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It Removes the Veil–It Plants the Flag of Truth within the Fortes of a Rebel Soul!
It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief. We are creating a new society. Not a changed society. Now an extended, larger-than-life various of our present society. But a new society. The simple premise has not yet begun to tincture our consciousness. Yet unless we understand this, we shall destroy ourselves in trying to cope with tomorrow. A revolution shatters institutions and power relationships. This is precisely what is happening today in all the high-technology nations. Students in Berlin and New York, in Hong Kong and Tokyo, capture their deans and chancellors, bring great clanking education factories to a grinding halt, and even threaten to toppled governments. Great states and cities are paralyzed by strikes, power failures, demonstrations. Internal power alliances are shaken. Financial and political leaders secretly tremble—not out of fear that revolutionaries will oust them, but that the entire system is somehow flying out of control. These are indisputable signs of a sick social structure, as society that can no longer perform even its most basic function in the accustomed ways. It is a society caught in the agony of revolutionary change. What is occurring now is not a crisis of capitalism, but of the age of information itself, regardless of political form. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
We are also experiencing a youth revolution, cultural revolution, an economic revolution, and the most rapid and deep-going technological revolution in history. We are in the midst of a super-information revolution. Old systems need to be updated to handle all the technology that is being produced. Infrastructure needs to be updated. There is so much technology that we are not even keeping up to date any more. Since at least the year 2009, there have been elevators that have touch screens like cell phones, but most buildings you enter today are still using buttons. People are opposing genetically modified organism fish as we are depleting fishing populations and seeing a 94 percent decline of mega fish. One needs imagination to confront a revolution. For revolution does not move in straights lines alone. It jerks, twists and backtracks. It arrives in the form of quantum jumps and dialectical reversals. Only by accepting the premise that we are racing toward a wholly new stage of eco-technological development—the super-information stage—can we make sense of our era. Only by accepting the revolutionary premise can we free our imaginations to grapple with the future. We have the technology to save the planet, save rain forest, save animals on the verge of extinction, but have to be willing to use technology for that purpose, instead of just sitting by and expressing sorrow and fear. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Revolution implies novelty. It sends a flood of newness into the lives of countless individuals, confronting them with unfamiliar institutions and first-time situation. Reaching deep into our personal lives, the enormous changes ahead will transform traditional family structures and social attitudes. They will alter conventional relationships between the generations. They will creature new values with respect to money and success. They will facilitate changes in word, play, and education beyond our wildest imagination. And they will do all this in a context of spectacular, elegant, yet curious scientific advance. If transience is the first key to understanding the new society, therefore, novelty is the second. The future will unfold as an unending success of bizarre incidents, sensational discoveries, implausible conflicts, and wildly novel dilemmas. This means that many members of the super-information society will have to adapt to feel at home in it. The super-information revolution can erase hunger, disease, ignorance, and brutality. This coming future will radiate new opportunities for personal growth, adventure, and delight. It will be vividly colourful and amazingly open to individuality. The problem is not whether humans can survive regimentation and standardization. The problem, as we shall see, is whether one can survive freedom. Yet for all this, humans have never truly inhabited a novelty-filled environment before. When life situations are more or less familiar, having to live at an accelerating pace is one thing. When faced by unfamiliar, strange or unprecedented situations, having to do so is distinctly another. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
By unleashing the forces of novelty, we slam humans up against the non-routine, the unpredicted. And, by doing so, we escalate the problems of adaptation to a new and dangerous level. For transience and novelty are an explosive mix. If all of this seems doubtful, let us contemplate some of the novelties that lies in store for us. Combining rational intelligence with all the imagination we can command, let us project ourselves forcefully into the future. In doing so, let us not fear occasional error—the imagination is only free when fear of error is temporarily laid aside. Moreover, in thinking about the future, it is better to err on the side of daring, than the side of caution. One sees why the moment one begins listening to the humans who are even now creating that future. Listen, as they describe some of the developments waiting to burst from their laboratories and factories. Humans are moving onto and into the sea—occupying it and exploiting it as an integral part of their use of this planet for recreation, minerals, food, waste disposal, military and transportation operations, and, as populations grow, for actual living space. More than sixty six percent of the planet’s surface is covered with ocean—and of this submerged terrain a bare five percent is well mapped. However, this underwater land is known to be rich with oil, gas, coal, gold, diamonds, sulphur, cobalt, uranium, tin, phosphates, and other minerals. It teems with fish and plant life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
These immense riches are about to be fought over and exploited on a staggering scale. Today in the United States of America alone more than 600 companies are readying themselves for a monumental competitive struggle under the seas. De Beers Group, the World’s largest diamond producers is conducting their own deep-sea mining for diamonds. They currently operate the largest underwater mining fleet of ships in the World, which travel across the West African seabed, pulverizing diamond-bearing deposits and pumping them to the surface. DeepGreen Metals is a Canadian start-up company who plans to extract cobalt and other battery metals from small rockers covering the seafloor, and have secured funding from Switzerland-based offshore pipeline company. Beijing Pioneer Hi-Tech Development Corporation (BPHDC) is a stated-owned enterprise, sponsored by the Government of the People’s Republic of China, and they have already been granted by the International Seabed Authority (ISA) to mine polymetallic nodules in the Western Pacific Ocean. Those are just a few of the companies who play to explore and harvest material from the dynamic landscape of the ocean floor, which is home to countless different ecosystems. The race will intensify year by year—with far reaching impact on society. Who “owns” the bottom of the ocean and the marine life that covers it? #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
As ocean mining becomes feasible and economically advantageous, we can expect the resources balance among nations to shift. The Japanese already extract 10,000,000 tons of coal each year from underwater mines; tin is already being ocean-minded by Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. Before long nations may go to war over patches of ocean bottom. We may also find sharp changes in the rate of industrialization of what are now resource-poor nations. Technologically, novel industries will rise to process the output of the oceans. Others will produce sophisticated and highly expensive tools for working the sea—deep—diving research craft, rescue submarines, electronic fish-herding equipment and the like. The rate of obsolescence in these fields will be swift. The competitive struggle will spur ever accelerating innovation. Culturally, we can expect new words to stream rapidly into the language. “Aqua-culture”—the term for scientific cultivation of the ocean’s food resources—will take its place alongside “Agriculture.” “Water,” itself a term freighted with symbolic and emotional associations, will take on wholly new connotations. Along with a new vocabulary will come new symbols in poetry, painting, film and the other arts. Representations of ocean life forms will find their way into graphic and industrial design. Fashions will reflect dependence on the ocean. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
New textiles, new plastics, and other material will be discovered from aqua-culture. New medications will be found to cure illness or alter mental states. Most important, increased reliance on the oceans for food will alter the nutrition of millions—a change that, itself, carries significant unknowns in its wake. What happens to the energy level of people, to their desire for achievement, not to speak of their biochemistry, their life span, their characteristic diseases, even their psychological responses, when their society shifts from a reliance on argi- to aqua-culture? The opening of the sea may also bring with it a new frontier spirit—a way of life that offers adventure, danger, quick riches or fame to the initial explorers. Later, as humans begin to colonize the continental shelves, and perhaps even the deeper reaches, the pioneers may well be followed by settlers who build artificial cities beneath the waves—work cities, science cities, medical cities, and play cities, complete with hospitals, hotels, and homes. If all this sounds too far off, living underwater is actually possible, and you could be moving to an underwater city in the near future. Jacques Yves Cousteau was a French oceanographer, researcher, filmmaker, and undersea explorer, who was largely responsible for igniting the interest of the general public in the ocean, and eventual possibility of underwater cities. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Mr. Cousteau was so passionate about understanding and exploring the World’s oceans that he created the famous Conshelf series of underwater habitats. The structures allowed “oceanauts” to live underwater for days, or even weeks at a time. Each iteration of the shelters (Conshelf I, II, III) improved over time, eventually allowing six oceanauts to liver underwater at a full 328 feet (100 meters) below the surface. Underwater habitats were dotted across the seabeds, with names like Sealab, Hydrolab, Edalhab, Helgoland, Galathee, Tektite, Aquabulle, Hippocampe. Furthermore, living on the ocean floor could provide humans with ready access to seafood and sea plants. There are aquanauts who are currently living underwater, who are able to partially support themselves via spearfishing, combined with canned and preserved foods. Also, Dr. Walter L. Robb, a scientist at General Electric (GE), has already kept a hamster alive under water by enclosing it in a box that is, in effect, an artificial gill—a synthetic membrane that extracts air from the surrounding water while keeping the water out. Such membranes formed the top, bottom and two sides of a box in which the hamster was submerged in water. Without the gill, the animal would have suffocated. With it, it was able to breathe under water. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Such membranes, GE claims, may some day furnish air for the occupants of underwater experimental stations. They might eventually be built into the walls of undersea apartment houses, hotels and other structures, or even—who knows?—into the human body itself. Indeed, the antiquated science fictions speculations about characters like Aquaman, but with surgically implanted gills no longer quite so impossibly far-fetched as they once did. We may create (perhaps even breed) specialists for ocean work, men and women who are not only mentally, but physically equipped for work, play, love and other pleasures under the sea. Even if we do not resort to such dramatic measures in our haste to conquer the underwater frontier, it seems likely that the opening of the oceans will generate not merely new professional specialties, but new life styles, new ocean-oriented subcultures, and perhaps even new religious sect or mystical cults to celebrate the sea. One need not push speculation so far, however, to recognize that the novel environments to which humans will be exposed will, of necessity, bring with them altered perceptions, new sensations, new sensitivities to colour and form, new ways of thinking and feeling. Moreover, the invasion of the sea, the first wave of which we shall witness long before the arrival of A.D. 2040, is only one series of closely tied scientific-technological trends that are now racing forward—all of them crammed with novel social and psychological implications. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Whereas there are various principles of natural duty, all obligations arise from the principle of fairness. It will be recalled that this principle holds that a person is under an obligation to do one’s part as specified by the rules of an institution whenever one has voluntarily accepted the benefits of the scheme or has taken advantage of the opportunities it offers to advance one’s interests, provided that this institution is just or fair, that is, satisfies the two principles of justice. The intuitive idea here is that when a number of persons engage in a mutually advantageous cooperative venture according to certain rules and the voluntarily restrict their liberty, those who have submitted to these restrictions have a right to a similar acquiescence on the part of those who have benefited from their submission. We are not to gain from the cooperative efforts of others without doing our fair share. It must bot be forgotten that the principle of fairness has two parts: one which states how we acquire obligations, namely, by doing various things voluntarily; and another which lays down the condition that the institution in question be just, if not perfectly just, at least as just as it is reasonable to expect under the circumstances. The purpose of this second clause is to insure that obligations arise only if certain background conditions are satisfied. Acquiescence in, or even consent to, clearly unjust institutions does not give rise to obligations. It is generally agreed that extorted promises are void ab initio. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
However, similarly, unjust social arrangements are themselves a kind of extortion, even violence, and consent to them odes not bind. The reason for this condition is that the parties in the original position would insist upon it. It may be objected that since the principles of natural duty are on hand, there is no necessity for the principle of fairness. Obligation can be accounted for by the natural duty of justice, for when a person avails oneself of an institutional set up, its rules then apply to one and the duty of justice holds. Now this contention is, indeed, sound enough We can, if we like, explain obligation by invoking the duty of justice. It suffices to construe the requisite voluntary acts as acts by which our natural duties are freely extended. Although previously the scheme in question did not apply to us, as we had no duties in regard to it other than that of not seeking to undermine it, we have now by our deeds enlarged the bonds of natural duty. However, it seems appropriate to distinguish between those institutions or aspects thereof which must inevitably apply to us since we are born into them and they regulate the full scope of our activity, and those that apply to us because we have freely done certain things as a rational way of advancing our ends. Thus we have a natural duty to comply with the constitution, say, or with the basic laws regulating property (assuming them to be just), whereas we have an obligation to carry out the duties of an office that we have succeeded in winning, or follow the rules of associations or activities that we have joined. Sometimes it is reasonable to weigh obligations and duties differently when they conflict precisely because they do not arise in the same way. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
In some cases at least, the fact that obligations are freely assumed is bound to affect their assessment when they conflict with other moral requirements. It is also true that the better-paced members of society are more likely than others to have political obligations as distinct from political duties. For by and large it is these persons who are best able to gain political office and to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the constitutional system. They are, therefore, bound even more tightly to the scheme of just institutions. To mark this fact, and to emphasize the manner in which many ties are freely assumed, it is useful to have the principle of fairness. This principle should enable us to give a more discriminating account of duty and obligation. The term “obligation” will be reserved, then, for moral requirements that derive from the principle of fairness, while other requirements are called “natural duties.” A perception of this truth lies at the back of the universal feeling that bad humans ought to suffer. It is no use turning up our noses at this feeling, as if it were wholly base. On its mildest level it appeals to everyone’s sense of justice. However, some enlightened people would like to banish all conceptions of retribution or desert from their theory of punishment and place its value wholly in the deterrence of others or the reform of the criminal oneself. They do not see that by so doing they render all punishment unjust. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
If I do not deserve it, what can be more immoral than to inflict suffering on me for the sake of deterring others? And if I do not deserve it, you are admitting the claims of “retribution.” And what can be more outrageous than to catch me and submit me to a disagreeable process of moral improvement without my consent, unless (once more) I deserve it? On yet a third level we get vindictive passion—the thirst for revenge. This, of course, is evil and expressly forbidden to Christians. However, it has perhaps appeared already from our discussion of Sadism and Masochism that the ugliest thing in human nature are perversions of good or innocent things. The good thing of which vindictive passion is the perversion comes out with startling clarity in the definition of Revengefulness, “desire by doing hurt to another to make one condemn some fact of one’s own.” Revenge loses sight of the end in the means but its end is not wholly bad—it wants the evil of the bad human to be with one what it is to everyone else. This is proved by the fact that the avenger wants the guilty part not merely to suffer, but to suffer at one’s hands, and to know it, and to know why. Hence the impulse to taunt the guilty person with one’s crime at the moment of taking vengeance: hence, too, such natural expressions as “If the same thing were done to him, I wonder how he would like it,” or “I will teach him.” For the same reasons when are going to abuse a human in words, we say we are going to “let him know what we think of him.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
When our ancestors referred to pains and sorrows as God’s “vengeance” upon sin they were not necessarily attributing evil passions to God; they may have been recognizing the good element in the idea of retribution. Until the evil human finds evil unmistakably present in one’s existence, in the form of pain, one is enclosed in illusion. Once pain has aroused one, one knows that on is in some way or other “up against” the real Universe: one either rebels (with the possibility of a clearer issues and deeper repentance at some later stage) or else makes some attempt at an adjustment, which, if pursued, will lead one to religion. It is true that neither effect is so certain now as in ages when that existence of God (or even of the gods) was more widely known, but even in our own days we see it operating. Even atheists rebel and express, like Hardy and Housman, their rage against God although (or because) He does not, in their view, exist: and other atheists, like Mr. Huxley, are driven by suffering to raise the whole problem of existence and to find some way of coming to terms with it which, if not Christian, is almost infinitely superior to fatuous contentment with a profane life. No doubt Pain as God’s megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. However, it gives the only opportunity the bad human can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortes of a rebel soul. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
If the first and lowest operation of pain shatters the illusion that all is well, the second shatters the illusion that what we have, whether good or bad in itself, is our own and enough for us. When everything is going well with us, everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thought to God. When “all” does not include God, we “have all we want” is a terrible saying. We find God an interruption. God wants t give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full—there is nowhere for Him to put it. We regard God as an airman regards his parachute: it is there for emergencies but he hopes he will never have to use it. Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. While what we call “our own life” remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make “our own life” less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible source of false happiness? It is just here, where God’s providence seems at first to be most cruel, that the Divine humility, the stooping down of the Highest, most deserves praise. We are perplexed to see misfortune falling upon decent, inoffensive, worthy people—on capable, hard-working mothers and families, veterans, or diligent, thirty little tradespeople, on those who have worked so hard, and honestly for their modest stock of happiness and now seem to be entering on the enjoyment of it with the fullest right. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
How can I say with sufficient tenderness what here needs to be said? It does not matter that I know I must become, in the eyes of every hostile reader, as it were, personally responsible for all the suffering I try to explain—just as, to this day, everyone talks as if St Augustine wanted unbaptized infants to go to Hell. However, if I alienate anyone from the truth, it matters enormously. Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for the moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He think that their modest prosperity and happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore God troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stand between them and the recognition of their need; God makes that life less sweet to them. I call this a Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up “our own” when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, God stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is “nothing better” now to be had. The same humility is shown by all those Divine appeals to our fears which trouble high-minded readers of Scripture. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this God accepts. The creature’s illusions of self-sufficiency must, for the creature’s sake, be shattered; and by trouble or fear of trouble on Earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters its “unmindful of His glory’s diminution.” Those who like the God of the Scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask. If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved? And this illusion of self-sufficiency may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly, and temperate people, and on such people, therefore, misfortune must fall. The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to Worldly success. Men and women of the evening are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger. Certain persons totally denied the existence of providence, as Democritus and the Epicureans, maintaining that the World was made by chance. Others taught that incorruptible things only were subject to providence and corruptible things not in their individual selves, but only according to their species; for in this respect they are incorruptible. They are represented as saying (Job 22.14): “The could are His covert; and He doth not consider our things; He walketh about the poles of Heaven.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Rabbi Moses, however, excluded humans from the generality of things corruptible, on account of the excellence of the intellect which they possess, but in reference to all else that suffers corruption he adhered to the opinion of others. We must say, however, that all things are subject to divine providence, not only in general, but even in their own individual selves. This is made evident thus. For since every great agent acts for an end, the ordering of effects towards that end extends as far as the causality of the first agent extends. Whence it happens that in the effects of an agent something takes place which has no reference towards the end, because the effect comes from a cause other than, and outside the intention of the agent. However, the causality of God, Who is the first agent, extends to all beings, not only as a constituent principles of species, but also as to the individualizing principles; not only of things incorruptible, but also of things corruptible. Hence all things that exist in whatsoever manner are necessarily directed by God towards some end; as the Apostle says: “Those things that are of God are well ordered [*Vulg. ‘Those powers that are, are ordained of God’].” Since, therefore, as the providence of God is nothing less than they type of the order of things towards an end, as we have said; it necessarily follows that all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
It has also ben show that God knows all things, both universal and particular. And since His knowledge may be compared to the things themselves, as the knowledge of art to the objects of art all things must of necessity come under His ordering; as all things wrought by art are subject to the ordering of that art. There is a difference between universal and particular causes. A think can escape the order of a particular cause; but not the order of a universal cause. For nothing escapes the order of a particular cause, expect through the intervention and hindrance of some other particular cause; as, for instance, wood may be prevented from burning, by the action of water. Since then, all particular causes are included under the universal cause, it could not be that nay effect should take place outside the range of that universal cause. So far then as an effect escapes the order of a particular cause, it is said to be casual or fortuitous in respect to that cause; but if we regard the universal cause, outside whose range no effect happen, it is said to be foreseen. Thus, for instance, the meeting of two servants, although to them it appears a chance circumstance, has been fully foreseen by their master, who has purposely sent to meet at the one place, in such a way that the one knows about the other. The term nonduality reminds a sound in the air when heard, a visual image when read. Without the key of mentalism, it remains just that. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
The thing is in mind, is a projection of mind as thought. The is nonduality, for mind is not apart from what comes and goes back into it. As with things, so wit bodies and Worlds. All appear along with the ultimately cosmic but immediately individual thought of them. The teaching of nonduality is that all things are within one and the same element—Consciousness. Hence there are no two or three or three million things and entities: there is in reality only the One Consciousness. Duality exists, but only within nonduality, which as the last word. If we could raise ourselves to the ultimate point of view, we would see all forms in one spirit, one essence in all atoms, and hence no difference between one World and another, one thing and another, one human and another. Just as a larger circle may contain a smaller one within it, yet the one need not contradict the other, so the ever-being of Mind may contain the ever-changing incredibly numerous forms of Nature without and contradiction. The universal reality is neither a unit nor a cipher. Were it a cipher we could never know it, could not even think of it, for then we would not be thinking. Were it a unit it could not stand alone but would mask a host of other units, thus making a plurality of realities. For it can be proved mathematically that the existence of one always implies the existence of a whole series of figures, from two upwards. What is it then? The answer, be it said to their credit, was discovered by old Indian sages. It is nonduality. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
The notion of the One belongs to the realms of instruction for beginners; in reality it is as illusory as the Many, because it presupposes the truth of the latter; the reality of number one implies the reality of number two, and so forth. Hence Monism is not our doctrine, but rather Nonduality There is a vast difference between the two terms. Nonduality simply means that there is nothing other than the unseen Power, nothing else, no Universe, no creature. This is Absolute Being, where duality doe not exist and multiplicity cannot. In the end, when truth is seen and its relativities are transcended, there is only this: nonduality, nonorigination, and noncausality. Everything exists in opposing pairs, that is, in twos. Hence the Origin, the Ultimate, is called by Hindu sages “the Not-TWO.” All distinctions between this and that, here and there, before and after, are dissolved in the Absolute. In the highest Sanskrit text, the Universe is pointed to as “This” and the final reality as “That.” In the immaterial and spiritual World, the person is devoid of real existence, the ego is a fiction, and there is only the One Universal Mind (God). There is only the ne inexhaustible Source out of which all this vast complex of universal existence emerges. It alone always is; the rest is an ever-changing picture. Just as the dreamer’s mind appears to split itself up into the various figures and persons of one’s dream, so the One has never really split itself up into the many, but it has appeared to do so. I swear on oath today to God, bringer of Justice, and His Son Jesus Christ, that I will tell only that which is true. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
Whether it by to my advantage or bring me harm, what I say will be what I know to be true. Lord of the pledged World and keeper of oaths: God, I pray to you for justice. May you grant me great discernment, God, as I weigh what I have learned. May you balance my mind, body, and soul. May what I will do be what is right, may what I will do equal the truth. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words which I command thee this day shall be in thy heart. Thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thy house, when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be for frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thy house and upon they gates. “It shall come to pass, if ye shall hearken diligently unto My commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord your God, and to serve Him with all your heart, and with all your soul, that I will give the rain of your land in its season, the former rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine and thine oil. And I will give grasses in thy fields for thy cattle, and thou shalt eat and satisfied. Be careful, or you will be enticed to turn away and worship other gods and bow down to them. The LORD’s anger will burn against you, and he will shut the Heavens so that it will not rain and the ground will yield no produce, and you will soon perish from the good land and the LORD is giving you,” reports Deuteronomy 11.13-18. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Business Underlies Everything—Do Business in Great Waters!
