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Stars Now Folded in the Flowerless Fields of Heaven
The only complete love is for God. The goal is to love everyone equally, but it does not necessarily work out that way. Theology might possibly take the psychological self as an allegory of Christ. This opposition is, no doubt, very irritating, but unfortunately inevitable, unless psychology is to be denied the right to exist at all. I therefore plead for tolerance. Nor is this very hard for psychology since as a science it makes no totalitarian claims. The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of Buddha. We can see this from the scope and substance of all the pronouncements that have been made about Christ: they agree with the psychological phenomenology of the self in unusually high degree, although they do not include all aspects of this archetype. The almost limitless range of the self might be deemed a disadvantage as compared with the definiteness of a religious figure, but it is by no means the task of science to pass value judgment. Not only is the self indefinite but—paradoxically enough—it also includes the quality of definiteness and even of uniqueness. This is probably one of the reasons why precisely those religions founded by historical personages have become World religions, such as Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The inclusion is a religion of a unique human personality—especially when conjoined to an indeterminable divine nature—is consistent with the absolute individuality of the self, which combines uniqueness with the absolute individuality of the self, which combines uniqueness with eternity and the individual with the universal. The self is a union of opposites par excellence, and this is where it differs essential from the Christ-symbol. The androgyny of Christ is the utmost concession the Church has made to the problems of opposites. The opposition between light and good on the one hand and darkness and evil on the other is left in a state of open conflict, since Christ simply represents good, and his counterpart the devil, evil. This opposition is the real World problem, which at present is still unsolved. The self, however, is absolutely paradoxical in the it represents in every respect thesis and antithesis, and at the same time synthesis. (Psychological proofs of this assertion abound, though it is impossible for me to quite them here in extenso. I would refer the knowledgeable reader to the symbolism of the mandala.) Once the exploration of the unconscious has led the conscious mind to an experience of the archetype, the individual is confronted with the abysmal contradictions of human nature, and this confrontation in turn leads to the possibility of a direct experience of light and darkness, of Christ and the devil. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
For better or worse there is only a bare possibility of this, and not a guarantee; for experiences of this kind cannot of necessity be induced by any human means. There are factors to be considered which are not under our control. Experience of the opposites has nothing whatever to do with intellectual insight or with empathy. It is more what we would call fate. Such an experience can convince one person of truth of Christ, another of the truth of the Buddha, to the exclusion of all other evidence. Without the experience of the opposite there is no experience of wholeness and hence no inner approach to the sacred figures. For this reason Christianity rightly insists on sinfulness and original sin, with the obvious intent of opening up the abyss of universal opposition in every individual—at least from the outside. However, this method is bound to break down in the case of a moderately alert intellect: dogma is then simply no longer believed and on top of that is thought absurd. Such an intellect is merely one-sided and sticks at the ineptia mysterii. It is miles from Tertullian’s antinomies; in fact, it is quite incapable of enduring the suffering such a tension involves. Cases are not unknown where the rigorous exercises and proselytizings of the Catholics, and a certain type of Protestant education that is always sniffing out sin, have brought about psychic damage that leads not to the Kingdom of Heaven but to the consulting room of the doctor. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Although insight into the problem of opposites is absolutely imperative, there are very few people who can stand it in practice—a fact which has not escaped the notice of the confessional. By way of a reaction to this we have the palliative of “moral “probabilism,” a doctrines that has suffered frequent attack from all quarters because it tries to mitigate the crushing effect of sin. Whatever one may think of this phenomenon one thing is certain: that apart from anything else it holds within it a large humanity and an understanding of human weakness which compensate for the World’s unbearable antinomies. The tremendous paradox implicit in the insistence on original sin on the one hand and the concession made by probabilism on the other is, for the psychologist, a necessary consequence of the Christian problem of opposites outlined above—for in the self good and evil are indeed closer than identical twins! The reality of evil and its incompatibility with good cleave the opposites asunder and lead inexorably to the crucifixion and suspension of everything that lives. Since the soul by nature is Christian this result is bound to come as infallibly as it did in the life of Jesus: we all have to be crucified with Christ, id est, suspended in a moral suffering equivalent to veritable crucifixion. In practice this is only possible up to the point, and apart from that is so unbearable and inimical to life that the ordinary human being can afford to get into such a state only occasionally, in fact as seldom as possible. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
For how could one remain ordinary in the face of such suffering! A more or less probabilistic attitude to the problem of evil is therefore unavoidable. Hence the truth about the self—the unfathomable union of good and evil—comes out concretely in the paradox that although sin is the gravest and most pernicious thing there is, it is still not so serious that it cannot be disposed of what “probablisist” arguments. Nor is this necessarily a lax or frivolous proceeding but simply a practical necessity of life. The confessional proceeds like life itself, which successfully struggles against being engulfed in an irreconcilable contradiction. Note that at the same time the conflict remains in full force, as is once more consistent with the antinomial character of the self, which is itself both conflict and unity. Christianity has made the antinomy of good and evil into a World problem and, by formulating the conflict dogmatically, raised it to an absolute principle. Into this as yet unresolved conflict the Christian is cast as a protagonist of good, a fellow player in the World drama. Understood in its deepest sense, being Christ’s follower involves a suffering that in endurable to the great majority of humankind. Consequently the example of Christ is in reality followed either with reservation or not at all, and the pastoral practice of the Church even finds itself obliged to lighten the yoke of Christ. This means a pretty considerable reduction in the severity and harshness of the conflict and hence, in practice a relativism of good and evil. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Good is equivalent to the unconditional imitation of Christ and evil is its hindrance. Human’s moral weakness and sloth are what chiefly hinder the imitation, and it is to these that probabilism extends a practical understanding which may sometimes, perhaps, come nearer to Christian tolerance, mildness, and love of one’s neighbour than the attitude of those who see in probabilism a mere laxity. Although one must concede a number of cardinal Christian virtues to the probabilist endeavour, one must still not overlook the fact that it obviates much of the suffering involved in the imitation of Christ and that the conflict of good and evil is thus robbed of its harshness and toned down to tolerable proportions. This brings about an approach to the psychic archetype of the self, where even these opposites seem to be united—though, as I say, it differs from the Christian symbolism, which leaves the conflict open. For the latter there is a rift running through the World: light wars against night and the upper against the lower. The two are not one, as they are in the psychic archetype. However, even though religious dogma may condemn the idea of two being one, religious practice does, as we have seen, allow the natural psychological symbol of the self at one with itself an approximate means of expression. One the other hand, dogma insists that three are one, while denying that four are one. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Since olden times, not only in the New World but also in the Old World, uneven numbers have been regarded as masculine and even numbers as feminine. The Trinity is therefore a decidedly masculine deity, of which the androgyny of Christ and the special position and veneration accorded to the Mother of God are not the real equivalent. With this statement, which may strike the reader as peculiar, we come to one of the central axioms of alchemy, namely the saying of Maria Prophetissa: “One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth.” Alchemy is rather like an undercurrent to the Christianity that ruled on the surface. It is to this surface as the dream is to consciousness, and just as the dream compensates the conflicts of the conscious mind, so alchemy endeavours to fill in the gaps left open by the Christian tensions of opposites. Perhaps the most pregnant expression f this is the axiom of Maria Prophetissa quoted above, which runs like a leitmotiv throughout almost the whole of the lifetime of alchemy, extending over more than seventeen centuries. In this aphorism the even numbers which signify the feminine principle, Earth, the regions under the Earth, and evil itself are interpolated between the uneven numbers of the Christian dogma. They are personified by the serpens mercurii, the dragon that creates and destroys itself and represents the prima materia. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
This fundamental idea of alchemy points back to the Tehom (“And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of Go moved upon the face of the waters,” reports Genesis 1.2.), to Tiamat with her dragon attribute, and thus to the primordial matriarchal World which, in the theomachy of the Marduk myth, was overthrown by the masculine World of the Father. The historical shift in the World’s consciousness towards the masculine is compensated at first by the chthonic femininity of the unconscious. In certain pre-Christian religions the differentiation of the masculine principle had taken the form of the father-son specification, a change which was to be of the utmost importance for Christianity. Were the unconscious merely complementary, this shift of consciousness would have been accompanied by the production of a mother and a daughter, for which the necessary material lay ready to hand in the myth of Demeter and Persephone. However, as alchemy shows, the unconscious chose rather the Cybele-Attis type in the form of the prima materia and the filius macrocosmi, thus proving that it is not complementary but compensatory. This goes to show that the unconscious does not simply act contrary to the conscious mind but modifies it more in the manner of an opponent partner. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The son type does not call up a daughter as a complementary image from the depths of the “chthonic” unconscious—it calls up another son. This remarkable fact would seem to be connected with the incarnation in our Earthly human nature of a purely spiritual God, brough about by the Holy Ghost impregnating the womb of the Blessed Virgin. Thus the higher, the spiritual, the masculine inclines to the lower, the Earthly, the feminine; and accordingly, the mother, who was anterior to the World of the Father, accommodates herself to the masculine principle and, with the assistance of the human spirit (alchemy or “the philosophy”), produces a son—not the antithesis of Christ but rather his chthonic counterpart, not a divine man but a fabulous being conforming to the nature of the primordial mothers. And just as the redemption of humans the microcosm is the task of the “upper” son, so the “lower” son has the function of a salvator macrocosmi. This, in brief, is the drama that was played out in the obscurities of alchemy. It is superfluous to remark that these two sons were never untied, except perhaps in the mind and innermost experience of a few particularly gifted alchemists. However, it is not very difficult to see the “purpose” of this drama: in the Incarnation it looked as though the masculine principle of the father-World were approximating to the feminine principle of the mother-World, with the result that the latter felt impelled to approximate in turn to the Father-World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
What it evidently amounted to was an attempt to bridge the gulf separating the two Worlds as compensation for the open conflict between them. The act of creative meditation which brings the Universe into being is performed by the World-Mind. We, insofar as we experience the World, are participating in this act unconsciously. It is a thought-World and we are thought-beings. Somehow, this infinite life germinates an infinite variety of minds and puts them through an infinite variety of experiences. However real they may seem through its mysterious working, they are all appearances only. This play of mind upon mind will reach its end with the last act, and the World-dream will then begin to dissolve. World-Mind is doing its works by providing the basic materials and necessary energies. The One Mind appears both as the millions of little minds and as the mental images of things, creatures, or evens which they come to know, see or experience. In the end all things finally come from World-Mind and for us come from mind, which itself comes from the same source. The World-Mind is expressing through an infinite number of minds its own infinitude multiplied by infinity an infinite number of times. Each particular thing is expressed by infinite ideas in infinite ways in the infinite understanding of God. In all these studies the principal concept should be returned to again and again: the entire Universe, everything—objects and creatures—is in Mind. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
I hold all the objects of my experience in my consciousness but I myself and held, along with them, in an incredibly greater consciousness, the World-Mind’s. The notion propounded by certain celebrated theologians and mystics that “God has need of me just as I have need of Him” is a fantasy, a self-constructed opinion based upon an egoism which is unwilling and unable to let go of its own importance. God does His own work. He needs n partner, no associate, no helper. Eckhart’s assertion that “Without humans God would not know He existed” requires explanation. It is not that God, the Unique, needs a second thing, a cosmos, in order to be Itself, but that our human thought about God is incapacitated by the utter void in which God dwells. God needs no partner and has no enemy. For the power of God is not only above that of all other entities but it is the source whence they themselves derive. It is the presence of the World-Mind which makes things happen according to the World-Idea: the former does not need to put forward each activity. No engineer can form an engine merely by throwing together all the necessary pieces of metal, not even by throwing together all the finished parts. One’s mind and will must be brought to bear upon them. It is exactly the same with the Universe itself. A universal intelligence, a World-Mind and its willed activity, must be active behind it, too. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Mind is not the final Reality, but a basic aspect of it. Will is another. Often one will not respond and allow an intuition to form itself within one’s mind, because one does not immediately realize what is happening, does not feel a birth is beginning. In the search for guidance when we have to make a momentous decision, or take an important step, it is well to go into “Silence” with our problem. We may not get the answer quickly or even directly but if we are well experienced in this kind of seeking, a light may eventually emerge from the dark and shine down on the problem. One should not form a preconception of what the answer ought to be, for thereby one imposes the ego’s dubious solution in advance upon the higher mind’s. Instead one should be entirely unbiased and try to receive the answer, as well as respond to it, in a perfectly free way. What is sometimes so hard to do is to trust this intuitive monitor when it contradicts the voices of those who are monitorless. However, in the end one will discover by results that this is practical wisdom. Sometimes an intuition appears as a vague feeling which haunts a human and which one cannot shake off. If one firmly believes in one’s own hidden intuitive powers, one will be able to ascribe much of one’s success to one’s readiness to follow their guidance, despite the opposition of logic and circumstances. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
When we keep ourselves busy with everything external and our minds with thoughts about everything external, the intuition is unable to insert itself into our awareness. Even if it whispers to us, we will not realize what is happening. If we continue to ignore it, we may lose the capacity to hear it at all. It is then that we have to retain ourselves to do so. The practice of meditation is one such way of training our receptivity. The source of intuitive knowledge lies outside the conscious mind. The vehicle which conveys that knowledge need not necessarily be within us. It may be without us, in the form of a book, a person, or an event to which we are led, guided, or prompted. We blunder in life and make endless mistakes because we have no time to listen for God’s voice—Intuition. A change of attitude towards one’s problems may help to clear the way for intuition to operate on the conscious level. These inner promptings—when authentic and not ego-biased, and when double-checked by reason—can guide one to wiser decisions concerning both outward work and inner life. If we would heed our intuitions as much as we heed our desires, the trick would be done. Illumination would come in not too long a time. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone: “Of course, it will be a little thing, but do not ignore it. Follow it up, explore all around it; one discovery will lead to another, and before you know it you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the results of thought.” In trying to get an intuitive answer, it is important to formulate the problem or the questions clearly and as sharply as you can. Let one wait tranquilly for the intuitive feeling to warm and enlighten one, as flowers wait tranquilly for the morning Sun to warm them. We leave the word to go away to the thought (which the mind does almost at once) but we ought to leave a wordless intuitive feeling only to go deeper into it. Again and again one’s thoughts should return to whatever memorable experience brought one an intuitive feeling that one was on the right track, or to whatever sudden lighted understanding of mentalism flashed into one’s head after study or reflection. If one feels the intuition but does not attend to it then, however slightly, the very faculty which produced it begins to lose strength. This is the penalty imposed for the failure, and this shows how serious it is. If one is always alert for this intuitive feeling, one will throw aside whatever one is doing and meditate upon it at once. One will depend more and more of these casual exercises, in contrast to the dependence on fixed routine exercises in the Long Path. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Treasure every moment when the intuition makes itself felt and, most especially, when it takes the form of a glimpse into higher truth; it is then that other things should be well put aside in order to sustain and prolong the experience. “For Good, who said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. However, we have this treasure in Earthen vessels, that the surpassing greatness of the power may be of God and not from ourselves,” reports 2 Corinthians 4.6-7. The primary application of this distinction between treasure and vessel in the context of Saint Paul’s own body and the visible events of his life in the World. Of this he said, “Our otter human is decaying,” reports 2 Corinthians 4.16. He was not troubled by this, for he looked to his spiritual side in the spiritual World. And he wanted the faith of his hearers to stand on the “demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that [their] faith should not rest on the wisdom of humans, but on the power of God,” reports 1 Corinthians 2.4-5. The weakness of the vessel, Saint Paul’s physical reality, was accepted and recognized by him as the occasion for the triumph of the treasure. However, the same principles of “vessel” and “treasure” apply to our local congregations, their traditions, and their higher-level groupings called “denominations.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Now, it is worthy nothing that nearly everything that defines any given denomination is negative—that is, something “we” do not do that “they” do. By far most of our groups were born in negation. Just think of the mass of people of many denominations who are called Protest-ants. Our identity is that we protest? Against what? And then within both Protestant and Catholic traditions there are the multitudes of groupings that have been defined by what they do not do that others do. Our various groups become over time nearly 100-percent vessel. That is, what they seem to regard as essential and what they devote almost all their attention and effort to, has to do with human, historical contingencies that have attached themselves to individuals brought up a certain way. They of course love those contingencies, and they love the dear ones who have shared life with them within the contingent forms. And because the contingencies are dear to us—often there is much good associated with their past—we mistake them for the treasure of the real presence of Christ in our midst, and we spend most of our time concerned with the historical accidents or contingencies of our group, even trying to urge them upon others as essential to salvation, or at least as what is best for us and for them. No wonder we are distracted from the path of spiritual formation in Christ. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
However, all the ways of the Lord are mercy and truth. If mercy be taken to mean the removal of any kind of defect, mercy and truth are necessarily found in God’s. Not every defect, however, can properly be called a misery; but only defect in a rational nature whose lot is to be happy; for misery is opposed to happiness. For this necessity there is a reason, because since a debt paid according to the divine justice is one due either to God, or to some creature, neither the one nor the other can be lacking in any work of God: because Go can do nothing that is not in accord with His wisdom and goodness; and it is in this sense, as we have said, that anything is due to God. Likewise, whatever is done by Him in created things, is done according to proper order and proportion wherein consists the idea of justice. Thus justice must exist in all God’s works. Now the work of divine justice always presupposed the work of mercy; and is founded thereupon. For nothing is due to creatures, except for something pre-existing in them, or foreknown. Again, if this is due to a creature, it must be due on account of something that precedes. And since we cannot go on to infinity, we must come to something that depends only on the goodness of the divine will—which is the ultimate end. We may say, for instance, that to possess hands is due to humans on account of their rational soul; and one’s rational soul is due to one that one may be human; and one’s being human is on account of the divine goodness. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
So in every work of God, viewed at its primary source, there appears mercy. In all the follows, the power of mercy remains, and works indeed with even greater force; as the influence of the first cause is more intense than that of second causes. For this reason does God out of proportionate to their deserts: since less would suffice for preserving the order of justice than what the divine goodness confers; because between creatures and God’s goodness there can be no proportion. Certain works are attributed to justice, and certain others to mercy, because in some justice appears more forcibly and in others mercy. Even in the damnation of the reprobate mercy is seen, which, though it des not totally remit, yet somewhat alleviates, in punishing short of what is deserved. In the justification of the ungodly, justice is seen, when God remits sins on account of love, though He Himself has mercifully infused that love. So we read of Magdalen: “Many sins are forgiven her, because she hath loved much,” reports Luke 7.47. God’s justice and mercy appear both in the conversation of the Jews and of the Gentiles. However, an aspect of justice appears in the conversation of the Jews which is not seen in the conversation of the Gentiles; inasmuch as the Jews were saved on account of the promises made to the fathers. Justice and mercy appear in the punishment of the just in the World, since by afflictions lesser faults are cleansed in them, and they are the more raised up from Earthly affection to God. The evils that press on us in the World force us to go to God. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Although creation presupposed nothing in the Universe; yet it does presuppose something in the knowledge of God. In this way too the idea of justice is preserved in creation; by the production of beings in a manner that accords with the divine wisdom and goodness. And the idea of mercy, also, is preserved in the change of creatures from non-existence to existence. Hail to the Measurer, who laid things out, putting this one here and that one there, putting in the place it belonged. Hail to the determining one, who established laws, that all things might run smoothly, that all things might perform well. God of establishing, I pray to you: may you fashion the World in such a way as to bring me happiness, as to bring me prosperity, as to bring me peace, as to being blessings on all of your worshippers. None but Thee will be out Redeemer in the Messianic days and none is t be compared unto Thee O Saviour, for the assurance of immortal life. The Lord is Master over all His works; blessed is He, acclaimed by every living thing. His greatness and His goodness fill the Universe, while knowledge and discernment compass Him about. The Lord, exalted over all the celestial host, above the Heavenly Chariot in radiance adorned. Purity and justice stand before His throne, kindness and compassion before His glory go. The luminaries which the Lord has wrought are good, with wisdom, knowledge and discernment were they are made. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Winchester Mystery House
The Winchester Estate is open today until 4PM! Come walk the grounds and learn about Sarah Winchester’s beautiful home. winchestermysteryhouse.com
Come experience the beautiful Victorian Gardens this weekend while learning more about Sarah Winchester’s story and iconic mansion.
There is more glass at the Winchester Mystery House than the Empire State Building. How many times have you visited Sarah Winchester’s stunning mansion?
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
Vocatus Atque Non Vocatus, Deus Aderit!
