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If You Do His Work, You Must Prepare for His Wages!
I must be getting absent-minded. Whenever I complain that things are not what they used to be, I always forget to include myself. The theory of civil disobedience is designed only for a special case of a nearly just society, one that is well-ordered for the most part but in which some serious violations of justice nevertheless do occur. A state of near justice requires a democratic regime, and the theory concerns the role and the appropriateness of civil disobedience to legitimately established democratic authority. It does not apply to the other forms of government nor, except incidentally, to other kinds of dissent or resistance. It is not necessary to discuss this mode of protect, along with militant action and resistance, as a tactic for transforming or even overturning an unjust and corrupt system. There is no difficulty about such action in this case. If any means to this end are justified, then surely nonviolent opposition is justified. The problem of civil disobedience, arises only within a more or less just democratic state for those citizens who recognize and accept the legitimacy of the constitution. The difficulty is one of a conflict of duties. At what point does the duty to comply with laws enacted by a legislative majority (or with executive acts supported by such a majority) cease to be binding in view of the right to defend one’s liberties and the duty to oppose injustice? This question involves the nature and limits of majority rule. For this reason the problem of civil disobedience is a crucial test case for any theory of the moral basis of democracy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
A constitutional theory of civil disobedience has three parts. First, it defines this kind of dissent and separated it from other forms of opposition to democratic authority. These rand from legal demonstrations and infractions of law designed to raise test cases before the courts to militant action and organized resistance. A theory specifies the place of civil disobedience in this spectrum of possibilities. Next, it set out the grounds of civil disobedience and the conditions under which such action is justified in a (more or less) just democratic regime. And finally, a theory should explain the role of civil disobedience within a constitutional system and account for the appropriateness of this mode of protest within a free society. As a word of caution, we should not expect too much of a theory of civil disobedience, even one framed for special circumstances. Precise principles that straightway decide actual cases are clearly out of the question. Instead, a useful theory defines a perspective within which the problem of civil disobedience can be approached; it identifies the relevant considerations and helps us to assign them their correct weights in the more important instances. If a theory about these matters appears to us, on reflection, to have cleared our vision and to have made our considered judgments more coherent, then it has been worthwhile. The theory has done what, for the present, ne may reasonably expect it to do: namely, to narrow the disparity between the conscientious convictions of those who accept the basic principles of a democratic society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Civil disobedience as a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law is usually done with the aims of being about change in the law or policies of the government. Civil disobedience can also be considered a deliberate, discriminate violations of the law for a vital social purpose. By acting in this way one addresses the sense of justice of the majority of the community and declares that in one’s considered opinion the principles of social cooperation among free and equal humans are not being respected. A preliminary gloss on this definition is that it does not require that the civilly disobedient act breach the same law that is being protested. It allows for what some have called indirect as well as direct civil disobedience. And this definition should do, as there are sometimes strong reasons for not infringing on the law or policy held to be unjust. Instead, one may disobey traffic ordinances or laws of trespass as a way of presenting one’s case. Thus, if the government enacts a vague and harsh statue against treason, it would not be appropriate to commit treason as a way of objecting to it, and in any event, the penalty might be far more than one should reasonably be ready to accept. In other cases there is no way to violate the government’s policy directly, as when it concerns foreign affairs, or affects another part of the country. A second gloss is that the civilly disobedient act is indeed thought to be contrary to law, at least in the sense that those engaged in it are not simply presenting a test case for a constitutional decision; they are prepared to oppose the statue if it should be upheld. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
To be sure in a constitutional regime, the courts may finally side with the dissenters and declare the law or policy objected to unconditional. It often happens, then, that there is some uncertainty as to whether the dissenters’ action will be held illegal or not. However, this is merely a complicating element. Those who use civil disobedience to protest unjust laws are not prepared to desist should the courts eventually disagree with them, however pleased they might have been with the opposite decision. It should also be noted that civil disobedience is a political act noted that civil disobedience is a political act not only in the sense that it is addressed to the majority that holds political power, but also because it is an act guided and justified by political principles, that is, by the principles of justice which regulate the constitution and social institutions generally. In justifying civil disobedience one does not appeal to principles of personal morality or to religious doctrines, though these may coincide with and support one’s claims; and it goes without saying that civil disobedience cannot be ground solely on group or self-interest. Instead one invokes the commonly shared conception of justice that underlies the political order. It is assumed that in a reasonably just democratic regime there is a public conception of justice by reference to which citizens regulate their political affairs and interpret the constitution. The persistent and deliberate violation of the basic principles of this conception over any extended period of time, especially the infringement of the fundamental equal liberties, invites either submission or resistance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
By engaging in civil disobedience a minority forces the majority to consider whether it wishes to have its actions construed in this ways, or whether, in view of the common sense of justice, it wishes to acknowledge the legitimate claims of the minority. A further point is that civil disobedience is a public act. Not only is it addressed to public principles, it is done in public. It is engaged in openly with fair notice; it is not covert or secretive. One may compare it to public speech, and being a form of address, an expression of profound and conscientious political conviction, it takes place in the public forum. For this reason, among others, civil disobedience is nonviolent. It tries to avoid the use of violence, especially against persons, not from the abhorrence of the use of force in principle, but because it is a final expression of one’s case. To engage in violent acts likely to injure and to hurt is incompatible with civil disobedience as a mode of address. Indeed, any interference with the civil liberties of others tends to obscure the civilly disobedient quality of one’s act. Sometimes if the appeal fails in its purpose, forceful resistance may later be entertained. Yet civil disobedience is giving voice to conscientious and deeply held convictions; while it may warn and admonish, it is not itself a threat. Civil disobedience is nonviolent for another reason. It expresses disobedience to law within the limits of fidelity to law, although it is at the outer edge of theory. The law is broken, but fidelity to law is expressed by the public and nonviolent nature of the act, by the willingness to accept the legal consequences of one’s conduct. One should be willing to undergo the legal consequences for the sake of fidelity to law. The charge may be contested in court, should this prove appropriate. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
This fidelity to law helps to establish to the majority that the act is indeed politically conscientious and sincere, and that it is intended to address the public’s sense of justice. To be completely open and nonviolent is to give bond of one’s sincerity, for it is not easy to convince another that one’s acts are conscientious, or even to be sure of this before oneself. No doubt it is possible to imagine a legal system in which conscientious belief that the law is unjust is accepted as a defense for noncompliance. Humans of great honesty with full confidence in one another might make such a system work. However, as things are, such a scheme would presumably be unstable even in a state of near justice. We must pay a certain prince to convince others that our actions have, in our carefully considered view, a sufficient moral basis in the political convictions of the community. Civil disobedience has been defined so that it falls between legal protest and the raising of test cases on the one side, and conscientious refusal and the various forms of resistance on the other. In this range of possibilities it stands for that form of dissent at the boundary of fidelity to law. Civil disobedience, so understood, is clearly distinct from militant actions and obstruction; it is far removed from organized forcible resistance. The militant, for example, is much more deeply opposed to the existing political system. One does not accept it as one which is nearly just or reasonable so; one believes either that it departs widely from its professed principles or that it pursues a mistake conception altogether. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
While one’s action is conscientious in its own terms, one does not appeal to the sense of justice of the majority (or those having effective political power), since one thinks that their sense of justice is erroneous, or else without effect. Instead, one seeks by well-framed militant acts of disruption and resistance, and the like, to attack the prevalent view of justice or to force a movement in the desired direction. Thus the militant may try to evade the penalty, since one is not prepare to accept the legal consequences of one’s violation of the law; this would not only be to play into the hands of forces that one believes cannot be trusted, but also to express a recognition of the legitimacy of the constitution to which one is opposed. In this sense militant action is not within the bounds of fidelity to law, but represents a more profound opposition to the legal order. The basic structure is thought to be so unjust or else to depart so widely from its own professed ideals that one must try to prepare the way for radical or even revolution change. And this is to be done by trying to arouse the public to an awareness of the fundamental reforms that need to be made. Now in certain circumstances militant action and other kinds of resistance are surely justified. The year 2100 A.D. is closer to us in time than the great depression, yet the World’s economists, traumatized by it, 9/11, the recession of 2008, and the COVID-19 crisis, remain frozen in their attitudes of the past. Economist, even those who talk the language of revolution, are peculiarly conservative creatures. If it were possible to pry from their brains their collective image of the economy of, say, the year 2125, it would look very much like that of 2010—only more so. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Conditioned to think in straight lines, economists have great difficulty imagining alternatives to communism and capitalism. They see in the growth of large-scale organizations nothing more than a linear expansion of old-fashion bureaucracy. They see technological advance as a simple, non-revolutionary extension of the known. Born of scarcity, trained to think in terms of limited resources, they can hardly conceive of a society in which human’s basic material wants have been satisfied. One reason for their lack of imagination is that when they think about technological advance, they concentrate solely on the means of economic activity. Yet the super-age of information revolution challenges the ends as well. It threatens to alter not merely the “how” of production but they “why.” It will, in short, transform the very purposes of economic activity. Before such an upheaval, even the most sophisticated tools of today’s economists are helpless. Input-output tables, econometric models—the whole paraphernalia of analysis that economists employ simply do not come to grips with the external forces—political, social and ethical—that will transform economic life in the decades before us. What does “productivity” or “efficiency” mean in a society that places a high value on psychic fulfillment? What happens to an economy, when, as is likely, the entire concept of property is reduced to meaninglessness? #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
How economies likely to be affected by the rise of supra-national planning, taxing, and regulatory agencies or by a kind of dialectical return to “cottage industry” based on the most advanced cybernetic technologies? Most important, what happens when “no growth” replaces “growth” as an economic objective, When Gross National Product (GNP) ceases to be the holy grail? Only by stepping outside the framework of orthodox economic thought and examining these possibilities can we begin to prepare for tomorrow. And among these, none is more central than the shift in values that is likely to accompany the super-industrial revolution. Under conditions of scarcity, humans struggle to meet their immediate material needs. Today under more affluent conditions, we are reorganizing the economy to deal with a new level of human needs. From a system designed to provide material satisfaction, we are rapidly creating an economy geared to the provision of psychic gratification. This process of “psychologization,” one of the central themes of the super-age of information revolution, has been all but overlooked by the economists. Yet it will result in a novel, surprise-filled economy unlike any human has ever experienced. The issues raised by it will reduce the great conflict of the twenty-first century, the conflict between capitalism and communism, to comparative insignificance. For these issues sweep far beyond economic or political dogma. They involve, as we shall see, nothing less than sanity, the human organism’s ability to distinguish illusion from reality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Much excitement has accompanied the discovery that once a techno-society reaches a certain stage of informational development, it begins to shift energies into automation and autonomy. Many experts see in the services the wave of the future. They suggest the many retail, jobs, food service jobs and manual labor jobs, even news broadcasting, teaching, many aspects of medical care, and law enforcement will be handled by androids and other machines—a prophecy already on its way toward fulfillment. Actors and musicians are expected to be replaced by holograms. What the economists, however, have not done, is ask the obvious question. Where does the economy go next? After the services, what? The high technology nations must, in coming years, direct vast resources to rehabilitating their physical environment and improving what has come to be called “the quality of life.” The fight against air and noise pollution, aesthetic blight, crowding, noise and dirt will clearly absorb tremendous energies. However, in addition to the provision of these public goods, we can also anticipate a subtle change in the character of production for private use. They very excitement aroused by the mushrooming growth of the service sector has diverted professional attention from another shift that will deeply affect both goods and services in the future. It is this shift that will lead to the net forward movement of the economy, the growth of a strange new sector based on what can only be called the “experience industries.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
For the key to post-service economies lies in the psychologization of all production, beginning with manufacture. One of the curious facts about the production in all the techno-societies today, and especially the United States of America, is that goods are increasingly designed to yield psychological “extras” for the consumer. Technology becomes a Veblen good. As the demand of technology increases, which is a luxury good and also a necessity with new products, the price also increases. The future will be packed with positional good, which are goods valued only by how they are distributed among the population, not by how many of them there are available in total (as would be the case with other consumer goods). The source of greater worth of positional goods is their desirability as a status symbol, which usually results in them greatly exceeding the value of comparable good. Various goods have been described as positional in a given capitalist society, such as gold, real estate, diamonds, and luxury goods. More formally in economics, positional goods are a subset of economic goods whose consumption (and subsequent utility), also conditioned by Veblen-like pricing, depends negatively on consumption of those same goods by others. In particular, for these goods the value is at least in part (if not exclusively) a function of its ranking in desirability by others, in comparison to substitutes. Therefore, new is not always better. It depends on the status and ranking of an item you possess. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The term-Veblen good is sometimes extended to include services and non-material possession that may alter one’s social status and that are deemed highly desirable when enjoyed by a relatively few in a community, such as college degrees, Cresleigh Homes, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, big trucks, college degrees, achievements, awards, memberships to exclusive clubs, et cetera. The manufacturer adds a “psychic load” to one’s basic product, and the consumer gladly pays for this intangible benefit. A classic example is the case of the appliance or auto manufacturer who adds buttons, knobs, touch screens, dials to the control panel or dashboard, to replace basic tools that are slightly out of fashion. Or home builders who add luxury features to their new homes like butler’s panties, California rooms, coded entry doors, surveillance systems and other luxury features like stained glass, floor to ceiling windows, and so forth. The manufacturer has learned that increasing the number of gadgets and features, up to a point, gives the operator of the machine or home the sense of controlling a more complex device, and hence a feeling of increased mastery. This psychological payoff is designed into the product. Conversely, pains are taken not to deprive the consumer of an existing psychological benefit. Thus a large American food company proudly launched a labour-saving, add-water-only cake mix. The company was amazed when women rejected the product in favour of mixes that require extra labour—the addition of an egg along with the water. By inserting powered egg in the factory, the company had oversimplified the task of the housewife, depriving her of the sense of creatively participating in the cake-baking process. The powered egg was hastily eliminated, and women went happily back to cracking their own eggs. Once again a product was modified to provide a psychic benefit. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Examples like these can be multiplied endlessly in almost any major industry, from soap and clothing stores to dishwashers and diet colas. According to Dr. Emanuel Demby, president of Motivational Programmers, Incorporated, a research firm employed in the United States of America and Europe by such blue-chip corporations as General Electric, Caltex, and IBM, “The engineering of psychological factors into manufactured goods will be a hallmark of production in the future—not only in consumer goods, but in industrial hardware. “Even the big cranes and derricks built today embody this principle. Their cabs are streamlined, slick like something out of the twenty-first century. Cater-pillar, International Harvester, Ferguson—all of them. Why? These mechanical monsters do not dig better or hoist better because the cab is aesthetically improved. However, the contractor who buys them likes it better. The men who work on them like it better. The contractor’s customers like it better. So even the manufacturers of earthmoving equipment begin to pay attention to non-utilitarian—id est, psychological—factors.” Beyond this, Dr. Demby asserts, manufacturers are devoting more attention to reducing tensions that accompany the use of certain products. Manufacturers of sanitary napkins, for example, know that women have a fear of stopping up the toilet when disposing of them. “A new product ha been developed,” he says, “that instantly dissolves on contact with water. It does not perform its basic function any better. However, it relieves some of the anxiety that went with it. This is psychological engineering if ever there was any!” #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Affluent consumers are willing and able to pay for such niceties. As disposable income rises, they become progressively less concerned with price, progressively more insistent on what they call “quality.” For many products quality can still be measured in the traditional terms of workmanship, durability and materials. However, for a fast-growing class of products, such differences are virtually undetectable. Blindfolded, the consumer cannot distinguish Brand A from Brand B. Nevertheless, she often argues fiercely that one is superior to another. This paradox vanishes once the psychic component of production is taken int account. For even when they are otherwise identical, there are likely to be marked psychological differences between one product and another. Advertisers strive to stamp each product with its own distinct image. These images are functional: they fill a need on the part of the consumer. The need is psychological, however, rather than utilitarian in ordinary sense. Thus we find that the term “quality” increasingly refers to the ambience, the status associations—in effect, the psychological connotations of the product. As more and more of the basic material needs of the consumer are met, it is strongly predictable that even more economic energy will be directed at meeting the consumer’s subtle, varied and quite personal needs for beauty, prestige, individuation, and sensory delight. The manufacturing sector will channel ever greater resources into the conscious design of psychological distinctions and gratifications. They psychic component of goods production will assume increasing importance. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
A merciful human aims at one’s neighbour’s good and so does “God’s will,” consciously co-operating with “the simple good.” A cruel human oppresses one’s neighbour, and so does simple evil. However, in doing such evil, one is used by God, without one’s own knowledge or consent, to produce the complex good—so that the first human serves God as a son (or child), and the second as a tool. For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John. The whole system is, so to speak, calculated for the clash between good humans and bad humans, and the good fruits of fortitude, patience, pity and forgiveness for which the cruel human is permitted to be cruel, presuppose that the good human ordinarily continues to seek simple good. I say “ordinarily” because a human is sometimes entitled to hurt (or even, in my opinion, to kill) one’s fellow, but only where the necessity is urgent and the good to be attained obvious, and usually (though not always) when one who inflicts the pain has a definite authority to do so—a parent’s authority derived from nature, a magistrate’s or soldier’s derived from civil society, or a surgeon’s derived, most often, from the patient. To turn this into a general charter for afflicting humanity because the affliction is good for them is not indeed to break the Divine scheme but to volunteer for the post of Satan within that scheme. If you do his work, you must prepare for his wages. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The problem about avoiding our own pain admis a similar solution. Some ascetics have used self-torture. As a layman, I offer no opinion on the prudence of such a regimen; but I insist that, whatever its merits, self-torture is quite a different thing from tribulation sent by God. Everyone knows that fasting is a different experience from missing your dinner by accident or through poverty. Fasting asserts the will against the appetite—the reward being self-mastery and the danger pride: involuntary hunger subjects appetite and will together to the Divine will, furnishing an occasion for submission and exposing us to the danger or rebellion. However, the redemptive effect of suffering lies chiefly in its tendency to reduce the rebel will. Ascetic practices, which in themselves strengthen the will, are only useful in so far as they enable the will to put its own house (the passions) in order, as a preparation for offering the whole human to God. They are necessary as a means; as an end, they would be abominable, for in substituting will for appetite and there stopping, they would merely exchange the animal self for the diabolical self. It was, therefore, truly said that only God can mortify. Tribulation does its work in a World where human beings are ordinarily seeking, by lawful means, to avoid their own natural evil and to attain their natural god, and presuppose such a World. In order to submit the will to God, we must have a will and that will must have objects. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Christian renunciation does not mean stoic “Apathy,” but a readiness to prefer God to inferior ends which are in themselves lawful. Hence the Perfect Man brought to Gethsemane a will, and a strong will, to escape suffering and death is such escape were compatible with the Father’s will, combined with a perfect readiness for obedience if it were not. Some of the saints recommend a total renunciation at the very threshold of our discipleship; but I think this can mean only a total readiness for every particular renunciation that may be demanded, for it would not be possible to live from moment to moment willing nothing but submission to God as such. What would be the material for the submission? It would seem self-contradictory to say “What I will is to subject what I will to God’s will,” for the second what has no content. Doubtless we all spend too much care in the avoidance of our own pain: but a duly subordinated intention to avoid it, using lawful means, is in accordance with nature—that is, with the whole working system of creaturely life for which the redemptive work of tribulation is calculated. It would be quite false, therefore, to suppose that the Christian view of suffering is incompatible with the strongest emphasis on our duty to leave the World, even in a temporal sense, better than we found it. In the fullest parabolic picture which He gave to the Judgment, Our Lord seems to reduce all virtue to active beneficence: and though it would be misleading to take that one picture in isolation from the Gospel as a whole, it is sufficient to place beyond doubt the basic principles of the social ethics of Christianity. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Before Abraham was God. God is a higher mentalism. “I am” points to the eternal One where no individual entity ever was, is, or shall be. Philosophy raises the questions of Reality and pursues it until an answer can be found. That answer assets there is something unique which alone can be the Real, which ever was, is, and shall be. Philosophy’s fundamental postulate is that there is but one ultimate Power, one sublime Reality, one transcendent Being. It is invisible to all, since it is the power that makes the World visible. It is without form, since it is the Substance out of which all forms are made. The Real is unique—the only undivided, unsplit being beyond which there is nothing else. There is nothing else either beyond it or besides it. It is the unique not only because of what IT is but also because two statements concerning IT can be quite contradictory, yet each can still be correct! Ne transcends all categories. Since the Real is unique, the One without a second and not the One which is related to the Many that spring out of it, it cannot correctly be set up in opposition to the Unreal, the Illusory, the Appearance. They are not on the same level. That which both Greek Plato and Indian Vedantin called “the One” did not refer to the beginning figure of a series, but to “One-without-a-Second.” It is unique. There is nothing to which it can be justly likened, or with which it can be compared. This must be so since it goes beyond and transcends all things without any exception. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Whatever is said of it will only succeed in describing an idea in the mind of the sayer, and this goes beyond and transcends all ideas, again without any exception. You can compare one being or one thing with another but not This, not This! There is a Mind which is self-existent, unique, unlike anything else, unbegotten. The Universal Mind is also unique in that, while comprehending all things, it is itself incomprehensible. It stands alone, unique, unseen and untouchable. Yet from it emerge all the gods of all the planets which they govern, all the ethical injunctions which humans need and must in the end. Please stand about me, your protective spirits, on all six sides, please establish your guards. From all dangers, no matter from what quarter, whether from above or below, please keep me safe. My Lord at my right hand, and my Lord at my left: please be with me throughout my life, watching over me by night and by day. Thy dwelling there forever. Mayest Thou be exalted and sanctified in Jerusalem, Thy city, throughout all generations and to all eternity. O please let our eyes behold the establishment of Thy kingdom, according to the word that was spoken in the inspired Psalms of David, Thy righteous anointed: The Lord shall reign forever. Thy God, O American, shall be Sovereign unto all generations. Hallelujah! Unto all generations we will declare Thy greatness and to all eternity we will proclaim Thy holiness. Our mouth shall ever speak Thy praise, O our God, for Thou art a great and holy God and King. Your arms are strong, Father; they can hug a child or restrain one from harm. Please Wrap them about me: I trust You to know which is needed. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the holy King. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
CRESLEIGH RANCH: BRIGHTON STATION– Rancho Cordova, CA
3-5 Beds 3-3.5 Bath 2,054-3,634 Square Feet
Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together!
Eco-Technological Development is Firmly Convinced that Human Nature is Eternal and Stability Will Return!
