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Lord, what Fools these Mortals be!
The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own. We ought to read books that set the tone of our lives. Most of what we read does not have that power. It either falls within the province of our special field, or it has no meaning for us at all. However, every one of us should ask ourselves: If there one book, are there two or three books that have been absolutely central to your entire development? I read not to learn, but to live. Seen by that standard, there are not many books that are truly influential for us. Any halfway decent book will, of course, have some effect on us. No book leaves us completely untouched, any more than a serious conversation or meeting with another person does. If two people speak seriously together, they will both experience something, or—as I prefer to put it—they will both undergo a change. The change will often be so minute that we cannot detect it. However, this line of thought takes back to this point: If two people talk together and both of them remain the same people they were before, then they have not really talked at all. They have simply engaged in an exchange of words. The Old Testament in the Christian Bible made a powerful and lasting impression on me. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
As a boy I was particularly drawn to the vision of universal peace, to the vision of the lamb lying down together, and at a young age it made me believe there was a chance for World peace. In the Old Testament, one can distinguish between the psalms that reflect some inner movement, a shift from sadness to joy, and those quite different ones that maintain the same mood and that are in a certain sense, though not always, somewhat self-righteous. At the very least there is no inner conflict in them, n inner movement. There are psalms that can be understood only if we notice that the speaker begins in a state of despair. Then he overcomes his despair, but it comes back. And he overcomes it again. And only when he hits rock bottom, when his despair is most intense, does a sudden, miraculous change come about, a change accompanied by a jubilant, religious, hopeful mood. Psalm 22, which begins with the words, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” is a good example. An interesting point is that people have often wondered why Jesus spoke these words of despair at his death. That question puzzled me when I was still a child. His words do not seem in keeping with his voluntary death and with his faith. However, there really is no contradiction here, because the psalms are cited differently in the Jewish tradition and in the Christian. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Where the Christian tradition cites a psalm by number, the Jewish tradition evokes the entire psalm by quoting the first sentence of the first few words. So what the Bible is telling us in this passage is that Jesus recited all of Psalm 22. And if you read this psalm, you will see that it begins in despair but ends as a hymn of hope. Perhaps more than any other psalm it expresses the universalistic, messianic message of early Christianity. If we fail to see the shift that takes place in that psalm, and if we think Jesus spoke only the first sentence of it, then we overlook the message. This sentence was even changed in the Gospel later because it caused misunderstandings. Well, we are getting a bit far afield here. However, then it is nice that we are not bound by a program or schedule. So that is one of the major influences in my life, and when I read the prophets today they are as fresh and alive for me as they were when I was a child, perhaps even fresher and more alive. Youth is not chronological age but the state of growing, learning, and changing. All people must be helped to regain the conditions of youth. The matriarchal position—to state the case briefly—stands for the principle of unconditional human love. A mother loves her children without any regard for their merits. She loves them because they are her children. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
And if a mother loved her baby only when it smiled sweetly and was well behaved, then many a child would starve to death. A father loves his children because they obey him, because they are like him. Now I am not speaking here about every mother or every father but rather about types or categories, about the classic types we see exemplified throughout the history of paternal and maternal love. Taken individually, people are so mixed that we find many maternal fathers and many paternal mothers. The difference has to do with the social order, with whether it is patriarchal or matriarchal. The conflict between the two is nowhere more beautifully articulated then in Sophocles’’ Antigone. Antigone embodies the matriarchal principle: “I am here not to hate but to love,” while Creon embodies the patriarchal one, the principle that makes the state supreme over all other human values (and a principle that we would call fascist today). Many human beings experience a longing for some extraordinary figure like a god of goddess, who will relieve one of one’s responsibilities, eliminate the risks of life, indeed, even relieve us of our fear of death, and shelter us in a kind of paradise. For that protection, we pay the price of dependence on religion and God. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Unlike God, we do not start with nothing and make something of it. We start with ourselves as nothing and makes something of the nothing with the things at hand. The relationship of one human being to another and to the specifically human emotions that are rooted not in instinct but rather in human’s existences, are what make us come alive. Deep in the hearts of almost all people, they want more peace than war, more life than death, more light than darkness. However, some people are sadomasochist, they are people with an unlimited passion for exerting power and control over others but also for subjection of the self. We see this more during the COVID-19 crisis with the restrictions on businesses and people, but the dependence on the federal government and people shaming others for not wearing masks. Now, in the light of more extensive study and better insight, I have come to consider another factor even more important. This factor is called necrophilia. Ordinarily that term is applied only to a sexual perversion, but in using it as I do, I am following the example of the great Spanish philosopher Unamuno, who said in a speech he gave in Salamanca in 1936 that the Falangist motto “Long live death: was a necrophiliac moto. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
What I mean by necrophilia in a nonsexual and nonphysical sense is a fascination with everything that is dead, lifeless, with everything having to do with dismemberment, with the destruction of living relationships. The necrophiliac is motivated not by a love for the living but by an attraction to the purely mechanical. Necrophilia means love for what is dead. Nekros means corpse. Necrophilia is not a love of death but a love of dead things, of everything that is not alive. Its opposite is a love of the living, a love for everything that grows, that has structure, that forms a unity, that is not dismembered. Many necrophiliacs have a characteristic facial expression. They look as if they smell something rotten, but there is no bad odor present. What this indicates is that these people regard living things, not dead ones, as filth, and they consequently relate to them in this archaic way—by smelling and sniffing. There are some individuals who enjoy smelling foul odors. They are attracted to bad smalls or to excrement and carrion. This perversion is visible in their facial expressions. With necrophiliac types you will find that the face remains immobile. They do not react; they are frozen. With biophilic people, the face shows a great variety of expressions, and it lights up in the presence of whatever is alive. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Another way we can express this is to say that the necrophiliac is hopelessly boring. A biophile is never boring. It does not matter what one talks about. The subject can be quite insignificant, but whatever one says is always marked by vitality. A necrophiliac may say something intelligent, but it does not come alive. We have all had the experience of hearing an intellectual say something terribly clever, yet we are bored by it. Conversely, a much less brilliant person can say something quite simple (this is bringing us back to our starting point this evening, the subject of conversation), and we are not bored at all. On the contrary, we are stimulated, because it is life that is speaking to us. We are always drawn to what is alive. It is vitality that makes people attractive. These says people seem to think—we humans talk this way, and the cosmetic industry tries to convince women that it is true—we seem to think people can make themselves attractive and lovable if they paint their faces this way or that way or adopt a certain expression that is supposed to be modern and irresistible. A lot of people fall for that kind of thing, usually people who do not have much of a self. There is only one thing that really attracts us, and that is vitality. We can observe that in people who are falling in love. In their desire to please and attract the other, they in fact become livelier than they usually are. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
The only problem with people becoming livelier than they usually are is once they have achieved their goal and “have” each other, their desire to be more alive is much reduced. Then they suddenly become quite different, and after a while they do not love each other anymore. They do not even know why they fell in live in the first place. Their partners are changed. They are no longer beautiful, because they no longer have the beauty that vitality brings to the face. There are two basic tendencies in people and they are a propensity for life and a propensity for death and destruction. Eros, the vital force or the force of love, strives for the integration of the whole, for union, while the goal of the death wish is disintegration or, dismemberment, dissection. Necrophilia and biophilia are two forces of equal strength. The desire to destroy is as strong in people as is their joy of life. That could be why there is so much crime and the population keeps growing so rapidly. As a result of increase competition, scarcity of resources, population growth, and crime, a lot of people have no chance to be free and to develop their own powers, people are hemmed in, and live in a class or in a society in which everything functions in a mechanical, lifeless way and people are losing their capacity for spontaneity. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
This link between thwarted vitality and necrophilia is evident in individuals. It is by no means rare to find people whose families were so “dead” that the children never experience even bureaucratized, routine, subject rules. Life consisted solely of possessing things, owning things. The parents regarded any sign of spontaneity in their children as inherently bad. It is clear beyond any doubt that children are naturally very lively and active, a fact proved by recent neurophysiological and psychological studies. The child becomes more and more discouraged and then takes another direction a direction in which the nonliving becomes central. In the final analysis we can say that a person who finds no joy in living will try to avenge oneself and will prefer to destroy life rather than feel that one can make no sense of one’s life at all. One may still be alive physiologically, but psychologically one is dead. That is what gives rise to the active desire to destroy and to the passionate need to destroy everyone, including oneself, rather than confess that one has been born yet has failed to become a living human being. That is a bitter feeling for those who experience it, and we are not indulging in mere speculation if we assume that the wish to destroy follows on this feeling as an almost inevitable reaction. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
I am afraid that our preoccupation with everything mechanical encourages necrophilia to increase. And COVID-19, social distancing, and masks are making it even harder to connection with people, read their emotions and enjoy life, especially with nearly 30,000,000 people and approximately 1,000,000 dead globally. We are running away from life. It is difficult to explain in any concise way why it is that things are taking the place of human beings in our cybernetic society and culture, pushing human beings aside, but perhaps in is due to the World being overpopulated ad evolution. People are becoming increasingly uncertain about their own being. When I speak of “being” here I am using a term of great importance in the history of philosophy. What is being? I am less interested in its philosophical meaning here than I am in its experiential aspect. Let me give a simple example. A woman might come to an analyst and begin describing herself something like this: Well, Doctor, I “have” a problem. I “have” a happy marriage, and I “have” two children, too, but I am “having” so many difficulties. Every sentence she produces uses the verb “to have.” The entire World is represented as an object of having. In earlier time (and I know this from my own experience in both English and German) she would have said: I feel miserable, I am satisfied, I am worried, I love my husband, or perhaps I do not love him or I doubt that I love him. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
In any language like that, people speak about what they are, about their own activity, about the feelings they experience, not about objects or possessions. People are more and more inclined to express their being with nouns followed by some form of the verb “to have.” I have everything, but I am nothing. Some people are convinced that they must “have” things and “get” people in order to live because they do not see a future for themselves in the name of the nation or of the law or of the party or of necessity or of God or of any other authorities they may come up with. So their life has to “have” conditions in which they can “get” people and flourish. Lies can tie us to a political part, but ultimately it is only the truth that can lead to the liberation of humans. However, too many people are afraid of freedom and prefer illusions to it. They do not want to believe in God, they are to believe they are god. Because people take a party line. Party politics can put blinders on us. We could say, in a certain sense, that party politics can makes us apolitical. I do not mean that as an attack on political parties, nor do I deny their necessity, but I do feel that when our political life is dominated by party politics, we run the danger of becoming unpolitical. We need more independent people. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
It is essential to your political lives that there be politically active people who, from their own perspectives come right out and say what they think, what they know. Private and public life cannot be separated. We cannot split off our knowledge of ourselves from our knowledge of society. Both belong together. The truth is indivisible. We cannot see reality here and remain closed to it there. That dulls our cutting edge and makes our search for the truth ineffectual. And we can see ourselves rightly only if we can see others rightly, only if we can see them in the context of their social circumstances, which is to say, only if we look sharply and critically at all that is going on around us in the World. This is what love demands of us, too. And if we love our fellow humans, we cannot limit our insight and our love only to others as individuals. That will inevitably lead to mistakes. We have to be political people, I would even say passionately involved political people, each of us in the way that best suits our own temperaments, our working lives, and our own capabilities. The intellectual has one prime task to fulfill, first, last, and always. It is one’s job to search out the truth as best one can and to speak that truth. It is not the intellectual’s primary calling, it is not one’s primary function, to draft political platforms. And to say this does not contradict what I have just been saying about political activity. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
However, it is the intellectual’s special task—and this is what defines one’s role or should define it—to purse the truth without compromise and without regard for one’s own or anyone else’s interests. If intellectuals restrict their function of finding and speaking the whole truth in the service of any party program or any political goals, no matter how praiseworthy the program or the goals may be, then those intellectuals are failing in their own unique task and, ultimately, in the most important political task they have. For political progress depends on how much of the truth we know, how clearly and boldly we speak it, and how great an impression it makes on other people. “And when even was come, there came a rich person from Arimathea, named Joseph, who also himself was Jesus’ disciple: This man went to Pilate, and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate, and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate commanded it to be given up. And Joseph took the body, and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock: and he rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb, and departed. And Mary Magdalene was there, and the other Mary, sitting over against the sepulchre. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
“Now on the morrow, which is the day after the Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees were gathered together unto Pilate, saying, Sir, we remember that the deceiver said, while he was yet alive, After three days I raise again. Command therefore that the sepulchre be made sure until the third day, lest haply his disciples come and steal one away, and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead: and the last error will be worse than the first. Pilate said unto them, Ye have a guard: go your way, make it as sure as ye can. So they went, and made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone, the guard being with them,” reports Matthew 27.57-66. In the Nuremburg War-Crime Trials a witness appeared who had lived for a time in a grave in a Jewish grave-yard, in Wilna, Poland. It was the only place he—and many others—could live, when in hiding after they had escaped the gas chamber. During this time he wrote poetry, and one of the poems was a description of a birth. In a grave nearby a young woman gave birth to a boy. The eighty-year-old gravedigger, wrapped in a linen shroud, assisted. When the newborn child uttered his first cry, the old man prayed: “Great God, hast Thu finally sent the Messiah to us? For who else than the Messiah Himself can be born in a grave?” However, after three says the poet saw the child sucking his mother’s tears because she had no milk for him. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
This story, which surpasses anything the human imagination could have invented, has not only incomparable emotional value, but also tremendous symbolic power. When I first read it, it occurred to me more forcefully than ever before that our Christian symbols, take from the gospel stories, have lost a great deal of their power because too often repeated and too superficially used. It has been forgotten that the manger of Christmas was the expression of utter poverty and distress before it became the place where the angels appeared and to which the star pointed. And it has been forgotten that the tomb of Jesus was the end of His life and of His work before it became the place of His final triumph. We have become insensitive to the infinite tension which implied in words of the Apostles’ Creed: “suffered…was crucified, dead, and buried…rose again from the dead.” We already know, when we hear the first words, what the ending will be: “rose again;” and for many people it is no more than the inevitable “happy ending.” The old Jewish grave-digger knew better. For him, the immeasurable tension implicit in the expectation of the Messiah was a reality, appearing in the infinite contrast between the things he saw and the hope he maintained. The depth of this tension is emphasized by the last part of the story. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
After three days the child was not elevated to glory; he drank his mother’s tears, having nothing else to drink. Probably he died and the hope of the old Jew was frustrated once more, as it had been frustrated innumerable times before. No consolation can be derived from this story; there cannot be a happy ending—and precisely this is the truth about our lives. In a remarkable passage of his book, Credo, Karl Barth writes about the word “buried” in the Creed: “By a person’s being buried it is evidently confirmed and sealed—seemingly in his presence, actually already in his absence—that he has no longer a present, any more than a future. He has become pure past. He is accessible only to memory, and even that only so long as those who are able and willing to remember him are not themselves buried. And the future toward which all human present is running is just this: to be buried.” These words describe exactly the situation in which the pious old Jew payed: “Great God, hast Thou finally sent the Messiah to us?” We often hide the seriousness of the “buried” in the Creed, not only for the Christ, but also for ourselves, but imagining that not we shall be buried, but only a comparatively unimportant part of us the physical body. That is not what the Creed implies. It is the same subject, Jesus Christ, of Whom it is said that He suffered and that He was buried and that He was resurrected. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Jesus Christ was buried, He—His whole personality—was removed from the Earth. The same is true of us. We shall die, we—our personality, from which we cannot separate our body as an accidental part—shall be buried. Only if we take the “buried” in the gospel stories as seriously as this, can we evaluate the Easter stories and can we evaluate the words of the grave-digger, “Who else than the Messiah can be born a grave?” His question has two aspects. Only the messiah can bring birth out of death. It is not a natural event. It does not happen every day, but it happens on the day of the Messiah. It is the most surprising, the most profound, and the most paradoxical mystery of existence. Arguments for the immortality of an assumedly better part of us cannot bring life out of the grave. Eternal life is brought about only with the coming of the “new reality,” the eon of the Messiah, which, according to our faith, has already appeared in Jesus as the Christ. However, there is another side to the assertation that nobody other than the Messiah Himself can be born in a grace, a side, which, perhaps, was less conscious to the pious Jew. The Christ must be buried in order to be the “Christ,” namely, He Who has conquered death. The gospel story we have heard assures us of the real and irrevocable death and burial of Jesus. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
The women, the high priests, the soldiers, the sealed stone—they are all called by the gospel to witness to the reality of the end. We ought to listen more carefully to these witnesses, to the ones who tell us with triumph or cynicism that Jesus has been buried, that He is removed forever from the Earth, that no real traces of Him are left in our World. And we ought also to listen to the others who say, in doubt and despair, “But we trusted that it had been He Who should have redeemed Israel.” It is not hard to hear both these voices today, in a World where there are so many places like the Jewish cemetery in Wilna. It is even possible to hear them in ourselves, for each of us to hear them in oneself. And, if we hear them, what can we answer? Let us be clear abut this. The answer of Easter is not a necessity. In reality, there is no inevitable happy ending as there is in perverted and perverting cinemas. However, the answer of Easter has become possible precisely because the Christ has been buried. If it did not come from the complete end of the old life, the new life would not really be new life. Otherwise, it would have to be buried again. However, if the new life has come out of the grave, then he Messiah Himself has appeared. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
“And now it came to pass that, as soon as Amalickiah had obtained the kingdom he began to inspire the hearts of the Lamanites against the people of Nephi; yea, he did appoint men to speak unto the Lamanites from towers, against the Nephites. And thus he did inspire their hearts against the Nephites, insomuch that in the latter end of the nineteenth years of the reign of the judges, he having accomplished his designs thus far, yea, having been made king over the Lamanites, he sought also to reign over all the land, yea, and all the people who were in the land, the Nephites as well as the Lamanites. Therefore he had accomplished his design, for he had hardened the hearts of the Lamanites and blinded their minds, and stirred them up to anger, insomuch that he had gathered together a numerous host to go to battle against the Nephites. For he was determined, because of the greatness of the number of his people, to overpower the Nephites and to bring them into bondage. And thus he did appoint chief captains of the Zoramites, they being the most acquainted with the strength of the Nephites, and their places of resort, and the weakest parts of their cities; therefore he appointed them to be chief captains over his armies. And it came to pass that they took up their camp, and moved forth toward the land of Zarahemla in the wilderness. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
“Now it came to pass that while Amalickiah had thus been obtaining power by fraud and deceit, Moroni, on the other hand, had been preparing the minds of the people to be faithful unto the Lord their God. Yea, he had been strengthening the armies of the Nephite, and erecting small forts, or places round about to enclose his armies, and also building walls of stone to encircle them about, round about their cities and the borders of their lands; yes, all round about the land. And in their weakest fortifications he did place the greater number of humans; and this he did fortify and strengthen the land which was possessed by the Nephites. And thus he was preparing to support their liberty, their lands, their wives, and their children, and their peace, and that they might live unto the Lord their God, and that they might maintain that which was called by their enemies the cause of Christians. And Moroni was a strong and a might man; he was a man of a perfect understanding; yea, a man that did not delight in bloodshed; a man whose would did joy in the liberty, and his brethren from bondage and slavery. Yea, a man whose heart did swell with thanksgiving to his God, for the many privileges and blessings which he bestowed upon his people; a man who did labour exceedingly for the welfare and safety of the people. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
“Yea, and he was a man who was firm in the faith of Christ, and he had sworn with an oath to defend his people, his rights, and his country, and his religion, even to the loss of his blood. Now, if it were necessary, the Nephites were taught to defend themselves against their enemies, even to the shedding of blood; yea, and they were also taught never to give an offense, yea, never to raise the sword except it were to preserve their lives. And his was their faith, that by so doing God would prosper them in the land, or other words, if they were faithful in keeping the commandments of God that he would prosper them in the land; yea, warn them to flee, or to prepare for war, according to their danger; and also, that God would make it known unto them wither they should go to defend themselves against their enemies, and by so doing, the Lord would deliver them; and this was the faith of Moroni, and his heart did glory in it; not in the shedding of blood but in doing good, in preserving his people, yea, in keeping the commandments of God, yea, and resisting iniquity. Yes, verily, verily I say unto you, if all humans had been, and were, and ever would be, like unto Moroni, behold, the very powers of hell would have been shaken forever; yea, the devil would never have power over the hearts of the children of humans. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
“Behold, he was a man like unto Ammon, the son of Mosiah, yea, and even the other sons of Mosiah, yea, and also Alma and his sons, for they were all humans of God. Now behold, Helaman and his brethren were no less serviceable unto the people than was Moroni; for they did preach the word of God, and they did baptize unto repentance all humans whosoever would hearken unto their words. And thus they went forth, and the people did humble themselves because of their words, insomuch that they were highly favoured of the Lord, and thus they were free from wars and contentions among themselves, yea, even for the space of four years. However, as I have said, in the latter end of the nineteenth year, yea, notwithstanding their peace amongst themselves, they were compelled reluctantly to contend with their brethren, the Lamanites. Yea, and in fine, their wars never did cease for the space of many years with the Lamanites, notwithstanding their much reluctance. Now, they were sorry to take up arms against the Lamanites, because they did not delight in the shedding of blood; yea, and this was not all—they were sorry to be the means of sending so many of their brethren out of the World into an eternal World, unprepared to meet their God. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
“Nevertheless, they could not suffer to lay down their lives, that their wives and their children should be massacred by the barbarous cruelty of those who were once their brethren, yea, and had dissented from their church, and had let them and had gone to destroy them by joining the Lamanites. Yea, they could not bear that their brethren should rejoice over the blood of the Nephites, so long as there were any who should keep the commandments of God, for the promise of the Lord was, if they should keep his commandments they should prosper in the land,” reports Alma 48.1-25. God of the In-between, you I praise, you who sit at ease in the midst of chaos, you who sit at ease on the edge of a sword. Can anyone attain the mastery you should as you hold your place between life and death? Can anyone rival the poise your presence radiates as you sit in the gateway between past and future? Can anyone sit so still, but be ready to move at the exact time the moment requires? Lord who holds death and life equally in your hands, I stand in your presence today and give you my praise. Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness; revere Him all that inhabit the Earth. The Lord reigneth. Let the Heavens be glad and the Earth rejoice; let the sea roar, and all within it give praise. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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I Feared Dying, Not Because of Death, but Because it Would End My Career!
People talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do. Every society faces not merely a succession of probable futures, but an array of possible futures, and a conflict over preferable futures. The pace of events is moving so fast that unless we can find some way to keep our sights on tomorrow, we cannot expect to be in touch with today. Millions of people regard their work as something they must bear, a living indignity. Their feelings are not without precedent. A dark could of dissatisfaction blankets today’s work force. For the overwhelming majority, work is dull and meaningless. This pervasive discontent has spawned the paradoxical problems of laziness on the one hand and overwork on the other. Twenty five percent of employees gives one’s best effort on the job, and about twenty percent of the average worker’s time is wasted, thus producing, in effect, a four-day work week. However, sloth is an epidemic, so is over overwork. Moonlighting is a way of life for a substantial part of our work force. When the workers at a rubber manufacturing plant in Akron, Ohio USA, were given six-hour workdays—and over half of them took on a second full- or part-time job—this was a classic illustration! #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
The managerial counterpart to workers’ moonlighting is the workaholism of those who sublimate everything—family, leisure, friends, church—to career. The depths to which careerism can go is chronicled and is extreme but not an uncommon expression when a man confessed he feared dying, not because of death, but because it would end his career. This mind-set has produced an unending list of shallow folk-religion epigrams which tout the requisite qualities of successful careers: discipline—creativity is two percent inspiration and ninety eight percent perspiration; goals—if you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time; savvy—success in life some not from holding a good hand, but from playing a poor hand well; perseverance—tough times never last, but tough people do; vision—some people dream dreams and ask, Why? I dream dreams and ask, Why not?; self-confidence—believe in God, and you are halfway there; believe in yourself, and you are three-quarters there. The careerists who espouse the hubris of these credos wrongly think themselves heirs of the Protestant work ethic, but they are anything but that, as we shall see. This delusion takes on personally tragic dimensions, because surveys have indicated that the work ethics of Christians and non-Christians are virtually identical. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
At church they swear allegiance to values informed by creeds and Scriptures. However, at work they bow to idols of expedience and career success. Moral camouflage has become de rigueur (required by etiquette or current fashion) in the workplace. The plain truth is, many Christian humans miserably fail in their work ethics either because of sloth or overwork or, ironically, both. What we need is a work ethic which is informed by God’s Word and religiously lived out in the workplace and the Church. The reason this is so important is that most of us spend eight to twelve of our sixteen waking hours at work five or six days a week. So how we work not only reveals who we are, but determines what we are. The Christian discipline of work must be observed de rigueur wherever God has placed us. “Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound. However, where in abounded, grace did much more abound,” reports Romans 5.20. Thee words of Paul summarize his apostolic experience, his religious message as a whole, and the Christian understanding of life. To discuss theses words, or to make them the text of even several sermons, has always seemed impossible to me. I have never dared to use them before. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
However, something has driven me to consider these words during the past few months, a desire to give witness to the two facts which appeared to me, in hour of retrospection, as the all-determining facts of our life: the abounding sin and the greater abound of grace. There are few words more strange to most of us than “sin” and “grace.” They are strange, just because they are so well-known. During the centuries they have received distorting connotations, and have lost so much of their genuine power that we must seriously ask ourselves whether we should use them at all, or whether we should discard them as useless tools. However, there is a mysterious fact about the great words of our religious tradition: they cannot be replaced. All attempts to make substitutions, including those I have tried myself, have failed to convey the reality that was to be expressed; they have led to shallow and important talk. There are no substitutes for words like “sin” and “grace”. However, there is a way of rediscovering their meaning, the same way that leads us down into the depths of our human existence. In that depth these words were conceived; and there they gained power for all ages; there they must be found again by each generation, and by each of us for ourselves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
Let us therefore try to penetrate the deeper levels in our life, in order to see whether we can discover in them the realities of which our text speaks. It seems desirable at this point, in order to prevent misunderstanding to discuss briefly the nature of moral theory. I shall do this by explaining in more detail the concept of a considered judgment in reflective equilibrium and the reasons for introducing it. Let us assume that each person beyond a certain age and possessed of the requisite intellectual capacity develops a sense of justice under normal social circumstances. We acquire a skill in judging things to be just and unjust, and in supporting these judgments by reasons. Moreover, we ordinarily have some desire to act in accord with there pronouncements and expect a similar desire on the part of others. Clearly this moral capacity is extraordinarily complex. To see this suffices to note the potentially infinite number and variety of judgments that we are prepared to make. The fact that we often do not know what to day, and sometime find our minds unsettled, does not detract from the complexity of the capacity we have. Now one may think of moral philosophy at first (and I stress the provisional nature of the view) as the attempt to describe our moral capacity; or, in the present case, one may regard a theory of justice. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
This enterprise is very difficult. For by such a description is not meant simply a list of the judgments on institutions and actions that we are prepared to render, accompanied with supporting reasons when these are offered. Rather, what is required is a formulation of a set of principle which, when conjoined to our beliefs and knowledge of the circumstances, would lead is to make these judgements with their supporting reasons were we to apply these principles conscientiously and intelligently. A conception of justice characterizes our moral sensibility when the everyday judgments we do make are in accordance with its principles. These principles can serve as part of the premises of an argument which arrives at the matching judgments. We do not understand our sense of justice until we know in some systematic way covering a wide range of cases what these principles are. Only a deceptive familiarity with our everyday judgments and our natural readiness to make them could conceal the fact that characterizing our moral capacities is an intricate task. The principles which describe them must be presumed to have a complex structure, and the concepts involved will require a serious study. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
A useful comparison here is with the problem of describing the sense of grammaticalness that we have for the sentences of our native language. In this case the aim is to characterize the ability to recognize well-formed sentences by formulating clearly expressed principles which make the same discrimination as the native speaker. This is a difficult undertaking which, although still unfinished, is known to require theoretical constructions that far outrun the ad hoc precepts of our explicit grammatical knowledge. A similar situation presumably holds in moral philosophy. There is no reason to assume that our sense of justice can be adequately characterized by familiar common-sense precepts, or derived from the more obvious learning principles. A correct account of moral capacities will certainly involve principles and theoretical constructions which go much beyond the norms and standards cited in everyday life; it may eventually require fairly sophisticated mathematics as well. This is to be expected, since on the contract view theory of justice is part of the theory of rational choice. Thus the idea of the original position and of an agreement on principles there does not seem too complicated or unnecessary. Indeed, these notions are rather simple and can serve only as a beginning. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
So far, though, I have not said anything about considered judgments. Now, as already suggested, they enter as those judgments in which our moral capacities are most likely to be displayed without distortion. Thys in deciding which of our judgement to take into account we may reasonably select some and exclude others. For example, we can discard those judgments made with hesitation, or in which we have little confidence. Similarly, those given when we are upset or frightened, or when we stand to gain one way or the other can be left aside. All these judgments are likely to be erroneous or to be influenced by an excessive attention to our own interests. Considered judgements are simply those rendered under conditions favourable to the exercise of the sense of justice, and therefore in circumstances where the more common excuses and explanations making a mistake do not obtain. The person making the judgment is presumed, then, to have the ability, the opportunity, and the desires to reach a correct decision (or at least, not the desire not to). Moreover, the criteria that identify these judgments are not arbitrary. They are, in fact, similar to those that single out considered judgments of any kind. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
And once we regard the sense of justice as a mental capacity, as involving the exercise of thought, the relevant judgments are those given under conditions favourable for deliberating and judgment in general. Have the people of our time still a feeling of sin? Do they, and do we, still realize that sin does not mean an immoral act, that “sin” should never be used in the plural, and that not our sins, but rather our sin is the great, all-pervading problem of our life? Do we still know that it is arrogant and erroneous to divine humans by calling some “sinners” and others “righteous”? For by way of such a division, we can usually discover that we ourselves do not quite belong to the “sinners”, since we have avoided heavy sins, have made some progress in the control of this or that sin, and have been even humble enough not to all ourselves “righteous”. Are we still able to realize that this kind of thinking and feeling about sin is far removed from what the great religious tradition, both within and outside the Bible, has meant when it speaks of sin? I should like to suggest another word to you, not as a substitute for the word “sin”, but as a useful clue in the interpretation of the word “sin”: “separation”. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
Separation is an aspect of the experience of everyone. Perhaps the word “sin” has the same root as the word “asunder”. In any case, sin is separation. To be in the state of sin is to be in the state of separation. And separation is threefold: there is separation among individual lives, separation of humans from oneself, and separation of all humans from the Ground Being. This three-fold separation constitutes the state of everything that exists; it is a universal fact; it is the fate of every life. And it is our human fate in a very special sense. For we as humans know that we are separated. We not only suffer with all other creatures because of the self-destructive consequences of our separation, but also know why we suffer. We know that we are estranged from something to which we really belong, and with which we should be united. We know that the fate of separation is not merely a natural event like a flash of sudden lightening, but that it is an experience in which we actively participate, in which our whole personality is involved, and that, as fate, it is also guilt. Separation which is fate and guilt constitutes the meaning of the word “sin”. It is this which is the state of our entire existence, from its very beginning to its very end. Such separation is prepared in the mother’s womb, and before that time, in every preceding generation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
Separation is manifest in the special actions of our conscious life. It reached beyond our graves into all succeeding generations. It is our existence itself. Existence is separation! Before sin is an act, it is a state. We can say the same thing about grace. For sin and grace are bound to each other. We do not even have a knowledge of sin unless we have already experienced the unity of life, which is grace. And conversely, we could not grasp the meaning of grace without having experienced the separation of life, which is sin. Grace is just as difficult to describe as sin. For some people, grace is the willingness of a divine king and a father to forgive over and again the foolishness and weakness of his subjects and children. We must reject such a concept of grace; for it is a merely childish destruction of a human dignity. For others, grace is a magic power in the dark places of the soul, but a power without any significance for practical life, a quickly vanishing and useless idea. For others, grace is the benevolence that we may find beside the cruelty and destructiveness in life. However, it does not mater whether we say “life goes on”, or whether we say “there is grace in life”; if grace means no more than this, the word should, and will, disappear. For other people, grace indicates the gifts that one has received from nature or society, and the power to do good things with the help of those gifts. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
However, grace is more than gifts. In grace something is overcome; grace occurs “in spite of” something; grace occurs in spite of separation and estrangement. Grace is the reunion of life with life, the reconciliation of the self with itself. Grace is the acceptance of that which is rejected. Grace transforms fate into a meaningful destiny; it changes guilt into confidence and courage. There is something triumphant in the word “grace”: in spite of the abounding of sin grace abounds much more. Implicit in the emphasis of orthodox psychotherapy is the point of view that the neurotic is a person who once had a problem, and that the resolution of this past problem is the goal of psychotherapy. The whole approach to treatment through memory and the past indicates this assumption, which runs directly counter to everything we observe about neurosis and the neurotic. The neurotic is not merely a person who once had a problem, one is a person who has a continuing problem, here and now, in the present. Although it may well be that one is acting the way one is today “because” of things that happened to one in the past, one’s difficulties today are connected with the ways one is acting today. One cannot get along in the present, and unless one learns how to deal with problems as they arise, one will not be able to get along in the future. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
The goal of therapy is to reunite the individual with one’s soul and give one the means with which one can solve one’s present problems and any that may arise tomorrow or next years. That tool is self-support, and this one achieves by dealing with oneself and one’s problems with all the means presently at one’s command, right now. If one can become truly aware at every instant of oneself and one’s actions on whatever level—fantasy, verbal or physical—one can see how one is producing one’s difficulties, one can see what one’s present difficulties are, and one can help oneself to solve them in the present, in the here and now. Each one the individual solves makes easier the solution for the next, for every solution increases one’s self-support. It is usual for humans, in such difficulties, to have resource to some invisible intelligent principle, as the immediate cause of that event, which surprises them, and which they think, cannot be accounted for from the common powers of nature. However, philosophers, who carry their scrutiny a little farther, immediately perceive, that, even in the most familiar events, the energy of the cause is as unintelligible as in the most unusual, and that we only learn by experience the frequent conjunctions of objects, without being ever able to comprehend any thing like connection between them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
Here then, many philosophers think themselves obliged by reason to have recourse, on all occasions, to the same principle, which the vulgar never appeal to but in cases, that appear miraculous and supernatural. They acknowledge mind and intelligence to be, not only the ultimate and original cause of all things, but the immediate and sole cause of every event, which appears in nature. They pretend, that those objects, which are commonly denominated causes, are in reality nothing but occasions; and that the true and direct principle of every effect is not any power or force in nature, but a volition of the Supreme Being, who wills, that such particular objects should, forever, be conjoined with each other. Instead of saying, that one billiard-ball moves another, by a force, which it has derived from the author of nature; it is the Deity oneself, they say, who, by particular volition, moves the second ball, being determined to this operation by the impulses of the first ball; in consequence of those general laws, which one has laid down to oneself in the government of the Universe. However, philosophers advancing still in their enquiries, discover, that, as we are totally ignorant of the power, on which depends the mutual operation of bodies, we are no less ignorant of that power, on which depends the operation of mind on body, or of body on mind. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Nor are we able, either from our senses or consciousness, to assign the ultimate principle in one cause, more than the other. The same ignorance, therefore, reduces them to the same conclusions. They assert, that the Deity is the immediate cause of the union between soul and body; and that they are not the organs of sense, which, being agitated by external objects, produce sensations in the mind; but that it is a particular volition of our omnipotent Maker, which excites such sensation, in consequence of such a motion in the organ. In like manner, it is not any energy in the will, that produces local motion in our members: It is God himself, who is pleased to second our will, in itself impotent, and to command that motion, which we erroneously attribute to our own power and efficacy. Nor do philosophers stop at this conclusion. They sometimes extend the same inference to the mind itself, in its internal operations. Our mental vision or conception of ideas is nothing but a revelation made to us by our Maker. When we voluntarily turn our thought to any object, and rise up its image in the fancy; it is not the will which crates the idea: It is the Universal Creator, who discover it to the mind, and renders it present to us. “And now it came to pass that the sons of Alma did go forth among the people, to declare the word unto them. And Alma, also, himself, could not rest, and he also went forth. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
“Now we shall say no more concerning their preaching, except that they preached the word, and the truth, according to the spirit of prophecy and revelation; and they preached after the holy order of God by which they were called. And now I return to an account of the wars between the Nephites and the Lamanites, in the eighteenth year of the reign of the judges. For behold, it came to pass that the Zoramites became Lamanites; therefore, in the commencement of the eighteenth year the people of the Nephites saw that the Lamanites were coming upon them; therefore they made preparations for war; yea, they gathered together their armies in the land of Jershon. And it came to pass that the Lamanites came with their thousands; and they came into the land of Antionum, which is the land of the Zoramites; and a man by the name of Zerahemnah was their leader. And now, as the Amalekites were of a more wicked and murderous disposition than the Lamanites were, in and of themselves, therefore, Zerahemnah appointed chief captains over the Lamanites, and they were all Amalekites and Zoramites. Now this he did that he might preserve their hatred towards the Nephites, that he might bring them into subjection to the accomplishment of his designs. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
“For behold, his designs were to stir up the Lamanites to anger against the Nephites; this he did that he might usurp great power over them, and also that he might gain power over the Nephites by bringing them into bondage. And now the design of the Nephites was to support their lands, and their houses, and their wives, and their children, that they might preserve them from the hands of their enemies; and also that they might preserve their rights and their privileges, yea, and also their liberty, that they might worship God according to their desires. For they knew that if they should fall into the hands of the Lamanites, that whosoever should worship God in spirit and in truth, the true and the living God, the Lamanites would destroy. Yes, and they also knew the extreme hatred of the Lamanites towards their brethren, who were the people of Anti-Nephi-Lehi, who were called the people of Ammon—and they would not take up arms, yea, they had entered into a covenant and they would not break it—therefore, if they should fall into the hands of the Lamanites they would be destroyed. And the Nephites would not suffer that they should be destroyed; therefore they gave them lands for their inheritance. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
“And the people of Ammon did give unto the Nephites a large portion of their substance to support their armies; and thus the Nephites were compelled, alone, to withstand against the Lamanites, who were a compound of Laman and Lemuel, and the sons of Ishmael, and all those who had dissented from the Nephites, who were Amalekites and Zoramites, and the descendants of the priests Noah. Now those descendants were as numerous, nearly, as were the Nephites; and this the Nephites were obliged to contend with their brethren, even unto bloodshed. And it came to pass as the armies of the Lamanites had gathered together in the land of Antionum, behold, the armies of the Nephites were prepared to meet them in the land of Jershon. Now, the leader of the Nephites, or the man who has been appointed to be the chief captain over the Nephites—now the chief captain took the command of all the armies of the Nephites—and his name was Moroni; and Moroni took all the command, and the government of their ways. And he was only twenty and five years old when he was appointed chief captain over the armies of the Nephites. And it came to pass that he met the Lamanites in the borders of Jershon, and his people were armed with swords, and with cimeters, and all manner of weapons of war. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
“And when the armies of the Lamanites saw that the people of Nephi, or that Moroni, has prepared his people with breastplates and with arm-shields, yea, and also shields to defend their heads, and also they were dressed with thick clothing—now the army of Zerahemnah was not prepared with any such thing; they had only their swords and their cimeters, their bows and their arrows, their stones, and their slings; and they were naked, save it were a skin which was girded about their loins; yea, all were naked, save it were the Zoramites, and the Amalekites. However, they were not armed with breastplates, nor shields—therefore, they were exceedingly afraid of the armies of the Nephites because of their armour, notwithstanding their number being so much greater than Nephites. Behold, not it came to pass that they durst not come against the Nephites in the borders of Jerson; therefore they departed out of the land of Antionum into the wilderness, and took their journey around about in the wilderness, away by the head of the river Sidon, that they might come into the land of Manti and take possession of the land; for they did not suppose that the armies of Moroni would know whither they had gone. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
“However, it came to pass, as soon as they had departed into the wilderness Moroni sent spies into the wilderness to watch their camp; and Moroni, also, knowing of the prophecies of Alma, sent certain humans unto him, desiring him that he should inquire of the Lord whither the armies of the Nephites should go to defend themselves against the Lamanites. And it came to pass that the word of the Lord came unto Alma, and Alma informed the messengers of Moroni, that the armies of the Lamanites were marching round about in the wilderness, that they might come over into the and of Manti, that they might commence an attack upon the weaker part of the people. And those messengers went and delivered the message unto Moroni. Now Moroni, leaving a part of his army in the land of Jershon, lest by any means a part of the Lamanites should come into that land and take possession of the city, took the remaining part of his army and marched over into the land of Manti. And he caused that all the people in that quarter of the land should gather themselves together to battle against the Lamanites, to defend their lands and their country, their rights and their liberties; therefore they were prepared against the time of the coming of the Lamanites. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
“And it came to pass that Moroni caused this his army should be secret in the valley which was near the bank of the river Sidon, which was on the west of the river Sidon in the wilderness. And Moroni placed spies round about, that he might know when the camp of the Lamanites should come. And now, as Moroni knew the intention of the Lamanites, that it was their intention to destroy their brethren, or to subject them and bring them into bondage that they might establish a kingdom unto themselves over all the land; and he also knowing that it was the only desire of the Nephites to preserve their lands, and their liberty, and their church, therefore he thought it no sin that he should defend them by stratagem; therefore, he found by his spies which course the Lamanites were to take. Therefore, he divided his army and brought a part over into the valley, and concealed them on the east, and on the south of the hill Riplah; and the remainder he concealed in the west valley, in the west of the river Sidon, and so down into the borders of the land of Manti. And thus having placed his army according to his desire, he was prepared to meet them. And it came to pass that the Lamanites came upon the north of the hill, where a part of the army of Moroni was concealed. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
“And as the Lamanites has passed the hill Riplah, and came into the valley, and began to cross the river Sidon, the army which was concealed on the south of the hill, which was led by a man whose name was Lehi, and he led his army forth and encircled the Lamanites about on the east in their rear. And it came to pass that the Lamanites, when they saw the Nephites coming upon them in their rear, turned them about and began to contend with the army of Lehi. And the work of death commenced on both sides, but it was more dreadful on the part f the Lamanites, for their nakedness was exposed to the heavy blows of the Nephites with their swords and their cimeters, which brought death almost at every stroke. While on the other hand, there was now and then a man fell among he Nephites, by their swords and the loss of blood, they being shielded for the more vital parts of the body, or the more vital part of the body being shielded from the strokes of the Lamanites, by their breastplates, and their armshields, and their head-plates; and thus the Nephites did carry on the work of death among the Lamanite. And it came to pass that the Lamanites became frightened, because of the great destruction among them, even until they began to flee towards the river Sidon. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
“And they were pursued by Lehi and his men; and they were driven by Lehi into the waters of Sidon, and they crossed the waters of Sidon. And Lehi retained his armies upon the bank of the river Sidon that they should not cross. And it came to pass that Moroni and his army met the Lamanites in the valley, on the other side of the river Sidon, and began to fall upon them and to slay them. And the Lamanites did flee again before them, toward the land of Manti; and they were met again by the armies of Moroni. Now in this case the Lamanites did fight exceedingly; yea, never had the Lamanites been known to fight exceedingly; yea, never had the Lamanites been know to fight with such exceedingly great strength and courage, no, not even from the beginning. And they were inspired by the Zoramites and the Amalekites, who were their chief captains and leaders, and by Zerahemnah, who was their chief captain, or their chief leader and commander; yea, they did fight like dragons, and many of the Nephites were slain by their hands, yea, for they did smite in two many of their head-plates, and they did pierce man of the breastplates, and they did smite off many of their arms; and this the Lamanites did smite in their fierce anger. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
“Nevertheless, the Nephites were inspired by a better cause, for they were not fighting for a monarchy nor power but they were fighting for their homes and their liberties, their wives and children, and their all, yes, for their rites of worship and their church. And they were doing that which they felt was the duty to which they owed to their God; for the Lord had said unto them, and also unto their fathers, that: Inasmuch as ye are not guilty of the first offense, neither the second, ye shall not suffer yourselves to be slain by the hands of your enemies. And again, the Lord has said that: Ye shall defend your families even unto bloodshed. Therefore for this cause were the Nephites contending with the Lamanites, to defend themselves, and their families, and their lands, their country, and their rights, and their religion. And it came to pass that when the humans of Moroni saw the fierceness and the anger of the Lamanites, they were about to shrink and flee from them. And Moroni, perceiving their intent, sent forth and inspired their hearts with these thoughts—yea, the thoughts of their lands, their liberty, yea, their freedom from bondage. And it came to pass that they turned upon the Lamanites, and they cried with one voice unto the Lord their God, for their liberty and their freedom from bondage. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
“And they began to stand against the Lamanites with power; and in the selfsame hour that they cried unto the Lord for their freedom, the Lamanites began to flee before them; and they fled even to the waters of Sidon. Now, the Lamanites were more numerous, yea, by more than double the number of the Nephites; nevertheless, they were driven insomuch that they were gathered together in one body in the valley, upon the bank by the river Sidon. Therefore the armies of Moroni encircled them about, yes, even on both sides of the river, for behold, on the east were the humans of Lehi. Therefore when Zerahemnah saw the humans of Lehi on the east of the river Sidon, and the armies of Moroni on the west of the river Sidon, that they were encircled about by the Nephites, they were struck with terror. Now Moroni, when he saw their terror, commanded his humans that they should stop shedding their blood,” reports Alma 43.1-54. Within the tangle of bushes and wines, among the stones and under fallen trees, the spirit of God is in the forest waiting for me. I go to Him with gifts as a token friendship. Hidden from me in the forest around me within each tree, behind each rock, the Spirit of God is gathered, unseen by people who walk, heavy-footed, through the World. I will sit quietly and wait for you, leaving you these gifts. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
Cresleigh Homes
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And it Seems Like “Everyday” Would be Every Day, Like Monday!