The pace of events is moving so fast that unless we can find some way to keep our sights on tomorrow, we cannot expect to be in touch with today. The Sanskrit word mandala means “circle” in the ordinary sense of the word. In the sphere of religious practices and in psychology it denotes circular images, which are drawn, painted, modelled, or danced. Plastic structures of this kind are to be found, for instance, in Tibetan Buddhism, and as dance figures these circular pattern occur also in Dervish monasteries. As psychological phenomena they appear spontaneously in dreams, in certain states of conflict, and in cases of schizophrenia. Very frequently they contain a quaternity of multiple of four, in the form of a cross, a star, a square, an octagon, et cetera. In alchemy we encounter this motif in the form of the quadratura circuli. In Tibetan Buddhism the figure has the significance of a ritual instrument (yantra), whose purpose is to assist meditation and concentration. Its meaning in alchemy is somewhat similar, inasmuch as it represents the synthesis of four elements which are forever tending to fall apart. It is at the same tie an image of God and is designated as such. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The innermost divine essence of humans, is characterized by symbols which can just as well express a God-image, namely the image of Deity unfolding in the World, nature, and in humans. When God is not acknowledged, egomania develops, and out of this mania comes sickness. The fact that images of this kind have under certain circumstances a considerable therapeutic effect on their authors is empirically proved and also readily understandable, in that they often represent very bold attempts to see and put together apparently irreconcilable opposites and bridge over apparently hopeless spirts. Even the mere attempt in this direction usually has a healing effect, but only when it is done spontaneously. Nothing can be expected from an artificial repetition or a deliberate imitation of such images. Vocatus atque non vocatus, deus aderit (invoked or not invoked, the God will be present). It is not a matter of indifference whether one calls something “mania” or a “god.” To serve a mania is detestable and undignified, but to serve a god is full of meaning and promise because it is an act of submission to a higher, invisible, and spiritual being. Religion seizes control of the human subject, who is always rather its victim than its creator. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
The numinosum, that is, a dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will, whatever its cause may be, is an experience of the subject independent of one’s will. At all events, religious teaching as well as the consensus gentium always and everywhere explain this experience as being due to a cause external to the individual. The numinosum is either a quality belonging to a visible object or the influence of an invisible presence that causes a peculiar alteration of consciousness. This is, at any rate, the general rule. There are, however, certain exceptions when it comes to the question of religious practice or ritual. A great many ritualistic performances are carried out for the sole purpose of producing at will the effect of the numinosum by means of certain devices of a magical nature, such as invocation, incantation, sacrifice, meditation and other yoga practices, self-inflicted tortures of various descriptions, and so forth. However, a religious belief in an external and objective divine cause is always prior to any such performance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The Catholic Church, for instance, administers the sacraments for the purpose of bestowing their spiritual blessings upon the believer; but since this act would amount to enforcing the presence of divine grace by an indubitably magical procedure, it is logically argued that nobody can compel divine grace to be present in the sacramental act, but that it is nevertheless inevitably present since the sacrament is a divine institution which God would not have to be if he had not intended to lend it his support. Religion appears to me to be a peculiar attitude of mind which could be formulated in accordance with the original use of the word religio, which means a careful consideration and observation of certain dynamic factors, that are conceived as “powers”: spirits, daemons, gods, laws, ideas, ideals, or whatever name humans have given to such a factors in their World as one has found powerful, dangerous, or help enough to be taken into careful consideration, or grand, beautiful, and meaningful enough to be devoutly worshipped and loved. In colloquial speech one often says of somebody who is enthusiastically interested in a certain pursuit that one is almost “religiously devoted” to one’s cause. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
I want to make it clear that by the term “religion” I do not mean creed. Religion is that which gives reverence and worship to some higher nature [which is called divine]. It is, however, true that every creed is originally based on the one hand upon trust, or loyalty, the experience of the numinosum and on the other hand upon faith and confidence in a certain experience of a numinous nature and in the change of consciousness that ensures. The conversation of Paul is a striking example of this. We might say, than, that the term “religion” designates the attitude peculiar to a consciousness which has been changed by experience of the numinsum. If we allow ourselves to draw conclusions from modern mandalas we should ask people, first, whether they worship stars, suns, flowers, and snakes. They will deny this, and at the same time they will asset that the globes, stars, crosses, and the like are symbols for a center in themselves. And if asked what they mean by this center, they will begin to stammer and to refer to this or that experience which may turn out to be something very similar to the confession of my patient, who found that the vision of one’s World clock had left one with a wonderful feeling of perfect harmony. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Others will confess that a similar vision came to them in a moment of extreme pain or profound despair. To others again it is the memory of a sublime dream or of a moment when long and fruitless struggles came to an end and a reign of peace began. If you sum up what people tell you about their experiences, you can formulate it this way: They came to themselves, they could accept themselves, they were able to become reconciled to themselves, and thus were reconciled to adverse circumstances and event. This is almost like what used to be expressed by saying: He has made his peace with God, he has sacrificed his own will, he has submitted himself to the will of God. A modern mandala is an involuntary confession of a peculiar mental condition. There is no deity in the mandala, nor is there any submission or reconciliation to a deity. The place of the deity seems to be taken by the wholeness of human beings. When one speaks of humans, everybody means one’s own ego—and when one speaks of others one assumes that they have a very similar personality. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
However, since modern research has acquainted us with the fact that individual consciousness is based on and surrounded by an indefinitely extended unconscious psyche, we must needs revise our somewhat old-fashioned prejudice that humans are nothing but their consciousness. This naïve assumption must be confronted at once with the critical question: Whose consciousness? The fact is, it would be a difficult task to reconcile the picture I have of myself with the one which other people have of me. Who is right? And who is the real individual? If we go further and consider the fact that humans are also what neither one oneself nor other people know of one—and unknown something which can yet be proved to exist—the problem of identity becomes more difficult still. Indeed, it is quite impossible to define the extent and the ultimate character of psychic existence. When we speak of humans we mean the indefinable whole of one, an ineffable totality, which can only be formulated symbolically. I have chosen the term “self” to designate the totality of human, the sum total of their conscious and unconscious contents. I have chosen this term in accordance with Easter philosophy, which for centuries as occupied itself with the problems that arise when even the gods cases to incarnate. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
The World is as it ever has been, but our consciousness undergoes peculiar changes. First, in remote times (which can still be observed among primitives living today), the main body of psychic life was apparently in human and in nonhuman objects: it was projected, as we should say now. Consciousness can hardly exist in a state of complete projection. At most it would be a heap of emotions. Through the withdrawal of projections, conscious knowledge slowly developed. Science, curiously enough, began with the withdrawal, so to speak, of the most distant projections. This was the first stage in the despiritualization of the World. Once stop followed another: already in antiquity the gods were withdrawn from mountains and rivers, from trees and animals. Modern science has subtilized its projections to an almost unrecognizable degree, but our ordinary life still swarms with them. You can find them spread out in the newspapers, in books, on social media, rumours, and ordinary social gossip. All gaps in our actual knowledge are still filled out with projections. We are still so sure we know wat other people think or what their true character is. We are convinced that certain people have all the bad qualities we do not know in ourselves or that they practise all those vices which could, of course, never be our own. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
We must still be exceedingly careful not to project our own shadows too shamelessly; we are still swamped with projected illusions. If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all these projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a considerable shadow. Such an individual has saddled oneself with new problems and conflict. One has become a serious problem to oneself, as one is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. One lives in the “House of Gathering.” Such a human knows that whatever is wrong in the World is in oneself, and if one only learns to deal with one’s own shadow one has done something real for the World. One has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day. These problems are mostly so difficult because they are poisoned by mutual projections. When one does not even see oneself and the darkness one unconsciously carries with one into all dealings how can anyone see straight? #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Modern psychological development leads to a much better understanding as to what humans really consist of. The gods at first lived in superhuman power and beauty on top of snow-clad mountains or in the darkness of caves, woods, and seas. Later on they drew together into one god, and then that god became man. However, in our day even the God-man seems to have descended from his throne and to be dissolving himself in the common man. That is probably why his seat is empty. Instead, the common man suffers from a hybris of consciousness that borders on the pathological. This psychic condition in the individual corresponds by and large to the hypertrophy and totalitarian pretensions of the idealized State. In the same way that the Sate has caught the individual, the individual imagines that one has caught the psyche and holds her in the hollow of his hand. He is even making a science of her in the absurd supposition that the intellect, which is but a part and a function of the psyche, is sufficient to comprehend the much greater whole. In reality the psyche is the mother and the maker, the subject and even the possibility of consciousness itself. It reaches so far beyond the boundaries of consciousness that the latter could easily be compared to an island in the ocean. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Whereas the island is small and narrow, the ocean is immensely wide and deep and contains a life infinitely surpassing, in kind and degree, anything known on the island—so that if it is a question of space, it does not matter whether the gods are “inside” or “outside.” It might be objected that there is no proof that consciousness is nothing more than an island in the ocean. Certainly it is impossible to prove this, since the known range of consciousness is confronted with the unknown extension of the unconscious, of which we only know that it exists and by the very fact of its existence exerts a limiting influence on consciousness and is freedom. Wherever unconsciousness reigns, there is bondage and possession. The immensity of the ocean is simply a comparison; it expresses in allegorical form the capacity of the unconscious to limit and threaten consciousness. Empirical psychology loved, until recently, to explain the “unconscious” as mere absence of consciousness—the term itself indicated as much—just as shadow is an absence of light. Today accurate observation of unconscious processes has recognized, with all other ages before us, that the unconscious possesses a creative autonomy such as a mere shadow could never be endowed with. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
When Dr. Carus, Dr. von Hartmann and, in a sense, Dr. Schopenhauer equated the unconscious with the World-creating principle, they were only summing up all those teachings of the past which, grounded in inner experience, saw the mysterious agent personified as the gods. The Universe’s first principle, be it called God with the religionists or energy with the scientists, is beyond the power of human understanding. At its very best it can know only its own reaction to the Principle. The Biblical announcement “I Am That I Am” is easier understood as “I Am As I Am.” It can have no other meaning that the uniqueness and incomprehensibility of God. For every attempt to being God within the range of the intellectual always fails, and every attempt to being God within the range of the imagination merely symbolizes. If, then, the original sentence is to be understood still more easily, let us read it as: “I am THAT which knows all and sees all, but can be known and seen by none.” The atheist says, “God is nowhere!” The mystic says, “God is here!” The philosopher says, “God is!” #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Human’s mental apparatus being so limited, the truths one conceives through it must be limited too. One cannot possibly know what God is like but only that God—some sort of higher power—is. The Bible’s phrase wherein God is self-described to Moses as “I am that I am” is more philosophically correct and more linguistically right, in the original Hebrew sense, if Englished as “I am what I shall be.” It was one’s consciousness of being untied with this timeless pre-existent as well as ever-existence Life that enabled Jesus to announce: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was I am.” “I am that I am,” was the revelation of God to the Hebrew Master, Moses. “That I am,” was the revelation of God to the anonymous Hindu Master of the Upanishads. All verbal definitions of the World-Mind are inevitably limited and inadequate. If the statements here made seem to be of the nature of strict and rigid doctrines it is because of the inadequacy of language to convey more subtle meaning. They who read these lines with intuitive insight allied to clear thinking will see that the concepts are flexible verbal frames for holding thought steady in that borderland of human consciousness where thinking verges on wordless knowing. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
The first great truth is that a Supreme Mind minds the Universe. All scientific evidence indicates that there is a single power which presides over the entire Universe, and all religious mystic experience and philosophic insight confirms it. Not only is this so, but this power also maintains the Universe; its intelligence is unique, matchless, incredible. This power is what I call the World-Mind, the Mind of God. “You were formerly darkness, but now you are light in the Lord; walk as children of light (for the fruit of light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth), verifying what is pleasing to the Lord,” Ephesians 5.8-11. The simple program of Christ for winning the whole World is to make each person one touches magnetic enough with love to draw others. The significance of human life upon the Earth must either be very small or very great. Very small from the strictly natural point of view. If we represent Earth’s history on a twenty-four-hour clock, from midnight to midnight, then according to the evolutionary story, our remotest human ancestors appeared at 11.59 P.M., and what we call the “civilization” of the last several thousand years is represented as the pop of a flashbulb at midnight. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
By any account, if the future of the Earth’s surface resembles its astonishing past, and from the merely scientific point of view, the Earth will not support human society for any long period of time (in cosmic terms). God’s purposes for human history, as set forth in the Bible, are of course quite another matter. According to the biblical picture, the function of human history is to bring forth an immense community of people, from “every nation and tribe and tongue and people,” reports Revelation 14.6, who will be a kingdom of persists under God (Revelation 1.6, 5.10; Exodus 19.6), and who for some period of time in the future will actually govern the Earth under him (Revelation 5.10). They will also, beyond that, reign with him in the eternal future of the cosmos, forever and ever (Revelation 22.5). These people will, together as a living community, form a special dwelling place for God. It will be one that allows one’s magnificence to be known and gratefully accepted by all of creation through all of the ages (Ephesians 2.7; 3.10; Philippians 2.9-11). What the human heart now vaguely senses should be, eventually will be, in the cosmic triumph of Christ and his people. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
And those who have fully taken on the character of Christ—those “children of light” in Saint Paul’s language—will in eternity be empowered by God to do what they want, as free creative agents. And it will always harmonize perfectly with God’s own purposes. Spiritual formation in Christlikeness during our life here on Earth is a constant movement toward this eternal appointment God placed upon each of us in our creation—the “kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the World” (Matthew 25.34; see also Luke 19.17). This movement forward is now carried on through our apprenticeship to Jesus Christ. It is a process of character transformation toward complete trustworthiness before God. God loves all things that He has made, and amongst them rational creatures more, and of these especially those who are members of His only—begotten Son Himself. Since to love a thing is to will it good, in a twofold way anything may be loved more, or less. In one way on the part of the act of the will itself, which is more or less intense. In this way God does not love some things more than others, because He loves all things by an act of the will that is one, simple, and always the same. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
In another way on the part of the good itself that a person wills for the beloved. In this way we are said to love that one more than another, for whom we will greater good, though our will is not more intense. In the ways we must needs say that God loves some things more than others. For since God’s love is the cause of goodness in things, as has been said, no one thing would be better than another, if God did not will greater good for one than for another. God is said to have equally care of all, not because by His care He deals out equal good to all, but because He administers all things with a like wisdom and goodness. The good that God wills for his creatures, is not the divine essence. Therefore there is no reason why it may not vary in degree. To understand and to will denote the act alone, and do not include in their meaning objects from the diversity of which God may be said to know or will more or less, as has been said with respect to God’s love. Father of All, please absorb our spirits back into your essence. There, please reshape us in your place of molding, preparing us for the Kingdom of Heaven. “Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, King of the ages. Who will not fear you, O Lord, and bring glory to your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your righteous acts have been revealed,” reports Revelation 15.3-4. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
We are preparing the kingdom to be delivered to the Saviour when he comes in the clouds of Heaven. When the kingdom has been adequately prepared, Jesus will come again. It has always been my feeling that when the trump of God shall sound and the righteous dead shall sound and the righteous dead shall come forth, it will be the lifters and not the leaners that the Saviour will call forth to help one in preparing his kingdom. Salvation in its true and full meaning is synonymous with exaltation or eternal life and consists in gaining an inheritance in the highest of the three Heavens within the celestial kingdom. With few exceptions this is the salvation of which the scriptures speak. It is the salvation which the saints seek. Hallelujah. It is good to sing praises unto our God; it is pleasant and befitting to praise Him. The Lord restores America, He gathers together the dispersed of America; He heals the broken in heart, binding up their wounds. He calls them all by their names. Great is our Lord, and mighty in power; His understanding is infinite. The Lord upholds the humble; He brings low the wicked to the very ground. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Mystery is a well-earned middle name for Sarah Winchester’s labyrinth mansion. Last year, a 90-year-old riddle was solved thanks to a combination of research and serendipity.
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Freedom is the Condition for the Full Growth of a Person, for One’s Mental Health and Well-Being!
Life is an unanswered question, but let us believe in the dignity and importance of the question. At the highest level, the level of ego-identity, the personality is organized by an overall organization of introjections and identifications under the guiding principle of the systematic function of the ego. The ego is a controlling and evaluating system. This controlling and evaluating system is integrated with other psychic structures to a greater or a lesser extent. It is by this that people steer themselves; it constitutes their sense of themselves in relation to the World and other people and things as they have learnt to experience them. Culture influences are important on personality development, and the formation of the ego-identity is a lifelong process. A self or a personality can be imagined, in a continuous development which began with clusters and networks of neural connections. The island is beginning to cohere from smaller clusters, integrating and differentiating into larger landmasses and developing specific flora and funa. Yet, it is easy when we think in terms of each person born already endowed with a soul which was highly individual from the start. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
When we understand that the infant is born into a relationship and develops in the context of that relationship, we realize that its developmental problems have to do with the differentiation of itself from others and with the relationship of self to others; one’s understanding that impulses are normally not isolated processes to which a person is somehow subject, but an expression of one’s personality; one’s understanding of dynamic structures, which are best thought of as structures of experiences, makes it clear that organizations of the memory-traces of the experiences in which a person is involved psychologically, neurologically, and psychologically creates actions and reactions and sensations and feelings, maps and models that motivates people to seek gratification, and this gratification is pleasurable. Pleasure is the signpost to the object: people seek people and take pleasure in them. There are people who live for the satisfaction of their drives; even when analysed in depth they seek others. And naturally, there are people who in some circumstances show more of one kind of interest, and in other circumstances show more of the other. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
Even though the neurophysiology basis for defensive aggression is not identical with that of the animal, it is similar enough to permit the statement that this same neurophysiological equipment leads to an incidence of defensive aggression many times greater in humans than in animals. The reason for this phenomenon lies in specific conditions of human existence. The animal perceives as a threat only clear and present danger. To be sure, its instinctive equipment and its individually acquired and genetically inherited memories induce the awareness of dangers and threats often more accurately than they are perceived by humans. However, humans being endowed with a capacity for foresight and imagination, reacts not only to present dangers and threats or to memories of dangers and threats or to memories of danger and threats but to the dangers and threats one can imagine as possibly happening in the future. One may conclude, for instance, that because one’s tribe is richer than a neighbouring tribe that is well trained in warfare, the other will attack one’s own sometime from now. Or one may reason that a neighbour whom one has harmed will take revenge when the time is favourable. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
In the political field the calculation of future threats is one of the central preoccupations of politicians and generals. If an individual or a group feels threatened, the mechanism of defensive aggression is mobilized even though the threat is not immediate; hence human’s capacity to foresee future threats enhances the frequency of one’s aggressive reactions. Humans are capable not only of foreseeing real dangers in the future; they are also capable of being persuaded and brainwashed by one’s leaders to see dangers when in reality they do not exist. Most modern wars, for instance, have been prepared by systematic propaganda of this type; the population was persuaded by its leaders that it was in danger of being attacked and destroyed, and thus reactions of hate and against the threatening nations have been provoked. Often no threat existed. Especially since the French Revolution, with the appearance of large citizens’ armies rather than relatively small armies consisting of professional soldiers, it is not easy for a nation’s leader to tell the people to kill and be killed because industry wants cheaper raw materials, cheaper labours, or new markets. If it were justified by declaring such aims, only a minority would be willing to participate in the war. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
If, on the other hand, a government can make the population believe that it is being threatened, the normal biological reaction against threat is mobilized. In addition, these predictions of threat from the outside are often self-fulfilling: the aggressor state, by preparing for war, forces the state that is it about to be attacked to prepare also, thereby providing the “proof” of the alleged threat. The arousal of defensive aggression by means of brainwashing can occur only in humans. In order to persuade people that they are threatened, one needs, above all, the medium of language; without this, most suggestion would be impossible. In addition, one needs a social structure that provides a sufficient basis for brainwashing. It is hard to imagine, for example, that this kind of suggestion would work among the Mbutu, the African pygmy hunters living contentedly in the forest and having no permanent authorities. In their society there is no human with sufficient power to make the incredible credible. On the other hand, in a society that has figures carrying great authority—such as sorcerers or political and religious leaders—the basis for such suggestion is present. The distinction between defensive and malignant aggression is not innate, and hence not ineradicable. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
However, malignant aggression is a human potential and more than a learned pattern of behavior that readily disappears when new patterns are introduced. By and large, the power of suggestion exercised by a ruling group is in proportion to the group’s power over the ruled and/or the capacity of the rulers to use an elaborate ideological system to reduce the faculty of critical and independent thinking. Another specifically human condition of existence contributes to a further increase of humans’ defensive aggressiveness compared with animal aggressiveness. Humans, like animals, defend themselves against threat to their vital interests. However, the range of human vital interests is much wider than that of the animal. Humans must survive not only physically but also psychically. One needs to maintain a certain psychic equilibrium lest one lose the capacity to function; for humans everything necessary for the maintenance of one’s psychic equilibrium is of the same vital interest as that which serves one’s physical equilibrium. First of all, human beings have a vital interest in retaining their frame of orientation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
The human capacity to act depends on them remaining stable, and their sense of identity. If others threaten one with ideas that question one’s own frame of orientation, one will react to these ideas as to a vital threat. One may rationalize this reaction in many ways. One will say that the new ideas are inherently “immoral,” “uncivilized,” “crazy,” or whatever else one can think of to express one’s repugnance, but this antagonism is in fact aroused because “one” feels threatened. Humans need not only a frame of orientation but also objects of devotion, which become a vital necessity for one’s emotional equilibrium. Whatever they are—values, ideals, ancestors, father, mother, the soil, country, class, religion, and hundreds of other phenomena—they are perceived as sacred. Even customs can become sacred because they symbolize the existing values. It is characteristic for this phenomenon that the Greek word ethos—meaning literally behaviour—has assumed the meaning of the “ethical,” just as “norm” (originally the word for a carpenter’s tool) was used in the double sense of what is “normal” and what is “normative.” The individual—or the group—reacts to an attack against the “sacred” with the same rage and aggressiveness as to an attack against life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
What has been said about reactions to threat to vital interests can be expressed also in a different and more generalized way by stating that fright tends to mobilize either aggression or the tendency to flight. The latter is often the case when a person still has a way out that saves a modicum of “face,” but if one is driven into a corner and no possibility of evasion is left, the aggressive reaction is more likely to occur. Fright, like pain, is a most uncomfortable feeling, and humans will do almost anything to get rid of it. There are many ways to get rid of fright and anxiety, such as substance abuse, pleasures of the flesh, sleep, and the company of other. One of the most effective ways of getting rid of anxiety is to become aggressive. When a person can get out of the passive state of fright and begin to attack, the painful nature of fright disappears. Among all threat to human’s vital interest, the threat to their freedom is of extraordinary importance, individually and socially. In contrast to the widely held opinion that this desire for freedom is a product of culture and more specifically of learning-condition, there is able evidence to suggest that the desire for freedom is a biological reaction of the human organism. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
One phenomenon that supports this view is that throughout history nations and classes have fought their oppressors if there was any possibility of victory, and often even if there was none. The history of humankind is, indeed, a history of the fight for freedom, a history or revolutions, from the war of liberation of the Hebrews against the Egyptians, the national uprising against the Roman Empire, the German peasant rebellions in the sixteenth center, to the American, French, Herman, Russian, Chinese, Algerian, and Vietnamese revolutions. And the start of a revolution that is breaking out on American soil today. The revolutions that have occurred in history must not obscure the fact that infants and children also make revolutions, but since they are powerless, they have to use their own methods, those of guerrilla warfare, as it were. They fight against suppression of their freedom by various individual methods, such as stubborn negativism, refusal to eat, refusal to be toilet trained, bet-wetting, up and on the more drastic methods of autistic withdrawal and pseudomental debility. The adults behave like any elite whose power is challenged. As a result, most children surrender and prefer submission to constant torment. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
No mercy is shown in this war until victory is achieved, and our hospitals are filled with its casualties. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable fact that all human beings—the children of the powerful as well as those of the powerless—share the common experience of once having been powerless and having fought for their freedom. That is why one may assume that every human being—aside from one’s biological equipment—has acquired in one’s childhood a revolutionary potential that, though dormant for a long time, might be mobilized under special circumstances. Leaders have all to frequently used the slogan that they are leading their people in a battle of freedom, when in reality their aim has been to enslave them. That no promise appeals more powerfully to the great of humans are evidenced by the phenomenon that even those leaders who want to suppress freedom find it necessary to promise it. Much like in the lockdowns that many Americans are subjected today, unable to work, leave their homes, visit their families, or attend church and school. Another reason for assuming there is an inherent impulse in humans to fight for freedom lies in the fact that freedom is the condition for the full growth of a person, for one’s mental health and well-being; its absence cripples a person and is unhealthy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
Freedom does not imply lack of constraint, since any growth occurs only within a structure, and any structure requires constraint. What matter is whether the constraint functions primarily for the sake of another person or institution, or whether it is autonomous—id est, that it results from the necessities of growth inherent in the structure of the person. As a condition for the unstunted development of the human organism, freedom is a vital biological interest of humans, but not only on humans. The deteriorating effect on the animal life in the zoo has been mentioned before and seems to outweigh the contrary views of even as great an authority as Dr. Hediger. And threats to humans freedom arouse defensive aggression as do all other threats to vital interests. Is it surprising then that aggression and violence continue to be generated in a World in which the majority are deprived from freedom, especially the people in the so-called underdeveloped countries? Those in power—id est, the dominant political party, culture, and race—would perhaps be less surprised and indignant if they were not accustomed to considering the underrepresented groups as nonpersons and, hence, not expected to react humanly. Only if combined with powerlessness, skin colour has this effect. The possession of advanced technology has become the criterion of being human. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
However, there is an additional reason for blindness. Even the dominant culture, powerful as they are, have surrendered their freedom because their own system had forced them to do so, although in a less drastic and overt way. Perhaps they hate those who fight for it today all the more because they are reminded of their own surrender. The fact that genuine revolutionary aggression, like all aggression generated by the impulse to defend one’s life, freedom, or dignity, is biologically rational and part of normal human functioning must not deceive one into forgetting that destruction of life always remains destruction, even when it is biologically justified; it is a matter of one’s religious, moral, or political principles whether one believes that it is humanly justified or not. However, whatever one’s principles in this respect are, it is important to be aware how easily purely defensive aggression is blended with (nondefensive) destructiveness and with the sadistic wish to reverse the situation by controlling other instead of being controlled. If and when this happens, revolutionary aggression is vitiated and tends to renew the conditions it was seeking to abolish. The conception of formal justice, the regular and impartial administration of public rules, becomes the rule of law when applied to the legal system. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
One kind of unjust action is the failure of judges and others in authority to apply the appropriate rule or to interpret it correctly. It is more illuminating in this connection to think not of gross violations exemplified by bribery and corruption, or the abuse of the legal system to punish political enemies, but rather of the subtle distortions of prejudice and bias as these effectively discriminate against certain groups in the judicial process. The regular and impartial, and in this sense fair, administration of law we may call “justice as regularity.” This is a more suggestive phrase than “formal justice.” Now the rule of law is obviously closely related to liberty. We can see this by considering the notion of a legal system and its intimate connection with the precepts definitive of justice as regularity. A legal system is a coercive order of public rules addressed to rational persons for the purpose of regulating their conduct and providing the framework for social cooperation. When these rules are just they establish a basis for legitimate expectations. They constitute grounds upon which persons can rely on one another and rightly object when their expectations are not fulfilled. If the bases of these claims are unsure, so are the boundaries of human’s liberties. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