The human task is to make of oneself a work of art. It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief. There are four chief ways in which guidance may be given. They are: intuitive feeling, giving in a general ways approbation or rejection of a proposed course of action; direct and precise inner message; the shaping of outer circumstances; and the teaching of inspired texts. If all four exist together, and if they all harmonize, then you may step forward in the fullest assurance. However, if there are contradictions between them, then great caution and some delay is certainly advisable. It is also needful to remember that the higher self can only be known by the higher part of the mind, that is, the intuition. The emotions are on a lesser and lower level, however noble or religious they may be. The immense satisfaction which the ecstatic raptures give is no indication that one is directly touching reality, but only that one is coming closer to it. They may seem purely spiritual, but they still belong to the ego’s feeling nature and if one believes otherwise one will fall into self-deception. Only through the pure intuition, freed from emotional egoism and transcending intellectual illusion, can one really make a contact with the Overself. And that will happen in a state of utter and perfect tranquillity; there will be none of the emotional excitement which marked the successful practice of the earlier stage of meditation exercises. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
When the deliverance of intuition cancels the deliverance of reason, one may trust oneself to the first, but only when one is sure it is what it purports to be. When one finds some of one’s own intuitions formulated and printed in someone else’s book, one feels their truth is confirmed and one’s own mind confronted. One has the right to judge an intuition rationally before submitting to it, but what if one’s judgment is itself wrong? Intuition may support reason but must supplant it only on the gravest occasions. The sudden revelation of correct understanding, whether in certain situations or about uncertain problems, may come unexpectedly or abruptly anytime during the day. It springs up of its own accord or it appears in a dream message. If the intuitive feeling leads one gently at some times, it also leads one firmly at other times. An intuition is directly self-revealing; it does not depend on what kind of thought and study were done before it appeared. It is also self-evident: the correctness of the receiving conscious is very calm, and when the lapse of time tends to strengthen its authority. The intuitive answer may come in one of several ways, but the commonest is either a self-evident that one cannot help thinking it. This is how intuition usually appears and is usually recognized for what it is. Develop them that another sign to recognize intuitions is the unexpectedness. #RandolphHrris 2 of 21
The mysterious appearance of an intuition may well make us ask where it comes from. At one moment it is no there; at the next it is lodged in the mind. Sometimes we are wiser than we know and utter involuntary answers which surprise us with their unexpected wisdom or unknown Truth in one way intuitions are born. Because it comes from within, it comes with its own authority. When it is “the real thing,” the seeker will not have to question examine or verify its authenticity, will not have to run to others for their appraisal of its worth or its rejection as a pseudo-intuition. One will know overwhelmingly what it is in the same way that one knows who one is. Education and experience alone do not make the mind; there is something higher that mixed itself in now and again with disconcerting incomprehensible spontaneity. One reason why an intuition is so often missed is that it flashes into the mind as disjointedly, as abruptly, and as inconsequentially as a person or s thing sometimes comes momentarily into the field of vision through the corner of an eye. Today the human with a pacemaker or a plastic aorta is still recognizably a human. The inanimate part of one’s body is still relatively unimportant in terms of one’s personality and consciousness. However, as the proportion of machine components rise, what happens to one’s awareness of self, one’s inner experience? If we assume that the brain is he seat of consciousness and intelligence, and that no other part of the body affects personality or self very much, then it is possible to conceive of a disembodied brain—a brain without arms, legs, spinal cord or other equipment—as a self, a personality, an embodiment of awareness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
It may then become possible to combine the human brain with a whole set of artificial sensors, receptors, and effectors, and to call that tangle of wires and plastic a human being. All this may seem to resemble medieval speculation about the number of angels who can pirouette on a pinhead, yet the first small seps toward some form of human-machines symbiosis are already being taken. Moreover, they are being taken not by a lone mad scientist, but by thousands of highly trained engineers, mathematicians, biologists, surgeons, chemists, neurologists and communications specialists. Dr. W. G. Walter’s mechanical “tortoises” are machines that behave as though they had been psychologically conditioned. These tortoises were early specimens of a growing breed of robots ranging from the “Perceptron” which could learn (and even generalize) to the more recent “Wanderer,” a robot capable of exploring an area, building up in its memory an “image” of the terrain, and able even to indulge in certain operations comparable, at least in some respects, to “contemplative speculation” and “fantasy.” Experiments by Ross Ashby, H. D. Block, Frank Rosenblatt and others demonstrate that machines can learn from their mistakes, improve their performance, and, in certain limited kinds of learning, outstrip human students. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Reports Dr. Block, professors of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University: “I do not think that there is a task you can name that a machine cannot do—in principle. If you can define a task and a human can do it, then a machine can, at least in theory, also do it. The converse, however, is not true.” Intelligence and creativity, it would appear, are not a human monopoly. Robotology may be the new wave of the future. Technicians at Disneyland have created extremely life-life computer-controlled humanoids capable of moving their arms and legs, grimacing, smiling, glowering, simulating fear, joy and a wide range of other emotions. Built of clear plastic, that according to one reporter, “does everything but bleed,” the robots chase girls, play music, fire pistols, and so closely resemble human forms that visitors routinely shriek with fear, flinch and otherwise react as though they were dealing with real human beings. The purposes to which these robots are put may seem trivial, but the technology on which they are based is highly sophisticated. It depends heavily on knowledge acquired from the space program—and this knowledge is accumulating rapidly. There appears to be no reason, in principle, why we cannot go forward from these present primitive and trivial robots to build humanoid machines capable of extremely varied behaviour, capable of even “human” error and seemingly random choice—in short, to make them behaviourally indistinguishable from humans except by means of highly sophisticated or elaborate tests. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
At that point we shall face the novel sensation of trying to determine whether the smiling, assured humanoid behind the airline reservation counter is a pretty young lady or a carefully wired robot. (This raises a number of half-amusing, half-serious problems about the relationships between humans and machines, including emotional and even relationships involving pleasure of the flesh. Professor Block at Cornell speculates that human-made relationships involving pleasures of the flesh may not be too far distant. Pointing out that people often develop emotional attachment to the machines they use, he suggests that we shall have to give attention to the “ethical” questions arising from our treatment of “these mechanical objects of our affection and passion.”) The likelihood the that flight attendant with be both human and robot is likely. The thrust toward some form of human-machine symbiosis is furthered by out increasing ingenuity in communicating with machines. A great deal of much-publicized work is being done to facilitate the interaction of humans and computers. However, quite apart from this, Russian and American scientists have both been experimenting with the placement or implantation of detectors that pick up signals from the nerve ends at the stub of an amputated limb. These signals are then amplified and used to activate an artificial limb, thereby making a machine directly and sensitively responsive to the nervous system of a human being. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
The human need not “think out” one’s desires; even involuntary impulses are transmittable. The respon 89sive behaviour of the machine is as automatic as the behaviour of one’s own hand, eye or leg. In Flight to Arras, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, novelist, poet and pioneer aviator, described buckling himself into the seat of a fighter plane during World War II. “All this complication of oxygen tubes, heating equipment; these speaking tubes that form the ‘intercom’ running between the members of the crew. This mask through which I breathe. I am attached to the plane by a rubber tube as indispensable as an umbilical cord. Organs have been added to my being, and they seem to intervene between me and my heart.” We have come far since those distant days. Space biology is marching irresistibly toward the day when the astronaut will not merely be buckled into one’s capsule, but become a part of it in the full symbiotic sense of the phrase. One aim is to make the craft itself a wholly self-sufficient Universe, in which algae is grown for food, water is recovered from body waste, air is recycled to purge it of the ammonia entering the atmosphere from urine, et cetera. In this totally enclosed fully regenerative World, the human being becomes an integral part of an on-going micro-ecological process whirling through the vastness of space. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Thus Theodore Gordon, author of The Future and himself a leading space engineer, writes: “Perhaps it would be simpler to provide life support in the form of machines that plug into the astronaut. One could be fed intravenously using a liquid food compactly stored in a remote pressurized tank. Perhaps direct processing of body liquid wastes, and conversion to water, could be accomplished by a new type of artificial kidney built in as part of the spaceship. Perhaps sleep could be induced electronically…to lower one’s metabolism.” Und so weiter. One after another, the body functions of human become interwoven with, dependent on, and part of, the machine functions of the capsule. The ultimate extension of such work, however, is not necessarily to be found in the outer reaches of space; it may well become a common part of everyday life here on the mother planet. This is the direct link-up of the human brain—stripped of its supporting physical structures—with the computer. Indeed, it may be that the biological component of the supercomputers of the future may be massed human brains. The possibility of enhancing human (and machine) intelligence by linking them together organically opens enormous and exciting probabilities, so exciting that Dr. R. M. Page, director of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, has publicly discussed the feasibility of a system in which human thoughts are fed automatically into the storage unit of a computer to form the basis for machine decision-making. Furthermore, research from countless sources contributes toward the eventual symbiosis. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
In one of the most fascinating, frightening and intellectually provocative experiments ever recorded, Professor Robert White, director of neurosurgery at the Metropolitan General Hospital in Cleveland, has given evidence that the brain can be isolated from its body and kept alive after the “death” of the rest of the organism. The experiment, described in a brilliant article by Oriana Fallaci, saw a team of neurosurgeons cut the brain out of a rhesus monkey, discard the body, then hook the brain’s carotid arteries up to another money, whose blood then continued to bathe the disembodied organ, keeping it alive. Said one of the members of the medical team, Dr. Leo Massopust, a neurophysiologist: “The brain activity is largely better than when the brain had a body…No doubt about it. I even suspect that without his senses, he can think more quickly. What kind of thinking, I do not know. I guess he is primarily a memory, repository for information stored when he had his flesh; he cannot develop further because he no longer has the nourishment of experience. Yet this, too, is a new experience.” The brain survived for five hours. It could have lasted much longer, had it served the purposes of research. Professor White has successfully kept other brains alive for days, using machinery, rather than a living monkey, to keep the brain washed with blood. “I do not think we have reached the stage,” he told Miss Fallaci, “where you can turn humans into robots, obedient sheep. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
“Yet…it could happen, it is not impossible. If you consider that we can transfer the head of a man onto the trunk of another man, if you consider that we can isolate the brain of a human and make it work without its body…To me, there is no longer any gap between science fiction and science…We could keep Dr. Einstein’s brain alive and make it function normally.” Not only, Professor White implies, can we transfer the head of one person to the shoulders of another, not only can we keep a head or a brain “alive” and functioning, but it can all be done, with “existing techniques.” Indeed, he declares, “The Japanese will be the first to [keep an isolated human head alive]. I will not, because I have not resolved as yet this dilemma: Is it right or not?” A devout Catholic, Dr. White is deeply troubled by the philosophical and moral implications of his work. As of the year 2018, a team of scientists recently revealed they had successfully conducted experiments on hundreds of pigs that involved keeping their brains alive for up to 36 hours after the animals had been decapitated. Researcher Dr. Nenad Sestan, who lead the team of Yale University scientists, disclosed the nature of the research in a meeting at the National Institutes of Health to discuss the ethical concerns surrounding edge research with the human brain. In essence they were able to successfully remove the pigs’ heads and resuscitate their brains while no longer connected to a body. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Through a delicate, complex process they were able to keep the brains alive by connecting them to a closed-loop system called “BrainEX” that pumps oxygen-rich artificial blood through the necessary areas of the brain to sustain life. The researchers intent, reportedly, is to create a complete atlas of the connections between human brain cells, a monumental undertaking that has never been done. By keeping the pig brains alive, they are able to study them in ways that will contribute to further breakthroughs. This could lead to a radical enhancement of our understanding of the human brain. The research itself is remarkable and, it could change everything. We may have to evolve the way we think about death, consciousness, souls, and what it means to be human. As the brin surgeons and he neurologist probe further, as the bio-engineers and the neurologists probe further, as the bio-engineers and the mathematicians, the communications experts and robot-builders become more sophisticated, as the space humans and their capsules grow closer and closer to one another, as machines begin to embody biological components and humans come bristling with sensors and mechanical organs, the ultimate symbiosis approaches. The work converges. Yet the greatest marvel of all is not organ transplantation or symbiosis or underwater engineering. It is not technology, nor science itself. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The greatest and most dangerous marvel of all is the complacent past-orientation of the race, its unwillingness to confront the reality of acceleration. Thus humans move swiftly into an explored Universe, into a totally new stage of eco-technological development, firmly convinced that “human nature is eternal” or that “stability will return.” He stumbles into the most violent revolution in human history muttering, in the words of one famous, though myopic sociologist, that “the processes of modernization…have been more or less ‘completed.’” He simply refuses to imagine the future. In 1865 a newspaper editor told his readers that “Well informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that, were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.” Barely a decade later, the telephone erupted from Mr. Bell’s laboratory and changed the World. One the very day that the Wright brothers took wing, newspapers refused to report the event because their sober, solid, feet-on-the-ground editors simply could not bring themselves to believe it had happened. After all, a famous American astronomer, Dr. Simon Newcomb, had not long before assured the World that “No possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which humans shall fly long distances.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Not long after this, another expert announced publicly that it was “nothing less than feeblemindedness to expect anything to come of the horseless carriage movement.” Six years later the one-millionth Ford automobile rolled off an assembly line. And then there was the great Dr. Rutherford, himself, the discoverer of the atom, who said in 1933 that the energy in the atom’s nucleus would never be released. Nine years later: the first chain reaction. Again and again the human brain—including the first class scientific brain—has blinded itself to the novel possibilities of the future, has narrowed its field of concern to gain momentary reassurance, only to be rudely shaken by the accelerative thrust. This is not to imply that all the scientific or technological advances so far discussed will necessarily materialize. Still less does it imply that they will all occur between now and the turn of the century. Some will, no doubt, die a-borning. Some may represent blind alleys. Others will succeed in the lab, but turn out to be impractical for one reason or another. Yet all this is unimportant. For even if none of these developments occur, others, perhaps even more unsettling, will. We have scarcely touched on the computer revolution and the far-ramifying changes that must follow in its churning wake. We have barely mentioned the implications of the thrust into outer space, an adventure that could, before the new millennium arrives, change all our lives and attitudes in radical and as yet unpredicted ways. (What would happen if an astronaut or space vehicle returned to Earth contaminated with some fast-multiplying, death-dealing microorganism or space ghost?) #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
We have said nothing about the laser, the holograph, the powerful new instruments of personal and mass communication, the new technologies of crime and espionage, new forms of transport and construction, the developing horror of chemical and bacteriological warfare techniques, the radiant promise of solar energy, the discovery that life can be conceived in a test tube, the startling new tools and techniques for education, and an endless list of other fields in which high-impact changes lie just ahead or are already here. In the coming years, advances in all these fields will fire off like a series of rockets carrying us out of the past, plunging us deeper into the new society. Now will this new society quickly settle into a steady state. It, too, will quiver and crack and roar as it suffers jolt after jolt of high-energy change. For the individual who wishes to live in one’s time, to be a part of the future, the super-industrial revolution offers no surcease from change. It offers no return to the familiar past. It offers only the highly combustible mixture of transience and novelty. This massive injection of speed and novelty into the fabric of society will force us not merely to cope more rapidly with familiar situations, events and moral dilemmas, but to cope at a progressively faster rate with situations that are, for us, decidedly unfamiliar, “first-time” situations, strange, irregular, unpredictable. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
This will significantly alter the balance that prevails in any society between the familiar and unfamiliar elements in the daily life of its people, between the routine and non-routine, the predictable and unpredictable. The relationship between these two kinds of daily-life elements can be called the “novelty ratio” of the society, and as the level of newness or novelty rises, less and less of life appears subject to our routine forms of coping behaviour. More and more, there is a growing weariness and wariness, a pall of pessimism, a decline in our sense of mastery. More and more, the environment comes to seem chaotic, beyond human control. Thus two great social forces converge: the relentless movement toward transience is reinforced and made more potentially dangerous by a rise in the novelty ratio. Nor, as we shall next see, is this novelty to be found solely in the technological arrangements of the society-to-be. In its social arrangements, too, we can anticipate the unprecedented, the unfamiliar, the bizarre. All things which are as they ought to be are conformed unto this second law eternal; and even those things which to this eternal law are not conformable are notwithstanding in some sort ordered by the first eternal law. There is a paradox about tribulation in Christianity. Blessed are the poor, but by “judgment” (id est, social justice) and alms we are to remove poverty wherever possible. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Blessed are we when persecuted, but we may avoid persecution by flying from city to city, and may pray to be spared it, as Our Lord prayed in Gethsemane. However, if suffering is good, ought it not to be pursued rather than avoided? I answer that suffering is not good in itself. What is good in any painful experience is, for the sufferer, one’s submission to the will of God, and, for the spectators, the compassion aroused and the acts of mercy to which it leads. If wholeness or integration consists in the union of opposites, symbolized by the emergence of quaternities and mandalas, it follows that the most obvious pair of opposites, good and evil, are to be found in the self. Yet the self, as we have seen, is a God-image, or at least cannot be distinguished from one. The conventional Christian view of God is dualistic, in that God is entirely good (the doctrine of the Summum Bonum), while evil is contained in Satan. However, earlier Christian belief was monotheistic. Clement of Rome taught that God rules the World with a right and a left hand, the right being Christ, the left Satan. All of our lives, many of us has wrestled with the problem of the origin of evil. Just as we have to remember the gods of antiquity in order to appreciate the psychological value of the anima/animus archetype, so Christ is our nearest analogy of the self and its meaning. It is naturally not a question of a collective value artificially manufactured or arbitrarily awarded, but of one that is effective and present per se, and that makes its effectiveness felt whether the subject is conscious of it or not. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Yet, though the attributes of Christ (consubstantiality with the Father, co-eternity, filiation, parthenogenesis, crucifixion, Lamb scarified between opposites, One divided into Many, et cetera) undoubtedly mark Him out as an embodiment of the self, looked at from the psychological angle He corresponds to only one half of the archetype. The other half appears in the Antichrist. The latter is just as much a manifestation of the self, except that one consists of its dark aspect. Both are Christian symbols, and they have the same meaning as the image of the Saviour crucified between two thieves. This great symbol tells us that the progressive development and differentiation of consciousness leads to an ever more menacing awareness of the conflict and involves nothing less than a crucifixion of the ego, its agonizing suspension between irreconcilable opposites. However, it is fitting that one of these two extremes, and the best, should be called the Son of God because of His excellence, and the other, diametrically opposed to him, the son of the evil demon, of Satan and the devil. The opposites even condition one another. Where there is evil…there must needs be good contrary to the evil. The one follows from the other; hence we must either do away with both, and deny that good and evil exist, or if we admit the one, and particularly evil, we must also admit good. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Evil spirits and impure demons do not have the contrary virtue substantially, and they were not created evil but chose the condition of wickedness (malitiae gradus) of their own free will. For it is certain that to be evil means to be deprived of good. To turn aside from good is nothing other than to be perfected in evil. However, who can accurately judge what is good and evil because in some cases it is subjective. Take for instance, The Queen of the Damned, the movie by Warner Brothers, which is based on an Anne Rice novel Queen of the Damned. The vampire Queen, Akasha is 6,000 years old and trying to preserve her race and the planet by feeding on humans. Some might see this as an evil act, where others might she it as a benevolent act. After all, how much different is it from humans trying to preserve their race from feeding on animals and plant life? Food is food, right? This shows clearly that an increase in either good or evil means a diminution of the other, so that good and evil represent equivalent halves of an opposition. Naturally there can be no question on a total extinction of the ego, for then the focus of consciousness would be destroyed, and the result would be complete unconsciousness. The relative abolition of the ego affects only those supreme and ultimate decision which confront us in situations where there are insoluble conflicts of duty. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
This means, in other words, that in such cases the ego is a suffering bystander who decides nothing but must submit to decision and surrender unconditionally. The “genius” of humans, the higher and more spacious part of one whose extent no one knows, has the final word. It is therefore well to examine carefully the psychological aspects of the individuation process in the light of Christian tradition, which can describe it for us with an exactness and impressiveness far surpassing our feeble attempts, even through the Christian image of the self—Christ—lacks the shadow that properly belongs to it. In the fallen and partially redeemed Universe we may distinguish the simple good descending from God, the simple evil produced by rebellious creatures, and the exploitation of the evil by God for His redemptive purposes, which produced the complex good to which accepted suffering and repented sin contribute. Now the fact that God can make complex good out of simple evil does not excuse—though by mercy it may save—those who do the simple evil. And this distinction is central. Offences must come, but woe to those why whom they come; sins do cause grace to abound, but we must not make that an excuse for continuing to sin. The crucifixion itself is the best, as well as the worst, of all historical events, but the role of Judas remains simply evil. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Love is a feeling of deep devotion, concern, and affection. The greatest example of God’s love for His children is found in the infinite Atonement of Jesus Christ. Love for God and fellow humans is a characteristic of disciples of Jesus Christ. Have you recognized the love of God in your life? We manifest our love for Heavenly Father by keeping His commandments and serving His children. Our expressions of love for others may include being kind to them, listening to them, mouring with them, comforting them, serving them, praying for them, sharing the gospel with them, and being their friend. When we remember that we are all children of God—that we are spirit brothers and sisters–our love for those around us increases. The love that results from this realization has the power to transcend all boundaries of nation, creed, and colour. Dear Lord in Heaven, please remind me on my drive that my anger harms me more than that which angers me. Lord of Peace, in ultimate calm sitting, please pass on to me some of your beatific pose. Please remind us that we have the power to overcome anger, as our Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave his life for us and love us and is not angry that our sins before he was born, while he was born, and after his death is the toll he paid for us to cross over into this mortal realm and he still love us. May even my commute be done in beauty. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Land folk, I am here, newly arrived to this place. I have come from my previous home, where I lived under the protecting gaze of the Land Spirits there. In this new place, then, I wish to establish peace again between my people and the people of the land, as it as been done since the unremembered time. I bring gifts to you, I bring offerings, as a suppliant should when entering a chieftain’s hall. Please accept the from me and, with them, my friendship. Please establish between us peace. Please encompass me about with your protection, Holy Ones of ancient times. Please stand about me on all sides, warding away from me all dangers, keeping away from me all harm. Who may be compared to Thee, Father of mercy, who in love rememberest Thy creatures unto life? Faithful art Thou to grant eternal life to the departed. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who callest the dead to life everlasting. Holy art Thou and holy is Thy name and unto Thee holy beings render praise daily. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the Holy God. We sanctify Thy name on Earth even as it is sanctified in the Heavens above, as described in the vision of Thy Prophet: And the seraphim called one unto another saying: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole Earth is full of His glory. Whereupon the angels in stirring and mighty chorus rise toward the seraphim and with resounding acclaim declare: Blessed by the glory of God from His Heavenly abode. From Thy Heavenly abode, please reveal Thyself, O our King, and reign over us, for we wait for Thee. O when wilt Thou reign in America? Speedily, even in our days, do Thou establish Thy dwelling here forever. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
You made it past Wednesday! Time to kick back and relax in your #Riverside Residence 1 home. Grab some loungewear from your spacious Primary Bedroom closet and head downstairs to the kitchen to make plans for the weekend. 😄
Or you could learn more about this residence on our website! And with approximately 2,300 square feet, all on one level, you will likely find all the space you need. Link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/residence-1/
My God Sits in the Back of the Limousine, My God Has the House on the Cover of the Magazine!
