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The Very “Fans” of the Cinema Stars and the Famous Footballers Know Better than to Desire that!
The Lord raises up righteous nations and destroys nations of wicked. The mention of that nation which worshipped Nature-gods turns our attention to one of those features in the Christian story which is repulsive to the idea of a “chosen people.” Democrats by birth and education, we should prefer to think that all nations and individuals start to level in the search for God, or even that all religions are equally true. It must be admitted at once that Christianity makes no concessions to this point of view. It does not tell of a human search for God at all, but of something done by God for, to, and about, Man. And the way in which it is done is selective, undemocratic, to the highest degree. After the knowledge of God had been universally lost or obscured, one man from the whole Earth (Abraham) is picked out. He is separated (miserably enough, we may suppose) from his natural surroundings, sent into a strange country, and made the ancestor of a nation who are to carry the knowledge of the true God. Within this nation there is further selection: some die in the desert, some remain behind in Babylon. There is further selection still. The process grows narrower and narrower, sharpens at last into one small bright point like the head of a spear. It is a Jewish girl at her prayers. All humanity (so far as concerns its redemption) has narrowed to that. Such a process is very unlike what modern feeling demands: but it is startlingly like what Nature habitually does. Selectiveness, and with it (we must allow) enormous wastage, is her method. Out of enormous space a very small portion is occupied by mater at all. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Of all the stars, perhaps very few, perhaps only one, have planets. Of all the planets in our own system probably only one supports organic life. In the transmission of organic life, countless seeds and spermatozoa are emitted: some few are selected for the distinction of fertility. Among the species only one is rational. Within that species only a few attain excellence of beauty, strength, or intelligence. At this point we come perilously near the argument of Butler’s famous Analogy. I say “perilously” because the argument of that book very nearly admits parodying in the form “You say that the behavior attributed to the Christian God is both wicked and foolish: but it is no less likely to be true on that account for I can show that Nature (which He created) behaves just as badly.” To which the atheist will answer—and the nearer he is to Christ in his heart, the more certainly he will do so—“If there is a God like that I despise and defy Him.” However, I am not saying that Nature, as we know her, is good; that is a point we must return to in a moment. Nor am I saying that a God whose actions were no better than Nature’s would be a proper object of worship for any honest human. The point is a little finer than that. This selective or undemocratic quality in Nature, at least in so far as it affects human life, is neither good nor evil. According as spirit exploits of fails to exploit this Natural situation, it gives rise to one or the other. It permits, on the one hand, ruthless competition, arrogance, and envy; it permits on the other, modesty and (one of our greatest pleasures) admiration. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
A World in which I was really (and not merely by a useful legal fiction) “as good as everyone else,” in which I never looked up to anyone wiser or cleverer or braver or more learned than I, would be insufferable. The very “fans” of the cinema stars and the famous footballers know better than to desire that! What the Christian story does is not to instate on the Divine level a cruelty and wastefulness which have already disgusted us on the Natural, but to show us in God’s act, working neither cruelly nor wastefully, the same principle which is in Nature also, though down there it works sometimes in one way and sometimes in the other. It illuminates he Natural scene by suggesting that a principle which at first looked meaningless may ye be derived from a principle which is good and fair, may indeed be a depraved and blurred copy of it—the pathological form which is would take in a spoiled Nature. For when we look into the Selectiveness which the Christians attribute to God we find in it none of that “favoritism” which we were afraid of. The “chosen” people are chosen no for their own sake (certainly not for their own honor or pleasure) but for the sake of the unchosen. Abraham is told that “in his seed” (the chosen nation) “all nations shall be blest.” That nation has been chosen to bear a heavy burden. Their sufferings heal others. On the finally selected Woman falls the utmost depth of maternal anguish. Her Son, the incarnate God, is a “man of sorrows”; the one Man into whom Deity descended, the one Man who can be lawfully adored, is pre-eminent for suffering. However, you will ask does this much mend matters? #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Is this sill injustice, though now the other way round? Where, at the first glance, we accused God of undue favor to His “chosen,” we are now temped to accuse Him of undue disfavor. (The attempt to keep up both charges at the same time had better be dropped.) And certainly we have here come to a principle very deep-rooted in Christianity: what may be called the principle of Vicariousness. The Sinless Man suffers for the sinful, and, in their degree, all good men for all bad men. And the Vicariousness—no less than Death and Rebirth or Selectiveness—is also a characteristic of Nature. Self-sufficiency, living on one’s own resources, is a thing impossible in her realm. Everything is indebted to everything else, sacrificed to everything else, dependent on everything else. And here too we must recognize that the principle is in itself neither good nor bad. The cat lives on the mouse in a way I think bad: the bees and the flowers live on one another in a more pleasing manner. The parasite lives on its “host”: but so also unborn child on its mother. In social life without Vicariousness there would be no exploitation or oppression; but also no kindness or gratitude. It is a fountain both of love and hatred, both of misery and happiness. When we have understood this we shall no longer think that the depraved examples of Vicariousness in Nature forbid us to suppose that the principle itself is of divine origin. At this point it may be well to take a backward glance and notice how the doctrine of the Incarnation is already acting on the rest of our knowledge. We have already brought it into contact with four other principles: the composite nature of man, the pattern of descent and reascension, Selectiveness, and Vicariousness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
The first may be called a fac about the frontier between Nature and Supernature; the other three are characteristics of Nature herself. Now most religions, when brough face to face with the facts of Nature either simply re-affirm them, give them (just as they stand) a transcendent prestige, or else simply negate them, promises us release from such facts and from Nature altogether. The Nature-Religions take the first line. They sanctify our agricultural concerns and indeed our whole biological life. We get really drunk in the worship of Dionysus and life with real women in the temple of the fertility goddess. In Life-force worship, which is the modern and western type of Nature-religion, we take over the existing trend towards “development” or increasing complexity in organic, social, and industrial life, and make it a god. My dear Devout, is there a good way to put the grace of the devotion to work? Of course, there is. You hide it. That is to say, do not flaunt it; do not meander around it; do not maunder over it. A better way to handle the situation is to render yourself undeserving. How? Just imagine that the Gracious Gift is delivered to the wrong person. Namely you. This affection of the soul, this consolation, must not be clung to too tenaciously, for it can very quickly be changed to its contrary. When in grace, think how wretched you are; but when out of grace, think how utterly destitute you must be! Odd thing about the grace of consolation. Not much spiritual progress is made when it is present. However, when it is absent, you do cover rather more ground. How? By dutifully enduring the slippage of consolation; that is to say, by not dozing off during scheduled prayer, not allowing the rest of your ordo diei to fall apart. Just because you feel spiritually dry or mentally anxious, that is no reason to disintegrate. Just do what you think ought to be done and only what you are able to do. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Many Devouts, when Success does not come up and buss them on the bum, immediately become nervous. That is to say, they sit down and cross their legs in a way that would make the Great Arsenious blush. That is to say, they cross their legs at the knee and drum their fingers on the table. As the Old Jeremiah has said (10.23), not everyone can choose the road one travels. However, God always has the power to give and console when He wants, how much He wants, and to whom He wants. He has only one rule: does it please Him, or does it not? Certain Devouts have thrown caution to the wind; that is to say, wanting to fulfill their expectations, yet unwilling to acknowledge their limitations, they have destroyed themselves. The grace of devotion made them do it! Or so they said. Trouble was, they followed the urging of their heart and neglected the judgment of their reason. Because they presumed the grace was greater than God actually gave, they quickly lost that grace. Instantly, they were thrown down, made destitute, the lowest of the low. They had built themselves a quiet little nest in Heaven, but now they were pulverized and pauperized. Once they flew, but now their wings were clipped. If there were any hope for them at all, it would be under My wings, as the Psalmist had it (91.4). The Devouts who at this point are new and inexperienced in the way of the Lord should pay special attention to this. Why? They can easily be deceived or knocked about in the rugged course of the spiritual life. To avoid much of this roister-doistery, they should take advantage of the experience of the discreet old Devouts in their community. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
When these young Devouts follow their own heads in this regard, they come to regard the elder Devouts as old trouts. That is a perilous path to follow, especially if they have made up their minds to trust no one older than themselves. Rare it is for those “who think they know it all,” as Paul characterized them to the Romans (11.25), to allow themselves to be ruled by others. A tale of two Devouts. One may have a modest education and carry it off with great humility and yet with some hilarity. Another may be a walking encyclopedia spouting the wisdom of the West to a World with wax it its ears. Pick one. It is better to have little to be proud than to pride yourself over a lot. You are not all that wise when you give yourself too much joy. Actually, that joy is rather smaller than you think, and losing it is the last thing you want to do. However, obviously, you are oblivious of your Pristine Destitution and chaste fear of the Lord that should have resulted. You are never so virtuous that in times of crisis you do not find your faith in Me profoundly shaken. No one wants to feel too hemmed in during peacetime, but in time of war, you would welcome restrictions; without them you do not know where you are or were the fear is coming from. Remain humble and modest always. Rein in that runaway spirit of yours, and you will not fall into dangers so easily. Good counsel has it that you should meditate at noonday about what your future will be at midnight. Even in this prayer, remember that the light will return. It is that light I withhold every now and then as a caution to you and a glory to Me. The temptational process has its uses. First, it is better to greet Temptation as an old friend than to meet it as a stranger. Second, merits are not accumulated by the number of visions and consolations you have. Third, your skill in interpreting the Scriptures has little to do with your spiritual progress. Fourth, a young person’s exalted social station in the outside World certainly has absolutely nothing to do with one’s capacity for spiritual progress in the inside World. Fifth, if you are truly humbled and really charitable, if you always seek the honour of God—that has everything to do with your spiritual progress. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Sixth, if you think yourself an ant, and really despise your antics, and do no antagonize others, and prefer to be squished under foot than crowned king of the World—then that is something to be truly proud of. Emma Smith, Joseph’s wife, was one of those baptized by Oliver Cowdery on the Monday morning before Joseph was arrested. While her husband was in court for several days, Emma was concerned about his troubles. In her grief and worry she visited her sister, and it was here that Joseph came after his release. Together they went to their home in Harmony, Pennsylvania, where a revelation was given for Emma. The Lord said: Hearken unto the voice of the Lord your God, while I speak unto thee, Emma Smith, my daughter, for verily I say unto thee, All those who receive my gospel are sons and daughters in my kingdom. Behold thy sins are forgiven thee, and thou art an elect lady, who I have called. And the office of thy calling shall be for a comfort unto my servant Joseph Smith, Jr., thy husband, in his afflictions, with consoling words, in the spirit of meekness. And thou shalt go with him at the time of his going, and be unto him for a scribe, while here is no one o be scribe for him. Thou shalt lay aside the things of this World, and seek for the things of a better. And it shall be given thee, also, to make a selection of sacred hymns…to be had in my church; for my soul deligheth in the song of the heart; yea, the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me. Wherefore, lift up thy heart and rejoice, and cleave unto the covenants which thou hast made. Continue in the spirit of meekness, and beware of pride. Keep my commandments continually, and a crown of righteousness thou shalt receive. And except thou do this, where I am thou canst not come. And verily, verily, I say unto you, that this is my voice unto all. Amen. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Emma had had some training in music and singing. She had a clear soprano voice. She delighted in music. She began to select hymns for the new hymnbook according to the commandment of the Lord. Emma gathered together words of hymns for use in the church. The words of twenty-four hymns were published in the official church paper, the Evening and Morning Star, from June, 1832, to July, 1833. The first hymnbook, containing ninety hymns, words only was called “A Selection of Sacred Hymns,” by Emma Smith. This was published at Kirtland in 1835. At Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1841, a second and larger edition was published. This was vest pocket size and contained words of 304 hymns selected by Emma Smith. Some of the hymns of these early editions were: “Redeemer of Israel,” “O Jesus, the Giver of All We Enjoy,” “The Spirit of God Like a Fire Is Burning,” “O God, the Eternal Father,” “Earth with Her Ten Thousand Flowers,” “Glorious Things Are Sung of Zion,” “When Earth in Bondage Long Had Lain,” “Hark, Ye Mortals, Hark, Be Still,” “Guide Us, O Thou Great Jehovah.” In the meantime, Joseph was making copies of the revelations he had received. John Whitmer, who had come to live with them for a while, helped him in this work. In July, 1830 a Harmony, Pennsylvania, a revelation was given addressed to Joseph, Oliver Cowdery, and John Whitmer, in which the Lord said: Let your time be devoted to the studying of the Scriptures, and to preaching, and to confirming the church at Colesville; and to performing your labours on the land, such as is required, until after you shall go to the west, to hold the next conference; and then it shall be made known what you shall do. And all things shall be done by common consent in the church, by much prayer and faith; for all things you shall receive by faith. Amen. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
This revelation is very important, for it reaffirms the principle of “common consent” in the affairs of the church. A second chance—but redemption follows not a change of body, but a change of heart. Beatitude belongs to God in a very special manner. For nothing else is understood to be meant by the term beatitude than the perfect good of an intellectual nature; which is capable of knowing that it has a sufficiency of the good which it possesses, to which it is competent that good or may befall, and which can control its own actions. All of these things belong in a most excellent manner to God, namely, to be perfect, and possess intelligence. Whence beatitude belongs to God in the highest degree. Aggregation of good is in God, after the manner not of composition, but of simplicity; for those things which in creatures is manifold, pre-exist in God, as was said above, in simplicity and unity. It belongs as an accident to beatitude or happiness to be the reward of virtue, so hard as anyone attains to beatitude; even as to be the term of generation belongs accidentally to a being, so far as it passes from potentiality to act. As, then, God has being, though not be gotten; so He has beatitude, although not acquired by merit. One might expect to encounter three different sets of therapeutic processes in the mind, and possibly also expect that analysts may need three different sets of technical measures, each directed so that it should influence the corresponding area of the mind. First, there are those patients who operate as whole persons and whose difficulties are in the realm of interpersonal relationships. The technique for the treatment of these patients belongs to psycho-analysis as it developed in the hands of Dr. Freud at the beginning of the century. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Then secondly there come the patients in whom the wholeness of the personality only just begins to be something that can be taken for granted; in fact one can say that analysis has to do with the first events that belong to and inherently and immediately follow not only the achievement of wholeness but also the coming together of love and hate and the dawning of recognition of dependence. This is the analysis of the stage of concern, or of what has come to be known as the “depressive position.” These patients require the analysis of mood. The technique for this work is not different from that needed by patients in the first category; nevertheless some new management problems do arise on account of the increase range of clinical material tackled. Important from our point of view here is the idea of the survival of the analyst as a dynamic factor. In the third grouping I place all those patients whose analyses must deal with the early stages of emotional development before and up to the establishment of the personality as an entity, before the achievement of space-time unit status. The personal structure is not yet securely founded. In regard to this third grouping, the accent is more surely on management, and sometimes over long periods with these patients ordinary analytic work has to be in abeyance, management being the whole thing. To recapitulate in terms of environment, once can say that in the first grouping we are dealing with patients who develop difficulties in the ordinary course of their home life, assuming satisfactory development in the earlier stages. In the second category, the analysis of the depressive position, we are dealing with the mother-child relationship especially around the time that weaning becomes a meaningful term. The mother holds a situation in time. In the third category there comes primitive emotional development, that which needs the mother actually holding the infant. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
When understanding and insight bring changes in people’s relationships, based on a natural wish to stop behaving in useless, painful, and/or unpopular ways, we are in the area of classical psycho-analysis. However, what if the therapist’s interpretations, aimed at increasing understanding and self-control, only bring misery, confusion, and ineptitude? Then we may be in other areas entirely. When people seem unable to comply with the psych-analyst’s fundamental rule, of honestly saying what is on their minds, they seem unable to apprehend what is expected of them. At times it is practically useless to try to remind them of the original complaints that prompted them to seek analytic help, since they have become exclusively preoccupied with their relationship to their analyst, the gratifications and frustrations they may expect from it. All sense for continuing with the analytic work seems to have been lost. In another pattern, they repeat endlessly that they know that they ought to co-operate but that they must get better before they can do anything about that. This vicious circle—in their sincere conviction—can only be broken if something that that has gone wrong is replaced in them, or if they can get hold of something in them, which they had at once time but which they have since lost. No wonder. Not only are they in the grip of the old, dreadful, helpless memories, but something new is indeed needed—strength. The people we are discussing here cannot change because they are not strong enough yet. (There are of course exceptions to this generalization, especially among those who, though strong enough structurally, fear to grow up and would prefer to remain children because things have gone wrong somewhere in the three-person regions of their personality.) #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The need for strength requires psychotherapists to rethink their approach. First of all, less emphasis on instinctual drives may be required. A life lived with the major emphasis on the satisfaction of biological drives is the consequence of a marked and fairly continuous lack of empathic responses in early and later childhood. If the baby had felt good about itself and about the World’s response to it, it would not have had to fall back on simple drive-satisfactions. Feeling good about yourself and your World is the result of a good selfobject phase; feeling good about what you can grab for yourself is the result of failures in that phase. (This does not mean, of course, that drive-satisfactions are not important biological gratifications in the fortunate person’s life also. It means that they are there incorporated in the experience of the self and other—not substitutes for that experience.) The deepest level to be reached is not the drive, but the threat to the organization of the self, the experience of the absence of the life-sustaining matrix of the empathic responsiveness of the self-object. Being, the sense of stable assured selfhood, is the basis of healthy doing, of spontaneous creative activity. Without it, doing can only be forced self-driving to keep oneself going, a state of mind that breeds aggression, in the first place against oneself; and then, to gain some relief from self-persecution, it is turned against other people. In these circumstances: Let me emphasize again that rage and destructiveness…are not primary givens, but arise in reaction to the faulty empathic response of the selfobject. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
An isolated striving to search for an outlet for rage and destructiveness is not part of our primary psychological equipment, and the guilt with regard to unconscious rage that we encounter in the clinical situation should not be regarded as a patient’s reaction to a primal infantile viciousness. When analysands become enraged in consequence of our attack on their resistance, they do so, not because a correct interpretation has loosened defences and has activated the aggressive energy that was bound up in them, but because a specific genetically important traumatic situation from their early life has been repeated in the analytic situation: the experience of the faulty non-empathic response of the selfobject. What were these enraged patients expecting? In this harmonious relationship, only one partner may have wishes, interests, and demands. Without any further need for testing, it is taken for granted that the other partner, the object, or the friendly expanse, will automatically have the same wishes, interests, or expectations. This explains why this is so often called the state of omnipotence. This description is somewhat out of tune: there is no feeling of power, in fact, no need for either power or effort, as all tings are in harmony. If any hitch or disharmony between subject and object occurs, the reaction to it will consist of loud and vehement symptoms suggesting processes either of a highly aggressive and destructive or of a profoundly disintegrated nature—as if the whole World including the self had been smashed up, or as if the subject had been flooded with pure and unmitigated aggressive-destructive impulses. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
On the other hand, if the harmony is allowed to persist without much disturbance from outside, the reaction amounts to a feeling of tranquil well-being, rather inconspicuous and difficult to observe. This difference in mood, expressed in adult language, would run somewhat like this: I must be loved and looked after in every respect by everyone and everything important to me, without anyone demanding any effort or claiming any return for this. It is only my wishes, interests, and needs that matter; none of the people who are important to me must have any interests, wishes, needs different from mine, and if they have any at all, they must subordinate theirs to mine without any resentment or strain; in fact, it must be their pleasure and their enjoyment to fit in with my wishes. If this happens, I shall be good, pleased, and happy but that is all. If this does not happen, it will be horrifying both for the World and for me. On the level of the basic fault, any difference is felt by the patient to be a major tragedy, reviving all the biter disappointments that established the fault. There is also an absoluteness of this state of mind. With the regressed patient the word “wish” is incorrect: instead we use the word need. If a regressed patient needs quiet, then without it nothing can be done at all. If the need is not met the result is not anger, only a reproduction of the environmental failure which stopped the processes of self growth. The individual’s capacity to “wish” has become interfered with, and we witness the reappearance of the original cause of a sense of futility. Therefore analysts must do everything in their power not to become, or to behave as, separate sharply-contoured objects. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
They must allow their patient to relate to them or exist with them as if they were one of the primary substances. This means they should be willing to carry the patient, not actively, but like water carries the swimmer or the Earth carries the walker, that is, to be there fore the patient, to be used without too much resistance against being used. This is the counselling ethic at its best: attentive listening, confirming, mirroring, reflecting accepting without judging or condemning, concerned with feeling rather than fact, responding to what makes sense rather than to wrong or silly bits, celebrating rather than nit-picking, and so on. Small wounder that we have found, regardless of the school of thought to which US psychiatrists, psycho-analysts, psychotherapists, or counsellors belonged, their patients got better according to the extent to which they could give them accurate empathy, unconditional warmth, with genuineness and authenticity. Friends do it effortlessly. People who have these resources easily available have an advantage in ministering to the distressed psyche. Some therapists find it easy only with relatively sensible people. Others find it easier with the very disturbed, strange, and apparently incoherent—if necessary for years. Other again had better not try. There are innumerable ways in which analysts may respond to their patients’ subtle forms of regression…indifference, disapproval, some slight sign of annoyance. They may tolerate acting out but follow it immediately with a correct and timely interpretation which, in turn, will take the patient some steps further to learning the analysts’ language and will inhibit further acting-out. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
They may sympathetically permit is as a kind of safety-valve; or they may take it in their stride, feeling no more, or for that matter no loess, need for interpretation (id est for interfering with the acting out), than with any other form of communication, say verbal associations. Evidently it is only in the last case that acting-out and verbal associations are equally accepted as communications addressed to the therapist. What ought to happen in therapy, is for analysts to let themselves be used a “primary objects,” objects of the absolute and primary love which existed before a basic fault cut the person off from the memory. This is not a task for loving friends to do on a non-professional basis. It needs a peculiar combination of freedom and firmness about boundaries, which is not compatible with everyday personal relationships. It is often argued that psychological treatment may cure people suffering from nervous troubles or those whose sickness are largely the result of their own imagination, but that such treatment is useless for physically caused maladies. The only way to get at the truth about this problem is to divide psychological treatment into mental and spiritual categories. Mental treatment is suitable for both nervous and physical troubles because in involves a higher power than the thinking or imagining one, a truly spiritual power which is able to affect the physical body no less than the personal mentality. Mental treatments include a large part of so-called spiritual healing, which is not genuine spiritual healing at all. Philosophy is able to make this differentiation because it understands the psyche of a human and one’s inner constitution, because it has a deeper knowledge than scientific observers working from the outside or religious devotees working by faith alone can get. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Our knowledge of the laws which govern the psychological causes of sickness and the spiritual healing of disease is still incomplete and uncertain. Before one talks of depending upon the Overself one must first have established a relation with it, earned a title to its grace. Otherwise, the talk is premature. Nor can such dependence ever annul the duty of utilizing all ordinary means, all human channels. The possibility of healing physical ailments by spiritual means depends in the last analysis not upon the personal will of the healer but upon the divine soul of the patient. By Its grace, which is a definite force, the soul can assist both mind and body. Those critics who deny the reality of Grace as well as those who deny the possibility of spiritual healing are tersely answered by the writer of Psalms 103.3: “Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healteth all thy diseases.” Such healing does no contradict the natural laws; it co-operates with them. Thus, to expect an antiquated man to be turned into a young man by its assistance, is unrealizable. To demand a new leg to replace an amputated one, is unreasonable. However, all things are possible to those who love God. Oh God of all, at this time of our gradual awakening to the dangers we are imposing on our beautiful Earth, please open the hearts and minds of all your children, that we may learn to nurture rather than destroy our planet. Amen. His enemies, on isles and seas, will suffering endure; but He will increase abundant peace to upright humans and pure. Then perfect joy will bring our Lord, the sacred vessels will be restored; the exiles, He will gather them into rebuilt America; day and night shall be His light a canopy of splendor; a crown of praise His people will raise to crown their Lord and Defender. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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The Kingdom of Heaven is Within Us and We are Within the Kingdom of Heaven!