Of course, other rules share many of these features. Rules of games and of private associations are likewise addressed to rational persons in order to give shape to their activities. Given that these rules are fair or just, then once humans have entered into these arrangements and accepted the benefits that result, the obligations which thereby arise constitute a basis for legitimate expectations. What distinguishes a legal system is its comprehensive scope and its regulative powers with respect to other associations. The constitutional agencies that it defines generally have the exclusive legal right to at least the more extreme forms of coercion. The kinds of duress that private associations can employ are strictly limited. Moreover, the legal order exercises a final authority over a certain well-defined territory. It is also marked by the wide range of the activities it regulates and the fundamental nature of the interests it is designed to secure. These features simply reflect the fact that the law defines the basic structure within which the pursuit of all other activities takes place. The actions which rules of law require and forbid should be of a kind which humans can reasonably be expected to do and to avoid. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
A system of rules addresses to rational persons to organize their conduct concerns itself with what they can and cannot do. It should not impose a duty to do what cannot be done. Also, the notion that ought implies can conveys the idea that those who enact laws and give orders do so in good faith. Legislators and judges, and other officials of the system, must believe that the laws can be obeyed; and they are to assume that any orders given can be carried out. Moreover, not only must the authorities act in good faith, but their good faith must be recognized by those subject to their enactments. Only if it is generally believed that they can be obeyed and executed, are laws and commands are accepted as laws and commands. If this is in question, the actions of authorities presumably have some other purpose than to organize conduct. Furthermore, this percent expresses the requirement that a legal system should recognize impossibility of performance as a defense, or at least as a mitigating circumstance. In enforcing rules a legal system cannot regard the inability to perform as irrelevant. If the liability to penalties was not normally limited to actions within our power to do or not to do, it would be an intolerable burden on liberty. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
The precept that like decisions be given in likes cases significantly limits the discretion of judges and other in authority. The precept forces them to justify the distinctions that they make between persons by reference to the relevant rules and principles. In any particular case, if the rules are at all complicated and call for interpretation, it may be easy to justify an arbitrary decision. However, as the number of cases increases, plausible justifications for biased judgments become more difficult to construct. The requirement for consistency holds of course for the interpretation of all rules and for justifications at all levels. Eventually reasoned arguments for discriminatory judgments become harder to formulate and the attempt to do so less persuasive. This precept holds also in cases of equity, that is, when an exception is to be made when the established rule works an unexpected hardship. However, this proviso: since there is no clear line separating these exceptional cases, there comes a point, as in matters of interpretation, at which nearly any difference will make a difference. In these instances, the principle of authoritative decision applies, and the weight of precedent or of the announced verdict suffices. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
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. “And again, verily I say unto you, that which is governed by law is also preserved by law and perfected and sanctified by the same law. That which breaketh a law, and abideth not by law, but seeketh to become a law unto itself, and willeth to abide in sin, and altogether abideth in sin, cannot be sanctified by law, neither by mercy, justice, nor judgment. Therefore, they must remain filthy still. For intelligence cleaveth unto intelligence; wisdom recieveth wisdom truth embraceth truth; virtue loveth virtue; light cleaveth unto light; mercy hath compassion on mercy and claimeth her own; justice continueth its course and claimeth its own; judgment goeth before the face of one who sitteth upon the throne and governeth and executeth all things. And again, verily I say unto you, one hath given a law unto all things, by which they move in their times and their seasons. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
“And their courses are fixed, even the courses of the Heaven and the Earth, which comprehend the Earth and all the planets,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 88.34-35, 40, 42-43. The written law that God gave to the Israelites is one of the greatest gifts of grace that God has ever conveyed to the human race. It is a part of the blessings that God promised would come to all the families or nations of the Earth through Abraham and his seed. Of course there is much more to the law than just rules or commandments. It provides a picture of reality: of how things are with God and his creation. The Prophets and the Gospels share with “the Law” this vital function of enabling humans beings to know God, what God is doing, and what we are to do—wherein our true well-being lies. Thus Moses challenges his people: “For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as is the LORD our God whenever we call on Him? Or what great nation is there that has statues and judgments as righteous as this whole law which I am setting before you today?” reports Deuteronomy. The law of the Lord gratefully received, studied, and internalized to the point of obedience as “perfect,” as Psalm 19.7 says. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
There is nothing lacking in it for its intended purpose. It therefore converts or restores the soul of those who seek it and receive it. It is a spiritual power in its own right, as is the Word of God generally. It is a living and powerful being capable of distinguishing soul from spirit in humans and dealing with them appropriately and redemptively. “For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any doubled-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of hi to whom we must give account,” reports Hebrews 4.12-13. There is nothing in all of the glory of the law according to the Old Testament that suggests for a moment that what the law does in the human heart is a human accomplishment. Rather, all benefit is ascribed to the law would be, simply, a loss. For in attempting to use it, we would have thrown ourselves back into the position of self-idolatry, utilizing the written law as our tool for managing ourselves and God. This mistake is what led to the horrible degradation of “the Law” at the time of Jesus and Paul, turning it from a pathway of grace to an instrument of cultural self-righteousness and human oppression. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
What is the use, ask many questioners, of first, an evolution of the human soul which merely brings it back to the same point where is started and second, of developing a selfhood through the long cycles of evolution only to have it merged or dissolved in the end into the unselfed Absolute? Is not the whole scheme absurdly useless? “Woe to you lawyers!” Jesus said, “For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter in yourselves, and those who were entering in you hindered,” reports Luke 11.52. The unit of life emanated from God and begins with the merest glimmer of consciousness, appearing on our plane as a protozoic cell. It evolves eventually into the fullest human consciousness, including the intellectual and spiritual. It does not finish as it began; on the contrary, there is a grand purpose behind all its travail. There is thus a wide gulf between its original state and its final one. Human’s individuality survives even in the divinest state accessible to them. There it becomes the same in quality but not identical in essence. The most intimate mental and physical experiences of human love cast a little light for our comprehension of this mystery. The misunderstanding which leads to these questions arises chiefly because of the error which believes that it is the divine soul which goes through all this pilgrimage by reincarnating in a series of Earthly forms. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
The true teaching about reincarnating is not that the divine soul enters into the captivity and ignorance of the flesh again and again but that something emanated from the soul, that is, a unit of life that eventually develops into the personal ego, does do. God contains this reincarnating ego within itself but does not itself reincarnate. It is the parent; the ego is only its offspring. The long and tremendous evolution through which the unit of life passes from its primate cellular existence to its matured human one is a genuine evolution of its consciousness. Whoever believes that the process first plunges a soul down from the heights into a body or forces Spirit to lose itself in Matter, and then leaves it no alternative but to climb all the way back to the lost summit again, believes wrongly. God never descends or climbs, never loses His own sublime consciousness. What really does this is something that emanates from it and that consequently holds its capacity and power in latency, something which is finited out of God’s infinitude and becomes first, the simple unit of life and later, the complex human ego. It is not God that suffers and struggles during this long unfoldment but His child, the ego. It is not God that slowly expands His intelligence and consciousness, but the ego. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
It is not God that gets deluded by ignorance and passion, by selfishness and extroversion, but the ego. “Then I saw another beast, coming out of the Earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but be spoke like a dragon. He exercised all the authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the Earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And her performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to come down from Heaven to Earth in full view of humans. Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the Earth. He ordered them to set up an image in honour of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given the power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive the mark on their right hand or on one’s forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless one had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name. 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 12.11-18. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
Notice everywhere you go there are a lot of 6s on the floor, telling you to stay six feet away from others? It is just kind of fascinating. We would not know the end of days if we were living in them, but it is possible that is what is going on. May the blessings of all the World descend on this mansion: the blessings of Earth, the blessings of sky, the blessings of the moving ocean and of the never still wind. From the people of stone, blessings: the blessings of plants and the blessings of animals; of two-legged and four, of six and of eight; and the blessings of the spirits. From all those who dwell on the Earth and in it and above it, may blessings flow. I pray to you, God of happiness, who for so long presided over this mansion We call to you again; awake, come to us, and once more shower blessings on this mansion and those who come before you. May the foundation and the structure be as strong as you, lasting through all ages. This mansion was formed in love. And with newly opened eyes, clear with sight the architectures knew its fate was to reveal a story. And with her heart’s own true wisdom, she has passed expectations. Mrs. Winchester loved it, she loves it, they love it. Blessings on love and on all who love. Blessings from the God of love. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
God does raise us to high honour. Our eyes have seen the defeat of our foes, our ears have heard the doom of evil doers that rise up against us. The righteous shall flourish like a redwood tree and grow might like cypress tree. Planted in the house of the Lord, they shall flourish in the courts of our God. Even in old age they shall bring forth fruit, they shall be full of vigour and strength, declaring that the Lord is just, my Rock in whom there is no unrighteousness. The Lord reigneth; He is robed in majesty; the Lord is robbed, He hath girded Himself with strength Now is the Earth firmly established; it shall not be moved. Thy throne established of old; Thou art from everlasting. The waters life up their voices, O Lord, the waters lift up their roaring; yet above the voices of many waters, above the breakers of the sea, Thou, O Lord, art mighty. The law is true and unfailing; holiness is becoming Thy house, O Lord, forevermore. May the glory of the Lord endure forever; let the Lord rejoice in His works. Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth and forever. From the rising of the sun unto its setting, the Lord’s name be praised. The Lord is high above all nations. His glory is above the Heavens; O Lord, Thy name endures forever; Thou art Lord for all generations. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
Winchester Mystery House
WINCHESTER HOUSE BUILT BY SARAH WINCHESTER. WIDOW OF RIFLE MANUFACTURER WILLIAM WINCHESTER. THIS UNIQUE STRUTUE MANY OUTSTANDING ELEMENTS OF VICTORIAN ARCHITECTURE AND FINE CRAFTSMANSHIP. CONSTRUCTION BEGAN 1884 AND CONTINUED WITHOUT INTERRUPTION UNTIL MRS WINCHESTER’S DEATH 1922. THE CONTINUAL BUILDING AND REMODELING CREATED A 160 ROOM HOUSE COVERING AN AREA OF SIX ACRES CALIFORNIA REGISTERED HISTORICAL LANDMARK NO 868 PLAQUE PLACED BY THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF PARKS AND RECREATION INCOOPERATION WITH THE WINCHESTER MYSTERY HOUSE MAY 3.1974.
What do you think inspired Sarah Winchester to continuously build such a beautiful and bizarre home composed of 160 rooms, once standing seven stories tall? winchestermysteryhouse.com
In a World where the Pulse of Time Beats Infinitely Slowly, Birth and Death Count for Little!
Hardships do not build character. They reveal it. Anyone who will tear down Victorian craftsmanship will tear down America. Victorian architecture and religion have made America what it is today. A World without Victorian architecture is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval prison. Just like the unconscious mind, Victorians have a lot of secrets that can take several lifetimes to reveal. Faith and the word of God fills our inner soul and is sufficient to sustain us—and allows us to access His power. The notion that God created this World spectacle for the benefit of the human alone is an absurd and unwarranted anthropolatry, but the notion that life first attains individual self-consciousness in humans is justified in philosophy and by experience. What is it of which one alone is conscious? It is of being oneself, one’s ego. In all earlier stages of evolution, consciousness is entirely veiled in its forms and never becomes self-aware. Only in the human state does individual consciousness of being first dawn. There may exist on other planets creatures infinitely more intelligent and more amiable than human beings. We may not be the only pebbles on the beach of life. Nevertheless the piece of arrogance which places humans highest in the scale of existence contains the dim reverberation of a great truth, for humans bear the divine within their hearts. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Human beings have made too much fuss about themselves, their own importance in the cosmic scale. Why should there not be other forms of life superior t them, conscious intelligent beings higher in mentality, character, and spiritual knowledge, better equipped with powers and techniques? Even a partial awareness of what it means to be a human—as above an animal—capable of thinking abstractly, conscious of the vastness of the Universe and the littleness of the ego, asking the ago-old questions about meaning and purpose in life, sometimes getting a glimpse of a few words of the answer through religion, art, Nature, mysticism, joy, suffering, or intelligence, even this is enough to make one wonder what follows in development after one, higher than oneself, if not here then perhaps on other planets or in a fourth dimension. Such beings must already exist somewhere. Are they the gods of ancient fable and myth, disfigured or miscomprehended in human narratives by passing of time? Were they visitors who helped infant humanity reach its tends and then left it, withdrew, except for rare appearances as avatars, angels, or lawgivers? There are existences for beings on levels and in times and space different from ours. The Level we know and the humans we see only partially manifest the World-Idea. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
The multibirthed nature of human experience fits in with the shimmering galaxies of the multiverse itself. “We are not alone,” could be echoed back by this planet Earth itself. There are beings not subject to the same laws as those governing humankind’s physical existence. They are normally not visible to humans. They are gods. The Gods are both symbols of particular forces and beings dwelling on higher planes. All these figures irrupt autonomously into consciousness as soon as it gets into a pathological state. With regard to the anima, I would particularly like to draw attention to the case described by Nelken. Now the remarkable thing is that these figures show the most striking connections with the poetic, religious, or mythological formulations, though these connections are in no way factual. That is to say, they are spontaneous products of analogy. One such case even led to the charge of plagiarism: the French writer Benoit gave a description of the anima and her classic myth in his book L’Atlantide, which is an exact parallel of Rider Haggard’s She. The lawsuit proved unsuccessful; Benoit and never heard of She. (It might, in the last analysis, have been an instance of cryptomnesic deception, which is often extremely difficult to rule out.) #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The distinctly “historical” aspect of the anima and Benoit’s condensation with the figures of the sister, wife, mother, and daughter, plus thus associated incest motif, can be found in Goethe (“You were in times gone by my wife of sister”), as well as in the anima figure of the regina and femina alba in alchemy. The English alchemist Eirenaeus Philalethes (“love of truth”), writing about 1645, remarks that the “Queen” was the King’s “sister, mother, or wife.” The same idea can be found, ornately elaborated, in Nelken’s patient and in a whole series of cases observed by me, where I was able to rule out with certainty any possibility of literary influence. For the rest, the anima complex is one of the oldest features of Latin alchemy. When one studies the archetypal personalities and their behaviour with the help of the dreams, fantasies, delusions of patients, one is profoundly impressed by their manifold and unmistakable connections with mythological ideas completely unknown to the layperson. They form a species of singular beings whom one would like to endow with ego-consciousness; indeed, they almost seem capable of it. And yet this idea is not borne out by the facts. There is nothing in their behaviour to suggest that they have an ego-consciousness as we know it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
The behaviours show, on the contrary, all the marks of fragmentary personalities. They are masklike, wraithlike, without problems, lacking self-reflection, with no conflicts, no doubts no sufferings; like gods, perhaps, who have no philosophy, such as the Brahma-gods of the Samyutta–nikaya, whose erroneous views needed correction by the Buddha. Unlike other contents, they always remain strangers in the World of consciousness, unwelcome intruders saturating the atmosphere with uncanny forebodings or even with the fear of madness. If we examine their content, id est, the fantasy material constituting their phenomenology, we find countless archaic and “historical” associations and images of an archetypal nature. This peculiar fact permits us to draw conclusions about the “localization’ of anima and animus in the psychic structure. They evidently live and function in the deeper layers of the unconscious, especially that phylogenetic substratum which I have called the collective unconscious. This localization explains a good deal of their strangeness: they being into our ephemeral consciousness an unknown psychic life belonging to a remote past. It is the mind of our unknown ancestors, their way of thinking and feeling, their way of experiencing life and the World, gods and humans. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The existence of these archaic strata is presumable the source of the human’s belief in reincarnations and in memories of “previous existences.” Just as the human body is a museum, so to speak, of its phylogenetic history, so too is the psyche. We have no reason to suppose that the specific structure of the psyche is the only thing in the World that has n history outside its individual manifestations. Even the conscious mind cannot be denied a history reaching back at least five thousand years. It is only our ego-consciousness that has forever a new beginning and an early end. The unconscious psyche is not only immensely old, it is also capable of growing into an equally remote future. It moulds the human species and is just as much a part of its as the human body, which, though ephemeral in the individual, is collectively of immense ago. The anima and animus live in a World quite different from the World outside—in a World where the pulse of time beats infinitely slowly, where the birth and death of individuals count for little. No wonder their nature is strange, so strange that their irruption into consciousness often amounts to a psychosis. They undoubtedly belong to the material that comes to light in schizophrenia. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
What I have said about the collective unconscious may give you give a more or less adequate idea of what I mean by their term. If we now turn back to the problem of individuation, we shall see ourselves faced with a rather extraordinary task: the psyche consists of two incongruous halves which together should form a whole. One is inclined to think that ego-consciousness is capable of assimilating the unconscious, at least one hopes that such a solution is possible. However, unfortunately the unconscious really is unconscious; in other words, it is unknown. And how can you assimilate something unknown? Even if you can form a fairly complete picture of the anima and animus, this does not mean that you have plumbed the depths of the unconscious. One hopes to control the unconscious, but the past masters in the art of self-control, the yogis, attain perfection in samadhi, a state of ecstasy, which so far as we know is equivalent to a state of unconsciousness. It makes no difference whether they call our unconscious a “universal consciousness”; the fact remains that in their case the unconscious has swallowed up ego-consciousness. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
They do not realize that a “universal consciousness” is a contradiction in terms, since exclusion, selection, and discrimination are the root and essence of everything that lays claim to the name “consciousness.” “Universal consciousness” is logically identical with unconsciousness. It is nevertheless true that a correct application of the methods described in the Pali Canon or the Yoga-sutra induces a remarkable extension of consciousness. But, with increasing extension, the contents of consciousness lose in clarity of detail. In the end consciousness becomes all-embracing, but nebulous; and infinite number of things merge into an indefinite whole, a state in which subject and object are almost completely identical. This is all very beautiful, but scarcely to be recommended anywhere north of the Tropic of Cancer. For this reason we must look for a different solution. We believe in ego-consciousness and in what we call reality. The realities of a north climate are somehow so convincing that we feel very much better off when we do not forget them. For us it makes sense to concern ourselves with reality. Our European ego-consciousness is therefore inclined to swallow up the unconscious, and if this should not prove feasible we try to suppress it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
However, if we understand anything of the unconscious, we know that it cannot be swallowed. We also know that it is dangerous to suppress it, because the unconscious is life and this life turns against us if suppressed, as it happens in neurosis. When one of them is suppressed and injured by the other, conscious and unconscious do not make a whole. If they must contend, let it at least be a fair fight with equal rights on both sides. Both are aspects of life. Consciousness should defend its reason and protect itself, and the chaotic life of the unconscious should be given the chance of having its way too—as much of it as we can stand. This means open conflict and open collaboration at once. That, evidently, is the way human life should be. It is the old game of hammer and anvil: between them the patient iron is forged into an indestructible whole, and “individual.” This, roughly, is what I mean by the individuation process. As the same shows, it is a process or course of development arising out of the conflict between the two fundamental psychic facts. The symbol of formation has the closet affinities with alchemical ideas, and especially with the conception of the “uniting symbol,” which yield highly significant parallels. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Naturally these are processes which have no meaning in the initial stages of psychological treatments. On the other hand, more difficult cases, such as cases of unresolved transference, develop these symbols. Knowledge of them is of inestimable importance in treating cases of this kind, especially when dealing with cultured patients. How the harmonizing of conscious and unconscious data is to be undertaken cannot be indicated in the form of a recipe. It is an irrational life-process which expressed itself in definite symbols. It may be the task of the analyst to stand by this process with all the help one can give. In this case, knowledge of the symbols is indispensable, for it is in them that the union of conscious and unconscious contents is consummated. Out of this union emerge new situations and new conscious attitudes. I have therefore called the union of opposites the “transcendent function.” This rounding out of the personality into a whole may well be the goal of any psychotherapy that claims to be more than a mere cure of symptoms. As experience piles up, self-structures gradually establish themselves and, in doing so, separate out more and more from other structures which have less to do with one’s identity. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
In the course of this process, as the self becomes more distinct, other people and things also gain coherence and individuality. There is a growing sense of “Ah yes, this is me, and that is that, and you are you, and this is what goes on between us.” Gradually, with further experiences, if all goes well, the personality develops a relatively stable sense of itself in its environment and a stable sense of what is not self but other people and things. Our life-experiences are increasingly reorganized and integrated, with more linkages to the more central regions of the self, and/or with more clearly delineated object-imagery. Our experiences can become more closely connected with (or, on the other hand, more distant from) the feelings or excitements which originally accompanied the experiences. This is a process through which our experiences can also become relatively less integrated with the person with whim we first experienced them, and relatively less integrated with the feelings or excitements with which we first experienced them. Thus feelings and excitements can be isolated from the structures in terms of which they were first experienced, isolated from structures of self and/or isolated from object-imagery. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
To give an imaginary illustration of a very complicated process, the experience may be of a child being hugged by the mother and enjoying it. In words: “I like being hugged by mother.” This may be broken up into such substructures as “hugging is lovely” (whoever hugs whom: the “depersonalized” relationship), as well as “I liked being hugged,” “I love mother,” “I like hugging,” “mother loves me,” “mother loves hugging me,” “mother likes hugging,” and so on. This example is also useful in letting us realize just how many structures can emerge out of one experience; it is a mistake to think of an experience being broken up into one self-concept, one object-concept, one relationship, one emotion. “Depersonalizing” is used to describe this process. Depersonalizing is a useful way of coping with distressing feelings, I shall often call it “distancing” or “disowning.” In depersonalizing, emotions and objects differentiate. My first experience of a dog may have been frightening, but “frightening” and “dog” will eventually probably differentiate from each other, so that in due course I can distinguish between the dog which scared me, and dogs in general which have no personal significance for me either frightening or lovable, and so on. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
At that level of abstraction, dogs remain dogs, whatever my experience of them: object-constancy has been achieved. In depersonalizing, the emotions and self differentiate. “I” and “frightened” differentiate. More generally, I learn that I am not wholly (always) good or wholly (always” bad, or wholly (always) happy or wholly (always) unhappy. Later I have to discover that my feeling hat someone or something is good or bad does not mean that it is so. And I have to discover that my feeling that someone or something is good or bad does not mean that other people think so. Subjectivity is thus turned into objectivity. This process of depersonalizing may be patchy or superficial. Underneath what we have learned about dogs which helps us say we know that not all dogs are frightening although we once knew a frightening puppy, there may be unconscious connections very tightly integrated with a feeling of good or bad about dogs. Part of psychotherapy is to being these unconscious connections into consciousness. When thinking about feelings, it is useful sometimes not to think in a “distancing” or depersonalized way of “love,” or “distress,” or “fear.” It can be instructive to think for a while in terms of “love-of,” and “distress-from,” and “fear-of,” and “hate-of,” and “greed-for,” and “bliss-with.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
If we think of feelings apart from who-feels-what-towards-whom, we risk being cut from out roots. Feeling are experienced as relational—once stated, it seems obvious, at least for a healthy functioning organism. Feelings are relational from the start except when something has gone wrong with our biochemistry. When feelings are detached from the experiences in which they were aroused, that is normally due to a later and defensive manoeuver. This component in the object-relation does not therefore separate out in an organized way, as self-structures or object-imagery do in the healthy infant. On the contrary, it looks as though health may consist in keeping feelings attached to the experiences with which they are bound up. Healthy people may have a clear sense of self and of the people and things around them, but they are not much visited by isolated waves of “fear-of” or “bliss-with.” Such feelings would normally be anchored in an experience. Depersonalized feelings are very weird. One of the many contributions made by Dr. Melanie Klein and her associates comes from their intuitive understanding that “I am angry (with a person or thing)” is very close to “Someone or something is very angry with me.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The feeling “angry-with” may be depersonalized, detached from particular experiences, and associated at random with self or with other. Similarly “I feel torn apart (by something in the course of hunger)” may become “I have torn apart (the breast associated with hunger).” For some people there is no differentiation between self-and-feeling; for others there is none between others-and-feeling. It seems that people vary in this respect. The former are likely to experience “I am fine, sad, content, frightened, furious,” et cetera. The latter are likely to experience “He is nice, she is frightening, that is nasty, this is sweet, the other wicked.” Only people who are very out of touch would be assailed by feelings of fear or well-being or anger or love without any clear connections with anything. Illustrating the extreme, a person mainly organized in terms of self-structures, and distant from the World of people and things, might say, “I was so worried when I did not hear…I wondered what I had done wrong. I felt so guilt and worried, then I remembered that I am always forgetting people’s birthdays. Are I not awful.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Another kind of person, mainly organized in terms of other people and things, and distant from one’s own feelings, might say, “They sent this letter which said they were closing down. With a cheque. The cheque was an insult. They have no right to send a notice like that through the post. I went to the Citizens’ Advice Bureau round the corner from where I used to live—not last year but the year before. Almost everyone there was new, much younger and two were Asian.” Yet another kind of person hardly experiences either self or other people, but picks up feelings without firmly attaching them to anyone: “It was really eerie, a dangerous atmosphere. There were a lot of booming noises and a lot of talk which I do not remember. It felt very heavy and threatening. It did not mater, though.” People differ in how they are aware, more in some ways, less in others. One wonders at which point thee types begin to become fixed. It is an interesting area to speculate in. Whole cultures or subcultures may be found which prefer one or other type, so that polite conventional speech requires more awareness of some aspect than another. Thus in some circles it is discourteous to talk about oneself, and in others it is band manners to talk about others, and in yet other circles one should not talk about impersonal matters. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Because I cannot deal with the soul here in a thorough and systematic manner that would address main issues (I refer again to the literature noted), my strategy will be twofold: First, I will elaborate a picture or image of the soul, and second, I will look at certain things said about the soul in the Bible. Now the image: Our soul is like an inner stream of water, which gives strength, direction, and harmony to every other element of our life. When that stream is as it should be, we are constantly refreshed and exuberant in all we do, because our soul itself is then profusely rooted in the vastness of God and His kingdom, including nature: and all else within us is enlivened and directed by that stream. Therefore we are in harmony with God, reality, and the rest of human nature at large. As is usual in biblical themes, a little child that has been allowed to develop naturally and have been natured in all the aspects of its being gives us the best presentation of that a life flooded with a healthy soul looks like. Now, beyond the image or picture of an inner stream is this reality: Life is self-initiating, self-directing, self-sustaining activity and power. In this full sense, of course, only God has life. That is the biblical view. Moreover, it his “hand is the soul of every living thing,” Job tells us (Job 12.10). #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Can it be truth that all this cast travail, all this long long ingathering of experience, all this travel to the farthest limit, is only to end in negation, in unlearning all knowledge and returning to where we started? My heart does not believe it, my reason cannot accept it. “The Father has life in Himself,” Jesus taught, and “gave to the Son also to have life in Himself,” reports John 5.26. “He alone possesses undying life,” reports 1 Timothy 6.16, according to Saint Paul, and is the one “who gives and preserves life to all things,” reports 1 Timothy 5.13. The individual living thing receives its relatively “self-initiating, self-directing, self-sustaining power” from the hand of God. This derivative life flows through the living being in the form of its own soul. As for the human, its peculiar form of soul is related to the unique spirit relationship it has to be God (Genesis 2.7). It is its peculiar form of soul that enlivens everything else in the creature, and its overall condition reflects the state of its soul. In the human being, spiritual life in the kingdom of God is central to its soul and its life. This, we seriously suggest, is not an image but a reality, and one that the image of a stream of water can portray with some force. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
When we speak of the human soul, then, we are speaking of the deepest level of life and power in the human being. On this land, please pour blessings, O Lord, pour blessings. On this house please pour blessings, O Lord pour blessings. Spirits of the Ancestors, do you see what has been done? A house has been born to continue your line. Once again, a link is forged in the ancient chain and we are all connected that much tighter. Bless this Victorian Mansion; it carries your memory forward to the future. Because God has set His love upon Sarah Winchester’s Mansion and estate, He will protect it; God will protect it because it knows His name. God will rescue the Winchester and its fine Victorian architecture and bring honour to it. Give will give Mrs. Winchester’s estate abundance of long life, and the Winchester mansion shall witness God’s salvation. Hallelujah. Praise the name of the Lord; give praise, ye servants of the Lord, who stand in the house of the Lord, in the courts of the house of God. Praise the Lord, for the Lord is good; sing praise unto the name of God, for it is pleasant. For the Lord hath chosen this estate as wonder of the World and a treasure for many generations to enjoy. Indeed I know that the Lord is great, that our Lord is above all who are worshipped as gods. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Winchester Mystery House
Sarah Winchester’s Daisy Bedroom – the room she was trapped in during the 1906 earthquake. Legend says that she had the front of the house boarded up after the earthquake.
