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It Was Not Merely the Affluence of the Surroundings, but their Programmed Pleasantness!
Supermarkets are all right, but it is much more fun to shop for food in nature. Here, again, we are already moving in the predictable direction, as a glance at air travel demonstrates. Once flying was simply a matter of getting from here to there. Before long, the airlines began to compete on the basis of pretty stewardesses, gourmet food, luxurious surroundings, cocktails, and in-flight entertainment. Americans Airlines, in the past, carried this process one step further by offering what it called “International accent” flights between major American cities. The American Airlines passengers were able to choose a jet on which the food, the music, the magazines, the movies, and the stewardess’ miniskirt were all French. One could choose a “Roman” flight on which the women wore togas. One could have opted for a “Manhattan Penthouse” flight. Or one could have selected the “Olde English” flight on which the women were called “serving wenches” and the décor supposedly suggest that of an English pub. It is clear that American Airlines is no longer selling transportation, as such, but a carefully designed psychological package as well. We can expect the airlines before long to make use of lights and multi-media projections to create total, but temporary, environments providing the passenger with something approaching a theatrical experience. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The experience may, in fact, soon go beyond theater. The experience was expected to go beyond theater. British Airways once considered pointing a wavering finger at the future when it announced a plan to provide unmarried American male passengers with “scientifically chose” blind dates in London. In the event the computer-selected date failed to show up, an alternate would be provided. Moreover, a party would be arranged to which “several additional Londoners of both genders of varying ages” would be invited so that the traveler, who would also be given a tour of discotheques and restaurants, would under no circumstances be alone. The program, called “The Beautiful Singles of London,” was abruptly called off when the government-owned airline came under Parliamentary criticism. Nevertheless, we can anticipate further colourful attempts to paint a psychic coating on many consumer service fields, including retail. Anyone who has strolled through Newport Center, once an incredibly lavish new shopping plaza in Newport Beach, California, could not fail to be impressed by the attention paid by its designers to aesthetic and psychological factors. Tall white arches and columns outlined against a blue sky, fountains, statues, carefully planned illumination, a pop art playground, and an enormous Japanese wind-bell were all used to create a mood of casual elegance for the shopper. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
It was not merely the affluence of the surroundings, but their programmed pleasantness that made shopping there a quite memorable experience. Once could anticipate fantastic variations and elaborations of the same principles in the planning of retail stores in the future. We shall go far beyond any “functional” necessity, turning the service, whether it is shopping, dining, or having one’s haircut, into a pre-fabricated experience. People are not paying big money to eat in dirty plastic tents in the streets, they want the ambiance of dining in luxury that will make the meal worth the cost. We shall watch movies or listen to chamber music as we have or haircut, and the mechanical bowl that fits over the skull of a woman in the beauty parlor will do more than simply dry her hair. By directing electronic waves to her brain, it may, quite literally, tickle her fancy. Bankers and brokers, real estate and insurance companies will employ the most carefully chosen décor, music, closed circuit colour television, engineered tastes and smells, along with the most advanced mixed-media equipment to heighten (or neutralize) the psychological change that accompanies even the most routine transaction. No important service will be offered to the consumer before it has been analyzed by teams of behavioural engineers to improve its psychic loading. Reaching beyond these simple elaborations of the present, we shall also witness a revolutionary expansion of certain industries whose sole output consists not of manufacture goods, nor even of ordinary services, but of pre-programmed “experiences.” The experience industry could turn out to be one of the pillars of super-age of informationalism, the very foundation, in fact, of the post-service economy. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
As rising affluence and transience ruthlessly undercut the old urge to possess, consumers begin to collect experiences as consciously and passionately as they once collected things. Today, as the airline example suggests, experiences are sold as an adjunct to some more traditional services. The experience is, so to speak, the frosting on the cake. As we advance into the future, however, more and more experiences will be sold strictly on their own merits, exactly as if they were things. Precisely this is beginning to happen, in fact. This accounts for the high growth rate visible in certain industries that have always been, at least partly, engaged in the production of experiences for their own sake. The arts are a good example. Much of the “culture industry” is devoted to the certation or staging of specialized psychological experiences. Today we find art-based “experience industries” booming in virtually all the techno-societies. The same is true of recreation, mass entertainment, education, and certain psychiatric services, all of which participate in what might be called experiential production. When Club Mediterrancee used to sell a package holiday that took a young French secretary to Tahiti or Israel for a week or two of sun and pleasures of the flesh, it was manufacturing an experience for one quite as carefully and systematically as Bayerische Motoren Werke AG Ultimate Driving Machines. Its advertisements underscore the point. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Thus a two-page spread in The New York Times Magazine began with the headline: “Take 300 men and women. Strand them on an exotic island. And strip them of every social pressure.” Based in France, Club Mediterranee now operates over seventy-four vacation “villages” in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, North America, Mexico, the Caribbean, South America, Asia, Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean. Similarly, when the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, offers weekend seminars in “body-awareness’ and “non-verbal communication” at $730 per person, or seven-day workshops starting at $900 and costs $1,700 per person for a couple in a private room, it promises not to simply teach, but to plunge its affluent customers into “joyous” new interpersonal experiences—a phrase some readers take to mean adventures deeper spiritual possibilities that will enlighten them and open gateways to change. Group therapy and sensitivity training sessions are packaged experiences. So are certain classes. Thus, going to an Arthur Murray or Fred Astaire studio to learn the latest dance step may provide the student with a skill that will bring enjoyment in the future, but it also provides a pleasurable here-and-now experience for the lonely bachelor or spinster. The learning experience, itself, is a major attraction for the customer. All these, however, provide only the palest clue as to the nature of the experience industry of the future and the great psychological corporations, or psychcorps, that will dominate it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
They that deny God destroy human’s nobility; for certainly, humans are akin to the beast by one’s body; and if one be not of kin to God by one’s spirit, one is a base and ignoble creature. In Aleksandr Solzhenisyn’s masterful novel The Cancer Ward, a young cancerous political prisoner named Oleg finds momentary escape from the hospital’s horrors in an attractive nurse, Zoya. One day Oleg volunteers to help Zoya with her reports. Reading from patient records, Oleg notices hardly any deaths in the hospital. “I see they do not allow them to die here,” he says. “They manage to discharge them in time.” “What else can they do?” responds Zoya. “Judge for yourself. If it is obvious a patient is beyond help and there is nothing left for him but to live out the few last weeks or months, why should he take up a bed? People who could be cured are kept waiting.” Days later, one of Oleg’s gravely ill friends is told he is being released from the hospital. The man struggles to dress, weakly bids adieu to his comrades, and sets out for the streets. The best he can hope for is an empty bench where he can lie down and wait to die. This account may be cruel, but it is not illogical. The Soviet system is committed to the eradication of any vital practice of religion. God is officially dead there. However, the death of God ultimately spells the death of what it means to be truly human. For it worth is not God-given, it must be established by man. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
And atheistic philosophies, such as the Soviet system, treat humans as an object whose value is determined solely by one’s usefulness to society. Why not, then, subject one to whatever will achieve the government’s objectives: oppression, torture, genocide? In utilitarian terms, sending terminal patients out to die is not inhumane, but eminently sensible. Why waste a bed on someone who will not survive? Now contrast The Cancer Ward with the Winchester Clinic of the General Hospital Society of Connecticut, that Mrs. Winchester left a substantial sum of cash to, in memory of William Wirt Winchester, for the care and treatment of tuberculosis patients. This faithful heiress has provided shelter and help for those patients some of who are treatable and suffering or dying in pain, afraid, and alone. Sometimes she is criticized: “Why care for those who are doomed anyway?” But she explains, “They are created by God; they deserve to die with dignity.” Christianity can never be utilitarian; it holds every human being as precious because human beings are created in the image of God. To understand the unique nature of this Judeo-Christian view, we need only compare the ancient Hebrew law codes in the Old Testament with, say, the Assyrian laws of Hammurabi, another Middle Eastern legal code from the same period. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Historian Paul Johnson has noted that the Assyrian code made the rights of property ultimate, while “the Hebrew [laws] emphasized the essential rights and obligations of man and their laws were framed with deliberate respect for moral values.” Jesus continued—and expanded—the Old Testament law. He constantly affirmed the dignity and worth of the lowest member of first-century society—women, children, Gentiles, tax-collectors, lepers. Today’s calmour for human rights is ironic. Much of the activism emanates from those who claim no belief in God. However, consider what many who have had a major influence on modern thinking believed. Karl Marx, for example, thought humans a victim of economic forces. Dr. Sigmund Freud believed all was lost in the dark web of the psyche. Dr. B.F. Skinner insisted that freedom was an illusion and dignity a lost case. More extreme philosophers get downright angry at the snobbery of specialists—those of us who see humans as the highest species—and assert that humans enjoy no special standing in the Universe. We can no longer base our ethics on the idea that human beings are a special form of creation, singled out from all other animals, and alone possessing a soul. We must learn from Jesus Christ and even love our planet and animal neighbour’s as ourselves. Although we may continue to see normal members of our species as possessing greater capacities…than members of any other species; but we will not regard as sacrosanct the life of each and every member of our species. Species membership alone is not morally relevant. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
In this light, human dignity and human rights are tenuous assertions. If humans are merely a fortuitous collection of molecules in a meaningless cosmos, why should they have any inhere rights? Humans build their kingdoms in accord with their concept of God. The rise of atheism in the twenty-first century has thus provided unlimited license for tyrants. If there is no morally binding standard above the state, becomes god and human beings mere beasts of bureaucratic burden. A government cannot be truly just without affirming the intrinsic value of human life. The Judeo-Christian ethic does more than affirm human dignity, however; it also insists that we are inclined to do evil. Humans are more than a beast, but they are not angels. This dual nature is not properly understood apart from what theologians called original sin. No modern parable portrays human’s sinful nature more powerfully than Nobel prize-winning author William Golding’s novel The Lord of the Flies, in which a planeload of English schoolboys is wrecked on a tropical island. Good British subjects that they are, they attempt to organize themselves into an orderly society while awaiting rescue. However, darker urges soon grip the boys. The veneer of civilization melts away, and many of them revert to savagery, first as a game, then in deadly earnest. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