Promoting diversity is the first step to not just “tolerance” but true inclusion and acceptance. Being unified in Christ does not mean we all must be the same. All people—across socioeconomic status, race, and nationality—are invited to come unto Christ and “partake of His goodness,” reports 2 Nephi 26.33. Through growing contact with, exposure to, and communication between people who are not like us in every way, we can learn how to relate to difference in a way where difference does not have to be a problem, a barrier, or a threat. And we may also see we have a lot in common with others. The demographics of America is changing and what we can do is accept that. Some people are not happy with the way the immigration system works, they think that others who are closer to the United States of America are given preference, while for them to immigrate to America takes much longer. We should not make anyone feel unwelcomed. It is up to our leaders to fix the immigration system so it is fair and legal. So, instead of making people feel unwanted, we can write to our leaders and share our concerns about the law being the golden standard in this country and how everyone deserves equal opportunity to immigrate to America. Nevertheless, even if both legal and undocumented immigration ceased immediately, the Hispanic population would be expected to continue to grow. This is primarily because of two factors. The populations age structure of the Hispanic population is far younger than that of the general population. The median age for Hispanics is twenty-six, while the median for non-Hispanics is thirty-three. This means a greater proportion of the Hispanic population is of child bearing age. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Second, Hispanic birthrates are approximately 50 percent higher than the United States of America averages. Thus, the expectation is that Hispanics will be an increasing proportion of the American population. There are currently 60.48 million in the United States of America. Approximately 47 percent of Hispanics are suburbanites. Many Hispanics are often well-to-do and live in affluent suburbs. Over half (55 percent) of all those of Asian background in the United States of America are suburbanites, making Asians slightly more suburban than the European American population. Asian Americans constitute the nation’s fastest-growing non-European American population. By 2040, the Asian population is expected to grow to 34.5 million. Economically, Asians Americans are American’s most affluent group of people in the United States of America with a median household income of $85,800.00. European Americans have a median household income of $65,777.00; Hispanic Americans have a median household income of $56,113.00; Africans Americans have median household income of $43,862.00. Geographically, the Asian population is concentrated on the west coast and Hawaii. One thing to note about Chinese Americans is that they tend to believe in the social advantages for children of more communal urban living. There exists a strong cultural belief in the superiority of urban environments. Early settlers in the United States of American were also rich in diversity. Most came from Europe. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
The Swedes settled in Delaware, the Dutch founded Pennsylvania, French Huguenots sought freedom from religious persecution, Germans came escaping the military draft, the Pilgrims sought a separate religious society, and the Irish were seeking relief from famine and landlords. Out of all this diversity, a nation emerged. Leaders of intelligence and character, still a wonder to those of us who study their trials and achievements, were equal to the challenges of creating a constitution and a nation that would marry principles of freedom and the dignity and rights of humans to unparalleled economic opportunity and an expanding frontier. The diverse nation has endured much. I know there are times when we all feel that we are far from God’s heart; and the same from the Saints. Just know that God is not offended. Know also that good affection and sweet, of which you have a taste every now and then, is the effect of Present Grace; and in a sense it is a foretaste of the Heavenly Country. All of which is another way of saying, do not rely too much on such consolation; it comes and it goes. However, to respond with force to the Enemy’s incursions and to spurn he Devil’s clever interpretation of what is happening along he boundaries of the soul—both are outstanding signs of great virtue and merit decorations. Know that the Ancient Enemy tries his damanedest to impede desire in the good soul. He also tries to draw one away from a variety of particulars. For example, the cult of the Saints. The pious memory of My Passion. A practical checklist of sins. An honor guard for the heart. A firm purpose of progressing in Virtue. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Many evil thoughts the Enemy forces upon the devout, soul, trying to wear one down by the horror of it all and distracting one from praying and reading the Scriptures. Humble Confession displeases the Enemy; Holy Communion enrages him. Do not believe the Enemy. Ignore what he says. And mind where you walk; he has spread his traps along your usual paths. Thoughts may come your way, loathsome and lithesome, but do not blame them on yourself. Blame them on the Enemy, and save your best for him. Epithets and expletives like the following. Avaunt, Unclean Spirit! Blush, you matted clotted thug! It is you who fill my ears with such horrid unhearable stuff! “Depart from me, you seducer and traducer,” reports Matthew 4.10! You will not have any part of me! “The Lord will be with me, great warrior that He is” Jeremiah 20.11, and you will stand before Him in a state of complete confusion! I prefer to undergo every pain, even to die, than to think like you! Avast! Do not say it! Bite your tongue! (Mark 4.39). I will not listen to you any more! I mean it! Just try—one more time, one hundred more times!—to abuse me and see what happens! “O Lord, my illumination, my salvation, who shall I fear?” (Psalm 27.1). “O Lord, come to my help, come to my rescue!” (Psalm 19.14). “Do battle as though you were a good soldier,” wrote Paul to Timothy the second time (2.3). And if your fragility takes a tumble, make a second effort, a new start. Rearrange your pack. Reinforcements are coming; that is to say, additional grace is on the way. Watch your step. Complacency and pride are squirreled everywhere, blinding the unsuspecting as they advance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
The Proud are the first casualties, but for you Caution and Humility are the watchwords. All of which is another way of saying, proceed with care, but stay level with the ground. Against this popular idea that only a few are gifted stands the Christian idea of giftedness. Each individual of God is a unique part of the body of Christ, taught the apostle Paul. One person is, so to speak, a hand, another an ear, another a toe. All such parts are essential to the functioning of the whole body. Thus each of us is gifted. “Having gifts that different according to the grace given to us,” admonished Paul, “Let us use them.” In his letter to the early churches, Paul identified more than two dozen different gift, challenging his readers to consider which are theirs to give. Among them are the gifts of: Administration—to organize and direct people toward a goal; discernment—to distinguish truth from error, good from evil; encouragement—to support and strengthen people; faith—a special capacity for belief and trust in God’s power; giving—an especially generous, even self-sacrificial spirit; hospitality—to be comfortably warm and open with strangers; leadership—to set goals and inspire a vision; mercy—to be deeply compassionate with people who are hurting; prophecy—to proclaim God’s message with authority; service—to identify needs and give effective assistance; pastoring—to guide, nurture, and care for people; teaching—to communicate knowledge effectively. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Paul presumed that none of us possess all of these gifts but that all of us possess at least one or two of them. None of us are completed persons by ourselves. Rather, we find our completion as we exercise our gifts in harmony with one another. Thus not everyone in a local church needs to feel compelled to teach, but some—those who have the gifts of teaching—should. Others will likewise give their gifts of hospitality, administration, or mercy. The body of Christ will therefore thrive if each of us will take time to identify our gifts, to say no to requests that siphon our energy into areas in which we do not feel gifted, and to say yes or even to volunteer for tasks that do harness our gifts. Consider, too, what it would mean for a college to apply the Christian idea that we are gifted. Instead of evaluating all faculty by the same yardstick, much as schools assess giftedness with but one yardstick, a college might encourage its faculty to identify their gifts, to say no to activities in which they do not feel a special competence, and to say yes to those activities in which they do excel. Some might direct their energies more to teaching, some more to befriending an advising students, some more to research, some more to administration. If all such activities were seen as essential to the body life of the institution, then such diversity could be celebrated. If all faculty were held responsible for developing and using their gifts to the utmost, then all could esteem one another as they affirmed each others’ gifts. Excellence would be expected and rewarded, but excellence might involve different priorities for different people. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
And consider finally what it would mean for schools to apply the Christian idea that all are gifted, even all children. One child might be encouraged to develop one’s artistic talent, another one’s mathematical wizardry, still others their capacity for leadership or music or mechanical tasks. There would be no need to pretend that everyone is equal or to teach children as if all were the same. Indeed, would not this Christian idea of giftedness encourage John Gardner’s vision of excellence, by providing opportunities and rewards such that individuals with every sort of gift “will realize their full potentialities, perform at their best and harbor no resentment toward any other level.” The biblical idea that different folks bear different gifts has found a home in psychological science. Intelligence comes in different packages, argue the psychologists Howard Gardner and Robert Sternberg. Mr. Gardner notes that brain damage may diminish one type of ability but not others. He observes that different abilities enabled our ancestors to cope with different environmental challenges (finding their way home, reading others’ emotions, solving problems). Indeed, contends Mr. Gardner and other intelligence researchers of today, we do not have an intelligence. Instead, we have multiple intelligences, each relatively independent of the others. In addition to the verbal intelligence assessed by standard intelligence tests, some folks are blessed with numerical intelligence musical intelligence, spatial intelligence, physical intelligence, or social intelligence. Albert Einstein, Georgia O’Keeffe, Sarah Winchester, Michael Jorden, and William Randolph Hearst are or were all brilliant in some domains but not in others. The psychologists Nancy Cantor and John Kihilstrom also distinguish academic intelligence from social intelligence—the know-how that enables us to comprehend and manage ourselves in social situations. We all have known people who could blast the top off the SAT yet self-destruct for lack of social sensitivity and judgment. Indeed, as Seymour Epstein and Petra Meier note, if academic aptitude signifies social competence, then why are academically smart people “not, by a wide margin, more effective in achieving better marriages, in successfully raising their children, and in achieving better mental and physical well-being?” #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
A critical part of social intelligence is what the psychologist Peter Salovey and John Mayer term emotional intelligence—the ability to perceive, express, understand, and manage emotions. Emotionally intelligent people are self-aware. They cope with life without letting their emotions get hijacked by dysfunctional depression, anxiety, or anger. In pursuit of long-term rewards, they can delay gratification rather than letting themselves be overtaken by impulses. Their empathy enables them to read others’ emotions and respond skillfully—knowing what to say to a grieving friend, when to encourage a colleague, how to manage conflicts. They are emotionally astute, and thus often more successful in careers, marriages, and parenting than are those academically smarter but emotionally denser. In extreme cases, some people display stunning gifs in one domain while utterly lacking them in another. Those with savant syndrome display some island of brilliance—say, in drawing, remembering music, or calculating numbers or dates—while scoring low on intelligence tests and being incapable of living independently. Others have suffered brain damage that destroys one dimension of intelligence but not another. Consider Elliot, a man with normal intelligence and memory, descried by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. Since removal of a brain tumor, Elliot has lived without emotion. “I never saw a tinge of emotion in my many hours of conversation with him,” Damasio reports, “no sadness, no impatience, no frustration.” Shown disturbing pictures of injured people, destroyed communities, and natural disasters, Elliot shows—and he realizes he feels—no emotion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Like Mr. Spock of Star Trek, and the human appearing android Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Elliot knows but he cannot feel. And since he lacked emotional signals, Elliot’s social intelligence plummeted. Unable to intuitively adjust his behavior in response to others’ feelings, he lost his job. He went bankrupt. His marriage collapsed. He remarried and divorced again. At last report, he was dependent on custodial care from a sibling and a disability check. So, the New Testament idea that people come bearing different gifts challenges the popular idea that some are gifted, others not, but finds support in psychological research on the multidimensional nature of giftedness. “Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them.” We may have been unable to integrate certain experiences because they happened at a time when we lacked the strength to do so. In the present day, we are therefore “unconscious” that they happened—they happened before we were organized enough to be either conscious or unconscious. They happened in our pre-history, certainly in pre-conceptual history, when we did not have a structure strong enough to hold in one frame the knowledge of both acceptable and unacceptable aspects of existence. The question is, are we now strong enough to do so? The idea that the strength to integrate is not always available, and that something more is required than bringing into consciousness what has been kept unconscious, has interested psychoanalysts and psychotherapists increasingly in recent decades. With some people—melancholics and obsessionals, one can always count on a reliable and intelligent ego that is able to take in words and then allow them to influence itself. The ego is able to perform what Dr. Freud called “working through.” Such people are strong enough already. They have a coherent self; they have reasonably well-developed ego-functions; their trouble is that they have repressed (by means of horizontal “lids”) things that were unacceptable to their imagery of themselves or of the World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
If the need therapy, they need help mainly in talking about, accepting, and recognizing what they are doing and saying, until they are able to recognize themselves—the hitherto unconscious bits included. However, other people find it hard or impossible to reflect on themselves and their World, but because they cannot accept this or that, but because the excluded feelings really do not belong to the self that is judging whether to accept them or not: there have been vertical splits. These are splits which weaken the structure of the personality—a person’s strength depends on the existence of organizing and integrating processes. These need not be too tremendously powerful or consistent, but they do need to be sufficient no o leave out great areas of experience. To put this the other way round, the strength of a person’s personality depends on having a sufficiently integrated structure to be able to see life as it is without too much distortion or denial. A person with too many splits—a person who really lacks integration—does not have a reliable and intelligent ego that is able to take in words and allow them to influence itself. An infantile ego has been rejected and repressed. It remains therefore undeveloped and weak, and deep maturing comes to a standstill. Such strength also requires “indwelling”—the sense of being based in one’s body. People dwelling in their body know what feels good and what feels bad, and can seek the former and avoid the latter without having to think about it. On the other hand, a split between body and mind erodes one’s sense of being. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
There are no fears worse or deeper than those which arise out of having to cope with life when one feels that one just is not a real person at all. Without such strength, we do not have the integrity to live life as it is without distorting or denying—we dread and resist the possibility of re-experiencing the deep feelings which were too unacceptable to be integrated when we first experienced them. If our integrative processes are not strong enough, we need help to gain strength first, so that we can bear the process of integration. The first task, then, is to become strong enough. And what is “strong enough”? I intend it to mean the possession of enough well-being and self-esteem to be able to accept (integrate) and live with out own imperfections and those of the World. A person who lacks this strength, and whom luck has failed in other ways, may have to work with a psychotherapist until the time when the nuclear self is consolidated, and the talents and skills that are correlated to the nuclear self are revitalized. In what regions of the personality is strength to be found? We do not yet understand perfectly just what it is, when a therapist works with people with this kind of weakness, that helps them get stronger. However, it is clear that the processes involved do not take place in the three-person region of classical psycho-analysis, the area in which Oedipal relationships find a place and in which feelings (instinctual ones in the view of classical psycho-analytic theory) are in conflict with considerations of good sense or good conduct. The area of the Oedipus conflict is characterized by the presence of all least two objects, apart from the person. The area of the Basic Fault is characterized by a very peculiar exclusively two-person relationship. A third area is characterized by the fact that there are no external objects in it. Here people are on their own and their main concern is to produce something out of themselves; this something to be produced may be an object, but is not necessarily so. I propose to call this the level or area of creation. The most often-discussed example is of course artistic creation, but other phenomena belong to the same group, among them mathematics and philosophy, gaining insight, understanding somebody or something. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
At this third level, there is no “other.” It is the level at which something or someone is being recognized and given shape and form for the first time. Something or someone is in the process of becoming conceptualized, but is not yet clearly “mapped.” At this level, although there are no others, there is a sense of connectedness. We know that there are no “objects” in the regions where certain takes place, butt we know also that for some of the time at least, the person is not entirely alone there. Here we are reaching for the concept of ego-relatedness. Our idea of what does on at these levels is still very tentative, but is still uncertain. However, we do now have more hints. The therapeutic side of meditation practices can be competently studied only by one who both practices them form the inside as well as observes them from the outside. The scientists and the medical physician, who can do the later only, are not even half-competent: they miss the essence of the subject in missing the power at work. Their intellects may logically theorize or imaginatively guess at it but that does not bring them into touch with the reality of it. The very scepticism with which they usually confront the record of these unorthodox healings and often reject their genuineness, unfits them for such investigation. The proper openness of mind, neither credulous nor cynical, is hard for them to establish. Spiritual healing must be separated from mental healing, as the former workers by a descent of divine grace but the latter by a power-concentration of mind. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
A cure in the firs case will not only be permanent but also affect the character of the patient, whereas in the second case a cure may be and often if (especially when hypnotic methods are used) transient whilst the character remains untouched. A genuine spiritual healing of the physical body will always produce spiritual results. That is, it will produce an inner change in the character of the person healed. However, when this happens in means that some kind of wrong thinking or wrong feeling is the real cause of one’s physical sickness. For instance, thoughts of bitterness, resentment, criticism, and condemnation strongly held and long sustained against other persons can and very often do easily produce liver trouble. So long as that kind of thinking and feeling continues, so long will the liver trouble continue. The proper way to heal it, therefore, is to get at the psychological seat of trouble—that is, effect inner change. Where spiritual healing treatment influences a human to give up the wrong thinking, so it leaves one utterly, the physical effects of the change may show themselves suddenly and miraculously or slowly and gradually. Although they show themselves as a cure of a physical malady, note that it first began as a mental malady or as an emotional malady. And if the inner change is an enduring one, the following cure will be an enduring one too. This is the only type of healing which can be truly called spiritual. All other kinds of so-called spiritual healing are merely mental healing or hypnotic healing, and the cure can never be equal in quality or durability. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Quite often, they have only temporary results and the sickness reappears because the inner human has been left with all one’s psychological neuroses uncured. Mental healing and hypnotic healing are no, strictly speaking, healing at all. They are suppression of symptoms, and at the cost of retention of the hidden causes of these symptoms. In the cause of mental healing there is not necessarily any change at all in the character of the patient. One’s angers, one’s hostilities, or one’s resentments may remain as active as before. One’s cure simply illustrates the power of mind over body—one’s own or someone else’s mind. It is achieved by faith or concentration or suggestion. However, in the case of spiritual healing there is an inner change along with bodily cure. Why is it wrong to seek the cure of physical ailments by nonphysical remedies, and particularly by spiritual ones? To argue that the inner healing of bad character is more important—which may be granted-does not do away with the necessity of the outer healing. It is not the true spiritual healing if it laves the character and outlook untouched, unimproved. There are other kinds of healing which may relieve or cure one kind of ailment while leaving the person still open to make one’s fate later bring on another kind of ailment. One who sees in everything only matter and beyond it only nothing, who looks to physics and physiology for sufficient explanation of our existence and chemical actions for sufficient explanation of our loftiest emotions, will be sceptical of mentalists principles and distrustful of spiritual healing. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
So much noxious material is eliminated through the ski that three processes of cleansing are needed to counteract it. First, the warm bath. Many persons are not tough enough to stand the weakening effects of a too hot bath. It is better to be prudent and be satisfied with a moderately warm one. Second, the friction rub. Third, the frequent change of underclothing. It is a physiological fact that a part of this material can be re-absorbed into the body if these processes are neglected. When that happens, this rancid and poisonous stuff will open the way to disease. The friction rub may be done with a small coarse rough face cloth or with a loofah sponge. The entire body should be vigorously scrubbed, but especially the feet. A cool—not cold—shower at the end will close the pores and stimulate circulation. Some religions consider a twice-daily shower bath to be an essential part of spirituality. The moderns says that cleanliness is next to godliness. It is also recommended to keep the colon cleans and advisable to keep the breathing passages clear from mucous, especially the thick, gummy kind which adheres to the membranes. This can be done by gargling the throat and washing the nostrils and nasal passages with water which has been purified and slightly dissolved with salt and is comfortably lukewarm. If the eye muscles are overworked by too much desk work, regular resting at intervals during this work will enable them to recuperate their strength and efficiency. In this connection remember the advice given by my occultist that when using any eye drop medicine take care not to touch the eyes themselves with the eye cup or the dropper. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
If one eye gets infected with, say, conjunctivitis in this way one avoids passing the infection to the other eye. The same care should be used with the small towel used for wiping the eyes after washing. Separate towels reserved for this purpose should be used or rather separate face cloths. As planets derive much more substance from air and water for their sustenance than they do from the Earth, it happens that when they rot they return to the Earth more than they have derived from it. Moreover, a forest determines the amount of rainwater by stopping vapors. Thus, in a wooded area that was preserved for a long time without being touched, the bed of Earth that serves for vegetation would increase considerably. However, since animals return to the soil less than they derive from it, and since humans take in huge quantities of wood for plants for fire an other uses, it follows that the bed of vegetative Earth of an inhabited country must always diminish and finally become like the terrain of Arabia Petraea, and like that of so many other provinces of the Old World (which in fact is the region that has been inhabited from the most ancient times), where only salt and sand are found. For the fixed salt of plants and animals remains, while all the other parts are volatized. To this can be added the factual proof based on the quantity of trees and plants of every sort, which filled almost all the uninhabited islands that have been discovered in the last few centuries, and on what history teaches us about the immense forests all over the Earth that had to be cut down to the degree that it was populated or civilized. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Furthermore, if there is kind of a vegetation that can make up for the loss of vegetative matter which was occasioned by animals, according to M. de Buffon’s reasoning, it is above all the wooded areas, where the treetops and the leaves gather and appropriate more water and vapor than do other plants. Second, the destruction of the soil, that is, the loss of the substance that is appropriate for vegetation, should accelerate in proporion as the Earth is more cultivated and as the more industrious inhabitant consumer in greater abundance its products of every sort. My third and most important remark is that the fruits of trees supply animals with more abundant nourishment than is possible for other forms of vegetation: an experiment I made myself, by comparing the products of two land masses of equal size and quality, the one covered with chestnut trees and the other sown with wheat. Among the quadrupeds, the two most universal distinguishing traits of voracious species are derived, on the one hand, from the shape of teeth, and, on the other, from the conformation of the intestines. Animals that live solely on vegetation have al flat teeth, like the horse, ox, sheep and hare, but voracious animals have pointed teeth, like the cat, dog, wolf and fox. And as for the intestines, the frugivorous ones have some, such as the colon, which are not found in voracious animals. It appears therefore that humans, having teeth and intestines like frugivorous animals, should naturally be placed in that class. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
And not only do anatomical observations confirm this opinion, but the monuments of antiquity are also very favorable to it. “Dicaearcuhs,” says St. Jerome, “relates in his books on Greek antiquities that under the reign of Saturn, when the Earth was still fertile by itself, no humans ate flesh, but that all lived on fruits and vegetables that grew naturally.” [This opinion can also be supported by the reports of several modern travelers. Francois Correal, among others, testifies that the majority of inhabitants of the Lucayes, whom the Spaniards transported to the islands of Cuba, Santo Domingo, and elsewhere, died from having eaten flesh.] From this, one can see that I am neglecting several advantageous considerations that I could turn to account. For since prey is nearly the exclusive subject of fighting among carnivorous animals, and since frugivorous animals live among themselves in continual peace, if the human species were of this later genus, it is clear that it would have had a much easier time subsisting in the state of nature, and much less need and occasion to leave it. Brother of the sea, look at the stars, look at the deep blue, and set the World free. Our right is to live and be free; freedom will not come from outside. It is only in ourselves united. How fairer wilt thou be to sight, if thou with us in faith unite; Thy favor we shall always seek. However, American’s sons with wisdom speak: “O ye, who are wise in your own eyes, how can your trumpery at all compare with our great share when God proclaims us free.” And shines on us in glorious light, while you are wrapped in gloom of night? His glory then will shine and gleam—Almightly God, over all Supreme! Almighty God, who are mother and father to us all, look upon your planet Earth divided: Help us to know that we are all your children; that all nations belong to one great family, and all of our religions lead to you. Please multiply our prayers in every land until the whole Earth becomes your congregation, united in your love. Please sustain our vision of a peaceful future and please give us strength to work unceasingly to make that vision real. Amen. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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When You Pursue Only Your Own Interests, You May be Said to Have Fallen Out of Love!
Drown me in Love, my Lord, that I may learn how smooth and swimming it is to love. Love has me in its grasp, sending me to the heights with fervor and wonder I did not know I have within me. The Lord has made known how people ought to treat one another. By searching the scriptures on this subject, we become more fully aware that we do have a responsibility to promote the happiness and well-being of our fellow humans. For example, through Moses the Lord said: “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” reports Leviticus 19.18. To help us understand what is meant by this, the Lord has given some specific examples of what a person will not do to one’s neighbour if be truly loves Jesus. “Ye shall not steal, neither deal falsely neither lie one to another. Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbour, neither rob one. Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block before the blind,” reports Leviticus 19.11-14. Furthermore, the hired servant should be paid promptly for one’s work: “the wages of one that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning,” reports Leviticus 19.13. “Thou shall not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy, whether one be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates: At one’s day thou shalt give one one’s hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it,” reports Deuteronomy 24.14-15. Let me follow You on high, my Beloved Lord “canting the canticle of love,” as Isaiah put it (5.1). Let my soul, beside itself with love, weary itself in Your praise! Let me love You more than myself! #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Let me love myself because You loved me first! Let me love everyone else who truly loves You! That sounds like a lot, but it is only what the law of Love, of which You are the Chiefest Illumination, tells me I have to do. Love’s swift, sincere, pious, joyous, pleasant, brave, patient, long-suffering, virile, and selfless, as Paul wrote in his First Letter to the Corinthians (13.4-7). Love’s selfless; that is to say, when you pursue only your own interests, you may be said to have fallen out of love. Love is mindful of others, humble, honorable; not soft, not giddy, not messing around with the meaningless tasks of this World. Love is sober, chaste, not given to flights of fancy, quiet, and has all the senses under control. In tatters, like a waif or a wastrel, Love nonetheless can approach a prelate with confident step. Love is devoted and thankful to God, trusting and hoping in Him, even though it has been a long tie between consolations. That is to say, Love and Pain go hand and hand throughout life. You may think you know something about Love, but if you are not prepared to suffer for or stand by the Loved One, then you are not worthy to be called a lover. Any lover worth one’s word should freely embrace the hard and the harsh for the Loved One, and at the same time one should not allow oneself to be distracted by Contraries or Contretemps. The World’s dirt seems so remote from these moods of complete goodness as to seem non-existent, or a mere vaporous mist at most. With the glimpse a feelings overspreads one’s heart of benevolence towards all living creatures—not only animal but even plant. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
One would not, could not knowingly harm a single one. The Christians call this love, the Buddhists compassion, the Hindus oneness. My own term is goodwill, but all are right. These are different facets, as seen from different points. In this wonderful state one becomes keenly aware of the love that is at the core of the Universe, and therefore at one’s own core too. However, one not only absorbs it, one also radiates it. It is not something to be held selfishly, like a material possession. As it is received, so it is given. There is no possibility here of feeling stagnant, mediocre, ordinary. It is their very contraries that one feels. There are exquisite moments when all existence seems elevated to a higher plane, when one’s individual being is absorbed in a harmony with all things. The feeling which comes over one at this stage is indescribably delightful. One recognizes its divine quality and rightly attributes it to a transcendental source. No vision accompanies it. Yet the certitude and reality seem greater than if one did. The common youthful experience of falling in love bears some of the leading characteristics of this uncommon mystical experience of awakening to the divine reality. However of course it bears them in a grosser and smaller way. Some of them are: a feeling of “walking on air,” a frequent recollection of beloved at unexpected moments, a glowing sense of deliverance from burdens, a cheerful attitude towards everything and everyone, intense satisfaction with life, rosy expectations about the future, expanded sympathies, dreamy absent-minded lapses from attention to the prosaic everyday round, and new appreciation of poetry, music, or Nature’s beauty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
There is a self which one feels within one yet is not oneself. Something unknown yet joy-giving. Some dynamic force streams through the blood in one’s veins, the feeling in one’s heart, and the will in one’s innermost being. It is no ordinary force, for one knows that never or rarely has one experienced its like before. There is magic in its movement, enchantment in its effect. The things of the World fall far away from you and a great spell will seemingly be put upon the leading mind till you remember little of name, or kin, or country, and care less. You lie in the lap of a shining mood, granted respite from heavy cares and given relaxation from corrosive thoughts. You become aware of the secret undercurrent of holy peace which flows silently beneath the heart. Although one’s general experience of it will be of its gentleness, there will be times when one will feel only an authoritative and commanding force in it, when tremendous power will manifest and rule in some episode or event. One may have a vague feeling some immaterial presence around or within oneself, a presence uplifting, ennobling, unworldly. Not only is the kingdom of Heaven within us but we are ourselves within the kingdom. We may discover this as a psychic and visual experience, as some do, or simply as a feeling-and-knowing experience that All is God. It is a transparence because one feels open, letting in a rare mood. It is also a transcendence, because one feels lifted out of one’s ordinary “I” and put down again on a higher level. Reverence for the divine presence filled my heart awe at the divine wonder permeated my mind. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
One will feel spontaneous peace that comes from one knows not where, intellectual conviction that the right path has been found, mysterious detachment that takes hold of one during Worldly temptations and Worldly tribulation alike. When you are in this wider consciousness you are at home. Outwardly you may be without a roof to shelter your head but still you will feel protected, secure, and provided for. Your feeling and your trust are not groundless. For the outward manifestation of this inward care will follow. You will comprehend that while the Overself thus enfolds you, you can never again feel lonely, never again find the sky turned black because some human love has been denied or been withdrawn from you. It is there, in the deep center of oneself, that one finds holiness and liberation. From the physical standpoint, the ego first becomes aware of the Overself as being located in the heart. However, in higher mystical experience, this awareness is free from any bodily relationship. A feeling of lightness and freedom, songlike well-being and perfect harmony, comes with this disidentification from the body. I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime, of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. Dear soul, up to this point in our friendly chatsworth, with lots of give and take on both sides—and I hope you will not take offense—but I think I can safely say, you are not what I would call—and I want you to know that I speak only as a friend—a vigorous or prudent lover. One feels a rightness about the World-plan and a loveliness in some deeper part of oneself. It may remain for a little while only but its memory will remain for long years. In this lofty mood, bringing so much good will and insight with it, as it does, one is inclined to ignore misunderstanding and hostility from any quarter which caused one resentment or even suffering in the past. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Now this brings us to the oddest thing about Christianity. In a sense the view which I have just described is actually true. From a certain point of view Christ is the same sort of thing as Adonis or Osiris (always, of course, waiving the fact that they lived nobody knows where or when, while He was executed by a Roman magistrate we know in a year which can be roughly dated.) And that is just the puzzle. If Christianity is a religion of that kind why is the analogy of the seed falling into the ground so seldom mentioned (twice only if I mistake not) in the New Testament? Corn-religions are popular and respectable: if that is what the first Christian teachers were putting across, what motive could they have for concealing the fact? The impression they make is that of humans who simply do not know how close they re to the corn-religions: men who simply overlook the rich sources of relevant imagery and association which they must have been on the verge of tapping at every moment. If you say they suppressed it because they were Jewish people, that only raises the puzzle in a new form. Why should the only religion of a “dying God” which has actually survived and risen to unexampled spiritual heights occur precisely among those people to whim, and to whom almost alone, the whole circle of ideas that belong to the “dying God” was foreign? I myself, who first seriously read the New Testament when I was, imaginatively and poetically, all agog for the Death and Re-birth pattern and anxious to meet a corn-king, was chilled and puzzled by the almost total absence of such ideas in the Christian documents. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
One moment particularly stood out. A “dying God”—the only dying God who might possibly be historical—holds bread, that is, corn, in His hand and says, “This is my body.” Surely here, even if nowhere else—or surely if not here, at least in the earliest comments on this passage and through all later devotional usage in ever swelling volume—the truth must come out; the connection between this and the annual drama of the corps must be made. However, it is not. It is there for me. There is no sign that it was there for the disciples or (humanly speaking) for Christ Himself. It is almost as if He did not realize what He had said. The records, in fact, show us a Person who enacts the part of the Dying God, but whose thoughts and words remain quite outside the circle of religious ideas to which the Dying God belongs. The very thing which the Nature-religions are all about seems to have happened once: but it happened in a circle where no trace of Nature-religions are all about seems to have really happened once: but it happened in a circle where no trace of Nature-religion was present. It is as if you met the sea-serpent and found that is disbelieved in sea-serpents: as if history recorded a human who had done all the things attributed to Sir Launcelot but who had himself never apparently heard of chivalry. There is, however, one hypothesis which, if accepted, makes everything easy and coherent. The Christians are not claiming that simply “God” was incarnate in Jesus. They are claiming that the one true God is He whom the Jewish people worshipped as Jahweh, and that is it He who has descended. Now the double character of Jahweh is this. On the one hand He is the God of Nature, her glad Creator. It is He who sends rain into the furrows till the valleys stand so thick with corn that they laugh and sing. The trees of the wood rejoice before Him and His voice causes the wild deer to bring forth their young. He is the God of what and wine and oil. In that respect He is constantly doing all the things that Nature-Gods do: He is Bacchus, Venus, Ceres all rolled into one. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
There is no trace in Judaism of the idea found in some pessimistic and Pantheistic religions tht Nature is some kind of illusion or disaster, that finite existence is in itself an evil and that the cure lies in the relapse of all things into God. Compared with such anti-natural conceptions Jahweh might almost be mistaken for a Nature-God. On the other hand, Jahweh is clearly not a Nature-God. He does not die and come to life each year as a true Corn-king should. He may give wine and fertility, but must not be worshipped with Bacchanalian or aphrodisiac rites. He is not the soul of Nature nor of any part of Nature. He inhabits eternity: He dwells in the high and holy place: Heaven is His throne, not His vehicle, Earth His footstool, not Hs vesture. One day He will dismantle both and make a new Heaven and Earth. He is not to be identified even with the “divine spark” in humans. He is “God and not man”: His thoughts are not our thoughts: all our righteousness is filthy rags. His appearance to Ezekiel is attended with imagery that does not borrow from Nature, but (it is a mystery too seldom noticed) from those machines which humans were to make centuries after Ezekiel’s death. The prophet saw something suspiciously like a dynamo. Jahweh is neither the soul of Nature nor her enemy. She is neither His body nor a declension and falling way from Him. She is His creature. He is not a nature-God, but the God of Nature—her inventor, maker, owner, and controller. To everyone who reads this essay, the conception has been familiar from childhood; we therefore easily think it is the most ordinary conception in the World. “If people are going to believe in a God at all,” we ask, “what other kind would they believe in?” #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
We mistake our privileges for our own instincts: just as one meets ladies who believe their own refined manners to be natural to them. They do not remember being taught. Now if there is such a God and if He descends to rise again, then we can understand why Christ is at once so like the Corn-King and so silent about him. He is like the Corn-King because the Corn-King is a portrait of Him. The similarity is not in the lest unreal or accidental. For the Corn-King is derived (through human imagination) from the facts of Nature, and the facts of Nature from her Creator; the Death and Re-birth patten is in her because it was first in Him. On the other hand, elements of Nature-religion are strikingly absent from the teaching of Jesus and from the Judaic preparation which led up to it precisely because in them Nature’s Original is manifesting itself. In them you have to have from the very outset got in behind Nature-religion and behind Nature herself. Where the real God is present the shadows of that God do not appear; that which the shadows resembled does. The Hebrews throughout their history were being constantly headed off from the worship of Nature-gods; not because the Nature-god were in all respects unlike the God of Nature but because, at best, they were merely like, and it was the destiny of that nation to be turned away from likenesses to the thing itself. The goodness of anything is twofold; one, which is of the essence of it—thus, for instance, to be rational pertains to the essence of humans. As regards this god, God cannot make a thing better than it is itself; although He can make another thing better than it; even as He cannot make the number four greater than it is; because if it were greater it would no longer be four, but another number. For the addition of a substantial difference in definitions is after the manner of the addition of unity of numbers. Another kind of goodness is that which is over and above the essence; thus, the good of a human is to be virtuous or wise. As regards this kind of goodness, God can make better the things He has made. Absolutely speaking, however, God can make something else better than each thing made by Him. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
When it is said that God can make a thing better than He makes it, if “better” is taken substantively, this proposition is true. For He can always make something else better than each individual thing: and He can make the same thing in one way better than it is, and in another way not; as was explained above. If, however, “better” is taken as an adverb, implying the manner of the making; thus God cannot make anything better than He makes it, because He cannot make it from greater wisdom and goodness. However, if it implies the manner of the thing done, He can make something better; because He can give to things made by Him a beer manner of existence as regards the accidents, although not as regards the substance. It is of the nature of a son that he should be equal to his father, when he comes to maturity. However, it is not the nature of anything created, that it should be better than it was made by God. Hence the comparison fails. The Universe, the present creation being supposed, cannot be better, on account of the most beautiful order given to things by God; in which the good of the Universe consists. For if any one thing were bettered, the proportion of order would be destroyed; as if one strong were stretched more than it ought to be, the melody of the harp would be destroyed. Yet God could make other things, or add something to the present creation; and then there would be another and a better Universe. The humanity of Christ, from the fact that it is untied to the Godhead; and created happiness from the fact that it is the fruition of God; and the Blessed Virgin from the fact that she is the mother of God; have all a certain infinite dignity from the infinite good, which is God. And on this account there cannot be anything better than these; just as there cannot be anything better than God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Man has always been fascinating with going back in time. The question has often been asked, if you could go back in time, would you do anything differently? But what if it came out another. However, no one asks, if you could go forward in time, what would you change? As fewer workers in the rich nations have engaged in physical production, more have been needed to produce ideas, patents, scientific formulae, bills, invoices, reorganization plans, files, dossiers, marker research, sales presentations, letters, graphic, legal briefs, engineering specifications, computer programs, and a thousand other forms of data or symbolic output. This rise in white-collar, technical, and administrative activity has been so widely documented in so many countries that we need no statistics here to make the point. Indeed, some sociologists have seized on the increasing abstraction of production as evidence that society has moved into a “post-industrial” stage. The facts are more complicated. For the growth of the white-collar work force can be better understood as an extension of industrialism—a further last surge of the Second Wave—than as a leap to a new system. While it is true that work has grown more abstract and less concrete, the actual offices in which this work is being done are modeled the after Second Wave factories, with the work itself fragmented, repetitive, dull, and dehumanizing. Even today, much office reorganization is little more than an attempt to make the office more closely resemble a factory. In this “symbol-factory,” Second Wave civilization also created a factorylike caste system. The factory work force is divided into manual and nonmanual workers. The office is similarly divided into “high abstraction” and “low abstraction” workers. At one level we find the high abstracters, the technocratic elites: scientist, engineers, and managers, much of whose time is taken up with meetings, conferences, business lunches, or in dictating, drafting memos, placing phone calls, and otherwise exchanging information. One recent survey estimated that 80 percent of the manager’s time is spent in 150 to 300 “information transactions” daily. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