Explore in 360 http://ow.ly/280u50CXeNm
Rubbing their Sleepy Eyes with Lazy Wrists–There is the Brute and the Angel in Almost Every Human!
Americans are trained from infancy for mutationhood. Western civilization is a human running with increased speed through an air-sealed tunnel in search of additional oxygen. In your prayers, pour out your heart to your Father in Heaven in thanks for the blessings you have received. Please be specific in thanking God for His goodness, for your family, for your friends, for your home, for your leaders and teachers, for the gospel, and for His Son, Jesus Christ. If we prayed for the small and simple blessings of if our prayers were only prayers of gratitude, what would our prayers be like? Recognizing our blessings and expressing gratitude increases our happiness. God gives us commandments to protect us and help us to be happy. The commandment to be grateful is no exception. Gratitude takes us outside of ourselves and focuses our attention on God and others. At this beautiful time of year, may our hearts be softened and changed as we increase our gratitude. May we always choose, no matter the season, to be grateful and qualify for God’s acknowledgement and promised blessings. “And one who recieveth all things with thankfulness shall be made glorious; and the things of this Earth shall be added unto one, even an hundred fold, yea, more,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 78.19. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
When things get tough, perseverance is demonstrated by those who keep going, who do not give up even when others say it cannot be done. When we encounter challenged, success is usually earned by persevering and not becoming discouraged. Early warning signals are evident in many aspects of our lives. For example, a fever can be a first symptom of sickness of disease. Various financial and labour market indicator are used to forecast future trends in local and national economies. And depending upon the area of the World in which we live, we may receiver flood, Earthquake, avalanche, hurricane, tsunami, tornado, or winter storm warnings. We are also blessed by spiritual early warning signals as a source of protection and direction in our lives. Recall how Noah was alerted by God of things not yet seen, and he “prepared the ark to the saving of his house,” reports Hebrews 11.7. Consider the language of the Lord in the revelation known as the Word of Wisdom: “In consequence of evils and designs which do and will exist in the hearts of conspiring humans in the last days, I have warned you, and forewarn you, by giving unto you this word of wisdom by revelation,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 89.4. Spiritual warning should lead to increasingly vigilant watching. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
You and I live in “a day of warning,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 63.58. And because we have been and will be warned, we need to be, as the Apostle Paul admonished, “watching with all perseverance,” reports Ephesians 6.19. I pray for the guidance of the Holy Ghost. The highest possibility which separates humans from beast is attainment of insight into truth, experience of one’s divine source. A tension holds all thins in equilibrium between coming together of their elements, temporary maintenance of their forms, and passing away int dissolution. This includes the mineral, the plant, the animal, and the human. However, when we look at the last-named, a new possibility opens up which could not have happened to Nature’s earlier kingdoms. All things dissolve in the end, but humans alone dissolve consciously into a higher Consciousness. We are not just higher animals and nothing more, but as human beings we possess a self-consciousness which can be developed until it matures into a thinking power as well as a totally superior kind of awareness—that of God. A human life presents only the opportunity for attaining the realization of God. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Developing the full potential of the human mind ought not to be taken away from any human, however evil one may be, and however remote from this goal, in punishment for one’s crimes. Our sole objective where the truths of salvation are concerned should be to find out what the Lord has revealed and then to believe and act accordingly. We testify that God is infinite and eternal and that He ordained the laws whereby His spirit children might have power to advance and progress and become like Him. We know the salvation is in Christ; that He was the Firstborn Son of the Eternal Father; that he was chosen and foreordained in the councils of Heaven to work out the infinite and eternal atonement; that Christ was born into the World as the Son of God; and that He has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. We believe with perfect surety that Christ came to ransom humans from the temporal and spiritual death brought into the World by the Fall of Adam and that Christ took upon Himself the sins of all humans on condition of repentance. We testify that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the plan of salvation; and that through the Lord’s atoning sacrifice all humans shall be raised in immortality to be judged by Jesus Christ according to the deeds done in the flesh. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Those that believe and obey the fullness of gospel shall be raised also unto eternal life in our Father’s kingdom. We believe it is by grace that we are saved after all that we can do, and that building upon the foundation of the atonement of Christ, all humans must work out their salvation with fear and trembling before the Lord. We proclaim that to gain salvation humans must believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, repent of their sins, receive the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands, and then press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, keeping the commandments and enduring to the end. How can humans be so blind to the truth of their very being? Their quality of consciousness provides the clue, but it must be followed up. It is questionable whether the advantages of being a human creature are outweighed by the disadvantages. Why? Simply because humans may use their human faculties to transcend their present level and, as they call it, “realize oneself.” The choice between submitting or not submitting to one’s terrestrial genes and hormones belongs to humans, but the tendency to follow them belongs to the earlier stage; it is very, very ancient and is coming under their control very, very slowly. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
When this transcendence of their ancestry is complete, humans fulfill themselves as truly human. If a human walks upright, it is because this upright poster is symbolic of their gradual progression into ruling their terrestrial body and human nature. The ordinary ego-driven unenlightened human is acted on by lower cosmic Nature, just as plants and animals are. However, in human animal, individuality and intellect are additionally present—whether slightly in the savage or markedly in the highly civilized person. The enlightened human is also acted on, but in one’s case it is by higher cosmic Nature. Instead of being guided by passion and desire, one is guided by intuition. The changeover from lower to higher requires one’s contribution, one’s effort to control nature, to discipline individuality, and to achieve self-mastery. It is not only in the possession of reason and the reception of intuition that the human form of life is superior to other beings, but also in the exercise of will. Humans are an individualized creature. They are aware of their own separate identity and special personality. If humans feel one feel they are not individually responsible for their actions, being entirely responsive to their instincts, they have the choice to learn how to modify their behaviour. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Human beings add a new urge, that of conscious development through intelligence to the Earth. The impersonal and eternal part of us is the God in us, symbolized by the upper half of the Sphinx’s head, as the lower half symbolizes the human part, and as the body itself symbolizes the terrestrial part. We cannot separate the importance of the body from the importance of the mind. We are animals in one part of our nature, human beings in the second part, and sometimes angelic in the third part. All make one creature. We learn what our bodies are through the physical senses. We learn a part of what the mind is through our thoughts. We learn still more about the mind’s deeper phases through our non-thoughts—that is, intuitions. Such is the triple nature of humans—a lower self of animal instincts, a middle self of human thoughts, a higher self of divine nature. We may well wonder how animal lust, human cunning, and angelic nobility can come to be mingled in a single entity. That indeed is the mystery of humans. When the whole cosmos shows its double-face of Eternal Consciousness, shadow and light, we must expect the individual creature to show the same. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Hence, humans are half animal and half god, with reason as their link; only when they establish an equilibrium between then do they fulfill themselves. Nature is what it is—bipolar—so existence involves struggle and conflict of all of us until the genius in a million finds the point of equilibrium between the two opposing pulls, between the savage and the saint in one. The animal nature is naturally selfish, the spiritual nature unselfish. Between those two poles, humans are brought more and more into conflict with oneself as one evolves. Because they are human animals bonded to a divine spirit, we see humans as erratic in their behaviour and irrelevant in their purposes. They bear the human form externally but are largely predatory animal internally. Mind—that is, character and consciousness—is the real essence of a human. There is the brute and the angel in almost every human. However, how much there is of the one and how little of the other, differs with every human. Returning for a moment to the metaphor of “islands,” it has to be acknowledged that the islands undergo some atypical developments in the course of time. As the infant encounters further experiences, we may think of the island both as disintegrating and as merging in new ways. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
However, this transformation happens not on a geographical but on a multidimensional scale, and it is not easily visualized on a flat map. It is as though all the green on al the islands (green of leaves, of sea, of stones) merged to contribute to the more abstract concept of “green” without, however, bleaching the green objects on the island. It is as though the flying of the birds and of the leaves in the win were integrated to make the concept of flying. In short, each experience remains itself although generalized abstracted aspects may grow in relative importance as further experiences contribute to them. Differentiating, generalizing, and abstracting go together. Abstraction, differentiation, and generalization are names for different aspects of the same process which are in connection with learning to recognize triangles, oranges, and musical notation: the formation of concept. The concepts now under consideration are at a higher level, that is all. In order to conceptualize the colour puce, I have to perceive and recognize as puce a particular shade in a variety of contexts—generalizing. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
I have to disentangle it from other features of the situation in which it is embedded—abstracting. And I have to distinguish it from other shades which are not puce—differentiating. Three main sets of abstractions, generalizations, and differentiations with which we are concerned just now are to do with the achievement of some sense of self, some sense of other people and things, and, thirdly, some ways in which self is experienced as related to other people and things. These will be considered one by one. However, perhaps yet another caution is needed before we do so. It is only for the sake of clarity we look at these three sets one by one and “abstract” them. Except in very rare circumstances, my experience of myself is not of me in some pure abstract sense. I am aware at this moment, not of “me,” but of me-getting-an-idea-across-to-you-the-reader and of you-the-reader-understanding-me, you-liking-this-point, you-put-off-by-my-style. In short, and to say it yet again, our experiences come in units of relationship. Gradually, if all goes well, a self, and a sense of self, is established, made up from all the bits of experience in which the persons has been involved. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
The memory-traces of all these bits remain, but the structures which they form are profoundly affected by the context which the evolving structures provide for each new experience as it happened. Some experiences will have integrated with much that has gone before; some will have been left more or less isolated. Under the influences of a well integrated ego-identity, more central controls gain increasingly more dominance over new information coming in, and the map is no longer so easily modified by further experience. New information, although registered, then has relatively little effect on behaviour or indeed on consciousness. This is in reference to the process of selective perception, by which certain meanings come to predominate over others. Through these processes the sense of self differentiates from not self. Strong psychological structures are created in which the self is involved—self-structures. Self-structures are often strong enough to be functioning as “maps” to the working model of what is going on in and around the organism at a particular time. When this is so, they are strong enough to steer behaviour in a particular direction. When this has happenes, we recognize a stable identity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Appetite and will are two different faculties, yet they have the same function: they impel humans to action. The two faculties are essential to action. Appetite is the efficient and effective cause of processes not having sense organs. It appears, for example, in the movements of nutrition and excretion. It seemed logical to postulate the same kind of originative power for all kinds of movement. That is why we admonish the mora philosophers who spend such an infinite quantity of debate touching good and the highest good to cast their eye abroad upon nature and behold the appetite that is in all things to receive and to give. With receiving and giving as the controlling ideas, there are appetitive motions more precise than that of philosopher in their long and wandering discourses of pleasure, virtue, duty, and religion. Furthermore, if one looks deeply into the experience of human desire one can detect movement, for every obtaining of a desire hath a shew of advancement, as motion though in a circle hath a shew of progression. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
That is, a desire—say that of obtaining political office, or a mistress—directs one initially to a goal, and arriving at the goal is like retuning to one’s starting point. The will, too, seems to be the immediate impetus to any action that is the outcome of reasoning and judgment. Reason might work well and true, judgment might be sound, but unless the will were moved the intellect would have cerebrated in vain. One function of the imagination, described previously, is that of making reason appealing to the will; and the art of rhetoric discharged its office by applying the dictates of reason to imagination for “better’ moving of the will. As efficient causes, appetite and will allowed two different kinds of behaviour, the sensuous and the rational. In sensuous actions, three features were always present. First, they were immediate and nonreflective; there was no thinking about consequence. Desire, for example, was often touched off by some unlawful wish, and the wish rashly granted before it has been understood and weighed. Second, pleasure and pain attend sensuous actions, and hence were guides to desire. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
These qualities of experience are shown most clearly in the passions, some emotional experience giving pleasure, as with joy, other experiences giving pain, as with anger. Pleasure and pain are to the particular affections, as light is to particular colours. That is, pleasure or pain is always a feature of emotional experience, just as light is always present in colour. As a quality of experience, pleasure is not most pure and satisfying when accompanying knowledge and learning. Delight always attends upon learning; there is no satiety for satisfaction and appetite are perpetually interchangeable. Many other kinds of behaviour give pleasure because of their novelty. Accordingly, some of life’s pleasures can be graded, the pleasures of knowing exceed those of affections, the affections those of the senses, achievement and victory those of a strong dinner. If the pleasure of learning be not insatiable, why do voluptuous men turn friars, and ambition men turn melancholy? The third feature of sensuous behaviour in some manner involves the affections of passions; that is, sensuous actions are emotional to some degree, great or small. The center of emotional experience is in the heart or its region. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Both affections and passions are linked to appetite rather than will. Their activity, strongly tinctured with pleasure and pain, powerfully affects the appetite. Their influence, however, need not be bad. In fact, in the scheme of things, if it does not conflict with reason and will, appetitive behaviour is coloured with good. The affections, indeed, can be properly enlisted by the imagination in efforts to move the will. Only when the affections of their perturbation rise up to disturb judgment and overpower the will are the issues of appetite are evil. As a general rule, behaviour controlled by will is preferable to actions controlled by appetite. “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth. Now the Earth was a formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day,’ and the darkness he called ‘night.’ And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day,” reports Genesis 1.1-3. Light is a species of quality. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Some writers have said that the light in the air has not a natural being such as the colour on a wall has, but only an intentional being, as a similitude of colour in their air. However, this cannot be the case for two reasons. First, because light gives a name to the air, since by it the air becomes actually luminous. However, colour does not do this, for we do not speak of the air as coloured. Secondly, because light produces natural effect, for by the rays of the sun bodies are warmed, and natural changes cannot be brought about by mere intentions. Others have said that light is the sun’s substantial form, but this also sems impossible for two reasons. First because substantial forms are not of themselves objects of the senses; for the object of the intellect is what a thing is. Whereas light is visible of itself. In the second place, because it is impossible that what is the substantial form of one thing should be accidental for of another; since substantial forms of their very nature constitute species: wherefore the substantial form always and everywhere accompanies the species. However, light is not the substantial for of air, for if it were, the air would be destroyed when light is withdrawn. Hence it cannot be the substantial form of the sun. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
We must say, then, that as heat is an active quality consequent on the substantial form of fire, so light is an active quality consequent on the substantial form of the sun, or of another body that is of itself luminous, if there is any such body. A proof of this is that the rays of different stars produce different effects according to the diverse natures of bodies. Since quality is consequent upon substantial form, the mode in which the subject receives a quality differs ad the mode differs in which a subject receives a substantial form. For when matter receives its form perfectly, the qualities consequent upon the form are firm and enduring; as when, for instance, water is converted into fire. When, however, substantial form is received imperfectly, so as to be, as it were, in process of being received, rather than fully impressed, the consequent quality lasts for a time but is not permanent; as may be seen when water which has been heated returns in time to its natural state. However, light is not produced by the transmutation of matter, as though matter were in receipt of a substantial form, and light were a certain inception of substantial form. For this reason light disappears on the disappearance of its active cause. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
It is accidental to light not to have a contrary, forasmuch as it is the natural quality of the first corporal cause of change, which is itself removed from contrariety. As heart acts towards perfecting the form of fire, as instrumental cause, by virtue of the substantial form, so does light act instrumentally, by virtue of the Heavenly bodies, towards producing substantial forms; and towards rendering colours actually visible, inasmuch as it is a quality of the first sensible body. God hath done all things, whatsoever He would. The will of God must needs always be fulfilled. In proof of which we must consider that since an effect is confirmed to the agent according to its form, the rule is the same with active causes as with formal causes. The rule in forms is this: that although a thing may fall short of any particular form, it cannot fall short of universal form. For though a thing may fail to be, for example, a man or a living being, yet it cannot fail to be a being. Hence the same must happen in active causes. Something may fall outside the order of any particular cause, but not outside the order of the universal cause; under which all particular causes are included: and if any particular cause fails of its effect, this is because of the hindrance of some other particular cause, which is included in the order of the universal cause. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Even in corporeal things this is clearly seen. For it may happen that a star is hindered from producing its effects; yet whatever effect does result, in corporeal things, from this hindrance of a corporal cause, must be referred though intermediate causes to the universal influence of Heaven first. Since, then, the will f God is the universal cause of all things, it is impossible that the divine will should not produce its effect. Hence that which seems to depart from the divine will in one order, returns into it in another order; as does the sinner, who by sin falls away from the divine will as much as lies in one, yet falls back into the order of that will, when it is punished. In the spiritually transformed social dimension is abandonment of all defensiveness. This of course could occur only in a social context where Christ dwells—that is, among his special people. However, it is natural it would occur in the absence of attack and withdrawal, wherever that may be, or where we have an impregnable defense against it. This abandonment includes a willingness to beknown in our most intimate relationships for who we really are. It would include abandonment of all practices of self-justification, evasiveness, and deceit, as well as manipulation. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
That is not to say we should impose all the fact about ourselves upon those close to us, much less on others at large. Of course we should not. However, it does mean that we do not hide and we do not follow strategies for “looking good.” Jesus’ teachings about not performing for public approval, about letting our “yes” be a “yes” and nothing more, and about not being a hypocrite—having a face that differs from our reality—all find application here. “Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before humans, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have n reward from your Heavenly Father,” reports Matthew 6.1. (Important to read Matthew chapters 5 and 6 in the Christian Bible.) Frequently, death comes as an intruder. It is an enemy that suddenly appears in the midst of life’s feasts, putting out is lights and gaiety. It visits the aged as they walk on faltering feet. Its summons is heard by those who have scarcely reached midway in life’s journey, and often it hushes the laughter of little children. Death lays its heavy hand upon those dear to us and at times leaves us baffled and wondering. In certain situations, as in great suffering and illness, death comes as an Angel of mercy. However, for the most part, we think of it as the enemy of human happiness. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
The darkness of death can ever be dispelled by the light of revealed truth. “I am the resurrection, and the life,” spoke the Master. “One that believeth in me, though one were dead, yet shall one live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die,” reports John 11.25-26. This reassurance, yes, even holy confirmation of life beyond the grace, could well be the peace promised by the Saviour when he assured his disciples: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the World giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, nether let it be afraid,” reports John 14.27. So all those who walk with God in this Earthly pilgrimage will be blessed and know that God will not abandon his children who trust in Him. In the night of death God’s presence will be better than a light and safer than a known way. The door is starting to swing from hot to cold. Although it is not as cold as it should be, occasionally a cold day comes. The pokeberries are purple, the sassafras is starting to turn, and the gardens are heavy with tomatoes and mandarin oranges. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
It is a time to stop and pay attention: the spirit of the land are very busy. I pray to them at this liminal time to open my eyes. Do not let me awake one day and ask where winter has gone. May I be aware of its heavy rain and feet and feet of deep snow, and artic chill. May I be aware of winter’s presence, may we experience rain and lightning and thunder storms, and be as thrilled with it as I will be with arrival of the spring. I set my face to the dark I will travel with the Sun through the dark. I will go with confidence in the deepest dark. Though about me the dark may grow, God is always at my side guiding me to light. This is what I know, God of the Universe. This is what you are telling me and this is what I tell you: the Earth prepares for a great change. Light and dark are equal today, but that will not last. I see the Heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God. The Earth makes its way around the Sun and takes u with it into the year’s dark half. We travel with it, not in calm resignation, but with wild anticipation of what dreams may be dreamt in the night of the World. May they be good dreams. For we saw Him, even on the right hand of God; and we heard the voice bearing record that he if the Only Begotten of the Father. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
That by God, and through God, and of God, the World are and were created, and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters of God. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows His handiwork; day unto day expresses His greatness; night unto night makes Him known. There is no speech, there are no words, their voice is not heard. Yet their sway extends over all the Earth and their message to the ends of the World. In the Heavens, He hath set a tent for the Sun. For the Sun is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber it rejoices as a strong human to run its course. Its going forth is from one end of the Heaven, and its circuit unto the other; nothing is hidden from its heat. The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is clear, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever; the judgments of the Lord are true, they are righteous altogether; more to be desired are they than gold, yea, than must fine gold; sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. More over by them is Thy servant warned; in keeping of the there is great reward. What can humans discern of their own errors? Please clear me of my hidden faults. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
Winchester Mystery House
The Witches Cap – named for it’s conical resemblance of a witches hat. Many famous mediums claim this room was “important” to Sarah Winchester, all though we do not know what it may have been used for. How did you feel when you experienced the Witches Cap for the first time?