The most distinguished hallmark of the American society is and always has been—change. The value-life (spiritual, religious, philosophical, axiological, et cetera) is an aspect of human biology and in on the same continuum with the “lower” animal life (rather than being in separated, dichotomized, or mutually exclusive realms). It is probably therefore species-wide, supracultural even though it must be actualized by culture in order to exist. The spiritual life is part of the human essence. It is a defining characteristic of human nature, without which human nature is not fully human nature. It is part of the Real Self, of one’s identity, of one’s specieshood, of full-humanness. To the extent that pure spontaneity, is possible, to that extent will the metaneeds also be expressed. “Uncovering” or Taoistic or existential therapeutic or logotherapeutic, or “ontogogic” techniques, should never uncover and strengthen the metaneeds as well as the basic needs. Depth-diagnostic and therapeutic techniques should ultimately also uncover these same metaneeds because, paradoxically, our “highest nature” is also our “deepest nature.” The value life and the animal life are not in two separate realms as most religions and philosophies have assumed, and as classical, impersonal science has also assumed. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
The spiritual life (the contemplative, religious, philosophical, or value-life) is within the jurisdiction of human thought and is attainable in principle by human’s own efforts. Even though it has been cast out of the realm of reality by the classical, value-free science which models itself upon physic, it can be reclaimed as an object of study and technology by humanistic science. Let me also make quite explicit the implication that metamotivation is species-wide, and is, therefore, supracultural, common-human, not created arbitrarily by culture. Since this is a point at which misunderstandings are fated to occur, let me say it so: the metaneeds seem to me to be instinctoid, that is, to have an appreciable hereditary, species-wide determination. However, they are potentialities, rather than actualities. Culture is definitely and absolutely needed for their actualization; but also culture can fail to actualize them, and indeed this is just what most known cultures actually seem to do and to have done throughout history. Therefore, there is implied here a superacultural factor which can criticize any culture from outside and above that culture, namely, in terms of the degree to which it fosters or suppresses self-actualization, full-humanness, and metamotivation. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
The so-called spiritual (or transcendent, or axiological) life is clearly rooted in the biological nature of the species. It is a kind of “higher” animality whose precondition is a heathy “lower” animality, id est, they are hierarchically-integrated (rather than mutually exclusive). However, this higher, spiritual “animality” is so timid and weak, and so easily lost, is so easily crushed by stronger cultural forces, that is can become widely actualized only in a culture which approves of human nature, and therefore actively fosters its fullest growth. Fortunately, there are a number of recent studies of animals living in the wild which clearly show that the aggressiveness to be observed under conditions of captivity is not present when the same animals life in their natural habitat. Among the monkeys, baboons have the reputation of a certain violence, and they have been carefully studied. There is little aggressive behaviour; whatever aggressive behaviour there is, is essentially one of the gestures or threat postures. It is worthwhile to note, considering the previous discussion on crowding, it is reported that no fighting was observed between baboon troops that met at the waterhole. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
More than four hundred baboons around were counted around a single waterhole at one time, and yet they did not observe any aggressive behaviour among them. It was also observed that the baboons were very unaggressive toward members of other animal species. The study of aggressive behaviour among chimpanzees, the primates that most resemble humans, is of particular interest. Until recent years almost nothing was known of their way of life in Equatorial Africa. However, three separate observations of chimpanzees in their natural habitat have by now been carried out and offer very interesting material with regard to aggressive behaviour. Exceedingly low incidence of aggression was reported among the chimpanzees of the Bodongo Forest. During 300 observation hours, 17 quarrels involving actual fighting or displays of threat or anger were seen and none of these lasted more than a few seconds. Only four of these seventeen quarrels involved two adult males. The threatening behaviour that was seen on 4 occasions was when a subordinate male tried to take food before a dominant one. Instances of attack were seldom observed and mature males were seen fighting only on one occasion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
On the other hand, there are a number of activities and gestures like grooming and courting behaviour, whose main function is apparently to establish and maintain good relations between the individual chimpanzees of the community. Their groups are largely temporary, and no stable relationships other than mother-infant could be found. A dominance hierarchy proper was not observed among these chimpanzees, alt though there were seventy-two clear-cut dominance interactions observed. There is an observation concerning the uncertainty of chimpanzees which is very important for the understanding of the evolution of human’s “second nature,” their character. All the chimpanzees observed were cautious, hesitant creatures. This is one of the major impressions one carries away from studying chimpanzees at close range in the wild. Behind their lively, searching eyes one senses a doubting, contemplative personality, always trying to make sense out of a puzzling World. It is as if the certainty of instinct has been replaced in chimpanzees by the uncertainty of intellect—but without the determination and decisiveness that characterizes humans. There also seems to be some indecision in male chimpanzees to select food or a female mate when both are present. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
The incapacity of the male chimpanzee to come to a decision whether first to eat the bananas or mount the female is striking. If we observed this same behaviour in a man, we would say that he was suffering from obsessional doubt, because the normal human would have no difficulty in acting according to the dominant impulse in his character structure; the oral receptive character would first eat the banana and postpone the satisfaction of his pleasures of the flesh impulse; the “private area character” would let the food wait until he was gratified in pleasures of the flesh. In either case he would act without doubt or hesitancy. Since we can hardly assume that the male in this example is suffering from an obsessional neurosis. The chimpanzee’s remarkable tolerance toward the young as well as their deference toward the old, even when they no longer had physical power. Chimpanzees normally show a good deal of tolerance in their behaviour toward each other. This is especially true of males, less so with females. A typical instance of tolerance of a dominant to a subordinate animal occurred when an adolescent male was feeding from the only ripe cluster of fruits in a palm tree. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
A mature male climbed up but did not try to force the other away; he merely moved up beside the younger and the two fed side by side. Under similar circumstances a subordinate chimpanzee may move up to a dominant one, but before attempting to feed, it normally reaches out to touch the other on the lips, thigh, or in the private area. Tolerance between males is particularly noticeable during the mating season, as for example on the occasion described above when seven males were observed copulating with one female with no signs of aggression between them; one of these males was an adolescent. On gorillas in the wild, it was reported on the whole “interaction” between groups was peaceful. Aggressive bluff charges were made by one male as noted above, and I once observed weak aggressiveness in the form of incipient charges towards intruders from another group by a female, a juvenile and an infant. Most intergroup aggressiveness in the form of incipient charges towards intruders from another group aggressiveness was confined to staring and snapping. Serious aggressive attacks among gorillas were not witnessed. This is all the more remarkable because the gorilla group home ranges not only overlapped, but seem to have been commonly shared amongst the gorilla population. Hence there would be ample occasion for friction. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Special attention should be paid to reports on feeding behaviour because it uncovers carnivorous or predatory character of chimpanzees. The chimpanzees of the Gombe Stream Reserve (and probably in most places throughout the range of the species as a whole) are omnivorous. The chimpanzees is primarily vegetarian; that is, by far the greatest proportion of foods constituting his diet as a whole is vegetable. There were certain exceptions to this rule. During the course of field study by scientists, it was observed chimpanzees feeding on the flesh of other mammals in twenty-eight instances (goes without saying, other animals in rainforest may eat humans besides lions and tigers). In addition, examining occasional samples of feces during the first two and a half years and regular samples in the last two and a half years, altogether the remnants of thirty-six different mammals were found in dung, over and above those chimpanzees were observed eating. In addition it was reported in four instances, during these years, in which in three cases a male chimpanzee caught and killed an infant baboon, and in one the killing involved a, probably female, red colobus monkey. Furthermore it was observed sixty-eight mammals had eaten (mostly primates) within forty-five months, or roughly one and a half per month, by a group of fifty chimpanzees. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
These figures confirm that chimpanzees’ diet on the whole is vegetable and hence that meat eating is exceptional. Yet, in Jane Goodall’s book In the Shadow of Man, the author states flatly that she and her husband “saw chimpanzees eating meat fairly frequently,” but without quoting the qualifying data in her previous work that show the relative infrequency of meat eating. I stress emphasizing the “predatory” character of chimpanzees. However, chimpanzees are as many authors had stated, omnivorous; they live mainly on a vegetable diet. That they eat meat occasionally (in fact rarely), does not make them carnivorous and surely not predatory animals. However, the use of the words “predatory” and “carnivorous” insinuate that humans are born with an innate destructiveness. Pleasures and gratifications can be arranged in hierarchy of levels from lower to higher. So also can hedonistic theories be seen as ranging from lower to higher, id est, metahedonism. The B-values, seen as gratifications of metaneeds, are then also the highest pleasures or happiness that we know of. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
I have suggested elsewhere the need for usefulness of being conscious that there is a hierarchy of pleasures, ranging from exempli gratia, relief from pain, through the contentment of a hot tub, the happiness of being with good friends, the joy of great music, the bliss of having a child, the ecstasy of the highest love-experiences, on up to the fusion with B-values. Such a hierarchy suggests a solution of the problem of hedonism, selfishness, duty, et cetera. If one includes the highest pleasures among the pleasures in general, then it becomes true in a very real sense that fully-human people also seek only for pleasure, id est, metapleasure. Perhaps we call this “metahedonism” and then point out that at this level there is then no contradiction between pleasure and duty since the highest obligations of human beings are certainly to truth, justice, et cetera, which however are also the highest pleasures that the species can experience. And of course at this level of discourse the mutual exclusiveness between selfishness and unselfishness has disappeared. What is good for us is good for everyone else, what is gratifying is praiseworthy, our appetites are now trustworthy, rational, and wise, what we enjoy is good for us, seeking our own (highest) good is also seeking the general good, et cetera. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Everybody can say the Lord’s prayer and it is recited millions and millions of times every day. However, how many of those who say it have received the power to pray it? The fatherhood of God, which is the greatest and most incredible concept of Christianity, has become one of the most usual and insignificance phrases of daily life. Christianity has forgotten that in every invocation of God as Father the enmity against God must be overcome, the ecstatic certainty of our childhood must be given by the Spirit. Many of those outside Christianity know more about it than those within it. They know how paradoxical and impossible it is to call God “Father.” However, where it happens that humans have gained freedom, “the spirit of bondage” to fear is overcome by “the spirit of adoption.” When a child has a moment that we could call a moment of grace, one suddenly does the good freely, without command, and more than had been commanded; happiness glows in one’s face. One is balanced within oneself, without enmity, and is full of love. Bondage and fear have disappeared; obedience has ceased to be obedience and has become free inclination; ego and super-ego are untied. This is the liberty of the children of God, liberty from the law, and because from the law, also from the condemnation to despair. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Those who have the Spirit walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit. The power of infinite desire and unlimited will to power is broken. It is not extinguished; the hunger and thirst for life remain. However, when, for us, the Spirit is present, desire is transformed into love and will to power into justice. In the great chapter on live in First Corinthians, Paul makes it clear that love is the fruit of the Spirit, and that there is no love without the Spirit. Love is not a matter of law. As long as it is commanded, it does not exist. Neither is it a matter of sentimental emotion. It is impossible for the natural human; and it is ecstatic in its appearance, like every gift of the Spirit. And finally, Spirit is life. “To be carnally minded is death.” There is a human of our time who discovered the truth of this profound statement. Dr. Sigmund Freud recognized that at the root of our infinite desire lies the will to death. The individual, feeling the impossibility of fulfilling one’s desire, wants to rid oneself of it my losing oneself as an individual. Death is inevitable, but it is also chosen. Not only must we die, we also want to die, “for to be carnally minded is death.” “But,” continues Paul, “to be spiritually minded is life.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Spirit is life, creative life, as the ancient hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, declares. The word “spirit” has largely disappeared from our daily language and entirely from our scientific terminology. It is replaced by “reason.” However, reason argues about what it has received; it analyzes life and often kills life. It is not life itself; it is without creative power. However, the Spirit is power as well as reason, uniting and transcending them. It is creative life. Neither power alone, nor reason alone, creates the works of art and poetry, of philosophy and politics; the Spirit creates them individually and universally, powerful and full of reason at the same time. In every great human work we admire the inexhaustible depth of its individual and incomparable character, the power of something which happens but once and cannot be repeated and that, nevertheless, is visible to century after century, universal and accessible in every period. No argument of reason can give certainty. The finite cannot argue for the infinite; it cannot reach God and it can never reach its own eternity. However, there are two certainties. One dwells in every soul which knows about itself. It is certainty which the law imposes that no life and no death, no courage and no flight, can liberate us from the command to be what we ought to be and the impossibility to be so, the condemnation of which is despair. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The eternity of despair encompasses us in the moment that we are conscious of our witness to the law. The other certainty dwells in those who have Spirit; they are beyond their own finiteness and they cannot use arguments, for their eternity is present to them. It is not a matter of a future life after death; it is the convincing presence of the Spirit Who is Life, beyond life and death. In the story of Pentecost, the Spirit of Christ shows its creativity in both directions, the individual and universal. Each disciple receives the fiery tongue that is the new creative Spirit. Members of all nations, separated by their different tongues, understand each other in this New Spirit, which creates a new peace, beyond the cleavages of Babel—the peace of the Church. Furthermore, for Paul, the Spirit is eternal life. It is obvious that the certainty that we are children of God, that we are united with the eternal meaning of life, is either itself eternal or is nothing. There is no rational argument for the immortality of our souls. Here and now we are encompassed in the never-ending despair brought on us by law. Here and now we are encompassed in the eternal and inexhaustible life created by the Spirit, which witnesses to the fact that we are the children of God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
However, someone may say: “I have not received this witness. I have not experienced the Spirit of which Paul speaks. I am not Christian in this sense.” Listen to Paul’s reply. Perhaps it is the most puzzling and mysterious of all his sayings. “Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities. For we know not what we should pray for as we ought; but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered; and one that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because one maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.” Paul recognizes the fact that usually we are possessed by weakness which makes the experience of the Spirit and the right prayer impossible. However, he tells us that in these periods we must not believe that the Spirit is far from us. It is within us, although not experienced by us. Our sighing in the depth of our souls, which we are not able to articulate, is taken by God to be the work of the Spirit within us. To the human who longs for God and cannot find Him; to the human who wants to be acknowledged by God and cannot even believe that He is; to the human who is striving for a new and imperishable meaning of one’s life and cannot discover it—to this man Paul speaks. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
We are each such a human. Just in this situation, where the Spirit is far from our consciousness, where we are unable to pray or to experience any meaning in life, the Spirit is working quietly in the depth of our souls. In the moment when we feel separated from God, meaninglessness in our lives, and condemned to despair, we are not left alone. The spirit, sighing and longing in us and with us, represents us. It manifests what we really are. In feeling this against feeling, in believing this against belief, in knowing this against knowledge, we, like Paul, possess all. Those outside that experience possess nothing. Paul, in spite of the boldness of his faith and the depth of his mysticism, is most human, most realistic—nearer to those who are strong. He knows that we, with all other creatures, are in the stage of expectation, longing and suffering with all animals and flowers, with the oceans and winds. The soundless mourning of these other creatures echoes the soundless longing of the human soul. Paul knows that what we are to be has not yet appeared. And yet he has written his triumphant and ecstatic letter on Spirit and Life. It is not his spirit which inspired him to write those words, but rather the Spirit which has witnessed to his spirit and which witnesses to our spirit that we are the children of God. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
“My son, give ear to my words; for I swear unto you, that inasmuch as ye shall keep the commandments of God ye shall prosper in the land. I would that ye should do as I have done, in remembering the captivity of our fathers; for they were in bondage, and none could deliver them except it was the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; and he surely did deliver them in their afflictions. And now, O my son Helaman, behold thou art in thy youth, and therefore, I beseech of thee that thou wilt hear my words and learn of me; for I do know that whosoever shall put their trust in God shall be supported in their trials, and their troubles, and their afflictions, and shall be lifted up at the last day. And I would not that ye think that I know of myself—not of the temporal but of the spiritual, not of the carnal mind but of a God. Now, behold, I say unto you, if I had not been born of God I should not have known these things; but God has, by the mouth of his holy angel, made these things known unto me, not of any worthiness of myself; for I went about with the sons of Mosiah, seeking to destroy the church of God; but behold, God sent his holy angel to stop us by the way. And behold, he spake unto us, as it were the voice of thunder, and the whole Earth did tremble beneath our feet; and we all fell to the Earth, for the fear of the Lord came upon us. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“However, behold, the voice said unto me: Arise. And I arose and stood up, and beheld the Angel. And he said unto me: If thou wilt of thyself be destroyed, seek no more to destroy the church of God. And it came to pass that I fell to the Earth; and it was for the space of three days and three nights that I could not open my mouth, neither had I use of my limbs. And the angel spake more things unto me, which were heard by my brethren, but I did not hear them; for when I heard the words—If thou wilt be destroyed of thyself, seek no more to destroy the church of God—I was struck with such great fear and amazement lest perhaps I should be destroyed, that I fell to the Earth and I did hear no more. However, I was racked with eternal torment, for my soul was harrowed up to the greatest degree and racked with all my sins. Yea, I did remember all my sins and iniquities, for which I was tormented with the pains of hell; yea, I saw that I had rebelled against my God, and that I had not kept his holy commandments. Yea, and I had murdered many of his children, or rather led them away unto destruction; yea, and in fine so great had been my iniquities, that the very thought of coming into the presence of my God did rack my soul with inexpressible horror. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
“Oh, thought I, that I could be banished and become extinct both soul and body, that I might not be brought to stand in the presence of my God, to be judge of my deeds. And now, for three days and for three night was I racked, even with the pains of a damned soul. And it came to pass that as I was thus racked with torment, while I was harrowed up by the memory of my many sins, before, I remembered also to have heard my father prophesy unto the people concerning the coming of one Jesus Christ, a Son of God, to atone for the sins of the World. Now, as my mind caught hold upon this thought, I cried within my heart: O Jesus, thou Son of God, have mercy on me, who am in the gall of bitterness, and am encircled abut by the everlasting chains of death. And now, behold, when I thought this, I could remember my pains no more; yea, I was harrowed up by the memory of my sins no more. And oh, what joy, and what marvelous light I did behold; yea, my soul was filled with joy as exceeding as was my pain! Yea, I saw unto you, my son, that there could be nothing so exquisite and so bitter as were my pains. Yea, and again I say unto you, my son, that on the other hand, there can be nothing so exquisite and sweet as was my joy. Yea, methought I aw, even as our father Lehi saw, God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of angels, in the attitude of singing and praising their God; yea, and my soul did long to be there. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“However, behold, my limbs did receive their strength again, and I stood upon my feet, and did manifest unto the people that I had been born of God. Yea, and from that time even until now, I have laboured without ceasing, that I might bring souls unto repentance; that I might bring them to taste; that they might also be born of God, and be filled with the Holy Ghost. Yea, and now behold, O my son, the Lord doth give me exceedingly great joy in the fruit of my labours; for because of the word which he has imparted unto me, behold, many have been born of God, and have tasted as I have tasted, and have seen eye to eye as I have seen; therefore they do know of these things of which I have spoken, as I do know; and the knowledge which I have is of God. And I have been supported under trials and troubles of every kind, yea, and in all manners of afflictions; yea, God has delivered me from prison, and from bonds, and from death; yea, and I do put my trust in him, and he will still deliver me. And I know that he will raise me up at the last day, to dwell with him in glory; yea, and I will praise him forever, for he has brought our fathers out of Egypt, and he has swallowed up the Egyptians in the Red Sea; and he led them by his power into the promised land; yea, and he has delivered them out of bondage and captivity from time to time. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Yea, and he has also brought our fathers out of the land of Jerusalem; and he has also, by his everlasting power, delivered them out of bondage and captivity, from time to time even down to the present day; and I have always retained in remembrance their captivity; yea, and ye also ought to retain in remembrance, as I have done, their captivity. However, behold, my son, this is not all; for ye ought to know as I do know, that inasmuch as ye shall keep the commandments of God ye shall prosper in the land; and ye ought to know also, that inasmuch as ye will not keep the commandments of God ye shall be cut off from his presence. Now this is according to his word,” report Alma 36.1-30. The Serpent King s stirring within me, awakening, his fire and force growing. The raving one awakes, who is spendthrift with his fire and force growing. The raving one awakes, who is spendthrift with his power, breaking through, breaking down, breaking apart what is outworn. Do what you must, thunder and lightning, but leave behind a newly ordered creation, an oak growing from the wet ground. I pray to God who is Father of All and ask his presence today. Lord, God, Almighty, Most High: I call to you by these ancient names. I call to you by these names you are known by and ask you to come to me. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
Long-time maintenance worker Denny reported that one morning, after entering the water tower, he heard the patter of footsteps above. He ascended to let the trespasser know the three-story structure was off-limits. But the footsteps always seemed to be one step ahead of him, and, one floor above. His search culminated on the roof, with no one in sight.
Open tonight from 8PM – 11PM for the Walk With Spirits Tour!
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A Great City is that which has the Greatest Men and Women!
I can get a better grasp of what is going on in the World from one good Washington dinner party than from all the background information piled on my desk. The concept of a team allows us to think of performances that are given by one or more than one performer; it also covers another case. It has been suggested that a performer may be taken in by one’s own act, convinced at the moment that the impression of reality which one fosters is the one and only reality. In such cases the performer comes to be one’s own audience; one comes to be performer and observer of the same show. Presumably one intracepts or incorporates the standards one attempts to maintain in the presence of others so that one’s conscience requires one to act in a socially proper way. It will have been necessary for the individual in one’s audience capacity the discreditable facts that one has had to learn about the performance; in everyday teams, there will be things one knows, or has known, that one will not be able to tell oneself. This intricate maneuver of self-delusion constantly occurs; psychoanalysts have provided us with the beautiful field data of this kind, under the headings of repressions and dissociation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 26
Individualistic modes of thought tend to treat processes such as self-deception and insincerity as characterological weaknesses generated within the deep recesses of the individual personality. It might be better to start from outside the individual and work inward than to star from inside the individual and work out. We may say that the starting point for all that is to come later consist of the individual performer maintaining a definition of the situation before the audience. The individual automatically becomes insincere when one adheres to the obligation of maintaining a working consensus and participates in different routines or performs a given part before different audiences. Self-deception can be seen as something that results when two different roles, performer and audience, come to be compressed into the same individual. Perhaps here we have a source of what has been called “self-destantiation,” namely, that process by which a person comes to feel estranged from oneself. When a performer guides one’s private activity in accordance with incorporated moral standards, one may associate these standards with a reference group of some kind, thus creating a non-present audience for this activity. This possibility leads us to consider a further one. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26
The individual may privately maintain standards of behaviour which one does not personally believe in, maintaining these standards because of a lively belief that an unseen audience is present who will punish deviation from these standards. In other words, an individual may be one’s own audience or may imagine an audience to be present. (In all of this we see the analytical difference between the concept of a team and that of an individual performer.) This should make us go on to see that a team may stage a performance of an audience that is not present n the flesh to witness the show. Some people live lives of isolation and loneliness in modern society. This loneliness can develop to a tragic point. There are many ways of looking at loneliness. The first is the estrangement of humans from oneself, from one’s experiencing organism. In this fundamental rift, the experiencing organism senses one meaning in experience, but the conscious self clings rigidly to another, since that is the way it has found love and acceptance from others. Thus, we have potentially fatal division, with most behavior being regulated in terms of meanings perceived in awareness, but with other meanings sensed by the physiological organism being denied and ignored because of an inability to communicate freely within oneself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26
The other element in our loneliness is the lack of any relationship in which we communicate our real experiencing—and hence our real self—to another. When there is no relationship in which we are able to communicate both aspects of our divided self—our conscious façade and our deeper level of experiencing—then we feel the loneliness of not being in real touch with any other human being. Is this loneliness contemporary only? Perhaps. In earlier times, the individual also distrusted or ignored one’s experiencing in order to keep the regard of significant others. However, the façade one adopted, the meaning one now felt one had found in one’s experiences, became a unified and strongly supportive set of beliefs and meanings. One’s whole social group tended to perceive life and experience in the same way, so that while one had unwittingly given up one’s deepest self, at leas one had taken on a consistent, respected, approved self by which one could live. An early Puritan, for example, must have experienced much inward strain as one denied vast areas of one’s organismic experiencing. It is doubtful, however, if one experienced as much isolation and aloneness as our client today. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26
Modern humans, like the members of earlier and more homogeneous groups, deserts one’s own experiencing to take on the way of being that will being love. However, he façade one adopts is taken over only from parents or a few others, and one is continually exposed to the knowledge that although that façade is approved by some, others see life in very different fashions. There is no security in any single façade. Hence, to a degree probably unknow before, modern humans experiences one’s loneliness, one’s cut-off-ness, one’s isolation both from one’s own deeper being and from others. Some people become estranged from themselves, who initially start off as with promise because their parent’s feelings conflict with their own. There was a young lady who was engaged to a young man, but her father wished for her to break the engagement off. There was a lack of protest on her part, probably because she adopted her father’s feelings as if they were her own. If we put this episode in schematic form, her realization would be something like this: “I thought my feelings meant that I was in love. I felt I was doing the beneficial and meaningful thing to get engaged. However, my engagement was not a meaningful commitment. I cannot be guided by what I experience. To do so would be to act wrongly, and to lose my father’s love. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26
Within a few weeks of developing an Electra Complex, the young lady starts eating too much and growing above average weight—the first appearance of what was to become her major symptom. It I perhaps indicative of the beginnings of her lack of trust in herself that she begins to diet only when teased by her companions. She feels an increasing need to live her life in terms of the expectations of others, since her own impulses are unreliable. It is not difficult to see why she begins to despise herself shortly after this time, and even to perceive death as a “glorious woman.” After all, she is an untrustworthy organism, a misleading cluster of experiencings, deserving to be despised. Her diary reports “shadows of doubts and of dread,” which soon translate into dread of getting fat. Nor is it surprising that she is frightened at the “evil spirits” in her—the unaccepted and denied feelings that haunt her. I am sure this was not the first real estrangement between her self and her underlying feelings, but there seems little doubt that it was a deeply significant one. It went a long way in destroying her confidence in herself as a being capable of autonomy. Even though her good spirits return, and she has happy periods, she has given up a part of herself and introjected as her own feelings of her father. #RandolphHarris 6 of 26
During this period she is full of fluctuations. She wants to do something great; she hopes for a social revolution; she works very hard as a student; she established reading rooms for children. However, at times she is “a timid, Earthly worm”; she longs for death and has her tutor reread the sentence, “The good die young.” Occasionally, “life had triumphed again.” She has an “unpleasant affair with a teacher.” She has a “breakdown.” She is very overconcerned with her weight. When she is twenty-four, there is another point at which she even more fully loses confidence in herself. Though she still is unsure enough or herself to need her old governess with her, she is nevertheless happy in her studies. “The diary breathes joy of life and sensuality.” She falls in love with a student. This was evidently a deep commitment, judging by its lasting and pervasive qualities. She becomes engaged, but again her parents insist that her experiencing is erroneous. They demand a temporary separation. So to her it must deem that the relationship is not real, is not wise, is better given up. Once more, she distrusts and disregards her own experience and introjects her parents’ feelings. She gives up the relationship and, with it, any trust in herself as capable of wise self-direction. Only the experience of others can be trusted. At this time, she turns to her doctor for help. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26
Had she rebelled at this point, had she possessed the strength to fight for her own experiencing of her own World, she would have been true to her deeper feelings and would, quite literally, have saved her potentially autonomous self. However, instead of rebellion there is only a terrible depression and a hatred of her body, which is obviously a totally untrustworthy organism for dealing with life. The extent to which she has surrendered her self is indicated by her tragic dieting. As she says later, “Something in me rebels against becoming fat. Rebels against becoming healthy, having plump red cheeks, becoming a simple, robust woman, as corresponds to my true nature.” In other words, if she were to trust her own feelings, desires, experiences, she would become a robust, plump, young woman and marry the student she loves. However, her feelings have been proven completely unreliable, her desires and experiences totally untrustworthy guides. So she must not only deny her feelings for loved one; she also must starve and coerce her body into a form approved by others but completely opposite from her own tendencies. She has lost, completely, her trust in her own experiencing as the basis for living. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26