When choosing between two evils, I always like to take the one I have never tried before. The justification for majority rule rests squarely on the political ends that the constitution is designed to achieve, and therefore on the two principles of justice. As a reminder, the first principle of justice states that each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all. The second principle of justice states that social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: They are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle). The first principle of equal basic liberties is to be embodied in the political constitution, while the second principle applies primarily to economic institutions. Fulfillment of the first principle takes priority over fulfillment of the second principle, and within the second principle fair equality of opportunity takes priority over the difference principle. The first principle affirms that all citizens should have the familiar basic rights and liberties: liberty of conscience and freedom of association, freedom of speech and liberty of the person, the rights to vote, to hold public office, to be treated in accordance with the rule of law, and so on. The first principle accords these rights and liberties to all citizens equally. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Unequal rights would not benefit those who would get a lesser share of the rights, so justice requires equal rights for all, in all normal circumstances. The second distinctive feature of the first principle is that it requires fair value of the political liberties. The political liberties, concerned with the right to hold public office, the right to affect the outcome of national elections and so on. For these liberties, citizens who are similarly endowed and motivated should have similar opportunities to hold office, to influence elections, and so on regardless of how rich or poor they are. This fair value proviso has major implications for how elections should be funded and run. The second principle of justice has two parts. The first part, fair equality of opportunity, requires that citizens with the same talents and willingness to use them have the same educational and economic opportunities regardless of whether they were born rich or poor. In all parts of society there are to be roughly the same prospects of culture and achievement for those similarly motivated and endowed. So, for example, if we assume that natural endowments and the willingness to use them are evenly distributed across children born into different social classes, then within any type of occupation (generally specified) we should find that roughly one quarter of people in that occupation were born into the top 25 percent of the income distribution, one quarter were born into the second-highest 25 percent of the income distribution, one quarter were born into the lowest 25 percent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Since class of origin is a morally arbitrary fact about citizens, justice does not allow class origin to turn into unequal opportunities for education or meaningful work. The second part of the second principle is the difference principle, which regulates the distribution of wealth and income. Allowing inequalities of wealth and income can lead to a larger social product: higher wages can cover the costs of training and education, for example, and can provide incentives to fill jobs that are more in demand. The difference principle allows inequalities of wealth and income, so long as these will be to everyone’s advantage, and specifically to advantage of those who will be worst off. The difference principle requires, that is, that any economic inequalities be to the greatest advantage of those who are advantaged least. The difference principle is partly based on the negative thesis that the distribution of natural assets is undeserved. A citizen does not merit more of the social product simply because one was lucky enough to be born with the potential to develop skills that are currently in high demand. Yet this does not mean that everyone must get the same shares. The fact that citizens have different talents and abilities can be used to make everyone better office. In a society governed by the difference principle, citizens regard the distribution of natural endowments as a common asset that can benefit all. Those better endowed are welcome to use their gifts to make themselves better off, so long as their doing so also contributes to the good of those less well endowed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The difference principle this expresses a positive ideal, an ideal of deep social unity. In a society that satisfies the difference principle, citizens know that their economy works to everyone’s benefit, and that those who were lucky enough to be born with greater natural potentials are not getting richer at the expense of those who were less fortunate. In justice as fairness, humans agree to share one another’s fate. I have assumed that some form of majority rule is justified as the best available way of insuring just and effective legislation. It is compatible with equal liberty and possesses a certain naturalness; for if minority rule is allowed, there is no obvious criterion to select which one is decide and equality is violated. A fundamental part of the majority principle is that the procedure should satisfy the conditions of background justice. In this case these conditions are those of political liberty—freedom of speech and assembly, freedom to take part in public affairs and to influence by constitutional means the course of legislation—and the guarantee of the fair value of these freedoms. When this background is absent, the first principle of justice is not satisfied; yet even when it is present, there is no assurance that legislation with be enacted. One problem with this procedure of majority rule is that it may allow cyclical majorities. However, the primary defect from the point of view of justice is that it permits the violation of liberty. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
There is nothing to the view, then, that what the majority wills is right. In fact, none of the traditional conceptions of justice have held this doctrine, maintaining always that the outcome of the voting is subject to political principles. Although in given circumstances it is justified that the majority (suitably defined and circumscribed) has the constitutional right to make law, this does not imply that the laws enacted are just. The dispute of substances about majority rule concerns how it is best defined and whether constitutional constraints are effective and reasonable devices for strengthening the overall balance of justice. These limitations may often be used by entrenched minorities to preserve their illicit advantages. This question is one of political judgment and does not belong to the theory of justice. It suffices to note that while citizens normally submit their conduct to democratic authority, that is, recognized the outcome of a vote as establishing a binding rule, other things equal, they do not submit their judgment to it. A justice constitution is defined as a constitution that would be agreed upon by rational delegates in a constitutional convention who are guided by the two principles of justice. When we justify a constitution, we present considerations to show that it would be adopted under these conditions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Similarly, just laws and policies are those that would be enacted by rational legislators at the legislative stage who are constrained by a justice constitution and who are conscientiously trying to follow the principles of justice as their standard. When we criticize laws and policies, we try to show that they would not be chosen under this ideal procedure. Now since even rational legislators would often reach different conclusions, there is a necessity for a vote under ideal conditions. The restrictions on information will not guarantee agreement, since the tendencies of the general social facts will often be ambiguous and difficult to assess. The Lord has said that “there is a law, irrevocably decreed in Heaven before the foundations of this World, upon which all blessings are predicated—and when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 130.20-21. It would seem from this declaration that there is no permanent progress made in any field or in any place except it be through obedience to the governing law. We know this is true in the Heavens, because the Lord said: “That which is governed by law is also preserved by law and perfected and sanctified by the same. That which breaketh a law, and abideth not by law, but seeketh to become a law unto itself, and willeth to abide in sin [sin, being the breaking of the law], and altogether abideth in sin, cannot be sanctified by law, neither by mercy, justice, nor judgment. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
“For judgement goeth before the face of one who sitteth upon the throne and governeth and executeth all things. And one hath given a law unto all things, by which they move in their times and their seasons; and their courses are fixed, even the courses of the Heavens and the Earth, which comprehend the Earth and all the planets,” Doctrine and Covenants 88.34-35, 40, 42-43. This scripture tells us that all things in God’s economy, even those which to us seem inanimate, obey the laws by which they are governed. “The Earth [for example] abideh the law of a celestial kingdom, for it filleth the measure of its creation, and transgresseth not the law,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 88.25. Therefore, it shall be crowned with glory, even with the presence of God the Father; that bodies who are of the celestial kingdom may possess it forever and ever; and they who are not sanctified through the law which I have given unto you, even the law of Christ [which is His gospel—the perfect law of liberty] must inherit another kingdom, for one who is not able to abide the law of the celestial kingdom cannot abide a celestial glory. And one who cannot abide the law of a terrestrial kingdom cannot abide a terrestrial glory. And one who cannot abide the law of a telestial kingdom cannot abide a telestial glory,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 88.19-24. How blessed are Latter-day Saint to be assured by the revealed word of God that there will be no capriciousness in the World to come. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
We are so blessed that every soul will be rewarded according to the law that one has obeyed; all divine law is as immutable as the law of gravity; it is the same yesterday, today, and forever; judgment will be mercifully administered, but it will be administered pursuant to law, and it will not rob justice. Not only are we blessed by having this knowledge concerning the rule of law; we are twice blessed by having both a knowledge and an understanding of the laws by which we are to be judged. If we were to fail to obey the law, in our light of our knowledge of the perfect law of liberty, how shortsighted, how foolish, how tragic that would be. Latter-day Saints should strictly obey the laws of the government in which they live. By our own declaration of faith we are committed to do so, for we declare to the World that “we believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honouring, and sustaining the law,” reports Articles of Faith 1.12. This we do in harmony with the Lord’s command: “Let no human break the laws of the land, for one that keepeth the laws of God hath no need to break the laws of the land. Wherefore, be subject to the powers that be, until one reigns whose right it is to reign, and subdues all enemies under one’s feet,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 58.21-22. Civil authority is of divine origin. It may be more or less adapted to the needs of humans; more or less just and benevolent, but, even at its worst, it is better than anarchy. Revolutionary movements that aim at the abolition of government itself are contrary to the law of God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
When the rule of law breaks down in a family, a community, a state, or a nation, chaos reigns. The kingdoms of Heaven are to be free from chaos, because no one will be in any one of them who does not by one’s own free will obey the laws thereof. Here on Earth, some people steadfastly refuse to face such facts. We avoid them by stubbornly refusing to recognize the speed of change. It makes us feel better to defer the future. Even those closet to the cutting edge of technology and scientific research can scarcely believe the reality. Even they routinely underestimate the speed at which the future is breaking on our shores. Thus Dr. Richard J. Cleveland, speaking before a conference of organ transplant specialists, announced in January, 1967, that the first human heart transplant operation will occur “within five years.” Yet before the same year was our Dr. Christiaan Barnard had operated on a fifty-five-year-old grocer named Louis Washkansky, and a staccato sequence of heart transplant operation exploded like a string of firecrackers into the World’s awareness. In the meantime, success rates are rising steadily in kidney transplants to 97 percent. Successful liver, pancreas, and ovary transplants are also reported. Scientists and doctors are getting so good that they even have the ability to do face transplants now. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Such accelerating medical advances must compel profound changes in our ways of thinking, as well as our way of caring for the sick. Startling new legal, ethical and philosophical issues arise. What, for instance, is death? Does death occur when the heart stops beating, as we have traditionally believed? Or does it occur when the brain stops functioning? Hospitals are becoming more and more familiar with cases of patients kept alive through advanced medical techniques, but doomed to exist as unconscious vegetables. What are the ethics of condemning such a person to death to obtain a healthy organ needed for transplant to save the life of a person with a better prognosis? Lacking guidelines or precedents, we flounder over the moral and legal questions. Ghoulish rumors race through the medical community. There has been speculation about the possibility of future murder rings supplying healthy organs for unofficial surgeons whose patients are unwilling to wait until natural sources have supplied the heart or liver or pancreas they need. In Trenton, New Jersey USA—an Israeli citizen living in Brooklyn, New York USA, admitted to brokering three illegal kidney transplants for payments of $120,000.00 UDS or more before he was caught conspiring to organize another illegal sale. Levy Izhak Rosenbaum also known as Isaac Rosenbaum, age 60 at the time he brought to trial in 2011 (now age 70), plead guilty to an information charging him with three counts of acquiring, receiving, and otherwise transferring human organs for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation; and one count of conspiracy to do the same. Mr. Rosenbaum was originally charged with the conspiracy by Complain in July 2009. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
The defendant entered his guilty plea before U.S. District Judge Anne E. Thompson in Trenton federal court. Mr. Rosenbaum’s convictions were the first under the federal statue involving illegal market sales of kidneys from paid donors. “Mr. Rosenbaum admitted he was not new to the human kidney business when he was caught brokering what he thought was an organ trafficking,” U.S. Attorney Fishman said. “Trafficking in human organs is not only a grave threat to public health, it reserves lifesaving treatment for those who can best afford it at the expense of those who cannot. We will not tolerate such an affront to human dignity.” According to documents filed in this case and statements made in court: Mr. Rosenbaum admitted that from January 2006 through February 2009, he conspired with other to provide a service, in exchange for large payments, to individuals seeking kidney transplants by obtaining kidneys from paid donors. Specifically, Mr. Rosenbaum admitted to arranging three transplants on behalf of New Jersey residents that took place in December 2006, September 2008, and February 2009. Mr. Rosenbaum admitted that he was paid approximately $120, 000.00 USA, $150,000.00 USA, and $140,000.00 USD, respectively on behalf of these three recipients. Mr. Rosenbaum’s kidney business was exposed through the use of cooperating criminal defendant Solomon Dwek and an undercover FBI agent (the “UC”) who was posing as an employee of Dwek and who represented to Mr. Rosenbaum that her uncle was in need of a kidney transplant. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Dwek and the UC first met with Mr. Rosenbaum in mid-February 2008 at which time Mr. Rosenbaum informed them that “it’s illegal to buy and sell organs,” but assured them that “I’m doing this a long time.” Mr. Rosenbaum explained to Dwek and the UC that he would help the recipient and the donor concoct a fictitious story to make it appear that the transplant was the product of a genuine donation and that he would be in charge of babysitting the donor upon the donor’s arrival from overseas. In Washington, the National Academy of Science, backed by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, has been studying social policy issues springing from advances in the life sciences. At Stanford, a symposium, also funded by Russell Sage, examines methods for setting up transplant organ banks, the economics of an organ market, and evidence of the economics of an organ market, and evidences of class or racial discrimination in organ availability. The possibility of cannibalizing bodies or corpses for usable transplant organs, grisly as it is, will serve to accelerate further the pace of change by lending urgency to research in the field of artificial organs—plastic or electronic substitutes for the heart or liver or spleen. (Eventually, even these may be made unnecessary when we learn how to regenerate damaged organs or severed limbs, growing new ones as the lizard now grows a tail.) #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
And it is totally possible that the human body could be advanced to regrow limbs, organs, and other healthy tissues as it already replaces blood, hair, teeth, nail, skin and you see how can manifest and growth tumors and cancer. So if scientists are able to unlock the secrets of the human body, stopping death and loss of organs and life is totally possible. The drive to develop spare parts for failing human bodies will be stepped up as demand intensified. The development of an economical artificial heart, Professor Lederberg says, “is only a few transient failures away.” Professors R. M. Kenedi of the bio-engineering group at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow believes that “artificial replacements for tissues and organs may well have become commonplace.” For some organs, this is in fact, a reality. Already more than 3 million cardiac patients Worldwide—including a former Supreme Court justice—are alive because they carry, stitched into their chest cavity, a tiny pacemaker—a device that sends pulses of electricity to activate the hearts. Each year 600,000 pacemakers are implanted. Approximal 90,000 heart valve substitutes are now implanted in the United States of America and 280,000 Worldwide each year; it is estimated that nearly half are mechanical valves and half are bioprosthetic valves. Implanting hearing aids, artificial kidneys, arteries, hip joints, lungs, eye sockets and other parts are all in various stages of early development. We shall, before many decades are past, implant tiny, aspirin-sized sensors in the body to monitor blood pressures, pulse, respiration and other functions, and tiny transmitters to emit a signal when something goes wrong. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Such signals will feed into giant diagnostic computer centers upon which the medicine of the future will be based. Some of us will carry a tiny platinum plate and a dime-sized “stimulator” attached to the spine. By turning a midget “radio” on and off we will be able to activate the stimulator and kill the pain. Initial work on these pain-control mechanisms is already under way at the Case Institute of Technology. Push button pain killers are already being used by certain cardiac patients. Such developments will lead to vast new bio-engineering industries, chains of medical-electronic repair stations, new technical professions and a reorganization of the entire health system. They will change life expectancy, shatter insurance company life tables, and bring about important shifts in the human outlook. Surgery will be less frightening to the average individual; implantation routine. The human body will come to be seen as modular. Through application of the modular principle—preservation of the whole through systematic replacement of transient components—we may add two or three decades to the average life span of the entire population. Imagine that, people living to be an average of 100 to 120 and strong and healthy. Unless, however, we develop far more advanced understanding of the brain than we now have, this could lead to one of the greatest ironies in history. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Sir George Pickering Regius professor of medicine at Oxford, has waned that unless we watch out, “those with senile brains will form an ever increasing fraction of the inhabitants of the Earth. I find this,” he added unnecessarily, “a terrifying prospect. With President Joe Biden being the 46th President of the United States and the oldest President so far, being 78 years of age, many feel this is why Speaker on the United States House, Nancy Pelosi fought to remind the people about the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The 25th Amendment deals with Presidential Disability and Succession, which says that is a President becomes unable to do his or her job, the Vice President shall become President. This amendment was passed by Congress 6 July 1965, and ratified 10 February 1967. Such terrifying prospects will drive us toward more accelerated research into the brain—which, in turn, will generate still further radical changes in the society. Today we strive to make heart valves or artificial plumbing that imitate the original they are designed to place. We have even been able to use valves from the hearts of pigs into human beings. We strive for functional equivalence. Once we have mastered the basic problems, however, we shall not merely install plastic aortas in people because their original aorta is about to fail. We shall install specially-designed parts that are better than the original, and then we shall move on to install parts that provide the user with capabilities that were absent in the first place. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Just as genetic engineering holds out the promise of producing “super-people,” so, too, does organ technology suggest the possibility of track stars with extra-capacity lungs or hearts; sculptors with a neural device that intensifies sensitivity to texture; students with super computer brains. We will no longer implant merely to save a life, but to enhance it—to make possible the achievement of moods, states, conditions or ecstasies that are presently beyond us. Under these circumstances, what happens to our ago-old definitions of “human-ness?” How will it feel to be part protoplasm and part transistor? Exactly what possibilities will it open? What limitations will it place on work, play, socialism, intellectual or aesthetic responses? What happens to the mind when they body is changed? Questions like these cannot be long deferred, for advanced fusions of human and machine—called “Cyborgs”—are closer than more people suspect. We are constantly faced by the hoariest of all problems, which is “Why did the Universe arise out of the depth and darkness of the Absolute Spirit?” The Seer can offer us a picture of the way in which this Spirit has involved itself into matter and is evolving itself back to self-knowledge. That is only the How and not the Why of the World. The truth is not only that nobody has ever known, that nobody knows, and that nobody will ever know the final and fundamental purpose of creation, but that God Himself does not even know—for God too has arisen out of the Absolute no less than the Universe, has found Himself emanated from the primeval darkness and utter silence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Even God must be content to watch the flow and not wonder why, for both God and humans must merge and be absorbed when they face the Absolute for the last time. (In the symbolic language of the Bible, “For humans cannot meet God face to face and live.”) That which IS can be none other than Final Being itself, not dependent on anything or anyone, mysteriously self-sufficient without a shape, yet all shaped things and creature have emerged from elements which trace back to it. Forever alone, there was none to witness the Beginning. As Mind the Real is static, as World-Mind it is dynamic. As Godhead It alone is in the stillness of being; but as God it is the source, substance, and power of the Universe. As Mind there is no second thing, no second intelligence to ask the question why it stirred and breathed forth World-Mind, hence why the whole World-process exists. Only humans ask this question and it returns unanswered. For all of us, for the witless and for the wise, there are unanswerable questions in life and we must learn to live with them. None of us is a full and finalized encyclopedia, for however, far we may penetrate into the meaning of things we are always confronted in the end by the Unknowable Mystery. We do not know why the whole process of involution and evolution ever started at all: because we find that there is in the deepest metaphysical sense no becoming and process at all, there is only the Real. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
At the ultimate level there is neither purpose nor plan because there is no creation. Mind, which forever is, can undergo n change in itself and no multiplication of itself. If it could, it would not be what it is—the Ultimate, the Unconditioned, and the Unique. Nor, being perfect, complete, could it have desire, purpose, aim, or motive for itself. Therefore it could not have projected the Universe on account of any benefit sought or gain needed. There is no answer to the question why the Universe was sent forth. It is to impose human limitation upon the transcendental Godhead to say that It has any eternal purpose to fulfill for Itself in the cosmos, whether that purpose be the establishment of a perfect society on Earth or the training of individuals to enter into fellowship with It and participate in Its creative work. Purpose implies a movement in times whereas the Godhead is also the Timeless. Neither this Earth nor the societies upon it can be necessary to God’s serenely self-sufficient being. Yet these fallacies are still taught by the theology of theistic orthodox. We know as much, and as little, about the Primal Mind as we know why there was a beginning of the Universe—that is, precisely nothing. If being asked how to prevent oneself from being deceived by these pseudo-intuitions, it can be said that a useful rule is to check them against other sources on the same subject and see if they all harmonize. If, for example, fifty inspired humans who have written on the subject teach what contradictions the alleged intuition, then there is something wrong on one side or the other and careful investigation is called for. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
It is always safer to ascertain what the great scriptural texts or the classic mystical testaments have to tell on the matter and not depend solely on what one’s intuition tells. We need more. And most of us—deep down—cannot deny it. There is a core of truth buried in every heart, a truth that we cannot escape. All-Father God, protector of travelers, please guards us, please guide us, please bring us through in safety and ease on our journey today. As I enter your realm, spirits of the air, as I mount to the clouds in this airplane, I place myself in your hands. There, among the vagaries of the winds, I will not be afraid, because I know you are my allies. As I fly today, please be at my side. Please protect me until I land again safely. Who is like unto Thee, O Lord, among the mighty? Who is like unto Thee, glorious in holiness, revered in praises, doing wonders? At the shore of the Red Sea, the redeemed offered praise unto Thy name. Singing a new song, they proclaimed Thy sovereignty: “The Lord shall reign for ever and ever.” O Rock of America, arise to help Thy scattered folk; deliver all who are crushed beneath oppression’s heel. Thou art our Saviour: the Lord of Hosts is Thy name; blessed art Thou, O Lord, Redeemer of America. O Lord, please open Thou my lips and my mouth shall declare Thy praise. Expand your faith so you can access everything God has in store. Allow God to be present in your life and have faith in Him, and you will see God make miracles and blessings that you can only imagine in your best dreams! #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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The Last Infirmity of Noble Mind–To Scorn Delights and Live Labourious Day!
We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists in the loved one, perfection. A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime. The types of skills which an anxious child develops are characteristic of one’s situation. Children with a sense of security and competence, and an interest in the World of challenging unyielding things, are likely to look for new things and enjoy the challenge. Children with a more insecurely-based self will feel more dependent on others, unsure whether they will be given good things and unsure whether they are allowed to get good things for themselves; they will therefore have less practice in developing the skills which lead to control over the environment in any direct way. The skills they develop are more likely to be in the area of getting others to comfort or approve or achieve for them. They may be a good deal more perceptive than their mores secure friends, their sensitivity to others developing from the time when voice and body-language might yield clues on what others were good for and how they could be got to be kind, pleased, not offended. Other people’s expectations can become of overriding importance, overlaying or contradicting the original sense of self, the one connected to the very roots of one’s being, the homunculi and the very earliest memory-traced. This kind of development, a compensatory structure, is called the False Self. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
In fact, all of us have a collection of overlapping selves or roles, some of us more so, some of us less. Some of these selves are falser than others: more strongly linked with being acceptable, less strongly linked with our deeper feelings. One of my friends has “George,” a robot bit of her very nice personality, whom she switches on at formal do’s and occasions when genuineness and spontaneity are very much not called for! It makes it pleasant for the rest of her to have her around, false self or not. In any case, the False Self is not a structure that should be unthinkingly denigrated. All of us need protective defences and devices against hurt. Some developments of the self are primarily defensive, deriving from the need to carry on when life no longer feels like a continuous stream of satisfying (or at least manageable) experiences. In the analysis of a False Personality the fact must be recognized that the analyst can only talk to the False Self of the patient about the patient’s True Self. It is as if a nurse brings a child, and at first the analyst discusses the child’s problem, and the child is not directly contacted. Analysis does not start until the nurse has left the child with the analyst, and the child has become able to remain with the analyst and has started to play. Normal healthy development starts with a strong biologically determined attachment to a mother figure, while exploration of the environment comes naturally at a later stage, exactly because the growing young individual feels secure and safe, not terrified, starving or desperate. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Lack of secure attachment forces the immature organism into action, but the action is accompanied by terror and stereotyping. Real understanding is lack when the infant has had no opportunity for a leisurely and secure playful exploratory phase, during which it has a chance to familiarize itself gradually with the fascinating World of other people and things. Mental representations of the self-in-the-World will have had to form prematurely for the sake of avoiding distress; because of this, a lot of enriching connections which might otherwise have been linked to these representations, will be missing. If the baby has been too worried to linger and enjoy, the adult will think, “Never mind the sunset, let’s go home before something goes wrong.” We ding either that individuals live creatively and feel that life is worth living, or else that they cannot live creatively and are doubtful about the value of living. This variable in human beings is directly related to the quality and quantity of environmental provision at the beginning of each baby’s living experience. Some unfortunate people have almost no complex ego-functioning, they just react. As soon as a need appears or an alarm is signalled, the instant any meaning or pattern begins to emerge, they respond with scarcely a moment of reflection. Premature development of the ego-functions means doing too much, being too little. Premature ego-development is experiences as a continual pressure to respond and react, a sense of straining. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
In many ways similar to ecstatic destructiveness is the chronic dedication of a person’s whole life to hate and destructiveness. Not a momentary state as in ecstasies, it has nevertheless the function of taking hold of the whole person, of unifying one in the worship of one goal: to destroy. This state is a permanent idolatry of the god of destruction; one’s devotee has, as it were, given over one’s life to him. Some people have a special pleasures in destruction, thus they can feel in the midst of the daily pain an absorbing pleasure in seeing how the baggage of ideas and values has diminished, how the arsenal of idealisms has been ground piece by piece until nothing remains but a bundle of flesh with raw nerves; nerves that like taut strings renders each tune vibrantly and doubly so in the thin air of isolation. These people want power. They want an aim that fills their day, they want life with all the sweetness of this World, they want t know that the sacrifices are worth while. People who find pleasure in destructiveness do not fight so that the nation is happy, they fight to force it into its line of fate. Their intense masochism by which they make themselves a willing subject of a higher power is fueled by a unifying force of hate and the wish for destruction that they worship something they are willing to give their lives for. These types of individuals do not want to forget the pain they suffered for they believe forgetting will damn them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
By visualizing hurt and pain from the past every day and every hour, it creates a potent hate destructive people thrive on. They do not want to forget any humiliation, and slighting, any arrogant gesture, they want to think of every meanness done to them, every word that caused them pain and was meant to cause pain. They want to remember every face and every experience and every enemy. They want to load their whole life with the whole disgusting dirt, with this a piled-up mass of disgusting memories. They do not want to forget; but the little good that happened to them, that they want to forget. They hate not only their enemies, but they hate life itself. This is very clear from their disposition and how they feel about others, the environment, and animals. These types of individuals feel utterly unrelated and unresponsive to anybody or anything alive. One condition of their worship of hate is because their whole World had been broken down, morally and socially. Their thirst for revenge, the meaninglessness of their present existence, their social uprootedness, goes far to explain their worship of hate. What triggers the effect of their destructive behaviour? A person may first react with defensive aggression against a threat; by this behaviour one has shed some of the conventional inhibitions to aggressive behaviour. This makes it easier for others kinds of aggressiveness, such as destruction and cruelty, to be unleashed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Once this aggressive destruction is unleashed, it may lead to a kind of chain reaction in which destructiveness becomes so intense that when a critical mass is reached, the result is a state of ecstasis in a person, and particularly in a group. There is so much more to psychology than most people realize. And while it is important to be kind and show respect to others, there are just some people we should stay away from. People also have to realize that they cannot fix others and it is not always a great idea to reach out to others it pain, they may be baiting you into a situation that allow them to attach their pain and darkness to you and they may never want to let go. Therefore, follow the usual rules. Do not talk to strangers, and if someone makes you uncomfortable, stay away from them. We are creating and using up ideas and images at a faster and faster pace. Knowledge, like people, places, things, and organizational forms, is becoming disposable. If our inner images of reality appear to be turning over more and more rapidly, one reason may well be an increase in the rate at which image-laden messages are being hurled at our senses. Little effort has been made to investigate this scientifically, but there is evidence that we are increasing the exposure of the individual to image-bearing stimuli. The external environment showers stimuli upon us. Signals originating outside ourselves—sound waves, light, et cetera—strike our sensory organs. Once perceived, these signals are converted, through a still mysterious process, into symbols of reality, into images. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
The waves of coded information turn into violent breakers and come at a faster and faster clip, pounding at us, seeking entry, as it were, to our nervous system. Many schools of thought encourage us to shift the responsibility for our behaviour from our own shoulders to some inherent necessity in the nature of human life, and thus, indirectly, to the Creator. Popular forms of this view are the evolutionary doctrine that what we call badness is an unavoidable legacy from our animal ancestors, or the idealistic doctrine that it is merely a result of our being finite. Now Christianity, if I have understood the Pauline epistles, does admit that perfect obedience to the moral law, which we find written in our hearts and perceive to be necessary even on the biological level, is not in fact possible to humans. This would raise a real difficulty about our responsibility if perfect obedience had any practical relation at all to the lives of most of us. Some degree of obedience which you and I have failed to attain in the last twenty-four hours is certainly possible. The ultimate problem must not be used as one more means of evasion. Most of us are less urgently concerned with the Pauline question than with William Law’s simple statement: “If you will here stop and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
If our depravity were total, we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us so much goodness in human nature. Nor is there a universal gloom. The emotion of shame has been valued not as an emotion but because of the insight to which it leads. I think that insight should be permanent in each human’s mind: but whether the painful emotions that attend it should be encouraged, is a technical problem of spiritual direction on which I have little cause to speak. My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying he apostolic injunction to “rejoice” as much as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue: it is the high minded unbeliever, desperately trying in the teeth of repeated disillusions to retain one’s faith in human nature, who is really sad. I have been aiming at an intellectual, not an emotional, effect: I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a human is, the more fully one is aware of that fact. Perhaps you have imagined that his humility in the saints is a pious illusion at which God smile. That is a most dangerous error. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
It is theoretically dangerous, because it makes you identify a virtue (id est, a perfection) with an illusion (id est, an imperfection), which must be nonsense. It is practically dangerous because in encourages a human to mistake one’s first insights into one’s own corruption for the first beginnings of a halo round one’s own silly head. No, depend upon it; when the saints say that they—even they—are vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy. The principle of perfection is a fascinating concept. There are two variants: in the first it is the sole principle of a teleological theory directing society to arrange institutions and to define the duties and obligations of individuals so as to maximize the achievement of human excellence in art, science, and culture. The principle obviously is more demanding the high the relevant ideal is pitched. Humankind must continually strive to produce great individuals. We give values to our lives by working for the good of highest specimens. For the questions is this: how can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? Only by your living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens. The second variant is a more moderate doctrine in which perfection is accepted as but one standard among several in n intuitionist theory. The principle is to be balanced against others by intuition. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
The extent to which such a view is perfectionist depends, then, upon the weight given to the claims of excellence and culture. If for example it is maintained that in themselves the achievements of the Greeks in philosophy, science, and art justified the ancient practice of slavery (assuming that this practice was necessary for these achievement), surely the conception is highly perfectionist. Th requirements of perfection override the strong claims of liberty. On the other hand, one may use the criterion simply to limit the redistribution of wealth and income under a constitutional regime. In this case it serves as a counterpoise to egalitarian ideas. Thus it may be said that distribution should indeed be more equal if this is essential for meeting the basic needs of those less favoured and only diminishes the enjoyments and pleasures of those better off. However, the greater happiness of the less fortunate does not in general justify curtailing the expenditures required to preserve cultural values. These forms of life have greater intrinsic worth than the lesser pleasures, however widely the latter are enjoyed. Under normal conditions a certain minimum of social resources must be kept aside to advance the ends of perfection. The only exception is when these claims clash with the demands of the basic needs. Thus given improving circumstances, the principle of perfection acquires an increasing weight relative to a greater satisfaction of desire. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
No doubt many have accepted perfectionism in this intuitionist form. It allows for a range of interpretations and seems to express a far more reasonable view than the strict perfectionist theory. Persons in the original position are asked to consider which principles one would select for the basic structure of society, but one must select as if one had no knowledge ahead of time what position one would end up having in that society. This choice is made from behind a “veil of ignorance,” which prevents one from knowing the individual’s ethnicity, social status, gender, and crucially, the individual’s idea of how to lead a god life. Ideally, this would force participants to select principles impartially and rationally. Individuals in the original position take no interest in one another’s interests, they know that they have (or may have) certain moral and religious interests and other cultural ends which they cannot put in jeopardy. Moreover, they are assumed to be committed to different conceptions of the good and they think that they are entitled to press their claims on one another to further their separate aims. The parties do not share a conception of the good by reference to which the fruition of their powers or even the satisfaction of their desires can be evaluated. They do not have an agreed criterion of perfection that can be used as a principle for choosing between institutions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
If it did not lead to a loss of freedom altogether to advance many of one’s spiritual ends, to acknowledge any such standard would be, in effect, to accept a principle that might lead to a lesser religious or other liberty. If the standard of excellence is reasonably clear, the parties have no way of knowing that their claims may not fall before the higher social goal of maximizing perfect. Thus is seems that the only understanding that the persons in the original position can reach is that everyone should have the greatest equal liberty consistent with a similar liberty for others. They cannot risk their freedom by authorizing a standard of value to define what is to be maximized by teleological principle of justice. Very often it is beyond question that the work of one person is superior to that of another. Indeed, the freedom and well-being of individuals, when measured by the excellence of their activities and works, is vastly different in value. This is true not only of actual performance but of potential performance as well. Comparison of intrinsic value can obviously be made; and although the standard of perfection is not a principle of justice, judgments of value have an important place in human affairs. They are not necessarily so vague that they must fail as a workable basis for assigning rights. The argument is rather that in view of their disparate aims the parties have no reason to adopt the principle of perfection given the conditions of the original position. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