Diet is a way of eating for the kind of life you want. Accelerated changes in the human condition require an array of symbolic images of humans which will match up to the requirements of constant change, fleeting impression and a high rate of obsolescence. We need a replaceable, expendable series of ikons. Speed has become something undreamt-of, and constant movement every human’s intimate experience. We are different from what we were three moments ago, and in three minutes more, we will again be different. The image appears and disappears, but nothing is retained. Whether one regards this as fun or not depends on the individual, perhaps; but the overall direction of such movement is clear. We are racing toward impermanence. Human’s relationships with symbolic imagery are growing more and more temporary. Events speed past us, compelling us to reassess our assumptions—our previous formed images of reality. Research topples older conceptions of humans and nature. Ideas come and go at a frenetic rate. (A rate, that, in science at least, has been estimated to be twenty to one hundred times faster than a mere century ago.) Image-laden messages hammer at our senses. Meanwhile, language and art, the codes through which we transfer image-bearing messages to one another, are themselves turning over more rapidly. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
All this cannot—and does not—leave us unchanged. If one is to adapt successfully to the churning environment, it accelerates the rate at which the individual must process one’s imagery. Nobody really knows how we convert signals from outside into images within. Yet psychology and the information sciences cast some light on what happens once the image is born. They suggest, to begin with, that the mental model is organized into many highly complex image-structures, and that new images are, in effect, filed away in these structures according to several classificatory principles. A newly generated image is filed away with other images pertaining to the same subject matter. Smaller and more limited inferences are ranged under larger and more inclusive generalizations. The image is checked out for its consistency with those on file. (There is evidence of the existence of a specific neural mechanism that carries out this consistency-check procedure.) We make a decision, with respect to the image, as to whether it is closely relevant to our gals, or whether, instead, it is remote and hence, for us, unimportant. Each image is also evaluated—is it “good” or “bad” for us? Finally, whatever else we do with the new image, we also judge its truth. We decide just how much faith to place in it. Is it an accurate reflection of reality? Can it be believed? Can we base action on it? #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Large numbers of images may have to be reclassified, shuffled, changed again until a suitable integration is found. The mental model must be seen not as a static library of images, but as a living entity, tightly charged with energy and activity. It is not a “given” that we passively receive from outside. Rather, it is something we actively construct and reconstruct from moment to moment. Restlessly scanning the outer World with our senses, probing for information relevant to our needs and desires, we engage in a constant process of rearrangement and updating. At any given instant, innumerable images are decaying, dropping into the black immensity of the forgotten. Others are entering the system, being images, “using them,” and returning them to file, perhaps in different place. We are constantly comparing images, associating them, cross-referencing them in new ways, and repositioning them. This is like muscular activity, it is a form of work. It requires high energy to keep the system operating. Change, roaring through society, widens the gap between what we believe and what really is, between the existing images and the reality they are supposed to reflect. When this gap is only moderate, we can cope more or less rationally with change, we can react sanely to new conditions, we have a grip on reality. When this gap grows too wide, however, we find ourselves increasingly unable to cope, we respond inappropriately, we become ineffectual, withdraw or simply panic. At the final extreme, when the gap grows too wide, we suffer psychosis—or even death. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
To maintain our adaptive balance, to keep the cap within manageable proportions, we struggle to refresh our imagery, to keep it up-to-date, to relearn reality. Thus the accelerative thrust outside us finds a corresponding speed-up in the adapting individual. Our image-processing mechanism, whatever they may be, are driven to operate at higher and higher speeds. This has consequences that have been as yet largely overlooked. For when we classify an image, any image, we may a definite, perhaps even measurable, energy-investment in a specific organizational pattern in the brain. Learning requires energy; and relearning requires even more. All the researches on learning seems to confirm the view that “energies” are bound in support of past learning, and that new energies are essential to unbind the old. At the neurological level, any established system appears to include exceedingly intricate arrangements of cell material, electrical changes and chemical elements. At any cross section in time the somatic structure represents a tremendous investment of fixed forms and potentials. What this means is very simple: there are cost involved in relearning—or, in our terminology, reclassifying imagery. There is an assumption that human’s potential for re-education are unlimited. This is, at best, an assumption, not a fact, and it is an assumption that needs close and scientific scrutiny. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The process of image formation and classification is, in the end, a physical process, dependent upon finite characteristics of nerve cells and body chemicals. In the neural system as now constituted there are, in all likelihood, inherent limits to the amount and speed of image processing that the individual can accomplish. How fast and how continuously can the individual revise one’s inner images before one smashes up against these limits? Nobody knows. It may well be that the limits stretch so far beyond present needs, that such gloomy speculations are unjustified. Yet one salient fact command attention: by speeding up change in the outer World, we compel the individual to relearn one’s environment at every moment. This, in itself, places a new demand on the nervous system. The people of the past, adapting to comparatively stable environments, maintained longer-lasting ties with their own inner conceptions of “the-way-things-are.” We, moving into high-transience society, are forced to truncate these relationships. Just as we must make and break our relationships with things, places, people, and organizations at an ever more rapid pace, so, too, must we turn over our conceptions of reality, our mental images of the World at shorter and shorter intervals. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Transience, then, the forcible abbreviation of human’s relationships, is not merely a condition of the external World. It has its shadow within us as well. New discoveries, new technologies, new social arrangements in the external World erupt into our lives in the form of increased turnover rates—shorter and shorter relational durations. They force a faster and faster pace of daily life. They demand a new level of adaptability. And they set the stage for that potentially devastating social illness—future shock. When you have not discovered them for yourself, being told what your impulses are can lead to compliance and to role-playing the personality you have been told you have; it can lead to a false idea of yourself, to a False Self. I am concerned with the search for the self and the restatement of the fact that certain conditions are necessary if success is to be achieved in this search. These conditions are associated with what is usually called creativity. It is in playing, and only in playing, that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self. Self means the whole personality, conscious and unconscious, integrated and non-integrated, the whole map as well as the current working model. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
The self is something that can be experience and apprehended: it cannot be accurately described in words. A child that is playing happily is exploring what happens in various manageable circumstances—what people and things feel like when one handles then, what one feels like wen handling them, what they can do, and what they can be made to do. In play we have freedom to overcome timidity by trial and error, uninhibited by the fear of mistakes. Interest can build up gradually, at our own pace, and we can stop when we want to. There is no impingement, however helpfully it is meant, from the World of others. Others are not wanted just then, however loved they may be at other times. Babies are persons. You may be sure that if one is just an ordinary baby, one will notice the attractive object and one will reach for it. As a matter of fact, probably as soon as one has reached for it, one will suddenly be overcome with reserve. It is as if one thought, “I had better think this thing out; I wonder what feelings mother will have on this subject. I had better hold back until I know.” So, as if nothing were further from one’s thoughts, one will turn away from the spoon. In a few moments, however, one will return one’s interest in it, and one will very tentatively put a finger on the spoon. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The baby may perhaps grasp the spoon, and look at mother to see what one can get from her eyes. At this point I will probably have to tell mother what to do, because otherwise she will help too much, or hinder, as the case may be; so I ask her to take as little part in what happens as possible. The baby gradually finds from one’s mother’s eyes that this new thing one is doing is not disapproved of and so one catches hold of the spoon more firmly and begins to make it one’s own. One is still very tense, however, because one is not certain what will happen if one does with this thing what one wants to do so badly. One does not even know for sure what it is that one wants to do. We guess that in the course of a little while one will discover what one wants to do with it because one’s mouth begins to get excited. The baby is still very quiet and thoughtful but saliva begins to flow from one’s mouth. One’s tongue looks sloppy. One’s mouth beings to want the spoon. One’s gums begin to want to enjoy biting on it. It is not very long before one has put it in one’s mouth. We can now say that the baby has taken this thing and made it one’s own. One has lost all the stillness that belongs to concentration and wondering, and doubt. Instead one is confident and very much enriched by the new acquisition. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The True Self starts with a sense of being-at-one both with an interesting, helpful, friendly World and with whatever impulses, needs, and wishes may arise. What are the conditions in which the True Self can survive and maintain itself? Being securely held by a facilitating environment is apparently essential. The mother is the matrix or a framework of ego-relatedness. She facilitates conditions which provide security and the freedom to explore, to find, to create, to play. When parents provide such sure and unobtrusive protection that the child feels totally secure, the child does not need its watchful and defensive ego-functions, and they do not develop prematurely: this gives a longer time for the True Self to establish itself and ramify. To relax into non-purposive activity, to be undefended and not on the watch, that is a very rare state for most of us. It is sometimes achieved in psychotherapy, and by some children in infancy and childhood. When a silence falls between people who feel secure with each other, we have something like it. It is the stuff out of which friendship is made, and may turn out to be the matrix of transference. If we have had no experience of this state, it is hard to imagine it—or to allow it to happen. This is called ego-relatedness, for the e-merging self is not conscious of relating to anyone, but does not feel alone either, and is in fact not unrelated (not without an attachment figure), since someone is there, though without impinging on the child’s awareness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
This is a vulnerable state for there is another person to look after you, but you do not experience this other, except through knowing that it is safe for you to forget about yourself and about any dangers which might threaten. Because of this other, however, nothing can go wrong. Being safely held makes ego-relatedness possible. Ego-relatedness makes play possible. A moment of reflection will show that a person’s capacity to be alone is very convincing evidence that that person is capable of being separate, individuated, an individual. However, it is not about whether you can be on your own, but whether you can be in other people’s company, and yet be yourself, and feel comfortable and unthreatened. The capacity to be alone is based on the experience of being “alone” in the presence of someone else. This is the experience of ego-relatedness. In this state the ego-immaturity of the infant is naturally balanced by ego-support from the mother. Without sufficient experience of ego-relatedness, the capacity to be alone cannot develop. When we examine the phrase “I am alone,” the concept “I” implies that there has already been considerable emotional development: it implies the differentiation of “I” from “other,” an internal Word and an external one. The phrase “I am” shows that the individual has not only shape but also life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
In the beginnings of “I am,” the individual is raw, undefended, vulnerable. The individual can achieve the “I am” stage only because a protective environment exists, created by the mother and other caring adults, though the baby is probably not aware of this. Next comes the phrase “I am alone,” a development from “I am” which depends on the infant’s awareness of the continued existence of a reliable mother whose reliability makes it possible for the infant to be alone and to enjoy being alone, for a limited period. Ego-relatedness as a state of mind comes, I imagine, after selfobject states of mind have started to develop: ego-relatedness seems to require a little more consciousness that there is something or someone besides yourself. The next development, in which transitional objects are created, probably cannot begin until after the state of mind in which selfobjcts predominant has declined. While the infant is still totally dependent on the (m)other, various phantasies float through its mind. In this state of mind the infant has in one sense complete control over the other, but the infant uses some of that control to give a phantasied independence to that other. They are more noticed now because we have not learnt to notice these things, all of which give the child some reassurance that its environment is a benevolent one and can provide what it needs. The child ensures that it never feels alone, powerless, or abandoned. Transitional experiences help the child develop. They allow one to experiment and come to terms, by easy stages, with some unpleasant facts when it is developmentally ready to accept them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The child knows that it is not in total control of the World but does have some control; that a relationship has two ends to it—self and other; that both ends of the relationship can be practiced in play so as to get a better grasp of their nature; and that self-assertion is not too dangerous. To begin with, a thumb or a blanket or a teddy bear was enough to satisfy the child with phantasies of comfort. One only wanted lulling. However, when the self begins to be strong enough to tolerate moments of frustration, the child may create a grown-up based on the nearest human being who will stand still for it. And then: “Oh, brave new World, that has such people in it.” Transitional processes are active and reach out to create the needed World, given half a chance. Intuition will not mislead you but your conscious mentality, which is its receiving agent, may do so. For your consciousness may partially deviate from its message, or even wholly pervert it, in giving deliverance to exaggerations or extravagances impossibilities or delusions, thus filling you with useless hopes or groundless fears. Consequently, at the very time when you suppose that you are being infallibly guided by intuition you may in fact be strongly guided by pseudo-intuition—which is something quite different. You may believe that you are honouring higher guidance when in actuality you are dishonouring it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
The situation is therefore much less simple and much more complex than most people know. To get intuitive direction when, for example, two or more conflicting courses of action confront you is not so easy as it seems and less easy still during a time of trouble. For during such a time you will naturally catch at anything already unknowingly or knowingly pre-determined by some complex to be the best way out of it. The very desire for a particular thing, event, or action may put a pseudo-intuition into your mind. If you want to be wary of this you should seek corroboration from other sources and especially from right reason. Again, the first thought which enters your consciousness after you have decided to seek such direction and have committed your affair to the deeper mind, is not necessarily an authentic intuition. Nor is the second thought such a one, nor the third, and so on. If the impression is to be rightly received, it must be patiently received, and that quite often means that you must sleep on it, and sleep on it perhaps for several days, sometimes weeks. The trustworthy intuition is really there during all this time but the obstacles to knowing it are also there in yourself. Do not, therefore, lose the inner direction through haste nor set up a stone image to be worshipped by mistake in its place. Nor is it enough to say that intuitive truths are self-evident ones. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
What appeared to be self-evident to you twenty years ago may now appear self-delusive. All humans at some time or other receive intuitive suggestions from within, whilst a few humans receive them constantly. It is not therefore that intuition is such a rare and extraordinary manifestation. What is rare and extraordinary is its pure reception, its correct comprehension. For on the one hand we receive along with an intuition the suggestions of environment, education, heredity, and self-interest no less than the distortions of desire, fear, and hope, while on the other hand we receive the doubts and questionings of reason. Even if we correct the suggestions and adjust the distortions of the first group, we remain uncertain and unclear because reason naturally wants to know why? It wants to understand why an intuitive prompting should be accepted. And by the very nature of an intuition it is often something which neither past experience nor present logic can justify. This is not only because all the facts of the case are not at our command but, because of their endless ramifications or superphysical character, cannot possibly be at our command. These are some of the difficulties which confront humans at one’s present stage of evolution and which render so many so-called intuitions unreliable or undependable even though their original birth was genuinely what it claimed to be. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
What is the remedy? Only careful, ruthless, and impartial analysis of each and every intuition, constant vigilance over and checking of the results which ensue when they are accepted, and long self-training through several years can finally bring us to the clear recognition of what is or is not authentic intuitive guidance, suggestion, or information. One would not be so bad a judge of vale as to prefer reason over intuition, whenever one had the absolute certainty that it was intuition. However, past experience has shown how difficult it is to arrive at such certitude, how deceptive are the masks which impulse, desire, rashness, and selfishness can assume. Until, therefore, one’s development has reached a point where a genuine intuition is at once recognized as such and a pseudo-intuition quickly detected for what it is, one must not abandon the use of reason but rather regard it as a most valuable ally. If inner guidance is truly intuitive or merely pseudo-intuitive, how can one tell? One of the ways is to consider whether it tends to the benefit of all concerned in a situation, the others as well as oneself. The word “benefit” here must be understood in a large way, must include the spiritual result along with the material one. If the guidance does not yield this result, it may be ego-prompted and will then hold the possibility of error. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
An intuitive feeling is one untainted by the ego’s wishes, uncoloured by its aversions. Wrong personal intention may be negated by right intuitive guidance, but it is not easy to recognize the later as such. The difference between a mere impulse and a real intuition may often be detected in two ways: first by waiting a few days, as the subconscious mind has then a chance to offer help in deciding the matter; second, by noting the kind of emotion which accompanies the message. If the emotion is of the lower kind, such as anger, indignation, greed, or lust, it is most likely an impulse. If of the higher kind, such as unselfishness or forgiveness, it is most likely an intuition. When having to make a decision by the fact that it proceeds out of deep inner calm, out of utter tranquility, one may recognize the voice the voice of wisdom, whereas impulse is frequently born in exaggerated enthusiasm or undue excitement. The possibility of pain is inherent in the very existence of a World where souls can meet. When souls become wicked they will certainly use this possibility to hurt one another; and this, perhaps, accounts for four-fifths of the suffering in humans. It is human, not God, who by human avarice or human unenlighteness produced destruction, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
However, there remains, nonetheless, much suffering which cannot be thus traced to ourselves. Even if all suffering were human-made, we should like to know the reason for the enormous permission to torture their fellows which God gives to the worst of humans. Now the proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator—to enact intellectually, volitionally, and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature. When it does so, it is good and happy. Lest we should think this a hardship, this kind of good begins on a level far above the creatures, for God Himself, as Son, from all eternity renders back to God as Father by filial obedience the being which the Father by paternal love eternally generates in the Son. This is the pattern which humans were made to imitate—which Paradisal humans did imitate—and wherever the will conferred by Creator is thus perfectly offered back in delighted and delighting obedience by the creature, there, most undoubtedly, is Heaven, and there the Holy Ghost proceeds. In the World as we now know it, the problem is how to recover this self-surrender. We are not merely imperfect creature who must be improved: we are rebels who must lay down our arms. The first answer, then, to the questions why our cure should be painful, is that to render back the will which we have so long claimed for our own, is in itself, whenever and however it is done, a grievous pain. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Even in Paradise I have supposed a minimal self-adherence to be overcome, though the overcoming, and the yielding, would there by rapturous. However, to surrender a self-will inflamed and swollen with years of usurpation is a kind of death. We all remember this self-will as it was in childhood: the bitter, prolonged rage at every thwarting, the burst of passionate tears, the morbid fear of obedience. Hence the older type of nurse or parent was right to train children to respect their elders and obey God’s rules. And now that we are grown up, we do not howl and stamp quite so much, that is partly because our elders began the process of raising us to be obedient in the nursery, and partly because the same passions now take more subtle forms and have grown clever at avoid deviant behaviour. However, the human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every human knows that something is wrong when one is being hurt. Pain is not only immediately recognizable evil, but evil impossible to ignore. We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our unenlighteness; and anyone who has watched gluttons shovelling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
However, pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscious, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf World. A bad human, happy, is a human without the least inkling that one’s actions do not “answer,” that they are not in accord with the laws of the Universe. A compelling inner conviction or intuition need not necessarily collide with cold reason. However, as an assumed intuition which may be merely a bit of wishful thinking or emotional bias, it is always needful to check or confirm or discipline it by reasoning. The two can work together, even whilst recognizing and accepting each other’s peculiar characteristics and different methods or approach. Hence all intuitively formed projects and plans should be examined under this duplex light. The contribution of fact by reason should be candidly and calmly brought up against the contribution of inward rightness made by “intuition.” If they prove unworkable or unreasonable, we must not hesitate to scrap intuitively formed plans. The promptings that come from this inner being are so faintly heard at first, however, strong on their own plane, that we tend to disregard them as trivial. This is the tragedy of humans. The voices that so often mislead one into pain-brining courses—one’s passion, one’s ego, and blind intellect—are loud and clamant. The whisper that guides one aright and to God is timid and soft. So subtle is the oncoming and so mysterious is the working of the true intuition, so open and blatant is the fantasy that is false intuition, that the first test of authenticity is indicated here. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The corrective separation of true from false intuitions, and of impersonal from personal impressions, follows a careful disciplining of the consciousness and a cautious vigilance over the feelings. One can learn with time, and from the visible results it always brings, a better estimate of the truth or falsity of these impressions and intuitions. When the results injure one, one may know that the acceptance of that which led to them was an error; a careful study of which errors will point the way to their avoidance in the future. The intuitive consciousness eludes common sense at some times but aligns with it at others. The day will come when constant effort and long practice will permit one to recognize true from pseudo-intuition with the speed and certainty with which a musically trained ear recognizes notes and times (tunes) in a played piece. When a strong intuitive feeling contradicts—much more if it nearly swallows up—a conventional sense-impression, it is wise to become alert and reconsider the report. In this case I bring before the court, may it be your side that I argue, God. Please bring me to the truth, and please show me the way to proclaim it. May it not be the side of the more skillful that prevails, but that of the more deserving justice. Great Judge, please sit in judgment on this case! The One mind is experiencing itself in us, less in the ego-shadow and fully in God, hardly aware in that shadow and self-realized in the light that casts it. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
With abounding love has Thou loved us, O Lord our God, with exceeding compassion has Thou revealed Thy mercy unto us. O our Father, our King, for the sake of our fathers who trusted in Thee and whom Thou did teach the laws of life, be also gracious unto us and please teach us. O our Father, compassionate Father, please have mercy upon us and imbue us with the will to understand, to discern, to hearken and to learn, to teach and to obey, to practice and to fulfill in love all the teachings of Thy Bible. Please deepen our insights in your Bible, and please make our hearts cleave to Thy commandments. Please grant us singleness of purpose to love and revere Thy name so that we may never suffer humiliation. Because we have faith in Thy holy, great and revered name, may we rejoice in Thy saving power. O gather us in peace from the four corners of the Earth, and please restore us triumphantly to our homeland, for Thou art the God who works salvation. Thou has chosen us from among all peoples and tongues by brining us near unto Thee in faithlessness that we might lovingly give thanks unto Thee and proclaim Thy unity. Blessed are Thou, O Lord, who in love has chosen Thy people America. Hear, O America: the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Blessed by His glorious kingdom for ever and ever. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
Sort of how tacos tonight just makes sense, getting cozy in this #Meadows Residence 1 Great Room is kind of a no-brainer. 😉🌮 The open concept floor plan means there’s plenty of room for a sectional. 😍
View elevations for this residence on our website. Link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/residence-1/
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Exaggerate Nothing for All Good Lies in Right Measure!
Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable. Even the best-intentioned people have been horrified by probabilism, but, when brought face to face with the realities of life, many of them have fund their horror evaporating or their laughter dying on their lips. The doctor too must weigh and ponder, not whether a thing is for or against the Church but whether it is for or against life and health. On paper the moral code looks clear and neat enough; but the same document written on the “living tables of the heart” is often a sorry tatter, particularly in the mouths of those who talk the loudest. We are told on every side that evil is evil and that there can be no hesitation in condemning it, but that does not prevent evil from being the most problematical thing in the individual’s life and the one which demands the deepest reflection. What above all deserves our keenest attention is the question “Exactly who is the doer?” For the answer to this question ultimately decides the value of the deed. It is true that society attaches greater importance at first to what is done, because it is immediately obvious; but in the long run the right deed in the hands of the wrong human will also have a disastrous effect. No one who is far-sighted will allow oneself to be hoodwinked by the right deed of the wrong human, any more than by the wrong deed of the right human. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Hence the psychotherapist must fix one’s eye on not what is done but on how it is done, because therein is decided the whole character of the doer. Evil needs to be pondered just as much as good, for good and evil are ultimately nothing but ideal extensions and abstractions of doing, and both belong to the chiaroscuro of life. In the last resort there is no good that cannot produce evil and no evil that cannot produce good. The encounter with the dark half of the personality, or “shadow,” comes about of its own accord in any moderately thorough treatment. This problem is as important that of sin in the Church. The open conflict is unavoidable and painful. I have often been asked, “And what do you do about it?” I do nothing; there is nothing I can do expect wait, with a certain trust in God, until, out of a conflict borne with patience and fortitude, there emerges the solution destined—although I cannot foresee it—for that particular person. Not that I am passive or inactive meanwhile: I help the patient to understand all the things that the unconscious produces during the conflict. The reader may believe me that these are no ordinary products. On the contrary, they are among the most significant things that have ever engaged my attention. Nor is the patient inactive; one must do the right thing, and do it with all one’s might, in order to prevent the pressure of evil from becoming too powerful in one. “The Lord will judge his people. It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” reports Hebrews 10.30-31. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
One needs justification by faith, for justification by fait alone has remained an empty sound for one as for so many others. “By faith we understand that the Universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what is visible,” reports Hebrews 11.3. Faith can sometimes be a substitute for a lack of experience. In these cases what is needed is real work. Christ espoused the sinner and did not condemn one. The true follower of Christ will do the same, and, since one should do unto others as one would do unto oneself, one will always take the part of the sinner who is oneself. And as little as we would accuse Christ of fraternizing with evil, so little should we reproach ourselves that to love the sinner who is oneself is to make a pact with the devil. Love makes a human better, hate makes one worse—even when that human is oneself. “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ However, I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons (and daughters) of you Father in Heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers (or sisters), what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect,” reports Matthew 5.43-48. The danger in this point f view is the same as in the imitation of Christ; but the Pharisee in us will never allow oneself to be caught talking to publicans and harlots. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
I must emphasize of course that psychology invented neither. Christianity nor the imitation of Christ. I wish everybody could be free from the burden of their sins by the Church. However, one to whom she cannot render this service must bend very low in the imitation of Christ in order to take the burden of one’s cross upon one. The ancients could get along with the Greek wisdom of the ages: Exaggerate nothing, all good lies in right measure. However, what an abyss still separates us from reason! Apar from the moral difficulty there is another danger which is not inconsiderable and may lead to complications, particularly with individuals who are pathologically inclined. This is the fact that the contents of the persona unconscious (id est, the shadow) are indistinguishably merged with the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious and drag the latter with them when the shadow is brought into consciousness. This may exert an uncanny influence on the conscious mind; for activated archetypes have a disagreeable effect even—or I should perhaps say, particularly—on the most cold-blooded rationalist. One is afraid that the lowest form of conviction, namely superstition, is, as one thinks, forcing itself on one. However, superstition in the truest sense only appears in such people if they are pathological, not if they can keep their balance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
It then takes the form of the fear of “going mad”—for everything that the modern mind cannot define it regards as insane. It must be admitted that the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious can often assume grotesque and horrible forms in dreams and fantasies, so that even the most hard-boiled rationalist is not immune from shattering nightmares and haunting fears. The psychological elucidation of these images, which cannot be passed over in silence of blindly ignored, leads logically into the depths of religious phenomenology. The history of religion in its widest sense (including therefore mythology, folklore, and primitive psychology) is a treasure-horse of archetypal forms from which the doctor can draw helpful parallels and enlightening comparisons for the purpose of calming and clarifying a consciousness that is all at sea. It is absolutely necessary to supply these fantastic images that rise up so strange and threatening before the mind’s eye with some kind of context so as to make them more intelligible. Experience has shown that the best way to do this is by means of comparative mythological material. There is a lot of connection between individual dream symbolism and medieval alchemy. That is not, as one might suppose, a prerogative of the case in questions, but a general fact which only struck me some ten years ago when first I began to come to grips with the ideas and symbolism of alchemy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
More often than not it is precisely the more intelligent and cultured patients who, finding a retuning to the Church impossible, and come up against archetypal material and thus set the doctor problems which can no longer be mastered by a narrowly personalistic psychology. Nor is a mere knowledge of the psychic structure of a neurosis by any means sufficient; for once the process has reached the sphere of the collective unconscious we are dealing with healthy material, id est, wit the universal basis of the individually varied psyche. Our understanding of these deeper layers of the psyche is helped not only by a knowledge of primitive psychology and mythology, but to an even greater extent by some familiarity with the history of our modern consciousness and the stages immediately preceding it. One the one hand it is a child of the Church; on the other, of science, in whose beginnings very much lies hid that the Church was unable to accept—that is to say, remnants of the classical spirit and the classical feeling for nature which could not be exterminated and eventually found refuge in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages. As the “spiritus metallorum” and the astrological components of destiny the old gods of the planets lasted out many a Christian century. Whereas in the Church the increasing differentiation of ritual and dogma alienated consciousness from its natural roots in the unconscious, alchemy and astrology were ceaselessly engaged in preserving the bridge to nature, id est, to the unconscious psyche, from decay. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
Astrology led the conscious mind back again and again to the knowledge of Heimarmene, that is, the dependence of character and destiny on certain moments in time; and alchemy afforded numerous “hooks” for the projection of those archetypes which could not be fitted smoothly into the Christian process. It is true that alchemy always stood on the verge of heresy and that certain decrees leave no doubt as to the Church’s attitude towards it, but on the other hand it was effectively protected by the obscurity of its symbolism, which could always be explained as harmless allegory. For many alchemists the allegorical aspect undoubtedly occupied the foreground to such an extent that they were firmly convinced that their sole concern was with chemical substances. However, there were always a few for whom laboratory work was primarily a matter of symbols and their psychic effect. As the texts shows, they were quite conscious of this, to the point of condemning the naïve goldmakers as liars, frauds, and dupes. Their own standpoint they proclaimed with propositions like “Aurum nostrum non est aurun vulgi.” Although their labours over the retort were a serious effort to elicit the secrets of chemical transformation, it was at the same time—and often in overwhelming degree—the reflection of a parallel psychic process which could be projected all the more easily into the unknown chemistry of matter since that process is an unconscious phenomenon of nature, just like the mysterious alteration of substances. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
What the symbolism of alchemy expresses is the whole problem of the evolution of personality described above, the so-called individuation process. Whereas the Church’s great buttress is the imitation of Christ, the alchemist, without wanting it, easily fell victim, in the loneliness and obscure problems of one’s work, to the promptings and unconscious assumptions of one’s own mind, since, unlike the Christians, one had no clear and unmistakable models on which to reply. The authors one studied provided one with symbols whose meaning one thought one understood in one’s own way; but in reality they touched and stimulated one’s unconscious. Ironical towards themselves, the alchemists coined the phrase “obscurum per obscurius.” However, with this method of explaining the obscure by more obscure they only sank themselves deeper in the very process from which the Church was struggling to redeem them. While the dogmas of the Church offered analogies to the alchemical process, these analogies, in strict contrast to alchemy, had become detached from the World of nature through their connection with the historical figure of the Redeemer. The alchemical four in one, the philosophical gold, the lapis angularis, the aqua divina, became, in the Church, the four-armed cross on which the Only-Begotten had sacrificed himself once in history and at the same time for all eternity. The alchemists ran counter to the Church in preferring to seek through knowledge rather than to find through faith, though as medieval people they never thought of themselves as anything but good Christians. Paracelsus is a classic example in this respect. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
However, in reality they were in much the same position as modern humans, who prefer immediate personal experience to belief in traditional ideas, or rather has it forced upon one. Dogma is not arbitrarily invented nor is it a unique miracle, although it is often described as miraculous with the obvious intent of lifting it out of its natural context. The central ideas of Christianity are rooted in Gnostic philosophy, which, in accordance with psychological laws, simply had to grow up at a time when the classical religions had become obsolete. It was founded on the perception of symbols thrown up by the unconscious individuation process which always sets in when the collective dominants of human life fall into decay. At such a time there is bound to be a considerable number of individuals who are possessed by archetypes of a numinous nature that force their way to the surface in order to form new dominants. This state of possession shows itself almost without exception in the fact that the possessed identity themselves with the archetypal contents of their unconscious, and, because they do not realize that the role which is being thrust upon them is the effect of new contents still to be understood, they exemplify these concretely in their own lives, thus becoming prophets and reformers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
In so far as the archetypal content of the Christian drama was about to give satisfying expression to the uneasy and clamorous unconscious of the many, the consensus omnium raised this drama to a universally binding truth—not of course by an act of judgment, but by the irrational fact of possession, which is far more effective. Thus Jesus became the tutelary image or amulet against the archetypal powers that threatened to possess everyone. The glad tidings announced: “It has happened, but it will not happen to you inasmuch as you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God!” Yet it could and it can and it will happen to everyone in whom the Christian dominant has decayed. For this reason there have always been people who, not satisfied with the dominants of conscious life, set forth—under cover and by devious paths, to their destruction or salvation—to seek direct experience of the eternal roots, and following the lure of the restless unconscious psyche, find themselves in the wilderness where, like Jesus, they come up against the son of darkness. Thus an old alchemist—and he a cleric!—prays: “Horridas nostrae mentis purge tenebras, accende lumen sensibus!” (Purge the horrible darkness of our mind, light a light for our senses!) The author of this sentence must have been undergoing the experience of the nigredo, the first stage of the work, which was felt as “melancholia” in alchemy and corresponds to the encounter with the shadow in psychology. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
When, therefore, modern psychotherapy once more meets with the activated archetypes of the collective unconscious, it is merely the repetition of a phenomenon that has often been observed in moments of great religious crisis, although it can also occur in individuals for whom the ruling ideas have lost their meaning. An example of this is the descensus ad inferos depicted in Prince Lestat, which, consciously or unconsciously, is an opus alchymicum. The problem of opposites called up by the shadow plays a great—indeed, the decisive—role in alchemy, since it leads in the ultimate phase of the work to the union of opposites in the archetypal form of the hierosgamos or “chymical wedding.” Here the supreme opposites, male and female (as in the Chinses yang and yin), are melted into a unity purified of all oppositions and therefore incorruptible. The prerequisite for this, of course, is that the Artifex should not identify oneself with the figures in the work but should leave them in their objective, impersonal state. So long as the alchemist was working in one’s laboratory one was in a favourable position, psychologically speaking, for one had no opportunity to identify oneself with the archetypes as they appeared, since they were all projected immediately into the chemical substances. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
The disadvantage of this situation was that the alchemist was forced to represent the incorruptible substance as a chemical product—an impossible undertaking which led to the downfall of alchemy, its place in the laboratory being taken by chemistry. However, the psychic part of the work did not disappear. It captured new interpreters, as we can see from the example of Prince Lestat, and also from the signal connection between our modern psychology of the unconscious alchemical symbolism. From our own childhood we remember that before our elders thought us capable of “understanding” anything, we already had spiritual experience as pure and as momentous as any we have undergone since, though not, of course, as rich in factual context. From Christianity itself we learn that there is a level—in the long run the only level of importance—on which the learned and the adult have no advantage at all over the simple and the child. I do not doubt that if the Paradisal man could now appear among us, we should regard him as an utter savage, a creature to be exploited or, at best, patronized. Only one or two, and those the holiest among us, would glance a second time at the naked, saggy-bearded, slow-spoken creature: but they, after a few minutes, would fall at his feet. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
We do not know how many of these creatures God made, nor how long they continued in the Paradisal state. However, sooner or later they fell. Someone or something whispered that they could become as gods—that they could cease directing their lives to their Creator and taking all their delights as uncovenanted mercies, as “accidents” (in the logical sense) which arose in the course of a life directed not to those delights but to the adoration of God. As a young man wants a regular allowance from his father which he can count on as his own, within which he makes his own plans (and rightly, for his father is after all a fellow creature), so they desired to be on their own, to take care for their own future, to plan for pleasure and for security, to have a medium from which, no doubt, they would pay some reasonable tribute to God in the way of time, attention, and love, but which, nevertheless, was theirs not His. They wanted, as we say, to “call their souls their own.” However, that means to live a life, for our souls are not, in fact, our own. They wanted some corner in the Universe of which they could say to God, “This is our business, not yours.” However, there is no such corner. They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives. We have no idea in what particular act, or series of acts, the self-contradictory, impossible wish found expression. For all I can see, it might have concerned the literal eating of a fruit, but the question is of no consequence. This act of self-will on the part of the creature, which constitutes an utter falseness to its true creaturely position, is the only sin that can be conceived as the Fall. For the difficulty about the first sin is that it must be very heinous, or its consequences would no be so terrible, and yet it must be something which a being free from the temptations of fallen humans could conceivably have committed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
The turning from God to self fulfills both conditions. It is a sin possible even to Paradisal man, because the mere existence of a self—the mere fact that we call it “me”—includes, from the first, the danger of self-idolatry. Since I am I, I must make an act of self-surrender, however small or however easy, in living to God rather than to myself. This is, if you like, the “weak spot” in the very nature of creation, the risk which God apparently thinks work taking. However, the sin was very heinous, because the self which Paradisal man had to surrender contained no natural recalcitrancy to being surrendered. His data, so to speak, were a psychophysical organism wholly subject to the will and a will wholly disposed, though not compelled, to turn to God. The self-surrender which he practiced before the Fall meant no struggle but only the delicious overcoming of an infinitesimal self-adherence which delighted to be overcome—of which we see a dim analogy in the rapturous mutual self-surrenders of lovers even now. He had, therefore, no temptation (in our sense) to choose the self—no passion or inclination obstinately inclining that way—nothing but the bare fact that the self was himself. Up to that moment the human spirit had been in full control of the human organism. When it has ceased to obey God, it doubtless expected that it would retain this control. However, its authority over the organism was a delegated authority which it lost when it ceased to be God’s delegate. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Having cut itself off, as far as it could, from the source of its being, it had cut itself off from the source of power. For when we say of created things that A rules B this must mean that God rules B through A. I doubt whether it would have been intrinsically possible for God to continue to rule the organism through the human spirit when the human spirit was in revolt against Him. At any rate He did not. He began to rule the organism in a more external way, not by the laws of spirit, but by those of nature. To disobey your proper law (id est, the law God makes for being such as you) means to find yourself obeying one of God’s lower laws: exempli gratia, if, when walking on a slippery pavement, you neglect the law of Prudence, you suddenly find yourself obeying the law of gravitation. Thus the organs, no longer governed by man’s will, fell under the control of ordinary biochemical laws and stuffed whatever the inter-workings of those laws might bring about in the way of pain, senility, and death. And desires began to come up into the mind of humans, and as one’s reason chose, but just as the biochemical and environmental facts happened to cause them. And the mind itself fell under the psychological laws of association and the like which God had made to rule the psychology of the higher anthropoids. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
And the will, caught in the tidal wave of mere nature, had no resource but to force back some of the new thoughts and desires by main strength, and these uneasy rebels became the subconscious as we now know it. The process was not, I conceive, comparable to mere deterioration as it may now occur in a human individual; it was a loss of status as a species. What man lost by the Fall was his original specific nature. “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” The total organism which had been taken up into his spiritual life was allowed to fall back int the merely natural condition from which, at one’s making, it had been raised—just as far earlier in the story of creation, God had raised vegetable life to become the vehicle of animality, and chemical process to be the vehicle of vegetation, and physical process to be the vehicle of chemical. Thus human spirit from being the master of human nature became a mere lodger in its own house, or even a prisoner; rational consciousness became what it now is—a fitful spotlight resting on a small part of the cerebral motions. However, this limitation of the spirit’s powers was a lesser evil than the corruption of the spirit itself. It has turned from God and become its own idol, so that though it could still turn back to God, it could do so only by painful effort, and its inclination was self-ward. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
Hence pride and ambition, the desire to be lovely in its own eyes and to depress and humiliate all rivals, envy, and restless search for more, and still more, security, were now the attitudes that came easiest to it. It was not only a weak king over its own nature, but a bad one: it sent down into the psychophysical organism desires far worse than the organism sent up into it. This condition was transmitted by heredity to all later generations, for it was not simply what biologists call an acquired variation; it was the emergence of a new kind of man—a new species, never made by God, had sinned itself into existence. The change which man had underdone was not parallel to the development of a new habit; it was a radical alteration of one’s constitution, a disturbance of the relation between one’s component parts, and an internal perversion of one of them. God might have arrested this process by miracle: but this—to speak in somewhat irreverent metaphor—would have been to decline the problem which God has set Himself when He created the World, the problem of expressing His goodness through the total drama of a World containing free agents, in spite of, and by means of, their rebellion against Him. If we talk too much of God planning and creating the World process for good and of that good being frustrated by the free will of the creatures, the symbol of a drama, a symphony, or a dance, is here useful to correct a certain absurdity which may arise. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
This may raise the ridiculous idea that the Fall took God by surprise and upset His plan, or else—more ridiculously still—that God planned the whole thing for conditions which, He well knew, were never going to be realized. In fact, of course, God saw the crucifixion in the act of creating the first nebula. The World is a dance in which good, descending from God, is disturbed by evil arising from the creatures, and the resulting conflict is resolved by God’s own assumptions of the suffering nature which evil produces. The doctrine of the free Fall asserts that the evil which thus makes the fuel or raw material for the second and more complex kind of good is not God’s contribution but man’s. This does not mean that if man had remained innocent God could not than have contrived an equally splendid symphonic whole—supposing that we insist on asking such questions. However, it must always be remembered that when we talk of what might have happened, of contingencies outside the whole actuality, we do not really know what we are talking about. There are no times or paces outside the existing Universe in which all this “could happen” or “could have happened.” I think the most significant way of stating the real freedom of man is to say that if there are other rational species than man, existing in some other part of the actual Universe, then it is not necessary to suppose that they also have fallen. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
Our present condition, then, is explained by the fact that we are members of a spoiled species. I do not mean that our sufferings are a punishment for being what we cannot now help being nor that we are morally responsible for the rebellion of a remote ancestor. If, none the less, I call our present condition one of original Sin, and not merely one of original misfortune, that is because our actual religious experience does not allow us to regard it in any other way. Theoretically, I suppose, we might say “Yes: we behave like vermin, but then that is because we are vermin. And that, at any rate, is not our fault.” However, the fact that we are vermin, so far from being felt as an excuse, is a greater shame and grief to us than any of the particular acts which it leads us to commit. The situation is not nearly so hard to understand as some people make it out. It arises among human beings whenever a very badly brought up boy is introduced into a decent family. They rightly remind themselves that it is “not his own fault” that he is a bully, a coward, a tale-bearer and a lair. But none the less, however it came there, his present character is detestable. They not only hate it, but ought to hate it. They cannot love him for what he is, they can only try to turn him into what he is not. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
In the meantime, though the body is most unfortunate in having been so brought up, you cannot quite call his character a “misfortune” as if he were one thing and his character another. It is he—he himself—who bullies and sneaks and like doing it. And if he begins to mend he will inevitably feel shame and guilt at what he is just beginning to cease to be. The fact that we can die “in” Adam and live “in” Christ seems to imply that humans, as they really are, differs a good deal from humans as our categories of thought and our three-dimensional imaginations represent them; that the separateness—modified only by casual relations—which we discern between individuals, is balanced, in absolute reality, by some kind of “inter-inanimation” of which we have no conception at all. It may be that the acts and sufferings of great archetypal individuals such as Adam and Christ are ours, not by legal fiction, metaphor, or causality, but in some much deeper fashion. There is no question, of course, of individuals melting down into a kind of spiritual continuum such as Pantheistic systems believe in; that is excluded by the whole of our faith. However, there may be a tension between individuality and some other principle. We believe that the Holy Spirit can be really present and operative in the human spirit, but we do not, like Pantheists, take no mean that we are “parts” or “modifications” or “appearances” of God. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
We may have to suppose, in the long run, that something of the same kind is true, in its appropriate degree, even of created spirits, that each, though distinct, is really present in all, or in some, others—just as we may have to admit “action at a distance” into our conception of matter. Everyone will have noticed how the Old Testament seems at times to ignore our conception of the individual. When God promises Jacob that “He will go down with him into Egypt and will also surely bring him up again,” this is fulfilled either by the burial of Jacob’s body in Palestine or by the exodus of Jacob’s descendants from Egypt. It is quite right to connect this notion with the social structure of early communities in which the individual is constantly overlooked in favour of the tribe or family: but we ought to express this connection by two propositions of equal importance—firstly that their social experience blinded the ancients to some truths which we perceive, and secondly that it made them sensible of some truths to which we are blind. If they had always been felt to be so artificial as we now feel them to be, legal fiction, adoption, and transference or imputation of merit and guilt, could never have played the part they did play in theology. I have thought it right to allow this one glance at what is for me an impenetrable curtain. Clearly it would be futile to attempt to solve the problem of pain by producing another problem. Humans, as a species, spoiled themselves, and good, to us in our present state, must mean primarily remedial or corrective good. What part pain actually plays in such remedy or correction must be considered. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
The Real stands alone. It is without any kind of support, and needs none. It is without any kind of dependence or dependent relationship. The emptiness of space is a symbol. The Universe spread out in that space is also a symbol. Both speak of the Real that is in them, but each in a different way. Yes, within every localized point, every timed instant, That which Is proclaims Itself as the unique Fact outside relationship and beyond change. All one needs to take one through intricate problems of metaphysics is this single masterly conception: Mind alone is. In the last summation, there is only a single infinite thing, but it expresses itself brokenly through infinitely varied forms. Philosophy defines God as pure Mind from the human standpoint and perfect Reality from the cosmic one. The time has indeed come for us to rise to meditate upon the supreme Mind. It is the source of all appearances, the explanation of all existences. It is the only reality, the only thing which is, was, and shall be unalterably the same. Mind itself is ineffable and indestructible. We never see it as it is in itself but only the things which are its passing phases. The ultimate reality is one and the same, no matter what it is called; to the Chinese mystic it is TAO, that is, the Significance; to the Christian mystic it is GOD; to the Chinese philosopher it is T’AI CHI, that is, The Great Extreme; to the Hindu philosopher it is TAT, that is Absolute existence. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
The pure Mind has its own independent, everlasting, invisible, and infinite existence, while all Worldly things and creatures are but fragmentary and fleeting expressions of IT on a lower sphere altogether. It lies deeply concealed as their innermost substance, and persists through their changes of form. Before the personal ego came into being, Being was. “Before Abraha was I am,” announced Jesus. Before thoughts, Thought! In its timelessness, Mind is the One without a Second; “it its timed manifestation it is all things.” The REAL is always where: we live in it. Mind is primary being. It is mysteriously as still as it is self-active. Absolute mind is the actuality of human life and the plentitude of universal existence. Apart from Mind they could not even come into existence, and separated from it they could not continue to exist. Their truth and being are in It. However, it would be utterly wrong to imagine the Absolute as the sum total of all finite beings and individual beings. The absolute is not the integral of all its visible aspects. It is the unlimited, the boundless void within which millions of Universes may appear and disappear ceaselessly and unendingly but yet leave It unaffected. The latter do not exhaust even one millionth of its being. The Great Mind—invisible and untouchable; the host of little minds visible and pseudoconscious; the words incessantly poured out until the Silence descends. The Great Mind again! Yet it was always there but humans looked elsewhere. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
With every thought we break the divine stillness. Yet behind all thoughts is Mind. Behind all things that give rise to thoughts is Mind. The One Infinite Life-Power is the ultimate of all things and all consciousness. There is no thing and no mind beyond it. Within and without the Universe there is only a single absolute power, a single uncreate essence, a single primary reality. The ultimate metaphysical principle of Mind behind all this ordered activity is the same as the ultimate religious principle worshipped as God. This is the mysterious element which hides as the unknown quantity—the algebraic x—of the Universe. That which is at the heart of all existence—the World’s and yours—must be real, if anything can be. The World may be an illusion, your ego a fiction, but the ultimate essence cannot be either. Reality must be here or nowhere. Mind is the essence in humans and the power in the Universe. It is always there, the only reality in a mind-made World. It is in here, and out there, the fundament upon which all Universes are structured, the substance of which they are composed, yet it is nowhere to be seen microscopically or measures geometrically. When all else is extinct it remains, indestructible and unique. There is a principle of life which is conscious in its own unique way, which is the essential being of all entities and the essential reality behind all substances. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
The Infinite Being is there and will be there whether Universes exist or not. The essence of all these finite forms is an infinite one. No one can see the Real yet everyone may see the things which come from it. Although it is itself untouchable, whatever we touch enshrines its presence. There is but One God, One Life, One infinite Power, one all-knowing Mind. Each human individualizes it but does not multiply it. One brings it to a point, God, but does not alter its unity or change its character. Lord of travelers, please unite this land. We share one road, with many branches: guide us along it to find each other’s homes. And when we find them, please clear our sight so that we might see that we all live in the same neighbourhood, that none of us lives apart. 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 creatin, as it is said in the Psalm: “Gibe 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 25 of 25
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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
The Winchester Estate
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The Last Infirmity of Noble Mind–To Scorn Delights and Live Labourious Day!
