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The Presence of the Divine in the Name of Demands a Shy and Trembling Heart that Glance so Brightly at the New Sun-Rise!
Silent entangler of beauty’s tresses! Most happy listener when the morning blesses thee for enlivening all the cheerful eyes. The streets of Cresleigh Mills Station with their giant homes, were soothing to him. Soon he was shopping in brightly lighted emporiums for decent clothes. And in his comfortable parlor from midnight till dawn he watched television, learning all about this modern World in which he had emerged, how things were done, how things had to be. A steady stream of dramas, soap operas, news broadcast, and documentaries soon taught him everything. He lay back in his large overstuffed easy chair marveling at the blue skies and the brilliant Sun he saw before him on the large television screen. He watched sleek and powerful Germany automobiles speeding on mountain roads and over prairies. He watched s somber bespectacled teacher speak in sonorous tones of “the ascent of man.” What is it about the structure of American society that produces delinquency in certain sectors of that society? We believe that problems of adjustment to social class play a vital role in the genesis of the delinquent subculture. First and most obviously, the working class child stares the social class status of one’s parents. In the status game, then, the working-class child starts out with a disadvantage and, to the extent that one cares what middle-class person think of one or has internalized the dominant middle-class attitudes toward social class position, one may be expected to feel some shame. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The one area of one’s occupational life in which one might be free to act, the area of one’s own personality, must now also be managed, must become the alert yet obsequious instrument by which goods are distributed. “When he was seven years old, I used to carry him [to work] on my back to and fro through the snow, and he used to work 16 hours a day…I have often knelt down to feed him, as he stood by the machine, for he could not leave it or stop.” Fed meals as he worked, as a steam engine is fed coal and water, this child was an instrument of labor. We should be concerned with the fundamental: the cost of becoming an instrument of labor. Shame is felt perhaps most strongly over the failures of other people, especially one’s parents, who have not been successful, who have not worked hard enough to have a large and beautiful house, or a new BMW M750Li automobile, Cadillac Escalade, Chevy Impala, Ford F350, or Honda Accord, or to send one to a private school, to live on the right street, on the right side of the river, or go to the right church. As class is an expression of economic success, then it follows that to belong as a child or an adolescent in a class below others is a statement that one’s parents have failed, they did not make it good. This is bad enough when they have not risen, unbearable if they have stated to fall even lower. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Deeper than our disapproval of any breaking of then ten commandments possesses our conviction that a failure to keep moving is unforgiveable sin. Furthermore, people of status tend to be people of power and property. They have the means to make more certain that their children will obtain respect and other rewards which have status significance even where title in terms of deserving middle-class conduct is dubious. One me stress that throughout the importance of parental status in obtaining special consideration in school activities and on the job through “connections” and other means of exerting pressure. Finally, parents of good standing in the class system can usually provide their children with money, Betty Crocker desserts, clothes, cars, Cresleigh homes and other material amenities which not only function as external trappings and insignia of status, but which serve also as a means and avenue to activities and relationships which confer status. Like one’s parents, a child is unlikely to be invited to participate in activities which require a material apparatus one cannot afford; if invited, one is less likely to accept for fear of embarrassment; and if one accepts, one is less likely to be in a position to reciprocate and therefore to sustain a relationship premised on a certain among of reciprocity. It seems reasonable to assume that out of all this there arise feelings of inferiority and perhaps resentment and hostility. It is remarkable, however, that there is relatively little research explicitly designed to test this assumption. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
However, invidious status distinctions among young people are, after all, a result of individual differences in conformity to a set of conduct norms as well as simple functions of their parents’ social status. Variations in character reputation scores cannot be explained simply as a result of social class membership. The existence of “achieved” as well as “ascribed” criteria of status for children makes it possible for some working-class children to “rise above” the status to which the social class position of their parents would otherwise consign them. However, this does not make the situation psychologically any easier for those of their brethren who remain behind, or rather, below. Low achieved status is no pleasanter than low ascribed status, and very likely a good deal more unpleasant, for reasons we have indicated earlier; it reflects more directly on the personal inadequacy of the child and leaves one with fewer convenient rationalizations. The young trainee sitting next to me wrote on her digital note pad, “Important to smile. Do not forget to smile.” The admonition came from the speaker in the front of the room, a crew cut pilot in his early fifties, speaking in a Southern drawl: “Now girls, I want you to get out there and really smile. Your smile if your biggest asset. I want you to go out there and use it. Smile. Really smile. Really lay it on.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
The pilot spoke of the smile as the flight attendant’s asset. However, as novices like the one next to me move through training, the value of a personal smile is groomed to reflect the company’s disposition—its confidence that its planes will not crash, its reassurance the departures and arrivals will be on time, its welcome and its invitation to return. Trainers take it as their job to attach to the trainee’s smile an attitude, a viewpoint, a rhythm of feeling that is, as they often say, “professional.” This deeper extension of the professional smile is not always easy to retract and the end of the workday, as one worker in her first year at American Airlines noted: “Sometimes I come off a long trip in a state of utter exhaustion, but I find I cannot relax. I giggle a lot, I shatter, I call friends. It is as if I cannot release myself from an artificially created elation that kept me ‘up’ on the trip. I hope to be able to come down from it better as I get better at the job.” As the Public Service Announcement jingle says, “Our smiles are not just painted on.” Our flight attendants’ smiles, the company emphasizes, will be more human than the phony smiles you are resigned to seeing on people who are paid to smile. There is a smile like strip of paint on the nose of plane. Indeed, the plane and the flight attendant advertise each other. The radio advertisement foes on to promise not just smiles and service but a travel experience of real happiness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
As in any industry such as banking, real estate, fashion, sales or retail, politeness and a smile are seen in one way, this is no more than delivering a service. Also, workers know their own smiles and convinces provided to customers is part of the on-the-job behavior, which is part of professionalism, dollar bills, and bitcoins that have intervened between the smiler and the smiled upon, and the extra effort it takes to invoke this spontaneous warmth makes it possible to exist in uniform—and companies now advertise spontaneous warmth, too. Customers call to inform departments that not only would they like educational material, but they would also like it to make them happy as well as inform them, and when your goal is to please the customer or member, you have to comply to their wishes. Nonetheless, at first glance, it might seem that the circumstances of the nineteenth-century factory child and the twentieth-century flight attendant could not be more different. To the boy’s mother, to Karl Marx, to the members of the Children’s Employment Commission, perhaps to the manager of the wallpaper factory, and almost certainly to the contemporary reader, the boy was a victim, even a symbol, of the brutalizing conditions of his time. We might imagine that he had an emotional half-life, conscious of little more than fatigue, hunger, and boredom. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