In order to arrive at the ethic of perfectionism, we should have to attribute to the parties a prior acceptance of some natural duty, say the duty to develop human persons of a certain style and aesthetic grace, and to advance the pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of the arts. However, this assumption would drastically alter the interpretation of the original position. While justice as fairness allows that in a well-ordered society the values of excellence are recognized, the human perfections are to be pursed within the limits of the principle of free associations. Persons join together to further their cultural and artistic interests in the same way that they form religious communities. They do not use coercive apparatus of the state to win for themselves a greater liberty or larger distributive shares on the grounds that their activities are of more intrinsic value. Perfectionism is denied as a political principle. Thus the social resources necessary to support associations dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences and culture generally are to be won as a fair return for services rendered, or from such voluntary contributions as citizens wish to make, all within a regime regulated by the two principle of justice. On the contract doctrines, then, equal liberty of citizens does not presuppose that the ends of different persons have the same intrinsic value, nor that their freedom and well-being is of the same worth. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
It is postulated though that the parties are moral persons, rational individuals with a coherent system of ends and a capacity for a sense of justice. Since they have the requisite defining properties, it would be superfluous to add that the parties are equally moral persons. We can say if we wish that humans have equal dignity, meaning by this simply that they all satisfy the conditions of moral personality expressed by the interpretation of the initial contractual situation. And being alike in this respect, they are to be treated as the principles of justice require. Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all; social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: they are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society. However, none of this implies that their activities and accomplishments are of equal excellence. To think this is to conflate the notion of moral personality with the various perfections that fall under the concept of value. Persons’ being of equal value is not necessary for equal liberty. Their being of equal value is not sufficient either. Sometimes it is said that equality of basic rights follows from the equal capacity of individuals for the higher forms of life; but it is not clear why this should be so. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Intrinsic worth is a notion falling under the concept of value, and whether equal liberty or some other principle is appropriate depends upon the conception of right. Now the criterion of perfection insists that rights in basic structure be assigned so as to maximize the total of intrinsic value. Presumably the configuration of rights and opportunities enjoyed by individuals affects the degree to which they bring to fruition their latest powers and excellences. However, it does not follow that an equal distribution of basic freedom is the best solution. The situation resembles that of classical utilitarianism: we require postulates parallel to the standard assumptions. Thus even if the latent abilities of individuals were similar, unless the assignment of right is governed by a principle of diminishing marginal value (estimated in this case by the criteria for excellence), equal rights would not be insured. Indeed, unless there are bountiful resources, the sum of value might be best increased by very unequal rights and opportunities favouring a few. Doing this is not unjust n the perfectionist view provided that it is necessary to produce a greater sum of human excellence. Now a principle of diminishing marginal value is certainly questionable, although perhaps not so much as that of equal value. There is little reason to suppose that, in general, rights and resources allocated to encourage and to cultivate highly talented persons contribute less and less to the total beyond some point in the relevant range. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
To the contrary, this contribution may grow (or stay consistent) indefinitely. The principle of perfection provides, then, an insecure foundation for the equal liberty and it would presumably depart widely from the difference principle. The assumptions required for equality seem extremely implausible. To find a firm basis for equal liberty, it seems that we must reject the traditional teleological principles, both perfectionism and utilitarian. Justice as fairness requires us to show that modes of conduct interfere with the basic liberties of others or else violate some obligation or natural duty before they can be restricted. For it is when arguments to this conclusion fail that individuals are tempted to appeal to perfectionist criteria in an ad hoc manner. When it is said, for example, that certain kinds of relations involving pleasures of the flesh are degrading and shameful, and should be prohibited on this basis, if only for the sake of the individuals in question irrespective of their wishes, it is often because a reasonable case cannot be made in terms of the principle of justice. Instead we fall back on notions of excellence. However, in these matters we are likely to be influenced by subtle aesthetic preferences and personal feelings of propriety; and individual, class, and group differences are often sharp and irreconcilable. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Since these uncertainties plague perfectionist criteria and jeopardize individual liberty, it seems best to rely entirely on the principles of justice which have a more definite structure. Thus even in its intuitionistic form, perfectionism would be rejected as not defining a feasible basis of social justice. Eventually of course we would have to check whether the consequences of doing without a standard of perfection are acceptable, since offhand it may seem as if justice as fairness does not allow enough scope for ideal-regarding considerations. Yet, public funds for the arts and sciences may be provided through the exchange branch. In this instance there are no restrictions on the reasons, citizens may have for imposing upon themselves the requisite taxes. They may assess the merits of these public goods on perfectionist principles, since the coercive machinery of government is used in this case only to overcome the problems of isolation and assurance, and no one is taxed without one’s consent. The criterion of excellence does not sere here as a political principle; and so, if it wishes, a well-ordered society can devote a sizable fraction of its resources to expenditures of this kind. However, while the claims of culture can be met in this way, the principles of justice do not permit subsidizing universities and institutes, or opera and the theater, on the grounds that these institutions are intrinsically valuable, and that those who engage in them are to be supported even at some significant expense to others who do not receive compensating benefits. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Taxation for these purposes can be justified only as promoting directly or indirectly the social conditions that secure the equal liberties and as advancing in the appropriate way the long-term interests of the least advantaged. This seems to authorize those subsidies the justice of which is least in dispute, and so in these cases anyway there is no evident need for a principle of perfection. The contract doctrine may serve well enough as an alternative moral conception. When we check its consequences for institutions, it appears to match our common sense convictions more accurate than its traditional rivals, and to extrapolate to preciously unsettled cases in a reasonable way. Outreach is one essential task of Christ’s people, and among them there will always be those especially gifted for evangelism. However, the most successful work of outreach would be the work of inreach that that turns people, wherever they are, into lights in the darkened World. A simple goal for the leaders of a particular group would be to bring all those in attendance to understand clearly what it means to be a disciple of Jesus and to be solidly committed to discipleship in their whole life. That is, when asked who they are, they first words out of their mouth would be, “I am an apprentice of Jesus Christ.” This goal would have to be approached very gently and lovingly and patiently with existing groups, where the people involved have not understood this to be part of their membership commitment. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
We are not talking about purifying the church, by getting all the “tares” or (Matthew 13). Even tares, real or apparent, are to be loved and served—and called to apprenticeship to Jesus. “Purifying” the church, on the other hand, has always been part of the illusion of being perfectly “right.” Instead of pursing that illusion, we are trying to clarify the local congregation itself in the light of Christ’s call to it. We are trying to make clear what it is that even a false professor must profess in order to participate fully in the congregation. They would, namely have to profess to be disciples or apprentices of Jesus. However, the Lord is the only purifier of groups, and one has one’s own schedule for it. Our task is to be fruitful wheat and to cultivate others to be so. Who we are in our inmost depths is the most basic issue. God’s first concern is not what the church does, it is what the church is. Being must always precede doing, for what we do will be according to what we are. To understand the moral character of God’s people is a primary essential in understanding the nature of the church. As Christians we are to be a moral example to the World, reflecting the character of Jesus Christ. In our present context, to be sure, serious work will have to be done, and there is a strong likelihood of failure. The genuine intuition gets mixed up with guesses and speculations about the matter, with reasonings and ruminations about it. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
One’s intuition is unavoidably condition by one’s own personality, inevitably shaped as it is because one is the kind of human one is. It is not only one’s wishes and hopes which interfere with correct receptivity to intuition but also one’s fears and suspicions. One’s normal everyday mind is slow to heed the Higher Power of God and confused in interpretation of the prompting received. One whose mind is too sharply critical to be sensitive to finer mental radiations may fail to recognize the inner happening. This may be because one oneself is not sufficiently in tune with the high frequency represented by God, or it may be because one is too impatient and wants something which in one’s case can only be had with sufficient time. When intuition points to something unwelcome to the ego, the intellect looks for and usually finds an excuse to reject it. A human who really and sincerely wants to find the Truth should be on the lookout for hints, clues, and signs which would be useful to one’s Quest, for they constitute the response from God to one’s aspiration. God can furnish one with the Truth and puts these signals in one’s way. Manifestation implies the necessity of manifesting. However, it might be objected that any sort of necessity existing in the divine equally implies its insufficiency. The answer is that the number One may become aware of itself as being one only be becoming aware of the presence of Two—itself and another. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
However, the figure Nought is under no compulsion. Here we have a mathematical hint towards understanding the riddle of manifestation. Mind as Void is the supreme inconceivable unmanifesting ultimate whereas the World-Mind is forever throwing forth the Universe-series as a second, an “other” wherein it becomes self-aware. God-active, the Unseen Power, is (for us humans) the World-Mind. God-in-repose is Mind. The creative power or energy which comes from World-Mind is not the ultimate essence-consciousness which is God. It is needful to point out the difference between the divine essence and the divine energies. The latter may be several and varied, but the former is always single. It is the difference between Mind as it is in itself, and Mind as it expresses through the cosmos. It would, however, be a mistake to consider the World-Mind as one entity and Mind as another separate from it. It would be truer to consider World-Mind as the active function of Mind. Mind cannot be separated from its powers. The two are one. In its quiescent state it is simply Mind. In its active state it is World-Mind. Mind is in it inmost transcendent nature is the inscrutable mystery of Mysteries but when expressing itself in act and immanent in the Universe, it is the World Mind. We may find in the attributes of the manifested God—that is, the World-Mind—the only indications of the quality, existence, and character of the unmanifest Godhead that it is possible for human to comprehend all. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
All this is a mystery which is perhaps forever will remain an incomprehensible paradox. Mind is active and mind is quiescence are not two separate beings, but two aspects of one and the same being as they appear to human inquiry. Mind active expressed itself in the heart of humans as one’s higher self and in the Universe as the World-Mind. The World-Mind is a radiation of the forever incomprehensible Mind. It is the essence of all things and all beings, from the smallest to the largest. Mind id the Real; matter is the appearance it takes on. The Universe comes by degrees out of the ultimate Being, beyond which nothing is or could possibly be. It is Mind, measureless, with a Power equally measureless. World-Mind is this power in operation, creating, maintaining, and in the end destroying what it has brought forth. If it be true that absolute divine Mind knows nothing of the Universe, nothing of mortal humans, then it is also true that the World-Mind, which is its other aspect, does know them. May God of my people hear my prayers; as we go to the polls to choose our leaders, may it be with wisdom. Lord, please bless my country. Please guide its governors, show them the path to take, make their actions conform to the way of nature. Please knit together the many peoples into one tribe; unite us, make us a family, as indeed we are under your loving gaze. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
God’s chief hosts are holy beings that exalt the Almighty and continually declare God’s glory and holiness. Be Thou praised, O Lord our God, for the excellence of Thy handiwork and for the luminaries which Thou hast made and which render Thee glory. The Heavens are envisioned as the scene of a symphony of worship and song in which all the celestial beings, obedient servants of the divine will, join in a harmonious melody of praise to the Creator. Be Thou blessed, O our Rock, our King and Redeemer; praised by Thy name forever, Creator of ministering beings who stand in the heights of the Universe and with awe proclaim in unison the words of the living God and everlasting King. All of them act with harmonious accord, with purity of purpose and with united strength to perform reverently the will of their Creator. They all break forth into song of pure and holy praise, while they bless, glorify, and proclaim the sovereignty of the name of God, the great, mighty, awe-inspiring King; holy is He. They all pledge before one another to accept willingly the rule of the Kingdom of God. Each grants leave to the other to join in hallowing their Creator. In tranquil spirit with pure speech and sacred melody, they all exclaim in unison and reverently declare: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole Earth is full of His glory. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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It Aims to Get People into Heaven Rather than Get Heaven into People!
Every person carries within one’s head a mental model of the World—a subjective representation of external reality. This model consists of tens upon tends of thousands of images. These may be as simple as a mental picture of clouds scudding across the sky, or big red and pink hearts. We many think of this mental model as a fantastic internal warehouse, an image emporium in which we store our inner portraits. People say Valentine’s Day is just a capitalistic holiday to make money, but I think Valentine’s Day is important. It gives people an excuse to be happy and express their love for others, a reason to buy gifts for someone else, and an occasion to get dressed up and feel young again. We have some much to grieve, and Valentine’s Day, much like other holidays, gives us a reason to come together, thank God we are alive, unite with others, and express love. The news, on the other hand, wants to make us sad, scared and fear for our safety. The government got something right. Regardless of if it is a federal holiday, or just a symbolic one, it is important to slow down, celebrate, and appreciate the beauty in our lives. Valentine’s Day also teaches children to share and it makes them happy by giving them art projects to work on. It is nice for everyone to take a break from doom and gloom and express love for one another. This is, after all, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Any person’s mental model will contain some images that approximate reality closely, along with others that are distorted or inaccurate. However, for the person to function, even to survive, the model must bear some overall resemblance to reality. Every reproduction of the external World, constructed and used as a guide to actions by an historical society, must in some degree correspond to that reality. Otherwise the society could no have maintained itself; its members if acting in accordance with totally untrue propositions, would not have succeeded in making even the simplest tools and in securing therewith food and shelter from the external World. No human’s model of reality is a purely personal product. While some of one’s images are based on firsthand observation, an increasing proportion of them today are based on messages beamed to us by the mass media and people around us. Thus the degree of accuracy in one’s model to some extent reflects the general knowledge in society. And as experience and scientific research pump more refined and accurate knowledge into society, new concepts, new ways of thinking, supersede, contradict, and render obsolete ideas and World views. If society itself were standing still, there might be little pressure on the individual to update one’s own supply of images, to bring them in line with the latest knowledge available in the society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
So long as the society in which one is embedded is stable or slowly changing, the images on which one bases one’s behaviour can also change slowly. However, to function in a fast-changing society, to cope with swift and complex change, the individua must turn over one’s own stock of images at a rate that in some way correlates with the pace of change. One’s model must be updated. To the degree that it lags, one’s responses to change become inappropriate; one becomes increasingly thwarted, ineffective. Thus there is intense pressure on the individual to keep up with the generalized pace. Today change is so swift and relentless in the techno-societies that yesterday’s truths suddenly become today’s fictions, and the most highly skilled and intelligent members of society admit difficulty in keeping up with the deluge of new knowledge—even in extremely narrow fields. You cannot possibly keep in touch with all you want to. I spend 25 percent to 50 percent of my working time trying to keep up with what is going. With all the information and technology coming out, it is hard for almost anyone to wade through the ocean of information. In fact, with all the high technology cars coming out, I wonder how auto science engineers are able to keep up-to-date with how to repair them? #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
New knowledge either extends or outmodes the old. In either case it compels those for whom it is relevant to reorganize their store of images. It forces them to relearn today what they thought they knew yesterday. Thus Lord James, vice-chancellor of the University of York, says, “I took my first degree in chemistry at Oxford.” Looking at the questions asked in chemistry exams at Oxford today, he continues, “I realized that not only an I not do them, but that I never could have done them, since at least two-thirds of the questions involved knowledge that simply did not exist when I graduated.” And Dr. Robert Hilliard, once the top educational broadcasting specialist for the Federal Communications Commission, presses the point further: “At the rate which knowledge is growing, by the time the child born today graduates from college, the amount of knowledge in the World will be four times as great. By the time that same child is fifty years old, it will be thirty-two times as great, and 97 percent of everything known in the World will have been learned since the time one was born.” Granting that definitions of “knowledge” are vague and that such statistics are necessarily hazardous, there still can be no question that the rising tide of new knowledge forces us into ever-narrower specialization and drives us to revise our inner images of reality at ever-faster rates. Nor does this refer merely to abstruse scientific information about physical particles or genetic structure. It applies with equal force to various categories of knowledge that closely affect the everyday life of millions. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
There is a tendency for common sense to suppose that income and wealth, and the good things in life generally, should be distributed accord to moral desert. Justice is happiness according to virtue. While it is recognized that this ideal can never be fully carried out, it is the appropriate conception of distributive justice, at least as a prime facie principle, and society should try to realize it as circumstances permit. Now justice as fairness rejects this conception. Such a principle would not be chosen in the original position. There seems to be no way of defining the requisite criterion in that situation. Moreover, the notion of distribution according to virtues fails to distinguish between moral desert and legitimate expectations. Thus it is true that as persons and groups take part in just arrangements, they acquire claims on one another defined by the publicly recognized rules. Having done various things encouraged by the existing arrangements, they now have certain rights, and just distributive shares honor these claims. A just scheme, then, answers to what humans are entitled to; it satisfies their legitimate expectations as founded upon social institutions. However, what they are entitled to is not proportional to nor dependent upon their intrinsic worth. The principles of justice that regulate the basic structure and specify the duties and obligations of individuals do not mention moral desert, and there is no tendency for distributive shares to correspond to it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
This contention is borne out by the preceding account of common-sense precepts and their role in pure procedural justice. For example, in determining wages a competitive economy gives weight to the precept of contribution. However, as we have seen, the extent of one’ s contribution (estimated by one’s marginal productivity) depends upon supply and demand. Surely a person’s moral worth does not vary according to how many offer similar skills, or happen to want what one can produce. No one supposes that when someone’s abilities are less in demand or have deteriorated (as in the case of singers) one’s moral deservingness undergoes a similar shift. All of this is perfectly obvious and has long been agree to. It simply reflects the fact noted before that it is one of the fixed points of our moral judgments that no one deserves one’s place in the distribution of natural assets any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in society. Moreover, none of the precepts of justice aims at rewarding virtue. The premiums earned by scarce natural talents, for example, are to cover the costs of training and to encourage the efforts of learning, as well as to direct ability to where it best furthers the common interest. The distributive shares that result do not correlate with moral worth, since the initial endowment of natural assets and the contingences of their growth and nature in early life are arbitrary from a moral point of view. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
The precept which seems intuitively to come closet to rewarding moral desert is that of distribution according to effort, or perhaps better, conscientious effort. Once again, however, it seems clear that the effort a person is willing to make is influenced by one’s natural abilities and skills and the alternatives open to one. The better endowed are more likely, others things equal, to strive conscientiously, and there seems to be no way to discount for their greater good fortune. The idea of rewarding desert is impracticable. And certainly to the extent that the precept of need is emphasized, moral worth is ignored. Nor does the basic structure tend to balance the precepts of justice so as to achieve the requisite correspondence behind the scenes. It is regulated by the two principles of justice which define other aims entirely. The same conclusion may be reached in another way. In the preceding remarks the notion of moral worthy as distinct from a person’s claims based upon one’s legitimate expectations has not been explained. Suppose, then, that we define this notion and show that it has no correlation with distributive shares. We have only to consider a well-ordered society, that is, a society in which institutions are just and this fact is publicly recognized. Its members also have a strong sense of justice, an effective desire to comply with the existing rules and to give one another that to which they are entitled. In this case we may assume that everyone is of equal moral worth. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
However, the equal moral worth of persons does not entail that distributive shares are equal. Each is to receive what the principles of justice say one is entitled to, and these do not require equality. The essential point is that the concept of moral worth does not provide a first principle of distributive justice. This is because it cannot be introduced until after the principles of justice and of natural duty and obligation have been acknowledged. Once these principles are on and, moral worth can be defined as having a sense of justice; the virtues can be characterized as desires or tendencies to act upon the corresponding principles. Thus the concept of moral worth is secondary to those of right and justice, and it plays no role in substantive definition of distributive shares. For a society to organize itself with the aim of rewarding moral desert as a first principle would be like having the institution of property in order to punish thieves. The criterion to each according to one’s virtue would not, then, be chosen in the original position. Since the parties desire to advance their conceptions of the good, they have no reason for arranging their institutions so that distributive shares are determined by moral desert, even if they could find an antecedent standard for its definition. In a well-ordered society individuals acquire claims to share of the social product by doing certain things encouraged by the existing arrangements. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The legitimate expectations that arise are the other side, so to speak, of the principle of fairness and the natural duty of justice. For in the way that one has a duty to uphold just arrangements, and an obligation to do one’s part when one has accepted a position in them, so a person who has complied with the scheme and done one’s share has a right to be treated accordingly by others. They are bound to meet one’s legitimate expectations. Thus when just economic arrangements exist, the claims of individuals are properly settled by reference t the rules and precepts (with their respective weights) which these practices take as relevant. It is incorrect to say that just distributive shares reward individuals according to their moral worth. However, what we can say is that, in the traditional phrase, a just scheme gives each person one’s due: that is, it allots to each what one is entitled to as defined by the scheme itself. The principles of justice for institutions and individuals establish that doing this is fair. Even though a person’s claims are regulated by the existing rules, we can still make a distinction between being entitled to something and deserving it in a familiar although nonmoral sense. To illustrate, after a game one often says that the losing side deserved to win. Here one does not mean that the victors are not entitled to claim the championship, or whatever spoils go to the winner. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Like the controversy Kanye West created when he interrupted the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs), by cutting off Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for winning the award for Best Female Video category, when he thought that Beyonce should have won because, “Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time!” one is not saying the other team or individual should not have won. One is, however saying that the losing entity displayed to a higher degree that skills and qualities that the game or industry calls forth, and the exercise of which gives the sport or industry its appeal. Therefore the losers truly deserved to win but lost out as a result of bad luck, or from other contingencies that caused the contest to miscarry. Similarly even the best economic arrangements will not always lead to the more preferred outcomes. The claims that individuals actually acquire inevitably deviate more or less widely in favoured positions, for example, may not have to a higher degree than others the desired qualities and abilities. All this is evident enough. Its bearing here is that although we can indeed distinguish between the claims that existing arrangements required us to honor, given what individuals have done and how things have turned out, and the claims that would have resulted under more ideal circumstances, none of this implies that distributive shares should be in accordance with moral worth. Even when things happen in the best way, there is still no tendency for distribution and virtue to coincide. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
No doubt some may still contend that distributive shares should match moral worth at least to the extent that this is feasible. They may believe that unless those who are better off have superior moral character, their having greater advantages is an affront to our sense of justice. Now this opinion may arise from thinking of distributive justice as somehow the opposite of retributive justice. It is true that in a reasonably well-ordered society those who are punished for violating just laws have normally done something wrong. This is because the purpose of the criminal law is to uphold basic natural duties, those which forbid us to injure other persons in their life and limb, or to deprive them of their liberty and property, and punishments are to serve this end. They are not simply a scheme of taxes and burdens designed to put a price on certain forms of conducts and in this way to guide human’s conduct for mutual advantage. If the acts proscribed by penal statues were never done, it would be far better. Thus a propensity to commit such acts is a mark of bad character, and in a just society legal punishments will only fall upon those who display these faults. It is clear that the distribution of economic and social advantages is entirely different. These arrangements are not the converse, so to speak, of the criminal law, so that just as the one punishes certain offenses, the other rewards moral worth. The function of unequal distributive shares is to cover the costs of training and education to attract individuals to places and associations where they are most needed from a social point of view, and so on. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Assuming that everyone accept the propriety of self—or group-interested motivation duly regulated by a sense of justice, each decides to do those things that best accord with one’s aims. Variations in wages and income and the perquisites of position are simply to influence these choices so that the end results accords with efficiency and justice. In a well-ordered society there would be no need for the penal law expect insofar as the assurance problem made in necessary. The question of criminal justice belongs for the most part to partial compliance theory, whereas the account of distributive shares belongs to strict compliance theory and so to the consideration of the ideal scheme. To think of distributive and retributive justice as converses of one another is completely misleading and suggests a different justification for distributive shares than then one they in fact have. When we fail to center everything on becoming people who have the character of Christ, then we become means and angry Christians. As a leader of a Christian organization, I often feel the burn of the meanness within the Christian community, a mean-spirited suspicion and judgment that mirrors the broader culture. Every Christian leader I know feels it. It is difficult to be Christian in a secular World. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
However, you know, it is sometimes more difficult to be a leader in Christian circles. There too you can be vilified for just the slightest move that is displeasing to someone. This is one of the most common points of commiseration among our leaders. We must realize there is an answer as to why some Christians are so man. And we must face this answer and effectively deal with it or Satan will sustain his stranglehold on spiritual transformation in local congregations. Some Christians are routinely taught by example and word that it is more important to be right (always in terms of their beloved vessel, or tradition) than it is to be Christlike. In fact, being right licenses many people to be mean, and, indeed, requires one to be mean—righteously mean, of course. It is believed that one must be hard on people who are wrong, and especially if they are in positions of Christian leadership. They deserve nothing better. This is part of what I call the practice of “condemnation engineering.” A fundamental mistake of the conservative side of the American church today, and much of the churches in the New World, is that it takes as its basic goal to get as many people as possible ready to die and go to Heaven. It aims to get people into Heaven rather than to get Heaven into people. This of course requires that these people, who are going to be “in,” must be right on what is basic. You cannot really quarrel with that. However, it turns out that to be right on “what is basic” is to be right in terms of the particular church vessel or tradition in question, not in terms of Christlikeness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Now, the project thus understood and practiced is self-defeating. It implodes upon itself because it creates groups of people who may be ready to die, but clearly are not ready to live. They rarely can get along with another, much less those “outside.” Often this most intimate relations are tangles of reciprocal harm, coldness, and resentment. They have found ways of being “Christian” without being Christlike. As a result they actually fall short of getting as many people are possible ready to go to Heaven, because the lives of the “converted” testify against the reality of “the life that is life indeed,” reports 1 Timothy 6.19. The way to get as many people into Heaven as you can is to get Heaven into as many people are you can—that is, to follow the path of genuine spiritual transformation of full-throttled discipleship to Jesus Christ. When we are counting up results we also need to keep in mind the multitudes of people (surrounded by churches) who will not be in Heaven because they have never, to their knowledge, seen the reality of Christ in a living human being. The Christian minister is frequently in the position of a lawyer who states to the court the case one intends to prove (that would be the biblical picture of life from above), and then calls one’s witnesses (professing Christians), who contradict their testimony (their life) every point one said one would prove. One can have no greater sign of confirmed pride than when one thinks one is humble enough. Love may cause pain to its object, but only on the supposition that that object needs alteration to become fully lovable. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Now why do we humans need to much alteration? The Christian answer—that we have used our free will to become very bad—is so well known that it hardly needs to be stated. However, to bring this doctrine into real life in the minds of modern humans, and even of modern Christians, is very hard. The consciousness is supposed to deliver humans from the fear of eternal punishment. It was against this background that the Gospel appeared as good news. It brought news of possible healing to humans who knew that they were morally ill. However, all this has changed. Christianity now has to preach the diagnosis—in itself very bad news—before it can win a hearing for the cure. There are two principle causes. One is the fact that for about a hundred and fifty years we have so concentrated on one of the virtues— “kindness” or mercy—that most of us do not feel anything except kindness to be really good or anything but cruelty to be really bad. Such disequilibrium of ethical developments are not uncommon, and other ages too have had their pet virtues and curious insensibilities. And if one virtue must be cultivated at the expense of all the rest, none has a higher claim than mercy—for every Christian must reject with detestation that covert propaganda for cruelty which tries to derive mercy out of the World by calling it names such as “Humanitarianism” and “Sentimentality.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The real trouble is that “kindness” is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. If nothing happens to be annoying an individual in the moment, everyone feels benevolent. Thus a human easily comes to console oneself for all one’s other vices by a conviction that one’s heart is in the right place and that one would not hurt a fly nor take candy from a baby, though in fact one has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We thin we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble. The second cause is the effect of Psychoanalysis on the public mind, and, in particular, the doctrine of repressions and inhibition. Whatever these doctrines really mean, the impression they have actually left on most people is that the sense of Shame is a dangerous and mischievous thing. We have laboured to overcome that sense of shrinking, that desire to conceal, which either Nature herself or the tradition of almost all humankind has attached to cowardice, unchastity, falsehood, and envy. We are told to “get things out in the open,” not for the sake of self-humiliation, but on the grounds that these “things” are very natural and we need not be ashamed of them. However, unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one; and even the Worldly society has usually recognized “shamelessness” as the nadir of the soul. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
In trying to extirpate shame we have broken down one of the ramparts of the human spirit, madly exulting in the work as the Trojans exulted when they broke their walls and pulled the Horse into Troy. I do not know that there is anything to be done but to set about the rebuilding as soon as we can. It is mad work remove hypocrisy by removing the temptation to hypocrisy: the ”frankness” of people sunk below shame is a very cheap forthrightness. However, if one’s own scepticism, sensualism, or materialism does not offer too hard a resistance, the intuition which is working its way to formulation, expression, and understanding may finally gain acceptance. This opens a new cycle for one. If only one heeds its intuitive message, the higher self will not fail one. One will make one’s way to true balance sanity and deep inner calm. Without searching for others, knowing that in oneself God’s representative resides and that this can give the right kind of help, one will depend for self-reliance on an ever-presence. If one cultivates sufficient faith, out of the cosmic mind will come the response to one’s aspirations and, eventually, the answers to one’s questions. To receive this, one must learn to keep a constant vigil for intuitive feelings and messages of the delicate nature, and to trust one’s inner promptings. One’s attention should always have God at its center. By constant prayer and aspiration to one’s higher self, the student will get intuitive promptings from time to time. One should catch them when they appear and yield oneself to them: in this way one will get the necessary guidance from within. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Once one learns to recognize the intuitive voice, follow its dictates; do not hesitate to conform with them to try to make up an excuse for failing to do so it the guidance is unpalatable. If the seeker will heed this intuitive feeling it may lead one to a clue, a thread by holding which one may grope one’s way to clearer and stronger feeling until it becomes a certainty. If reason, experience, and authority can solve it, whatever be the problem, carry it inwards to the deep still center. However, one must learn to wait in patience for the answer, for the blockage is in you, not in it. A day or a month may pass until the response is felt, thought, or materialized. There is a feeling of scaredness, of holy peace at such moments, and they should be cherished for the precious moment that they are. They contain hints of the communion with the Higher Self, elements of something beyond the ordinary self, and possibilities of transcending the past with its debris of memories and mistakes. In every important move one will seek guidance from the intuitive levels of being as well as from the intellectual. These messages are all formulated by the faculty of intuition. Hence their lofty tone. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
However, the emotions, desires, and intellect—being on a lower level—ignore the message in practice and action. Hence, disobeyed, they bring suffering or disappointment. Sometimes the intuitive bidding of God will be in favour of one’s own private interests but sometimes it will be at variance with them. Where the wakeful consciousness is not easily reached owing to its preoccupations, then the dream consciousness will be more receptive to the message. Sometimes an intuition does not stay behind. It flashes through consciousness for a small fraction of a second and is gone. Unless it is detected and recognized during this quick passage while it is still fresh, we are hardly likely to do so afterwards. Amid the toils and agitations of everyday living, through all the boiler pressures of crisis events, such intuitions can gain entry only with difficulty. Yet we need their help and solace more than we know: we need their stimulus to enkindle fresh hope and more faith. Either a human possesses this intuitive sense or one does not. It cannot be created by argument or analysis. They betray the higher part of themselves every time they resist, reject, or merely ignore the intuitive feelings which come so delicately into consciousness. In the seeming self’s activity, personal willpower is used and personal effort is made. In God’s activity, both these signs are absent. Instead there is a passive receptivity to its voice—intuitions—and obedience to its guidance. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The self-sufficing World-Mind has nothing to gain for itself by the Universal activity. What could the Supreme Power gain by bringing the World into existence? It is not like the humans who have desires to be satisfied or limitations to be removed. Those who point to the marvellous pattern of the Universe as proof of the existence of Deity, do well; but when they begin to render account of the reasons which induced Deity to turn Himself into myriad souls and to blind their divine sight by involving them into this material Universe, it is time to put on our shoes and walk away. For no philosopher and no theologian, no occultist and no mystic has yet solved this supreme riddle in a truly satisfying manner. World-Mind imagines and objectifies thing and happenings, and humans are within this space-time net. God is within the Universe but unbound by its limitations. God is free in a sense in which no human being is free. For the conflict of motives which precedes every act of human freedom is entirely absent from the acts of God, which are truly spontaneous. No one knows why the Infinite Power must go on incarnating something of Itself in the Universe; everyone can in the end only accept the fact, for the question is answerless. “Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for true and just are His judgments,” reports Revelations 19.1. Mothers and Fathers who went before, please watch over my words as I tell the old stories, that they may be passed on rightly. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Please make me today’s link in the chain that reaches on, from nights around the fire beneath American sikes to the end of humanity and beyond. Endowed with might, endowed with everlasting power, they govern all the World. In splendor, lustrously their brightness radiates, their brilliance beautiful throughout the Universe. In rising they rejoice, in setting they exult, awesomely fulfilling their Creator’s will. Glory and honor do they give unto His name; in joyous songs of praise His kingdom they acclaim. God called unto the Sun and it shone forth in light, He looked, and then He formed the figure of the Moon. The Heavenly host, the constellations gave Him praise, and all celestial beings of the Heavenly throne attribute honor, greatness, glory—unto God who rested from all His work, and on the seventh day exalted Himself and ascended the throne of His glory. Adorned in majesty for the day of rest, God called the Sabbath a delight. This is the praise offered by the Sabbath day, the day itself rendered praise saying: A psalm, a song of Sabbath Day. It is good to give thanks unto the Lord. Therefore, let all of God’s creatures glorify and bless Him. Let them all render praise, distinction and greatness unto God, the King and Creator of all, who in His holiness bestoweth rest upon His people of American on the sacred Sabbath day. May Thy name, O Lord our God, be sanctified, and Thy fame, O our King, glorified in Heaven above and on Earth beneath. Be Thou praised, O our Deliverer, for the excellency of Thy handiwork and for the luminaries which Thou hast made and which render Thee glory. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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If there is Laughter in the Morning, there Will be Tears Before Bedtime!