We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists in the loved one, perfection. A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime. The types of skills which an anxious child develops are characteristic of one’s situation. Children with a sense of security and competence, and an interest in the World of challenging unyielding things, are likely to look for new things and enjoy the challenge. Children with a more insecurely-based self will feel more dependent on others, unsure whether they will be given good things and unsure whether they are allowed to get good things for themselves; they will therefore have less practice in developing the skills which lead to control over the environment in any direct way. The skills they develop are more likely to be in the area of getting others to comfort or approve or achieve for them. They may be a good deal more perceptive than their mores secure friends, their sensitivity to others developing from the time when voice and body-language might yield clues on what others were good for and how they could be got to be kind, pleased, not offended. Other people’s expectations can become of overriding importance, overlaying or contradicting the original sense of self, the one connected to the very roots of one’s being, the homunculi and the very earliest memory-traced. This kind of development, a compensatory structure, is called the False Self. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
In fact, all of us have a collection of overlapping selves or roles, some of us more so, some of us less. Some of these selves are falser than others: more strongly linked with being acceptable, less strongly linked with our deeper feelings. One of my friends has “George,” a robot bit of her very nice personality, whom she switches on at formal do’s and occasions when genuineness and spontaneity are very much not called for! It makes it pleasant for the rest of her to have her around, false self or not. In any case, the False Self is not a structure that should be unthinkingly denigrated. All of us need protective defences and devices against hurt. Some developments of the self are primarily defensive, deriving from the need to carry on when life no longer feels like a continuous stream of satisfying (or at least manageable) experiences. In the analysis of a False Personality the fact must be recognized that the analyst can only talk to the False Self of the patient about the patient’s True Self. It is as if a nurse brings a child, and at first the analyst discusses the child’s problem, and the child is not directly contacted. Analysis does not start until the nurse has left the child with the analyst, and the child has become able to remain with the analyst and has started to play. Normal healthy development starts with a strong biologically determined attachment to a mother figure, while exploration of the environment comes naturally at a later stage, exactly because the growing young individual feels secure and safe, not terrified, starving or desperate. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Lack of secure attachment forces the immature organism into action, but the action is accompanied by terror and stereotyping. Real understanding is lack when the infant has had no opportunity for a leisurely and secure playful exploratory phase, during which it has a chance to familiarize itself gradually with the fascinating World of other people and things. Mental representations of the self-in-the-World will have had to form prematurely for the sake of avoiding distress; because of this, a lot of enriching connections which might otherwise have been linked to these representations, will be missing. If the baby has been too worried to linger and enjoy, the adult will think, “Never mind the sunset, let’s go home before something goes wrong.” We ding either that individuals live creatively and feel that life is worth living, or else that they cannot live creatively and are doubtful about the value of living. This variable in human beings is directly related to the quality and quantity of environmental provision at the beginning of each baby’s living experience. Some unfortunate people have almost no complex ego-functioning, they just react. As soon as a need appears or an alarm is signalled, the instant any meaning or pattern begins to emerge, they respond with scarcely a moment of reflection. Premature development of the ego-functions means doing too much, being too little. Premature ego-development is experiences as a continual pressure to respond and react, a sense of straining. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
In many ways similar to ecstatic destructiveness is the chronic dedication of a person’s whole life to hate and destructiveness. Not a momentary state as in ecstasies, it has nevertheless the function of taking hold of the whole person, of unifying one in the worship of one goal: to destroy. This state is a permanent idolatry of the god of destruction; one’s devotee has, as it were, given over one’s life to him. Some people have a special pleasures in destruction, thus they can feel in the midst of the daily pain an absorbing pleasure in seeing how the baggage of ideas and values has diminished, how the arsenal of idealisms has been ground piece by piece until nothing remains but a bundle of flesh with raw nerves; nerves that like taut strings renders each tune vibrantly and doubly so in the thin air of isolation. These people want power. They want an aim that fills their day, they want life with all the sweetness of this World, they want t know that the sacrifices are worth while. People who find pleasure in destructiveness do not fight so that the nation is happy, they fight to force it into its line of fate. Their intense masochism by which they make themselves a willing subject of a higher power is fueled by a unifying force of hate and the wish for destruction that they worship something they are willing to give their lives for. These types of individuals do not want to forget the pain they suffered for they believe forgetting will damn them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
By visualizing hurt and pain from the past every day and every hour, it creates a potent hate destructive people thrive on. They do not want to forget any humiliation, and slighting, any arrogant gesture, they want to think of every meanness done to them, every word that caused them pain and was meant to cause pain. They want to remember every face and every experience and every enemy. They want to load their whole life with the whole disgusting dirt, with this a piled-up mass of disgusting memories. They do not want to forget; but the little good that happened to them, that they want to forget. They hate not only their enemies, but they hate life itself. This is very clear from their disposition and how they feel about others, the environment, and animals. These types of individuals feel utterly unrelated and unresponsive to anybody or anything alive. One condition of their worship of hate is because their whole World had been broken down, morally and socially. Their thirst for revenge, the meaninglessness of their present existence, their social uprootedness, goes far to explain their worship of hate. What triggers the effect of their destructive behaviour? A person may first react with defensive aggression against a threat; by this behaviour one has shed some of the conventional inhibitions to aggressive behaviour. This makes it easier for others kinds of aggressiveness, such as destruction and cruelty, to be unleashed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Once this aggressive destruction is unleashed, it may lead to a kind of chain reaction in which destructiveness becomes so intense that when a critical mass is reached, the result is a state of ecstasis in a person, and particularly in a group. There is so much more to psychology than most people realize. And while it is important to be kind and show respect to others, there are just some people we should stay away from. People also have to realize that they cannot fix others and it is not always a great idea to reach out to others it pain, they may be baiting you into a situation that allow them to attach their pain and darkness to you and they may never want to let go. Therefore, follow the usual rules. Do not talk to strangers, and if someone makes you uncomfortable, stay away from them. We are creating and using up ideas and images at a faster and faster pace. Knowledge, like people, places, things, and organizational forms, is becoming disposable. If our inner images of reality appear to be turning over more and more rapidly, one reason may well be an increase in the rate at which image-laden messages are being hurled at our senses. Little effort has been made to investigate this scientifically, but there is evidence that we are increasing the exposure of the individual to image-bearing stimuli. The external environment showers stimuli upon us. Signals originating outside ourselves—sound waves, light, et cetera—strike our sensory organs. Once perceived, these signals are converted, through a still mysterious process, into symbols of reality, into images. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
The waves of coded information turn into violent breakers and come at a faster and faster clip, pounding at us, seeking entry, as it were, to our nervous system. Many schools of thought encourage us to shift the responsibility for our behaviour from our own shoulders to some inherent necessity in the nature of human life, and thus, indirectly, to the Creator. Popular forms of this view are the evolutionary doctrine that what we call badness is an unavoidable legacy from our animal ancestors, or the idealistic doctrine that it is merely a result of our being finite. Now Christianity, if I have understood the Pauline epistles, does admit that perfect obedience to the moral law, which we find written in our hearts and perceive to be necessary even on the biological level, is not in fact possible to humans. This would raise a real difficulty about our responsibility if perfect obedience had any practical relation at all to the lives of most of us. Some degree of obedience which you and I have failed to attain in the last twenty-four hours is certainly possible. The ultimate problem must not be used as one more means of evasion. Most of us are less urgently concerned with the Pauline question than with William Law’s simple statement: “If you will here stop and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
If our depravity were total, we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us so much goodness in human nature. Nor is there a universal gloom. The emotion of shame has been valued not as an emotion but because of the insight to which it leads. I think that insight should be permanent in each human’s mind: but whether the painful emotions that attend it should be encouraged, is a technical problem of spiritual direction on which I have little cause to speak. My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying he apostolic injunction to “rejoice” as much as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue: it is the high minded unbeliever, desperately trying in the teeth of repeated disillusions to retain one’s faith in human nature, who is really sad. I have been aiming at an intellectual, not an emotional, effect: I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a human is, the more fully one is aware of that fact. Perhaps you have imagined that his humility in the saints is a pious illusion at which God smile. That is a most dangerous error. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
It is theoretically dangerous, because it makes you identify a virtue (id est, a perfection) with an illusion (id est, an imperfection), which must be nonsense. It is practically dangerous because in encourages a human to mistake one’s first insights into one’s own corruption for the first beginnings of a halo round one’s own silly head. No, depend upon it; when the saints say that they—even they—are vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy. The principle of perfection is a fascinating concept. There are two variants: in the first it is the sole principle of a teleological theory directing society to arrange institutions and to define the duties and obligations of individuals so as to maximize the achievement of human excellence in art, science, and culture. The principle obviously is more demanding the high the relevant ideal is pitched. Humankind must continually strive to produce great individuals. We give values to our lives by working for the good of highest specimens. For the questions is this: how can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? Only by your living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens. The second variant is a more moderate doctrine in which perfection is accepted as but one standard among several in n intuitionist theory. The principle is to be balanced against others by intuition. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
The extent to which such a view is perfectionist depends, then, upon the weight given to the claims of excellence and culture. If for example it is maintained that in themselves the achievements of the Greeks in philosophy, science, and art justified the ancient practice of slavery (assuming that this practice was necessary for these achievement), surely the conception is highly perfectionist. Th requirements of perfection override the strong claims of liberty. On the other hand, one may use the criterion simply to limit the redistribution of wealth and income under a constitutional regime. In this case it serves as a counterpoise to egalitarian ideas. Thus it may be said that distribution should indeed be more equal if this is essential for meeting the basic needs of those less favoured and only diminishes the enjoyments and pleasures of those better off. However, the greater happiness of the less fortunate does not in general justify curtailing the expenditures required to preserve cultural values. These forms of life have greater intrinsic worth than the lesser pleasures, however widely the latter are enjoyed. Under normal conditions a certain minimum of social resources must be kept aside to advance the ends of perfection. The only exception is when these claims clash with the demands of the basic needs. Thus given improving circumstances, the principle of perfection acquires an increasing weight relative to a greater satisfaction of desire. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
No doubt many have accepted perfectionism in this intuitionist form. It allows for a range of interpretations and seems to express a far more reasonable view than the strict perfectionist theory. Persons in the original position are asked to consider which principles one would select for the basic structure of society, but one must select as if one had no knowledge ahead of time what position one would end up having in that society. This choice is made from behind a “veil of ignorance,” which prevents one from knowing the individual’s ethnicity, social status, gender, and crucially, the individual’s idea of how to lead a god life. Ideally, this would force participants to select principles impartially and rationally. Individuals in the original position take no interest in one another’s interests, they know that they have (or may have) certain moral and religious interests and other cultural ends which they cannot put in jeopardy. Moreover, they are assumed to be committed to different conceptions of the good and they think that they are entitled to press their claims on one another to further their separate aims. The parties do not share a conception of the good by reference to which the fruition of their powers or even the satisfaction of their desires can be evaluated. They do not have an agreed criterion of perfection that can be used as a principle for choosing between institutions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
If it did not lead to a loss of freedom altogether to advance many of one’s spiritual ends, to acknowledge any such standard would be, in effect, to accept a principle that might lead to a lesser religious or other liberty. If the standard of excellence is reasonably clear, the parties have no way of knowing that their claims may not fall before the higher social goal of maximizing perfect. Thus is seems that the only understanding that the persons in the original position can reach is that everyone should have the greatest equal liberty consistent with a similar liberty for others. They cannot risk their freedom by authorizing a standard of value to define what is to be maximized by teleological principle of justice. Very often it is beyond question that the work of one person is superior to that of another. Indeed, the freedom and well-being of individuals, when measured by the excellence of their activities and works, is vastly different in value. This is true not only of actual performance but of potential performance as well. Comparison of intrinsic value can obviously be made; and although the standard of perfection is not a principle of justice, judgments of value have an important place in human affairs. They are not necessarily so vague that they must fail as a workable basis for assigning rights. The argument is rather that in view of their disparate aims the parties have no reason to adopt the principle of perfection given the conditions of the original position. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
In order to arrive at the ethic of perfectionism, we should have to attribute to the parties a prior acceptance of some natural duty, say the duty to develop human persons of a certain style and aesthetic grace, and to advance the pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of the arts. However, this assumption would drastically alter the interpretation of the original position. While justice as fairness allows that in a well-ordered society the values of excellence are recognized, the human perfections are to be pursed within the limits of the principle of free associations. Persons join together to further their cultural and artistic interests in the same way that they form religious communities. They do not use coercive apparatus of the state to win for themselves a greater liberty or larger distributive shares on the grounds that their activities are of more intrinsic value. Perfectionism is denied as a political principle. Thus the social resources necessary to support associations dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences and culture generally are to be won as a fair return for services rendered, or from such voluntary contributions as citizens wish to make, all within a regime regulated by the two principle of justice. On the contract doctrines, then, equal liberty of citizens does not presuppose that the ends of different persons have the same intrinsic value, nor that their freedom and well-being is of the same worth. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
It is postulated though that the parties are moral persons, rational individuals with a coherent system of ends and a capacity for a sense of justice. Since they have the requisite defining properties, it would be superfluous to add that the parties are equally moral persons. We can say if we wish that humans have equal dignity, meaning by this simply that they all satisfy the conditions of moral personality expressed by the interpretation of the initial contractual situation. And being alike in this respect, they are to be treated as the principles of justice require. Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all; social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: they are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society. However, none of this implies that their activities and accomplishments are of equal excellence. To think this is to conflate the notion of moral personality with the various perfections that fall under the concept of value. Persons’ being of equal value is not necessary for equal liberty. Their being of equal value is not sufficient either. Sometimes it is said that equality of basic rights follows from the equal capacity of individuals for the higher forms of life; but it is not clear why this should be so. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Intrinsic worth is a notion falling under the concept of value, and whether equal liberty or some other principle is appropriate depends upon the conception of right. Now the criterion of perfection insists that rights in basic structure be assigned so as to maximize the total of intrinsic value. Presumably the configuration of rights and opportunities enjoyed by individuals affects the degree to which they bring to fruition their latest powers and excellences. However, it does not follow that an equal distribution of basic freedom is the best solution. The situation resembles that of classical utilitarianism: we require postulates parallel to the standard assumptions. Thus even if the latent abilities of individuals were similar, unless the assignment of right is governed by a principle of diminishing marginal value (estimated in this case by the criteria for excellence), equal rights would not be insured. Indeed, unless there are bountiful resources, the sum of value might be best increased by very unequal rights and opportunities favouring a few. Doing this is not unjust n the perfectionist view provided that it is necessary to produce a greater sum of human excellence. Now a principle of diminishing marginal value is certainly questionable, although perhaps not so much as that of equal value. There is little reason to suppose that, in general, rights and resources allocated to encourage and to cultivate highly talented persons contribute less and less to the total beyond some point in the relevant range. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
To the contrary, this contribution may grow (or stay consistent) indefinitely. The principle of perfection provides, then, an insecure foundation for the equal liberty and it would presumably depart widely from the difference principle. The assumptions required for equality seem extremely implausible. To find a firm basis for equal liberty, it seems that we must reject the traditional teleological principles, both perfectionism and utilitarian. Justice as fairness requires us to show that modes of conduct interfere with the basic liberties of others or else violate some obligation or natural duty before they can be restricted. For it is when arguments to this conclusion fail that individuals are tempted to appeal to perfectionist criteria in an ad hoc manner. When it is said, for example, that certain kinds of relations involving pleasures of the flesh are degrading and shameful, and should be prohibited on this basis, if only for the sake of the individuals in question irrespective of their wishes, it is often because a reasonable case cannot be made in terms of the principle of justice. Instead we fall back on notions of excellence. However, in these matters we are likely to be influenced by subtle aesthetic preferences and personal feelings of propriety; and individual, class, and group differences are often sharp and irreconcilable. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Since these uncertainties plague perfectionist criteria and jeopardize individual liberty, it seems best to rely entirely on the principles of justice which have a more definite structure. Thus even in its intuitionistic form, perfectionism would be rejected as not defining a feasible basis of social justice. Eventually of course we would have to check whether the consequences of doing without a standard of perfection are acceptable, since offhand it may seem as if justice as fairness does not allow enough scope for ideal-regarding considerations. Yet, public funds for the arts and sciences may be provided through the exchange branch. In this instance there are no restrictions on the reasons, citizens may have for imposing upon themselves the requisite taxes. They may assess the merits of these public goods on perfectionist principles, since the coercive machinery of government is used in this case only to overcome the problems of isolation and assurance, and no one is taxed without one’s consent. The criterion of excellence does not sere here as a political principle; and so, if it wishes, a well-ordered society can devote a sizable fraction of its resources to expenditures of this kind. However, while the claims of culture can be met in this way, the principles of justice do not permit subsidizing universities and institutes, or opera and the theater, on the grounds that these institutions are intrinsically valuable, and that those who engage in them are to be supported even at some significant expense to others who do not receive compensating benefits. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Taxation for these purposes can be justified only as promoting directly or indirectly the social conditions that secure the equal liberties and as advancing in the appropriate way the long-term interests of the least advantaged. This seems to authorize those subsidies the justice of which is least in dispute, and so in these cases anyway there is no evident need for a principle of perfection. The contract doctrine may serve well enough as an alternative moral conception. When we check its consequences for institutions, it appears to match our common sense convictions more accurate than its traditional rivals, and to extrapolate to preciously unsettled cases in a reasonable way. Outreach is one essential task of Christ’s people, and among them there will always be those especially gifted for evangelism. However, the most successful work of outreach would be the work of inreach that that turns people, wherever they are, into lights in the darkened World. A simple goal for the leaders of a particular group would be to bring all those in attendance to understand clearly what it means to be a disciple of Jesus and to be solidly committed to discipleship in their whole life. That is, when asked who they are, they first words out of their mouth would be, “I am an apprentice of Jesus Christ.” This goal would have to be approached very gently and lovingly and patiently with existing groups, where the people involved have not understood this to be part of their membership commitment. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
We are not talking about purifying the church, by getting all the “tares” or (Matthew 13). Even tares, real or apparent, are to be loved and served—and called to apprenticeship to Jesus. “Purifying” the church, on the other hand, has always been part of the illusion of being perfectly “right.” Instead of pursing that illusion, we are trying to clarify the local congregation itself in the light of Christ’s call to it. We are trying to make clear what it is that even a false professor must profess in order to participate fully in the congregation. They would, namely have to profess to be disciples or apprentices of Jesus. However, the Lord is the only purifier of groups, and one has one’s own schedule for it. Our task is to be fruitful wheat and to cultivate others to be so. Who we are in our inmost depths is the most basic issue. God’s first concern is not what the church does, it is what the church is. Being must always precede doing, for what we do will be according to what we are. To understand the moral character of God’s people is a primary essential in understanding the nature of the church. As Christians we are to be a moral example to the World, reflecting the character of Jesus Christ. In our present context, to be sure, serious work will have to be done, and there is a strong likelihood of failure. The genuine intuition gets mixed up with guesses and speculations about the matter, with reasonings and ruminations about it. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
One’s intuition is unavoidably condition by one’s own personality, inevitably shaped as it is because one is the kind of human one is. It is not only one’s wishes and hopes which interfere with correct receptivity to intuition but also one’s fears and suspicions. One’s normal everyday mind is slow to heed the Higher Power of God and confused in interpretation of the prompting received. One whose mind is too sharply critical to be sensitive to finer mental radiations may fail to recognize the inner happening. This may be because one oneself is not sufficiently in tune with the high frequency represented by God, or it may be because one is too impatient and wants something which in one’s case can only be had with sufficient time. When intuition points to something unwelcome to the ego, the intellect looks for and usually finds an excuse to reject it. A human who really and sincerely wants to find the Truth should be on the lookout for hints, clues, and signs which would be useful to one’s Quest, for they constitute the response from God to one’s aspiration. God can furnish one with the Truth and puts these signals in one’s way. Manifestation implies the necessity of manifesting. However, it might be objected that any sort of necessity existing in the divine equally implies its insufficiency. The answer is that the number One may become aware of itself as being one only be becoming aware of the presence of Two—itself and another. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
However, the figure Nought is under no compulsion. Here we have a mathematical hint towards understanding the riddle of manifestation. Mind as Void is the supreme inconceivable unmanifesting ultimate whereas the World-Mind is forever throwing forth the Universe-series as a second, an “other” wherein it becomes self-aware. God-active, the Unseen Power, is (for us humans) the World-Mind. God-in-repose is Mind. The creative power or energy which comes from World-Mind is not the ultimate essence-consciousness which is God. It is needful to point out the difference between the divine essence and the divine energies. The latter may be several and varied, but the former is always single. It is the difference between Mind as it is in itself, and Mind as it expresses through the cosmos. It would, however, be a mistake to consider the World-Mind as one entity and Mind as another separate from it. It would be truer to consider World-Mind as the active function of Mind. Mind cannot be separated from its powers. The two are one. In its quiescent state it is simply Mind. In its active state it is World-Mind. Mind is in it inmost transcendent nature is the inscrutable mystery of Mysteries but when expressing itself in act and immanent in the Universe, it is the World Mind. We may find in the attributes of the manifested God—that is, the World-Mind—the only indications of the quality, existence, and character of the unmanifest Godhead that it is possible for human to comprehend all. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
All this is a mystery which is perhaps forever will remain an incomprehensible paradox. Mind is active and mind is quiescence are not two separate beings, but two aspects of one and the same being as they appear to human inquiry. Mind active expressed itself in the heart of humans as one’s higher self and in the Universe as the World-Mind. The World-Mind is a radiation of the forever incomprehensible Mind. It is the essence of all things and all beings, from the smallest to the largest. Mind id the Real; matter is the appearance it takes on. The Universe comes by degrees out of the ultimate Being, beyond which nothing is or could possibly be. It is Mind, measureless, with a Power equally measureless. World-Mind is this power in operation, creating, maintaining, and in the end destroying what it has brought forth. If it be true that absolute divine Mind knows nothing of the Universe, nothing of mortal humans, then it is also true that the World-Mind, which is its other aspect, does know them. May God of my people hear my prayers; as we go to the polls to choose our leaders, may it be with wisdom. Lord, please bless my country. Please guide its governors, show them the path to take, make their actions conform to the way of nature. Please knit together the many peoples into one tribe; unite us, make us a family, as indeed we are under your loving gaze. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
God’s chief hosts are holy beings that exalt the Almighty and continually declare God’s glory and holiness. Be Thou praised, O Lord our God, for the excellence of Thy handiwork and for the luminaries which Thou hast made and which render Thee glory. The Heavens are envisioned as the scene of a symphony of worship and song in which all the celestial beings, obedient servants of the divine will, join in a harmonious melody of praise to the Creator. Be Thou blessed, O our Rock, our King and Redeemer; praised by Thy name forever, Creator of ministering beings who stand in the heights of the Universe and with awe proclaim in unison the words of the living God and everlasting King. All of them act with harmonious accord, with purity of purpose and with united strength to perform reverently the will of their Creator. They all break forth into song of pure and holy praise, while they bless, glorify, and proclaim the sovereignty of the name of God, the great, mighty, awe-inspiring King; holy is He. They all pledge before one another to accept willingly the rule of the Kingdom of God. Each grants leave to the other to join in hallowing their Creator. In tranquil spirit with pure speech and sacred melody, they all exclaim in unison and reverently declare: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole Earth is full of His glory. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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The Quality of Mercy is Not Strained, it Drops as the Gentle Rain from Heaven!