She finds her employee to be a possible mate, and this choice for her is approved by her family. They plan to marry. However, for more years, until age twenty-eight, she vacillates between her employee and the student she has loved. She goes to see the student and breaks off with him, leaving, in her words, an “open wound.” We know nothing of the content of this most crucial interaction, but I would speculate that her psychological life hung in the balance here. Should she trust her own experiencing and choose the person she loves, or should she choose her employee? Her won feelings are cooler toward the employee, but for him she should feel all the approved feelings she is supposed to feel. I suspect that she realized dimly that is she chose the student, she would be choosing the uncharted path of autonomous selfhood. If she chose her employee, she would be living the life expected of her by others, but it would be a safe and approved pretense. She chooses her employee and married him, thus renouncing still further any trust in herself. By the age of thirty-two, she is totally obsessed with the idea that she must make herself thin. To this end she starves herself and takes sixty laxative pills a day! Not surprisingly, she has little strength. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26
She tires psychoanalysis but she feels she is not helped. She says, “I analyzed with my mind, but everything remained theory”; and, “The analyst can give me discernment, but not healing.” However, when the analysis is broken off by circumstances, she becomes worse. During this period she speaks of her ideal love, the student. She says to her husband in a letter, “At that time you were the life I was ready to accept and to give up my ideal for. But it was…a forced resolve.” She appears to be trying desperately to have the feelings that others want her to have, but she has to force herself. From here on, the estrangement within herself leads to more estrangement and to more and more feelings of isolation from others. It is not surprising that her first attempt at suicide comes at a point when her second analyst, working with her in the hospital to which she was sent, repeats the now familiar pattern. Her husband is not allowed to be by herself because he is deemed to not be helpful, as he would destroy any lingering confidence she might have in herself as a self-directing person. Several analysts and psychiatrist diagnose her and argue over what is a correct diagnosis for her. They consider things like sever obsessive neurosis combined with manic-depressive oscillations, psychopathic constitutions progressively unfolding. While others say she is not schizophrenic, because there is no mental defect. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26
However, two other doctors agree that she is suffering from progressive schizophrenic psychosis (schizophrenia simplex). They see little hope for her and say, “It was clear that a release from the institution meant certain suicide.” The young woman is aware of a number of these discussions, and she became to see herself not as a person, but as some strange abnormal mechanism, completely out of her control, going its own way to destruction. One looks in vain through all these diagnoses for any trance of recognition that the doctors were dealing with a human person! It is not hard to understand her words: “I confronted myself as a strange person. I am afraid of myself.” Or, at another time: “On this one point I am insane—I am perishing in the struggle against my nature. Fate wanted to have me fat and strong, but I want to be thin and delicate.” Indeed, she is perishing in the struggle with her nature. Her organism wants to be healthy and strong, but the introjected “I”—the false self she has taken on to please others—wants to be, as she says at one point, thing and “intellectual.” The wise doctors, in spite of the risk of suicide come to the conclusion: “No definitely reliable therapy is possible. We therefore resolved to give in to the patient’s demand for discharge.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 26
She left the hospital. Three days later, she seemed well and happy, ate well for the first time in years, and then tool a lethal dose of poison. She was thirty-three. Her epitaph might well be her own words: “I feel myself, quite passively, the stage on which two hostile forces are mangling each other.” What went fatally wrong in the life of this young lady? She was made to feel that her own experiencing was invalid, erroneous, wrong, and unsound, and that what she should be feeling was something quite different. Unfortunately for her, her love for her parents, especially her father, was so strong that she surrendered her own capacity for trusting her experience and substituted theirs, or his. She gave up being her self, and is completely dependent on what others think. She has no way of knowing what she feels or what her opinion is. This is the loneliest state of all—an almost complete separation from one’s autonomous organism. The greatest weakness in her treatment was that no one involved seems to have related to her as a person—a person worthy of respect, a person capable of autonomous choice, a person whose inner experiencing is precious resources to be drawn upon and trusted. Rather, she seems to have been dealt with as an object. She is simply following the pattern which has already isolated her—distrusting her own experiencing and trying to believe and feel what she should feel, what the expect tells her she feels. #RandolphHarris 12 of 26
Her parents and the two analysts and the physicians never seem to have respected her enough to hear her deeply. They did not deal with her as a person capable of meeting life, a person whose experiencing is trustworthy, whose inner feelings are worthy of acceptance. How, then could she listen to herself or respect the experiencing going on within her? “I am isolated. I sit in a glass ball, I see people through a glass wall. I scream, but they do not hear me.” What a desperate cry for a relationship between two persons. She never experienced healing through meeting. There was no one who could meet her, accept her, as she was. This was a tragic case. One should feel angry at the tragic waste of a human being. A person needs to be taught that it is okay to experience love and resentment toward family members. They need to discover it is okay to both fear independent living and to be eager for independent living. It is okay to listen to your heart about gender identity, body image, intelligence, and social ideas. And that it is okay to eat, but it is also a good idea to get a fitness trainer and talk to a nutritionist. So many people are afraid of themselves, but they are ways to be the person you want to be and do some of the things you want to do, and achieve your dreams and goals. Little by little, we have to learn to experience our feelings and some of them are frightening indeed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 26
To explore and experience both the risk and the excitement of being an independent person is one of those fearful elements in life. As one experiences these different hidden facets of oneself, one would find oneself changing. This time the changed self that emerged would be based on one’s organismic reactions, one’s inner experiencing, and not on the values and expectations of others. One does not have to struggle against one’s nature, against one’s feelings. Rather, one will find that when one can be open to all one’s experiencing—both one’s inner experiencing, and one’s experiencing of the demands and attitudes of others—one would have a basis by which to live. If one can learn to be open and listen sensitively for life’s meaning, it would provide a constructive guide for one’s behaviour and for one’s life. This is not to say that this process would be smooth or comfortable. To be a person—sometimes opposing one’s parents, sometimes standing against social pressures, often choosing to act even though uncertain of the outcome—this is painful, costly, sometimes even terrifying. However, it is very precious: to be oneself is worth a high price. It also has many other valuable aspects. #RandolphHarris 14 of 26
In a therapeutic relationship, where all of oneself is accepted, one can discover that it is safe to communicate oneself more completely. There is no need to be lonely and isolated, there are others who can understand and share the meaning of one’s experience. During this process is usually when a person makes friends with oneself—and learns that one’s body, feelings, and desires are not enemy aliens but friendly constructive parts of oneself. It is unnecessary to utter, I am perishing in the struggle against my nature.” One will be in a good and communicative relationship with oneself. One will also have found it safe to be oneself full in a relationship. As a consequence, one will find oneself relating with more of oneself to others, and again discovering that it is not dangerously unsafe, but rather far more satisfying, to be one’s real self in relating to others. It is by a process that the glass wall would dissolve. One will go on to find that life is adventurous, often painful. It will be a never ending puzzlement to discover the behaviour that would best harmonize with one’s complex and contradictory feelings. However, one will be vital and real and in relationship to oneself and others. One would have resolved for oneself the great loneliness of contemporary humans. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26
In every respect in which we make an object of the person—whether by diagnosing one, analyzing one, or perceiving one impersonally in a case history—we stand in way of our therapeutic goal. To make an object of a person has been helpful in treating physical ills; it has no been successful in treating psychological ills. We are deeply helpful only when we relate as persons, when we risk ourselves as persons in the relationship, when we experience the other person as a person in one’s own right. Only then is there a meeting at a depth that dissolves the pain of aloneness in both client and therapist. “For the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit,” reports Romans 14.17. Feelings are a primary blessing and a primary problem for human life. We cannot live without them and we can hardly live with them. Hence they are also central for spiritual formation in the Christian tradition. “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desire,” reports Galatians 5.24. In the restoration of the individual God, feelings too must be renovated: old ones removed in many cases, or at least thoroughly modified, and new ones installed or at least heightened into a new prominence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 26
Our first inquiry as we greet people for the day is likely to be, “How are you feeling today?” Rarely will it be, “how are you thinking?” Feelings live on the front row of our lives like unruly children clamoring for attention. They presume on their justification in being whatever they are—unlike a thought, which by nature is open to challenge and invites the question, “Why?” The term “feeling” indicated a kind of “contact,” a “touch,” that is at once blind and powerful—in allure as well as in revulsion. A “touching” scene is one that evokes feelings, that “touches” us. In feelings we really know that something is “there,” and solidly so. However, it is and why it is remains obscure—though hauntingly present. This aspect of “blind power” has famously led to the description of emotions as “human bondage.” However, the quality of blind power equally extends to mere sensations or desires, which as well as emotions, can be simply overwhelming. The attraction of feeling to human minds is so great that we project it into angels. One of the most common themes found in literary and artistic portrayals of angels is how they desire to feel what human beings feel and, mainly, what they are capable of feeling because they have flesh bodies. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26
Of course, the idea is, angels would have irreversibly given up their angel status to have what they desire, and as the stories go, they sometimes do give it up. However, there is also an element of responsibility at work here. Angels protect of because they know they have more power than we do, and this gives them a certain responsibility. They will help us, because they know it is right for them to do so. And if prayer is a conversation with divine beings, it is only right that we should occasionally let them speak, too. I sit still, that my motion may not hide your presence. I do not speak, that my words may hide your voice. I will still my thoughts, that my thinking might not block your arrival. God of old, long have you waited, seemingly forgotten and outgrown, waiting with patience born of wisdom, for your children to remember you and to come to you with open hearts. Awake, come, that day is here. One more we thank you, once more the old songs rise, once more the dance steps are traced, once more your name is spoken. Never more will the altars be unattended. Never again the time of waiting. Your children look to you once again and pledge to you their faith. The author of the “Cathedral” likes the thoughts which the Sunday Collect brings to, “healthful founts in Elim green, casting a freshness over the week.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 26
Nor is it a small advantage which the Collect-type of prayer secures to any community that adopts it, that it answers the end which, as Hooker, quoting S. Augustine, tells us, the Egyptian monks proposed to themselves—namely, to preserve “that vigilant and erect attention of monks proposed to themselves—namely, to preserve “the vigilant and erect attention of mind, which in prayer is very necessary, from being wasted or dulled through continuance, if their prayers were few or long:” for which the purpose,–or, as Cassin expressed it, “both to solicit God more earnestly by frequent addresses, and to avoid the temptations of Satan drawing them into lassitude and weariness,”—they resolved that their prayers should be man and brief, like darts cast forth with energy. This is doubtless chiefly realized by many. “Now it came to pass that after the end of Korihor, Alma having received tidings that the Zoramites were perverting the ways of the Lord, and that Zorman, who was their leader, was leading the hearts of the people to bow down to dumb idols, his heart again began to sicken because of the iniquity of the people. For it was the cause of great sorrow to Alma to know of iniquity among his people; therefore his heart was exceedingly sorrowful because of the separation of the Zoramites from the Nephites. #RandolphHarris 19 of 26
“Now the Zoramites had gathered themselves together in a land which was east of the land of Zarahemla, which lay nearly bordering upon the seashore, which was south of the land of Jershon, which also bordered upon the wilderness south, which wilderness was full of the Lamanites. Now the Nephites greatly feared that the Zoramites would enter into a correspondence which the Lamanites, and that it would be the means of great loss on the part of the Nephites. And now, as the preaching of the word had a great tendency to lead the people to do that which was just—yea, it had had more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword, or anything else, which had happened unto them—therefore Alma thought it was expedient that they should try the virtue of the word of God. Therefore he took Ammon, and Aaron, and Omner; and Himni he did leave in the church in Zarahemla; but the former three he took with him, and also Amulek and Zeesrom, who were at Melek; and he also took two of his sons. Now the eldest of his sons he took not with him, and his name was Helaman; but the names of those whom he took with him were Shiblon and Corianton; and these are the names of those who went with him among the Zoramites, to preach unto the word. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26
“Now the Zoramites were dissenters from the Nephites; therefore they had had the word of God preached unto them. However, they had fallen into great errors, for they would not observe to keep the commandments of God, and his statutes, according to the law of Moses. Neither would they observe the performances of the church, to continue in prayer and supplication to God daily, that they might not enter into temptation. Yea, in fine, they did pervert the ways of the Lord in very many instances; therefore, for this cause, Alma and his brethren went into the land to preach the word unto them. Now, when they had come into the land, behold, to their astonishment they found that Zoramites had built synagogues, and that they did gather themselves together on one day of the week, which day they did call the day of the Lord; and they did worship after a manner which Alma and his brethren had never beheld. For they had a place built up in the center of their synagogue, a place for standing, which was high above the head; and the top thereof would only admit one person. Therefore, whosoever desired to worship must go forth and stand upon the top thereof, and stretch forth his hands towards Heaven and cry with a loud voice, saying: Holy, holy God; we believe that thou art God, and we believe that thou art holy, and that thou wast a spirit, and that thou art a spirit, and that thou wilt be a spirit forever. #RandolphHarris 21 of 26
Holy God, we believe that thou hast separated us from our brethren; and we do not believe the tradition of our brethren, which was handed down to them by the childishness of their fathers; but we believe that thou hast elected us to be thy holy children; and also thou hast made it known unto us that there shall be no Christ. However, thou art the same yesterday, today, and forever; and thou hast elected us that we shall be saved, whilst all around us are elected to be cast by thy wrath down to hell; for the which holiness, O God, we thank thee; and we also thank thee that thou hast elected us, that we may no be led away after the foolish traditions of our brethren, which doth bind them down to a belief of Christ, which doth lead their heart to wander far from thee, our God. And again we thank thee, O God, that we are a chosen and a holy people. Amen. Now it came to pass that after Alma and his brethren and his sons had heard these prayers, they were astonished beyond all measure. For behold, every human did go forth and offer up these same prayers. Now the place was called by them Rameumptom, which, being interpreted, is the holy stand. #RandolphHarris 22 of 26
“Now, from this stand they did offer up, every human, the selfsame prayer unto God, thanking their God that they were chosen of him, and that he did not lead them away after the tradition of their brethren, and that their hearts were not stolen away to believe in things to come, which they knew nothing about. Now, after the people had all offered-up thanks after this manner, they returned to their homes, never speaking of their God again until they had assembled themselves together again to the holy stand, to offer up thanks after their manner. Now when Alma saw this his heart was grieved; for he saw that they were a wicked and a perverse people; yea, he saw that their hearts were set upon gold, and upon silver, and upon all manner of fine goods. Yea, and he also saw that their hearts were lifted up unto great boasting, in their pride. And he lifted up his voice to Heaven, and cried, saying: O, how long, O Lord, wilt thou suffer that thy servants shall dwell here below in the flesh, to behold such gross wickedness among the children of human? Behold, O God, they cry unto thee, and yet their hearts are swallowed up in their pride. Behold, O God, they cry unto thee with their mouths, while they are puffed up, even to greatness, with the vain things of the World. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26
“Behold, O my God, their costly apparel, and their ringlets, and their bracelets, and their ornaments of gold, and all their precious things which they are ornamented with; and behold, their hearts are set upon them, and yet they cry unto thee and say—We thank thee, O God, for we are a chosen people unto thee, while others shall perish. Yea, and they say that thou hast made it known unto them that there shall be no Christ. O Lord God, how long wilt thou suffer that such wickedness and infidelity shall be among this people? O Lord, wilt thou give me strength, that I may bear with mine infirmities. For I am infirm, and such wickedness among this people doth pain my soul. O Lord, my heart is exceedingly sorrowful; wilt thou comfort my soul in Christ. O Lord, wilt thou grant unto me that I may strength, that thy servants shall dwell here below in the flesh, to behold such gross wickedness among the children of humans? Behold, O God, they cry unto thee, and yet their hearts are swallowed up in their pride. Behold, O God, they cry unto thee with their mouths, while they are puffed up, even to greatness, with the vain things of the World. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26
“Behold, O my God, their costly apparel, and their ringlets, and their bracelets, and their ornaments of gold, and all their precious things which they are ornamented with; and behold, their hearts are set upon them, and yet they cry unto thee and say—We thank thee, O God, for we are a chosen people unto thee, while others shall perish. Yea, and they say that thou hast made it known unto them that there shall be no Christ. O Lord God, how long wilt thou suffer that such wickedness and infidelity shall be among this people? O Lord, wilt thou give me strength, that I may bear with mine infirmities. For I am infirm, and such wickedness among this people doth pain my soul. O Lord, my heart is exceedingly sorrowful; wilt thou comfort my soul in Christ. O Lord, wilt thou grant unto me that I may have strength, that I may suffer with patience these afflictions which shall come upon me, because of the iniquity of this people. O Lord, wilt thou comfort my soul, and give unto me success, and also my fellow labourers who are with me—yea, Ammon, and Aaron, and Omner, and also Amulek and Zeezrom, and also my two sons—yea, even all these wilt thou comfort, O Lord. Yea, wilt thou comfort their souls in Christ. Wilt thou grant unto them that they may have strength, that they may bear their afflictions which shall come upon them because of the iniquities of this people. #RandolphHarris 25 of 26
“O Lord, wilt thou grant unto us that we may have success in bringing them again unto thee in Christ. Behold, O Lord, their souls are precious, and many of them are our brethren; therefore, give unto us, O Lord, power and wisdom that we may bring these, our brethren, again unto thee. Now it came to pass that when Alma had said these words, that he clapped his hands upon all them who were with him. And behold, as he clapped his hands upon them, they were filled with the Holy Spirit. And after that they did separate themselves one from another, taking no thought for themselves what they should eat, or what they should drink, or what they should put on. And the Lord provided for them that they should hunger not, neither should they thirst; yea, and he also gave them strength, that they should suffer no manner of affliction, save it were swallowed up in joy of Christ. Now this was according to the prayer of Alma; and this because he prayed in faith,” reports Alma 31.1-38. Love is more important than what we can take. Please say with me, three times—Love! Love! Love! There exists in the World today a gigantic reservoir of good will toward us, the American people. Business underlies everything in our national life, including our spiritual life. Witness the fact that the Lord’s Prayer, the first petition is for daily bread. No one can worship God or love one’s neighbour on an empty stomach. #RandolphHarris 26 of 26
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Sober, Serious, Understated and Elegant–Come Ye Out from Among them and be Ye Separate!
Success is a drug in itself. When you strive to become somebody and you become that person, it is difficult to give it up. Other persons behave in dubious ways which we do not approve in our family. Many of them play cards, go o movies, smoke, dance, drink, and engage in other activities—some unmentionable. So the best thing to do is to be tolerant of them, since they may not know better, and to keep away from any close communication with them and live your life within the family. “Come ye out from among them and be ye separate” is a good Biblical text to follow. Self-actualizing individuals (more matured, more fully-human), by definition, already suitably gratified in their basic needs, are now motivated in other higher ways, to be called “metamotivations.” This is to say that they have a feeling of belongingness and rootedness, they are satisfied in their love needs, have friend and feel loved and loveworthy they have status and place in life and respect from other people, and they have a reasonable feeling of worth and self-respect. If we phrase this negatively—in terms of the frustration of these basic needs and in terms of pathology—then this is to say that self-actualizing people do not need (for any length of time) feel anxiety-ridden, rootless, or isolated, nor do they have crippling feelings of inferiority or worthlessness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 27
Of course this can be phrased in other ways and this I have done. For instance, since the basic needs had been assumed to be the only motivations for human beings, it was possible, and in certain contexts also useful, to say of self-actualizing people that they were “unmotivated.” This was to align these people with the Eastern philosophical view of health as the transcendence of striving or desiring. It was also possible o describe self-actualizing people as expressing rather than coping, and to stress that they were spontaneous, and natural, that they were more easily themselves than other people. Each of these phrasings has its own operational usefulness in particular research context. However, it is also true that for certain purposes it is best to ask the questions, “What motivates the self-actualizing person?” Clearly we must make an immediate distinction between the ordinary motives of people below the level of self-actualization—that is, people motivated by the basic needs—and the motivations of people who are sufficiently gratified in all their basic needs and therefore are no longer motivated by them primarily, but by “higher” motivations. It is therefore convenient to call these higher motives and needs of self-actualizing persons by the name “metaneeds” and also to differentiate the category of motivation from the category of “metamotivation.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 27
(It is now more clear to me that gratification of the basic needs is not a sufficient condition for metamotivation, although it may be a necessary precondition. I have individual subjects in whom apparent basic-need-gratification is compatible with “existential neurosis,” meaninglessness, valuelessness, or the like. Metamotivation now seems not to ensure automatically after basic-need-gratification. One must speak also of the additional variable of “defenses against metamotivation.” This implies that, for the strategy of communication and of theory-building, it may turn out to be useful to add to the definition of the self-actualizing person, not only [a] that one be sufficiently free of illness, [b] that one be sufficiently gratified in one’s basic needs, and [c] that one be beneficially using one’s capacities, but also [d] that one be motivated by some values which one strives for or gropes for and to which one is loyal.) All such people are devoted to some task, call, vocation, beloved (“outside themselves”). Generally the devotion and dedication is so marked that one can fairly use the old words vocation, calling, or mission to describe their passionate, selfless, and profound feeling for their “work.” We could even use the words destiny or fate. #RandolphHarris 3 of 27
I have sometimes gone so far as to speak of obligation in the religious sense, in the sense of offering oneself or dedicating oneself upon some altar for some particular task, some cause outside oneself and bigger than oneself, something not merely selfish, something impersonal. I think it is possible to go pretty far with the notion of destiny or fate. This is a way of putting into inadequate words the feeling that one gets when one listens to self-actualizing people (and some others) talking about their work or task. One gets the feeling of a beloved job, and, furthermore, of something for which the person is “natural,” something that one is suited for, something that is right for one, even something that one was born for. It should be said that this all seems to hold true for my female subjects even though in a different sense. I have at lease one women subject who devoted herself entirely to the task of being the mother, the wife, the housewife and the clan matriarch. Her vocation, one could very reasonably call it, was to being up her children, to make her husband happy, and to hold together a large number of relatives in a network of personal relations. This she did very well and, as nearly as I could make out, this she enjoyed. She loved her lot completely and totally, never yearning for anything else so far as I could tell, and using all her capacities well in the process. #RandolphHarris 4 of 27
Other women subjects have had various combinations of home life and professional work outside the home which could produce this same sense of dedication to something perceived simultaneously, as both as beloved and also as important and worthwhile doing. In some women, I have also been tempted to thing of “having a baby” as fullest self-actualization all by itself, at least for a time. In this ideal instance, inner requiredness coincides with external requiredness, “I want to” with ‘I must.” I often get the feeling in this kind of situation that I can tease apart two kinds of determinants of this transaction. One can be spoken of as the responses within the person, exempla gratia, “I love babies (or painting, or research, or political power) more than anything in the World. I am fascinated with it…I am inexorably drawn to…I need to…” This we may call “inner requiredness” and it is felt as a kind of self-indulgence rather than as a duty. It is different from and separable from “external requireness,” which is rather felt as a response to what the environment, the situation, requires of the person, as a fire “calls for” putting out, or as a helpless baby demands that one takes care of it, or as some obvious injustice calls for righting. Here one feels more the element of duty, or obligation, or responsibility, or being compelled helplessly to respond no matter what one was planning to do, or wished to do. It is more “I must, I have to, I am compelled” than “I want to.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 27
In the ideal instance, which fortunately also happens in fact in many of my instances, “I want to” coincides with “I must.” I hesitate to call this simply “purposefulness” because that may imply that is happens only out of will, purpose, decision, or calculation, and does not give enough weight to the subjective feeling of being swept along, of willing and eager surrender, or yielding to fate and happily embracing it at the same time. Ideally, one also discovers one’s fate; it is not only made or constructed or decided upon. It is recognized as if one had been unwittingly waiting for it. Perhaps the better phrase would be “Spinozistic” or “Taoistic” choice or decision or purpose—or even will. The best way to communicate these feelings to someone who does not intuitively, directly understand them is to use as a model “falling in love.” This is clearly different from doing one’s duty, or doing what is sensible or logical. And clearly also “will,” if mentioned at all, is used in a very special sense. And when two people love each other fully, then each one knows that it feels like to be magnet and what it feels like to be iron filings, and what it feels like to be both simultaneously. This ideal situation generates feelings of good fortune and also of ambivalence and unworthiness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 27
This model also helps to convey what is difficult to communicate in words, that is, their sense of good fortune, of luck, of gratuitous grace, of awe that this miracle should have occurred, of wonder that they should have been chosen, and of the peculiar mixture of pride fused with humility, or arrogance shot through with the pity-for-the-less-fortunate that one finds in lovers. Of course the possibility of good fortune and success also can set into motion all sorts of neurotic fears, feelings of unworthiness, countervalues, Jonah-syndromes dynamics, et cetera. These defenses against our highest possibilities must be overcome before the highest values can be wholeheartedly embraced. At this level the dichotomizing of work and play is transcended; wages, hobbies, vacation, et cetera, must be defined at a high level. And then, of course, it can be said of such a person with real meaningfulness that one is being one’s own kind of person, of being oneself, or actualizing one’s real self. An abstract statement, an extrapolation out from this kind of observation toward the ultimate and perfect ideal would run something like this: This person is the best one in the whole World for this particular job, and this particular job is the best job in the World for this particular person and one’s talents, capacities, and taste. One was meant for it, and it was meant for one. #RandolphHarris 7 of 27
Of course, as soon as we accept this and get the feeling of it, then we move over into another realm of discourse, id est, the realm of being, of transcendence. Now we can speak meaningfully only in the language of being (“The B-language,” communication at the mystical level, et cetera.). For instance, it is quite obvious with such people that the ordinary or conventional dichotomy between work and play is transcended totally. That is, there is certainly no distinction between work and play in such a person in such a situation. One’s work is one’s play and one’s play is one’s one. If a person loves one’s work and enjoys it more than any other activity in the whole World and is eager to get to it, to get back to it after any interruption, then how can we speak about “labour” in the sense of something one is forced to do against one’s wishes? Such vocation-loving individuals tend to identify (introject, incorporate) with their “work” and to make it into a defining-characteristic of the self. It becomes part of the self. If one asks such a person, id est, self-actualizing, work-loving, “Who are you?” or “What are you?” one often tends to answer in term of one’s “call,” exempli gratia, “I am a lawyer.” “I am an architect.” “I am a psychiatrist.” “I am an artist,” et cetera. #RandolphHarris 8 of 27
Or, if one asks one, “Supposing you were not a scientist (or a teacher, or pilot), then what would you be?” Or, “Supposing you were not a psychologist, then what?” It is my impression that one’s response is apt to be one of puzzlement, thoughtfulness, being taken aback, id est, not having a ready answer. Or the response can be one of amusement, id est, it is funny. In effect, the answer is, “If I were not a father (anthropologist, industrialist), then I would not be me. I would be someone else. And I cannot imagine being someone else.” This kind of response parallels the confused response to the question, “Supposing you were a lawyer rather than a doctor?” A tentative conclusion is then that in self-actualizing subjects, their beloved calling tends to be perceived as a defining characteristic of the self, to be identified with, incorporated, introjected. It becomes an inextricable aspect of one’s being. The task to which they are dedicated seem to be interpretable as embodiments or incarnation of intrinsic values (rather than as a means to ends outside the work itself, and rather than as functionally autonomous). The tasks are loved (and introjected) BECAUSE hey embody these values. That is, ultimately it is the values that are loved rater than the job as such. #RandolphHarris 9 of 27
For these people the profession seems to be not functionally autonomous, but rather to be a carrier of, an instrument of, or an incarnation of ultimate values. For them the profession of, exempli gratia, law is a means to the end of justice, and not an end in itself. Perhaps I can communicate my feeling for the subtle difference in this way: for one human the law is loved because it is justice, while another human, he pure value-free technologist, might love the law simply as an intrinsically loveable set of rules, precedents, procedures without regard to the end of products of their use. Often when a modern person looks at nineteenth-century architecture, it seems like a confusing babble of warning styles. The “modern” movement in architecture, also known as the “International Style,” fostered this view of the nineteenth century by condemning all “historical” styles and ornament. The modernists of the twentieth century disdained all applied decoration. They condemned it as shallow, fake, and contrary to good principles of proportion, honesty of materials and structure, and creative shaping of space, all of which were held to be the proper measures of architecture. In doing this, the modernists were guilty of a present-mindedness and reductionism that caused them to condemn an entire century without bothering understand it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 27
Historical styles had a lot of content to nineteenth-century people. Architects like the Adam brothers in England adopted the new slim and elegant classicism, and it can to be used in the United State of America as well. In England, Adamesque ornament had very little ideological content. It was just decorative. In the United States of America, after the Revolution it came to represent republican government. The new capitol at Washington was filled with Federal-style buildings in direct reference to republican Rome. The Roman classical style was adopted by the revolutionaries in France as well, to symbolize the break with the old monarchy. In time the new Roman style was adopted by Napoleon and made showier and more bombastic to represent the Roman Empire in its new incarnation under the Emperor Napoleon. This was the background, then, in the 1830s. Americans were well acquainted with classicism and associated Roman classicism with the generation of the founding fathers. The nation was turning away from the Eastern seaboard and focusing on the trans-Appalachian West. In 1825, the Erie Canal was opened, encouraging commerce in the West. #RandolphHarris 11 of 27
