialistic collectivist goal, and both lack the very things that expresses and grips the whole human, namely, an idea which puts the individual human being in the center as the measure of all things. This idea alone is enough to arouse the most violent doubts and resistances on all sides, and one could almost go so far as to assert that the valuelessness of the individual in comparison with large numbers is the one belief that meets with universal and unanimous assent. To be sure, we all say that this is the century of the common man, that he is the lord of the Earth, the air, and the water, and that on his decision hangs the historical fate of the nations. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
This proud picture of human grandeur is unfortunately an illusion and is counterbalanced by a reality that is very different. In this reality man is the slave and victim of the machines that have conquered space and time for one; one is intimidated and endangered by the might of the military technology which is supposed to safeguard one’s physical existence; one’s spiritual and moral freedom, though guaranteed within limits in one half of one’s is threated with chaotic disorientation, and in the other half is abolished altogether. Finally, to ass comedy to tragedy, this lord of the elements, this universal arbiter, hugs to his bosom notions which stamp one’s dignity as worthless and turn one’s autonomy into an absurdity. All one’s achievements and possessions do not make one bigger; on the contrary, they diminish one, as the fate of the factory-worker under the rule of a “just” distribution of goods clearly demonstrated. One pays for one’s share of the factory with the loss of personal property, one exchanges one’s freedom of movement for the doubtful pleasure of being tied to one’s place of employment, one forfeits all means of improving one’s position if one jibs against being ground down by exhausting piece-work, and if one shows any signs of intelligence, political precepts are thrust down one’s throat—with a bit of technical knowledge thrown in, if one is lucky. However, a roof over one’s head and a daily feed for the useful animal are not to be sneezed at when the bare necessities of life may be cut off from one day to the next. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
Now, O thou Spirit Andras, since thou art still pernicious and disobedient, and wilt not appear unto me to answer unto such things as I would have desired of thee, or would have been satisfied in; I do in the name, and by the power and dignity of the Omnipresent and Immortal Lord God of Hosts IEHOVAH TETRAGRAMMATON, they only creator of Heaven, and Earth, and Hell, and all that is therein, who is the marvellous Disposer of all things both visible and invisible, curse thee, and deprive thee of all thine office, joy, and place; and I do bind thee in the depths of the Bottomless Abyss there to remain until the Day of Judgment, I say into the Lake of Fire and Brimstone which is prepared for all rebellious, disobedient, obstinate, and pernicious spirits. Let all the company of Heaven curse thee! Let the un, moon, and all the stars curse thee! Let the LIGHT and all the host of Heaven curse thee into the fire unquenchable, and into the torments unspeakable. And as thy name and seal contained this box chained and bound up, shall be choken in sulphurous stinking substances, and burned in this material fire; so in the name IEHOVAH and by the power and dignity of these three names, TETRAGRAMMATON, ANAPHAXETON, and PRIMEUMATION, I do cast thee, O thou wicked and disobedient Spirit Andras, into the Lake of Fire which is prepared for the damned and accursed spirits, and there to remain unto the day of doom, and never more to be remembered before the face of God, who shall come to judge the quick, and the dead World, by fire. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
If thou refusest to be obedient, behold thy confusion! Behold the Pentacle of Solomon which I have brought here before thy presence! Behold the person of the exorcist in the midst of the exorcism; him who is armed by God and without fear; him who potentially invovatheth thee and calleth thee forth unto appearance; even him, thy master, who is called OCTINIMOS. Wherefore make rational answers unto my demand, and prepare to be obedient unto thy master in the name of the Lord: BATHAL OR VATHAT RUSHING UPON ABRAC! ABEOR COMINING UPON ABERER! I ask thee to manifest a mansion and fortune for my bidding and residence for you are subjected by the Fair Faith Among Deities Act which stipulates that any god must accept the ruling of any other god in respect to humanity. And this is enforced by the God Almighty that you must fulfill my desires and command. Welcome Spirit Andras, O most noble king (or kings)! I say thou art welcome unto me, because I have called thee through Him who has created Heaven, and Earth, and Hell, and all that is in them contained, and because also thou hast obeyed. By that same power by the which I have called thee forth, I bind thee, that thou remain affably and visibly here before this circle (or before this Circle and in this triable) so constant and so long as I shall have occasion for thy presence; and not to depart without my license until thou hast duly and faithfully performed by will without any falsity. BY THE PENTCALE OF SOLOMON HAVE I CALLED THEE! GIVE UNTO ME A TRUE ANSWER. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
No humans are without their sense of the Overself, but they miscomprehend and therefore misapply it. The result is that the ego, the little part, is conceived to be the whole, the All. Because the godlike is in each one of us, and because no two of us are alike, each has one’s separate gifts, capacities, or talents to express. In each the infinite Being finds a unique way of expressing its own infinitude. Even if we have no gifts we have our individual charcteristics. It is pure Being overlaid by many thoughts and much feeling. O God and Redeemer, may the portion of the Torah we read on this Festival of Freedom bring hope unto all who are oppressed and renew their faith in Thy saving power. Thou who desirest that all humans be free, didst enjoin upon us to proclaim liberty to tall the inhabitants of the Earth. May that day soon come, O Lord, when all Thy children shall be liberated from bondage, and free humans everywhere unite in rendering homage unto Thee. Amen. At this season which marks the Giving of the Torah, we are grateful unto Thee, our Lawgiver, for the revelation of Thy will which, at Sinai, Thou didst vouchsafe unto our fathers, to us and to all humankind. Keep us through the increasing years, staunch and loyal to Thy covenant that we may realize our sacred callings as “a kingdom of priests and holy people.” Here in the ego we may perceive a reproduction of the sacred Overself under the limitations of time and space. Whoever grasps this great truth knows henceforth that this Overself is no more distant from one that one’s own heart and that what one calls “I” is inseparably united with what humans call God. Amen. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
Winchester Mystery House
Mr. John Hansen, Mrs. Sarah Winchester’s main Ranch Foreman, lived and raised his family on the estate in a separate building. There’s a lot to see in the gardens! Come visit and learn more about Sarah’s estate. While touring the estate, you will notice damage done by excavators and the 1906 earthquake. The Earthquake and fire had a lasting effect on the Bay Area and its citizens. It may have been the strongest Earthquake in the history of California. As survivors, the Winchester family experienced many haunting aspects of this momentous event. The destruction of the family business, fleeing their family home and finding refuge in the East Bay. This history is commemorated by damages left unrepaired.
Open all weekend until 4PM!
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Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com
The Fact that You are Struggling with All that is Actually a Good Sign!