Winchester Mystery House
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻 The original mansion still stands, but there were also other Victorian houses on the estate for employees. Be sure to show your support and help keep tours possible in the future by taking virtual tours and exploring items in the online gift shop.
🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
And Now the Purple Dusk of Twilight Time Steals Across the Meadows of My Heart!
Civilization beings with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos. If one is always a little hungry, never quite warm enough, and never falling prey to the dangers of the soft life of self-gratification, a person can think and meditate better. Meditation is just oiling the machinery and making the unused parts come into use. You have not done enough, you have never done enough, so long as it is possible that you have something of value to contribute. Let us now consider whether justice requires the toleration of the intolerant, and if so under what conditions. There are a variety of situations in which this question arises. Some political parties in democratic states hold doctrines that commit them to suppress the constitutional liberties whenever they have power. Again, there are those who reject intellectual freedom but who nevertheless hold positions in the university. It may appear that toleration in these cases is inconsistent with the principles of justice, or at any rate not required by them. I shall discuss the matter in connection with religious toleration. With appropriate alterations the argument can be extended to these other instances. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Several questions should be distinguished. First, there is the question whether an intolerant sect has any title to complain if it is not tolerated; second, under what conditions tolerant sects have a right not to tolerate those which are intolerant; and last, when they have the right not to tolerate them, for what ends it should be exercised. Beginning with the first question, it seems that an intolerant sect has no title to complain when it is denied an equal liberty. At least this follows if it is assumed that one has no title to object to the conduct of others that is in accordance with principles one would use in similar circumstance to justify one’s action toward them. A person’s right to complain is limited to violations of principles one acknowledges oneself. A complaint is a protest addressed to another in good faith. It claims a violation of a principle that both parties accept. Now, to be sure, an intolerant human will say that one acts in good faith and that one does not ask anything for oneself that one denies to others. One’s view, let us suppose, is that one is acting on the principle that God is to be obeyed and the truth accepted by all. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
This principle is absolute authority is perfectly general and by acting on it one is not making an exception in one’s own case. As one sees that matter, one is following the correct principle others reject. The reply to this defense is that, from the standpoint of the original position (designed to be a fair and impartial point of view that is to be adopted in our reasoning about fundamental principles of justice), no particular interpretation of religious truth can be acknowledged as binding upon citizens generally; nor can it be agreed that there should be one authority with the right to settle questions of theological doctrine. Each person must insist upon an equal right t decide what one’s religious obligations are. One cannot give up this right to another person or institutional authority. In fact, a human exercises one’s liberty in deciding to accept anther as an authority even when one regards this authority as infallible, since in doing this one in no way abandons one’s equal liberty of conscience as a matter of constitutional law. For this liberty as secured by justice is imprescriptible: a person is always free to change one’s faith and this right does not depend upon one’s having exercised one’s powers of choice regularly or intelligently. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
We may observe that human beings having an equal liberty of conscience is consistent with the idea that all humans ought to obey God and accept the truth. The problem of liberty is that of choosing a principle by which the claims humans make on one another in the name of their religion are to be regulated. Granting that God’s will should be followed and the truth recognized does not as yet define a principle of adjudication. From the fact that God’s intention is to be complied with, it does follow that any person or institution has authority to interfere with another’s interpretation of one’s religious obligations. This religious principle justifies no one in demanding in law or politics a greater liberty for oneself. The only principles which authorize claims on institutions are those that would be chosen in the original position. Let us suppose, then, that an intolerant sect has no title to complain of intolerance. We still cannot say that tolerant sects have the right to suppress them. For one thing, others may have a right to complain. They may have this right not as a right to complain on behalf of the intolerant, but simply as a right to object whenever a principle of justice is violated. For justice is infringed whenever equal liberty is denied without sufficient reason. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The question, then, is whether being intolerant of another in grounds enough for limiting someone’s liberty. To simplify things, assumes that the tolerant sects have the right not to tolerate the intolerant in at least one circumstances, namely, when they sincerely and with reason believe that intolerance is necessary for their own security. This right follows readily enough since, as the original position is defined, each would agree to the right of self-preservation. Justice does not require that humans must stand idly by while others destroy the basis of their existence. Since it can never be to human’s advantage, from a general point of view, to forgo the right of self-protection, the only question, then, is whether the tolerant have a right to curb the intolerant when they are of no immediate danger to the equal liberties of others. Suppose that, in some way or other, an intolerant sect comes to exist within a well-ordered society accepting the two principles of justice. How are the citizens of this society to act in regard to it? Now certainly they would not suppress it simply because the members of the intolerant sect could not complain were they to do so. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Rather, since a just constitution exists, all citizens have a natural duty of justice to uphold it. We are not released from this duty whenever others are disposed to act unjustly. A more stringent condition is required: there must be some considerable risks to our own legitimate interests. Thus just citizens should strive to preserve the constitution with all its equal liberties as long as liberty itself and their own freedom are not in danger. They can properly force the intolerant to respect the liberty of others, since a person can be required to respect the rights established by principles that one would acknowledge in the original position. However, when the constitution itself is secure, there is no reason to deny freedom to the intolerant. The question of tolerating the intolerant is directly related to that of the stability of a well-ordered society regulated by the two principles. We can see this as follows. It is from the position of equal citizenship that persons join the various religious associations, and it is from this position that they should conduct their discussions with one another. Citizens in a free society should not think one another incapable of a sense of justice unless this is necessary for the sake of liberty itself. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
If an intolerant sect appears in a well-ordered society, the others should keep in mind the inherent stability of their institutions. The liberties of the intolerant may persuade them to a belief in freedom. This persuasion works on the psychological principle that those whose liberties are protected by and who benefit from a just constitution will, ceteris paribus (other things equal), acquire an allegiance to it over a period of times. So even if an intolerant sect should arise, provided that it is not so strong initially that it can impose its will straightway, or does not grow so rapidly that the psychological principle has no time to take hold, it will tend to lose its intolerance and accept liberty of conscience. This is the consequence of the stability of just institutions, for stability means that when tendencies to injustice arise other forces will be called into play that work to preserve the justice of the whole arrangement. Of course, the intolerant sect may be so strong initially or growing so fast that the forces making for stability cannot convert it to liberty. This situation presents a practical dilemma which philosophy alone cannot resolve it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Whether the liberty of the intolerant should be limited to preserve freedom under a just constitution depends on the circumstances. The theory of justice only characterizes the just constitution, the end of political action by reference to which practical decisions are to be made. In pursuing this end the natural strength of free institutions must not be forgotten, nor should it be supposed that tendencies to depart from them go unchecked and always win out. Knowing the inherent stability of a just constitution, members of a well-ordered society have the confidence to limit the freedom of the intolerant only in the special cases when it is necessary for preserving equal liberty itself. Therefore, while an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger. The tolerant should curb the intolerant only in this case. The leading principle is to establish a justice constitution with the liberties of equal citizenship. The just should be guided by the principles of justice and not the fact that the unjust cannot complain. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
It should be noted that even when the freedom of the intolerant is limited to safeguard a just constitution, this is not done in the name of maximizing liberty. The liberties of some are not suppressed simply to make possible a greater liberty for others. Justice forbids this sort of reasoning in connection with liberty as much as it does in regard to the sum of advantages. It is only the liberty of the intolerant which is to be limited, and this is done for the sake of equal liberty under a just constitution the principles of which the intolerant themselves would acknowledge in the original position. The argument in this and in the preceding sections suggests that the adoption of the principle of equal liberty can be viewed as a limiting case. Even though their differences are profound and no one knows how to reconcile them by reason, humans can, from the standpoint of the original position, still agree on this principle if they can agree on any principle at all. This idea which arose historically with religious toleration can be extended to other instances. Thus we can suppose that the persons in the original position know that they have moral convictions although, as the veil of ignorance requires, they do not know what these convictions are. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
They understand that the principles they acknowledge are to override these beliefs when there is a conflict; but otherwise they need not revise their opinions nor give them up when these principles do not uphold them. In this way the principles of justice can adjudicate between opposing moralities just as they regular the claims of rival religions. Within the framework that justice established, moral conceptions with different principles, or conceptions representing a different balancing of the same principles, may be adopted by various parts of society. What is essential is that when persons with different convictions make conflicting demands on the basic structure as a matter of political principle, they are to judge these claims by the principles of justice. The principles that would be chosen in the original position are the kernel of political morality. They not only specify the terms of cooperation between persons but they define a pact of reconciliation between diverse religions and moral beliefs, and the forms of culture to which they belong. If this conception of justice now seems largely negative, we shall see that it has a happier side. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
When we overcome our own selfish desires and put God first in our lives and covenant to serve God regardless of the cost, we are then living the law of sacrifice. One of the best ways to be sure we are keeping the first great commandment is to keep the second. “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have any strange god before me. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” The faithful are required to honour the name of God. If we are to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, it makes sense that we are naturally to respect the name of God with equal passion and vigour. The law of sacrifice provides an opportunity for us to prove to the Lord that we love Him more than any other thing. As a result the course sometimes becomes difficult since this process of perfection that prepares us for the celestial kingdom to “dwell in the presence of God and His Christ forever and ever,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 76.62. The sacred mission of the Church is to “invite all to come unto Christ,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 20.59. Come unto Christ and be perfected in Him. In that light, the law of sacrifice has always been a means for God’s children to come unto the Lord Jesus Christ. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Let us here observe, that a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation; it is though the medium of the sacrifice of all Earthly things that humans do actually know that they are doing the things that are well pleasing in the sight of God. When a human has offered in sacrifice all that one has for the truth’s sake, not even withholding one’s life, and believing before God that one has been called to make this sacrifice because one seeks to do one’s will, one does know, most assuredly, that God does and will accept one’s sacrifice and offering, and that one has not, nor will seek one’s face in vain. Under these circumstances, then one can obtain the faith necessary for one to lay hold on eternal life. We know what we do is pleasing before God and understand that this knowledge comes to us through sacrifice and obedience. Those who come unto Christ in this way receive a confidence that whispers peace to their souls and that will eventually enable them to lay hold upon eternal life. Sacrifice allows us to learn something about ourselves—what we are willing to offer the Lord through our obedience. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Through sacrifice and service, one comes to know the Lord. As we sacrifice our selfish desires, serve our God and others, we become more like Him. We do this by our obedience to the commandments of God. Thus, the laws of obedience and sacrifice are indelibly intertwined. As we comply with these and other commandments, something wonderful happens to us. We become more sacred and holy—more like our Lord! In fact, the word sacrifice means literally “to make scared,” or “to render sacred.” Our first lessons about the law of sacrifice, as well as other gospel principles, began in our premotal life. We were taught the fulness of the gospel and the plan of salvation. We knew of the Saviour’s mission and of His futre atoning sacrifice, and we willingly sustained Christ as our Saviour and our Redeemer. In fact, we learn from Revelation 12.9, 11 that it is by “the blood of the Lamb” (Christ’s atoning sacrifice) and our testimony that we are able to overcome Satan. The Lord designed in the beginning to place before humans the knowledge of good and evil, and gave one a commandment to cleave to good and abstain from evil. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
However, if one should fail, God would give unto one the law of sacrifice and provide a Saviour for one, that one might be brought back again into the presence and favour of God and partake of eternal life with God. This is the plan of redemption chosen and instituted by the Alight before human was placed on Earth. Adam and Eve were taught the law of sacrifice and were commanded to practice it by giving offerings. These included two emblems: the firstlings of the flock and the first fruits of the field. They obeyed without questioning. The effect of this law was that the best of the Earth produced, the best specimen in the flock or heard should not be sued for self, but for God. At a time in history when it was a struggle to make sure the family had food, those who sought to worship the Lord were asked to sacrifice the best part of their source of life. It was the real test of Adam and Eve’s faith, and they obeyed. “And now I speak concerning baptism. Behold, elders, priests, and teachers were baptized; and they were not baptized save they brought forth fruit meet that they were worthy of it. Neither did they receive any unto baptism save they came forth with a broken heart and a contrite spirit, and witnessed unto the church that they truly repented of all their sins. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
“And none were received unto baptism save they took upon them the name of Christ, having a determination to serve him to the end. And after they had been received unto baptism, and were wrought upon and cleansed by the power of the Holy Ghost, they were numbered among the people of the church of Christ; and their names were taken that they might be remembered and nourished by the good word of God, to keep them in the right way, to keep them continually watchful unto prayer, relying alone upon the merits of Christ, who was the author and the finisher of their faith. And the church did meet together oft, to fast and to pray, and to speak one with another concerning the welfare of their souls. And hey did meet together oft to partake of bread and wine, in remembrance of the Lord Jesus. And they were strict to observe that there should be no iniquity among them; and whoso was found to commit iniquity, and three witnesses of the church did condemn them before the elders, and if they repented not and confessed not, their names were blotted out, and they were not numbered among the people of Christ. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
“However, as oft as they repented and sought forgiveness, with real intent, they were forgiven. And their meetings were conducted by the church after the manner of the workings of the Spirit, and by the power of the Holy Ghost; for as the power of the Holy Ghost led them whether to preach, or to exhort, or to pray, or to supplicate, or to sing, even so it was done,” reports Moroni 6.1-9. It is especially in our families and similarly close associations that we must identify the elements of assault and withdrawal that defeat love and right relation to others. By insight and practice we must break away from them and reserve them, first by learning a calm but firm non-cooperation with those poisonous elements, and then by initiatives of goodwill and blessing in the midst of them. What we do in our meetings as Christians should be focused on enabling us to do this effectively wherever we are. Those meetings should and could be centers from which powerfully redemptive community spreads. Where to start? In various parts of the United States of America, publicly owned vehicles (police, street maintenance, schools) wear a bumper sticker that proclaims, “There is No Excuse for Domestic Violence.” It is a wonderful idea. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
However, we need to go deeper, of course. We need to become the kind of people whom domestic violence is unthinkable and never an option. We must be transformed in such a way that our minds and bodies—our very souls—simply do not have the makeup for it. This is the work of the Christian spiritual formations. We must begin in the family. Now the slogan must be, “There is No Excuse for Assault or Withdrawal in the Home.” Do you think that would take care of intimate partner violence? Of course it would. However, the reserve is not true: merely avoiding the subject of intimate partner violence, domestic violence or assault can still leave the home a hell of cutting remarks, contempt, coldness, and withdrawal or noninvolvement. Such a hell is often found in the homes of Christians and even of Christian leaders. Frequently they seem to honestly think that such a condition is normal, and they have no knowledge of any other way. Their very theology may strengthen this tragically false outlook. If I were married, I would seek the help of my spouse in this matter. If not, then a trusted friend who is spiritually mature and not abusive. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
I would then number my areas of need in order of importance, say: Purity, Mind, Prayer, Witness, Giving, Work, Friendship, and Leadership. Then, beginning with the first need, Purity, I would look over the suggested sub-disciplines and choose one to three things which I think would best help me improve. In doing this, I would resist the temptation to commit myself to too many disciplines. Better to succeed in a few than to assure failure by overcommitment. Perhaps, regarding the discipline of Purity I would choose to commit myself, first, to memorizing Scripture which help steel me to temptations, and second, to not watching anything sensual on TV or at the movies. Perhaps under Witness, I would make commitments to pray that God would give me someone to share Christ with and to join an interest club to meet unchurched people. After going through my life I would have perhaps twenty specific things which I could do to improve my eight weakest areas. However, before commitment to the specifics, I would look at the whole list with honest realism, asking, “Are the things which I am about to commit to really within my reach with the help of God?” #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Perhaps, regarding the discipline of Mind, I have become so convicted that I am considering committing myself to reading the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice, plus reading The Book of Mormon. Make sure your commitments make you sweat, but also make sure that taken together they are manageable. It is better to increase your commitments as you succeed than to bite off more than you can do. Success begets success. Before setting your commitments in concrete, give yourself a week to think about them and pray over them. Seek the Holy Spirit’s guidance for other ways of personal discipline not mentioned in this essay. Ask your spouse of friend to hold you accountable for your disciplines. Even if it has to be over the phone, make sure you regularly confer and pray. Be honest about your success and failures. And be willing to take advice and make adjustments. You may have some complications, no doubt, and may not succeed at time. When this happens, wounded pride and embarrassment can make you want to take your marbles and go home. We do not like to do things which we fail. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
However, we must realize that failure is a part of succeeding, provided we admit our failures and go at it again. Moreover, we are not under Law but grace. God is not counting our failure against us, and we are not building a treasure of merit with our success. We are simply trying to live a disciplined life which pleases our loving Father—and He understands our failures better than we understand our own children’s. When the movement in one direction has exhausted itself, there is a pause, and then a reversal directs the movement into the opposite direction. The flow of Nature follows the course indicated by the Principle of Reversion, which throws it back after a time in the opposite direction. When the point of farthest travel is reached, the forces reverse themselves. In this way, excess disciplines and even defeats itself. In this way too the Universe and all the different kinds of existence in it are kept in equilibrium. In the to-and-fro movement of human breathing, we have a kay to human development. Study it well with this assistance and you will discern a forward and backward movement, a pendulum-like swing, here too. Everything in the Universe is subject to a pendulum-like movement. It shuttles to and from with a coming-to-be and a ceasing-to-be effect. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Winchester Mystery House
Sarah Winchester had multiple rooms dedicated to plants and flowers. This room, her South Conservatory, contains over 200 panes of glass to allow for natural light. How would you spend a day alone in this room?
Explore the house from the comfort of your own home!
Learn More Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
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The Unconscious Thinks and Lives in Terms of Millennia–for that We Require the Help of the Black Magician!