I only wish that I could take the entire United States of America into the locker room at half time. I would simply say that we must look not at the points we have lost but at the point we can gain. Currently, it is easier for those with the stronger social positions to advance their interests unjustly without being shown to be clearly out of bounds. Of course all this is obvious, and it has always been recognized that ethical principles are vague. Nevertheless they are not all equally imprecise, and the two principles of justice have an advantage in the greater clarity of their demands in what needs to be done to satisfy them. Each person has an equal right to the most extensive liberties compatible with similar liberties for all. Also, social and economic inequalities should be arranged so that they are both to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged persons, and attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of equality of opportunity. Much new knowledge is admittedly remote from the immediate interests of the ordinary person in the street. One is not intrigued or impressed by the fact that a noble gas like xenon can form compounds—something that until recently most chemists swore was impossible. While even this knowledge may have an impact on one when it is embodies in new technology, until then, one can afford to ignore it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Individuals do not enjoy the experience of risk, the actual process of gambling, the resulting measure is nevertheless influenced by attitudes toward uncertainty as defined by the overall probability distribution. However, a good bit of new knowledge, on the other hand, is directly related to one’s immediate concerns, one’s job, one’s politics, one’s family life, even one’s behaviour involving pleasures of the flesh. Interpersonal comparisons depend upon value judgments. While it is obvious that the acceptance of the principle of utility is a matter for moral theory, it is less evident that the very procedures for measuring well-being raise similar problems. A poignant example is the dilemma that parents find themselves in today as a consequence of successive radical changes in the image of the child in society and in our theories of childrearing. At the turn of last century in the United States of America, for example, the dominant theory reflected the prevailing scientific belief in the primacy of heredity in determining behaviour. Mothers who had never heard of Dr. Darwin or Dr. Spencer raised their babies in ways consistent with the World views of these thinkers. Vulgarized and simplified, passed from person to person, these World views were reflected in the conviction of millions of ordinary people that “bad children are a result of bad stock,” that “crime is hereditary,” et cetera. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
In the early decades of the twentieth century, these attitudes fell back before the advance of environmentalism. The belief that environment shapes personality, and that the early years are the most important, created a new image of the child. The work of Dr. Watson and Dr. Pavlov began to creep into the public ken. Mothers reflected the new behavourism, refusing to feed infants on demand, refusing to pick them up when they cried, weaning them early to avoid a prolonged dependency. A study by Martha Wolfenstein has compared the advice offered parents in seven successive editions of Infant Care, a handbook issues by the United States Children’s Bureau between 1914 and 1951. She found distinct shifts in the preferred methods for dealing with weaning, thumb-sucking, masturbation, bowel and bladder training. It is clear from this study that by the late thirties still another image of the child had gained ascendancy. Freudian concepts swept in like a wave and revolutionized childrearing practices. Suddenly, mothers began to hear about “the rights of infants” and the need for “oral gratification.” Permissiveness became the order of the day. Parenthetically, at the same time that Freudian images of the child were altering the behaviour of parents in Dayton, Dubuque and Dallas, the images of the psychoanalyst changed, too. Psychoanalysts became culture heroes. Movies, television scripts, novels and magazine stories represented them as wise and sympathetic souls, wonder-worker capable of remaking damaged personalities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
From the appearance of the movies Spellbound in 1945, through the late fifties, the analyst was painted in largely positive terms by the mass media. By the mid-sixties, however, one had already turned into a comical creature. Peter Sellers in What’s New Pussycat? played a psychoanalyst much crazier than most of his patients, and “psychanalyst jokes” began to circulate not merely among New York and California sophisticates, but through the population at large, helped along by the same mass media that created the myth of the analyst in the first place. I guess that is why the news is labeled “fake news,” they often contradict themselves for ratings and revenue, swaying viewers in the more popular direction, instead of figuring out what is true and just. This sharp reversal in the public image of the psychoanalyst (the public image being no more than the weighted aggregate of private images in the society) reflected changes in research as well. For evidence was piling up that psychoanalytic therapy did not live up to the claims made for it, and new knowledge in the behavioural sciences, and particularly in psychopharmacology, made many Freudian therapeutic measures seem quaintly archaic. At the same time, there was a great burst of research in the field of learning theory, and a new swing in childrearing, this time toward a kind of neo-behaviourism, got under way. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
At each stage of this development a widely held set of images was attacked by a set of counter-images. Individuals holding one set were assailed by reports, articles, documentaries, and advice from authorities, friends, relatives, and even casual acquaintances who accepted conflicting views. The same mother, turning to the same authorities at two different ties in the course of raising her child, would receive, in effect, somewhat different advice based on different inferences about reality. While for the people of the past, childrearing patterns remained stable for centuries at a time, for the people of the present and the future, it has, like so many other fields, become an arena in which successive waves of images, many of them generated by scientific research, do battle. In this way, new knowledge alters old. The mass media instantly and persuasively disseminate new images, and ordinary individuals, seeking help in coping with an ever more complex social environment, attempt to keep up. At the same time, events—as distinct from research as such—also batter our old image structures. Racing swiftly past our attention screen, they wash out old images and generate new ones. After the freedom rides and the riots in America only the pathological could hang on to the long-cherished notion that underrepresented people are “happy children” content with their poverty. And after the conflicts in the Middle East and America, how many still cling to the image of people as cheek-turning pacifists or a battlefield coward? #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
In education, in politics, in economic theory, in medicine, in international affairs, wave after wave of new images penetrate our defenses, shake up our mental models of reality. The result of this image bombardment is the accelerated decay of old images, a faster intellectual through-out, and a new, profound sense of the impermanence of knowledge, itself. However, with an insufficiently facilitating environment there may be fatal breaks in the sequence of connecting processes which link the infant’s earliest and most physical experiences of needs and their satisfactions—at the very core of the self—to its later experiences of the World of other people and things. Where, for whatever reasons, the environment is less facilitating, there is not s smooth a sequence of connections and so these integrating links are less strong, or absent. The infant may even come to associate its needs with distress and inadequacy, and not with satisfaction and well-being. In such circumstances—the infant may feel compelled to shift away from an interest in one’s own needs to an interest in the (m)other, before it is developmentally ready to do so. The child then mises out on the idea what when it experiences a need, then is the time to satisfy it. The link is missing. The infant has gratifications but does not connect them with the needs it has experienced. Similarly, the infant at times has deprivations, and these are not connected with their source either. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
When the link is missing, even if there are no other ill effect, there is no cathexis to the arousal of needs: a person will not experience the arousal of a need as a pleasurable or desirable experience, since satisfaction has never become directly associated with excitement or arousal. At worst, the deprivation maybe so intense that the whole biologically-based personality is dissociated, the whole conscious personality may break away from the experience of arousal and interest. This kind of breakaway split is called a Basic Fault (or, at least, one kind of Basic Fault). The infant’s needs, biologically associated with the earliest mapping and the original homunculus, become a matter of emotional indifference or even, in severe cases, the cause of panic fear because they are experienced as dangerous intrusions. Meanwhile, emotional attachments do develop. Through these, arousals and interest come to be connected, not with the needs the infant experiences, but with the perceived or imagined needs of those who bring the infant its gratifications—at times which are connected not to the infant’s biological clock but to the (m)other’s ideas. The (m)other must therefore be watched and taken notice of. Attachments made on this basis will be strong but anxious: insecurity is built in. An anxious infant has to stop “being,” in order to deal with distress and in order to deal with the needs of the (m)other from whom help is needed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Unlike the more relaxed infant, who will eventually start an interest in the (m)others because it begins to explore the interesting environment at the biologically appropriate developmental stage, the more needy and distressed infant will begin to be interested in the environment for what it can get out of it. This infant needs to start doing things. The premature shift from being to doing may mark another point of development which would locate a Basic Fault. For the infant is at the developmental stage at which it needs to feel in tune with the World. It needs to feel confirmed as a secure, interesting, and interested self, in a secure relationship with the interested and interesting World of others. However, the need to survive may make it fearful about the World, and interested mainly in seeing where distress and the alleviation of distress may come from. The question ceases to be “Who am I?” “Who are we?” “Who are you?”, and becomes “What are you good for?”, “How do I have to behave to get what I need from you?” The environment become something to be exploited. So children learn how to hustle, scheme and manipulate as infants and it becomes part of their character. The environment becomes something to be exploited. The self and the other stand over against each other, and the primary relationship is not unified but exploitative. What does such a child see when one looks into the face of the mother? Of course nothing can be said about the single occasions on which the mother could not respond. Many babies, however, have to have a long experience of not getting back what they are giving. They look and they do not see themselves. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
When mirroring is disabled, of course there are consequences. First, the baby’s own creative capacity beings to atrophy, and in some way or other they look around for other ways of getting something of themselves back from the environment. Second, the baby gets settled in to the idea that when one looks, what is seen is the mother’s face. The mother’s face is not then a mirror. So perception takes the place of what might have been the beginning of a significant exchange, a two-way process in which self-enrichment alternates with the discovery of meaning in the World of seen things. Naturally, there are half-way stages in this scheme of things. Some babies do not quite give up hope and they study the object and do all that is possible to see in the object some meaning that ought to be there if only it could be felt. Some babies, tantalized by this type of relative maternal failure, study the variable maternal visage in an attempt to predict mother’s mood, just exactly as we all study the weather. The suppositions and anticipations, the attractions and repulsions of the ego enter into one’s intuitive experiences and impede or change them. Most inner guidance is rarely purely intuitive but more often a mixture of genuine intuition with wishful thinking. Hence it is right in parts and wrong in others. The original intuition itself may be a correct one but its reception is so inexpert and so biased that the version accepted in consciousness has deformed and somewhat falsified it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The intuitive is so fine and sensitive a faculty that the emanations of another mind may well disturb its activity or distort its truth. The intuitive approach is the most effective of all, provided it is not clouded by suggestion from outside sources or blurred by bias from inside ones. Suffering from the awareness of one’s powerlessness and separateness, humans can try to overcome one’s existential burden by achieving trancelike state of ecstasy (“to be beside oneself”) and thus to regain unity within oneself and with nature. There are many ways to accomplish this. A very transitory one is provided by nature in the act of pleasures of the flesh. This experience may be said to be the natural prototype of complete concentration and momentary ecstasies; it may include the intimate partner but too often remains a narcissistic experience for each of the two, who perhaps share mutual gratitude for pleasure they have given each other (conventionally felt as love). We Other symbiotic, more lasting and intense ways to arrive at ecstasy are found in religious cults, such as ecstatic dances, the use of mind-altering substances, hortatory practices, or self-induced states of trance. The expression of hate, destructiveness, and aggression is actually rooted in some modern cultures are a rite of passage. Therefore, we must guard against the feeling that there is “safety in numbers.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
It is natural to feel that if all humans are bas bad as the Christians say, then badness must be very excusable. If all the boys plough in the examination, surely the papers must have been too hard? And so the masters at that school feel till they learn that there are other schools where ninety percent of the boys passed on the same papers. Then they begin to suspect that the fault did not lie with the examiners. Again, many of us have had the experience of living in some local pocket of human society—some particular school, college, regiment or profession where the tone was bad. And inside that pocket certain actions were regarded as merely normal (“Everyone does it”) and certain others as impracticably virtuous and Quixotic. However, when we emerge from that bad society we made the horrible discovery that in the outer World our “normal” was the kind of thing that no decent person ever dreamed of doing, and our “Quixotic” was take for granted as the minimum standard of decency. What had seemed to us morbid and fantastic scruples so long as we were in the “pocket” now turned out to be the only moments of sanity we there enjoyed. It is wise to face the possibility that the whole human race (being a small thing in the Universe) is, in fact, just such a local pocket of evil—an isolated bad school or regiment inside which minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Inside the pocket we do not say that justice, mercy, fortitude, and temperance are of no value, but only that the local custom is as just, brave, temperate and merciful as can reasonably be expected. It begins to look as if the neglected school rules even inside this bad school were connected with some larger World—and that when the terms ends we might find ourselves facing the public opinion of that larger World. However, the worst of all is this: we cannot help seeing that only the degree of virtue which we now regard as impracticable can possibly save our race from disaster even on this planet. The standard which seems to have come into the “pocket” from outside, turns out to be terribly relevant to conditions inside the pocket—so relevant that a consistent practice of virtue by the human race even for ten years would fill the Earth from pole to pole with peace, plenty, health, merriment, and heartsease and that nothing else will. I may be the custom, down here, to treat the regimental rules as a dead letter or a counsel of perfection: but now, everyone who stops to think can see that when we meet the enemy this neglect is going to cost every person of us one’s life. It is then that we shall envy the “morbid” person, the “pedant” or “enthusiast” who really has taught one’s company to shoot and dig in and spare their water bottles. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
According to some people, the larger society to which I here contrast the human “pocket” may not exist, and at any rate we have no experience of it. We do not meet Angels, or unfallen races. However, we can get some inkling of the truth even inside our own race. Different ages and cultures can be regarded as “pockets” in relation to one another. Different ages excelled in different virtues. If, then, you are ever tempted to think that we modern people in the Old World and the New World cannot really be so bad because we are, comparatively speaking, humane—if, in other words, you think God might be content with us on that ground—ask yourself whether you think God ought to have been content with the cruelty of cruel ages because they excelled in courage of chastity. You will see at once that this is an impossibility. From considering how the cruelty of our ancestors looks to us, you may get some inkling how our softness, Worldliness, and timidity would have looked to them, and hence how both must look to God. Before humans complain that they are unable to get intuition, one should remember that one’s own moral fault may be responsible for this. It can prevent one not only from receiving true intuitions but also from responding to them in action. Amid the general rush of today’s events, it is easy to miss an intuitive feeling. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Nor when the answer first comes, may we understand it aright. We may mix it up with out own ideas or wishes, our own expectations or fancies, and the result will be that the help received will not work out quite as it should have done. We may have to spend further years straightening out the message and, incidentally, ourselves. However, again, it is worth doing and nothing else is so much worth doing. One will come to find that the guidance one receives is perfect but one’s reception of it may still be imperfect. Perhaps harping on the word “kindness” has already aroused a protest in some reader’s minds. Are not really an increasingly cruel age? Perhaps we are: but I think we have become so in the attempt to reduce all virtues to kindness. For Plat rightly taught that virtue is one. You cannot be kind unless you have all the other virtues. If, being cowardly, conceited and slothful, you have never yet done a fellow creature a great mischief, that is only because your neighbour’s welfare has not yet happened to conflict with your safety, self-approval, or ease. Every vice leads to cruelty. Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty. Most atrocities are stimulated by accounts of the enemy’s atrocities; and pity for the oppressed classes, when separated from the moral law as a whole, leads by a very natural process to the unremitting brutalities of a region of terror. #RandolphHarris 14 of #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Their problem is that they have rejected God, for whatever reason, and have chosen to live life of their own. They have not surrendered their will to Him. They do not want to do what God says to do, but what they think is best. And they are lost because of that. They do not know what their real needs are and do not think of themselves as rebels and outlaws who must radically change because they are not acceptable to God. They do not think they need the grace of God for radical transformation of what they are, but that they just need a little help. They are good people. Or so it seems to them. It might be easy to lose faith, but sometimes, mysteriously, one feels one is not alone. One has family, friends, and church members praying for them. Some modern theologians have, quite rightly, protested against an excessively moralistic interpretation of Christianity. The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfect: His claim upon us is something more and other than the claim of moral duty. I do not deny it: but this conception, like that of corporate guilt, is very easily used as an evasion of the real issue. God ay be more than moral goodness: He is not less. The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending for it for those who have not first admitted its claims upon them, and then tried with all their strengths to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The church of Jesus Christ is vital and alive and changing the World—whether individual believers obey Him, live out His Word, and love Him. The Lord does give us the desires of our heart. Becoming a disciple is a matter of giving up your life as you have understood it to that point. Jesus made this starkly clear in Luke 14 and elsewhere. And without that “giving up,” you cannot be his disciple, because you will still think you are in charge and just in need of a little help from Jesus for your project of a successful life. However, our idea of a successful life is precisely our problem. The groups and times where individual and social transformation unto Christlikeness have manifestly taken place and have shaken the human order to its foundations all verify this completely: the early Christians, the early monastic, the early Franciscans or Dominicans, the early Quakers and early Methodists, for example. Note how in all these cases the word “early” has to be used. This is because the “vessel” that emerges in the course of a particular outbreak of radical discipleship gradually overwhelms the Heavenly “treasure” it initially served to convey. That is a primary satanic energy in defeating the cause of Christ on Earth. Then we have yet another tradition on exhibit in the museum of Christian history. Usually that means an institution of some sort, perhaps a local church or a denomination, whose perpetuation and survival becomes the main concern of the people associated with it. Discipleship to Christ is either dropped altogether from the basic objectives or is redefined as devotion to the institution. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Spiritual formation then in some cases is actually and explicity understood as the process of conforming to the tradition. Being disciples and making disciples in the obvious sense of the New Testament is omitted from the local congregations and their higher groupings. Clearly, then, the first stage of Jesus’ plan for spiritual formation in local congregations, as stated in Matthew 28.18-20, has to do with the vision and intention in our Vision, Intention, Mission (VIM) pattern of spiritual growth. If spiritual formation is to be the central focus of the local congregation, the group must be possessed by the vision of apprenticeship to Jesus in kingdom living as the central reality of salvation and as the basic good news, and they must have formed the clear intention to be disciples and to make disciples, as the central protect of their group. It is not enough to know what World-Mind has put forth in this Universe by its presence. We must also know, intellectually at least, what it is in itself. Out of this vast void comes the Universe. What then must be the ineffable and incredible Mystery hidden behind it from our sightless eyes? Take the beginning and the end of the Greek alphabet and suppose that the first letter, Alpha, is the first faint stirring of the Universe. And take the last letter, Omega, to be the last vanishing trace of that Universe. Imagines that Alpha is the reincarnation of the previous Omega, and you will have a key to what is really happening. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
However, what is this mysterious invisible intangible source whence all this is derived into which all this passes. The notion of a Personal God includes truth and an error. So far as there is a World-Mind, manifesting along with a World itself, the notion is true. However, so far as there is only the Unique, the One without a Second, both are appearances, phenomena out of the Noumenon. In the case of the World, it appears in time out of the Timeless; but in the case of the World-Mind, all times are embraced in its Duration. Yet it too withdraws into its other aspect, Mind—only. There has been so much friction and clash between the difference religions because of this idea: whether God is personal or impersonal—so much persecution, even hared, so unnecessarily. I say unnecessarily because the difference between the two conceptions is only an apparent one. Mind is the course of all; this is Mind inactive. Mind as World-Mind-in-manifestation is the personal God. Between essence and manifestation the only difference is that essence is hidden and manifestation is known. World-Mind is personal; Mind is totally impersonal. Basically, the two are one. On the two view of God—transcendence and immanence: One view conditions your conception of God, the other sets limits to Him. However, if you simultaneously affirm both one and the other point of view, you will be exempt from error. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
As Mind, it is beyond all the relativities of this World, beyond time and space, human thought and human imagination. As World Mind it is immanent in the World itself, the Lord of All, the God whom human worship, yet cyclic in Its existences. The World-Mind, however, has a double life. As Mind, it is eternally free but as the World-Mind, it is eternally crucified, as Plato said, on the cross of the World’s body. “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. As citizens of a country that supports religious freedom, we should take our religion into our civic duties, and we should gladly seek to support and to guide our country’s institutions with prayer. I pray to the God of my people, and I ask this: May what is done be done well. May what is done be done rightly. May what is done be done according to justice. May truth prevail, may falsehood fail, may words and deeds and thoughts be just. O Lord of our strength, sheltering Rock, Shield of our salvation, Thou art a stronghold unto us. The blessed God, great in knowledge, designed and made the radiance of the Sun. The beneficent One thus wrought glory unto His name. He set luminaries round about His strength. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Cresleigh Homes
Some dream of getting lost in a daydream, others in a book, but one thing we can all agree on: getting lost in this #MillsStation Residence 4 Great Room would be the comfiest afternoon of our lives. 😌
They Provide Bed and Bath, but Something Deeper—The Certainty that Someone Cares!