I used to believe that anything was better than nothing. Now I know that sometimes nothing is better. Rage and envy and the feelings of persecution which go with humanity impairs the ability to be fully human. Feeling persecuted by others is not very compatible with find them wonderful and taking easy uncomplicated pleasure in the company. People who have been insufficiently mirrored, admired, and confirmed may go in for rather idealized hierarchical leadership-structures and hero-worship. Conversely, people who had lot of confirmation but lacked the opportunity to create and copy admired figures are more liable to sit around like garden gnomes being agreeable and democratic and lovable and cosy—even while Rome burns. The grandiose self and the wretched self correspond rather closely. A split of this kind is also more likely when an individual discovers too abruptly and unexpectedly the limitations to which one is subject. For instance, if one has been your source of support beyond an appropriate time, this in turn is more likely because an attachment figure sees you as an extension of one’s own self-esteem and one’s own grandiose phantasies, so that there is a merging beyond the time when this was necessitated by the individual’s weakness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
When people are too supportive of an individual, it is often because they are anxious phobic caregivers also, and this obstructs the individual’s normal development, which would otherwise has taken one beyond a desire to be merged in a selfobject state. Fixation in the selfobject state interferes with the development, which would otherwise have taken one beyond a desire to be merged in a selfobject state. Fixation in the selfobject state interferes with the development of identification with an admired figure who does things. We then get the kind of person who, smugly or desperately, conveys the impression “I am wonderful because I am so lovable.” Such individuals may have had the opportunity for gradually developing the skills needed for a more independent exercise of their functions. So, the individual will discover its lack of power. One will discover the extent to which one is defenceless and subject to intrusion, and that will be a terrible blow. Just going off to school or work for some people in the morning can be a terrible experience because they may not yet be psychologically individuated. Splits are due to inadequate recognition and confirmation: inadequate mirroring. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Splits are due to things going wrong in the development of appropriate integrations and individuations. One has not been appreciated in the right way for what one is and what one can become. One’s grand and one’s wretched self are isolated from one another. Repression is different. It puts the lid on certain experiences and feelings. Repression creates a horizontal split. This is a later development, when a more realistic self is beginning to be formed. Neither wretched nor grandiose self are very realistic: elements of both will be integrated in more realistic self-structures when development does as it should. With a more realistic self, the individual becomes able to take pride and pleasure in what one is and what one can do. This process is called the natural self-assertion, in contrast to the unrealistic grandiosity attributable to unresolved selfobject merging. When the lid is put on the individual’s sense of being grans, when its natural excitement and self-assertion, in contrast to the unrealistic grandiosity attributable to unresolved selfobject merging. When the lid is put on the individual’s sense of being grand, when one’s natural excitement and self-assertion are met with disapproval, the individual feels bad, and in some circumstances one may become anxious whenever one thinks of doing anything unbidden that might be fun or feel good. This is a repressed, guilty individual. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
In some strata of British life, and probably elsewhere, people are shamed as a matter of routine at the very moments when they feel they have done something good or done something well—jokingly, of course, so that the ill-will can be disowned. There appears to be a determination that no one shall feel “bigheaded” or forget for a moment that “if there is laughter in the morning, there will be tears before bedtime.” Even the very possibility of someone achieving something has to be counteracted by “taking them down a peg or two.” No wonder that individuals brought up in this atmosphere avoid being noticed as far as they can, and are quietly angry: “sullen.” Whereas splitting has to do with defects in mirroring, repression has more to do with identification with admired figures, and especially with the idealization of rather ungiving and unforgiving figures—the dour, the jealous, the exhausted. Such people can confirm the fears and phantasies of weakness and inadequacy which the individual has necessarily accumulated already. A strong sense of self-esteem brings not only a sense of well-being, but also generally improved functioning. As, though the right therapeutic approach, patients feel better about themselves, their capacity for work improves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Conversely, many of the most severe work-disturbances are due to a decline in self-esteem and subsequent fear of fragmentation. People will often attempt to counteract painful feelings of unreality or fragmentation by forcing themselves into activities, ranging from the physical (in sports) to overwork. Their work (or their sport) is made the isolated activity of an isolated self-structure, a pocket lacking pleasant associated connections. Such people engage in their activities in an “automatic” way, passively, without pleasure or initiative, simply responding to cues or demands. If things go well in therapy, individuals will one day report that their work has changed, that they are now enjoying it, that they now have the choice of whether to work or not, that they now undertake it on their own initiative rather than by passive obedience. Last but not least, they find that their approach has now some originality rather than being humdrum and routine. A living self in depth has become the organizing center of the ego’s activities. Takes which we set ourselves, and to which we feel committed, can play an important role in giving meaning and validity to what might otherwise be a rather more fragile personality-structure. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
A skill is a good example of a compensatory structure. I may not be lovable or interesting to people, but I know I can design the best residential architecture than anyone in my town, or come first in exams, or tell fascinating stories about history, or impress others with my charm. Compensatory developments add to self-respect by achievements which are generally respected, and other more defensive manoeuvres which can do no more than serve to hide the pain suffered through lack of self-respect: unrealistic values, hostile phantasies, perversions. Clearly this is a tricky area in which to make pronouncements, since it depends so much on what is admired in the culture. To make yourself the most outstanding competitor would normally be seen as compensatory in our culture, but it might be seen as a defensive perverted individualism in a more collectively minded culture. If one is not careful, however, compensatory methods can lead to a “False Self.” It is a loss, and a grave one, to let oneself remain torpid to intuitive feeling so much of the time, while alert and alive to every lesser and lower feeling. There are times, however, when, in a hard problem, reason will come into conflict with intuition but when the later is so overwhelmingly strong that it seems one must perforce yield to it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
In the times when these are difficult, we have to do what it takes to survive. Time alone can show the truth of such a matter. Let one therefore not fall into the peril of strict ideas about it. Let one rather withhold judgment and await its issue patiently. Intuition does not always flash suddenly out of the depths of the mind into consciousness: quite often if forms itself very slowly over a period of hours, days, or even weeks. Who hears this quiet whisper of intuition? Who, hearing, obeys? Not only is it most unnoticed but its guidance is also unsought; humans prefer and follow, the ego’s direction. It begins as an uncertain and intermittent feeling: it ends as a definite and persistent intuition. If humans followed their intuition more there would be fewer tragedies that could have been prevented or regrets that could have been avoided. The student should make one’s own research and observation on the need of accepting first intuitive impressions and being the best guidance. The undegraded feeling which first comes when an object, a person, or an event confronts one is mostly the correct intuition about it. However, it must be caught on the wing or it will be gone. If we understood this capacity to receive first impressions better, we should value them accordingly. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The subtlety and depth of one’s intuitions will increase with quickness, readiness, and obedience of one’s response to them. If they are to remain and not vanish away, intuition must be caught quickly and inspiration must be followed up at once. If we respectfully meet each intuitive feeling and give it our trusting collaboration, it will little by little become a frequent visitor. First, we have to become willing to receive these divine intuitions. These intuitive feelings do not respond to direct frontal demands for their appearance. They must be gently coaxed out of their deeper levels where they reside, quietly lured out of their shy seclusion. To open ourselves and receive an intuition we must surrender the ego and submit the intellect to it. If one is to interpret it aright and not miss its importance, one should let oneself go when one feels this inner prompting. Let it absorb one’s being, draw one inwards to a deepening sense of itself. The deeper mind is so close to the source of our karma that we may at times get its right guidance not only intuitively from within but also circumstantially from without. The interval between the coming and the going of an intuitive thought is so short that one must immediately and alertly respond to it. If one misses it, one will find that the mind can go back to it only with difficulty and uncertainty. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
We can receive a new truth more easily in the mind’s quietude than in the mind’s agitation. When thinking is stilled, intuiting begins. Such internal silence is not useless idleness, it is creative experience. God may use some event, some person, or some book as a messenger to Him. It may make any new circumstance act in the same way. However, one must have the capacity to recognize what is happening and the willingness to receive the message. To let the intuitive feelings come through requires an inner passivity which meditation fosters but which extroversion inhibits. Submit yourself as an empty vessel to be filled with the intuitive leading of God. Do not stop short of this goal, do not be satisfied with a half-and-half sort of life. We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Love between the father and son, is a symbol, means essentially authoritative love on the one side, and obedient love on the other. The father uses his authority to make the son into the sort of human being he, rightly, and in his superior wisdom, want him to be. Even in our own days, though a man might say it, he could mean nothing by saying, “I love my son but do not care how great a blackguard he is provided he has a good time.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The Church is the Lord’s bride whom he so loves that in her no spot or wrinkle is endurable. For the truth which this analogy serves to emphasize is that Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere “kindness” which tolerates anything expect suffering in its object is, in that respect, at the opposite pole from Love. When we fall in love with another human being, do we crease to care whether she or he is clean or dirty, fair or foul? Do we not rather then first begin to care? Does anyone regard it as a sign of love in another human being that one neither knows nor cares how he or she is looking? Love may, indeed, love the beloved when one’s beauty or handsomeness is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved; one’s feeling is more soft and sensible than are the tender horns of cockled snails. Of all powers one forgives most, but one condones least: one is pleased with little, but demands all. When Christianity says that God loves humans, it means that God loves human: not that He has some “disinterested,” because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the lord of terrible aspect, is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of one’s guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the Worlds, persistent and the artist’s love for one’s work and despotic as a human’s love for one’s garden, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between intimate partners. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator’s eyes. It is certainly a burden of glory not only beyond our deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring; we are inclined, like the maidens in the old play, to deprecate the love of Zeus. However, the fact seems unquestionable. The Impassible speaks as if it suffered passion, and that which contains in Itself the cause of its own and all other bliss talks as though it could be in want and yearning. The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word “love,” and look on things as if human are the center of them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Humans are not the center. God does not exist for the sake of humans. Humans do not exist for their own sake. “Thou has crated all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created,” reports Revelation 4.11. We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest well pleased. To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us God must labour to make us lovable. We cannot even wish, in our better moments, that God could reconcile Himself to our present impurities—no more than the beggar maid could wish the King Cophetua should be content with her rags and dirt, or a dog, once having learned to love humans, could wish that humans were such as to tolerate one’s house the snapping, verminous, polluting creature of the wild pack. What we would here and now call our “happiness” is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The body of believers called the church is to grow from the inside out in response to the Spirit. Built that way, the church prevails against anything. The church comes together on Saturday or Sunday mornings principally to be prepared to carry out its ministry the rest of the week in every walk of life. And the church must equip the humans to take the church into the World. The believer’s ministry is being Christ’s person right where one is, in the marketplace or the home, every moment of every day. This is part of the everyday business of holiness. This is the very nature of loving God. Therefore spiritual discipline is very important. We must practice fervent prayer and serious study of God’s Word. This is the life-or-death principle, churches that exercise spiritual discipline can be mightily used. The great revivals have been born in times when Christians were intent on prayer. The evidence also makes clear that revivals are not confined geographically. For the church of Jesus Christ is not confined to one area. It is one church, one body, one holy nation transcending human’s arbitrary geographic and political boundaries. As one holy nation, we must break free of any provincialism and work for unity in Christ. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
In my travels as a believer among fellow believers of other races and nationalities, the Lord has given me some of His richest fellowship in those very countries. The Holy Spirit can break down every barrier. However, the requirement for individual cells within God’s holy nation goes far beyond sharing financial resources; the church is called to give itself, to share in the hunger and pain of those in need. Jesus Himself shared the pain of the less affluent; He suffered for the entire World. As God’s visible presence in the World today, should not His people also participate in the suffering of the World? Most empathically, yes. Not until we go where need is and share in the suffering of the less affluent, alienated, isolated, and downtrodden will the holy nation of God’s people also become the loving nation. With the methods employed hitherto we have not succeeded in Christianizing the soul to the point where even the most elementary demands of Christian ethics can exert any decisive influence on the main concerns of the Christian European and American. The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor and naked heathen, but the spiritual who populate the Old World and the New World have as yet heard nothing of Christianity. If it is to meet its high educative task, Christianity must indeed begin again from the beginning. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
So long as religion is only faith and outward form, and the religious function is not experienced in our own souls, nothing of any importance has happened. It has yet to be understood that the mysterium magnum is not only an actuality but is first and foremost rooted in the human psyche. The human who does not know this from one’s own experience may be a most learned theologian, but one has no idea of religion and still less of education. Yet when I point out that the soul possesses by nature a religious function, and when I stipulate that it is the prime task of all education (of adults) to convey the archetype of God-image, or its emanations and effects, to the conscious mind, then it is precisely the theologian who seizes me by the arm and accuses me of “psyhchologims.” However, were it not a fact of experience that supreme values reside in the soul (quite apart from the holy ghost who is also there), psychology would interest me in the least, for the soul would then be nothing but a miserable vapour. I know, however, from hundredfold experience that it is nothing of the sort, but on the contrary contains the equivalents of everything that has been formulated in stick doctrines and a good deal more, which is just what enables it to be an eye destined to behold the light. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The beholding of the light requires limitless range and unfathomable depth of vision. I have been accused of “deifying the soul.” Not I but God Himself has defied it! I did not attribute a religious function to the soul, I merely produced the facts which prove that the soul is naturaliter religiosa, id est, possess a religious function. I did not invent or insinuate this function, it produces itself of it own accord without being prompted thereto by any opinions or suggestions of mine. With a truly tragic delusion these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time that we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing. For it is obvious that far too many people are incapable of establishing a connection between the sacred figures and their own psyche: they cannot see to what extent the equivalent images are lying dormant in their own unconscious. In order to facilitate this inner vision we must first clear the way for the faculty of seeing. How this is to be done without psychology, that is, without making contact with the psyche, is frankly beyond my comprehension. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Another equally serious misunderstanding lies in imputing to psychology the wish to be a new and possibly heretical doctrine. If a visually impaired man can gradually be helped to see it is not to be expected that one will at once discern new truths with an eagle eye. If he sees anything at all, one must be glad, and if he begins to understand what he is seeing, that is a blessing. Psychology is concerned with the act of seeing and not with the construction of new religious truths, when even the existing teachings have not yet been perceived and understood. In religious matters it is a well-known fact that we cannot understand a thing until we have experienced it inwardly, for it is in the inward experience that the connection between the psyche and the outward image or creed is first revealed as a relationship or correspondence like that of sponsus and sponsa. Accordingly when I says as a psychologist that God is an archetype, I mean by that the “type” in the psyche. The word “type” is, as we know, derived from “blow” or “imprint”; thus an archetype presupposes an imprinter. Psychology as the science of the soul has to confine itself to its subject and guard against overstepping its proper boundaries by metaphysical assertions or other professions of faith. Should it set up a God, even as a hypothetical cause, it would have implicitly claimed the possibility of proving God, thus exceeding its competence in an absolutely illegitimate way. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Science can only be science; there is no “scientific” professions of faith and similar contradictiones in adiecto. We simply do not know the ultimate derivation of the archetype any more than we know the origin of the psyche. The competence of psychology as an empirical science only goes so far as to establish, on the basis of comparative research, whether for instance the imprint found in the psyche can or cannot reasonably be termed a “God-image.” Nothing positive or negative has thereby been asserted about the possible existence of God, and more than the archetype of the “hero” posits the actual existence of a hero. Now if my psychological researches has demonstrated the existence of certain psyche types and their correspondence with well-known religious ideas, then we have opened up a possible approach to those experienceable contents which manifestly and undeniably form the empirical foundations of all religious experience. The religious-minded human is free to accept whatever metaphysical explanations one pleases about the origin of these images; not so the intellect, which must keep strictly to the principles of scientific interpretation and avoid trespassing beyond the bounds of what can be known. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Nobody can prevent the believer from accepting God, Purusha, the Atman, or Tao as the Prime Cause and thus putting an end to the fundamental disquiet of humans. The scientist is a scrupulous worker; one cannot take Heaven by storm. Should one allow oneself to be seduced into such an extravagance one would be sawing of the branch on which one sits. God, please open the way for me. God, please remove my obstacles. God, please carry me on your back, bringing me through difficulties to success. Heavenly God, please rain your blessings down on your people, like milk pouring from above. Unto Thee we offer blessings and thanksgiving from this time forth and forevermore. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, exalted in praises, God of thanksgiving, Lord of wonders, who takest delight in songs and psalms, Thou God and King, the life of the Universe. Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the World which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all the house of America, speedily, yea, son; and say ye, Amen. May His great name be blessed for ever and ever. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises, hymns and blessings that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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For Thou Shall Hear this Secret–Mathematics Possesses Not Only Truth, but Supreme Beauty!