At the other level we find the low abstracters—white-collar proletarians, as it were—who, like factory workers throughout the Second Wave period, perform endlessly routine and deadening work. Mostly female and nonunionized, this group can justifiably smile with irony at the sociologists’ talk of “post-industrialism.” They are the industrial work force of the office. Today the office, too, is beginning to move beyond the Second Wave and into the Third, and his industrial caste system is about to be challenged. All the old hierarchies and structures of the office are soon to be reshuffled. The Third Wave revolution in the office is a result of several colliding forces. The need for information has mushroomed so wildly that no army of Second Wave clerks, typists, and secretaries, no matter how large or hard-working, can possibly cope with it. In addition, the cost of paper work has climbed so calamitously that a frantic search is underway to control it. (Office costs have swelled to 40 or 50 percent of all costs in many companies, and some experts estimate that the expense companies spend per employee annually is $1,844. The expense for preparing one business letter anywhere between $75 and $150 for a typical one-page letter of 350-450 words). Moreover, while the average factory worker in the United States of America today is supported by an estimated $150,000 worth of technology, the office worker, as one Xerox sales man out it, “works with about $13,500 worth of computers and machines, and is probably among the least productive workers in the World.” Office productivity has climbed a bare 4 percent over the past decade, and conditions in other countries are probably even more pronounced. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Contrast this with the extraordinary decline in the cost of computers, as measured by the number of functions performed. It has been estimated that computer output has increased 10,000 times in the past fifteen years, and that the per-function cost today is down 100,000-fold. The combination of rising costs and stagnating productivity on the one hand and computer advances on the other make an irresistible combination. The result is likely to be nothing less than a “wordquake.” Over 66 percent of Americans use a computer at work, and over 80 percent of them say it is essential to their jobs. With this much workplace use and demand, it is important to understand the way a computer can affect your job. Many Americans rely on their computer skills to find meaningful employment and to work effectively once employed. Computer and information technology (IT) touch nearly every aspect of modern life. Information technology can help with such diverse tasks as driving motor vehicles and diagnosing disease. IT enables seamless integration and communication between businesses anywhere in the World. The IT industry is one of the largest in the World employing 1.7 million people. The global computers market is expected to grow from $331.45 billion to $367.56 billion on 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.9 percent. Major companies in the computers market include HP; Apple; Advantech; Eurotech and Kontron. The market is expected to reach $505.45 billion in 2025 with CAGR of 8 percent. The computer is still sometimes called a “smart typewriter” and this device fundamentally alters the flow of information in the office, and with it the job structure. It is however, only one of great family of new technologies deluging the white-collar World. As businesses continue to work primarily remotely, video is increasing in importance. Being able to see team members helps build a sense of comradery and helps everyone feel less isolated from one another, while making collaboration more productive. What we are looking at is the beginning of what some term the “paperless office” of tomorrow. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Not only will video benefit your workforce in the way of conferencing and meetings, it also is the preferred way to consume all content in general. In fact, employees are 75 percent more likely to watch a video than read text. Technology in business communication is largely centered around remote work. We have witnessed a huge mobile tsunami over the past two years. This will only continue as 5G is arriving and offers more in the way of mobility. In fact 1 in 2 people will not return to jobs that do not offer remote work. Also, 75 percent of people feel more productive at home, while 80 percent expect to work from home at least tree times of week. For those concerned about the environment, this is a great solution because it will reduce air pollution, traffic, and fuel consumption. Working from is very important, which is why more people are buying larger houses than they need, so they can have space to work in a quiet area. Instead of wasting money on cars and maintenance and fuel, they are able to invest in a home, something that will earn them money over time. Therefore, people also want to keep their neighborhood peaceful and attractive. To physically maintain communities, there are several millions of dollars of low-interest loans available to remodel homes and upgrade apartments. Ten percent of all apartment building flats are inspected every year, and a building must be brought fully up to code before it can be sold and title transferred. Some communities even used to offer grants to landlords to discourage all-one-race apartments. On a voluntary basis, a landlord could enter a five-year agreement to let Housing Centers serve as the landlord’s rental agent. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The landlord, on singing, became eligible for matching grants up to $10,000 per unit to improve the apartment interiors; there were larger grants for exterior renovations. The Housing Center, in turn, actively sought non-European American tenants for buildings that were predominately European American and European America tenants for buildings that were predominantly non-European American. In both goals of physically maintaining the suburb and encouraging integration, the community program was remarkably successful for a quarter of a century. The communities were tightly managed, and that did not appeal to some. The community would quickly intervene to prevent signs of building deterioration and to encourage racial harmony. The suburb rigidly enforced building codes and also acted swiftly to prevent unethical or illegal activities by realtors. Brotherly love is not synonymous with friendship, although it may be part of it. Friends like each other, delight in each other’s companionship, are confidential, loyal, trusting, and share many mutual interests. Friendship is reciprocal. Brotherly love is more unselfish than either romantic love or friendship. One possessed of Christian love has a profound concern for the welfare of others. One loses one’s life in their interests. One’s life is alter- or other-ego centered. It does not matter whether the other person—the one loved—appreciates or responds to the love shown one, because brotherly love nourishes itself. It resides wholly in the person who loves and does not need response to keep it alive as romantic love and friendship do. The real test of whether one has brotherly love was given by Jesus when he said and exemplified: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you,” reports Matthew 5.44. Brotherly love is impartial and, therefore, universal. One who has brotherly love is concerned for any and every human, whether one be sinner or saint, attractive or unattractive, of the same or of another faith or race. In fact, if one is selective as to whom one loves, the chances are one loves no human in a brotherly way. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
What gives a person the sense of being well and “together”? How does a person become strong, in the sense of having good self-esteem, a god ability to understand situation and use them creatively, good personality-organization which allows feelings and needs to find expression in actions and in gratifications which in turn feed self-esteem? We do not know for sure. We may have come guesses based on what good parents, good friends, and good therapists have in common. It has been interesting to note what parallels between the behavior of good parents and good therapists. Literally, psychotherapy means “ministering to a person’s breath, soul, life.” Parents do this, and psychotherapists do this, but they are not the only ones. Friends and lovers are also notable in this respect. Friends and lovers have certain advantages in ministering to each other. However, in some particulars the professionals have the advantage. First of all, we must remember the many people who have no friends and yet need to have their psyche ministered to. Equally important, there are some things which are incompatible with friendship but which need to happen if a person’s psyche is to be restored, and so this must be left to the professionals. What these things are will become clearer in the course of these essays; they have to do with the circumstances in which a person can make a new beginning. In psychotherapy a person may find the secure boundaries which are essential for this work. Psychotherapists can impose the boundaries within which work with transferences and regressions can safely be carried on. They can set rules and insist on them: only fifty minutes per session, only one session per day, no physical violence. Also, their other close relationships are not endangered by this relationship. And so on. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
What friends are able and willing to do for each other depends on many factors and I see no good in trying to lay down the law about that. My own views are sometimes made clear in this essay and sometimes not—in the latter case often because I am in fact not clear about them myself. Psychotherapy is a developmental process, as growing-up is, and the two have features in common. A difference is that psychotherapy is remedial: it is intended to make people better, to make good some deficiency or disturbance whose roots my go back to the days of childhood. This necessarily raises questions it has been convenient to evade until now: what do I mean by “good” development and by a “fortunate baby”? And if something goes “wrong,” what do I mean? And what do I mean by “better”? My own values necessarily permeate this essay, and it is time to look at these explicitly, however briefly. There are interrelated clusters of values that seem important to me: I think it is better for children (and for those who come into psychotherapy) if, in the course of development, they gain in self-knowledge including knowledge of unwanted regions of the self, self-acceptance including acceptance of at least some unwanted regions of the self, self-direction including the ability to choose one’s own goals and values, self-love, love of other people and knowledge and acceptance of some of their unwanted regions, ability to relate to and yet be separate from others, tolerance of frustration when goals, values or affection require, a varied set of values, freedom to develop further. The first culture of values has to do with the geography and logistics of the self. It seems important to me that people should have the opportunity to discover who they are—what is good and bad in them, what hurts, what delights, and so on—as well as the opportunity to decide what to do about it. The second cluster has to do with relationships. It seems important to me that people should enjoy themselves and each other, and that they should know the difference. The third cluster is about favorable conditions for work, growth, and change. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
In psychotherapy, as in helping children grow up, the ideal development is one in which each new stage is accepted in such a way that the satisfactions of the previous stage are still accessible, neither associated with such pain that thoughts of it must be avoided at all costs, nor so delicious that developing to the next stage seems a trouble from which we recoil. Ideally we should only have to overcome our natural reluctance, conscious or unconscious, to think about painful as well as about pleasant things. However, bad things may have happened to us before we have sufficiently well-organized self-regions to absorb them. What are the consequences? In some circumstances, the memory-traces of the bad experiences are kept apart, and so are not subject to modification by later events. These split-off memory-traces can later be responsible for overwhelming feelings of misery, emptiness, inertia, and fear. By “overwhelming” I mean literally that we feel we have ceased to be people and are just clumps of dreadful feelings. We may try to rationalize those feelings—we feel so terrible because we failed an examination, lost a lover, or a job, or are worried about the state of the World. However in fact, we feel terrible because we are not in touch with memories from when we did not yet exist as persons and yet were in a state of suffering; it would be more accurate to say “There is a sense of dreadful misery” than to say “I feel very miserable”: this misery of those earlier says has never been integrated. If we are ever to feel better, the bad memory-traces of those days have to be integrated later in less painful contexts. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
During that process of integration, a process of dissolution also takes place. These reorganizations enable us to see things as they are, more or less closely connected with us and, by the same token, more or less distant from us. Thus we get a self which as feelings but is not dissolved in them. In therapy or in everyday life, processes have to happen at the end of which a person can say “I feel miserable”: there is an “I” to feel it. The misery no longer feels overwhelming, eternal, and immovable. After that, further healing can take place. Let there be peace, welfare, and righteousness in every part of the World. Let confidence and friendship prevail for the good of east and west, for the good of the needy south, for the good of all humanity. Let people inspire their leaders, helping them to seek peace by peaceful means, helping them and urging them to build a better World, a World with a home for everybody, a World with food and work for everybody, a World with spiritual freedom for everybody. Let those who have the power of money be motivated by selfless compassion. Let money become a tool for the good of humanity. Let those who have power deal respectfully with the resources of the planet. Let them respect and maintain the purity of the air, water, land and subsoil. Let them co-operate to restore the ecological soundness of Mother Earth. Let trees grow up by the billions around the World. Let green life invade the deserts. Let industry serve humanity and produce waste that serves nature. Let technology respect the holiness of Mother Earth. Let those who control the mass media contribute to create mutual understanding, contribute to create optimism and confidence. Let ordinary people meet by the millions across the borders. Let them create a universal network of love and friendship. Let billions of human beings co-operate to create a good future for their children and grandchildren. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Let us survive in peace and harmony with Mother Earth. It is up to us to receive and transmit our Torah. It is up to us to see that the World still stands. May the time be not distant when nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, for the Earth will be filled with the wonder of life. Then shall we sit under our vine and our fig tree and none shall be afraid. We seek a renewed stirring of life for the Earth. We plead that what we are capable of doing is not always what we ought to do. We urge that all people now determine that a wide untrammeled freedom shall remain to testify that this generation has love for the next. If we want to succeed in that, we might show, meanwhile, a little more love for this one, and for each other. The Heavenly hosts in awe reply: “His Kingdom be blessed forever and aye.” Their song being hushed, they vanish away; they may never again offer rapturous lay. But America, therein excel—fixed times they set aside, with praise and prayer, Him One declare, at morn and eventide. His portion them He made, that they His praise declare by night and day; a Torah, precious more than gold, He bade them study, fast to hold; that He may be near, their prayer to hear, for always wear will He as diadem fair His people’s prayer in His phylactery, wherein is told of America’s fame who oft God’s unity proclaim. It is also meet God’s praise to sing in presence of both prince and king. With tempestuous glee, like a stormy sea, they surge and ask: “Who, then, is the Friend of thy heart, for who thou rt cast in the lions’ den?” From that which we fear, make us fearless. O bounteous One, assist us with your grace. May the atmosphere we breathe breathe fearlessness into us: fearlessness on Earth and fearlessness in Heaven! May fearlessness surround us above and below! May we be without fear by night and by day! Let all the World by my friend! #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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A Family Down the Block Has One and So do Several of Our Colleagues!
Take a moment to make a list of your closet friends. What do they have in common (other than the joy of knowing you)? It is likely that most are similar to you in age and the same gender and race as you. There will be exceptions, of course. However, similarity on these three dimensions is the general rule for friendships. Ninety percent of all people in Western society marry at some point. What, beyond attraction, determines how people pair up? The answer is that we tend to marry someone who is like us in almost every way, a pattern called homogamy. In case you are wondering, homogamy also applies to unmarried couples who are living together. Studies show that married and cohabiting couples are highly similar in age, education, race, religion, and ethnic background. In general, you are far more likely to choose someone similar to yourself as a mate than someone very different. This is probably a good thing. Personality traits tend to be closely matches in the most stable marriages. Conversely, this risk of divorce is highest among couples with sizable differences in age and education. Most dangerous of all are “fatal attractions,” in which qualities that originally made a partner appealing are later disliked. Fatal attractions are likely when an individual is drawn to someone who seems “different,” “unique,” or “extreme.” When two people are similar, disenchantment is less likely to occur. Do people look for specific traits in a potential mate? Yes, in the United States of America, both men and women agree that the most important qualities are kindness and understanding, intelligence, exciting personality, good health, adaptability, and physical attractiveness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Love is a great thing, My monastic, monotheistic friend, altogether a great good. “It makes every burden light,” as Matthew has recorded My saying in his Gospel (11.30), and manages to carry every load, no matter how slip-sliding it may be. What is more, it makes every tart and bitter thing taste sweet and juicy. My love is noble and provides the energy for doing great things; it encourages the desiring of even greater things. Love wants to rise, does not want to be tied down. Love wants to walk free, not to be told where to go. However, sadly, it loses its sense of direction. That is to say, it cannot sustain anything in time of consolation; it succumbs in time of desolation. There is nothing sweeter than Love; nothing stronger, higher, broader, happier, fuller, better in Heaven and on Earth. That is because Love is born of God, as the Beloved John has written in his First Letter (4.7), and cannot rest except in God, who is above all created things. Some wonderful effects of Love. First, one who knows how to love runs and rejoices; one is a free human and has no restraints. Second, one gives everything and in return receives everything; in a manner of speaking, one may be said to have everything. That is because one rests in the Great One, who has everything and from whom every good fountain flows. Third, one does not look for gifts for oneself, but love turns one into the giver of all goods. Fourth, Love is not measured out in small packets; more often than not, it spills all over. Fifth, Love is not seen as a load, does not have a reputation as a chore; it is more in the area of motivation than in the exercise of strength. Sixth, Love does not rise out of impossibility; that is because it comes out of possibility and permission. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
All things considered, whoever knows how to love has the strength for everything, fills to overflowing, causes every effect. The one who has not learned to love merely flops to the floor in heap. Some more effects of Love. Love stands the night watch, yet sleeps with one eye open. Exhausted, it nonetheless does not nod off. Shoved, it shoves back. Terrified, it does not pass the terror down the line, but like a flickering flame, a smoking torch, it flares up and burns brighter than before. If you know how to love, then you can make out the words of this riotous shout. It is a burning affection of the soul clamoring in the ears of the Lord, echoing the Song of Songs (2.16): “Mine? You are all mine! Yours? I am all Yours!” Speech can accomplish more than an organizing function, in that it reminds us of imagery which we can hold on to at need—it keeps reverberations alive. The very action of saying things has consequences of a steadying kind. Speech enables people to reassess what has happened to them, to reconsider past events in the light of later experience and even, at a very deep level, to reorganize their understanding of themselves and of their World. It can even help to change the very structure of the personality. Talking puts experience into words. Sometimes talking allows us to connect experiences with words for the first time. This means that, sometimes for the first time ever, we are able to “give an account” of those experiences—we are conscious of them for the first time. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Once the experiences are conscious, there are the experiences, and there is a narrator who is talking about them. Here we see a benign aspect of the process of depersonalizing and distancing. “I” am for the first time consciously distanced from what happened to me. I can get some perspective: “I then did this” or “Such and such happened to me next.” Moreover, the “I” and the “me” in these accounts have a curious status. There is continuity and identity: these experiences were not someone else’s but “mine” (the speaker’s), they belong to my self-regions. However, at the same time, the “I” who is doing the talking now is ten or twenty or more years older than “I” in the account. There is a distance between the self-structures-from-then and the self-structures-of-now, a gap of time. This allows for a new perspective and a new meaning. Meaning depends on context. I am not in a different context from then. If myself-structures today are more mature, more complex, with better ego-functions and capacities for respect and recognition, they may be able to hold and integrate the self-structures for then. Talking, and being understood, changes the nature of the connections between “I then” and “I now,” weakening them in some respects (“Because this happened to me twenty-four years ago, I need not be afraid of thunderstorms now”) and strengthening them in other respects (“I do not need to despise myself for having feared thunderstorms twenty-four years ago. I can stop despising myself and I can love myself.”) If I try to talk honestly to others about my past life, it comes up for review. The relation between my semantic self and my episodic self may also be challenged and changed when they confront one another. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Sympathetic listening, and the knowledge that what happened when I was little, weak, and ignorant cannot happen to me now, give me the strength to try and remember how it was with me then. Between us, we can hold “me then.” Held, I dare given an account of hitherto hidden parts of my self. I can integrate them. This is one reason why friends are so important for our well-being, and why people who for some reason have been unable to make friends or to keep them may find psychotherapeutic groups useful. Sometimes with professionals who help people suffer misfortune and it leads them into difficulties where friends cannot help. However, in more fortunate circumstances, our friends can do a god deal of our organizing and ego-functioning with and for us. They do so anyway in the normal course of life, as we pass the time of day with hem, gossip about others, or explore the meaning of the Universe. They let us talk and blow off steam. They are patient while we talk nonsense. They talk a load of rubbish themselves. They relax us when we get too desperately tense, and amuse us. However, more particularly, good friends strengthen and diversify our ego-functioning: they produce speculations, explanations, and suggestions of their own for us to consider, and much else. Thus the passage which follows may be read in terms of friends or in terms of ego-functioning or in terms of organizing processes. They help us toward increasing knowledge of our selves: they produce new ideas, and they surprise us by changing and developing and expecting us to welcome the changes. Though they may be tolerant they will not put up with our nonsense indefinitely without protest. They love us and accept us and warm us and make us feel worth while. They help us sand firm under pressure. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
In times of crisis friends are especially important, sustaining us while we encounter and explore new things, encouraging us to carry on, holding us when we temporarily lose our footing in the stress of reorganizing our concepts. They take care of us and step in when, in the course of the temporary disorganization which new developments may bring, we are about to do something permanently detrimental to our interests. Some people are able to give sense and direction to their lives by commitment to a cause or a task. There are many who can put something non-personal into the center of their lives. I may have got no foundation for self-love from the love of others, but by being part of something admirable, I can make my life worthwhile. Some people who take this second chance will come to have a deep and rich identity, in terms of which they organize their lives. However, others will not integrate in this organized way, and yet feel held by a sense of purpose and coherence because they know what they are doing and that it is worth while. Such people present quite a range. At one end are those who are contained within an ordered social system such as traditional societies are said to afford, or religious orders or other ideologically committed groups; these will be exercising individual judgment only in narrowly restricted areas. At the other extreme are people in the fragmented societies with which most readers will be familiar. Yet even here, those of us who have no solid sense of who we are, independent of what we do, may find significance in what we are doing and feel held by it. Many creative people belong in this category. As one creation is accomplished, hey suffer a kind of “post-coital depression,” but this when the next project begins to define itself. At a less elevated level are many of us who can always cheer ourselves up by the accomplishment of small tasks well done: shoes shined, cakes baked, lawns mown, letters written. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
What gives a person the sense of being well and “together”? There are many indications that if I am to have a deep, east, and steady sense of well-being and identity, I must not have had any experiences so bad that they have cut me off from my bodily self. If they have, I must make a new beginning. Secondly, I must have been experienced as a whole person to unconscious matter, but it is not mystical. It is neurological. Neurologically the infant forms a set of conceptual structures which are either closely interconnected or nor, depending on whether those who relate to the infant regard it as a baby or as a set of tasks requiring to be done. The baby who is regarded as a loud yell at one end and a bad smell at the other will carry that knowledge through life. Experiencing myself as loveable strengthens the basis for a sense of well-being and self-esteem yet further. This lovability must depend on having been valued for being myself rather than for anything I do. The value of something we cherish or that nourishes us must lie exactly in not being exciting and not having to work or be worked for. A poorly cathected self is one which has experienced relatively little love, relatively little respect for its manifestations, relatively little empathy; lacking feelings of value and power, there are no deep roots for later self-esteem to develop from. The baby who is recognized as a person from the start is able to use this experience of recognition as a validation of itself, and can let the consequent imagery of itself perform holding functions. This in turn creates the right conditions for further integrating processes. The changes that a long-established habit of walking on two feet could have brough about in the conformation of humans, the relations that are still observed between one’s arms and the forelegs of quadrupeds, and the induction drawn from their manner of walking, could have given rise to doubts about the manner that must have been the most natural to us. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
All children begin by walking on all fours, and need our example and our lessons to learn to stand upright. There are even savage nations, such as Hottentots, who, greatly neglecting their children, allow them to walk on their hands for so long that they then have a great deal of trouble getting them to straighten up. The children of the Caribs of the Antilles do the same thing. There are various examples of quadruped men, and I could cite among others that of the child who was found in 1344 near Hesse, where he had been raised by wolves, and who said afterward at the court of Prince Henry that, had the decision been left exclusively to him, he would have preferred to return to the wolves than to live among men. He had embraced to such an extent the habit of walking like those animals, that wooden boards had to be attached to him to force him to stand upright and maintain his balance on two feet. It was the same with the child who was found in 1694, in the forests of Lithuania, and who lived among bears. He did not give rise, says M. de Condillac, any sign of reason, walked on his hands and feet, had no language, and formed sounds that bore no resemblance whatever to those of a man. The little savage of Hanover, who was brought to the court of England several years ago, had all sorts of trouble getting himself to walk on two feet. And in 1719, two other savages, who were found in the Pyrenees, ran about the mountains in the manner of quadrupeds. As for the objection one might make that this deprives one of the use of one’s hands from which we derive so many advantages, over and above the fact that the example of monkeys shows that the hand can be used quite well in both ways, this would prove only that man can give one’s limbs a destination more congenial than that of nature, and not that nature has destined man to walk otherwise than it teaches one. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
However, there are, it seems to me, much better reasons to state in support of the claim that humans are bidped. First, if it were shown that they could have originally been formed otherwise than we see one and yet finally become what one is, this would not suffice to conclude that this is how it happened; for, after having shown the possibility of these changes, it would still be necessary, prior to granting them, t demonstrate at least their probability. Moreover, if humans’ arms seem as if they could have served as legs when needed, it is the sole observation favorable to that system, out of a great number of others which are contrary to it. The chief ones are that the manner in which humans’ head is attached to one’s body, instead of directing one’s view horizontally (as is the case for all other animals and for humans themselves when one walks upright), would have kept one, while walking on all fours, with one’s eyes fixed directly on the ground, a situation hardly conducive to the preservation of the individual; that the tail one is lacking, and for which one has no use when walking on two feet, is useful to quadrupeds, and none of them is deprived of one; that the breast of a woman, very well located for a biped who holds her child in her arms, is so poorly located for a quadruped that none has it located in that way; that, since the hind part is of an excessive height in proportion to the forelegs (which causes us to crawl on our knees when walking on all fours), the whole would have made an animal that was poorly proportioned and that walked comfortably; that if one has places one’s foot as well as one’s hand down flat, one would have had one less articulation in the hind leg than do other animals, namely the one that joins canon to the tibia; and that by setting down only the tip of the foot, as doubtlessly one would have been forced to do, the tarsus (not to mention the plurality of bones that make it up) appears too large to take the place of the canon, and its articulations with the metatarsus and the tibia too close together to give the human leg in this situation the same flexibility as those of quadrupeds. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Since the example of children is taken from an age when natural forces are not yet developed nor the members strengthened, it proves nothing whatever. I might just as well say that dogs are not destined to walk because several weeks after their birth they merely crawl. Particular facts also have little force against the universal practice of all humans; even nations that have had no communication with others could not have imitated anything about them. A child abandoned in a forest before one is able to walk, and nourished by some beast, will have followed the example of one’s nurse in training oneself to walk like the figure of dependence. Habit could have given one capabilities one did not have from nature and just as one-armed humans are successful, by dint of exercise, at doing with their feet whatever we do with our hands, one will finally have succeeded in using one’s hands as feet. Psychology receives much criticism, but it can be used to complement Christian faith. In celebrating the complementary relationships that exist between psychology and religion we must not, however, delude ourselves into thinking that there are no conflicts. As when we build a tunnel between two territories, it sometimes happens that the two ends of the tunnel simply do not connect. The two tunnels of psychology and religion may fail to connect because the two disciplines start off guided by different underlying values. The two fields may also fail to connect because they approach a subject with two utterly different conceptions of it. A case in point is the idea of giftedness. Consider the concept of giftedness as found in an older educational psychology and then in the New Testament. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
A family down the block has one. So do several of our colleagues. One family we know has two of them. And each of these families knowns of other families who have one: a gifted child. All across America a great hunt is on to find more gifted children. A promotional letter from the Gifted Children Newsletter solicited subscriptions from parents who “have the sneaking suspicion your child is special in some way.” And how many are special? Dorothy Sisk, former director of the U.S. Office of Gifted and Talented, estimate that “approximately 3 to 5 percent of the school age-population could be considered gifted and talented.” The implication is that the other 95 percent are not gifted. And that explains why, despite the lobbying of the mostly European American, upper-middle-class parents of these children, most school districts find “there generally are not enough gifted children” in their town to justify special programs for their gifted children. Nevertheless, the psychology and education of a gifted few has become something approaching a social movement. Several national associations for the gifted have sprung up, as have journals and magazines. Nearly every state now as a coordinator of programs for the gifted. Virtually everyone agrees that the gifted-child movement will serve a valuable purpose if it pushes schools to treat children as individuals. Not every third-grader should be taking the same spelling test and working the same math problems. Better if we can find ways to individualize instructions so that no child is bored by work that is too easy or frustrated by tasks too hard. The challenge is to provide opportunities and rewards for individuals of every degree of ability so that students at every level will realize their full potentialities, perform at their best and harbor n resentment toward any other level. However, the problem with the gifted-child movement, says its critics, is that it does not affirm and stimulate individuals of every ability level and, worse, may provoke resentment or self-disparagement among those implicitly labeled “not gifted or talented.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The gifted may get to visit computer centers, do special art and science projects, visit museums, and hear guest speakers, while the nongifted remain in their classrooms, wondering why they are excluded. Moreover, labels such as “gifted” and “not gifted” can be self-confirming. In experiments, teachers who are told that certain children fit such labels, or students who are led to feel competent or incompetent by receiving such labels, sometimes act in ways that make the label into a reality. In all the hoopla over giftedness, what most people miss is the arbitrariness of the concept. We forget that giftedness is only a concept, artificially defined by scores among the top 3 or 4 percent of some test of aptitude or intelligence. We begin to assume that giftedness really exists out there somewhere. We come to believe it is like a red hair: children either have it of they do not. Actually, giftedness is a decision made in the minds of those who use the word. Nothing is gifted until someone names it that. Nature has no clustered children into well-defined groups corresponding to our value-laden labels. We, not nature, decide what is a flower and what is a weed. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, a weed is but a flower that someone decides does not belong in the garden. The arbitrariness of designating what is and what is not gifted becomes apparent when we try to agree on a practical definition. To the Yanomamo Indians of South America, giftedness is possession of the skills of a great hunter and warrior. To Suzuki violin teachers, it is musical talent. In middle-class America, one finds almost as many definitions of the term as articles on gifted children. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
However, in order to pigeon-hold children as gifted or not gifted, we must somehow measure their giftedness. Thus we often reduce it to a score on a one-dimensional device that measures not artistic talent or leadership skill or physical prowess or any other gift that a particular child may have, but IQ score. Several other quite extraordinary advances are taking place in society and transforming the way we make things. As some industries move from mass to small batch production, others are already moving beyond that toward full customization on a continuous-flow basis. Instead of starting and stopping production at the beginning and end of each short run, they are advancing to the point at which the machines can continuously reset themselves, so that he units of output—each one different from the next—stream from the machines in an unbroken flow. In a nutshell, we are racing toward the machine customization on a round-the-clock, continuous basis. Another significant change, as we shall shortly see, brings the customer more directly than ever before into the manufacturing process. In some industries we are only a step removed from a situation in which a customer-company pipes its specifications directly into the manufacturer’s computers, which will in turn control the production lines. As this practice becomes widespread, the customer will become so integrated into the production process that we will find it more and more difficult to tell just who is actually the consumer and who the producer. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Finally, while Second Wave manufacture was Cartesian in the sense that products were broken into pieces, then painstakingly reassembled, Third Wave manufacture is post-Cartesian or “wholistic.” This is illustrated by what has happened to common manufactured products like the wristwatch. Whereas watches once had hundreds of moving parts, we are now able to make solid-state watches that are more accurate and reliable—with no moving parts at all. Similarly, today’s Panasonic TV set is more of a computer than TV made just ten years ago. They are thinner, more stylish, have higher quality digital signage and a much more vibrant and enhanced picture. As tiny microprocessors—those tiny miracle chips again—turn up in more and more products making them more efficient, better quality, and more enthralling. These new electronics certainly are gifted. And of course with technology, not only is everything becoming more stylish, devices are also becoming more compact and reliable. Computers have made it where watches can be used as telephones, lightweight laptops have replaced bulk desktops, and cameras can function perfectly underwater or catch moving objects clearly (as long as that is what they are designed for). By intervening at the molecular level, by using computer-assisted design or other advanced manufacturing tools, we integrate more and more functions into fewer and fewer parts, substituting “wholes” for many discrete components. What is occurring can be compared to the rise of computers in residential agriculture. Instead of simply setting a program or watering the yard by hand, new tools now allow your sprinkler system to analyze moisture content, types of vegetation, and the weather to decide how much water is needed and when. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
There are even small robots that can weed your garden for you on a constant basis so one never sees a weed sprouting. We are also beginning to see this “presto effect” in construction and manufacturing. The question is with things becoming more automated, more expensive, and more efficient, will the human population respond by decreasing because they will not be as needed as in the past, and it would not be wise to have a population of people, who cannot afford to live, overcrowding our communities and sitting idle. The pattern becomes clear, therefore. Vast changes in the techno-sphere and the info-sphere have converged to change the way we make goods. We are moving rapidly beyond traditional mass production to a sophisticated mix of mass and de-massified products. The ultimate goal of this effort is now apparent: completely customized goods, made with wholistic, continuous-flow processes, increasingly under the direct control of the consumer. In brief, we are revolutionizing the deep structure of production, sending currents of change through every layer of society. However, this transformation, which will affect the student planning a career, the business planning an investment, or the nation planning a development strategy, cannot und understood in isolation. It must be seen in direct relationship to yet another revolution—this one in the office. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Artificial intelligence will raise humanity to the heights of power and immortality many have envisioned. Throughout the World, hundred of people are making a difference in their neighborhoods, their communities, and their country. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
In the public service arena, God loving people are changing laws, shaping school curricula, working for peace, laboring against bad habits, and helping elect good men and women to public office—or running for office themselves. The alternative to the succession model in the suburbs is the parallel growth model. What this suggests is that suburbs show both European American growth, as well as growth of other races and/or cultures. This appears to have been the more common pattern for recent decades, with comparatively less racial turnover when compared to the patten in central cities. Even thirty to four years ago, when non-dominate culture groups rates of suburbanization were already exceeding European American rates, there was no major pattern of succession of suburbs from European American to non-European America. However, we have seen European Americans move totally out of some areas, and that is mostly due to an increase in wealth. They can afford other neighborhoods usually because they have seen growth in equity in their homes, they are more established in their careers, and have been left an inheritance. This is also because America is a country that allows immigration, so as new people move in, they tend to inhabit costal communities, which can cause them to become more populated and increase prices. However, costal communities are also where more business hubs are because back in the days when things traveled by ships, that is where they docked and most commerce took place. Many suburbs are not turning over racially because European Americans make up 60.1 percent of the population. So rapid displacement of European Americans is not occurring everywhere, but is starting to happen as our nation diversifies. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
African Americans in the suburbs tend to have a higher income than those in central cities. In metropolitan areas with a population of at least a million, African American suburban families had an average income of $66.840.83. That is 55 percent higher than the average income of central-city African Americans in the same metropolitan areas. It is interesting, however, that not all non-Europeans are open to integration and diversity. In seeking that suburban dream, some middle-class non-European American families are deliberately forgoing the American dream of an integrated society. For instance, many Asian American moved to Greenhaven/Pocket in South Sacramento, which is an upper-middle class suburb. Serval African Americans moved to suburbs such as Rolling Oaks in the Miami area and Brook Glen and Wyndham Park outside Atlanta, which represents for many middle-class African Americas an affirmative decision to live in predominately African American suburbs. Race is still a core variable in American society, but class is more important than race in determining one’s neighbors. For much of the middle class, race is increasingly being supplanted by the social-class variables of income, education, and occupations. As we are well into the new century, the variables of social class are affecting housing decisions. While middle-class neighbors of any race are becoming increasingly acceptable, lower-class neighbors are not. People tend to want peace and quiet in their neighborhoods. They want to feel safe. They want their kids to be able to play in their backyards and they do not want their property vandalized or stolen. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Believe it or not, there are still some communities in America where people live their doors unlocked and their keys in their cars. And it is not because they are forgetful, but because their communities are just that safe and peaceful. Overall the pattern of housing in America is one of optimism and some discouragement. The 1968 Fair Housing Act has displaced most government or illegal segregation in America. Many European Americas accept open housing principal. Neighborhood or suburban racial changeover is no longer triggered by the presence of non-European America residents, but European Americans and others still exhibit reluctance to move into predominantly non-European American areas. The old racial segregation is largely becoming history, and because many people are driven by money and sales, racial steering by real estate agents and discrimination against non-European Americans by banks and financial institutions is less common. There are even loans for people who have income, but cannot verify that income, called non-prime loans. These people can afford expensive houses, but may not be able to prove where their money is coming from, and the banks want to accommodate them because cash is king! Over the decades suburbs have taken much criticism as being the recipients of white flight and the last bastion of the lace front curtain, white shoe law firm community. However, as indicated, the data shows a much more complex racial mosaic. Suburbs are becoming more multiracial and multiethnic. Ironically, as we enter the new century, the suburbs have the opportunity to achieve what the cities largely have failed to accomplish: truly racially integrated communities. To live content with small means, to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion, to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich, to study hard, think quietly, talk gentle, act frankly, to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart, to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never—in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. This is to by my symphony. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
I have come to terms with the future. From this day onward I will walk easy on the Earth. Plant trees. Kill no living things. Live in harmony with all creatures. I will restore the Earth where I am. Use no more of its resources than I need. And listen, listen to what it is telling me. Were the sky of parchment made, a quill each reed, each twig, and blade o, could we with ink the oceans fill, were every human a scribe of skill, the marvelous story of God’s greatest glory would still remain untold; for He, Most High, the Earth and sky created alone of old. Without fatigue or weary hand, He spoke the word, He breathed command; the World and all that therein dwell, field and meadow, fen and fell, mount and sea, in six days He with life did then inspire; the work when ended, His glory ascended upon His throne of fire. Before Him myriads angels flash, to praise the Mighty One, Ancient of Days; six-winged hosts stand at their posts—the flaming Seraphim—in hushed awe together draw to chant their morning hymn. The angels, together, without delay, call one to another in rapturous lay: “Thrice holy He whose majesty fills Earth from end to end.” The Cherubim soar, like the ocean’s roar, on celestial spheres, ascend, to gaze upon the Light on high, which, like the bow in cloudy sky, is iris-colored, silver-lined; while hasting on their assigned, in every tongue they utter song and bless and praise the Lord, whose secret and source, whose light and force can never be explored. There is the peace which comes from having a well-filled stomach. There is the peace of the graveyard. However, a glimpse gives us the highest peace, the Shanti of Indian sages, that which passeth understanding of the New Testament. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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At His Preliminary Examination He Testified that He Has Been in the Snare of the Devil!