Every soul speaks that same language. Know that language of love that swells within the human temple. Our presence in a place of need is more powerful than a thousand sermons. Being there is our witness. As we love God through our love for others, seemingly insurmountable barriers fall before us. When we are at perfect peace with God, our warm smiles show it. It is a reflection of our one hope for breaking down barriers and for restoring the sense of community, of caring for one another, that our decadent, impersonalized culture has sucked out of us. It is the most urgent challenge for the holy nation, perhaps the most important principle. It is the nature of human beings to organize. Probably since the Tower of Babel we have been setting up hierarchies, organizational flow charts, orders of authority, and all the other structural schemes dreamed up through the ages. The more advanced the civilization, the more refined the organizational schemes. However, though structures are essential to hold society together, they are there to serve, not be served. The marvels of modern technology have produced a sophistication in systems and structures that encourage the political illusion, the misguided belief that all problems can be solved by structures—namely, institutions. So for each new problem, a new institution is created. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
However, the church is a living organism and its function is to love the God who created it—to care for others out of obedience to Christ, to heal those who hurt, to take away fear, to restore community, to belong to one another, to proclaim the Good News while living it out. The church is the invisible made visible. In happy circumstances, the baby sees its own charm, worth, and lovability when one looks into the (m)other’s face. The first definitions of the self are influenced on the one hand by the internal climate and, on the other, by what you discover about yourself from the mirror of the other. All this is very relevant to the process of psychotherapy, in which people discover parts of themselves which hitherto had been hidden. This uncovering makes people feel unsure and vulnerable. They are not as they thought they were. How will other people react now? Can they accept their new discoveries? The recognition and acceptance found in other people’s eyes (in some circumstances the psychotherapist’s) may make all the difference between renewed defensiveness and a change for the better. When (m)others are sensitive and living, the infant sense of the love of God and is able to experience a smooth sequence from feeling-a-need to having-that-need-met. This smooth sequence makes for the integration in at least three way. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
The smooth sequence welds the arousal of the infant’s needs strongly to the satisfaction to an idea of the World as a-place-where-needs-are-met. So the satisfaction of experienced needs contributes to the infant’s expanding imagery of itself and of the World. The child who has been fortunate in its parents is supported by the confidence that one can do the things which-it-and-the mother did while they were at one, and that the environment is benevolent and not frustrating or hostile. Such a child’s self-imagery is replete with confident self-congratulatory feelings, such as some socially successful parents’ children have who—although they themselves have not yet achieved anything—nevertheless feel that they are somehow more meritorious than the children of parents who are less well off. At a later stage, good parenting brings about not only the infant’s experience that it can cope, but also the experience that it can cope with occasional times when it either is not getting that gratification it is looking for, or is not getting it straight away or not so well. If things have gone well, the child can absorb a certain amount of strain of this kind and can put up with the discovery that the World is sometimes less than entirely beneficent. The “right” amount of anxiety has been generated for the child one’s own powers. Not too little, not too much, but just the right: “optimal” frustration. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Learning to deal with frustrations early on is very important. Most of us feel bad about inflicting hurt. However, some people go through life causing a great deal of hurt to other people, including their romantic partners and even their own children. They might fall under the label of narcissistic or borderline personality disorder. When one is on the receiving end of dealing with a person’s ill will, it can be extremely frustrating. When people do not like themselves—no matter how good of a front they put on—they are likely to project this self-dislike onto others. Particularly if this self-dislike stems from abusive behaviour which they have experiences in their past, they will engage in hurtful behaviours towards those people they love—replicating their own lived experiences. They may be driven by a desire to hurt you in the same way they have been hurt, to bring you down and cause you pain in the same way they have experienced it. These individuals need to seek help, but often will not and no one will usually point out to them that they have a problem and hurting others gives them the energy they need to boost their own self-esteem. Hurting others can be part of a strategy to weaken another individual. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Very different from destructiveness are certain deeply buried archaic experiences that often appear to the modern observer as proof of human’s innate destructiveness. Yet a closer analysis can show that while they result in destructive acts, their motivation is not the passion to destroy. One should be warned against the hasty interpretation of all destructive behaviour as the outcome of a destructive instinct, rather one must reorganize the frequency of religious and nondestructive motivations behind such behaviour. Destructiveness, however, can be spontaneous, or bound in the character structure. By the former I refer to the outburst of dormant (not necessarily repressed) destructive impulses that are activated by extraordinary circumstances, in contrast to the permanent, although not always expressed, presence of destructive traits in the character. However, these destructive explosions are not spontaneous in the sense that they break out without any reason. In the first place, there are always external conditions that stimulate them, such as wars, religions or political conflicts, poverty, extreme boredom and insignificance of the individual. Secondly, there are subjective reasons: extreme group narcissism in national or religious terms, as in India, a certain proneness to a state of trance, as in parts of Indonesia. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
It is not human nature that makes a sudden appearance, but the destructive potential that is fostered by certain permanent conditions and mobilized by sudden traumatic events. Without these provoking factors, the destructive energies in these population seems to be dormant, and not as with the destructive character, a constantly flowing source of energy. Vengeful destructiveness is a spontaneous reaction to intense and unjustified suffering inflicted upon a person or the members of the group with whom one is identified. It differs from normal defensive aggression in two ways: It occurs after the damage has been done, and hence is not a defense against a threatening danger. It is of much greater intensity, and is often cruel, lustful, and insatiable. Language itself expresses this particular quality of vengeance in the term “thirst for vengeance.” It hardly needs to be emphasized how widespread vengeful aggression is, both among individuals and groups. All forms of punishment—from primitive to modern—are an expression of vengeance. The Bible continually mandates restitution for property offenses. The Old Testament in the Christian Bible contains repeated references; and in the New Testament is found the example of Zacchaeus giving back fourfold what had been wrongly taken. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Nowhere in Scripture are prisons instituted as punishment for crimes, however. They are referred to as place for detaining people and for political purposes. The use of prisons for rehabilitation or punishment following conviction is a very recent invention, the result of Quaker-initiated reforms two centuries ago. The word “penitentiary” comes from the Quaker idea that the criminal needed to be penitent and repent and reform themselves. The first state prison in American was the Walnut Street jail in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, opened in 1790. The program drew national attention and has been duplicated many times since. However, punishment as an expression of vengeance, the classic example is the lex talionis of the Old Testament. The threat to punish a misdeed up to the third and fourth generation must also be considered an expression of revenge by a God whose commands have been disobeyed, even though it seems that the attempt was made to weak the traditional concept by adding “and who will be merciful until the thousandth generation.” The same idea can be found in many primitive societies—for instance, the law of the Yakuts which says events which cause the loss of life require atonement. The atonement was attached to the aggressor’s descendants for nine generations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
It cannot be denied that criminal law has a certain social function in upholding social stability. However, why is vengeance such a deep-seated and intense passion? I can only offer some speculations. Let us consider first the idea that vengeance is in some sense a magic act. By destroying the one who committed the atrocity one’s deed is magically undone. (However, that is not very rational and one never wants another person to suffer the same as one did. That is why we have the justice system.) Yet, the former is still expressed today by saying that “the criminal has paid one’s debt”; at least in theory, one is now like someone who never committed a crime. Vengeance may be said to be a magic reparation; but even assuming that this is so, why is this desire for reparation so intense? Perhaps humans are endowed with an elementary sense of justice; this may be because there is a deep-rooted sense of “existential equality”: we all are born from mothers, we were once powerless children, and we shall one day return to Heaven. Although no human can often not defend oneself against the harm others inflict upon one, in one’s wish for revenge one tries to wipe the sheet clean by denying, magically, that the damage was ever done. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
It seems that envy has the same root. Cain could not stand the fact that he was rejected while his brother was accepted. The rejection was arbitrary, and it was not in his power to change it; this fundamental injustice aroused such envy that the score could only be evened out by terminating Abel. However, there must be more to the cause of vengeance. When God and secular authorities fail, humans seem to take justice into their own hands. It is as if in one’s passion for vengeance one elevates oneself to the role of God, and of the Angels of vengeance. The act of vengeance may be one’s greatest hour just because of this self-elevation. While vengeance is indeed widespread there are great differences in degree, up to the point that certain cultures and individuals seem to have only minimal traces of it. There must be factors that explain the difference. One such factor is that of scarcity versus abundance. The person—or group—who has confidence in life and enjoys it, whose material resources may not be ample but sufficient not to elicit stinginess, will be less eager for the reparation of damage than an anxious, hoarding person who is afraid that one can never made up for one’s losses. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
This much can be stated with some degree of probability: the thirst for revenge can be plotted on a line at ne end of which are people in whom nothing will arouse a wish for revenge; these are humans who have reached a degree of development which in Buddhist or Christian terms is the ideal for all humans. On the other end would be those who have an anxious, hoarding, or extremely narcissistic character, for whom even a slight damage will arouse an intense craving for revenge. This type would be exemplified by a human from who a thief has stolen a few dollars and who wants one to be severely punished; or a professor who has been slighted by a student and therefore writes a negative report on him when he is asked to recommend the student for a good job; or a customer who has been treated “wrongly” by a salesperson and complains to the management, wanting the individual to be fired. In these cases we are dealing with a character in which vengeance is constantly present trait. The spontaneous outbreak of lust for revenge, with which we are here mainly concerned, occurs in people who do not have a vengeful character, but in whom extraordinary provocations can whip up intense and sometimes almost compulsive vengefulness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Of course, we do not want to be vengeful, nor do we want to hurt others. The goal is to be law abiding citizens, express the love of Christ, and allow the law to enforce the rules of the land. When humans attempt to be Christian without this preliminary consciousness of sin, the result is almost bound to be a certain resentment as to one who is always inexplicably angry. Every human, not very holy or very arrogant, has to live up to the outward appearance of other humans: one knows there is that within one which falls far below even one’s most careless public behaviour, even one’s loosest talk. In an instant of time—while your friend hesitates for a word—what things have passed through your mind? We have never told the truth. We may confess ugly fact—the meanest cowardice or the shabbiest and most prosaic impurity—but the toke is false. The very act of confessing—an infinitesimally hypocritical glance—a dash of humour—all this contrives to dissociate the facts from your very self. No one could guess how familiar and, in a sense, congenial to your soul these things were, how much of a piece with all the rest: down there, in the dreaming inner warmth, they struck no such discordant note, were not nearly so odd and detachable from the rest of you, as they seem when they turned into words. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues—like the bad tennis player who calls one’s normal form one’s “bad days” and mistakes one’s rare success for one’s normal. I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth about ourselves; the persistent, life-long, inner murmur of spite, jealousy, prurience, greed and self-complacence, simply will not go into words. However, the important thing is that we should not mistake out inevitably limited utterances for a full account of the worst that is inside. A reaction—it itself wholesome—is not going on against purely private or domestic conceptions of mortality, a reawakening of the social conscience. We feel ourselves to be involve in an iniquitous social system and to share a corporate guilt. This is very true: but the enemy can exploit even truths to our deception. Beware lest you are making use of the idea of corporate guilt to distract your attention from those humdrum, old-fashioned guilts of your own which have nothing to do with “the system” and which can be dealt with without waiting for the future. For corporate guilt perhaps cannot be, and certainly is not, felt with the same force as personal guilt. For most of us, as we now are, this conception is a mere excuse for evading the real issue. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
When we have really learned to know our individual corruption, then indeed we can go on to think of the corporate guilt and can hardly think of it too much. However, we must learn to walk before we run. We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. As if they were no concern of the present speaker’s and even with laughter, I have heard myself recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood. However, mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the prince of our forgiveness and be humble. As for the fact of a sin, is it probably that anything cancels it? All times are eternally present to God. It is not at least possible that along some one line of His multi-dimensional eternity He sees you forever in the nursery pulling the playing with your cute little toes and singing a song, forever toadying, lying, and lusting as a schoolboy or schoolgirl, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a subaltern? It may be that salvation consists not in the cancelling of these eternal moments but in the perfected humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to God’s compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the Universe. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Perhaps in that eternal moment St. Peter—he will forgive me if I am wrong—forever denies his Master. If so, it would indeed be true that the joys of Heaven are for most of us, in our present condition, “an acquired taste”—and certain ways of life may render the taste impossible of acquisition. Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a public place. Of course I do not know that this is true; but I think the possibility is worth keeping in mind. Here we are learning to understand and do the things Jesus gave us in specific commandments and teachings. We are studying his words and deeds in the four gospels. This “learning” is primarily developed through the teaching ministry of our church as we gather. We must learn to trust ourselves wholly to Christ. It is necessary to attribute providence to God. For all the good that is in created things has been created by God. In created things good is found not only as regards their substance, but also as regards their order towards an end and especially their last end, which, is the divine goodness. This good of order existing in things created, is itself created by God. Since, however, God is the cause of things by His intellect, and this it behooves that the type of every effect should pre-exist in Him, as is clear from what has gone before, it is necessary that the type of the order of things towards their end should be pre-exist in the divine mind: and the type of things ordered towards an end is, properly speaking, providence. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
For it is the chief part of prudence, to which two other parts are directed—namely, remembrance of the past, and understanding of the present; inasmuch as from the remembrance of what is past and the understanding of what is present, we gather how to provide for the future. Now it belongs to prudence, according to the Philosopher, to direct other things towards an end whether in regard to oneself—as for instance, a human is said to be prudent, who orders well one’s own acts towards the end of life—or in regard to others subject to one, in a family, city or kingdom; in which sense it is said, “a faithful and wise servant, whom one’s lord hath appointed over one’s family,” reports Matthew 24.45. In this way prudence or providence may suitably be attributed to God. For in God Himself there can be nothing ordered towards an end, since He is the last end. This type of order in things towards an end is therefore in God called providence. Whence Boethius says (De Consol. Iv, 6) that {Providence is the divine type itself, seated in the Supreme Ruler; which disposeth all thing”; which disposition may refer either to the type of the order of things towards an end, or to the type of the order of parts in the whole. The intuitive feeling or the seminal idea may be planted in a human’s heart today but it may need twenty to thirty years before it comes to sufficient growth in one’s conscious mind. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Providence resides in the intellect; but presupposes the act of willing the end. Nobody gives a precept about things done for an end; unless one will that end. Hence prudence presupposes the moral virtues, by means of which the appetitive faculty is directed towards good. Even if Providence has to do with the divine will and intellect equally, this would not affect the divine simplicity, since in God both the will and intellect are one and the same thing. No one was or could have been present at creation. Moreover, while we have an idea of who God is and wants, He wants, He is utterly incomprehensible to finite humans. The World-Mind is forever attempting to reflect its qualities and attributes in the Universe. The Universe is already and eternally within God. No decision was needed nor could there have been one, any ore than a human may decide to be kind. Bringing the Universe out of Himself is a function, quality, or attribute—none of these terms is quite correct but a better is hard to find—an obedience to the law of God’s own being. The movement which brings the Universe into being out of the World-Mind’s stillness is a spontaneous, not a deliberate, one. It just happens because it is the very nature of the World-Mind to make this movement. It is an inner compulsion rather than an inner necessity that moves the World-Mind to bring about these repeated reincarnations of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
If we try to consider the inner necessity which makes the World-Mind manifest Itself to Itself through an other, a cosmos, we find ourselves on the threshold of a mystery. How could compulsion, limit, or desire arise in the desireless one? Human intellect can only formulate such a question, but cannot answer it. The moment we assert that this infinite Power has a motive in making the cosmos, a purpose in creating the World, in that moment we limit it and ascribe need or want or lack to it. The World-Mind has the power of vigorous creativeness as an essential attribute of its nature. It will stop its work of sustaining the Universe when it stops being what it is. There is no other purpose behind creation than that of continuing its own existence. To understand this is to understand that the question as to purpose is not at all applicable to the World-Mind but only to an imagined and inferior being, one which could start or discontinue. We know that the mask of the unconscious is not rigid—it reflects the face we turn towards it. Hostility lends it a threatening aspect, friendliness softens its features. It is not a question of mere optical reflection but of an autonomous answer which reveals the self-sufficing nature of that which answers. Christian symbolism is particularly concerned with healing, or attempting to heal the wound of the gaping rift in this World. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
It would be more correct to take the open conflict as a symptom of the psychic situation of humans in the New World, and to deplore their inability to assimilate the whole range of the Christian symbol. As a doctor I cannot demand anything of my patients in this respect, also I lack the Church’s means of grace. Consequently I am faced with the task of taking the only path open to me—bringing the hidden into consciousness. At the same time I must leave my patient to decide in accordance with one’s assumptions, one’s spiritual maturity, one’s education, origins, and temperament, so far as this is possible without serious conflicts. As a doctor it is my takes to help the final decisions, because I know from experience that all coercion—be it suggestion, insinuation, or any other method of persuasion—ultimately proves to be nothing but an obstacle to the highest and most decisive experience of all, which is to be alone with one’s own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. If one is to find out what it is that supports one when one can no longer support oneself, the patient must be alone. I would be only too delighted to leave this anything but easy task to the theologian, were it not that it is just from the theologian that many of my patients come. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
They ought to have hung on to the community of the Church, but they were shed like dry leaves from the great tree and now find themselves “hanging on” to the treatment. As if they or the thing they cling to would drop off into the void the moment they relaxed their hold, something in them clings, often with the strength of despair. They are seeking firm ground on which to stand. Since no outward support is of any use to them they must finally discover it in themselves—admittedly the most unlikely place from the rational point of view, but an altogether possible one from the point of view of the unconscious. We can this this from the archetype of the “lowly origin of the redeemer.” The way to the goal seems chaotic and interminable at first, and only gradually do the signs increase that it is leading anywhere. The way is not straight but appears to go round in circles. More accurate knowledge has proved it to go in spirals: the dream-motifs always return after certain intervals to definite forms, whose characteristic is to define a center. And as a matter of fact the whole process revolves about a certain point or some arrangement round a center, which may in certain circumstances appear even in the initial dreams. As manifestations of unconscious processes the dreams rotate or circumambulate round the center, drawing closer to it as the amplifications increase in distinctness and in scope. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Owning to the diversity of the symbolical material it is difficult at first to perceive any kind of order at all. Nor should it be taken for granted that dream sequences are subject to any governing principle. However, as I say, the process of development proves on closer inspection to be cyclic or spiral. We might draw a parallel between such spiral courses and the processes of growth in plants; in fact the plant motif (tree, flower, et cetera) frequently recurs in these dreams and fantasies and is also spontaneously drawn or painted in Mandala symbolism. In alchemy the tree is the symbol of Hermetic philosophy. Harmonicists believe that true theology exists in all religions, and that it was given by God to humans in antiquity. When the inner voice says what we do not like to hear, we are apt to ignore it in modern times. However, in its manifestation, an intuitive idea is too often such a tiny spark that we are more likely to miss it than not. It is prudent to obey warning premonitions than to ignore them. Take time over problems, let your final decisions wait until they are fully ripe. Where is the wisdom in forcing a quick decision, which could easily be a wrong one, merely to get a decision at all? Intuition is the voice which is constantly calling one to this higher state. However, if one seldom or never pauses amid the press of activity to listen for it, one fails to benefit by it. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Such intuitions manifest themselves only on the fringe of consciousness. They are tender shoots and therefore need to be tenderly nurtured. The more one follows a course contrary to intuitive leading, the more will errors of mishaps follow one. These feelings may be cultivated as a gardener cultivates flowers. Their visitation may be brought on again, their delight renewed. If one listens humbly, in the end one will rely on this little inner voice which speaks and tells one which way to turn. Do not deny your intuitive self as Judas denied his master, as Peter denied him. There is also one’s subconscious mind, one’s brilliant and seemingly effortless hunches. One’s judgements come forth spontaneously like lightning, with no supporting brief of argument. One follows one’s own subconscious with blind faith but insists that to have a hunch, one must first have all the facts at one’s command, and one’s intelligence must be working at full speed. Then suddenly and without conscious effort you think of a solution which is really based on facts, but is not achieved by deliberate cerebrations. With it comes an unexampled feeling of well-being. One will learn sooner or later by the test of experience to defer to this intuitive feeing whenever its judgement, guidance, or warning manifests itself. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Thomas Alva Edison, an American inventor and businessman who has been described as America’s greatest inventor developed many devices such as the phonograph and incandescent electric light and power, telephony and telegraphy sound recording. He said that all his inventions grew out of initial flashes which welled up from within. The rest was a matter of research. The intuitive element has to be awaited wit much patience and vigilant attention. Is one fully open to intuitive feelings that originate in one’s deeper being, one’s sacred self? Or does one’s ego get in the way by its rigidities, habits, and tendencies? The importance of these feelings is that they are threadlike clues which need following up, for they can lead one to a blessed renewal or revelation. The capacity to respond to spiritual intuitions is latent in all humans but trained and developed in few humans. From this hidden source comes at times guidance, warnings, attractions, or aversions which ought to be construed as intuitive messages. However, for this they must first best recognized and believed: they pass too quickly. It is not that one put out the antenna of one’s intuition, so much as that one insulates its end and thus provides clear receptivity. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
We may not forecast how quickly or how well every student will progress in this art. For one may naturally possess much sensitivity but another may posses little. And even when an intuition is recognized immediately, the will may respond to it very slowly. It is true that conscious is the voice of God in the moral life of humans, but it is also true that one seldom hears its pure sound. Most often one hears it mixed with much egotism. Do you hear me, Earth spirits, as I go walking? Do you hear my footfalls, drumming on the dirt? Do you hear my breathing, mixing with the air? Do you hear my heart beating, weaving in the rhythms? Do you hear my words of prayer, asking your attention? Do you hear me, Earth Spirits? Please hear me, please hear me, please hear my voice. Please hear the one who walks among you. Please hear my words of peace and friendship. Please hear my plea, please grant my wish. In mercy Thou bringest light to the Earth and to those who dwell thereon, and in Thy goodness renewest continually each day the work of creation. How great are Thy works, O Lord! In wisdom has Thou made them all; the Earth is full of Thy creatures. O King, Thou alone hast been exalted from the days of old, praised, glorified and extolled from of yore. O everlasting God, in Thine abundant mercy, please have compassion on us. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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It Aims to Get People into Heaven Rather than Get Heaven into People!
