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The More Individualized People are, the More Difficult it is to Attain Identification
Those who take the long view of human’s experience will find that from time to time there were other societies no less honest and courageous than ours in facing all the ugliness, cruelty, and indifference the mirror reveals, but with the greater honesty still to hold the brighter, nobler view of humans and with greater courage to pursue the vision. Despite romantic rhetoric, freedom cannot be absolute. To argue for total choice (a meaningless concept) or total individuality is to argue against any form of community or society altogether. If each person, busily doing one’s thing, were to be wholly different from every other, no two humans would have any basis for communication. It is ironic that the people who complain the most loudly that people cannot “relate” to one another, or cannot “communicate” with one another, are often the very same people who urge greater individuality. The sociologist Karl Mannheim recognized this contradiction when he wrote: “The more individualized people are, the more difficult it is to attain identification.” Unless we are literally prepared to plunge backward into pre-technological primitivism, and accept all the consequences—a shorter, more brutal life, ore disease, pain, starvation, fear, superstition, xenophobia, bigotry, and so on—we shall move forward to the more and more differentiated societies. This raises severe problems of social integration. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
What bonds of education, politics, culture must we fashion to tie the super-age of information order together into a functioning whole? Can this be accomplished? “This integration,” writes Bertram M. Gross of Wayne State University, “must be based upon certain commonly accepted values or some degree of perceived interdependence, if not mutually acceptable objectives.” A society fast fragmenting at the level of values and life styles challenges all the old integrative mechanism and cries out for a totally new basis for reconstitution. We have by no means yet found this basis. Ye if we shall face disturbing problems of social integration, we shall confront even more agonizing problems of individual integration. For the multiplication of life styles challenges our ability to hold the very self together. Which of many potential selves shall we choose to be? What sequences of serial selves will describe us? How, in short, must we deal with overchoice at this, the most intensely personal and emotion-laden level of all? In our headlong rush for variety, choice and freedom, we have not yet begun to examine the awesome implications of diversity. When diversity, however, converges with transience and novelty, we rocket the society toward an historical crisis of adaptation. We create an environment so ephemeral, unfamiliar and complex so to threaten millions with adaptive breakdown. This breakdown is future shock. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
The problem of synchronicity has puzzled me for a long time, ever since the middle twenties, when I was investigating the phenomena of the collective unconscious and kept on coming across connections which I simply could not explain as chance groupings or “run.” What I found were “coincidences” which were connected so meaningfully that their “chance” concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure. By way of example, I shall mention an incident from my own observation. A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since, and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in my experience. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
I should like to mention another case that is typical of a certain category of events. The wife of one of my patients, a man in his fifties, once told me in conversation that, at the deaths of her mother and her grandmother, a number of birds gathered outside the windows of the death-chamber. I had heard similar stories from other people. When her husband’s treatment was nearing its end, his neurosis having been cleared up, he developed some apparently quite innocuous symptoms which seemed to me, however, to be those of heart-disease. I sent him along to a specialist, who after examining him told me in writing that he could find no cause for anxiety. One the way back from this conclusion (with the medical report in his pocket) my patient collapsed in the street. As he was brought home dying, his wife was already in a great state of anxiety because, soon after her husband had gone to the doctor, a whole flock of birds alighted on their house. She naturally remembered the similar incidents that had happened at the death of her own relatives, and feared the worst. Although I was personally acquainted with the people concerned and know very well that the facts here reported are true, I do not imagine for a moment that this will induce anybody who is determined to regard such things as pure “chance” to change one’s mind. My sole object in relating these two incidents is simply to give some indication of how meaningful coincidences usually present themselves in practical life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
The meaningful connection is obvious enough in the first case in view of the approximate identity of the chief objects (the scarab and the beetle); but in the second case death and the flock of birds seem to be incommensurable with one another. If one considers, however, that in the Babylonian Hades the souls wore a “feather dress,” and that in ancient Egypt the ba, or soul, was thought of as a bird (in Homer the souls of the dead “twitter”) it is not too far-fetched to suppose that there may be some archetypal symbolism at work. Has such an incident occurred in a dream, that interpretation would be justified by the comparative psychological material. There also seems to be an archetypal foundation to the first. It was an extraordinarily difficult case to treat, and up to the time of the dream little or no progress had been made. I should explain that the main reason for this was my patient’s animus, which was steeped in Cartesian philosophy and clung so rigidly to its own idea of reality that the efforts of three doctors—I was the third—had no been able to weaken it. Evidently something quite irrational was needed which was beyond my power to produce. The dream alone was enough to disturb ever so slightly the rationalistic attitude of my patient. However, when the “scarab” came flying in through the armour of her animus possession and the process of transformation could at last begin to move. Any essential change of attitude signifies a psychic renewal which is usually accompanied by symbols of rebirth in the patient’s dreams and fantasies. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
The scarab is a classic example of a rebirth symbol. The ancient Egyptian Book of What Is in the Netherworld describes how the dead sun-god changes himself at the tenth station into Khepri, the scarab, and then, at the twelfth station, mounts the barge which carries the rejuvenated sun-god into the morning sky. The only difficulty here is that with educated people cryptomenesia often cannot be ruled out with certainty (although my patient did not happen to know this symbol). However, this does not alter the fact that psychologist is continually coming up against cases where the emergence of symbolic parallels cannot be explained without the hypothesis of the collective unconscious. The other part of the answer is that the Overself is always here as human’s innermost truest self. It is beginningless and endless in time. Its consciousness does not have to be developed as something new. However, the person’s awareness of it begins in time and has to be developed as a new attainment. The ever-presence of Overself means that anyone may attain it here and now. There is no inner necessity to travel anywhere or to anyone in space or to wait years in time for this to happen. Anyone, for instance, who attends carefully and earnestly to the present exposition may perhaps suddenly and easily get the first stage of insight, the lightning-flash which affords a glimpse of reality, at any moment. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
By that glimpse one will have been lifted to a new dimension of being. The difficulty will consist in retaining the new perception. For ancient habits of erroneous thinking will quickly reassert themselves and overwhelm one enough to push it into the background. This is why repeated introspection, reflective study and mystical meditation are needed to weaken those habits and generate the inner strength which can firmly hold the higher outlook against these aggressive intruders from one’s own past. Those who are unable to grasp this explanation the first time may do so at a later attempt, while those who will not grasp it and refuse to consider it further thereby indicate that they are not subtle enough to receive its truth. They will continue to seek reality among the cozening deceivers of superficial experience, but it will ever elude them there. Although It is at the very heart of human beings, the Overself is very far from their present level of consciousness. Nothing could be close yet this is the supreme paradox of our existence and the strangest enigma confronting our thought. The Overself is implicit in all humanity but explicit only in a few solitary figures. Its golden note of harmony falls dead upon our muted ears. The Overself is not a goal to be attained but a realization of what already is. It is the inalienable possession of all conscious beings and not of a mere few. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
No effort is needed to get hold of the Overself, but every effort is needed to get rid of the many impediments to its recognition. We cannot take hold of it; it takes hold of us. Therefore the last stage of this quest is an effortless one. We are led, as children by the hand, into the resplendent presence. Our weary strivings come to an abrupt end. Our lips are made shut and wordless. No situation in human life lasts totally unchanged forever, just as no condition on the very planet which harbours that life lasts forever. It is folly to demand changelessness. And ye we do. Why? Because beneath this conscious desire for fresh experiences there is the unconscious longing for That which is the permanent core of selfhood. The stilled, one-pointed, and reverent mind may know it, the self may dissolve in it. We carry the divine presence with us everywhere we travel. We do not directly profit by it simply because we are not directly conscious of it. The effort to arouse such awareness is a worthwhile one, brining rich reward in its train. The soul is always with us but our sense of its presence is not. There is a spiritual element in every human. It is one’s essence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Although we are divided in awareness from the higher power, we are not divided in fact from it. The divine being is immanent in each one of us. This is why there is always some good in the worst of us. Goethe: “You give me space to belong to myself yet without separating me from your own life.” The Overself is always present but human’s attention seldom is. Because the soul is present deep down in each human heart, none is so depraved that one will not one day find the inward experience of it. There is a zone of utter clam within a human. It is not only there but always there. Those who suffer, fret, or are confused may doubt or deny this—understandably and pardonably. It is always possible for a human to gain enlightenment anytime anywhere even though I may not be probable, for one has within oneself the Light itself as an ever-present Reality. What does happen and what is probable is that some moment during the course of a lifetime a glimpse may happen, and the glimpse itself is nothing less than a testimony to that ever-presence, a witness telling one that it is true and real. Just then, as thoughts themselves stop coming into one’s mind, one stops living in time and begins living in the eternal. One knows and feels one’s timelessness. And since all one’s sufferings belong to the World of passing time, of personal ego, one leaves them far behind as though they had never been. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
One finds oneself in the Heaven of a serene, infinite bliss. One learns that one could always have entered it; only one’s insistence on holding to the little egoistic values, one’s lack of thought-control, and one’s disobedience to the age-old advice of the Great Teachers prevented one from doing so. If that divine element into which they exalted us did not already exist within us, these rear moments of spontaneous spiritual exaltation, which cast all other moments in the shade and which are remembered ever after, could not have been born. Its very presence in our hearts makes always possible and sometimes actual the precious feeling of a non-material sublimely happy order of being. It is not really a goal to be reached, nor a state to be attained, nor something new to be added to what one now has or is. However, if one insists on thinking that it is any of these things, there is no other course open than to take the appropriate action, make the necessary effort, for such achievement. One’s labours are really self-imposed, a consequence of incorrect thought about oneself. Is this benign state a past from which we have lapsed or a future to which we are coming? The true answer is that it is neither. This state as always been existent within us, is so now, and always will be. It is forever with us simply because it is wat we really are. It is not as if one has to find something foreign, making communication too distant and too difficult, for this is one’s very native being, giving one meaning and awareness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
If the real Self must have been present and been witness to our peaceful enjoyment of deep slumber—otherwise we would not have known that we had such enjoyment—so must it likewise have been present and been witness to our rambling imaginations in dream-filled sleep and to our physical activities in waking. This leads to a tremendous but inescapable conclusion. We are as near to, or as much in, the real Self, the Overself, at conclusion. We are as near to, or as much in, the real self, the Overself, at every moment of every day as we shall ever be. All we need is awareness of it. A thing that is infinite and eternal hath n qualities, since it hath all qualities. This nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA. Therein both thinking and being cease, since the eternal and infinite possess no qualities. In it no being is, for one then would be distinct from the pleroma, and would possess qualities which would distinguish one as something distinct from the pleroma. In the pleroma there is nothing and everything. It is quite fruitless to think about the pleroma, for this would mean self-dissolution. The opposites are contained in the pleroma, but because they are equally balanced, they void. Although the opposites are manifested in individuals, they are not balanced and void. The individual’s task is to pursue one’s own distinctiveness, and this involves one in distinguishing oneself from the opposites. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
We labour to attain the good and beautiful, yet at the same time we also lay hold of the evil and ugly, since in the pleroma these are one with the good and the beautiful. When, however, we remain true to our own nature, which is distinctiveness, we distinguish ourselves from the good and the beautiful, and, therefore, at the same time, from the evil and the ugly. And thus we fall not into the pleroma, namely into nothingness and dissolution. In the pleromatic or (as the Tibetans call it) Bardo state, there is a perfect interplay of cosmic forces, but with the Creation—that is, with the division of the World into distinct processes in space and time—events begin to rub and jostle one another. Although the birth of Christ is an event that occurred but once in history, it has always existed in eternity. For the layperson in these matters, the identity of a nontemporal, eternal event with a unique historical occurrence is something that is extremely difficult to conceive. One must, however, accustom oneself to the idea that “time” is a relative concept and needs to be complemented by that of the “simultaneous” existence, in the Bard or pleroma, of all historical processes. What exists in the pleroma as an eternal process appears in time as an aperiodic sequence, that is to say, it is repeated many times in an irregular patten. To take but one example: Yahweh had one good son and one who was a failure. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, correspond to this prototype, and so, in all ages and in all parts of the World, does the motif of the hostile brothers, which in innumerable modern variants still causes dissension in families and keeps the psychotherapist busy. Just as many examples, no less instructive, could be found for the two women prefigured in eternity. When these things occur as modern variants, therefore, they should not be regarded merely as person episodes, modes, or chance idiosyncrasies in people, but as fragments of the pleromatic process itself, which, broken up into individual events occurring in time, is an essential component or aspect of the divine drama. Wen Yahweh created the World from his prima materia, the “Void,” he could not help breathing his own mystery into Creation which is himself in every part, as every reasonable theology has long been convinced. From this comes the belief that it is possible to know God from His Creation. When I say that He could not help doing this, I do not imply any limitation of is omnipotence; on the contrary, it is an acknowledgment that all possibilities are contained in Him, and that there are in consequence no other possibilities than those which express Him. All the World is God’s, and God is in all the World from the very beginning. Why, then, the tour de force of the Incarnation? One asks oneself, astonished. God is in everything already, and yet there must be something missing is a sort of second entrance into Creation has now to be staged with so much care and circumspection. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Since Creation is universal, reaching to the remotest stellar galaxies, and since it has also made organic life infinitely variable and capable of endless differentiation, we can hardly see where the defect lies. The fact that Satan as everywhere intruded his corrupting influence is no doubt regrettable for many reasons, but it makes no difference in principle. It is not easy to give an answer to this question. One would like to say that Christ had to appear in order to deliver humankind from evil. However, when one considers that evil was originally slipped into the scheme of things by Satan, and still is, then it would seem much simpler if Yahweh would, for once, call this “practical joker” severely to account, get rid of his pernicious influence, and thus eliminate the root of all evil. He would then no need the elaborate arrangement of a special Incarnation with all the unforeseeable consequences which this entails. Wen God becomes man, one should make clear to oneself what it means. It means nothing less than a World-shaking transformation of God. It means more of less what Creation meant in the beginning, namely an objectivation of God. At the time of the Creation, He revealed Himself in Nature; now he wants to be more specific and become man. It must be admitted, however, that there was a tendency in this direction right from the start. For, when those other human beings, who had evidently been created before Adam, appeared on the scene along with the higher mammals, Yahweh created on the following day, by a special act of creation, a man who was the image of God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
This was the first prefiguration of His becoming man. God took Adam’s descendants, especially the people of Israel, into His personal possession, and from time to time He filled this people’s prophets with His spirit. All these things were preparatory events and symptoms of a tendency within God to become man. However, in the omniscience there had existed from all eternity a knowledge of the human nature of God or of the divine nature of man. That is why, long before Genesis was written, we find corresponding testimonies in the ancient Egyptian records. These intimations and prefigurations of the Incarnation must strike one as either completely incomprehensible or superfluous, since all creation ex nihilo is God’s and consists of nothing but God, with the result that humans, like the rest of creation, are simply God become concrete. Prefigurations, however, are not in themselves creative events, but are only stages in the process of becoming conscious. It was only quite late that we realized (or rather, are beginning to realize) that God is Reality itself and therefore—last but not least—man. This realization is a millennial process. The conception of “the millennial process” refers to a profound belief that change is about to take place in human’s conception of oneself and the Universe. Traditionally, the reign of Christ ended with the first millennium, to be succeeded by the reign of Antichrist. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
The reign of the Antichrist is now nearing its end, coinciding with the entry of the vernal equinox into Aquarius, and the end of the aeon of Pisces. A human’s refusal to allow spiritually intuitive feelings to awaken in one cannot obliterate the presence of the source of those feelings. One bears that presence ever within one and one day must reconcile oneself willingly, knowingly, even yearningly, with it. The Overself is always within call, for its hiding place is no farther than a human’s heart. However, if the call does not go forth, or goes forth without faith, or is not sustained with patience, the response will not come. God is ever present with us but we are ever turning away from Him. No one is forsaken except those who look only to, and into, the ego, and even then only for a time. In one sense that World of the Overself remains always inaccessible and inexpressible, but in another sense it is as close as breathing and as palpable in highest art forms or in the illuminated human’s presence as a fragrant perfume. By one’s ignoring of the Overself’s presence, humans commit their greatest sin and shows one’s worst stupidity. If God did not exist, then we humans would not exist. A divine ray, atom, soul, call it what you wish, is present in each of us. Some are aware of this, others must one day come to this knowledge. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
The Overself is always present in human’s heart. If one does not receive awareness of this face in one’s mind, that is because one makes no proper and sustained effort to do so. You may be an insignificant creature in the vastness of the cosmos, but the divine life—of which that cosmos is but a channel—is in you, too. Have enough faith in your divine heritage, take it into your common everyday life and thought, and in some way, to some people, you will become very significant and important. If unconscious, we life all the time in unfailing union with the Overself. Perhaps the most wonderful thing which the illuminate discovers is that one’s independence from the infinite life power never really existed and was only illusory, that one’s separation from the Overself was only an idea of the imagination and not a fact of being. Even the desire to unite with the Overself was only a dream, and consequently all lesser desire of the ego were merely dreams within a dream. Speaking of dreams, the Winchester mansion is something reminiscent of a dream, it is so surreal. Surrealism is a style of art in which the reality of the dream, or the subconscious mind, is seen as more “real” than the surface of everyday life. Its reality is a higher reality. It is usually reflected in works of art. When using surrealism, people are directly presenting the reality of their own feelings and emotions on the canvas. Nothing can be more concrete to a human than one’s own felt thought, one own thought feeling. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
There are many surreal elements in the Winchester mansion such as a spiral stairway that has 42 steps, each two inches high. Other stairways melt into blank walls. A second story door opens into the great outdoors, and a 20-foot step. A linen closet has the area of a three-room apartment; a nearby cupboard is less than one-inch deep. A skylight is placed in the middle of a room, in the floor! Another floor is apparently a series of trap-doors. Exterior faucets project unexpectedly from under second-story windows. The visitor must stoop through one door to enter, the next gives clearance for an eight-foot giant. Many stairway turnposts are set upside down. Entire walls are built entirely of half-inch, “half-round” strips. Everywhere prevails that uncanny deference to the number 13; 13 stairsteps, 13 hangers in a closet, 13 wall panels, 13 lights in the chandeliers, 13 windows to a room and if necessary to make that number, some placed in an inside wall. No wonder the one-time visitors Houdini and Ripley stood in awe; imagine Houdini in the dead center of this 160-room catacomb, perhaps wondering if blindfolded he could make a timely midnight escape from such a maze, or imagine a spellbound Ripley, reaching for his Believe-It-Or-Not sketch pad to immortalize this architectural dream. In searching out potential hunts, human investigators may be drawn to the Winchester mansion with its long, dark corridors, widow’s walk, and dramatic staircases. However, the ghost themselves show a profound indifference to such things. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
The ghost, it seems, is concerned with what happened to one, not where it happened. In most accounts of hauntings, the spirit comes back to erase, re-enact, avenge or simply brood about some awful event or unfulfilled longing. The Winchester mansion with its mysterious history and unresolved hauntings would inspire a legion of restless spirits and that is not surprising. In December of 1897, several curious people flocked to the Winchester mansion—in a window in the house—a bodiless head appeared at a second story window. The floating visage manifested itself at random day or night. Many people thought it resembled William Wirt Winchester, but Mrs. Winchester disagreed. Eventually the whole window concealed inside of the mansion by new construction. It is reported to be the one next to the most expensive window in the house. Judging from the number of individuals reporting spectral contact, one does not have to be a professional medium to see a ghost. They attract believer and nonbeliever indiscriminately. One man reports in the 1960s medical students would sleep in the Winchester mansion because of their professional interests. One of the students who had a skeleton in his bedroom told an analyst after some time and with great embarrassment that he often took the skeleton into his bed, embraced it, and sometimes kissed it. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Another student reported that one night he slept in the attic in the witch’s cap, and was suddenly wrenched up out of the bed and dragged across the floor! He was fully awake in an instant. Into the bathroom he was forced by powerful hands that hurt his arms. His head was smacked against the wall. He was lifted off his feet and held that way, and by the thin light from the door through which he had just been dragged he saw that it was a tall man who held him. His hair was clearly brushed from his high rounded temples, and his large dark eyes were fastened on him. His hands came up around the student’s neck and then he vanished. However, if nothing paranormal occurs while you are visiting the house, that can be expected. Ghost tend to be shy and more active overnight. Nonetheless, you will have lost nothing. As an adventure in historical research, the Winchester mansion has no equal. A spirit has literally conquered death and come back to prove it. It is both a clue and an invitation to a World beyond our own limited reality, an offer to broaden our awareness to encompass everything and anything that just might be possible. The truth is that this feeling or its presence has been shut up so long, that we have come back to look upon it as non-existent and to regard the rumours of its actual experience as hallucination. This is why religion, mysticism, and philosophy have so hard a battle to fight in these ties, a battle against human’s inevitable incredulity. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Even more scary than the Land of Spirits are the deities of destruction and death. Since mysticism seeks to include all life, it must include its bad parts as well as its good. That is not to say that we have to like the bad things. It is certainly understandable to ask that they pass us by. However, some of its is unavoidable, so we ask for the strength to deal with it. Sometimes we ask benevolent deities to protect us, and sometimes we ask the not-so-benevolent ones to deal lightly with us, or to show us in what way our sufferings are necessary and even valuable. I do not want to wax poetic about how curses can be blessings in disguise, after all Mrs. Winchester was said to be cursed and look at the beautiful work of art that was produced as a result. However, I also do not want to insult those who suffer by implying that their suffering is a good thing. I do want to say, however, that sometimes suffering can indeed bring blessings. It shows us that the World is not all bunnies, kittens, and rainbows, which means we come face to face with reality, a great blessing. It both tests us and strengthens us. We learn how much we can stand and how to stand worse, if it should come. We learn that sometimes good things are born from bad things. Think of the pain that comes with childbirth. All in all, may God protect the person who grows up without experiencing suffering; the first strong wind they encountered as an adult will blow them away. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Beyond all this, destruction can be beneficial. Sometimes the weeds need to be whacked back to let the good stuff grow. Part of us must die so the best of us can live. Deities of destruction can do this for us. This is not easy, nor is it safe. The fire that burns away brush can get out of control and destroy the forest. It has become fashionable in neo-Paganism to worship “dark” deities—Kali, Loki, Hecate, et cetera. They are seen as misunderstood. They are in fact misunderstood, but by those who see them as “fun.” They are not fun. They are scary, dangerous, and difficult to deal with. I hesitate to share ghost stories and episodes of real demonic possession to readers. No sense in calling up trouble for people. However, we need to acknowledge the darker side of things in order to fill out our relationship with the Universe, as Mrs. Winchester did. Loki is a demon who, when the gods grew too comfortable in their unending like, stole the apples that kept them young and made them face age. When they sought to cheat the giant of the wages for his work, they turned to him to save themselves. When Thor grew too sure of his strength to end Chaos, Loki showed him that craftiness is as necessary as raw power. Loki is a god of unpleasant truths, and he can open your eyes to your own limits. It is only by seeing them that we can overcome them. May all your weaknesses be burned away, making you fit for God. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Winchester Mystery House
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Like a Diamond in the Sky Discipline Must be Maintained!
