Considering the Universe as a whole, both directions of time are still indistinguishable, just as space knows no above and below. Yet, at a specific point of the surface of the Earth, we call the direction towards the center the downward direction; in the same way, a living being dwelling in a certain time-phase of such a local World will distinguish the direction towards the more improbable state from the opposite direction, call the former the past, and the latter the future. This seems to be the only method which will allow us to conceive the Second Law of thermodynamics, which asserts the existence of irreversible processes which apparently cannot be explained by the atomic theory. It may well be that initial conditions leading to a reversal in motion are almost never realized in nature. Thus, just as the Universe is created and governed by one God, so both the church and state must be preserving administrative unity. However, since the church is the direct channel of communication between God and his creatures, the state and its subjects must be governed in moral affairs by the church.   

In purity and love have we genius; the Gospel gives beauty and holiness to the soul. There are two ways of life for the soul, one which is subject to the laws of fate and another which, although it recognizes these laws, is able to rise above them and uses them as tools.  You cannot hide the soul. The two great movements of the soul are the desire of honor and the fear of shame. Just as every variation of habit, of fashion is noticeable to those who live outside themselves, so the changes and complexities in the life of the soul are perceived by them who live within themselves. The soul does not measure time by seconds, nor yet by heartbeats, but by modifications in its own quality and character. The watches of the World may stop; the planets may cease to measure the flight of time; the body may retain its pristine vigor—but in an hour, a moment almost, the heart may grow antiquated, the being be transformed. The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away.  

It can be poisoned, or made perfect. There is a soul in each one of us.  It was the living death of my own soul that troubled me.  God will see to it that the innocent does not suffer in the afterlife. The conscious subject can be aware of other things only if it is capable at one and the same time of being modified and of remaining identical with itself, or inalterable. The solution of this apparent contradiction might lie in distinguished between consciousness, understood as thought or pure mentality, and sensibility. Consciousness neither is changed by the object nor changes it. The act of consciousness detaches the psychic event from its matrix in reality and thinks its possible essence or its possibility or quiddity or whatever you wish to call it. Upon investigation, both consciousness itself and the relation between the psychic mechanism external to consciousness would lose itself in an endless postponement but rather is a completed penetration of self, the fullness and richness of the activity of thought.   

Creation proceeds from God. All creatures, by an inevitable and eternal process, springs from the creative mind of God through a chain of intermediary causes of continually diminishing perfection. The whole of the cosmic machine was produced in time and from nothing, by one principle only who is supreme and whose power, through immense, still arranges all according to a certain weight, number and measure. It is to be noted that some reject the concept of the eternity of the World, of the eternity of matter, and of a dual principle of good and evil, and the existence of intermediary causes. The perfect power must be free to create varying degrees of perfection, and there is a measure, which suggests the seal of the Blessed Trinity is stamped on every creature. God is final cause and ultimate goal of human’s quest for happiness. Since the Father begets the Son by an external act of self-knowledge, the Son may also be called the wisdom of the Father and expresses in his person all of God’s creative possibilities. And enlightens everyone who comes into the World.   

From his [magisterial] chair in Heaven, Christ teaches us interiorly. If as the Philosopher, the knowable qua knowable is eternal, nothing can be known except through that Truth which is unshaken, immutable, and without limit. I believe this man to be nature’s mode, the exemplar which nature found to reveal the ultimate in human perfection. Christ is God’s model for humanity. He gives us the power of becoming child of God, and he is the one master of all the sciences. If God lacked the exemplar ideas, he would know only himself and nothing of the World. He would be only related to the World only as a final cause and not as a creator. And if that was the cause, there would be no explanations of the cycle of changes of the cosmos, the Universe would be ruled by determinism. However, then humans would no longer be a responsible agent; they would deserve neither reward nor punishment, and divine providence would be a myth. With the recognitions of exemplarism, on the other hand, the whole of creation takes on a sacramental character—this is, it becomes a material means of bringing the soul to God.   

Nature becomes the mirror of God, reflecting his perfections in varying degrees. Although we see only a shadowy likeness (umbra) of trace (vestigium) of the creation in inorganic substances and the lower forms of life, the soul of humans is God’s image (imago) and the angel his similitude (similitude). The recognition of God in nature begins in philosophy, but is continued and perfected in theology. If there are potential beings, then pure act must also exist; composite things imply the existence of something simple; the changeable can only coexist with the unchangeable. Knowing that these ten self-evident conditionals have their antecedents verified in the corporeal World, and explains much about God. The soul, possesses memory, intelligence, and will, and is an image of God, not only mirroring his spiritual nature, but the Trinity itself. Did you stop for a moment to about all of this? That kindly, Fatherly figure could never blame me for being led astray. He would never turn from me because of my minor transgressions.  