On the other hand, the flight attendant enjoys the upper-class freedom to travel, and she participates in the glamour she creates for others. She is the envy of clerks in duller, less well-paid jobs. However, a close examination of the differences between the two can lead us to some unexpected common ground. On the surface there is a difference in how we know what labor actually produces. How could the worker in the wallpaper factory tell when his job was done? Count the rolls of Lincrusta-Walton wallpaper; a good had been produced. How can the flight attendant tell when her job is done? A service has been produced; the customer seems content. In the case of the flight attendant, the emotional style of offering the service is part of the service itself, in a way that loving or hating wallpaper is not part of producing wallpaper. Seeming to love the job become part of the job; actually trying to love it, and to enjoy the customers, helps in this effort. You ever notice when you shop at a corporate store, where the manager is polite and acts like they own the business, care about the presentation of the products and inventory, and wants you to be satisfied, not only does it make your more confident in their abilities, but it makes it more likely that you will purchase products from the brand or business again in the future. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
In processing people, the product is a state of mind. For instance, in real estate, people are greeted not only with a smile, but with concerned enquiry such as, “Would you also like to tour residence 3 today and hear about the options, Miss?” The atmosphere is that of a civilized party—with the guest, in response, behaving like civilized community members. Once or twice our inspectors tested the employees by being deliberately exacting, but they were never roused, and at the end of the tour they lined up to say farewell with undiminished brightness. Potential buyers are quick to detect strained or forced smiles, and they come to view the property wanting to enjoy the tour and get an idea of what it will be like to live in the home and community. The customers look forward to signing the contract and buying the house because it was a pleasant experience. Surely that is how it ought to feel. This is an emotional labor. Emotional labor is the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display; emotional labor is sold for a wage and therefore has an exchange value. This labor requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mine in others—in this case, the sense of being cared for in a convivial and safe place. This kind of labor calls for a coordination of mind and feeling, and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honor as deep and integral to out individuality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Beneath the difference between physical and emotional labor there is possessed a similarity in the possible cost of doing the work: the worker can become estranged or alienated from an aspect of self—either the body or the margins of the soul—that is used to do the work. The factory boy’s arm functioned like a piece of machinery used to produce wallpaper. His employer, regarding that arm as an instrument, claimed control over its speed and motions. In this situation what was the relation between the boy’s arm and his mind? Was his arm in any meaningful sense his own? The real estate agent does physical work when she gives tours, and she does mental work when she prepared for and actually organizes sales. And his is also part of an emotional labor. This is an old issue, but as the comparison with the real estate agency suggest, it is still very much alive. If we can become alienated from service in a service-producing society, we can become alienated from the service in a service-producing society. We need to characterize American society of the twenty first century in more psychological terms, for now the problems that concerns us mist order on the psychiatric. For the real estate agent, the smiles are part of her work, a part that requires her to coordinate self and feeling so that the work seems to be effortless. To show that enjoyment takes effort is to do the job poorly. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Similarly, part of the job is to disguise fatigue and irritation, for otherwise the labor would show in an unseemly way, and the product—buy contentment—would be damaged. It suggests what costs even happy workers under normal conditions pay for this labor without a name. The speed-up of demand has sharpened the ambivalence many workers feel about how much of oneself to give over to the role and how much of oneself to protect from it. Because it is easier to disguise fatigue and irritation if they can be banished altogether, at least for brief periods, this feat calls for emotional labor. It is also good to remember some people are really curious about products and for them, seeing a new house could be like being exposed to an advanced trigonometry class—they have no idea what they are looking at, how they will fit into it, or what designs will go well in the space. There have always been public-service jobs, of course; what is new is that they are now socially engineered and thoroughly organized from the upper levels. Though a real estate agents job is no worse and in many ways better than other service jobs, it makes the worker more vulnerable to the social engineering of one’s emotional labor and reduces one’s control over that labor. Emotional labor is potentially good. No customer wants to deal with a surly waiter, a crabby member service representative, or a cashier who avoids eye contact in order to avoid getting a request. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Lapses in courtesy by those paid to be courteous are very real and fairly common. What they show us is how fragile public civility really is. We are brought back to the question of what the social carpet actually consists of and what it requires of those who are supposed to keep it beautiful. The laggards and sluff-offs of emotional labor return us to the basic questions. What is emotional labor? What do we do when we manage emotion? What, in fact, is emotion? What are the costs and benefits of managing emotion, in private life and at work? What one cannot do in the beginning, one may be able to do in the middle of one’s journey. One should not let misgivings about one’s capacity to travel far stop one from travelling at all. Those who already possess a flair for emotional labor will naturally advance more easily and more quickly than those who do not. However, there is no reason for the one who is new to learning about emotional labor to adopt a defeatist attitude and negate the quest altogether. One’s weaknesses may come in the way of one’s seeking, yet one still remains an authentic seeker. If one lets one’s thoughts become negative, the quest would have to be entered with a realization of all its complexity and with a comprehension that one’s good intentions could be frustrated by adverse circumstances. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
A being needs to know his or her limitations and to accept them. However, one need not accept them as absolutes. There is always the mysterious miracle, the second wind, the untapped unpredictable resources. One should fit one’s aspiration to one’s estimated capacity but, in order not to miss unknown possibilities which might yet emerge to the surface, one should do so loosely and not rigidly. It is true that enlightenment is to be found wherever it is earnestly sought. However, one’s own desire and needs will provide one with a source of direction; and it may be that these will indicate that one’s individual progress may be hastened or better served by a journey to some particular location. No matter what the personal circumstances of a being may be, no matter whether one be rich or poor, well or ill, mature or young, educated or illiterate, there is no point in one’s life where some part at east of the quest may not be introduced. Would they have done better to have stayed home, rather then to have gone off looking for gurus in the news media? The answer must vary from seeker to seeker. From a long-range point of view, is anyone really “lost”? It is sometimes consoling to remember that we have Eternity before us, and we can only do what we are capable of at a given time. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Individuals who present themselves before others may wish them to think highly of them, or to think that one thinks highly of them, or to perceive how in fact one feels toward them, or to obtain no clear-cut impression; one may wish to ensure sufficient harmony so that the interaction can be sustained, or to elude them, get rid of, confuse, mislead, antagonize, or insult them. Regardless of the particular objective which the individual has in mind and of one’s motive for having this objective, it will be in one’s interests to control the conduct of the others, especially their responsive treatment of one. This control is achieve largely by influencing the definition of the situation which the others come to formulate, and one can influence this definition by expressing oneself in such a way as to give them the kind of impression that will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with one’s own plan. Thus, when an individual appears in the presence of others, there will usually be some reason for one to mobilize one’s activity so that it will convey an impression to others which it is in one’s interest to convey. If some acknowledge and accept the responsibility which accompanies their spiritual eminence, others prefer to leave humankind in God’s keeping and to themselves! Some illuminates are willing, even eager, to get involved with individuals but others are not. If they prefer to live quietly, unnoticed, this does not make them more selfish and less holy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
If one attains enlightenment, it is not possible to predict with precision what a being would do. With some persons, force of habit or innate tendencies may lead to the continuance of the same outer life which one led before enlightenment. So an individual leading a solitary withdrawn life may still do so whereas another may start a preaching crusade to the mass of people. For, with the personal self subdued by God, the latter is then the operative factor. And the spirit is like the wind which blows as it listens. However, we must go forward with the process of evocation of the Holy Ghost for the sake of communicating with these powers to gain insight, or compelling them to create beneficial Changes. When one reaches a level of spiritual maturity through substantial contact with the powers of God and the discipline of Jesus Christ (these things are mutually dependent) and has been infernally empowered by the Rite of Preparing for the Grace of God, we can see reality through unveiled eyes. This will change us in incredible ways forever. One will begin to trump the physical decay, and the desire to gain power and strength will intensify as one grows tired of being tired. As a result, the individual will begin to integrate more practical techniques of grounding this power within to growth in physical and spiritual strength. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Though the physical body may be at its weakest, your will shall start to be exercised and developed in very intense ways. Keep that in mind. The power of God are keys that open up the soul and perception through their spiritual eyes. God will grant you the infernal blessing of seeing through your eyes. Tear down the limits of the flesh and allow the Lord to dwell within you are you dwell within him. Remember to stay centered in your own God Self to prevent being deceived and led toward self-destruction. “And then I will remember my covenant which I have made unto my people, and I will bring my gospel unto them,” reports 3 Nephi 16.11. Not long ago, an intellectual leader was reported as saying, “I hope for the say when everyone can speak again of God without embarrassment.” These words, seriously meant, deserve thoughtful consideration, especially in view of the fact that the last sixty-five years have brought to this country an immense increase in the willingness to use the name of God—an unquestionable and astonishing revival, if not of religion, certainly of religious awareness. Do we hop that this will lead us to a state in which the name of God will be used without sublime embarrassment, without the restriction imposed by the fact that in the divine name there is more present than the name? Is an unembarrassed use of the divine name desirable? Is unembarrassed religion desirable? Certainly not! For the Presence of the divine in the name of demands a shy and trembling heart. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
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The Challenges You Face in Your Own Life Experience Will be Trying, to Say the Least, for it Has a Glory and Naught Else Can Share it!
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The Power of the Ballot We Need in Sheer Self-Defence—Else What Shall Save Us from a Second Slavery?
The World-Idea is Forever Realizing itself in the Actual, a Process which is Ceaseless and Infinite, without Known Beginning or Known End!
A little country community in the valley, with a dozen or more subdivisions, most names long ago effaced, and the whole surrounded by a small iron fence and four immense oak trees, the kind weighed down by their dipping branches, and the sky the perfect color of lilacs, and the heat of the Summer sweet and caressing and—you bet I have got on my black velvet frock coat (close-up: tapered at the waist, brass buttons) and my motorcycle boots, and a brand-new linen shirt loaded with lace at cuffs and throat (pity the poor slob who snickers at me on account of that!), and I have not cut my shoulder-length blonde mane tonight, which I sometimes do for a variety, and I have chucked my violet glasses because who cares that my eyes attract attention, and my skin is still dramatically tanned from my years-ago suicide attempts in the raw Sun of the Gobi Desert, and I am thinking—what about the informants themselves? Did they too think themselves superior? Just as people were less ready to label themselves “unfriendly” than they were others, so they were less ready to admit they themselves felt superior. Not many showed their mind so clearly as Mrs. Abbott who said, “As soon as they get down here they get big ideas, and yet they are never used to it. They are nothing really.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Or as Mr. Haddon: “Some people are inclined to think they are better than some other people in the East End of London, but they are not. I have met them and mixed with them and I find that they are actually lower than others—they have not the ability to be sociable. That is why it is. So they put themselves a bit above others so as to give a let-out to feelings.” Yet we formed the strong impression that most of the critics of the “big-heads” did at least in part share the attitude they complained of. One key to this attitude, as we have said, is the house. When they compare it with the gloomy tenement or decaying cottage, is it any wonder that they should feel they have moved up in the World? “When people moved out here it was a big change for them,” said Mr. Adams. “In Bethnal Green the people were coped up in two rooms or something like that, and when they get here they think they have bettered themselves—and so they have bettered themselves. And they try to raise their standard of living.” A house is one bearer of status in any society—it most certainly is in a country where a semi-detached suburban house with a garden has become the signal mark of the middle class. When the migrants compare the new with the old, it is any wonder that they should for a time feel “big-headed”? #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