Every time I open a book, I risk my life…Every work of imagination offers another view of life, an invitation to spend a few days inside someone else’s emotions. The wise person lets the Overself’s presence flow through one’s life, never blocks it by one’s ego nor turns it aside by one’s passions. The ego can no longer foresee what will happen to the outer course of its personal life when the Overself takes the lead, nor can it dictate what that course should be. With all one’s humility before the Overself, one will bear oneself among one’s fellow human beings with serene self-assurance and speak with firm conviction of that which one knows. When these experiences increase and multiply to such an extent that they accumulate into a large body of evidence, one will become convinced that some power is somehow using one as a beneficent channel. It is the real originator of these experiences, the real bestower of these blessing, the real illuminator of these other people. What is this power? Despite its seeming otherness, its apparent separateness, it is really one’s own higher self. Humanity is one, with psyche. Humility is a not inconsiderable virtue which should prompt Christians, for the sake of charity—the greatest of all virtues—to set a good example and acknowledge that though there is only one truth it speaks in many tongues, and that if we still cannot see this is simply due to lack of understanding. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
No one is so godlike that one alone knows the true word. All of us gaze into that “dark glass” in which the dark myth takes shape, adumbrating the invisible truth. In this glass the eyes of the spirit glimpse an image which we call the self, fully conscious of the fact that it is an anthropomorphic image which we have merely named but not explained. By “self” we mean psychic wholeness, but what realities underlie this concept we do not know, because psychic contents cannot be observed in their unconscious state, and moreover the psyche cannot know itself. The conscious can know the unconscious only so far as it has become conscious. We have only a very hazy idea of the changes an unconscious content undergoes in the process of becoming conscious, but no certain knowledge. The concept of psychic wholeness necessarily implies an element of transcendence on account of the existence of unconscious components. Transcendence in this sense is not equivalent to a metaphysical postulate or hypostasis; it claims to be no more than a borderline concept, to quote Kant. That there is something beyond the borderline, beyond the frontiers of knowledge, is shown by the archetypes and, most clearly of all, by numbers, which this side of the border are quantities but on the other side are autonomous psychic entities, capable of making qualitative statements which manifest themselves in a priori patterns of order. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
These patterns include not only causally explicable phenonmena like dream-symbols and such, but remarkable relativizations of time and space which simply cannot be explained causally. They are the parapsychological phenomena which I have summed up under the terms “synchronicity” and which have been statistically investigated by Rhine. The beneficial results of experiments elevate these phenomena to the rank of undeniable facts. This brings us a little nearer to understanding the mystery of psychophysical parallelism, for we know that a factor exists which mediates between the apparent incommensurability of body and psyche, giving matter a kind of “psychic” faculty and the psyche a kind of “materiality,” by means of which the one can work on the other. That the body can work on the psyche seems to be a truism, but strictly speaking all we know is that any bodily defect or illness also expresses itself psychically. Naturally this assumption only holds good if, contrary to the popular materialistic view, the psyche is credited with an existence of its own. However, materialism in its turn cannot explain how chemical changes can produce a psyche. Both views, the materialistic as well as the spiritualistic, are metaphysical prejudices. It accords better with experience to suppose that living matter has a psychic aspect, and the psyche a physical aspect. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
If we give due consideration to the facts of parapsychology, then the hypothesis of the psychic aspect must be extended beyond the sphere of biochemical process to matter in general. In that case all reality would be grounded on an as yet unknown substrate possessing material and at the same tie psychic qualities. In view of the trend of modern theoretical physics, this assumption should arouse fewer resistances than before. It would also do away with the awkward hypothesis of psychophysical parallelism, and afford us an opportunity to construct a new World model closer to the idea of the unus mundus. The “acausal” correspondence between mutually independent psychic and physical events, id est, synchronistic phenomena, and in particular psychokinesis, would then become more understandable, for every physical event would involve a psychic one and vice versa. Such reflections are not idle speculations; they are forced on us in any serious psychological investigation of the UF phenomenon. Undoubtedly the idea of the unus mundus is founded on the assumption that the multiplicity of the empirical World rests on an underlying unity, and that not two of more fundamentally different Worlds exist side by side or are mingled with one another. Rather, everything divided and different belongs to one and the same World, which is not the World of sense but a postulate whose probability is vouched for by the fact that until now one has been able to discover a World in which the known laws of nature are invalid. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
That even the psychic World, which is so extraordinarily different from the physical Word, does not have its roots outside the one cosmos is evidence from the undeniable fact that causal connections exist between the psyche and the body which point to their underlying unitary nature. All that is is not encompassed by our knowledge, so that we are not in a position to make any statements about its total nature. Microphysics is feeling its way into the unknow side of matter, just as complex psychology is pushing forward into the unknown side of the psyche. Both lines of investigation have yielded findings which can be conceived only by means of antinomies, and both have developed concepts which display remarkable analogies. If this trend should become more pronounced in the future, the hypothesis of the unity of their subject-matters would gain in probability. Of course there is little or no hope that the unitary Being can ever be conceived, since our powers of thought and language permit only of antinomian statements. However, this much we do know beyond all doubt, that empirical reality has a transcendental background—a fact which, as Sir James Jeans has shown, can be expressed by Plato’s parable of the cave. The common background of microphysics and depth-psychology is as much physical as psychic and therefore neither, but rather a third thing, a neutral nature which can at most be grasped in hints since in essence it is transcendental. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The background of our empirical World thus appears to be in fact a unus mundus. This is at least a probable hypothesis which satisfies the fundamental tenet of scientific theory: “Explanatory principles are not to be multiplied beyond the necessary.” The transcendental psychophysical background corresponds to a “potential World” in so far as all those conditions which determine the form of empirical phenomena are inherent in it. This obviously holds good as much for physics as for psychology, or, to be more precise, for macrophysics as much as for the psychology of consciousness. Only when we act in and from the Overself can we really be said to act aright, for only then shall our deeds be wise and virtuous, most beneficial in the ultimate sense both to our own self and to others. What the ego thinks and feels and does is to reflect the Overself’s dominion. The ego itself is now to be subsidiary. Every thought or feeling or act is to be dedicated one, every place where is finds itself a consecrated one. The Overself is not merely a transient intellectual abstraction but rather an eternal presence. For those who have awakened to the consciousness of this presence, there is always available its mysterious power and sublime inspiration. It is the divine moment; no longer foes speech come forth humanly not action individually: the God within has taken over. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
At some mysterious moment a higher power takes possession of one, dictates one’s thoughts, words, and acts. Sometimes one is amazed by them, by their difference from what one would normally have thought, spoken, or done. The unfoldment of intuitive action, intuitive thinking, and intuitive feeling means that the Overself and the personality are then in accord and working together. The little circle of the ego then lies within the larger circle of the Overself, in harmony and in co-operation. It does not matter than whether a human lives as a monk or as a householder, whether one is engaged in the World’s activity, or whether one is in retirement. Of course, such a condition is not attained without a full and deep transformation of the human. It is necessary to point out that the mere removal of thoughts by itself is not enough and could only give an illusory illumination and not the kind of peace which one feels after a dreamless sleep—passive, but not positive. There are various tricks. Some are of a hypnotic nature, whereby thoughts can be kept out of the mind and an apparent stillness obtained; but the mediator who only uses these tricks and nothing more deceives oneself. One might as well go to sleep and then wake up. The spiritual value is about the same, while the psychological value is definitely adverse to one. One will ten be in danger of becoming a dreamer with a dulled mind. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
One must look forward hopefully to the day when one can actually feel the higher self present within all one’s activity. It will reign in one’s inner World and thus be the real doer of one’s actions, not the ego in the outer World. It is not easy to subordinate oneself to this inner voice. However, where can one hide from it? We are to exalt life, not to degrade it. There are times when the Overself accepts no resistance, when it acts with such compelling force that the human is unable to disobey. However, such happenings are special ones. Some elf other than one’s familiar one will rise up within one, some force—ennobling, masterful, and divine—will control one. When a human’s consciousness, outlook, and character are so exalted as this, altruistic duty becomes not a burden to be carried irksomely but a part of one’s path of self-fulfillment from which one would not wish to be spared. There is a strange feeling that not one but somebody else is living and talking in the same body. It is somebody nobler and wiser than one’s own ego. The feeling of being possessed for a while by a holy other-Worldly presence comes over one. One is now under the influence, and later may be under the control, of a superior power. One becomes a vessel, filled from time to time with spiritual presence. One’s words, one’s feelings, and one’ actions will ten not only be expressions of one’s human self but also of that self united indissolubly with one’s divine self. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Mind is the aspect of reality. When this intellectual understanding is brough within one’s own experience as fact, when it is made as much one’s own as a bodily pain, then it becomes direct insight. Such thinking is the most profitable and resultful in which one can engage, for it brings the student to the very portal of Mind where it stops activity by itself and where the differentiations of ideas disappears. As the mental muscles strain after this concept of the Absolute, the Ineffable and Infinite, they lose their materialist rigidity and become more sensitive to intimations from the Overself. When thinking is able to reach such a profound depth that it attains utter impersonality and clam universality, it is able to approach the fundamental principle of its own being. When hard thinking reaches a culminating point, it then voluntarily destroys itself. Such an attainment of course can take place deep within the innermost recesses of the individual’s consciousness alone. One will arrive at the firm unshakable conviction that there is an inward reality behind all existence. If one wishes one may go farther still and seek to translate the intellectual idea of this reality into a conscious fact. In that case the comprehension that is the quest of pure Mind one is in quest of that which is alone the Supreme Reality in this entire Universe, must possess one. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
This mystery Mind is a theme upon which no aspirant can ever reflect enough: first, because of its importance, and second, because of its capacity to unfold one’s latent spirituality. One will doubtless feel cold on these lofty peaks of thought, but in the end one will find a Heavenly reward whilst still on Earth. We are not saying that something of the nature of mind as we humans know it is the supreme reality of the Universe, but only that it is more like that reality than anything else we know of and certainly more like it than what we usually call by the name of “matter.” The simplest way to express this is to say that Reality is of the nature of our mind rather than of our body, although it is Mind transcending the familiar phases and raised to infinity. It is the ultimate being the highest state. This is the Principle which forever remains what it was and will be. It is in the Universe and yet the Universe is in it too. It never evolves, for it is outside time. It has no shape, for it is outside space. It is beyond human’s consciousness, for it is beyond both one’s thoughts and senseless humans may enter into its knowledge, many enter into its Void, so soon as one can drop one’s thoughts, let go one’s sense-experience, but keep one’s sense of being. Then one may understand what Jesus meant when saying: “One that loseth one’s life shall find it.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Such an accomplishment may appear too spectral to be of any use to one’s matter-of-fact generation. What is their madness will one one’s sanity. One will know there is reality where they think there is nothingness. To keep this origin always at the back of one’s mind because it is also the end of all things, is a necessary practice. However, this can only be done if one cultivates reactionlessness to the happenings of every day. This does not mean showing no outward reactions, but it does mean that deep down indifference has been achieved—not an empty indifference, but one based on seeing the Divine essence in all things, all creatures, and a Divine meaning in all happenings. There is only this one Mind. All else is a seeming show on its surface. To forget the ego and think of this infinite and unending reality is the highest kind of meditation. First, remember that It is appearing as ego; then remember to think tat you are It; finally cease to think of It so you may be free of thoughts to be It! To attach oneself to a guru, an avatar, one religion, one creed, is to see stars only. To put one’s faith in the Infinite Being, and in its presence within the heart, is to see the vast empty sky itself. The stars will come and go, will disintegrate and vanish, but the sky remains. In a World of constantly changing scenes, fortunes, health, and relationships, a precious possession is the knowledge that there is the unseen Unchanging Real. Still more precious is awareness within oneself of ITS ever-presence. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
In the moment that there dawns on one’s understanding the fact of Mind’s beginninglessness and deathlessness, one gains the second illumination, the first being that of the ego’s illusoriness and transiency. Not to find the Energy of the Spirit but the Spirit itself is the ultimate goal—not its power or effects or qualities or attributes but the actuality of pure being. The aspirant is not to stop short with any of these but to push on. One will have gone far intellectually when one can understand the statement that mind is the seeker but Mind is the sought. One who puts one’s mind on the Unlimited instead of on the little parts, who does not deal with fractions but with the all-absorbing Whole, gains some of Its power. What we need to grasp is that although our apprehension of the Real is gradual, the Real is nonetheless with us at every moment in all its radiant totality. Modern science has filled our heads with the false notion that reality is in a state of evolution, whereas it is only our mental concept of reality which is in a state of evolution. Thinking can, ordinarily, only produce more thoughts. Even thinking about truth, about reality, however correct it be, shares this limitation. However, if properly instructed it will know its place and understand the situation, with the consequence that at the proper moment it will make no further effort, and will seek to merge into meditation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
When the merger is successfully completed, a holy silence will pervade the consciousness which remains. Truth will then be revealed of its own accord. When all thought are gone, when all vibration, movement, or activity of thinking faculty has ceased, then is the self-revealing possible of Mind-in-itself, of Consciousness with its states. Where the intellect is active it creates a double result—the thought and thinker. Where the enlightened human goes into the Stillness this duality does not appear but Consciousness remains. It contains nothing created by one. It is the Alone. Every creature, from the most primitive amoeba up to the most intellectual human, has some kind and degree of awareness; but only the Illuminate has that toward which awareness itself is striving to attain—Consciousness. The “Void” means void of all mental activity and productivity. It means that the notions and images of the mind have been emptied out, that all perceptions of the body and conceptions of the brain have gone. The Mind is here, now. However, as soon as any thought arises you miss it. It is like space…unthinkable. The great Emptiness is the Ultimate Being, without form, Matterless and Motionless, ineffable, and undescribable except by statements of what it is not. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Those who study can lead them to this high level must then let go of ward, abandon images, representations, symbols, numberings, divisions, and dualities; must be ready to enter the Stillness. This means being able to attain the utmost Vacuity. Cling single-heartedly to Quietude. Mentalism is the study of Mind and its product, thoughts. To separate the two, to disentangle them, is to become aware of Awareness itself. This achievement comes not by any process of intellectual activity but by the very opposite—suspending such activity. And it comes not as another idea but as extremely vivid, powerfully compelling insight. Nothing that the mind can think into mental existence is IT. Mind in its most unlimited sense is reality. A human can know it only be the intuitive process of being it, in the same manner in which one know one’s name, which is not an intellectual process but an immediate one. We shall never grasp that totality of being with out intellect, but we shall grasp it with the only thing capable of holding it, with Consciousness. The awareness of It as being It is something other, and more, than the mere emptiness of Mind. God in unfathomable and unknowable. Every idea of Him is a false idea, created to satisfy our little human mental need but also sharing our finite human limitations. That is, the idea describes something about humans, nothing about God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
We prefer to delude ourselves with such images and idols, rather than to take off our shoes at the very remembrance of God and enter the temple of the Silenced Mind. Here, at least, we get no untrue concepts which have to be discarded in the end. Here the wakened faint or strong intuition may bet intimations Godlike in quality, of THAT which must always remain incomprehensible to the intellect. Those who look to God as a healer, or as a mother, or as a father, or as a teacher are still looking for God within the ego. They are thinking of God only in relation to themselves because their first interest is in themselves. However, those who look to God in the Void, and not in any relationship or under any image or idea, really find God. Therefore they really find “the peace which passeth understanding.” If they begin and end in words, all attempts to explain the inexplicable, to describe the inscrutable, to communicate the ineffable must end in failure. For then it is merely intellect talking to intellect. However, let the attempts be made in the stillness, let “hear speak to heart,” and the Real may reveal itself. All talk of things being inside or outside the mind is submission to the spell of a vicious spatial metaphor. All language is applicable to things and thoughts, but not to the august infinite of mind. Here every word can be at best symbolic and at worst irrelevant, while remaining always as remote from definable meaning as unseen and unseeable Universes are from our own. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
We have lived in illusions long enough. Let us not yield the last grand hope of humans to the deceptive sway of profane words. Here there must and shall be SILENCE—serene, profound, mysterious, yet satisfying beyond all Earthly satisfactions. It is not possible for a finite human being to grasp the infinite significance of the Infinite Being, nor to gather any true idea about such Being. One can only think what It is not: otherwise one must retreat into utter silence, not merely of speech alone but also of mental imaginative and passional activity. Awareness alone is whatever it turns its attention to, seems to exist at the time: only that. If to Void then there is nothing else. If to World, then World assumes reality. What is it that is aware? The though of a point of awareness create, gives reality at the lowest level to ego, and at the highest to Higher Self but when the thought itself is dropped there is only the One Existence, Being, in the divine Emptiness. It is therefore the Source of all life, intelligence, form. The idea held becomes direct experience for the personality, the awareness becomes direct perception. Awareness is the very nature of one’s being: it is the Self. Every human credits oneself with having consciousness during the wakeful state. One never questions or disputes the fact. One does not need anyone else to till it to one, not does one tell it to oneself. It is the surest part of one’s knowledge. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Yet this is not a knowing which one brings into the field of awareness. It is known differently from the way other facts are known by one. The difference is that the ego is absent from the knowledge—the fact is not actually perceived. Reason tells us that pure Thought cannot know itself because that would set up a duality which would be false if pure though is the only real itself. Although all ordinary experience confirms it, extraordinary experience refutes it. Consciousness is the best witness to its own existence. When we experience Mind through the sense we call it matter. When we experience it trough imagination of thinking we call it idea. When we experience it as it is in its own pure being, we call it Spirit, or better Overself. Humans are not the authors of nature; but one uses natural things in applying art and virtue to one’s own use. Hence human providence does not reach to that which takes place in nature from necessity; but divine providence extends thus far, since God is the author of nature. Apparently it was this argument that moved those who withdrew the course of nature from the care of divine providence, attributing it rather to the necessity of matter, as Democritus, and others of the ancients. When it is said that God left humans to themselves, this does not mean that humans are exempt from divine providence; but merely that one has not a prefixed operating force determined to only the one effect; as in the case of natural things, which are only acted upon though directed by another towards an end; and do not act of themselves, as if they directed themselves towards an end, like rational creatures, though the possession of free will, by which these are able to take counsel and make choice. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Hence it is significantly said: “In the hand of one’s own counsel.” However, since the very act of free will is traced to God as to a cause, it necessarily follows that everything happening from the exercise of free will must be subject to divine providence. For human providence is included under the providence of God, as a particular universal cause. God, however, extends His providence over the just in a certain more excellent way than over the wicked; inasmuch as He prevents anything happening which would impede their final salvation. For “to them that love God, all things work together unto good,” reports Romans 8.28. However, from the fact that God does not restrain the wicked from the evil of sin, He is said to abandon them: not that He altogether withdraws His providence from them; otherwise they would return to nothing, if they were not preserved in existence by His providence. This was the reason that had weight with Tully, who withdrew from the care of divine providence human affairs concerning which we take counsel. Since a rational creature has, through its free well, control over its action, as was said above, it is subject to divine providence in an especial manner, so that something is imputed to it as a fault, or as a merit; and there is given it accordingly something by way of punishment or reward. In this way, the Apostle withdraws oxen from the care of God: not, however, that individual irrational creatures escape the care of divine providence; as was the opinion of the Rabbis Moses. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Dear Lord in the shining Heaven, during today’s negotiations, please make me eloquent. God, please ease the way, please remove all obstacles, opening the path for a smoothly accomplished deal, opening the path for a profitable outcome. I take up my pen and invoke the Spirit of God, the God of writing, please make my way smooth. I take up the pen and invoke Jesus Christ: Inspiring Saviour, please enflame my words. O Lord our God, please bestow upon us the blessing of Thy festivals for life and peace, for joy and gladness, even as Thou hast graciously promised to bless us. [Our God and God of our fathers, please accept our rest.] Please sanctify us through Thy commandments, and please grant our potion in Thy Bible; please give us abundantly of Thy goodness and please make us rejoice in Thy salvation. Please purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth. In Thy loving favour, O Lord our God, please let us inherit with joy and gladness Thy holy [Sabbath and] festivals; and may America who sanctifies Thy name, rejoice in Thee. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hallowest [the Sabbath and] America and the festivals. O Lord our God, please be gracious unto Thy people of America and please accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy sanctuary and receive in love the supplications of America; and may the worship of Thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. O may our eyes witness Thy return to America. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who restorest Thy divine presence unto America. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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The Queen of Heaven and Bride at the Heavenly Court!
The chief problem of lower-income famers is poverty. The bodily assumption of Mary into Heaven was defined as a dogma of the Catholic faith by Pope Pius XII in November 1950. Carl Jung, who had examined the doctrine of the Trinity, (“A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity,” CW 11, pars. 172-295) believed his to be “the most important religious event since the Reformation.” For the new dogma adds a fourth figure to the Trinity, converting it into a quaternity. The promulgation of the new dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary could, in itself, have been sufficient reason for examining the psychological background. It was interesting to note that, among the many articles published in the Catholic and Protestant press on the declaration of the dogma, there was not one, so far as I could see, which laid anything like the proper emphasis on what was undoubtedly the most powerful motive: namely, the popular movement and the psychological need behind it. Essentially, the writers of the articles were satisfied with learned considerations, dogmatic and historical, which have no bearing on the living religious process. However, anyone who has followed with attention the visions of Mary which have been increasing in number over the last few decades, and has taken their psychological significance into account, might have known what was brewing. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The fact, especially, that is was largely children who had the visions might have given pause for thought, for in such cases the collective unconscious is always at work. Incidentally, the Pope himself is rumoured to have had several visions of the Mother of God on the occasion of the declaration. One could have known for a long time that there was a deep longing in the masses for an intercessor and mediatrix who would at last take her place alongside the Holy Trinity and be received as the “Queen of Heaven and Bride at the Heavenly court.” For more than a thousand years it had been taken for granted that the Mother of God dwelt there, and we know from the Old Testament that Sophia was with God before the creation. From the ancient Egyptian theology of the divine Pharaohs we know that God wants to become man by means of a human mother, and it was recognized even in prehistoric times that the primordial divine being is both male and female. However, such a truth eventuates in time only when it is solemnly proclaimed or rediscovered. It is psychologically significant for our day that in the year 1950 the Heavenly bride was united with the bridegroom. In order to interpret this event, one has to consider not only the arguments adduced by the Papal Bull, but the prefigurations in the apocalyptic marriage of the Lamb and in the Old Testament anamnesis of Sophia. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The nuptial union in the thalamus (bridal-chamber) signifies the hieros gamos, and this in turn is the first step towards incarnation, towards the birth of the saviour who, since antiquity, was thought of as the filius solis et lunae, the filius sapientiae, and the equivalent of Christ. When, therefore, a longing for the exaltation of the Mother of God passes through the people, this tendency, if thought to its logical conclusion, means the desire for the birth of a saviour, a peacemaker, a mediator pacem faciens inter inimicos (a mediator making peace between enemies). Although he is already born in the pleroma, his birth in time can only be accomplished when it is perceived, recognized, and declared by humans. The motive and content of the popular movement which contributed to the Pope’s decision solemnly to declare the new dogma consist not in the birth of a new god, but in the continuing incarnation of God which began with Christ. Arguments based on historical criticism will never do justice to the new dogma; on the contrary, they are as lamentably wide of the mark as are the unqualified fears to which the English archbishops have given expression. In the first place, the declaration of the dogma has changed nothing in principle in the Catholic ideology as it has existed for more than a thousand years; and in the second place, the failure to understand that God has eternally wanted to become man, for that purpose continually incarnates through the Holy Ghost in the temporal sphere, is an alarming symptom and can only mean that the Protestant standpoint has lost ground by not understanding the signs of the times and by ignoring the continued operation of the Holy Ghost. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
It is obviously out of touch with the tremendous archetypal happenings in the psyche of the individual and the masses, and with the symbols which are intended to compensate the truly apocalyptic World situation today. It seems to have succumbed to a species of rationalistic historicism and to have lost any understanding of the Holy Ghost who works in the hidden places of the soul. It can therefore neither understand nor admit a further revelation of the divine drama. This circumstance has given me, a layman in things theological, cause to put forward my views on these dark matters. My attempt is based on the psychological experience I have harvested during the course of a long life. I do not underestimate the psyche in any respect whatsoever, nor do I imagine for a moment that psychic happenings vanish into thin air by being explained. Psychologism represents a still primitive mode of magical thinking, with the help of which one hopes to conjure the reality of the soul out of existence, after the manner of the “Proktophantasmist” in Faust: “Are you still here? Nay, it’s a thing unheard. Vanish at once! We’ve said the enlightening word.” One would be very ill advised to identify me with such a childish standpoint. However, I have been asked so often whether I believe in the existence of God or not that I am somewhat concerned lest I be taken for an adherent of “psychologism” far more commonly than I suspect. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
What most people overlook or seem unable to understand is the fac that I regard the psyche as real. They believe only in physical facts, and must consequently come to the conclusion that either the uranium itself or the laboratory equipment created the atom bomb. That is no loess absurd than the assumption that a non-physical fact, id est, a fact tat can be established psychically but not physically. Equally, these people have still not got it into their heads that the psychology of religion falls into two categories, which must be sharply distinguished from one another: firstly, the psychology of the religious person, and secondly, the psychology of religion proper, id est, of religious contents. It is chiefly my experience in the latter field which have given me the courage to enter into the discussion of the religious question and especially into the pros and the cons of the dogma of the Assumption—which, by the way, I consider to be the most important religious event since the Reformation. It is a petra scandali for the unpsychological mind: how can such an unfounded assertion as the bodily reception of the Virgin into Heaven be put forward as worthy of belief? However, the method which the Pope uses in order to demonstrate the truth of the dogma makes sense to the psychological mind, because it bases itself firstly on the necessary prefigurations, and secondly on a tradition of religious assertions reaching back for more than a thousand years. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Clearly, the material evidence for the existence of this psychic phenomenon is more than sufficient. It does not matter at all that a physically impossible fact is asserted, because all religious assertions are physical impossibilities. If they were not so, they would, as I said earlier, necessarily be treated in the text-books of natural science. However, religious statements without exception have to do with the reality of psyche and not with the reality of physis. What outrages the Protestant standpoint in particular is the boundless approximation of the Deipara to the Godhead and, in consequence, the endangered supremacy of Christ, from which Protestantism will not budge. In sticking to this point it has obviously failed to consider that its hymnology is full of references to the “Heavenly bridegroom,” who is now suddenly supposed not to have a bride with equal rights. Or has, perchance, the “bridegroom,” in true psychologistic manner, been understood as a mere metaphor? The logical consistency of the papal declaration cannot be surpassed, and it leaves Protestantism with the odium of being nothing but a man’s religion which allows no metaphysical representation of woman. In this respect it is similar to Mithraism, and Mithraism found this prejudice very much to its detriment. Protestantism has obviously not given sufficient attention to the signs of the times which point to the equality of women. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
However, this equality requires to be metaphysically anchored in the figure of a “divine” woman, the bride of Christ. Just as the person of Christ cannot be replaced by an organization, s the bride cannot be replaced by the Church. The feminine, like the masculine, demands an equally personal representation. The dogmatizing of the Assumption does not, however, according to the dogmatic view, mean that Mary has attained the status of a goddess, although, as mistress of Heaven (as opposed to the prince of the sublunary aerial realm, Satan) and mediatrix, she is functionally on par with Christ, the kind and mediator. At any rate her position satisfies the need of the archetype. The new dogma expresses a renewed hope for the fulfillment of that yearning for peace which stirs deep down in the soul, and for a resolution of the threatening tension between the opposites. Everyone shares this tension and everyone experiences it in one’s individual form of unrest, the more so the less one sees any possibility of getting rid of it by rational means. It is no wonder, therefore, that the hope, indeed he expectation of the divine intervention arises in the collective unconscious and at the same time in the masses. The papal declaration has given comforting expression to this yearning. How could Protestantism so completely miss the point? This lack of understanding can only be explained by the fact that the dogmatic symbols and hermeneutic allegories have lost their meaning for Protestant rationalism. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