A weary and secretive darkness crept into her face, a distraction, as though her soul had traveled out of doors towards Heaven, and the she looked down sadly. When I came in sight of the house where John Procter live, there was a very hard blow struck on my breast which caused great pain in my stomach and amazement in my head. However, I did see no person near me, only my wife behind me on the same horse. And when I cam against said Mr. Procter’s house, according to my understanding, I did see John Procter and his wife at the said house. [They were, remember, in prison at this time.] Mr. Procter himself looked out of the window and his wife did stand just without the door. I told my wife of it, and she did look that way and could see nothing but a little maid at the door. I saw no maid there, but Mr. Procter’s wife according to my understanding did stand at the door. Afterwards, about half a mile from the aforesaid house, I was taken speechless for some short time. My wife did ask me several questions and desired me that if I could not speak I should hold up my hand, which I did. And immediately I could speak as well as ever. [Notice again that the fit was broken when the subject is able to move or speak.] And when we came to the way where Salem Road cometh into Ispwich Road, here I received another blow on my breast which caused much pain, so that I could not sit on my horse. And when I did alight off my horse, to my understanding I saw a woman coming towards us about sixteen or twenty pole from us, but did not know who it was. My wife could not see her. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
When I did get up on my horse again, to my understanding there stood a cow where I saw the woman. [Witches were thought capable of transforming their shapes.] After that we went to Boston without any further molestation, but after I came home again to Newbury I was pinched and nipped by something invisible for some time. However, now through God’s goodness to me I am well again. That was testimony from Joseph Bailey of what he and his wife encountered. Testimony like this is careful and honest, and historians have been wrong in refusing to take it seriously. Mr. Baily was quite aware that he had been ill, and that the illness had created a difference between his perceptions and those of his wife. However, the fatal distinction between his understandings of the event and ours is that his culture led him to attribute his illness to witchcraft whereas ours permits us to attribute it to his fear of witchcraft. There are many similar instances of the specters of innocent people appearing to afflict the citizenry once they were suspected of witchcraft. One of the more interesting involves John Willard, who had at first been a deputy-constable employed in arresting persons who had been complained of. According to Robert Calef, an American author who wrote a book on the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-93, he became dissatisfied after being sent to arrest persons he believed innocent, and resigned his position. This immediately brought him under suspicion, and soon the afflicted girls were crying out against him. Shortly thereafter his grandfathers, Bray Wilkins, was ready for dinner when John Willard came into the house with my son Henry Wilkins, before I sat down, and said Mr. Willard to my apprehension looked after such a sort upon me as I never before discerned in any. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
That is, Mr. Wilkins thought Mr. Willard had “overlooked” him—given him the evil eye. I did but step into the next room and I was presently taken so that I could not dine nor eat anything. I cannot express the misery I was in, for my water was suddenly stopped and I had no benefit of nature, but was like a man in a rock. And I told my wife immediately that I was afraid that Mr. Willard had done me wrong. My pain continuing and finding no relief my jealousy [id es, suspicion] continued. Mr. Lawson and others there were all amazed and knew not what to do for me. There was a woman accounted skillful [who] came hoping to help me, and after she had used means she asked me whether none of those evil persons had done me damage. I said I could not say they had but I was sore afraid they had. She answered, she did fear so too. As near as I remember I lay in this case three or four days at Boston, and afterwards, with the jeopardy of my life (as I though), I cam home. And then some of my friends coming to see me (and at this time John Willard was run away) one of the afflicted persons, Mercy Lewis, came in with them, and they asked whether she saw anything. She said, “Yes, they are looking for Jon Willard but here he is on his grandfather’s belly.” (And at that time I was in grievous pain in the small of my belly.) I continued so in grievous pain and my water much stopped till said Mr. Willard was in chains. And then as near as I can guess I have considerable ease. However, on the other hand, in the room of a stoppage I was vexed with a flowing of water so that it was hard to keep myself dry. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
On the fifth [of] July last, talking with some friends about John Willard, some pleading his innocency and myself and some others arguing the contrary, within about one-quarter of an hour after that I was taken in the sorest distress and misery, my water being turned into real blood, or of a bloody color, and the old pain returned excessively as before, which continued for about twenty-four hours together. In this testimony, we come to understand the hysterical loss of appetite which was Mr. Wilkins’ first symptom we have seen before and shall see again. The inability to urinate we have seen in Mrs. Simms as a result of Manny Redd’s curse. However, there was clearly something organic as well as psychosomatic wrong with Bray Wilkins. The blood in the urine coupled with the extreme pain of relatively short duration suggests that it may have been a kidney stone. However, whatever it was, both Mr. Wilkins and the community at large were by this time ready to attribute it to witchcraft. William Baker’s confessions provide an excellent example that the Salem Witch Trials were carried in chiefly by the complaints and accusations of the afflicted and by the confessions of the accused, condemning themselves and others. Nothing is a first sight more surprising than the number of the confessors and the character of their confessions. There were about fifty of them, and the statements which they made far exceed in color and detail the simple statements of personal guilt that were necessary to save their lives. According to Mr. Baker, at his preliminary examination he testified that he has been in the snare of the Devil three years. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
That the Devil first appeared to him like a black man, and he perceived he had a cloven foot; that the Devil demanded of him to give up himself soul and body unto him, which he promised to do. [The Devil promised in return to pay Mr. Baker’s debts and see that he lived comfortably. Mr. Baker signed the contract in blood.] Satan’s design was to set up his own worship, abolish all churches in the land (which some say politicians are currently doing), to fall next [id est, first] upon Salem and so go through the country. He saith the Devil promised that all his people should be equal, that there should be n day of resurrection or of judgment, and neither punishment nor shame for sin. That explains why people are trying to banish God and they church. They know they are bad people and believe they can avoid being held responsible for their crimes and sins by raising hell on Earth and raising the Devil. Mr. Baker said that the demonic “Grandess” had told him there were about “307 witches in the country” and he volunteered his opinion that all the persons arrested and imprisoned to date (August 29, 1692) were guilty. However, an oral confession was not enough for him. Mr. Hale prints another “which he wore himself in prison, and sent to the magistrate to confirm his former confession.” However, an oral confession was not enough for him. Mr. Hale prints another “which he wrote himself in prison, and sent to the magistrates to confirm his former confession.” Here is his testimony: God having called me to confess my sins and apostasy in that fall in giving the Devil advantage over me, appearing to me like a Black, in the evening, to set my hand to his book, as I have owned to my shame. He told me that I should not want [in] so doing. At Salem Village, there being a little off the Meeting-House about an hundred five blades [id est, young bucks], some with rapiers by their sides, which was called (and might be more for ought I know) by Bishop and Burroughs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
And the trumpet sounded, and [there was] bread and beverage which they called Sacrament, but I had none, being carried over all on a stick, never being at any other meeting. I being at carting a Saturday last, all the day of hay and English corn, the Devil brought my shape to Salem and did afflict Martha Sprague and Rose Foster by clitching my hand. And a Sabbath day my shape afflicted Abigail Martin. Elizabeth Johnson and Abigail Faulkner have been my enticers to this great abomination, as one have owned and charged her to her sister with the same. And the design was to destroy Salem Village, and to begin at the minister’s house, and to destroy the Church of God, and to set up Satan’s kingdom, and then all will be well. And now I hope God in some measure has made me something sensible of my sin and apostasy, begging pardon of God, and of the Honorable Magistrates and all God’s People, hoping and promising by the help of God to set to my heart and hand to do what in me leith to destroy such wicked worship, humbly begging the prayers of all God’s People for me [that] I may walk humbly under this great affliction and that I may procure to myself he sure mercies of David and the blessing of Abraham. Such testimony sheds light on the centuries long plot of some to remove God from America. Pray I must, my Lordly Friend, but what should I pray? Bless You, Heavenly Father, Father of my Lord Jesus Christ, for remembering me, pauper that I am? O Father of mercies and God of consolations, as Paul began his Second Letter to the Corinthians (1.3), I give You thanks, unworthy as I am of Your every consolation? #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
I bless You always, and I glorify You, with You Only Begotten Son and the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, for ever and ever? O Lord God, my Holy Loving Friend, when You come into my heart, You make my blood dance? “You are my glory,” thrummed the Psalmist (3.3) and “the exaltation of my heart” (119.111)? You are my hope and—thrumming again—“my refuge in the day of my tribulation” (59.16)? I ask again, O Lord, what should I pray? At this point in my life, I find myself not only a little long in the tooth, but also a little short in the hoof; that is to say, a little short of breath in the pursuit of Love and Virtue. I have no one to turn to. You are the only One who can help me. Do not be surprised, then, when I ask You to visit me more often. I need to know more about the holy disciplines. Will they free my body from the itch, cure my heart from the worm? Cleanse me on the inside, scrub me on the outside, and I will be ready enough to love, strong enough to suffer, stable enough to preserve. And you say that these blood drinkers are worshiped in the hills. It was the spring of 1880, I had lost my way, and could not tell how far I might be from my destination. I was very tired and had a heavy knapsack on my shoulders, packed with stones and relics from the ruins of the Old Pelasgic fortress which I had been exploring, besides a number of old coins and a lamp or two which I had purchased there. I could discern no signs of any human habitation, and the hills, covered with wood, seemed to shut me in on every side. I was beginning to think seriously of looking out for some sheltered spot under a thicket in which to pass the night. I was so excited to get back to the Winchester estate. The mansion was a large rambling place, and was tolerably comfortable within. My room was situated at the end of a long passage; there were two rooms on the right side of this passage, and a window on the left, which looked out upon the garden. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Having taken a survey of the outside of the house while getting some fresh air after dinner, when the moon was up, I remembered exactly the position of my chamber—the end room of a long narrow wing, projecting at right angles from the main building, with which it was connected only by the passage and two side rooms already mentioned. Please to bear this description carefully in mind while I proceed. Before getting into bed, I drove into the floor close to the door a small gimlet which formed part of a complicated Winchester pocket-knife which I always carried with me, so that it would be impossible for any one to enter the room without my knowledge; there was a lock to the door, but the key would not turn in it; there was also a bolt, but it would not enter the hole intended for it, the door having sunk apparently from its proper level. I satisfied, myself, however, that the door was securely fastened by my gimlet, and soon fell asleep. How can I describe the strange and horrible sensation which oppressed me as I woke out of my slumber? I had been sleeping soundly, and before I quite recovered consciousness I had instinctively risen from my pillow, and was crouching forward, my knees drawn up, my hands clasped before my face, and my whole frame quivering with horror. I saw nothing, felt nothing; but a sound was ringing in my ears which seemed to make my blood run cold. I could not have supposed it possible that any mere sound, whatever might be its nature, could have produced such a revulsion of feeling or inspired such intense horror as I then experienced. It was not a cry of terror that I heard—that would have roused me to action—nor the moaning of one in pain—that would have distressed me, and called forth sympathy rather than aversion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
True, it was like the groaning of one in anguish and despair, but not like any mortal voice: it seemed too dreadful, too intense, for human utterance. The sound had begun while I was fast asleep—close to the head of my bed—close to my very pillow; it continued after I was wide awake—a long, hollow, protracted groan, making the midnight air reverberate, and then dying gradually away until it ceased entirely. It was some minutes before I could at all recover from the terrible impression which seemed to stop my breath and paralyse my limbs. At length I began to look about me, for the night was not entirely dark, and I could discern the outlines of the room and the several pieces of furniture in it. I then got out of bed, and called aloud, “Who is there? What is the matter? Is anyone ill?” I repeated these enquiries in Italian, German, and French, but there was none that answered. Fortunately I had some matches in my pocket and was able to light my candle. I then examined every part of the room carefully, and especially the wall at the head of my bed, sounding it with my knuckles; it was firm and solid there, as in all other places. I unfastened my door, and explored the passage and the two adjoining rooms, which were unoccupied and almost destitute of furniture; they had evidently not been used for some time. Search as I would, I could gain no clue to the mystery. Returning to my room I sat down upon the bed in great perplexity, and began to turn over in my mind whether it was possible I could have been deceived—whether the sounds which caused me such distress might be the offspring of some dream or nightmare; but to that conclusion I could not bring myself at all, much as I wished it, for the groaning had continued ringing in my ears long after I was wide away and conscious. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
While I was thus reflecting, having neglected to close the door which was opposite to the side of my bed where I was sitting, I heard a soft footstep at a distance, and presently a light appeared at the further end of the passage. Then I saw the shadow of a man cast upon the opposite wall; it moved very slowly, and presently stopped. I saw the hand raised, as if making a sign to someone, an I knew from the fact of the shadow being thrown in advance that there must be a second person in the rear by whom the light was carried. After a short pause they seemed to retrace their steps, without my having had a glimpse of either of them, but only of the shadow which had come before and which followed them as they withdrew. It was then a little after one o’clock, and I concluded they were retiring late to rest, and anxious to avoid disturbing me, though I have since thought that it was the light from my room which caused their retreat. I felt half inclined to call to them, but I shrank, without knowing why, from making known what had disturbed me, and while I hesitated they were gone; so I fastened my door again, and resolved to sit up and watch a little longer by myself. However, now my candle was beginning to burn low, and I found myself in this dilemma: either I must extinguish it at once, or I should be left without the means of procuring a light in case I should be again disturbed. I regretted that I had not called for another candle while there were people yet moving in the house, but I could not do so now without making explanations; so I grasped my box of matches, put out my light, and lay down, not without a shudder, in the bed. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
For an hour more I lay awake thinking over what had occurred, and by that time I had almost persuaded myself that I had nothing but my own morbid imagination to thank for the alarm which I had suffered. “It is an outer wall,” I said to myself; “they are all outer walls, and the house 9-inch-thick walls; it is impossible that sound could be heard through such a thickness. Besides, it seemed to be in my room, close to my ear. What an idiot I must be, to be excited an alarmed about nothing; I will think no more about it.” So I turned on my side, with a smile (rather a forced one) at my own foolishness, and composed myself to sleep. At that instant I heard, with more distinctness than I ever heard any other sound in my life, a gasp, a voiceless gasp, as if someone were in agony for breath, biting at the air, or trying with desperate efforts to cry out or speak. It was repeated a second and a third time; then there was a pause; then again that horrible gasping; and then a long-drawn breath, an audible drawing up of air into the throat, such as one would make in heaving a deep sigh. Such sounds as these could not possibly have been heard unless they had been close to my ear; they seemed to come from the wall at my heard, or to rise up out of my pillow. That fearful gasping, and that drawing in of the breath, in darkness and silence of the night, seemed to make every nerve in my body thrill with dreadful expectation. Unconsciously I shrank away from it, crouching down as before, with my face upon my knees. It ceased, and immediately a moaning sound began, which lengthened out into an awful, protracted groan waxing louder and louder, as if under an increasing agony, and then dying away slowly and gradually into silence; yet painfully and distinctly audible even to the last. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
As soon as I could rouse myself from the freezing horror which seemed to penetrate even to my joints and marrow, I crept away from the bed, and in the further corner of the room lighted with shaking hand of my candle, looking anxiously about me as I did so, expecting some dreadful revelation as the light flashed up. Yet, if you will believe me, I did not feel alarmed or frightened; but rather oppressed, and penetrated wit an unnatural, overpowering, sentiment of awe. I seemed to be in the presence of some great and horrible mystery, some bottomless depth of woe, or misery, or crime. I shrank from it with a sensation of intolerable loathing and suspense. It was a feeling akin to this which prevented me from calling Mrs. Winchester. I could not bring myself to speak to her of what had passed; not knowing how nearly she might be involved in the mystery. I was only anxious to escape as quietly as possible from the room and from the house. The candle was now beginning to flicker in its socket, but the stars were shining outside, and there was space and air to breathe there, which seemed to be wanting in my room; so I hastily opened my window, tied the bedclothes together for a rope, and lowered myself silently and safely to the ground. There was a light still burning in the lower part of the house; but I crept noiselessly along, feeling my way carefully among the trees, and in due time came upon a beaten track which led me to a road, the same which I had been travelling on the previous night. I walked on, scarcely knowing whither, anxious only to increase my distance from the accursed house, until day began to break, when almost the first object I could see distinctly was a small body of men approaching me. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The men asked me what was wrong? “I was disturbed in the night. I could not sleep. I made my escape from the Winchester mansion, and here I am I cannot tell you more.” “But you must tell me more, dear sir; forgive me; you must tell me everything. I must know all that passed in that mansion. We have had in under our surveillance for a long time, and when I heard in what direction you had gone yesterday, and had not returned, I feared you had got into some mischief there, and we were even now upon our way to look for you. The mansion is so large that people seem to get lost inside and disappear.” I could not enter into particulars, but I told him I had heard strange sounds, and at his respect I went back with him to the mansion. He told me by the way that the mansion was haunted; that Mrs. Winchester e mansion, he placed his men about the premises and instituted a strict search, and Mrs. Winchester and the man who was found in the house being compelled to accompany him. The room in which I had slept was carefully examined; the wall was of plaster or cement, so that no sound could have passed through it; the walls were sound and solid, and there was nothing to be seen that could in any way account for the strange disturbance I had experienced. The room on the ground-floor underneath my bedroom was inspected; it contained a quantity of straw, hay, firewood, and lumber. It was paved with thick wooden slaps, and it was observed that the floors were uneven, as if they had been recently disturbed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
“Ply the board loose,” said the officer, “we shall find something hidden here, I reckon.” Mrs. Winchester was evidently much disturbed. “Stop,” she cried. “I will tell you what lies there; come away out of doors, and you shall know all about it.” “Dig, I say. We will find out for ourselves.” “Let the dead rest,” cried Mrs. Winchester, with a trembling voice. “For the love of Heaven come away, and hear what I shall tell you. It is the body of my son, my only son—let him rest, if rest he can. He was wounded in a quarrel, and brought home to die. I thought he would recover, but there was neither doctor nor priest at hand, an in spite of all that would could do for him he died. Let him alone now, or let a priest first be sent for; he died unconfessed and unacknowledged. No one ever knew of his existence. I had hope to spare him of the Winchester cruse that Annie and his father had succumbed to. He was buried here because I did not want to make a stir about it. Nobody knew of his death nor his existence, and we laid him down quietly; once place I thought was as good as another when once the life was out of him. We could not bare a scandal. That gasping attempt to speak, and that awful groaning—whence did they proceed? It was no living voice. Beyond that I will express no opinion on the subject. I will only say it was the means of saving my life, and at the same time putting an end to the series of bloody deeds which had been committed under my family’s name. Every year, I go to the edge of my estate and drop a pound of silver in a grave, and my prayers go up to Heaven in all sincerity!” #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
I invoke thee, and move thee, and stir thee up O Spirit Berith appear unto my eyes before the circle in the likeness of a man in the names and by the name Iah and Vau, which Adam spake and in the name of God, Agla, which Lot spake: and it was as pleasant deliverers unto him and his house and in the name Ioth which Iacob spake in the voice of the Holy ones who cast one down, and it was also as pleasant deliverers in the anger of his brother and in the name Anaphaxeton, which Aaron spake and it was as the Secret Wisdom and in the name Asher Ehyeh Oriston, which Mosheh spake, and all waters were brining forth creatures who wax strong, which lifted up unto the houses, which destroyed all things and in the name of Elion which Mosheh spake, and it was as stones from the firmament of wrath, such as was not in the ages of Time the beginning of the Earth and in the name of Adni, which Mosheh spake and there appeared creatures of Earth who destroyed what the big stones did not: and in the name Schema Amathia, which Ioshua invoked, and the Sun remained over ye, O ye hills the seats of Gibeon, and in the names Alpha and Omega which Daniel spake, and destoyed Bel and the Dragon: and in the nae Emmanuel which the sons of God sang praises in the midst of the burning plain, and flourished in conquest: and in the name Hagios, and by the Throne of Adni, and in Ischyros, Athanatos, Paracletos: and in O Theos, Ictros, Athanatos. And in these names of the secret truth, Agla, On, Tetragrammaton, do I invoke and move thee. And in these names, and all things that are the names of the God of Secret Truth who liveth for ever, the All-Powerful. I invoke and stie thee up, O’ spirit Berith. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Even by him who spake it was, to whom all creatures are obedient and in the Extreme Justice and Anger of God; and by the veil that is before the glory of God, mighty; and by the creatures of living breath before the Throne whose eyes are east and west; by the fire in the fire of just Glory of the Throne; by the Holy ones of Heaven; and by the secret wisdom of God, I, exalted in power, stir three up. Appear before this circle; obey in all things that I say; in the seal Basdathea Baldachia; and in this Name Primeumaton, which Mosheh spake and the Earth was divided, and Korah, Dathan, and Abiram fell in the depth. Therefore obey in all things, O Spirit Berith, obey thy creation. Come thou forth: appear into my eyes; visit us in peace, be friendly; come forth in the 24th of a moment; obey my power, speaking the secrets of Truth in voice and in understanding! I stir thee up, O Spirit Berith, in all things that are the names of glory and power of God the Great One who is greater than understanding, Adni Ihvh Tzabaoth, come forth in the 24th of a moment, let Thy dwelling-place be empty; apply thyself unto the secret truth and obey my power: appear unto my eyes, visit us in peace, speaking the secrets of truth in voice and understanding. I stir thee up and move thee, O spirit Berith, in all the names that I have said, and I add these one and sic names wherein Solomon, the lord of the secret wisdom, placed yourselves, spirits of wrath, in a vessel, Adonai, Preyai Tetragrammaton, Anaphaxeton Ineddenfatoal, Pathtomon and Itemon: appear before this circle; obey in all things my power. And as thou art he that obeys not and comes not I shall be in thy power, O God Most High that liveth for ever, who is the creator of all things n six days, Eie, Saraye, and in my power in the name Prieumaton that ruleth over the palaces of Heaven, Curse Thee, and destroy thy seat, joy, and power; and I bind thee in the depth of Abaddon, to remain until the day of judgment whose end cannot be. And I being thee in the fire of sulphur mingled with poison and the seas of fire and sulphur: come forth, therefore, obey my power and appear before this circle. Therefore come forth, therefore, obey my power and appear before this circle. Therefore come forth in the name of the Holy Ones Zabaoth, Adonia, Amioran. Come! For I am Adonai who stir thee up. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
The attic spaces can get quite dark, but the lights shine through those beautiful glass panes! Come see this and more on the Explore More Tour!
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A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
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They Have Wandered into a Forest of Towering Temptations!