One of the wounds a boar. Suddenly, “the desire to squeeze and hurt was overmastering.” Soon the boys are chanting with ritualistic fevour, “Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Bash him in!” A sow is caught and killed in a primitive sacrifice, the head cut off and placed on a post, allegedly to assuage the “beast” some of the boys have encountered. Great black and iridescent green files buzz insistently around the severed head. The boys’ “chieftain” giggles as he rubs his bloodied hands n the next boy’s face. The young savages soon turn on a fat, asthmatic, bespectacled lad nicknamed Piggy, who retains more civility than they care to have on their island. “Which is better,” Piggy asks plaintively as they advance on him, “to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill?” Moments later, Piggy is knocked off a cliff. His skull cracks open, his arms and legs twitching. Eventually the pounding waves suck his body into the sea. Piggy’s friend Ralph collapses in a spasm of grief. “With filthy body, mattered hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of the man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise, friend called Piggy.” Later, when the group is rescued, a shocked naval officer asks how such savagery could have happened. “I should have thought that a pack of British boys—your are all British, are you not?—would have been able to put up a better show than that—I mean.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Civilization, empire, education, all of the trappings of human progress had clothed these young innocents. Now, their faces smeared with blood, their consciences apparently inoperative, they bear the guilt of death of two playmates. When William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983, the Swedish Academy declared that his novels “illuminate the human condition in the World today.” They reflect as well what Golding described as “an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system, however apparently logical or respectable.” Golding’s views sound grimly anachronistic in a culture constantly heralding human’s ability to achieve utopia through modern science, education, and technology. This notion was given impetus by, among others, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Enlightenment writer who insisted the human misery was rooted in the structures of society. Change the structures and you can the man, he said. Rousseau looked to primitive human experience as a rosy time of innocence free of socially induced vices. From the beginning of human’s history, however, we see not guilelessness, but betrayal and evil. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
After the account of the Garden of Eden the Bible tells the story of the first four people on the planet—and before long, one of them killed his brother. This murder was committed long before the urban blight and social deprivations. There were—and are—no noble savages. Human nature has not changed since Cain. This is vividly illustrated in the memoirs of Cuban poet Armando Valladares, Against All Hope, in which he recounts his twenty-two-year imprisonment by Fidel Castro for speaking out “against Communism because it went against my religious beliefs and some of my more idealistic notions of the World.” For such treason, Valladares was thrown into the human-made hell of a Cuban prison. He was given showers of human urine and excrement by sadistic guards. During an escape attempt he broke three bones in his legal and was captured and brought back to his cell. “Guards stripped us again,” he writes. “They were armed with thick twisted electric cables and truncheons. Suddenly, everything was a whirl—my head spun around in terrible vertigo…The beatings felt as if they were branding me with a red-hot branding iron, but then I suddenly experienced the most intense, unbearable, and brutal pain of my life. One of the guards had jumped with all his weight on my broken, throbbing leg.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
One cannot read this and explain the torture, the sadism, and the evil only in terms of godless political systems. The problem is human nature. The only progress between Cain and the Communist jailers of Armando Valladares has bee the technological sophistication of cruelty. Given the wealth of such examples today, why is it so difficult for modern humans to acknowledge the inherent evil in the human heart? Why is sin an outmoded term, used only by Bible-thumping preachers, born-again zealots, or the titillating covers of paperback thrillers? The core of sadism is s passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being, whether an animal, a child, a man, or a woman. To force someone to endure pain or humiliation without being able to defend oneself is one of the manifestations of absolute control, but it is by no means the only one. The person who has complete control over another living being makes this being into one’s thing, one’s property, while one becomes the other being’s god. Sometimes the control can even be helpful, and in that case we might speak of a benevolent sadism, such as one finds in instances where one persons rules another for the other’s own good, and in fact furthers one in many ways, expect that one keeps holding one in bondage. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
However, most sadism is malevolent and orthodox psychoanalysis claims that there is a particular aspect of sexuality common in all forms of sadism. That it somehow arouses tyrants sexually to terrorize their victims. Complete control over another human being means crippling one, strangling one, thwarting one. Such control can have all forms and all degrees. Albert Camus’s play, Caligula, provides an example of an extreme type of sadistic control which amounts to a desire for omnipotence. We see how Caligula, brought by circumstances to a position of unlimited power, gets ever-more deeply involved in the craving for power. He sleeps with the wives of the senators and enjoys their humiliation when they have to act like admiring and fawning friends. He kills some of them, and those that remain have to smile and joke. However, even all this power does not satisfy him; he wants absolute power, he wants the impossible. As Camus has him say, “I want the moon.” It is easy enough to say that Caligula is mad, but his madness is a way of life; it is one solution of the problem of human existence, because it serves the illusion of omnipotence, of transcending the frontiers of human existence. In the process of trying to win absolute power Caligula lost all contact with humans. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Caligula became an outcast by casting them out; he had to become mad because, when the bid for omnipotence failed, he was left a lonely, important individual. The case of Caligula is of course exceptional. Few people ever have the chance to attain so much power that they can seduce themselves into the delusion that it might be absolute. However, some have existed throughout history, up to our time; if they are defeated, they are considered mad-humans or criminals. This extreme solution to the problem of human existence is barred to the average person. Yet in most social systems, including our, even those on lower social levels can have control over somebody who is subject to their power. There are always children, wives, or dogs available; or there are helpless people, such as inmates of prisons, patients in hospitals, if they are not well-to-do (especially the mentally sick), pupils in schools, members of civilian bureaucracies. It depends on the social structure to what degree the factual power of superiors in each of these instances is controlled or restricted and, hence, how much possibility for sadistic satisfactions these situations offer. Aside from all these situations, religious and racially marginalized groups, as far as they are powerless, offer a vast opportunity for sadistic satisfaction for even the poorest of the majority. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Sadism is one of the answers to the problem of being born human when better ones are not attainable. The experience of absolute control over another being, of omnipotence as far as one, or it is concerned, creates the illusion of transcending the limitations of human existence, particularly for one whose real life is deprived of productivity and joy. Sadism has essentially no particular aim; it is not trivial but not devotional. It is the transformation of importance into the experience of omnipotence; it is the religion of psychical cripples. The misreading of the nature of human beings has resulted in the denial of personal responsibility, and is institutionalized into various social reforms; these contributed markedly to the social pathologies of American inner cities. What many of these reforms shared (in varying ways and degrees) was an assumption that people are not in control of their own behaviour and should not properly be held responsible for the consequences of their actions. The economic system is to blame; the social environment is to blame; perhaps accidents and conceivably genetics are to blame. However, there is some truth to that. If people are not raised properly and not taught right from wrong, they may not know what decisions to make. If people are born with intellectual disabilities, they may not know what is correct behaviour. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
If people are oppressed by corruption, they may not have any choice but to become a criminal to survive. If politicians and their families are not held accountable by laws, they may continue down the path of evil and sin and keep hurting people because they can get away with it and think it is fun. So, there are factors in society that can contribute to corruption and sin in humans. It can be because they do not know better, or they never face civil and legal consequences for their actions. Any effort to encourage individual initiative and responsibility among America’s politicians and urban poor was derided as “blaming the victim.” Blaming the system rather than the “victim” further eradicated individual responsibility and dignity. However, the elimination of individual responsibility has encouraged the corresponding utopian belief in human’s collective perfectibility. While Christian teaching emphasizes that each person has worth and responsibility before God, utopianism argues that salvation can only be achieved collectively. Utopianism always spells disaster because the utopian holds that if the goal is goodness and perfection, then the use of force is justified. In contrast, the Christian realization that perfection eludes us in this life resists the tyranny and bloodshed of the dictator who promises a brave new World. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Thus, twenty-first century men and woman have inherited a stark dilemma. With God dead or ill, they are stripped of their source of dignity and reduced to sophisticated beasts. At the same time, society denies individual sin, blaming all social ills on environment, and illogically assumes human perfectibility. Both propositions run counter to the evidence of history. Humans are neither ape nor angel. Deep down inside, humans know they are created. They desperately long to know the Power beyond us and discover a transcendent purpose for living. That is why Mrs. Winchester conducted mystic meetings with the spirits in her famous Blue Séance Room. We long as well to shed the guilt of sin, to be free people, forgiven in the sight of the God we know is there. Many search for God through bizarre spiritual journeys, attested to by the popularity of religion and tabloid psychics, reincarnation, Beverly Hills spiritual gurus, crystals, cosmic energy and symbols, seaweed, and channeling. Such contraband only intensify desire to seek contact with God and Jesus and the spiritual World. The occult is a question to discover more than the material World. Modern men and women do not want to be left to thrash about in darkness while the World worships the fake news industry and their favourite tool, politicians, as gods. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
The fake news media and politicians will only lead us to a journey that ends gruesomely and shockingly, like the piles of bones at Jonestown. The people’s frustration inevitably deepens into despair. For some, like Hemingway, who accept the logic of this age, the despair turns to tragedy; for millions of others, it fosters a brooding sense of alienation and helplessness. And so we come full circle, back to where we began. For it is this pervasive sense of impotence that has paved the way for the emergence of political saviours and the all-powerful state that promise salvation through changed structures. Before we discuss our future further, we must pray. Your arms are strong, Father; they can hug a child or restrain one from harm. Please wrap them around this planet Earth and all of your children and please heal us and protect us from harm. Please give us a sign that you are alive and love you human children. We trust You to know what is needed. The children of America shall keep the Sabbath and observe it throughout their generations as an everlasting covenant. It is a sign between our Heavenly Father and the children of American forever; for in six days the Lord made Heaven and Earth, and on the seventh day He ceased from work and rested. May the people who sanctify the seventh day be sated and delighted with Thy bounty. For Thou didst find pleasure in the seventh day, and didst sanctify it, calling it the desirable of days, in remembrance of creation. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
The Mansion Designed by Spirits
San Jose, California
California Historical Landmark Number 868
During a Connecticut thunder storm, Mrs. Winchester’s husband and baby lost their lives in a tragic fire. Foretelling her future, one seer warned her of all the countless spirits seeking her soul and to protect herself, she was told to plan a castle and continue its building indefinitely because as long as it I was under construction, she would live; cessation would prove immediately fatal. As the massive mansion was nearing completion, the Winchester House was the midnight rendezvous for legions of ghosts, with special attention accorded those created by a Winchester rifle slug.