In 1807, Robert Fulton had demonstrated his steamboat, and by 1830s dozens of steamboats plied the Hudson. In 1830, Peter Cooper displayed his midget engine, the Tom Thumb, and began a transportation revolution in railroads. In 1827, Americans rose up and elected Andrew Jackson president and threw out the last vestige of the Founding Fathers in the person of Jon Quincy Adams. Americans believed the age of Jackson to be the era of the common human, and the 1830s to be an American social revolution. It is no wonder that the elegance and refinement of the Federal style now seemed wrong. The Greek Revival style in America pervaded the smallest details of everyday life. Women wore light muslin dressed with Empire waists and no crinolines. They put their hair up in Greek style. Houses and public building were erected as little temples in small frontier towns in western New York and Ohio and Georgia. The town themselves were named Athens, Syracuse, Troy, and Rome. A lamp to ready by, a fork to eat with, a chair to sit on were all Greek inspired. Why Greek? Because the Greeks invented democracy. However, in classical ties, democracy meant mod-rule, and a republic meant rule by the people. #RandolphHarris 12 of 27
It did not matter that only a small proportion of ancient Greeks actually got to participate in government. It was only during the Enlightenment that the attitude toward the common human changed from “the mob” to the “noble savage,” and democracy became desirable. Sober, serious, understated, and elegant, every parlor is a Parthenon in 1832. How much different could a parlor be from the late Victorian riot of objects and patterns? To Americans, however, democracy was a Greek concept and the rule of the common human was democracy. The Greek Revival in interiors is usually called American Empire, and it was a style admirably suited to the new realities of American life. Empire furniture is usually made of mahogany veneer sheathing substantial monumental shapes. Carving, which has been such a prominent feature of the Federal style, practically disappeared. The furniture achieved its effect of beauty of its surfaces and the drama of its silhouette. A modern viewer might not realize that it is the first mass-produced, machine-made furniture in America. New steam and water-powered sawmills could cut Honduras mahogany into inexpensive veneers. New, machine-tooled casters and nuts and bolts joined bed parts into a whole. New transportation opened larger markets and made large-scale furniture factories profitable. #RandolphHarris 13 of 27
The simplicity of American Empire furniture appealed to the common human of Jacksonian American. The affordable prices also appealed to the common humans as well. Americans saw themselves as noble, honest democrats, founding a new egalitarian system in the wilderness. What better furnishings could there be than simple, sturdy, egalitarian Greek? This feeling was very profound, but fleeting. The country changes so quickly between the 180s and 1850s that new needs had to be met by a new architecture and a new furniture style. It is safe to say that the second most important room in the Victorian home was the dining room, where not only the family gathered, but where social interaction took place among family and visitors. “In the family it should be observed as a rule to meet together at all meals of the day around one common table where the same rules of etiquette should be as rigidly observed as the at the table of a stranger,” said Almon Verney in his Our Homes and Their Adornments. Up to the Elizabethan period, no one room was specifically designated for eating. Meals took place in sitting rooms, kitchens, or hall/entrance ways (which were sizable) in which tables and chairs, or benches, were set up for meals, then removed afterward. #RandolphHarris 14 of 27
Grand mansions, of course, had their banquet halls. It was when a room convenient to the kitchen and pantry evolved, that the dining room, as we know it, came to be. Dining rooms were also public rooms in which the best in furniture and décor was displayed. Typical dining room furniture would be a table, if possible with extensions (an invention that occurred during the Victorian period), dining chair, and a sideboard or chiffonier for storing serving pieces and presenting food. During this period, the dining rose to the most elegant state. Etiquette books prescribing serving and dining behavior down to the smallest detail. Serving pieces and dining utensils had very specific purposes such as pickle tongs, celery dishes, and syllabub-sticks. Sideboards of walnut, oak, or mahogany could include features like carved columns and friezes, pediments, and cornices, and were small works of architecture in themselves. Styles ranged from the intricately carved Jacobean and Gothic or Rococo Revival, to the clean lies of a Sheraton or Chippendale piece. Beginning around the 1860s, the sideboard was the most important piece of furniture in the dining room, equal in relevance to the parlor’s center table. Families with sufficient means had built in sideboards. #RandolphHarris 15 of 27
An 1892 Ladies Home Journal article tells what the sideboard is for, “Several people have asked me about the uses of the sideboard. The drawers are for the silver and cutlery, the closets for wine, if they be used, and often for such things as preserved ginger, confectionary, cut sugar, and indeed, any of the many little things that one likes to have in the dining-room yet out of sight. The water pitcher and other sliver and pretty bits of china can be placed on the sideboard. Cracker jar and fruit dish also belong there. At dinner time the dessert dishes are usually arranged upon it.” Life’s unfairness is not irrevocable; we can help balance the scales for others, if not always for ourselves. “Behold, now it came to pass that after the people of Ammon were established in the land of Jershon, yea, and also after the Lamanites were driven out of the land, and their dead were buried by the people of the land—Now their dead were not numbered because of the greatness of their numbers; neither were the dead of the Nephites numbered—but it came to pass after they had buried their dead, and also after the days of fasting, and mourning and prayer, (and it was in the sixteenth year of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi) there began to be continual peace throughout all the land. #RandolphHarris 16 of 27
“Yea, and the people did observe to keep the commandments of the Lord; and they were strict in observing the ordinances of God, according to the law of Moses; for they were taught to keep the law of Moses until it should be fulfilled. And thus the people did have no disturbance in all the sixteenth year of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi. And it came to pass that in the commencement of the seventeenth year of the reign of the judges, there was continual peace. However, it came to pass in the latter end of the seventeenth year, there came a man into the land of Zarahemla, and he was Anti-Christ, for he began to preach unto the people against the prophecies which had been spoken by the prophets, concerning the coming of Christ. Now there was no law against a human’s belief; for it was strictly contrary to the commands of God that there should be a law which should bring humans on to unequal grounds. For thus saith the scripture: Choose ye this day, whom ye will serve. Now if a human desired to serve God, it was one’s privilege; or rather, if one believed in God it was one’s privilege to serve him there was no law to punish one. However, if one murdered one was punished unto death; and if one robbed one was also punished; and if one committed adultery one was also punished; yea, for all this wickedness they were punished. #RandolphHarris 17 of 27
“For there was a law that humans should be judged according to their crimes. Nevertheless, there was no law against a human’s belief; therefore a human was punished only for the crimes which one had done; therefore, all humans were on equal grounds. And this Anti-Christ, whose name was Korihor, (and the law could have no hold upon him) began to preach unto the people that there should be no Christ. And after this manner did he preach, saying: O ye that are bound down under a foolish and a vain hope why do ye yoke yourselves with such foolish things? Why do ye look for a Chris? For no human can know of anything which is to come. Behold, these things which ye call prophecies, which ye say are handed down by holy prophets, behold, they are foolish traditions of your fathers. How do ye know of their surety? Behold, ye cannot know of things which ye do not see; therefore ye cannot know that there shall be a Christ. Ye look forward and say that ye see a remission of your sins. However, behold, ye cannot know of things which ye do not see; therefore ye cannot know that there shall be a Christ. Ye look forward and say that ye see a remission of your skins. However, behold, it is the effect of a frenzied mind; and this derangement of your minds becomes because of the traditions of your fathers, which lead you away into a belief of things which are not so. #RandolphHarris 18 of 27
“And many more such things did he say unto them, telling them that there could be no more atonement made for the sins of humans, but every human fared in this life according to the management of the creature; therefore every human prospered according to one’s genius, and that every human conquered according to one’s strength; and whatsoever a human did was no crime. And thus one did preach unto then, leading away the hearts of many, causing them to lift up their heads in their wickedness, yea, leading away many women, and also men, to commit whoredoms—telling them that when a human was dead, that was the end thereof. Now this human went over to the land of Jershon also, to preach these things among the people of Ammon, who were once the people of the Lamanites. However, behold they were more wise than many of the Nephites; for they took one around, and bound one, and carried one before Ammon, who was a high priest over that people. And it came to pass that one caused the one should be carried out of the land. And one cam over into the land of Gideon, and began to preach unto them also; and here one did not have much success, for one was taken and bound and carried before the high priest, and also the chief judge over the land. #RandolphHarris 19 of 27
“And it came to pass that the high priest said unto him: Why do ye go about perverting the ways of the Lord? Why do ye teach this people that there shall be no Christ, to interrupt their rejoicings? Why do ye speak against all the prophecies of the holy prophets? Now the high priest’s name was Giddonah. And Korihor said unto him: Because I do not teach the foolish traditions of your fathers, and because I do not teach this people to bind themselves down under the foolish ordinances and performances which are laid down by ancient priests, to usurp power and authority over them, to keep them in ignorance, that they may not lift up their heads, but be brought down according to thy words. Ye say that this people is a free people. Behold, I say they are in bondage. Ye say that those ancient prophecies are true. Behold, I say that ye do not know that they are true. Ye say that this people is a guilty and a fallen people, because of the transgression of a parent. Behold, I say that a child is not guilty because of its parents. And ye also say that Christ shall be come. However, behold, I say that ye do not know that he shall be slain for the sins of the World. And thus ye lead away this people after the foolish traditions of your fathers, and according to your own desires. #RandolphHarris 20 of 27
“And ye keep them down, even as it were in bondage, that ye may glut yourselves with the labours of their hands, that they durst not look up with boldness, and that they durst not enjoy their rights and privileges. Yea, they durst not make use of that which is their own lest they should offend their priests, who do yoke them according to their desires, and have brought them to believe, by their traditions and their dreams and their whims and the visions and their pretended mysteries, that they should, if they did not do according to their words, offend some unknow being, who they says is God—a being who never has been seen or known, who never was nor ever will be. Now when the high priest and the chief judge saw the hardness of his heart, yes, when they say that he would revile even against God, they would not make any reply to his words; but they caused that he should be bound; and they delivered him up into the hands of the officers, and sent him to the land of Zarahemla, that he might be brought before Alma, and the chief judge who was governor over all the land. And it came to pass that when we was brought before Alma and the chief judge, he did go on in the same manner as he did in the land of Gideon; yea, he went on to blaspheme. #RandolphHarris 21 of 27
“And he did rise up in great swelling words before Alma, and did revile against the priests and teachers, accusing them of leading away the people after the silly traditions of their fathers, for the sake of glutting on the labours of the people. Now Alma said unto him: Thou knowest that we do not glut ourselves upon the labours of this people; for behold I have laboured even from the commencement of the reign of the judges until now, with mine own hands for my support, notwithstanding my many travels round about the land to declare the word of God unto my people. And notwithstanding the many labours which I have performed in the churches, I have never received so much as even one senine for my labour; neither has any of my brethren, save it were in the judgment-seat; and then we have received only according to law for our time. And now, if we do not receive anything for our labours in the church, what doth it profit us to labour in the church save it were to declare the truth, that we may have rejoicings in the joy of our brethren? Then why sayest thou that we preach unto this people to get gain, when thou, of thyself, knowest that we receive no gain? And now, believest thou we deceive this people, that causes such joy in their hearts? #RandolphHarris 22 of 27
“And Korihor answered him, Yea. And then Alma said unto him: Believest thou that there is a God? And he answered, Nay. Now Alma said unto him: Will ye deny against that there is a God, and also deny the Christ? For behold, I say unto you, I know there is a God, and also that Christ shall come. And now what evidence have ye that there is no God, or that Christ cometh not? I say unto you that ye have none, save it be your word only. However, behold, I have all things as a testimony that these tings are true; and ye also have all things as a testimony unto you that they are true; and will ye deny them? Believest thou that these things are true? Behold, I know that thou believest, but thou art possessed with a lying spirit, and ye have put off the Spirit of God that it may have no place in you; but the devil has power over you, and he doth carry you about, working devices that he may destroy the children of God. And now Koihor said unto Alma: If thou wilt show me a sign, that I may be convinced that there is a God, yea, show unto me that he hath power, and then will I be convinced of the truth of thy words. However, Alma said unto him: Thou hast ad signs enough; will ye tempt your God? Will ye say, Show me a sign, when ye have the testimony of all these thy brethren, and also the holy prophets? #RandolphHarris 23 of 27
“The scriptures are laid before thee, yea, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator. And yet do ye go about, leading away the hearts of this people, testifying unto them there is no God? And yet will ye deny against all these witnesses? And he said: Yea, I will deny, except ye shall show me a sign. And now it came to pass that Alma said unto him: Behold, I am grieved because of the hardness of your heart, yea, that ye will still resist the spirit of the truth, that thy soul may be destroyed. However, behold, it is better than thy soul should be lost than that thou shouldst be the means of bringing many souls down to destruction, by thy lying and by the flattering words; therefore if thou shalt deny again, behold God shall smite thee, that thou shalt become dumb, that thou shalt never open thy mouth any more, that thou shalt not deceive this people any more. Now Korihor said unto him: I do not deny the existence of a God, but I do not believe there is a God; and I say also that ye do not know that there is a God; and except ye show me a sign, I will not believe. Now Alma said unto him: This will I give unto thee for a sign, that thou shalt be struck dumb, according to my words; and I say, that in the name of God, ye shall be struck dumb, that ye shall no more have utterance. #RandolphHarris 24 of 27
“Now when Alma had said these words, Korior was struck dumb, that we could not have utterance, according to the words of Alma. And now when the chief judge saw this, he put forth his hand and wrote unto Korihor, saying: Art thou convinced of the power of God? In whom did ye desire that Alma should show forth his sign? Behold, he has showed unto you a sign; and now will ye dispute more? And Korihor put forth his hand and wrote, saying: I know that I am dumb, for I cannot speak; and I know that nothing save it were the power of God could bring this upon me; yea, and I always knew that there was a God. However, behold, the devil hath deceived me; for he appeared unto me in the form of an angel, and said unto me: Go and reclaim this people, for they have all gone astray after an unknow God. And he said unto me: There is no God; yea, and he taught me that which I should say. And I have taught his words; and I taught them because they were pleasing unto the carnal mind; and I taught them, even until I have much success, insomuch that I verily believed that they were true; and for this cause I withstood the truth, even until I have brought this great curse upon me. Now when he had said this, he besought that Alma should pray unto God, that the curse might be taken from him. #RandolphHarris 25 of 27
“However, Alma said unto him: If this curse should be taken from thee though wouldst again lead away the hearts of this people; therefore, it shall be unto thee even as the Lord will. And it came to pass that the curse was not taken off of Korihor; but he was cast out, and went about from house to house begging for his food. Now the knowledge of what had happened unto Korihor was immediately published throughout all the land; yea, the proclamation was sent forth by the chief judge to all the people in the land, declaring unto those who had believed in the words of Korihor that they must speedily repent, lest the same judgments would come unto them. And it came to pas that they were all convinced of the wickedness of Korihor; therefore they were all converted again unto the Lord; and this put an end to the inequity after the manner of Krihor. And Korihor did go about from house to house, begging food for his support. And it came to pass that as he went forth among the people, yes, among a people who has separated themselves from the Nephites and called themselves Zoramites, being led by a man whose name was Zoram—and as he went forth amongst them, behold, he was run upon and trodden down, even until he wad dead. #RandolphHarris 26 of 27
“And thus we see the end of him who perverteth the ways of the Lord; and thus we see that the devil will not support his children at the last say, but doth speedily drag them down to hell,” reports Alma 30.1-60. Various writer bear witness to the majesty and the preciousness of our Anglican Collects. These beautiful Collects, which has soothed the griefs of forty generations of Christians. It is some of the most passionate, proper, and most elegant comprehensive expressions that any language ever afforded with the gifted Iayman, who said that for 1200 years they had been as the manna in the wilderness to devout spirits, and were, next to Scriptures itself, the clearest standards whereby genuine piety might de discerned; and with divines of our own day, who dwell on the stores of exact theology which are laid up in the Collects, and on their power to deliver our worship from incoherency, and to sustain it with strong and satisfying views of the Divine love. It is, indeed, this wonderful blending of strength and sweetness in the Collects, which has called forth so much love and admiration, and has made them such a bound of union for pious minds of different times and countries; even as the same imagery, in regard to their effect, naturally occurs to a bishop of Treves in the sixth century, and to an Anglican poet in the nineteenth. #RandolphHarris 27 of 27
Prayers to the Ancestors—the ancient Celts honoured their ancestors. Most cultures have such a day, and you should use whatever one is right for your ancestry. I have chanted your names each Samian as is my duty. I have offered thanksgiving gifts. I have never forgotten where I came from, and have kept the old ways, as is only proper. I therefore turn in confidence to you, spirits of my Ancestors, and ask your protection for my family and all its property. The ground which we stand, the starter block of our race; the slate on which we write, the pattern behind our lives. You who have lived in the times before us, who laid down the way on which we travel, who established traditions that guide our people, whose blood flows red within us, whose genes have engendered us: a gift for you, a small one in return for the great ones you have given us. Even the greatest, life itself, is your gift to us. A gift, then, from life to the dead. Old Ones who grace our shrine, who grace our line, who grace our lives: we honour you with right living, making you proud of us; the best offering you could receive. However, today a small offering, a token.
Winchester Mystery House
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As Pure in thought as Angels are, to Know Her was to Love Her!
Life experiences become acting experiences, which in turn become life experiences. Today I saw her for the first time at Mrs. Jansen’s. I was introduced to her. Oh! She was good as she was fair. None—none on Earth above her! As pure in thought as angels are, to know her was to love her. She did not seem to make anything of it or pay any attention to me. I kept myself as unobtrusive as possible in order to observe her all the better. She stayed only a moment; she had come only to fetch the daughters, who were to go to the royal kitchen. While the two Jansen girls were putting on their coats, we two were alone in a room, and I, with a cold, almost supercilious apathy, said a few casual words to her, to which she replied with undeserved politeness. Then they went. I could have offered to accompany them, but that already would have sufficed to indicate the gallant suitor, and I have convinced myself that she is not to be won that way. –On the contrary, I chose to leave right after they had gone and to walk faster than they, but along other streets, yet likewise heading toward the royal kitchen so that when they turned onto Store Kongensgade I passed them in the greatest haste without greeting them or anything. It is necessary for me to gain entrance to the house, and for that, as they say in military language, I am prepared. It looks, however, as if that will be a fairly protracted and difficult matter. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
I have never known any family that lived so much apart. It is only she and her aunt—no brothers, no cousins, not a thread to grab onto, no far-removed connection to contact. I walk around continually with one arm available. Not for anything in the World would I walk with someone on each arm at this time. My arm is a grappling hook that must always be kept in readiness; my arm is intended for the potential yield—if far off in the distance a very distant relative or friend should appear whom I from afar could catch hold of, then I make a grab. Moreover, it is not right for a family to live so isolated; the poor young lady is being deprived of the opportunity to learn to know the World, to say nothing of the other possible dangerous consequences it may have. That always has its revenge. It is the same with proposing. To be sure, such isolation does protect one from petty thievery. In a very sociable house, opportunity makes the thief. However, that does not matter greatly, for there is not much to steal from such young women; when they are twenty-eight years old, their hearts are already a filled autograph album, and I never care to write my name where many have already written. It never occurs to me to scratch my name on a window pane or in a tavern, or on a tree or a bench in Frederiksberg gardens. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Beliefs are the rails upon which our lives run. We almost always act according to what we really believe. It does not matter much what we say we believe or what we want others to think we believe. When the rubber meets the road, we act out our actual beliefs most of the time. That is why behaviour is such a good indicator of a person’s beliefs. Let us look, then, at five aspects of belief that are critical to the shape of our minds. The content of a belief. A belief’s impact on behaviour I a function of three of the belief’s traits: its content, strength, and centrality. The content of a belief helps determine how important the belief is for our character behaviour. What we believe matters—the actual content of what we believe about God, morality, politics, life after death, and so on will shape the contours of our lives and actions. In fact, the contents of one’s beliefs are so important that, according to Scripture, our eternal destiny is determined by what we believe about Jesus Christ. Today, people are inclined to think that the sincerity and fervency of one’s beliefs are more important than the content. As long as we believe something honestly and strongly, we are told, then that is all that matters. Nothing can be further from the truth. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
I can believe with all my might that my Ultimate Driving Machine will fly me to Japan or love is caused solely by the brain, but that fervency does not change a thing. As far as reality is concerned, what matters is not whether I like a belief or how sincere I am in believing it but whether or not the belief is true. I am responsible for what I believe and, I might add, for what I refuse to believe because the content of what I do or do not believe makes a tremendous difference to what I become and how I act. The strength of a belief. There is, however, more to a belief than its content. There is also strength and centrality for the person who believes it. We are all familiar with the idea of a belief having strength. If you believe something, that does not mean you are certain that it is true. Rather, it means that you are at least more than 50 percent convinced the belief is true. If it were fifty-fifty for you, you would not really have the belief in question. Instead, you would still be in a process of deciding whether or not you should adopt the belief. A belief’s strength is the degree to which you are convinced the belief is true. As you gain evidence and support for a belief, its strength grows for you. It may start off as plausible and later become fairly likely, quite likely, beyond reasonable doubt, or complete certain. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
The more certain you are of a belief, the more it becomes a part of your very soul, and the more you rely on it as a basis for action. The centrality of a belief. You may be less familiar with this concept than with the previous two, but with a little reflection the idea of centrality is easy to grasp. The centrality of a belief is the degree of importance the belief plays in your entire set of beliefs, that is, in your Worldview. The more central a belief is, the greater the impact on one’s Worldview were the belief given up. My belief that prunes are good for me is fairly strong (even thought I do not care for that belief!), but it is not very central for me. I could give it up and not have to abandon or adjust very many other beliefs I hold. However, my beliefs in absolute morality, life after death, or the Christian faith are very central for me—more central now, in fact, than just after my conversion in 2020. If I were to lose these beliefs, my entire set of beliefs would undergo a radical reshuffling—more so now than in 2021. As I grow, some of my beliefs come to play a more central role in the entire way I see life. How do we change beliefs? The content, strength, and centrality of a person’s beliefs plays a powerful role in determining the person’s character and behaviour. However, there is an apparent paradox about one’s beliefs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
On the one hand, Scripture holds us responsible for our beliefs since it commands us to embrace certain beliefs and warns us of the consequences of accepting other beliefs. On the other hand, experience teaches us that we cannot choose or change our beliefs by direct effort. For example, if someone offered you $100,000 to believe right now that a pink elephant was sitting next to you, you could not really choose to believe this in spite of having a good motive to do so! Happily, there is a way out of this paradox: we can change our beliefs indirectly. If I want to change my beliefs about something, I can embark on a course of study in which I choose to think regularly about certain things, read certain pieces of evidence and argument, and try to find problems with evidence raised against the belief in question. More generally, by choosing to undertake a course of study, meditation, and reflection, I can put myself in a position to undergo a change in the content, strength, and centrality of my beliefs. (We will look more at these truths later.) And if these kinds of changes in belief are what caused a change in my character and behaviour, then I will be transformed by these belief changes. That is exactly why Paul tells us to be transformed by the renewing of the mind, because it is precisely activities of the mind that change these three aspects of belief, which, in turn, transform our character and behaviour. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
How beliefs form the plausibility structure of a culture. There is a critical corollary of this insight. If I cannot even entertain the belief needed to bring about that change, I will never be able to change my life. By “entertain a belief” I mean to consider the possibility that the belief might be true. If you are hateful and mean to someone at work, you will have to change what you believe about the person before you will treat one differently. However, if you cannot even entertain the thought that one is a god person worthy of kindness, you will not change. There is a straightforward application here for evangelism. A person’s plausibility structure is set of ideas the person either is or is not willing to entertain as possibly true. For example, no one would come to a lecture defending a flat Earth because this idea is just not part of our plausibility structure. We cannot even entertain the idea. Moreover, a person’s plausibility structure is a function of the beliefs one already has. God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favourable conditions for the receptions of the gospel. False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
We may preach with all the fervour of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the World to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. If a culture reaches the point where Christian claims are not even part of its plausibility structure, fewer and fewer people will be able to entertain the possibility that they might be true. Whatever stragglers do come to faith in such a context would do so on the basis of felt needs alone, and the genuineness of such conversions would be questionable to say the least. This is why apologetics is so crucial to evangelism. It seeks to create a plausibility structure in a person’s mind, favourable conditions, so the gospel can be entertained by a person. To plant a seed in someone’s mind in pre-evangelism is to present a person with an idea that will work on one’s plausibility structure to create a space in which Christianity can be entertained seriously. If this is important to evangelism, it is strategically crucial that local churches think about how hey can address those aspects of the modern Worldview that place Christianity outside the plausibility structure of so many. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Our modern post-Christian society is perilously close to regarding Christian claims as mere figments in the minds of the faithful. Speaking of fundamentalists after the Scopes trial in 1925, historian George Marsden observes that they could not “raise the level of discourse to a plane where any of their arguments would be taken seriously. Whatever they said would be overshadowed by the pejorative associations attached to the movement by the seemingly victorious secular establishment.” Tragically, as we approach the twenty-first century, our current context for proclaiming Christian truth is even worse than it was in the decades following 1925. During those decades, at least argumentation was considered relevant to making or accepting religious claims. However, now religious assertions are regarded as mere expressions of private belief or emotion, far below the level needed for argument itself to be considered at all relevant. The plausibility, content, strength, and centrality of our beliefs play a key role in determining our character and behaviour. And various activities of thought and study affect our beliefs and thereby impact our character and behaviour. Because thoughts and beliefs are contained in the mind, intellectually development and the renewal of the mind transform our lives. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
James’ words are consistently surgical. However, none are so penetrating as these: “If anyone considers oneself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on one’s tongue, one deceives oneself and one’s religion is worthless,” reports James 1.26. An exercise in futility! This is a spiritually terrifying statement, to say the least, for it cuts like a hot knife through warm butter, dissecting the cant and piety of the self-satisfied religious. An out-of-control tongue suggests bogus religion, no matter how well one’s devotion is carried out. The true test of a human’s spirituality is not one’s ability to speak, as we are apt to think, but rather one’s ability to bridle one’s tongue. The Lord Jesus Himself explained this in no uncertain terms in a heated exchange with the Pharisees: “Make a tree god and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit. You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks,” reports Matthew 12.33, 34). The tongue will inevitably reveal what is on the inside. This is especially true under stress, when the tongue is compulsively revealing. A preacher with a hammer in hand, doing some work on a church workday, noticed that one of the men seemed to be following him around. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Finally the preacher asked this man why he was following him around. The man answered, “I just want to hear what you say when you hit your thumb.” The curious parishioner understood that would be of the home, where the mouth unfailingly trumpets one’s essence. James does not mean that those who sometimes fall into this sin have a worthless religion, for all are guilty at times. Rather, he is saying that if anyone’s tongue is habitually unbridled, though one’s church attendance be impeccable, one’s Bible knowledge envied, one’s prayers many, one’s tithes exemplary, and though one considers oneself religious…one deceives oneself and one’s religion is worthless. The ever practical James has cut through all the religious decorum, but it is not butter that glistens under one’s knife, but the marrow of our souls. True religion controls the tongue. Humans, how is your religion? How is mine? Do you talk too much? Do you pass along choice morsels for others to gleefully take in? Do you pass along choice morsels for others to gleefully take in? Do you say to people’s faces what you would never say behind their backs? Do you have a “gift” of a sharp tongue? Are people elevated or diminished through your words? #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
From the time when one begins to take instruction from one’s teacher, the disciple also begins a period of probation in one’s inner career and of separation from one’s inner weaknesses. The probation will enable one gradually to show forth all the different aspects of one’s personality and will indicate how receptive one really is to the teacher’s influence. During this process, qualities which are lying latent beneath the surface will arise above it; situations will arrange themselves in such a way as to force one to express them. In short, what is hidden will become open. Thus one will be given the chance to look to one’s moral foundations before one advances to the intensive mystical training which places hidden power and hidden knowledge in one’s hands. Without first getting such a foundation, one who gets possession of these powers may soon fall into overpowering temptations, with disastrous results to oneself and others. The inner conflict which results from the probation will force one to face oneself, to look at the weaknesses which are present within one and to try to conquer them. If there is no other way to get one to do so, then one will have to take the way of suffering their consequences so as to have them brought home to one. Such a phase of the disciple’s career will naturally be filled with strains for oneself and with misunderstandings about oneself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The term of probation is a period of severe trials and strong temptations. However, the principle of probation is a sound one. Out of the vortex of its tests and stresses and upheavals, one has the chance to emerge a stronger and wiser being. One’s probationary period is concerned with the general purification of character from egoism and animality as well as with its sensitization to intuition and instruction. Without such a basis to work upon, it would be dangerous for one to venture into mystical work or public service. Nor would the teacher permit one to do so, as there are inexorable laws, not of one’s making, which govern the matter. One must be on guard and not mistake psychism for spirituality, pseudo-intuition for the real thing, mix personal motives with altruistic service, nor lose oneself in dreams and fantasies instead of finding oneself in inspired action. These faults are common to most mystical aspirants. The Quest for God is deadly serious and demands so much. It is far easier to go astray from it than to keep on it. A householder is responsible for all who dwell in the house, but especially for guest. Treat anyone who has safely passed the borders of your land with respect, unless they perform some act to offend the spirit of God. Even then, treat them with kindness until you have escorted them off your property. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