United States policy on the World scene is viewed as being neutral toward our enemy, friendly toward the neutrals, and unfriendly toward our friends. Geography of super industrial society can be expected to become increasingly kinetic, filled with turbulence and change. The more rapidly the environment changes, the shorter the life span of organization forms. In administrative structure, just as in architectural structure, we are moving from long-enduring to temporary forms. From permanence to transience. We are moving from bureaucracy to Ad-hocracy. In this way, the accelerative thrust translates itself into organization. Permanence, one of the identifying characteristics of bureaucracy, one of the identifying characteristics of bureaucracy, is undermined, and we are driven to a relentless conclusion: human’s ties with the invisible geography of organization turn over more and more rapidly, exactly as do one’s relationships with things, places, and the human beings who people these ever-changing organizational structures. Just as the new nomads migrate from place to place, humans increasingly migrate from organizational structure to organizational structure. Something else is happening, too: a revolutionary shift in power relationships. Not only are large organizations forced to create temporary units, but they are also finding it increasingly difficult to maintain their traditional chains-of-command. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
It would be pollyannish to suggest that workers in industry or government today truly “participate” in the management of their enterprises—either in capitalist or, for that matter, in socialist and communist countries. Yet there is evidence that bureaucratic hierarchies, separating those who “make decisions” from those who merely carry them out, are being altered, side-stepped or broken. This process is noticeable in industry where irresistible pressures are battering hierarchical arrangements. The central, crucial and important business of organizations is increasingly shifting from up and down to sideways. What is involved in such a shift is a virtual revolution in organizational structure—and human relations. For people communicating in sideways—id est, to others at approximately the same level of organization—behave differently, operate under very different pressures, than those who must communicate up and down a hierarchy. To illustrate, let us look at a typical work setting in which a traditional bureaucratic hierarchy operates. While still a young man, I worked for a couple of years as a millwright’s helper in a foundry. Here, in a great dark cavern of a building, thousands of men laboured to produce automobile crankcase castings. The scene was Dantesque—smoke and soot smeared our faces, soot covered the floors and filled the air, the pungent, choking smell of sulphur and burnt sand seared our nostrils. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Overhead a creaking conveyor carried red hot castings and dripped hot sand on the men blow. There were flashes of molten iron, the yellow flares of fires, and a lunatic cacophony of noises: men shouting, chains rattling, pug mills hammering, compressed air shrieking. To a stranger the scene appeared chaotic. However, those inside knew that everything was carefully organized. Bureaucratic order prevailed. Men did the same job over and over again. Rules governed every situation. And each man knew exactly where he stood in a vertical hierarchy that reached from the lowest-paid core paster up to the unseen “they” who populated the executive suits in another building. In the immense shed where we worked, something was always going wrong. A bearing would burn out, a belt snap or a gear break. Whenever this happened in a section, work would screech to a halt, and frantic messages would begin to flow up and down the hierarchy. The worker nearest the breakdown would notify his foreman. He, in turn, would tell the production supervisor. The production supervisor would send the word to the maintenance supervisor. The maintenance supervisor would dispatch a crew to repair the damage. Information in this system is passed by the worker “upward” through the foreman to the production supervisor. The production supervisor carries it sideways to a man occupying a niche at approximately the same level in the hierarchy (the maintenance supervisor), who, in turn, passes it downward to the millwrights who actually get things going again. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The information thus must move a total of four steps up and down the vertical ladder plus one step sideways before repairs can begin. The process is a lot like taking a tour through the Winchester mansion. This system is premised on the unspoken assumption that the dirty, sweaty men down below cannot make sound decisions. Only those higher in the hierarchy are to be trusted with judgment or discretion. Officials at the top make the decisions; men at the bottom carry them out. One group represents the brains of the organization; the other, the hands. This typically bureaucratic arrangement is ideally suited to solving routine problems at a moderate pace. However, when things speed up, or the problems cease to be routine, chaos often breaks loose. It is easy to see why. First, the acceleration of the pace of life (and especially the speed-up of production brought about by automation) means that every minute of down time cost more in lost output than ever before. Delay is increasingly costly. Information must flow faster than ever before. At the same time, rapid change, by increasing the number of novel, unexpected problems increases the amount of information needed. It takes more information to cope with a noel problem than one we have solved a dozen or a hundred times before. It is this combined demand for more information at faster speeds that is now undermining the great vertical hierarchies so typical of bureaucracy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
A radical speed-up could have been effected in the foundry described above simply by allowing the worker to report the breakdown directly to the maintenance supervisor or even to a maintenance crew, instead of passing the news along through his foreman and production supervisor. At least one and perhaps two steps could have been cut from the four-step communication process in this way—a saving of from 25 to 50 percent. Significantly, the steps that might be eliminated are the up-and-down steps, the vertical ones. Today such savings are feverishly sought by managers fighting to keep up with change. Shortcuts that by-pass the hierarchy are increasingly employed in thousands of factories, offices, laboratories, even in the military. The cumulative result of such small changes is a massive shift from vertical to lateral communication systems. The intended result is speedier communication. This leveling process, however, represents a major blow to the once-sacred bureaucratic hierarchy, and it punches a jagged hole in the brain and hand analogy. For as he vertical chain of command is increasingly by-passed, we find “hands” beginning to make decisions, too. When the worker by-passes his foreman or supervisor and calls in a repair team, he makes a decision that in the past was reserved for these higher ups. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
This silent but significant deterioration of hierarchy, now occurring in the executive suite as well as at the ground level of the factory floor, is intensified by the arrival on the scene of hordes of experts—specialists in vital fields so narrow that often the men on top have difficulty understanding them. Increasingly, managers have to rely on the judgment of these experts. Solid state physicists, computer programmers, systems designers, operation researchers, engineering specialists—such humans are assuming new decision-making function. At one time, they merely consulted with executives who reserved unto themselves the right to make managerial decisions. Today, the managers are losing their monopoly on decision-making. The specialists do not fit neatly together into a chain-of-command system and cannot wait for their expert advice to be approved at a higher level. With no time for decisions to wend their leisurely way up and down the hierarchy, advisors stop merely advising and begin to make decisions themselves. Often they do this in direct consultation with the workers and ground-level technicians. As a result, you no longer have the strict allegiance to hierarchy. You may have five or six different levels of the hierarchy represented in one meeting. You try to forget about salary level and hierarchy, and organize to get the job done. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Such facts represent a staggering change in thinking, action, and decision-making in organizations. Quite possibly, the only truly effective methods for preventing, or coping with, problems of coordination and communication in our changing technology will be found in the new arrangements of people and tasks, in arrangements which sharply break with the bureaucratic tradition. It will be a log time before the last bureaucratic hierarchy is obliterated. For bureaucracies are well suited to task that require masses of moderately educated humans to perform routine operations, and, no doubt, some such operations will continue to be performed by humans in the future. It is clear that in super-industrial society many such tasks will be performed by great self-regulating systems of machines, doing away with the need for bureaucracy on civilization more tightly than before, automation leads to its overthrow. As machines take over routine tasks and the accelerative thrust increases the amount of novelty in the environment, more and more of the energy of society (and its organizations) must turn toward the solution of non-routine problems. This requires a degree of imagination and creativity that bureaucracy, with its human-on-a-slot organization, its permanent structures, and its hierarchies, is not well equipped to provide. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Thus it is not surprising to find that wherever organizations today are caught up in the stream of technological or social change, wherever research and development is important, wherever humans must cope with first-time problems, the decline of bureaucratic forms is most pronounced. In these frontier organizations a new system of human relations is springing up. To live, organizations must cast off those bureaucratic practices that immobilize them, making them less sensitive and less rapidly responsive to change. We are moving toward a working society of technical co-equals in which the line of demarcation between the leader and the led has become fuzzy. Super-industrial Humans, rather than occupying a permanent, cleanly-defined slot and performing mindless routine tasks in response to orders from above, finds increasingly that one must assume decision-making responsibility—and must do so within a kaleidoscopically changing organization structure built upon highly transient human relationships. Whatever else might be said, that is not the old, familiar Weberian bureaucracy at which so many of our novelists and social critics are still, belatedly, hurling their rusty javelins. The sum of transfers and benefits from essential public goods should be arranged so as to enhance the expectations of the least favoured consistent with the required saving and the maintenance of equal liberties. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
When the basic structure takes this form the distribution that results will be just (or at least not unjust) whatever it is. Each receives that total income (earnings plus transfers) to which one is entitled under the public system of rules upon which one’s legitimate expectations are founded. A central feature of this conception of distributive justice is that it contains a large element of pure procedural justice. If the notion of pure procedural justice is to succeed, it is necessary to set up and to administer impartially a just system of surrounding institutions. The reliance on pure procedural justice presupposes that the basic structure satisfies the two principles. The first principle of justice is that: Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same arrangement of liberties for all; the second principle of justice is: Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions—they are to be attached to offices and position open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle). This account of distributive shares is simply an elaboration of the familiar idea that income and wages will be just once a (workably) competitive price system is properly organized and embedded in a just structure. These conditions are sufficient. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The distribution that results is a case of background justice on the analogy with the outcome of a fair game. However, we need to consider whether this conception fits our intuitive ideas of what is just and unjust. Consider the case of wages in a perfectly competitive economy surrounded by a just basic structure. Assume that each firm (whether publicly or privately owned) must adjust its rates of pay to the long-run forces of supply and demand. The rates of pay cannot be so high that they cannot afford paying those rates or so low that a sufficient number will not offer their skills in view of the other opportunities available. In equilibrium the relative attractiveness of different jobs will be equal, all things considered. It is easy, then, to see how the various precepts of justice arise. They simply identify features of jobs that are significant on either the demand or the supply side of the market, or both. A firm’s demand for workers is determined by the marginal productivity of labour, that is, by the net value of the contribution of a unit of labour measured by the sale price of the commodities that it produces. The worth of this contribution to the firm rests eventually on market conditions, on what households are willing to pay for various goods. Experience and training, natural ability and special know-how, tend to earn a premium. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Firms are willing to pay more to those with special skills, knowledge, talent and ability because these characteristics mean their productivity is greater. This fact explains and gives weight to the precept to each according to one’s contribution, and as special cases, we have the norms to each according to one’s training, or one’s experience, and the like. However, also, viewed from the supply side, a premium must be paid if those who may later offer their services are to be persuaded to undertake the costs of training and postponement. Similarly jobs which involve uncertain or unstable employment, or which are performed under hazardous and unpleasantly strenuous conditions, tend to receive more pay. Otherwise humans cannot be found to fill them. From this circumstance arise such precepts as to each according to one’s effort, or the risk one bears, and so on. Even when individuals are assumed to be of the same natural ability, these normal will still arise from the requirement of economic activity. Given the aims of productive units and of those seeking work, certain characteristics are singled out as relevant. At any time the wage practices of firms tend to recognize these precepts and, allowing time for adjustment, assign them the weights called for by market conditions. All of this seems reasonably clear. At the height of the energy crisis in 1977, the governor of Virginia ordered energy use restricted in non-essential buildings. No one seemed particularly surprised that churches headed his list. In the eyes of the World, as well as many church-goers, the church is only a building, and an expensive, under-used one at that. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The only time the church is used is usually on Saturday or Sunday, for a few hours, and an occasional mid-week service or function, the temple of God sits empty. SO why use scarce resources to heat it? These same people consider the church just another institution with its own bureaucracy, run by ministers and priests who, like lawyers and doctors, are members of a profession (though not so well-paid). And while this parochial institution fulfills a worthwhile social and inspirational function, rather like an arts society or civic club, most people could get along fine without it. In many ways, of course, the church has allowed itself to become what the World says it is. (This seems to be a common human bent—to become what others consider us to be.) However, that sad fact has not dulled or changed God’s definition of, and intention for, His church. For biblically the church is an organism not an organization—a movement, not a monument. It is not a part of the community; it is a whole new community. It is not an orderly gathering; it is a new order with new values, often in sharp conflict with the values of the surrounding society. The church does nor draw people in; it sends them out. It does not settle into a comfortable niche, taking its place alongside the Rotary, the Elks, and the Hilton country club. Rather, the church is to make society uncomfortable. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Like yeast, the temple of God unsettles the masses around it, changing it from within. Like salt, it flavours and preserves that into which it vanishes. However, as yeast is made up of many particles and salt composed of multiplied grains, so the church is many individual believers. For God has given us each other; we do not live the Christian life alone. We do not love God alone. To believe Jesus means we follow Hum and join what He called the “kingdom of God” which He said was “at hand.” This is a new commitment…a new companionship, new community established by conversion. The young church, made up of believers of every country, race, and language of the World as a Holy Nation. Being part of the Holy Nation requires an understanding and practice of certain truths. When I came first to the University, I fell among a set of young men and women, who believed in chastity, truthfulness, self-sacrifice. We were sufficiently close in intellect and imagination, which allowed us to secure immediate intimacy and they taught me to obey the moral law. God’s goodness differs from ours; but one needs have no fear that, as one approached it, one will be asked simply to reverse one’s moral standards. Christ calls humans to repent—a call which would be meaningless if God’s standards were sheerly different from that which they already knew and failed to practise #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
God appeals to our existing moral judgments. By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness—the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness. There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness (in the sense given above) is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object—we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to give animals homes so they do not suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our relationships, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, God has never regarded us with contempt. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense. The relation between Creator and creature is, of course, unique, and cannot be paralleled by any relations between one creature and another. God is both further from us, and nearer to us, than any other being. He is further from us because the sheer difference between that which has Its principle of being in Itself and that to which being is communicated, is one compared with which the difference between an archangel and a worm is quite insignificant. God makes, we are made: God is original, we derivative. However, as the same time, and for the same reason, the intimacy between God and even the meanest creature is closer than any that creatures can attain with one another. Our life is, at every moment, supplied by God: our tiny, miraculous power of free will only operates on bodies which God’s continual energy keeps in existence—our very power to think in His power communicated to us. Such a unique relation can be apprehended only by analogies: from the various types of love known among creatures we reach an inadequate, but useful, conception of God’s love for humans. MIND is the Real, Energy is tis appearance. Matter is the form taken by radiation or energy. It is not that the truth lies between two extremes but that it lies above both. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
It is not a miracle that physical objects, minerals like coal and oil, can be turned into heat and light and power, that is, into energies, as humans are doing today?—that matter can be transmuted into electrical energy, which can be turned into sounds, pictures, sounds, and words as it is thrown across the World? However, what is the essence of this energy, whence does it come ultimately? Where else but from the Great Mind which activated the Universe? Physics derives the World of continents and creatures from energies; these in turn derive from a mysterious No-thing. There is no room here for materialism. For if nothing material can be found at that deep level, mathematical evidence points to Mind. The substance of matter has shifted from the visible World to an invisible one but precise, if difficult, mathematical formulas tell us that it is there, while exploding atomic bombs demonstrate its power. At this point matter disappears; its substance becomes its source. All things and all energies come from this source. It is the ONE, unique. It is life for us all and death for us all. Mind has its own energy, which mysteriously constructs forms in space and time, forms of planets, sun galaxies, the cosmos. Energy is expression in movement of the unseen substance. Matter is its apparent form. All things are made from it. We are a part of it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
At the very end of all their explorations of the atom, what do the scientists find? Empty space, no thing-in-itself, a gap out of which pour flashes of energy. The World-Mind acts by its own power, underived from any other source. This entire Universe is a tremendous manifestation—the One turned into the Many—of a single Energy, which in its turn is an aspect of a single Mind. Whatever its nature, every other force derives from this Energy, as every other form of consciousness derives from this Mind. The statement “Light is God” is meant in two sense: first, as the poetical and a physical fact that, in the present condition of the human being, one’s spiritual ignorance is equivalent to darkness and one’s discovery of God is equivalent to light; second, as the scientific fact that has verified in light, and since God has made the Universe out of His own substance, the light-waves are ultimately divine. The Light is World-Mind’s active and creative force. The Light of the World-Mind is the Source of the physical Universe; the Love of the World-Mind is its structural basis. All the forces of the physical World are derived from a single source—the solar energy. This energy which is within the cosmos, from which it is drawn by humans, this Life-Force, may be called “bio-electric” for its shows itself on one level as light, on another as the whole spectrum of colours. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Biology does not know or explain Life-Power, only its manifestations. What the scientist formerly called “radiant light” became the stuff of which Worlds are made; what the mystic visionary called “the body of God” and actually saw a mysterious light, is still present in the World in hence in all terrestrial life forms. If we seek an origin for the consciousness, however small finite and limited it may be, that a human possesses, none other can be found except the universal consciousness which informs the entire Universe and guides its development. All the different kinds of consciousness come from this Universal Mind. All the highest ideals and virtues of human consciousness come from it too. Even the simple religious faith indirectly has its rise there. It is the mysterious essence of all things and of nothing, the infinite presence that is everywhere and yet nowhere. Above all, it is at the very root of human’s inward being. Our roots are in the World-Mind. In that sense, our whole life is born and grows from it—physical and non-physical alike. There is our true Parent. Without this constant listening for intuitive guidance, and submission to it, we waste much time putting right the mistakes made or curing the sickness which could have been prevented or bemoaning the calamity which willpower could have averted. None of these are God’s will, but our own causation. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Being guided intuitively does not mean that every problem will be solved instantly as soon as it appears. Some solutions will not come into consciousness until almost the very last minute before they are actually needed. One learns to be patient, to let the higher power take its own course. We can thank intuition for many of the inventions that surround us every day. I know that intuition has invariably set me on the right track. My hunches come to me most frequently in bed, in a plane, or while staring out of a pullman window. When a problem really has me stumped I am apt to write down all the details as far as I can go, then put it aside to cool for forty-eight hours. At the end of that time I often find it’s solved itself….In any case, the most interesting sensations are the elation that accompanies the hunch and the feeling of certainty it inspires that the solution which has been glimpsed is right. Learn to relax. Intuition cannot operate when your conscious mind is tied up in knots. Among the best ways to relax are hobbies, provided they are not taken too seriously. These intrusions from a realm beyond conscious thinking may be Heavenly ones. If so, to resist them would be to lose much and to accept them would be to fain much. However, they have to be caught on the wing. Their delicate beginnings must be recognized for what they are—precious guides. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The more one follows this intuitive leading the more one not only learns to trust it but also develops future response to it. Truth consists in the equation of mind and things. Now the mind, that is the cause of the thing, is related to it as its rule and measure; whereas the converse is the case with the mind that receives its knowledge from things. When therefore things are the measure and rule of the mind, truth consists in the equation of the mind to the thing, as happens in ourselves. For according as a thing is, or is not, our thoughts or our words about it are true or false. However, when the mind is the rule or measure of things, truth consists in the equation of the thing to the mind; just as the work of an artist is said to be true, when it is in accordance with one’s art. Now as work of art are related to art, so are works of justice related to the law with which they accord. Therefore God’s justice, which establishes things in the order conformable to the rule of His wisdom, which is the law of His justice, is suitably called truth. Thus we also in human affairs speak of the truth of justice. Justice, as to the law that governs, resides in the reason or intellect; but as to the command whereby our actions are governed according to the law, it resides in the will. Virtue whereby a human shows oneself in word and deed such as one really is. Thus it consists in the conformity of the sign with the thing signified; and not in that of the effect with its cause and rule: as has been said regarding the truth of justice. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
God Almighty, Lord, sitter in the doorway, God of equilibrium, lovingkindness, and mercy: Thy who hold the opposites apart, Thy in whom all opposites unite, my prayer goes to Thy to open the passage, to clear the threshold, to make the way clear. Please, with the next turn on the wheel of, Fortuna, bring me luck. “I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the Earth will bring their splendour into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and honour of the nations will be brought into it. Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life,” reports Revelation 21.22-27. It is the duty of all creatures towards Thee, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to give thanks unto Thee, to laud, adore and praise Thee, even beyond all the words of song and praise uttered by David, the son of Jesse, Thine anointed servant. Praise by Thy name forever, O our King, Thou God and King, great and holy, in Heaven on Earth. For unto Thee, O Lord our God and God of our father, it is fitting to render song and praise, hymn and psalm, ascribing unto Thee power and dominion, victory and glory, holiness and sovereignty. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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The Secret to Happiness is Beauty—Beauty Cold and Austere!
Outside the kingdom of the Lord there is no nation which is greater than any other. God and history will remember your judgment. Many writers hold that fair equality of opportunity would have grave consequences. They believe that some sort of hierarchical social structure and a governing class with pervasive hereditary features are essential for public good. Political power should be exercised by humans experienced in, and educated from childhood to assume, the constitutional traditions of their society, humans whose ambitions are moderated by the privileges and amenities of their assured position. Otherwise the stakes become too high and those lacking in culture and conviction contend with one another to control the power of the states for their narrow ends. Thus it is believed that the great families of the ruling stratum contribute by the wisdom of their political rule to the general welfare from generation to generation. And restrictions on equality of opportunity such as primogeniture are essential to insure a landed class especially suited to political rule in virtue of its independence from the state, the quest for profit, and manifold contingencies of civil society. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Privileged family and property arrangements prepare those favoured by them to take a clearer view of the universal interest for the benefit of the whole society. Of course, one need not favour anything like a rigidly stratified system; one may maintain to the contrary that it is essential for the vigour of the governing class that persons of unusual talents should be able to make their way into it and be fully accepted. However, this proviso is compatible with denying the principle of fair opportunity. Now to be consistent with the priority of fair opportunity over the difference principle, it is not enough to argue that the whole of society including the least favoured benefit from certain restrictions on equality of opportunity. We must also clam that the attempt to eliminate these inequalities would so interfere wit the social system and the operations of the economy that in the long run anyway the opportunities of the disadvantaged would be even more limited. The priority of fair opportunity, as in the parallel case of the priority of liberty, means that we must appeal to the chances given to those with the lesser opportunity. We must hold that a wider range of more desirable alternatives is open to them than otherwise would be the case. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
The less definite claim that all of society benefits suffices only when circumstances justify giving up the lexical ordering and moving to an intuitive balancing of fair opportunity against social and economic benefits. These circumstances may or may not require us to abandon the lexical ordering of the principles of justice as well. The two orderings may come into play at different times. I shall not pursue these complications further. We should however note that although the internal life and culture of the culture of the family influence, perhaps as much as anything else, a child’s motivation and one’s capacity to gain from education, and so in turn one’s life prospects, these effects are not necessarily inconsistent with fair equality opportunity. Even in a well-ordered society that satisfies the two principles of justice, the family may be a barrier to equal chances between individuals. For as I have defined it, the second principle only requires equal life prospects in all sectors of society for those similarly endowed and motivated. If there are variations among families in the same sector in how they shape the child’s aspirations, then while fair equality of opportunity may obtain between sectors, equal chances between individuals will not. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
This possibility raises the questions as to how far the notion of equality of opportunity can be carried out; but I defer comment on this until later. I shall only remark here that following the difference principle and the priority rules it suggests reduces the urgency to achieve perfect equality of opportunity. I shall not examine whether there are sound arguments overriding the principle of fair equality of opportunity in favour of a hierarchical class structure. These matters are not part of the theory of justice. The relevant point is that while such contentions may sometimes appear self-serving and hypocritical, they have the right form when they exemplify the general conception of justice as it is to be interpreted in the light of the difference principle and the lexical ordering to which it tends. Infringements of fair equality of opportunity are not justified by a greater sum of advantages enjoyed by others or by society as a whole. If these inequalities were removed, the claim (whether correct or not) must be that the opportunities of the least favoured sectors of the community would be still more limited. One is to hold that they are not unjust, since the conditions for achieving the full realization of the principles of justice do not exist. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Having noted these cases of priority, each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all. Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just saving principle, and attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair and equality of opportunity. Frist Priority Rule (The Priority of Liberty)—the principles of justice are to be ranked in lexical order and therefore liberty can be restricted only for the sake of liberty. There are two cases: a less extensive liberty must strengthen the total system of liberty shared by all; a less than equal liberty must be acceptable to those with lesser liberty. Second Priority Rule (The Priority of Justice over Efficiency and Welfare)—the second principle of justice is lexically prior to the principle of efficiency and to that of maximizing the sum of advantages; and fair opportunity is prior to the difference principle. There are two cases: an inequality of opportunity must enhance the opportunity of those with the lesser opportunity; and excessive rate of saving must on balance mitigate the burden of those bearing this hardship. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
General Conception: All primary goods—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favoured. By way of comment, these principles and priority rules are no doubt incomplete. Other modifications will surely have to be made, but I shall not further complicate the statement of the principles. It suffices to observe that when we come to nonideal theory, we do not fall back straightway upon the general conception of justice. The lexical ordering of the two principles, and the valuations that this ordering implies, suggest priority rules which seem to be reasonable enough in many cases. By various examples I have tried to illustrate how these rules can be used and to indicate their plausibility. Thus the ranking of the principles of justice in ideal theory reflects back and guides the application of these principles to nonideal situations. It identifies with limitations need to be dealt with first. The drawback of the general conception of justice is that it lacks the definite structure of the two principles in serial order. In more extreme and tangled instances of nonideal theory there may be no alternative to it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
At some point the priority of rules for nonideal cases will fail; and indeed, we may be able to find no satisfactory answer at all. However, we must try to postpone the day of reckoning as long as possible, and try to arrange society so that it never comes. Sometimes old political cronies have the hardest time, for they cannot figure out why a conservative Republican would go against President Donald Trump. “Trump,” once officer hold shrugs, sighing in resignation, “well, he has just gone radical, that is all.” Gone radical. What a great term for it. Unfortunately, “radical” has taken on unpleasant, even nasty connotations in modern times. It suggests something un-American, like the violent protesters in 2020 who had riots all over America, for months on end, leading to the loss of many lives and hundreds of millions of dollars in destruction. These fiery-eyed extremists were upset and wanted their voices to be heard. However, the word “radical” comes from the Latin radix meaning “the root” or “the fundamental.” So it simply means going back to the original source or “getting to the root of things.” Indeed, in a World where values are being shaped by the fleeting fantasies of secular humanism, it is radical to stand for the fundamental truth of God, to go to the “root,” the Word of God. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
Love can forbear, and Love can forgive…but Love can never be reconciled to an unlovely object…He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person, because that may be restored. Believers today have many ancestral radicals in their family tree. In fact, the kingdom of God is full of them. John Wesley passionately argued that there could be “no holiness but social holiness….[and] to turn [Christianity] into a solitary religion is to destroy it.” Dr. Wesley was branded a radical for his famed St. Mary’s speech, an angry, but accurate denunciation of one’s fellow Oxford faculty members for their weak-kneed faith (he was never invited to speak there again). Later he captured the essence of radical holiness when he wrote: “Making an open stand against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness, which overspreads our land as a flood, is one of the noblest ways of confessing Christ in the face of His enemies.” Also, Dr. William Wilberforce has had a profound impact on my Christian life. That is why I refer so consistently to his radical stand for Christ in his culture and why I quote so often from a letter written by John Wesley to Wilberforce—then a recent convert. Dr. Wesley, who was to die only days later, commissioned Dr. Wilberforce to lead the radical campaign against slavery. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
I have carried this excerpt from Dr. Wesley’s letter in my Bible for the past seven years: “Unless the Divine Power has raised you up to be as Athanasius, contra mundum, I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of humans and devils, but if God be for you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? Oh, be not weary in well doing. Go on, in the name of God and in the power of His might, till even American slavery, the vilest that ever saw the sun, shall vanish away before it.” Dr. Wilberforce took his stand, at first but a single, lonely voice against a business that was the mainstay of the lucrative West Indies trade, employing some 5,500 sailors and 160 ships worth 6,000,000 pounds sterling a year. For twenty years the radical Dr. Wilberforce, later joined by a small group of Christian friends known as the Clapham Sect, fought the economic and political might of the British Empire. In the end, righteousness prevailed, and for the next half century a mighty revival swept across England and the New World. Contra mundum. Against the World. Radicals. Radical stands do, however, lead us into the briar patch of thorny questions about the Christian’s role in government and politics. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
First comes the issue of evil disobedience. When it directs them contrary to God’s law, many Christians must disobey their government. Yet Scripture plainly commands us to obey civil laws and to be in subjection to governing authorities. Is not this a clear conflict? No. However, to resolve it requires understanding a major biblical purpose of government. The origin of government goes back to humanity’s first sin, when to keep rebellions Adam and Eve away from the Tree of Life, Gd stationed an angel with flaming sword at the entrance to the Garden; this was, so to speak, the first officer on the beat. Thereafter the Bible makes clear that government was established as God’s means for restraining human’s sin. Avaricious as it is by nature, government has today strayed far from its biblical purposes; it is hard to imagine how subsidizing college professors or controlling tobacco crops, laudable though such ventures may seem, can be considered as necessary for preserving order and maintaining justice. So the Christian, when weighing one’s biblical responsibility toward governments, may draw ethical distinctions between a government’s exercise of a clear biblical mandate and the exercise of some illegitimate function. God’s people are enjoined to submit to those in authority not because governments are inherently sanctified, but because the alterative is anarchy. In its sinfulness, humanity would quickly destroy itself. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Government, then, is biblically ordained for the purpose of preserving order, but, as Francis Schaeffer writes, “God has ordained that State as a delegated authority; it is not autonomous.” So when government violates what God clearly commands, it exceeds its authority. At that point, the Christian is no longer bound to be in submission, but can be compelled to open and active disobedience. Dr. Carl Henry sums up the Christian duty: “If a government puts itself above the norms of civilized society, it can be disobeyed and challenged in view of the revealed will of God; if it otherwise requires what conscience disallows, one should inform government and be ready to take the consequences.” John Knox, the great Scottish lawyer and theologian, advocated Christian revolution under such circumstances—to the shock of the Christian World of the sixteenth century. Furthermore, the Bible provides clear precedence for civil disobediences. Moses’ parents are cited approvingly for their decision to hide their child from Egyptian officials, as are Daniel and his friends for their refusal to bow before the statue of Nebuchadnezzar. In the days following Pentecost, Peter and John defied the orders of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish governing body, who ordered the disciples to stop speaking of Jesus. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Most cases are not this clear-cut; of course, and therefore the Christian response can never be made lightly or automatically. Only after seeking every other remedy, after prayer, consultation with Christian brothers and sisters, and a thorough search of Scripture should civil disobedience be employed. The second thorny question is whether man and women who seek to be faithful to Christ can serve in public office. My answer is yes. For if Christ is not only truth, but the truth of life and all creation, then Christians belong in the political arena, just as they belong in all legitimate fields and activities, that “the blessings of God might show forth in every area of life,” to quote the great Puritan pastor Dr. Cotton Mather. Indeed, it is the Christian’s duty to see that God’s standards of righteousness are upheld in the governing process. This may be accomplished from within the structures themselves or from the outside by organizing public pressure to influence the system. Or, it may have to be done as President Trump did by taking a stand in open defiance of the system. This, then, leads us to the third and perhaps the thorniest questions: can Christians be vigorous advocates for justice and morality without destroying the separation of church and state? The New Testament is clear: there is to be no merger of church and state until Christ returns and the kingdoms of this World become “the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