This is also true, in some measure, of the opposition to the new dogma within the Catholic Church itself, or rather to the dogmatication of the old doctrine. Naturally, a certain degree of rationalism is better suited to Protestantism than it is to the Catholic outlook. The latter gives the archetypal symbolisms the necessary freedom and space in which to develop over the centuries while at the same time insisting on their original form, unperturbed by intellectual difficulties and the objections of rationalists. In this way the Catholic Church demonstrated her maternal character, because she allows the tree growing out of her matrix to develop according to its own laws. Protestantism, in contrast, is committed to the paternal spirit. Not only did it develop, at the outset, from an encounter with the Worldly spirit of the times, but it continues this dialectic with the spiritual currents of every age; for the pneuma, in keeping with its original wind nature, is flexible, ever in living motion, comparable now to water, now to fire. It can desert its original haunts, can even go astray and get lost, if it succumbs too much to the spirit of the age. In order to fulfill its task, the Protestant spirit must be full of unrest and occasionally troublesome; it must even be revolutionary, so as to make sure that tradition has an influence on the change of contemporary vales. The shocks it sustains during this encounter modify and at the same time enliven the tradition, which in its slow progress through the centuries would, without these disturbances, finally arrive at complete petrifaction and thus lose its effect. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
By merely criticizing and opposing certain developments within the Catholic Church, Protestantism would gain only a miserable bit of vitality, unless, mindful of the fact that Christianity consists of two separate camps, or rather, is a defending its own existence it must acknowledge Catholicism’s right to exist too. A brother who for theological reasons wanted to cut the thread of his elder sister’s life would rightly be called inhuman—to say nothing of Christian charity—and the converse is also true. Nothing is achieved by merely negative criticism. It is justified only to the degree that it is creative. Therefore it would seems profitable to me if, for example, Protestantism admitted that it is shocked by the new dogma not only because it throws a distressing light on the gulf between brother and sister, but because, for fundamental reasons, a situation has developed within Christianity which removes it further than ever from the sphere of Worldly understanding. Protestantism knows, or could know, how much it owes its very existence to the Catholic Church. How much or how little does the Protestant still possess if one can no longer criticize or protest? In view of the intellectual skandalon which the new dogma represents, one should remind oneself of one’s Christian responsibility—“Am I my brother’s (or in this case, my sister’s) keeper?”—and examine in all seriousness the reasons, explicit or otherwise, that decided the declaration of the new dogma. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
In so doing, one should guard against casting cheap aspersions and would do well to assume that there is more in than papal arbitrariness. It would be desirable for the Protestant to understand that the new dogma has placed upon one a new responsibility towards the Worldly spirit of our age, for one cannot simply deny one’s problematical sister before the eyes of the World. One must, even if one finds her antipathetic, be fair to her if one does not want to lose one’s self-respect. For instance, this is a favourable opportunity for one to ask oneself, for a change, what is the meaning not only of the new dogma but of all more or less dogmatic assertions over and above their literal concretism. Considering the arbitrary and protean state of one’s own dogmas, and the precarious, schism-riven condition of one’s Church, one cannot afford to remain rigid and impervious to the spirit of the age. And since, moreover, in accordance with one’s obligations to the spirit, one is more concerned to come to terms with the World and its ideas than with God, it would seem clearly indicated that, on the occasion of the entry of the Mother of God into the Heavenly bridal-chamber, one should bend to the great task of reinterpreting all the Christian traditions. If it is a question of truths which are anchored deep in the soul—and no one with the slightest insight can doubt this fact—then the solution of this task must be possible. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
For this we need the freedom of the spirit, which, as we know, is assured only in Protestantism. The dogma of the Assumption is a slap in the face for the historical and rationalistic view of the World, and would remain so for all time if one were to insist obstinately on the arguments of reason and history. This is a case, if ever there was one, where psychological understanding is needed, because the mythologem coming to light is so obvious that we must be deliberately blinding ourselves if we cannot see its symbolic nature and interpret it in symbolic terms. The dogmatization of the Assumptio Mariae points to the hieros gamos in the pleroma, and this in turn implies, as we have said, the future birth of the divine child, who, in accordance with the divine trend towards incarnation, will choose as one’s birthplace the empirical man. The metaphysical process is known to the psychology of the unconscious as the individuation process. In so far as this process, as a rule, runs its course unconsciously as it as from time immemorial, it means no more than that the acorn becomes an oak, the calf a cow, and the child an adult. However, if the individuation process is made conscious, consciousness must confront the unconscious and a balance between the opposites must be found. As this is not possible through logic, one is dependent on symbols which make the irrational union of opposites possible. They are produced spontaneously by the unconscious and are amplified by the conscious mind. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The central symbols of this process describe the elf, which is human’s totality, consisting on the one hand of that which is conscious to one, and on the other hand of the contents of the unconscious. The self is the (a Latin term I cannot translate), the whole human, whose symbols are the divine child and its synonyms. This is only a very summary sketch of the process, but it can be observed at any time in modern humans, or one can read about it in the documents of Hermetic philosophy from the Middle Ages. The parallelism between the symbols is astonishing to anyone who knows both the psychology of the unconscious and alchemy. The difference between the “natural” individuation process, which runs its course unconsciously, and the one which is consciously realized, is tremendous. In the first case consciousness nowhere intervenes; the end remains as dark as the beginning. In the second case so much darkness comes to light than the personality is permeated with light, and consciousness necessarily gains in scope and insight. The encounter between conscious and unconscious has to ensure that the light which shines in the darkness is not only comprehended by the darkness, but comprehends it. The filius solis et lunae is the possibility as well as the symbols of the union of opposites. It is the alpha and omega of the process, the mediator and intermedius. “It has a thousand names,” says the alchemists, meaning that the source from which the individuation process rises and the goal towards which its aims is nameless, ineffable. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. However, empirically it can be established, with a sufficient degree of probability, that there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness which manifests itself spontaneously in dreams, et cetera, and a tendency, independent of the conscious will, to relate other archetypes to this center. Consequently, it does not seem improbable that the archetype of wholeness occupies as such a central position which approximates it to the God-image. The similarity is further borne out by the peculiar fact that the archetype produces a symbolism which has always characterized and expressed the Deity. These facts make possible a certain qualification of our above thesis concerning the indistinguishableness of God and the unconscious. Strictly speaking, the God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with a special content of it, namely the archetype of the self. It is this archetype from which we can no longer distinguish the God-image empirically. We can arbitrarily postulate a difference between these two entities, but that does not help us at all. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
On the contrary, it only helps us to separate man from God, and prevents God from becoming man. Faith is certainly right when it impresses on man’s mind and heart how infinitely far away and inaccessible God is; but it also teaches his nearness, his immediate presence, and it is just this nearness which has to be empirically real if it is not to lose all significance. Only that which acts upon me do I recognize as real and actual. However, that which has no effect upon me might as well not exist. The religious need longs for wholeness, and therefore lays hold of the images of wholeness offered by the unconscious, which, independently of the conscious mind, rise up from the depth of our psychic nature. In different periods of history, many people believed in an ultimate unity of all existence. Using the terminology of medieval philosophy, we refer to this as the unus mundus. This unity is outside the human categories of time and space, and beyond our separation of reality into physical and mental. In Psychology and Alchemy, actualizing those contents of the unconscious which are outside nature, id est, not a datum of our empirical World, and therefore a priori of archetypal character, the place or the medium of realization is neither mind nor matter, but that intermediate realm of subtle reality which can be expressed only by symbol. If our categories of physical and mental are artificial, “objective events and states of mind may be interrelated. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Archetypes manifest themselves, at least occasionally, in physical events and in states of mind at the same time. This is phenomenon is named synchronicity. Our World has shrunk, and it is drawing on us that humanity is one, with one psyche. Scattered throughout the Winchester mansion were hundreds of mirrors because of unwary ghost hastened their departure when faced with their own gruesome reflections. The Winchester Estate has always been the biggest secret of the Santa Clara Valley, and became a host to a dozen crime fighters, including not only the sheriff and his deputies but two private investigators hired directly by owners of the mansion, two private laboratory technicians and two gentlemen from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It became public knowledge that something bizarre was going on in this secret retreat. People reported seeing dead bodies at the estate. It was still early and the sun was high and falling down on the lawn beneath the palm trees. Best, warmest time in the back garden. When we heard the sound of someone digging. We were wide awake and staring across the grass at the distant ginger lilies, at the azaleas. I walked around the mansion as best I could. Why precisely I want not sure. Maybe I wanted to feel that I was doing something, and I listened, listened very carefully in case anyone out there was calling my name. Of course I heard the countless night birds and low gurgling noises coming from the fountains, but no human voice. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
I came back to the point where I started and there stood a ghost, my perfect mirror image, watching me intently, his figure illuminated, just as if it was solid by the candlelight that came from the house. What a marvelous spectacle, it seemed to me, that could create such an illusion, and I racked my brain to remember if I have ever seen something so spectacular before. I had seen him in the shadows, in darkness and in light, of course, but never had I seen light falling on him, outlining his shoulder and his face. He made a sudden gesture with his right hand, beckoning me to come close to where he stood. I moved towards him and he reached out with his left arm to guide me in a turn. Then he pointed out to the fountain. For a moment I was only aware of a distant pool of moonlight—that is, an opening in the thick growth many yards from where we stood, where the water sparkled with clear radiance. Then I heard the sound of lapping. So I called J.P. de River who reported to me that in 1964, at the age of eighteen, a boy who lived in the mansion fell in love with a girl, but she was in poor health (pulmonary tuberculosis). And he never got over the death of his sweetheart. He was so emotionally upset at seeing her laid out in a white shroud that he had a crying spell, and he allowed himself to be removed from the side of the casket with great reluctance. At this time he felt an urge to jump into the casket with her, and he actually wanted to be buried alive with his sweetheart. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The funeral was held on the estate, and when he was finally alone with the body, he drank some of her blood. This gave him great excitement, and he felt that if he could only devour her—eat her up—even chew part of her body, it would give him great satisfaction. No one knows what happened to him after that night. Rumor has it that he drowned in the fountain, others say he went missing inside of the mansion, never to be seen again. I saw the moonlight as if it were shining on me now. I saw the dim figure who had stood at my bedroom fireplace. Glint of light on hand, of forehead, on cheek. Terror. I felt mystery, yes, but a cold panic. When I opened my eyes, he was still grotesquely close to me, his eyes gleaming, his lips smiling. Am I this handsome? I thought. No Something else shines from my eyes. And for the first time I noticed how really handsome he was. I felt awakened to his red hair and green eyes and his good build. I would say he is about six feet tall. And his manner of speaking was so utterly convincing that he had to be a man from the Victorian period. This made me believe in eternal life, and I felt my panic was a sin against God, a sin of atheism. Optimism was a virtue; and the despair, the terror I often felt—it was a sin. As for the ghosts I saw, maybe that was somehow a gift from God. Maybe there would be a use for it. And I suppose I do believe, in the final analysis, that a peace of mind can be obtained in the face of the worst horrors and the worst losses. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
It can be obtained by faith in change and in will and in accident; and by faith in ourselves, that we will do the right things, or often than not, in the face of adversity. We must take what we have and do it without regret. Many strange things have happened at the Winchester Mansion. Perhaps William Wirt Winchester had returned to his estate. Many other people who have slept overnight in the mansion have had dreams in which they saw parts of dismembered bodies floating or lying around, sometimes in blood, often in dirty water. One man describes a similar scene of his not being able to tear himself away from the sight of a decayed corpse of a soldier. These dreams, if that is what they are, hardly require any interpretation. The house is a “vault,” a tomb for spirits killed by the Winchester rifle, and simultaneously symbolizes the womb. The Winchester mansion is also a symbol of life. Instead of walking toward life, to visit a friend, the dreamer walks towards a place of the dead. The man reports that he kneeled, and began to intone a plaintive melody in the style of a Gregorian chant, in which is repeated again and again a long-drawn-out “Jesus Maria.” He then says, numerous mirrors lined the walls of this long, high-ceilinged, wood paneled hall, as his plaintive tones become more and more monotonous, and the row of doors in the halls seems to be endless. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Perhaps these are vision people have had while staying in the mansion that they would rather call dreams. Being in the place alone at night or must be quite an experience. Mrs. Winchester had a favourite French maid who, on her nights off, attended the current performances, usually a production or a “play” by a local stock company. The maid upon her return, delighted in regaling her mistress with the evening’s highlights. If these had appeal, Mrs. Winchester would ask the players to stage excerpts or skit, often after midnight, in her spacious ball room. In view of her well-known generosity, the cast was happy to comply. Mrs. Winchester was neither cold or distant in her early years of valley residence. She was a highly sensitive lady and the cruel rumors even then in circulation disturbed and hurt her. Eventually all this idle gossip reached her ears and as it persisted, she withdrew closer into her seven-story shell. Here is a prayer Mrs. Winchster used in her Blue Séance Room, “I sit before my place of work and spread my tools before me. God, please grant your blessings on my tools that they might serve me as well as the parts of my body do. Master Craftsman, please grant your blessings upon this house, that its work might bring beauty to all the World and all (spirits) who live in it. Orderer of Chaos, please grant that all we may do might be in accord with the will of Nature, so that, by doing our work, we might do the will of God.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Mrs. Winchester must be given due credit for inventiveness. She found the planning kept her griefing mind occupied and she became thoroughly enthused. Some of the built-in innovations were decades ahead of the times. Annunciators installed in all rooms could signal her whereabouts to the servants. Illuminating gas was manufactured by a new process directly on the grounds. She improvised a window catch patterned after the Winchester rifle trigger and trip-hammer. The mansion was one of the first to utilize wool insulation. Today’s visitors are surprised by her years-ahead brass corner-plates on many stairways to prevent dust pockets. She invented an inside crank to open and close outside shutters. Her 47 fireplaces had the first hinged iron drops for ashes and concealed wood boxed. The tier of tubs in her immense laundry had moulded-in wash-boards. Every morning she made the rounds with her ever patient foremen inspecting that latest progress of her mansion. Some days she sketched plans on the spot using a saw-horse drawing table and any handy material, often brown wrapping paper (and used both sides). From the foreman came no argument; he had only the problem of interpretation. However, glaring mistakes failed to discourage her and time was fleeting. Mrs. Winchester simply ordered the error torn out, sealed up, built over, or around, or more likely, totally ignored. Hence came support for the conjecture that for her, this was a gigantic game of building-blocks! #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Some Things You Will Think of for Yourself, and Others a God Will Put into Your Heart!
Truth is the glue that holds the governments together. Compromise the oil that makes governments go. An aim of civil disobedience is to explain its roles within a constitutional system and to account for its connection with a democratic polity. As always, I assume that the society in question is one that is nearly just; and this implies that it has some form of democratic government, although serious injustices may nevertheless exist. In such a society I assumed that the principles of justice are for the most part publicly recognized as the fundamental terms of willing cooperation among free and equal persons. By engaging in civil disobedience one intends, then, to address the sense of justice of the majority and to serve fair notice that in one’s sincere and considered opinion the conditions of free cooperation are being violated. We are appealing to others to reconsider, to put themselves in our position, and to recognize that they cannot expect us to acquiesce indefinitely in the terms they impose upon us. Now the force of this appeal depends upon the democratic conception of society as a system of cooperation among equal persons. If one things of society in another way, this form of protest may be out of place. For example, if the basic law is thought to reflect the other nature and if the sovereign is held to govern only by divine right as God’s chosen lieutenant, then one’s subjects have only the right of suppliants. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
The citizens can plead their cause but they cannot disobey should their appeal be denied. To do this would be to rebel against the final legitimate moral (and not simply legal) authority. This is not to say that the sovereign cannot be in error but only that the situation is not one for one’s subjects to correct. However, once society is interpreted as a scheme of cooperation among equals, those injured by serious injustice need not submit. Indeed, civil disobedience (and conscientious refusal as well) is one of the stabilizing devices of a constitutional system, although by definition an illegal one. Along with such things as free and regular elections and an independent judiciary empowered to interpret the constitution (not necessarily written), civil disobedience used with due restraint and sound judgement helps to maintain and strengthen just institutions. By resisting injustice within the limits of fidelity to law, it serves to inhibit departures from justice and to correct them when they occur. A general disposition to engage in justified civil disobedience introduces stability into a well-ordered society, or one that is nearly just. It is necessary to look at this doctrine from the standpoint of the persons in the original position. There are two related problems which they must consider. The first is that, having chosen principles for individuals, they must work out guidelines for assessing the strength of the natural duties and obligations, and, in particular, the strength of the duty to comply with a just constitution and one of its basic procedures, that of majority rule. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
The second problem is that of finding reasonable principles for dealing with unjust situations, or with circumstances in which the compliance with just principles is only partial. Now it seems that, given the assumptions characterizing a nearly just society, the parties would agree to the presumptions (previously discussed) that specify when civil disobedience is justified. They would acknowledge these criteria as spelling out when this form of dissent is appropriate. Doing this could indicate the weight of the natural duty of justice in one important special case. It would also tend to enhance the realization of justice throughout the society by strengthening human’s self-esteem as well as their respect for one another. And the contract doctrine emphasizes, the principles of justice are the principles of willing cooperation among equals. To deny justice to another is either to refuse to recognize one as an equal (one in regard to whom we are prepared to constrain our actions by principles that we would choose in a situation of equality that is fair), or to manifest a willingness to exploit the contingencies of natural fortune and happenstance for our own advantage. In either case deliberate injustice invites submission or resistance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Submission arouses the contempt of those who perpetuate injustice and confirms their intention, whereas resistance cuts the ties of the community. If after a decent period of time to allow for reasonable political appeals in the normal way, citizens were to dissent by civil disobedience when infractions of the basic liberties occurred, these liberties would, it seems, be more rather than less secure. For these reasons, then, the parities would adopt the conditions defining justified civil disobedience as a way of setting up, within the limits of fidelity to law, a final device to maintain the stability of a just constitution. Although this mode of action is strictly speaking contrary to law, it is nevertheless a morally correct way of maintaining a constitutional regime. In a fuller account the same kind of explanation could presumably be given for the justifying conditions of conscientious refusal (again assuming the context of a nearly just state). I shall not, however, discuss these conditions here. I should like to emphasize instead that the constitutional theory of civil disobedience rests solely upon a conception of justice. Even the features of publicity and nonviolence are explained on this basis. And the same is true of the account of conscientious refusal, although it requires a further elaboration of the contract doctrine. At no point has a reference been made to other than political principles; religious or pacifist conceptions are not essential. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
While those engaging in civil disobedience have often been moved by convictions of the kind, there is no necessary connection between them and civil disobedience. For this form of political action can be understood as a way of addressing the sense of justice of the community, an invocation of the recognized principles of cooperation among equals. Being an appeal to the moral basis of civic life, it is a political and not a religious act. It relies upon common sense principles of justice that humans can require one another to follow and not upon the affirmations of religious faith and love which they cannot demand that everyone accept. I do not mean, of course, that nonpolitical conceptions have no validity. They may, in fact, confirm our judgement and support our acting in ways known on other grounds to be just. Nevertheless, it is not these principles but the principles of justice, the fundamental terms of social cooperation between free and equal persons, that underlie the constitution. Civil disobedience as defined does not require a sectarian foundation but is derived from the public conception of justice that characterizes a democratic society. So understood a conception of civil disobedience is part of the theory of free government. One distinction between medieval and modern constitutionalism is that in the former the supremacy of laws was not secured by established institutional controls. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
The check to the ruler who in his judgments and edicts opposed the sense of justice of the community was limited for the most part to the right of resistance by the whole society, or any part. Even this right seems not to have been interpreted as a corporate act; an unjust king was simply put aside. Thus the Middle Ages lacked the basic ideas of modern constitutional government, the idea of the sovereign people who have final authority and the institutionalizing of this authority by means of elections and parliaments, and other constitutional forms. Now in much the same way that the modern conception of constitutional government builds upon the medieval, the theory of civil disobedience supplements the purely legal conception of constitutional democracy. It attempts to formulate the grounds upon which legitimate democratic authority may be dissented from in ways that while admittedly contrary to law nevertheless express a fidelity to law and appeal to the fundamental political principles of a democratic regime. Thus to the legal forms of constitutionalism one may adjoin certain modes of illegal protest that do not violate the aims of a democratic constitution in view of the principles by which such dissent is guided. I have tried to show how these principles can be accounted for by the contract doctrine. Some may object to this theory of civil disobedience that it is unrealistic. It presupposes that the majority has a sense of justice, and one might reply that moral sentiments are not a significant political force. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
What moves humans are various interests, the desires for power, prestige, wealth, and the like. Although they are clever at producing moral arguments to support their claims, between one situation and another their opinions do not fit into a coherent conception of justice. Rather their views at even given time are occasional pieces calculated to advance certain interests. Unquestionably there is much truth in this contention, and in some societies it is more truth than in others. However, the essential question is the relative strength of the tendencies that oppose the sense of justice and whether the latter is ever strong enough so that it can be invoked to some significant effect. A few comments may make the account presented more plausible. First of all, I have assumed throughout that we have to do with a nearly just society. This implies that there exists a constitutional regimen and a publicly recognized conception of justice. Of course, in any particular situation certain individuals and groups may be tempted to violate its principles but the collective sentiment in their behalf has considerable strength when properly addressed. These principles are affirmed as the necessary terms of cooperation between free and equal persons. If those who perpetrate injustice can be clearly identified and isolated from the larger community, the convictions of the greater part of society may be of sufficient weight. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Or if the contending parties are roughly equal, the sentiment of justice of those not engaged can roughly equal, the sentiment of justice of those not engaged can be the deciding factor. In any case, should circumstances of this kind not obtain, the wisdom of civil disobedience is highly problematic. For unless one can appeal to the sense of justice of the larger society, the majority may simply be aroused to more repressive measures if the calculations of advantages points in this direction. Court should take into account the civilly disobedient nature of the protester’s act, and the fact that it is justifiable (or may seem so) by the political principle underling the constitution, and on these grounds reduce and in some cases suspend the legal sanction. Yet quite the opposite may happen when the necessary background is lacking. We have to recognize than that justifiable civil disobedience is normally a reasonable and effective form of dissent only in a society regulated to some considerable degree by a sense of justice. There may be some misapprehension about the manner in which the sense of justice is said to work. One may think that this sentiment expresses itself in sincere professions of principle and in actions requiring a considerable degree of self-sacrifice. However, this supposition asks too much. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
A community’s sense of justice is more likely to be revealed in the fact that the majority cannot bring itself to the steps necessary to suppress the minority and to punish acts of civil disobedience as the law allows. Ruthless tactics that might be contemplated in other societies are not entertained as real alternatives. Thus he sense of justice affects, in ways we are often unaware of, our interpretation of political life, our perception of the possible courses of action, our will to resist the justified protest of others, and so on. In spite of its superior power, the majority may abandon its position and acquiesce in the proposals of the dissenters; its desire to give justice weakens its capacity to defends its unjust advantages. The sentiment of justice will be seen as a more vital political force once the subtle forms in which it exerts its influence are recognized, and in particular its role in rendering certain social positions indefensible. In these remarks I have assumed that in a nearly just society there is a public acceptance of the same principles of justice. Fortunately this assumption is stronger than necessary. There can, in fact, be considerable differences in citizens’ conceptions of justice provided that these conceptions lead to similar political judgments. And this is possible, since different premises can yield the same conclusions. In the case there exists what we may refer to as overlapping rather than strict consensus. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
In general, the overlapping of professed conceptions of justice suffices for civil disobedience to be a reasonable and prudent form of political dissent. Of course, this overlapping need not be perfect; it is enough that a condition of reciprocity is satisfied. Both sides must believe that however much their conceptions of justice differ, their views support the same judgment in the situation at hand, and would do so even should their respective positions be interchanged. Eventually, though, there comes a point beyond which the requisite agreement in judgment breaks down and society splits into more or less distinct parts that hold diverse opinions on fundamental political questions. In this case of strictly partitioned consensus, the basis for civil disobedience no longer obtains. For example, suppose those who do not believe in toleration, and who would not tolerate other had they the power, wish to protest their lesser liberty by appealing to the sense of justice of the majority which holds the principle of equal liberty. While those who accept this principle should, as we have seen, tolerate the intolerant as far as the free institutions permits, they are likely to resent being reminded of this duty by the intolerant who would, if positions were switched, established their own dominion. The majority is bound to feel that their allegiance to equal liberty is being exploited by others for unjust ends. #RandolphHaris 10 of 23
This situation illustrates once again the fact that a common sense of justice is a great collective asset which requires the cooperation of many to maintain. The intolerant can be viewed as free-riders, as persons who seek the advantages of just institution while not doing their share to uphold them. Although those who acknowledge the principles of justice should always be guided by them, in a fragmented society as well as in one moved by group egoisms, the conditions for civil disobedience do not still exist. Still, it is not necessary to have strict consensus, for often a degree of overlapping consensus allows the reciprocity condition to be fulfilled. There are, to be sure, definite risks in the resort to civil disobedience. One reason for constitutional forms and their judicial interpretation is to establish a public reading of the political conception of justice and an explanation of the application of its principles to social questions. Up to a certain point it is better than the law and its interpretation to be settled than that it be settled rightly. Therefore it may be protested that the preceding account does not determine who is to say when circumstances are such as to justify civil disobedience. It invites anarchy by encouraging everyone do decide for oneself, and to abandon the public rendering of political principles. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
They reply to this is that each person must indeed make one’s own decision. Even though humans normally seek advice and counsel, and accept the injunctions of those in authority when these seem reasonable to them, they are always accountable for their deeds. We cannot divest ourselves of our responsibility and transfer the burden of blame to others. This is true on any theory of political duty and obligation that is compatible with the principles of a democratic constitution. The citizen is autonomous yet one is held responsible for what one does. If we ordinarily think that we should comply with the law, this is because our political principles normally lead to this conclusion. Certainly in a state of near justice there is a presumption in favour of compliance in the absence of strong reasons to the contrary. The many free and reasoned decisions of individuals fit together into an orderly political regime. However, while each person must decide for oneself whether the circumstances justify civil disobedience, it does not follow that one is to decide as one pleases. It is not by looking to our personal interests, or to our political allegiances narrowly construed, that we should make up our minds. To act autonomously and responsibly a citizen must look to the political principles that underlie and guide the interpretation of the constitution. One must try to access how these principles should be applied in the existing circumstances. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
If one comes to the conclusion after due consideration that civil disobedience is justified and conducts oneself accordingly, one acts conscientiously. And though one ay be mistaken, one has not done as one pleased. The theory of political duty and obligation enables us to draw these distinctions. There are parallels with the common understandings and conclusions reached in the sciences. Here, too, everyone is autonomous yet responsible. We are to assess theories and hypotheses in the light of the evidence by publicly recognized principles. It is true that there are that there are authoritative works, but these sum up the consensus of many persons each deciding for oneself. The absence of a final authority to decide, and so of an official interpretation that all must accept, does not lead to confusion, but is rather a condition of theoretical advance. Equals accepting and applying reasonable principles need have no established superior. To the question, who is to decide? The answer is: all are to decide, everyone taking counsel with oneself, and with reasonableness, comity, and good fortune, it often works out well enough. In a democratic society, then, it is recognized that each citizen is responsible for one’s interpretation of the principles of justice and for one’s conduct in the light of them. There can be no legal or socially approved rendering of these principles that we are always morally bound to accept, not even when it is given by a supreme court or legislature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Indeed each constitutional agency, the legislature, the executive, and the court, puts forward its interpretation of the constitution and the political ideals that inform it. Although the court may have the last say in settling any particular case, it is not immune from powerful political influences that may force a revision of its reading of the constitution. The court presents its doctrine by reason and argument; its conception of the constitution must, if it is to endure, persuade the major part of the citizens of its soundness. The final court of appeal is not the court, nor the executive, nor the legislature, but the electorate as a whole. The civilly disobedient appeal in a special way to this body. There is no danger of anarchy so long as there is a sufficient working agreement in citizens’ conceptions of justice and the conditions for resorting to civil disobedience are respected. That humans can achieve such an understanding and honour these limits when the basic political liberties are maintained is an assumption implicit in a democratic polity. There is no way to avoid entirely the danger of diverse strife, any more than one can rule out the possibility of profound scientific controversy. Yet if justified civil disobedience seems to threaten civic concord, the responsibility falls not upon those who protest but upon those whose abuse of authority and power justifies such opposition. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