There are absolute truths and relative truths. There are many ideas advanced to the World that have been changed to meet the needs of the truth as it has been discovered. Relative truths change, but absolute truths remain the same yesterday, today, and forever—never changing. These absolute truths are not altered by the opinions of humans. Greater laws can overcome lesser ones, but that does not change their undeniable truth. We learn about these absolute truths by being taught by the Spirit. These truths are “independent” in their spiritual sphere and are to be discovered spiritually, though they may be confirmed by experience and intellect. “All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 93.30. Yes, My humble friend, I will teach you some truth things, that is to say, what is right and pleasing to Me, if I may paraphrase the words of the beloved John in his Firs Letter (3.22). First, think of your sins with great displease and grief. Second, do not think that you will amount to something just because you have done a few good deeds. On the contrary, you are a sinner subjected to, and indeed smothered by, your many swarming passions. Third, left to your own devices, you always take a header. Fourth, at the first sign of trouble, you wobble, then you fall down. You get tied up into knots, then you melt away in tears. Fifth, you do not have a lot to boast about, but you do have a lot to bring yourself down, you are rather more infirm that you would like to admit. And who better to say it than I? #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
I see to have gotten off on the wrong foot, My dearest friend. Let Me start again with some quiet words of advice. Of all the thing you do, rank none above the other. Nothing sizable, nothing likeable, nothing pricey, nothing dicey, let none of these appear worthy of remark. Consider nothing exalted, laudable, desirable, except what has immortal trappings. Above all, let Eternal Truth be the only thing that gives you pleasure. And let nothing be so upsetting to you as your own cheapness. That is to say, may you fear, blame, flee nothing so much as your own vices and sins; they ought o be more distressing to you than all the insects of the World. Like Tobit, some people pretend they are sincere (3.5). Motivated by a certain curiosity and arrogance, they strut about in My presence trying to sniff out My secrets, only to snuff out God’s plans. Their time would be better spent, I think, tending their own spiritual lives and salvation. However, more often than I would like to admit, it is these very same people who put Me into an adversarial position. Is it any wonder, then, that, goaded on by a grizzly pride and curiosity, they have wandered into a forest of towering temptations? The great prophet Jacob said that “the Spirit speaketh the truth. Wherefore, it speaketh of things as they really are, and of things as they really will be,” reports Jacob 4.13. We need to be taught in order to really understand life and who we really are. God, our Heavenly Father—Elohim—lives. That is an absolute truth. All 7.5 billion of the children of men on Earth might be ignorant of His powers, but he still lives. All the people on Earth might deny Him an disbelieve, but He lives in spite of them. “Fear the judgments of God,” said the Psalmist (119.120), and with good reason. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
People may have their own opinions, but God still lives, and His form, powers, and attributes do not change according to humans’ opinions. In short, opinion alone has no power in the matter of an absolute truth. He still lives. And Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Almighty, the Creator, the Master of the only true way of life—the gospel of Jesus Christ. The intellectual may rationalize Him out of existence and the unbeliever may scoff, but Christ still lives and guides the destines of His people. That is an absolute truth. Tremble at the wrath of the Omnipotent, as Second Maccabees has it (7.38)! Do not take the works of the Most High an scatter them all over the landscape. If humans are really humble, they will realize that they discover, but do not create, truth. Scrutinize the iniquities you have committed in quantity, and remember all the good works you could done in their place. Some of you carry your devotion in books, others in images; still others put their devotion in miracles and metaphors. “My name crosses their lips when they pray,” wrote the Prophet Isaiah, “but there is no room for Me in their hearts,” (29.13). Some have their intellects in hand and their affections under control, and at the same time they seem to pant for eternal things. They listen to the issues of this World with some seriousness, and they pay rather less attention to the necessities of nature. However, they do feel “the Spirit of Truth speaking within,” as Matthew put it in his Gospel (10.20). That is to say, the voice they hear within teaches them to despise the Terrestrials and love the Celestials, to pay no attention to the World, to desire Heaven night and day. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
The practice of hypnotism to help others psychologically or to heal the physically cannot be recommended indiscriminately. Just as there are dangers in the surrender of one’s body and will to an invisible spirit-entity in mediumistic passivity, so there are dangers in their surrender to a visible human entity in mesmerized passivity. It should not be practiced—if it is practiced at all—more than is sufficient to give a needed initial impulse to start the patient’s constructive energies. If one is subjected too long and too often to this controlling influence of another person while in this passive inert condition, one’s willpower can only get weaker and weaker until one is ruined. For if the mind has opened itself up to accept control and receive suggestions from one outside source, it will do so from other outside sources too. In the end its individuality will be destroyed and its capacity for self-protection lost. Although hypnotism is useful for some nervous illnesses, its “cures” are not reliable. When carefully and conscientiously used by the right person, it may be helpful; but it is also exceedingly dangerous in the hands of the wrong one. The Theosophical denunciation of hypnotism as a black art is too sweeping. Hypnotism can be good or evil. That depends partly upon the intentions with which it is practiced, the depth of knowledge of the operator, and partly upon the methods used. In the field of healing, it may offer useful although often merely temporary relief. The same is true of the field of psychological and more re-education. If the hypnotist is more than that, if one is also an advanced mystic, it is possible for the alleviations which one brings about to be of durable nature. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Thus vice of alcoholism can be and has been at times cured instantaneously. The changes are brought about by the impact of the hypnotist’s aura upon the patient. When this occurs and when the hypnotist places one’s will and mind upon the suggestion which one gives, there is a discharge of force dynamically into the patient’s aura. It is the force that brings about the change, provided the patient has been able to fall into a passive, sleepy condition. In the case of an advanced mystic, the various physical techniques which bring about this condition are not required. It is then enough if the patient has sufficient faith and is sufficiently relaxed. The mystic can then accomplish the discharge of force merely by gazing intently into the patient’s eyes. Hypnotism can bring one to a kind of peace but it will not the real one—only a copy. No one can learn the art of thorough self-control by putting one’s will under someone else’s control and one’s mind in a state of helplessness. Hypnotism, mesmerism, and suggestion may be useful as momentary helps or temporary palliatives but they do not solve the problem of attaining self-liberation. They may even be permanently useful when applied by a human to oneself but one who most needs their help least possesses the willpower needful to apply to them. Hypnosis should not be resorted to lightly, nor use ordinarily, but should be left to treat chronic cases. More than half the cases reported cured by hypnotic treatment were found by one investigator to have had their symptoms temporarily lulled only, the diseased condition or bad habit retuning in a worse form than before within a few weeks, a few months, or at least within one-and-a-half years. Thus the patient merely deceived oneself about being cured and unwittingly allowed the disease to continue its ravages unchecked by other treatment; hence its later aggravation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
It is true that with hypnosis, symptoms of deeper psychological maladjustments may be banished, but the psychological difficult will remain and may break out in a more serious form elsewhere. This is the greatest limitation on the therapeutic use of hypnosis. It is effectively applied in psychology, not as a cure, but as a bridge to the subconscious mind to locate causes of maladjustments and phobias for other types of therapy. If the hypnotist’s patient is given the suggestion to rely on oneself rather than on the hypnotist, this should overcome the objection to hypnotism as having a weakening effect on the will. The most exaggerated claims have been made on behalf of medical hypnotism. Dr. Alexander Cannon for years diagnosed ailments by using someone as a professional hypnotic subject, but the truth is that the subject will only give a diagnosis either of what the patient believes is wrong with oneself, or of what someone else present believes (many psychologist and psychiatrists have also used the same form of medical malpractice when they want to use mental health as a way to punish a person). The subject picks up the thought in the other person’s mind rather than penetrating into the true nature of the disease itself. Dr. Cannon also professed to read the past incarnations of people by the same means, and I once had amusing proof of the truth of this criticism. A lady whom I had met and who was exceedingly ambitious and conceited, who could only conceive of herself playing the most historic roles whether in the past, present, or future, once went to him for a reading. The hypnotized medium said that she had been Cleopatra in a past life. Later the lady told me this with great excitement as convincing proof of the fact that she had been Cleopatra and the Anne Rice book, The Queen of the Damned was based on her reign in Egypt 6,000 years ago. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
Hypnotism has enough of a case to offer for scientific study without running into farcical extremes of fantastic assertions. Hypnotism is morally wrong because it is the imposition of one person’s will on another person. It is also practically ineffective because its results are mostly transient and the patient relapses later into one’s original or even a worse state. This is because it is an attempt to cheat karma and to sidestep evolution, but the Overself of the patient will not allow that to happen. Hence hypnotism’s failure, for it is an artificial attempt to do the patient’s own walking for one. Every human must in the end do it for oneself. The hypnotist who cures me of a drink habit leaves me jus as weak-willed afterwards as I was before, nay, even more so. However, if I develop my own willpower and thus cure myself of the habit, I get both a permanent cure and a stronger character. In other ways, too, ego-functioning enriches our lives. Many of us have held on to the lovely idea of being able to paint or sing, as an incentive for doing boring practice-chores. Or, if not naturally gifted in what our senses bring us or our muscles do for us, we may have been able to increase our enjoyment of the art by taking trouble to increase out understanding of brushwork in painting or voice production in singing—another triumph of ego-functioning. In much the same way, we can learn to extend our imaginative sympathy and empathy toward people of who we have been ignorant or shy, by learning to understand the way they live. An adult who can help a child with this confers a major benefit. At the most primitive level it is a question of making sure that the infant does not feel overwhelmed by distress. However, right from the start, the more fortunate infant has people talking to it, so that its World is made meaningful not only at the level of physical and emotional contentment but also at the level of things feeling right intellectually, cognitively one might say, in terms of the ego-functions. The mother transforms the child’s fragmentary beta-elements into meaningful integrated alpha-elements. The adult World organizes meanings for the child. Children of phobic parents are timid: they have had their World made meaningful in terms of the dangers it can hold. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Children of parents who find food a comfort find food a comfort; children of parents who think that to be seen eating is only barely less disgusting than to be seen defecating will behave accordingly. Parents who enjoy explaining and making connections (in a spirit of enjoyment, exploration, and curiosity) have children who take an interest in how things work. Children of parents who habitually put words to feelings (in a kind way which does not make the child feel guilty or found out) will feel more at ease with their feelings. These are not conditioning processes; these are the normal processes by which parents organize or metabolize or transmute or pattern the child’s experiences and give them a particular meaning. Children of parents who are able to maintain their emotional balance while the child loses control of itself and lets fly, have children less frightening by what they may find at the back of their minds. This seems to me a prototype of how the balanced adult mind works (or at least, one kind). The feelings come and go, excited by various events, internal and external. We accept, recognize, understand, and thereby validate them. In the short run, we allow hem expression as we judge appropriate in the circumstances; in the longer run, we give them further thought. Rereading the previous sentences, let us say “child” where the text reads “feelings.” “The children come and go, excited by various events, internal and external. We accept, recognize, understand and thereby validate them. In short run we allow them expression as we judge appropriate in the circumstances; in the longer run we give them further thought.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
The adult here is in charge of the ego-functions. The need for achievement differs from a need for power, which is a desire to have an impact on or control over others. People with strong needs for power want their importance to be visible: They buy expensive possessions, wear, prestigious clothes, and exploit relationships. In some ways the pursuit of power and financial success is the dark side of the American dream. People whose main goal in life is to make a lot of money tend to be poorly adjusted and unhappy. Competition and achievement are highly valued in Western culture. Some of your friends are more interested than others in success, money, possessions, status, love, approval, grades, dominance, power, or belonging to groups All of these are social motives, or goals. We acquire social motives through socialization and cultural conditioning. The behaviour of outstanding artists, scientists, athletes, educators, and leaders is best understood in terms of such learned needs, particularly the need for achievement. Our good-parent adult ego-functioning regions accept, recognize, understand, and validate our feelings, and allow them appropriate expression but also reflect on the implications of it all, talking it over with the impulsive child (part of us) and co-operating in making sense of it all. Ego-functioning = adult; feelings = child. These equations also work nicely when applied to two almost infallible rules of thumb in relationships: Do not retaliate, and do not retreat. Retaliation punishes people for being themselves—the opposite of recognition, acceptance, and validation. On the other hand, retreat in the face of dangerous feelings leave them shapeless and unbounded when what they need is recognition and meaningful, acceptable, limited expression. Fortunate the child whose parents are on good terms with their feelings and their children. Even more fortunate the child whose parents can also use words intelligently, not only about feelings, but about other things which strengthen ego-functioning. Practically all speech, other than expletives, is ego-functioning. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Thursday 12 August, 2021
Annie: Daddy?
Daddy: Yes Annie.
Annie: Do people tell the truth on television?
Daddy: Sometimes they do and sometimes they do not.
Annie: When do they tell the truth
Daddy: There is no way of knowing that for sure.
Annie: Do they tell the truth when it is The News?
Daddy: Sometimes they do and sometimes they do not.
Annie: Sometimes they tell lies and sometimes they just tell the truth?
Daddy: Yep.
#RandolphHarris 10 of 17
As the child grows up and becomes more able to converse, good parenting allows for a lot of talk. However, perhaps we should remind ourselves that parental help in ego-functioning will help to strengthen the child only to the extent that there is affection and pleasure in the adult’s recognition of the child (and later, in the adult’s recognition of one’s own nature). Here is the same vicious circle again, for we cannot usually take more pleasure and interest in feelings (and in children) than we ourselves received. As the child grows up, conversation with others also becomes an ever more important factor. Reading too. The rules of logic and evidence can be taught. Through all these channels the person becomes strengthened and more able to make sense of things and give meaning to the World. New connections throw new light on our nature and on the World around us. We can learn from others. We can seek to be taught. We can grow further. Why do some people pass up success? They do it because easy goals offer no satisfaction. They also avoid long shots because there is either no hope of success, or “winning” will be due to luck rather than skill. Need for Achievement (nAch) is an individual’s desire for significant accomplishment, mastering of skills, control, or high standards. Persons low in nAch select sure things or impossible goals. Either way, they do not have to take any responsibility for failure. Desires for achievement and calculated risk-taking lead to success in many situations. People high in nAch complete difficult tasks, they earn beter grades, and they tend to excel in their occupations. College students high in nAch attribute success to their own ability, and failure to insufficient effort. Thus, high nAch students are more likely to renew their efforts when they perform poorly. When the going get tough, high achievers get going. In college, a great deal of importance is placed on academic achievement. In light of this, it is understandable that students are sometimes tempted to buy self-help tapes, CD, digital lectures, of DVDs that promise to improve their motivation to study. Such materials are aggressively advertised and available in many campus bookstores. However, if you are ever temped any format of this material, you should ask a crucial question: Do they work? Although science has begun to note the facts of spiritual healing, it has not really begun to explain the facts. Nor will it ever, unless it becomes utterly humble before the great power of God. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
It is conventional knowledge by now that the percentage of workers employed in manufacturing in “advanced” nations has declined over the past eighty years. (In the United States of America today only 12,800,000 people are involved in manufacturing.) And as this shrinkage of manufacturing has accelerated in the industrial World, more and more routine manufacturing has been farmed out to the so-called developing countries, from Algeria to Mexico and India to Thailand. Like second hand agricultural equipment, the most backward Second Wave industries are thus exported from the developed nations to the developing nations. For strategic as well as economic reasons, the rich nations cannot afford to surrender manufacturing altogether, and they will not become pure examples of “service societies” or “information economies.” The image of the rich World living off nonmaterial production while the rest of the World engages in the output of material goods is highly oversimplified. Instead, we will find the rich nations continuing to manufacture key goods—but needing fewer workers to do so. For we are transforming the very way goods are made. The essence of Second Wave manufacture was the long “run” of millions of identical, standardized products. By contrast, the essence of Third Wave manufacture is the short run of partially or completely customized products. The public still tends to think of manufacture in terms of long runs, and we do of course continue to turn out cigarettes by the billion, textiles by the millions of yards, light bulbs, matches, bricks, or spark plugs in astronomical quantities, and American cars and trucks have become a premium good. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
No doubt America will continue to manufacture some high-quality products for some time. Yet these are precisely the products of the more backward industries rather than the most advanced, and today they account for only about 5 percent of all manufactured goods. The future of manufacturing will rely on complete customization—the actual manufacture of one-of-a-kind products. And that is clearly the direction in which we are heading: products custom-cut for individual users. Currently, it is no harder to custom produce something than it is to mass produce. We are beyond the modularization stage where you make a lot of modules and plug them together and we are getting on to the stage of just plain custom production. Just like clothes. The shift toward customization is perhaps best symbolized by a computer-based laser gun introduced a few years ago. Before the Second Wave brough mass production, if a human wanted a piece of clothing made, they went to a tailor or a seamstress, or one’s wife sewed it. In any case, it was done on a handcraft basis, to one’s individual measure. All sewing was essentially custom tailoring. After the arrival of the Second Wave, we began to manufacture identical clothes on a mass-production basis. Under this system the worker placed one layer of cloth on top of another; one laid a pattern on top; then, with an electric cutting knife one cut around the edges of the pattern and produced multiple, identical processing and came out identical in size, shape, color, and so forth. The new laser machine operates on a radically different principle. In does not cut 10 or 50 or 100 or even 500 shirts or jackets at a time. It cuts one at a time. However, it actually cuts faster and cheaper than the mass-production methods employed until now. It reduces waste and eliminates the need for inventory. For these reasons, the laser machines can be programmed to fill an order for one garment economically. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
What that suggests is that some day even standard sizes may disappear. It may be possible to read one’s measurements into a telephone, or point a video camera at oneself, thus feeding data directly into a computer, which in turn will instruct the machine to produce a single garment, cut exactly to one’s personal, individualized dimensions. What we are looking at, in effect, is custom tailoring on a high-technology basis. It is the reinstatement of a system of production that flourished before the industrial revolution—but now built on the basis of the most advanced, sophisticated technology. Jus as we are de-massifying the media, we are de-massifying manufacture. In the 1980s and 1990s, we also saw overall suburbs becoming more diverse racially, and spillover was not the major pattern in the metropolitan areas having the largest African American populations, such as Washington, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. Here there appears to be more of a “leapfrog” effect. Also, the old classic model of the racial tipping point has less validity. Rather than invasion-succession, with one group totally supplanting another, the more common pattern is now one of stable multiracial neighborhoods. Research on patterns of neighborhood racial succession indicate, the succession model may be more limited than popularly believed. With a third of all metropolitan area African Americans now living in the suburbs, they are more welcoming and diverse. Although the classic invasion-succession model is still commonly accepted by much of the population (and some scholars), it largely ceased to have empirical validity as the major model of African American suburbanization by 1980. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Old beliefs die hard, however. The All African-American suburbs of today tend not to be poor but middle-class or even lace curtain affluence communities. Their racial makeup is a matter of deliberate choice by those moving in. The traditional southern version of the displacement model now is also largely history. It was the invasion-succession model in reverse. Rather than African Americans moving into previously all-European American areas, middle-class European Americans moved to outer areas and, by so doing, displaced low-income African Americans who were living in African American neighborhoods on the city fringe. As was noted earlier, it was a common residential pattern throughout much of this century for southern cities to have poorer African Americans residing in marginal areas on the urban periphery. Those living in such fringe areas often mixed from rural farming with urban wage labor. The data indicate that the older southern pattern of middle-class European Americans displacing poor African Americans has become less common. However, the trend of gentrification is growing now that older, less affluent neighborhoods are full of historical buildings and homes that are close to being authentic or need renovation. Yet, the southern pattern of movement of European Americans to African American suburban areas now appears to be part of history. Invasion-succession models of any form, although still widely used, are now largely outdated. It is necessary to acknowledge that all people are accountable for the laws, otherwise there will be an all powerful in the state and more powerful than the President. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
From the start, we must be able to have the ability and rely on the confidence of those in authority are respectable, and have come from a solid and sublime reason, which they alone know how to find and perceive. Whatever interest we may have in knowing ourselves, I do not know whether we do no have a better knowledge of everything that is not us. Provided by nature with organs uniquely destined for our preservation, we use them merely to receive impressions of external things; we seek merely to extend ourselves outward and to exist outside ourselves. Too much taken with multiplying the functions of our sense and with increasing the external range of our being, we rarely make use of that internal sense which reduces us to our true dimensions, and which separates us from all that is not us. Nevertheless, if we wish to know ourselves, this is the sense we must use. It is the only one by which we can judge ourselves. However, how can this sense be activated and given its full range? How can our soul, in which it resides, be rid of all the illusions of our mind? We have lost the habit of using it; it has remained unexercised in the midst of the tumult of our bodily sensations; it has been dried out by the fire of our passions; the heart, the mind, the senses, everything has worked against it. The brain must be sufficiently purified to understand deep doctrines. We call upon he Earth, our planet home, with its beautiful depths and soaring heights, is vitality and abundance of life, and together we ask that it: Teach us, and show us the way. We call upon the mountains, the Cascades and the Olympics, the high green valleys and meadows filled with wild flowers, the snows that never melt, the summits of intense silence, and we ask that they: Teach us, and show us the way. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
We call upon the waters that rim the Earth, horizon to horizon, that flow in our rivers and streams, that fall upon our gardens and fields, and we ask that they: Teach us, and show us the way. We call upon the land which grows our food, the nurturing sol, the fertile fields, the abundant gardens and orchards, as we asl that they: Teach us, and show us the way. We call upon the forests, the great trees reaching strongly to the sky with Earth in their roots and the Heavens in their branches, the fir and the pine and the cedar, and we asl them to: Teach us, and show us the way. We call upon the creatures of the fields and forests and the seas, our brothers and sisters the wolves and deer, the eagle and dove, the great whales and the dolphin, the beautiful Orca and salmon who share our Northwest home, and we ask them to: Teach us, and show us the way. We call upon all those who have lived on this Earth, our ancestors and our friends, who dreamed the best for future generations, and upon whose lives our lives are built, and with thanksgiving, we call upon them to: Teach us and show us the way. And lastly, we call upon all that we hold most sacred, the presence and power of the Great Spirit of love and truth which flows through all the Universe to be with us to: Teach us, and show us the way. Before the Words of God Supreme today are read, for this theme approbation will I seek these my sentences to speak; just two or three, while tremblingly on Him I meditate: the Pure, who doth bear the World for ever, His power who can relate? All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has paced it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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I am a Simple Doctor–All I Wanted to do Here Was to Found a Small Hospital!
Dear friend, you need to do two things. First, “Walk with Me,” as My Father in Heaven told the decrepit Abraham in Genesis, “and let Truth come with us” (12.1). Second, “Seek Me always in the sincerity of your heart,” as the Wisdom of Solomon said right at the beginning (1.1). Do these two things, and you will be protected from the bandit horde. Punishment calls for “retributive suffering.” However, discipline is “training that corrects, molds, or perfects.” Punishment is directed at the child oneself. Discipline is directed more at the objectionable behavior of the child; it is something we do for our children, not to them. The common goal is to establish a home where harmony, respect, and love abound. However, as we attempt to teach our children to “walk uprightly before the Lord,” Doctrine and Covenants 68.28, our methods will strongly influence our children’s behavior and self-image—and these either encourage or impede the results we are seeking. The heart of child management is the relationship between parents and their children. There are four basic ingredients of positive parent-child interactions. First of all, mutual respect is very important. Effective parents try to avoid nagging, hitting, debating, and talking down to their children. They also avoid doing things for their children that children can do for themselves. (Constantly stripping children of opportunities to learn and take responsibility prevents them from becoming independent and developing self-esteem.) Second come shared enjoyment. Effective parents spend some time each day with their children, doing something that both the parent and child enjoy. Third comes love. This goes almost without saying, but many parents assume their children know that they are loved. It is important to show them you care—in words and by actions such as hugging. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The fourth tool in the child management program is encouragement. Children who get frequent encouragement come to believe in themselves. Effective parents do not just praise their children for success, winning, or good behavior. They also recognize a child’s progress and attempts to improve. Show you have faith in children by letting them try things on their own and by encouraging their efforts. Creative communication is another important ingredient of successful child management. Making a distinction between feelings and behavior is the key to clear communication. Since children (and parents, too) do not choose how they feel, it is important to allow free expression of feelings. The child who learns to regard some feelings as “bad,” or unacceptable, is being asked to deny a very real part of one’s experience. Parents are encouraged to teach their children that all feelings are appropriate; it is only actions that are subject to disapproval. Many parents are unaware of just how often they block communication and the expression of feelings in their children. Consider this typical conversation:
Son: I am stupid, and I know it. Look at my grades in school.
Father: You just have to work harder.
Son: I already work harder and it does not help. I have no brains.
Father: You are smart, I know it.
Son: I am stupid, I know it.
Father: (loudly) You are not stupid!
Son: Yes, I am!
Father: You are not just good. You are the best!
#RandolphHarris 2 of 19
By debating with the child, the father misses the point that his son feels stupid. It would be far more helpful for the father to encourage the boy to talk about his feelings. How could he do that? He might say, “You really feel that you are not as smart as others, do you not? Do you feel this way often? Are you feeling bad at school?” In this way, the child is given a chance to express his emotions and to feel understood. The father might conclude by saying, “Look, son, in my eyes you area fine person. However, I understand how you feel. Everyone feels inadequate at times.” Again, it is valuable to remember that supportive parents encourage their children. In order for any organization to run effectively, it must establish a set of bylaws. A family also needs bylaws to prescribe boundaries for behavior. If parents do not have a specific, deliberate plan for discipline, they are likely to rely simply on instinct and react emotionally. At our weekly family council, we mutually agree upon rules which all must abide by. We also establish consequences for disobedience. In this way, everyone is aware of the rules and the consequences; there are no surprises. And the consequences are predicable and consistent. As a family, we have come to recognize that certain behaviors are “love destroying acts” and therefore cannot be tolerated. These include such things as sassing, teasing, and name-calling. “Behold, mine house is a house of order, saith the Lord God, and not a house of confusion,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 132.8. Order is an eternal principle—an important characteristic of the kingdom of God. We are instructed to follow the pattern and set our own houses in order. “And now a commandment I give unto you—if you will be delivered you shall set in order your own house,” Doctrine and Covenants 93.43. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
An orderly home depends upon well-defined and well-understood rules. One way the Lord maintains order in His kingdom is to bless those who obey certain laws. “There is a law, irrevocably decreed in Heaven before the foundations of this World, upon which all blessings are predicated—and when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 130.20, 21. An orderly home also operates on this important principle. Family rules must be established and observed before the blessing of family harmony can be attained. Truth will free you—as I said to the Jewish people who believed in Me, and as the Beloved Disciple recorded in his Gospel (8.32)—from the seductions and detractions of those who hunt you down. Yes, Truth has freed you already; and when you are truly free, you do no care what epithets the vain World slings at you. “A light that shone from behind the sun; the sun was not so fierce as to pierce where that light could,” reports Charles Williams. The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this. Just as every natural event is the manifestation at a particular place and moment of Nature’s total character, so every particular Christian miracle manifests at a particular place and moment the character and significance of the Incarnation. There is no question in Christianity of arbitrary interferences just scattered about. It relates not a series of disconnected raids on Nature but the various steps of a strategically coherent invasion—an invasion which intends complete conquest and “occupation.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
The fitness, and therefore credibility, of the particular miracles depends on their relation to the Grand Miracle; all discussion of then is isolated from it is futile. The fitness or credibility of the Grand Miracle itself cannot, obviously, be judged by the same standard. And let us admit at once that it is very difficult to find a standard by which it can be judged. If the thing happened, it was he central event in the history of the Earth—the very thing that the whole story has been about. Since it happened only once, it is by Hume’s standards infinitely improbable. However, then the whole history of the Earth has also happened only once; is it therefore incredible? Hence the difficulty, which weighs upon Christian and atheist alike, of estimating the probability of the Incarnation. It is like asking whether the existence of Nature herself is intrinsically probable. That is why it is easier to argue, on historical grounds, that the Incarnation actually occurred than to show, on philosophical grounds, the probability of its occurrence. The historical difficulty of giving for the life, sayings and influence of Jesus any explanation that is not harder than the Christian explanation, is very great. The discrepancy between the depth and sanity and (let me add) shrewdness of His moral teaching and the rampant megalomania which must lie behind His theological teaching unless He is indeed God, has never been satisfactorily got over. Hence the non-Christian hypotheses succeed one another with the restless fertility of bewilderment. Today we are asked to regard all the theological elements as later accretions to the story of a “historical” and merely human Jesus: yesterday we were asked to believe that the whole thing began with vegetation myths and mystery religions and that the pseudo-historical Man was only fadged up at a later date. However, this historical inquiry is outside the scope of my book. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Since the Incarnation, if it is a fact, holds this central position, and since we are assuming that we do not yet know it to have happened on historical grounds, we are in a position which may be illustrated by the following analogy. Let us suppose we possess parts of a novel or a symphony. Someone now brings us a newly discovered piece of manuscript and says, “This is the missing part of the work. This is the chapter on which the whole plot of the novel really turned. This is the main theme of the symphony.” Our business would be to see whether new passage, if admitted to the central place which the discoverer claimed for it, did actually illuminate all the parts we had already seen and “pull them together.” Nor should we be likely to go very far wrong. The new passage, if spurious, however, attractive it looked at the first glance, would become harder and harder to reconcile with the rest of the work the longer we considered the matter. However, if it were genuine, then at every fresh hearing of the music or every fresh reading of the book, we should find it settling down, making itself more at home, and eliciting significance from all sorts of details in the whole work which we had hitherto neglected. Even though the new central chapter or main theme contained great difficulties in itself, we should still think it genuine provided that it continually removed difficulties elsewhere. Something like this we must do with the doctrines of the Incarnation. Here, instead of a symphony or a novel, we have the whole mass of our knowledge. The credibility will depend on the extent to which the doctrine, if accepted, can illuminate and integrate that whole mass. It is much less important that the doctrine itself should be fully comprehensible. We believe that the sun is in the sky at midday in summer no because we can clearly see the sun (in fact, we cannot) but because we can see everything else. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The first difficulty that occurs to any critic of the doctrine lies in the very center of it. What can be meant by “God becoming man”? In what sense is it conceivable that eternal self-existent Spirit, basic Fact-hood, should be so combined with a natural human organism as to make one person? And this would be a fatal stumbling-block if we had not already discovered that in every human being a more than natural activity (the fact of reasoning) and therefore presumably a more than natural agent is thus united with a part of Nature: so united that the composite creature calls itself “I” and “Me.” I am not, of course, suggesting that what happened when God became Man was simply another instance of this process. In other men a supernatural creature thus becomes, in union with the natural creature, one human being. In Jesus, it is held, the Supernatural Creator Himself did so. I do not think anything we can do will enable us to imagine the mode of consciousness of the incarnate God. That is where the doctrine is not fully comprehensible. However, the difficulty which we felt in the mere idea of the Supernatural descending into the Natural is apparently non-existent, or is at least overcome in the person of every human. If we did not know by experience what it feels like to be a rational terrestrial being—how all these natural facts, all this biochemistry and instinctive affection or repulsion and sensuous perception, can become the medium of rational thought and moral will which understand necessary relations and acknowledge mode of behavior as universally binding, we could not conceive, much less imagine, the thing happening. The discrepancy between a movement of atoms in an astronomer’s cortex and one’s understanding that there must be s till unobserved planet beyond Uranus, is already so immense that the Incarnation of God Himself is, in one sense, scarcely more startling. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
We cannot conceive how the Divine Spirit dwelled within the created and human spirit of Jesus: but neither can we conceive how His human spirit, or that of any human, dwells within one’s natural organism. What we can understand, if the Christian doctrine is true, is that our own composite existence is not sheer anomaly it might seem to be but a faint image of the Divine Incarnation itself—the same theme in a very minor key. We can understand that if God so descends into a human spirit, and human spirit so descends into Nature, and our thoughts into our senses and passions, and if adult minds (but only the best of them) can descend into sympathy with children, and men into sympathy with beasts, then everything hands together and the total reality, both Natural and Supernatural, in which we are living is more multifariously and subtly harmonious than we had suspected. We catch sight of a new key principle—the power of the Higher, just in so far as it truly Higher, to come down, the power of the greater to include the less. Thus solid bodies exemplify many truths of plane geometry, but plane figures no truths of solid geometry: many inorganic propositions are true of organisms but no organic propositions are true of minerals; Montaigne became kittenish with his kitten but she never talked philosophy to him. Everywhere the great enters the little—its power to do so is almost the test of its greatness. In the Christian story God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and sea-bed of the Nature He has created. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
However, He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined World up with Him. One has the picture of a strong man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great complicated burden. One must stoop in order to lift, one must almost disappear under the load before one incredibly straightens one’s back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on one’s shoulders. Or one may think of a diver, first reducing oneself to nakedness, then glancing in mid-air, then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the death-like region of ooze and slime and of decay; then up again, back to color and light, one’s lungs almost bursting, till suddenly one breaks surface again, holding in one’s hand the dripping, precious thing that one went down to recover. One and it are both colored now that they have come up into the light: down below, where it lay colorless in the dark, one lost one’s color too. In this descent and re-ascent everyone will recognize a familiar pattern: a thing written all over the World. It is the pattern of all vegetable life. It must belittle itself into something hard, small and deathlike, it must fall into the ground: thence the new life re-ascends. It is the pattern of all animal generation too. There is descent from the full and perfect organisms into the spermatozoon and ovum, and in the dark womb a life at first inferior in kind to that of the species which is being reproduced: then the slow ascent to the perfect embryo, to the living, conscious baby, and finally to the adult. So it is also in our moral and emotional life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The first innocent and spontaneous desires have to submit to the deathlike process of control or total denial: but from that there is a re-ascent to fully formed character in which the strength of the original material all operates but in a new way. Death and Re-birth—go down to go up—it is a key principle. Through this bottleneck, this belittlement, the highroad nearly always lies. The doctrine of the Incarnation, if accepted, puts this principle even more emphatically at the center. The pattern is there in Nature because it was first there in God. All the instances of which I have mentioned turn out to be but transpositions of the Divine theme into a minor key. I am not now referring simply to the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ. The total pattern, of which they are only the turning point, is the real Death and Re-birth: for certainly no seed ever fell from so fair a tree into so dark and cold a soil as would furnish more than a faint analogy to this huge descent and re-ascension in which God dredged the salt and oozy bottom Creation. From this point of view the Christian doctrine makes itself so quickly at home amid the deepest apprehension of reality which we have from other sources, that doubt may spring up in a new direction. Is it not fitting in too well? So well that it must have come into humans’ minds from seeing this pattern elsewhere, particularly in the annual death and resurrection of the corn? For there have, of course, been many religions in which that annual drama (so important for life of the tribe) was almost admittedly the central theme, and the deity—Adonis, Osiris, or another—almost undisguisedly a personification of the corn, a “corn-king” who died and rose again each year. Is not Christ simply another corn-king? #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