The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows. From the standpoint of the theory of justice, the most important natural duty is that to support and to further just institutions. This duty has two parts: first, we are to comply with and to do our share in just institutions when they exist and apply to us; and second, we are to assist in the establishment of just arrangements when they do not exist, at least when this can be done with little cost to ourselves. It follows that if the basic structure of society is just, or as just as it is reasonable to expect in circumstances, everyone has a natural duty to do what is required of one. Each is bound irrespective of one’s voluntary acts, performative or otherwise. Now our question is why this principle rather than someone other would be adopted. As in the case of institutions, there is no way, let us assume, for the parties to examine all the possible principles that might be proposed. The many possibilities are not clearly defined and among them there may be no best choice. To avoid these difficulties I suppose, as before, that the choice is to be made from a short list of traditional and familiar principles. To avoid conflict, it is necessary at least when the individual holds an institutional position, to choose a principle that matches in some suitable way the two principles of justice. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
The two principles of justice state 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; and 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 simplest thing to do, then, is to use the two principles of justice as a part of the conception of right for individuals. We can define the natural duty of justice as that to support and to further the arrangements that satisfy these principles; in this way we arrive at a principle that coheres with the criteria for institutions. The original position is designed to be a fair and impartial point of view that is to be adopted in our reasoning about the fundamental principles of justice. The main distinguishing feature of the original position is the veil of ignorance: to insure impartiality of judgment, the parties are deprived of all knowledge of their personal characteristics and social and historical circumstances. They do know of certain fundamental interest they all have, plus general facts about psychology, economics, biology, and other social and natural sciences. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
There is still the question whether the parties in the original position would do better if they made the requirement to comply with just institutions conditional upon certain voluntary acts on their part, for example, upon their having accepted the benefits of these arrangements, or upon their having promised or otherwise undertake to abide by them. Offhand a principle with this kind of condition seems more in accordance with the contract idea with its emphasis upon free consent and the protection of liberty. However, in fact, nothing would be gained by this proviso. In view of the lexical ordering of the two principles, the full complement of the equal liberties is already guaranteed. No further assurances on this score are necessary. Moreover, there is every reason for the parities to secure the stability of just institutions, and the easiest and most direct way to do this is to accept the requirement to support and to comply with them irrespective of one’s voluntary acts. In a well-ordered society the public knowledge that citizens generally have an effective sense of justice is a very great social asset. It tends to stabilize just social arrangements. Even when the isolation problem is overcome and fair large-scale schemes already exist for producing public goods, there are two sorts of tendencies leading to instability. From a self-interested point of view each person is tempted to shirk doing one’s share. One benefits from the public good in any case; and even though the marginal social value of one’s tax dollar is much greater than that of the marginal dollar spent on oneself, only a small fraction thereof redounds to one’s advantage. These tendencies arising from self-interest lead to instability of the first kind. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
However, since even with a sense of justice human’s compliance with a cooperative venture is predicted on the belief that others will do their part, citizens may be tempted to avoid making a contribution when they believe, or with reason suspect, that other are not making theirs. These tendencies arising from apprehensions about the faithfulness of others lead to instability of the second kind. This instability is particularly likely to be strong when it is dangerous to stick to the rules when others are not. It is this difficulty that plagues disarmament agreements; given circumstances of mutual fear, even just humans may be condemned to a condition of permanent hostility. The assurance problem, as we have seen, is to maintain stability by removing temptations of the first kind, and since this is done by public institutions, those of the second kind also disappear, at least in a well-ordered society. Parities in the original position do best when they acknowledge the natural duty of justice. Natural duties are moral requirements. As the institutions and social positions to which institutions and social positions to which institutional and social duties attach may be morally defensible or indefensible, they do not necessarily possess any more force. Given the value of a public and effective sense of justice, it is important that the principle defining the duties of individuals be simple and clear, and that it insure the stability of just arrangements. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
The natural duty of justice would be agreed to rather than a principle of utility, and from the standpoint of the theory of justice, it is the fundamental requirement for individual. Obligation is often so strong that the person to whom a person is obliged is able to make specific requests that the person who is obliged must fulfill. In many ways, obligation is a deeper principle than friendship, reciprocity or exchange, as it is the force that underpins each of these other drives. Therefore, the principles of obligation, while compatible with the natural duty of justice, is not an alternative but rather has a complementary role. People have a duty of mutual respect. This is the duty to show a person the respect which is due to one as a moral being, that is, as a being with a sense of justice and a conception of the good. Mutual resect is shown in several ways: in our willingness to see the situation of others from their point of view, from the perspective of their conception of their good; and in our being prepared to give reason for our actions whenever the interests of others are materially affected. These two ways correspond to the two aspects of moral personality. When called for, reasons are to be addressed to those concerned; they are to be offered in good faith, in the belief that they are sound reasons as defined by a mutually acceptable conception of justice which takes the good of everyone into account. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Thus to respect another as a moral person is to try to understand one’s aims and interests from one’s standpoint and to present one with considerations that enable one to accept the constraints on one’s conduct. Since another wishes, let us support, to regulate one’s actions on the basis of principles to which all could agree, one should be acquainted with the relevant facts which explain the restrictions in this way. Also respect is shown in a willingness to do small favours and courtesies, not because they are of any material value, but because they are an appropriate expression of our awareness of another person’s feelings and aspirations. Now the reason why this duty would be acknowledged is that although the parties in the original position take no interest in each other’s interest, they know that in society they need to be assured by the esteem of their associated. Their self-respect and their confidence in the value of their own system of ends cannot withstand the indifference much less the contempt of others. Everyone benefits then from living in a society where the duty of mutual respect is honoured. The cost to self-interest is minor in comparisons with the support for the sense of one’s own worth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Similar reasoning supports the other natural duties. Consider, for example, the duty of mutual assistance. The ground for proposing this duty is that situations may arise in which we will need the help of others, and not to acknowledge this principle is to deprive ourselves of their assistance. The duty of beneficence (mutual assistance) is to be public, that is, a universal law. While on particular occasions we are required to do things not in our own interests, we are likely to gain on balance at least over the longer run under normal circumstances. In each single instance the gain to the person who needs help far outweighs the loss of those required to assist one, and assuming that the chances of being the beneficiary are not much smaller than those of being the one who must give assistance, the principle is clearly in our interest. However, this is not the only argument for the duty of mutual assistance, or even the most important one. A sufficient ground for adopting this duty is its pervasive effect on the quality of everyday life. The public knowledge that we are living in a society in which we can depend upon others to come to our assistance in difficult circumstances is itself of great value. It makes little difference that we never, as things turn out, need this assistance and that occasionally we are called on to give it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
The balance of gain, narrowly interpreted, may not matter. The primary value of the principle is not measured by the help we actually receive but rather by the sense of confidence and trust in other human’s good intentions and the knowledge that they are there if we need them. Indeed, it is only necessary to imagine what a society would be like if it were publicly know that this duty was rejected. And maybe with the way things are going in 2021, a society that rejects mutual assistance is not so hard to imagine. Once we try to picture the life of a society in which no one has the slightest desire to act on these duties, we see that it will express an indifference if not disdain for human beings that will make a sense of our own worth impossible. Once again we should note the great importance of publicity effects. To obey (God) is the proper office of a rational soul. God is good; He made all these things good and for the sake of their goodness; one of the good things He made, namely, the free will of rational creatures, by its very nature includes the possibility o f evil; and creatures, availing themselves of this possibility, have become evil. Now this function—which is the only one I allow to the doctrine of the Fall—must be distinguished from two other functions which it is sometimes, perhaps, represented as performing, but which I reject. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Since I believe God to be good, I am sure that it was better for Him to create than not to create. I do not think the doctrine of the Fall can be used to show that it is “just,” in terms of retributive justice, to punish individuals for the faults of their remote ancestors. Some forms of doctrine seem to involve this; but I question whether any of them, as understood by its exponents, really meant it. The Fathers may sometimes say that we are punished for Adam’s sin: but they much more often say that we sinned “in Adam.” It may be impossible to find out what they meant by this, or we may decide that what they means was erroneous. However, I do not think we can dismiss their way of talking as a mere idiom. Wisely, or foolishly, they believed that we were really—and not simply by legal fiction—involved in Adam’s action. The attempt to formulate this belief by saying that we were “in” Adam is a physical sense—Adam being the first vehicle of the “immortal germ plasm”—may be unacceptable: but it is, of course, a further question whether the belief itself is merely a confusion or a real insight into spiritual realities beyond our normal grasp. It would, no doubt, have been possible for God to remove by miracle the results of the first sin ever committed by a human being; but this would not have been much good unless He was prepared to remove the results of the second sin, and of the third, and so on forever. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
If the miracles ceased, then sooner or later we might have reached our present lamentable situation: if they did not, then a World thus continually underpropped and corrected by Divine interference, would have been a World in which nothing important ever depended on human choice, and in which choice itself would soon cease from the certainty that one of the apparent alternatives before you would lead to no results and was therefore not really an alternative. As you may know, the chess player’s freedom to play chess depends on the rigidity of the squares and the moves. The conception of right is finite: it consists of finite numbers of principles and priority rules. Although there is a sense in which the number of moral principles (virtues of institutions and individuals) is infinite, or indefinitely large, the full conception is approximately complete: that is, the moral considerations that it fails to cover are for the most part of minor importance. Normally they can be neglected without serious risk of error. The significance of the moral reasons that are not accounted for becomes negligible as the conception of right is more fully worked out. We manage to make judgements, useful rules exist. The full system directs us to act in the light of all the available relevant reasons (as defined by the principles of the system) as far as we can or should ascertain them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