 

I have no doubt that the concept of beauty is rooted in the soil of sexual stimulation and signified originally that which is sexually exciting. Covering the body, which keeps abreast with civilization, continuously arouses the sexual curiosity and serves to supplement the sexual object by uncovering the hidden parts. This can be turned into the artistic (sublimation) if the interest is turned from the genitals to the form of the body. The tendency to linger at this intermediary sexual aim of the sexually accentuated looking is found to a certain degree in most normal; indeed, it gives them the possibility of directing a certain amount of their libido to a higher artistic aim. On the other hand, the desire for looking becomes a perversion when it is exclusively limited to the genitals; when it becomes connected with the overcoming of loathing (voyeurs and onlookers at the functions of excretion); and when instead of preparing for the normal sexual aim, it suppresses it. The latter, if I may draw conclusions from a single analysis, is in a most pronounced way true exhibitionists, who expose their genitals with the idea of bringing to view the genitals of others.

Analysis reveals that this perversion—just as most others—has an unexpected multiplicity of motivation and meanings. Exhibitionism, for instance, is strongly dependent upon the castration complex; it would emphasize again the integrity of one’s own (male) genitals and repeats the infantile satisfaction of the lack of the penis in the female. In the perversion, which consists in striving to look and to be looked at, we are even more intensively in the following aberration. The sexual aim exists here in a two-fold formation in an active and a passive form. The force which opposes the desire for looking and though which the latter is eventually abolished is shame (like the former loathing). The tendency to cause pain to the sexual object and its opposite, the most frequent and most significant of all perversions, was designated as sadism for the active form, and masochism for the passive form. The pleasure is secured in all kinds of humility and submission in the foreground.   

Destiny, it may be—the most skillful of stage managers—seldom chooses to arrange its scenes, and carry forward its drama, without securing the presence of at least one calm observer.  Some dream of having their lover on all fours with one’s hand in his shirt, around his torso, gripping his cheeks, with their legs wrapped around waist, like a stripper lustfully hanging from a pole, dragging his crisp, white Sea Iceland cotton underwear, that are so soft you could mistake for cashmere or silk, down to his ankles, as they stare as his manhood which stands as erect as the Washington Monument—smooth, but with a juicy, pulsating-veined at the bottom looking like it is ready to erupt. As one holds it with both hands, kissing the length of it, feeling the warmth under one’s tongue, just before taking it into their pretty little mouth. As one he fills your mouth like no man has ever done before, robbing you of your breath. The roots of active algolagina, sadism, can be readily demonstrable in the normal individual. The sexuality of most men shows an admixture of aggression, of a desire to subdue, the biological significance of which lies in the necessity for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by actions other than mere courting. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 6

Sadism would then correspond to an aggressive component of the sexual instinct which has become independent and exaggerated and has been brought to the foreground by displacement.  The concept of sadism fluctuates in everyday speech from a mere active or impetuous attitude towards the sexual object to an absolute attachment of the gratification to the subjection and maltreatment of the object. Strictly speaking, only the last extreme case can calm the name of perversion. Too many men have chained themselves to a sexuality that is significantly detrimental to them and others, turning away from what could free them. What a gift it can be to them when other men decisively break this pattern and take a no-bullshit stand for sexuality that is rooted not in unresolved wounding, but in a potently embodied, open-eyed love. A love that makes it impossible to dehumanize or otherwise mistreat those we are being sexual with. A love that is passionate as it is awakened. A love that makes it possible to sexually shift from maximizing pleasure sensation to fully embodying an ecstatically open intimacy.  

There is so creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. All reality is mediation, or the subject-object relation, a dynamic relation that tends ultimately toward the final goal (Endziel) of the reunion of subject and object. As we know not future events, so neither can we tell to what purpose any accident tends; and that which at first threatens us with evil may in the end produce our good. The Urgrund, the primordial stuff prior to the distinction between subject and object, matter and spirit, is moved by an obscure immediate cosmic impulse, which is a hunger. Like busts in marble, so does our individual fate exist in the limestone of time. After subject and object have been distinguished, this hunger remains essential to both subject and object. Thus, the reality of both subject and object is in the future, and the category of possibility comes to play a central role in one’s thought. Incidents little in human speculation are great in the eye of fortune.  

In humans, the primordial hunger becomes desire, or hope. Hope presents itself as utopia, as a vision of a possibility that might be realized. Hope is tension toward the future, toward the new. It moves from a mere state of mind (Stimmung) to a representation, and then to knowledge. Although hope is founded on the will, in order to be hope that understands (begriffene Hoffnung, docta spes), it must draw strength from something real that will survive even when hope itself is completely satisfied. One can no more resist the impulse of fate than a Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (a German luxury vehicle) can the force of its driver. This inertia makes hope something more than a project of reason and puts it in relation to what is objectively possible. The future possibility is not just a dream, even if it is heralded in dreams. By the analysis of dreams, we obtain some insight into the composition of this most marvelous and most mysterious know of the unconscious element in our psychic life.  