In their mind’s eye the people with whom they compare themselves may be less their fellow-residents at Greenleigh with their identical houses than their old neighbors of Bethnal Green, and, compared to them, they are in this one way undeniably superior. Mr. Berry, a milkman, was one of several who connected the “snobbishness” with the possession of a new house. “I deliver milk all over the estate so I think I know practically everybody on this estate. And I can tell you that when they move down here—I suppose it is just that they have got a new house—they just think they are a cut above everybody else.” Mrs. Allen, although rather more tentative, was of the same mind. “I do not like it, the atmosphere. People are not the same; I do not know if they get big-headed because they have got a house. Out here you just get a good morning.” The women most appreciate their new workshop and nursery. The man’s status is the status of his job; the woman’s status of her home. Since she has moved up most in the World, she is only being realistic to recognize it. “When I was in London I had a six-bedroom house on my own, but you get a few of them who some from, say, a two bedroom. Then they get a house. Well, they have worked hard—you must admit they have worked hard—they have got themselves a nice home, television and that. So you find this type of person temporarily gets a bit to thinking that they are somebody. You do find it with some people, and I think you find it more amongst the women than amongst the men.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The house when the builders leave it is only a shell, unless you get one of those fully furnished model homes by Cresleigh. But anyway, the house when people move into it really comes to life. They bestow an authority upon it, even vest it with a kind of personality; up to a point it then decrees what they shall do within its walls. The house is also a challenge, demanding that their style of life shall accord with the standard it sets. When they make a first cup of coffee after the removal van has driven away and look around their mansion, they are conscious not only of all they have got which they never had before but also of all the things they need which they still lack. The furniture brought from Bethnal Green looks old and forlorn against the bright paint. They need carpets for the lounge, lino for the stairs and mats for the front door. They need curtains. They need another bed. They need a kitchen table. They need new lampshades, pot and pans, grass seed and spades, washer and dryer, sometimes they want a clothes line, and bath mats, Airwick and Jeyes, mops and pails—all the paraphernalia of modern life for a house two of three times larger and a hundred times grader than the one they life behind them. Then the women start wanting new dresses from Draper James, and a few Smash and Tess rompers. With the assistance of their belongings, they need somehow to live the kind of life, be the kind of people, that will fit into Forest Close or Cambridge Avenue. Then they, and the house, can at last be comfortable. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
They have to acquire new property. They have to acquire new habits. If they are to settle at Greenleigh, they have to make a profound adjustment in their lives: that is the challenge. The first essential is money for material possessions. When people move to Greenleigh the standard of life, measured by the quality of housing, is at once raised. They attempt to bring the level in other respects up to the same standard. Furniture and carpets have to be bought from Crate and Barrel, and although, with the assistance of the ever more ubiquitous hire purchase, this can be done without capital, it cannot be done without a burden on income. Moreover, the house is only the beginning. A nice house and shabby clothes, a neat garden box and an old box of a pram, do not go together. “My sister gave me a beautiful Dunkley pram,” said Mrs. Berry, “because I was going to such a beautiful new house.” Smartness calls for smartness. As well as appurtenances for the house, there is more need for the sort of possessions which will improve communications with the outer World. The Bethnal Greener’s society is close by. He does not need a telephone to make appointments to see his friends because they are only a few minutes away. He does not need a highly developed time sense (as we discovered to our cost when interviewing) because it does not matter greatly whether he goes round to Mum’s at 10 o’clock or 11. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
If Mum is not home, someone will explain where she has gone. He does not have to have a care or a motor cycle because relatives and friends, even work, are at a walking distance. At Greenleigh a person has to organize one’s life more closely, develop a more exact sense of time and be prepared to travel to avoid being cut off from social contact altogether. In some ways the more self-contained home is less self-contained than ever. Greenleigh is part of a larger World. A person’s shops are a mile off, one’s work six miles away and one’s relatives 10 or 20 miles away, some of them on the suburban circuit of housing estates—Oxhey, Debden, Harold Hill, Becontree—along which no buses ply. Distances to shops, work and relatives are not walking distances any more. They are motoring distances: a car, like a telephone, can overcome geography and organize a more scattered life into a manageable whole. With a car one can, without having to expose oneself to the wintry winds which blow over the fields, get to work, to one’s relatives in Bethanl Green Road or to one’s friends who have done over to Kent. “Now that we have got the car,” said Mr. Marsh, “we can see the wife’s sister at Laindon more often.” She was now seen every fortnight instead of every three or four months. Cares as beginning to move from luxury to necessity. “I do not want to win $750,000. I just want to win $5,000—so that I can get myself a little car. I could get a nice little car for that. You really need a car down here,” said Mr. Adams. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
One of the more fortunate, Mr. Berry, who had already achieved the two accomplishments of the complete man discoursed on their necessity. “When you live on the estate, there are two things that I think are essential. One is a telephone, the other is a car. I do not like having to pay my telephone bill, but I think it is worth it. It means my brother can ring me up on the estate any time he wants to. And if you are in any trouble—if there is anything wrong with one of the boys say—I can ring up a doctor if I need one. You do not need a telephone in Bethnal Green, because the doctor is on the doorstep. Practically anywhere you live in Bethnal Green there is a doctor near at hand. And you need a car for traveling about. We are so far away from everywhere out here that it is actually less expensive to run a car than it is to pay fares.” Greenleigh already had many more telephones than Bethnal Green, where you can do down the street to your relatives as quickly as you can phone them. Greenleigh though composed mainly of manual workers like Bethnal Green, has nearly seven times more telephones per head and, if our informants are any guide, at least one motive is to keep in touch with the kin left behind. “We cannot get up to see them very often,” said Mrs. Adams. “That is really why we had the phone put in here. If you can only hear each other it is something. It does keep you in touch with home.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
However, if telephones can be installed easily enough, garages cannot. When the architects made the future in County Hall, they were not a necessity. A garage, was once rare, as where indoor lavatories. However, many homes now have indoor lavatories and carriage houses attached to the house. Cars, telephones, telegrams, email, and text messages represent not so much a new and higher standard of life as a means of clinging to something of the old. Where you could walk, and public transport is inconvenient or too expensive, you need a care. This understandable urge to acquisition can easily become competitive. People struggle to raise their all-round standards to those of the home, in in the course of doing so, they look for guidance to their neighbors. To begin with, the first-comers have to make their own way. The later arrivals have their model at hand. The neighbors have put up nice curtains. Have we? They have got their garden planted with privet and new grass-seed. Have we? They have a John Deer lawn-mower and a Dunkley pram. What have we got? They have a new BMW M5 and a Ford F350. What about us? The new arrivals watch the first-comers, and the first-comers watch the new arrivals. All being under the same pressure for material advance, they naturally mark each other’s progress. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Those who make the most progress are those who have proved their claim to respectability, Greenleigh-style. The fact that people are watching their neighbors and their neighbors watching them provides the further stimulus, reinforcing the process set in motion by the new house, to conform to the norms of the estate. There is anxiety lest they do not fit. “People are not very friendly here. It is the same on all the estates. They have nothing else to do when they have finished work except watch you. It is all jealousy. They are afraid you will get a penny more than they have, In London people have other things to occupy their minds. Here they have done their work they have nothing to do. They are at the window and they notice everything. They say, ‘Mrs. Brown’s got a new hat on.’ They do not miss anything, but when something happens or goes wrong, no one know who done it. When they come from London they think they are high and mighty. If you have got something they will go into debt to get it themselves.” The Quest for affection is one way frequently used in our culture for obtaining reassurance against anxiety. The quest for power, prestige, and possession is another. Which of the goals prevails in the neurotic’s striving for reassurance depends on external circumstances as well as on differences in individual gifts and psychic structure. If I deal with them as a unity it is because they all have something in common which distinguishes them from the need for affection. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Winning affection means obtaining reassurance through intensified contact with others, while striving for power, prestige and possession means obtaining reassurance through loosening of the contact with others and through fortifying one’s own position. The wish to dominate, to win prestige, to acquire wealthy, is certainly not in itself a neurotic trend, just as the wish for affection is not itself neurotic. In order to understand the characteristics of the neurotic striving in this direction it should be compared with the normal. The feeling of power, for example, may in a normal person be born of the realization of one’s own superior strength, whether it be physical strength or ability, mental capacities, maturity or wisdom. Or one’s striving for power may be connected with some particular cause: family, political or professional group, native land, a religious or scientific idea. The neurotic striving for power, however, is born out of anxiety, hatred and feelings of inferiority. To put it categorically, the normal striving for power is born of strength, the neurotic of weakness. A cultural factor is also involved. Individual power, prestige and possession do not play a role in every culture. With Pueblo Indians, for instance, striving for prestige is definitely discouraged, and there is but little difference in individual possessions, and thus this striving too has little importance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
In that culture it would be meaningless to strive for any kind of dominance as a means of reassurance. That neurotics in our culture choose this way results from the fact that in our social structure power, prestige and possession give a feeling of greater security. Once people consented to live by the redistribution of life’s goods through a god figure who represented life, they had sealed their fate. There was no stopping the process of the monopolization of life in the king’s hands. It sent like this The king of ritual principal was in charge of the scared objects of the group and had to hold the prescribed ceremonies by a strict observance of the customs of the ancestors. This made one a repository of custom, an authority on custom. “Custom” is a weak word in English to convey something really momentous, as we saw; custom is the abstruse technical lord that runs the machinery for the renewal of nature. It is the physics, medicine, and mechanics of primitive society. Imagine our trying to fight a plague with faulty chemicals, and you can understand that custom equals life. The authority on custom, then, is the supreme regulator of certain departments of nature. However, this regulation is so useful to the tribe—in fact it is life itself—that it naturally comes to be extended to all departments. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Again, I think an analogy to modern life may convey some of the flavor: what first began as he miraculous harnessing of electric power in the electric bulb now extends to toothbrushes, razors, garden tools, typewriters, laptops, and so forth. What was at first limited to ritual and to the seat of ritual gradually spread to the whole of the king’s realm and the whole life of his subjects. After all, if you are going to be supreme regulator of the World, it is only logical that you should gradually encompass the whole World. If your invisible mechanics work in one area, there is no reason why it should not work in another, you have only to try it. And you try it by extending your ritual prerogative to cover the case: you extend the veil of your mana power over wider and wider jurisdictions. It seems like a benign and harmless enough process, one you might never even notice and in fact might want to happen—but what is happening is the complete entrenchment of social inequality. In searching for the conditions which produce a striving for these ends it becomes apparent that such a striving usually develops only when it has proved impossible to find reassurance for the underlying anxiety through affection. A girl was strongly attached to her brother who was four years older than she. They had a tenderness of more or less sexual character, but when the girl was eight years old her brother suddenly rejected her, pointing out that they were now too old for that sort of play. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Soon after this experience, the girl developed a sudden fierce ambition at school. It was caused certainly by a disappointment in her quest for affection and this was all the more painful as the child had not many people to cling to. The father was indifferent to his children, and the mother conspicuously preferred the brother. However, it was not only disappointment that she felt, but also a terrible blow to her pride. She did not realize that her change in the brother’s attitude was caused simply by his approaching puberty. Therefore, she felt ashamed and humiliated, and so much the more since her self-confidence had in any case stood on too insecure a basis. The mother had not wanted her in the first place, and she was made to feel insignificant because the mother, a beautiful woman, was much admired by everyone; besides, the brother was not only preferred by the mother but also enjoyed her confidence. The marriage of the parents was unhappy and the mother discussed all her troubles with the brother. Thus, the girl felt completely left out. She made one more attempt to get the affection she needed: she fell in love with a boy whom she met on a trip immediately after the painful experience with her brother, was quite elated and began spinning glorious fantasies about this boy. When he dropped out of sight she reacted to the new disappointment by becoming depressed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
As quite frequently happens in situations of this kind, the parents and the family physician are ascribed her condition to her being in too high a class at school. They took her out of school, sent her to a Summer resort for recreation, and then put her in a class a year below the one she had been in before. It was then, at the age of nine, that she showed an ambition of a rather desperate character. She could not endure being any but first in her class. At the same time her relations with other girls, which had formerly been friendly, became visibly impaired. This example illustrates the typical factors that combine to generate a neurotic ambition: from the beginning she felt insecure because she felt unwanted; considerable antagonism was created, which could not be expressed because the mother, the dominant figure in the family, demanded blind admiration; the repressed hatred generated a great deal of anxiety; her self-esteem had never had a chance to grow, she had been humiliated on several occasions, and she felt definitely stigmatized by the experience with her brother; attempts to reach out for affection as a means of reassurance had failed. The neurotic strivings for power, prestige and possession serve not only as a protection against anxiety, but also as a channel through which repressed hostility can be discharged. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