For to employ the coercive apparatus of the state in order to maintain manifestly unjust institutions is itself is a form of illegitimate force that humans in due course have a right to resist. This discussion of the principles of justice has described a scheme of institutions that satisfies these principles and indicates how duties and obligations arise. If the theory of justice put forward matches our considered judgments and extends them in an acceptable way, these things must be done to see. We need to check whether it defines a workable political conception and helps to focus our reflections on the most relevant and basic moral concerns. The account in this part is still highly abstract, but I hope to have provide some guidance as to how the principles of justice apply in practice. However, we should not forget the limited scope of theory presented. For the most part I have tried t develop an ideal conception, only occasionally commenting on the various cases of nonideal theory. To be sure the priority rules suggest directives in many instances if not pressed too far. Even so, they only question of nonideal theory examined in any detail is that of civil disobedience in the special case of near justice. If the ideal theory is worthy of study, it must be because, as I have conjectured, it is the fundamental part of the theory of justice and essential for the nonideal part as well. I shall not purse these matters further. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
We have still to complete the theory of justice by seeing how it is rooted in human thought and feeling, and tied in with our ends and aspirations. Turning to the meaning of that word “inspiration,” what more can one say than that it is “in-breathing”—the in-breathing of a spiritual quality that raises a work or a person above the common order of things? I do not mean a work is inspired when it is cheaply glamorous, or that a human is inspired when one is rhetorically aggressive, or that a mind is inspired when it indulges in clever intellectual jugglery. It is my standpoint that all inspired art is the expression at most or a product at least of spiritual experience, although the latter may not be well understood by its experiencer. The experience must come first. Art is a movement and noise, whereas the spirit out of which it rises is hushed stillness and invulnerable silence. When the goddess Athena, in Greek mythology, says that “some things you will think of for yourself, and others a god will put into your heart,” this is her way of describing what we, more simply, would call inspiration. Only the direct experience of this exalted state will supply the sense of actuality and the feeling of vividness in spiritual writing. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
When this exalted feeling is transferred to the intellect and there turned into thought, whether for expression in words for one’s own understanding or for communication to others, it is termed a truth. In this form it becomes a source of renewed inspiration, a help in darker times, and a guide to live by in ordinary times. Inspiration can come to any person. It is not reserved for artists and mystics alone. When intuition expressed itself through, or enters into, the creative arts, we call it inspiration. The two are the same in root, but different in leaf. It would be absurd to believe that the creative power of inspiration exhausts itself with the arts alone. It can appear in any and every kind of human activity, in the making of a home or of a decision. It is the difference between real beauty and mere prettiness, between divine inspiration and practiced competence, between a flower and the painting of it. There is a hidden light within humans. Sometimes its glow appears in one’s most beautiful art productions, one’s loftiest religious revelations, one’s most irreproachable moral decisions. America is tortured by uncertainty, law and order, race, religion, God, family and self. Nor is the United States of America alone in suffering from a kind of value vertigo. All the techno-societies are caught up in the same massive upheaval. This collapse of the values of the past has hardly gone unnoticed. Every priest, politician, and parent is reduced to a head-shaking anxiety by it. Yet most discussions of value change are barren for they miss two essential points. The first of these is acceleration. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Value turnover is now faster than ever before in history. While in the past a human growing up in a society could expect that its public value system would remain largely unchanged in one’s lifetime, no such assumption is warranted today, expect perhaps in the most isolated of pre-technology communities. This implies temporariness in the structure of both public and personal value systems, and it suggests that whatever the content of values that arise to replace those of the informational age, they will be shorter-lived, more ephemeral than the values of the past. There is no evidence whatsoever that the value system of the techno-societies are likely to return to a “steady state” condition. For the foreseeable future, we must anticipate still more rapidly value change. Within this context, however, a second powerful trend is unfolding. For the fragmentation of societies brings with it a diversification of values. We are witnessing the crack-up of consensus. Most previous societies have operated with a broad central core of commonly shared values. This core is now contracting, and there is little reason to anticipate the formations of a new broad consensus within the decades ahead. The pressures are outward toward diversity, not inward toward unity. This account for the fantastically discordant propaganda that assails the mind in the techno-societies. Home, school, corporations, church, peer group, mass media—and myriad subcults—all advertise varying sets of values. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
The result for many is “anything goes” or “live out loud” attitude—which is, itself still another position. We are a society that has lost its consensus…a society that cannot agree on standards of conduct, language and manners, on what can be seen and heard. Certain people no longer even have to follow the laws and city leaders are pushing to abolish laws that protect citizens. In the San Francisco Bay area, for example, city leaders want to allow people to cross or walk in the street or road unlawfully or without regard for approaching traffic. This picture of a cracked consensus is confirmed by findings of Walter Gruen, social science research coordinator at Rhode Island Hospital, who has conducted a series of statistical studies of what he terms “the American core culture.” Rather than the monolithic system of beliefs attributed to the middle class by earlier investigators, Dr. Gruen found—to his own surprise—that “diversity in beliefs was more striking than the statistically supported uniformities. It is,” he concluded, “perhaps already misleading to talk of an ‘American’ culture complex.” Dr. Gruen suggests that particularly among the affluent, educated group, consensus is giving way to what he calls “pockets” of values. We can expect that, as the number and variety of subcults continues to expand, these pockets will proliferate, too. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Faced with colliding value systems, confronted with a blinding array of new consumer goods, services, educational, occupational and recreational options, the people of the future are driven to make choices in a new way. They begin to “consume” life styles the way people of an earlier, less choice-choked time consumed ordinary products. Some of the seers even call it blasphemy to proclaim or write down a description of the Supreme Divinity. By this they mean that the mind of a consumer cannot bring Truth into any limited thought, so a description would be false. The most appropriate act is silent awestruck reverence. Word circumscribe meaning, confine it by the very act of defining it. However, the Real is infinite, outside all circumscription and beyond all inclusion. If you must express it, you may do so correctly only by silence. However, it is essentially inexpressible. Concepts, thoughts, and words would bring Him down from the plane of Being to that of thinking, which would not only be a descent but also a falsification at worst, or a deformation at best. The human who really believes that one can explain nothing of the highest truth to any other human ought to follow one’s theory into practice. One ought to write nothing and speak nothing about it, create nothing artistically to suggest it. One ought to act as if it does not exist. It is a fundamental error to turn the pure mind into an object of experience in an attempt to reach comprehension. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Mind can know everything else and is the inescapable condition of every experience, for by its light every object and every event is revealed, but it cannot itself be known in the same way that we know everything else. Ordinarily there is a knower and a known, and mind would have to transcend such a relation were it to become away of itself, which means that it would have to transcend thinking itself. Mind itself produces the categories of time, space, and cause which makes World experience possible and knowable—that is, thinkable—which is why it cannot be grasped in the same way. The nature of mind is unique, and before its sublime verity speech trembles into silence. In affirming that the One alone exists, they imply their own existence. The affirmation points to someone who affirms, so one must be added to the One, making Two. The more they prattle about the One, the more they proclaim, by inference, the Two. We may perceive how the highest truth turns all lesser doctrines into illusions and yet admits their validity on their own level. There is a beauty in the infinite reality which outshines whatever beauty there is in the imaginative phantasy. With the lamp of Word, one must go beyond Word. None of us can play with the pen for some years, or wield the painter’s brush, or practice any of the arts, without in time letting our minds dwell on the process of inspiration. The mysteries of human’s being must necessarily occupy us. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
And if we dare to be truly frank in our facing of the self, if we will put aside preconceived notions and ready-made theories in order to watch what really happens during those processes, we discover our feet upon the verge of a great discovery. For we shall discover—if we are both patient enough and yet persistent enough—that there is a Source within us which promises astonishing possibilities to the human race. That Source is loosely called the soul. The part of us that response to the truth and ideals is the best part. Great importance is to be placed on the guidance to be got from what psychoanalysis calls the unconscious elements within the human. How many a prominent orator’s delivery during public speeches shows that when one speaks out of one’s head one is quite undistinguished and uninspiring, whereas when one speaks out of one’s heart, without previous preparation and under the sway of one’s innermost feeling, one strongly impresses and affects one’s audience. It happens on a plane above human’s heads; most of them do not know of it explicitly at the moment. Yet they are truly rendering service through being used as channels. There are moods or periods when the ideas stream through one’s mind in swift succession or come in slow stately revelations. What is true of the World’s work is true of the arts. The secret of inspired action is also the secret of inspired art. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
If one will take the divine path, the temporary inspirations of the artist can become permanent. When genius discovers the mysterious source which inspires it, intermittent inspiration develops ultimately into continuous contact with the sublime. One is as intensely alive in the spirit as most humans are intensely alive in the flesh. King God, my Father in the shining Heaven, my Lord, since the creation of the Universe and beyond, since ancient ties the bringer of comfort, who mourned for your Son the Lord Jesus Christ: please be with me now in my time of loss. Please grieve with me now in my time of loss. Please comfort me now in my time of loss. Please wrap about me your soothing wings, blankets to warm me from sorrow’ cold hands. And Thou hast given us in love, O Lord our God, [Sabbaths for rest,] holidays for gladness, festivals and seasons for rejoicing. Thou hast granted us [this Sabbath day and] this Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Season of our Freedom, this Feast of Weeks, the Season of the Giving of our Grace, this Feast of Tabernacles, the Season of our Gladness, this Eighth Day Feast of Assembly, the Season of our Gladness, as a holy convocation, commemorating our liberation from Egypt. Our God and God of our fathers, may our remembrance and remembrance of our forefathers come before Thee. Please remember the Messiah of the house of David, Thy servant, and America, Thy holy city, and all Thy people, the house of America. Please grant us deliverance and wellbeing, lovingkindness, life and peace on this day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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From Watergate we learned what generations before us have known; our Constitution works. And during Watergate years it was interpreted again so as to reaffirm that no one—absolutely no one—is above the law. The total rejection of any religious belief is so contrary to human’s natural instincts and so destructive of one’s peace of mind. However, the French revelation was a conscious effort to replace the Kingdom of God with the kingdoms of man. Thus Grace’s irreligion was soon replaced by a new faith—man’s worship of man. Meanwhile, in the New World a radical experiment opened another chapter in church-state relations. There a group of gentlemen farmers, who were neither naïve about human nature nor pretentious about human society, were drawing up the American Constitution. By refusing to assign redemptive powers to the state or to allow coercive power to the church, the American experiment separated these two institutions for the first time since Constantine. What might be considered the modern phase in church-state history has emerged in out live times. It is an amalgam of elements from the previous eras. The rise of totalitarian regimes has brought back the kind of persecution the church experienced in early Rome; like Herod, modern dictators tolerate no other kinds. In the West secularism has aggressively spread irreligion, turning Europe into a post-Christian culture and America into a battleground with orthodox religion in retreat. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
This is dangerous because of people like Heinrich Himmler, who is an excellent example of a vicious, sadistic character who illustrates what has been said about the connection between sadism and the extreme forms of the anal-hoarding, bureaucratic, authoritarian character. The “bloodhound of Europe,” as he was called by many, Mr. Himmler was, together with Adolph Hitler, responsible for the slaughter of between fifteen and twenty million unarmed and powerless Russians, Poles, and Jews. Mr. Himmler impressed one as of uncanny subalternity, narrow-minded conscientiousness, inhuman methodicalness, blended with an element of an automaton. This sadistic authoritarian character is not the description of a hater or of that of a monster as the latter is usually conceived, but of an extremely dehumanized bureaucrat. Mr. Himmler was the type of a cruel educator of the old school, strict against himself but stricter against others. The signs of compassion and especially friendly tone of his thank you letters were all a fake, as one often finds in clearly cold natures. He could be a tender family father, a correct superior and a good comrade. At the same time he was an obsessed fanatic, an eccentric dreamer and a will-less instrument in Mr. Hitler’s hands to whom he was tied in an ever increasing love/hate. The most extreme example of his submission was that to Mr. Hitler, although one must suspect that his opportunism may have induced him to use a degree of flatter that was not entirely genuine. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Mr. Hitler was for Mr. Himmler the god-man, to be compared to the significance of Christ in the Christian religion or of Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita. He writes of him: “He is destined by the Karma of the universal Germanness, to lead the fight against the east and to save the Germanness of the World; one of the very great figures of light has found its incarnation in him.” Mr. Himmler submitted to the new Krishna-Christ-Hitler as he had to the old Christ/God, except much more fervently. It must be noted, however, that under the circumstances the new gods offered greater opportunities for fame and power. Can we conclude from this cursory overview that the church and the state must inevitably be in conflict? To some extent the answer is yes. Dual allegiances always create tension. And in a sinful World the struggle for power, which inevitably corrupts, is unavoidable. When the church is not being persecuted, it is being corrupted. So as much as anything else, it is human’s own nature that has created centuries of conflict. While they know that they represent different nations each living under the normal circumstances of their own society, its power and strength in comparison with other nations, nor do they know their place in their own society. Once again the contracting parties, in this case representatives of states, are allowed only enough knowledge to make a rational choice to protect their interests but not so much that the more fortunate among them can take advantage of their special situation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, every generation has an obligation to seek anew a healthy relationship between church and state. Both are reflections of human’s nature; both have a role to play. Christ’s teaching clearly delineates these roles. Jesus was remarkably indifferent to those who held political power. He had no desire to replace Caesar or Pilate with His apostles Peter or John. He gave civil authority its due, rebuking both the Zealots and Peter for using the sword. This infuriated the religious right of His day. Eager to discredit Jesus, the Pharisees and Herodians tried trapping Jesus over the question of allegiance to political authority. “Tell us,” they asked, “is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” The question puts Jesus in the middle: If He said no, He would be a threat to the Roman government; if He said yes, He would lose the respect of the masses who hated the Romans. Jesus asked them for a coin. It was a Roman denarius, the only coin that could be used to pay the hated yearly poll tax. On one side was the image of the Emperor Tiberius, around which were written the words Tiberius, Caesar Augusts, son of the divine Augustus. “Whose portrait is this?” Jesus asked, rubbing His finger over the raised features of the Roman ruler. “And whose inscription?” “Caesar’s,” they replied impatiently. “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” replied Jesus, handing the coin back to them. They stared at Jesus in stunned silence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Not only had Jesus eluded the trap, but He has put Caesar in his place. Christ might simply have said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” That is all that was at issue. It was Caesar’s image on the coin, and Caesar had authority over the state. What made Jesus add the second phrase, “Give to God what is God’s”? The answer is found on the reverse face of the coin, which showed Tiberius’s mother represented as the goddess of peace, along with the words highest priest. The blasphemous words commanded the worship of Caesar; they thus exceeded the state’s authority. Jesus’ lesson was not lost on the early church. Government is to be respected, and its rule honoured. “It is necessary to submit to the authorities,” wrote the apostle Paul. “If you owe taxes, pay taxes.” However, worship is reserved solely for God. The distinction Christ made is clear; both the church and state have clear and distinct roles ordained by God. The issue is how to apply these teachings to each institution in today’s volatile World. Christ did not give the keys to of the Kingdom to Caesar nor the sword to Peter. In God’s provision the state is not to seize authority over ecclesiastical or spiritual matters, nor is the church to seek authority over political matters. Yet the constant temptation of each is to encroach upon the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The basic principle of the law of nations is a principle of equality. Independent peoples organized as states have certain fundamental equal rights. This principle is analogous to the equal rights of citizens in a constitutional regime. One consequence of this equality of nations is the principle of self-determination, the right of a people to settle its own affairs without the intervention of foreign powers. Another consequence is the right of self-defense against attack, including the right to form defensive alliances to protect this right. A further principle is that treaties are to be kept, provided they are consistent with other principles governing the relations of states. Thus treaties for self-defense, suitably interpreted, would be binding, but agreements to cooperate in an unjustified attack are void ab initio. Even in a just war certain forms of violence are strictly inadmissible; and where a country’s right to war is questionable and uncertain, the constraints on the means it can use are all the more severe. Acts permissible in a war of legitimate self-defense, when these are necessary, may be flatly excluded in a more doubtful situation. The ai of war is a just peace, and therefore the means employed must not destroy the possibility of peace or encourage a contempt for human life that puts the safety of ourselves and of humankind in jeopardy. The conduct of war is to be constrained and adjusted to this end. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
The representatives of states would recognize that their national interest, as seen from the original position, is best served by acknowledging these limits on the means of war. This is because the national interest of a just state is defined by the principles of justice that have already been acknowledged. Therefore such a nation will aim above all to maintain and to preserve its just institutions and conditions that make them possible. It is not moved by the desire for World power or national glory; nor does it wage war for purposes of economic gain or the acquisition of territory. These ends are contrary to the conception of justice that defines a society’s legitimate interests, however prevalent they have been in the actual conduct of states. Granting these presumptions, then, it seems reasonable to suppose that the traditional prohibitions incorporating the natural duties that protect human life would be chosen. Now if conscientious refusal in time of war appeals to these principles, it is founded upon a political conception, and not necessarily upon religious or other nations. While this form of denial may not be a political act, since it does not take place in the public forum, it is based upon the same theory of justice that underlies the constitution and guides its interpretation. Moreover, the legal order itself presumably recognizes in the form of treaties the validity of at least some of these principles of the law of nations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Therefore if a soldier is ordered to engage in certain illicit acts of war, one may refuse if one reasonably and conscientiously believes that the principles applying to the conduct of war are plainly violated. One can maintain that, all things considered, one’s natural duty not to e made the agent of grave injustice and evil to another outweighs one’s duty to obey. Conscription is a drastic interference with the basic liberties of equal citizenship, it cannot be justified by any needs less compelling than those of national security. Citizens agree to this arrangement as a fair way of sharing in the burdens of national defense. In a well-ordered society anyway, evils arise externally, that is, from unjustified attacks from the outside. It is impossible for just institutions to eliminate these hardships entirely. The most that they can do is to try to make sure that the risks of suffering from these imposed misfortunes are more or less evenly shared by all members of society over the course of their life, and that there is no avoidable class bias in selecting those who are called for duty. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
And, of course, it is unjust and contrary to the law of nations to attack the liberty of other societies without just cause. Therefore if a just case for war does not exist, and this may be sufficiently evident under some circumstances, a citizen is justified in refusing to discharge one’s legal duty. Both the law of nations and the principles of justice for one’s own society uphold one in this claim. It no more challenges the state’s authority than the celibacy of priest challenges the sanctity of marriage. Governments, with rare exceptions, seek to expand their power beyond the mandate to restrain evil, preserve order, and promote justice. Most often they do this by venturing into religious or moral areas. The reason is twofold: the state needs religious legitimization for its polices and an independent church is the one structure that rivals that state’s clam for ultimate allegiance. However, when the state has presumed on God’s role, whether in ancient Rome, in Germany, or modern America, the first liberty, freedom of conscience, suffers. On the other side of the coin, the church, whose principal function is to proclaim the Good News and witness the values of the Kingdom of God, must resist the tempting illusion that it can usher in that Kingdom through political means. Jesus provided the best example for the church in His wilderness confrontation with Satan when the Devil tempted Jesus to worship him and thus take dominion over the kingdom of this World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
No small temptation. With that kind of power, Christ could enforce the Sermon on the Mount; love and justice could reign. He might have reasoned that if He did not accept, someone else would. This rationalization is popular today, right up through the highest councils of government: compromise to stay in power because there you can do more for the common good. However, as the saying goes, “People who lie down with dogs, get flees.” It is just another way of achieving success by compromising one’s morals and yielding to coercive power. And think of the popularity Jesus could have gained. After all, the people wanted a Messiah who would vanquish their oppressors. However, Jesus understood His mission, and it could not be accomplished by taking over the kingdoms of the World in a political coup. The mission of the church is to build the kingdom of God on Earth, and the means of the mission is politics. We live with both good (the wheat) and evil (the tares), and cannot root out the tares. Only God is able to do that and He will—when the Kingdom comes in its final glory. However, citizens of the World have a duty to work through civil authority for the advancement of justice and human good. They may provide critical illumination, personal example and vocational leadership. There are proper ways as well for the institutional church to provide society with its moral vision and hold government to moral account. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Some Christian traditional similarly believe that they can best model Kingdom values not by involvement in politics but by the establishment of alternative communities in which they live out the teachings of the Kingdom. In its proper form, this is not a withdrawal from the World or abandonment of Christian responsibility; nor is it a privatization of Christian values as with those who profess to believe but live as they do not. Instead a different strategy to the same end of providing a witness in the kingdom of man to the values of the Kingdom of God. While I do not agree with the generally negative view of government held by such groups, I respect the faithfulness by which they live their convictions. This split up of the social order is precisely analogous to the process of growth in biology. Embryos differentiate as they develop, forming more and more specialized organs. The entire march of evolution, from the virus to the man, displays a relentless advance toward higher and higher degrees of differentiation. There appears to be a seemingly irresistible movement of living beings and social groups from less to more differentiated forms. Thus it is not accidental that we witness parallel trends toward diversity—in the economy, in politics, in religion, in art, in education and mass culture, in the social order itself. These trends all fit together forming part of an immensely larger historic process. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The Super-age of information Revolution can now be seen for what, in large measure, it is—the advance of human society to its next higher stage of differentiation. This is why it often seems to us that our society is cracking at the seams. It is. This is why everything grows increasingly complex. Where once there stood 1,000 organizational entities, there are now at least 21.6 million in America alone—interconnected by increasingly transient links. Where once there were a few relatively permanent subcults with which a person might identify, there are now thousands of temporary subcluts milling about, colliding, and multiplying. The powerful bonds that integrated industrial society—bons of law, common values, centralized and standardized education and cultural production—are breaking down. All this explains why cities suddenly seem to be “unmanageable” and states “ungovernable.” For the old ways of integrating a society, methods based on uniformity, simplicity, and permanence, are not as effective. For the individual, this leap to a new level of differentiation holds awesome implications. However, not for the ones most people fear. We have been told so often that we are heading for faceless uniformity that we fail to appreciate the fantastic opportunities for individuality that the Super-industrial Revolution brings with it. And we have hardly begun to think about the dangers of over-individualization that are also implicit in it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Therefore keep in mind that the common grace is God’s provision for the welfare of all His created beings, both those who believe in God and those who do not. The human race, far from being flattened into monotonous conformity, will become far more diverse socially than it ever was before. The new society, the super-age of informational society now beginning to take form, will encourage a crazy-quilt pattern of evanescent life styles. The critical dynamic in the church-state tension is separation of institutional authority. Religion and politics cannot be separated—they inevitably overlap—but the institutions of church and state must preserve their separate and distinct roles. In this regard, the American experiment merits closer examination. The Kingdom of God is universal, bound by neither race nor nation. The church was ordained principally for the conversion of men and women—conversion grounded in individual conscience wrought by the supernatural work of a sovereign God upon the soul. So that state could neither successfully establish nor destroy the church, since it could not rule conscience nor transform people’s hearts and soul. Each rational soul has an equal right to judge for oneself, every person has an unalienable right to act in all religious affairs according to the full persuasion of one’s own mind. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Thus two typically mortal enemies, the Enlightenment and the Christian faith, found a patch of common ground on American soil. Both agreed (for different reasons) that the new government should neither establish nor interfere with the church. The religion of every human must be left to the conviction and conscience of every human; and it is the right of every human to exercise it as these may dictate. It was this reasoning, not the right for the news reporters to spread lie, that led to the adoption of the First Amendment, expressly to protect the individual’s right to freedom of conscience and expression, and to prevent the establishment of a state church. However, contrary to the belief of many today, this separation of church and state did not mean that America was to be a nation free of religious influence. From the very beginning the American Revolution itself was seen by many as a rebellion fueled by the conviction that humans are creatures of God, and one’s political life is conditioned by that truth. As James Madison insisted, “This duty [homage to the Creator] is precedent, both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of civil society. Before any human can be considered as a member of civil society, one must be considered as a subject of the governor of the Universe.” A nation under God was no idle phrase. Nor did the separation of church and state mean religion and politics could be separated or religious values removed form the public arena. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
For one’s political life is an expression of values, and religion, by definition, most profoundly influences values. The concept of a “wall of separation,” a phrase incidentally first used by Jefferson fifteen years after the Constitution was adopted, applied to institutions of church and state, not religious and political values. The Founding Father were all aware that the form of limited government they were adopting could only succeed if there was an underlying consensus of values shared by the populace. I am reminded of this when I visit the House of Representatives. A beautiful fresco on the upper walls of the chamber itself contains the portraits of history’s great lawmakers. Standing at the speaker’s desk and looking straight ahead over the main entrance, one’s eyes meet the piercing eyes of the first figure in the series: Moses, the one who recorded the Law from the original Lawgiver. John Adams eloquently acknowledged the understanding of our constitutional framers when in 1798 he wrote: “We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passion unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made only for moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any others. Many of these original American visionaries believed that Christian citizens would actively bring their religious values to the public forum. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
George Washington faintly echoed Augustine when he asserted, “Of all the dispositions and habit which lead to a political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that men claim that tribute of patriotism, who should labour to subvert these great pillars of human happiness.” Thus, when laws were passed reflecting the consensus of Christian values in the land, no one panicked supposing that the Christian religion was being “established” or that a sectarian morality was being imposed on an unwilling people. The point of the First Amendment was that such convictions could only become the law of the land if a majority of citizens could be persuaded (without coercion), whether they shared the religious foundation or nor, of the merits of a particular proposition. Today’s widespread relegation of religion to merely something people do in the privacy of their homes or churches would be unimaginable to the founders of the republic—even those who personally repudiated orthodox Christian faith. Though America has drifted far from the vision of its founders, this system continues to offer one of the World’s most hopeful models in an otherwise contentious history of conflict #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
The record of the centuries should not cause despair, however. Tensions between church and state is inherent and inevitable. Indeed, it is perhaps the outworking of one of God’s great mysteries, part of the dynamic by which He governs His Universe. For from the constant tension—the chafing back and forth—a certain equilibrium is achieved. To maintain this balance the church and the state must fulfill their respective role. One cannot survive without the other; yet neither can do the work of the other. Both operate under God’s rule, each in a different relationship to that rule. Certainly one thing is clear. When they fail in their appointed tasks—that is, when the church fails to be the visible manifestation of the Kingdom of God and the state fails to maintain justice and concord—civic order collapses. The consequences can be catastrophic and tumultuous events demonstrate that. To confess that intellectually we know nothing about the Absolute is understandable. However, to say that therefore we should leave its existence entirely out of our intellectual World-view, is not. For although that exact definition and direct explanation of the spirit is unable to catch the whole of this subtle experience within our receiving range because it is turned into ordinary human intellectual, emotional, and physical experience, by studying the spirit we may nevertheless evoke an intuitive recognition of its beauty; we may be able to better understand the world of the soul and the spirit may arouse the first aspirations towards spiritual enlightenment. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Spiritual enlightenment is the topic most worth writing about yet least understood. Whoever has entered into a partial understanding—it would be too much to demand more—of it, bears some responsibility. One must communicate with one’s fellows. Because the Real is beyond the thinking intellect’s grasp, it cannot be formulated into ideas. Yet because we need signpost and a goal to give guidance and direction, we must tentatively and provisionally formulate it. Dear Lord in shining in Heaven, I drop my fears into your ocean and watch them sink from sight. I place my fears on your broad Earth and see them rot away. I put my fears into your hands and they are no more. When you offer your arms to me, Great Father, your hands hold nothing but love. We sanctify Thy name on Earth even as it is sanctified in the shining Heavens above, as described in the vision of Thy Prophet: And the seraphim called one unto another saying: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole Earth is full of His glory. Whereupon the angels in stirring and mighty chorus rise toward the seraphim and with resounding acclaim declare: Blessed be the glory of God from His Heavenly abode. From Thy Heavenly abide, please reveal Thyself, O our King, and reign over us, for we wait for Thee. O when wilt Thy reign in America? Speedily, even in our days, do Thou establish Thy dwelling here forever. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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In the World Below Who is this that Darkens Counsel by Words Without Insight?