 

 

 

 

 It is right to be prepared for all things, and if trouble is sent, to remember as it is not sent without a cause. At a New Year’s Eve dinner the host, the patriarch of the family, ushered in the New Years with a speech. One of his sons-in-law, a lawyer, was not inclined to take the antiquated man seriously, especially when in the course of his speech he expressed himself as follows: “When I open the ledger of the Old Year and glance at its pages I see everything on the asset side and nothing, thank the Lord, on the side of liability; all you children have been a great asset, none of you a liability.” On hearing this the young lawyer thought of X., his wife’s brother, who was a cheat and a liar, and whom he had recently extricated from the entanglements of the law. That night, in a dream, he saw the New Year’s celebration once more, and heard the speech, or rather saw it. Instead of speaking, the antiquated man actually opened the ledger, but on the side marked “assets” he saw his name amongst others, but on the other side, marked “liability,” there was the name of his brother-in-law, X. However, the word “Liability” was changed into “Lie-Ability,” which he regarded as X’s main characteristic. The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for all of us.  #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

To stand after one’s death before one’s children great and undefiled: who would not wish that? If there were only one body in existence there could be no idea of motion, for motion is the change of position of two bodies relative to one another. Thus sensible qualities, without which there could be no bodies, are essential to the very conception of movement. Furthermore, since sensible qualities are passive existences, and hence bodies are too, movement cannot have it source in body; and as we know what it is to move our own bodies, we know that the source of motion must be found in the mind. Created spirits are responsible for only a small part of the movement in the World, and therefore God, the infinite spirit, must be its prime source. A man who nursed his father during his last illness, and who felt his death very keenly, dreamed some time afterwards that his father was again living, and conversing with him as usual, but (and this was the remarkable thing) he has nevertheless dies, though he did not know it. So too our conception of time is inseparable from our ideas in our minds and from the [articular actions and ideas that diversify the day.  #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

The young man who thought that he was having a conversation with his father was experiencing hypostatized abstraction, which is the belief in humankind’s eternal advance, and to disavow anything that does not fit this preordained vision. And so natural philosophy either presupposed the knowledge of God or borrows it from some superior science. The thesis that God is the ultimate source of motion is a special case of the principle that the only real cause are spirits. This principle has the general consequence, of course, the inanimate bodies cannot act causally upon one another. What are called natural causes are really signs of what follows them. Fire does not cause heat, but is so regularly followed by it that it is a reliable sigh of it as long as “the Author of Nature always operates uniformly.” The kinship of human passion, the sameness of mortal scenery, inevitably touches the heart and charms them.  Must like the Crusades had their origin in a great impulse, and in a certain sense, led to great results, amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.  #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

Natural laws describe but do not explain, for real explanations must be reference to the aims and purposes of spirits, that is, in terms of final causes. The dream of the man talking to his dead father is intelligible if, after he had nevertheless died, we insert in the consequence of the dreamer’s wish, and if after but he did not know it, we add that the dreamer had entertained the really compassionate thought that it would be a good thing if his father, was by miracle of God, well again. Because God is all powerful and can do supernatural things, mechanical explanations of movements in terms of attraction are misleading, unless it is recognized that they merely recorded the rates at which bodies in fact approach one another. While he was mourining his father’s death, this compassionate wish became an unconscious reproach to heal from the traumatic loss of his father. As a general thing, the dreams of a deceased person of whom the dreamer has been fond confront the interpreter with difficult problems, the solution of which is not always satisfying. The reason for this may be sought in the especially pronounced ambivalence of feeling which controls the relation of the dreamer to the dead person.  #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

After the loss of his father and tumultuous years afterwards, the dreamer felt like his heart was bleeding and would have pains in his heart when stretching and if he laughed from watching a funny movie.  In such situations, it could be the minds ways of trying to preserve the dreamer’s body by producing an image of the deceased person to be treated at first as living; then it suddenly appears that he is dead; and in the continuation of the dream he is once more living. This has a confusing effect. However, gravity or to force when these are regarded as explanations of the movements of the body do not deny the importance of Newton’s laws, for Newton did not regard gravity as a true physical quality, but only as a mathematical hypothesis. I at last divined that this alternation of death and life is intended to represent the wish of the dreamer (“It is all one to me whether he is alive or dead, as long as I can see him and talk to him.”) This manifestation is very intense and emotional and he rejects the idea that his father is dead. Forces and attractions are not found in nature but are useful constructions in the formulation of theories from which deductions can be made about what is found in nature, that is, sensible qualities or ideas.  #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