If we only could be certain that our bravery and patience with it were terminating and eventuating and bearing fruit somewhere in an unseen spiritual World, probably to almost every one of us here the most adverse life would seem well worth living. However, granting we are not certain, does it then follow that a bare trust in such a World is a fool’s paradise and lubberland, or rather that it is a living attitude in which we are free to indulge? Well, we are free to trust at our own risks anything that is not impossible, and that can bring analogies to bear in its behalf. That the World of physics is probably not absolute, all the converging multitude of arguments that make in favor of idealism tend to prove; and that our whole physical life ay lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of being that we at present have no organ for apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of our domestic animals. Our dogs, for example, are in our human life but not of it. They witness hourly the outward body of events whose inner meaning cannot, by any possible operation, be revealed to their intelligence, events in which they themselves often play the cardinal part. My terrier bites a teasing boy, for example, and the father demands damages. The dog may be present at every step of the negotiations, and see the money paid, without an inkling of what it all means, without a suspicion that it has anything to do with him; and he never can know in his natural dog’s life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Or take another case which used greatly to impress me in my medical-student days. Consider a poor dog whom they are vivisecting in a laboratory. He lies strapped on a board and shrieking at his executioners, and to his own dark consciousness is literally in a sort of hell. He cannot see a single redeeming ray in the whole business; and yet all these diabolical seeming events are often controlled by human intentions with which, if his poor benighted mind could only be made to catch a glimpse of them, all that is heroic in him would religiously acquiesce. Healing truth, relief to future sufferings of beast and beings, are to be bought by them. It may be genuinely a process of redemption. Lying on one’s back on the board there he may be performing a function incalculably higher than any that prosperous canine life admits of; and yet, of the whole performance, this function is the one portion that must remain absolutely beyond his ken. Now turn from this to the life of humans. In the dog’s life we see the World invisible to one because we live in both Worlds. In the human life, although we only see our World, and one’s within it, yet encompassing both these Worlds a still wider World may be there, as unseen by us as our World is by one; and to believe in that World may be the most essential function that out lives in the World perform. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
But “may be! may be!” one now hears the positivist contemptuously exclaim; “what use can a scientific life have for maybes?” Well, I reply, the ‘scientific’ life itself has much to do with maybes, and human life at large has everything to do with them. So far as beings stands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, one’s entire vital function may be said to have to deal with maybes. Not a victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done, expect upon a maybe; not a service, not a sally of generosity, not a scientific exploration or experiment or text-book, that may not be a mistake. It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true. Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successful make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. However, mist trust yourself, and think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss. In such a case (and it belongs to an enormous class), the part of wisdom as well as of courage is to believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. However, believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself. You make one or the other of two possible Universes true by your trust or mistrust—both Universes having been only maybes, in this particular, before you contributed your act. Now, it appears to me that the question whether life is worth living is subject to conditions logically much like these. It does, indeed, depend on you the liver. If you surrender to the nightmare view and crown the evil edifice by your own suicide, you have indeed made a picture totally dismal. Pessimism, completed by your act, is true beyond a doubt, so far as your World goes. Your mistrust of life has removed whatever worth your own enduring existence might have given to it; and now, throughout the whole sphere of possible influence of that existence, the mistrust has proved itself to have had divining power. Enlightenment comes by gaining knowledge and by applying its wisdom. This is why it was said that some were fed by eating brains of humans. The brains are symbolic of the knowledge and wisdom we seek. We are working with forces to master our own subjective reality, to exercise one’s own will to manifest a life in which we can thrive. “And he answered: Yes, Lord, I know that thou speakest the truth, for thou art a God of truth, and canst not lie,” reports Ether 3.12. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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It Will Not be Enough to Show them the Path—One Must Also Keep them Steadfast on the Path!
Now let me take up the point again. Do not be destroyed in the first years. It happens with too many. There is so much danger all around you. It is easy to despair. It is easy to succumb to bitter hatred of yourself. It is easy to feel that the World no longer belongs to you, when nothing is further from the truth. It is all yours and the passage of the years is yours. And now you must simply and plainly live up to it. When people regard others as unfriendly, the comparisons they implicitly make are with the community of Bethnal Green. We have already discussed the reasons why people living in the borough considered that a friendly place. They and their relatives had lived there a long time, and consequently had around them a host of long-standing friends and acquaintances. At Greenleigh they neither share long residence with their fellow tenants nor as a rule have kin to serves as bridges between the family and the wider community. These two vital interlocked conditions of friendliness are missing, and their absence goes far to explain the attitude we have illustrated here. It also accounts for the astringency of the criticism. Migrants, to the Untied States of America or to housing estates, always take part of their homeland, with them, our information like everyone else. They take with them the standards of Bethnal Green, derived from a close community of kindred and neighbors. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Friends, within and without the kindship network, were the unavoidable accompaniment of the kind of life they led—too much so for devotees of quiet and privacy. They grew up with their friend, they met them at auntie’s, for tens years for tea and animal crackers or hot chocolate, they walked down the street with them to work. They are used to friendliness, and, their standards in this regard being so high, they are all the more censorious about the other tenants of the County Council. They are harsh in their comment, where someone arriving from a less settled district, or from another and even newer housing estate, might be accustomed to the standoffishness, and, by one’s canons, even impressed by the good behavior, of the same neighbors. If they had an established community, it would not matter quite so much people being newcomers. The place would then already have been crisscrossed with tires of kinship and friendship, and one friend made would have been an introduction to several. However, Greenleigh was built in the late 1940s on ground that had been open fields before. The nearest substantial settlement, a few miles away at Barnhurst, is the antithesis of East London, an outer suburb of privately-owned houses, mainly built between the wars for the rising middle classes of the time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The distance between the estate and its neighbor is magnified by the resentment, real and imagined, of the old residents of Barnhurst at the intrusion of rough East Enders into the rides of Essex and, what is worse, living in houses not very unlike their own put up at the expense of the taxpayer. “People at Barnhurst look down on us. They treat us like dirt. They are a different class of people. They have money.” “It is not so easy for the girls to get boys down here. If people from the estate go to the dance hall at Barnhurst they all look down on them. There is a lot of class distinction down here.” These, the kind of thoughts harbored by the ex-Bethnal Greeners, do nothing to make for ease of communication between the two places. So there is no tradition into which the newcomers can enter. If Barnhurst has any influence upon Greenleigh, it is to sharpen the resentment of the estate against its environment and to stimulate the aspiration for material standards as high. Nor would it matter quite so much if the residents of Greenleigh all had the same origin. No doubt if they all came from Bethnal Green, they would get on much better than they do: many of them would have known each other before and, anyway, at least have a background in common. As it is, they arrive from all over London, though with East Ender predominant. Such a vast common origin might be enough to bind together a group of Cockneys in the Western Desert Western Essex is to near for that. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