Frightened by the death of Mrs. Winchester, the family sought to disappear from society and go into hiding because they did not want to bare the cruse, and the gatekeeper for the spirits was no longer around to protect the family from the spirits. Rumors have it that the Winchester family died out, but others say they simply went into hiding and do not want to be found. Legends have it that they have other castles around the World, in hope of never being discovered. It has been over three months since the doors of the World’s most beautiful and bizarre mansion closed, and the spirits that walk these halls are just as restless as you are. The doors to the Winchester Mystery House are wide open once more!
Tickets on sale now! winchestermysteryhouse.com
Yesterday and All Our Yesterdays—Stuck Fast in Yesterday!
Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It is perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we have learned something from yesterday. There is quite clearly no difficulty in explaining why we are to comply with just laws enacted under a just constitution. In this case the principles of natural duty and the principle of fairness establish the requisite duties and obligations. Citizens generally are bound by the duty of justice, and those who have assumed favoured offices and positions, or who have taken advantage of certain opportunities to further their interests, are in addition obligated to do their part by the principle of fairness. The real question is under which circumstances and to what extent we are bound to comply with unjust arrangements. Not it is sometimes said that we are never required to comply in these cases. However, that is a mistake. The injustice of a law is not, in general, a sufficient reason for not adhering to it any more than the legal validity of legislation (as defined by the existing constitution) is a sufficient reason for going along with it. When the basic structure of society is reasonably just, as estimated by what the current state of thins allows, we are to recognize unjust laws as binding provided that they do not exceed certain limits of injustice. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
In trying to discern these limits we approach the deeper problem of political duty and obligation. The difficulty here lies in part in the fact that there is a conflict of principles in these cases. Some principles counsel compliance while other direct us the other ways. Thus the claims of political duty and obligation must be balanced by a conception of the appropriate priorities. There is, however, further problem. As we have seen, the principles of justice (in lexical order) belong to ideal theory. The persons in the original position assume that the principles they acknowledge, whatever they are, will be strictly complied with and followed by everyone. Thus the principles of justice that result are those defining a perfectly just society, given favourable conditions. With the presumption of strict compliance, we arrive at a certain ideal conception. When we as whether and under what circumstances unjust arrangements are to be tolerated, we are faced with a different sort of question. If needed it applies at all, we must ascertain how the ideal conception of justice applies, to cases where rather than having to make adjustments to natural limitations, we are confronted with injustice. The discussion of these problems belongs to the partial compliance part of nonideal theory. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
It included, among other things, the theory of punishment and compensatory justice, just war and conscientious objection, civil disobedience and militant resistance. These are among the central issues of political life, yet so far the conception of justice as fairness does not directly apply to them. Now I shall not attempt to discuss these matters in full generality. In fact, I shall take up but one fragment of partial compliance theory: namely, the problems of civil disobedience and conscientious refusal. And even here I shall assume that the context is one of a state of near justice, that is, one in which the basic structure of society is nearly just, making due allowance for what it is reasonable to expect in the circumstances. An understanding of this admittedly special case may help to clarify the more difficult problems. However, in order to consider civil disobedience and conscientious refusal, we must first discuss several points concerning political duty and obligation. For one thing, it is evident that our duty or obligation to accept existing arrangements may sometimes be overridden. These requirements depend upon the principles of right, which may justify noncompliance in certain situations, all things considered. Whether noncompliance is justified depend on the extent to which laws and institutions are unjust. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Unjust laws do not all stand on a par, and the same is true of policies and institutions. Now there are two way in which injustice can arise: current arrangements may depart in varying degrees from publicly accepted standards that are more of less just; or these arrangements may conform to a society’s conception of justice, or to the view of the dominant class, but his conception itself may be unreasonable, and in many cases clearly unjust. As we have seen, some conceptions of justice are more reasonable than others. While the two principles of justice and the related principles of natural duty and obligation define the most reasonable view among those on the list, other principles are not unreasonable. Indeed, some mixed conceptions are certainly adequate enough for many purposes. As rough rule a conception of justice is reasonable in proportion to the strength of the arguments that can be given for adopting it in the original position. This criterion is, of course, perfectly natural if the original position incorporates the various conditions which are to be imposed on the choice of principles and which lead to a match with our considered judgments. Although it is easy enough to distinguish these two ways in which existing institutions can be unjust, a workable theory of how they affect our political duty and obligations is another matter. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
When laws and policies deviate from publicly recognized standards, an appeal to the society’s sense of justice is presumably possible to some extent. This condition is presupposed in undertaking civil disobedience. If, however, the prevailing conception of justice is not violated, than the situation is very different. The course of action to be follow depends largely on how reasonable the accepted doctrine is and what means are available to change it. Doubtless one can manage to live with a variety of mixed and intuitionistic conceptions, and with utilitarian view when they are not too rigorously interpreted. In other cases, though, as when a society is regulated by principles favouring narrow class interests, one may have no recourse but to oppose the prevailing conception and the institution it justifies in such ways as promise some success. Secondly, we must consider the question why, in a situation of near justice, we normally have a duty to comply with unjust, and not simply with just, laws. While some writers have questioned this contention, I believe that most would accept it; only a few think that any deviation from justice, however small, nullifies the duty to comply with existing rules. How, then, is this fact to be accounted for? Since they duty of justice and the principle of fairness presuppose that institutions are just, some further explanation is required. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Now one can answer this question if we postulate a nearly just society in which there exists a viable constitutional regime more or less satisfying in the principles of justice. Thus I suppose that for the most part the social system is well-ordered, although not of course perfectly ordered, for in this event the question of whether to comply with unjust laws and policies would not arise. Under these assumptions, the earlier account of a just constitution as an instance of imperfect procedural justice provides an answer. It will be recalled that in the constitutional convention the aim of the parties is to find among the just constitutions (those satisfying the principle of equal liberty) the one most likely to lead to just and effective legislation in view of the general facts about the society in question. The constitution is regarded as a just but imperfect procedure framed as far as the circumstances permit to insure a just outcome. It is imperfect because there is no feasible political process which guarantees that the laws enacted in accordance with it will be just. In political affairs perfect procedural justice cannot be achieved. Moreover, the constitutional process must rely, to a large degree, on some form of voting. I assume for simplicity that a variant of majority rule suitably circumscribed is a practical necessity. Yet majorities (or coalitions of minorities) are bound to make mistakes, if not from a lack of knowledge and judgment, than as a result of partial and self-interested views. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Nevertheless, our natural duty to uphold just institutions binds us to comply with unjust laws and policies, or at least not to oppose them by illegal means as long as they do not exceed certain limits of injustice. Being required to support a just constitution, we must go along with one of its essential principles, that of majority rule. In a state of near justice, then, we normally have a duty to comply with unjust laws in virtue of our duty to support a just constitution. Given humans as they are, there are many occasions when this duty will come into play. The contract doctrine naturally leads us to wonder how we could ever consent to a constitutional rule that would require us to comply with laws that we think are unjust. One might ask: how is it possible that when we are free and still without chains, we can rationally accept a procedure that may decide against our opinion and give effect to that of others? Once we take up the point of view of the constitutional convention, the answer is clear enough. First, among the very limited number of feasible procedures that have any chance of being accepted at all, there are none that would always decide in our favour. And second, consenting to one of these procedures is surely preferable to no agreement at all. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The situation is analogous to that of the original position where the parties give up any hope of free-rider egoism: this alternative is each person’s best (or second best) candidate (leaving aside the constraint of generality), but it is obviously not acceptable to anyone else. Similarly, although at the stage of the constitutional convention the parties are now committed to the principles of justice, they must make some concession to one another to operate a constitutional regime. Even with the best of intentions, their opinions of justice are bound to clash. In choosing a constitution, then, and in adopting some form of majority rule, the parties accept the risks of suffering the defects of one another’s knowledge and sense of justice in order to gain the advantages of an effective legislative procedure. There is no other way to manage a democratic regime. Nevertheless, when they adopt the majority principle the parties agree to put up with unjust laws only on certain conditions. Roughly speaking, in the long run the burden of injustice should be more or less evenly distributed over different groups in society, and the hardship of unjust policies should not weigh too heavily in any particular case. Therefore the duty to comply is problematic for permanent minorities that have suffered from injustice for many years. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
And certainly we are not required to acquiesce in the denial of our own and others’ basic liberties, since this requirement could not have been within the meaning of the duty of justice in the origin position, nor consistent with the understanding of the rights of the majority in the constitutional convention. Instead, we submit our conduct to democratic authority only to the extent necessary to share equitably in the inevitable imperfections of a connotational system. Accepting these hardships is simply recognizing and being willing to work within the limits imposed by the circumstances of human life. In view of this, we have a natural duty of civility not to invoke the faults of social arrangements as a too ready excuse for not complying with them, nor to exploit in evitable loopholes in the rules to advance our interests. The duty of civility imposes a due acceptance of the defects of institutions and a certain restraint in taking advantage of them. Without some recognition of this duty mutual trust and confidence are liable to break down. Thus in a state of near justice at least, there is normally a duty (and for some also the obligation) to comply with unjust laws provided that they do not exceed certain bounds of injustice. This conclusion is not much stronger than that asserting our duty to comply with just laws. It does, however, take us a step further, since it covers a wider range of situations; but more important, it gives some idea of the questions that are to be asked in ascertaining our political duty. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Like the geography of the planet, the human body has until now represented a fixed point in human experience, a “given.” Today we are fast approaching the day when the body can no longer be regarded as fixed. Humans will be able, within a reasonably short period, to redesign not merely individual bodies, but the entire human race. In in 1962 Drs. J. D, Watson and F. H. Crick received the Novel prize for describing the DNA molecule, advanced in genetic have come tripping over one another at a rapid pace. Molecular biology is now exploding from the laboratories. New genetic knowledge has permitted us to tinker with human heredity and manipulate the genes to create altogether new versions of humans. One of the more fantastic possibilities is that humans will be able to make biological carbon copies of themselves. Through a process known as “cloning” it will be possible to grow from the nucleus of an adult cell a new organism that has the same genetic characteristics of the person contributing the cell nucleus. The resultant human “copy” would start life with a genetic endowment identical to that of the donor, although cultural differences might thereafter alter the personality or physical development of the clone. Cloning would make it possible for people to see themselves born anew, to fill the World with twins of themselves. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Cloning would, among other things, provide us with solid empirical evidence to help us resolve, once and for all, the ancient controversy over “nature vs. nurture” or “heredity vs. environment.” The solution of this problem, through the determination of the role played by each, would be one of the great milestones of human intellectual development. Whole libraries of philosophical speculation could, by a single stroke, be rendered irrelevant. An answer to this question would open the way for speedy, qualitative advances in psychology, moral philosophy and a dozen other fields. However, cloning could also create undreamed of complications for the race. There is a certain charm to the idea of Albert Einstein bequeathing copies of himself to posterity. We could bring Mrs. Winchester back and learn the secrets of her mansion, and find out if she wanted to complete or expand it. However, what of horrible figures enshrined in history? Should there be laws to regulate cloning. Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg, a scientist who takes his social responsibility very seriously, believes it conceivable that those who are most narcissistic, and that the clones they produce will also be narcissists. Even if narcissism, however, is culturally rather than biologically transmitted, there are other eerie difficulties. Thus Dr. Lederberg rises a question as to whether human, if permitted, might not “go critical.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