People who take an optimum amount of vitamin C will experience only a quarter as much illness as those who do not. Through proper use, we could raise the average life expectancy by eight years. We have certain ideas as to how a civilized or educated or moral being should live, and we occasionally do our best to fulfill these ambitious expectations. Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat. We call the unconscious “nothing,” and yet it is a reality in poetentia. The thought we shall think, the deed we shall do, even the fate we shall lament tomorrow, all lie unconscious in our today. The unknown is us which the affect uncovers was always there and sooner or later would have presented itself to the conscious. Sarah Winchester’s mansion has hosted many glittering, star studded parties and was regarded as the place to see and been seen. Conrad Nicholson Hilton, Constance Hilton, Zsa Zsa Gabor, William Randolph Heart, Phoebe Apperson, Vivien Leigh, Hattie McDaniel, and Sidney Howard are said to have visited. As often happens, the intensity of emotion experienced over the years by those anxious to be recognized at the mysterious mansion has left the grand Queen Anne, Eastlake, Gothic mansion uniquely stocked with echoes from the past. #RandolphHarris 1 of 28
The only slightly surprising element to this haunted house is that ghosts were apparently not officially acknowledged until 1985, just prior to the mansion’s $40-million renovation. During mid-December in 1985, everyone at the Winchester mansion was busy preparing for the upcoming day when the mansion would once again receive guests. No matter what their usual duties or job titles, all employees were directly involved with the last-minute details—secretaries were sweeping, butlers were dusting, waitresses were helping make up guest rooms. The place was a veritable model of industry. Mr. Jim was in the Grand Ballroom, which some consider the most beautiful room in the house, in anticipation of the new carpet being installed. Like many of those on the staff, Mr. Jim was a part-time Hollywood actor; given the star-studded history of the mansion, the “day job” was very much a labour of love. Being able to devote some of himself this gorgeous room that had been so important to the history of movie-making felt more like a privilege than a chore. It was also a perfect time, he thought, to commune with the spirits of those who came to the mansion to celebrate receiving Academy Awards here. As Mr. Jim’s experience unfolded, it became a far closer encounter than he anticipated. #RandolphHarris 2 of 28
The Grand Ballroom is large and the job had to be done thoroughly, so Mr. Jim was taking his time and making sure he did not miss any part of the floor. After repeatedly going back over to a certain area in the Grand Ballroom, he realized that while the rest of the room was kept at a very comfortable temperature, the air in that particular spot was incredibly chilly. More puzzled than concerned Mr. Jim wanted to determine what was causing this draft. The temperature was an inexplicably 20 degrees Fahrenheit cooler in this circle which was about 45 inches in diameter near a wall, mahogany framed mirror. As Mr. Jim wiped his cloth over the reflective glass, he was astonished to see the face a young man, with slick dark hair, smoking a cigarette staring back at him. Mr. Jim was alone in the room, so he quickly turned around to see who had joined him. There was no one else in the room, and that was not his face in the mirror. He turned back to the mirror. The image was still there. That was enough for Mr. Jim. He took it as a sign to remove the carpet he had just installed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 28
According to information released by the mansion, the mirror was gifted to the mansion by Boris Karloff with a note saying, “A warm private friendship has subsisted between us for half our lives, interrupted by no untoward occurrence, and never for a moment cooling into indifference. Of this friendship, the source of so much happiness to me, I wish to leave, if not an enduring memorial, at least an affectionate and grateful acknowledgment. I inscribe this mirror to you.” One night, I was in the Winchester mansion, standing in the presence of a sublime hieratic figured we now called the “Warlock” who was clothed in a long black robe reflecting from the mirror. This warlock was Boris Karloff, and he had just ended a lengthy discourse with the words, “And for that we require the help of black magician.” Then the door suddenly opened and an old man came in, the “black magician,” who however was dressed in a white rob. He too looked noble and sublime. The black magician evidently wanted to speak with the warlock, but he hesitated to do so in my presence. As that the warlock, point to me, said, “Speak, only an innocent is here.” So the black magician began to relate a strange story of how he had found the lost keys of Paradise and did not know how to use them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 28
The black magician told the warlock (Boris) that the king of the country in which he lived was seeking a suitable tomb for himself. The king’s subjects had chanced to dig up an old sarcophagus, threw away the bones, and had the empty sarcophagus buried again for later use on the spot that this sprawling mansion now occupies. However, no sooner had the bones seen the light of day than the being to whom they once had belonged—the virgin—changed into a black horse that galloped off into the desert. The black magician pursued it across the sandy coast and beyond, and there after many vicissitudes and difficulties he found the lost keys of Paradise. That was the end of history, and also, unfortunately, of the warlock and his mirror. It supposedly shattered into pieces, was sent out to San Francisco for repair and never returned. This haunting did not fall out as we had wished, no one understand what the warlock, the black magician, and the king were trying to tell us. The meaning of the story died with the disappearance of the haunted mirror. We were confronted with a problem and one which life is always brining us up against: namely, the uncertainty of all moral valuation, the bewildering interplay of good and evil, and the remorseless concatenation of guilt, suffering, and redemption. #RandolphHarris 5 of 28
This path to the primordial religious experience is the right one, but how many recognize it? It is like a still small voice, and it sounds from afar. It is ambiguous, questionable, dark, presaging danger and hazardous adventure; a razor-egged path, to be trodden for God’s sake only, without assurance and without sanction. Hence we must always reckon with the presence of things not yet discovered. These, as I have said, may be unknow quirks of character. However, the possibilities of future development may also come to light in this way, perhaps in just such an outburst of affect which sometimes radically alters the whole situation. The unconscious has a Janus-face: on one side its contents point back to a preconscious, prehistoric World of instinct, while on the other side it potentially anticipates the future—precisely because of the instinctive readiness for action of the factors that determine human’s fate. If we had complete knowledge of the ground plan lying dormant in an individual from the beginning, one’s fate would be in large measure predictable. #RandolphHarris 6 of 28
Now, to the extent that unconscious tendencies—by they backward-looking images or forward-looking anticipations—appear in visions, vision have been regarded, in all previous ages less as historical regression than as anticipations of the future, and rightly so. For everything that will be happens on the basis of what has been, and of what—consciously or unconsciously—still exists as a memory-trace. In s far as no human is born totally new, but continually repeats the stage of development last reached by the species, one contains unconsciously, as an a priori datum, the entire psychic structure developed both upwards and downwards by one’s ancestors in the course of the ages. That is what gives the unconscious its characteristic “historical” aspect, but it is at the same time the sine qua non for shaping the future. For this reason it is often very difficult to decide whether an autonomous manifestation of the unconscious should be interpreted as an effect (and therefore historical) or as an aim (and therefore teleological and anticipatory). The conscious mind thinks as a rule without regard to ancestral preconditions and without taking into account the influence this a priori factor has on the shaping of the individual’s fate. #RandolphHarris 7 of 28
Whereas we think in periods of years, the unconscious thinks and lives in terms of millennia. So when something happens that seems to us an unexampled novelty, it is generally a very old story indeed. We still forget, like children, what happened yesterday. We are still living in a wonderful new World where humans think themselves astonishingly new and “modern.” This is unmistakable proof of the youthfulness of human consciousness, which has not yet grown aware of its historical antecedents. As a matter of fact, the “normal” person convinces me far more of the autonomy of the unconscious than does the insane person. Psychiatric theory can always take refuge behind real or alleged organic disorders of the brain and thus detract from the importance of the unconscious. However, when it comes to normal humanity, such a view is no longer applicable. What one sees happening in the World is no just a shadowy vestige of activities that were once conscious, but expression of a living psychic condition that still exists and always will exist. Were that not so, one might well be astonished. However, it is precisely those who give least credence to the autonomy of the unconscious who are the most surprised by it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 28
Because of its youthfulness and vulnerability, our consciousness tends to make light of the unconscious. This is understandable each, for if one wants to start something on one’s own account. a young person should not let oneself be overawed by the authority of one’s parents. Historically as well as individually, our consciousness has developed out of the darkness and somnolence of primordial unconsciousness. There were psychic processes and functions long before any ego-consciousness existed. Thinking existed long before humans were able to say: “I am conscious of thinking.” The primitive “perils of the soul” consist mainly of dangers to consciousness. Fascination, bewitchment, “loss of soul,” possession, et cetera are obviously phenomena of the dissociation and suppression of consciousness caused by unconscious contents. Even civilized humans are not yet entirely free of the darkness of primeval times. The unconscious is the mother of consciousness. Where there is a mother there is also a father, yet one seems to be unknown. #RandolphHarris 9 of 28
Consciousness in the pride of its youth, may deny its father, but it cannot deny its mother. That would be too unnatural, for one can see in every child how hesitantly and slowly its ego-consciousness evolves out of a fragmentary consciousness lasting for single moments only, and how these islands gradually emerge from the total darkness of mere instinctuality. Consciousness grows out of an unconscious psyche which is older than it, and which goes on functioning together with it or even in spite of it. Although there are numerous cases of conscious contents becoming unconscious again (through being repressed, for instance), the unconscious as a whole is far from being a mere remnant of consciousness. Or are the psychic functions of animals remnants of consciousness? There is little hope of our finding in the unconscious an order equivalent to that of the ego. It certainly does not look as if we were likely to discover an unconscious ego-personality, something in the nature of a Pythagorean “counter-Earth.” And this of course means “miraculous” interposition, but not necessarily of the gross sort our fathers took such delight in representing, and which has so lost is magic for us. #RandolphHarris 10 of 28
If evil were really one under the same sun, the sky would incontinently shrivel to a snakeskin and cast it out in spasms. However, the spasms of Nature are years and centuries; and it will tax human’s patience to wait so long. We may think of the reserved possibilities God keeps in his own hand, under as invisible and molecular slowly self-summating a form as we please. We may think of them as counteracting human agencies which God inspires ad hoc. In short, signs and wonders and convulsions of the Earth and sky are not the only neutralizers of obstruction to God’s plans of which it is possible to think. As long as languages contain a future perfect tense, determinists, following the bent of laziness or passion, the lines of least resistance, can reply in that tense, saying, “It will have been fated,” to the still small voice which urges an opposite course; and thus excuse themselves from effort in a quiet unanswerable way. Vampires, Ghost, and Demons—God Himself, you think, can have no use for them. An immortality of every separate specimen must be to Him and to the Universe as indigestible a load to carry as it is to you. #RandolphHarris 11 of 28
So, engulfing the whole subject in a sort of mental giddiness and nausea, you drift along, first doubting that the mass can be immortal, then losing all assurance in the immortality of a particular person, precious as you all the while feel and realize the latter to be. This, I am sure, is the attitude of mind of some of you before me. However, is not such an attitude due to the verist lack and dearth of your imagination? You take these swarms of alien kinsmen as they are for you: an external picture painted on your retina, representing a crowd oppressive by tis vastness and confusion. As they are for you, so you think they positively and absolutely are. I feel no call for them, you say; therefore there is no call for them. However, all the while, beyond this externality which is your way of realizing them, they realize themselves with the acutest internality, with the most violent thrills of life. It is you who are dead, stone-dead and blind and senseless, in your way of looking. You open your eyes upon a scene of which you miss the whole significance. Each of these grotesque or even repulsive aliens is animated by an inner joy of living as hot or hotter than that which you feel beating in your private breast. #RandolphHarris 12 of 28
The sun rises and beauty beams to light his path. To miss the inner joy of him is to miss the whole of him. Not a being of the countless throng is there whose continued life is not called for, and called for intensely, by the consciousness that animates the being’s form. That you neither realize nor understand nor call for it, that you have no use for it, is an absolutely irrelevant circumstance. That you have a saturation-point of interest tells us nothing of the interest that absolutely are. The Universe, with every living entity which her resources create, creates at the same time a call for that entity, and an appetite for its continuance—creates it, if nowhere else, at least within the heart of the entity itself. It is absurd to suppose, simply because our private power of sympathetic vibration wit other lives gives out so soon, that in the heart of infinite being itself there can be such a thing as plethora, or glut, or supersaturation. It is not as if there were a bounded room where the minds in possession had to move up or make place and crowd together to accommodate new occupants. Each new mind brings its own edition of the Universe of space along with it, its own room to inhabit; and these spaces never crowd each other—the space of my imagination, for example, in no way interferes with yours. #RandolphHarris 13 of 28
The amount of possible consciousness seems to be governed by no law analogous to that of the so-called conservation of energy in the material World. When one human wakes up, or is born, another does not have to go to sleep, or die, in order to keep the consciousness of the Universe a constant quantity. There is a law of the Universe called the Law of Increase of Spiritual energy, by Dr. Wundt, which expressly oppose the law of conservation of energy in physical things. There seems no formal limit to the positive increase of being in spiritual respects; and since spiritual being, whenever it conies, affirms itself, expands and craves continuance, we may justly and literally say, regardless of the defect of our own private sympathy, that the supply of the individual life in the Universe can never possibly, however immeasurable it may become, exceed the demand. The demand for that supply is there the moment the supply itself comes into being, for the beings supplied demand their own continuance. Through many diversified channels of expression, the eternal Spirit of the Universe affirms and realizes its own infinite life. However, if we are theists, we can go no farther without altering the result. #RandolphHarris 14 of 28
God, we can then say, has so inexhaustible a capacity for love that His call and need is for literally endless accumulation of created lives. God can never faint or grow weary, as we should, under the increasing supply. God’s scale is infinite in all things. His sympathy can never know satiety or glut. Furthermore, consciousness in this process does not have to be generated de novo in a vast number of places. It exists already, behind the scenes, coeval with the World. The condition of consciousness is a certain kind of psychophysical movement. Before consciousness can come, a certain degree of activity in the movement must be reached. This requisite degree is called the threshold; but the height of the threshold varies under different circumstances: it may rise of fall. When it falls, as in states of great lucidity, we grow conscious of things of which we should be unconscious at other times; when it rises, as in drowsiness, consciousness sinks in amount. This rising and lowering of a psychophysical threshold exactly conforms to our notion of a permanent obstruction to the transmission of consciousness, which obstruction may, in our brains, grow alternately greater or less. #RandolphHarris 15 of 28
The transmission-theory also puts itself in touch with a whole class of experiences that are with difficulty explained by the production-theory. I refer to those obscure and exceptional phenomena reported at all times throughout human history which the psychical-researchers are doing to much to rehabilitate; such phenomena, namely, as religious conversions, providential leadings in answers to prayer, instantaneous healings, premonitions, apparitions at time of death, clairvoyant visions or impressions, and the whole range of mediumistic capacities, to say nothing of still more exceptional and incomprehensible things. If all our human thought be a function of the brain, then of course, if any of these things are fact—and to my own mind some of them are fact—we may not suppose that they can occur without preliminary brain-action. However, the ordinary production-theory of consciousness is knit up with a peculiar notion of how brain-action can occur—that notion being that all brain-action, without exception, is due to a prior action, immediate or remote, of the bodily sense-organs on the brain. #RandolphHarris 16 of 28
Such action makes the brain produce sensations and mental images, and out of the sensations and images the higher forms of thought and knowledge in their turn are framed. As transmissionists, we also must admit this to the condition of all our usual thought. Sense-action is what lowers the brain-barrier. My voice and aspect, for instance strike upon your ears and eyes; your brain thereupon becomes more previous, and an awareness on your part of what I say and who I am slips into this World from the World behind the veil. However, in the mysterious phenomena to which I allude, it is often hard to see where the sense-organs can come in. A medium, for example, will show knowledge of his sitter’s private affairs which it seems impossible he should have acquired through sight or hearing, or inference therefrom. Or you will have an apparition of some one who is now dying hundreds of miles away. We need only suppose the continuity of our consciousness with a mother sea, to allow for exceptional waves occasionally pouring over the dam. Of course the causes of these odd lowerings of the brain’s threshold still remain a mystery on any terms with its grouping of Heavenly and Hellish forces upon a common center. #RandolphHarris 17 of 28
If it were the dark nor even if all were in the light, we could see no form of anything at all. The contrast of shadow and light is needed to define the form. Opposites are always necessary to each other. This is why they are present throughout the Universe and moreover present in all possible combinations and proportions in all possible rhythms and patterns. It is present in life, in all things, in planets and seasons. It is the eternal and invariable law of manifested existence. For anything to exist for us at all, it needs an opposite to compare it with, or it will remain non-existent to our consciousness. Unless it recognizes the pairs of opposites, thinking cannot come into existence at all. If we had not experienced Evil, we could not appreciate Good. If we had not become lost in Appearance, we could not appreciate Reality. It may be that for us humans, the ultimate meaning of the cosmos lies implicit in this truth. The acting self needs an outer World and an inner one—both. All things in human’s experience can be classified into pairs of opposites—that which experiences and that which is experienced. In each pair the first member itself becomes, on analysis, the second member of another pair. #RandolphHarris 18 of 28
Whatever we look at, we see only in a relationship of contrast to something else. It is a mistake to consider this opposition to be antagonistic. On the contrary, if our perception is to be true and our judgment correct, each should be considered a part of the other. This teaches us to synthesize, to look at both sides of a thing, to include both points of view in an argument, and to add the similarities also instead of nothing the differences alone. It may be unusual, inconsistent, startling, to propose that we think in terms of opposing ideas, of conflicting statements, and find identity in variety, but this is Nature’s own way—her balance. Balance is a teaching which plays on contradictions and finds room for opposites. It seems them both in the structure of the Universe and in the movement of evolution. It puts them in its approach to human problems. Each to view of a thing or idea implies the existence of the contrary view. To understand that the universal evolution depends upon a two-way interconnected movement, and that its comprehension requires us to think about it in oppositional terms, is to be liberated from the narrow, one sided, incomplete, and intolerant thinking which is responsible for so many absurdities and miseries in human history. #RandolphHarris 19 of 28
When both ignore the two-face character of fortune and Nature, optimism becomes unreasonable pessimism. The life of the human being is one of relating to others. We reemphasize: The life of the human beings is one of relating to others. Though many are cursed to live and die alone, we are born of relations and into relations. One of the heart-rending stories found in Sarah Winchester’s diary is of a broken human being living on the streets. He was dying, and Mrs. Winchester took him in and had her staff care for him. When he recovered, she gave him a job and a place to stay on her estate. To merely welcome another, to provide for one, to make a place, is one of the most life-giving and life-receiving things a human being can do. They are the basic, universal acts of love. Our lives were meant to be full of such acts, drawing on the abundance of God, and they achieve their greatest fulfillment precisely when, like Jesus, we “lay down our lives for the brethren.” This “relating” quality reaches into every dimension of human existence. It characterizes the basic nature of all thought and feeling, which is always thought of or feeling something other than itself. #RandolphHarris 20 of 28
The way relate to others pervades the deepest reaches of our body, soul, and World, where our very identity—who we really are—is always intermingled (if sometimes negatively, by reaction) with others who have given us life, sustained us, or walked with us—or perhaps have deeply injured us. The call of “the other” on our lives is a constant for everyone. It is the basic reality of a moral existence, which we retreat from only into a living death of isolation. If we make our purpose to save our life by withdrawal, we lost it. So Jesus said. However, this is not only a revealed truth, it is also a testable fact of life. If you would live, then give—and receive. Now you understand why Sarah Winchester, even though she withdrew, created a microcosm in her own mansion, and kept people employed for 38 years of nonstop construction. “And it came to pass when Corintumr had recovered of his wounds, he began to remember the words which Ether had spoken unto him. He saw that there had been slain by the sword already nearly two millions of his people, and he began to sorrow in his heart; yea, there had been slain two millions of mighty men, and also their wives and the children. #RandolphHarris 21 of 28
“He began to repent of evil which he had done; he began to remember the words which had been spoken by the mouth of all the prophets, and he saw them that they were fulfilled thus far, every whit; and his soul mourned and refused to be comforted. And it came to pass that he write an epistle unto Shiz, desiring him that he would spare the people, and he would give up the kingdom for the sake of their lives of the people. And it came to pass that when Shiz had received his epistle he wrote an epistle unto Coriantumr, that is he would give himself up, that he might slay him with his own sword, that he would spare the lives of the people. And it came to pass that the people repented not of their iniquity; and the people of Coriantumr were stirred up to anger against the people of Shiz; and the people of Shiz were stirred up to anger against the people of Coriantumr; wherefore, the people of Shi did give battle unto the people of Coriantumr. And when Coriantumr saw that he was about to fall he fled again before the people of Shiz. And it came to pass that he came to the waters of Ripliancum, which, by interpretation, is large, or to exceed all; wherefore, when they came to these waters they pitched their tents. #RandolphHarris 22 of 28
“And Shiz also pitched his tents near unto them; and therefore on the morrow they did come to battle. And it came to pass that they fought and exceedingly sore battle, in which Coriantumr was wounded again, and he fainted with the loss of blood. And it came to pass that the armies of Coriantumr did press upon the armies of Shiz that they beat them, that they caused them to flee before them; and they did flee southward, and did pitch their tents in a place which was called Ogath. And it came to pass that they army of Coriantumr did pitch their tents by the hill Ramah; and it was that same hill where my father Mormon did hide up the records unto the Lord, which were sacred. And it came to pass that they did gather together all the people upon all the face of the land, who had not been slain, save it was Ether. And it came to pass that Ether did behold all the doings of the people; and he beheld that the people who were for Coriantumr were gathered together to the army of Coriantumr; and the people who were for Shiz were gathered together to the army of Shiz. Wherefore, they were for the space of four years gathering together the people, that they might get all who were upon the face of the land, and that they might receive all the strength which it was possible that they could receive. #RandolphHarris 23 of 28
“And it came to pass that when they were all gathered together, every one to the army which he would, with their wives and their children—both men, women, and children being armed with weapons of war, having shields, and breastplates, and head-plates, and being clothed after the manner of war—they did march forth one against another to battle; and they fought all that day, and conquered not. And it came to pass that when it was night they were weary, and retired to their camps; and after they had retired to their camps they took up a howling and a lamentation for the loss of the slain of their people; and so great were their cries, their howling and a lamentation for the loss of the slain of their people; and so great were their cries, that they did rend the air exceedingly. And it came to pass that on the morrow they did go again to battle, and great and terrible was that day; nevertheless, they conquered not, and when the night came again they did rend the air with their cries, and their howlings, and their mournings, for the loss of the slain of their people. And it came to pass that Coriantumr wrote again an epistle unto Shiz, desiring that he would not come again to battle, but that he would take the kingdom, and spare the lives of the people. #RandolphHarris 24 of 28
“However, behold, the Spirit of the Lord had ceased striving with them, and Satan had full power over the hearts of the people; for they were given up unto the hardness of their hearts, and the blindness of their minds that they might be destroyed; wherefore they went again to battle. And it came to pass that they fought all that day, and when the night came they slept upon their swords. And on the morrow they fought even until the night came. And when the night came they were drunken with anger, even as a man who is drunken with wine; and they slept again upon their swords. And on the morrow they fought again; and when the night came they had fallen by the sword save it were fifty and two of the people of Coriantumr, and sixty nine of the people of Shiz. And it came to pass that they slept upon their swords that night, and on the morrow they fought again, and they contended in their might with their swords and with their shields, all that day. And when the night came there were thirty and two of the people of Shiz, and twenty and seven of the people of Coriantumr. And it came to pass that they ate and slept, and prepared for death on the morrow. And they were large and mighty men as to the strength of men. #RandolphHarris 25 of 28
“And it came to pass that they fought for the space of three hours, and they fainted with the loss of blood. And it came to pass that when the men of Coriantumr had received sufficient strength that they could walk, they were about to flee for their lives; but behold, Shiz arose, and also his men, and he swore in his wrath that he would slay Coriantumr or he would perish by the sword. Wherefore, he did pursue them, and on the morrow he did overtake them; and they fought again with the sword. And it came to pass that when they had all fallen by the sword, save it were Coriantumr and Shiz, behold Shiz had fainted with the loss of blood. And it came to pass that when Croiantumr had leaned upon his sword, that he rested a little, he smote off the head of Shiz. And it came to pass that after he had smitten off the head of Shiz, that Shiz raised up on his hands and fell; and after that he had struggled for breath, he died. And it came to pass that Coriantumr fell to the Earth, and became as if he had no life. And the Lord spake unto Ether, and said unto him: Go forth. And he went forth, and beheld that the words of the Lord has all been fulfilled; and he finished his record; (and the hundredth part I have not written) and he hid them in a manner that the people of Limhi did find them. #RandolphHarris 26 of 28
“Now the last words which are written by Ether are these: Whether the Lord will that I be translated, or that I suffer the will of the Lord in the flesh, it mattereth not, if it so be that I am saved in the kingdom of God. Amen,” reports Ether 15.1-34. “But the LORD said to him, ‘Not so; if anyone kills Cain, one will suffer vengeance seven times over.’ Then the LORD put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. So Cain went out from the LORD’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden,” reports Genesis 4.15-16. A view of the World which fails or refuses to recognize that the opposites are essential to it, which accepts its beauty but not its ugliness, is not complete and only a half truth. If there is suffering as well as sweetness in life, that is not accident, nor is it brought into the scheme of things by human evil alone: nothing exists without its contrary. In the end, a human must recognize that there are two forces a work in Nature—and therefore in one’s own life—the ne benign, the other hostile. The cold time is here: time to work and time to rest, time to celebrate inside, time to enjoy the harvest. All about us, the Land of Spirits are singing. All about us, the deities are speaking. Please help me listen, all you divine beings. May I hear your voices. #RandolphHarris 27 of 28
I need much help in cooling my Earth. I cannot do it alone I ask for help from the Sky: please give rise to your cloud with plentiful moisture and ice so the Earth can cool and have water. I ask for help from the rain: please give your moisture to be the plants’ own blood. I ask for help from the soil: please give your minerals from which the plants will form their bodies. I will give my time, I will give my care, I will give my loving stewardship. All these will I give my garden and I ask for your others to give what the garden of Eden will need as well. We will do it together and I will not forget your contribution. Glory His holy name; may your heart rejoice, ye who seek the Lord. Seek the Lord and His strength; seek His presence continually. Remember the marvellous works that He hath done, His wonders, and the judgments He decreed, O seed of Israel, His servant, Children of Jacob, His beloved ones. He is the Lord our God; His judgments are throughout the Earth. Remember His covenant forever, the word which He commanded to a thousand generations. In Luke 18.1-8, Jesus told a parable about an unfair, unjust judge who finally was willing to listen to a woman’s case because of her continual persistence. When it comes to God, that is the way we need to be of what he said. What promises or promises from God are you bringing to His constant remembrance? #RandolphHarris 28 of 28
Winchester Mystery House
WMH 13 Days of Christmas #7
Sarah Winchester’s innovations for water conservation was far ahead of her time. She had multiple rooms dedicated for plants, each with a complex drainage system that allowed for the reuse of water. On today’s episode of the Winchester Mystery House 13 Days of Christmas, explore Sarah’s North Conservatory and learn more about her magnificent innovations.