When all are from London, no one is from London: they are from one of the many districts into which the city is divided. What is then emphasized is far more their differences than their sameness. The native of Bethnal Greens feels oneself different from the native of Stepney or Hackney. One of our informants, who had recently moved into Bethnal Green from Hackney, a few minutes away, told us “I honestly do not like telling people that I live in Bethnal Green. I come from Hackney myself, and when I was a child living in Hackney, my parents would not let me come to Bethnal Green. I thought it was something terrible.” These distinctions are carried over to Greenleigh, where it is no virtue in a neighbor to have come from Stepney, rather the opposite. Mr. Abbot summed it up as follows: “You have not grown up with them. They come from different neighborhoods, they are different sorts of people and they do not mix.” We had expected that, despite these disadvantages, people would, in the course of time, settle down and make new friendships, and our surprise was that this had not happened to a greater extent. The informants who had been on the estate longest had no higher opinion than others of the friendliness of their fellows. Four of the 18 coupes who had been there six or seven years judged other people to be friendly, as did six of the 23 couples with residence for five years or less. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Mr. Oliver was one who commented on how long it was taking time for its wonders to perform. “They are all Londoners here but they get highbrow when they get here. They are not so friendly. Coming from a tuning like the one where we lived, we knew everyone. We were bred and born amongst them, like one big family we were. We knew all their troubles and everything. Here they are all total strangers to each other and so they are all wary of each other. It is question of time, I suppose. However, we have been here four years and I do not see any change yet. It does seem to be taking a very long while to get friendly.” One reason it is taking so long is that the estate is so strung out—the number of people per acre at Greenleigh being only one-fifth what it is in Bethnal Green—and low density does not encourage sociability. In Bethnal Green your pub, and your shop is a “local.” There people meet their neighbors. At Greenleigh they are put off by distance. They do go to the pub because it may take 20 minutes to walk, instead of one minute as in Bethnal Green. They do not go to the shops, which are grouped into specialized centers instead of being scattered in converted houses through the ordinary streets, more than they have to, again because of the distance. And they do not go so much to either because when they get there, the people are gathered from the corners of the estate, instead of being neighbors with whom they already have a point of contact. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
The pubs and shops of Bethnal Green serve so well as “neighborhood centers” because there are so many of them: they provide the same small face-to-face groups with continual opportunities to meet. Where they are few and large, as at Greenleigh, they do not serve this purpose so well. The relatives of Bethnal Green have not, therefore, been replaced by the neighbors of Greenleigh. The newcomers are surrounded by strangers instead of kin. Their lives outside the family are no longer centered on the people; their lives are centered on the house. This change from a people-centered to a house-centered existence is one of the fundamental changes resulting from the migration. It does some way to explain the competition for status which is in itself the result of isolation from kin and the cause of estrangement from neighbors, the reason why coexistence, instead of being just a state of neutrality—a tacit agreement to live and let live—is frequently infused with so much bitterness. When we asked what in their view had made people change since they moved from East London, time and time again our informants gave the same kind of suggestive answers—that people had become, as they put it, “toffeensed,” “big-headed,” “high and mighty,” “jealous,” “a cut above everybody else.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
“It is like a strange land in your own country,” said Mrs. Ames. “People are jealous out here. They are made to be much quitter in a high-class way, if you know what I mean. They get snobbish, and when you get snobbish you are not sociable any more.” “I am surprised,” said Mr. Tonks, “at the way people vote Conservative at Greenleigh when the L.C.C. built these houses for them. One has a little car or something and so one thinks oneself superior. People seem to think only of themselves when they get here.” “The neighbor runs away with the idea that she is a cut above everybody else, but when you get down to brass tacks,” which Mrs. Berry proceeded to do, “she is worse off than you will ever be. She is one of those people, you know what I mean, she is very toffee-nosed. There are some people down here who get like that.” Conflict play an infinitely greater roe in neurosis than is commonly assumed. To detect them, however, is no easy matter—partly because they are essentially unconscious, but even more because the neurotic goes to any length to deny their existence. What, then, are the signals that would warrant us to suspect underlying conflicts? We usually can find their presence was indicated by a few factors, both fairly obvious. One is the resulting symptoms—fatigue, boredom, jealousy, and stealing. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The fact is that every neurotic symptom points to an underlying conflict; that is, every symptom is more or less direct outgrowth of a conflict. We shall see gradually what unresolved conflicts do to people, how they produce states of anxiety, depression, indecision, inertia, detachment, and so on. An understanding of the causative relation here helps direct our attention from the manifest disturbances to their source—though the exact nature of the source will not be disclosed. The other signal indicating that conflicts were in operation was inconsistency. When person is convinced of a procedure being wrong and a injustice being done to him or her, or when a person who has highly valued friendship is turned to stealing money from a friend, sometimes the person will be aware of such inconsistencies; more often one is blind to them even when they are blatantly obvious to an untrained observer. Inconsistences are as definite an indication of the presence of conflicts as a rise in body temperature is of physical disturbance. To cite some common ones: A girls wants above all else to marry, yet shrinks from the advances of any man. A mother oversolicitous of her children frequently forgets their birthdays. A person always generous to others is cheap about expenditures for himself. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Another who longs for solitude never manages to be alone. One forgiving and tolerant toward most people is oversevere and demanding with oneself. Unlike the symptoms, the inconsistencies often permit of tentative conflict. An acute depression, for instance, reveals only the fact that a person is caught in a dilemma. However, if an apparently devoted mother forgets her children’s birthdays, we might be inclined to think that the mother was more devoted to her ideal of being a good mother than to the children themselves. We might also admit the possibility that her ideal collided with an unconscious sadistic tendency to frustrate them. Sometimes a conflict will appear on the surface—that is, be consciously experienced as such. This would seem to contradict my assertion that neurotic conflicts are unconscious. However, actually what appears is a distortion or modification of the real conflict. Thus a person may be torn by a conscious conflict when, in spite of one’s evasive techniques, well-functioning otherwise, one finds oneself confronted with the necessity of making a major decision. One cannot decide now whether to marry this woman or that one or whether to marry at all, whether to take this or that job, whether to retain or dissolve a partnership. He will then go through the greatest torment, shutting from one opposite to the other, utterly incapable of arriving at any decision. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