All words are pegs to hang ideas on. One of psychology’s perennial chicken-and-egg questions is, Which comes first, thoughts or words? Do ideas arise first and await words to name them? Or are thoughts born of words and inconceivable without them? As usually happens with such either/or questions, the answer seems to be both: thinking shapes language, which shapes thought. Some thoughts precede the words used to express them. Consider: to tighten a screw, which direction do you turn it? Very likely, you first visualize the answer without words and only then expressed your thought in words such as “clockwise,” or “to the right.” Likewise, many artists, composers, poets, mathematicians, and scientists achieve creative insights as images. Peak religious moments, too, are sometimes experienced inarticulately; later the person struggles to express the mystical experience within the confines of language but finds it, as the apostle Paul reported, “inexpressible.” If words are sometimes the mere containers of ideas, they are nevertheless containers that shape the thoughts poured into them. Indeed, argued the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, “Language itself shapes a human’s basic ideas.” As evidence of the power of language to shape thought Whorf pointed to the differing conceptions of reality in those who speak different languages. Because Eskimos have a variety of words that describe snow, he argued, they can more readily perceive differences in snow that often go unnoticed by English speakers. Because the Hopi Indian language has no past tense for verbs, the Hopi people cannot so readily think about the past. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Likewise, people who are bilingual will readily testify that certain concepts are available to them in one language but not the other. The language-thought relationship is why so much of education is devoted to enlarging students’ vocabularies. It pays to increase your word power. As Henry Ward Beecher realized, words are pegs to hang ideas on. When trained in sign language, even chimpanzees behave with an enlarged thinking power. Because our words influence how we think, we do well to choose our words carefully. Our labels for things affect our thoughts about them. Whether a space weapons program is termed “Star Wars” or “The Peace Shield” can subtly affect people’s thoughts and feelings about it. Liberation movements recognize this power of words to shape thought. When African American men were called “boys” or “buddy” and when women were called “girls” and “dolls” it was easy to think of them as unequal to European American men. Recognizing that racist and sexist language undergirds racist and sexist thought, a liberation movement may choose as one of its first goals that of changing the way people talk. What is true in other realms of life is also true of religion. Our words influence our thoughts. For example, some words reflect and reinforce our tendency to think of reality as dualistic (divided into distinct categories) rather than as a unified whole. We dichotomize supernatural and natural forces, sacred and secular truths, mental and bodily realms, spiritual and material needs. Such dualisms, which as we noted in the past are more congenial with platonic than biblical assumptions, depend on certain religious words, such as soul. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Praying about another’s soul surely reflects a concern for the person’s ultimate welfare, which can only be applauded. However, concern for another’s soul can easily degenerate into concern for an imaginary person inside the person, while one ignores the needs of the very real person who is depressed, hurting, hungry, or lonely. If we were to expunge words such as soul from our vocabulary, it would become harder to think in dualistic terms. Similarly, we may talk of Christian life. The very words enable us to think of the Christian life as but one aspect of life, separate from one’s school life, life involving pleasures of the flesh, vocational life, or family life. The result is a compartmentalized view of life that assigns a corner of religion—that concerning prayer, worship, and the like—as distinct from one’s studies, one’s dating and family relationships, or one’s aspirations. To rid oneself of such dualistic thinking, a simple first step to avoid phrases such as Christian Life or spiritual life. Even in the struggle to find alternative words, one begins to view life more as a whole, no corner of which is irrelevant to being Christian. For the Christian, all vocations can be ministry, all learning is exploration of the Creator’s World, all human relations are opportunities for embodying God’s love. Or consider the adjectives that people are fond of piling up before the word Christian. It is not enough to be simply a Christian. One must be an evangelical Christian, a mainline Christian, a Bible-believing Christian, a born-again Christian, or even a really truly born-again Christian. One scores additional points, it seems, by piling the adjectives in top of one another. Thus we have Bible-believing, Bible-teaching Christians, and even a few really truly born-again, Bible-believing, Bible-teaching, evangelical Christians. Such words describe but also divine. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The tendency of Christians (or Muslims or any other religious groups) to focus on the differences rather than their kinship with others illustrates a powerful phenomenon: people’s self-concepts center on their distinctiveness. For example, William McGuire and his Yale University colleagues report that when children are asked to tell about themselves, they spontaneously mention how they differ from others. Children born in countries not native to the one they live in or are visiting are more likely than others to mention their birthplace; redheads are more likely than black- and brown-haired children to volunteer their hair color; below average weight and above average weight children are more likely to refer to their body weight; non-dominate culture children are the most likely to mention their race or culture/ The principle, says McGuire, is that “one is conscious of oneself insofar as, and in the ways that, one is different.” Thus: “If I am an African American man in a group of European American men, I tend to think of myself as an African American; if I move to a group of African American women, my African Americaness loses salience and I become more conscious of being a man.” This insight helps us understand why Christians so often label themselves as distinct from other Christians, especially in predominately Christian cultures. In India, Christians are more likely to see themselves simply as “Christian” (as distinct from Hindu or Muslim) and to feel a kindship with other Christians. In the United States of America, where a majority of the population claims to be Christian, one’s distinctive identity is more likely to be a subcategory of Christian. The result is that one begins to see most fellow Christians and certainly most fellow humans as “they” and only those within one’s faction as “we.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Social psychologists have also become intrigued by a subtle but reliable in–group bias phenomenon. Merely assigning people an arbitrary label that they share with certain others triggers a tendency to favor one’s own group and to disparage those assigned a different label. In his novel Slapstick, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. illustrated the phenomenon: computers gave everyone a new middle name, whereupon all “Daffodil-11s” felt kinship with one another and distance from “Raspberry-13s.” It is a point worth remembering: the labeling of who we are—our race, gender, religious denomination, and the like—also implies a definition of who we are not. The circle that defines “us” excludes “them.” Devotion to and pride in one’s own ethic heritage or school or nation—or religious group—often creates a devaluation of other ethnic groups or schools or nations or religious groups. To label oneself as one of “Paul’s people” or “Apollo’s people,” or as fundamentalist, evangelical, mainline, or liberal, can be descriptive. However, it can also be divisive and a source of a spiritual pride that negates Jesus’ prayer “that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me, and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the World may believe that you have sent me.” Other words, and the images they carry, are more helpful. To say, as the apostle Paul did, that all Christians are members of one body acknowledges and accepts differences, yet encourages us to view other parts of the body as complementary to ourselves. Each part is unique and yet all work together—unity without uniformity. The moral: let us consider our words, for powerful ideas are hung upon them. There is an old proverb that say—be careful what you wish for, for you wish may come true. And if your wish is for immortality, it is something you will have to live with for a very long time. Did changes in the number of suburbanizing African Americans represent increasing housing integration, or merely the growth of all African American suburban areas? A related issue is whether the government’s goal should be racially integrated neighborhoods or freedom of choice for African Americans to live where they choose. Some non-dominant culture scholars suggest that the latter, rather than the former, has always been the African American priority. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Researchers refer to suburbs where one racial group replaces another as “displacement” or “succession” suburbs. The northern version of succession typically involves African Americans overflowing in substantial numbers from the central city into older and les desirable inner-ring suburbs. European American residents then, in turn, depart for newer suburbs further out. This type of central-to-periphery racial movement fits the ecological invasion-succession model of urban change first proposed by Chicago School sociologists in the 1920s. African American suburbanization of this type does not indicate racial integration, but rather the expansion of high-risk neighborhoods across city lines. The period of integration this type of suburbanization encompasses is only the interval between the arrival of the first African Americans and the departure of the last European Americans. Research examining the period before the 1980s indicates that the pattern of African American spillover into older and less desirable inner-ring suburban housing has empirical validity. Areas that were most prone to turn over racially where those in close proximity to all African American areas thus, a HUD studying interviewing African Americans and European Americans confirmed that lite actual residential integration had occurred. European Americans continued to show reluctance to move into areas they viewed likely to be incorporated into high-risk neighborhoods. A real fear was that inner-ring suburbs into which African Americans disproportionately were flowing would undergo the same economic difficulties and population declines that plague central cities. The assumption was that African Americans would remain concentrated in the inner suburbs abutting central-city high-risk neighborhoods. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
The first holding which infants know about is an embrace which is physical. For the lucky ones this develops almost imperceptibly into understanding, respect, and validation, in the process of being taken care of—a more psychological sort of embrace. Embrace turns into recognition. At first, someone else has to hold me. Gradually I am able to do my share in taking care of my self. Fortunate people can embrace themselves: they can understand and accept themselves, respect and love themselves, and see to it they get their share of good things. However, still someone else has had to do it for them first. The same is true for ego-functioning—thinking, understanding, making connections, planning ahead, thinking back, comparing, taking into consideration, giving an account of, making sense of life. Ego-functioning is only one aspect of holding, but it is an important part. And I must have had a mother or someone who was my self and did my ego-functioning for me, before I can have a self of my own and do my own ego-functioning. Some people have had the blessings of natural integration more or less from their beginnings, and hold together effortlessly. Others will always have to give some attention to staying integrated. In conditions of stress, their integration will also be under stress. They always have to devote at least some small amount of energy to keeping the connections between parts of themselves intact, lest they find themselves acting on the basis of only part of who they are or what they know or what they want. How may this more effortful integration be maintained? For this we need the rationality which comes from highly developed ego-functioning. I do not mean that this must be a cold and unfeeling reasonableness. I mean the ability to take care of things intelligently and to take enough factors into account so that we need not regret our impulsive actions afterwards. However, even cold unfeeling rationality has a lot to commend it, when we contrast it with hot emotional irrationality. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Ego-functioning, even when divested of attractive social values, can integrate and hold together what would otherwise be a jumble of impulses and responses ungoverned by any principle. We need only look at the lives of those whose ego-functioning is suppressed by disease, distress, or the misuse of drugs, to be persuaded of this. We should not belittle the uses of the intellect. Ego-functioning can strengthen the integrating process. It is ego-functioning which strengthens the bonds between a valued self-imagery and other aspects of living. There are times when we need to remind ourselves who we are and how we wish to be. It is ego-functioning that enables us to say: “Although these people treat me like dirt, I know who I am and I am not dirt.” A number of writers have noticed how many of those who survived in extreme conditions, as Japanese prisoners of war, in German concentration camps, or during natural disasters, said afterwards that they had had important values or ideas which they exerted themselves to hold on to. Those of us who have fortunately not had to survive in such extreme circumstances, also know how to hold on to ideas which in turn hold us: “I do not want to be embarrassed or ashamed, as I would be if I were untrue to myself and did not keep this promise, which turns out hard to keep, so I had better get on and do what I said I would do.” Learning social skills takes practice. There is nothing “innate” about knowing how to meet people or start a conversation. Social skills can be directly practiced in a variety of ways. It can be helpful, for instance, to get a tape reorder and listen to several of your conversations. You may be surprised by the way your pause, interrupt, miss cues, or seem disinterested. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Similarly, it can be useful to look at yourself in a mirror and exaggerate facial expressions of surprise, interest, dislike, pleasure, and so forth. By such methods, most people can learn to put more animation and skill into their self-presentation. Let the trees be consulted before you take any action, every time you breathe in, thank a tree. Let treeroots crack parking lots at the World bank headquarters, let loggers be druids, specially trained and rewarded to sacrifice trees at auspicious times let carpenters be master artisans. Let lumber be treasured like gold, let chainsaws be played like saxophones, and let soldiers on maneuvers plant trees. Give police and criminals a shovel and a thousand seedlings. Let businessmen carry pocketfuls of acorns. Let newlyweds honeymoon in the woods. Walk, do not drive, stop reading newspapers, stop writing poetry, squat under a tree and tell stories. The day the saved of God traversed the deep dryshod, then a new song sang Thy redeemed throng. Lo, sunken in deceit the Egyptian daughter’s feet, but lo, the Shulamite went shod in fair delight. Then a new song sang Thy redeemed thong. Thy banners Thou wilt set o’er those remaining yet, and gather those forlorn as gatherings ears of corn. Then a new song sang Thy redeemed throng. Those that have come to Thee under Thy seal to be, they from the birth are Thine bound by a holy sign. Then a new song sang Thy redeemed throng. Their token show to all whose eyes upon them fall: Lo, on their garments’ hem the fringe ordained for them! Then a new song sang Thy redeemed throng. For whom then are they sealed? Let truth be now revealed. Whose is the seal, and who shall claim the thread of blue? Then a new song sang Thy redeemed throng. Ah, take her as of yore, and cast her forth no more. Let sunlight crown her day and shadows flee away. Then a new song sang Thy redeemed throng. For Thy beloved throng still come to Thee with song, singing with one accord: “Now who is like Thee ‘mid the gods, O Lord?” Still Thy redeemed throng sing a new song. For the fathers’ sake Thou wilt save the children, yea, and bring redemption unto their children’s children. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who has redeemed America. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Spiritual Hunger is Seen Beyond the United States of America!
Most children have at least a few minor behavioural problems while growing up. Adolescence is often a turbulent time. Caught between childhood and adulthood, teens face some unique problems. Mental, physical, and sexual maturation bring new feelings, a new body, and new attitudes. Adolescents must build a consistent identity out of their talents, values, life history, relationships, and their culture. Conflicting experiences as a student, friend, athlete, worker, son or daughter, lover, and so forth, must be integrated into a unified sense of self. Persons who fail to develop a sense of identity suffer from role confusion. That is, they are uncertain about who they are and where they are going. However, some children have more serious difficulties. If left untreated, learning disorders, hyperactivity, and similar disorders can have lifelong consequences. Can you remember a time in childhood when your actions led to a disaster or a near-disaster? It should not be hard. It is a wonder that many of us survive childhood at all. Where I grew up, digging underground tunnels, wiggling down chimneys, hopping on trains, jumping off houses, crawling through storm drains—and worse—were common childhood adventures. Stress is a normal part of life—even in childhood. Certainly, parents should not intentionally stress a child. However, it is also true that children need not be completely sheltered from distress. Overprotection, or “smother love,” can be as damaging as too much stress. (Overprotection refers to excessively shielding a child from ordinary stresses.) #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Most children do a god job of keeping stress at comfortable levels when they initiate an activity. At a public swimming pool, for instance, some children can be observed making death-defying leaps from the high dive while others stick close to the wading area. If there is no immediate danger, it is reasonable to let children get stuck in trees, make themselves dizzy, squabble with other children, and so forth. Getting into a few scrapes can help prepare a child to cope with later challenges. If a child is being subjected to too much stress, how can you tell? All children occasionally have sleep disturbances, including wakefulness, nightmares, or a desire to get into their parents bed. Specific fears of the dark, dogs, school, or a particular room or person are also common. Most children will be overly timid at times, allowing themselves to be bullied by other children. Temporary periods of general dissatisfaction may occur, when nothing pleases the child. Children also normally display periods of general negativism. Repeatedly saying “no” or refusing to do anything requested is typical of such times. Another problem is clinging. Children who “cling” refuse to leave the sides of their mothers or do anything on their own. Development does not always advance smoothly. Reversals or regressions to more infantile behaviour occur with almost all children. Teach your children to respect their neighbour, respect the leaders in the church, and the teachers that come to their home to teach them. Teach your children to respect their elders and those with feeble frames. Teach them to venerate and to hold in honourable remembrance their parents, and to help all those who are helpless and needy. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Teach your children that when they go to school honour their teachers in that which is true and honest, in that which is humanly, and worthwhile. Teach your children to honour the law of God and the law of the state and the law of the country. Teach them to respect and hold in honour those who are chosen by the people to stand at their head and execute justice and administer the law. Teach them to be loyal to their country, loyal to righteousness and uprightness and honour, and thereby they will grow up to be men and women choice above all the men and women of the World. Why do You scarify me, Lord and God of all I own? You make me tremble so, yet I must dare to speak with You! That is how the Great Abraham haggled with God the Father in Genesis (18.27), quivering and quavering, and that is how I am going to haggle with You now, my Outraged if Outspoken Friend. I am just Your average pauperous, verminous servant—much more poor and contemptible than I dare to say and You seem to know. Not that I need to remind You, O Lord, but just in case You have forgotten, remember I am nothing, as the Great Paul described himself to the Second Corinthians (12.11). I have nothing, and I have the strength for nothing. You alone, on the other hand, are good, just, holy. You have the strength for everything, cries Job to the Lord God My Father (42.2). You surpass everything. You fill everything; that is to say, except perhaps the holey and unholy sinner. “Remember Your mercies,” cried the Psalmist to the Lord God My Father (25.6), and so do I. Fill my heart with Your grace “if You want Your works to work,” as the Wisdom of Solomon so wisely has it (14.5). #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Unless Your mercy and grace comfort me, how can I put up with this wretched life? “Do not turn Your face from me”—that was the Psalmist’s great fear (143.7), and it is also mine. Do not prolong the times between Your visits. Do no take Your consolation away les, as the Psalmist cried (143.6; 63.1), “my soul appear to You as hard, cracked Earth crying out for rain.” O Lord, “Teach me to do Your will,” as the whipped and beaten Psalms pled (143.10). Teach me how to walk with dignity in Your presence and how to talk with wisdom in our chatsworth. You know who I am. You have known before I was born into the World, even before the World came into being. “Thinkest thou that I cannot ask My Father, and He will give Me presently more than twelve legions of Angels?” reports Matthew 26.53. However, He neither asked for them, nor did His Father show them to refute the Jewish people. Therefore God can do what He does not. In this matter certain persons erred in two ways. Some laid it down that God acts from natural necessity in such way that as from the action of nature nothing else can happen beyond what actually takes place—as, for instance, from the seed of man, a man must come, and from that of an olive, and olive; so from the divine operation there could not result other things, nor another ordered of things, than that which now is. However, we showed above that God does not act from natural necessity, but that His will is the cause of all things; nor is that will naturally and from any necessity determined to those things. Whence in no way at all is the present course of events produced by God from any necessity, so that other things could not happen. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Others, however, said that the divine power is restricted to this present course of events through the order of the divine wisdom and justice without which God does nothing. However, since the power of God, which is His essence, is nothing else but His wisdom, it can indeed be fittingly said that there is nothing in the divine power which is not in the order of the divine power which is not in the order of the divine wisdom; for the divine wisdom included the whole potency of the divine power. Yet the order placed in creation by divine wisdom, in which order the notion of His justice consist, as said above, is not so adequate to the divine wisdom that the divine wisdom should be restricted to this present order of things. Now it is clear that the whole idea of order which a wise person puts into things made by one is taken from their end. So, when the end is proportionate to the things made for that end, the wisdom of the maker is restricted to some definite order. However, the divine goodness is an end exceeding beyond all proportion things created. Whence the divine wisdom is not so restricted to any particular order that no other course of events could happen. Wherefore we must simply say that God can do other things than those He has done. In ourselves, in whom power and essence are distinct from will an intellect, and again intellect from wisdom, and will from justice, there can be something in the power which is not in the just will nor in the wise intellect. However, in God, power and essence, will and intellect, wisdom and justice, are not one and the same. Whence, there can be nothing in the divine power which cannot also be in His just will or in His wise intellect. Nevertheless, because His will cannot be determined from necessity to this or that order of things, except upon supposition, as was said above, neither are the wisdom and justice of God restricted to this present order, as was shown above; so nothing prevents there being something in the divine power which He does not will, and which is not included in the order which He has placed in things. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Again, because power is considered as executing, the will as commanding, and the intellect and wisdom as directing; what is attributed to His power considered in itself, God is said to be able to do in accordance with His absolute power. Of such a kind is everything which has the nature of being, as was said above. What is, however, attributed to the divine power, according as it carries into execution the command of a just will, God is said to be able to do by His ordinary power. In this manner, we must say that God can do other things by His absolute power than those He has foreknown and pre-ordained He would do. However, it could not happen that He should do anything which He had not foreknown, and had not pre-ordained that He would do, because His actual doing in subject to His foreknowledge and pre-ordination, though His power, which is His nature, is not so. For God does things because He will so to do; yet the power to do them does not come from His nature. God is bound to nobody but Himself. Hence, when it is said that God can only do what He ought, nothing else is meant by this than that God can do nothing but what is befitting to Himself, and just. However, these words “befitting” and “just” may be understood in two ways: one, in direct connection with the verb “is”; and thus they would be restricted to the present order of things; and would concern His power. Then what is said in the objection is false; for the sense is that God can do noting except what is now fitting and just. If, however they be joined directly with the verb “can” (which has the effect of extending the meaning), and then secondly with “is,” the present will be signified, but in a confused and general way. The sentence would then be true in this sense: “God cannot do anything except that which, if He did it, would be suitable and just.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Although this order of things be restricted to what now exists, the divine power and wisdom are not thus restricted. Whence, although no other order would be suitable and good to the things which now are, yet God can do other things and impose upon them another order. How do we know when we are being treated respectfully or disrespectfully? Do we sometimes rationalize our treatment of others because of their behaviour? How can we avoid this? Why does developing love for others lead to respectful treatment of them? Are you aware of someone who is being treated disrespectfully? How might you show respect to that person? After discarding spirituality’s bathwater, does there remain a baby? Can one challenge the sort of spiritual intuitions that give spirituality a bad reputation without expressing a condescending cynicism toward all forms of spirituality? “Is there a way to express how the ‘wind of the Spirit’ can blow in the life of someone who is mindful of the powers and perils of intuition?” asked a friend after reading this material. “Is there a warm, gentle, spontaneous approach that keeps intuition’s perils in mind, but does not automatically feel the need to ‘explain away’ rationally what very well might be a prompting of the Spirit?” Faith Seeking Understanding was St. Anselm’s eleventh-century motto. Today, understanding seeks faith. In St. Anselm’s World, faith was a given. Anselm yearned for a more informed, intelligent depth of understanding. Today, scientific understanding is a given. What we seek are answers to Tolstoy’s questions about our identity, purpose, and ultimate destiny and to our wonderings about why anything exists rather than nothing. What explains this fine-tuned Universe? Against astronomical odds, what made it—like Baby Bear’s porridge—“just right” for producing enduring matter, living organisms, human consciousness? #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
How did it come to be, in the words of the Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Owen Gingerich, “so extraordinarily right, that it seemed the Universe had been expressly designed to produce intelligent, sentient beings”? Is there a benevolent superintelligent underneath it? A divine mind being its rational beauty? A divine purpose behind its fine-tuning? If so, does that supreme reality have significance for us? Science does not pretend to answer such questions. Today pepe hunger for “something more.” For President Trump said “We need a way out of this spiritual vacuum because we are suffering a spiritual crisis in modern civilization, and it seems to be based on an emptiness at its center and the absence of a larger spiritual purpose. Something can be defined as life if it fears it own death. There is a yawning hole in the psyche of American and Americans where our sense of common purpose, of community and connection, of hope and a spiritual satisfaction should be. This is One Nation, Under God, and it always will be.” All Americans must acknowledge this: that while the rights of the individuals are precious, at some deep level individualism alone does not suffice. And the ability of the radical right to seize and exploit the terrain of the soul has been helped immeasurably by he failure of so many of the rest of the World to even acknowledge the soul’s existence. Having figured out how to make a nice living, we are left to ponder why we live. What is the point? Why care about anything or anyone beyond ourselves? Spiritual hunger is seen beyond the United States of American. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
The Czech poet and former president of his country Vaclav Havel saw “the present global crisis” as “directly related to the spiritual condition of modern civilization. This condition is characterized by loss: the loss of metaphysical certainties, of an experience of the transcendental, of any superpersonal moral authority, and of any kind of higher horizon.” Mr. Havel believes that if the World “is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness.” We must discover “a deeper sense of responsibility toward the World, which means responsibility toward something higher than self.” However, how? And what evidence is there that spiritual consciousness and faith communities enrich human lives? In addition to multiple intelligences and emotional intelligence, we must additionally consider a possible spiritual intelligence. Is spirituality really a form of intelligence? We define intelligence as an ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations. Spiritual intelligence also includes an adaptive function, a pattern of development, cultural significance, a discernible neural basis, and exceptional persons who embody it. If spirituality is a search for the sacred and for meaning, might spiritual intelligence be the adaptive use of spirituality to facilitate everyday problem-solving and goal attainment? If spirituality is concerned with transcendent realities, might spiritual intelligence be the human potential to use spiritual information fruitfully? There are five components of spiritual intelligence. To be spiritually intelligence, one must have the capacity for transcendence. Highly spiritual persons perceive a reality that transcends the material and physical. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
One must have the ability to sanctify every experience. Spiritual intelligent persons have an ability to invest everyday activities, events, and relationships with a sense of the sacred or divine. They consider its implications for their understanding of self, others, nature, and life. For the spiritually intelligent person, work is seen as calling, parenting as a sacred responsibility, marriage as having spiritual significance. There is also a need to experience heightened states of consciousness. While engaged in prayer and certain forms of mystical mediations, spiritually intelligent persons experience spiritual ecstasy. They are receptive to mystical experience. Required for spiritual intelligence is ability to utilize divine resources to solve problems. Spiritual transformations often lead people to reprioritize goals. If spiritual intelligence is indeed a form of intelligence, it will also lead people to cope more effectively with problems and to lead more effective lives, with higher levels of well-being. Having the capacity to engage in virtuous behaviour should be possessed. Spiritually intelligent people have an enhanced ability to show forgiveness, express gratitude, feel humility, display compassion. (This last component might also be considered a result of spiritual intelligence rather than as one of its cognitive elements.) Does spiritual intelligence, like other forms of intelligence, exhibit evolutionary, developmental, and neurological patterns? And—the big question—is it psychologically adaptive? Given that religion is everywhere, did it serve a Darwinian survival function—perhaps binding people together, motivating reciprocal altruism, relieving their stress, or helping them cope with and explain unpredictable events? #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Religiousness is now recognized to be genetically influenced and associated with brain areas that activate during mystical and religious experiences. We experience religion with our brains. To say the brain produces religion is like saying a piano produces music. That being so, skeptics can surmise that our belief in God is an artifact of our brain’s activity, and believers can surmise that God hard-wired us for prayer and spirituality. Moreover, spirituality also exhibits a developmental pattern, from childhood to later life. It is typified in spiritually exceptional individuals. And there are a variety of scales for measuring spirituality, intrinsic religiosity, and purpose in life. In all these ways, spiritual ability mirrors others intelligences. However, is it also adaptive? Is it conducive to health, happiness, character, and compassion? Mountains of accumulating evidence indicates that, on balance, the answer is yes. However, does spirituality pursue an illusion or a deep truth? Is God merely a word we use to cover our ignorance? Is spirituality an opiate of the people? Or is it human ignorance to presume God’s absence from the fabric of the Universe? If we are honest with ourselves, we cannot know which is right. In the dark of the night, the theist and atheist will each have moments when they wonder if the other might be right. Perhaps all spiritual intuitions are illusions? Or perhaps those missing a spiritual dimension are two-dimensional “flatlanders,” whose myopia misses another dimension of existence. If we could prove the nature of ultimate reality we would not need faith to place our bet on God’s existence. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Lacking prof or certainty, should we straddle the fence with percent indecision? Credit religion’s skeptics for the courage to get off the fence and stir the public debate with intellectual vigour? It is understandable that the successes of scientific explanation combined with the superstition and inhumanity sometimes practiced in religion’s name might push some people off the fence toward skepticism. And credit people of faith, including those who practice faith-based skepticism, for venturing a leap of faith. They can do so mindful that they might be wrong, yet choosing to bet their lives on a humble spirituality—on an alternative to purposeless scientism, gullible spiritualism, and dogmatic fundamentalism. They can root themselves in a spirituality that helps make sense of the Universe, gives meaning to life, opens the to the transcendent, connects them in supportive communities, provides a foundation for morality and selfless compassion, and offers hope in the face of adversity and death. Although we are all surely wrong to some extent—we glimpse ultimate reality on dimly, both skeptics and faithful agree-perhaps we can draw wisdom from both scientific skepticism and biblical spirituality. Perhaps we can anchor our lives in a rationality and humility that restrains spiritual intuition with critical analysis, and in an authentic spirituality that nurtures purpose, love, and joy. The sense of identity is nothing other than this recognition by others that I am what I am. Being recognized as a person capable of organizing my World and myself helps to make me feel god about myself. Lack of respect stunts and cripples. Although the processes with which we are here concerned are among the very earliest ones, they are not so difficult to understand because they remain with us in adult life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Many of us, for instance, find it difficult to move on in conversation until we have received recognition that what we have just said has been understood and been given some consideration. Without this we feel devalued and stuck. Harold Pinter’s dialogues are so devastating to listen to and so true to life, just because his remote and damaged to listen to and so true to life, just because his remote and damaged characters inflict further damage on each other by talking in each other’s presence without acknowledging that presence in a living way. When we do not take each other seriously, with joy and interest, we deprive each other of recognition and validation, and destroy our assurance of a worthwhile identity. Many infants seem to be naturally joyous, interested, and sociable, many of them tremendously so. Their willingness to take notice of others and involve them in play is at the center of therapy as well as the diagnosis that babies initiate other relations. They are always making advances which makes us want to reciprocate. This is attachment behaviour, and it is a biological trait working for the survival of the species. Many older babies, and toddlers too, show a natural talent in getting relationship going with those around them. Even many schoolchildren like to be with adults. It seems to me that infants and children try quite hard to stay in relationships, often against the odds. Even adolescents try, given a fair chance. Alas, the proportion of those who look with confidence and trust to adults declines in each successive age-group. There must be a lot of discouragement coming from somewhere. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Either the biological urge declines—and I do not think this is so—or the effect is due to lack of appropriate response. If more adults were able to take more natural pleasure in children as children, the World would be a happier place, I think. However, we are caught in a vicious circle—we adults were children once, and what happened then to our natural joy and interest in being with the grown-ups? And where is the recognition in political and economic terms that this parental function is a worthwhile one? If the infant is not given recognition in terms of the appropriate response for its age, it cannot feel held and contained. And it may no yet have learned to hold and contain itself. In that case, there are a lo of uncontained feelings going nowhere—they have been felt, and perhaps expressed, but they have not been communicated (that is recognized and understood by another person). Feelings experienced without containment tend to be overwhelming and frightening. We know this quite well in the World of adults. In many circles it is not the done thing to show much feeing. When we do, others do not respond as though we had communicated anything that has meaning, or else they do not respond as though they had understood what we meant. If we could have said it, they do not respond appropriately to what we would have said. Vice versa, when other people’s expressions of rage or pain or even love come our way, we often fail to receive and hold them. It is often more polite to ignore them, and even when it is not, we may be at a loss how to respond appropriately to a sob or a spat of temper. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
In many circumstances, we have learnt to be impassive and not react to other people’s expressions of feeling, except when they inconvenience us. We tend to react manipulatively, to stop or minimize them. Many a psychotherapist, having learnt to interpret them, has offended by doing this instead of receiving them, even in everyday life. Adults are often very disrespectful towards children’s expressions of feeling, showing amusement and ridicule or, when the expressions go beyond a certain limit, reactive rage. Or they may placate. It is distressingly rare, in much of Britain at any rate, for any but the mildest expressions of feeling to be regarded as a basis for mutual recognition. Such a response would involve listening to other, and actually hearing what is meant, and receiving it, and acknowledging it. At the very least, the other person would get some validation and, perhaps respect, maybe love, certainly a kind of holding. Some of our authors, incidentally, rather tend to write as though the feelings which we need others to hold for us and to respect and recognize, are necessarily negative ones. Certainly it is true that we need others to share our pain and to put up with our conflicts, our angers, ambivalences, and doubts. We need support in pain, rage, uncertainty, and fear of going to pieces. However, it seems to me a very incomplete holding which does only this. We also need support in our happiness, excitement, and rapture, without fear of gong to pieces. One day not long ago I drove a rented car from the snow swathed peaks of the Rocky Mountains down along snaky roads, then across the high plains, and down, down again until I reached the eastern foothills of that majestic mountain range. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
There in Colorado Springs, under a brilliant sky, I made my way to a long, low building complex that nestled along the highway, dwarfed by the peaks looming behind me. As I entered the building, I remembered again the factories in which I had once worked, with all their clatter and roar, their dirt, smoke, and suppressed anger. For years, ever since leaving our manual jobs, my wife and I have been “factory voyeurs.” In all our travels around the globe, instead of zeroing in on ruined cathedrals and tourist clips joins we have made it our business to see how people work. For nothing tells us more about their culture. And now in Colorado Spring I was once again visiting a factory. I had been told that it was among the most advanced manufacturing facilities in the World. It soon became clear why. For, in plants like this, one glimpses the latest technology and the most advanced information systems—and the practical effects of their convergence. This $10.4 billion dollar company turns out electronic apparatuses—printers, computers, software, scanners, tablet computers, mobile phones, digital cameras, pocket computers, business desktops, thin clients, medical equipment, oscilloscopes, “logic analyzers” for testing, and even more arcane items. Forty percent of the employees are engineers, programmers, technicians, clerical or managerial personnel. They work in a huge, high-ceilinged open space. One wall is a giant picture window that frames an imposing view of Pikes Peak. The other walls are painted bright yellow and white. The floors are light-coloured vinyl, gleaming and hospital clean. The workers at H-P, from clerks to computer specialists, from the plant manager to assemblers and inspectors, are not separated spatially but work together in open bays. Instead of shouting to one another over a machine clatter, they speak in normal conversational tones. Because everyone wears ordinary everyday clothes there are no visible distinctions of rank or task. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Production employees sit at their own benches or desks; so many of these are decorated with trailing ivy flowers, and other greenery that, from some visual angles, one has the fleeting illusion of being in a garden. Striding through this facility, I thought how poignant it would be if I could magically lift some of my old mates out of the foundry and auto assembly line, out of the racket, the dirt, the hard bruising manual labour, and the rigidly authoritarian discipline that accompanied it, and transplant them into this new-style work environment. They would stare in wonder at what they saw. I doubt very much that H-P is a workers’ paradise, and my blue collar friends would not be easily fooled. They would demand to know, item by item, the pay schedules, the fringe benefits, the grievance procedures, if any. They would ask whether the exotic new materials being handled in this plant are really safe or whether there are environmental health hazards. They would assume rightly that even under the seemingly casual relationships some people give orders and others take them. Nevertheless, my old friends’ shrewd eyes would take in much that is new and sharply different from the classical factories they knew. They would notice, for example, that instead of all the H-P employees arriving at once, punching the clock, and racing to their work location, they are able to move about as they wish. My old friends would marvel at the freedom of the H-P employees, again within limits, to set their own work place. To talk to managers or engineers without worrying about status or hierarchy. To dress as they wish. In short, to be individuals. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
In fact, my old companions in their heavy steel-tipped shoes, dirty overalls, and working-person’s caps would find it hard, I believe, to think of the place as a factory at all. And if we regard the factory as the home of mass production, they would be right. For mass production is not what this facility is all about. We have moved beyond mass production. As little too abstract, a little too wise, it is time for us to kiss the Earth again, it is time to let the leaves rain from the skies, let the rich life run to the roots again. I will go down to the lovely Sur Rivers and dip my arms in them up to the shoulders. I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers, in the ocean wind over the river boulders. I will touch things and things and no more thoughts, that breed like mouthless May-files darkening the sky, the insect clouds that blind our passionate hawks so that they cannot strike, hardly can fly. Things are the hawk’s food and noble is the mountain, oh noble Pico Blanco, steep sea-wave of marble. Beloved, hasten to Thy habitation, and from Thy covenant although we err, remember, pray, Thy tabernacle’s station, and all Thy promised grace on us confer, Thy city rearing on its old foundation, which I above my chiefest joy prefer. Beloved, hasten to Thy shrine in America, and though from Thy appointed path we stray, yet cast, we pray, no unrelenting eye on Thy hapless folk upon their thorny way, nor let Thy wrath go roaring like a lion, but shelter them beneath Thy wings for aye. Beloved, hasten to Thy haunt primeval, and though base treachery our souls enfold, yet take our silent prayer for retrieval, and from the miry depths our feet uphold, redeem the nation guarded through all evil, as at this first of months in days of old. For the fathers’ sake Thou wilt save the children, yea, and bring redemption unto their children’s children. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hast redeemed American. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
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Why are these People Out there More Prepare for Perdition than You are for Eternal Life?