“I use that phrase,” Dr. Lederberg told me, “in almost exactly the same sense that is involved in nuclear energy. It will go critical if there is a sufficient positive advantage to doing so. This has to do with whether the efficiency of communication, particularly along educational lines, is increased as between identical genotypes or not. The similarity of neurological hardware might make it easier for identical copies to transmit technical and other insights from one generation to the next.” How close is cloning? We have technically been able to clone humans for almost a decade, but as far as we know, no one has actually cloned a whole person. Technically, it is not difficult to produce a clone embryo. However, to even research human cloning, scientists would need to ethically collect a large amount of donated eggs and find enough surrogates to carry them. But even if they made it through that logistical nightmare. Across the board, scientists have found that some embryos expire before they are implanted. And those that make it to term often die soon after birth or end up wit severe abnormalities. Simply, these are risks that are easier to take when it comes to experimenting with non-human beings. However, scientists have learned how the various organs of the body develop, and they have begun to experiment with various means of modifying them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Eventually, things like the size of the brain and certain sensory qualities of the brain are going to be brought under direct developmental control. I think this is very near. However, this ethical, moral, and political questions raised by the new biology simply boggle the mind. Who shall live and who shall die? What are humans? Who shall control research into these fields? How shall new findings be applied? Might we not unleash horrors for which humans are totally unprepared? In the opinion of many of the World’s leading scientist human cloning is a disaster waiting to happen. However, gene editing has some benefits. Imagine the implications of the biological breakthroughs in what might be termed “birth technology.” Within a mere ten to fifteen years a woman will be able to buy a tiny frozen embryo that has been perfected, take it to her doctor, have it implanted in her uterus, carry it for nine months, and then give birth to it as thought it had been conceived in her own body. The embryo would, in effect, be sold with a guarantee that the resultant baby would be free of genetic defect. The purchaser would also be told in advance the colour of the baby’s eyes, and hair, its gender, its probable size at maturity and its probable Intelligence Quotient (IQ). #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Indeed, it will be possible at some point to do away with the female uterus altogether. Babies will be conceived, nurtured and raised to maturity outside the human body. It is clearly only a matter of years before the work begun by Dr. Daniele Petrucci in Bologna and other scientists in the United States of America and the Soviet Union, makes it possible for women to have babies without the discomfort of pregnancy. Fertilized human eggs might be useful in the colonization of the planets. Instead of shipping adults to Mars, we could ship a shoebox full of such cells and grow them into an entire city-size population of humans. When you consider how much it costs in fuel to lift every pound off the launch pad, why send full-grown men and women aboard space ships? Instead, why not ship tiny embryos, in the care of a competent biologist…We miniaturize other spacecraft components. Why not the passengers? Long before such developments occur in outer space, however, the impact of the new birth technology will strike home on Earth, splintering our traditional notions of sexuality, motherhood, love, child-rearing, and education. Discussions about the future of the family that deal only with The Pill overlook the biological witches’ brew now seething in the laboratories. The moral and emotional choices that will confront us in the coming decades are mind-staggering. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Many believe that we are playing God and should not, but we have been made in the image of God and should we sit back and watch as the environment and the human race and animal and plant life have been destroyed, or try to fix errors and make a primary race of humans that is healthy, control the weather and make Earth a paradise and produce enough food to feed humanity, make other planets inhabitable to sustain the human life that is produced by a healthy society, and product animal and plant life from going extinct? We really could produce an animal planet, have a forest planet, so forth and so on. It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them. I emphatically embrace the first alternative. The second might lead to the abominable conclusion that charity is good only because God arbitrarily commanded it—that He might equally well have commanded us to hate Him and one another and that hatred would then have been right. I believe, on the contrary, that they err who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides His will. God’s will is determined by His wisdom which always perceives, and His goodness which always embraces, the intrinsically good. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
However, when we have said that God commands things only because they are good, we must add that one of the things intrinsically good is that rational creatures should freely surrender themselves to their Creator in obedience. The content of our obedience—the thing we are commanded to do—will always be something intrinsically good, something we ought to do even if (by an impossible supposition) God had not commanded it. However, in addition to the content, the mere obeying is also intrinsically good, for, in obeying, a rational creature consciously enacts its creaturely role, reverses the act by which we fell, treads Adam’s dance backward, and returns. We therefore agree with Aristotle that what is intrinsically right may well be agreeable, and that the better a human is the more one will like it; but we agree with Dr. Kant so far as to say that there is one right act—that of self-surrender—which cannot be willed to the height by fallen creatures unless it is unpleasant. And we must add that this one right act includes all other righteousness, and that the supreme cancelling of Adam’s fall, the movement full speed astern by which we retrace our long journey from Paradise, the untying of the old, hard know, must be when the creature, with no desire to assist it, stripped naked to the bare willing of obedience, embraces what is contrary to its nature, and does that for which only one motive is possible. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Such an act may be described as a test of the creature’s return to God: hence our fathers said that troubles were sent to us. A familiar example is Abraham’s trial when he was ordered to sacrifice Isaac. With the historicity or the morality of that story I am not now concerned, but with the obvious question, “If God is omniscient He must have known what Abraham would do, without any experiment; why, then, this needless torture? However, as St. Augustine points out, whatever God knew, Abraham at any rate did not know his obedience could endure such a command until the even taught him; and the obedience which he did not know that he would choose, he cannot be said to have chosen. The reality of Abraham’s obedience was the act itself; and what God knew in knowing that Abraham would obey was Abraham’s actual obedience on that mountain top at that moment. To say that God need not have tried the experiment is to say that because God knows, the thing known by God need not exist. However, God uses these legends in the Bible and gives us free will to cultivate us and not allow nature nor nurture to control us, in hopes that we learn to yield to the righteous will of God through guidance and not force. If pain sometimes shatters the creature’s false self-sufficiency, yet in supreme Trial or Sacrifice it teaches one the self-sufficiency which really ought to be one’s—the strength, which if Heaven gave it, may be called one’s own: for then, in the absence of all merely natural motives and supports, one acts in that strength, and that alone, which God confers upon one through one’s subject will. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God’s, and this is one of the many senses in which one that loses one’s soul shall find it. In all other acts our will is fed through nature, that is, through created things other than the self—through the desires which our physical organism and our heredity supply to us. When we act from ourselves alone—that is, from God in ourselves—we are collaborators in, or live instruments of, creation: and that is why such an act undoes with backward mutters of dissevering power the uncreative spell which Adam laid upon his species. Hence as suicide is the typical expression of the stoic spirit, and battle of the warrior spirit, martyrdom always remains the supreme enacting and perfection of Christianity. This great action has been initiated for us, done on our behalf, exemplified for our imitation, and inconceivably communicated to all believers, by Christ on Calvary. There the degree of accepted Death reaches the utmost bounds of the imaginable and perhaps goes beyond them; not only all natural supports, but the presence of the very Father to whom the sacrifice is made deserts the victim, and surrender to God does not falter though God forsakes it. The doctrine of death which I describe is not peculiar to Christianity. Nature herself has written it large across the World in the repeated drama of the buried seed and the re-arising corn. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
From nature, perhaps, the oldest agricultural communities learned it and with animal, or human, sacrifices showed forth for centuries the truth that without shedding of blood is no remission; and though at first such conceptions may have concerned only the crops and offspring of the tribe, they came later, in the Mysteries, to concern the spiritual death and resurrection of the individual. The Indian ascetic, mortifying one’s body on a bed of spikes, preaches the same lesson; the Greek philosopher tells us that the life of wisdom is a practice of death. The sensitive and noble heathen of modern times makes one’s imagined gods die into life. Mr. Huxley expounds non-attachment. We cannot escape the doctrine by ceasing to be Christians. It is an eternal gospel revealed to humans wherever humans have sought, or endured, the truth: it is the very never of redemption, which anatomizing wisdom at all times and in all places lays bare; the unescapable knowledge which the Light and that lighteneth every human presses down upon the minds of all who seriously question what the Universe is about. The peculiarity of the Christian faith is not to teach this doctrine but to render it, in various ways, more tolerable. Christianity teaches us that the terrible task has already in some sense been accomplished for us—that a master’s hand is holding ours as we attempt to trace the difficult letters and that our script need only be a copy, not an original. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Again, where other systems expose our total nature to death (as in Buddhist renunciation) Christianity demands only that we set right a misdirection of our nature, and has no quarrel, like Plato, with the body as such, nor with the psychical elements in our make-up. And sacrifice in its supreme realization is not exacted of all. Confessors as well as martyrs are saved, and some old people whose state of grace we can hardly doubt seem to have gotten through their, on average, seventy to ninety years surprisingly easily. The sacrifice of Christ is repeated, or re-echoed, among His followers in varying degrees, from the curellest martyrdom down to a self-submission of intention whose outward signs have nothing to distinguish them from the ordinary fruits of temperance and sweet reasonableness. The causes of tis distribution I do not know; but from our present point of view it ought to be clear that the real problem is not why some humble, pious, believing people suffer, but why some do not. Our Lord Himself, it will be remembered, explained the salvation of those wo are fortunate in the World only by referring to the unsearchable omnipotence of God. Guide to travelers, for your help I pray, that you might be with me as I go on my way. I give greetings to the God of this place, I, a traveler, offer up prayers. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
From my land to this one, I have come, meaning no harm to any who dwell here. Land of Spirits, I pray to you; though I do not yet know you, I honour you. Lord of Trees, I pray to you as I enter this forest. Please watch over my steps while I am under your care. Throughout all generations God endureth and His name endureth; His throne is established, and His kingdom and His faithfulness are eternal. His words have living and abiding power. They are forever trustworthy and for all time precious both for our fathers and for us, for our children, and for all future generations of His servants, the seed of America. As for our ancestors so for our descendants, Thy teaching is good and endures forever and ever; it is a truth, a faith, a law which shall not pass away. It is true that Thou art the Lord our God and the God of our fathers, our King and our fathers’ King, our Redeemer and the Redeemer of our Fathers. From everlasting Thou has been our Creator, the Rock of our salvation; our Deliverer and Redeemer forever; there is no God besides Thee. Thou has been the help of our father from of old, a Shield and a Deliverer to their children in every generation. In the height of the Universe is Thy habitation, and Thy laws of righteousness please reach unto the ends of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
At night, passers-by heard ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion. The bell in the belfry high in the gables tolled regularly at midnight to summon incoming flights of spirits. Later it tolled again to warn these visitors to return to their sepulchres. About once a week these departed ones relaxed and danced in the Great Ball Room.