It is your responsibility to restore the harmony to your house. This obligation holds for the uninvited as well as the invited guest—the neighbourhood children, the sales person, the evangelist at your door. Greet them pleasantly. Offer them hospitality. If you invite them in, offer them something to ear or drink. Your Cresleigh Home will develop a reputation for hospitality, which will please God no end. Lord who sits at the edge of my land, sits at the edge of all I own. Watchful Jesus Christ guards my space. About my Cresleigh Home, establish your place of warding. Stand watchfully at the corners. Be a shield between our house and all that would work evil. Guard our land and all who claim its protection. Here on the border, you stand your watch. I have come out here to assure you that your attention to duty is appreciated, bringing not only words, but gifts to place before your maker. Watcher on the Borders, the steward of this land offers to you. This grain is for you, and the atmosphere is for you. “O that I were an angel, and could have the wish of mine heart, that I might go forth and speak with the trump of God, with a voice to shake the Earth, and cry repentance unto every people! Yea, I would declare unto every soul, as with the voice of thunder, repentance and the plan of redemption, that they should repent and come unto our God, that there might not be more sorrow upon all the face of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
“However, behold, I am a man, and do sin in my wish; for I ought to be content with the things which the Lord hath allotted unto me. I ought not to harrow up in my desires the firm decree of a just God, for I know that he granteth unto humans according to their desires, whether it be unto death or unto life; yea, I know that he allotteth unto humans, yea, decreeth unto them decrees which are unalterable, according to their wills, whether they be unto salvation or unto destruction. Yea, and I know that good and evil have come before all humans; he that knoweth not good from evil is blameless; but one that knoweth good and evil, to one it is given according to one’s desires, whether one desireth good or evil, life or death, joy or remorse of conscience. Now, seeing that I know these things, why should I desire more than to perform the work to which I have been called? Why should I desire that I were an angel, that I could speak unto all the ends of the Earth? For behold, the Lord doth grant unto all nations, of their own nation and tongue, to teach his word, yea, in wisdom, all that he seeth fit that they should have; therefore we see that the Lord doth counsel in wisdom, according to that which is just and true. I know that which the Lord hath commanded me, and I glory in it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
“I do not glory of myself, but I glory in that which the Lord hath commanded me; yea, and this is my glory, that perhaps I may be an instrument in the hands of God to bring some soul to repentance; and this is my joy. And behold, when I see many of my brethren truly penitent, and coming to the Lord their God, then is my soul filled with joy; then do I remember what the Lord has done for me, yea, even that he hath heard my prayer; yea, then do I remember his merciful arm which he extended towards me. Yea, and I also remember the captivity of my fathers; for I surely do know that the Lord did deliver them out of bondage, and by this did establish his church; yes, the Lord God, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, did deliver them out of bondage. Yea, I have always remembered the captivity of my fathers; and that same God who delivered them out of the hands of the Egyptians did deliver them out of bondage. Yea, and that same God did establish his church among them; yea, and that same God hath called me by a holy calling, to preach the word unto this people, and hath given me much success, in the which my joy is full. However, I do not joy in m own success alone, but my joy is more full because of the success of my brethren, who have been up to the land of Nephi. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
“Behold, they have laboured exceedingly, and have brought forth much fruit; and how great shall be their reward! Now, when I think of the success of these my brethren my soul is carried away, even to the separation of it from the body, as it were, so great is my joy. And now may God grant unto these, my brethren, that they may sit down in the kingdom of God; yea, and also all those who are the fruit of their labours that they may go no more out, but that they may praise him forever. And may God grant that it maybe done according to my words, even as I have spoken. Amen,” reports Alma 29.1-17. When we understand what humans are, we do not forthwith understand other things which belong to them, but we understand them one by one, according to a certain succession. On this account the things we understand as separated, we must reduce to one by way of composition or division, by forming an enunciation. Now the species of the divine intellect, which is essences of all things, and also whatever can accidental to them. Enunciatory composition signifies some existence of a thing; and thus God by His existence, which His essence, is the similitude of all those things which are signified by enunciation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Seeing that I have no confidence in anything but Thy mercy, do Thou endue my mouth with power to proclaim Thy truth, and sanctify my work with more abundant richness of grace, that Thou mayest both save my unworthy self, and justify in Thy loving-kindness the flock entrusted to me. Whatever Thou seest corrupt in them, do Thou make sound; and whatever Thou discernest vicious in me, do Thou cure; whatever guilt they have contracted or do contract, through my sinful lukewarmness or carelessness, do Thou put away. If in anything they have fallen into sin, whether with or without my knowledge, or have fallen by the stumbling block of my example, pardon them, and render not to my unhappy self the punishment which such a fault deserves. However, let the rebukes which I have administered in censure of others conduce to their salvation; and let the pleading of this prayer recall them from the error they have committed, that they may not endure the torments of hell:–so that Thou mayest vouchsafe pardon to their iniquities, and wash away the offence of which I have become guilty by my own unfitness to bear rule. Incline Thine ear, O God, to our sacrifices, and write me, and those who are committed to me, in Thy books; whereby, together with the flock entrusted to me, I may both be cleansed from all sin, and be enabled to attain to Thee in peace. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Look down from Heaven, O Christ, on Thy flock and lambs, and bless their bodies and souls. Grant those who have received Thy sign, O Christ, on their foreheads, to be Thine own in the day of judgment.
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Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat—God Moves in a Mysterious Way, Survival of the Fittest!
Half of the reporters in town are looking on you as a Pulitzer Prize waiting to be won. The word norm means an authoritative standard, and correspondingly, normal means abiding by such a standard. It follows that a normal personality is one whose conduct conforms to an authoritative standard, and an abnormal personality is one whose conduct does not do so. However, having said this much we immediately discover that there are two entirely different kinds of standards that may be applied to divide the normal from the abnormal: the one statistical, the other ethical. The one pertains to the average or usual, and the other to the desirable or valuable. These two standards are not only different, but in many ways they stand in flat contradiction to one another. It is, for example, usual for people to have some noxious trends in their natures, some pathology of tissues or organs, some evidences of nervousness and some self-defeating habits; but though usual or avege, such trends are not healthy. Or again, society’s authoritative standard for a wholesome love life may be achieved by only a minority of American males. Here too the usual is not the desirable; what is normal in one sense is not normal in the other sense. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
Certainly, unless they are taught what is legal, ethical, moral and Godly, no system of ethics in the civilized World holds up as a model for its children becoming productive members of society. It is not the actualities, but rather the potentialities, of human nature that somehow provide us with a standard for a sound and healthy personality. One hundred years ago this double meaning of norm and normal did not trouble psychology so much as it does today. In those days psychology was deeply involved in discovering average norms for every conceivable type of mental function. Means, modes, and sigmas were in the saddle, and differential psychology was riding high. Intoxicated with the new-found beauty of the normal distribution curve, psychologists were content to declare its slender tails as the one and only sensible measure of “abnormality.” Departures from the means were abnormal and for this reason slightly unsavory. In this era there grew up the concept of mental adjustment, and this concept held sway well into the decade of the 1920s. While not all psychologists adjustment with average behaviour, this implication was pretty generally present. It was, for example, frequently pointed out that an animal who does not adjust to the norm for one’s species usually dies. It was not yet pointed out that a human being who does so adjust is a bore and a mediocrity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
Now time have changed. Our concern for the improvement of average human behaviour is deep, for we now seriously doubt that the merely mediocre human can survive. As social anomie spreads, as society itself becomes more and more sick, we doubt that the mediocre human will escape mental disease and delinquency, or that one will keep oneself out of the clutch of dictators or succeed in preventing atomic or biological warfare. The normal distribution curve, we see, holds out no hope of salvation. We need citizens who are in a more beneficial and optimistic sense of normal, healthy and sound. And the World needs them more urgently than it ever did before. It is for this reason, I think, that psychologists are now seeking a fresh definition of what is normal and what is abnormal. They are asking questions concerning the valuable, the right, and the good as they have never asked them before. At the same time psychologists know that in seeking for a criterion of normality in this new sense they are trespassing on the traditional domain of moral philosophy. They also know that, by and large, philosophers have failed to establish authoritative standards for what constitutes the sound life—the life that educators, parents, and therapist should seek to mold. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
And so psychologist, for the most part, wish to pursue the search in a fresh way and if they can, avoid the traditional traps of axiology. During the past few months two proposals have been published that merit serious attention. Both are by social scientists, one a psychologist in the United States of America, the other a sociologist in England. Their aim is to derive a concept of normality (in the value sense) from the condition of humans (in the naturalistic sense). Both seek their ethical imperatives from biology and psychology, not from value-theory directly. In short, they boldly seek the ought (the goal to which teachers, counsellors, therapists should strive) from the is of human nature. Many philosophers tell us that this is an impossible undertaking. However, before we pass judgment let us see what success they have had. Humans are expected to maximize those attributes that are distinctively human. The first is human’s capacity for the use of propositional language (symbolization). From this particular superiority over animals derives several specific guidelines for normality. With the assistance of symbolic language, for example, humans can delay their gratifications, holding in mind a distant goal, a remote reward, an objective to be reached perhaps only at the end of one’s life or perhaps never. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
With the assistance of symbolic language, one can imagine a future for oneself that is far better than the present. One can also develop an intricate system of social concepts that leads one to all manner of possible relations with other human beings, far exceeding the rigid symbiotic rituals of, say, the social insects. A second distinctive human quality is related to the prolonged childhood in the human species. Dependence, basic trust, sympathy and altruism are absolutely essential to human survival, in a sense and to a degree that is maybe not always true for animals. The conception of normality has to do with a model of integrative adjustment. It follows that a sense of personal responsibility marks the normal human, for responsibility is a distinctive capacity derived from holding in mind a symbolic image of the future, delaying gratification, and being able to strive in accordance with one’s conception of the best principles of conduct for oneself. Similarly social responsibility is normal; for all these symbolic capacities can interact with the unique factor of trust or altruism. Closely related is the criterion of democratic social interest which derives from both symbolization and trust. Similarly, the possession of ideals and the necessity for self–control follow from the same naturalistic analysis. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
A sense of guilt is an inevitable consequence of human’s failure to live according to the distinctive human pattern, and so in our concept of normality we must include both guilt and devices for expiation. Every psychologist who wishes to make minimum assumptions and who wishes to keep close to empirical evidence, and who inclines toward the naturalism of biological science prefers fact-based evidence that has not been manipulated. Manipulated and prejudice science is worthless junk. It is must like fake news and has no value other than propaganda. Nonetheless, our philosopher friends will arise to confound us with some uncomfortable questions. Is it not a distinctively human capacity, they will ask, for a possessive mother to keep her child permanently tied to her apron strings? Does any lower animal engage in this destructive behaviour? Likewise, is it not distinctively human to develop fierce in-group loyalties that lead to prejudice, contempt, and war? Is it not possible that the burden of symbolization, social responsibility, and guilt may lead a person to depression and suicide? Suicide, along with all the other destructive patterns I have mentioned, is distinctly human. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
A philosopher who raises these questions would conclude, “No, you cannot derive the ought from the is of human nature. What is distinctively human is not necessarily distinctively good.” What are the minimum conditions for survival? When we know these minimum conditions we can declare that any situations falling below this level will lead to abnormality, and tend toward death and destruction, which COVID-19 could be symbolic of—humanity falling below minimum conditions needed to sustain a developing nation like America, and others around the World. This criterion is called the abnorm and we can define it, even if we cannot define normality, because people in general agree more readily on what is bad for humans than on what is good for them. They agree on the bad because all mortals are subject to the basic imperative of survival. The need for survival is connected to our need for growth and the need for social cohesion. These two principles are the universal conditions of all life, not merely of human life. Growth means autonomy and the process of individuation. Cohesion is the basic fact of social interdependence, involving, at least for human beings, initial trust, heteronomy, mating and the founding of family. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
By taking an inventory of conditions deleterious to growth and cohesion we may establish the “abnorm.” As a start, the first and foremost disorders of child training is the continued or repeated interruption of physical proximity between mother and child and emotional rejection of the child by the mother are conditions that harm survival of the individual and the group. In the first criterion of abnormality lies in a rupture in the transmutation of cohesion into love. Most of what is abnormal can be traced to failures in the principle of cohesion, so that the child becomes excessively demanding and compulsive. It is abnormal (inimical to survival) if repetition of conduct occurs irrespective of the situation and unmodified by its consequences; also when one’s accomplishments constantly fall short of one’s potentialities; likewise when one’s psychosexual frustrations prevent both growth and cohesion. Normality requires a balance between individuation and socialization, between autonomy and heteronomy. When an individual identifies oneself to an extreme degree with a group, the effect is that one loses one’s value. On the other hand, a complete inability to identify has the effect that the environment loses its value for the individual. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
In both extreme cases the dynamic relationship between individual and environment is distorted. An individual behaving in such a way is called neurotic. In a normal group each member preserves one’s individuality but accepts one’s role as participator also. While there is much agreement that the normal personality must strike a serviceable balance between growth as an individual and cohesion with society, we do not yet have a clear criterion for determining when these factors are in serviceable balance and when they are not. However, Philosophers, I fear, would shake their heads at us and ask us, “How do you know that survival is a good thing?” Further, “Why should all people enjoy equal rights to the benefits of growth and cohesion?” And, “How are we to define the optimum balance between cohesion and growth within the single personality?” We also have to worry about the relationship between abnormality and creativity. It was Nietzsche who declared, “I say unto you: a human must have chaos yet within one to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” Have not many meritorious works of music, literature, and even of science draw their inspiration not from balance but from some kind of psychic chaos? In effect that creativity and normality are not identical values. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
On the whole the normal person will be creative, but if valuable creations come likewise from people who are slipping away from the norm of survival, this fact can only be accepted and valued on the scale of creativity, but not properly on the scale of normality. In this day of existentialism I sense that psychologist are becoming less and less content with the concept of adjustment, and correspondingly with the concepts of tension reduction, restoration of equilibrium, and homeostasis. We wonder if a human who enjoys these beatific conditions is truly human. Growth we know is not due to homeostasis but to a kind of “transiistasis.” And cohesion is a matter of keeping our human relationships moving and not in mere stationary equilibrium. Stability cannot be a criterion of normality since stability brings evolution to a standstill, negating both growth and cohesion. Dr. Freud once wrote to Dr. Fliess that he finds “moderate misery necessary for intensive work.” When people have a zero correlation between self and ideal self, it is too low for normality; it leads to such anguish that the sufferer seeks therapy. At the same time normal people are by no means perfectly adjusted to themselves. There is always a wholesome gap between self and ideal self, between present existence and aspiration. On the other hand, too high a satisfaction indicates pathology. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
When individuals reach an extremely high coefficient for self-satisfaction, it is clear that one is pathological. Perfect correlations we might expect only from smug psychotics, particularly paranoid schizophrenics. And whatever our definition of normality turns out to be it must allow for serviceable imbalances within personality, and between person and society. There is an approach dear to the psychologist’s heart. The established criterion of normality or otherwise known as soundness, leads us to identify people who are “sound.” Teachers of graduate students in the University of California nominated a large number of people whom they considered sound, and some of the opposite trend. In testing and experimenting with these two groups, whose identities were unknow to the investigators, certain significant difference appeared. For one thing the sounder human had more realistic perceptions; they were not thrown off by distortions or by surrounding context in the sensory field. Further, on adjective check-lists they stood high on such traits as integrated pursuit of goals, persistence, adaptability, good nature. On the Minnesota Personality Inventory they were high in equanimity, self-confidence, objectivity and virility. Their self-insight was superior, as was their physical health. Finally, they came from homes where there was little or not affective rupture. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
A healthy person will be able to “love” and to “work.” On the schedule of other qualities a healthy person possesses include among others: efficient perception of reality, philosophical humour, spontaneity, detachment, and acceptance of self and others. A normal person has a strong ego, an abnormal person has a weak ego. Whether one is normal or abnormal depends on the degree to which one can manage one’s relationships successfully. Furthermore, the earlier enthusiasm of psychologist for the normal distribution curve helps to entrench the theory of continuum. Extreme withdrawal and escape constitute psychosis. However, you may ask, do no we all do some escaping? Yes, we do, and what is more, escapism may provide not only recreation but may sometimes have a certain constructive utility, as it has in mild daydreaming. Only if the dominant process is confrontation, the process of escape can still be harmless. Left to itself escapism spells disaster. In the psychotic this process has the upper hand; in the normal person, on the contrary, confrontation has the upper hand. Following this line of reasoning we can list other processes that intrinsically generate abnormality, and those that generate normality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
The first list deals with catabolic (energy used to break down) functions. I would mention: Escape or withdrawal (including fantasy), repression or dissociation, other “ego defences,” including rationalization, reaction formation, projection, displacement, impulsivity (uncontrolled), restriction of thinking to concrete level, fixation of personality at a juvenile level, all forms of rigidification. The list is not complete, but the process in question, I submit, are intrinsically catabolic. They are as much so as are the disease mechanisms responsible for diabetes, tuberculosis, hyperthyroidism, or cancer. A person suffering only a small dose of these mechanisms may appear to be normal, but only if anabolic (requires energy to grow and build) mechanisms predominate. Among the latter I would list: Confrontation (or, if you prefer, reality testing) availability of knowledge to consciousness, self-insight, with its attendant humour, integrative action of the nervous system, ability to think abstractly, continuous individuation (without arrested or fixated development), functional autonomy of motives, frustration of tolerance. I realize that what I have called processes, or mechanisms, are not in all cases logically parallel. However, they serve to make my point, that normality depends on the dominance of one set of principles, abnormality upon the dominance of another. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
The fact that all normal people are occasionally afflicted with catabolic processes does not alter the point. The normal life is marked by a preponderance of the anabolic functions; the abnormal by a preponderance of the catabolic. Investigations have told us much concerning the nature of human needs and motives, both conscious and unconscious. Much is known concerning the pathologies that result from frustration and imbalance of these needs. We know much about childhood conditions that predispose toward delinquency, prejudice, and mental disorder. A moralist might do well to cast one’s imperatives in terms of standards for child training. I can suggest, for example, that the abstract imperative “respect for persons” should be tested and formulated from the point of view for child training. The distinction between the anabolic and catabolic processes in the formation of personality represents a fact of importance. Instead of judging merely the end-product of action, perhaps the moralist would do well to focus one’s attention upon the process by which various ends are achieved. Conceivably, the moral law could be written in terms of strengthening anabolic functions in oneself and in others whilst fighting against catabolic functions. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
Apriorism, belief in a priori principles or reasoning specifically: the doctrine that knowledge rests upon principles that are self-evident to reason or are presupposed by experience in general, is a legitimate tool of philosophy. Up to now this method as yielded a wide array of moral imperatives, including the following: so act that maxim of thy action can become a universal law; be a respecter of persons; seek to reduce your desires; harmonize your interests with the interest of others; thou art nothing, thy folk is everything; thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind…and thy neighbour as thyself. Psychologists who in their teaching and counselling follow the lines now laid down will not go far wrong in guiding personalities toward normality. “Do not speak evil against one another, brethren,” reports James 4.11. God forbids any speech (whether true or false) which runs down another person. Certainly no Christian should ever be a party to slander—making false charges against another’s reputation. Yet some do. However, even more penetrating is the challenge to refrain from any speech intends to run down someone else, even if it is totally true. Personally I can think of few commands that go against commonly accepted conventions more than this, for most people think it is okay to convey negative information if it is true. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
Some people have had to defend themselves because no one else would. Still, no innocent person should be physically attacked and terrorized by a violent mob and forced to defend themselves. We understand that lying is immoral. However, is passing along damaging truth immoral? It seems almost a moral responsibility! By such reasoning, criticism behind another’s back is thought to be all right as long as it is based on fact. Likewise, denigrating gossip (of course it is never called gossip!) is seen as okay if the information is true. Thus many believers use truth as a license to righteously diminish others’ reputations. Related to this, some reject running down another behind one’s back, but believe it is okay if done face to face. These persons are driven by a “moral” compulsion to make others aware of their shortcomings. Fault-finding is, to them, a spiritual gift – a license to conduct spiritual search-and-destroy missions. What people like this do not know is that most people are painfully aware of their own faults – and would like to overcome them – and are trying very hard to do so. Then someone mercilessly assaults them believing they are doing their spiritual duty – and, oh, the hurt! This destructive speaking down against others can also manifest itself in the subtle art of minimizing another’s virtues, and accomplishments. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
After being with such people, your mental abilities, athletic accomplishments, musical skills, and domestic virtues seem not to be quite as good as they were a few minutes earlier. Some of this feeling came perhaps from their words about your Ultimate Driving Machine—“what a nice little BMW”—or from surprised exclamations about what you did not know. It was also the tone of the voice, the cast of the eye, and the surgical silences. There are many sinful reasons why humans in Christ talk down to one another. Revenge over some slight, real or imagined, may be the motivation of “Christian” slander. Others imagine that their spirituality and sensitivity equips them to pull others from their ivory towers and unmask their hypocrisies. Gideon once rightly cried, “A sword for the Lord and for Gideon!” (Judges 7.20), and we may do the same, but in our case it is too often a sword of self-righteousness. Condescending words and actions may also come from the need to elevate oneself – like the Pharisee who thanked God he was not like other sinners “or even like this tax collector” (Luke 18.11). We thus enjoy the dubious elevation of walking on the bruised head of others, and coming down on innocent heads. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
Sometimes this diminishing of others simply comes from too much empty talk. People do not have much to talk about, so they fuel the fires of conversation with the flesh of others. The abilities and motivations of the Body of Christ to run itself down could fill a library. We are all skillful in rationalizing such talk, but God’s Word still speaks: “Christians do not speak against one another.” Verbal cyanide comes in many forms. Gossip, innuendo, flattery, criticism, diminishment, are only a few of the venoms with which Christians inject each other. And the results are universal: toxic gastric juices a Devil’s feast – the swill of souls. Dear Lord in Heaven, please eat what is offered to you and transform it, as food is transformed, into blessings for me, and for all my household. The fire that burns on my hearth is the very heart of my Cresleigh Home. By feeding the fire with wood and with air, I am feeding my Cresleigh Home with what it needs most. I give you these things, fire on my hearth and more gifts will follow as we live our lives together. I light a fire on my family’s hearth and praise the God of our home. I pray to the Most High and praise the Ancestors. Hear my words, see me as I perform the rites, receive the gifts I offer you. Threshold Spirit, guardian and protector of my Cresleigh Home’s entrance, I honour you as I pass through the beautiful door. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
God of doorways, bless my goings out, bless my comings in. Lord of the threshold, of doors and gates Lord, place where inside and outside meet: God is my threshold. Please Guard my doors, God, keeper of the keys. Watch it with care, please keep my Cresleigh Homes safe. May the blessings of God guard this door. God it is who guards our doors. The Lord commands Ammon to lead the people of Anti-Nephi-Lehi to safety—upon meeting Alma, Ammon’s joy exhausts his strength—the Nephites give the Anti-Nephi-Lehies the land of Jershon—they are called the people of Amon. About 90-77 Before Christ. “Now it came to pass that when those Lamanites who had gone to war against the Nephites had found, after their many struggles to destroy them, that it was in vain to seek their destruction, they returned again to the land of Nephi. And it came to pass that the Amalekites, because of their loss, were exceedingly angry. And when they saw that they could not seek revenge from the Nephites, they began to stir up the people in anger against their brethren, the people of Anti-Nephi-Lehi; therefore they began again to destroy them. Now this people again refused to take their arms, and they suffered themselves to be slain according to the desires of their enemies. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
“Now when Amon and his brethren saw this work of destruction among those whom they so dearly beloved, and among those who had so dearly beloved them—for hey were treated as though they were angels sent from God to save them from everlasting destruction—therefore, when Amon and his brethren saw this great work of destruction, they were moved with compassion, and they said unto the king: Let us gather together this people of the Lord, and let us go down to the land of Zarahemla to our brethren the Nephites, and flee out of the hands of our enemies, that we be not destroyed. However, the king said unto them: Behold, the Nephites will destroy us, because of the many murders and sins we have committed against them. And Ammon said: I will go and inquire of the Lord, and if he say unto us, go down unto our brethren, will ye go? And the king said unto him: Yea, if the Lord saith unto us go, we will go down unto our brethren, and we will be any slaves among them; therefore let us go down and rely upon the mercies of our brethren. However, the king said unto him: Inquire of the Lord, and if he saith unto us go, we will go; otherwise we will perish in the land. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
“And it came to pass that Ammon went and inquired of the Lord and the Lord aid unto him: Get this people out of this land, that they perish not; for Satan has great hold on the hearts of the Amalekites, who do stir up the Lamanites to anger against their brethren to slay them; therefore get thee out of this land; and blessed are this people in this generation, for I will preserve them. And now it came to pass that Ammon went and told the king all the words which the Lord had said unto him. And they gathered together all their people, yea, all the people of the Lord, and did gather together all their flocks and herds, and departed out of the land, and came into the wilderness which divided the land of Nephi from the land of Zarahemla, and came over near the borders of the land. And it came to pass that Ammon said unto them: Behold, I and my brethren will go forth into the land of Zarahemla, and ye shall remain here until we return; and we will try the hearts of our brethren, whether they will that ye shall come into their land. And it came to pass that as Ammon was going forth into the land, that he and his brethren met Alma, over in the place of which has been spoken; and behold, this was a joyful meeting. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
“Now the joy of Ammon was so great even that he was full; yea, he was swallowed up in the joy of his God, even to the exhausting of his strength; and he fell again to the Earth. Now was not this exceeding joy? Behold, this is joy which none receiveth save it be the truly penitent and humble seeker of happiness. Now the joy of Alma in meeting his brethren was truly great, and also the joy of Aaron, of Omner, and Himni; but behold their joy was not that to exceed their strength. And now it came to pass that Alma conducted his brethren back to the land of Zarahemla; even to his own house. And they went and told the chief judge all the things that that happened unto them in the land of Nephi, among their brethren, the Lamanites. And it came to pass that the chief judge sent a proclamation throughout all the land, desiring the voice of the people concerning the admitting their brethren, who were the people of Anti-Nephi-Lehi. And it came to pass that the voice of the people came, saying: Behold, we will give up the land of Jershon, which is on the east by the sea, which joins the land Bountiful, which is on the south of the land Bountiful; and this land Jershon is the land which we will give unto our brethren for an inheritance. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
“And behold, we will set our armies between the land Jershon and the land Nephi, that we may protect our brethren in the land of Jershon; and this we do for our brethren lest they should commit sin; and this their great fear came because of their sore repentance which they had, on account of their many murders and their awful wickedness. And now behold, this will we do unto our brethren, that they may inherit the land Jershon; and we will guard them from their enemies with our armies, on condition that they will give us a portion of their substance to assist us that we may maintain our armies. Now, it came to pass that when Ammon had heard this, he returned to the people of Anti0Nephi-Lehi, and also Alma with him, into the wilderness, where they had pitched their tents, and made known unto them all these things. And Alma also related unto them his conversion, with Ammon and Aaron, and his brethren. And it came to pass that it did cause great joy among them. And they went down into the land of Jershon, and took possession of the land of Jershon; and they were called by the Nephites the people of Ammon; therefore they were distinguished by that name ever after. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
“And they were among the people of Nephi, and also numbered among the people who were of the church of God. And they were also distinguished for their zeal towards God, and also towards humans; for they were perfectly honest and upright in all things; and they were firm in the faith of Christ, even unto the end. And they did look upon shedding the blood of their brethren with the greatest abhorrence; and they never could be prevailed upon to take up arms against their brethren; and they never did look upon death with any degree of terror, for their hope and views of Christ and the resurrection; therefore, death was swallowed up to them by the victory of Christ over it. Therefore, they would suffer death in the most aggravating and distressing manner which could be inflicted by their brethren, before they would take the sword or cimeter to smite them. And thus they were a zealous and beloved people, a highly favoured people of the Lord,” reports Alma 27.1-30. O God, Whose will it runs down the order of all the ages; come to me, please look favorably on your servant’s sake. I try to live up to the order of Godly people and promote the messages in the scripture. You are the one and only God, and I approve of dedicating my service to you, Lord. Thank you for your gifts and take pity of me. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
Cresleigh Homes
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Look down from Heaven, O Christ, on Thy flock and lambs, and bless their bodies and souls. Grant those who have received Thy sign, O Christ, on their foreheads, to be Thine own in the day of judgment.