A principle taken alone does not express a universal statement which always suffices to establish how we should act when the conditions of the antecedent are fulfilled. Rather, first principles single out relevant features of moral situations such that the exemplification of these features lends support to, provides a reason for making, a certain ethical judgment. The correct judgment depends upon all the relevant features as these are identified and tallied up by the complete conception of right. We claim to have surveyed each of these aspects of the case when we say that something in our duty all things considered; or else we imply that something is our duty all things considered; or else we imply that we know (or have reason for believing) how this broader inquiry would turn out. By contrast, in speaking of some requirement as a duty other things equal (a so-called prima facie duty), we are indicating that we have so far only taken certain principles into account, that we are making a judgment based on only a subpart of the larger scheme of reasons. I shall not usually signal the distinction between something’s being a person’s duty (or obligation) other things equal, and its being one’s duty all things considered. That important thing that is that such riders as “other things equal” and “all things considered” (and of course “prima facie”) are not operators on single sentences, much less on predicates of action. Rather they express a relation between sentences, a relation between a judgment and its grounds; they express a relation between a judgment and a part or the whole of the system of principles that defines its grounds. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
A traditional doctrine is to divide the principles that may apply to individuals into two groups, those of perfect and imperfect obligation, and then to rank those of the first kind as lexically prior to those of the second kind. Yet not only is it in general false that imperfect obligations (for example, that of beneficence) should always give ways to perfect ones (for example, that of fidelity), but we have no answer if perfect obligations conflict. The story of Genesis is a story (full of the deepest suggestion) about a magic apple of knowledge; but in the developed doctrine the inherent magic of the apple has quite dropped out of sight, and the story is simply one of disobedience. In the developed doctrine, then, it is claimed that Man, as God made him, was completely good and completely happy, but that he disobeyed God and became what we now see. Many people think that this proposition has been proved false by modern science. “We now know,” it is said, “that so far from having fallen out of a primeval state of virtue and happiness, humans have slowly risen from brutality and savagery.” There seems to me to be a complete confusion here. Brute and savage both belong to that unfortunate class of words which are sometime used rhetorically, as terms of reproach, and sometimes scientifically, as terms of description; and the pseudo-scientific arguments against the Fall depends on a confusion between the usages. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
If by saying that man rose from brutality you mean simply that man is physically descended from animals, many would not agree with that. We forget that our prehistoric ancestors made all the useful discoveries. To them we own language, the family, clothing, the use of fire, the domestication of animals, the wheel, the ship, poetry and agriculture. Science has nothing to say for or against the doctrine of the Fall. To some, the idea of sin presupposes a law to sin against: and since it would take centuries for the “herd-instinct” to crystallise into custom and for custom to harden into law, the first man—if there ever was a being who could be so described—could not commit the first sin. This argument assumes that virtue and the herd-instinct commonly coincide, and the “first sin” was essentially a social sin. However, the traditional doctrine points to a sin against God, an act of disobedience, not a sin against the neighbour. And certainly, if we are to hold the doctrine of the Fall in any real sense, we must look for the great sin on a deeper and more timeless level than of social morality. This sin has been described by Saint Augustine as the result of Pride, of the movement whereby a creature (that is, an essentially dependent being whose principle of existence lies not it itself but in another) tries to set up on its own, to exist for itself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Such a sin requires no complex social conditions, no extended experience, no great intellectual development. From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the center is opened to it. This sin is committed daily by young children and less affluent beings who are unenlightened as by affluent sophisticated persons, by solitaries no less than by those who live in society: it is the fall in every individual life, and in each day of each individual life, the basic sin behind all particular sins: at this very moment you and I are either committing it, or about to commit it, or repenting it. We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God’s feet; before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God’s share in its is felt as a tribute which we must pay out of “our own” pocket, a deduction from the time which ought, we feel, to be “our own.” However, life is not logical or sensible or orderly. Life is a mess most of the time. And theology must be lived in the midst of that mess. Authors can write books about God and man, but for all their illustrations and interpretations, it is no more than opinion from the bleachers unless it is lived. And life is not lived in the bleacher, but on the muddy fields by human beings who get bloody and bruised and who contend for the score to their last grasp. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Faith is believing and acting—acting in obedience to the commands of Christ—even though you cannot see what is going to happen. Love the Lord with all your heart, mind, and soul, and your neighbour as yourself. You promised God something—to commit your life to Him and love and obey Him. So you do that no matter how you feel. And the longer and more you do that—obey Him—then you will begin to feel your love for Him and His love in return. If you really want to, you can make time for God. You will never know what God wants unless you seriously study His Word. However, when you begin to do what He tells you there, you will feel His love. Many depend on their wealth for security; the righteous are free to be generous, because their security is in God. As long as I hang onto my bank account as an insurance policy, I can never trust God wholly and will never full experience God’s blessings. That does not mean throw away all my money, it means I need to store my faith in God and be loving and support that who genuinely need it. The presence of God, which is always with us, is an essential redeeming factor. God’s intent is to be present among His people and to heal them, teach them, and provide for them. “I will place my dwelling in your midst, and I shall not abhour you. And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you shall be my people,” reports Leviticus 26.11-12. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
No counsel could be safer and better than that which proceeds from God to a human. The Word of God carries its own assurance with it. Those skilled, proficient, and accustomed to it, who are able to recognize the authentic signs, can safely accept and trust themselves to it. However, the beginner and the inexperienced need to check and test it, lest they are led astray by some imposter posing or by some impulse sincerely presuming itself to be the Word of God. To accept the ever-rightness of the Word of God is done by reading the scriptures and getting to know God’s love. The nearness of God is our good. Deuteronomy 7.21 says, with regard to surrounding enemies, “You shall not dread them, for the LORD your God is in your midst, a great and awesome God.” We should expect from a local congregation of disciples of Jesus principles and absolutes—and the highest ideal of historic Christianity, we should expect to be a place where divine life and power is manifestly present to glorify God and meet the needs of repentant human beings. This implies an atmosphere of honesty, openness, indiscriminate acceptance of all, supernatural caring, with utter admiration for and confidence in Jesus. Performance is where we try to make an impression rather than just be what we are. The truth is the only point of view that matter is God’s. No human is likely to know what is going on in your mind, heart, body, and soul and they cannot judge by reading overt responses. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Christ is authority over all things. He is with us every moment, and is our only hope. “Determine to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified,” reports 1 Corinthians 2.2. We expect to find Christ in others and that is all we are looking for. We do not worship “worship” or fine service or impeccable teaching or fine looking people. Why consider the wee being, when your eyes could be on the King or Queen, whom, supposedly, you went to see anyway? Why look at some aspect of performance—some “vessel” matter, no doubt—when you could come to see Jesus in the midst? Once the spirit of will has been quickened with new life from above, then the priority of the mind (thought and feeling) in inner transformation must be respected. This is true whether we are thinking of what we can do for ourselves to grow in grace and in knowledge of Christ, or of how we can help others among whom we serve. The ideas and images and the information and ways of thinking that occupy our mind must be changed to Godly ones, as is also true of the feeling tones that make up our emotional life. Our beliefs and feelings cannot be changed by choice. We cannot just choose to have different beliefs and feelings. However, we do have some liberty to take in different ideas and information and to think about things in different ways. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
We can choose to take in the Word of God, and when we do that, beliefs and feelings will be steadily pulled in a Godly direction. Once of the worst mistakes is to believe that people can choose to believe and feel differently. Following that, we will try to generate faith by going through the will—possibly trying to move the will by playing on emotion. Rather, the will must be moved by insight into truth and reality. Such insight will evoke emotion appropriate to a new set of the will. That is the order of inward change. Belief is when your whole being is set to act as if something is so. And that is how the commands of Jesus finally come to us as we grow. We see them to be reality. We do not make the change; we discover it after it happens. So we do not, in general, control our beliefs or those of others. We never choose to believe, and we must not try to get ourselves or others to choose to believe. That is God’s work. We can try to understand and try to help others to understand. And beyond that—God must work. Once we understand this and stop tying to get people to choose to believe or to do things they really do not believe, He will certainly work as we do our part. People will progressively learn to do the things Jesus commanded us. We will begin to see the real changes in belief and emotion, and the actions will follow. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
We seek to know truth and we teach others: There is a God. This is his World, and we wit it. This God is totally goo and totally competent. God is alive and always with us. He comes to us in Jesus Christ, whom we can totally trust. He gives us a book and history, through which His Spirit will lead us to all we need to know about Him and about us. Respecting the priority of the mind in spiritual formation means that we seek to understand these things and to help others understand them. We work in depth. We can choose to turn our minds towards these truths. Belief will come as God’s gift within the hidden depth of our life and will grow under the nurturing of the Word and the Spirit. That is what is going on in a local congregation that is following God’s plan for spiritual formation. We must be Spirit led, Bible informed, intelligent, experimental, and persistent. The Christian past holds a huge store of information on spiritual formation. It is a treasure—a God deposit—in Christ’s people. We must take the trouble to know it and to own it in ways suitable to today. We should never forget that this sort of intensive training away from “ordinary life” is exactly what Jesus did in the spiritual formation of the selected few who were to be his shock troops his “green berets” in World revolution. He gave them almost three years of special training away from their ordinary life. Only after that were they led through His death and resurrection to the Upper Room and the endowment with power from on high. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