Yes, there was a six-foot cypress hedge enclosing the estate. The writer’s father in 1888, helped with much of the ground’s landscaping, pruned this hedge and planted many of the still-standing ornamental trees. He mentioned no barbed wire–nor did the man who removed this hedge decades later.
Entrance was not really barred but we were reluctant to trespass. Adults stretched their necks when they drove by and small boys settled for a peek through the cypress hedge. So much for answers to a few of those endless rumors surrounding our mysterious lady.
Ghosts have always been a part of the human psyche and experience. Some ghosts are so quiet you would hardly know they were there. The Victorian Gardens are open today! winchestermysteryhouse.com
So Our Running with Mozart is Also with Patience and Deliverance Will Come!
Either a person possesses an intuitive sense or one does not. It cannot be created by argument or analysis. The whole Puritan atmosphere has one advantage….It makes everything seems more exciting when you break away from it. In the United States today the median time spent by adults reading newspapers is fifty-two minutes per day. The same person who commits nearly an hour to newspaper also spends time reading magazines, books, signs, billboards, recipes, instructions, labels on cans, advertising on the back of breakfast food boxes, and news on social media. Surrounded by print, one “ingests” between 10,000 and 20,000 edited words per day of the several times that many to which one is exposed. The same person also spends an hour listening to FM radio, satellite radio, or a podcast. If one listens to news, commercials, commentary or other such programs, one will, during this period, hear about 11,000 pre-processed words. One also spends several hours watching television or streaming it from a digital service—add another 10,000 words or so, plus a sequence of carefully arranged, highly purposive visuals. This is not to suggest that only words and pictures convey or evoke images. Music, too, sets the internal image machinery working, although the images produced may be completely non-verbal. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Nothing, indeed, is quite so purposive as advertising, and today the average American has 560 advertising messages shining in their face daily. Of the 560 advertisements people are exposed to daily, they only notice seventy-six. In effect, an individual blocks out 484 advertising message a day to preserve one’s attention for other matters. All this represents the press of engineered messages against one’s sense. And the pressure is rising. In an effort to transmit even richer image-producing messages at an even faster rate, communications people, artists and others consciously work to make each instant of exposure to the mass media carry a heavier informational and emotional freight. Thus we see the widespread and increasing use of symbolism for compacting information. Today advertising humans, in a deliberate attempt to cram more messages into the individual’s mind within a given moment of time, make increasing use of the symbolic techniques of the arts. Consider the “tiger” that is allegedly put in one’s tank. Here a single word transmits to the audience a distinct visual image that has been associated since childhood with power, speed, and force. The pages of advertising trade magazines Architectural Digest are filled with sophisticated technical articles about the use of verbal and visual symbolism to accelerate image-flow. Indeed, today many artists might learn new image-accelerating techniques from the advertising humans. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
If the ad humans, who must pay for each split second of time on radio or television, and who fight for the reader’s fleeting attention in magazines, newspapers, and on social media, are busy trying to communicate maximum imagery in minimum time, there is evidence, too, that at least some members of the public want to increase the rate at which they can receive messages and process images. This explains the phenomenal success of speed-reading courses among college students, business executives, politicians, doctors, lawyers, actors, and others. One leading speed reading school claims it can increase almost anyone’s input speed three times, and some readers report the ability to read literally tens of thousands of works per minute. Whether or not such speeds are achievable by the average persons, the clear fact is that the rate of communication is accelerating. Busy people wage a desperate battle each day to plow through as much information as possible. Speed-reading presumably helps them do this. The impulse toward acceleration in communications is, however, by no means limited to advertising or to the printed word. A desire to maximize message content in minimum time explains, for example, the experiments conducted by psychologists at the American Institutes for Research who played taped lectures at faster than normal speeds and then tested the comprehension of listeners. Their purpose: to discover whether students would learn more if lecturers talked faster. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The same intent to accelerate information flow explains the recent obsession with split-screen and multi-screen movies, mobile phones, and computers. Some auto makers have even replaced all the instrument clusters in their cars with screens. At the Montreal World’s Fair, viewers in pavilion after pavilion were confronted not with a traditional movie screen on which ordered visual images appear in sequence, but with two, three, or five screens, each of them hurling messages at the viewer at the same time. One these, several stories play themselves out at the same tie, demanding of the viewer the ability to accept many more messages simultaneously than any movie-goer in the past, or else to censor out, or block, certain messages to keep the rate of message-input, or image-stimulation, within reasonable limits. Having to look at six images at the same tie, having to watch in twenty minutes the equivalent of a full-length movie, excites and crams the mind. By putting more into a moment, one effectively condenses time. Even in music the same accelerative thrust is increasingly evident. A conference of composers and computer specialists held in San Francisco not long ago was informed that for several centuries music has been undergoing an increase in the amount of auditory information transmitted during a given interval of time. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
There is evidence also that musicians today play the music of Mozart, Bach, and Haydn at a faster tempo than that at which the same music was performed at the time it was composed. We are getting Mozart on the run. If our images of reality are changing more rapidly, and the machinery of image-transmission is being speeded up, a parallel change is altering the very codes we use. For language, too, is convulsing. The words we use are changing faster today—and not merely on the slang level, but on every level. The rapidity with which words come and go is vastly accelerated. This seems to be true not only of English, but of French, Russian, and Japanese as well. There are an estimated 450,000 “usable” words in the English language today, only perhaps 250,000 would be comprehensible to William Shakespeare. Were Mr. Shakespeare suddenly to materialize in London or New York today, he would be able to understand, on the average, only five out of every nine words in our vocabulary. The bloke would be semi-literate. This implies that if the language had the same number of words in Mr. Shakespeare’s time as it does today, at least 200,000 words—perhaps several times that many—have dropped out and been replaced in the intervening four centuries, most within the past century. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
The Christian life cannot be lived alone. To follow Christ is to become part of a new community. The same may be said about writing a book on the Christian life. It can never be written in a vacuum; the author is inevitably influenced by the lives and writings of others. A book, therefore, is a synthesis of shared experience. It draws on the teachings and loves of so many, past and present. Many books, there preparation is very much a team effort. Some would even go as far to say that they had help or guidance from supernatural forces, but that is supposedly how they Bible came to fruition. A whole new vision of the majesty of the God we serve has manifested, awakening me in a continuing desire for spiration. I have been privileged, too, to learn from some of the great scholars of our time. Richard Lovelace of Gordon Conwell Seminary patiently tutored me in the early days of my faith. My times of fellowship with Carl Henry, who has the rare combination of genius and humility, Francis Schaeffer, Jim Huston, Jon Stott, Vernon Grounds, Dick Halverson, Annie Rice and others have enriched me immeasurably. And I have been blessed to study and worship under two excellent pastors: Neal Jones of church, Columbia Baptist in Falls Church, Virginia, and Dr. Chares Webster of Moorings Presbyterian Church in Naples, Florida. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
While the World is going through a pandemic, though I felt an awful deadness inside, I did not think I was searching spiritually. However, I noticed that people who have accepted Jesus Christ have peace within themselves, something I surely needed. My friend explained it all to me one sultry August night. I could now show too much interest, of course—I was a senior partner at a powerful Washington law firm, friend of the President. But as I left my friend’s house, I discovered I could push the button to start my car. That night I was confronted with my own sin—not just Sacramento’s dirty tricks, but the sin deep within me, the hidden evil that lies in every human heart. It was painful, and I could not escape. I cried out to God and fund myself driven irresistibly into His waiting arms. That was the night I gave my life to Jesus Christ and began the greatest adventure of my life. A lot of skeptics thought it would not last, that it was just a ploy for sympathy, to boost views on a blog, a foxhole conversation. I do not blame them. If the tables were turned, I would have probably thought the same thing. However, not once have I doubted that Jesus Christ lives. There is nothing of which I am more certain. I have accepted him as a child, but then was exposed to someone, older than me who said Jesus was just another man like him, nothing special. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
So, from that point, I took him as a source of authority and started to worship God only. However, a woman asked to read the prayers I was writing one day, and told me that she wanted me to include Jesus in them, so I did. Then I started reading hundreds of religious books, and more of the Christian Bible and even the entire Mormon Bible and started reading hundreds of Mormon Church doctrines and even some encyclopedias about Jesus, and accepted Him as Saviour again. Although, one would be surprised to know that not every culture considers Jesus a good man. Some in the Middle East said he was a Charlton using magic tricks. Nonetheless, we live in American and it is one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all, it is a Christian nation, so it is understandable that we are expected to accept Jesus as our Saviour. To hose who serve in the little platoons around the World, faithfully evidencing the love and justice of the Kingdom of God in the midst of the kingdom of this World, keep defending the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked. So our running with Mozart is also with patience. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
We take the long view of the race that is set before us. We do not try to accomplish everything at once, and we do not force things. If we do not immediately succeed in removing a weight or a sin, we just keep running—steadily, patiently—while we find out how it can be removed in God’s way. All the while, we keep looking up at our Teacher, who we know gave us faith to run in the first place and who will bring us safely to the end. “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful humans, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons: ‘My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son.’ Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
“Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live! Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. ‘Make level path for your feet,’ so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed,” reports Hebrews 12.2-13. We concentrate on our teacher’s thoughts, feelings, character, body, social bearing, and soul. We are constantly learning from one, and one shows us how to let the weights and sins drop off so we can run better. As we run we sense divine assistance making our steps lighter. We realize truth more strongly, see things more clearly. We find greater joy in those running with us, our companions in Christ and those who went before and are coming after. His yoke is easy, we find, His burden is light. As out “outer man” perishes, our “inner man” is renewed on daily basis (2 Corinthians 4.16). And no matter what the difficulty, we sing we run, “Deliverance will come!” #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
However, as we look forward, now is the time for specific planning. Individually we must ask ourselves what are the particular things we need to do in order to bring the triumph of Christ’s life more fully into the various dimensions of our being. Are there areas where my will is not abandoned to God’s will or where old segments of fallen character remain unchallenged? Do some of my thoughts, images, or patterns of thinking show more of my kingdom or the kingdom of evil than they do God’s kingdom—for example, as they relate to money, social practices, or efforts to bring the World to Christ? Is my body still my master in some area Am I its servant rather than it mine. And if I have some role in leadership among Christ’s people, and I doing all that I reasonably can to assist and direct their progress inward transformation into Christlikeness? Is that progress the true aim of our life together, and are there ways in which our activities might be ore supportive of that aim? Is the teaching that goes out from me appropriate to the condition of the people, and is my example one that gives clear assurance and direction? Is “my progress evident to all”? “For God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer,” reports 1 Timothy 4.4. “Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress. Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers,” reports 1 Timothy 4.15. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Whatever my situation is, now is the time to make the changes and undertake the initiatives that are indicated by the studies we have made in this essay. Spiritual formation in Christlikeness is the sure outcome of well-directed activities that are under the personal supervision of Christ and are sustained by all of the instrumentalities of His grace. This aching World is waiting for the people explicitly identified with Christ to be, through and through, the people He intends them to be. Whether it realizes it or not. There is no other hope on Earth. And that, of course, is where we stand: on Earth. Strangely, perhaps, it is only spiritual formation in Christ that makes us at home on Earth. We are pilgrims of course, and we look for a better city. “Longing for a better country—a Heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them,” reports Hebrews 11.16. However, we are content that this is not yet. Christ brings me to the place where I am able to walk beside my neighbour, whoever one may be. I am not above or below them. I am beside them: living with them through the events common to all of us. I am not called to judge the, but to serve them as best as I can by the light I have, humbly and patiently, with the strength I have and the strength God supplies. If is true that our ways will at some point part for eternity, I shall love them none the less for it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
And the best gift I can give them is always the character and power of Christ in me and in others who really trust him. Beyond that I look to God for the renovation of their heart as well. I know that, no matter what comes, He is over all. The development of symbols in dreams is almost the equivalent of a healing process. The center or goal thus signifies salvation in the proper sense of the word. The justification for such a terminology comes from the dreams themselves, for these contain so many references to religious phenomena that I was able to use some of them. It seems to me beyond all doubt that these processes are concerned with the religion-creating archetypes. Whatever else religion may be, those psychic ingredients of it which are empirically verifiable undoubtedly consist of unconscious manifestations of the kind. People have dwelt far too long on the fundamentally sterile question of whether the assertions of faith are true or not. Quite apart from the impossibility of ever proving or refuting the truth of a metaphysical assertion, the very existence of the assertion is a self-evident fact that needs no further proof, and when a consenus gentium allies itself thereto the validity of the statement is proved to just that extent. The only thing about it that we can verify is the psychological phenomenon, which is incommensurable with the category of objective rightness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
No phenomenon can ever be disposed of by rational criticism, and in religious life we have to deal with phenomena and acts and not with arguable hypotheses. During the process of treatment the dialectical discussion leads logically to a meeting between the individual and one’s shadow, that dark half of the psyche which we invariably get rid of my means of projection: either by burdening our neighbours—in a wider or narrower sense—with all the faults which we obviously have ourselves, or by casting our sins upon a divine mediator with the assistance of contritio or the milder attritio (Contritio is “perfect” repentance; attritio “imperfect” repentance. The former regards sin as the opposite of the highest good; the latter reprehends it not only n account of its wicked and hideous nature but also from fear of punishment). We know of course that without sin there is no repentance and without repentance no redeeming grace, also that without original sin the redemption of the World could never have come about; but we assiduously avoid investigating whether in this very power of evil God might not have placed some special purpose which it is most important for us to know. One often feels driven to some such view when, like the psychotherapist, one has to deal with people who are confronted with their blackest shadow. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
A religious terminology comes naturally, as the only adequate one in the circumstances, when we are faced with the tragic fate that is the unavoidable concomitant of wholeness. “My fate” means a daemoic will to precisely that fate—a will not necessarily coincident with my own (the ego will). When it is opposed to the ego, it is difficult not to feel a certain “power” in it, whether divine or infernal. The human who submits to one’s fate calls it the will of God; the human who puts up a hopeless and exhausting fight is more apt to see the devil in it. In either event this terminology is not only universally understood but meaningful as well. At any rate the doctor cannot afford to point, with a gesture of facile moral superiority, to the tablets of the law and say “Thou shalt not.” He has to examine things objectively and weigh up possibilities, for he knows, less from religious training and education that from instinct and experience, that there is something very like a felix culpa (the sin of Adam viewed as fortunate, because it brought about the blessedness of the Redemption). One knows that one can miss not only one’s happiness but also one’s final guilt, without which a human will never reach one’s wholeness. Wholeness is in fact a charisma which one can manufacture neither by art nor by cunning; one can only grow into it and endure whatever its advent may bring. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
No doubt it is a great nuisance that humankind is not uniform but compounded individuals whose psychic structure spreads the over a span of at least ten thousand years. Hence there is absolutely no truth that does not spell salvation to one person and damnation to another. All universalism get stuck in this terrible dilemma. Thus the bloom of innocence, the element of obedience and the readiness to take what comes is rubbed off every activity because the law of diminishing marginal utility. Thoughts undertaken for God’s sake—like that on which we are engaged at the moment—are continued as if they were an end in themselves, and then as if our pleasure in thinking were the end, and finally as if our pride or celebrity were the end. Thus all day long, and all the days of our life, we are sliding, slipping, falling away—as if God were, to our present consciousness, a smooth inclined plane on which there is no resting. And indeed we are now of such a nature that we must slip off, and the sin because it is unavoidable, may be venial. However, God cannot have made us so. The gravitation away from God, “the journey homeward to habitual self,” must, we think, be a product of the Fall. What exactly happened when Man fall, we do know; but if it is legitimate to guess, I offer the following picture—a “myth” in the Socratic sense, a not unlikely tale. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Perhaps the nursery story, “Humpty Dumpty” by Mother Goose symbolizes the fall of Man. And no matter how much the Father’s of the Church try to repair humanity, they just cannot. For long centuries God perfected the terrestrial form which was to become the vehicle of humanity and the image of Himself. He gave it hands whose thumb could be applied to each of the fingers, and jaws and teeth and throat capable of articulation, and a brain sufficiently complex to execute all the material motions whereby rational thought is incarnated. The creature may have existed for ages in this state before it became man: it may even have been clever enough to make things which a modern archaeologist would accept as proof of its humanity. However, it was only a terrestrial being because all its physical and psychical processes were directed to purely material and natural ends. Then, in the fullness of time, God caused to descend upon this organism, both on its psychology and physiology, a new kind of consciousness which could say “I” and “me,” which could look upon itself as an object, which knew God, which could make judgments of truth, beauty, and goodness, and which was so far above time that it could perceive time flowing past. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
This new consciousness ruled and illuminated the whole, organism, flooding every part of it with light, and was not, like ours, limited to a selection of the movements going on in one part of the organism, namely the brain. Humans were then all conscious. His organic processes obeyed the law of his own will, not the law of nature. His organs sent up appetites to the judgment seat of will not because they had to, but because he chose. Sleep meant to him not the stupor which we undergo, but willed and conscious repose—he remained awake to enjoy the pleasure and duty of sleep. Since the process of decay and repair in his tissues were similarly conscious and obedient, it may not be fanciful to suppose that the length of his life was largely at his own discretion. Wholly commanding himself, he commanded all lower lives with which he came into contact Even now we meet rare individuals who have a mysterious power of taming beasts. This power the Paradisal man enjoyed in eminence. The old picture of the brutes sporting before Adam and fawning upon him may not be wholly symbolic. Even now, if they are given a reasonable opportunity, more animals than you might expect are ready to adore man: for man was made to be the priest and even, in one sense, the Christ, of the animals—the mediator through whom they apprehend so much of the Divine splendour as their rational nature allows. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
And God was to such a man no slippery, inclined plane. The new consciousness has been made to repose on its Creator, and repose it did. However rich and varied human’s experience of one’s fellows (or fellow) in charity and friendship and love, or of the beasts, or of the surrounding World then first recognized as beautiful and awful, God came first in his love and in his thought, and that without painful effort. In perfect cyclic movement, being, power and joy descended from God to man in the form of gift and returned from man to God in the form of obedient love and ecstatic adoration: and in this sense, though not in all, man was then truly the son of God, the prototype of Christ, perfectly enacting in joy and ease of all the faculties and all the senses that filial self-surrender which Our Lord enacted in the agonies of the crucifixion. Judged by his artefacts, or perhaps even by his language, this blessed creature was, no doubt, a savage. All that experience and practice can teach he had still to learn: if he chipped flints, he doubtless chipped them clumsily enough. He may have been utterly incapable of expressing in conceptual form his Paradisal experience. All that is quite irrelevant. When I look at the people who stream by me in the city today, I do not see my people. I see the other, the foreigner, the stranger, the unknow, the barbarian. I know that this is not right, and I still find I am doing it. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