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord!
When bad people combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. People who live for the next miracle cream do not realize that beauty comes from a secret happiness and equilibrium within themselves. Today I learned something about the house into which she disappeared. It belongs to a widow with three lovely daughters. Information in abundance is to be had there—that is, provided they have any. The only difficulty is to understand these details raised to the third power, for they are three speak at once. Her name is Cordelia Wahl, and she is the daughter of an officer in the Royal Navy. He has been dead for some years—the mother, too. He was a very severe and strict man. She now lives with her aunt, her father’s sister, who is supposed to be like her brother but otherwise is a very respectable woman. Now that is all very fine, but in other respects they know nothing about this household; they never visit there, but Cordelia visits them frequently. She and the two other young ladies take a course in the royal kitchen. Therefore, she generally visits there early in the afternoon, sometimes in the morning, never in the evening. They keep very much to themselves. So this is the end of the story; it is appear that there is no bridge over which I can steal into Cordelia’s house. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Consequently, she does have a conception of the pains in life, of the dark side. Who would have said this to her. Yet these recollections probably belong to an earlier period; this is a horizon under which she has lived without really being aware of it. That is fine—it has saved her femininity; she is not warped. On the other hand, it will also have significance in elevating her, if one really knows how to call it forth. All such things usually teach pride, provided they do not break one, and she is far from being broken. She lives near the embankment; they locality is not the best, no neighbours whose acquaintance one could make, no public places where one can make observations unnoticed. The embankment itself is not very suitable; one is too visible. If one walk below on the street, one cannot very well walk on the side next to the embankment, because no one walks there, and it would be too conspicuous, or one would have to walk close to the houses, and then one can see nothing. It is a corner house. Since the house has no neighbouring house, the widows to the courtyard are also visible from the street. Presumably her bedroom is there. No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. What therefore God hath joined together, let not humans put asunder. Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
When people are working out, they tend to get lost in the own thoughts. More than once, I have waited for a circuit machine to free up, only to watch Mr. Oblivious finish with a set and just sit there, hogging he machine. He could easily have alternated sets with me—but he simply was not aware of what was happening around him or he just did not care. In either case, he failed to realize the reality that in a public setting like a fitness center, you are not alone. You are in a group setting that requires being aware at all times of how your actions affect others. Here are some of the most common fitness club flubs that men make: Leaving a pool of sweat. Mr. Buff is really pushing his physical limits on an exercise bike. Finally the session ends, and he steps off the bike, still totally focused on his effort, and walk away. Behind him, the handles glisten with his manly perspiration, and the seat has a small pool of sweat on it, waiting for the next lucky exerciser to climb on—maybe even that certain someone he has been trying to impress. It is not that Mr. Buff refused to clean the machine on purpose—he just did not think of it. His mind was far, far, away, in an endorphin haze. Which brings us back to the central premise of the fitness center etiquette: Be conscious of the people around you. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Imagine this scenario instead: When Mr. Buffy steps off, he turns to the next person and says cheerfully, “Just a second—let me clean this off for you.” A handy bottle of cleanser and a towel are nearby. He squirts the towel and then wipes the bike down. This is called being considerate. It is also a great way to make the right kind of impression on your fellow fitness center member. So gross! “They do not wipe down their machines and weights when they are done. So gross!” Over and over women spoke loudly and clearly about the failure of men to wipe down the equipment after using it. It takes just a minute. Fitness centers keep pray bottles and wipe-down rags nearby. A quick spray and wipe will do more to ingratiate you with your fellow fitness buffs than any other thing you can do at the gym. By the way, it is not just women who are frustrated by this gross behaviour. Twenty-nine percent of the respondents who brought up this issue were men and, by a wide margin, this was the biggest complaint about the fitness center in a 2019 survey. The unwanted stare. This one is a toughie. Those close-fitting sports bras and shorts do not always leave much to the imagination. And then there is all that uncovered skin—sometimes lots of it—not to mention the occasional tattoo. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Somehow I have always thought of a tattoo as an invitation to look: After all, why else is it there but to be noticed? The other day, for example, a woman on the tennis court next to mine took off her jacket to reveal what looked like a tiny fairy tattoo of one of the fairies from William Blake’s painting Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing, circa 1786, one of the great works of modern art, on her back. I had to consciously work at not staring at her. I would have loved to really study that tattoo, but I limited myself to a few discreet looks when her back was turned toward me. The point is there is a difference between a look and a stare. Here is the distinction: When you look around you are you work out, your gaze falls naturally on another person but your focus is on what you are doing. When you stare, you focus on the object of your staring rather than on what you are doing. The bottom line: Women know when you are staring at them, especially when you are staring at their chest (“and I have a normal-sized bustline,” fumed one respondent). They do not like it. Do you want to impress a woman? Then look, do not stare. And look in her eyes, not at her assets. You will impress her most by showing that you are a man who knows how to respect a woman, tattooed, voluptuous, or otherwise. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Grunting—“In through the nose, out through the mouth. Exhale!” Dana, my trainer, exhorts me. And then I realize I can hear myself. I wonder if other people are hearing me, too. Now, there is a difference between an exhale—whooooosh—and a decibel shattering grunt. When your woosh becomes a grunt you have crossed a line, and when you do, men and women are equally irritated. You do not have to grunt to exhale and when you do grunt, as one respondent put it so eloquently, “You are just showing off.” Now it is time to pretend we are on an episode of Family Feud with Steve Harvey. Survey says: What Women Really Think About Macho Men. Here is what the women in our surveys had to say about men who are fitness center show-offs: Acts like Homey D. Clown trying to impress attractive women. Acts like The Rock when he is really In Living Color’s— Men On Films II, and deserves the new and improved, “Two snaps and a twist and a kiss. Pilot to Co-Pilot, we goin’ down in flames!” Admires himself excessively in the surrounding mirrors. Flexes constantly. Grunts and groans excessively. Lifts more weight than he can handle. Shows off his form in a spandex suit when he is overweight and his belly is popping out the shirt. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Nonetheless, in the realm of human destiny, the depth of a human’s questioning is more important than one’s answers. Our society is set up so that most women lose their identities when their husbands die…It is wrenching enough to lose the man who is your beloved, your companion, your best friend, the father of your children, without losing yourself as well. This is why some are bothered by the, “I am more important than you are” syndrome. I was on a Love Boat cruise ship recently where the line of jogging machines all face out the top deck windows, providing a fabulous view of the ocean as you work out. The sign-up system for these machines was pretty strict, I was told, for a good reason: It seems a woman had overstayed her time limit on one of the machines a while back, and the guy, who looked like Tattoo, waiting took a swing at her when she did not get off. Of course, she did not help matters by refusing to get off the machine when her time was up. Both individuals had fitness goals and needed to find a compromise. Otherwise it may seem they maybe guilty of the all-too-prevalent “I am more important than you are” syndrome, which seems to be a hazard of working out. The best way to deal with difficult people, and to avoid getting labeled as one yourself, is to respect the fitness center’s rules: Follow the schedules for all machines—start on time and end on time. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Do not monopolize the machines. Do not use the as spare seats, and do not stand around them whole talking with your buddies. If a conflict does arise, do not take it upon yourself to be the “twelve” or SWAT of the club. Instead, kindly point out the issue to the staff, and let them take care of it. In the event that you are the culprit, admit your mistake forthrightly and make a conscious effort to change your habits. Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there. Flirting with women in midworkout may not be a good idea. Do you ever read those relationship advice columns in Men’s Health? They are full of guidance on how to meet women, and one of the places they often recommend is the fitness center. You have got to wonder if any of these writers has ever actually been to a fitness center. However, I do love the trend they started with the bright neon shoes of any color with matching shorts. I admit, the idea of meeting the love of your life at the fitness center sound great in theory: After all, it is a place where a lot of fit, attractive people are gathered to pursue a common interest. So what exactly is the appropriate application for getting a woman’s attention that you are interested in doing a Richard Simmons Sweatin’ to the 80s on the Stairmaster, or straining to complete the Suzanne Somers thighmaster with? #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Well, since the days of the Jane Fonda workout tapes, there has not been one. Most women like to look like Farrah Fawcett, Aaliyah, or Viola Davis at the gym, but they do not want some beef cake like Brad Pitt, or hunk David Hasselhoff, or a tall cup of hot chocolate like Billy D. Williams in their face, breaking their concentration while they are trying to get their body like Beyonce. What they want is to be left alone so they can do their routine. The bottom line: Even if you look like Davey Fisher, back off. Do your workout and let her finish hers. On your way out of the club, after you have showered and dressed (and are looking and smelling great), you can try striking up a conversation by treating her to The Donna, a soy, caramel latte with a double shot and whipped cream, and a homemade, semi-sweet chocolate chip cookie, with a dollop of butterscotch, and pistachios at your local coffee shop, where you can strike up a conversation. At that point she may be as interested in talking to you as Rachel Zane was at getting into Harvard Law. Life is an unanswered question, but let us believe in the dignity and importance of the question. Also, when at the fitness center, remember your personal trainer is a person. My brother called me the other day. “Where are you?” he asked. “You were not at your workout with Dana, and she was surprised because she said you always call or text her if you are going to miss an appointment.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
I thought I had arranged with my wife that she would take my appointment and I would take hers, but we got our signals crossed and neither of us showed up. In five years of working with Dana, our personal trainer, I have heard over and over from her how frustrating it is to have an appointment not show up. She loses with the person who is skipped and she has a vacancy in her schedule someone else could have used, so from Dana’s point of view she loses twice. Personal trainers are like your best friend and confident like officer Poncherello and officer Jonathan from CHiPs. So it is natural to assume that when you happen to see him or her at the gym you can stop by for a chat. Unfortunately for your trainer and the client he or she is working with, your interruption takes away from the client’s time with the trainer. These sessions are as serious as doctor’s appointments. While a quick “Hello” is totally acceptable, it is better to save longer conversations for breaks between clients. Conversing with your trainer is a fun part of your workout (sometime the only fun part), but be careful about gossiping. Sure, your trainer is like a confidant, but do not say anything to one you would not want posted on a bulletin board for anyone to read. Even if your trainer is the most discreet person in the World, others working out nearby can overhear your conversation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Also, class courtesy is very important. You can get a great workout from taking one of the many classes fitness centers offer members. Just be careful not to overdo it, and respect the other class participants as well. Cleanliness matters—weight training class had started when Mike Ross waltzed in and set up right next to me. Unfortunately, I almost had to leave class. He brought his Betty Crocker Tuna Salad Sandwiches with him. I felt awkward moving to another location so I had to bear it. Just because you are in a hurry to the gym does not mean you should bring your lunch with you. Hygiene and personal habits matter. Maybe consider buying lunch at the café. Therefore, leave your lunch at home. And always do your fellow fitness buffs a courtesy: Wash your clothes, wash your body, brush your teeth, and use a deodorant. Even more so, know your limitations. Do not try to poses or push yourself beyond your body’s limits. I have seen to many people exit a class and not be able to come back for weeks just because they pushed the limits and ended up straining their backs or a muscle. If you do want to try a new position or exercise, do not rock the boat, talk with the instructor ahead of time and get his or her help in making sure you can do so safely. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
If you are at a more advanced level than the class, it is respectful to ask if you can execute a more advanced move, say, a handstand instead of a headstand, before just going ahead and doing it. If you have preexisting conditions take that into consideration. Before you start a class, give the instructor a heads up about any injuries you may currently be dealing with. That was he or she knows the limitations you have and will not inadvertently push you beyond your current capabilities. In the silence of night I have often wished for just a few words of wisdom from one person, rather than unsolicited advice from thousands of people. Success means never having to admit you are unhappy. If you cannot make a class, call. Weight training and tennis classes are very popular at my fitness center, and there are often more people who want to attend them than there are open slots. When someone blows off a class without calling, these folks get very upset and with good reason. There are plenty of people on the waiting list who would have enthusiastically taken the spot, and even at four in the morning they would have showed up religiously. The final thoughts: If you cannot make a class you have signed up for, be like Harvey or Jessica and call the center well in advance and let them know you will not be there. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
The soul is a very complicated thing with an intricate internal structure that we need to understand if we are to appreciate the mind’s role in spiritual transformation. In order to understand that structure, we need to grasp two important issues: the different types of states within the soul and the notion of a faculty of the sou. The soul is a substantial, unified reality that informs its body. The soul is to the body what God is to space—it is fully “present” at each point within the body. Further, the soul and the body relate to each other in a cause-effect way. For example, if I worry in my soul, my brain chemistry will change; if I exercise my will to raise my arm in my soul, the arm goes up. If I experience brain cell damage, this can cause me to lose the ability to remember certain things in my soul. And so forth. The soul also contains various mental states within it—for example, sensations, thoughts, beliefs, desires, and acts of will. This is not as complicated as it sounds. Water can be in a cold or a hot state. Likewise, the soul can be in a feeling or thinking state. The soul contains several states. There is a belief that sounds have this kind of power. The awareness of God and your soul may percolate in your unconscious for some time; then, all of the sudden, you have an epiphany and a flash of insight comes to you, seemingly from out of nowhere. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
O God, the Protector of the faithful, and constant Visitor of souls obedient unto Thee; may it please Thee to be present, with Thy favour, to Thy servants who dwell in this house; that while we visit them with human solicitude, Thou mayest guard them with Divine favour; through our Lord. “Now, as Ammon was thus teaching the people of Lamoni continually, we will return to the account of Aaron and his brethren; for after he departed from the land of Middoni he was led by the Spirit to the land of Nephi, even to the house of the king which was over all the land save it were the land of Ishmael; and he was the father of Lamoni. And it came to pass that he went in unto him into the king’s palace, with his brethren, and bowed himself before the king, and said unto him: Behold, O king, we are the brethren of Ammon, whom thou hast delivered out of prison. And now, O king, if thou wilt spare our lives, we will be thy servants. And the king said unto them: Arise, for I will grant unto you your lives, and I will not suffer that ye shall be my servants; but I will insist that ye shall administer unto me; for I have been somewhat troubled in mind because of the generosity and the greatness of the words of thy brother Ammon; and I desire to know the cause why he has not come up out of Middoni with thee. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
“And Aaron said unto the king: Behold, the Spirit of the Lord has called him another way; he has called him another way; he has gone to the land of Ishmael, to teach the people of Lamoni. Now the king said unto them: What is this that ye have said concerning the Spirit of the Lord? Behold, this is the thing which doth trouble me. And also, what is this that Ammon said—if ye will not repent, ye shall be cast off at the last day? And Aaron answered him and said unto them: Believest thou that there is a God? And the king said: I know that the Amalekites say that there is a God, and I have granted unto them that they may assemble themselves together to worship him. And if now thou sayest there is a God, behold I will believe. And now when Aaron heard this, his heart began to rejoice, and he said: Behold, assuredly as thou livest, O king, there is a God. And the kind said: Is God that Great Spirit that brought our fathers out of the land of Jerusalem? And Aaron said unto him: Yea, he is that Great Spirit, and he created all things both in Heaven and in Earth. Believest thou this? And he said: Yea, I believe that the Great Spirit created all things, and I desire that ye should tell me concerning all these things, and I will believe thy words. And it came to pass that when Aaron saw that the king would believe his words, he began from the creation of Adam, reading the scriptures unto the king—how God created humans after his own image, and that God gave him commandments, and that because of transgression, humans had fallen. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
“And Aaron did expound unto him the scriptures from the creation of Adam, laying the fall of human before him, and their carnal state and also the plan of redemption, which was prepared from the foundation of the World, through Christ, for all whosoever would believe on his name. And since the human had fallen he could not merit anything of himself; but the sufferings and death of Christ atone for their sins, through faith and repentance, and so forth; and that he breaketh the bands of death, that the grace shall have no victory, and that the sting of death should be swallowed up in the hopes of glory; and Aaron did expound all these things unto the king. And it came to pass that after Aaron had expounded these things unto him, the king said: What shall I do that I may have this eternal life of which thou hast spoken? Yea, what shall I do that I may be born of God, having this wicked spirit rooted out of my heart, and receive his Spirit, that I may be filled with joy, that I may not be cast off at the last day? Behold, said he, I will give up all that I possess, yea, I will forsake my kingdom, that I may receive this great joy. However, Aaron said unto him: If thou desirest this thing, if thou wilt bow down before God, yea, if thou wilt repent of all thy sins, and will bow down before God, and call on his name in faith, believing that ye shall receive, then shalt thou receive he hope which thou desirest. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
“And it came to pass that when Aaron has said these words, the king did bow down before the Lord, upon his knees; yea, even he did prostrate himself upon the Earth, and cried mightily, saying: O God, Aaron hath told me that there is a God; and if there is a God, and if thou art God, wilt thou make thyself known unto me, and I will give away all my sins to know thee, and that I may be raised from the dead, and be saved at the last day. And now when the king had said these words, he was struck as if he were dead. And it came to pass that his servants ran and told the queen all that had happened unto the king. And she same in unto the king; and when she saw him lay as if he were dead, and also Aaron and his brethren standing as though they had been the cause of his fall, she was angry with them, and commanded that her servants, or the servants of the king, should take them and lay them. Now the servants had seen the cause of the king’s fall, therefore they durst not lay their hands on Aaron and his brethren; and they pled with the queen saying: Why commandest thou that we should slay these men, when behold one of them is mightier than us all? Therefore we shall fall before them. Now when the queen saw the fear of the servants she also began to fear exceedingly, lest there should some evil some upon her. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“And she commanded her servants that they should go and call the people, that hey might slay Aaron and his brethren. And when Aaron saw the determination of the queen, he, also knowing the hardness of their hearts of the people, feared lest that a multitude should assemble themselves together, and should be a great contention and a disturbance among them; therefore he put forth his hand and raised the king from the Earth, and said unto him: Stand. And he stood upon his feet, receiving his strength. Now this was done in the presence of the queen and many of the servants. And when they saw it they greatly marveled, and began to fear. And the king stood forth, and began to minister unto them. And he did minister unto them, insomuch that his whole household were converted unto the Lord. Now there was a multitude gathered together because of the commandment of the queen, and there began to be great murmurings among them because of Aaron and his brethren. However, the king stood forth among them and administered unto them. And they were pacified towards Aaron and those who were with him. And it came to pass that when the king saw that the people were pacified, he caused that Aaron and his brethren should stand forth in the midst of the multitude, and that they should preach the word unto them. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
“And it came to pass that the kind sent a proclamation throughout all the land, amongst all his people who were in all his land, who were in all the regions round about, which was bordering even o the sea, on the east and on the west, and which was divided from the land of Zarahemla by a narrow strip of wilderness, which ran from the sea east even to the sea west, and round about on the borders of the seashore, and the borders of the wilderness which was on the north by the land of Zarahemla, through the borders of Manti, by the head of the river Sidon, running from the east towards the west—and thus were the Lamanites and the Nephites divided. Now, the more idle part of the Lamanites lived in the wilderness, and dwelt in tents; and they were spread through the wilderness on the west, in the land of Nephi; yea, and also on the west of the land of Zarahemla, in the borders by the seashore, and on the west in the land of Nephi, in the place of their fathers’ first inheritance, and thus bordering along by the seashore. And also there were many Lamanites on the east by the seashores, whither the Nephites had driven them. And thus the Nephites were nearly surrounded by the Lamanites; nevertheless the Nephites had taken possession of all the northern parts of the land bordering on the wilderness, at the head of the west, round about on the wilderness side; on the north, even until they came to then land which they called Bountiful. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“And it bordered upon the land which they called Desolation, it being so far northward that it came into the land which had been peopled and been destroyed, of whose bones we have spoken, which was discovered by the people of Zarahemla, it being the place of their first landing. And they came from there up into the south wilderness. Thus the land on the northward was called Desolation, and the land on the southward was called Bountiful, it being the wilderness which is filled with all manner of wild animals of every kind, a part of which had come from the land northward for food. And now, it was only the distance of a day and a half’s journey for a Nephite, on the line Bountiful and the land Desolation, for the east to the west sea; and thus the land of Nephi and the land of Zarahemla were nearly surrounded by water, there being a small neck of land between the land northward and the land southward. And it came to pass that the Nephites had inhabited the land Bountiful, even from the east unto the west sea, and thus the Nephites in their wisdom, with their guards and their armies, had hemmed in the Lamanites on the south, that thereby they should have no more possession on the north, that they might not overrun the land northward. Therefore the Lamanites could have no more possessions only the land of Nephi, and the wilderness round about. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
“Now this was wisdom in the Nephites—as the Lamanites were an enemy to them, they would not suffer their afflictions on every hand, and also that they might have a country whither they might flee, according to their desires. And now I, after having said this, return again to the account of Ammon and Aaron, Omner and Himni, and their brethren,” reports Alma 22.1-35. Bless, O Lord, this house and all who dwell in it, as Thou wast pleased to bless the house of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that within these walls may dwell an Angel of light, and that those who dwell together in it may receive the abundant dew of Heavenly blessing, and though Thy tenderness rejoice in peace and quiet; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Although the supreme cause is necessary, the effect may be contingent by reason of the proximate contingent cause; just as the germination of a plant is contingent by reason of the proximate contingent cause, although the movement of the Sun which is the first cause, is necessary. So likewise things known by God are contingent on account of their proximate cases, while the knowledge of God, which is the first cause is necessary. “I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear. Racism is still with us. But it is up to us to prepare our children for what they have to meet, and, hopefully, we shall overcome,” reports Mrs. Rosa Parks. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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God is the protector of the faithful, the God of, all and in subjection to them in your mind reminding you to celebrate, be merciful to the inhabitants of Thy servants. Thou wouldst live in this house; so that those whom enter, the human visitors form care, and promise to protect you, as you are the power of the divine.