If we fail to be vigilant, we may well find that the miracles which allows our greatness as a species, may well spell our doom. Underlying principles of respect that were once commonplace in society have increasingly given way to unkind behaviour. To help our children and youth sett aside the many negative examples that bombard them, we must first understand respect, reasons we sometimes act disrespectfully, gospel principles that apply, and ways we can be better teachers and exemplars of respect. There are at least two definitions of respect. The first refers to being polite or civil to those we meet or with whom we interact. This would include being respectful of a teacher. We hope grandchildren will treat grandparents respectfully during visits. We usually treat strangers with polite respect. Another meaning, however, refers to our feelings towards those who merit respect through honourable living. We admire their commitment or standards. For example, we might respect a sailor who gave up winning a boat race to save a man overboard. On the other hand, we do not respect one who embezzles or another who treats a child harshly in the supermarket. Yet if we were to interact with these people, we would likely treat them with respectful or polite manners, regardless of our feelings about their transgressions. Ultimately, even if we do not honour or admire their acts, we can treat people respectfully. As parents and leaders, we are to honour both definitions. We want children not only to treat us with respect—using good manners—but also to honour our standards, which we seek to exemplify through Christlike living. While the gospel teaches us to be respectful toward others without qualification, sometimes we may find ourselves falling into rationalizations about being disrespectful based on their behaviour. A person who cases a problems is often seen as warranting disrespectful treatment. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
It is probably fair to say that the animal rights movement has called needed attention to the abuse of animals for such purpose as testing cosmetics and other products. It has also encouraged development of alternatives that minimize the use of animals. For example, it may be possible to use computer simulations of animal behaviour for teaching and preliminary research. Also, use of animals could be limited to critical studies. However, again questions arise: Who is to say what research is worthwhile? Is it possible to guess where new knowledge will lead? Might a seemingly minor finding eventually unleash a breakthrough? Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from animal research is that anyone working with vulnerable subjects, be they animals, children, or those with special needs or disabilities, must maintain the highest ethical standards. Psychological studies are vital for advancing knowledge, but research cannot continue unless researchers are able to retain the public’s trust. The majority of psychological studies are harmless. However, some behavioural research does raise ethical and legal concerns. Anytime there is a risk of possible harm, investigators must ensure that subjects are protected and that strict ethical standards are upheld. There are some basic ethical guidelines for psychological research. Some must do no harm, accurately describe risks to potential subject, ensure that participation is voluntary, minimize any discomfort to participants, maintain confidentiality, do not unnecessarily invade privacy, use deception only when absolutely necessary. Remove any misconceptions caused by deception (debrief), provide results and interpretations to participants, and treat participants with dignity and respect. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Respect is an expression of our sense of universal brotherhood or sisterhood—a testimony of our membership in the human family. It acknowledges our common humanity and shows our reverence for children of God. The gospel teaches us that we are to hold the same esteem for others that we hold for ourselves. “And again I say unto you, let every human esteem one’s brother (or sister) as oneself,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 38.25. Acting disrespectfully suggest we do not esteem the other person as ourselves. For example, prejudice is a result of disrespect for our fellow humans. We cannot participate in attitudes of prejudice without distancing ourselves from others. True respect, then, comes as we develop our ability to love our brothers and sisters as ourselves. Humility and affection? Sounds like trouble for me, O Lord, the sort one finds in psalmistries and prophecies. “Blessed is one whom You have brought up, O Lord, and taught about Your law,” as the Psalmist prayed (94.12-13); “may one not be swamped by the troubles!” And may one not ramble about the Earth like the ravaged Daughters of Zion in Isaiah (3.26)! Do not worry about the Prophets, My dear friend. I was their tutor from the beginning, as the Author of the Letter to the Hebrews correctly has it (1.1-2), and I have not stopped talking since. Funny thing, though. Nowadays, when I begin to speak, people feel their deafness coming on. They would rather heart the World than the Word of God; they would rather tickle the fancies of the flesh than tackle the fancy of God. Something is wrong here. The World promises a lot of pretty small stuff, much of it perishable, and guards the warehouse aggressively. However, when I promise Highest Quality and Lasting Value, the mortal heart begins to cringe. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
The World and its managers have no trouble commanding performance, but I have difficulty in finding just a few good people who will follow My commandments. “Run red with bloody shame, O Sidon, says the sea”; that is what the oracle about the destruction of Tyre and Sidon, those doleful cities, said in Isaiah (23.4). However, I, the Lord and Tailor of the Universe, have a question. Why do I always seem to come out on the short end? For a small benefic you will run a mile, but for Eternal Life you will not lift a single sandal. For a tinny toy people will haggle for the lowest price. However, why does just one coin seem to make so much difference? So the hagglers linger over the litigation until their faces turn red. And what is truly astonishing is that, for a vain premise or a small promise, they are not afraid to work themselves silly day and night. What a shame it is! For Incommutable Good, Inestimable Reward, Incomparable Honour, Interminable Glory, Humanity’s slow to break a sweat. Blush with the common beet, you sluggish and querulous soul, and answer Me these! Why are there people out there more prepared for perdition than you are for Eternal Life? Why do they rejoice more in Vanity than you in Verity? Why are their hopes always coming up short, and ye, for all their foolishness, they never seem sad? Why is that? What is wrong with My promises? Nothing that I can see. First, they do not lumber anyone. Second, they do not dismiss as dolts the persons who put confidence in Me. Third, I give what I promise; I fulfill what I order. Fourth, My only condition is that a person remain faithful to Me till the end. When you remember I am the Rigorous Examiner of all Devouts and the Rewarder of all good folk everywhere, not exactly a bad condition. Now, before you forget, some things to remember. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Write My words in your heart and familiarize yourself with them. Why? In time of temptation, you will have to put them into play. What you do not understand when you read, you will learn on the Day of Visitation, that is to say, when I visit My chosen people on the Day of Temptation and the Day of Consolation. Every day I read two lessons to My friends. First, to encourage them to decrease their vices; second, to exhort them to increase their virtues. Whoever “hears My words and spurns them has picked one’s own judge on the Last Day,” I have said in the Gospel oh John (12.48); and an unsympathetic judge at that. Public fascination has recently shifted to John Edward, James Van Praagh, Jensen Ackles, the late Sylvia Brown, and other medium who claim they can make “a really, really long-distance call”—contact with the dead. In 2001, Gallup reported that 28 percent of Americans—up from 18 percent in 1990—reported believing “that people can hear from or communicate mentally with someone who has died”; another 26 percent are “not sure.” Edward, born John MaGee Jr., is a charismatic former ballroom-dance instructor who has seen his gig soar from New York radio stations, to nationwide seminars, to a popular Sci Fi Channel program (Crossing Over) that got moved from late night to prime time and then to daytime syndication. “Alternatively funny, sarcastic and compassionate, he comes off as sensitive yet strong, a sort of all-in-one priest, father and husband figure for the show’s predominately female audience,” reports the New York Times. “He’s telling me to acknowledge the wedding, do you understand this?” Edward asks an audience member to whom he relays information from her recently lost father. In response, the woman crumbles, breaking into sobs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
On the edited-for-entertainment broadcast, the television audience sees this impressive hit, but not, the Times reports, the twenty minutes Edward spent during the same taping shooting blanks. The televised hits, say skeptics, are accomplished, first, by a “throw-it-all-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks” routine. Search the crowd, Edward says, “They are telling me to acknowledge an M connection; two people’s names begin with M in the family. They are telling me that somebody had the Parkinson’s, or somebody had some sort of neurological disease as well. I’m in this area over here.” He points to a row in the audience. “Do you understand this? Yes? No? Hello?” When a couple of people nod, he focuses on one of them and continues to spew statements (“Somebody in your family is a very heavy smoker”) and questions (“Does ‘Dr. Zhivago’ have any meaning to you?”). Much of the information is ambiguous enough to allow the target to impute meaning: Edward gets “a J or G” sound for a name and sees “blackness in the chest.” Skeptics also say Edward applies classic “cold reading” techniques long practiced by mediums, palm readers, and crystal-ball gazers. Cold readers “read” our clothing, physical features, nonverbal gestures, and reactions to what they are saying. Imagine yourself as the character reader who was visited by a young woman in her late twenties or early thirties. The psychologist Ray Hyman, who once read palms to supplement his income from magic and mental shows, understands the art of cold reading. He described the woman as “wearing expensive jewelry, a wedding band, and a black dress of cheap material. The observant reader noted that she was wearing shoes which were advertised for people with foot trouble.” Do these clues suggest anything? #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Drawing on these observations, Hyman reports, the character reader proceeded to amaze his client. He assumed that the woman had come to see him, as did most of his female customers, because of a love of financial problem. The black dress and the wedding band led him to reason that her husband had died recently. The expensive jewelry suggested that she had been financially comfortable during the marriage, but the inexpensive dress suggested that her husband’s death had left her impoverished. The therapeutic shoes signified that she was now on her feet more than she had been used to, implying that she had been working to support herself since her husband’s death. Any reader of Sherlock Holmes stories is familiar with this art of cold reading. If you are no as shrewd as this character reader (who correctly guessed that the woman was wondering if she should remarry in the hope of ending her economic hardship), Hyman says it hardly matters. If people seek you out for a reading, start with safe sympathy: “I sense you are having some problems lately. You seem unsure what to do. I get the feeling another person is involved.” Then tell them what hey want to hear. Memorize some universally true statements from astrology and fortune-telling manuals and use them liberally. Tell people it is their responsibility to cooperate by relating your message to their specific experiences. Later they will recall that you predicted the specifics. Phrase statements as questions, and when you detect a positive response, assert the statement strongly. Be a good listener, and later, in different words, reveal to people what they earlier revealed to you. If you dupe them, they will come. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
The technique works so well that, while seeing others accept his readings as psychic intuitions, Hyman himself became a “a firm believer in palmistry”—until one day a respected professional mentalist suggested an interesting experiment. The mentalist proposed that Hyman deliberately give readings opposite to what the lines indicated. “I tried this out with a few clients,” Hyman reported. “To my surprise and horror, my readings were just as successful as ever. The medium was the message. Ever since then I have been interested in the powerful forces that convince us, [palm] reader and client alike, that something is so when it really isn’t.” Such is the scientific critique of New Age spiritual intuition. However, let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater. One can regard New Age claims of psychic powers and disembodied immortality as unfounded, yet celebrate the gentle music, respect for the planet, and concern for peace and harmony. New Age folk have something to teach skeptics about feelings, and skeptics have something to teach them about critical thinking. They can teach skeptics about the benefits of openness, and skeptics can teach them that a completely open mind is vulnerable to having garbage tossed in. The glimpse is what the name purports to be and should not be regarded as something more, as the fullest opening of the mind to divine truth. However, naturally, because there are different capacities and temperaments in different persons, one glimpse may be wider than another, or take less similar form. The Glimpses are not completely uniform in their details. In each one there is different emphasis on a particular aspect, such as its Beauty, Power, Impersonality, or Emptiness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Since no two human beings are exactly alike, whether in body or mind, the kind of glimpse which each one gets, the way in which one feels and finds the Overself’s pressure, is entirely according to personal needs and not according to a fixed stereotype pattern for all. All humans who win through to the World of their higher self, enter the same World. If their reports differ, as they do, that is not because the experiences differ but because the humans themselves differ. Nevertheless a comparative examination of all available reports will show that there is still a golden thread of similarity running through the, a highest factor of perception. The first occasion when this happens brings a thrill of wonder. This is of course due in part to the tremendous nature of the Overself’s discovery, but it is also due to its novelty, to the fact that it was never previously experienced. Hence the thrill cannot come again, cannot be repeated even though the experience itself may be repeated several times; but the wonder will always remain. There is the deepest feeling in the glimpse, but this does not at all mean it is hysterical. It may be extremely quiet. It may be strongly passionate, in which case it will be completely under control—not by the ego but by the higher power. When one begins to know oneself as one really is, when one experiences this wonderous touch of the Untouched, one feels truly alive. The amazing clearness of the whole revelation and the certainty beyond all possible doubt which accompanies it are only two of its features. An extraordinary inspired elation—emotional, intellectual, and intuitive—is a third feature, with a diffused sense of well-being as its consequence or its corollary. The points of this experience are the difficulty of describing it precisely, the joy it yields and the peace it brings, the feeling of a finer self and the sense of a higher presence, the appraisal of its preciousness and the fading away of Worldly desires. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
In that blessed moment one finds oneself free in a way never before felt. For one finds oneself without the perplexities of the intellect and without the schemings of the ego. When the two are one, when ego and Overself no longer remain at a distance from one another, humans experience their first illumination. What will happen thereafter is wrapped in mystery. In this brief interval when one feels oneself to be in the presence of the Overself, when goodwill, peace, and wisdom become living eternal realities rather than mere mocking words, the littleness vanishes from life and a sacred grandeur replaces it. In extreme cases, one may even feel as if this is the first time in human history that anyone has had such a glowing experience. The tremulous happiness of these contemplative moments attains is zenith with an inarticulate breathless stillness. One feels elated, lifted up beyond one’s normal self, intensely happy without having any particular physical cause to account for one’s happiness. One feels this goodness with all others. And lastly, the burden of past sins and ancient errors falls from one’s shoulders. One has become cleansed, purified, made whole. These splendid moments, so filled with flashes of beauty and goodness, so tremendous in meaning and perspective, are like peeps into Paradise. All through one’s spiritual career one has dreamt of this first blissful and unique moment when one would enter the Overself’s awareness. In these blessed moments one loves God and knows that one is loved by God. The experience is feeling blent with knowing, but the feeling is as delicious as peach-blossom and the knowing is as certain as sunrise. In finding the godlike within oneself, one finds also the god. And from that stems forth goodwill toward all. It is really love active on a higher plane, love purified of self and cleansed of grossness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Glimpses vary much in their nature. Some are soft, mild, and delicate, quiet and restrained; others are ecstatic, rapturous, and excited. All gives some sort of uplift, exaltation, enlightenment, or revelation an also to varying degrees. I remember the first time I had this astonishing experience. I was fond of disappearing from London whenever the weather allowed and wandering alongside the river Thames in its more picturesque country parts. If the day was sunny I would stretch my feet out, lie down in the grass, pull out notebook and pen from my pocket—knowing that thoughts would eventually arise that would have for me an instructive or even revelatory nature, apart from those ordinary ones which were merely expressive. One day, while I was waiting for these thoughts to arise, I lost the feeling that I was there at all. I seemed to dissolve and vanish from that place, but not from consciousness. Something was there, a presence, certainly not me, but I was fully aware of it. It seemed to be something of the highest importance, the only thing that mattered. After a few minutes I came back, discovered myself in time and space again; but a great peace had touched me and a very benevolent feeling was still with me. I looked at the beautiful evergreen trees, the shrubs, the flowers, and the grass and felt a tremendous sympathy with them and then when I though of other persons a tremendous benevolence towards them. In this mysterious moment the two are one. One no longer abides with the mere images of reality. One is now in the authentic World of reality with itself. There are three stages in each glimpse. The initial one brings a soft feeling of its gentle approach. The second carries the human to its peak of upliftment, enlightenment, and peace. The final one draws one down again into a fading glow which occupies the mind’s background and later survives only in memory. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
It is a state of exquisite tenderness, of love welling up from an inner center and radiating outward in all directions. If other human beings or animal creatures come within one’s contact at the time, they become recipients of this love without exception. For then no enemies are recognized, none are disliked, and it is not possible to regard anyone as repulsive. The mood is exhilarative without being excitable, centered in reality without losing touch with this pseudo-real World. One may find oneself lost at times in short periods of absent-mindedness. It may be in the sound of bubbling brook or some lovely music or some striking lines of memorable prose. With that one forgets cares and peace wells up within one. Such an experience comes close to the mystical glimpse, only the mystic’s consciousness moves on a higher level. One seeks a diviner life, a finer soul, inner peace. For a fraction of the hour, time suddenly and uniquely steps aside, Isis is unveiled and the real beauty of Being exhibits itself: All is suspended in this glimpse, all is stillness and grace. The memory of a first glimpse is imperishable. It is a love-experience along with a birth of knowledge, all under an enchanter’s spell. When the highly personal egocentric attitude is first displaced by the Overself, there is a sense of sharp liberation and utter relief. In those glorious experiences, one seems to live a charmed existence, above all that distressed one before, beyond all the hideous negatives which the World obtrudes on one’s notice, secure in a spiritual ivory tower shimmering with inner light around. It is an experience which happens deep inside the heart. The glimpse is fresh and direct, it is both a vision and an experience and above all it is spontaneous, for it comes by itself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
All memories can be divided into those that are purely personal or private and those that are shared or social. Unshared private memories die with the individual. Social memory lives on. Our remarkable ability to file and retrieve share memories is the secret of our species’ evolutionary success. And anything hat significantly alters the way we construct, store, or use social memory therefore touches on the very wellsprings of destiny. Twice before in human history humankind has revolutionized its social memory. Today, in constructing a new info-sphere, we are poised on the brink of another such transformation. In the beginning, human groups were forced to store their shared memories in the same place they kept private memories—id est, in the minds of individuals. Tribal elders, wise humans, and other carried these memories with them in the form of history, myth, lore, and legend, and transmitted them to their children through speech, song, chant, and example How to light a fire, the best way to snare a bird, how to lace a raft or pound taro, how to sharpen a plowstick or care for the oxen—all the accumulated experience of the group was stored in the neurons and glia and synapses of human beings. So long as this remained true, the size of the social memory was sorely limited. No matter how good the memories of the elderly, no matter how memorable the songs or lessons, there was only so much storage space in the skulls of any population. Second Wave civilization smashed the memory barrier. It spread mass literacy. It kept systematic business records. It built thousands of libraries and museums. It invented the file cabinet. In short, it moved social memory outside the skull, found new ways to store it, and thus expanded it beyond its previous limits. By increasing the store of cumulative knowledge, it accelerated all the processes of innovation and social change, giving Second Wave civilization the most rapidly changing and developing culture the World until then had known. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Some of humans’ greatest inventions have come from a new to be love, then a desire to be worshipped; a god. Today we are taking a quantum leap to a whole new stage of social memory. One day we will be able to send an email to a computer by just thinking about what we want to write and it will be transmitted. The radical de-massification of the media, the invention of new media, the mapping of the Earth by satellite, the monitoring of hospital patients by electronic sensors, the computerization of corporate files—al mean we are recording the activities of the civilization in fine-grain detail. Unless we incinerate the planet, and our social memory with it, we shall before long have the closet thing to a civilization with total recall. Third Wave civilization will have at its disposal more information, and more finely organized information, about itself than could have been imagined even a quarter-century ago. The shift to a Third Wave social memory, however, is more than just quantitative. We are also, as it were, imparting life to our memory. When social memory was stored in human brains it was continually being eroded, refreshed, stirred about, combined and recombined in new ways. It was active, or dynamic. It was, in the most literal sense, alive. When industrial civilization moved much of social memory outside the skull, that memory became objectified, embedded in artifacts, books, payroll sheets, newspapers, photographs, and films. However, a symbol once inscribed on a page, a photo once captured on film a newspaper once printed, remained passive or static. Only when these symbols were fed into a human brain again did they come alive, to be manipulated or recombined in fresh ways. While Second Wave civilization radially expanded social memory, it also froze it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
What makes the leap to a Third Wave info-sphere so historically exciting is that it not only vastly expands social memory again, but resurrects it from the dead. The computer, because it processes the data it stores, creates an historically unprecedented situation: it makes social memory both extensive and active. And this combination will prove to be propulsive. Activating this newly expanded memory will unleash fresh cultural energies. For the computer not only helps us organize or synthesize “blips” into coherent models of reality, it also stretches the far limits of possible. No library or file cabinet could think, let alone think in an unorthodox fashion. The computer, by contrast, can be asked by us to “think the unthinkable” and the previously unthought. It makes possible a flood of new theories, ideas, ideologies, artistic insights, technical advances, economic and political innovations that were, in the most literal sense, unthinkable and unimaginable before now. In this way, it accelerates historical change and fuels the thrust toward Third Wave social diversity. In all previous societies the info-sphere provided the means for communication between humans. The Third Wave multiplies these means. However, it also provides powerful facilities, for the first time in history, for machine-to-machine communications and, even more astonishing, for conversations between humans and the intelligent environment around them. When we stand back and look at the larger picture, it becomes clear that the revolution in the info-sphere is at least as dramatic as that in the techno-sphere—in the energy system and technological base of society. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
The work of constructing a new civilization is racing forward on many levels. The Chicago School urban ecologist of the 1920s believed that social distance was reflected in spatial distance. The level of segregation would thus be reflected in the social distance between groups. Thus, as segregation decreased, the integration of social groups would increase. The data are fairly definite in suggesting that this is what occurred with European American ethnic populations, although for some groups it was considerably faster and easier. For European ethnic populations, as generations increased, and income, educational level, and occupational status rose, they increasingly blended into the general American population. For example, as recently as the end of the second World War one could map out distinct ethnic neighbourhoods for groups such as the Irish. Today, with the exception of a few historical holdovers such as south Boston, there no longer are any demographically distinct Irish neighbourhoods. Richard Alba argues that what is emerging is a new ethnic group—“one based on ancestry from anywhere on the European continent.” The major exception to the relationship between rising socioeconomic status and declining spatial segregation has been African Americans. Historically, rising income and education has not, over time, been more or less automatically translated into declining segregation, as has been the case with European or even Hispanic immigrants. Nor did segregation decrease as generations in the United States of America increased. For African Americans the fact of race traditionally has overridden variables. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
For nearly a century, research has shown that suburban African Americans were more likely to live in suburban municipalities that had lower income, less adequate housing, and trained local finances. At least until the 1980s the patten was of residential segregation increasing in the north and declining in the south. If there is a dual housing market that shunts African Americans primarily into already African American communities, movement of African Americans to the suburbs does not automatically increase interaction between the races. However, there is less institutional discrimination in suburban rental housing than in owner-occupied housing. However, research is showing that in some communities with subsidized rental housing, European Americans face discrimination, especially if they are young. Their applications are overlooked, and people from outside the city, who are African American, women in particular, are given a preference. That is the result of the unaudited “lottery system.” Instead of being first come, first served, there is allegedly a lottery the randomly selects people for the limited number of subsidized units. However, many of the people selected to occupy these units tend to know each other, tend to be related, and are from the same city, so they have to relocate to the new city where these subsided units are. Experts say it is more than a coincidence, but housing fraud. It is not the same as a group of people all moving to one area and buying are renting houses. “It would be nearly impossible for all these people to qualify for subsidized housing in a city they do not live in and for it to be to be so segregated,” (Linda Brewster Stearns and John R. Logan, “Racial Structuring of the Housing Market and Segregation in Suburban Areas”). #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
From the extreme inequality of conditions and fortunes, from the diversity of passions and talents, from useless arts, from pernicious arts, from frivolous sciences there would come a pack of prejudices equally contrary to reason, happiness, and virtue. One would see the leaders fomenting whatever can weaken men untied together by disuniting them; whatever can give society an air of apparent concord while sowing the seeds of real division; whatever can inspire defiance and hatred in the various classes through the opposition of their rights and interests, and can as a consequence strengthen the power that contains them all. It is from the bosom of this disorder and these upheavals that despotism, by gradually raising its hideous head and devouring everything it had seen to be good and healthy in every part of the state, would eventually succeed in trampling underfoot the laws of the people, and in establishing itself on the ruins of the republic. The times that would precede this last transformation would be times of troubles and calamities; but in the end everything would be swallowed up by the monster, and the peoples would no longer have leaders or laws, but only tyrants. Also, from that moment on, there would no longer be any question of mores and virtue, for wherever despotism, in which decency affords no hope, reigns, it tolerates no other master. As soon as it speaks, there is neither probity nor duty to consul, and the blindest obedience is the only virtue remaining for slaves. Here is the final stage of inequality, and the extreme point that closes the circle and touches the point from which we started. Here all private individuals become equals again, because they are nothing. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
And since subjects no longer have any law other than the master’s will, nor the master any rule other than one’s passions, the notions of good and the principles of justice again vanish. Here everything is returned solely to the law of the strongest, and consequently to a new state of nature different from the one with which we began, in that the one was the state of nature in its purity, and this last one is the fruit of an excess of corruption. Moreover, there is so little difference between these two states, and the governmental contract is o utterly dissolved by despotism, that that despot is master only as long as one is the strongest; and as soon as one can be ousted, one had no cause to protest against violence. The uprising that ends in the strangulation or the dethronement of a sultan is as lawful an act as those by which one disposed of the lives and goods of one’s subjects the day before. Force alone maintained one; force alone brings one down. Thus everything happens in accordance with the natural order, and whatever the outcome of these brief and frequent upheavals may be, no one can complain about someone else’s injustice, but only of one’s own imprudence or one’s misfortune. In discovering and following thus the forgotten and lost routes that must have led humans from the natural state to the civil state: in reestablishing, with the intermediate position I have just taken note of, those that time constrains on me have made me suppress or that the imagination has not suggested to me, no attentive reader can fail to be struck by the immense space that separates these two states. It is in this slow succession of things that one will see the solution to an infinity of moral and political problems which the philosophers are unable to resolve. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
One will realize that, since the human race of one age is not the human race of another age, the reason why Diogenes did not find one’s man is because one searched among one’s contemporaries for a man who no longer existed. Cato, one will say, perished with Rome and liberty because he was out of place in his age; and this greatest of men merely astonished the World, which five hundred years earlier he would have governed. In short, he will explain how the soul and human passions are imperceptibly altered and, as it were, change their nature; why, in the long run, our needs and our pleasures change their objects; why, with original humans gradually disappearing, society no longer offers to the eyes of the wise human anything but an assemblage of artificial humans and factitious passions which are the work of all these new relations and have no true foundation in nature. What reflection teaches us on this subject is perfectly confirmed by observation: savage humans and civilized humans differ so greatly in the depths of their hearts and in their inclinations, that what constitutes the supreme happiness of the one would reduce the other to despair. Savage man breathes only tranquility and liberty; one wants simply to live and rest easy; and not even the unperturbed tranquility of the Stoic approaches one’s profound indifference for any other objects. On the other hand, the citizen is always active and in a sweat, always agitated, and unceasingly tormenting oneself in order to seek still more laborious occupations. One works until one dies; one even runs to one’s death in order to be in a position to live, or renounces life in order to acquire immorality. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
One pays court to the great whom one hates and to the rich whom one scorns. One stops at nothing to obtain the honour of serving them. One proudly crows about one’s own baseness and their protection; and proud of one’s slavery, one speaks with disdain about hose who do no have the honour of taking part in it. What a spectacle for the Carib are the difficult and envied labours of the European minister! How many cruel deaths would that indolent savage not prefer to the horror of such a life, which often is not mollified even by the pleasure of doing good. However, in order to see the purpose of so many cares, the words power and reputation would have to have a meaning in one’s mind; one would have to learn that there is a type of men who place some value on the regard the rest of the World has for them, and who know how to be happy and content with themselves on the testimony of others rather than on their own. Such, in fact, is the true cause of all these differences; the savage lives in oneself; the human accustomed to the ways of society is always outside oneself and knows how to live only in the opinion of others. And it is, as it were, from their judgment alone that one draws the sentiment of one’s own existence. It is no pertinent to my subject to show how, from such a disposition, so much indifference for good and evil arises, along with such fine discourse or morality; how, with everything reduced to appearances, everything becomes factitious and bogus: honour, friendship, virtue, and often even our vices, about which we eventually find the secret of boasting; how, in a word, always asking others what we are and never daring to question ourselves on his asking others what are and never daring to question ourselves on this matter, in the midst of so much philosophy, humanity, politeness and sublime maxims, we have merely a deceitful and frivolous exterior: honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
It is enough for me to have proved that his is not the original state of man, and that this is only the spirit of society, and the inequality that society engenders, which thus change and alter all our natural inclinations. I have tried to set forth the origin and process of inequality, the establishment and abuse of political societies, to the extent that these things can be deduced from the nature of humans by the light of reason alone, and independently of the sacred dogmas that give to sovereign authority the sanction of the divine right. It follows from this presentation that, since inequality is practically non-existent in the state of nature, it derives its force and growth from the development of our faculties and the progress of the human mind, and eventually becomes stable and legitimate through the establishment of property and laws. Moreover, it follows that moral inequality, authorized by positive right alone, is contrary to natural right whenever it is not combined in the same proportion with physical inequality: a distinction that is sufficient to determine what one should think in this regard about the sort of inequality that reigns among all civilized people, for it is obviously contrary to the law of nature, however it may be defined, for a child to command an old man, for an imbecile to lead a wise man, and for a handful of people to gorge themselves on superfluities while the starving multitude lacks necessities. Tired of all who come with words, words but no language I went to the snow-covered island. The wild does not have words. The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions! I come across the marks of roe-deer’s hooves in the snow. Language but no words. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
Lord, please grant me the ability to be alone; may it be my custom to go outdoors each day among the trees and grasses, among all growing things, and there may I be alone, and enter into prayer to talk with the one that I belong to. Praised art Thou, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, mighty, revered and exalted God. Thou bestowest lovingkindness and possesses all things. Mindful of the patriarchs’ love for Thee, Thou wilt in Thy love bring a redeemer to their children’s children for the sake of Thy name. O King, Thou Helper, Redeemer and Shiel, be Thou praised, O Lord, Shield of Abraham. Thou, O Lord, art mighty forever. Thou callest the dead to immortal life for Thou art might in deliverance. Our God and God of our fathers, dew, precious dew, unto Thy land forlorn! Pour out our blessing in Thy exultation, to strengthen us with ample premium cranberry juice and corn, and give Thy chosen city safe foundation in dew. Dew, precious dew, the good year’s crown, we wait, that Earth in pride and glory may be fruited, and that the city now so desolate into a gleaming crown may be transmuted by dew. Dew, precious dew, let fall upon the land, from Heaven’s treasury be this accorded, so shall the darkness by a beam be spanned, the faithful of Thy vineyard be rewarded with dew. Dew, precious dew, to make the mountains sweet, the savour of Thy excellence recalling! Deliver us from exile, we entreat, so we my sing Thy praises, softly falling as dew. Dew, precious dew, our granaries to fill, and us with youthful freshness to enharden! Beloved God, uplift us at Thy will and make us as a richly-watered garden with dew. Dew, precious dew, that we our harvest reap, and guard our fatted flocks and herds from leanness! Behold our people follows Thee like sheep, and looks to Thee to give the Earth her greenness with due. For Thou art the Lord our God who causest the wind to blow and the dew to descend: For a blessing and no for a curse. Amen. For life and not for death. Amen. For plenty and not for famine. Amen. Remember, it takes a special breed to keep America safe! #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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A Smarter Environment Might Make Smarter People!