People have observed the intense bond of attachment that usually develops between a parent and their child, a bond that a mother or father enables one to pick up a hurt or frightened child and rapidly eliminate all external signs of pain and fear. So it is plausible that if someone feeds into a delusion of a person in mouring, they might believe that their father or another loved one has come back to life. We laugh at educated adults who pay large sums to go and play youthful games of touching and hug in scientific institutes, and we fail to see the signs. It is surely an extraordinary sign of our times that adults feel the need to relieve their loneliness by going to scientific institutes, and that they should need scientists to legitimize human intimacy. When a loved one dies and a person feels all alone, the human spirit is in distress and they are willing to believe almost anything if it would bring their loved one back. Someone preying on people who have lost a family member are despicable. Especially if that individual has moved beyond the pain and young come back only to remind them of how much it hurt to lose a father. We do not live in a solitary or purely objective World, nor can we live in isolation. We must learn to live together or increase our chances of dying prematurely.  #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

Aristotle pointed out long ago that, “a man wholly solitary would be either a God or a brute.” There is a brutality in many modern human relationships that directly stems from their very objectivity and pervasiveness of such relationships in our culture is an omnipresent testimony to our interpersonal brutality. A purely objective relationship between two human beings can be brutal precisely because it is detached from human feelings—it is a relationship that by definition creates distance, loneliness, and estrangement, and which can, at its worst, permit completely inhumane actions. Medicine, as an adviser to our society, can help restore respect for the healing power of human companionship and can help people see that they too can prevent and cure loneliness—induced disease by simply caring for one another. Foggy-eyed romanticists might want to believe that a loved one will come back from the dead, and the Bible preaches that one day they will. However, be wise enough to know that anyone who loves you would not torment and use and abuse you and laugh at you in their distress, while boasting about how good their life is, and watching you suffering. We must learn that healing is an affair of the heart.  #RandolphHarris 7 of 7

 The Winchester Mystery House

Your steps echo down the long hall of this historical Victorian mansion. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

A person may go to Heaven with half the pain which it costs one to purchase hell. An ascetic renunciation of the World and its life—and even of the will to survive in life—may be named, as the best-known discipline of peace that has been proposed, as yet, to mankind. And if one may judge from the historic circumstances of its original pronouncement, it arose—or at least caught on—as a response to a desperate general sense of things falling apart. Whatever philosophy and experience may pretend on such subjects, it is certain that humans are disposed to be superstitious in respect to the secret influenced that guide their fortunes, in the dark passage of the World. It is not the persecution, but the catastrophe which is annexed to it, that makes the difference between the tyrant and the sufferer. In mere corporal exertion, the hunter into a new state. Deep unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.  For now, we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Right now, you may not see all clearly. You are only looking at it in part. However, one day it will come into focus.  #RandolphHarris 1 of 9

Some people oppose those individualist theories of the state that invoke concepts of the social contract and of natural rights, and, on the other, all natural law and organic theories of the state. Persons’ moral and/or political obligations are dependent upon a contract or agreement among them to form the society in which they live. Natural rights have some key ideas that all humans are created equal and have inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Few will deny that a genuine revival of Natural Law has occurred everywhere in the Western World. Natural law means that the State is not only an association of associations, but it is the highest natural association. Humans are basically good and the functioning of the states is to develop our good faculty into a habit of actions. The organic theory of society is entertained by nearly every serious thinker of the present time. Everyone seems ready to declare, although often with some reservations, that society is an organism; in other words, humans and nature are one, and so, among many other things, that no device or institution of human life is free from conditions of change. These principles all for the social contract theory.  #RandolphHarris 2 of 9

Some arguments of the social contract theory have suspicion of it and these suspicions are increased by its being one of those legal fictions in which some see have the root of so much evil. Player are heroes upon the stage; but beggars, sots, or prostitutes in their private lodgings. It was not asserted that every citizen had in fact contracted to obey the law, but only that they should be deemed to have so contracted. However, this is mischievous unless obeying the laws does in fact make for the general happiness. The principle of utility, then, is the real basis of obedience. To suppose anything else is misleading, since it suggests that the individual need not obey any law to which one has not personally assented—a principle that, if taken seriously, could lead only to anarchy. Therefore, to say that humans have inalienable rights is nonsense on stilts, when the assertion is made by way of protest against a government that has in fact alienated right. There would be no need for revolutions if humans were in fact equal, as they are asserted to be: what is meant is that they ought to be treated as equal but as not. Yet each life has equal value. What is a country village without its mysterious personage?  #RandolphHarris 3 of 9

Things unserviceable in one way may with advantage be applied in another.  If we take the doctrine of natural rights as a statement of what governments ought to do, it will be found untenable. No government could continue to govern if it abstained from ever depriving any of its citizens of life, liberty, or property (still less of happiness), since taxation and punishment would then be impossible. So indeed, would law itself, since any law is a restriction on liberty. The only principle that can be justified to the extent that it is backed by coercion, is that the law should not impose restriction on any individual unless this is necessary to avoid greater pain, on balance, to other individuals: in short, the principle of utility. The civilized life of individuals start from the family reaches its top in form of state. Therefore, the family is the starting point and state is the last point of human development. Although most of the needs are fulfilled in family, villages and tribes but the super sufficient life is not possible without state. Therefore, state is a natural requirement of human uplift. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9