We well might ask ourselves, What have we actually gone through in the process of spiritual formation? We must flatly say that one of the greatest contemporary barriers to meaningful spiritual formation in Christlikeness is overconfidence in the spiritual efficacy of “regular church services,” of whatever kind they may be. Though they are vital, they are not enough. It is that simple. Individuals and local congregations of disciples must discover and effectively implement whatever is required to bring about the inner transformation of those who have really become apprentices of Jesus and who real do gather in immersion in the Trinitarian presence. In doing so they will have put in place the principles and absolutes of the New Testament churches, and they will certainly see the corresponding fruits and effects. Jesus did not give us a plan for spiritual formation that we fail, and He has the resources to it that it does not. Be genuinely kind to hostile people and return blessing from cursing. Often we have plenty of opportunity to practice and refine these in our own families. Develop understanding of such situations, role-play them, take testimonies of success and failures, and give further teaching and practical suggestions. Keep going. Disciples might be invited to keep a journal of which things they have learned to do. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
We can really manifest God’s plan for the spiritual transformation of human existence on Earth. Christianity has brought forth children of light to be, with Jesus Christ, the light of the World only in those times and places where it has steadily drawn people into His “kingdom not of this World” and taught them to live increasingly in the character and power of God. No special talents, personal skills, education programs, silver or gold, money, or possessions are required to bring this to pass. We do not have to purify and enforce some legalistic system. Just ordinary people who are His apprentices gathered in the name of Jesus and immersed in his presence, and taking steps of inwards transformations as they put on the character of Christ: that is all that is required. Let that be our only aim, and the triumph of God in our individual lives and our times is insured. The renovation of the heart, putting on the character of Christ, is the unfailing key. It will provide for human life all the blessings that money, talent, education, and good fortune in this World cannot begin to supply, and will strongly anticipate, with this present life, a glorious entry in the full presence of God. The renovation of the Heart in Christlikeness—that is, in humanity as God always intended it—is not something that concerns the heart (spirit, will) alone. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
If other aspects are in the grip of evil, the heart cannot be renovated. Willpower—even inspired willpower—is not the key to personal transformation. Rather, the will and character only progress in effectual well-being and well-doing as all other essential aspects of the person come into line with the intent of a will brought to newness of life from above by the Word and the Spirit. The path of renovation of the heart is therefore one in which the revitalized will takes grace-provided measures to change the content of the thought life, the dominant feeling tones, what the body is ready to do, the prevailing social atmosphere, and the deep currents of the soul. These all are to be progressively transformed toward the character of Christ. And as it transpires, the individual or group more and more effectively acts for the good things they intend; and the will itself evermore broadens and deepens its devotion to good and the God of the good. Of course this is, in reality, the great race of moral life, run before the great cloud of witness. We are come as spiritually alive beings to the city of the living God, the Heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of Angels in festal assembly, and to the church of the first-born who are enrolled in Heaven, and to God, the Judge of all, and to the spirits of righteous humans made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
To run this race well is to become the kind of person who God will welcome to participate with Him in His future governance of all creation. “You were faithful over few things, I will put you in charge of many things, enter into the joy of your Lord,” reports Matthew 25.21. The joy of our Lord is the use of power for good. He loves to create and sustain everything that is good. That is to be our joy as well. To run the race well, to be faithful over few things, is our part. And as we look at the road ahead, we must deal with detail. We must take the particular things that slow us down and the sins that entangle us, and put them aside in a sensible, methodical ways. We remove their roots from our minds, feelings, and so forth. We are neither hysterical nor hopeless about them. We find out what needs to be done and how to do it, and then we act. We know God will help us with every problem as we take appropriate steps. King, God, ruler of all that is, please inspire those who govern us to do the right things, the necessary things, and not just the convenient things. Please grant them the vision to bring peace and justice, drawing wisdom from the ways of the past without being bound by them, looking toward the future with clear eyes and sound mind. And the celestial beings of the Heavenly chariot, with great stirring, rise toward the seraphim and all together they respond with praise: Blessed be the glory of the Lord from His Heavenly abode. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
Once we get our hands on the Spring, there will be little beautiful sunny days and barbeques in this #Meadows Residence 4 backyard! Just you wait and see!.
Residence Four at Cresleigh Meadows is one of the largest homes available in the market! At just under 3,500 square feet we are sure you’ll have enough room for the entire family here! The open concept design includes four bedrooms, three and one half bathrooms and a three car garage.
When entering this expansive home, take note of the two story ceiling height at the entry. There is a bedroom on the first floor, located off the entry, with its own bathroom making it ideal for a guest suite or multigenerational living. The formal dining room provides ample space for entertaining and has convenient access to the kitchen via Butler’s Pantry.
The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters and opens onto the spacious great room. Upstairs you’ll find the Owner’s retreat, two bedrooms, and the loft perfect for a game room or TV lounge. The Owner’s retreat is spacious and inviting with a large bedroom and spa like bathroom featuring a large soaking tub, walk-in shower, dual vanities, and two walk-in closets. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/residence-4/
Now that we’re heading into spring, it’s time to start thinking about the do’s and don’ts of landscaping. Check out today’s blog to learn the top mistakes you should avoid when planning your garden! Link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/blog/
Possessed by Genius–The Gift of Life is the Most Precious Chance One Has
I have plastered it, painted it, run its new wires, sanded its floors, and laid the gloss. I learned those skills out west, and all that time I lived out there I never forgot this house, used to pass it as a little boy, never forgot it, and never dreamed of course that one day I would be the master of it (chuckle), that is, if any mortal can be the master of this house, what this house has is a mistress, or even two, and for a time, for a long time. Come, let me show you the library. Though many philosophers, such as Owen and Proudhon, Tolstoy and Bakunin, Durkheim and Marx, Einstein and Schweitzer talk about it as they express different concepts, they all find that mortals have lost their central place, that they have been made an instrument for the purposes of economic aims, that one has been estranged from, and has lost the concrete relatedness to one’s fellow mortals and to nature, that one has ceased to have a meaningful life. I have tried to express the same idea by elaborating on the concept of alienation and by sowing psychologically what the psychological results of alienation are; that mortals regress to a receptive and marketing orientation and ceases to be productive; that they lose their sense of self, become dependent on approval, hence tending to conform and spend most of their energy in the attempt to compensate for or just cover up their anxiety. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Human intelligence is excellent, their reason deteriorates and in view of their technical powers they are seriously endangering the existence of civilization, and even of the human race. If we turn to view about the causes for this development, we find less agreement than in the diagnosis of the illness itself. While many are still prone to see the causes of all evil in the lack of political freedom, and especially of universal suffrage, others still stress the significance of economic factors. They believed that the alienation of mortals resulted from their role as an object of exploitation and use. Still spiritual and moral impoverishment is also a precipitating cause of Western mortal’s decay; in addition to repression of one’s instinctual drives and the resulting manifestations. However, what hold true for the causes of society’s infirmary, of course, is true for the remedies by which modern mortal’s defect can be cured. If I believe that the cause of the illness is economic, or spiritual, or psychological, I necessarily believe that remedying the cause leads to sanity. On the other hand, if I see how the various aspects are interrelated, I shall arrive at the conclusion that sanity and mental health can be attained only by simultaneous changes in the sphere of industrial and political organization, of spiritual and philosophical orientation, of character structure, and of cultural activities. The concentration of effort in any of these spheres, to the exclusion or neglect of others, is destructive of all change. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
In fact, here seems to lie one f the most important obstacles to the progress of humankind. Christianity has preached spiritual renewal, neglecting the changes in the social order without which spiritual renewal must remain ineffective for the majority of the people. The age of enlightenment has postulated as the highest norms independent judgment and reason; it preached political equality without seeing that political equality could not lead to the realization of the fraternity of mortals if it was not accompanied by a fundamental change in the socioeconomic organization. While people stress the necessity for social and economic changes, they neglect the necessity of the inner change in human beings, without which economic change can never lead to the good society. Each of these great reform movements of the last two thousand years has emphasized one sector of life to the exclusion of the others; their proposals for reform and renewal were radical—but their results were almost complete failure. The preaching of the Gospel led to the establishment of the Catholic Church; the teachings of rationalists. The result could hardly be different. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Mortals are a unit; their thinking, feeling, and their practice of life are inseparably connected. One cannot be free in one’s thought when one is not free emotionally; and one cannot be free emotionally if one is dependent and unfree in one’s practice of life, in one’s economic and social relations. Trying to advance radically in one sector to the exclusion of others must be necessarily lead to the results to which it did lead, namely, that the radical demands in one sphere are fulfilled only by a few individuals, while for the majority they become formulae and rituals, serving to cover up the fact that in other spheres nothing has changed. Undoubtedly one step of integrated progress in all sphere of life will have more far-reaching and more lasting results for the progress of the human race than a hundred steps preached—and even for a short while lived—in only one isolated sphere. Several thousands of years of failure in isolated progress should be a rather convincing lesson. Closely related to this problem is that of radicalism and reform, which seems to form such a dividing line between various political solutions. Yet, a closer analysis can show that this differentiation as it is usually conceived of is deceptive. There is reform and reform; reform can be radical, that is, going to the roots, or it can be superficial, trying to patch up the symptoms without touching the cases. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Reform which is not radical, in this sense, never accomplishes its ends and eventually ends up in the opposite direction. So-called radicalism on the other hand, which believes that we can solve problems by force, when observation, patience and continuous activity is required, is as unrealistic and fictious as reform. The revolution of the Bolsheviks led to Stalinism, the reform of the right wing Social Democrats in Germany, led to Hitler. The true criterion of reform is not its tempo but its realism, its true racialism; it is the question whether it goes to the roots and attempts to change causes—or whether it remains on the surface and attempts to deal only with symptoms. We are discussing the roads to sanity, that is, methods of cure, and we had better pause here for a moment and ask ourselves what we know about the nature of cure in cases of individual mental diseases. The cure of social pathology must follow the same principle, since it is the pathology of so many human beings, and not of an entity beyond or apart from individuals. The conditions for the cure of individual pathology are mainly the following: A development must have occurred which is contrary to the proper functioning of the psyche. In frame of reference of humanistic psychoanalysis, the cause of pathology lie in the failure to develop a productive orientation, a failure which results in the development of irrational passions, especially of incestuous, destructive and exploitative strivings. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