The great secret, known to internists and learned early in marriage by internists’ wives, but still hidden from the general public, is that most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning. With the way in which a modern humans with a Christian education and background comes to terms with the divine darkness which is unveiled in the Book of Job (in the Christian Bible), and what effect it has on one…I hope to act as a voice for many who feel the same way as I do, and to give expression to the shattering emotion which the unvarnished spectacle of divine savagery and ruthlessness produces in us. The Book of Job places this pious and faithful man, so heavily afflicted by the Lord, on a brightly lit stage where he presents his case to the eyes and ears of the World. It is amazing to see ow easily Yahweh, quite without reason, had let himself be influenced by one of his sons, by a doubting thought (Satan is presumably one of God’s eyes which “go to and fro in the Earth and walk up and down in it,” reports Job 1.7). In Persian tradition, Ahriman who is the evil spirit in Early Iranian religion is the Lord of Darkness and Chaos, and the source of human confusion, disappointment and strife. He is believed to have proceeded from one of Ormuzd’s, the chief god of the ancient Persians, the creator and lord of the whole Universe, doubting thoughts. Satan or Ahriman is supposedly the being who made unsure of Job’s faithfulness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
With his touchiness and suspiciousness the mere possibility of doubt was enough to infuriate God and induce that peculiar double-faced behaviour of which he had already given proof in the Garden of Eden, when he pointed out the tree to the First Parents and at the same time forbade them to eat of it. In this way he precipitated the Fall, which he apparently never intended. Similarly, his faithful servant Job is now to be exposed to a rigorous moral test, quite gratuitously and to no purpose, although Yahweh is convinced of Job’s faithfulness and constancy, and could moreover have assured himself beyond all doubt on this point he had taken counsel with his own omniscience. Why, then, is the experiment made at all, and a bet with the unscrupulous slanderer settled, without a stake, on the back of a powerless creature? It is indeed no deifying spectacle to see how quickly Yahweh abandons his faithful servant to the evil spirit and lets him (Job) fall without compunction or pity into the abyss of physical and moral suffering. From the human point of view Yahweh’s behaviour is so revolting that one has to ask oneself whether there is not a deeper motive hidden behind it. Has Yahweh some secret resistance against Job? That would explain his yielding to Satan. However, what does man possess that God does not have? Because of littleness, puniness, and defencelessness against the Almighty, man possess, as we have already suggested, a somewhat keener consciousness based on self-reflection: he must, in order to survive, always be mindful of his impotence. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
God has no need of this circumspection, for nowhere does he come up against an insuperable obstacle that would force him to hesitate and hence make him reflect on himself. Could a suspicious have grown up in God that man possess an infinitely small yet more concentrated light than he, Yahweh, possesses? “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,” reports Exodus 20.5. A jealousy of that kind might perhaps explain God’s behaviour. It would be quite explicable if some such dim barely understood deviation from the definition of a mere “creature” had aroused his divine suspicious. Too often already these human beings had not behaved in the prescribed manner. Even his trusty servant Job might have something up his sleeve….Hence Yahweh’s surprising readiness to listen to Satan’s insinuations against his better judgment. Without further ado Job is robbed of his herds, his servants are slaughtered, his sons and daughters are killed by a whirlwind, and he himself is smitten with sickness and brought to the brink of the grave. To rob him of peace altogether, his wife and his old friends are let loose against him, all of whom say the wrong things. His justified complaint finds no hearing with the judge who is so much praised for his justice. Job’s right is refused in order that Satan be not disturbed in his play. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
One must bear in mind here the dark deeds that follow one another in quick succession: robbery, murder, bodily injury with premeditation, and denial of a fair trial. This is further exacerbated by the fact that Yahweh displays no compunction, remorse, or compassion, but only ruthlessness and brutality. The plea of unconsciousness is invalid, seeing that he flagrantly violates at least thee of the commandments he himself gave out on Mount Sinai. Job’s friends do everything in their power to contribute to his moral torments, and instead of giving him, whom God has perfidiously abandoned, their warm-hearted support, they moralize in an all too human manner, that is, in the stupidest fashion imaginable, and “fill him with wrinkles.” They thus deny him even the last comfort of sympathetic participation and human understanding, so that one cannot altogether suppress the suspicion of connivance in high places. Why Job’s torments and the divine wager should suddenly come to an end is not quite clear. So long as Job does not actually die, the pointless suffering could be continued indefinitely. We must, however, keep an eye on the background of all these events: it is just possible that something in this background will gradually begin to take shape as a compensation for Job’s undeserved suffering—something to which Yahweh, even if he had only a faint inkling of it, could hardly remain indifferent. Without Yahweh’s knowledge and contrary to his intentions, the tormented though guiltless Job had secretly been lifted up to a superior knowledge of God which God himself did not possess. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Had Yahweh consulted his omniscience, Job would not have had the advantage of him. However, then, so many other things would not have happened either. Job realizes God’s inner antinomy, and in the light of this realization his knowledge attains a divine numinosity. The possibility of this development lies, one must suppose, in man’s “godlikeness,” which one should certainly not look for in human morphology. Yahweh himself had guarded against this error by expressly forbidding the making of images. Job, by his insistence on brining his case before God, even without hope of a hearing, had stood his ground and thus created the very obstacle that forced God to reveal his true nature. With this dramatic climax Yahweh abruptly breaks off his cruel game of cat and mouse. However, if anyone should expect that his wrath will now be turned against the slanderer, one will be severely disappointed. Yahweh does not think of brining this mischief-making son of his to account, nor does it ever occur to him to give Job at least the moral satisfaction of explaining his behaviour. Instead, one come riding along on the tempest of his almightiness and thunders reproaches at the half-crushed human work: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without insight?” reports Job 38.2. In view of the subsequent words of Yahweh, one must really ask oneself: Who is darkening what counsel? #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
The only dark thing here is how Yahweh ever came to make a bet with Satan. It is certainly not Job who has darkened anything and least of all a counsel, for there was never any talk of this nor will there be in what follows. The bet does not contain any “counsel” so far as one can see—unless of course, it was Yahweh himself who egged Satan on for the ultimate purpose of exalting Job. Naturally this development was foreseen in omniscience, and it may be that the word “counsel” refers to this eternal and absolute knowledge. If so, Yahweh’s attitude seems the more illogical and incomprehensible, as he could then have enlightened Job on this point—which, in view of the wrong done to him, would have been only fair and equitable. I must therefore regard this possibility as improbable. Whose words are without insight? Presumably Yahweh is not referring to the words of Job’s friends, but is rebuking Job. However, what is Job’s guilt? The only think he can be blamed for is his incurable optimism in believing that he can appeal to divine justice. In this he is mistaken, as Yahweh’s subsequent words prove. God does not want to be just; he merely flaunts might over right. Job could not get that into his head, because he looked upon God as a moral being. He had never doubted God’s might, but had hoped for right as well. He had, however, when we recognized God’s contradictory nature, take back this error already, and by doing so Job assigned a place to God’s justice and goodness. So one can hardly speak of lack of insight. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
The answer to Yahweh’s conundrum is therefore: it is Yahweh himself who darkens his own counsel and who has no insight. He turns the tables on Job and blames him for what he himself does: man is not permitted to have an opinion about him, and, in particular, is to have no insight which he himself does not possess. For seventy-one versus God proclaims his World-creating power to his miserable victim, who sits in ashes and scratches his sores with potsherds, and who by now has had more than enough of superhuman violence. Job has absolutely no need of being impressed by further exhibitions of God’s power. Yahweh, in his omniscience, could have known just how incongruous his attempts at intimidation were in such a situation. He could easily have seen that Job believes in his omnipotence as much as ever and has never doubted it or wavered in his loyalty. Altogether, he pays so little attention to Job’s real situation that one suspects him of having an ulterior motive which is more important to him: Job is no more than the outward occasion for an inward process of dialectic in God. His thunderings at Job so completely miss the point that one cannot help but see how much he is occupied with himself. The tremendous emphasis he lays on his omnipotence and greatness makes no sense in relation to Job, who certainly needs no more convincing, but only becomes intelligible when aimed at a listener who doubts it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
This “doubting thought” is Satan, who after completing his evil handiwork has returned to the paternal heart in order to continue his subversive activity there. Yahweh must have seen that Job’s loyalty was unshakable and that Satan had lost his bet. He must also have realized that, in accepting this bet, he had done everything possible to drive his faithful servant to disloyalty, even to the extent of perpetrating a whole series of crimes. Yet it is not remorse and certainly not moral horror that rises to his consciousness, but an obscure intimation of something that questions his omnipotence. He is particularly sensitive on this point, because “might” is the great argument. However, omniscience knows that might excuses nothing. The said intimation refers, of course, to the extremely uncomfortable fact that Yahweh had let himself be bamboozled by Satan. This weakness of his does not reach full consciousness, since Satan is treated with remarkable tolerance and consideration. Evidently Satan’s intrigue is deliberately overlooked at Job’s expense. Luckily enough, Job had noticed during this harangue that everything else had been mentioned except his right. He has understood that it is at present impossible to argue the question of right, as it is only too obvious that Yahweh has no interest whatever in Job’s cause but is far more preoccupied with his own affairs. Satan, that is to say, has somehow to disappear, and this can best be done by casting suspicion on Job as a man of subversive opinions. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
The problem is thus switched on to another track, and the episode with Satan remains unmentioned and unconscious. To the spectator it is not quite clear why Job is treated to this almighty exhibition of thunder and lightning, but the performance as such is sufficiently magnificent and impressive to convince not only a larger audience but above all Yahweh himself of his unassailable power. Whether Job realized what violence Yahweh is doing to his own omniscience by behaving like this we do not know, but his silence and submission leave a number of possibilities open. Job has no alternative but formally to revoke his demand for justice, and he therefore answers in the words quoted at the beginning: “I lay my hand on my mouth.” He betrays not the slightest trace of mental reservation—in fact, his answer leaves us in no doubt that he had succumbed completely and without question to the tremendous force of the divine demonstration. The most exacting tyrant should have been satisfied with this, and could be quite sure that his servant—from terror alone, to say nothing of his undoubted loyalty—would not dare to nourish a single improper thought for a very long time to come. Strangely enough, Yahweh does not notice anything of this kind. He does not see Job and his situation at all. It is rather as if he had another powerful opponent in the place of Job, one who was better worth challenging. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
This example of displaced projection is clear from his twice-repeated taunt: “Gird up your loins like a man; I will question you, and you shall declare to me,” reports Job 38.3 and 40.7. One would have to choose positively grotesque examples to illustrate the disproportion between the two antagonists. Yahweh sees something in Jon which we would not ascribe to him but to God, that is, an equal power which causes him to bring out his whole power apparatus and parade it before his opponent. Yahweh projects on to Job a sceptic’s face which is hateful to him because it is his own, and which gazes at him with an uncanny and critical eye. He is afraid of it, for only in face of something frightening does one let off a cannonade of references to one’s power, cleverness, courage, invincibility, et cetera. What has all that to do with Job? It is worth the lion’s while to terrify the mouse? Yahweh cannot es satisfied with the first victorious round. Job has long since been knocked out, but the great antagonist whose phantom is projected on the pitiable sufferer still stands menacingly upright. Therefore Yahweh raises his arm again: “Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me that you may be justified? Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his?” reports Job 40:8-9. Man, abandoned without protection and stripped of his rights, and whose nothingness is thrown in his face at every opportunity, evidently appears to be so dangerous to Yahweh that he must be battered down with the heaviest artillery. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
What irritates Yahweh can be seen from his challenging to the ostensible Job: “Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked where they stand. Hide them in the dust together; bind their faces in the hidden place. Then will I also acknowledge to you that your own right hand can give you victory,” reports Job 40.12-14 (“in the hidden place” is Revised Standard Version alternative reading for “in the World below”). The most satisfying proofs will come to one that God is really guiding the course of one’s outer life and really inspiring the course of one’s inner life. There will be decisions that one does not think out logically, moves that one does not plan calculatingly. Yet the sequence of further events will prove the one to be right, the other wise. For they will have come intuitively. One may have no idea how to get out of one’s predicament. Yet suddenly one will make some unreasoned and unpremeditated act which will do this for one. One’s best moves are mostly the unplanned ones. One would be wise to do nothing drastic unless there is a clear and positive urge from the deepest part of being approving the deed. Such efforts will eventually open the way for intuition to come into outer consciousness and absorbing all lesser elements, give one the great blessing of its guidance. Job is challenged as though he himself were a god. However, in the contemporary metaphysics there was no deuteros theos, no other god except Satan, who owns Yahweh’s ear and is able to influence him. He is the only one who can pull the wool over his eyes, beguile him, and put him up to a massive violation of his own penal code. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
A formidable opponent indeed, and, because of his close kinship, so compromising that he must be concealed with the utmost discretion—even to the point of God’s hiding him from his own consciousness in his own heart! In his stead God must set up his miserable servant as the bugbear whom he has to fight, in hope that by banishing the dreaded countenance to “the hidden place” he will be able to maintain himself in a state of unconsciousness. If we tried to reduce them to the purely negative factor of Yahweh’s fear of becoming conscious and of the relativization which it entails, the stage-managing of this imaginary duel, the speechifying, and the impressive performance given by the prehistoric menagerie would not be sufficiently explained. This conflict becomes acute for Yahweh as a result of a new factor, which is, however, not hidden from omniscience—though in this case the existing knowledge is not accompanied by any conclusion. The new factor is something that has never occurred before in the history of the World, the unheard-of fact that without knowing it or wanting it, a mortal man is raised by his moral behaviour above the stars in Heaven, from which position of advantage he can behold the back of Yahweh, the abysmal World of “shards.” (This is an allusion to an idea found in the later cabalistic philosophy.) Does Job know what he has seen? If he does, he is astute or canny enough not to betray it. However, his words speak volumes: “I know that thou canst do all thing, and that no purpose of thine can be thwarted,” reports Job 42.2. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Truly, Yahweh can do all things and permits himself all things without batting an eyelid. The absoluteness of the Godhead is complete and basic. It is not categorically identical with humans any more than the ray is with the Sun; they are different although not more fundamentally different than the ray from the Sun. hence there can be no direct communication and no positive relationship between them. A profound impenetrability, and existence beyond comprehension, is the first characteristic of the Godhead, when gazed at by human sight. The Godhead as he is, and God as he appears; God in the vacuous repose of Nothingness, and God in the continuous activity of a cosmos; God forever hidden in his own being and forever unknown to mortals, and God revealed in relation to humans; THAT which is not perceptible to human thinking as opposed to HE who is experienceable by intuition—these differences seem to imply an inherent contradiction. Those attractive and positive attributes which we always associate with the very name God—justice, goodness, and the like—cannot be associated with the Godhead for the reason that nobody, not the greatest of mystics, knows or ever can know the Godhead. If a human is made in the image of God, then this God is something other than the Ultimate Principle, for THAT has no likeness with anything else; it is a void, a no-thing, and so utterly beyond human perception that it is destined to remain forever unknown. Nothing on Earth is alone adequate to comprehend the Real. Neither can inner peace affirm it nor can intellect negate it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Not for the finite mind is there to know knowledge of Ein Soph, the Hebrew philosopher’s idea of the Infinite, what he terms “the Most Hidden of the Hidden.” Leave God alone! Why must humans forever bleat and whimper, praise and glorify That of which they know nothing and imagine everything! Why do the not write and fight, argue and quarrel about those things which they can touch or know, see or examine? There is no discernible sign, form, or clue by which the Absolute, the Unmanifest, may be known. It is wrapped in blackness, which is why the Manifested World is symbolized by light, why its colour is white when contrasted with the other. The great Mystery remains where it always has been—untouched by human’s feelings and undefined by their thoughts. Human mentality cannot comprehend the real nature of thus mysterious substratum of all existence. Human understanding cannot assimilate that which utterly transcends it. It is not a testable truth; it must be left the mystery that it is. With brazen countenance God can project his shadow side and remain unconscious at human’s expense. He can boast of his superior power and enact laws which means less than air to him. Murder and manslaughter are mere bagatelles, and if the mood takes God, he can play the feudal grand seigneur and generously recompense his bondslave for the havoc wrought in his wheat-fields. “So you have lost your sons and daughters? No harm done, I will give you new and better ones.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Job continues (no doubt with downcast eyes and in a low voice): “Who is this that hides counsel without insight?” Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. “Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me.” I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee; therefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes. (Job 42.3-6, modified). Shrewdly, Job takes up Yahweh’s aggressive words and prostrates himself at his feet as if he were indeed the defeated antagonist. Guileless as Job’s speech sounds, it could just as well be equivocal. He has learnt his lesson well and experienced “wonderful things” which are none too easily grasped. Before, he had known Yahweh “by the hearing of the ear,” but now he has got a taste of his reality, more so even than David—an incisive lesson that had better not be forgotten. Former he was naïve, dreaming perhaps of a “good” God, or of a benevolent ruler and just judge. He has imagined that a “covenant” was a legal matter and that anyone who was party to a contract could insist on his rights as agreed; that Gd would be faithful and true or at least just, and, as one could assume from the Ten Commandments, would have some recognition of ethical values or at least feel committed to his own legal standpoint. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
However, to his horror, Job has discovered that Yahweh is not human but, in certain respect, less than human, that he is just what Yahweh himself says of Leviathan (the crocodile): “He beholds everything that is high: He is king over all proud beasts,” reports Job 41.25 (Zurcher Bibel); cf. 41.34 (Authorized and Revised Standard Version). Unconscious has an animal nature. Like all old gods Yahweh has his animal symbolism with its unmistakable borrowings from the much older theriomorphic gods of Egypt, especially Horus and his four sons. Of the four animals of Yahweh only one has a human face. That is probably Satan, the godfather of man as a spiritual being. Ezekiel’s vision attributes three-fourths animal nature and only one-fourth human nature to the animal deity, while the upper deity, the one above the “sapphire throne,” merely had the “likeness” of man (Ezekiel 1.26). This symbolism explains Yahweh’s behaviour, which, from the human point of view, is so intolerable: it is the behaviour of an unconscious being who cannot be judged morally. Yahweh is a phenomenon and, as Job says, “not man.” The naïve assumption that the creator of the World is a conscious being must be regarded as a disastrous prejudice which later gave rise to the most incredible dislocations of logic. For example, the nonsensical doctrine of the privatio boni would never have been necessary had one not had to assume in advance that it is impossible for the consciousness of a good God to produce evil deeds. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Divine unconscious and lack of reflection, on the other hand, enable us to form a conception of God which puts his actions beyond moral judgment and allows no conflict to arise between goodness and beastliness. One could, without too much difficulty, impute such a meaning to job’s speech. Be that as it may, Yahweh calmed down at last. The therapeutic measures of unresisting acceptance had proved its value yet again. Nevertheless, Yahweh is still somewhat nervous of Job’s friends—they “have not spoken of me what is right,” reports Job 42.7. The projection of his doubt-complex extends—comically enough, one must say—to these respectable and slightly pedantic old gentlemen, as though God-knows-what depended on what they thought. However, the fact that humans should think at all, and especially about him, is maddeningly disquieting and ought somehow to be stopped. It is far too much like the sort of ting his vagrant son is always springing on him, thus hitting him in his weakest spot. How often already has he bitterly regretted his unconsidered outbursts! One can hardly avoid the impression that Omniscience is gradually drawing near to a realization, and is threatened with an insight that seems to be hedged about with fears of self-destruction. Fortunately, Job’s final declaration is so formulated that one can assume with some certainty that, for the protagonists, the incident is closed for good and all. We, the commenting chorus on this great tragedy, which has never at any time lost its vitality, do not feel quite like that. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
For our modern sensibilities it is by no means apparent that with Job’s profound obeisance to the majesty of the divine presence, and his prudent silence, a real answer has been given to the questioned raised by the Satanic prank of a wager with God. Job has not so much answered as reacted in an adjusted way. In so doing he displayed remarkable self-discipline, but an unequivocal answer has still to be given. To take the most obvious thing, what about the moral wrong Job has suffered? Is man so worthless in God’s eyes that not even a tort moral can be inflicted on him? That contradicts the fact that humans are desired by Yahweh and that it obviously maters to him whether men speak “right” of him or not. He needs Job’s loyalty, and it means so much to hum that he shrinks at nothing in carrying out his test. This attitude attaches an almost divine importance that could mean anything to one who has everything? Yahweh’s divided attitude, which on the one had tramples on human life and happiness without regard, and on the other hand must have man for a partner, puts the latter in an impossible position. At one moment Yahweh behaves as irrationally as a cataclysm; the next moment he wants to be loved, honoured, worshipped, and praised as just. If his actions happen to run counter to its statutes, he reacts irritably to every word that has the faintest suggestion of criticism, while he himself does not care a straw for his own moral code. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
One can submit to such a God only with fear and trembling, and can try indirectly to propitiate the despot with unctuous praises and ostentatious obedience. However, a relationship of trust seems completely out of the question to our modern way of thinking. Nor can moral satisfaction be expected from an unconscious nature god of this kind. Nevertheless, Job got his satisfaction, without Yahweh’s intending it and possibly without himself knowing it, as the poet would have it appear. Yahweh’s allocutions have the unthinking yet none the less transparent purpose of showing Job the brutal power of the demiurge: “This is I, the creator of all the ungovernable, ruthless forces of Nature, which are not subject to any ethical laws. I, too, am an amoral force of Nature, a purely phenomenal personality that cannot see its own back.” This is, or at any rate could be, a moral satisfaction of the first order for Job, because through this declaration man, in spite of his impotence, is set upas a judge over God himself. We do not know whether Job realizes this, but we do know from the numerous commentaries on Job that all succeeding ages have overlooked the fact that a kind of Moira or Dike rule over Yahweh, causing him to give himself away so blatantly. Anyone can see how he unwittingly raises Job by humiliating him in the dust. By so doing he pronounced judgment on himself and gives humans the moral satisfaction whose absence we found so painful in the Book of Job. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The poet of this drama showed a masterly discretion in ringing down the curtain at the very moment when his hero gave unqualified recognition to the (cannot translate Greek name) of the Demiurge by prostrating himself at the feet of His Divine Majesty. No other impression was permitted to remain. An unusual scandal was blowing up in the realm of metaphysics, with supposedly devastating consequences, and nobody was ready with a saving formula which would recue the monotheistic conception of God from disaster. Even in those days the critical intellect of a Greek could easily have seized on this new addition to Yahweh’s biography and used in it his disfavour (as indeed happened, though very much later) so as to mete out to him the fate that had already overtaken the Greek gods. However, a relativization of Gd was utterly unthinkable at that time, and remained so for the next two thousand years. When the conscious reason is blind and impotent, the unconscious mind of humans sees correctly. So it does not matter that the law was established before modern humans knew anything about the brain, ancient humans obviously knew more than modern human realize. The drama has been consummated for all eternity: Yahweh’s dual nature have been revealed, and somebody or something has seen and registered this fact. Such a revelation, whether it reached man’s consciousness or nor, could not fail to have far-reaching consequences. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
The story of any locale is assembled from people, settings, and events. As the competition for space in local history grows with the addition of time, participants whose impacts were not so durable (or perhaps so sensational) fade into the realm of the Almost Forgotten. Most of us could identify William Randolph Hearst and his castles, James Lick and his contributions, or Tiburcio Vasquez, the bandit. Many could place Sarah Winchester or James Manly. Only a few will have heard of Elisha Stevens and Mountain Charlie. Before what you see now existed, this castle by Sarah Winchester, a wealthy woman from New Haven, Connecticut, was more than a glorified two-story farm house. However, do not let the charming atmosphere fool you. Many people said the mansion appeared out of nowhere. Five hundred men were employed to work round the clock to build the mansion in one month. Men with names like “Pretty Boy,” “Bones,” “King of Chicago,” “The Butcher,” and “Baby Face” during the late 18th century (which would mean the mansion is much older than people know). It continued to thrive, growing bigger and more flamboyant all the time, so much so that it caught the attention of President Roosevelt, however, he was not allowed to tour the mansion. In 1902, Pretty Boy’s quick action saved Mrs. Winchester from an attempted suicide in her bedroom, but only a month later she tried and succeeded. Many say this is why there is a Sarah E. Winchester and a Sarah L. Winchester.
Mrs. Winchester officially died in 1922, and her house was quickly looted by archeologists. It was reported that each day for six weeks, six moving trucks stripped the mansion of Mrs. Winchester’s belongings and auctioned them off in San Francisco, California. It is reported that the items were cursed by the Devil and that people who possessed her belongings met an ill fate. The TV show Friday the 13th the Series was tightly based on stolen goods from the Winchester mansion. In 1923, with all living occupants gone, the mansion was opened for visitors. However, still on the dinning room was Mrs. Winchester’s solid gold $30,000.00 dinner services and freshly prepared food, but not a human being in sight, and one of this six kitchens was in disarray. Many report hearing sobbing sounds and the linger scent of perfume. In 2010, with many staff members still fearful of being in the mansion alone, it was decided to hold a séance there. A vision William Wirt Winchester and his baby girl Annie, was seen by some and a recording was made of unknown voices speaking a strange language. Later someone suggested that the language might be Native American. It was decided to take the tape to a Washoe Indian living in Reno. He confirmed that the voice was indeed speaking a Washoe dialogue but refused to translate, saying instead: “You do not wan to know. What is the point of sounding an alarm? Who would believe me this time?”
One man spent the night in the Winchester mansion, he thought he was awake, but was watching himself sleep, when he was attacked by a man in a black druid robe. The druid was walking out of the room and he could see him, and heard his claws dragging on the carpet when the druid turned around, walked back to the bed and tried to drag the man out of bed. He woke himself as he was kicking to get free. There was old blood on the bed, and a gash in his upper thigh, but no one was in the room but he. Months later the wound stopped bleeding, but will not form a scab, it is just pink, like one might expect from a radiofrequency ablation (RFA), which uses electrical energy to destroy cancer cells with heat. He rushed through the open doorway only to find the hallway empty. Attic and lower floors revealed nobody. He went back to his room and retrieved the crumpled-up paper from the fireplace. He knew what it was before he read it. It was a letter to the trespasser of the Winchester Estate, warning him to get off the property. He straightened it own and turned it over. There was no response written on it. Then he remembered the tapping on the mantelpiece, and sure enough there was a letter there, or at least a piece of folded white paper.
The white paper was thick and fancy, and writing was in script of a florid and large design. He could smell the India ink in which it had been written. This is an approximation of what it said:
My Dear Boy,
I am not as assumed by your notice as one might expect. On the contrary, I rather resent your intrusion into a portion of the Winchester Estate to which I hold unwritten title, thanks to the generosity and foresight of your great-great-great-grandfather William. If I had not set eyes on you tonight and not recognized you for the sensitive and serious young man which you are, I might take even greater umbrage than I do. As it stands, allow me to explain that I want the mansion undisturbed by you, and it is my express which that none of you or your family come here. I treasure my privacy, my boy, perhaps more than your treasure your life. Think on it, my boy. The Great Mystery remains where it always has been—untouched by human’s feelings and undefined by their thoughts. Human mentality cannot comprehend the real nature of this mysterious substratum of all existence. Human understanding cannot assimilate that which utterly transcends it. It is not a testable truth; it must be left the mystery that it is. It is a secret society that meets out here, you know, a sort of romantic clandestine thing, and one of them has come into this house, which you know is open to you at all times, you know, and he has dared to go upstairs. There is nothing romantic about dumping dead bodies. My sweet boy, I shall have this investigated in every conceivable way, make no mistake on it. But I am going to get you out of here.
The Resident of the Winchester Estate
The story of Santa Clara Valley’s most famous lady, Sarah Winchester and her fabulous mystery mansion
Winchester Mystery House
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Love, as Defined by the Lord, Elevates, Protects, Respects, and Enriches Another!