State is the super-most and top human institution that is a sovereign body and it works for comforting its citizens. Whether bread be cheap or dear do not much signify, if we have nothing to buy it with. States exists for the establishment and preservation of a perfect and healthy life. The State provides a safe and sound environment to enable its people to use their capabilities and potentials for the common good and welfare. Denial of natural law is confusing. Many people wonder how could natural law literally be law, so that an enactment that contravenes it is null and void. This would mean that the supreme governors who makes the laws have a legal duty not to make certain kinds of law. However, that this is my duty to do, which I am liable to be punished, according to law, if I do not do…Have these supreme governors any such duty? No: for if they are at all liable to punishment, according to law…then they are not, what they are supposed to bee, supreme governors. What is meant, doubtless, is that they have either a religious duty or a moral duty. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9

A religious duty is one whose neglect renders one liable to punishment by God, and a moral duty is one whose neglect renders one liable, not to punishment in a strict sense, but to various unorganized mortifications and inconveniences at the hands of one’s fellow citizens. This is in line with the moral sanctions, which is the fear of public opinion. In this sense, moral duties are certainly political realities: and the ruler is limited by what public opinion will tolerate. However, this is distinguishing from a legal limitation, and both from a nebulous law. Therefore, the legislator ought to make those laws that promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. It is clear that a law that, on balance, causes more suffering than it prevents is not necessarily one so unpopular that it provokes the citizens to active resistance. We have at least one moral right: the right to have one’s happiness considered equally with that of other humans. This is clearly not the same as the fact that humans will seek their own happiness, nor does it follow from the further fact that the legislator, seeking his or her own happiness, will see to it, if he or she is wise, that one does not provoke one’s subjects too far.  #RandolphHarris 6 of 9

When a door closes, you do not know what God is saving you from. If your prayers are not answered the way you want, instead of being discouraged or feeling like God let you down, why do you not have a more comprehensive perspective? You may be discouraged because your plans have not worked out, but those closed doors were not an accident. That was God directing your steps. The reason God closed them is because He has something better in store for you. Will you trust Him? Gods ways are not our ways. They are better than our ways. There will be times when a door closes and you cannot understand why? You may be experiencing that right now. However, will you stay in faith while you wait to see what God is up to? This one bright young man who was in the top five percent of the nation had a dream to become an engineer. However, when he applied for graduate studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California-Berkeley, California Institute of Technology, and others, he was turned down again and again, while some of his friends with lower grades and even undocumented citizens were accepted. He could not understand it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9

It had been a bleak few months, for a lot of reasons. He could hardly write through the tears. He crumpled up the poems he had been writing since December and tossed them into the flames. While this well-educated, but distraught young man was waiting, he went on a mission trip with a group of doctors from his church. When he saw the doctors taking care of the people, treating their injuries and aliments, something new was birthed on the inside.  It was like a ray of Sunshine through the clouds. He did not want to be an engineer anymore. He wanted to become a doctor. After he returned home, he applied to medical school and was immediately accepted. God closed the doors to the engineering school on purpose, to open the doors into his divine destiny. God is wonderful in His design and excellent in His working. Believer, God overrules all things for your good. The needs-be for all that you have suffered has been most accurately determined by God. Your course is all mapped out by your Lord. Nothing will take Him by surprise. There will be no novelties to Him. There will be no occurrences which He did not foresee, and for which, therefore, He has not provided. He has arranged all, and you have but to patiently wait, and you shall see an extraordinary deliverance.  #RandolphHarris 8 of 9

 

Sailing with sealed orders, we ourselves are the repositories of the secret packet, whose mysterious contents we long to learn. There are not mysteries out of ourselves. Dear Father in Heaven, You are amazing! Thank you, God, for loving me so much that certain prayers have not been answered. You have not allowed certain people into my life whom I really wanted, because they would have limited my growth. I know that God is in complete control. There is no power greater than the power of God. I believe that my destiny is ordered by God. I know that new opportunities will arise in my life and I will keep a good attitude. I am moving forward in faith, knowing that God has my best interest at heat. I believe the reason God block certain opportunities is because something better is in store. Sometimes we have to realize that God did not break his promise to us, he just needed to delay its fulfillment. The bounty of thoughts, however, will remain undiminished. Far sweeter are mysteries than Sunrises: though the mystery be unfathomable, it is still the unfathomableness of fullness; but the surmise, that is but shallow and unmeaning emptiness.  #RandolphHarris 9 of 9

The Winchester Mystery House

 The spirits come to life once more as tourist explore Mrs. Winchester’s home. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

 

 