Diversity is important, and we must keep that in mind and even respect and welcome groups who may not be oppressed. Equality is not for one, it is for all! One of the dangers facing the World is the deterioration of the home and family. The family is one of the greatest institutions of civilization. Subversion of this great institution can do nothing less than bring destruction upon the World. The plan of life and salvation teaches that marriage is for time and eternity. They very purpose of life is that we might take upon ourselves morality, that we might prove ourselves to see if we will do the things that the Lord has commanded up. This is a glorious World in which we live. It was created by God through his only Begotten Son, with its Heavenly bodies and their functions. The Earth with its abundance of flowers, its adornment of beautiful tress and shrubs; the majestic mountains; the mighty blue oceans; the sun and its great functions; the starts and the amazing planets in the Heaven and Victorian architecture—yes, they are all the handiwork of God. All these things bid us have joy. Humans, however, are the greatest of all God’s creations. The Lord God told Moses: “This is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of humans,” reports Moses 1.39. The question, “Do miracles occur?” and the question, “Is the course of Nature absolutely uniform?” are the same question asked in two different ways. Hume, by sleight of hand, treats them as two different questions. He first answers “Yes,” to the question whether Nature is absolutely uniform: and then uses this “Yes” as a ground for answering, “No,” to the question, “Do miracles occur?” The single real question which he set out to answer is never discussed at all. He gets the answer to one form of the question by assuming the answer to one form of the same question. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Probabilities of the kind that Hume is concerned with hold inside the framework of an assumed Uniformity of Nature. When the question of miracles is raised, we are asking about the validity or perfection of the frame itself. No study of probabilities inside a given frame itself tells us how probable it is that the frame itself can be violated. Granted a school time-table with French on Tuesday morning at ten o’clock, it is really probable that Jones, who always skimps his French preparation, will be in trouble next Tuesday, and that he was in trouble on any previous Tuesday. However, what does this tell us about the probability of the time-table’s being altered? To find that out one must eavesdrop in the masters’ common-room. It is no use studying the time table. If we stick to Hume’s method, far from getting what he hoped (namely, the conclusions that all miracles are infinitely improbable) we get a complete deadlock. The only kind of probability he allows holds exclusively within the frame of uniformity. When uniformity is itself in question (and it is in question the moment we ask whether miracles occur) this kind of probability is suspended. And Hume knows no other. By his method, therefore, we cannot say that uniformity is either probable or improbable. We have impounded both uniformity and miracles in a sort of limbo where probability and improbability can never come. This result is equally disastrous for the scientist and the theologian; but along Hume’s lines there is nothing whatever to be done about it. Our only hope, then, will be to cast about for some quite different kind of probability. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Let us for the moment cease to ask what right we have to believe in the Uniformity of Nature, and ask why in fac humans do believe in it. I think the belief has three causes, two of which are irrational. In the first place we are creatures of habit. We expect new situations to resemble old ones. It is a tendency which we share with other terrestrial beings; one can see it working, often to very comic results, in our dogs and cats. In the second place, when we plan our actions, we have to leave out of account the theoretical possibility that Nature might not behave as usual to-morrow, because we can do nothing about it. It is not worth bothering about because no action can be taken to meet it. And what we habitually put out of our minds we soon forget. The picture of uniformity thus comes to dominate our minds without rival and we believe it. Both these causes are irrational and would be just as effective in building up a false belief as in building up a tree. However, I am convinced that there is a third cause. “In science,” said the late Sir Arthur Eddington, “we sometimes have convictions which we cherish but cannot justify; we are influenced by some innate sense of the fitness of things.” This may sound a perilously subjective and aesthetic criterion; but can one doubt that it is a principal source of our belief in Uniformity? A Universe in which unprecedented and unpredictable events were at every moment flung into Nature would not merely be inconvenient to us: it would be profoundly repugnant. We will not accept such a Universe on any terms whatever. It is utterly detestable to us. It shocks our “sense of the fitness of things.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
In advance of experience, in the teeth of many experiences, we are already enlisted on the side of uniformity. For of course science actually proceeds by concentrating not on the regularities of Nature but on her apparent irregularities. It is the apparent irregularity that prompts each new hypothesis. It does do because we refuse to acquiesce in irregularities: we never rest till we have formed and verified a hypothesis which enables us to say that they were not really irregularities at all. Nature as it comes to us looks at first like a mass of irregularities. The stove which lit all right yesterday will not light to-day; the water which was wholesome last year is poisonous this year. The whole mass of seemingly irregular experience could never have been turned into scientific knowledge at all unless from the very start we had brought to it a faith in uniformity which almost no number of disappointments can shake. This faith—the preference—is it a thing we can trust? Or is it only the way our minds happen to work? It is useless to say that it has hitherto always been confirmed by the event. That is no good unless you (at least silently) add, “And therefore always will be”: and you cannot add that unless you know already that our faith in uniformity is well grounded. And that is just what we are now asking. Does this sense of fitness of our correspond to anything in external reality? The answer depends on the Metaphysic one holds. If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that out sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tells us anything about a reality external to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Our convictions are simply a fact about us—like that colour of our hair. If Naturalism is true, we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform. Only if quite a different Metaphysic is true, can it be trusted. If the deepest things in reality, the Fact which is the source of all other facthood, is a thing in some degree like ourselves—if it is a Rational Spirit and we derive our rational spirituality from It—then indeed our conviction can be trusted. Our repugnance to disorder is derived from Nature’s Creator and ours. The disorderly World which we cannot endure to believe in is the disorderly World He would not have endured to create. Our conviction that the time-table will not be perpetually or meaninglessly altered is sound because we have (in a sense) eavesdropped in the Masters’ common-room. The sciences logically require a metaphysic of this sort. Our greatest natural philosopher thinks it is also the metaphysic out of which they originally grew. Professor Whitehead points out that centuries of belief in a God who combined “the personal energy of God” with “the rationality of a Greek philosopher” first produced that firm expectation of systemic order which rendered possible the birther of modern science. Humans became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it. Two significant developments have already appeared—the hypothesis of a lawless sub-nature, and the surrender of the claim that science is true. We may be living nearer than we supposed to the end of the Scientific Age. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
However, if we admit God, must we admit Miracle? Indeed, indeed, you have no security against it. That is the bargain. Theology says to you in effect, “Admit God and with Him the risk of a few miracles, and I in return will ratify your faith in uniformity as regards the overwhelming majority of events.” The philosophy which forbids you to make uniformity absolute is also the philosophy which offers you solid grounds for believing it to be general, to be almost absolute. The Being who threatens Nature’s claim to omnipotence confirms her in her lawful occasions. Give us this ha’porth of tar and we will save the ship. The alternative is really much worse. Try to make Nature absolute and you find that her uniformity is not even probable. By claiming too much, you get nothing. You get the deadlock, as in Hume. Theology offers you a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue one’s experiments and the Christian to continue one’s prayers. We have also, I suggest, found what we were looking for—a criterion whereby to judge the intrinsic probability of an alleged miracle. We must judge it by our “innate sense of fitness of things,” that same sense of fitness which led us to anticipate that the Universe would be orderly. I do not mean, of course, that we are to use this sense in deciding whether miracles in general are possible: we know that they are on philosophical grounds. Nor do I mean that a sense of fitness will do instead of close inquiry into the historical evidence. As I have repeatedly pointed out, the historical evidence cannot be estimated unless we have first estimated the intrinsic probability of the recorded event. It is in making that estimate as regards each story of the miraculous that our sense of fitness comes into play. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
If in giving such weight to the sense of fitness I were doing anything new, I should feel rather nervous. In reality I am merely giving formal acknowledgement to a principle which is always used. Whatever humans may say, no one really thinks that the Christian doctrine of Resurrection is exactly on the same level with some pious title-tattle about how Mother Egaree Louise miraculously found her second best thimble by the assistance of St. Anthony. The religious and the irreligious are really quite agreed on the point. The whoop of delight with which the sceptic would unearth the story of the thimble, and the “rosy pudency” with which the Christian would keep it in the background, both tell the same tale. Even those who think all stories of miracles absurd think some very much more absurd than others: even those who believe them all (if anyone does) think that some require a specially robust faith. The criterion which both parties are actually using is that of fitness. More than half the disbelief in miracles that exists is based on a sense of their unfitness: a conviction (due, as I have argued, to false philosophy) that they are unsuitable to the dignity of God or Nature or else to the indignity and insignificance of humans. Although God can do all things, He cannot make a think that is corrupt not to have been corrupted. There does not fall under the scope of God’s omnipotence anything that implies a contradiction. Now that the past should not have been implies a contradiction. For as it implies a contradiction to say that Socrates is sitting, and not sitting, so does it to say that he sat, and did not sit. However, to say the he did sit is to say that it happened in the past. To say that he did not sit, is to say that it did not happen. Whence, that the past should not have been, does not come under the scope of divine power. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
This is what Augustine means when he says (Contra Faust. xxix, 5): “Whosoever says, If God is almighty, let Him make what is done as if it were not done, does not see that this is to say: If God is almighty let Hum effect that what is true, by they very fact that it is true, be false.” And the Philosopher says (Ethic. vi, 2): “Of this one thing alone is God deprived—namely, to make undone the things that have been done. Although it is impossible accidentally for the past not to have been, if one considers the past thing itself, as, for instance, the running of Socrates; nevertheless, if the pas thing is considered as past, that it should not have been is impossible, not only in itself, but absolutely since it implies a contradiction. Thus, it is more impossible than the raising of the dead; in which there is nothing contradictory, because this is reckoned impossible in reference to some power, that is to say, some natural power; for such impossible thing do some beneath the scope of divine power. As God, in accordance with the perfection of the divine power, can do all things, and yet some things are not subject to His power, because they fall short of being possible; so, also, if we regard the immutability of the divine power, whatever God could do, He can do now. Some things, however, at one time were in the nature of possibility, whilst they were yet to be done, which now fall short of the nature of possibility, when they have been done. So is God said not to be able to do them, because they themselves cannot be done. God can remove all corruption of the mind and body from a woman who has fallen; but the fact she has been corrupt cannot be removed from her; as also is it impossible that the fact of having sinned or having lost charity thereby removed from the sinner. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
In altering the info-sphere so profoundly, we are destined to transform our own minds as well—the way we think about our problems, the way we synthesize information, the way we anticipate the consequences of our own actions. We are likely to change the role of literacy in our lives. We may even alter our own brain chemistry. Hald’s comment about the ability of computers and chip-studded appliance to converse with us is not as blue-sky as it might seem. “Voice data entry” terminals in existence today almost feel at home with natural language, even thought they are not yet able to detect emotion or context, but forecasts for when this might happen range upwards of twenty years down to a mere five years, and the implications of this development—on both the economy and the culture—could be tremendous. Today millions of people are excluded from the job market because they are functionally illiterate. Even the simplest jobs demand people capable of reading forms, on-off buttons, paychecks, job instructions, and the like. In the Second Wave World the ability to read was the most element skill required by the hiring office. Pretty soon people will have to know how to write computer programs and repair computers to enhance their employment opportunities. It only makes sense. Learning a second or third language does give over a competitive advantage over the next applicant, but if one could also learn the language of computer programming and repair, that would be a huge advantage in the age of information. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Still, illiteracy is not the same as stupidity. We know that illiterate people the World over are capable of mastering highly sophisticated kills in activities as diverse as agriculture, construction, hunting, and music. Many illiterates have prodigious memories and can speak several languages fluently—something most university-educated Americans cannot do. In Second Wave societies, however, illiterates were economically doomed. Literacy, of course, is more than a job skill. It is the doorway to a fantastic Universe of imagination and pleasure. Yet in an intelligent environment, when machines, appliances, and even walls are programmed to speak, literacy could turn out to be less paycheck-linked than it has been for the past three hundred years. Airline reservation clerks, stock-room personnel, machine operators, and repair people may be able to function quite adequately on the job by listening rather than reading, as a voice from the machine tell them, step by step, what to do next or how to replace a broken par. Computers are not superhuman. They need repair and rest. They make errors—sometimes dangerous ones. There is nothing magical about them, and they are assuredly not “spirits” or “souls” in our environment. Yet with all these qualifications, they remain among the most amazing and unsettling of human achievements, for they enhance our mind-power as Second Wave technology enhanced our muscle-power, and we do not know where our own minds will ultimately lead us. As we grow more familiar with the intelligent environment, and learn to converse with it from the time we leave the cradle, we will begin to use computers with a grace and naturalness that is hard for us to imagine today. And they will help all of us—not just a few “super-technocrats”—to think more deeply about ourselves and the World. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Today, when a problem arises, we immediately seek to discover its causes. However, until now even the most profound thinkers have usually attempted to explain things in terms of a relative handful of causal forces. For even the best human mind finds it difficult to entertain, let alone manipulate, more than a few variables at a time. (While we may deal with many factors simultaneously on a subconscious or intuitive level, systematic, conscious thinking about a great many variables is damnably difficult, as anyone who has tried it knows.) In consequence, when faced with a truly complicated problem—like why a child is delinquent, or why inflation ravages an economy, or how urbanization affects the ecology of a nearby river—we tend to focus on two or three factors and to ignore many others that may, singly or collectively, be far more important. Worse yet, each group of experts typically insists on the primal importance of “its own” causes, to the exclusion of others. Faced with the staggering problems of urban decay, the Housing Expert traces it to congestion and a declining housing stock; the Transportation Expert points to the lack of mass transit; the Welfare Expert shows the inadequacy of budgets for day-care centers or social work; the Crime Expert points a finger at the infrequency of police patrols; the Economic Expert shows that high taxes are discouraging business investment; and so on. Everyone high-mindedly agrees that all these problems are somehow interconnected—that they form a self-reinforcing system. However, no one can keep the many complexities in mind while trying to think through a solution to the problem. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Urban decay is only one of a larger number of what Peter Ritner, in The Society of Space, once felicitously termed “weave problems.” He warned that we would increasingly face crises that were “not susceptible to ‘cause and effect analysis” but would require ‘mutual dependence analysis’; not composed of easily detachable elements but of hundreds of cooperating influences from dozens of independent, overlapping sources.” Because it can remember and interrelate large numbers of causal forces, the computer can help us cope with such problems at a deeper than customary level. It can sift vast masses of data to find subtle patterns. It can help assemble “blips” into larger, more meaningful wholes. Given a set of assumptions or a model, it can trace out the consequences of alternative decisions, and do it more systematically and completely than any individual normally could. It can even suggest imaginative solutions to certain problems by identifying novel or hitherto unnoticed relationships among people and resources. Human intelligence, imagination, and intuition will continue in the foreseeable decades to be far more important than the machine. Nevertheless, computers can be expected to deepen the entire culture’s view of causality, heightening our understanding of the interrelatedness of things, and helping us to synthesize meaningful “wholes” out of he disconnected data whirling around us. The computer is one antidote to blip culture. At the same time, the intelligent environment may eventually begin to change not merely the way we analyze problems and integrate information, but even the chemistry of our brains. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Experiments by David Krech, Marian Diamond, Mark Rosenzweig, and Edward Bennett, among others, have down that animals exposed to an “enriched” environment have larger cerebral cortices, more glial cells, bigger neurons, more active neurotransmitters, and larger blood supplies to the brain than animals in a control group. Can it be that, as we complexify the environment and make it more intelligent, we shall make ourselves more intelligent as well? Dr. Donald F. Klein, Director of Research at New York Psychiatric Institute, one of the World’s leading neuropsychiatrists, speculates: “Krech’s work suggests that among the variable affecting intelligence is the richness and responsiveness of the early environment—understimulating, poor, unresponsive—coon learn not to take chances. There is little margin for error, and it actually pays off to be cautious, conservative, uninquisitive or downright passive, none of which works wonders for the brain. On the other hand, kids raised in a smart, responsive environment, which is complex and stimulating, may develop a different set of skills. If kids can call on the environment to do things for them, they become less dependent on parents at a younger age. They may gain a sense of mastery or competence. And they can afford to be inquisitive, exploratory, imaginative, and to adopt a problem-solving approach to life. All of which may promote changes in the brain itself. At this point, all we can do is guess. However, it is not impossible that an intelligent environment could lead us to develop new synapses and a larger cortex. A smarter environment might make smarter people.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
All this, however, only begins to hint at the larger significance of the changes the new info-sphere brings with it. For the de-massification of the media and the concomitant rise of the computer together change our social memory. Self-imagery holds us together by a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. We confirm that we are as we imagine ourselves to be, by acting in a way which confirms it. In this, we may be guided by realistic self-imagery: “This-is-what-I-am,” or we may be guided by more idealized imagery: “This-is-how-I-would-wish-to-be.” There may not always be a lot of difference between these two: fortunate people are guided by ideas about themselves which please them, not crippled by aspects of themselves which shame or hurt them. How do we come to value our selves? More to the point, how do we come to value the ideas about ourselves which we do value? Surely our sense of worth comes initially from (m)others, though of course that is not how the infant part of us experiences it. The infant has right to feel grand. However, in fact our sense of worth depends on a good mirroring facilitating environment. If a mother accepts the faecal gift of proudly—or if she rejects it or is uninterested in it—she is not only responsive to a drive. She is also responding to the child’s forming self. Her attitude, in other words, influences a set of inner experiences that play a crucial role in the child’s future development. She responds—accepting, rejecting, disregarding—to a self that, in giving and offering, seeks confirmation by the mirroring self-object. The child therefore experiences the joyful prideful parental attitude, or the parent’s lack of interest…as the acceptance or rejection of one’s tentatively established, yet still vulnerable, creative-productive-active self. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
If the mother rejects this self just as it begins to assert itself as a center of creative-productive initiative (especially of course if her rejection or lack of interest is only one link in a long chain of rebuffs and disappointments emanating from her pathogenically unemphatic personality) or if her inability to respond to her child’s total self leads her to a fragmentation—producing preoccupation with its faeces—to the detriment of the cohesion-establishing involvement with her total child, her faeces-producing, learning, controlling, maturing, total child—then the child’s self will be depleted and it will abandon the attempt to obtain the joys of self-assertion. It will, for reassurance, turn to the pleasures it can derive from the fragments of its body self. This search for good feelings then no only fails to consolidate a valued self-image, but also leads to further fragmentation. In order to escape from depression, the child runs from the unemphatic or absent self-object to oral, anal and phallic sensation, which it experiences with great intensity. Disintegration—de-differentiation—is the fear at the heart of the narcissistically injured, that is of those whose self-imagery is a source of frequent misery to them. They lack that which gives more fortunate people a constant sense of their own well-being and worthwhileness. While the satisfaction of its needs gives the child a sense of well-bring and strength, what eventually gives it its integration and its identity is being treated as a whole person when it is not as yet feeling whole. For this to happen, people must relate to the baby as a person, and not as a series of chores or achievements. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
When the baby is treated as a collection of “part-objects,” there is likely to be less integration and less integrity. Very different consequences awaits the child whose oral, anal, and phallic sensations are welcomed as valid expressions of that child’s whole self (even before the child has a whole self). The empathic, mirroring, reflecting function of the adult then ensures pride in these functions without giving any of them eminence above the child as a living and loving human being—the whole person is validated. For people to value themselves, so that they can run their lives according to what they value, they have first to have been valued as persons. And they must have been loved for being, not for doing this or that—it is this which gives them the sense that they are valuable people rather than a jumble of bits. Initially, other people give the fortunate infant this identity by showing love and respect. In due course, this sense of value, given by (m)others, becomes self-respect, and becomes capable of acting as an integrating and guiding principle. This process is called “personalizing,” because it is the opposite of “depersonalizing.” By the late 1970s the postwar pattern seemed set. European Americans, for a variety of racial, educational, life-style, and tax reason, would continue to out-migrate to the suburbs. Non-European Americans, on the other hand, with few exceptions would become ever-more concentrated in the cities. The assumption that this is the inevitable future continues to be “popular wisdom” today, in spite of a quarter of a century of European American inner-city revitalization and gentrification and African American, Latino, and Asian suburbanization. During the 1970s it became increasingly apparent that in spite of the fact that both scholarly and popular attention were focused elsewhere, there were major changes in non-European American suburbanization. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
The fair housing legislation of 1968 legally opened the suburbs to middle-class non-European Americans. While racial steering still occurred, the housing legislation meant that African American, Latino, and Asian suburbanization was no longer de facto restricted to predominately Non-European American suburbs. The result was the beginning of African American and others experiencing a middle-class exodus to the suburbs. Not only did the non-dominant culture of America’s population grow faster than that in the cities; nationally, the rate of African American suburbanization was twice as fast as the previous decade. During the 1950s and 1960s, the percentage of African Americans who lived in suburbs barely changed. The 1970s marked a real turning point, with the African American population living outside cities growing faster than that within. In contrast to earlier decades, the 1970s showed the African American suburban population increasing three times as rapidly as the European American population. Washing, D. C., for example, saw its African decline 17 percent during the decade. By contrast, suburban Fairfax, in Virginia, saw a 119 percent increase in its African American residents, while the percentage increases for suburban Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in Maryland were 136 and 170 percent. By 1980 the latter county had 248,000 African American residents. Moderate- and middle-income non-European Americans were leaving the city for the suburbs. For upwardly mobile African Americans, as for European Americans, owning a home in the suburbs because a symbol of success in climbing the economic ladder. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
However, while the legal restriction of middle-class African Americans to urban high-risk neighbourhoods was no more, housing discrimination remained. De jure housing discrimination on the basis of race was no longer operative but de facto discrimination, particularly on the individual level, remained a fact of life. Nonetheless, in spite of de facto discrimination, there was an opportunity for middle-class families who could afford to do so left the cities and moved into suburban neighbourhoods. The leavers sought better housing and better educational opportunities for themselves and their children. As a consequence, middle-class African American rates of suburbanization accelerated at the same time as European American suburban growth rates were declining. According to the Bureau of the Census figures, the European American suburban population increased 13.1 percent during the decade of the 1970s, while the African American population increased 42.7 percent. The European American suburban increase was exactly half the 26.1 percent figure of the 1960 to 1970 period and only a fraction of the rapid growth of European American suburbanites in the 1950s. African American suburban growth during the 1970s was not just a regional phenomenon; it too place in all areas of the country. A pattern seemed to be developing in which African American population shifts trailed European American changes by a decade or so but followed the same general patterns. One example of this African American population shift was that several of the cities having the largest African American populations, such as Philadelphia, Washington, Cleveland, and St. Louis, saw their African American populations actually decline. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
During the 1970–1980-decade, African Americans departed from Washington, D.C., at twice the rate of European Americans. Moreover, those departing were disproportionately people in their twenties and thirties with young children. One consequence of the upswing in African American suburbanization was that by 1980, African Americans numbered 12 percent the national population and represented 6.1 percent of the suburban population. By 1990, the African American figure had increased to 6.6 percent. As of 2021, the population of African Americans in the suburbs is 27 percent. Overall, suburbs are 35 percent non-European American. Some argue that non-European Americans are still underrepresented in the suburbs. However, in general, many people like to buy homes in middle-class and upper-middle class communities that have a high number of college educated, professional European Americans because they tend to keep to themselves, are peaceful, quiet, and keep their properties in outstanding condition. So, it is not only because they tend to have higher property values, but also because they are busy working and tend to care about their reputations in the community. Nonetheless, the underrepresentation of African Americans in the suburbs is not just because of income or educational differences. African Americans of every income level are highly segregated from European Americans at the same economic level. Political distinctions necessarily lend themselves to civil distinctions. The growing inequality between the people and its leaders soon makes itself felt among private individuals, and is modified by them in a thousand ways according to passions, talents and events. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
The magistrate cannot usurp illegitimate power without producing proteges for oneself to whom one is forced to yield some part of it. Moreover, citizens allow themselves to be oppressed only insofar as they are driven by blind ambition; and looking more below than above them, domination becomes more dear to the than independence, and they consent to wear chains in order to be able to give them in turn to others. It is very difficult to reduce to obedience someone who does not seek to command; and the most adroit politician would never succeed in subjecting humans who wanted merely to be free. However, inequality spreads easily among ambitious and cowardly souls always ready to run the risks of fortune and, almost indifferently, to dominate or serve, according to whether it becomes favourable unfavourable to them. Thus it is that there must have come a time when the eyes of people ere beguiled to such an extent that its leaders merely had to say to the humblest of humans, “Be great, you and all your progeny,” and one immediately appeared great to everyone as well as in one’s own eyes, and one’s descendants were elevated even more in proportion as they were at some remove from one. The more remote and uncertain the cause, the more the effect increased; the more loafers one could count in a family, the more illustrious it became. If this were the place to go into detail, I would easily explain how [even without government involvement] the inequality of prestige and authority becomes inevitable among private individuals, as soon as they are united in one single society and are focused to make comparisons among themselves and to take into account the differences they discover in the continual use they have to make of one another. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
These differences are of several sorts, but in general, since wealth, nobility or rank, power and personal meri are the principal distinctions by which someone is measured in society, I would prove that the agreement or conflict of these various forces is the surest indication of a well- or ill-constituted state. I would make it apparent that among these four types of inequality, since personal qualities are the origin of all the others, wealth is the last to which they are ultimately reduced, because it readily serves to buy all the rest, since it is the most immediately useful to well-being and the easiest to communicate. This observation enables one to judge rather precisely the extent to which each people is removed from its primitive institution, and of the progress it has made toward the final stage of corruption. I would note how much that universal desire for reputation, honours, and preferences, which devours us all, trains and compares our talents and strengths; how much it excites and multiplies the passions; and, making all humans competitors, rivals, or rather enemies, how many setbacks, successes and catastrophes of every sort it causes every day, by making so many contenders run the same course. I would show that it is to this ardor for making oneself the topic of conversation, to this furor to distinguish oneself which nearly always keeps us outside ourselves, that we own what is best and worst among humans, our virtues and vices, our sciences and our errors, our conquerors and our philosophers, that is to say, a multitude of bad things against a small number of good ones. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Finally, I would prove that is one sees a handful of powerful and rich humans at the height of greatness and fortune while the mob grovels in obscurity and misery, it is because the former prize the things they enjoy only to the extent that the others are deprived of them; and because, without changing their position, they would cease to be happy, if the people ceased to be miserable. However, these details alone would be the subject of a large work in which one would weigh the advantages and the disadvantages of every government relative to rights of the state of nature, and where one would examine all the different faces under which inequality has appeared until now and many appear in [future] ages, according to the nature of these governments and the upheavals that time will necessarily bring in its wake. We would see the multitude oppressed from within as a consequence of the very precautions it had taken against what menaced it from without. We would see oppression continually increase, without the oppressed ever being able to know where it would end or what legitimate means would be left for them to stop it. We would see the rights of citizens and national liberties gradually die out, and the protests of the weak treated like seditious murmurs. We would see politics restrict the honour of defending the common cause to a mercenary portion of the people. We would see arising from this the necessity for taxes, the discouraged farmer leaving one’s field, even during peacetime, and leaving his plow in order to gird oneself with a sword. We would see the rise of fatal and bizarre rules in the code of honour. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
We would see the defenders of the homeland sooner or later become its enemies, constantly holding a dagger over their fellow citizens, and there would come a time when we would hear the say to the oppressor of their country: “If you order me to plunge my sword into my brother’s breast or my father’s throat, and into my pregnant wife’s entrails, and steal the gold coins from my uncle’s purse, I will do so, even though my right hand is unwilling.” When despair for the World grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not takes their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the World, and am free. Flee, my Beloved, till our love shall please Thee, then turn in pity. Base kings would sweep us hence;–shall their despoiling not appease Thee? O tear their roots up from our ruined heap! Then raise our rampart; let our songful children call, “Behold, He standeth now behind our wall.” Flee, my Beloved, till the day be breaking beyond the end of vision—then arise and chase these shadows,–him Thou wast forsaking, despised, shall be exalted, high and wise, sprinkling the nations.—Bare Thine art, Lord, when we cry, “The voice of my Beloved soundeth nigh.” Flee, my Beloved,–like a roe be flying till Thou reveal the end of mine account. Despoiled, and for my crown of beauty sighing, contemned, but longing for the glorious mount,–so with no leader and no prophet leave me, with yet no Tishbite to renew my fame; but plead my cause at last; the bonds that grieve me break; and my foe shall turn away in shame when these that do reproach me and deceive me I answer with sweet words that speak Thy name: “Lo, this is my Beloved, my Redeemer, Lover, Friend, my father’s God, my God until the end.” For the fathers’ sake Thou wilt save the children, yea, and bring redemption unto their children’s children. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hast redeemed America. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 