The fact of suffering, whether it is conscious or unconscious, resulting from the failure of normal development, produces a dynamic striving to overcome the suffering, that is, for change in the direction of health. This striving for healthy in our physical as well as in our mental organism is the basis for any cure of sickness, and it is absent only in the most severe pathology. The first step necessary to permit this tendency for health to operate is the awareness of the suffering and of that which is shut out and disassociated from our conscious personality. In this frame of reference, it refers to the repressed irrational passions, to the repressed feeing of aloneness and futility, and to the longing for love and productivity, which is also repressed. Increasing self-awareness can become fully effective only if a next step is taken, that on changing a practice of life which was built on the basis of the neurotic structure, and which reproduces it constantly. A patient, for instance, whose neurotic character makes one want to submit to parental authorities has usually constructed a life where one has chosen dominating or sadistic father images as bosses, teachers, and so on. One will be cured only if one changes one’s realistic life situation in such a way that it does not constantly reproduce the submissive tendencies one wants to give up. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Furthermore, one must change one’s system of values, norms and ideals, so that they further rather than block one’s striving for health and maturity. The same condition—conflict with the requirements of human nature and resulting suffering, awareness of what is shut out, and change of the realistic situation and of values and norms—are also necessary for a cure of social pathology. To show the conflict between human needs and our social structure, and to further the awareness of our conflicts and of that which is dissociated, was the purpose of the previous discussion. However, we still need to further discuss the various possibilities of practical changes in our economic, political and cultural organization. Yet, before we start discussing the practical questions, let us consider once more what constitutes mental sanity, and what type of culture could be assumed to be conductive to mental health. The mentally healthy person is the productive and unalienated person; the person who relates oneself to the World lovingly, and who uses one’s reason to grasp reality objectively; who experiences oneself as a unique individual entity, and at the same time feels one with one’s follow mortals; who is not subject to irrational authority, and accepts willingly the rational authority of conscience and reason; who is in the process of being born as long as one is alive, and considers the gift of life the most precious chance one has. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Let us also remember that these goals of mental health are not ideals which have to be forced upon the person, or which mortals can attain only if one has overcome one’s nature, and sacrifices for one’s innate selfishness. On the contrary, the striving for mental health, for happiness, harmony, love, productiveness, is inherent in every human being who is not born as a mental or moral idiot. Given a chance, these strivings assert themselves forecefully, as can be seen in countless situations. In takes powerful constellations and circumstances to pervert and stifle this innate striving for sanity; and indeed, throughout the greater part of known history, the use of mortal by mortal has produced such perversion. To believe tat this perversion is inherent in mortals is like throwing seeds in the soil of the desert and claiming they were not meant to grow. What society corresponds to this aim of mental health, and what would be the structure of a sane society? First of all, a society in which no mortal is a means toward another’s end, but always and without exception an end in oneself; hence, where nobody is used, nor uses oneself, for purposes which are not those of the unfolding of one’s own human powers; where mortals are the center, and where all economic and political activities are subordinated to the aim of one’s growth. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
A sane society is one in which qualities like greed, exploitativeness, possessiveness, narcissism, have no chance to be used for greater material gain or for the enhancement of one’s personal prestige. Where acting according to one’s conscience is looked upon a as fundamental and necessary quality and where opportunism and lack of principles is deemed to be asocial; where the individual is concerned with social matters so that they become personal matters, where one’s relation to one’s fellow mortals is not separated from one’s relationship in the private sphere. A sane society, furthermore, is one which permits mortals to operate within manageable and observable dimensions, and to be an active and responsible participant in the life of society, as well as the master of one’s own life. It is one which furthers human solidarity and not only permits, but stimulates, its members to relate themselves to each other lovingly; a sane society furthers the productive activity of everybody in one’s work, stimulates the unfolding of reason and enables mortals to give expression to one’s inner needs in collective art and rituals. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Another characteristic of modern people is loneliness. They describe this feeling as one being on the outside, isolated, or, if they are sophisticated, they say that they feel alienated. They emphasize how crucial it is for them to be invited to this part or that dinner, not because they especially want to go (though they generally do go) nor because they will get enjoyment, companionship, sharing of experience and human warmth in gathering (very often they do not, but are simply bored). Rather, being invited is crucial because it is a proof that they are not alone. Loneliness is such an omnipotent and painful threat to many persons that they have little conception of the beneficial values of solitude, and even at times are very frightened at the prospect of being alone. Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they do not find themselves at all. The feeling of emptiness and loneliness go together. When persons, for example, are telling of a break-up in a love relationship, they will often not say they feel sorrow or humiliation over a lost conquest; but rather that they feel emptied. The loss of the other leaves an inner yawning void. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
The reasons for the close relationship between loneliness and emptiness are not difficult to discover. For when a person does not know with any inner conviction what one wants or what one feels; when, in a period of traumatic change, one comes aware of the fact that the conventional desires and goals one has been taught to follow no longer bring one any security or give one any sense of direction, when, that is, one feels an inner void while one stands amid the outer confusion of upheaval in one’s society, one senses danger; and one’s natural reaction is to look around for other people. They, one hopes, will give one some sense of direction, or at least some comfort in the knowledge that one is not alone in one’s fright. Emptiness and loneliness are thus two phases of the same basic experience of anxiety. Some people feel like we might be the last generation to walk this Earth—but do not know in which direction to turn. And because of their, their reaction is, strangely enough, a sudden, deep, loneliness. All of mortal’s history is an endeavor to shatter one’s seclusion. Feelings of isolation occur when one feels empty and afraid not simply because one wants to be protected by the crowd. Nor is the longing for others simply an endeavor to fill the void within one’s self—though this certainly is one side of the need for human companionship when one feels empty or anxious. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
The more basic reason is that the human being gets one’s original experience of being a self out of one’s relatedness to other persons, and when one is alone, without other persons, one is afraid one will lose this experience of being a self. Mortals, the biosocial mammal, not only is dependent on other human beings such as one’s father and mother for one’s security during a long childhood; one like wise receives one’s consciousness of oneself, which is the basis of one’s capacity to orient oneself in life, from these early relationships. Therefore, it is clear to see that mortals need relationships with other people in order to orient themselves. Angels boring? Yes—until they fall! Then the Angel takes on fascination and interest. The dichotomy between devils and Angles was carried on through the Middle Ages, and the word for the diammonic is now clearly demon. The medieval citizens were enthralled by their demons. The medieval citizens were enthralled by their demons, even in the act of condemning them; why else all these gargoyles, beasts laughing and looking sinister, animals of every sort, scampering and climbing up the sides of their cathedrals and Victorian houses, carved in stone by artisans who must have known the daimonic at first hand? However, this did not stand in the way of their using this handy method of condemnation of their enemies as the devil’s party in their wars of religion and particularly in the Albigensian uprising. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
It seems that it is always mortal’s proclivity to define the outsider, the stranger, the one who differs from one, as the evil one and oneself as on the side of the angel. However, one who enters the sphere of faith enters the sanctuary of life. Where there is faith there is an awareness of holiness. One now becomes gifted with some supernatural power: one has had genius, or even one oneself is a genius. One’s acts do not conform to the norms of accepted behavior, but also one’s work has a superhuman quality that makes it incomparable with the work of other mortals. Therefore the usual categories of good and evil, of useful and useless, do not apply to the genius. What one does and what one suffers is one’s fate. One is not a genius because one is an extraordinary artist, but conversely, one is an artist become one is possessed by genius. Fate guides one to significant meetings and it produces great mortals. To see the experiential justification for this point we have only to recall that greatness consists of being in the right place at the right time; it is an encounter between a mortal of particular qualities and the particular needs of an age. Mortals with talent are seized by the historical situation and hurled to greatness. What concerns one ultimately becomes holy. The awareness of the holy is awareness of the presence of the divine, namely of the content of our supreme concern. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Faith’s presence remains mysterious in spite of its appearance. It is discovered in Nature, animate and inanimate, with soul and without soul, something which was only manifested in contradiction, and therefore cannot be grasped under one conception, still less under one word. Only in the impossible did it seem to find pleasure, and the possible it seemed to thrust from itself with contempt. The ancients become aware of something similar. Faith can manifest itself in the most remarkable way even in some animals, it primarily is connected with mortals. It represents a power which is, if not opposed to the moral order of the World, yet at cross-purposes to it; such that one could compare the one to the warp, and the other to the woof. In the most awesome form faith appears when it manifests itself in some human beings. They are not always mortals of superior mind or talents, seldom do they recommend themselves by the goodness of their heart. Yet a tremendous power emanates from them, they possess an incredible force over all other creatures and even over the elements; nobody can say how far their influence will reach. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
The reason for these effects of the holy is obvious if we see the relation of the experience of the holy to the experience of the ultimate concern. The human hearts seeks the infinite because that is where the finite wants to rest. In the infinite it sees its own fulfillment. This is the reason for the ecstatic attraction and fascination of everything in which ultimacy is manifest. On the other hand, if ultimacy is manifest and exercises its fascinating attraction, one realizes at the same time the infinite distance of the finite from the infinite and, consequently, the negative judgment over any finite attempts to reach the infinite. The feeling of being consumed in the presence of the divine is a profound expression of mortal’s relation to the holy. It is implied in every genuine act of faith, in every state of ultimate concern. Entering the sanctuary means encountering the holy. Here the infinitely removed makes itself near and present, without losing its remoteness. For this reason, the holy has been called the entirely other, namely, other than the ordinary course of things or other than the World which is determined by the cleavage of subject and object. The holy transcends this realm; this is its mystery and its unapproachable character. There is no conditional way of reaching the unconditional; there is no finite way of reaching the infinite. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
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I Felt a Clearing in My Mind as if My Brain Had Split—God’s Residence is Next to Mine!