Artists and scientists deal with the same World, but they differ in their intellectual attitudes and in the techniques they use to recognize and describe objects, person, and events. Artists focus their attention on private experiences, scientists on the generic aspects of nature. This difference in attitudes is so fundamental that the aspects of the World with which science and art are respectively concerned have little in common. Sometimes the idea of being a hip party person who is in the nightclub living it up, listening to techno opera, and talking to swanky people about work, vacations, and all the nice things our sweetheart is doing for us. In a party scene, the feeling type often brings a sense of enthusiasm, joy, conviviality, companionship and togetherness. However, is that all we are? It is enough for us to absorb the teachings of our society, its rules and norms, its definitions and its roles? What of joy? Fear? Anger? What of personal satisfaction, or thrill, risk, all powerful feelings? 

 We really need to look at these and other emotions that are such an essential part of being human. However, in our computer-oriented, information-valuing society, emotions and emotional people are often ridiculed. It is not usually a compliment when you describe someone as emotional. Some of us are the thinking type, in cognitive mode, which is one that focuses on reason, scientific method, logical thinking is dominate. These types of people are inclined to deal with nearly every type of situation and experience as Mr. Spock did, much like a proper computer and not some much emotion nor sarcasm. The sensing organs and the process of picking up information (sensations) through the sense is helpful because human beings are not robots! Human beings are not mechanical or machine like. They have a full range of emotional responses, and if we were honest most of us would admit that we would prefer a bit more feeling in the people around us.  

 Being human (and not a humanoid), we are all emotional, though we may deny it. We all have emotional responses to events and people and potentials for far more feelings than we often express. I actually want a career, but I also know that I need to rest and enjoy life. I feel like I am just waiting and waiting and waiting, and I wonder when the Universe will finally reward me for the good that I have done. I am a good person. I find myself attractive and I like to be happy. When I was younger, I remembered thinking I never wanted to do the same thing every day. I wanted to travel and get around and be a businessperson. And by the time I turned 30, I envisioned I would be in a nice white, two story house, with wood siding, with navy blue, Atlantic premium wood shutters on the exterior, emerald green grass, every green trees, a white picket fence, a BMW sedan and Sports Utility vehicle, and a convertible in the garage, a wife, two kids, hardwood floors, Royal Palace French provincial furniture, lots of windows, and real mahogany wood panels on the walls, with a basement, and a secret passage way in the house. However, I am not sure what I really want, some I am just going to leave that in God’s hands.

 We have to judge between alterative courses of action to consider the consequences of each, in terms of the pleasure and pain of all the people affected. Let us suppose, for example, that I am trying to decide whether to take my small nephew to the circus or to spend my evening at the house with a book. I know that the circus will bore me: I may estimate this boredom at, let us say, 5 units of pain; i.e. -5 units of pleasure. I will, on the other hand, gain some sympathetic pleasure from watching the small boy’s pleased excitement, though not enough, certainly, to compensate for my boredom. I may put this at +2 units of pleasure. However, the boy may be expecting to gain great pleasure from the outing: perhaps 10 units. Taking the child to the circus, then, may be expected to yield (10+2) – 5 units of pleasure; i.e., 7 units. Now, consider the alternative. A quiet evening at the house, though pleasurable, does not transport an adult as much as an evening out does a child: perhaps we may evaluate it at 6 units. My pleasure will be spoiled a little, too, by the sympathetic pain that knowledge of my nephew’s disappointment itself: since both the pains and pleasures of childhood are intense, we may put it at – 8 units. To stay at the house, then, will cause 6 – 2 – 8 units of pleasure, i.e., 4 units of pain. 

The first is clearly the one that will contribute most to the sum of happiness. It is then, the right action in these circumstances. Its rightness is not an intrinsic characteristic, but it depends entirely on its consequences in any given case: if I found the circuses more boring, or the nephew found them less pleasant, staying at the house might become the right action. This is, of course, a comparatively crude example. This type of ingenuity and refining calculus and working out these implications are important for legal reform. Punishment, for example, must be just harsh enough to deter, and no harsher. Any more pain than is necessary for this purpose is unjustifiable. On the other hand, too lenient a punishment is a worse evil, since the pain inflicted on the criminal, being insufficient to deter, will not be counterbalanced by the pain spared future victims of similar crimes. We have just begun to open up the Pandora’s box of surprises that awaits us in the study of our social World. The culture has a tremendously important influence upon us, giving us stuff to put in our near-empty minds at birth, refining and guiding, bullying and encouraging us, so that we will turn out to be pretty much what society needs us to be.