How will I escape my trap of exclusion, Holy Ones? How will I learn who my tribe is? How will I come to know that my family is passing before me, and I stand by, not only not knowing, but actually preventing that knowledge from coming to my mind? I pray to you, you who are the parents of this family of which I am a part: please open my eyes, please open my ears, please open my mind, please open my heart to all the relatives that surround me. “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for,” reports Hebrews 11.1-2. To the blessed God they offer sweet melody, to the Sovereign, the living and ever enduring God, they utter hymns and make their praises heard; for He alone works mighty deeds and makes all that is new. He is triumphant in battle, sowing righteousness and bringing forth victory. He creates healing, for He is the Lord of wonders and is revered in praises. In His goodness He renews continually each day the work of creation, as it is said in the Psalm: “Give thanks to Him who makes great lights, for His loving kindness endures forever.” O cause a new light to shine upon Zion, and may we all be worthy to delight in its splendor. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Creator of the Heavenly lights. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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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
Winchester Mystery House
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.
Read More http://ow.ly/RXdK50xSsUp
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
Upon Your Skirts Have Fallen Tears of Mine–Genuine Joy and Creativity Come Out of Paradox!
The run-of-the-mill have a truer capacity for love than intellectuals, who should know better. I have always worked with the temperamental conviction that at bottom there are no insoluble problems, and experience justifies me in so far as I have often seen patients simply outgrow a problem that destroyed others. This “outgrowing,” as I called it, proves on further investigation to be a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest appears on the patient’s horizon, and through this broadening of one’s outlook the insoluble problem loses its urgency. It is not solved logically in its own terms, but fades out when confronted with a new and stronger life urge. It is not repressed and made unconscious, but merely appears in a different light, and so really does become different. What, on a lower level, leads to the wildest conflicts and to panicky outbursts of emotion, from the higher level of personality now looks like a storm in the valley seen from the mountain top. This does not mean that the storm is robbed of its reality, but instead of being in it one is above it. However, since, in a psychic sense, we are both valley and mountain, it might seem a vain illusion to deem oneself beyond what is human. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
One certainly does feel the affect and is shaken and tormented by the storm, yet at the same time one is aware of a higher consciousness looking on which prevents one from becoming identical with the affect, a consciousness which regards the affect as an object, and can say, “I know that I suffer.” What our text says of indolence, “Indolence of which a human is conscious, and indolence of which one is unconscious, are a thousand miles apart,” hold true in the highest degree of affect. Now and then it happens in my practice that a patient grows beyond oneself because of unknow potentialities, and this becomes an experience of prime importance to me. In the meantime, I have learned that all the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble. They must be so, for they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved, but only outgrown. I therefore asked myself whether this outgrowing, this possibility of further psychic development, is not the normal thing, and whether getting stuck in conflict is pathological. Everyone must possess that higher level, at least in embryonic form, and must under favourable circumstances be able to develop this potentiality. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
When I examine the course of development in patients who quietly, and as if unconsciously, outgrow themselves, I see that their fates have been something in common. The new thing comes to them from obscure possibilities either outside or inside themselves; they accept it and grow with its help. It seems to me typical that some take the new thing from outside themselves, others from inside; or rather, that it grows int some persons from without, and into others from within. However, the new thing never comes exclusively either form within or from without. If it comes from outside, it becomes a profound inner experience; if it comes from inside, it becomes an outer happening. In no case is it conjured into existence intentionally or by conscious willing, but rather seems to be borne along on the stream of time. The goal toward which the individuation process is ending is “Wholeness” or “Integration”: a condition in which all the different elements of the psyche, both conscious and unconscious, are welded together. The person who achieves this goal possess an attitude that is beyond the reach of emotional entanglements and violent shocks—a consciousness detached from the World. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Individuation is a spiritual journey; and the person embarking upon it, although one might not subscribe to any recognized creed, is nonetheless pursuing a religious quest. By paying careful attention to the unconscious, as manifested in dream and fantasy, the individual comes to change one’s attitude from one in which ego and will are paramount to one in in which one acknowledges that one is guided by an integrating factor which is not of one’s own making. This integrating factor, expressed by the emergence of quaternity or mandala symbols, is named the Self; and archetype which not only signifies union between the opposites within the psyche, but is a God-image, or at least cannot be distinguished from one. Unity and totality stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values because their symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei. Imago Dei (The Image of God) is a concept and theological doctrine in Judaism, Christianity, and Sufism of Islam, which asserts that human beings are created in the image and likeness of God. Hence all statements about the God-image apply to the empirical symbols of totality. Ironically, facing death can being the courage to live and create. By the creative act, we are able to reach beyond our own death. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Because we are able to reach beyond our own death when we are creative, this is why creativity is so important, and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death. One needs to devote one’s aesthetic and sensibilities as an artist and their fantasy to the outside World and harness it for the task of creating a real life in relationship with others. The role of the artist is the greatest kind of courage. Many people struggle to create life through symbol and imagination, they demonstrate the essential task of creating in the face of death. It they create themselves and their own lives, however, it may be asked what “self” they are creating. Are they creating false selves and role expectations or authentic selves and authentic lives? Mandalas are cryptograms concerning the state of the self which is presented to the individual creating them. In them, some people see the self—that is, their whole being—actively at work. To be sure, at first one may only simply understand them; but they seem to the individual highly significant, and one guards the like precious pearls. One has the distinct feeling that they are something central, and in time one may acquire through them a living conception of the self. The self, one may think, is like the monad which one is, and which is their World. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The mandala represents his monad, and corresponds to the microcosmic nature of the psyche. Now, for clarity, the mandala is an art form that one usually creates, like a painting of patterns or a sketch, and it represents one’s mind. It makes it easier for one to concentrate on, transform, and internalize unconscious things in oneself. Monads are one of the ultimate indivisible units of existence. Monads are independent of one another and innately have the power of action and direction toward some end. Although no monad in reality acts on any other, they work in a divinely preestablished harmony so that an appearance of causal connection is maintained. The concept of the monad is intended, in part, to address the mind-body problem arising from Cartesian dualism. While working on mandalas, there may be a great many and some questions may arise repeatedly: What is this process leading to? Where is its goal? From one’s own experience, one may know that one cannot presume to choose a goal which would seem trustworthy to oneself. It may be necessary to abandon the idea of the superordinate position of the ego. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
It may be a good idea to go with the scientific analysis of myths which are Symbols of Transformation. This may be an unconscious process. Therefore, let oneself be carried along by the current without a notion of where it will lead one. When one begins drawing the mandalas, however, one will see that everything, all the paths one has been following, all the steps one has been taking, are leading back to a single point—namely, to the mid-point. It may become increasingly plain to one that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the paths to the center, to individuation. Some people have seen these artworks on the exterior of Victorian houses, or in the pattern of stained-glass windows, like the stained-glass window Mrs. Winchester created with the spider web and thirteen orbs. The goal of psychic development is the self. Uniform development exists, at most, only at the beginning; later, everything points toward the center. This insight gives one stability, and gradually one’s inner peace will return. One will know that finding the mandala as an expression of the self, one has attained for one the ultimate. And perhaps one will learn more. There is great importance of authenticity and subjectivity in the creation of the self in the World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Our subjectivity is our true home, our natural state, and our necessary place of refuge and renewal. It is the font of creativity, the stage for imagination, the drafting table for planning, and the ultimate heart of our fears and hopes, our sorrows and satisfactions. To the extent that some are struggling to create, not just any selves, but experientially coherent authentic selves, subjectivity is a necessary aspect of one’s creativity. The confrontation between life and death, the courage to create in the face of death, and the authenticity of a subjective self can be organized into a paradoxical model. Genuine joy and creativity come out of paradox. The human psyche is a continuum of constrictive and expansive possibilities. The dread of constriction and expansion promotes dysfunctional extremism or polarization, whereas confrontation with or integration of the poles promotes optimal living. Some people oscillate between the poles of expansion out into life and withdrawal into depression and a fantasy World (light and dark imagery, pleasures of the flesh and spirituality), these extremes can be understood as resting on a continuum, with the therapeutic task being to name and integrate the poles. However, the solitary journey toward independence may be molded after the heroic journey towards consciousness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