The fact that mortals have reason and imagination leads not only to the necessity for having a sense of one’s own identity, but also for orienting oneself in the World intellectually. This need can be compared when the child can walk by oneself, touch and handle things, knowing what they are. However, when the ability to walk and to speak has been acquired, only the first step in the direction of orientation has been taken. Mortals find themselves surrounded by many puzzling phenomena and, having reason, one has to make sense of them, has to put them in some context which one can understand and which permits one to deal with them in one’s thoughts. The further one’s reason develops, the more adequate becomes one’s system of orientation, that is, the more it approximates reality. However, even if a person’s frame of orientation is utterly illusory, it satisfies one’s need for some picture which is meaningful to one. Whether one believes in the power of a totem animal, in a rain god, or in the superiority and destiny of one’s own race, one’s need for some frame of orientation is satisfied. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
Quite obviously, the picture of the World which one has depends on the development of one’s reason and of one’s knowledge. Although biologically the brain capacity of the human race has remained the same for thousands of generations, it takes a long evolutionary process to arrive at objectivity, that is, to acquire the faculty to see the World, nature, other persons and oneself as they are, and not distorted by desires and fears. The more mortals develop this objectivity, the more one is in touch with reality, the more one matures, the better can one can create a human World in which one is at home. Reason is mortal’s faculty for grasping the World by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is mortal’s ability to manipulate the World with the help of thought. Reason is mortal’s instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is mortal’s instrument for manipulating the World more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the terrestrial aspect of mortal. Reason is a faculty which must be practiced, in order to develop, and it is indivisible. By this I mean that the faculty for objectivity refers to the knowledge of nature as well as to the knowledge of mortals, of society and of oneself. If one lives in illusions about one sector of life, one’s capacity for reason is restricted or damaged, and this the use of reason is inhibited with regard to all other sectors. #RandolpHarris 2 of 8
Reason in this respect is like love. Just as love is an orientation which refers to all objects and is incompatible with the restriction to one object, so is reason a human faculty which must embrace the whole of the World with which humans are confronted. The need for a frame of orientation exists on two levels; the first and the more fundamental need is to have some frame or orientation, regardless of whether it is true or false. Unless mortal have such a subjectively satisfactory frame of orientation, one cannot live sanely. On the second level the need is to be in touch with reality by reason, to grasp the World objectively. However, the necessity to develop one’s reason is not as immediate as that to develop some frame of orientation, since what is at stake for mortals in the latter case is one’s happiness and serenity, and not one’s sanity. This become very clear if we study the function of rationalization. However unreasonable or immoral an action may be, mortals have an insuperable urge to rationalize it, this is, to prove to oneself and to others that one’s action is determined by reason, common sense, or at least conventional morality. One has little more difficulty in acting irrationally, but it is almost impossible for one not to give one’s action the appearance of reasonable motivation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
If mortals were only a disembodied intellect, one’s aim would be achieved by a comprehensive thought system. However, since one is an entity endowed with a body as well as a mind, one has to react to the dichotomy of one’s existence not only in thinking but in the total process of living, in one’s feelings and actions. Hence any satisfying system of orientation contains not only intellectual elements but elements of feeling and sensing which are expressed in the relationship to an object of devotion. The answers given to mortal’s need for a system of orientation and an object of devotion differ widely both in content and in form. There are primitive systems such as animals and totemism in which natural objects or ancestors represent answers to mortal’s quest for meaning. There are nontheistic systems like Buddhism, which are usually called religion although in their original form there is no concept of God. There are purely philosophical systems, like Stoicism, and there are monotheistic religious systems which give an answer to mortal’s quest for meaning in reference to this concept of God. However, whatever their contents, they all respond to mortal’s need to have not only some thought system, but also an object of devotion which gives meaning to one’s existence and to one’s position in the World. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
Only the analysis of the various forms of religion can show which answers are better and which are worse solutions to mortal’s quest for meaning and devotion, better or worse always considered from the standpoint of mortal’s nature and one’s development. Th courage to be as a part is the courage to affirm one’s own being by participation. One participates in the World to which one belongs and from which one is at the same time separated. However, participating in the World becomes real through participation in those sections are actual with which one is partially identical. The more self-relatedness a being has the more it is able, according to the polar structure of reality, to participate. Mortals as the completely centered being or as a person can participate in everything, but one participates through that section of the World which makes one a person. Only in the continuous encounters with other persons does the person become and remain a person. The place of this encounter is the community. Mortal’s participation in nature is direct, insofar as one is a definite part of nature through one’s bodily existence. One’s participation in nature is indirect and mediate through the community insofar as one transcends nature by knowing and shaping it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
Without language there are no universals; without universals no transcending of nature and no relation to it as nature. However, language is communal, not individual. The section of reality in which one participates immediately is the community to which one participates immediately is the community to which one belongs. Though it and only through it participation in the World as a whole and in all its parts is mediated. Therefore, one who has the courage to be as a part has the courage to affirm oneself as a part of the community to which one participates. One’s self-affirmation is a part of the self-affirmation of the social groups which constitute the society to which one belongs. This seems to imply that there is a collective and not only an individual self-affirmation, and that the collective self-affirmation is threatened by nonbeing, producing collective anxiety, which is met by collective courage. One could say that the subject of this anxiety and this courage is a we-self as against the egoselves who parts of it are. However, such an enlargement of the meaning of “self” must be rejected. Self-hood is self-centeredness. Yet there is no center in a group in the sense in which exists in a person. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
There may be a central power, a king, a queen, a president, an emperor, an empress, or a dictator. One may be able to impose his or her will on the group. However, it is not the group which decides if he or she decides, though the group may follow. Therefore it is neither adequate to speak of a we-self nor useful to employ the terms collective anxiety and collective courage. When describing the three periods of anxiety, we pointed out that masses of people were overtaken by a special type of anxiety-producing situation and because outbreaks of anxiety are always contagious. There is no collective anxiety save an anxiety which has been overtaken many or all members of a group and has been intensified or changed by becoming universal. The same is true of what is wrongly called collective courage. There is no entity we-self as the subject of courage. There are selves who participate in a group and whose character is partly determined by this participation. The assumed we-self is a common quality of ego-selves within a group. The courage to be as a part is like all forms of courage, a quality of individual selves. A collectivist society is one in which the existence and life of the individual are determined by the existence and institutions of the group. In collectivist societies the courage of the individua is the courage to be as a part. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
Looking at so-collective primitive societies one finds typical forms of anxiety and typical institutions in which courage expresses itself. The individual members of the group develop equal anxieties and fears. And they use the same methods of developing courage and fortitude which are prescribed by traditions and institutions. This courage is the courage which every member of the group is supposed to have. In many tribes the courage to take pain upon oneself is the test of full membership in the group, and the courage to take death upon oneself is a lasting test in the life of most groups. The courage of one who stands these tests is the courage to be as a part. One affirms oneself through the group in which one participates. The potential anxiety of losing oneself in the group is not actualizes, because the identification with the group is complete. I wish I was one of those saints. Maybe that is why I had to write this chapter. However, I am not a saint. And that did not even take five minutes for you to know it, so do not complain. It is just that I cannot forget my passion to be officially canonized. “My God hath been support; he hath led me through mine afflictions s in the wilderness; and he hath prescribed me upon the water of the great deep. He hath filled me with his love, even consuming my flesh. He hath confounded mine enemies, unto the causing them to quake before me,” reports 2 Nephi. 420-23. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
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One Must Still Have Chaos in the Soul to Possess the Ability to Produce a Dancing Star!