Sometimes no process is superior to the others, though one is probably more appropriate and useful than the others at a given time and situation. It is important to experience life and to relate to the World in terms of emotions, both pleasant and unpleasant, of memories, of past and present feelings about a situation. Experiences are good and bad, pleasurable and unpleasureable—but we cannot just take them passively. I know I am blessed and I see you are happier, and that is nice. In the moral realm, freedom has grown so that many choices which were either controlled by law or churchly dictate are personal choices. The right to plan the number of children a family shall have…[and] such choices as drinking, non-criminal gambling, have becomes choices the individual has a right to make. One of our goals as humans is to help other individuals round out their personality so that they are not exclusively one type or another. It seems to me that if we are going to live sanely, then we must respect and be sensitive to differences, realizing that no two individuals are alike, and that is we really understand someone, we understand how one differs from us I really know one thing for such that would make me happy, a big house in the suburbs and privacy.  

 

 The Winchester Mystery House

Come explore the history and lore behind The Winchester Mystery House. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

When one bears in mind the suffering of the divine goat Dionysos in the performance of the Greek tragedy and lament of the retinue of goats who identified themselves with him, one can easily understand how the almost extinct drama was revived in the Middle Ages in the Passions of Christ. We know that God is everywhere; but certainly, we feel His presence when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His Worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence. Do you think God would be satisfied with half an oblation (peace offering)? I vehemently deny the charge of atheism. I am simply inveighed against the popular idol-worship of God as a substance, as another entity in the World, and against the vulgar eudemonistic morality which makes God a giver of sensuous rewards for good deeds and sensuous punishments for evil deeds. Such a conception—or, indeed, any attribution of personal characteristics to God—constitutes a lowering and limiting of the deity and has to be opposed in the interest of true religion. 

There can be no doubt that the notion of God as a separate substance is impossible and contradictory, and it is permitted to say this plainly.  When you would conceive of that great Being truly and fully, you must be able to realize the duration of eternity, obliterate the little periods of time and chronology, which require a starting and resting-place in our human minds—soar out of the reach of the sickly atmospheres which surround these little planets, and stand erect in the broad and fathomless light of God’s own atmosphere. Again, we need no other God [than the moral World order], and we cannot comprehend another one. There is no rational justification for going beyond the moral World order to a separate entity as its cause. God is too often a convenient stalking horse for human selfishness. However, the human soul is responsible for the origin of evil. God implants in the hearts of His people a desire to advance His ends, but human agents are compelled to employ natural means. The mystical union with the One is the ultimate goal of humans, and part of the soul makes such a union possible as superior to Intelligence. It is the flower of Intelligence.   

  In what ways did Christ obtain his amazing wisdom? Through careful study of the larger World in which we live and the smaller World of our human nature, it has emerged the duties of the heart: service of God, trust in God, wholehearted devotion to God, humility in God’s presence, repentance, self-communion, and renunciation. In this way, humans reach the height of the religious life, the love of God. Christ might have built up his teachings from the writings of Greek elders, which Providence could have out into his hands through his associations with Hellenistic Jews. Christ founded a kind of Freemasonry to assist him in his purpose to destroy superstition, restore reason to its rightful rule, and unite people in a rational faith in God, Providence and Immortality. The great message of spiritual vitality and force, directed to the human heart and resting on the threefold base of reason, revelation, and tradition. Apprehending the dimension of the spirit is a very succinct belief that cannot endure the acid test of rational examination in the product of life and time because it is a vision of reality that includes eternity, and immortality.  

In life, conjuring cannot be explained solely in material terms. From the traditionalist standpoint, it seemed an insoluble mystery how the mind knows just what motor nerves to activate when, for instance, expecting a blinding light to be switched on, it causes the eyes to close in advance. The spirit of God is not inert like levers but possess an inherent spontaneity, and this spontaneity means that the expectation of the painful glare is inseparably associated with preparations to close the eyes. And having faith in God inherently means we will spontaneously treat others with the kind of love and respect that God would expect so we escape the painful doctrine of damnation. The belief arises in the context of free will. We are on Earth and inseparable from a preparation to act in which one seriously expects alleviation from suffering is in reach. In trying to grasp salvation, the belief in God is inevitably put to the test: We believe first and prove or disprove afterwards.   

The essence of the human situation is a kind of circle of activity in which we inevitably acquire new nonrational beliefs as a direct consequence of practically and experimentally testing those we start with. The point is that our actions have unforeseen consequences. Disorder and tension on an individual level, and consequently, social level are the result of ignorance of the self and the World around. The mind stays without rest, running, jumping, and churning aimlessly, lashed by a white squall of feelings and emotions. The emotive pole of consciousness, where absorption in one’s pains or pleasures presents the objective assessment of one’s situation, and the cognitive pole, where pleasures and pains are forgotten in the business of mapping one’s own World and where emotions appears only in the shock of scientific discovery, as a feeling that, like boredom, is outside the pleasure-pain sphere. The movement from feeling to knowledge in consciousness is linked with the same facts that give human life the character of a passage from belief to self-criticism.   