Every person carries within one’s head a mental model of the World—a subjective representation of external reality. This model consists of tens upon tends of thousands of images. These may be as simple as a mental picture of clouds scudding across the sky, or big red and pink hearts. We many think of this mental model as a fantastic internal warehouse, an image emporium in which we store our inner portraits. People say Valentine’s Day is just a capitalistic holiday to make money, but I think Valentine’s Day is important. It gives people an excuse to be happy and express their love for others, a reason to buy gifts for someone else, and an occasion to get dressed up and feel young again. We have some much to grieve, and Valentine’s Day, much like other holidays, gives us a reason to come together, thank God we are alive, unite with others, and express love. The news, on the other hand, wants to make us sad, scared and fear for our safety. The government got something right. Regardless of if it is a federal holiday, or just a symbolic one, it is important to slow down, celebrate, and appreciate the beauty in our lives. Valentine’s Day also teaches children to share and it makes them happy by giving them art projects to work on. It is nice for everyone to take a break from doom and gloom and express love for one another. This is, after all, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Any person’s mental model will contain some images that approximate reality closely, along with others that are distorted or inaccurate. However, for the person to function, even to survive, the model must bear some overall resemblance to reality. Every reproduction of the external World, constructed and used as a guide to actions by an historical society, must in some degree correspond to that reality. Otherwise the society could no have maintained itself; its members if acting in accordance with totally untrue propositions, would not have succeeded in making even the simplest tools and in securing therewith food and shelter from the external World. No human’s model of reality is a purely personal product. While some of one’s images are based on firsthand observation, an increasing proportion of them today are based on messages beamed to us by the mass media and people around us. Thus the degree of accuracy in one’s model to some extent reflects the general knowledge in society. And as experience and scientific research pump more refined and accurate knowledge into society, new concepts, new ways of thinking, supersede, contradict, and render obsolete ideas and World views. If society itself were standing still, there might be little pressure on the individual to update one’s own supply of images, to bring them in line with the latest knowledge available in the society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
So long as the society in which one is embedded is stable or slowly changing, the images on which one bases one’s behaviour can also change slowly. However, to function in a fast-changing society, to cope with swift and complex change, the individua must turn over one’s own stock of images at a rate that in some way correlates with the pace of change. One’s model must be updated. To the degree that it lags, one’s responses to change become inappropriate; one becomes increasingly thwarted, ineffective. Thus there is intense pressure on the individual to keep up with the generalized pace. Today change is so swift and relentless in the techno-societies that yesterday’s truths suddenly become today’s fictions, and the most highly skilled and intelligent members of society admit difficulty in keeping up with the deluge of new knowledge—even in extremely narrow fields. You cannot possibly keep in touch with all you want to. I spend 25 percent to 50 percent of my working time trying to keep up with what is going. With all the information and technology coming out, it is hard for almost anyone to wade through the ocean of information. In fact, with all the high technology cars coming out, I wonder how auto science engineers are able to keep up-to-date with how to repair them? #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
New knowledge either extends or outmodes the old. In either case it compels those for whom it is relevant to reorganize their store of images. It forces them to relearn today what they thought they knew yesterday. Thus Lord James, vice-chancellor of the University of York, says, “I took my first degree in chemistry at Oxford.” Looking at the questions asked in chemistry exams at Oxford today, he continues, “I realized that not only an I not do them, but that I never could have done them, since at least two-thirds of the questions involved knowledge that simply did not exist when I graduated.” And Dr. Robert Hilliard, once the top educational broadcasting specialist for the Federal Communications Commission, presses the point further: “At the rate which knowledge is growing, by the time the child born today graduates from college, the amount of knowledge in the World will be four times as great. By the time that same child is fifty years old, it will be thirty-two times as great, and 97 percent of everything known in the World will have been learned since the time one was born.” Granting that definitions of “knowledge” are vague and that such statistics are necessarily hazardous, there still can be no question that the rising tide of new knowledge forces us into ever-narrower specialization and drives us to revise our inner images of reality at ever-faster rates. Nor does this refer merely to abstruse scientific information about physical particles or genetic structure. It applies with equal force to various categories of knowledge that closely affect the everyday life of millions. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
There is a tendency for common sense to suppose that income and wealth, and the good things in life generally, should be distributed accord to moral desert. Justice is happiness according to virtue. While it is recognized that this ideal can never be fully carried out, it is the appropriate conception of distributive justice, at least as a prime facie principle, and society should try to realize it as circumstances permit. Now justice as fairness rejects this conception. Such a principle would not be chosen in the original position. There seems to be no way of defining the requisite criterion in that situation. Moreover, the notion of distribution according to virtues fails to distinguish between moral desert and legitimate expectations. Thus it is true that as persons and groups take part in just arrangements, they acquire claims on one another defined by the publicly recognized rules. Having done various things encouraged by the existing arrangements, they now have certain rights, and just distributive shares honor these claims. A just scheme, then, answers to what humans are entitled to; it satisfies their legitimate expectations as founded upon social institutions. However, what they are entitled to is not proportional to nor dependent upon their intrinsic worth. The principles of justice that regulate the basic structure and specify the duties and obligations of individuals do not mention moral desert, and there is no tendency for distributive shares to correspond to it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
This contention is borne out by the preceding account of common-sense precepts and their role in pure procedural justice. For example, in determining wages a competitive economy gives weight to the precept of contribution. However, as we have seen, the extent of one’ s contribution (estimated by one’s marginal productivity) depends upon supply and demand. Surely a person’s moral worth does not vary according to how many offer similar skills, or happen to want what one can produce. No one supposes that when someone’s abilities are less in demand or have deteriorated (as in the case of singers) one’s moral deservingness undergoes a similar shift. All of this is perfectly obvious and has long been agree to. It simply reflects the fact noted before that it is one of the fixed points of our moral judgments that no one deserves one’s place in the distribution of natural assets any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in society. Moreover, none of the precepts of justice aims at rewarding virtue. The premiums earned by scarce natural talents, for example, are to cover the costs of training and to encourage the efforts of learning, as well as to direct ability to where it best furthers the common interest. The distributive shares that result do not correlate with moral worth, since the initial endowment of natural assets and the contingences of their growth and nature in early life are arbitrary from a moral point of view. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
The precept which seems intuitively to come closet to rewarding moral desert is that of distribution according to effort, or perhaps better, conscientious effort. Once again, however, it seems clear that the effort a person is willing to make is influenced by one’s natural abilities and skills and the alternatives open to one. The better endowed are more likely, others things equal, to strive conscientiously, and there seems to be no way to discount for their greater good fortune. The idea of rewarding desert is impracticable. And certainly to the extent that the precept of need is emphasized, moral worth is ignored. Nor does the basic structure tend to balance the precepts of justice so as to achieve the requisite correspondence behind the scenes. It is regulated by the two principles of justice which define other aims entirely. The same conclusion may be reached in another way. In the preceding remarks the notion of moral worthy as distinct from a person’s claims based upon one’s legitimate expectations has not been explained. Suppose, then, that we define this notion and show that it has no correlation with distributive shares. We have only to consider a well-ordered society, that is, a society in which institutions are just and this fact is publicly recognized. Its members also have a strong sense of justice, an effective desire to comply with the existing rules and to give one another that to which they are entitled. In this case we may assume that everyone is of equal moral worth. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
However, the equal moral worth of persons does not entail that distributive shares are equal. Each is to receive what the principles of justice say one is entitled to, and these do not require equality. The essential point is that the concept of moral worth does not provide a first principle of distributive justice. This is because it cannot be introduced until after the principles of justice and of natural duty and obligation have been acknowledged. Once these principles are on and, moral worth can be defined as having a sense of justice; the virtues can be characterized as desires or tendencies to act upon the corresponding principles. Thus the concept of moral worth is secondary to those of right and justice, and it plays no role in substantive definition of distributive shares. For a society to organize itself with the aim of rewarding moral desert as a first principle would be like having the institution of property in order to punish thieves. The criterion to each according to one’s virtue would not, then, be chosen in the original position. Since the parties desire to advance their conceptions of the good, they have no reason for arranging their institutions so that distributive shares are determined by moral desert, even if they could find an antecedent standard for its definition. In a well-ordered society individuals acquire claims to share of the social product by doing certain things encouraged by the existing arrangements. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The legitimate expectations that arise are the other side, so to speak, of the principle of fairness and the natural duty of justice. For in the way that one has a duty to uphold just arrangements, and an obligation to do one’s part when one has accepted a position in them, so a person who has complied with the scheme and done one’s share has a right to be treated accordingly by others. They are bound to meet one’s legitimate expectations. Thus when just economic arrangements exist, the claims of individuals are properly settled by reference t the rules and precepts (with their respective weights) which these practices take as relevant. It is incorrect to say that just distributive shares reward individuals according to their moral worth. However, what we can say is that, in the traditional phrase, a just scheme gives each person one’s due: that is, it allots to each what one is entitled to as defined by the scheme itself. The principles of justice for institutions and individuals establish that doing this is fair. Even though a person’s claims are regulated by the existing rules, we can still make a distinction between being entitled to something and deserving it in a familiar although nonmoral sense. To illustrate, after a game one often says that the losing side deserved to win. Here one does not mean that the victors are not entitled to claim the championship, or whatever spoils go to the winner. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Like the controversy Kanye West created when he interrupted the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs), by cutting off Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for winning the award for Best Female Video category, when he thought that Beyonce should have won because, “Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time!” one is not saying the other team or individual should not have won. One is, however saying that the losing entity displayed to a higher degree that skills and qualities that the game or industry calls forth, and the exercise of which gives the sport or industry its appeal. Therefore the losers truly deserved to win but lost out as a result of bad luck, or from other contingencies that caused the contest to miscarry. Similarly even the best economic arrangements will not always lead to the more preferred outcomes. The claims that individuals actually acquire inevitably deviate more or less widely in favoured positions, for example, may not have to a higher degree than others the desired qualities and abilities. All this is evident enough. Its bearing here is that although we can indeed distinguish between the claims that existing arrangements required us to honor, given what individuals have done and how things have turned out, and the claims that would have resulted under more ideal circumstances, none of this implies that distributive shares should be in accordance with moral worth. Even when things happen in the best way, there is still no tendency for distribution and virtue to coincide. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
No doubt some may still contend that distributive shares should match moral worth at least to the extent that this is feasible. They may believe that unless those who are better off have superior moral character, their having greater advantages is an affront to our sense of justice. Now this opinion may arise from thinking of distributive justice as somehow the opposite of retributive justice. It is true that in a reasonably well-ordered society those who are punished for violating just laws have normally done something wrong. This is because the purpose of the criminal law is to uphold basic natural duties, those which forbid us to injure other persons in their life and limb, or to deprive them of their liberty and property, and punishments are to serve this end. They are not simply a scheme of taxes and burdens designed to put a price on certain forms of conducts and in this way to guide human’s conduct for mutual advantage. If the acts proscribed by penal statues were never done, it would be far better. Thus a propensity to commit such acts is a mark of bad character, and in a just society legal punishments will only fall upon those who display these faults. It is clear that the distribution of economic and social advantages is entirely different. These arrangements are not the converse, so to speak, of the criminal law, so that just as the one punishes certain offenses, the other rewards moral worth. The function of unequal distributive shares is to cover the costs of training and education to attract individuals to places and associations where they are most needed from a social point of view, and so on. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Assuming that everyone accept the propriety of self—or group-interested motivation duly regulated by a sense of justice, each decides to do those things that best accord with one’s aims. Variations in wages and income and the perquisites of position are simply to influence these choices so that the end results accords with efficiency and justice. In a well-ordered society there would be no need for the penal law expect insofar as the assurance problem made in necessary. The question of criminal justice belongs for the most part to partial compliance theory, whereas the account of distributive shares belongs to strict compliance theory and so to the consideration of the ideal scheme. To think of distributive and retributive justice as converses of one another is completely misleading and suggests a different justification for distributive shares than then one they in fact have. When we fail to center everything on becoming people who have the character of Christ, then we become means and angry Christians. As a leader of a Christian organization, I often feel the burn of the meanness within the Christian community, a mean-spirited suspicion and judgment that mirrors the broader culture. Every Christian leader I know feels it. It is difficult to be Christian in a secular World. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
However, you know, it is sometimes more difficult to be a leader in Christian circles. There too you can be vilified for just the slightest move that is displeasing to someone. This is one of the most common points of commiseration among our leaders. We must realize there is an answer as to why some Christians are so man. And we must face this answer and effectively deal with it or Satan will sustain his stranglehold on spiritual transformation in local congregations. Some Christians are routinely taught by example and word that it is more important to be right (always in terms of their beloved vessel, or tradition) than it is to be Christlike. In fact, being right licenses many people to be mean, and, indeed, requires one to be mean—righteously mean, of course. It is believed that one must be hard on people who are wrong, and especially if they are in positions of Christian leadership. They deserve nothing better. This is part of what I call the practice of “condemnation engineering.” A fundamental mistake of the conservative side of the American church today, and much of the churches in the New World, is that it takes as its basic goal to get as many people as possible ready to die and go to Heaven. It aims to get people into Heaven rather than to get Heaven into people. This of course requires that these people, who are going to be “in,” must be right on what is basic. You cannot really quarrel with that. However, it turns out that to be right on “what is basic” is to be right in terms of the particular church vessel or tradition in question, not in terms of Christlikeness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Now, the project thus understood and practiced is self-defeating. It implodes upon itself because it creates groups of people who may be ready to die, but clearly are not ready to live. They rarely can get along with another, much less those “outside.” Often this most intimate relations are tangles of reciprocal harm, coldness, and resentment. They have found ways of being “Christian” without being Christlike. As a result they actually fall short of getting as many people are possible ready to go to Heaven, because the lives of the “converted” testify against the reality of “the life that is life indeed,” reports 1 Timothy 6.19. The way to get as many people into Heaven as you can is to get Heaven into as many people are you can—that is, to follow the path of genuine spiritual transformation of full-throttled discipleship to Jesus Christ. When we are counting up results we also need to keep in mind the multitudes of people (surrounded by churches) who will not be in Heaven because they have never, to their knowledge, seen the reality of Christ in a living human being. The Christian minister is frequently in the position of a lawyer who states to the court the case one intends to prove (that would be the biblical picture of life from above), and then calls one’s witnesses (professing Christians), who contradict their testimony (their life) every point one said one would prove. One can have no greater sign of confirmed pride than when one thinks one is humble enough. Love may cause pain to its object, but only on the supposition that that object needs alteration to become fully lovable. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Now why do we humans need to much alteration? The Christian answer—that we have used our free will to become very bad—is so well known that it hardly needs to be stated. However, to bring this doctrine into real life in the minds of modern humans, and even of modern Christians, is very hard. The consciousness is supposed to deliver humans from the fear of eternal punishment. It was against this background that the Gospel appeared as good news. It brought news of possible healing to humans who knew that they were morally ill. However, all this has changed. Christianity now has to preach the diagnosis—in itself very bad news—before it can win a hearing for the cure. There are two principle causes. One is the fact that for about a hundred and fifty years we have so concentrated on one of the virtues— “kindness” or mercy—that most of us do not feel anything except kindness to be really good or anything but cruelty to be really bad. Such disequilibrium of ethical developments are not uncommon, and other ages too have had their pet virtues and curious insensibilities. And if one virtue must be cultivated at the expense of all the rest, none has a higher claim than mercy—for every Christian must reject with detestation that covert propaganda for cruelty which tries to derive mercy out of the World by calling it names such as “Humanitarianism” and “Sentimentality.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The real trouble is that “kindness” is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. If nothing happens to be annoying an individual in the moment, everyone feels benevolent. Thus a human easily comes to console oneself for all one’s other vices by a conviction that one’s heart is in the right place and that one would not hurt a fly nor take candy from a baby, though in fact one has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We thin we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble. The second cause is the effect of Psychoanalysis on the public mind, and, in particular, the doctrine of repressions and inhibition. Whatever these doctrines really mean, the impression they have actually left on most people is that the sense of Shame is a dangerous and mischievous thing. We have laboured to overcome that sense of shrinking, that desire to conceal, which either Nature herself or the tradition of almost all humankind has attached to cowardice, unchastity, falsehood, and envy. We are told to “get things out in the open,” not for the sake of self-humiliation, but on the grounds that these “things” are very natural and we need not be ashamed of them. However, unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one; and even the Worldly society has usually recognized “shamelessness” as the nadir of the soul. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
In trying to extirpate shame we have broken down one of the ramparts of the human spirit, madly exulting in the work as the Trojans exulted when they broke their walls and pulled the Horse into Troy. I do not know that there is anything to be done but to set about the rebuilding as soon as we can. It is mad work remove hypocrisy by removing the temptation to hypocrisy: the ”frankness” of people sunk below shame is a very cheap forthrightness. However, if one’s own scepticism, sensualism, or materialism does not offer too hard a resistance, the intuition which is working its way to formulation, expression, and understanding may finally gain acceptance. This opens a new cycle for one. If only one heeds its intuitive message, the higher self will not fail one. One will make one’s way to true balance sanity and deep inner calm. Without searching for others, knowing that in oneself God’s representative resides and that this can give the right kind of help, one will depend for self-reliance on an ever-presence. If one cultivates sufficient faith, out of the cosmic mind will come the response to one’s aspirations and, eventually, the answers to one’s questions. To receive this, one must learn to keep a constant vigil for intuitive feelings and messages of the delicate nature, and to trust one’s inner promptings. One’s attention should always have God at its center. By constant prayer and aspiration to one’s higher self, the student will get intuitive promptings from time to time. One should catch them when they appear and yield oneself to them: in this way one will get the necessary guidance from within. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Once one learns to recognize the intuitive voice, follow its dictates; do not hesitate to conform with them to try to make up an excuse for failing to do so it the guidance is unpalatable. If the seeker will heed this intuitive feeling it may lead one to a clue, a thread by holding which one may grope one’s way to clearer and stronger feeling until it becomes a certainty. If reason, experience, and authority can solve it, whatever be the problem, carry it inwards to the deep still center. However, one must learn to wait in patience for the answer, for the blockage is in you, not in it. A day or a month may pass until the response is felt, thought, or materialized. There is a feeling of scaredness, of holy peace at such moments, and they should be cherished for the precious moment that they are. They contain hints of the communion with the Higher Self, elements of something beyond the ordinary self, and possibilities of transcending the past with its debris of memories and mistakes. In every important move one will seek guidance from the intuitive levels of being as well as from the intellectual. These messages are all formulated by the faculty of intuition. Hence their lofty tone. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
However, the emotions, desires, and intellect—being on a lower level—ignore the message in practice and action. Hence, disobeyed, they bring suffering or disappointment. Sometimes the intuitive bidding of God will be in favour of one’s own private interests but sometimes it will be at variance with them. Where the wakeful consciousness is not easily reached owing to its preoccupations, then the dream consciousness will be more receptive to the message. Sometimes an intuition does not stay behind. It flashes through consciousness for a small fraction of a second and is gone. Unless it is detected and recognized during this quick passage while it is still fresh, we are hardly likely to do so afterwards. Amid the toils and agitations of everyday living, through all the boiler pressures of crisis events, such intuitions can gain entry only with difficulty. Yet we need their help and solace more than we know: we need their stimulus to enkindle fresh hope and more faith. Either a human possesses this intuitive sense or one does not. It cannot be created by argument or analysis. They betray the higher part of themselves every time they resist, reject, or merely ignore the intuitive feelings which come so delicately into consciousness. In the seeming self’s activity, personal willpower is used and personal effort is made. In God’s activity, both these signs are absent. Instead there is a passive receptivity to its voice—intuitions—and obedience to its guidance. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The self-sufficing World-Mind has nothing to gain for itself by the Universal activity. What could the Supreme Power gain by bringing the World into existence? It is not like the humans who have desires to be satisfied or limitations to be removed. Those who point to the marvellous pattern of the Universe as proof of the existence of Deity, do well; but when they begin to render account of the reasons which induced Deity to turn Himself into myriad souls and to blind their divine sight by involving them into this material Universe, it is time to put on our shoes and walk away. For no philosopher and no theologian, no occultist and no mystic has yet solved this supreme riddle in a truly satisfying manner. World-Mind imagines and objectifies thing and happenings, and humans are within this space-time net. God is within the Universe but unbound by its limitations. God is free in a sense in which no human being is free. For the conflict of motives which precedes every act of human freedom is entirely absent from the acts of God, which are truly spontaneous. No one knows why the Infinite Power must go on incarnating something of Itself in the Universe; everyone can in the end only accept the fact, for the question is answerless. “Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for true and just are His judgments,” reports Revelations 19.1. Mothers and Fathers who went before, please watch over my words as I tell the old stories, that they may be passed on rightly. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Please make me today’s link in the chain that reaches on, from nights around the fire beneath American sikes to the end of humanity and beyond. Endowed with might, endowed with everlasting power, they govern all the World. In splendor, lustrously their brightness radiates, their brilliance beautiful throughout the Universe. In rising they rejoice, in setting they exult, awesomely fulfilling their Creator’s will. Glory and honor do they give unto His name; in joyous songs of praise His kingdom they acclaim. God called unto the Sun and it shone forth in light, He looked, and then He formed the figure of the Moon. The Heavenly host, the constellations gave Him praise, and all celestial beings of the Heavenly throne attribute honor, greatness, glory—unto God who rested from all His work, and on the seventh day exalted Himself and ascended the throne of His glory. Adorned in majesty for the day of rest, God called the Sabbath a delight. This is the praise offered by the Sabbath day, the day itself rendered praise saying: A psalm, a song of Sabbath Day. It is good to give thanks unto the Lord. Therefore, let all of God’s creatures glorify and bless Him. Let them all render praise, distinction and greatness unto God, the King and Creator of all, who in His holiness bestoweth rest upon His people of American on the sacred Sabbath day. May Thy name, O Lord our God, be sanctified, and Thy fame, O our King, glorified in Heaven above and on Earth beneath. Be Thou praised, O our Deliverer, for the excellency of Thy handiwork and for the luminaries which Thou hast made and which render Thee glory. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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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?