Winchester Mystery House
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
The Events of this Wide World I Would Seize Like a Strong Giant and My Spirit Tease!
Once you think that your own mind is not your friend anymore, you are on your way to insanity. In 1923 a very significant meeting was held at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago. Attending that famous gathering were nine of the World’s most successful financiers. The president of the largest independent steel company, the president of the largest utility company, the president of the New York Stock Exchange, a member of the President’s Cabinet, the greatest bear on Wall Street, the head of the World’s greatest monopoly, and finally the president of the Bank of International Settlement were all present. If there ever was one, a high-powered group was for sure present. These humans were supreme masters of the finance World! Twenty-five years later, in 1948 the picture was much different. After living on borrowed money for the last five years of his life, Charles Schwab had died bankrupt. A fugitive from justice, penniless in a foreign land is how Samuel Insull died. Howard Hopson was insance. Arthur Critten died abroad, insolvent. Richard Whitney has just been released from Sing Sing. Being pardoned from prison so he could die at home was the fate of Albert Fall. Death by suicide was the date with destiny for Leon Fraser and Ivar Kreuger. #RandolphHarris 1 of 26
All those men, master of finance, were mastered by wealth! The extraordinary sameness of the hellish gravity of their famous lives is a divine warning, for God set the ghost of these financial giants as spectral, mid-century witnesses to a nation about to run amok in materialism. Today their ghost have faded, and a new gallery of forlorn spirits is assembling, with names like Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, Amancio Ortega, and Elon Musk. Yet few take serious notice. Perhaps it is because most, especially if they are Christians, do not aspire to be the head of the World’s greatest monopoly or to the vulgar display of the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Instead they are quite content to cultivate a less encumbering level of wealth—not realizing that the dangers for themselves are the same for the super rich: a growing delusion that this World is everything that someday they will be content, the “providing for one’s family” means being able to give them more and better, that relationships will be enriched by wealth, that wealth will make them better people. Clearly, the abiding reality is that wealth presents substantial dangers for all, and especially for today’s increasingly prosperous Christian population. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26
However, what can we do to escape the power of materialism? Step out of the competitive World? Abandon Wall Street? Avoid the professions? Join a commune? Some think so, despite Christ’s firm admonitions against isolation. We all need stuff—stuff to wear, stuff to eat, stuff for home, stuff for school. And, of course, beyond the necessities there is also the stuff we want but do not really need, as well as the stuff we dream about but may not be able to obtain at the moment. If we are not careful, we can have a hard tie seeing past all that stuff. Material possession (both those we have and those we want) can obstruct our view of who we really are and what life is really about. There is a better way, actually, and it is taught repeatedly in God’s World. In fact, Scripture presents it as a grace—the grace of giving. The most explicit teaching on this subject is 2 Corinthians 8, where the Apostle Paul deftly instructs the Corinthian church regarding giving by citing the beautiful example of the Macedonian church’s giving. He begins: “And now, brothers, we want you to know about the grace [meaning the grace of giving] that God have given the Macedonian churches,” reports 2 Corinthians 8.1. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26
For Paul, giving is so much a grace that he uses the Greek word five times in this short text: verse 1, “the grace” (charin); verse 4, “the privilege” (charas); verse 6, “this act of grace” (charin); verse 7, “this grace of giving” (charity); and verse 9, “the grace” (charin). Giving is a matter of grace from beginning to end, as we shall see. Grace is the divine help or strength extended to us through the Atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. Through the grace of God, everyone who has lived will be resurrected—our spirits will be reunited with our bodies, never again to be separated. Through His grace, the Lord also enables those who live His gospel to repent and be forgiven. Grace is a gift from Heavenly Father given through His Son, Jesus Christ. The word grace, as used in the scriptures, refers primarily to enabling power and spiritual healing offered through the mercy and love of Jesus Christ. The grace of giving has nothing to do with being well-off. It is not dictated by ability. It is a willingness to give. Giving is viewed as a privilege. It is joyously enthusiastic and pleads for the opportunity to give more. What else produces such giving? Paul gives the answer in verse 5 as he relates the vertical and horizontal angles of the Macedonians’ commitment. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26
Yes, we will often feel inadequate, but fortunately God knows us far better than we know ourselves. “And they exceeded our expectations: They gave themselves first of all to the Lord, and then by the will of God also to us keeping with God’s will,” reports 2 Corinthians 8.5. Their remarkable giving was the result of their first giving themselves to God. It is so simple: when all one has is given to God, giving to others becomes the natural reflex of the soul. When we have already given the whole, it is easy to surrender part. This was shown in the life of a young Norwegian named Peter Torjesen when at the age of seventeen his heart was so stirred by a challenge to missionary giving that he opened his wallet and poured all his money into the offering. As an afterthought he also included a scrap of paper on which he wrote “Og mit liv” (“And my life”). Significantly, young Torjesen went on to lead a fruitful life as a missionary in China. The Macedonians did things right away: they gave their hearts to God, then they gave themselves to their fellow believers, which in turn resulted in their giving what they had to the work of Christ. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26
This is where grace giving must begin—given ourselves completely to God. Grace giving cannot exist without this. “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship,” reports Romans 12.1. A selfless person is one who is more concerned about the happiness and well-being of another than about one’s own convenience or comfort, one who is willing to serve another when it is neither sought for nor appreciated, or one who is willing to serve even those whom one dislikes. A selfless person displays a willingness to sacrifice, a willingness to purge from one’s mind and heart personal want, and needs, and feelings. Instead of reaching for and requiring praise and recognition for oneself, or gratification of one’s own wants, the selfless person will meet these very human needs for others. Remember the words of the Saviour as he taught his disciples on an occasion when personal recognition was being sought: “But Jesus called them to him, and saith unto them, Ye know they which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and their great ones exercise authority upon them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 26
“But so shall it not be among you: but whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister: And whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all. For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many,” reports Mark 10.42-45. There is another word that sound almost like the one we have been using. However, it is an ugly word. It describes a characteristic of satanic proportions. We will not say much of this word, for it is not pleasant to think about, as we do not like to use it. The word is selfish. The dictionary describes a selfish person as ne who is “concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself: seeking pleasure of well-being without regards for others.” May we add, a selfish person is often who refers to “I,” “me,” and “mine” rather than to “we,” “ours,” “yours,” or “theirs.” This person is anxious to be in the limelight, to be on center stage in life’s little dramas. One may not be a good listener, or a conversation monopolizer. Selfishness is the great unknown sin. No selfish person ever thought oneself to be selfish. The shinning example of the Macedonians’ giving was held high by the apostle Paul so as to convict and motivate the Corinthian church. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26
Now Paul left no doubt as to what we hoped would happen: “So we urged Titus, just as he had earlier made a beginning, to bring also to completion this act of grace on your part. However, just as you excel in everything—in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in complete earnestness and in your love for us—see that you also excel in this giving grace,” reports 2 Corinthians 8.6-7. The Corinthians were a gifted group who excelled in many commendable things other than giving. However, Paul knew that despite all their excellences they would never become what they could and should be until they learned the grace of giving. The abiding spiritual fact is, there is no way to grow into spiritual maturity without committing one’s giving to the Lord. God can have our money and not have our hearts, but He cannot have our hearts without having all our money. Jesus said, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” reports Matthew 6.21. The specters of the fallen Wall Street giants are not the only ones to announce the dangers of money. The entire New Testament is full of repeated warnings, many of which are from the lips of Jesus Himself, who informed His listeners about money than about Heaven and Hell, immorality involving pleasures of the flesh, or violence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26
After the rich young ruler turned away sorrowing because Jesus told him to sell all, Jesus told the disciples, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” reports Mark 10.25—His point being that it is impossible for a human who trusts in riches to get into Heaven. “The disciples were even more amazed, and said to each other, ‘Who then can be saved?’ Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God,’” reports Mark 10.26-27. Indeed, if we depend on wealth rather than on God, we can understand why Jesus consistently presented Wealth as a spiritual obstruction. At the end of the Sermon on the mount He recommended: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on Earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. However, store up for yourselves treasures in Heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal,” reports Matthew 6.19-20. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26
A little later Jesus warned, “No one can serve two masters. Either one will hate the one and love the other, or one will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money,” Matthew 6.4. And to a human grabbing for an inheritance Christ shouted, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed: a human’s life does not consist in the abundance of one’s possessions,” reports Luke 12.15. Then He related the story of the rich man who built bigger barns only to die that night, ending His parable with a solemn pronouncement: “This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for oneself but is not rich toward God,” reports Luke 12.21. Humans, the “rich toward God” are those who give not only themselves, but also their riches—thus laying up their treasures in Heaven. The key to liberation from the power of materialism is not an exodus from culture—abandoning Wall Street or leaving the wealth of the nation to others—but the grace of giving. Grace giving goes beyond a mere tithe, but rather giving till it hurts. Grace giving affects one’s lifestyle. When one indulges in grace giving, there are things one cannot have and things foregone. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26
If our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, et cetera, is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them. Givers for God disarm the power of money. They invite God’s grace to flow through them. “Silver and gold. Silver and gold. I’d rather have Jesus than silver and gold. No fame or fortune, no riches untold, I’d rather have Jesus than silver and gold. Don’t give me a mansion on top of the hill. Don’t give me the World with a shallow thrill, but just give me a Saviour my life He can hold. I’d rather have Jesus than silver and gold,” (Silver and Gold, by Kirk Franklin). It is possible you have reached a sticking point in your spiritual development and are perplexed. After all, you are attending church regularly, you enjoy the fellowship of Christians, you even read your Bible and pray regularly. The problem may be that you are not giving—the God simply does not have that part of you. If so, what you seen is the grace of giving. #RandolphHarris 11 of 26
The firstfruits giving is when one gives to God one’s best up-front, trusting that He will provide the rest; joyous freewill giving such as the Israelites experienced when Moses had to say “stop!”; the grace giving of the Macedonians whose liberality overflowed as they begged for the opportunity to give more. The apostle has made his point convincingly, but he caps it with a supreme illustration: “For you know the face of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich,” reports 2 Corinthians 8.9. Though Jesus could put His finger on every star, He emptied Himself and became a poor Earthly servant for us. That is Heaven’s “stewardship” program, and it is the pattern for us. The Corinthians were not clubbed into giving by fear or some gimmicky financial appeal. Rather, it was the ultimate example of giving—“the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ”—that produced the grace of giving in their lives. It was simply because of Jesus. We must understand that God’s grace in our lives demands discipline. This is why the great apostle of grace says, “discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness,” reports 1 Timothy 4.7. #RandolphHarris 12 of 26
And in this manner of the grace of giving, there must be the discipline of giving as well. Because of personal choices, everyone also experiences effects of sin. “Thus all humankind were lost; and behold, they would have been endlessly lost were it not that God redeemed his people from their lost and fallen state,” reports Mosiah 16.4. These effects are called spiritual death. No one can return to the divine grace. Through the Atonement, we all can be forgiven of our sins; we can become clean before God. To receive this enabling power, we must obey the gospel of Jesus Christ, which includes having faith in Him, repenting of our sins, being baptized, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, and trying to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ for the rest of our lives. The grace of God helps us every day. It strengthens us to do good works we could not do on our own. The Lord promised that if we humble ourselves before Him and have faith in Him, His grace will help us overcome all our personal weaknesses. “And if humans come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto humans weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all humans that humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them,” reports Ether 12.27. #RandolphHarris 13 of 26
Christ delivers from body hatred. A burning sese of these powers of evil actually inhabiting our body and specific parts thereof is one of the reasons body hatred, throughout the ages and across cultures, has been such a dreadful fact. Sincere people really do find evil in their body and wrongly blame the body for it. This misguided and terribly harmful attitude toward the body correctly sees the power of sin that really is in the actual body and its parts, and does not know how to think about the readiness to sin, the sinful meanings and intentions, that have come to possess those parts through their habituation in a World of sin. In this respect Paul’s teaching, explained above, that we are to “present our bodily parts as servants to righteousness for sanctification,” as reported in Romans 6.19, stand in shocking opposition to the assumptions of the classical thought of his day, as well as to those of most human thinking up to now. The same is true for his teaching that the body of the redeemed is a shrine of the Holy Spirit, and that therefore “the body is meant not meant for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body,” reports 1 Corinthians 6.16. “Do you now know,” he continues to say, “that your bodies are members [mela] of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 6.16). #RandolphHarris 14 of 26
Our bodies are the tabernacles of our spirits. He who is the Father of those spirits would have us build strength and virtue into these personal tabernacles. Dressing in neat, modest clothing invites the Spirit into our lives because it shows respect for our bodies and helps us to be an example for others. Satan is jealous of everyone who has a body, because he cannot have one. He tempts us to ruin our body’s purity by wearing inappropriate clothing or taking harmful substances. He even tempts us to be ashamed of our bodies—to think that they are not good enough, tall enough, strong enough, or pretty enough. If we follow the Spirit, we will be able to build strength and virtue into our bodies, and we will not believe the devils lies about them. Heavenly Father is pleased with the Earthly temples created for our spirits. We must show reverence for our bodies and treat them as holy temples. Well, they did not know, we can be sure, and could hardly think or imagine such a thing. We today do little better. In the past, theirs was the same understanding of the body that led Paul’s hearers in Athens to scoff at the idea of resurrection of the body. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26
A holy temple is considered the house of the Lord. Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost. However, “When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, ‘We want to hear you again on this subject,’” reports Acts 17.32. Yet, some still thought, “Who wants that thing back?” It was inconceivable to them that the physical body and its parts should be honoured and treasured as the habitation of God in redeemed human personality. And the same is true for most people today—and indeed for most professing Christians. For usual human beings in the usual circumstances, their body runs their life. “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?” reports Matthew 6.25. Contrary to the words of Jesus in Matthew 6.25, life is, for them, not more than food, nor the body more than clothing. As a matter of simple fact, their time and energy is almost wholly, if not entirely, devoted to how their body looks, smells, and feel, and to how it can be secured and used to meet ego needs such as admiration, gratification in pleasures of the flesh, and power over others. #RandolphHarris 16 of 26
It is this bodily orientation of the self that runs the human cosmos, as the elderly apostle John pointed out: “For all that is in the World, the lost of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the World,” report 1 John 2.16. This is “the mind of the flesh” discussed earlier from Paul, which is in opposition to “the mind of the spirit,” reports Romans 8.4-11. And John saw exactly the same outcomes for these two human options that Paul and all of the biblical writers knew: “The World is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God abides forever,” reports 1 John 2.17. By keeping the commandments and living righteously, you invite the Holy Ghost to be your constant companion. “Let thy bowels also be full of charity towards all humans, and to the house of faith and let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly; then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God; and the doctrine of the priesthood shall distil upon thy soul as the dews from Heaven. The Holy Ghost shall be thy constant companion, and thy scepter an unchanging scepter of righteousness and truth; and thy dominion shall be an everlasting dominion, and without compulsory means it shall flow unto thee forever and ever,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 121.45-46. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26
Nothing can come to pass that is contray to the will of the World-Mind, or that is not already mysteriously present in the World-Idea. All is formed according to the World-Idea, shaped and permeated by its expression of the Divine Will. All things which exist and all events which happen fulfill the World-Idea and are necessary to it. In the ultimate sense, all history—whether planetary or racial or personal—is pre-ordained. No chance event, no human planning can defeat the divine World-Idea. The Universe takes the pattern it does out of realization of its own inherent and latent possibilities. The Divine prevails everywhere within it, from atom to planet. The World-Idea must subsist through all the spectacles of history, must remain the beginning, the middle, and the end of it all, must operate and dominate inside and outside human’s will. The World-Idea is what is ordained for the Universe, its divine prescription. In the end the World-Idea must triumph. Nature, whose guests we all are, issues her dictates and executes them by her own power. #RandolphHarris 18 of 26
All things must in the end as in the beginning conform to the World-Idea or there would be no order in the Universe. Universal laws will not suffer defeat. All is known to the World-Mind—not only as it was in the past but also as it will be in the future. If it were otherwise then the World-Mind would not be able to maintain the Universe in complete function and all its parts in complete relation, nor would it be able to move all the planets in rhythmic revolution. If everything were not exactly knowable and every consequence predictable in advance, God could not be God. However, that in its turn could not be unless everything were predeterminable too. This is contrary to common modern and Western belief that it is what we, as human beings, freely choose and do, and what we try to get in satisfaction of our desires, which determines what course the future takes. If we all lived in a chaos and not in a cosmos, then it could be said that human’s will was completely free. However, in that case the Sun’s will, the stars’ wills and the moon’s will, would also have to be completely free. All things and all lives would then be subject to caprice, chance, and disorder. #RandolphHarris 19 of 26
The World-Idea is perfect. Since it is God’s Idea, how could it be otherwise? If we fail to become a co-worker with it, nothing of this perfection will be lost. If we do, we add nothing to it. No human can do anything to alter the World-Idea. It is God’s Will in every possible meaning of the word. The World-Idea will be realized anyhow, whatever human beings do or fail to do. “And it came to pass that the brother of Jared, (now the number of the vessels which had been prepared was eight) went forth unto the mount, which they called the mount Shelem, because of its exceeding height, and did molten out of rock sixteen small stones; and they were white and clear, even as transparent glass; and he did carry them in his hands upon the top of the mount, and cried again unto the Lord, saying: O Lord, thou hast said that we must be encompassed about by the floods. Now behold, O Lord, and do not be angry with thy servant because of his weakness before thee; for we know that thou art holy and dwellest in the Heavens, and that we are unworthy before three; because of the fall our natures have become evil continually; nevertheless, O Lord, thou hast given us a commandment that we must call upon thee, that from thee we may receive according to our desires. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26
“Behold, O Lord, thou hast driven us forth, and for these many years we have been in the wilderness; nevertheless, thou hast been merciful unto us. O Lord, look upon me in pity, and turn away thine anger from this thy people, and suffer not that they shall go forth across this ranging deep in darkness; but behold these things which I have molten out of the rock. And I know, O Lord, that thou hast all power, and can do whatsoever thou wilt for the benefit of man; therefore touch these stones, O Lord, with thy finger, and prepare them that they may shine forth in darkness; and they shall shine forth unto us in the vessels which we have prepared, that we may have light while we shall cross the sea. Behold, O Lord, thou canst do this. We know that thou art able to show forth great power, which looks so small unto the understanding of humans. And it came to pass that when the brother of Jared had said these words, behold, the Lord stretched forth his hand and touched the stones one by one with his finger. And the veil was taken from off the eyes of the brother of Jared, and he saw the finger of the Lord. #RandolphHarris 21 of 26
“And the finer of the Lord was like the finger of a man like unto flesh and blood; and the brother of Jared fell down before the Lord for he was stuck with fear. And the Lord saw that the brother of Jared has fallen to the Earth; and the Lord said unto him: Arise, why hast thou fallen? And he saith unto the Lord: I saw the finger of the Lord, and I feared lest he should smite me; for I knew not that the Lord had flesh and blood. And the Lord said unto him: Because of thy faith thou fast seen that I shall take upon me flesh and blood; and never has man come before me with such exceeding faith as thou hast; for were it not so ye could not have seen by finger. Sawest thou more than this? And he answered: Nay; Lord, show thyself unto me. And the Lord said unto him: Believest thou the words which I shall speak? And he answered: Yea, Lord, I know that thou speakest the truth, for thou art a God of truth, and canst not lie. And when he had said these words, behold, the Lord showed himself unto him, and said: Because thou knowest these things ye are redeemed from the fall; therefore ye are brought back into my presence; therefore I show myself unto you. #RandolphHarris 22 of 26
“Behold, I am he who was prepared from the foundation of the World to redeem my people. Behold, I am Jesus Christ. I am the Father and the Son. In me shall humankind have life, and that eternally, even they who shall believe on my name; and they shall become my sons and my daughters. And never have I showed myself unto humans whom I have created, for never has humans believed in me as thou hast. Seest thou that ye are created after mine own image? Yea, even all humans were crated in the beginning after mine own image. Behold, this body, which ye now behold, is the body of my spirit; and man have I created after the body of my spirit; and even as I appear unto thee to be in the spirit will I appear unto my people in the flesh. And now, as I, Moroni, said I could not make a full account of these things which are written, therefore it sufficeth me to say that Jesus showed himself unto this man in the spirit, even after the manner and in the likeness of the same body even as he showed himself unto the Nephites. And he ministered unto him even as he minister unto the Nephites; and all this, that this man might know that he was God, because of the many great works which the Lord had showed unto him. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26
“And because of the knowledge of this man he could not be kept from beholding within the veil; and he saw the finger of Jesus, which when he saw, he fell with fear; for he knew that it was the finger of the Lord; and he had faith no longer, for he knew, nothing doubting. Wherefore, having this perfect knowledge of God, he could not be kept from within the veil; therefore he saw Jesus; and he did minister unto him. And it came to pass that the Lord said unto the brother of Jared: Behold, thou shalt not suffer these things which ye have seen and heard to go forth unto the World, until the time cometh that I shall glorify my name in the flesh; wherefore, ye shall treasure up the things which ye have seen and heard, and show it to no man. And behold, when ye shall come unto me, ye shall write them and shall seal them up, that no one can interpret them; for ye shall write them in a language that they cannot be read. And behold, these two stones will I give unto thee, and ye shall seal them up also with the things which ye shall write. For behold, the language which ye shall write I have confounded; wherefore I will cause in my own due time that these stones shall magnify to the eyes of humans these things which ye shall write. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26
“And when the Lord had said these words, he showed unto the brother of Jared all the inhabitants of the Earth which had been, and also all that would be; and he withheld them not from his sight, even unto the ends of the Earth. For he had said unto him in times before, that if he would believe in him that he could show unto him in times before, that if he would believe in hm that he could show into him all things—it should be shown unto him; therefore the Lord could not withhold anything from him, for he knew that the Lord could show him all things. And the Lord said unto him: Write these things and seal them up; and I will show them in mine own due time unto the children of humans. And it came to pass that the Lord commanded him that he should seal up the two stones which he had received, and show them not until the Lord should show them unto the children of men,” reports Ether 3.1-28. Your silver disk will light the entire night; none of the night will be turned over to the dark. Even as your soft light guides my path tonight, may your gentile influence spread softly through my life. Father, please look down on me in blessing; please light my way through the darkness. #RandolphHarris 25 of 26
With such brilliant light, to rival the Sun, can you be said to move in darkness? A light for the shadows, a lantern for those abroad, a guide for travelers: throughout the night you continue to bless us. However, they neither know nor understand; they walk about in darkness, so that the foundations of the land are shaken. I formerly thought ye were like angels, that ye were all like sons of the Most High. Verily ye shall die like mere mortals, ye shall fall like one of the princes. Arise, O God, judge Thou the Earth; for Thou shalt have dominion over all the nations. O Lord of retribution, O Lord of retribution, reveal Thyself! Rise up, Thou judge of the Earth; render to the arrogant their recompense. Lord, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked exult? Loudly they vaunt their arrogance; all the workers of iniquity bear themselves haughtily. They crush Thy people, O Lord. And afflict Thy Heritage. They slay the widow and the stranger, and murder the fatherless. And they say: “The Lord will not see, the God of Jacob will give no heed.” Consider, ye brutish among the peoples; and ye fools, when will ye understand? Doth not He that formed the eye, see? Shall not He that instructeth the nations, and teacheth man knowledge, reprove them? The Lord knoweth the thoughts of man, that they are mere vanity. #RandolphHarris 26 of 26
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In His Immortal Spirit, Been as Free as the Sky-Searching Lark, and as Elate!