He may in his distress call upon an analyst, expecting him to clarify the particular issues involved. And one will necessarily be disappointed, because the present conflict is merely the point at which the dynamite of inner frictions finally exploded. The particular problem distressing him now cannot be solved without taking the long and tortuous road of recognizing the conflicts hidden beneath it. In other instances the inner conflict may be externalized and appear in the person’s conscious mind as an incompatibility between oneself and one’s environment. Or, finding that seemingly unfounded fears and inhibitions interfere with his wishes, a person may be aware that the crosscurrents within oneself issue from deeper sources. The more knowledge we gain of a person, the better able we are to recognize the conflicting elements that account for the symptoms, inconsistencies, and surface conflicts—and, we must add, the more confusing becomes the picture, through the number and variety of contradictions. So we are led to ask Can there be a basic conflict underlying all these particular conflicts and originally responsible for all of them? Can one picture the structure of conflict in terms, say, of an incompatible marriage, where an endless variety of apparently unrelated disagreements and rows over friends, children, finances, mealtimes, servants, all point to some fundamental disharmony in the relationship itself? #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
A belief in a basic conflict within the human personality is ancient and plays a prominent role in various religions and philosophies. The powers of light and darkness, of God and the devil, of good and evil are some of the ways in which this belief has been expressed. In modern psychology, Dr. Freud, on this score as on many others has done pioneer work. His first assumption was that the basic conflict is one between our instinctual drives, with their blind urge for satisfaction, and the forbidding environment—family and society. The forbidding environment is internalized at an early age and appears from then on as the forbidding superego. What remains, then, is the contention that the opposition between primitive egocentric drives and our forbidding conscience is the basic source of our manifold conflicts. My belief is that though it is a major conflict, it is a secondary and arises of necessity during the development of a neurosis. If we could actually see that God was satisfied with the fruits of our labor, imagine what a stimulus it would be to our own efforts today. Again we come back to the natural genius of primitive beings, who provided themselves with what beings need most: to know daily that one is living right in the eyes of God, that one’s workaday action has cosmic value—no, even that it enhances God Himself! #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
For early beings emanations of light and heat from the Sun were the archetypes of all miraculous power: the Sun shines from afar and by its invisible touch cases life to unfold and expand. We cannot say much more about this mystery even today. The individual Sun-Being was the focus of a cosmology of invisible energy, like the modern computer and atomic reactor, and one aroused the same hopes and yearning the arouse for the perfectly ordered, plentifully supplied life. Like the reactor, too, one reflected back energy-power on those around one: just the right amount and they prospered; too much and they withered into decay and death. Just as in traditional society, we tend to vote for the person who already represents health, wealth, and success so that some of it will rub off on us. Whence the old adage “Noting succeeds like success.” This attraction is also especially strong in certain religious cults of the Father Divine type: the followers want to see wealthy flaunted in the person of their leader, hoping that some of it will radiate back to them. How can we unite the message of the Spiritual Presence with the experience of the absent God? Let me say something about the absent God, by asking—what is the cause of His absence? We may answer—our resistance, our indifference, our lack of seriousness, our honest or dishonest questioning, our genuine or cynical doubt. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
All these answers have some truth, but they are not final. The final answer to the question as to who makes God is absent is God Himself! It is the work of the Spirit that removes God from our sight, not only for some beings, but sometimes for many in a particular period. We live in an era in which the God we know is the absent God. However, in knowing God as the absent God, we know Him; we feel His absence as the empty space that is left by something or someone that once belonged to us and has now vanished from our view. God is always infinitely near and infinitely far. We are fully aware of Him only if we experience both of these aspects. However, sometimes, when our awareness of God has become shallow, habitual—not warm and not cold—when He has become too familiar to be exciting, too near to be felt in His infinite distance, then He becomes the absent God. The Spirit has not ceased to be present. The Spiritual Presence can never end. However, the Spirit of God hides God from our sight. No resistance against the Spirit, no indifference, no doubt can drive the Spirit away. However, the Spirit that always remains present to us can hide itself, and this means that it can hide God. Then the Spirit shows us nothing except the absent God, and the empty space within us which is His space. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The Spirit has shown to our time and to innumerable people in our time the absent God and the empty space that cries in us to be filled by Him. And then the absent one may return and take the space that belongs to Him, and the Spiritual Presence may break again into our consciousness, awakening to us to recognize what we are, shaking and transforming us. This may happen like the coming of a storm, the storm of the Spirit, stirring up the stagnant air of our Spiritual life. The storm will then recede; a new stagnancy may take place; and the awareness of the present God may be replaced by the awareness of the empty space within us. Life in the Spirit is ebb and flow—and this means—whether we experience the present or the absent God, it is the work of the Spirit. A constitutional fatalism continuously adjusts itself to the ever-changing present. A pervasive alarmism greets every advance. For two thousand years we have been getting “out of hand.” This derives of course from our susceptibility to viewing the “now” ad the End Time, an Apocalyptic obsession that has endured since Christ ascended into Heaven. We must stop this! We must perceive that we are at the dawn of a sublime age! Enemies will no longer be conquered. They will be devoured, and transformed. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
However, here is the point I really want to make: Modernism and Materialism—elements that the Church has feared for so long—are in their philosophical and practical infancy! Their sacramental nature is only just being revealed! Never mind the infantile blunders! The electronic revolution has transmuted the industrial World beyond all predictive thinking of the twenty first century. We are still having birth pangs. Get into it! Work with it! Play it out. Daily life for millions in the developed countries is not only comfortable but a compilation of wonders that borders on the miraculous. And so new spiritual desires arise which are infinitely more courageous than the missionary goals of the past. There will be mountains and obstacles in your life to overcome and this will breed achievement. There will be beasts in our field of existence so that you may grow in cunning and might. This breeds victory. You must stand alone and endure as a warrior and usurp the power. Do not focus so much on politics and the news, as this keeps us from focusing on the power we have within. The power to destroy and create anew. It keeps us from seeing that we are our own God and we are our own Devil. We must constantly work toward achieving our goals through creating doorways of manifestation of desire through action in the World. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Thee for Enlivening All the Cheerful Eyes that Glance so Brightly at the New Sun-Rise!
Not Only is Everything Subject to Change but Everything Also Exists in Relation to Something Else—Thus Change and Relativity Dominate the World Scene!
The Master is Forever After Present in the Disciple’s Heart, Whether the Disciple Sees One Again or Not!
There is an Abyss which No Human Can Cross, a Mystery which Remains Utterly Impenetrable to One—This is Transcendent Godhead!
The Miracles of Genius Breed Doubt as Well as Faith so that We Feel Uplifted from the World!
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Now Selling!
Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Cresleigh Home’s newest solar home community in Rancho Cordova. Offering four distinct floorplans with unique exterior elevations, homeowners will have their choice of both single and two-story layouts ranging from three to five bedrooms.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no Home Owner Association (HOA) fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
Randolph Harris II International Institute 