However, we can make our country the Kingdom of God and wrap Christianity in our national flag. This is one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Yet, keep in mind that Christianity’s goal is not power, but justice. We are to seek to make the institutions of power just, without being corrupted by the process necessary to do this. It requires a delicate balance, and Deity is our role model: God in His sheer power could have crushed Satan in his revolt by the use of that sufficient power. However, because of God’s character, justice came before the use of power alone. Therefore Christ died that justice, rooted in what God is, would be the solution…Christ’s example, because of who He is, is our standard, our rule, or measure. Therefore power is not first, but justice is first in society and law. All my life I sought money, power, success because they were the keys to life—or so I thought—to security. I was influenced, like most people of the 2020 pandemic and those of the Great Depression, by memories of breadlines and parents worrying whether there would be enough money for food, mortgage, rent, transportation, medical bills, water and electricity. The vision of the American dream drove this immigrant’s great, great grandson and I believed with determination, education, and hard work I could become successful. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Money and property were the keys to the kingdom where I could lock the door against poverty, want, fear, and insecurity. Law school only deepened my convictions about the importance of private property. (In the post-war era, property courses in law school outnumbered courses about individual rights by at least 4 to 1; there were, incidentally, no courses on ethics. Then, I discovered that practicing law like most businesses: the most desirable clients were those able to play the most. So I began to spend my time almost exclusively with corporate executives or individuals with resources. I became convinced that law—justice, that is—functioned to protect the individual’s property and to act as the ultimate arbitrator in a mercantile society. Thus I saw my mission to be one of using my persuasive abilities in Congress or in the courts on behalf of those whose economic interests I represented (and by whom, not incidentally, I was very well paid). Justice was, in short, the sum of the riles and policies I tried to shape. When I moved into politics, my task was not really any different, expect my clients became the politicians I served, the political convictions I had formed, the party platform, and those whose campaign contributions or influence could get them through the most imposing security of the White House gates. I guess 6 January 2021 changed all that. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
I used to scoff at the protestors who could not get through those gates. “Law is not made in the street but in the halls of government,” was a favourite expression of President Trump. A nice way of saying that justice was determined by those of us who controlled the levers of political power. Ultimately, of course, I saw justice as the instrument for removing from society, and punishing, those who refused or were unable to live by the rules people like myself made. To be sure I had fundamental convictions about individual liberty and, as a student of Dr. Locke and Dr. Jefferson, believed deeply in human’s inalienable rights and the preservation of individual freedoms. However, my basis for judgment (as well as the causes and individuals I fought for) was almost entirely subjective, hence dangerously vulnerable to every whim and passion. The brighter I became, the more dangerous I was; the more power I acquired, the more power, or as some might say witchcraft, acquired me. For me, my view of life was through such narrow openings as the elegantly draped windows of McMansions, and my vistas were of lush green laws, a forest of trees, manicured bushes, beautiful roses and flowers and proud edifices housing the corridors of power. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
However, I started to see a breakdown of power when the media and social media was able to censor the president, but no one sensors the reporters spewing lies like an erupting volcano in Hawaii. Yet, it is in the breakdown of power rather than in its triumph that humans may discern its true nature and in awareness of their own inadequacy when confronted with such a breakdown that they can best understand who and what they are. I met a man, a former small-town bank president doing three years for a first offense conviction of $3,000.00 tax fraud. So deep were the wounds of years of fruitless appeals that his face was drawn and gaunt. He was the first flesh-and-blood casualty I met of the great economic wars targeting the wealth, rich, famous, and up-and-coming. I thought, he must have ran afoul of one of those quirks or loopholes engineered in the Internal Revenue Code. I also met a filling station owner, he was doing six months for having cashed a customer’s $84 check which was later proved to be stolen. First offense, too. His harsh sentence was the result of some ambitious prosecutor making a name for himself and a judge with a mean streak and a reputation for impulsiveness and senility. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
A moon-faced African American bloke with doleful eyes came to talk with me, insisting he did not know what his sentence was. Certainly he was playing dumb to win my sympathy and legal assistance, I brushed him aside. Some days later, to my astonishment, I discovered he was sincere. A court-appointed lawyer had given him twenty minutes, persuaded him to plead guilty to a charge of knowingly purchasing stolen property, and marched him terrified and handcuffed before a judge who mumbled something about not knowing anything about the case, four years to life and cracked the gavel with that sound no defendant ever forgets, then laughed about winning. This young man, who had never been in jail before, had spent the next thirty days fending for his life, crouched in the corner of a holding cell jail. For weeks after arriving at the prison, he cowered like a dog who had been beaten. These men were not exceptions. Most of those in the prison were poor; of if they had had any money, it had been wiped out by their enormous trial costs. I had seen such despair and suffering, that I began to see through the eyes of the powerless. A young blonde mother, and her two platinum blonde boys had their mansion foreclosed on because their father never returned from work. Aaliyah’s plane crashed killing her and nine others, and just days later the Twin Towers in New York were knocked down, killings over 3,300 people. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
I began to understand why God views society not through the princes of power, but through the eyes of the sick and needy, the oppressed and downtrodden. I began to realize why in demanding justice God spoke not through the easily corrupted kings, but through peasant prophets who in their own powerlessness could see and communicate God’s perspective. As a result, I learned to thank the Lord for letting me see how hard some people have it so I would never become one who abused power to make others suffer and die needlessly. I learned that power does not equal justice. However, the Christian who breaks radically with the power of the World is far from powerless—another kingdom of paradox. For example, some might think that in surrendering the power of his presidency, Dr. Donald Trump forfeited any chance to influence the justice system in this country and the greater World. However, the verdict on that is not in yet, and reform efforts are actively underway in America to ensure the American Dream, protect private property, corporations, the border, and the less affluent all because of President Trump. At the very least, his move exposed the fake news media and revealed a system of injustice to eyes that might never otherwise have seen it. In my own life it is certainly clear that my powerlessness has been used by God to influence the World. More than anything I could ever do in an office of Worldly power. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
If we would love God, we must love His justice and act upon it. Then, taking a holy, radical stand—contra mundum if need be—we surrender the illusion of power and find it replaced by True Power. We have to end the pattern of backbreaking labour and slow starvation. One day the hopelessness becomes too much to bear. However, never give up. You never know how much your testimony, writings on truth and freedom may one day enflame the whole World. Such is the power of God’s truth affords one person willing to stand against seemingly hopeless odds. Such is the power of the cross. Americans love one another. They never fail to help widows; they save orphans from those who would hurt them. If they have something they give freely to the person who has nothing; if they see a stranger, they take that person home, and are happy, as though one were a real brother or sister. They do not consider themselves siblings in the usual sense, but siblings instead through the Spirit, in God. If God is wiser than we, His judgment must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
However, the doctrine of Total Depravity—when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing—may this turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship. The escape from this dilemma depends on observing what happens, in human relations, when the human of inferior moral standards enters the society of those who are better and wiser than one and gradually learns to accept their standards—a process which, as it happens, I can describe fairly accurately, since I have undergone it. The spiritual hospital leaves room for some pretty weak and needy people and some distressing events in the process, but no room for doubt concerning where it all is to come out. The local groups of disciples, in the usual case, will certainly have people at all stages of the journey. They can be compared to the hospitals, with people at various stages of recovery and progress toward healthy. Some will be undergoing radical surgery or other strong treatments. Some will be in the Intensive Care Unit. Others will be taking their first wobbly steps after a lengthy time bed-ridden. And others will be showing the flus of health and steady strength as they get ready to resume their ordinary life. Parallels to these stages should be found in every church, and explicitly recognized and treated as such. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
And in addition, there would be those who are stepping out strongly in a strength of life that far exceeds just not being “sick” (sin-ridden), and there would be old warriors with many battle scares and many victories, with the steady gleam of “a better country” (Hebrews 11.16) in their eyes. What these local congregations look like is spelled out in more detail in the rest of Ephesians (4.17-6.24). It would be worth the reader’s time at this point to step aside and review this brilliant passage. However, here, given all the foregoing, we can perhaps just say that those local congregations are made up of the children of light who light up their World. The Ephesians passage makes it starkly clear that the ones described are the ones in whom spiritual formation in Christlikeness has done and is doing its steady, ongoing work. They are the emerging and the mature children of light, and they “shine like lights” in a darkened World, “blameless and innocent, children of God above reproach innocent, children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse population,” reports Philippians 2.15. God of eloquence, please teach me to pray. Open my moth that the words might come forth. Please open my heart that the words might ring true. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
May I be filled with the fire of God, the threefold king who inspires the artist, writer, craftsman, healer and everyone else. Lord God, opener of the door, please guide to the ways between, gatekeepers of the Heavens, please open the pathway, that all I wish for might be accomplished. Who is like unto Thee, who is equal to Thee, who can be compared to Thee, O great, mighty, revered and supreme God, Possessor of Heaven and Earth? We will praise, laud and glorify Thee; we will bless Thy holy name in the words of the Psalm of David: Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless His holy name. Thou art God by the power of Thy might; Thou art great by the glory of Thy name, mighty unto everlasting and revered by Thy name, mighty unto everlasting and revered by Thy awe-inspiring deeds; Thou, O King, sittest upon a throne high and exalted. Thou who inhabitest eternity, Thy name is Exalted and Holy and it is written: Rejoice in the Lord, O ye righteous; it is befitting for the upright to praise Him. By the words of the righteous, Thou shalt be blessed; by the tongue of the faithful, Thou shalt be extolled; and in the midst of the holy, Thou shalt be sanctified. In the assemblies of the multitudes of Thy people, the House of America, The name, O our King, shall be glorified with song in every generation. “This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let one calculate the number of the beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666,” reports Revelation 13.18. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Nobody Can Meddle with Fire or Poison without Being Affected in Some Vulnerable Spot!
Eggheads of the World unite; you have nothing to lose but your yolks. As my life entered it second half, I was already embarked on the confrontation with the contents of the unconscious. My work on this was an extremely long-drawn-out affair, and it was only after some twenty years of it that I reached some degree of understanding of my fantasies. First I had to find evidence for the historical prefiguration of my inner experiences. That is to say, I had to ask myself, “Where have my particular premises already occurred in history?” If I had not succeeded in finding such evidence, I would never have been able to substantiate my ideas. Therefore, my encounter with alchemy was decisive for me, as it provided me with the historical basis which I had hitherto lacked. Alchemy is the medieval forerunner of chemistry, based on the supposed transformation of matter. It was concerned particularly with attempts to convert base metal into gold or to fund a universal elixir. Necromancy is the practice of magic involving communication with the dead—either by summoning their spirits as apparitions, visions or raising them bodily—for the purpose of divination, imparting the means to foretell future events, discover hidden knowledge, to bring someone back from the dead, or to use the dead as a weapon. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Sometimes referred to as “Death Magic,” necromancy may also sometimes be used in a more general sense to refer to black magic or witchcraft. Necromancy and alchemy are semantically related in some cases. Some believe alchemy is a form of necromancy where energy is harvested to manipulate the souls of the dead and bring them back to life. Necromancers prefer to summon the recently departed based on the premise that their revelations were spoken more clearly. This timeframe was usually limited to the twelve months following the death of the physical body; once this period elapsed, necromancers would evoke the deceased’s ghostly spirit instead. The apparent value of their counsel may not have only been their physical form or ability in life, but information and knowledge the subjected learned while they were dead. The Book of Deuteronomy explicitly warns the Israelites against engaging in the Canaanite practice of divination from the dead. “When thou art come into the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do according to the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you any one who maketh one’s son or one’s daughter to pass through the fire, or who useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
“For all who do these things are an abomination unto the LORD, and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out before thee,” reports Deuteronomy 18.9-12. Though Mosaic Law prescribed the death penalty to practitioners of necromancy, this warning was not always heeded. “A man or a woman who is a medium or spiritist among you must be put to death. You are to stone them; their blood will be on their own heads,” reports Leviticus 20.27. One of the foremost explains is when King Saul had the Witch of Endor invoke the spirit of Samuel, a judge and prophet, from Sheol using a ritual conjuring pit (1 Samuel 28.3-25). However, the witch was shocked at the presence of the real spirit of Samuel for in I Samuel 28.12 it was reported, “When the woman saw Samuel, she cried out at the top of her voice and said to Saul, ‘Why have you deceived me? You are Saul!’ The king said t her, ‘Don’t be afraid. What do you see?’ The woman said, ‘I see a spirit coming from the ground,’” reports 1 Samuel 28.12-13. Saul did not receive a death penalty (his being the highest authority in the land) but he did receive it from God Himself as prophesied by Samuel during that conjuration—within a day he died in battle along with his son Jonathan. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Some Christians writers reject the idea that humans can bring back the spirits of the dead and believed that these are demons in disguise, thus conflating necromancy with demon summoning. It is also believed that even the working shells of these people provide benefit. Supposedly demons only act with divine permission and are permitted by God to test Christian people. Yet, some Christians believe that necromancy is real (along with other facets of occult magic) but that God has not allowed Christians to deal with those spirits. “The nations you will dispossess listen to those who practice sorcery or divination. However, as for you, the LORD your God has not permitted you to do so. The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him,” reports Deuteronomy 18.14-15. Still some believe the phantom of Samuel to be a trick. However, many people in the 18th and 19th centuries used to hold seances to assist them in the intellectual and spiritual affairs. One of these spiritualists was Sarah Winchester. Mrs. Winchester would go to the blue séance room in her mansion and consult with spirits. She used to planchette board to transmit messages from the dead and that is where she supposed receive the architectural blue prints for her mansion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Medieval practitioners believed they could accomplish things with the use of necromancy, and perhaps Mrs. Winchester was getting plans about her beautiful mansion from her late husband William Writ Winchester. It is believed that necromancers can manipulate the mind and will of another person, animal, or spirit. That they can summon demons to cause various afflictions on others, to drive them mad, inflame love or hatred, gain favour, or constrain one from a deed. The magic often involves reanimation of the dead, conjuring food, entertainment, or a mode of transportation. Also, knowledge is supposedly discovered when demons provide information about various things. This might involve identifying criminals, finding missing items, or revealing future events. Sacrifice was the payment for summoning; though it may involve the flesh of a human being or an animal, it could sometimes be as simple as offering a certain object. This is probably why God does not like humans to use witchcraft. Innocent lives were sometimes lost of personal gain. “When you enter the land of your LORD your God is giving you, do not learn to imitate the detestable ways of nations there. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
“Let no one be found among you who sacrifices one’s son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or cast spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead,” reports Deuteronomy 18.9-11. Analytical psychology is fundamentally a natural science, but it is subject far more than any other science to the personal bias of the observer. The psychologist must depend therefore in the highest degree upon historical and literacy parallels if one wishes to exclude at least the crudest errors in judgment. Between 1918 and 1926 I had seriously studied the Gnostic writers, for they had too been confronted with the primal World of the unconscious and had dealt with its contents, with images that were obviously contaminated with the World of instinct. Just how they understood these images remains difficult to say, in view of the paucity of the accounts—which, moreover, mostly stem from their opponents, the Church Fathers. It seems to me highly unlikely that they had a psychological conception of them. However, the Gnostics were too remote for me to establish any link with them in regard to the questions that were confronting me. As far as I could see, the tradition that might have connected Gnosis with the present seemed to have been severed, and for a long time it proved impossible to find any bridge that led from Gnosticism—or Neo-Platonism—to the contemporary World. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
However, when I begun to understand alchemy I realized that it represented the historical link with Gnosticism, and that a continuity there existed between past and present. Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed the bridge on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious. Light on the nature of alchemy began to come to me only after I had read the text of the Golden Flower, that specimen of Chinese alchemy which Richard Wilhelm sent me in 1928. I was stirred by the desire to become more closely acquainted with the alchemical text. I commissioned a Munich bookseller to notify me of any alchemical books that might fall into his hands. Soon afterwards I received the first of them, the Artis Auriferae Volumina Duo (1593), a comprehensive collection of Latin treatises among which are a number of the “classics” of alchemy. I let this book lie almost untouched for nearly two years. Occasionally I would look at the pictures, and each time I would think, “Good Lord, what nonsense! This stuff is impossible to understand.” However, it persistently intrigued me, and I made up my mind to go into it more thoroughly. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
The next winter I began, and soon found it provocative and exciting. To be sure, the texts still seemed to be blatant nonsense, but here and there would be passages that seemed significant to me, and occasionally I even found a few sentences which I thought I could understand. Finally I realized that the alchemist were talking in symbols—those old acquaintances of mine. “Why, this is fantastic,” I thought. “I simply must learn to decipher all this.” By now I was completely fascinated, and buried myself in the texts as often as I had the time. One night, while I was studying them, I suddenly recalled the dream that I was caught in the seventeenth century. At last I grasped its meaning. “So that is it! Now I am condemned to study alchemy from the very beginning.” It was a long while before I found my way about in the labyrinth of alchemical thought processes, for no Ariadne had put a thread into my hand. Reading the sixteenth-century text, “Rosarium Philosophorum,” I noticed that certain strange expressions and turns of phrase were frequently repeated. For example, “solve et coagula,” “unum vas,” “lapis,” “prima materia,” “Mercurius,” et cetera. I saw that these expressions were used again and again in a particular sense, but I could not make out what the sense was. I therefore decided to start a lexicon of key phrases with cross references. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
In the course of time I assembled several thousand such key phrases and words, and had volumes filled with excerpts. I worked along philological lines, as if I were trying to solve the riddle of an unknown language. In this way the alchemical mode of expression gradually yielded up its meaning. It was a task that kept me absorbed for more than a decade. I had very soon seen that analytical psychology coincided in a most curious way with alchemy. The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their World was my World. This was, of course, a momentous discovery: I had stumbled upon the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious. The possibility of a comparison with alchemy, and the interrupted intellectual chain back to Gnosticism, gave substance to my psychology. When I pored over these old texts everything fell into place: the fantasy-images, the empirical material I had gathered in my practice, and the conclusions I had drawn from it. I now began to understand what these psychic contents meant when seen in historical perspective. My understanding of their typical character, which had already begun with my investigation of myths, was deepened. The primordial images and the nature of the archetype took a central place in my researches, and it became clear to me that without history there can be no psychology, and certainly no psychology of the unconscious. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
A psychology of consciousness can, to be sure, content itself with material drawn from personal life, but as soon as we wish to explain a neurosis we require an anamnesis which reaches deeper than the knowledge of consciousness. And when in the course of treatment unusual decisions are called for, dreams occur that need more than personal memories for their interpretation. I regard my work on alchemy as a sign of my inner relationship to Prince Lestat. Lestat’s secret was that he was in the grip of that process of archetypal transformation which has gone on through the centuries. He was an opus magnum or divinum. This is his main business, and his whole life was enacted within the framework of this drama. Thus, what was alive and active within him was a living substance, a suprapersonal process the great dream of the mundus archetypus (archetypal World). I myself am haunted by the same dream, and from my eleventh year I have been launched upon a single enterprise which is my main business. My life has been permeated into the secret of personality. Everything can be explained from this central point, and all my works relate to this one theme. It is a remarkable fact, which we come across again and again, that absolutely everybody, even the most unqualified novice, thinks one knows all about psychology as though the psyche were something that enjoyed the most universal understanding. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
However, anyone who really knows that human psyche will agree with me when I say that it is one of the darkest and most mysterious regions of our experience. There is no end to what can be learned in this field. Hardly a day passes in my practice but I come across something new and unexpected. True enough, my experiences are not commonplaces lying on the surface of life. They are, however, within easy reach of every psychotherapist working in this particular field. It is therefore rather absurd, to say the least, that ignorance of the experiences I have to offer should be twisted into an accusation against me. I do not hold myself responsible for the shorting comings in the lay public’s knowledge of psychology. The treatment of neurosis opens up a problem which goes far beyond purely medical considerations and to which medical knowledge alone cannot hope to do justice. People are still very fond of describing a lengthy analysis as “running away from life,” “unresolved transference,” “auto-eroticism”—and by other equally unpleasant epithets. However, since there are two sides to everything, it is legitimate to condemn this so-called “hanging on” as negative to life only if it can be shown that it really does contain nothing positive. The very understandable impatience felt by the doctor does not prove anything in itself. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Only through infinitely patient research has the new science succeeded in building up a profounder knowledge of the nature of the psyche, and if there have been certain unexpected therapeutic results, these are due to the self-sacrificing perseverance of the doctor. Unjustifiably negative judgments are easily to come by and at times harmful; moreover they arouse the suspicion of being a mere cloak for ignorance if not an attempt to evade the responsibility of a thorough-going analysis. For since the analytical work must inevitably lead sooner or late to a fundamental discussion between “I” and “You” and “You” and “I” on a plane stripped of all human pretences, it is very likely, indeed it is almost certain, that no only the patient but the doctor as well will find the situation “getting under his skin.” Nobody can meddle with fire or poison without being affected in some vulnerable spot; for the true physician does not stand outside one’s work but is always in the thick of it. Christ can indeed be imitated even to the point of stigmatization without the imitator coming anywhere near the ideal of its meaning. For it is not a question of an imitation that leaves a person unchanged and makes ne int a mere artifact, but of realizing the ideal on one’s own account—Deo concedente—in one’s own individual life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
We must not forget, however, that even a mistake imitation may sometimes involve a tremendous moral effort which has all the merits of a total surrender to some supreme value, even though the real goal may never be reached and the value is represented externally. It is conceivable that by virtue of this total effort a human may even catch a fleeting glimpse of one’s wholeness, accompanied by the feeling of grace that always characterizes this experience. I for my part prefer the precious gift of doubt, for the reason that it does not violate the virginity of things beyond our ken. The Kingdom of God—Christians are taught that it is within you. However, Christ the ideal took upon himself the sins of the World. Therefore, if the ideal is wholly outside, then the sins of the individual are also outside, and consequently one is more fragmented than ever, since superficial misunderstanding conveniently enables one, quite literally, to “cast one’s sins upon Christ” and thus to evade one’s deepest responsibilities—which are contrary to the spirit of Christianity. Such formalism and laxity were not only one of the prime causes of the Reformation, they are also present within the body of Protestantism. If the supreme value (Christ) and the supreme negation (sin) are outside, then the soul is void: its highest and lowest are missing. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
People in the New World, whose soul is evidently of little worth, speak and think. If much were in one’s soul, one would speak of it with reverence. However, since one does not do so we can only conclude that there is nothing of value in it. Not that this is necessarily so always and everywhere, but only with people who put noting into their souls and have all God outside. An exclusive religious projection may rob the soul of its values so that through sheer inanition it becomes incapable of further development and gets stuck in an unconscious state. At the same time it falls victim to the delusion that the cause of all misfortune lies outside, and people no longer stop to ask themselves how far it is their own doing. So insignificant does the soul seem that it is regarded as hardly capable of evil, much less of good. However, if the soul no longer has any part to play, religious life congeals into externals and formalities. However we may picture the relationship between God and the soul, one thing is certain: that the souls cannot be nothing but. (Nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort.) On the contrary it has the dignity of an entity endowed with consciousness of a relationship to Deity. One’s first step is to detect the presence of the higher Power consciously in oneself through vigilantly noting and cultivating the intuitions it gives one. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
One must educate oneself to recognize the first faint beginners of the intuitive mood and train oneself to drop everything else when its onset is noticed. Intuitive feelings are so easily and hence so often drowned in the outer activity of the body, the passions, the emotions, or the intellect, that only a deliberate cultivation can safeguard and strengthen them. We may ardently want to do what is wholly right and yet not know just what this is. This is particularly possible and likely when confronted with two rads and when upon the choice between them the gravest consequences will follow. It is then that the mind easily becomes hesitant and indecisive. The search for the wisest choice may not end that day or that month. Indeed, it may not end until the last hour of the last day. This is how the aspirants are tested to see if they can humble the ego with the realization that they are no longer capable of making their own decision but must turn it over to the higher self and wait in quiet patience for the result. However, when finally the intuitive guidance does emerge after such deep, sincere, and obedient quest of God’s will, it will do so in a formulation so clear and self-evidence as to be beyond all doubt. One has to bring one’s problems and lay them at the feet of the higher self and wait in patience until an intuitive response does come. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
However, this is not to say that one has to lay them before one’s timid fears or eager wishes. The first step is to take them out of the hold of the anxious fretting intellect or the blind egoistic emotional self. Even if it were only the relationship of a drop of water to the sea, that sea would not exist but for the multitude of drops. The immortality of the soul insisted upon by strict and rigid doctrines exalts it above the transitoriness of mortal humans and cases it to partake of some supernatural quality. It thus infinitely surpasses the perishable, conscious individual in significance, so that logically the Christian is forbidden to regard the soul as “nothing but.” The strict and rigid doctrine that humans are formed in the likeness of God weigh heavily in the scales in any assessment of humans—not to mention the Incarnation. As the eye to the sun, so the soul corresponds to God. Since our conscious mind does not comprehend the soul it is ridiculous to speak of the things of the soul in a patronizing depreciatory manner. Even the believing Christian does not know God’s hidden ways and must leave one to decide whether one will work on humans from outside or from within, through the soul. So the believer should not boggle at the fact that there are somnia a Deo missa (dreams sent by God) and illuminations of the soul which cannot be traced back to any external causes. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
It would be blasphemy to asset that God can manifest oneself everywhere save only in the human soul. Indeed the very intimacy of the relationship between God and the soul precludes from the start any devaluation of the latter. The fact that the devil too can take possession of the soul does not diminish its significance in the least. It would be going perhaps too far to speak of an affinity; but at all events the soul must contain in itself the faculty of relationship to God, id est, a correspondence, otherwise a connection could never come about. It is therefore psychologically quite unthinkable for God to be simply the “wholly other,” for a “wholly other” could never be one of the soul’s deepest and closet intimacies—which is precisely what God is. The only statements that have psychological validity concerning the God-image are either paradoxes or antinomies. This correspondence is, in psychological terms, the archetype of the God-image. It may easily happen, therefore, that a Christian who believes in all the sacred figures is still undeveloped and unchanged in one’s inmost soul because one has all God outside and does not experience God in the soul. The great events of our World as planned and executed by humans do not breathe the spirit of Christianity but rather of unadorned paganism. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
These Worldly events originate in a psychic condition that has remained archaic and has not been even remotely touched by Christianity. The human soul is out of key with one’s beliefs; in one’s soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. One of the first steps is to watch out for those infrequent moments when deeply intuitive guidance, thoughts, or reflections make their unexpected appearance. As soon as hey are detected, all other mental activities should be thrown aside, all physical ones should be temporarily stilled, and one should sink oneself in them with the utmost concentration. Even if one falls into a kind of daze as a result, it will be a happy and fortunate event, possibly a glimpse. The secret is to stop, on the instant, whatever one is going just then, or even whatever one is saying, and reorient all one’s attention to the incoming intuition. The incompleted act, the broken sentence, should be deserted, for this is an exercise in evaluation. The whole of this quest is really a struggled toward a conception of life reflecting the surpreme values. Hence throughout its course the aspirant will feel vague intuitions which one cannot formulate. Only a master can do that. It is better to wait, if intuition is not at once apparent, till all favourable facts are found and till full knowledge is gained of the unfavourable ones before deciding an issue. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
The intuition grows by use of it and obedience to it. The intuitive faculty can be deliberately cultivated and consciously trained. Christian education has done all that is humanly possible, but it has not been enough. Too few people have experienced the divine image as the innermost possession of their own souls. Christ only meets them from without, never rom within the soul; that is why dark paganism still reigns there, a pasanism which, not in a form so blatant that it can no longer be denied and now in all too threadbare disguise, is swamping the World of the so-called Christian civilization. Thinking carefully, attempting clarity, I ask God for inspiration. If our lips were adorned was the spacious firmament, were our eyes radiant as the sun and the moon, our hands spread forth to Heaven like the wings of the eagles, and our feet swift as hinds, we would still be unable to thank and bless Thy name sufficiently, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, for even one measures of the thousands upon thousands of kindnesses which Thou hast bestowed upon our fathers and upon us. Thy tender mercies have helped us, Thy loving kindnesses have not failed us, and Thou wilt not ever forsake us, O Lord our God. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Therefore, the limbs which Thou hast fashioned for us, and the soul which Thou hast breathed into us, and the tongue which Thou has set in our mouth, lo, they shall thank, bless, exalt and revere Thee. They shall proclaim Thy sovereignty, O our King. The Godhead is a great Void and has no direct connection with the cosmos. When the hour ripens for the latter to appear, there first emanates from the Godhead a mediator which is the active creative agent. This is the World-Mind. From the Void emerges the Central Point. The Point spreads the All. So the World-Mind and the Grans Universe appear in existence together. No thing is exactly like any other nor is any individual history the same as any other. No entity or circumstance is perpetuated: each passes away and the entity reappears later in another form. If the divine activity ceases in one Universe it continues at the same time in another. If our World-Mind returns to its source in the end, there are other World-Minds and other Worlds which continue. Creation is a thing without beginning and without end, but there are interludes and periods of rest just as there are in the individual’s own life in and outside the body. Logos in Greek means not only the word through which mind communicates or expresses itself but also the thought behind the word. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
So the Biblical phrase “In the beginning was the Logos” means that first of all there was the MIND, here divine mind. Humans need and speak numerous words to express themselves, but God needed and uttered only the one creative silent Word to bring this infinitely varied cosmos into being. However far we trace back the line of cause and effects it must come to an end in the lone cause, the great mystery which is the unseen power. The sign for infinite is a circle. The sign for unity is a vertical dash. Hence 9, the figure nine, combines both and the figure six also, but reversed. Unity is the creative beginning of all things and infinite is that wherein they dissolve. The World-Mind is the conscious Power sustaining all life, the intelligent energy sustaining all atoms, the divine being behind and within the Universe. Just as the echo can have no reality, no existence even, without the sound which originally produced it, so this entire Universe can have none without the Infinite Power from which originate and on which it is still dependent. Call it God or Allah, the Creator or Tao, it is the First, the Source, the Origin from which all energies and things come into being. The World-Mind is the creative principle of the Universe. The World-Mind eternally thinks this Universe into being in a pulsating rhythm of thought and rest. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
The process is as eternal as the World-Mind itself. The energies which accompany this thinking are electrical. The scientists note and tap the energies, and ignore the Idea and the Mind they are expressing. There is a double alternating movement within Mind: the first spreading out from itself towards multiplicity, the second withdrawing inwards to its own primal unity. Hidden behind the so-called material Universe is the Power which emanated it, which it present in all atoms. Hidden behind the Power is the eternal Mind. There is no power in the material Universe itself. All its forces and energies drive from a single source—the World-Mind—whose thinking is expressed by that Universe. Intuitive guidance comes not necessarily when we seek it, but when the occasion calls for it. It does not usually come until it is actually needed. The intellect, as part of the ego, will often seek it in advance of the occasion because it may be driven by anxiety, fear, desire, or anticipation. Such premature seeking is fruitless. “Then the angel I has seen standing on the sea and on the land raised his right hand to Heaven. And he swore by him who lives forever and ever, who created the Heavens and all that is in them, the Earth and all this is in it, and the sea and all that is in it, and said, ‘There will be no more delay! But in the days when the seventh angel is about to sound his trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished, just as he announced to his servants the prophets,’” reports Revelation 10.5-7. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
It may seem that our intents have been to weave a clock of vindication and protection covering our Lady’s eccentricities, so many to this day still unexplainable. In truth, volumes could be written extolling her many virtues and justifying construction of this usually beautiful and mysterious estate. Still the question remains—Why? Why? The enigma of the Winchester Estate that tragedy and a rifle built is perhaps unanswerable. The present generation must weigh and drawn its own conclusions about this Valley’s most interest, most controversial, most unappreciated and surely our most mysterious Frist Lady! Prior to all the gossip and rumors, Mrs. Winchester was social and happy. Living today are descents of people who still tell of parties in those incomparable gardens lush with acres of blooming flowerbed, boarded with rare dwarf boxwood and shaded by imported ornamental trees and shrubs. At one time, the Winchester Mansion was the center of high society.