Good-bye, good night. Merry Christmas. God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth. What seems to be reasonable conditions for engaging in civil disobedience, and can we connect these conditions more systematically with the place of civil disobedience in a state of near justice? Of course, the conditions enumerated should be taken as presumptions; no doubt there will be situations when they do not hold, and other arguments could be given for civil disobedience. The first point concerns the kinds of wrongs that are appropriate objects of civil disobedience. Now if one views such disobedience as a political act addressed to the sense of justice of the community, then it seems reasonable, other things equal, to limit it to instances of substantial and clear injustice, and preferably to those which obstruct the path to removing other injustices. For this reason there is a presumption in favour of restricting civil disobedience to serious infringements of the first principle of justice, the principle of equal liberty, and to blatant violations of the second part of second principle, the principle of fair equality of opportunity. Of course, it is not always easy to tell whether these principles are satisfied. Still, if we think of them as guaranteeing the basic liberties, it is often clear that these freedoms are not being honoured. After all, they impose certain strict requirements that must be visibly expressed in institutions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Thus when certain marginalized members of the population are denied the right to vote or to hold office, or to own property and to move from place to place, or when certain religious groups are repressed and others denied various opportunities, these injustices may be obvious to all. They are publicly incorporated into the recognized practice if not the letter, of social arrangements. The establishment of these wrongs does not presuppose an informed examination of institutional effects. By contrast infractions of the difference principle are more difficult to ascertain. There is usually a wide range of conflicting yet rational opinion as to whether this principle is satisfied. The reason for this is that is applied primarily to economic and social institutions and policies. A choice among these depends upon theoretical and speculative beliefs as well as upon a wealth of statistical and other information, all of this seasoned with shrewd judgement and speculative beliefs as well as upon a wealth of statistical and other information, all of this seasoned with shrewd judgment and plain hunch. In view of the complexities of these questions, it is difficult to check the influence of self-interest and prejudice; and even if we can do this in our own case, it is another matter to convince others of our good faith. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Thus unless tax laws, for example, are clearly designed to attack or to abridge a basic equal liberty, they should not normally be protested by civil disobedience. The appeal to the public’s conception of justice is not sufficiently clear. The resolution of these issues is best left to the political process provided that the requisite equal liberties are secure. In this case a reasonable compromise can presumably be reached. The violation of the principle of equal liberty is, then, the more appropriate object of civil disobedience. This principle defines the common status of equal citizenship in a constitutional regime and lies at the basis of the political order. When it is fully honoured the presumption is that other injustices, while possibly persistent and significant, will not get out of hand. A further condition for civil disobedience is the following. We may suppose that the normal appeals to the political majority have already been made in good faith and that they have failed. The legal means of redress have proved of no avail. Thus, for example, the existing political parties have shown themselves indifferent to the claims of the minority or have proved unwilling to accommodate them. Attempts to have the laws repealed have been ignored and legal protests and demonstrations have had no success. Since civil disobedience is a last resort, we should be sure that it is necessary. Note that it has been said, however, tat legal means have been exhausted. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
At any rate, further normal appeals can be repeated; free speech is always possible. However, if past actions have shown the majority immovable or apathetic, further attempts may reasonably be thought fruitless, and a second condition for justified civil disobedience is met. This condition is, however, a presumption. Some cases may be so extreme tat there may be no duty to use first only legal means of political opposition. If, for example, the legislature were to enact some outrageous violations of equal liberty, say by forbidding the religion of a weak and defenseless minority, we surely could not expect that sect to oppose the law by normal political procedures. Indeed, even civil disobedience might be much too mild, the majority having already convicted itself of wantonly unjust and overtly hostile aims. The third and last condition being considered is rather complicated. It arises from the fact that while the two preceding conditions are often sufficient to justify civil disobedience, this is not always the case. In certain circumstances the natural duty of justice may require a certain restraint. We can see this as follows. If a certain minority is justified in engaging in civil disobedience, then any other minority is relevantly similar circumstances is likewise justified. Using the two previous conditions as the criteria of relevantly similar circumstances, we can say that, other things equal, two minorities are similarly justified in resorting to civil disobedience if they have suffered for the same length of time for the same degree of injustice and if their equally sincere and normal political appeals have likewise been to no avail. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
It is conceivable, however, even if it is unlikely, that there should be many groups with an equally sound case (in the sense just defined) for being civilly disobedient; but that, if they were all to act in this way, serious disorder would follow which might well undermine the efficacy of the just constitution. I assume here that there is a limit in the extent to which civil disobedience can be engaged in without leading to a breakdown in the respect for law and the constitution, thereby setting in motion consequences unfortunate for all. There is also an upper bound on the ability of the public forum to handle such forms of dissent; the appeal that civilly disobedient groups wish to make can be distorted and their intention to appeal to the sense of justice of the majority lost sight of. For one or both of these reasons, the effectiveness of civil disobedience as a form of protest declines beyond a certain point; and those contemplating it must consider these constraints. The ideal solution from a theoretical point of view calls for cooperative political alliance of the minorities to regulate the overall level of dissent. For consider the nature of the situation: there are many groups each equally entitled to engage in civil disobedience. Moreover they all wish to exercise this right, equally strong in each case; but if they all do so, lasting injury may result to the just constitution to which they each recognize a natural duty of justice. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Now when there are many equally strong claims which if taken together exceed what can be granted, some fair plan should be adopted so that all are equitably considered. In simple cases of claims to goods that are indivisible and fixed in number, some rotation or lottery scheme may be the fair solution when the number of equally valid claims is too great. However, this sort of device is completely unrealistic here. What seems called for is a political understanding among the minorities suffering from injustice. They can meet their duty to democratic institutions by coordinating their actions so that while each has an opportunity to exercise its right, the limits on the degree of civil disobedience are not exceeded. To be sure, an alliance of this sort is difficult to arrange; but with perceptive leadership, it does not appeal impossible. Certainly the situation envisaged is a special one, and it is quite possible that these sorts of consideration will not be a bar to justified civil disobedience. There are not likely to be many groups similarly entitled to engage in this form of dissent while at the same time recognizing a duty to a just constitution. One should not, however, that an injured minority is tempted to believe its claims as strong as those of any other; and therefore even if the reasons that different groups have for engaging in civil disobedience are not equally compelling, it is often wise to presume that their claims are indistinguishable. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Adopting this maxim, the circumstances imagined seems more likely to happen. This kind of case is also instructive in showing that the exercise of the right to dissent, like the exercise of rights generally, is sometimes limited by others having the very same right. Everyone’s exercising this right would have deleterious consequences for all, and se equitable plan is called for. Suppose that in the light of the three conditions, one has a right to appeal one’s case by civil disobedience. Thus injustice one protests is a clear violation of the liberties of equal citizenship, or of equality of opportunity, this violation having been more or less deliberate over an extended period of time in the face of normal political opposition, and any complications raised by the question of fairness are met. These conditions are not exhaustive; some allowance still has to be made for the possibility of injury to third parties, to the innocent, so to speak. However, I assume that they cover the main points. There is still, of course, the question whether it is wise or prudent to exercise this right. Having established the right, one is now free, as one is not before, to let these matters decide the issue. If our conduct only serves to provoke the harsh retaliation of the majority, we may be acting within our rights but nevertheless unwisely. To be sure, in a state of near justice, vindictive repression of legitimate dissent is unlikely, but it is important that the action be properly designed to make an effective appeal to the wider community. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Since civil disobedience is a mode of address taking place in the public forum, care must be taken to see that it is understood. Thus the exercise of the right to civil disobedience should, like any other right, be rationally framed to advance one’s ends or the ends of those one wishes to assist. The theory of justice has nothing specific to say about these practical considerations. In any event questions of strategy and tactics depend upon the circumstances of each case. However, the theory of justice should say at what point these matters are properly raised. Now in this account of the justification of civil disobedience I have not mentioned the principle of fairness. The natural duty of justice is the primary basis of our political ties to a constitutional regime. As we noted before only the more favoured members of society are likely to have a clear political obligation as opposed to a political duty. They are better situated to win public office and find it easier to take advantage of the political system. And having done so, they have acquired an obligation owed to citizens generally to uphold the just constitution. However, members of subjected minorities, say, who have a strong case for civil disobedience will not generally have a political obligation of this sort. This does not mean, however, that the principle of fairness will not give rise to important obligations in their case. For not only do many of the requirements of private life derive from this principle, but it comes into force wen persons or groups come together for common political purposes. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Just as we acquire obligations to others with whom we have joined in various private associations, those who engage in political action assume obligatory ties to one another. Thus while the political obligation of dissenters to citizens generally is problematical, bonds of loyalty and fidelity still develop between them as they seek to advance their cause. In general, free association under a just constitution give rise to obligations provided that the ends of the group are legitimate and its arrangements fair. This is as true of political as it is of other associations. These obligations are of immense significance and they constrain in many ways what individuals can do. However, they are distinct from an obligation to comply with a just constitution. My discussion of civil disobedience is in terms of the duty of justice alone; a fuller view would note the place of these other requirements. When religion is allowed to invade public life, things have come to a pretty pass when. Slavery, for instance, was a very unjust institution. People were packed into a dark bottom of a ship, barely able to breathe because of the stench of human waste and vomit, as they lay chest to back, legs drawn into a fetal position, feet resting on the heads of those in the next row. Some were taken prisoner during tribal wars. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Others were jailed as petty criminals; and many had been unsuspecting dinner guests of Englishmen visiting their country. However, all had been forcibly enslaved and held in a stockade on the African coast until sold to the highest bidder. That bidder was the captain in the cabin above. Once purchased they had been branded and rowed to the schooner waiting offshore, their screams and cries ignored by the seamen who hoisted them abroad and chained them in the stinking hold. For the women, however, there was a further torture. The crew, diseases and ill-treated themselves, claimed the one sordid privilege of their trade—the pick of the slave women. Once under way, the ship had become half bedlam, half brothel. Now, several weeks into the voyage, sixty slaves had already died. Fever had taken some. Others, driven insane by the horror of their lot, had been killed by the crew. Each morning when the lower decks were opened, several dead or near-dead bodies were thrown to the sharks trailing the ship. The captain cursed as the bodies hit the choppy water. Each body overboard meant lost profits. For those who survived the hellish three-month journey, an equally gruesome future awaited. They would be auctioned naked in the marketplace to planter who would work them to death on their Caribbean plantations. Never again would these African men and women see their homeland. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Thousands of miles to the north, in a country that profited richly from this human misery, another man sat at his desk. He too gazed into darkness still filled his second-floor library at Number 4 Old Palace Yard, London. Only his piercing blue eyes reflected the turmoil of his thoughts as he eyed the jumble of pamphlets on his cluttered desk. He ran his hand through his wavy hair and opened his Bible to begin the day, as was his custom, with Scripture reading and prayer. However, his thoughts kept returning to the pamphlets, grisly accounts of human flesh sold like mutton for the profit of his countrymen. No matter how be tried, William Wilberforce could not wipe these scenes from his mind. William Wilberforce was the only son of prosperous merchant parents. High society revolved around romantic intrigue and adulterous affairs. An upper-class couple might not be seen together in public for weeks during the social season, for no popular hostess would invite a husband and wife to the same event. The poor, of course, had no such opportunity to escape from one another. Crammed together in shabby dwellings, they were cogs grinding out a living in the Empire’s emerging industrial machines. Pale children worked eighteen hours a day in cotton mills or coal mines to bring homes a few shillings a month to parents who often wasted in on inexpensive gin. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
London was a city where unchecked passions and desires ran their course. Few raised their voice in opposition. So it is not surprising that few argued against one of the nation’s most bountiful sources of wealth—the slave trade. In fact, the trade was both a successful business and a national policy. Political alliances revolved around commitments to it. It became known euphemistically as “the institution,” the “pillar and support of British plantation industry in the West Indies.” In a celebrated case in England’s high court only four years earlier, slaves had been seemed “goods and chattels.” Corruption in government was so widespread that few members of Parliament thought twice about accepting bribes for their votes. Planters and other gentlemen involved in the slave trade paid three to five thousand pounds to “buy” boroughs, which sent their representatives to the House of Commons. The same attitude reigned in the House of Lords. Their political influence in Parliament grew until a large bloc was controlled by the vested influence of the slave trade. The horrors of the trade were remote and unseen, the cotton and sugar profits they yielded very tangible. So most consciences were not troubled about the Black men and women suffering far away on the high sea or on remote plantations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Many people say that some used Christianity and the Bible to incorrectly justify slavery, but that was not always the case. John Newton, son of a sailor, had been impressed into the Royal Navy when he was eleven. He deserted, was caught in West Africa, flogged, and placed into service on a slave ship. Eventually he became involved in the slave trade and in 1750 was given command of his own ship. On one especially stormy passage to West Indies, however, Mr. Newton was converted to faith in Jesus Christ. He renounced slaving and expressed his wonder at the gift of salvation in his famous hymn, “Amazing Grace.” Some people become so absorbed in politics that they never give themselves time for due reflection on religion. God wants to being compassion to the oppressed as well as oppose the oppressors. Almighty God has set before His people even today, two great objectives. The abolition of the slave trade and the reformation of manners. Slaver is so enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable, and an iniquity such as this, because it still happens today, must be abolished. We still live in a time, even in American, where the country’s economic strength depends on slavery at home and abroad. There are different forms from forced labour to human trafficking. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
An estimated 25 million victims are trapped in modern-day slavery. Of these, 16 million (64 percent) were exploited for labour, and approximately 5 million (19 percent) were exploited for pleasures of the flesh, 4 million (17 percent) were exploited in state-imposed forced labour. Forced labour takes place in many different industries. Therefore, private faith that does not act in the face of oppression is no faith at all. Slavery is a subject, in which the interest, not of this country, nor of Europe alone, but of the whole World, and of posterity, are involved. It is impossible for me not to feel both terrified and concerned at our leader’s inadequacy to abolish slavery in their communities before taking hold of state, nation, or international positions. However, as a race—the human race—as a nation, and as citizens of God’s Kingdom, we must fight for the total abolition of the slave trade. This is bigger than climate change, bigger than COVID-19, and much bigger than any jobs report because without human life, we have nothing. I mean not to accuse anyone for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on under their authority. We are all guilty—we ought all to plead guilty, and not to exculpate ourselves by throwing the blame on others. This evidence cannot be ignored. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Never, never will we desist till we extinguish every trace of this bloody traffic, which our posterity, looking back to the history of these enlightened ties, will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long a disgrace and dishonour to this country. The courts, law enforcement, and your employers have a duty to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America! For instance Amendment IV of the Constitution states people have a right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probably cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the person or things to be seized. Our sister, Breonna Taylor, an innocent young lady in the prime of her life was murdered in her own home, on 13 March 2020, while she lay in bed resting, so she could return to her job as a nurse in the morning, and because the police killed her by accident, no one is being held responsible for the crime, but so many are fighting to keep our boarders open and floor the streets with illegal immigrants, when we will not even protect our own citizens. How humane is that? Amendment VIII states the excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted. However, our brother George Perry Floyd was killed by the police on 25 March 2020, while telling the officer he could not breath because the officer had his knee on the man’s neck. How cruel and unusual is that! #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Amendment XVI states that all persons born or naturalized in the United States of America, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, but innocent 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was gunned down after buying some candy because someone did not like the way he looked. There are just a few laws that ought to be observed and we must never take our freedom for granted, nor allow criminals to roam the streets without answering for their crimes. That is why Amendment VI of the United States Constitution states in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against one; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in one’s favour, and to have the assistance of counsel for one’s defense. We do not want chaos on our streets, we do not want people becoming law enforcement agents to get away with murder, and we do not want people taken into custody without being read their Miranda rights or being allowed to have a trial. It should not be easier for those in public office or law enforcement to break the laws than it is to enforce it. The laws and law enforcement are there to protect us, not facilitate and help crime to fester. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Just remember, slavery is still a reality and in was not long ago, in the year 1788 in a ship destined for the slave trade, out of 650 persons on board, 155 died. In another, 405 were on board, out of whom were lost 200. In another there were on board 402, out of whom 73 died. When Captain Charles Wilson was asked the causes of this mortality, he replied that the slaves had a fixed melancholy and dejection; that they wished to die; that they refused sustenance, till they were beaten in order to compel them to eat; and that when they had been so beaten, they looked in the faces of their captures and said, piteously, “Soon we will be no more.” Now, I am sure you know someone who was happy and full of life who has suffered some adverse circumstances and is emotionally, physically, or born so worn down that they no longer want to live, and you know that is not them talking, but the endless pain and torment they so badly want to escape from and cannot. Often times, it is much harder for victims to get help than people know. It is not that they do not want to be saved, it is however, that the system is set up to make victims of those they want to harm. How else did Larry Nassar go on abusing hundreds of girls from 1992 until 2015? How did Jerry Sandusky go on abusing young boys from 1994 until 2011? Because people in positions of authority liked him and protected him, until they could not. Nonetheless, countless lives were ruined while these innocent children were enslaved. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Even the vested economic interests of the West Indian bloc could not gloss over the appalling facts nor ignore the public support the abolitionists were gaining. However, in modern times, the force of the people has to be involved in stopping slavery. We cannot allow radicals to continue to fan the flames of this reign of terror. Unless the Divine power has raised you up to be as Athanasius contra mundum, I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy, which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of humans and devils, but if God be for you who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? Oh, be not weary of well-doing. Go on in the name of God, and in the power of His might, till even modern American slavery, the vilest thing currently under the Sun, shall vanish away before it. That God that has guided you from your youth up may continue to strengthen in this and all things, is my prayer. Be not weary of well-doing. We must issue a proclamation at the deluge of every kind of vice which, to the scandal of our holy religion, and to the evil example of our loving subject, have broken upon this nation. The only wat to reform morals is to ruin purses. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Make them pay. How can you sleep while the fate of men, women, and children are in the hand of abusers should be rushing to your minds, and the guilt of our wicked land. If one really loves another, one would rather die for that person than to injure the individual. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nor height, nor depth, not any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” reports Romans 8.35, 39. If we would truly seek to be more like our Saviour and Master, learning to love as He loves should be our highest goal. Love is the foundation of marriage, but love itself is a product of law and lives by law. True love is law-abiding, for the highest satisfaction come to a law-abiding life. To those who are sealed to each other for all existence, love is ever warm, more hopeful, believing, courageous, and fearless. Such people live the richer, more joyful life. To them happiness and the making of it have no end. Above physical charm, love is begotten by qualities, often subtle, of mind and spirit. The beautiful face may hide an empty mind; the sweet voice may utter coarse words; the lovely form may be ill-mannered; the person of radiant beauty and the ne of kingly form may be intolerable bores on nearer acquaintanceship. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
The person who looks attractive may really have no faults, may excel us in knowledge and courtesy, yet one is not of our kind, one’s ways are not ours. Under either condition, love wilts in its first stage. “Falling in love” is always from within, rather than from without. That is, if true love is to be born and have long life, physical attractiveness must be reinforced with mental and spiritual harmony. There must be common ideals and standards. There must be a great devotion and companionship. Love is cleanliness and progress and sacrifice and selflessness. This kind of love never tires nor wanes, but lives through sickness and sorrow, poverty and privation, accomplishment and disappointment, time and eternity. Love cannot be forced, it comes out of Heaven, unasked and unsought. This respect comes of recognition that each of us is a son or daughter of God, endowed with something of one’s divine nature that each is an individual entitled to expression and cultivation of individual talents and deserving of forbearance, of patience, of understanding, of courtesy, of thoughtful consideration. True love is not so much a matter of romance as it is a matter of anxious concern for the well being of one’s companion. The World is filled with too many of us who are inclined to indicate our love with an announcement or declaration. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
True love is a process. True love requires personal action. Love must be continuing to be real. Love takes time. Too often expediency, infatuation, simulation, persuasion, or lust are mistaken for love. If our love is no deeper than the arousal of momentary feeling or the expression in words of what is more lasting than the time it takes to speak them, how hollow, how empty. We must at regular and appropriate intervals speak and reassure others of our love and the long time it takes to prove it by our actions. Real love does take time. The Great Shepherd had the same thoughts in mind when he taught, “If ye love me, keep my commandments,” reports Jon 14.15. If you love me, feed my sheep,” reports John 21.16. If it is to be continuing, love demands action. Love is a process, not a declaration. Love is not an announcement. Love is not a passing fancy. Love is not an expediency. Love is not convenience. God-given proclamations should remind us we can often best show our love through the process of feeling and keeping. Love of God takes time. Love of family takes time. Love of country takes tie. Love of neighbour takes time. Love of companion takes time. Love in courtship takes time. Love of self takes time. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
One who loves has and feels responsibility. If we look at love between two who are preparing for a temple marriage, we see the elements of sacrifice and of serving each other’s best interest, not a shortsighted “me” interest. True love and happiness in courtship and marriage are based upon honesty, self-respect, sacrifice, consideration, courtesy, kindness, and placing “we” ahead of “me.” Perfect love is perfectly patient. Unlike our love, Jesus’ love consists of active restraint as well as pressing encouragement. His perfect love of each and all spares Him the need to accept us as we now are for He knows perfectly what we have the possibility to become. Love, as defined by the Lord, elevates, protect, respects, and enriches another. It motivates one to make sacrifices for another. At the hour of sin, pure love is pushed out of one door while lust sneaks in the other. Affection has then been replaced with desire of the flesh and uncontrolled passion. Accepted has been the doctrine which the devil is so eager to establish, that illicit relations in pleasures of the flesh that are justified. Dear Lord in Heaven, with your quick-sent lightning and penetrating rain, please make the Earth fertile, storm-rider, hammer-wielder. Please wield the lightening on my side, Thunderer, and I will ensure that my cause is just. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
Wilder of the hammer, red-bearded one, God, protector, to you I call. I stand in the midst of a storm, and ask your protection. You who bear the flaming hammer, to you I pray: please fight on my side against all my opponents. For with you on my side, who can stand before me? Please remember my devotion to you, Lord of Thunder. As I work to your honour, may you work also to mine. Thou didst thus make Thy greatness and holiness known in Thy World, and didst bring great deliverance to America. Then Thy children came into Thy dwelling place, cleansed the Temple, purified the Sanctuary, kindled lights in Thy sacred courts, and they designated these days for giving thanks and praise unto Thy great name. For all this, Thy name, O our King, shall be blessed and exalted for ever and ever. O, please inscribe all the children of Thy covenant for a happy life. May all the living do home unto Thee forever and praise Thy name in truth, O God, who art our salvation and our help. Please blessed be Thou, O Lord, Beneficent One, unto whom our thanks are due. Our God and God of our fathers, please bless us with threefold blessing written in the Torah of Moses, Thy servant, and spoken by Aaron and his sons, Thy consecrated priests: May the Lord bless thee and keep thee; so may it be His will. May the Lord make His countenance to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee; so may it be His will. May the Lord turn His countenance unto thee and give thee peace. So may it be His will. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
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Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse. Homes range in size from approximately 2,000 to 3,000 square feet.
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 HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
The Act of Creation is a Miracle of Which One Hears, but in Which One Does Not Believe!