When Christianity began its entry into the ancient World it met with the competition of the religion of Mithras and for a long time it was doubtful which deity was to be the victor. The Bright figure of the youthful Persian god has eluded our understanding. Perhaps we may conclude from the illustrations of Mithras slaying the steers that he represented the son who carried out the sacrifice of the father by himself and this released the brothers from their oppressing complicity in the deed. There was another way of allying this sense of guilt and this is the one that Christ took. He sacrificed his own life and thereby redeemed the brothers from primal sin. The theory of primal sin is Orphic origin; it was preserved in the mysteries and thence penetrated into the philosophic schools of Greek antiquity. Men were the descendants of Titans, who had killed and dismembered the young Dionysos—Zagreus; the weight of this crime oppressed them. A fragment of Anaximander says that the unity of the World was destroyed by a primordial crime and everything that issues from it must carry on the punishment for this crime.   

Although the features of banding together, killing, and dismembering as expressed in the deeds of the Titans very clearly recall the totem sacrifice described by St. Nilus—as also many other myths of antiquity, for example, the death of Orpheus himself—we are nevertheless disturbed here by the variation according to which a youthful god was murdered. In the Christian myth, man’s original sin is undoubtedly an offense against God the Father, and if Christ redeems humankind from the weight of original sin by sacrificing his own life, he forces us to the conclusion that this sin was murder. According to the law of retaliation which is deeply rooted in human feeling, a murder can be atoned only by the sacrifice of another life; the self-sacrifice points to a blood-guilt. The suicidal impulses of our neurotic regularly prove to be self-punishments for death wishes directed against others. And id this sacrifice of one’s own life; the self-sacrifice brings about a reconciliation with God, the father, then the crime which must be expiated can only have been the murder of the father.   

Thus, in the Christian doctrine humankind most unreservedly acknowledges the guilty deed of primordial times because it now has found the most complete expiation for this deed in the sacrificial death of the son. The reconciliation with the father is the more thorough because simultaneously with this sacrifice there follows the complete renunciation of woman, for whose sake humankind rebelled against the father. However, not, also the psychological fatality of ambivalence demands its rights. In the same deed, which offers the greatest possible expiation to the father, the son also attains the goal of his wishes against the father. The religion of the son succeeds the religion of the father. As a sign of this substitution the antiquated totem feast is revived again in the form of communion in which the band of brothers now eats the flesh and blood of the son and no longer that of the father, the sons thereby identifying themselves with him and becoming holy themselves.  

Thus, through the ages we see the identity of the totem feast with the animal sacrifice, theanthropic human sacrifice, and the Christian Eucharist, and in all these solemn occasions we recognize the after effects of that crime which so oppressed men but of which they must have been so proud of. At bottom, however, the Christian communion is a new setting aside of the father, a repetition of the crime that must be expiated. We see how well the Christian communion has absorbed within itself a sacrament which is doubtless far older than Christianity. Full fathom five thy father lies: Of his hones are coral made; those pearls that were his eyes; nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange…But what, then, is this consciousness that underlies both the emotional side and the intellectual side? First, we are unconscious of the undifferentiated. A constant impression is to the blank mind—if temperature were unvarying we would not notice it. Second, we are conscious of the constant only in the midst of variety and difference.   

The essence of consciousness is thus to be discriminative, discriminations involved in the consciousness, the most liable to be misunderstood is that implicit in the problem of the external World.  Many people dismiss discrimination as meaningless the notion of material objects independent of experience, and they frequently overlook an important point—that a distinction can be drawn within experience between the person sensing it and the sensation sensed. There is a profound sense of the complexity of the problem in the external World. Thus, in dealing with the emotions the important role some give to pure malice, or sadism, as human motive contrast refreshingly with the more commonplace views have been justly appreciated in our time. Tragic guilt is not always easy to explain; it is often not a guilt in the ordinary sense. Almost always consisted of rebellion against a divine or human authority and the chorus accompanied the hero with their sympathies, trying to restrain and warn him, and lamented his fate after he had met with what was considered fitting punishment for his daring attempt.   

However, why did the hero of the tragedy have to suffer, and what was the tragedy have to suffer, and what was the meaning of his tragic guilt? We will cut short the discussion by a prompt answer. He had to suffer because he was the primal father, the hero of that primordial tragedy the repetition of which he serves a certain tendency, and the tragic guilt is the guilt of which he had to take upon himself in order to free the chorus of theirs. The scene upon the stage came into being through purposive distortion of the historical scene, or, one is tempted to say, it was the result of refined hypocrisy. Actually, in the antiquated situation, it was the members of the chorus themselves who had caused the suffering of the hero; here, on the other hand, they exhaust themselves in sympathy and regret, and the hero himself is to blame for his suffering. The crime foisted upon him, namely, presumption and rebellion against great authority, is the same as that which in the past oppressed the colleagues of the chorus, namely, the band of brothers. Thus, the tragic hero, through still against his will, is made the redeemer of the chorus.