Being an entertainer, especially in times like these, is really a public service. When a great person dies, the World looks for one’s successor. One has no successor. Liberty is a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may. All humans agree liberty is essential to morality, and that no human actions, where it is wanting, are susceptibe of any moral qualities, or can be the objects either of approbation or dislike. For as actions are objects of our moral sentiment, so far only as they are indications of the internal character, passions, and affections; it is impossible that they can give rise either to praise or blame, where they process not from these principles, but are derived altogether from external violence. I pretend not to have obviated or removed all objections to this theory, with regard to necessity and liberty. I can foresee other objections, derived from topics, which have not here been treated of. It may be said, for instance, that, if voluntary actions be subjected to the same laws of necessity with the operations of matter, there is a continued chain of necessary cases, pre-ordained or pre-determined, reaching from the original cause of all, to every single volition of every creation. No contingency anywhere in the Universe; no indifference; no liberty. #RandolphHarris 1 of 26
While we act, we are, at the same time, acted upon. The ultimate Author of all our volitions is the Creator of the World, who first bestowed motion on this immense machine, and, placed all being in particular position, whence every subsequent event, by an inevitable necessity, must result. Human actions, therefore, either can have no more turpitude at all, as proceeding from so good a cause; of if they have any turpitude, they must involve our Creator in the same guilt, while he is acknowledged to be their ultimate cause and author. For as a humans, who fired a mine, is answerable for all the consequences whether the train one employed be long or short; so wherever a continued chain of necessary causes is fixed, that Being, either finite or infinite, who produces the first, is likewise the author of all the rest, and must both bear the blame and acquire the praise, which belong to them. When we examine the consequences of any action, our clear and unalterable ideas of morality establish this rule, upon unquestionable reasons; and these reasons must still have force, when applied to the volitions and intentions of a Being, infinitely wise and powerful. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26
Ignorance or impotence may be pleased for so limited a creature as humans; but those imperfections have no place in our Creator. He foresaw, he ordained, he intended all those actions of humans, which we so rashly pronounce criminal, or that the Deity, not humans, are accountable for them. However, as either of these positions is absurd and impious; it follows, that the doctrine, from which they are deduced, cannot possibly be true, as being liable to all the same objections. An absurd consequence, if necessary, proves the original doctrine to be absurd; in the same manner as criminal actions render criminal the original cause, if the connextion between them be necessary and inevitable. The objection consists of two parts, which we shall examine separately; First, that, if human actions can be traced up, by a necessary chain, to the Deity, they can never be criminal; on account of the infinite perfection of that Being, from whom they are derived, and who can intend nothing but what is all together good and laudable. Or, secondly, if they be criminal, we must retract the attributes of perfection, which we ascribe to the Deity, and must acknowledge him to be the ultimate author of guilt and moral turpitude in all his creatures. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26
The answer to the first objection seems obvious and convincing. There are many philosophers, who, after an exact scrutiny of all the phenomena of nature, conclude, that the WHOLE, considered as one system, is, in every period of its existence, ordered with perfect benevolence; and that the utmost possible happiness will, in the end, result to all created beings, without any mixture of positive or absolute ill and misery. Every physical ill, say they, makes an essential part of this benevolent system, and could not possibly be removed, even by the Deity himself, considered as a wise agent, without giving entrance to greater ill, or excluding greater good, which will result from it. From this theory, some philosophers, and the ancient Stoics among the rest, derived a topic of consolation under all afflictions, while they taught their pupils, that those ills, under which they laboured, were, in reality, goods to the Universe; and that to an enlarged view, which could comprehend the whole system of nature, every event became an object of joy and exultation. However, though this topic be specious and sublime, it was soon found in practice weak and ineffectual. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26
You would surely more irritate, than appease a human, lying under the racking pains of the gout, by preaching up to one the rectitude of those general laws, which produced the malignant humours in one’s body, and led them through the proper canals, to the sinew and nerves, where they now excite such acute torments. These enlarged views may, for a moment, please the imagination of a speculative human, who is placed in ease and security; but neither can they dwell with constancy on one’s mind, even though undisturbed by the emotions of pain or passion; much less can they maintain their ground, when attacked by such powerful antagonists. The affections take a narrower and more natural survey of their object; and by an economy, more suitable to the infirmity of human minds, regard alone the beings around us, and are actuated by such events as appear good or ill to the private system. The case is the same with moral as with physical ill. It cannot reasonably be supposed, that those remote considerations, which are found of so little efficacy with regard to one, will have a more powerful influence with regard to the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26
The mind of humans is so formed by nature, that, upon the appearance of certain characters, dispositions, and action, it immediately feels the sentiment of approbation or blame; nor are there any emotions more essential to its frame and constitution. The characters, which engage our approbation, are chiefly such as contribute to the peace and security of human society; as the characters, which excite blame, are chiefly such as tend to public detriment and disturbance: Whence it may reasonably be presumed, that the moral sentiments arise, either mediately or immediately, from a reflection of these opposite interest. What though philosophical meditations establish a different opinion or conjecture; that every thing is right with regard to the WHOLE, and that the qualities, which disturb society, are, in the main, as beneficial, and are as suitable to the primary intention of nature, as those which more directly promote its happiness and welfare? A human who is robbed of a considerable sum; does one find one’s vexation for the losses any wise diminished by the sublime reflections? #RandolphHarris 6 of 26
Why then should one’s moral resentment against the crime be supposed incompatible with them? Or why should not the acknowledgement of a real distinction between vice and virtue be reconcilable to all speculative systems of philosophy, as well as that of a real distinction between person beauty and deformity? Both these distinctions are founded in the natural sentiment of the human mind: And these sentiments are not to be controller or altered by any philosophical theory or speculation whatsoever. The second objection admits not of so easy and satisfactory an answer; nor is it possible to explain distinctly, how the Deity can be the mediate cause of all the actions of humans, without being the author of sin and moral turpitude. These are mysteries, which mere natural and unassisted reason is very unfit to handle; and whatever system she embraces, she must find herself involved in inextricable difficulties, and even contradictions, at every step which she takes with regard to such subjects. To reconcile the indifferences and contingency of human actions with prescience; or to defend absolute decrees, and yet free the Deity from being the author of sin, has been found hitherto to exceed all the power of philosophy. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26
Happy, if she be thence sensible of her temerity, when she pries into these sublime mysteries; and leaving a scene so full of obscurities and perplexities, return, with suitable modesty, to her true and proper province, the examination of common life; where she will find difficulties enough to employ her enquiries, without launching into so boundless an ocean of doubt, uncertainty, and contradiction! From the standpoint of justice as fairness there is no reason why the persons in the original position (Often referred to as the veil of ignorance, one is asked to consider which principles one would select for the basic structure of society, but one must selectas if one has no knowledge ahead of time what position one would have in that society. This choice is made from behind a veil of ignorance, which prevents one from knowing your ethnicity, social status, gender and, crucially, your individual idea of how to lead a good life. Ideally, this would force participants to select principles impartially and rationally.) would agree to the approvals of an impartial sympathetic spectator as the standard of justice. This agreement has all the drawbacks of the classical principle of utility to which it is equivalent. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26
If, however, the parties are conceived as perfect altruists, that is, as persons who desired conform to the approvals of such a spectator, then the classical principle (the classical principle of utility, the best actions produce the greatest amount of utility for the greatest number of individuals) would, of course, be adopted. The greater net balance of happiness with which to sympathize, the more perfect altruist achieves one’s desire. Thus we arrive at the unexpected conclusion that while the average principle of utility is the ethic of a single rational individual (with no aversion to risk) who tries to maximize one’s own prospects, the classical doctrine is the ethic of perfect altruists. A surprising contrast indeed! By looking at these principles from the standpoint of the original position, we see that a different complex of ideas underlies them. Not only are they based upon contrary motivational assumptions, but the notion of taking chances has a part in one view yet none in the other. In the classical conception one chooses as if one will live through the experiences of each individual, seriatim as Lewis says, the then sum up the result. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26
The idea of taking a chance on which person one will turn out to be does not arise. Thus even if the concept of the original position served no other purpose, it would be a useful analytic device. Although the various principles of utility may often have similar practical consequences, we can see that these conceptions derive from markedly distinction assumption. There is, however, a peculiar feature of perfect altruism that deserves mention. A perfect altruist can fulfill one’s desire only if someone else has independent, or first-order, desires. To illustrate this fact, suppose that in deciding what to do all vote to do what everyone else wants to do. Obviously nothing get settled; in fact there is nothing to decide. For a problem of justice to arise at least two persons must want to do something other than whatever everyone else wants to do. It is impossible, then, to assume that the parties are simply perfect altruists. They may have some separate interests which may conflict. Justice as fairness makes this assumption, in the form of mutual disinterest, the main motivational condition of the original position. While this may prove to be an oversimplification, one can develop a reasonably comprehensive conception of justice on this basis. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26
Some philosophers have accepted the utilitarian principle because they believed that the idea of an impartial sympathetic spectator is the correct interpretation of impartiality. Indeed, Hume thought that it offered the only perspective from which moral judgments could be made coherent and brought into line. Now moral judgments are, or should be, impartial; but there is another way to achieve this, another point of view by reference to which our judgments of justice may be organized. Justice as fairness provides what we want. An impartial judgment, we can say, is one rendered in accordance with the principles which would be chosen in the original position. An impartial judgment, we can say, is one rendered in accordance with the principles without bias of prejudice. Instead of defining impartiality from the standpoint of a sympathetic observer who responds to the conflicting interests of others as if they were one’s own, we define impartiality from the standpoint of the litigants themselves. It is they who must choose their conception of justice once and for all in an original position of equality. They must decide by which principles their claims against one another are to be settled, and one who is to judge between humans serves as their agent. #RandolphHarris 11 of 26
The fault of the utilitarian doctrine is that it mistakes impersonality for impartiality. If one adopted the sympathetic spectator idea, but did not character this spectator as conflating all desires into one system, the preceding remarks naturally lead one to ask what sort of theory of justice would result. Hume’s conception provides one modus operadi for benevolence, but is it the only possibility? Now love clearly has among its main elements the desire to advance the other person’s good as this person’s rational self-love would require. Very often how one is to realize this desire is clear enough. The difficulty is that the love of several persons is thrown into confusion once the claims of these persons conflict. If we reject the classical doctrine, what does the love of humankind enjoin? It is quite pointless to say that one is to judge the situation as benevolence dictates. This assumes that we are wrongly swayed by self-concern. Our problem lies elsewhere. Benevolence is at sea as long as its many loves are in opposition in the persons of its many objects. #RandolphHarris 12 of 26
We might try out here the idea that a benevolent person is to be guided by the principles someone would choose if one knew that one is to split, so to speak, into many members of society. That is, one is to imagine that one is to divine into a plurality of persons whose life and experiences will be distinct in the usual way. Experiences and memories are to remain each person’s own; and there is to be no conflation of desires and memories into those of one person. Since a single individual is literally to become many persons, there is no question of guessing which one; once again the problem of taking chances does not arise. Now knowing this (or believing it), which conception of justice would a person chose for a society comprised of these individual? As this person would, let us suppose, love this plurality of persons as one loves oneself, perhaps the principles one would chose characterize the aims of benevolence. Leaving aside the difficulties in the idea of splitting that may arise from problems about personal identity, two things seem evident. First of all, it is still unclear what a person would decide, since the situation does not offhand provide an answer. #RandolphHarris 13 of 26
However, secondly, the two principles of justice now seem a relatively more plausible choice than the classical principle of utility. The latter is no longer the natural preference, and this suggests that the conflation of persons into one is indeed at the root of the classical view. The reason why the situation remains obscure is that love and benevolence are second-order notions: they seek to further the good of beloved individuals that is already given. If the claims of these goods clash, benevolence is at a loss as to how to proceed, as long anyway as it treats these individuals as separate persons. These high-order sentiments do not include principles of right to adjudicate these conflicts. Therefore a love of humankind that wishes to preserve the distinction of persons, to recognize the separateness of life and experience, will use the two principles of justice to determine its aims when many goods it cherishes are in opposition. Love is guided by what individuals themselves would consent to in a fair initial situation which gives them both equal representation as moral persons. We now see why nothing would have been gained by attributing benevolence to the parties in the original position. #RandolphHarris 14 of 26
We must, however, distinguish between the love of humankind kind and the sense of justice. The difference is not that they are guided by different principles, since both include a desire to give justice. Rather, the former is manifest by the greater intensity and pervasiveness of this desire, and in a readiness to fulfill all the natural duties in addition to that of justice, and even to go beyond their requirements. The love of humankind is more comprehensive than the sense of justice and prompts to acts of supererogation, whereas the latter does not. Thus we see that the assumption of the mutual disinterestedness of the parities does not prevent a reasonable interpretation of benevolence and of the love of humankind within the framework of justice as fairness. The fact that we start out assuming that the parties are mutually disinterested and have conflicting first-order desires still allows us to construct a comprehensive account. For once the principles of right and justice are on hand, they may be used to define the moral virtues just as in any other theory. The virtues are sentiments, that is, related families of dispositions and propensities regulated by a higher-order desire, in this case a desire to act from the corresponding moral principles. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26
Although justice as fairness begins by taking the persons in the original position as individuals, or more accurately as continuing strands, this is no obstacle to explicating the higher-order moral sentiments that serve to bind a community of persons together. Otherwise people can spend years groping amid-semi darkness for the entrance to the path which they have missed, but justice will gladly lead them in due course. Spiritually, at the moment of dying one will WILL one’s own rebirth again and again until one’s flock are brought safely through the narrow gate which leads to the kingdom of Heaven. Therefore it is said, for such is the mysterious reality of one’s telepathic power, that the birth of the self-actualized sends forth an echoing vibration within the Universe, which acts as a call to one’s unborn chelas (disciples) to incarnate with one, and as a command to the principle of rebirth to make effectual the event. The one sacrifices oneself for the salvation of one’s chelas (disciples). There are several self-styled spiritual guides who can guide their flocks into all kinds of queer experiences, but they cannot guide them into the Kingdom of Heaven. That territory is barred to them. Consequently it is barred to those who meekly walk behind them. The reason is quite simple. #RandolphHarris 16 of 26
Jesus explained it long ago. The lower ego with its baggage of desires is too big, while the door leading into the Kingdom is too small. In all their activities, these teachers fail to achieve a truly spiritual result because they are thinking primarily of themselves rather than of what they are supposed to be thinking. In some cases the process is an unconscious one, but in many it is not. The difference between a false teacher and a genuine one is often the difference between a dominating dictator and a quiet guide. The false teacher will seek to emasculate your will or even to enslave your mind, whereas the true teacher will endeavour to exalt you into a sense of your own self-responsibility. The teacher who demands or accepts such servility is dangerous to true growth. In the end, one will require a loyalty which should be given only to God. The true teacher will carry your soul into greater freedom and not less, into stabilizing truth and not emotional moods. The true teacher has no desire to hold anyone in pupilage, but on the contrary gladly welcomes the time when the disciple is able to stand without help from outside. However, because talk is easy and redemption is not demanded except in the distant future, these false teachers thrive for a while. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26
Many of the false teachers are but students, yet find it hard to take the low places where humility dwells. Hence their gravity; hence the laughter of the gods at them. Could they but laugh at themselves awhile, and perhaps at their doctrines occasionally, they might regain balance, a sense of proportion—but greatest of all true Humility. They are not necessarily deliberate misleaders of others, these self-appointed saviours, but their mystical experiences have given them false impressions about themselves. Their authority is fallible and their doctrines are false. They find it easy to deliver themselves of lofty teachings, but hard to put the same teachings into practice. These gurus promise much, but in the sequel do not redeem their word. These self-styled adepts appear to be adepts in circumlocution more than in anything else. Those who openly court worship or secretly exult in it cannot possibly have entered into the true Kingdom of Heaven. For the humility it demands is aptly described by Jesus when he describes its entrance as smaller than a needle’s eye. #RandolphHarris 18 of 26
Would-be disciples who are so eager to fill this role that they are swept straightaway into enthusiasm by the extravagant promises of would-be masters, usually lack both the desire and the competence to investigate the qualifications of such masters. Consequently they pay the penalty of their lack of discrimination. If a nation accepts and follows a wicked human as its leader, then there must be some fault in it which make this possible. And if a seeker accepts a false guide on one’s spiritual path, then there must be some false intuition, false thinking, or false standards which made this possible to. There are various ways of appraising a teacher at one’s true worth. We may watch one’s external life and notice how one conducts one’s affairs, how one talks and works, and how one behaves toward other humans. Or we may dive deep into one’s interior nature and plumb the depths of one’s mental life. The latter course presupposes some degree of psychic sensitiveness. The best way is to combine both to penetrate the unseen and to observe the visible. Do not reverence those who call themselves guru and beg for alms. Only who live by the fruits of their labours and do honest and useful work are in the way of truth. #RandolphHarris 19 of 26
Spiritual knowledge is not to be bought and sold. Indeed it could not be. That which could be got and given in this way is only the pretense of it. It is utterly impossible for a human who has entered into communion with the World-Mind to sell one’s power for money. The very act would of itself break one’s connection with it, leaving for one’s possession only those undesirable lesser powers which come from contact with the fringes of the nether World of dark spirits. There are too many aspirants who are hoping, like Micawber in Dicken’s story, for something to turn up. In their cause it is a spiritual master who will not only take their burdens and responsibilities off their shoulders but, much more, translate them overnight into a realm of spiritual consciousness for evermore. They go on waiting and they go on hoping, but nothing turns up and no one appears. What is the reason for this frustration of their hopes? It is that they fail to work while they wait, fail to prepare themselves to be fit for such a meeting, fail to recognize that whether they have a master or not they must still work upon themselves diligently, and that they harder they work in this task or self-improvement, the more likely it is that they will find a master. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26
They are like children who want to be carried all the way and coddled while they are being carried. They are waiting for someone to do what they ought to be doing for themselves. They are waiting to receive from outside what they could start getting straightaway by delving inside themselves. Instead of wandering about looking for Christs to come, we should be better employed wandering inward looking for Christ there, the Christ within. Such a truth is our best Saviour and the surest Avatar of our time. After he has “seen” you take the plunge and try to “feel” his presence as the next stage. Only When one has reached a point where one no longer thinks of the Master as another person but as the core of one’s inner self, can it be said that the Master’s work for one is done. When Jesus said that one who eats His flesh and drinks His blood abides in Him and He in one, Jesus meant no theatrical rite of purely ceremonial order such as is performed outwardly through the Eucharist today. He meant this inwardly achieved union here described. #RandolphHarris 21 of 26
There are untouched forces back of self which we seldom include when we reckon up our mortal accounts. One of these is that aspect of God in man which we denominate Power. Once found it makes us feel greater than we seem. When the divine will works through our hands, we may go forth into the World and master it. Strong in the consciousness of Power, we can advance without fear, asking favour of none, yet conferring it upon all we meet. “And now I finish my record concerning the destruction of my people, the Nephites. And it came to pass that we did march forth before the Lamanites. And I, Mormon, wrote an epistle unto the king of the Lamanites, and desired of him that he would grant unto us that he would grant unto us that we might gather together our people unto the land of Cumorah, by a hill which was called Cumorah, and there we could give them battle And it came to pass that the king of the Lamanites did grant unto me the thing which I desired. And it came to pass that we did march forth to the land of Cumorah, and we did pitch our tents around the hill Cumorah; and it was in the land of many waters, rivers, and fountains; and here we had hope to gain advantage over the Lamanites. #RandolphHarris 22 of 26
“And when three hundred and eighty and four years had passed away, we had gathered in all the remainder of our people unto the land of Cumorah. And it came to pass that when we had gathered in all our people in one to the land of Cumorah, behold I, Mormon, began to be old; and knowing it to be the last struggle of my people, and having been commanded of the Lord that I should not suffer the records which had been handed down by our fathers, which were sacred, to fall into the hands of the Lamanites, (for he Lamanites would destroy them) therefore I made this record out of the plates of Nephi, and hid up in the hill Cumorah all the records which had been entrusted to me by the hand of the Lord, save it were these few plates which I gave unto my son Moroni. And it came to pass that my people, with their wives and their children, did now behold the armies of the Lamanites marching towards them; and with that awful fear of death which fills the breast of all the wicked, did they await to receive them. And it came to pass that they came to battle against us, and every soul was filled with terror because of the greatness of their numbers. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26
“And it came to pass that my men were hewn down, yea, even my ten thousand who were with me, and I fell wounded in the midst; and they passed by me that they did not put an end to my life. And when they had gone through and hewn down all my people save it were twenty and four of us, (among whom my son Moroni) and we having survived the dead of our people, did behold on the morrow, when the Lamanites had returned unto their camps, from the top of the hill Cumorah, then ten thousand of my people who were hewn down, being led in the front by me. And we also beheld the ten thousand of my people who were led by my son Moroni. And behold, the ten thousand of Gidgiddonah had fallen, and he also in the midst. And Lamah had fallen with his ten thousand; and Limhah had fallen with his tend thousand; and Jeneum had fallen with his ten thousand; and Cumenihah, and Moronihah, and Antinum, and Shiblom, and Shem, and Josh, had fallen with their ten thousand each. And it came to pass that there were tend more who did fall by the sword, with their ten thousand each; yea, even all my people, save it were those who with me, and also a few who had escaped into the south countries, and a few who had deserted over unto the Lamanites, had fallen. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26
“And their flesh, and bones, and blood lay upon the face of the Earth, being left by the hands of those who slew them to molder upon the land, and to crumble and to return to their mother Earth, And my soul was rent with anguish, because of the slain of my people, and I cried: O ye fair ones, how could ye have departed from the ways of the Lord! O ye fair ones, how could ye have rejected that Jesus, who stood with open arms to receive you! Behold, if ye had not done this, ye would have fallen. However, behold, ye are fallen, and I mourn your loss. O ye fair sons and daughters, ye fathers and mothers, ye husbands and wives, ye fair ones, how is it that ye could have fallen! However, behold, ye are gone, and my sorrows cannot bring your return. And the day soon cometh that your mortal must put on immortality, and these bodies which are now moldering in corruption must soon become incorruptible bodies; and then ye must stand before the judgment-seat of Christ, to be judged according to your works; and if it so be that ye are righteous, then are ye blessed with your fathers who have gone before you. O that ye had repented before this great destruction had come upon you. #RandolphHarris 25 of 26
“However, behold, ye are gone, and the Father, yea, the Eternal Father of Heaven, knoweth your state; and he doeth with you according to his justice and mercy,” reports Mormon 6.1-22. Out of the bright sky as the Sun goes down, appears the Father who rules the darkness. I pray to him, my eyes facing west at the end of the day, and the beginning of the month. You will not be here with us long; you dance quickly toward the horizon. While you are still with us, though, I will look on you with love. Hope in the west, prophet of return from darkness: you show us it is possible to go from age into the shadowland and emerge, new yet the same. When I am surrounded by the shadows, come to me and remind me of this night’s lesson I pray to you, who wear the silver crescent, not to let me forget. Unto Israel and unto our scholars, unto their disciples and pupils, and unto all who engaged in the study of the Scriptures, here and everywhere, unto them and unto you, may there be abundant peace, grace, lovingkindness, mercy, long life, sustenance and salvation from their Father in Heaven; and say ye, Amen. May there be abundant peace from Heaven, and a happy life for us, and for all Israel; and say ye, Amen. May He who establisheth peace in the Heavens, in His mercy, grant peace unto us and unto all America; and say ye, Amen. #RandolphHarris 26 of 26
Winchester Mystery House
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 