The individual choice of garnishment of a burger can be an important point to the consumer in this day when individualism, in my mind, is an increasingly important thing to people. You may give us your symptoms. We will make the diagnosis. And we, the Establishment—for which I make no apologies for being part of—will implement the solution. Not only is darkness known through light, but conversely, light is known through darkness. As only that which works is real, so only good is real in the sense of exiting. Good is tantamount to convenient, sufficient, appropriate, suitable. One ought therefore to translate “omne agens agit propter bonum” as: “Every agent works for the sake of what suits it.” That is what the devil does too, as we all know. He too has an “appetite” and strives after perfection—not in good but in evil. Even so, one could hardly conclude from this that his striving is “essentially good.” However, not every situation where a person or a group has uncontrolled power over another generates sadism. Many—perhaps most—parents, prison guards, school teachers, and bureaucrats are not sadistic. For any number of reasons, the character structure of many individuals is not conducive to the development of sadism even under circumstances that offer an opportunity for it. Persons who have a dominantly life-furthering character, will not easily be seduced by power. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
What matters is the intensity of the sadistic passion within the character structure of a given person. There are many in whose characters sadistic elements can be found, but balanced by such strong life-furthering trends that they cannot be classified as sadistic characters. Not rarely in such individuals the internal conflict between the two orientations results in an enhanced sensitivity toward sadism and in the reactive formation of allergic reactions against all its forms. (Traces of their sadistic tendences may still show up in unimportant, marginal behaviour, slight enough to escape awareness.) There are others with a sadistic character in whim sadism is at least balanced by countervailing forces (not merely repressed), and while they may feel a certain amount of enjoyment in the control of helpless people, they would not participate in or get pleasure from actual torture and similar atrocities (except under extraordinary circumstances, such as mass frenzy). This can be demonstrated by the attitude of the Hitler regime toward the sadistic atrocities it ordered. It had to keep the extermination of Jews and Polish and Russians civilians a close secret known only to a small group of the SS elite, but kept from the vast majority of the German population. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
In many speeches by Himmler and other executors of atrocities, it was stressed that the killings must be done in a “humane” way, without sadistic excesses, sine otherwise it would be too repugnant even to the SS men. In some instances orders were given that Russian and Polish civilians who were to be killed had to be put through a short, formal trial in order to give their executors the feeling that the shooting was “legal.” While all this sounds absurd in its hypocrisy, it is nevertheless a proof that the Nazi leaders believed that large-scale sadistic acts would be revolting to most otherwise loyal adherents of the regime. A great deal of material has come to light since 1945, but a systematic investigation of the degree to which the majority of Germans were attracted by sadistic acts—even though they avoided knowing about them—has not yet been made. If one isolates them from the whole character structure, sadistic character traits can never be understood. They are part of a syndrome that has to be understood as a whole. For the sadistic character everything living is to be controllable; living beings become things. Or, still, more accurately, living beings are transformed into living, quivering, pulsating objects of control. Their responses are forced by the one who controls them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The sadist wants to become the master of life, and hence the quality of life should be maintained in one’s victim. This is, in fact, what distinguishes one from the destroying persons. The destroyer wants to do away with a person, to eliminate one, to destroy life itself; the sadist wants the sensation of controlling and choking life. Another trait of the sadist is that one is stimulated only by the helpless, never by those who are strong. It does not cause any sadistic pleasure, for instance, to inflict a wound on an enemy in a fight between equals, because in this situation the infliction of the wound is not an expression of control. For the sadistic character there is only one admirable quality, and that is power. One admires, loves, and submits to those who have power, and one despises and wants to control those who are powerless and cannot fight back. The sadistic character is afraid of everything that is not certain and predictable, that offers surprises which would force one to spontaneous and original reactions. For this reason, one is afraid of life. Life frightens one precisely because it is by its very nature unpredictable and uncertain. It is structured but it is not orderly; there is only one certainty in life: that all humans die. Love is equally uncertain. To be loved requires a capacity to be loving oneself, to arouse love, and it implies always a risk of rejection and failure. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Because love and unpredictable and may be unrequited, this is why the sadistic character can “love” only when one controls, id est, when ne has power over the object of one’s love. The sadistic character is usually xenophobic and neophobic—one who is strange constitutes newness, and what is new arouses fear, suspicion, and dislike, because a spontaneous, alive, and not-routinized response would be required. Another element is the syndrome is the submissiveness and cowardice of the sadist. It may sound like a contradiction that the sadist is a submissive person, and yet not only is it not a contradiction—it is, dynamically speaking, a necessity. One tries to compensate for this lack by having power over others, by transforming the worm one feels oneself to be into a god. However, even the sadist who has power suffers from one’s human impotence. One may kill and torture, but one remains loveless, isolated, frightened person in need of a higher power to whom one can submit. For those one step below Hitler, the Fuhrer was this highest power; for Hitler himself, it was Fate, the laws of Evolution. This need to submit is rooted in masochism. Sadism and masochism, which are invariably linked together, are opposites in behavioristic terms, but they are actually two different facets of one fundamental situation: the sense of vital impotence. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Both the sadist and the masochist need another being to “complete” them, as it were. The sadist makes another being an extension of oneself; the masochist makes oneself the extension of another being. Both seek a symbiotic relationship because neither has one’s center in oneself. While it appears that the sadist is free of one’s victim, one needs the victim in a perverse way. Because of the close connection between sadism and masochism it is more correct to speak of a sadomasochistic character, even though the one or the other aspect will be more dominant in a particular person. The sadomasochist has also been called the “authoritarian character,” translating the psychological aspect of one’s character structure into terms of a political attitude. This concept finds its justification in the fact that persons whose political attitude is generally described as authoritarian (active and passive) usually exhibit (in our society) the traits of the sadomasochistic character: control of those below and submission to those above. The sadomasochistic character cannot be fully understood without reference to Dr. Freud’s concept of the “anal character,” enlarged by one’s disciples, especially by K. Abraham and Ernest Jones. Dr. Freud (1908) believed that the anal character manifested itself in a syndrome of character traits: stubbornness, orderliness, and parsimony, to which punctuality and cleanliness were added later. He assumed that this syndrome was rooted in the “anal libido” that has its sources in the anal erogenous zone. The character traits of the syndrome were explained as reaction formations or sublimation of the aims of this anal libido. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Various traits of the syndrome are manifestations of the distance-keeping, controlling, rejecting, and hoarding mode of relatedness (“hoarding character”). This does not imply that Dr. Freud’s clinical observations with respect to the particular role of everything pertaining to feces and bowel movement was not correct. On the contrary, in decades of psychoanalytic observation of individuals, I have found Dr. Freud’s observations full confirmed. The difference lies, however, in the answer to the following: Is the anal libido the source of the preoccupation with feces and, indirectly, of the anal character syndrome, or is the syndrome the manifestation of a special mode of relatedness? In the latter case, the anal interest has to be understood as another, but symbolic expression of the anal character, not as its cause. Feces are, indeed, a very fitting symbol: they represent that which is eliminate from the human life process and which no longer serves human’s life. Those wishing to speculate might consider that the fascination with feces and smells constitutes a kind of neurophysiological regression to an evolutionary stage in which the animal was oriented more by smell than by sight. The hoarding character is orderly with things, thoughts and feelings, but one’s orderliness is sterile and rigid. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The hoarder cannot endure things to be out of place and has to put them in order; in this way one controls space; by irrational punctuality one controls time; by compulsive cleanliness one undoes the contact one had with the World which is considered dirty and hostile. (Sometimes, however, when no reaction-formation or sublimation has developed, one is not overclean but tends to be dirty.) The hoarding character experiences oneself like a beleaguered fortress; one must present anything from going out and save what is inside the fortress. One’s stubbornness and obstinacy is a quasi-automatic defense against intrusion. The hoarder tends to feel that one possesses only a fixed quantity of strength, energy, or mental capacity, and that this stock is diminished or exhausted by use and can never be replenished. One cannot understand the self-replenishing function of all living substance, and that activity and the use of our powers increases our strength while stagnation weakens it; to one, death and destruction have more reality than life and growth. The act of creation is a miracle of which one hears, but in which one does not believe. One’s highest values are order and security; one’s motto: “There is nothing new under the sun.” In one’s relationship to others intimacy is a threat; either remoteness or possession of a person means security. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
The hoarder tends to be suspicious and to have a special sense of justice that in essence says: “Mine is mine and yours is yours.” The anal-hoarding character has only one way to feel safe in one’s relatedness to the World: by possessing and controlling it, since one is incapable of relating oneself by love and productivity. That the anal-hoarding character has the close relationship to sadism described by classic psychoanalysts is amply borne out by the clinical data, and it makes little difference whether one interprets this connection in terms of the libido theory or in terms of the relatedness of humans to the Word. It is also evidenced by the fact that social groups with an anal-hoarding character tend to exhibit a marked degree of sadism. Roughly equivalent to the sadomasochistic character, in a social rather than a political sense, is the bureaucratic character. In speaking here of bureaucrats, I refer to the old-fashioned, cold, authoritarian bureaucrats as they are still found in many old-fashioned schools, hospitals, prisons, railroads, and post offices. Big industry, which is also a highly bureaucratic organization, has developed an entirely different character-type—the friendly, smiling, “understanding” bureaucrat who has perhaps taken a course in “human relations.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The reasons for this change lie in the nature of modern industry, its need for teamwork, for avoiding friction, for better labour relations, and a number of other factors. It is not as if the new friendly bureaucrats were insincere, as if they were really sadist who smile instead of showing their real faces; in fact, the old-fashioned sadist is not very suited to be a modern bureaucrat, for the reasons just mentioned. The modern bureaucrat is not a sadist turned friendly, but one is a thing to oneself, just as other people are things for one. One feels little, either for them or for oneself, and one’s friendly treatment, while not false, is so superficial and thin as to become false. However, even this is not quite fair, because nobody really expects it to be more than superficial and thin, except perhaps for the short moment when they both smile and indulge in the delusion that this is human contact. Two extended and thorough studies of the character of the modern manager will confirm or correct these impressions. In the bureaucratic system every person controls the one below one and is controlled by the one above. Both sadistic and masochistic impulses can be fulfilled in such a system. Those below, the bureaucratic character will hold in contempt, those above, one will admire and fear. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
One only has to look at the facial expression and the voice of a certain type of bureaucrat criticizing one’s subordinate, or frowning when one is a minute late, or insisting on behaviour that at least symbolically expresses that during office hours one “belongs” to the superior. Or one might think of the bureaucrat being the post office window and watch one’s hardly noticeable thin little smile as one shuts one’s widow at 5.30 P.M. sharp, while the last two people who have already been waiting for half an hour have to leave and come back the next day. The point is not that one stops selling stamps at 5.30 P.M. sharp: the important aspect of one’s behaviour is the fact that one enjoys frustrating people, showing them that one controls them, a satisfaction that is expressed in one’s facial expression. Needless to say, not all old-fashioned bureaucrats are sadistic. Only a depth psychological study could show what the incidence of sadism among this group is compared with nonbureaucrats or modern bureaucrats. To mention only some outstanding examples, General Marshall and General Eisenhower, both among the highest ranking members of the military bureaucracy during the second World War, were conspicuous of their lack of sadism and their genuine humane concern for the life of heir soldiers. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
On the other hand, a number of both German and French generals in the first World War were conspicuous for the ruthlessness and brutality with which they sacrificed the lives of their soldiers for no adequate strategic purpose. In many cases the sadism is camouflaged by kindness and what looks like benevolence toward certain people in certain circumstances. However, it would be erroneous to think that the kindness is simply intended to deceive, or even that it is only a gesture, not based on any genuine feeling. To understand this phenomenon better, it is necessary to consider that most sane people wish to preserve a self-image that makes them out to be human in at least some respects. To be completely inhuman means to be completely isolated, to lose any sense of being part of humanity. Hence it is not surprising that there are many data which makes one assume that the complete absence of any kindness, friendliness, or tenderness to any human being creates, in the long run, intolerable anxiety. There are reports of cases of insanity and psychic disorders, for instance, among humans who were in the Nazi special formations and who had to kill thousands of people. Under the Nazi regime a number of the functionaries who had to carry out the orders for the mass killings suffered nervous breakdowns that were called Funktinarskrankheit (“functionaries’ disease”). #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
I have used the words “control” and “power” in reference to sadism, but one must be clearly aware of their ambiguity. Power can mean power over people, or it can mean power to do things. What the sadist is striving for is power over people, precisely because one lacks the power to be. Many writers, unfortunately, make use of this ambiguous meaning of the words “power” and “control,” and in order to smuggle in the praise of “power over” they identify it with “power to.” Moreover, lack of control does not mean lack of any kind of organization, but only of those kinds in which the control is exploitative and the controlled cannot control the controllers. There are many examples from primitive societies and contemporary intentional communities in which there is rational authority based on rea—not manipulated—consent of all, and where relations of “power over” do not develop. To be sure, the one who has no power to defend oneself also suffers characterologically. One may become submissive and masochistic instead of sadistic. However, one’s realistic powerlessness may also be conducive to the development of virtues like solidarity and compassion, as well as to creativity. Being powerless and hence in danger of being enslaved, or having power and hence being in danger of becoming dehumanized, are two evils. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Which is to be shunned the most is a matter of religious and moral or political convictions. Buddhism, the Jewish tradition starting with the Prophets, and the Christian Gospels makes a clear decision, contrary to contemporary thinking. It is quite legitimate to make subtle differences between power and nonpower, but one danger is to be avoided: that of using the ambiguous meaning of certain words to recommend serving God and Caesar simultaneously, or still worse to identify them. Obviously evil can be represented as a diminution of good, but with this kind of logic one should just as well say: The temperature of the Arctic winter, which freezes our noses and ears, is relatively speaking only a little below the eat prevailing at the equator. For the Arctic temperature seldom falls much lower than 230 degrees Celsius above absolute zero. All things on Earth are “warm” in the sense that nowhere is absolute zero even approximately reached. Similarly, all things are more or less “good,” and just as cold is nothing a diminution of warmth, so evil is nothing but a diminution of good. The privatio boni argument remains a euphemistic petitio princippii no matter whether evil is regarded as a lesser good or as an effect of the finiteness and limitedness of created things. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The false conclusion necessarily follows from the premise “Deus = Summum Bonum,” since it is unthinkable that the perfect food could ever have created evil. It merely created the good and the less good (which last is simply called “worse” by laymen). Just as we freeze miserably despite a temperature of 230 degrees Celsius above absolute zero, so there are people and things that, although created by God, are good only to the minimal and bad to the maximal degree. It is probably from this tendency to deny any reality to evil that we get the axiom “Omne bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homine.” This is a contradiction of the truth that one who crated the heat is also responsible for the cold (“the goodness of the less good”). We can certainly hand it to Augustine that all natures are good, yet just not good enough to prevent their badness from being equally obvious. One could hardly call the things that have happened, and still happen, in the concentration camps of the dictator states an “accidental lack of perfection”—it would sound like mockery. Psychology does not know what good and evil are in themselves; it knows them only as judgments about relationships. “Good” is what seems suitable, acceptable, or valuable from a certain point of view; evil is its opposite. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
If the things we call good are “really” good, then there must be evil things that are “real” too. It is evident that psychology is concerned with a more or less subjective judgment, id est, with a psychic antithesis that cannot be avoided in naming value relationships: “good” denotes something that is not bad, and “bad” something that is not good. There are things which from a certain point of view are extremely evil, that is to say dangerous. There are also things in human nature which are very dangerous and which therefore seem proportionately evil to anyone standing in their line of fire. It is pointless to gloss over these evil things, because that only lulls ne into a sense of false security. Human nature is capable of an infinite amount of evil, and the evil deeds are as real as the good ones so far as human experience goes and so far as the psyche judges and differentiates between them. Only unconsciousness makes no difference between good and evil. Inside the psychological realm one honestly does not know which of them predominates in the World. We hope, merely, that good does—id est, what seems suitable to us. No one could possibly say what the general good might be. No amount of insight into the relativity and fallibility of our moral judgment can deliver us from these defects, and those who deem themselves beyond good and evil are usually the worst tormentors of humankind, because they are twisted with pain and fear of their own sickness. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Today as never before it is important that human beings should not overlook the danger of the evil lurking within them. It is unfortunately only too real, which is why psychology must insist on the reality of evil and must reject any definition that regards it as insignificant or actually non-existent. Psychology is an empirical science and deals wit realities. As a psychologist, therefore, I have neither the inclination nor the competence to mix myself up with metaphysics. Only, I have to get polemical when metaphysics encroaches on experience and interprets it in a way that is not justified empirically. My criticism of the privatio boni holds only so far as psychological experience goes. From the scientific point of view the privatio boni, as must be apparent to everyone, is founded on a petitio principii, where what invariably comes out at the end is what you put in at the beginning. Arguments of this kind have no power of conviction. However, the fact that such arguments are not only used but are undoubtedly believed is something that cannot be disposed of so easily. It proves that there is a tendency, existing right from the start, to give priority to “good,” and to do so with all the means in our power, whether suitable or unsuitable. So if Christian metaphysics clings to the privatio boni, it is giving expression to the tendency always to increase the good and diminish the bad. The privatio boni may therefore be a metaphysical truth. I presume to no judgment on this matter. I must only insist that in our field of experience white and black, light and dark, good and bad, are equivalent opposites which always predicate one another. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
The Infinite Reality cannot be reasoned with, but only reasoned about. It cannot even be adequately symbolized, for regarding it as a mental image, a pictured thought, is only a more refined form of idol-worship. It can only be designated. The true Godhead is unconditioned, formless, not picturable. No individual worship can reach what is utterly beyond all individual existence. No name can be given that will properly stand for what is without attributes and without limitations. In the ultimate reality there are and can be no distinctions and no differences no grades and no change. Striker, axe-bearer, splitter, hammerer: please protect me. Bolt-caster, cleaver, smasher, way-clearer: please protect me. Warrior, victor, overcomer, protector: please protect me. Please break their shields, hammerer: please dissolve their defenses, stormer; please remove their courage, thunderer. Please fight beside me as my comrade, please win through with me to victory. Tyrannical power rose up against Thy people America to compel them to forsake Thy Word, and to force them to transgress Thy commandments. In Thine abundant mercy Thou didst stand by them in time of distress. Thou didst rise to their defense and didst vindicate their cause. Thou didst bring retribution upon the evil doers, delivering the strong into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few, the wicked into the hands of the just, and the arrogant into the hands of those devoted to Thy Scripture. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Believe it or not the key to the massive front door was made of solid gold and the keys for the other 2,000 doors of the Eighth Wonder of the World fill two water buckets. We hear stories about dark things creeping out of the shadows, about people being possessed and doing unnatural, evil things to each other. If you are like me, you have tried to see inside yourself, to find in you what you see in others. If you are like me, you have only ever seen darkness where others have light. You believe you have no soul. You believe you have no goodness in you. However, you are made of God like everyone else. I was told I have no further permission from them to make use of any records I compiled while I was in the dead center of the 160-room catacomb—spellbound by the perplexity leavened by extravagant Victorian beauty scattered along each crooked path of exploration. However, I think it is important to share these srories. There is a dim-lit storeroom stacked entirely with never-used furnishings, displays rare hand-wrought elegance from another era, finest productions of forgotten craftsmen. Here are specially designed priceless stained-glass doors and windows, some set with jewel stones; concave-convex Belgium optical cut-glass panels furnished by Tiffany; a delicate inlaid spiderweb window designed personally by the Mystery Lady of the House. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
One sees exquisite sets of daisy pattern windows from Austria and rolls of quarter-inch thick, embossed French wall-paper. No causal visitor can see it all. Palatial elegance unfolds with each turn. One gazes through oval lens windows now only magnifying the pandemonium of Winchester Boulevard. But God, I swear it, in my soul of soul, it is not greed to live again, it is that the tale is unfinished, the demon continues, and I die. I would help, I would be an angel of the Lord somehow. It was a terrifying display of power. And I realized I felt possessed. I felt she was my Queen. I was displaying possession! The Queen had the Mind Gift and opened the many doors for me that lay between us. There was something so remarkable that it was painful for me to reveal it. No one human ever knows what lies beyond true death. Sarah Winchester admired her quiet gardens, sprouting fountains and blossoming orchards. The massive, flawless mirror still stands in the reception room, now counting expressions of a million perplexed faces. Spirits can come very close to knowing; they can see bright stairways to Heaven, they can see the fruit trees of paradise, they can talk to the dead in various forms, they can glimpse the light of God, on, that is forever happening, these glimpses and glimpses of light, but they cannot really know what lies beyond true death! No one who really escapes the Earth and its Earthbound spirits ever comes back. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
They may appear to you. They may talk to you. However, you cannot make them come from beyond death. Once they are dead, it is in their hands or God’s hands whether they appear here or not. So do not ever believe anyone who tells you one knows all about Heaven. All of the realms of the spirits and angels that will ever be known to you or to me are of the Earth, not beyond Death. You understand? People are fascinated by the ghost of a man said to have broken his neck while attempting to flee the mansion. There is sometimes a big shadow in the darkness, smelling of the winter cold, and then his warm trembling hands will wrap around your neck. There is a ghost dressed in armor who walks around the house at night. There are cold spots and objects that move from room to room of their own volition. Marvelous parqueted floors are everywhere, their intricate designs highlight optical illusion patterns assembled from as many as six different rare hardwoods, their tiny, apparently jointless segments forming polished mirror sweep of elegant harmony. Once seen it is easy to believe such a floor required the work of one man for a solid year. Connecting hallways of inlaid linoleum, trod by two million shuffling feet, show little wear. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
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Spare You Country’s Flag as if it was a Star-Crossed Lover Shining Bright!
If truth is less shapely than fiction, still it is more honest. The most obviously upsetting force likely to strike the family in the decades immediately ahead will be the impact of new birth technology. The ability to pre-set the gender of one’s baby, or even to “program” its IQ, looks and personality traits, must now be regarded as a real possibility. Embryo implants, babies grown in vitro, gene editing, the ability to swallow a pill and guarantee oneself twins or triplets or, even more, the ability to walk into a “babytorium” and actually purchase embryos—all this reaches so far beyond any previous human experience that one need to look at the future through the eyes of the poet or painter, rather than those of the sociologist or conventional philosopher. It is regarded as somehow unscholarly, even frivolous, to discuss these matters. Yet advances in science and technology, or in reproductive biology alone, could with in a short time, smash all orthodox ideas about the family and its responsibilities. When babies can be grown in a laboratory jar what happens to the very notion of maternity? And what happens to the self-image of the female in societies which, since the very beginnings of humans, have taught one that one’s primary mission is the propagation of and nurture of the race? Few social scientists have begun as yet to concern themselves with such questions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
One who has concerned oneself with birth technology and the woman’s role in the family and society is psychiatrist Hyman G. Weitzen, director of Neuropsychiatric Service at Polyclinic Hospital in New York. The cycle of birth, Dr. Weitzen suggests, “fulfills for most women a major creative need…Most women are proud of their ability to bear children…The special aura that glorifies the pregnant woman has figured largely in the art and literature of both East and West.” What happens to the cult of motherhood, Dr. Weitzen asks, if “her offspring might literally not be hers, but that of a genetically ‘superior’ ovum, implanted in her womb from another woman, or even grown in a Petri dish?” If women are to be important at all, he suggests, it will no longer be because they alone can bear children. If nothing else, we are about to end the mystique of motherhood. Not merely motherhood, but the concept of parenthood itself may be in for radical revision. Indeed, the day may soon dawn when it is possible for a child to have more than two biological parents. Dr. Beatrice Mintz, a developmental biologist at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia, has grown what are coming to be known as “multi-mice”—baby mice each of which has more than the usual number of parents. Embryos are placed in a laboratory dish and nurtured until they form a single growing mass. This is then implanted in the womb of a third female mouse. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Then, a baby is born that clearly shares the genetic characteristics of both sets of doners. Thus a typical multi-mouse, born of two pairs of parents, has white fur and whiskers on one side of its face, ark fur and dark hair covering the rest of the body. Some 700 multi-mice bred in this fashion have already produced more than 35,000 offspring themselves. If multi-mouse is here, can “multi-human” be far behind? Under such circumstances, what or who is the mother? And just exactly who is the father? If a couple can actually purchase an embryo, then parenthood becomes a legal, not a biological matter. Unless such transactions are tightly controlled, one can imagine such grotesqueries as a couple buying an embryo, raising it in vitro, then buying another in the name of the first, as though for a trust fund. In that case, they might be regarded as legal “grandparents” before their first child is out of infancy. We shall need a whole new vocabulary to describe kinship ties. Furthermore, if embryos are for sale, can a corporation buy one? Can it buy ten thousand? Can it resell them? And if not a corporation, how about a non-commercial research laboratory? If we buy and sell living embryos, are we back to a new form of slavery? Such are the nightmarish questions soon to be debated by us. To continue to think of the family therefore, in purely conventional terms is to defy all reason. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Faced by rapid social change and the staggering implications of the scientific revolution, super-industrial humans may be forced to experiment with novel family forms. Innovative marginalized members of the community can be expected to try out a colourful variety of family arrangements. They will begin by tinkering with existing forms. We expect a well-ordered society, but we know that in reality some serious violations of justice nevertheless do occur. Conscientious refusal is noncompliance with a more or less direct legal injunction or administrative order. It is refusal since an order is addressed to us and, given the nature of the situation, whether we accede to it is known to the authorities. Typical examples are the refusal of the early Christians to preform certain acts of piety prescribed by the pagan state, and the refusal of the Jehovah’s Witnesses to salute the flag. Other examples are the unwillingness of a pacifist to serve in the armed forces, or of a soldier to obey an order that one thinks is manifestly contrary to the moral laws as it applies to war. Or gain, in Thoreau’s case, the refusal to pay a tax on the grounds that to do so would make one an agent of grace injustice to another. One’s action is assumed to be known to the authorities, however much one might wish, in some cases, to conceal it. Where it can be covert, one might speak of conscientious evasion rather than conscientious refusal. Covert infractions of a fugitive slave law are instances of conscientious evasion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
There are several contrasts between conscientious refusal (or evasion) and civil disobedience. First of all, conscientious refusal is not a form of address appealing to the sense of justice of the majority. To be sure, such acts are not generally secretive or covert, as concealment is often impossible anyway. One simply refuses on conscientious grounds to obey a command or to comply with a legal injunction. One does not invoke the convictions of the community, and in this sense conscientious refusal is not an act in the public forum. Those ready to withhold obedience recognize that there may be no basis for mutual understanding; they do not seek out occasions for disobedience as a way to state their cause. Rather, they bide their time hoping that the necessity to disobey will not arise. They are less optimistic than those undertaking civil disobedience and they may entertain no expectation of changing laws or policies. The situation may allow no time for them to make their case, or again there may not be any chance that the majority will be receptive to their claims. Conscientious refusal is not necessarily based on political principles; it may be founded on religious or other principles at variance with the constitutional order. Civil disobedience is an appeal to a commonly shared conception of justice, whereas conscientious refusal may have other grounds. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
For example, assuming that early Christians would not justify their refusal to comply with the religious customs of the Empire by reasons of justice but simply as being contrary to their religious convictions, their argument would not be political; nor, with similar qualifications, are the views of a pacifist, assuming that wars of self-defense at least are recognized by the conception of justice that underlies a constitutional regime. Conscientious refusal may, however, be grounded on political principles. One many decline to go along with a law thinking that it is so unjust that complying with it is simply out of the question. This would be the case if, say, the law were to enjoin our being the agent of enslaving another, or to require us to submit to a similar fate. These are patent violations of recognized political principles. It is a difficult matter to find the right course when some humans appeal to religious principles in refusing to do actions which, it seems, are required by principle of political justice. Does the pacifist posses an immunity from military service in a just war, assuming that there are such wars? Or is the state permitted to impose certain hardships for noncompliance? There is a temptation to day that the law must always respect the dictates of conscience, but this cannot be right. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
As we have seen in the case of the intolerant, the legal order must regulate human’s pursuit of their religious interests so as to realize the principle of equal liberty; and it may certainly forbid religious practices such as human sacrifice, to take an extreme case. Neither religiosity nor conscientiousness suffices to protect this practice. A theory of justice must work out from its own point of view how to treat those who dissent from it. The aim of a well-ordered society, or one in a state of near justice, is to preserve and strengthen the institutions of justice. If a religion is denied its full expression, it is presumably because it is in violation of the equal liberties of others. In general, the degree of tolerance accorded opposing moral conceptions depends upon the extent to which they can be allowed an equal place within a just system of liberty. If pacifism is to be treated with respect and not merely tolerated, the explanation must be that it accords reasonably well with the principles of justice, the main exception arising from its attitude toward engaging in a just war (assuming here that in some situations wars of self-defense are justified). The political principles recognized by the community have a certain affinity with the doctrine the pacifist professes. There is a common abhorrence of war and the use of force, and a belief in the equal status of humans are moral persons. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
And given the tendency of nations, particularly great power, to engage in war unjustifiably and to set in motion the apparatus of the state to suppress dissent, the respect accorded to pacifism serves the purpose of altering citizens to the wrongs that governments are prone to commit in their name. Even though one’s views are not altogether sound, the warnings and protests that a pacifist is disposed to express may have the result that on balance the principles of justice are more rather than less secure. Pacifism as a natural departure from the correct doctrine conceivably compensates for the weakness of humans living up to their professions. It should be noted that there is, of course, in actual situations no sharp distinction between civil disobedience and conscientious refusal. Moreover the same action (or sequence of actions) may have strong elements of both. While there are clear cases of each, the contrast between them is intended as a way of elucidating the interpretation of civil disobedience and its role in a democratic society. Given the nature of this way of acting as a special kind of political appeal, it is not usually justified until other steps have been taken within the legal framework. By contrast this requirement often fails in the obvious case of legitimate conscientious refusal. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
In a free society no one may be compelled, as the early Christians were, to preform religious acts in violation of equal liberty, not must a soldier comply with inherently evil commands while awaiting an appeal to a higher authority. These remarks lead up to the question of justification. The reason people like to keep society busy with fake news and chaos is because as long as the people’s passions are spent on each other, they are not being vented on their conquerors. However, “The God of Heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed,” the prophecies said. God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to release the oppressed. The true Kingdom of Heaven is already a present reality. However, the Kingdom of God is a rule, not realm. It is the declaration of God’s absolute sovereignty, of His total order of life in this World and the next. That this Kingdom is not of this World, as Jesus later explained, and that it is spiritual rather than temporal makes it no less authoritative; that it is a rule not a realm makes it no less an actual kingdom, its laws less binding than those of nations and states, any more than unseen physical laws are less binding than the laws of legislatures. Jesus is ushering in the Kingdom of God. Almost all of His parables focused on the Kingdom in one aspect or another, while His miracles authenticated His message. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
In converting water to wine, calming storms, multiplying loaves and fishes, healing the sick, and raising the dead, Jesus was not working magic to gather crowds; nor was He showing His power to gain credibility. He was demonstrating the reality of His rule. By exercising dominion over every phase of Earthly existence, He reveled that in fact the Kingdom of God had come. Many people miss Christ’s message because they, like many today, are conditioned to look for salvation in political solutions. People long for a military messiah who will stamp out their hated oppressors. Another reason that people miss the full significance of the message of the Kingdom of God is that Jesus speaks about a Kingdom that has come and a Kingdom that is still to come—one Kingdom in two stages. This still confused people today. A holy God would not take dominion over a sinful World. So He first sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross to pay the debt for human’s sin and thereby provide for humans to be made holy and fit for God’s rule. Christ’s death and resurrection—the D-Day of human history—assure His ultimate victory. However, we are still on the beaches. The enemy has not yet been vanquished, and the fighting is still ugly. Christ’s invasion has assured the ultimate outcome, however—victory for God and His people at some future date. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
The second stage, which will take place when Christ returns, will assert God’s rule over all the Universe; His Kingdom will be visible without imperfection. At that time there will be a final judgment of all people, peace on Earth, and the restoration of harmony unknow since Eden. Many soldiers died to bring about the victory in Europe. However, in the Kingdom of God, it was the death of the king that assured the victory. And this leads to another reason that the Kingdom is often misunderstood: the nature of the King Himself. What king would ever sacrifice oneself for one’s people? Kings sacrifice their subjects, not themselves. What kind would wash one’s servants’ feet, as Jesus did, or freely befriend one’s lowest subjects? Potentates maintain the mystique of leadership by keeping a distance from those they rule. A certain grandeur seems to robe those who occupy high office. There is a certain aloofness, a power that is exuded by great humans that people feel and want to follow. Jesus Christ exhibited none of this self-conscious aloofness. He served other first; He spoke to those to whom no one spoke; He dined with the lowest members of society; He touched the untouchable. He had no throne, no crown, no bevy of servants or armoured guards. A borrowed manger and a borrowed tomb framed His Earthly life. Kings and presidents and governors and mayors and prime ministers surround themselves with minions who rush ahead, swing the doors wide, and stand at the attention as they wait for the great to pass. Jesus said that He Himself stands at the door and knocks, patiently waiting to enter our lives. Christ came as the Lamb of God. However, lambs were for sacrifice. Where was the mighty warrior who would tear Rome to shreds? #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Because the nature of the King and the price He paid for His Kingdom, much is required of its citizens, and Jesus made these demands of the Kingdom clear. Through the centuries, however, many of His followers have watered down His teachings, stripped away His demands for the building of a righteous society, and preached an insipid religion concerned only with personal benefit. This distorted view portrays Christianity not as the powerful source of spiritual rebirth and the mediating force for justice, mercy, and love in the World, but as the ultimate self-fulfillment plan. The gospel is not a release for the captives, but confidence for the shy. It is the spiritual equivalent of racy sports cars, designer clothes—a commodity to help one get more out of life. Many humanists have failed to understand human nature. However, many Christians have failed also—failed to understand the utterly radical nature of the central message of Christianity. Other great leaders have expounded creeds, philosophies, and mystical visions. Many are wise and moral, but they are only belief systems: rules to live by, value codes. Humans require more than rules; they require what Jesus’ message of the Kingdom uniquely provides: answers to their most basic needs. What are these needs? To know God. The heat of humans is restless until it finds its rest in Thee. Humans most primal yearning—the need to know God. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
In announcing His messiahship Jesus was saying that God’s love and just rule has come to Earth—in Him. Humans would thereafter be able to find rest not in a law they could never hope to fulfill, but in the actual person of Jesus Christ. To find salvation. However, how does one come to a personal relationship with this Christ? That is the archetypal question asked by the apostle Paul’s jailer: “What must I do to be saved?” Because we interpret it from our perspective and not God’s, salvation has always been misunderstood. People want salvation from their oppressor. However, Christ same to save them from a much greater oppressor—the sin within one. Sin is essentially rebellion against the rule of God. This is why Jesus coupled the message of the Kingdom with the call to repent and believe. Faith and repentance, the opposite of rebellion, are necessary human responses to the divine initiative of spiritual rebirth, resulting in salvation. When Christ first used the term born again, it was not the evangelical cliché or secular slur it is today. He used it in late-night conversation with Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish religious community, telling him it was the key to entering into the Kingdom of God. Imagine the shock of the religious elite when they heard Jesus’ words: Salvation was not to be found in proud piety or scrupulous adherence to religious rules, but in turning from evil and humble faith in One greater the oneself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Just as one is born physically in a particular nation, so one is born spiritually by submitting to God’s rule in His holy nation. To find meaning. This relationship with God meets human’s deepest psychological need. As we have already seen, human beings cannot live in a vacuum. We are not a chance collision of atoms in an indifferent Universe or islands amid cold currents of modern culture. We each have a personal purpose in history, which is to be found under the purposeful rule of God, as a beloved citizen of His Kingdom. To find authority. Christianity is more than simply a relationship between humans and God, however. The Kingdom of God embraces every aspect of life: ethical, spiritual, and temporal, and it determines the patter, purpose and dynamic by which God orders life of the Heavenly polis in this World. In announcing this all-encompassing Kingdom, Jesus was no using a clever metaphor; He was expressing the literal theme of history—that God was King and the people were His subjects. This tradition dated back to the days of Abraham and the patriarchs, when God made His original covenant with the Jews to be His “holy nation.” Americans, steeped in the tradition of democracy, find a monarchy, even with Christ on the throne, an alien concept. We think in terms of human rulers whose limitless lust for power is a constant peril to humankind. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
However, God is not a mirror reflection of human rulers. He is God—and as such, is entitled to rule over all things. His character, as revealed in the Bible and in the person of Christ, reveals absolute justice, mercy, and love. Prophets promised the coming of Messiah and the eventual establishment of the Kingdom of God. Christ was the fulfillment of the prophecy; He was the final king in David’s royal line. However, Jesus was not just a king for Israel; He was king for all people. His message, then, assumes the ultimate authority humans require: God rules every aspect of what He has made. Life, death, relationships, and Earthly kingdoms are all in His hands. When Christ commanded His followers to “seek first the kingdom of God,” He was exhorting them to seek to be ruled by God and gratefully acknowledge His power and authority over them. That means that the Christian’s goal is not to strive to rule, but to be ruled. While God’s rule is authoritarian, it is also voluntary. The Good News is that the price has been paid, and His Kingdom is open to all who desire admission. If the joyful news of the rule of God is proclaimed, if humans humble themselves and do justice to its claims, if evil is overcome and humans are made free for God, then the Rule of God has already become actual among them, then the Reign of God is in their midst. If every other entity in the Universe and the Universe itself disappeared, God would remain. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
That which always remains the same, never changes, that is reality. Reality is God. THAT is real being which is faultless and partless, and without a single one of the characteristic properties belonging to this physical World. It never varies whereas that World is constantly changing. Such everlasting being is incomparable, unique, and beyond human picturization. THAT is the essence of all things, the base whence, eventually, the Universe is projected. That is the Real which not only is not subject to any change but also would still abide even if the entire Universe vanished. Everything and everyone else must come out of some prior element which traces itself down even to the first and original element, but the Real alone is self-abiding and self-existing. It has its own independent Being. There is no period so far off in the future, no tie so distant in the past, no area anywhere in space, that will be or has been without Being. If humans can find it today, they will find it then as they found it in antiquity. If they commune with it on this Earth, or enter into some relationship with it here, they can do likewise on other planets. Moreover it remains ever the Same, the Unchanged and Unchangeable. Reality being what it is, a gigantic fact which is utterly impregnable against time and change, even the total disappearance of the exponents of that truth which points to it could not alter its own status. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
We must never forget that the entire dynamic movement occurs inseparably within a static blessed repose. Becoming is not apart from Being. Its kinetic movement takes pace in the eternal stillness. World-Mind is forever working in the Universe whereas Mind is forever at rest and its still motionlessness paradoxically makes all activity and motion possible. The infinite unconditioned Essence could never become confined within or subject to the finite limited World-form. The one dwells in a transcendental timelessness whereas the other exists in a continuous time. There cannot be two eternal principles, two ultimate realities, for each will limit the other’s existence and thus deprive it of its absolute character. There is only the One, which is beyond all phenomena and yet includes them. The manifestation of the cosmic order, filled with countless objects and entities though it be, does not in any way or to any extent alter the character of the absolute Reality in which it appears. That character is unvarying—is never reduced to a lower form, never confined in a limited one, never modified by conditions, never deprived of a single iota of its being, substance, amplitude, or quality. It always is what it was. It is the ultimate origin of everything and everyone in this Universe, yet it remains as unchanged by their death as by their birth, by their absence as by their presence. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Everything in the Universe is liable to changes, because it was born and must die. We venerate God because He is not liable to change, being ever-existent and self-subsisting, birthless and deathless. Considered from its own standpoint, the infinite can never manifest as the finite, the Real can never alter its nature and evolve into the unreal; hence the pictures of creation or evolution belong to the realm of dream and illusion. The gran verity is that the Universal self has never incarnated into matter, nor ever shall. It remains what it was, is, must forever be—the Unchanged and Unchangeable. The infinite has never, can never, become the finite. The Real is neither the Many nor the Changing but THAT from which these are both derived. Such a truth will never need to be replaced by a newer one: it will hold its place, and satisfy the searching mind, in a thousand years’ time as much as it does today. Bradley’s errors are: (a) to turn the Absolute into a system or a process, and (b) to identify the Absolute with its contents. God of Gentle hands, with arms held wide in benediction: please come between my enemies and me and join us together in peace. Our God and God of our fathers, may our remembrance and the remembrance of our forefathers come before Thee. Please Remember the Messiah of the house of David, thy servant, and America, Thy holy city, and all Thy people, the house of America. Please grant us deliverance and well being, loving kindness, life and peace on this day and forever. Please restore America back to a land of sanity, prosperity, law and order so we can earn the American Dream, which always includes freedom and homeownership. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes
Whether you’re admiring the guest bedroom or getting ready for spa night in the Primary bedroom’s ensuite, living life at #MillsStation Residence 2 means enjoying clean, modern lines in a familiar family home layout. 😍
Residence Two at Mills Station is a two story home that has all the conveniences of a single story! At 2,317 square feet, this home features the Owner’s suite on the first floor with two secondary bedrooms on the “pop top” second story. Take advantage of the vaulted ceilings offered in this plan! The open floor plan includes three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, Home Hub, Loft and more! Walk into the great room and feel the height of the ceilings and all the light brought in from the high windows.