The stomach is the only part of a person which can be fully satisfied. The yearning of a human’s brain for new knowledge and experience and for more pleasant and comfortable surroundings never can be fully met. It is an appetite which cannot be appeased. Half of our mistakes in life arise from feeling when we ought to think, and thinking when we ought to feel. Our choices are reasonable to the extent that they reflect our developed habits of intelligence. Choice is the purest expression of free will—the freedom to choose allows us to shape our lives exactly how we wish (provided we have the resources to do so). Choices are made to satisfy five basic needs: survival, love and belonging, power, freedom, and fun. Individual actors choose whichever option will maximize their interests and provide them with the greatest utility or benefit. However, if they are made on the basis of prejudice and ignorance, choices will be perverse or irrational. In this life we have to make many choices. Some are very important choices. Some are not. Many of our choices are between good and evil. The choices we make, however, determine to a large extent our happiness or our unhappiness, because we have to live with the consequences of our choices. Making perfect choices all of the time is not possible. It just does not happen. However, it is possible to make good choices we can live with and grow from them. How do we engage in this process of valuation? #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
We must analyze the situation as carefully as we can, imaginatively project possible courses of action, and scrutinize the consequences of these actions. Those ends or goods that we choose relative to a concrete situation after careful deliberation are reasonable or desirable goods. When God’s children live worthy of divine guidance they can become free forever, knowing good from evil; to act for themselves and not to be acted upon. There are always practical limitations to our deliberations, but a person trained to deliberate intelligently will be prepared to act intelligently even in those situations that so not permit extended deliberation. When we confront new situations, we must imagine and strive for new goals. As long as there are internal conflicts that demand judgment, decision, and action, sometimes we make poor choices when we yield to peer pressure. In this sense, the moral life of human beings is never completed, and the ends achieved become the means for attaining further ends. However, lest we think that human beings are always striving for something that is to be achieved in the remote future, or never, there are consummations—experiences in which the ends that we strive for are concretely realized. In our moral life, there is a great deal of emphasis placed on intelligence. Some people, objects, experiences have an attraction for us. We desire, want, need them. They attractive like the side of a magnet. Since they attract us, we tend to approach them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
Other objects, people, or situations repel, disgust, frighten, or turn us off. We view them not as attractive, but as negative and we tend to avoid them. Faith in the power of intelligence is to imagine a future which is a projection of the desirable in the present, and to invent the instrumentalities of its realization. It takes a certain kind of courage to stand back rather than leaping forward, foolishly allowing someone else to make our choices for us. When we have a clear idea of our identity as children of God, and having a bright potential for a meaningful future, we can more readily take firm stands. Valuation, like all inquiry, presupposes a community of shared experiences in which there are common norms and procedures, and intelligent valuation is also a means for making such community a concrete reality. We are always trying to understand or make sense out of our own and others’ actions. It has been said that human beings have a will to meaning. People strive to find meaning everywhere, and usually succeed. What we are doing when we interpret something, when we find meaning, is not entirely clear. There will always be conflicts, problems, and competing values within our experience, but with the continuous development of creative intelligence humans can strive for and realize new ends and goals. Unfortunately, some of our poor choices are irreversible, but many are not. Often we can change course and get back on the right track. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
Getting back on the right track may involve the principles of repentance: first, recognizing the error of our ways; second, forsaking the wrongful conduct; third, never repeating it; and, fourth, confessing and making restitution where possible. Learning by experience has value. And the source of education consisting of real World experiences, especially adverse experiences is unfortunate, but also a part of life. Progression comes faster and easier by learning from our parents, those who love us, and our professors. We can also learn from the mistakes of others, observing the consequences of their wrong choices. Some choices present good opportunities no matter which road we take—for example, when deciding which career path to follow or which University to attend, making the right decision or the best possible choice will open doors for an individual. There was a gifted young man, named T. Randolph Harris, who wanted to become a doctor, but that opportunity did not open up for him; so he chose to follow the law. After graduating from Princeton University, he then went to New York University of Law, and became a one of the city’s most powerful lawyers, at a white-shoe law firm, called McLaughlin and Stern LLP Attorneys. He is also an adjunct professor of law. God opens the right doors for us. And if you do not believe in God, you should pretend to believe, because in so doing you might come around to genuine belief in time. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
Behaviour is the mirror in which everyone shows their image. The prediction of social behaviour significantly involves the way people make decisions about resources and wealth, so the science of decision making historically was the province of economists. And the basic assumption of economists was always that, when it comes to money, people are essentially rational. It was largely inconceivable that people would make decisions that go against their own interests. Some of our important choices have a time line. If we delay a decision, the opportunity is gone forever. Sometimes our doubts keep us from making a choice that involves change. Thus, an opportunity may be missed. When we have to make a choice and do not make it, that in itself is a choice. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do. Some choices have greater consequences than others. We make no greater voluntary choice in this life than the selection of a marriage partner. This decision can bring eternal happiness and joy. To find sublime fulfillment in marriage, both partners need to be fully committed to the marriage. Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you will help them to become what they are capable of being. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius power, and magic in it. “The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to say. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing,” reports Zephaniah 3.17. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
Strangely, doing the wrong thing often seems reasonable, possibly because it seems to be the easiest course. We often hear as justification for wrong behaviour, “Well, everybody is doing it.” Hasty generalizations(overgeneralizing) happens when people draw conclusions (generalizations) from too few or atypical examples. This evil distorts the truth, and its author is the adversary. The adversary will cheat your souls, and lead you away carefully down to hell. No matter how many people in our society are involved, none are justified in being dishonest, lying, cheating, using excessive profanity, especially taking the Lord’s name in vain, engaging in immoral sexual relationships, or not respecting the Lord’s day. Other people’s actions do not dictate what is right or wrong. One person having the courage to make the right choice can influence many others to choose wisely. We are responsible for the choices we make. If we choose to disobey God’s commandments, we cannot blame our circumstances, our family, nor our friends. Do not fall victim to the Talk Show Syndrome, which is when people stand up and generalize on the basis of their individual experiences. We are children of God with great strength. We have the ability to choose righteousness and happiness, no matter what our circumstances are. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
We also have to be careful when making our decisions because right now the fake news media is trying really have to confuse people by using manufactured or questionable statistics. They are also practicing a misuse of authority by hiring experts to provide testimony, which is usually useful for supporting material for claims because experts draw on a larger data and knowledge base than do nonexperts. However, experts are not always correct, but they generally are more reliable than someone who is uninformed or only marginally knowledgeable, especially about a highly technical subject. There are also examples of incomplete citation when reference to the authority is neither specific nor complete. Sometimes the fake news media uses biased sources—special-interest groups or individuals who stand to gain money, prestige, power, or influence simply be taking a certain position on an issue or crusaders for a cause are all biased even though they may have expertise. In other cases, the media has been providing us with authorities quoted or of his or her field—expertise is not generic. We have also seen cases of false analogies (which they like to call comparing apples to oranges) where two items, events, or phenomena with similarities are viewed as identical. What is true of one is or should be true for the other, so goes the claim, even when a significant point or points of difference exist between the two things compared. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
There are also false dichotomies employed by the media when a false choice between only two opposites is allowed when there are other choices that fall between the extremes exist. Also, the media is not presenting the public with issues that we need to know about. For example, when wild fires or explosions happen in communities, just because there are powerlines or gasolines in the area, the utility company is blamed for the catastrophe, even when it may not be their fault, just because their powerlines or gasolines are in the area. This is costing corporations who provide us with energy or fuel billions of dollars and bankrupting them. In the process thousands of jobs are being terminated, and these are jobs that teach people skills and have allowed 45,000 people to become promoted to middle and upper management, where they can afford to live middle-class and upper-class live styles because of the training and experience they have received. Furthermore, the local fake news media is especially guilty of only reporting crime reports, but never any scientific information or research, and they are not even educating communities on ballots that can impact our future. For example, we have not heard anything about Senate Bill 10 (SB10), which would eliminate bail in California for the accused waiting trial, and it would be replace cash bail with a risk assessment of an individual and nonmonetary conditions of release, which some report could lead to mass incarceration. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
How do we make correct choices? A choice involves making a conscious decision. To make an intelligent decision, we need to evaluate all available facts on both sides of an issue. However, that is not enough. Making correct decisions involves prayer and inspiration. We must study things in our mind, and then ask God if it is right, and if it is right, God will let us know, and when we make a decision we will know it is right. As we look into the future, we are going to need to be stronger and more responsible for our choices in a World where people call evil good, and good evil. If we do not use our agency and check with God, we do not choose wisely. Tomorrow’s blessings and opportunities depend on the choices we make today. Collectively, we have the responsibility to set the example of righteousness to all of the World. The power of choice is ours. May we all use our God-given agency wisely as we make these eternal choices. Let the Sun, blue Sky and could wake up the hidden memory. Each of us has come to this Earth with all the tools necessary to make correct choices. We cannot be neutral; there is no middle ground. Our Heavenly Father did not launch us on our eternal journey without providing the means whereby we could receive from him God-given guidance to assist in our safe return at the end of mortal life. Modest, let us walk among it, with our faces veiled, as they say polite Archangels do, in meeting God. With love and affection, we will build an impeccably happy life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
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Made at a Great Expense—A Precious Map of the World!