The pull toward unconsciousness and the need for nurturance and interdependence is part of one’s journey. In Victorian women, hysteria often was a form personality of the vamp and the little girl. The mental hospital is a metaphorical space in which to articulate the crazy-making pressures of middle-class life, particularly for women. The home, the mental hospital, the body: these are woman’s places in the social order that apportion different roles to the genders; and woman herself is the very sense of mutilation. Some women, especially young women experience death by suicide or have a lust for it because they may want to die perfect, certainly not mutilated. To lose your virginity is to be mutilated; virginity is unopen, not yet spoiled. Sleeping Beauty remained perfect. Being Sleeping Beauty also expresses one’s desire to remain a child, and object of fantasy, dependent, and this beauty in their lives makes them want to die as Sleeping Beauty rather than risk imperfection. Some are seeking to balance freedom and security, meaning and emptiness, loneliness and relationship. Death may be seen as warm arms, as a release from the struggle of living. Perhaps it is a good idea to let them know it is acceptable to live and remain pure. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
When pain becomes too great, contain it with humour and with writing. Presence is critical. Having someone listen to one’s silence, to one’s presence (dasein), and give one immediate, kinesthetic, and profound attention is absolutely necessary. When in a suicidal depression, one needs someone to hold one’s hand. One needs someone to help them see life as a composition, to bring one’s extremes more integrated whole, and to apply one’s creativity to one’s actual life. An essential part of healing is to see one’s individual story in a larger cultural perspective. The balance tbween nurturance and work, and the themes of sacrifice, homelessness, and the closeness between death and rebirth, are especially close to the psyche and psychotherapy of women. Sacrifice is the basis of the early primordial fertility rites and is a necessary part of the spring rebirth. Feeling sacrificed to the dominant patriarchal culture and experiencing the plight of insecurity in the living environment through the dispossession of an archetypal place in the World bring some people together in a bond of empathy and shard humanity. This bond can also unite individuals in an empathy of an intense, preverbal sibling type relationship. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
When people have someone to groan with in sympathy, it implies a way of being that does not distance but noncognitively feels with one one’s experience and allows one to descend into the underworld, transform the pain unto image and symbol, and re-emerge stronger. As one has someone to work with them through the process and changing imagery, those who have faith and the word of God deep in their hearts will be able to absorb and overcome the fiery darts that the adversary will surely send to destroy us. Otherwise, our faith, hope, and conviction may not endure, and we could become a casualty. I have learned that having the word of God deep in my soul, coupled with faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and His Atonement, allows me to draw upon the power of God to overcome the adversary and anything he may throw at me. As we face challenges, we can rely upon the promise of the Lord taught by Saint Paul: “For God hath not given us a spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” We know that as a child the Saviour grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him. We know that as He grew older, Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and humans. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
And we know that by the time God’s ministry commenced, those who heard Him were astonished at his doctrine: for his word was with power. Through preparation, the Saviour grew in power and was able to resist all of Satan’s temptations. As we follow the Saviour’s example and prepare through studying the word of God and deepening our faith, we also can draw upon the power of God to resist temptations. Clear the space for change to happen. Let go of the vestiges of your old life, and of illusions that others provide a home for and that your Ghostly Love can provide a relationship. The second phase has to do with descent. These entails one’s experiencing one’s aloneness, one’s vulnerability, tracking the images in one’s dreams and journals, and experiencing one’s images of fire, darkness, crosses, and sacrifice. Remember, there is no expiration date associated with the power God bestows upon those who make and keep temple covenants, nor is there a restriction from accessing that power during a pandemic. However, if we fail to keep our covenants and do not life in a way that allows us to continually qualify to receive His power, the God’s power diminishes in our lives. Focus on your readiness to create your own life, and to meet another person without any baggage or encumbrances from your past. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
When you are free from encumbrances and baggage, when you do meet someone, you will be free and ready to move into a relationship with clear intentions of creating a stable home and a place for yourself. From then on, your images will deal with rebirth, light, and interdependence. Staying with this process means trusting in the Lord and the logic of one’s psyche and helping one to put one’s images and experiences into the context of a meaningful story. Because without working through the healing process, one is faced with total lack of understanding, either not wanting to understand what one is talking about because it is too painful or one is unable to understand because it is too foreign to their experience or because one is totally unable to listen to another person and hear what one is saying. In any event, the World will seem to offer nothing of care or concern for one’s experience or one’s feelings. It will seem unable and unprepared to give one anything to help one in suffering. One will just suffer, and by asking others to listen, and getting no response, one’s suffering will increase. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
However, through it all, our Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, love us! They care for us! They and Their holy angels are watching over us. I know this is true. As we seek union of feeling, we will call down the power of God to make our efforts whole. We often think of substance in terms of food or money, but perhaps what we all need more of is mercy. Sometimes when a person witnesses your suffering, it makes a difference. Just being seen and heard by another. And one listening and sharing in your deep mourning. It has an impact on other people. Their eyes fill with tears. This makes some people want to listen quietly and mourn with you. The ability to listen is a rare quality, born of love. The ability to sit in silence is even more rare—a holy moment when two sit as one. Th feeling has no need for explanation. When a person manifests the least kindness and love, oh what a power it has over one’s mind. The nearer we get to our Heavenly Father, the more are we disposed to look with compassion on perishing souls—we feel that we want to take them upon our shoulders and cast their sins behind our back. If you would have God have mercy on you, have mercy on another. Let us not judge each other or let or words bite. Let us keep each other’s names safe and give the gift of mercy. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Differences can be turned to advantage instead of disadvantage. Unity does not magically happen; it takes work. It is messy, sometimes uncomfortable, and happens gradually when we clear away the bad as fast as the good can grow. Each of us is going to have deeply wounding experiences, things that should never happen. Each of us will also, at various times, allow pride and loftiness to corrupt the fruit we bear. However, Jesus Christ is our Saviour in all things. His power reaches to the very bottom and is reliably there for us when we call on Him. We all beg for mercy for our sins and failures. Jesus freely gives it. And Jesus Christ asks us if we can give that same mercy and understanding to each other. That is the meaning of the soul in the Christian understanding, and can be seen from what the Bible says about God’s soul. Many people are surprised to learn that God, too, has a soul, and even translators of the Bible often do not seem to know what to do about it. Referring to the gross wickedness into which Judea had fallen, the prophet Jeremiah gives the Lord’s word: “Be thou instructed, O Jerusalem, lest my soul depart from thee: and lest I make thee desolate, a land not inhabited,” reports Jeremiah 6.8. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
However, more recent versions translate this as “or I shall turn from you in disgust,” or “Lest I be alienated from you.” Similarly I Jeremiah 9.9: “Shall not my soul be avenged on a nation as this?”; “Shall I not bring retribution on a nation such as this?”; and “On a nation such as this I shall not avenge Myself?” In these and other cases the word “nephesh” (or soul) occurs in the Hebrews text with reference to God. That is done in order to indicate the utter depth of the response of God to the wickedness of his people. That depth is not successfully communicated by the alternative language offered. The true meaning is hollowed out and lost. Similar observations must be made about Isaiah 1.14. In speaking of the soul of God, reference is always made to the deepest, most fundamental level of his being. And similarly in the New Testament texts such as, “Behold, My Servant Whom I Have Chosen; My Beloved In Whom My Soul Is Well-Pleased” (Matthew 12.18; see Leviticus 26.11; Psalm 11.5; and numerous other passages referring to God’s soul. The heart of the matter is that to refer to someone’s soul is to say something about the ultimate depths of one’s being and something that cannot be communicated by using terms like “person” or “self” or various available pronouns. (see Matthew 11.29.) #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
The human entity has travelled through joy and suffering, experienced birth and death, experimented with good and evil for the very purpose of becoming a fully conscious entity. How then could annihilation—Vendantic or any other kind—be its ultimate fate? Is it for this, that humans should end as a mere speck of dust, that they were born? Consciousness, aspiration insight, and inspirations, artistic creations and scientific revelations, the noblest ethical feeling—all useless because the being hey serve is destined to vanish utterly? If all human’s seeming progress comes to an end with one’s death, one’s own end, how futile it is! It helps little to say that others will benefit by it, for this merely shifts the futility to them, for they too will die. The human situation is unsatisfactory and the Biblical Psalmist succinctly lamented. We have not come from oblivion. All our past is present in our characters, capacities, and tendencies; therefore we shall not go into oblivion. There is no death—only a change of state. We have the power to remove prejudice and build unity while we are here in mortal form. May we draw upon God and walk upright with one another—in perfect peace and harmony. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
We bring before you today one of yours, people of our past, one who will continue what you started in the long-ago time. God your beloved child is one of us, the family that reached so far back, and we will need you to please guide your family until they are ready to assume their full responsibilities. Be with you children and us as we do that; as your children grow, please be at their side to help. Please come to us today and learn who your children are, come and celebrate with us. Whatever the Lord desireth, He performeth, in Heaven and Earth, in the seas, and all deeps; He causeth mists to arise from the ends of the Earth; He maketh lightening for the rain; He being forth the wind out of His store-houses. God smote the first-born of Egypt, both man and beast. He sent signs and wonders into the midst of Egypt, upon Pharaoh, and upon all His servants. God concerned many nations, and struck down might kings; Sihon, king of the Amorites, and Og, king of the Bashan, and all the kingdoms of Canaan; and gave their land for a heritage unto Israel His people. “Lord” is Thy name for ever; as Lord art Thou known throughout all generations. For the Lord shall judge His people, and have compassion upon His servants. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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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.
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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
Randolph Harris II International Institute 