The kitchen opens directly to the dining room allowing for perfect flow. The large kitchen island makes food prep and entertaining easy while the walk in pantry provides ample storage. The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters. The great room is spacious and full of natural light with a covered patio! The Owner’s suite is located on the first floor of this home providing easy access and eliminating the hassle of climbing stairs daily. The Owner’s bathroom is spacious and tranquil including a large free standing soaking tub, walk in shower and large walk-in closet.
This home is designed with Universal Design concepts meaning that its well equipped for life’s transitions and aging in place. Learn more about this unique feature by speaking with a sales associate today!
Check out the interactive floor plan on our website! Link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-2/
Sit Down and I Will Tell You a Story, Stand Up and We Will Play a Game!
Some people try to find things in this game that do not exist. Football is two things. It is blocking and tackling. One important class of experiential products will be based on simulated environments that offer the customer a taste of adventure, excitement, titillation or other pleasure without risk to one’s real life or reputation. Thus computer experts, roboteers, designers, historians, architects, automotive engineers, and museum specialists will join to create experiential enclaves that reproduce, as skillfully as sophisticated technology will permit, the splendor of ancient Rome, the pomp of Queen Elizabeth’s court, the traditional arts, ceremonies, calligraphy and flower arranging of Japan, the economic prosperity and rapid development and advancement of China, the rich culture and mysterious of Africa, the superior engineering of Germany, the liveness and flavour of Latin culture, the intelligence of the Middle East, and the hardworking and orderly conduct of America. Customers entering these pleasure domes will leave their everyday clothes (and cares) behind, don costumes, and run through a planned sequence of activities intended to provide them with a first-hand taste of what the original—id est, unstimulated—reality must have felt like. They will be invited, in effect, to live in the past or perhaps even in the future. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Production of such experiences is closer than one might think. It is clearly foreshadowed in the participatory techniques now being pioneered in the arts. Thus “happenings” in which the members of the audience take part may be regarded as a first stumbling step toward these simulations of the future. The same is true of more formal works as well. When Dionysus in 69 was performed in New York, a critic summed up the theories of its playwright, Richard Schechner, in the following words. “Theater has traditionally said to an audience, ‘Sit down and I will tell you a story.’ Why cannot it also say, ‘Stand up and we will play a game?’” Mr. Schechner’s work, based loosely on Euripides, says precisely this, and that audience is literally invited to join in dancing to celebrate the rites of Dionysus. Artists also have begun to create whole “environments”—works of art into which the audience may actually walk, and inside which things happens. For instance, BMW believes that design should always be a reflection of your identity, and so they make cars with a strong personality. When designing the BMW Concept i4, the goal was to make it organic, and less industrial. In its captivating dynamic, engineers wanted to add more nature-inspired elements. More handworked wood, intelligent fabrics—designs for all the sense so one feels like the cabin of the car is a living room. The artists who produce these are really “experiential engineers.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Knowledge gained for research on creating experiences will permit the construction of fantastic simulations. However, it will also lead to complex live environments that subject the customer to significant risks and rewards. The African safari today is a colourless example. Future experience designers will, for example, create gambling casinos in which the customer plays not for money, but for experiential payoffs. Certain American television programs, such as Survivor and The Bachelor, already pay players off in experiential rewards. In the future, simulated and non-simulated experiences will also be combined in ways that will sharply challenge human’s grasp of reality. In Ray Bradbury’s vivid novel, Fahrenheit 451, suburban couples desperately save their money to enable them to buy three-wall or four-wall video sets that permit them to enter into a kind of televised psycho-drama. They become actor-participants in soap operas that continue for weeks or months. Their participation in these stories is highly involving. We are, in fact, beginning to move toward the actual development of such “interactive” films with the help of advanced communications technology. The combination of simulation and “reals” will vastly multiply the number and variety of experiential products. However, the great psych-corps of tomorrow will not only sell individual, discrete experiences. They will offer sequences of experiences so organized that their very juxtaposition with other another will contribute colour, harmony or contrast to lives that lack these qualities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Beauty, excitement, suspense or delicious sensuality will be programmed to enhance one another. By offering such experiential chains or sequences, the psych-corps (working closely, no doubt, with community mental health centers) will provide partial frameworks for those whose lives are otherwise too chaotic and unstructured. In effect, they will say: “Let us plan (part of) your life for you.” In the transient, change-filled World of tomorrow, that proposition will find many eager takers. Many architects are now designing homes to feel like luxury hotels. These places are all about lifestyles—inviting the community to become part of the property. Adding unique vantage points, creating indoor/outdoor experiences, and making homes larger, function, bright and comfortable is what is making architecture exciting these days. People are always looking for a home that is special, affluent home buyers are seeking homes that are destinations with purpose and meaning, where lifelong memories can be created because luxury is the absence of worry. Home buyers want to know they are in good hands with gorgeous detail abound. Creative space segmentation is necessary, providing both intimae and social zones, as well as furniture delivering comfort and functionality. More extravagant entrance features are emerging, which include large green walls, indoor waterfalls, large chandeliers and multimedia stations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
No longer is the classic bed-table-closet combo enough to make a guest bedroom or primary bedroom feel inviting. Home buyers are looking for creative offices for those who are business travelers, interesting looking TV panels and an extra sofa or accent chairs next to the king-sized bed are just some of the key ingredients for a trendy guest bedroom or primary bedroom. We have also seen colourful walls and eclectic décor mixes, which can definitely appeal to guests or the home’s primary occupant wanting to experience unique accommodation. Bathrooms stopped being perceived as auxiliary rooms, spaces to be minimized, in order to expand living areas. The modern individual expects more than one got in the past. A resort bathroom with spa-like features is an open invite to relaxation and a sure-proof method of alluring potential buyers through the promise of ephemeral luxury. Think en-suite bedrooms, water fall showers, over-sized bathtubs, dual sinks, giant towels, beauty items and plenty of space. Fewer home builder base the appeal of the kitchen strictly on practicability. Cooking is an art and so should be the exhibition space. We have seen more and more home builders come up with exciting designs and turn the kitchen design into a memorable space. Theme are highly recommended, pushing creativity to new heights. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Sensory experiences go a log way. Beside open concept, the blurring of indoor-outdoor boundaries is well integrated in the array of services offered by modern homes builders, who strive to keep their indoor-outdoor transition as ethereal as possible. Not only are the offering more windows, larger windows, walls of glass, but also expanding the patio spaces so nature is brought inside in every possible way. Wood paneling, stone decorations, lush greenery, vibrant lawns, indoor waterfalls—these are just some of the elements employed to release the tension of residents. Sustainability is a delicate issue for home owners as they are doing their best to minimize short term costs. However, being ahead of the game is important, which leads to innovative ideas. Over-sized windows for natural lighting, solar panels to conserve electricity, luxury vinyl wood plank floors, and energy efficient appliances are just a few of the trends for staying green. It is a fact that a home will stay in a buyer’s mind for a long time if the accommodation is unique. With this in mind, home builders are offering individual personalized spaces as never before. With home hubs, butler’s pantries, build-in furniture, card rooms, super family rooms, and workspaces in the house. And more than anything, homes should provide comfort, that feeling of being home away from home, in your own home. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
No mater how luxurious, technology friendly and well-themed the home, coziness is a major factor to consider. Wood additions, inspired decorating items, carpets, a fireplace, build-in tables, uniquely shaped kitchen islands all add up to a memorable home. In the World outside of the home, agriculture and the manufacture of goods will become economic backwaters, employing fewer and fewer people. Highly automated, the making and growing of goods will be relatively simple. The design of new goods and the process of coating them with stronger, brighter, more emotion-packed psychological connotations, however, will challenge the ingenuity of tomorrow’s best and most resourceful entrepreneurs. The service sector, as defined today, will be vastly enlarged, and once more the design of psychological rewards will occupy a growing percentage of corporate time, energy, and money. Investment services, such as mutual funds, for example, may introduce elements of experiential gambling to provide both additional excitement and non-economic payoffs to their shareholders. Insurance companies may offer not merely to pay death benefits, but to care for the window or widower for several months after bereavement, providing nurses, psychological counseling and other assistance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Based on banks of detail data about their customers, they may offer a computerized mating service to help the survivor locate a new life partner. Services, in short, will be greatly elaborated. Attention will be paid to the psychological overtones of every step or component of the product. Finally, we shall watch the irresistible growth of companies already in the experiential field, and the formation of entirely new enterprises, both profit and non-profit, to design, package and distribute planned or programmed experiences. The arts will expand, becoming as Ruskin or Morris might have said, the handmaiden of the industry. Psych-corps and other businesses will employ actors, directors, musicians, and designers in large numbers. Recreational industries will grow, as the whole nature of leisure is redefined in experimental terms. Education, already exploding in size, will become one of the key experiences industries as it is beginning to employ experiential techniques to convey both knowledge and values to the students. The communication and computer industries will find in experiential production a major market for their machines and for their software as well. With COVID-19 and more people working from home and going to school at home, I would expect Cisco TelePresence IX5000 Series to become more people. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
This system allows immersive collaboration beyond the boardroom. Cisco TelePresence IX5000 Series offers a triples screen, high-fidelity audio and video, and rich collaboration tools, and more bandwidth of existing products. The IX5000 Series brings people together to make decisions faster with high-definition video and theater-quality audio. The immersive, lifelike experience increases engagement, which helps teams build relationships and trust. Participants can share multiple content sources on three 70-inche LCD screens. The 4K cameras allow flexible whiteboard placement and the series features industry-first support for H.265 video on a triple-screen product. This product allows people to work from home, teach from home, attend class from home and interact with others as if they are in the same room. In short, those industries that in one way or another associate themselves with behavioural technology, those industries that transcend the production of tangible goods and traditional services, will expand most rapidly. Eventually, the experience-makers will form a basic—if not the basic—sector of the economy. The process of psychologization will be complete. With more people working from home, spending less on transportation, they will be able to afford larger homes with real offices or even classrooms. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The essence of tomorrow’s economy is an emphasis upon the inner as well as the material need for individuals and groups. This new emphasis will arise not merely from the demands of the consumer, but from the very need of the economy to survive. In a nation where all essential material needs can be filled by perhaps no more than three-fourth or even half of the productive capacity, a basic adjustment is required to keep the economy healthy. It is this convergence of pressures—from the consumer and from those who wish to keep the economy growing—that will propel the techno-societies toward the experiential production of the future. The movement in this direction can be delayed. The poverty-stricken masses of the World may not stand idly by as the World’s favoured few traverse the path toward psychological self-indulgence. There is something morally repellent about one group seeking to gratify itself psychologically, pursuing novel and rarified pleasures, while the majority of humankind lives in wretchedness or starvation. The techno-societies could maintain a more conventional production, shifting resources to environmental quality control, and then launching absolutely massive anti-poverty and foreign assistance programs. By creaming off “excess” productivity and, in effect, giving it away, the factories can be kept running, the agricultural surpluses used up, and the society can continue to focus on the satisfaction of material wants. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
A fifty-year campaign to erase hunger from the World and family planning methods, for example, would not only make excellent moral sense, but would buy the techno-societies badly needed time for an easier transition to the economy of the future. Such a pause might give us tine to contemplate the philosophical and psychological impact of experiential production. If consumers can no longer distinguish clearly between the real and the simulated, if whole stretches of one’s life may be commercially programmed, we enter into a set of psycho-economic problems of breathtaking complexity. These problems challenge our most fundamental beliefs, not merely about democracy or economics, but about the very nature of rationality and sanity. One of the great unasked questions of our time has to do with the balance between vicarious and non-vicarious experience in our lives. No previous generation has been exposed to one-tenth the amount of vicarious experiences that we lavish on ourselves and our children today, and no one, anywhere, has any real idea about the impact of this monumental shift on personality. Our children mature physically more rapidly than we did. The age of first menstruation continues to drop four to six month every decade. The population grows taller sooner. It is clear that many of our young people, products of television and instance accesses to oceans of information, also become precocious intellectually. However, what happens to emotion development as the ratio of vicarious experience to “real” experience rises? Does the step-up of vicariousness contribute to emotional maturity? Or does it, in fact, make it as slow as molasses on a Winter’s day? #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
And what, then, happens when an economy in search of a new purpose, seriously begins to enter into the production of experience for their own sake, experience that blur the distinction between the vicarious and the non-vicarious, the simulated and the real? One of the definitions of sanity, itself, is the ability to tell real from unreal. Shall we need a new definition? We must begin to reflect on these problems, for unless we do—and perhaps even if we do—service will in the end triumph over manufacture, and experiential production over service. The growth of the experiential sector might just be an inevitable consequence of affluence. For the satisfaction of human’s elemental material needs opens the way for new, more sophisticated gratifications. We are moving from a “gut” economy to a “psyche” economy because there is only so much gut to be satisfied. Beyond this, we are also moving swiftly in the direction of a society in which objects, things, physical constructs, are increasingly transient. Not merely human’s relationships with them, but the very things themselves. It may be that experiences are the only products which, once brought by the consumer, cannot be taken away from one, cannot be disposed of like non-returnable soda pop bottles or nicked razor blades. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
For the ancient Japanese nobility every flower, every serving bowl or obi, was freighted with surplus meaning; each carried a heavy load of coded symbolism and ritual significance. The movement toward the psychologization of manufactured goods takes us in this direction; but it collides with the powerful thrust toward transience that makes the objects themselves so perishable. Thus we shall find it easier to adorn our services with symbolic significance than our products. And, in the end, we shall pass beyond the service economy, beyond the imagination of today’s economists; we shall become the first culture in history to employ high technology to manufacture than most transient, yet lasting of products: the human experience. The flood of novelty about to crash down upon us will spread from universities and research centers to factories and offices, from the marketplace and mass media into our social relationships, from the community into the home. Penetrating deep into our private lives, it will place absolutely unprecedented strains on the family itself. The family has been called the “giant shock absorber” of society—the place to which the bruised and battered individual returns after doing battle with the World, the one stable point in an increasingly flux-filled environment. As the super-age of information revolution unfolds, this “shock absorber” will come in for some of its own shocks. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Social critics have a field day speculating about the family. The family is “near the point of complete extinction,” says Ferdinand Lundberg, author of The Coming World Transformation. “The family is dead except for the first year or two of child raising,” according to psychoanalyst William Wolf. “This will be its only function.” Pessimists tell us what will take place. Family optimists, in contrast, contend that the family, having existed all this time, will continue to exist. Some go so far as to argue that the family is in for a Golden Age. As leisure spreads, they theorize, families will spend more time together and will derive great satisfaction from joint activity. “The family that play together, stays together,” et cetera. A more sophisticated view hold that the very turbulence of tomorrow will drive people deeper into their families. “People will marry for stable structure,” says Dr. Irwin M. Greenberg, Professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. According to this view, the family serves as one’s “portable root,” anchoring one against the storm of change. In short, the more transient and novel the environment, the more important the family will become. It may be that both ideas in this debate are wrong. For the future is more open than it might appear. #RandolphHrris 14 of 21
The family may neither vanish nor enter upon new Golden Age. It may—and this far more likely—break up, shatter, only to come together again in weird and novel ways. If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till Go sees the World to be either redeemed or no further redeemable. A Christian cannot, therefore, believe any of those who promise that if only some reform in our economic, political, or hygienic system were made, a Heaven on Earth would follow. This might seem to have a discouraging effect on the social worker, but it is not found in practice to discourage one. On the contrary, a strong sense of our common miseries, simply as humans, is at last as good a spur to the removal of all the miseries we can, as any of those wild hopes which tempt humans to seek their realization by breaking the moral law and prove such dust and ashes when they are realized. If applied to individual life, the doctrine that an imagined Heaven on Earth is necessary for vigorous attempts to remove present evil, would at once reveal is absurdity. Hungry human seeks food and sick humans healing none the less because they know that after the meal of the cure the ordinary ups and downs of life still await them. I am not, of course, discussing whether very drastic changes in our social system are, or are not, desirable; I am only reminder the reader that a particular medicine is not to be mistake for the elixir of life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Since political issues have here crossed our path, it is clear that the Christian doctrine of self-surrender and obedience is a purely theological, and not in the least a political, doctrine. Of forms of government, of civil authority and civil obedience, I have nothing to say. The kind and degree of obedience which a creatures owes to its Creator is unique because the relation between creature and Creator is unique: no inference can be drawn from it to any political proposition whatsoever. The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the World we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the World: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in the World and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with out friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home. We must never mistake the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the “unimaginable sum of human misery.” When a human hesitates too long over taking a course which intuition tells one, he or she should take, and in which one’s higher life is concerned, it may be that destiny will intervene and make one suddenly realize that this is the way, and that all doubts should be thrown out. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
An intuition may be sudden and unexpected, quite contrary to the line of previous thought about the matter. This is certainly true of many appearances but it is not true of other ones. An intuition may come into the mind apparently by hazard, unsummoned, experience. Every thought which comes down to us from that serene height comes with a divine authority and penetrating force which are absent from all other thoughts. We receive the visitant with eagerness and obey it with confidence. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached he maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the Universe. The addition of a million sufferers adds no more pain. Intuition is not the equal but rather the superior of all other human faculties. It delivers the gentlest of whispers, commands from the Overself, whereas the other faculties merely carry them out. It is the master, they are the servants. The intellect things, the will works, and the emotion drives towards the fulfilment of intuitively felt guidance in the properly developed spiritually erect human. Of all evils, pain only is sterilized or disinfected evil. Intellectual evil, or error, may recur because the cause of the first error (such as fatigue or bad handwriting) continues to operate; but quite apart from that, error in its own right breeds error—if the first step in an argument is wrong, everything that follows will be wrong. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Sin may recur because the original temptation continues: but quite apart from that, sin of its very nature breeds sin by strengthening sinful habit and weakening the conscience. Now pain, like the other evils, may of course recur because the cause of the first pain (disease, or an enemy) is still operative: but pain has no tendency, in its own right, to proliferate. When it is over, it is over, and the natural sequel is joy. This distinction may be put the other way round. After an error you need not only to remove the causes (the fatigue or bad writing) but also to correct the error itself: after a sin you must not only, if possible, remove the temptation, you must also go back and repent the sin itself. In each case an “undoing” is required. Pain requires no such undoing. You may need to heal the disease which caused it, but the pain, once over is sterile—whereas every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time. Again, when I err, my error infects every one who believes me When I sin publicly, every spectator either condones it, thus sharing my guilt, or condemns it with imminent danger to one’s charity and humility. However, suffering naturally produces in the spectators (unless they are unusually depraved) no bad effect, but a good one—piety. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Thus that evil which God chiefly uses to produce the “complex good” is most markedly disinfected, or deprived of that proliferous tendency which is the worst characteristic of evil in general. The Real is forever and unalterably the same, whether it be the unmanifest Void or the manifested World. It has never been born and consequently can never die. It cannot divide itself into different “realities” with different space-time levels or multiply itself beyond its own primal oneness. It cannot evolve or diminish, improve or deteriorate. Whereas everything else exists in dependence upon Mind and exists for a limited time, however prolonged, and therefore has only a relative existence, Mind is the absolute, the unique, the ultimate reality because with all its innumerable manifestations in the Universe it has never at any moment ceased to be itself. Only its appearances suffers change because they are in time and space, never itself, which is out of time and space. The divisions of time into past, present, and future are meaningless here; we may speak only of its “everness.” The truth about it is timeless, as no scientific truth could ever be, in the sense that whatever fate the Universe undergoes its own ultimate significance remains unchanged. If the Absolute appears to us as the first in the time-series, as the First Cause of the Universe, this is only true from our limited standpoint. It is in fact only our human idea. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The human mind can take itself the truth of transcendental being only by taking out of itself the screens of time, space, and person. For being eternally self-existence, reality is utterly timeless. Space divisions are equally unmeaning in its “Be-ness.” The Absolute is both everywhere and nowhere. It cannot be considered in spatial terms. Even the word “infinite” is really such a term. If it is used here because no other is available, let me be clearly understood, then, that it is used merely as a suggestive metaphor. If the infinite did not include the finite then it would be less than infinite. It is erroneous to make them both mutually exclusive. The finite alone must exclude the infinite from its experience but not vice versa. In the same way the infinite Duration does not exclude finite time. Hence, corruption and defects in natural things are said to be contrary to some particular nature; yet they are in keeping with the plan of universal nature; inasmuch as the defect in one thing yields to the good of another, or even to the universal good: for the corruption of ne is the generation of another, and through this it is that a species is kept in existence. Since God, then, provides universally for all being, it belongs to His providence to permit certain defects in particular effects, that the perfect good of the Universe may not be hindered, for if all evil were prevented, much god would be absent from the Universe. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
A lion would cease to life, if there were no slaying of animals; and there would be no patience of martyrs if there were no tyrannical persecution. Thus Augustine says (Enchiridion 2): “Almighty God would in wo wise permit evil to exist in His works, unless He were so almighty and so good as to produce good even from evil.” It would appear that is was on account of these two arguments to which we have just replied, that some were persuaded to consider corruptible things—exempli gratia, casual evil things—as removed from the care of divine providence. Dear Lord in Heaven, your bow’s swift arrows: are they blessing or destruction? Please show your blasting face to those who need it. Please show your blessing face to those who deserve it. Whether beating down mercilessly or shining benevolently, please bring what is right to each, God. Whether by fighting off enemies or singing them to peace, please be my protector, and I will always speak sweety of You. Our God and God of our fathers, please accept our rest. Please Sanctify us through Thy commandments, and please grant our portion in Thy Torah. Please give us abundantly of Thy goodness and please make us rejoice in Thy salvation. Please purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth. In Thy loving favour, O Lord our God, please grant that Thy holy Sabbath be our joyous heritage, and may America who sanctifies Thy name, rest thereon. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hallowest the Sabbath. O Lord our God, please be gracious unto Thy people of America and accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy sanctuary and receive in love and favour the supplication of America. May the worships of Thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
Don’t mind us, we’re just admiring the view from the backyard of this #BrightonStation Residence 3 home. Not only does it look great, it’s also shaped like the perfect place to make memories.
View a video walkthrough of this residence on our website. Link in bio. https://youtu.be/yQTnZ0oO2OE
Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse. There are enhanced included features, smart open floor plans, ample storage, nature views, and the quality you expect from Cresleigh.
Randolph Harris II International Institute 