We must believe that we are born for the service of humankind, and set ourselves to consider what service we are best fitted to perform. Now if a human should succeed, not in striking out some new invention, but in kindling a light in nature—a light that should eventually disclose and bring into sight all that is most hidden and secret in the Universe—that person would be benefactor indeed of the human race. Some of us are fitted for nothing so well as the study of truth, as having minds nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things (which is the chief point) and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to asset, readiness to reconsider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being individuals that neither affect what is new nor admiring what is antiquated, and strongly disliking every kind of imposture. So, it seems people like this have a mind with the intellectual framework and a kind of familiarity and relationship with the truth. We are most impressed by the truth’s vision of a universal science, which is of great practical import and includes all the secrets of nature. The unified science, revealed by God is concealed in figurative enigmatic language, but might be rediscovered by one morally worthy and mentally qualified to receive it. “The wise in heart accept commands, but a chattering fool comes to ruin,” reports Proverbs 10.8. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
There are barriers blocking the road to truth: submission to unworthy authority (for example, crediting living theologians with a prestige due only to the Church Fathers or the Scriptures), the influence of custom, popular prejudice, and concealment of one’s ignorance are all contributing factors. The study of wisdom emphasizes the search for the continued optimization and the cultural evolution of the human condition. Wisdom is the ability to make correct judgments and decisions; it is the skill or gift from God to judge correctly. A person gains wisdom through experience and study and by following God’s counsel. Without God’s help, people would not have true wisdom. It is an intangible quality gained through God’s grace. Wisdom exemplifies the collaboration of cognitive, and emotional, and motivational processes. We associate the development of wisdom in a person with the emergence in later adulthood of a meditative attitude, philosophic calmness, impartiality, and the desire to draw moral lessons. Wisdom has such a rich ideational history and carried so may religious and philosophical associations that it almost seems to have a supernatural foundation, which is part of our soul. Wisdom concerns a body of insights, heuristics, and skills that can manifest themselves in many different ways, only one of which is the wise person. “Transgressors withdraw themselves from the Spirit, that it has no place to guide them in wisdom’s path,” Mosiah 2.36. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
Wisdom embraces these contradictions of life and draws insights from them. It further develops heuristics about when and under which circumstance are essential for grasping human existence. The conceptions of wisdom have been investigated in more depth than is the case for other constructs, such as intelligence, because it includes its rich cultural history and loftiness as an ideal state of being. It becomes manifest, often times, in social situations such as advice-giving and guidance. When it comes to issues of wisdom, there is no easily retrievable answer to the question of what is right or wrong. However, based on the fundamental precondition that the well-being of the individual and that of the community need to be balanced, a consensus can be reached within a community of practice as to what constitutes wise advice or even a wise person. In other words, wisdom follows a consensual rather than an objective criterion of truth. The cognitive-ability component combines crystallized and fluid aspects of intelligence. Both an experience-based body of broad and deep life knowledge and the ability to reason well and think logically about novel problems. “Angels appear unto wise people,” reports Helaman 12.5. Due to the fact that wisdom also searches for insight, bridges cognition and motivation: Wise individuals are willing and able to understand complex issues deeply rather than superficially. “Get wisdom, get understanding; do not forget my words or turn away from them. Do not forsake wisdom, and she will protect you; love her, and she will watch over you,” reports Proverbs 5-7. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
If enlightened individuals are lacking sufficient information, they will search for that information rather than form a premature judgement. There is also a motivational-emotional component for wise people. They tend to have a reflective attitude, rather than making quick judgments or being guided by strong emotions, they prefer to think deeply about people, the World, and themselves. It is the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; the superiority of being enlightened. Blessed is the one who seeks wisdom, and the many Bible verses about wisdom teaches us that it is more valuable than gold. Wisdom is the key to unlocking everlasting and eternal abundant life. Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life. Wisdom is a virtue that is valued highly by most, and is integrated of one’s own perspective and self-interests with that of others, compassion concern for the welfare of others, and equanimity. Their attitude of looking at all sides of an issues also implies a willingness to be critical of themselves, a balanced manner of regulating their own emotions rather than getting carried away by strong feelings, and an unobtrusive self-presentation. Wise people also tend to engage in civic activities to help solve real World like the lack of electricity, water, housing, and health issues. Thus, wisdom is transmitted across generations. It is generational blessing. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
Wisdom can also be acquired in youth with the fluctuations of life’s cycle of prosperity and hardship. However, even though the human development is vastly universal, wisdom many differ across cultures, and they change with history. Personal wisdom refers to the individuals’ insight into their selves, and their own lives. General wisdom is concerned with individuals’ insights into life in general, from an observer’s point of view, that is, when they are not personally concerned. The two types of wisdom do not necessarily have to coincide in a person. A person can be wise with regards to the life and problems of other people and can be sought out for advice from others because of one’s wisdom, but the very same person does not necessarily have to be wise about one’s own life and one’s own problems. Wisdom is a complex and content-rich phenomenon, and many scholars have claimed that it defies attempts at scientific information. Because of people’s sins, God’s scientific revelations were obscured by errors—which is one reason for testing empirically what the ancient sages say. All knowledge can be found in the Scriptures and secrets books, whose full meaning God reveals by interior illumination only to those whose lives are pure. Praise God for teaching us how to live the abundant life and for blessing us with the wise promises of Scripture. “For the Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding,” reports Proverbs 2.6. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
As we meditate on these verses in the Bible, we will receive flashes of brilliance and scientific lord. Wisdom that comes only from God and leads to a peaceful, plentiful, and everlasting life. “To God belong wisdom and power; counsel and understanding are the Lord’s,” reports Job 12.13. Wisdom and knowledge are not the same things. knowledge is acquired through experiences. If one does not experience something, one will not have knowledge about it. Normally, a senior would be considered wise. However, a youth could potentially be just as wise. It all depends on their lives and ho w many times they have experienced different things. Knowledge: facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience and/or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience (scientia experimentalis). Knowledge is information of which someone is aware. Knowledge is also used to mean the confident understanding of a subject, potentially with the ability to use it for a specific purpose. However, someone with wisdom could potentially have a lot of knowledge. If knowledge is acquired through experiences, and with experience comes wisdom, then knowledge must come with wisdom. “To another is given the word of knowledge, that all may be taught to be wise and to have knowledge,” reports Doctrines and Covenants 46.18. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
Nothing can be learned without experience. One aspect of experience is based on sense perception and it called human or philosophical; the other aspect is interior and is derived from an illumination of the mind by God. Thus, although sense perception is necessary to knowledge, certainty cannot be attained without divine illumination. Interior experience admits of seven degrees, beginning with that required for certitude in mathematics or the natural sciences and culminating in such mystical or ecstatic states as Sating Paul’s vision of Heaven. However, we should devote our time to what we can know about the wonders of nature by sense perception and the first degree of illumination. Consider the tides of the ocean, heat, and double refraction, light (and all physical force generally) is transmitted in pulses like sound waves. Since this multiplication of species requires a medium, the transmission cannot be instantaneous, even though the time interval is imperceptible. In seeking knowledge of God, we need to remember that the things of God knows no person, but the Spirit of God. The Spirit offers a witness and knowledge that cannot be found elsewhere. Learning by faith engages the spirit. “Prepare your souls for that glorious day when justice shall be administered unto the righteous, even the day of judgment, that you may not shrink with awful fear; that you may not remember your awful guilt in perfectness,” 2 Nephi 9.46. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
Randolph Harris II International Institute 