The Winchester Estate is Open Today! We are happy to offer an opportunity to enjoy the Victorian Gardens on this beautiful day with a zero-contact, self guided tour complimented by informative visuals and educational sound clips. The strongest precautions are being taken to ensure the safety and health of our guests and employees, in accordance with city, county and state guidelines and protocols. winchestermysteryhouse.com
Genius Does What it Must—Cannot Make a Gentleman the Prince of Darkness!
The city room is an outhouse. You can get black lung by working on the rewrite desk for a week. They should pass a law against vaping, cigarettes, and the joint. There is need of a different kind, rooted exclusively in the human situation—the need for the development of a character structure. This need has to do with the phenomenon that was dealt with before, the decreasing significance of instinctive equipment in humans Effective behaviour presupposed that one can act immediately—that is, without being delayed by too much doubt and in a relatively integrated manner. It seems plausible to speculate that human beings, being still less determined by instinct than other terrestrial beings, would have been a biological failure if one had not developed a substitute for the instincts one lacked. This substitute also had to have the function of instincts: enabling one to act as if one were motivated by instincts. This substitute is the human character. Character is the specific structure in which human energy is organized in the pursuit of human’s goals; it motivates behaviour according to its dominate goals: a person acts “instinctively,” we say, in accordance with one’s character. Character is a human’s fate. The miser does not ponder whether one should save or spend; one is driven to save and to hoard; the exploitative-sadistic character is driven by the passion to exploit. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
The sadistic character is driven by the passion to control; the loving-productive character cannot help striving for love and sharing. These character-conditioned drives and strivings are so strong and unquestionable for the respective persons that they feel that theirs is simply a “natural” reaction, and find it difficult to really believe that there are other people whose nature is quite different. When they cannot help becoming aware of it, they prefer to think that these others suffer from some kind of deformation and are deviants from human nature. Anybody who has some sensitivity in judging other people (it is of course much more difficult with regard to oneself) sense whether a person has a sadistic or a destructive or a loving character; one sees enduring traits behind the overt behaviour and will be capable of sensing the insincerity of a destructive character who behaves as if one were a loving person. Sudden outburst of violence may be caused by brain disease, such as tumors, and such have, of course, nothing to do with depressive-bored states. Human groups from the very beginning have lived under very diverse environmental circumstances, regards different areas in the World and as regards fundamental changes of climate and vegetation within the same area. Since the emergence of Homo developed the less was a result of genetic changes, and the last forty thousand years such change is nil. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Yet these different environmental situations made is necessary for each group to adapt its behaviour to these respective situations, not only by learning but also by developing a “social character.” The concept of social character is based on the consideration that each form of society (or social class) needs to use human energy in the specific manner necessary for the functioning of that particular society. Its members want to do what they have to do if the society is to function properly. This process of transforming general psychic energy into specific psychosocial energy is mediated by the social character. The means by which social character is formed are essentially cultural. Through the agency of the parents, society transmits to the young its values, prescriptions, commands, et cetera. In more than a rudimentary sense, character is a human phenomenon; as far as we know human were able to create a substitute for their lost instinctive adaptation. The acquisition of character was a very important and necessary element in the process of human survival, but it has also many disadvantages and even dangers. Inasmuch as character is formed by traditions and motivates humans without appealing to one’s reason, it is often not adapted to or is sometimes even direct contradiction to new conditions. For example, concepts like the absolute sovereignty of the state are rooted in an older type of social character and are dangerous for the survival of humans in the atomic age. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The concept of character is crucial for the understanding of the manifestations of malignant aggression. The destructive and sadistic passions in a person are usually organized in one’s character system. In a sadistic person, for instance, the sadistic drive is a dominant part of one’s character structure and motivates ne to behave sadistically, limited only by one’s concern for self-preservation. In a person with a sadistic character, a sadistic impulse is constantly active, waiting only for a proper situation and a fitting renationalization to be acted out. Such a person corresponds almost completely to Lorenz’s hydraulic model inasmuch as character-rooted sadism is a spontaneously flowing impulse, seeking for occasions to be expressed and creating such occasions where they are not readily at hand by “appetitive behaviour.” The decisive difference is that the source of the sadistic passion lies in the character and not in a phylogenetically programmed neural area; hence it is not common to all humans, but only to those who share the same character. Human’s existential needs can be satisfied in different ways. The need for an object of devotion can be answered by devotion to God, love, and truth—or by idolatry of destructive idols. The need for relatedness can be answered by love and kindness—or by dependence, sadism, masochism, destructiveness, and narcissism. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The need for unity and rootedness can be answered by the passions for solidarity, brotherliness, love, and mystical experience—or by drunkenness, addition to harmful and intoxicating substances, depersonalization. The need for effectiveness can be answered by love, productive work—or by sadism and destructiveness. The need for stimulation and excitation can be answered by productive interest in humans, nature, art, ideas—or by a greedy pursuit of ever-changing pleasures. What are the conditions for the development of character—rooted passions? We consider first that these passions do not appear as single units but as syndromes. Love, solidarity, justice, reason are interrelated; they are all manifestations of the same productive orientation that I shall call the “life-furthering syndrome.” On the other hand, sadomasochism, destructiveness, greed, narcissism, incestuousness also belong together and are rooted in the same basic orientation: “life-thwarting syndrome.” Where one element of the syndrome is to be found, the other also exist in various degrees, but this does not mean that someone is ruled either by the one or by the other syndrome. In fact, people in whom this is the case are the exceptions: the average person is a blend of both syndromes; what matters for the behaviour of the person and the possibility of change is precisely the respective strength of each syndrome. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
As to the neurophysiological conditions for the development of the two respective kinds of passions, we must start out from the fact that humans are unfinished and “uncompleted.” Not only is the human brain not fully developed at birth, but the state of disequilibrium in which one finds oneself leaves one as an open-ended process to which there is no final solution. However, are humans—being deprived of the help of instincts and equipped only with the “weak reed” of reason by which one deceives oneself so easily—left without any help from one’s neurophysiological equipment? It seems that this assumption would miss an important point. One’s brain, so superior to that of the primate not only in size but also in the quality and structure of its neurons, has the capacity to recognize what kinds of goals are conducive to human’s health and growth, physically as well as psychically. It can set goals leading to the realization of human’s real, rational needs, and humans can organize one’s society in ways conducive to this realization. Humans are not only unfinished, incomplete, burdened by contradictions; one also can be defined as a being in active search of one’s optimal development, even though this search must often fail because external conditions are too unfavourable. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
The assumption that humans are a being in active search of their optimal development is not without support from neurophysiological data. Human’s capacity for intelligently directed self-development confers upon one the ability to determine the pattern of one’s culture and so to shape the course of human evolution in directions of one’s own choice. This ability, which no other terrestrial beings that we know of have, is human’s most distinctive characteristic, and it is perhaps the most significant fact known to since. It is now established beyond peradventure of doubt that various levels of nervous system organization are interdependently interrelated with one another. Somehow, by means that are still mysterious, purposive behaviour organized at each of these different levels of integrative function becomes expressed by a linked sequence of over-all purposes representing some kind of final judicious reckoning among contending functions. The purpose of the whole organism are clearly manifested and continuously served according to some integrated internal point of view. Some goal-seeking systems at the molecular level can be identified by physical-chemical techniques. Other goal-seeking systems at the level of the brain circuitry can be identified by neurophysiological techniques. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
At each level, parts of these systems are concerned with the appetites and satisfactions that govern behaviour. All of these goal-seeking systems originate in and are intrinsic to protoplasmic materials. Many such systems are peculiarly specialized and are located in particular nervous and endocrine systems. Evolutionarily elaborate organisms possess appetites and satisfactions, not only to fulfill vegetative needs; not simply for the obligate cooperations required for unions in pleasures of the flesh, the rearing of young, and the safeguarding of food, family and territory; not just for the adaptive behaviours essential to meet successfully the vicissitudes of environmental change; but also for extra energies, strivings, and outreaching—the extravagance that go beyond mere survival. The brain is a product of evolution, just as are teeth and claws; but we can expect much more of the brain because of its capacities for constructive adaptation. Neuroscientists can take as their long-range objective the understanding of the fullest potentialities of humankind in order to help humanity become more fully self-aware and to illuminate human’s nobler options. Above all, it is the human brain, with its capacities for memory, learning, communication, imagination, creativity, and the powers of self-awareness, that distinguishes humanity. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Cooperation, faith, mutual trust, and altruism are built into the fabric of the nervous system and propelled by internal satisfactions attached to them. Mammal and many other forms of life could not survive a single generation without built-in cooperative behaviour. A baby cannot exist alone, but is essentially part of a relationship. However complex the psychology of the sense of self and of the establishment of an identity eventually becomes as the baby grows, no sense of self emerges expect on the basis of this relation in the sense of BEING. This sense of being is something that antedates the idea of being-at-one with, because there has not yet been anything except identity. Two separate people can feel at one, but hereat the place that I am examining, the baby and the object are one. Many of my patients have suffered disturbances in the process of self-formation, and therapy can help them in specific ways to repair that early damage. I have become convinced that, to some extent at least, a properly conducted analysis of patients suffering from a disturbance in the formation of the self creates a psychological matrix that encourages the re-activation of the original development tendency. The nuclear self of the patient is consolidated, the talents and skills of the analysand that are correlated to the nuclear self are revitalized, while other aspects of the self are discarded or recede. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
In the state of primary narcissism, there is as yet no differentiation of self and object (usually an attachment figure like a parent, or may a house). Without this differentiation there can be no object-representation, and this makes it possible for the wonderful feelings of goodness, rightness, safety and omnipotence which belongs to that stage for the lucky ones. Yes, babies often feel like they are omnipotent because of a sense that is traced to what is called “oceanic feeling,” and it persists int adult life, or at least the longing for it persists. It is basically a narcissistic feeling of well-being, in conjunction with a feeling of union with some an all-powerful force—obviously the home-loving feelings. To my mind, narcissistic feelings come from the memory—traces of what it was like in the days of oceanic feelings and harmonious interpenetrating mix-up when the self and a beneficent and powerful (m)other were sill merged in the infant’s experience. This must have felt good. The baby’s self-esteem is determined by the gratification of its (instinctual) needs. The first supply of satisfaction from the external World is simultaneously the first regulator of self-esteem. When being gratified, the baby feels wonderful, indeed omnipotent. When the baby has a need which is not being satisfied, it fees irritated, frustrated, deprived, and it longs for what will remove the disturbing displeasure. The motivation comes from the wish to restore equilibrium. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The longing for the return of omnipotence and the longing for the removal of instinctual tension are not yet differentiated from each other. If one succeeds in getting rid of an unpleasant stimulus, one’s self-esteem is again restored. The individual’s experiences connected with omnipotence lead to a most significant need of the human mind. The longing for the oceanic feeling of primary narcissism can be called the “narcissistic need.” “Self-esteem” is awareness of how close the individual is to the original omnipotence. Its (instinctual) needs make the child dependent on the parent. However, the child actually renounces its own instinctual satisfaction. The tendency to participate in the parent’s omnipotence, after renunciation of one’s own, differentiates itself from the desire for instinctual satisfaction. Thereafter every token of love from the powerful adult has the same effect as the satisfaction of instinctual needs. The nature of the child’s dependence is thus changed. When the baby loses love, the small child loses self-esteem, and when one regains love the self-esteem also returns. This is what makes children so educable. They need supplies of affection so badly that they are ready to renounce other satisfactions if rewards of affection are promised or if withdrawal of affection is threatened. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The promise of necessary narcissistic supplies of affection under the condition of obedience and the threat of withdrawal of these supplies if the conditions are not fulfilled are the weapons of any authority. Some people behave as though any flaw, any difference of opinion, any lack in total harmony between them and an attachment figure or authority figure or even a peer is quite intolerable. When this occurs, they feel great distress and outrage, that their perhaps not yet even spoken thoughts and feeling had not been responded to by those people who are crafting their futures, and they require the full attention of these individuals so they can mirror their every move in an attempt to figure out what behaviours are proper decent. The individual is back in a development phase where one need a totally accurate and absolutely competent self-object. This way of relating is called “mirror-transference” and it is basically a revival of the “purified pleasure-ego,” in which the individual attempts to save the original all-embracing narcissism by concentrating perfection and power upon the self—here called the grandiose self—and by turning disdainfully aware from an outside to which all imperfections have been assigned. When children or mature people behave as though they are entitled to everyone’s deference and subservience, in ordinary life, we call them cheeky or demanding or pompous, and we respond by setting limits, through noncompliance, ridicule, scolding, or whatever. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
The self-object state of mind exists exactly to the extent that the mother is prompt to bring to the baby what it needs precisely at the moment the baby needs it. This confirms the illusion, so necessary at that stage, of harmony, security, and invulnerable power. For the self-object is the baby’s experience of its own competence, of its own power to have whatever it needs. We can get a glimpse of what this experience may feel like, in a sentence such as “To get what you want makes you feel grand, wonderful.” This sentence can mean both “makes you feel grand, wonderfully satisfied” and “makes you feel you are a grand, wonderful person.” This distinction between “I feel grand” and “I feel that I am grand” is more sophisticated than infants (and many adults) are capable of making. So the parents or care givers who are to prompt to cater to one’s baby keeps the baby feeling grand and confirms that baby’s sense of goodness and well-being. This promptness and accuracy of response is called “mirroring”: there is a symmetry between the baby’s phantasy-image of what it needs and the care giver’s intelligent caring supply of that need. I will often call it confirming, because it also confirms the baby’s sense of its own rightness: its right to exist, to have these needs, to have these gratifications. The confirming/mirroring process has important implications for the development of the infant’s sense of self. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
As if it has formed itself, the human environment reacts to even the smallest baby to confirm this idea. When, within the matrix of mutual empathy between the infant and its self-object, the baby’s innate potentialities and the self-object’s expectations converge, is it permissible to consider this juncture the point of origin of the infant’s primal rudimentary self? Accurate empathy is the first step in mirroring—knowing what the baby feels. Doing something about whatever is troubling the bay is the second step—but only the second. Except in extreme situations, the first is more important. The first requirement is not that something be done for the child; the first requirement is to understand and absorb what the child is experiencing and to communicate back some recognition and acceptance of its experience. In short, do not just shovel the silver spoon in, confirm the child’s right to hunger and satisfaction. When that happens in the right way, the child’s sense of itself is strengthened. The child then experiences hunger (or whatever), but not to such an extent that it becomes oppressed, humiliatingly dependent, or hurt—certainly not to the explosive extreme extent which would disrupt the emerging organization of self-structures. Gratifications also relate to beneficial satisfactions springing from buoyant health, vigorous and rested; delight accompanying both genetically endowed and socially acquired values; joys, solitary and shared feelings of pleasant excitement, engendered by exposure to novelty and during the quest for novelty. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
If anyone has a clear intuition about a matter, it would be foolish of one to trust intellect alone in the same matter. Gratifications result from satisfaction of curiosity and the pleasure of inquiry, from the acquisition of widening degrees of individual and collective freedom. Beneficial features of satisfaction enable humans to sustain unbelievable privations and yet to cling to life and, beyond that, to attach importance to beliefs tat may surpass the values of life itself. We do not have to speculate on which special area of the brain generates higher strivings, such as those for solidarity, altruism, mutual trust, and truth, but we must look at the brain system as a whole from the standpoint of its evolution in the service of survival. Empathy and love are qualities inherent in the brain system. How is it possible for two people to communicate, since language presupposed shared experience? Since the environment does not exist for humans by themselves but in their relationship to the human observer, communication presupposed that we find the like representation of environment in the two elements whoa re separated by their skins, but alike in their structure. When they realize and utilize this insight then A knows what A knows, because A identifies oneself with A and we have the equality I-Thou. Clearly, identification is the strongest coalition—and its mist subtle manifestation is love. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The intellect is one medium of understanding, the intuition is another. The intuition should give orders which the intellect should carry out. The reasoning and particularity needed to do so and to attend to their details will then be provided by the intellect itself. However, the original function of giving direction and the authority of giving command will be vested in the intuition alone. Intuition reaches a conclusion directly, without the working of any process of reasoned thinking. What the thinking in one cannot receive, the mystical intuition can. The secret has yielded itself again and again, but not to human’s logical thinking; it has yielded itself only to human’s subtle intuition. After long thought and observation I became aware of a second brain or gland, locked in the region of the heart, which commanded with authority. I discovered that most of the difficulties of life were the result of the head-brain attempting to do the work of the heart-brain. It was like a skilled labourer trying to assume the place of a high-powered engineer. The point which appears in space is a point of light. It spreads and spreads and spreads and becomes the World-Mind. God has emerged out of Godhead. And out of the World-Mind the World itself emerges—not all at once, but in various stages. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
From that great light come all other and lesser lights, come the suns and the planets, the galaxies, the Universes, and all the mighty hosts of creatures small and great, of being just beginning to sense and other fully conscious, aware, wise. And the World appear the opposite, the dual principle which can be detected everywhere in Nature, the equilibrium. The Lord is just, and hath loved justice. There are two kinds of justice. The one consists in mutual giving and receiving, as in buying and selling, and other kinds of intercourse and exchange. This the Philosopher calls commutative justice, that directs exchange and intercourse in business. This does not belong to God, since, as the Apostle says: “Who hath first given to Him, and recompense shall be made one?” (Romans 11.35). The other consists in distribution, and is called distributive justice; whereby a ruler or a steward gives to each what one’s rank deserves. As then the proper order displayed in a ruling family or any kind of multitude evinces justice of this kind in the ruler, so the order of the Universe, which is seen both in effects of nature and in effects of will, shows forth the justice of God. Hence Dionysius says (Div. Nim. Viii, 4): “We must needs see that God is truly just, in seeing how He gives to all existing things what is proper to the condition of each; and preserves the nature of each in the order and with the power that properly belong to it.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Certain of the moral virtues are concerned with the passions, as temperance wit concupiscence, fortitude with fear and daring, meekness with anger. Such virtues as these can only metaphorically be attributed to God; since, as stated above, in God there are no passions; nr a sensitive appetite, which is, as the Philosopher says, the subject of those virtues. On the other hand, certain moral virtues are concerned with works of giving and expending; such as justice, liberality, and magnificence; and these reside not in the sensitive faculty, but in the will. Hence, there is nothing to prevent out attributing these virtues to God; although not in civil matters, but in such acts as are not unbecoming to Him. For, as the Philosopher says, it would be absurd to praise God for His political virtues. Since good as perceived by intellect is the object of the will, it is impossible for God to will anything but what His wisdom approves. This is, as it were, is law of justice, in accordance with which His will is right and just. Hence, what He does according to His will He does justly: as we do justly what we do according to the law. However, whereas law comes to us from some higher power, God is a law unto Himself. Now is the time to be children of the light. That is where we now stand in our World. That is the situation we now have to deal with. We are beyond the point where mere talk—no matter how sound—can make an impression. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Demonstration is required. We must live what we talk, even in places where we cannot talk what we live. We stand again in the World of the first century, when children of light first entered it. The test is reality. If the bewildering array of spiritualities and ideologies that throng our times really can do what apprenticeship to Christ can do, what more is there to say? There is no effectual response to our current situation expect for the children of light to be who and what they were called to be by Christ their head. Mere “reason” and “fact” cannot effectively respond, because they are now under that same sway of public spirit and institutions as are the arts and public life generally—and indeed as much of the “church visible” as well. Only when those who really do know that Jesus Christ is the light of the World take up their stand with him, and fulfill their calling from him to be children of light where they are, will there by any realistic hope of stemming the tide of evil and showing the way out of that tide for those who really want out. The call of Christ today is the same as it was when he left us here to serve him “even to the end of the age,” reports Matthew 28.20. We have not yet come to the “end of the age.” That call is to be his apprentices, alive in the power of God, learning to do all he said to do, leading others into apprenticeship to him, and also teaching them how to do everything he said. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
If we follow that call today in our Christian groups to become the children of the light, the morbid and difficult moments can be replaced by hope and light offered through the gospel of Jesus Christ, as it did in past time. Also, the most important thing happening in our communities will be what is happening in our churches. “Let your light so shine before humans, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father in Heaven,” reports Matthew 5.14-16. And now that we know, from our studies here, what it takes to become mature children of the light, how could we possibly be excused from not taking that open path and leading others to it. We will then, once again, see among us the presence of God who answers by fire. As Moses said to the Lord long ago: “Is it not by Thy going with us, that we, I and Thy people, may be distinguished from all the other people who are upon the face of the Earth?” (Exodus 33.16). As coins pouring from your lap, please rain down your gifts and blessings on me, Prosperous One. As plants turning green in the spring, please bring prosperity into my life, Lord of Fertility. As Ultimate Driving Machines being brought from the factory to the dealership, please send riches into my life, Great Ultimate Driving Machine. Please walk beside me, Lord of Strength, as I undergo trial. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Controller of the riches beneath the Earth, fertilizer of all life upon it, distributor of the wealth that arises from it: Lord of the Earth, Lord of Wealth, when sharing out your bounty, please do not forget me, who am faithful in your service. The breath of every living being shall bless Thy name, O Lord our God, and the spirit of all flesh shall ever glorify and extol Thee, O our King. From everlasting to everlasting Thou art God. However, for Thee we have no King, Deliverer and Saviour to rescue, redeem and give sustenance and to show mercy in all times of trouble and distress; yea, we have no Sovereign but Thee. Thou wert God from the beginning even as Thou wilt be God until the end. Thou art God of all that lives, Lord of all generations, extolled in manifold praises. Thou guidest Thy World with loving kindness and Thy creatures with tender compassion. Thou dost not slumber nor sleep; Thou arousest those that sleep, and awakenest those that slumber. Thou causest the uneducated to speak, loosest the bound, supportest the falling and raisest up those that are bowed down. To Thee alone d we give thanks. Were our mouth filled with song as the sea, our tongues with joyful praise as the multitude of its waves, our lips with adoration as the spacious firmament. Father, please help me, I am calling to you! My need is great, but your power is greater. I know you will prevail over the troubles that beset me. You who created all things, please give birth to what I desire; bring it to pass. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Randolph Harris II International 