There are inexorable laws, not of one’s making, which govern the opening of spiritual relation between a self-actualized teacher and a would-be pupil, however, much of one’s devotion and loyalty are appreciated. The chance remains open to one on a probation only, which is necessarily of a limited number of years. If during that period, (and we all are on mortal probation and if we pass, we will live in Heaven with God) they are able to make personal contact, it will be helpful for the pupil’s progress in understanding the teaching, and one can profit by it to clear up misconceptions and filter out faults.
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It is Still an Ill Wind that Blows When You Leave the Hairdresser, Guilty of Spiritual Arson!
Cordelia, then, is her name! Cordelia! It is a beautiful name, and that, too, is important, since it can often be very disturbing to have an ugly name together with the most tender adjectives. I already recognized her a log way off; she was walking with two other girls on her left. The movement of their walking seemed to indicate that they were about to stop. I stood on the corner and read the posters, while I continually kept my eye on my strangers. They parted. The two presumably had gone a little out of their way, for they went in a different direction. She came along toward my corner. When she had walked a few steps, one of the young ladies came running after her and cried loudly enough for me to hear it: Cordelia! Cordelia! Then the third one joined them; they put their heads together for a privy council meeting whose secrets I futilely strained my ears to hear. Thereupon they all three laughed and hurried away at a somewhat quicker pace in the direction the two had taken. I followed them. They entered a house on Stranden. I waited for a while, since there was a strong probability that Cordelia would soon come back alone. However, that did not happen. Cordelia! That is really a splendid name—indeed, the same name as that of King Lear’s third daughter, that remarkable girl whose heart did no dwell on her lips, whose lips were mute when her heart was full. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
So also with my Cordelia. She resembles her, of that I am certain. However, in another sense her heart does dwell on her lips, not in the form of words but in more heartfelt way in the form of a kiss. How ripe with health her lips! I have never seen lips more beautiful. That I actually am in love I can tell partly by the secrecy with which I treat this matter, almost even with myself. All love is secretive, even the faithless kind, if it has the appropriate esthetic element within it. It has never occurred to me to wish for confidants or to boast of my adventures. Thus is almost makes me happy that I did not come to know where she lives but the place where she frequently visits. Perhaps I thereby may also have come even closer to my goal. I can make my observations without arousing her attention, and from this firmly established point it will be difficult for me to gain admission into her family. However, should this situation turn out to be a difficulty—eh bien [well, now]!—then I will put up with the difficulty alone. Everything I do I do con amore [with love] and o I also love con amore. In the realm of human destiny, the depth of human’s questioning is more important than one’s answers. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable. The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one’s soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are no attractive—you are leaking. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
James, the Lord’s brother, understood this as well as any man in history, and through the use of graphic analogies he has given us the most penetrating exposition of the tongue anywhere in literature, sacred or secular: “When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts,” reports James 3.3-5. The horse is an incredibly powerful animal. Takes 550 pounds (as much as puffing Olympic heavyweight lifter can hoist overhead), set it on a horse’s back, and it will barely snort as it stands breathing easily under the burden. The same horse, unburdened, can sprint a quarter-mile in about twenty-five seconds. A horse is half a ton of raw power! Yet, place a bridle and bit in its mouth and a 100-pound woman on its back who knows what she is doing and the animal can literally be made to dance. James observed the same phenomenon in ancient ships, as ships small and large were steered by an amazingly small rudder. Today it is still the same, where it be an acrobatic ski boat or the USS Enterprise. One who controls the rudder controls the ship. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
So it is with the mighty togue, that “movable muscular structure attached to the floor of the mouth” (Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary). “The tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts,” says James (v. 5). Or as Phillips has helpfully paraphrased it, “the human tongue is physically small, but what tremendous effects it can boast of.” Though it weighs only two ounces, it can legitimately boast of its disproportioned power to determine human destiny. This lives of Adolph Hitler and Winston Churchill bear eloquent testimony to the dark and bright sides of the to the dark and bright sides of the tongue’s power. The Fuhrer on one side of the Channel harangued a vast multitude with his hypnotic cadences. On the other side, the Prime Minister’s brilliant, measured utterances pulled a faltering nation together for its “finest hour.” However, we need not to look the drama of nations to see the truth of James’ words. Our own lives are evidence enough. Never doubt the power of the tiny tongue—and never underestimate it. James’ principal concern is with the destructive power of the tongue, and this produces a most provocative statement: “Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a World of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell,” (vv. 5,6). #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
The tongue has awesome potential for harm, as the forest fire analogy suggests. At 9.00 one Sunday evening, October 8, 1871, poor Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over the lantern as she was being milked, starting the great Chicago Fire. That disaster blackened three and one half miles of the city, destroying over 17,000 buildings before it was checked by gunpowder explosions on the south line of fire. The fire lasted two days and cost over 250 lives. However, ironically that was not the greatest inferno in the Midwest that year. Historians tell us that one the same day that dry autumn a spark ignited a raging fire in the North Woods of Wisconsin, a blasé which burned for an entire month, taking more lives than the Chicago Fire. A veritable firestorm destroyed billions of yards of precious timber—all from one spark! The tongue has that scope of inflammatory power in human relationships, and James is saying that those who misuse the tongue are guilty of spiritual arson. A mere spark from an ill-spoken word can produce a firestorm that annihilates everyone it touches. Furthermore, because the tongue is a “World of evil,” it contains and conveys all the World system’s wickedness. It is party to every evil there is and actively intrudes its evil into our lives. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
What is the effect of the tongue’s cosmic wickedness? “It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire” (v.6). “Course of life” is literally “the wheel of our genesis,” “genesis” referring to our human life or existence. What an apt description of human experience! About nine-tenths of the flames we experience in our lives come from the tongue. Having grabbed our imaginations with his graphic language, James adds the final touch: “and is itself set on fire by hell.” Here the language means continually set on fire. James used the same word for Hell that his brother Jesus used—“Gehenna”—derived from the perpetually burning garbage dump outside Jerusalem, a place of fire and filth where, as Jesus said, “their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9.48). Can anyone miss the point? The uncontrolled tongue has a direct pipeline to Hell! Fueled by Hell, it burns our lives with its filthy fires. However, it also, as Calvin says, an “instrument for catching, encouraging, and increasing the fires of hell.” Taking James’ word seriously, we recognize that the tongue has more destructive power than a hydrogen bomb, for the bomb’s power is physical and temporal, whereas the tongue is spiritual and eternal. The female spider is often a widow for embarrassing reasons—she regularly eats those who come her way. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Lonely suitors and visitors alike quickly become corpses, and her dining room is a morgue. A visiting fly, having become captive, will appear to be whole, but the spider has drunk his insides so that he becomes his own hollow casket. Not a pleasant thought, especially if you have a touch of arachnophobia, as I do! The reason for this macabre procedure is that she has no stomach and so is incapable of digesting anything with her. Through tiny punctures she injects her digestive juices into a fly so that his insides are broken down and turned into warm soup. This soup she swills, even as most of us swill souls of one another after having cooked them in various enzymes: guilt, humiliations, subjectivities, cruel love—there are a number of fine, acidic mixes. And some among us are so skilled with the hypodermic word that our dear ones continue to sit up and to smile, quite as though they were still alive. This is a gruesome but effective metaphor to describe the destructive power of evilly intended words. Words do not dissolve mere organs and nerves but souls! This World is populated by walking human caskets because countless lives have been dissolved and sucked empty by another’s words. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Significantly, James does not tell us how the tongue’s destructive power is manifested in human speech. He knows that the spiritual mind, informed by the Scriptures, will have no problem in making the connections. This is also the same message Mrs. Winchester left behind in her spider web, art glass, and Shakespearean windows. It is also why Mrs. Winchester did not tolerate gossip and would let an employee go in a heartbeat for violating her will. The tongue’s destructive power in gossip lead the list, of course. A neighbour was jealous of Mrs. Winchester’s house and she fell victim to disgruntled town’s folks, who tried to ruin her professionally through rumor, and almost did. Several years later the gossiper had a change of heart and wrote Mrs. Winchester asking for her forgiveness, and she forgave her. However, there was no way the story could be erased. As Solomon wisely observed, “The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; they go down into a human’s inmost parts,” Proverbs 18.8. Gossip is greedily picked up and stored away by the hearers like tasty tidbits of filet mignon en croute au foie gras. Vigorous denial would only bring more suspicion—“So and so protests too much!” The damage was done. Hereafter the innocent Mrs. Winchester would always look into certain eyes and wonder if they had heard the story—and if they believed it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Gossip often veils itself in acceptable conventions such as “Have you hear?” or “Did you know?” or “They tell me…” or “Keep this to yourself, but…” or “I do not believe it is true, but I heard that…” or “I would not such rationalization in Christian circles is, “I am telling you this so you can pray.” This seems so pious, but the heart that feeds on hearing evil reports is a tool of Hell, and it leaves flaming fires and dead bodies in its wake. Oh, the heartache that comes from the tongue. A cousin of gossip is innuendo. Consider the ship’s first mate who after a drunken binge was written up by the captain on the ship’s log: “mate drunk off some Amsterdam and Hennessy today.” The mate’s revenge? Some months later he surreptitiously wrote on his own entry, “Captain sober today.” So it goes with the word unsaid, the awkward silence, the raised eyebrows, the quizzical look—all freighted with the misery of Hell. Gossip involves saying behind a person’s back what you would never say to one’s face. Flattery means saying to a person’s face what you would never say behind one’s back. The Scriptures warn us repeatedly against flatterers, for they are destructive people who carry a legion of unwholesome motives: “Whoever flatters one’s neighbour is spreading a net for one’s feet,” reports Proverbs 29.5. “A lying togue hates those it hurts, and a flattering mouth works ruin,” reports Proverbs 26.28. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Fault-finding seems endemic to the Christian Church. Perhaps this is because a taste of righteousness can be easily perverted into an overweening sense of self-righteousness and judgmentalism. Once while William Wirt Winchester was preaching, he noticed a lady in the audience who was known for her critical attitude. All through the service she sat and stared at his new tie. When the meeting ended, she same up to him and said very sharply, “Mr. Winchester, the strings on your tie are much too long. It is an offense to me!” He asked if any of the ladies present happened to have a pair of scissors in their purse. When the scissors were handed to him, he gave them to his critic and asked her to trim the streamers to her liking. After she clipped them off near the collar, he said, “Are you sure they are all right now?” “Yes, that is much better.” “Then let me have those shears a moment,” said Mr. Winchester. “I am sure you would not mind if I also gave you a bit of correction. I must tell you, madam, that your tongue is an offense to me—it is too long! Please stick it out…I would like to take some off.” On another occasion someone said to Mr. Winchester, “My talent is to speak my mind.” Mr. Winchester replied, “That is one talent God would not care a bit if you buried!” This is good advice for all Christians. “May the Lord cut off all flattering lips and every boastful tongue that says, ‘We will triumph with our tongues…’” reports Psalm 12.3, 4. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the scarifies imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the right secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice. Being first virtues of human activities, truth and justice are uncompromising. These propositions seem to express our intuitive conviction of the primacy of justice. No doubt they are expressed too strongly. In any event I wish to inquire whether these contentions or others similar to them are sound, and if so how they can be accounted for. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
To this end it is necessary to work out a theory of justice in the light of which these assertions can be interpreted and assessed. I shall begin by considering the role of the principles of justice. Let us assume, to fix ideas, that a society is a more or less self-sufficient association of persons who in the relations to one another recognize certain rules of conduct as binding and who for the most part act in accordance with them. Supposed further that these rules specify a system of cooperation designed to advance the good of those taking part in it. Then, although a society is a cooperative venture for mutual advantage, it is typically marked by a conflict as well as by an identity of interests. There is an identity of interests since social cooperation makes possible a better life for all than any would have if each were to live solely by one’s own efforts. There is a conflict of interests since persons are not indifferent as to how the greater benefits produced by their collaboration are distributed, for in order to pursue their ends they each prefer a larger to a lesser share. A set of principles is required for choosing among the various social arrangements which determine this division of advantages for underwriting an agreement on the proper distributive shares. These principles are he principles of social justice: they provide a way of assigning right and duties in the basic institutions of society and they define the appropriate distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Now let us say that a society is well-ordered when it is not only designed advance the good of its members but when it is also effectively regulated by a public conception of justice. That is, it is a society in which (1) everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same principles of justice, and (2) the basic social institutions generally satisfy and are generally known to satisfy these principles. In this case while human may put forth excessive demands on one another, they nevertheless acknowledge a common point of view from which their claims may be adjudicated. If human’s inclination to self-interest makes their valiance against one another necessary, their public sense of justice makes their secure association together possible. Among individuals with disparate aims and purposes a shared conception of justice establishes the bonds of civic friendship; the general desire for justice limits the pursuit of other ends. One may think of a public conception of justice as constituting the fundamental character of a well-ordered human association. Existing societies are of course seldom well-ordered in this sense, for what is just and unjust is usually in dispute. Humans disagree about which principles should define the basis terms of their association. Yet we may still, despite this disagreement, that they each have a conception of justice. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
That is, they understand the need for, and they are prepared to affirm, a characteristic set of principles for assigning basic rights and duties and for determining what they take to be the proper distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. Thus it seems natural to think the conception of justice as distinct from the various conceptions of justice and as being specified by the role which these different sets of principles, these different conceptions, have in common. Those who hold different conceptions of justice can, then, still agree that institutions are just when no arbitrary distinctions are made between persons in the assigning of basic rights and duties and when the rules determine a proper balance between competing claims to the advantages of social life. Humans can agree to this description of just institutions since the notions of an arbitrary distinction and of a proper balance, which are included in the concept of justice, are left open for each to interpret according to the principles of justice that one accepts. These principles single out which similarities and differences among persons are relevant in determining rights and duties and they specify which division of advantages is appropriate. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Clearly this distinction between the concept and the various conceptions of justice settles no important questions. It simply helps to identify the role of the principles of social justice. Some measures of agreement in conceptions of justice is, however, not the only prerequisite for a viable human community. There are other fundamental social problems, in particular those of coordination, efficiency, and stability. Thus the plans of individuals need to be fitted together so that their activities are compatible with one another and they can all be carried through without anyone’s legitimate expectations being severely disappointed. Moreover, the execution of these plans should lead to the achievement of social ends in ways that are efficient and consistent with justice. And final, the scheme of social cooperation must be stable: it must be more or less regularly complied with and its basic rules willingly acted upon; and when infractions occur, stabilizing forces should exist that prevent further violations and tend to restore the arrangement. Now it is evident that these three problems are connected with that of justice. In the absence of a certain measure of agreement on what is just and unjust, it is clearly more difficult for individuals to coordinate their plans efficiently in order to ensure that mutually beneficial arraignments are maintained. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Distrust and resentment corrode the ties of civility, and suspicion and hostility tempt humans to acts in ways they would otherwise avoid. So while the distinctive role of conceptions of justice is to specify basic rights and duties and to determine the appropriate distributive shares, the way in which a conception does this is bound to affect the problems of efficiency, coordination, and stability. We cannot, in general, assess a conception of justice by its distributive role alone, however useful this role may be in identifying the concept of justice. We must take into account its wider connections; for even though justice has a certain priority, being the most important virtue of institutions, it is still true that, other things equal, one conception of justice is preferable to another when its broader consequences are more desirable. Recognizing God helps you define the Universe as you see it. I who stand before you, I who come into your presence, I who am your worshipper, call out to you, Dear God in Heaven. You are unlimited, and are vastly greater than we are. Sweet-songed God, hear me. I come before you, Lord of the Bow, whose arrows bring healing. I ask that you help me, please heal the wounded in this planet, as their wounds vary from spiritual, financial, physical and/or mental. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
King Lamont supposes that Ammon is the Great Spirit—Ammon teaches the king about the Creation, God’s dealings with humans, and the redemption that comes through Christ—Lamoni believes and falls to the Earth as if dead. About 90 years Before Christ. “And it came to pass that king Lamoni caused that his servants should stand forth and testified to the things which they had seen, and he had learned of the faithfulness of Ammon in preserving his flocks, and also of his great power in contending against those who sought to slay him, he was astonished exceedingly, and said: Surely, this is more than a man. Behold, is not this the Great Spirit who doth send such great punishments upon this people, because of their murders? And they answered the king, and said: Whether he be the Great Spirit or a man, we know not; but this much we do know, that he cannot be slain by the enemies of the king; neither can they scatter the king’s flocks when he is with us, because of his expertness and great strength; therefore, we know that he is a friend to the king. And now, O king, we do not believe that a human has such great power, for we know cannot be slain. And now, when the king heard these words, he said unto them; Now I know that it is the Great Spirit; and he has come down at this time to preserve you lives, that I might be your brethren. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
“Now, this is the Great Spirit of whom our father have spoken. Now this was the tradition of Lamoni, which he had received from his father, that there was a Great Spirit. Notwithstanding they believed in a Great Spirit, they suppose that whatsoever they did was right; nevertheless, Lamont began to fear exceedingly, with fear lest he had some wrong in slaying his servants; for he had slain many of them because their brethren had scattered their flocks at the place of water; and thus, because they had had their flocks scattered they were slain. Now it was the practices of these Lamanites to stand by the waters of Sebus to scatter the flocks of the people, that thereby they might drive away many that were scattered unto their own land, it being a practice of plunder among them. And it came to pass that king Lamoni inquired of his servants, saying: Where is this man that has such great power? And they said unto him: Behold, he is feeding they horses. Now the king has commanded his servants, previous to the time of the watering of their flocks, that they should prepare his horses and chariots, and conduct him forth to the land of Nephi; for there had been a great feast appointed at the land of Nephi, by the father of Lamoni, who was king over all the land. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
“Now when king Lamoni heard that Ammon was preparing his horses and his chariots he was more astonished, because of the faithfulness of Ammon, saying: Surely there has not been any servant among all my servants that has been so faithful as this man; for even he doth remember all my commandments to execute them. Now I surely know that this is the Great Spirit, and I would desire him that he come in unto me, but I durst not. And it came to pass that when Ammon had made ready the horses and the chariots for the king and his servants, he went in no the king, and he saw that the countenance of the king was changed; therefore he was about to return out of his presence. And one of the king’s servants said unto him, Rabbanah, which is, being interpreted, powerful or great king, considering their kings to be powerful; and thus he said unto him: Rabbanah, the king desireth thee to stay. Therefore Ammon turned himself unto the king, and said unto him: What wilt thou that I should do for thee, O king? And the king answered him not for the space of an hour, according to their time for he knew no what he should say unto him. And it came to pass that Ammon said unto him again: What desirest thou of me? But the king answered not. And it came to pass that Ammon, being filled with the Spirit of God, therefore he perceived the thoughts of the king. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
“And he said unto him: Is it because thou hast heard that I defended thy servants and thy flocks, and slew seven of their brethren with the sling and with the sword, and smote off the arms of others, in order to defend thy flocks and thy servants; behold, is it this that causeth thy marvelings? I say unto you, what is it, that they marvelings are so great? Behold, I am a man, and am thy servant; therefore, whatsoever thou desirest which is right, that will I do. Now when the king had heard these words, he marveled again, for he behold that Ammon could discern his thoughts; but notwithstanding this, king Lamoni did open his mouth, and said unto him: Who art thou? Art thou that Great Spirit, who knows all things? Ammon answered and said unto him: I am not. And the king said: How knowest thou the thoughts of my heart? Thou mayest speak boldly, and tell me concerning these things; and also tell me by what power ye slew and smote off the arms of my brethren that scattered my flocks—and now, if thou wilt tell me concerning these things, whatsoever thou desirest I will give unto thee: and if it were needed, I would guard thee with my armies; but I know that thou art more powerful than all they; nevertheless, whatsoever thou desirest of me I will grant it unto thee. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
“Now Ammon being wise, yet harmless, he said unto Lamoni: Wilt thou hearken unto my words, if I tell thee by what power I do these things? And this is the thing that I desire of thee. And the king answered him, and said: Yea, I will believe all thy words. And thus he was caught with guile. And Ammon began to speak unto him with boldness, and said unto him: Believest thou that there is a God? And he answered, and said unto him: I do no know what the meaneth. And then Ammon said: Believest thou that there is a Great Spirit? And he said, Yea. And Ammon said: This is God. And Ammon said unto him again: Believest thou that this Great Spirit, who is God, created all things which are in Heaven and in the Earth? And he said: Yea, I believe that he created all things which are in the Earth; but I do not know the Heavens. And Ammon said unto him: The Heavens is a place where God dwells and all his holy angels. And king Lamoni said: Is it above the Earth? And Ammon said: Yea, and he looked down upon all the children of humans; and he knows all the thoughts and intents of the heart; for by his hand were they all created from the beginning. And king Lamoni said; I believe all these things which thou hast spoken. Art thou sent from God? Ammon said to him: I am a man; and man in the beginning was created after the image of God, and I am called by his Holy Spirit to teach these things unto this people, that they may be brought to a knowledge of that which is just and true. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
“And a portion of that Spirit dwelleth in me, which giveth me knowledge, and also power according to my faith and desires which are in God. Now when Ammon had said these words, he began at the creation of the World, and also the creation of Adam, and told him all the things concerning the fall of man, and rehearsed and laid before him the records and the holy scriptures of the people, which had been spoken by the prophets, even down to the time that their father, Lehi, left Jerusalem. And he also rehearsed unto them (for it was unto the king and to his servants) al the journeyings of their fathers in the wilderness, and all their sufferings with hunger and thirst, and their travail, and so forth. And he also rehearsed unto them concerning the rebellions of Laman and Lemuel, and the sons of Ishmael, yea, all their rebellions did he relate unto them; and he expounded unto them all the records and scriptures from the time that Lehi left Jerusalem down to the present time. However, this is not all; for he expounded unto them the plan of redemption, which was prepared from the foundation of the World; and he also made known unto them concerning the coming of Christ, and all the work of the Lord did he make known unto them. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
“And it came to pass that after he had said all these things, and expounded them to the king, that the king believed all his words. And he began to cry unto the Lord, saying: O Lord, have mercy; according to thy abundant mercy which thou hast had upon the people of Nephi, have upon me, and my people. And now, when he had said this, he fell unto the Earth, as if he were dead. And it came to pass that his servant took him and carried him in unto his wife, and laid him upon a bed; and he lay as if he were dead for the space of two days and two nights; and his wife, and his sons, and his daughters mourned over him, after the manner of the Lamenting his loss,” reports Alma 18.1-43. Look down from Heaven, O Christ, on Thy flock and lambs, and bless their bodies and souls. Please grant those who have received Thy sign, O Christ, on their foreheads, to be Thine own in the day of judgment. A Desto, Domine, supplicationibus nostris; et me, qui etiam misericordia Tua primus indigeo, clementer exaudi; et quem non election emeriti, sed dono gratiae Tuae, constituisti hujus operis ministrum, da fiduciam Tui muneris exsequendia, et Ispse in nostro ministerio quod Tuae pietatis est operare. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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MOVE IN READY: HOME SITE 74
4 Bedrooms – 3.5 Bathrooms – 3,501 sq. ft. – $621,740
Home Site 74 at Brighton Station is a beautiful Residence Four and one of the largest homes available in the market! At 3,501 square feet we are sure you’ll have enough room for the entire family here! The open concept design includes four bedrooms, three and one half bathrooms and a three car garage. Enjoy a spacious back yard with California Room included!
When entering this expansive home, take note of the two story ceiling height at the entry. There is a bedroom on the first floor, located off the entry, with its own bathroom making it ideal for a guest suite or multigenerational living.
The formal dining room provides ample space for entertaining and has convenient access to the kitchen via Butler’s Pantry.
The kitchen comes fully equipped with our gleaming extended kitchen island, perfect for family gatherings and an entertainer’s dream! White cabinets and undercabinet lighting with stainless steel appliances, quartz counters and tile backsplash complete this stunning kitchen.
Upstairs you will find the Owner’s retreat, two bedrooms, and the loft perfect for a game room or TV lounge. The Owner’s retreat is spacious and inviting with a large bedroom and spa like bathroom featuring a free-standing soaking tub, walk-in shower, dual vanities, and two walk-in closets. https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/move-in-ready-home-site-74/
The Spirit of Liberty Remembers that Not Even a Sparrow Falls to the Earth Unheeded!
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 