Any Hypnotist May Invent a Seeming World for You but it Will be Gone in a Few Minutes or Hours!
You can say this for these ready-mixes—the next generation is not going to have any trouble making pies exactly like mother makes. In a society in which instant food, instant education and even instant cities are everyday phenomena, no product is more swiftly fabricated or more ruthlessly destroyed than the instant celebrity. Nations advancing toward super-industrialism sharply step up their output of these “psycho-economic” products. Instant celebrities burst upon the consciousness of millions like an image-bomb—which is exactly what they are. Within less than one year from the time a graceful girl named Paris Hilton took her first walk down the red carpet, millions of human beings around the globe stored mental images of her in their brain. A platinum blonde with dripping wet blue eyes that look like the Arctic Ocean, soft pillow lips, amazing cheek bones, and legs longer than your marriage, exploded into instant celebrityhood circa 2001. Her winsome face and beautiful malnourished figure suddenly appeared on covers of magazines in Britain, American, France, Italy, Japan, China, Africa and other countries. Overnight, Paris eyelashes, mannikins, perfumes, clothes, jewelry, movies, music, real estate and her custom Barbie BMW began to gush from the fad mills. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Critics pontificated about her social significance. News anchors accorded her the kind of coverage normally reserved for a peace treaty or a papal election. By now, however, many would expect our stored mental images of Paris to have been largely erased. Yet, she has not vanished from public view. She defines reality where celebrity status only lasts for six months nowadays. Her images still grace the New York Times, she has even been featured in Ebony and Vibe, Paris is breaking records and shattering boundaries, she may even take over the World! Not long ago I asked a highly intelligent teenager whether she and her classmates had any heroes. I said, “Do you regard Justin Timberlake, for example, as a hero? (Justin being a singer and actor and a former boyfriend of Britney Spears, I was sure she had heard of him.) The child’s response was revealing. “No,” she said, “he’s too old.” At friend I thought she regarded a man in his forties as being too old to be a hero. Soon I realized this was mistaken. What she meant was that Justin Timberlake’s career had peaked too long ago to be of interest. He has no new exploits. Today Justin Timberlake has receded from the foreground of public attention. In effect, his image has decayed. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Celebrityhood is a transient state. To be relevant, one has to become a mega star like Reese Witherspoon, Tom Brady, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Sean Mendez, Beyonce, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry and even Aaliyah is still trending on Twitter and remember in countless new songs. Thousands of “personalities” parade across the stage of contemporary history. Real people, magnified and projected by the mass media, they are stored as images in the millions of peoples or billions of people who have never met them, never spoken to them, never seen them “in person.” They take on a reality almost as (and sometimes even more) intense than that of many people with whom we do have “in-person” relationships. We form relationships with these “vicarious people,” just as we do with friends, neighbours and colleagues. And just as the through-put of real, in-person people in our lives is increasing, and the duration of our average relationship with them decreasing, the same is true of our ties with the vicarious people who populate our mines, but have not become mega celebrities. Their rate of flow-through is influenced by the real rate of change in the World, we find that the British prime ministership has been turning over since 1922 at a rate some 13 percent faster than in the base period of 1721-1922. In sports, the heavyweight boxing championship now changes hands twice as fast as it did during our father’s youth. Events, moving faster, constantly throw new personalities into the charmed circle of celebrityhood, and old images in the mind decay to make way for the new. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The same might be said for the fictional characters spewed out from the pages of books, from television screens, from digital streaming, theaters, movies, and magazines. No previous generation in history has had so many fictional characters flung at it. We may not even get used to Super-Hero, Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific before they fly off our television screens forever. These vicarious people, both live and fictional, play a significant role in our lives, providing models for behaviour, acting out of us various roles and situations from which we draw conclusions about our own lives. We deduce lessons from their activities, consciously or not. We learn from their triumphs and tribulations. They make it possible for us to “try on” various roles or life styles without suffering the consequences that might attend such experiments in real life. The accelerated flow-through various people cannot contribute to the instability of personality patterns among many real people who have difficulty in finding a suitable life style. These vicarious people, however, are not independent of one another. They preform their roles in a vast, complexly organized “public drama” which is largely a product of the new communications technology. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
This public drama, in which celebrities upstage and replace celebrities at an accelerating rate, has the effect of making leadership more unstable than it would be otherwise. Contretemps, upsets, follies, contests, scandals, make a feast of entertainment or a spinning political roulette wheel. Fads come and go at a dizzying pace. A country like the United States of America has an open public drama, in which new faces appear daily, there is always a contest to steal the show, and almost anything can happen and often does. What we are observing is a rapid turnover of symbolic leaders, which may make incumbent leaders less attractive, especially if the people are not happy with public policy, the jobs report, the economy, housing costs, health care cost, the price of food, utilities, insurances, tax rates, transportation costs, and performance in the stock market. This can be extended, however, into a far more powerful statement: what is happening is not merely a turnover of real people or even fictional characters, but a more rapid turnover of the images and image-structures in our brains. Our relationships with these images of reality, upon which we base our behaviour, are growing, on average, more and more transient. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
If we do not wish to lose it, the intuition first presents itself to us as a fine delicate filament which we must treat tenderly. The entire knowledge system in society is undergoing violent upheaval. The very concepts and codes in terms of which we think are turning over at a furious and accelerating pace. We are increasing the rate at which we must form and forget our images of reality. The fact is that with the knowledge and actual experience of these inner images a way is opened for reason and feeling to gain access to those other images which the teachings of religion offer humankind. Psychology thus does just the opposite of what it is accused of: it provides possible approaches to a better understanding of these things, it open people’s eyes to the real meaning of strict doctrines, and, far from destroying, it throws open an empty house to new inhabitants. I can corroborate this from countless experiences: people belong to creeds of all imaginable kinds, who had played the apostate or cooled off in their faith, have found a new approach to their old truths, not a few Catholics among them. Even a Parsee found the way back to the Zoroastrian fire-temple, which should bear witness to the objectivity of my point of view. However, this objectivity is just what my psychology is most blamed for: it is said not to decide in favour of this or that religious doctrine. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Without prejudice to my own subjective convictions I should like to raise the question: Is it not thinkable that when one refrains from setting oneself up as an arbiter mundi and, deliberately renouncing all subjectivism, cherishes on the contrary the belief, for instance, that God has expressed Himself in many languages and appeared in divers forms and that all these statements are true—is it not thinkable, I say, that this too is a decision? The objection raised, more particularly by Christians that it is impossible for contradictory statements to be true, must permit itself to be politely asked: Does one equal three? How can three be one? Can a mother be a virgin? And so on. Has it not yet been observed that all religious statements contain logical contradictions and assertions that are impossible in principle, that this is in fact the very essence of religious assertion? As witness to this we have Tertullian’s avowal: “And the Son of God is dead, which is worthy of belief because it is absurd. And when buried He rose again, which is certain because it is impossible.” If Christianity demands faith in such contradictions it does not seem to me that it can very well condemn those who asset a few paradoxes more. Oddly enough the paradox is one of the most valuable spiritual possessions, while uniformity of meaning is a sign of weakness. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Hence when it losses or waters down its paradoxes, a religion becomes inwardly impoverished; but their multiplication enriches because only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fulness of life. Non-ambiguity and non-contradiction are one-sided and thus unsuited to express the incomprehensible. Not everyone possesses the spiritual strength of a Tertullian. It is evident not only that one had the strength to sustain paradoxes but that they actually afforded one the highest degree of religious certainty. The inordinate number of spiritual weakliness makes paradoxes dangerous. So long as the paradox remains unexamined and is taken for granted as a customary part of life, it is harmless enough. However, when it occurs to an insufficiently cultivated mind (always, as we know, the most sure of itself) to make the paradoxical nature of some tent of faith the object of its lucubrations, as earnest as they are impotent, it is not long before such a one will break out into iconoclastic and scornful laughter, pointing to the manifest absurdity of the mystery. Things have gone rapidly downhill since the Age of Enlightenment, for, once this petty reasoning mind, which cannot endure any paradoxes, is awakened, no sermon on Earth can keep in down. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
A new task then arises: to lift this still undeveloped mind step by step to a higher level and to increase the number of persons who have at least some inkling of the scope of paradoxical truth. If this is not possible, then it must be admitted that the spiritual approaches to Christianity are as good as blocked. We simply do not understand any more what is meant by the paradoxes contained in the strict doctrines; and the more external our understanding of them becomes the more we are affronted by their irrationality, until finally they become completely obsolete, curious relics of the past. The human who is stricken in this way cannot estimate the extent of one’s spiritual loss, because one has never experienced the sacred images as one’s inmost possession and has never realized their kindship with one’s own psychic structure. However, it is just this indispensable knowledge that the psychology of the unconscious can give one, and its scientific objectivity is of the greatest value here. Were psychology bound to creed it would not and could not allow the unconscious of the individual that free play which is the basic condition for the production of archetypes. It is precisely the spontaneity of archetypal contents that convinces, whereas any prejudiced intervention is a bar to genuine experience. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
If the theologian really believes in the almighty power of God on the one hand and in the validity of strict doctrines in the other, why then does one not trust God to speak in the soul? Why this fear of psychology? Or is, in complete contradiction to strict doctrines, the soul itself is hell from which only demons gibber? Even if this ere really so it would not be any the less convincing; for as we all know the horrified perception of the reality of evil has led to at least as many conversations as the experience of good. The archetypes of the unconscious can be shown empirically to be the equivalents of strict religious doctrines. In the hermeneutic language of the Fathers the Church possesses a rich store of analogies with the individual and spontaneous products to be found in psychology. What the unconscious expresses is far from being merely arbitrary or opinionated; it is something that happens to be “just-so,” as is the case with every other natural being. It stands to reason that the expressions of the unconscious are natural and not formulated dogmatically; they are exactly like the patristic allegories which draw the whole of nature into the orbit of their amplificants. If these present us with some astonishing allegoriae Christi, we find much the same sort of thing in the psychology of the unconscious. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The only difference is that the patristic allegory as Christum spectat—refers to Christ—whereas the psychic archetype is simply itself and can therefore be interpreted according to time, place, and milieu. In the New World the archetype is filled out with the dogmatic figure of Christ; in the Old World, with Purusha, the Atman, Hiranyagarbha, the Buddha, and so on. The religious point of view, understandably enough, put the accept on the imprinter, whereas scientific psychology emphasizes the typos, the imprint—the only thing it can understand. The religious point of view understands the imprint as the working of an imprinter; the scientific point of view understands it as the symbol of an unknown and incomprehensible content. Since the typos is less definite and more variegated than any of the figures postulated by religion, psychology is compelled by its empirical material to express the typos by means of terminology not bound by time, pace, or milieu. If, for example, the typos agreed in every detail with the dogmatic figure of Christ, and if it contained no determinant that went beyond that figure, we would be bound to regard the typos as at least a faithful copy of the dogmatic figure, and to name it accordingly. The typos would coincide with Christ. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
However, as experience shows, this is not the case, seeing that the unconscious, like the allegories employed by the Church Fathers, produces countless other determinants that are not explicitly contained in the dogmatic formula: that is to say, non-Christian figures such as those mentioned above are included in the typos. However, neither do these figures comply with the indeterminate nature of the archetype. It is altogether inconceivable there could be any definite figure capable of expressing archetypal indefiniteness. For this reason I have found myself obliged to give the corresponding archetype the psychological name of the “self” – a terms on the one hand definite enough to convey the essence of human wholeness and on the other hand indefinite enough to express the indescribable and indeterminable nature of this wholeness. The paradoxical qualities of the term are a reflection of the fac that wholeness consist partly of the conscious human and partly of the unconscious human. However, we cannot define the latter or indicate one’s boundaries. Hence in its scientific usage the term “self” refers neither to Christ not to the Buddha but to the totality of the figures that are its equivalent, and each of these figures is a symbol of the self. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
This mode of expression is an intellectual necessity in scientific psychology and in no sense denotes a transcendental prejudice. On the contrary, as we have said before, this objective attitude enables one human to decide in favour of the determinant Christ, another in favour of the Buddha, and so on. Those who are irritated by this objectivity should reflect that science is quite impossible without it. Consequently by denying psychology the right to objectivity they are making an untimely attempted to extinguish the life-light of a science. Even if such a preposterous attempt were to succeed, it would only widen the already catastrophic gulf between the secular mind on the one hand and Church and religion on the other. One’s need is to recognize these half-formed intuitions for what they are, to rescue them from their vagueness, develop, nurture, and formulate them. When this first faint intrusion is sensed, the need is for utter relaxation, for becoming passive and yielding. Only so can the aspirant follow intuitive prompting more and more inwards until it becomes stronger and stronger, clearer and clearer. One’s early development of intuition is largely a matter of confused and uncertain impressions. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
When seeking intuitional light upon a subject, the aspirant is advised to put one’s body in a recumbent position. This, passive as it is, will correlate with the passivity of the mind that one should cultivate at such a time. Because an intuitive feeling is usually soft and delicate where egoistic ones are often strong and passionate, it is too many times not recognized for what it is, until someone else formulates it and offers it from outside, as a statement of truth or a suggestion for action. If allowed to grow, an intuition which is vague and weak in the beginning may become clear and certain in the end. With this beginning of the momentary “catch” in attention, one must follow by waiting with much patience, listening inwardly all the while. Have faith in your inner promptings and accept their guidance. When you are uncertain about them, wait and they will gradually clarify themselves. One is to defend oneself against false intuitions, not only by silencing wishful thoughts, but also by purifying the personal emotions. They are messages brought from the infinite for the blessing and guidance of finite humans. However, one must recognize their value and esteem their source. What we see here is not an impossible dream, a hopeless idealization. If we turn our efforts under God in the right direction, it can be done and has been done. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
And that direction would be one that makes spiritual formation in Christlikeness the exclusive primary goal of the local congregation. That is what one would natural expect after having read what Saint Paul says—and, indeed, after having read what Jesus sent his World revolutionaries out to do. “And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in Heaven and on Earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you,” reports Matthew 28.18-20. Pay attention to the “principle and absolutes” of the New Testament church and, one might suppose, everything else will fall into place—in large part because “everything else” really does not matter much one way or the other. To fail to put the focus on those principles and absolutes, on the other hand, is to wander off into a state of distraction, which is where most of our local congregations actually are. They wind up majoring on minors and allowing the majors, from the New Testament point of view, to disappears. “For God 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. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Some people feel like they are lost to the World, hidden from sight and memory. However, the love of Jesus Christ is unconditional, caring love. Humans are not separate from their Creator, nor can God misunderstand them. The place for which He designs them in His scheme of things is the place they are made for. When they reach it their nature is fulfilled and their happiness attained: a broken bone in the Universe has been set, the anguish is over. When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy. Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. God demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration. Do we suppose that they can do Him any good, or fear, like the chorus in Milton, that human irreverence can bring about “His glory’s diminution”? A human can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word “darkness” on the walls of one’s cell. However, God wills our good, and our good is to love Him (wit that responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
If we do not fall on our faces, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God—though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain. Yet the call is not only to prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine life, a creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires. We are bidden to “put on Christ,” to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little. Yet perhaps even this view falls short of the truth. It is not simply that God has arbitrarily made us such that He is our only good. Rather God is the only good of all creatures: and by necessity, each must find its good in that kind and degree of the fruition of God which is proper to its nature. The kind and degree may very with the creature’s nature: but that there ever could be any other good, is an atheistic dream. You must be strong with God’s strength and blessed with God’s blessedness, for He has no other to give us. God gives what He has, not what He has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
To be God—to be like God and to share His goodness is humanly response—to be miserable—these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the Universe grows—the only food that any possible Universe ever can grow—then we must starve eternally. Mercy is especially to be attributed to God, as seen in its effect, but not as an affection of passion. In proof of which it must be considered that a person is said to be merciful, as being, so to speak, sorrowful at heart; being affected with sorrow at the misery of another as though it were one’s own. Hence it follows that one endeavours to dispel that misery, whatever be the defect we call by that name. Now defects are not removed, except by the perfection of some kind of goodness; and the primary source of goodness is God. It must, however, be considered that to bestow perfection appertains not only to the divine goodness, but also to His justice, liberality, and mercy; yet under different aspects. The communicating of perfections, absolutely considered, appertains to goodness; in so far as perfections are given to things in proportion, the bestowal of them belongs to justice, as has already been said; in so far God does not bestow them for His own use, but only on account of His goodness, it belongs to liberality; in so far as perfections given to things by God expels defects, it belongs to mercy. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Mercy is regarded as an affection of passion. God acts mercifully, not indeed by going against His justice, but by doing something more than justice; thus a human who pays another two hundred pieces of money, though owing one only one hundred, des nothing against justice, but acts liberally or mercifully. The case is the same with one who pardons an offence committed against one, for in remitting it one may be said to bestow a gift. Hence the Apostle calls remission a forgiving: “Forgive one another, as Christ has forgiven you,” report Ephesians 4.32. Hence it is clear that mercy does not destroy justice, but in a sense is the fulness thereof. And thus it is said: “Mercy exalteth itself above judgement,” reports James 2.13. Since in the beginning God alone is, there is no second substance that can be used for such “creation.” God is forced to use His own substance for the purpose. God is Infinite Mind, so he uses mental power—Imagination—working on mental substances—Thought—to produce the result which appears to us as the Universe. Therefore existence cannot be derived from non-existence. If the Universe exists today, then its essence must have existed when the Universe itself had not been formed. This essence needed no “creation” for it was God, World-Mind, Itself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The Universe is the World-Mind coming out of itself and therefore making its manifestation out of its own substance—that is, Mind—just as the spider spins out a web from itself. The visible cosmos has come into being out of the invisible absolute by a process of emanation. That is why the relation between them is not only pantheistic but also transcendent. The creation is inseparable from its creator; indeed, they are but two names for one and the same thing, for God has objectified part of His own being as the Universe which we see. The World-Mind, limiting itself, shutting down its cous, produces what we know as the physical Universe. The fact that the cosmic existence is a beginningless and endless one eliminates the need of finding a Creator. It is itself a manifestation of an eternal principle, which is its own divine soul and not a second and separate thing Prospero says, in Shakespeare’s play, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” he implies the existence of some greater Mind in which we are the dreams. Any hypnotist may invent a seeming Word for you but it will be gone in a few minutes or hours. Only the World-Mind can invent one that will last and outlast the whole human race. When will the cosmic dream come to an end? If one’s personal life is a dream for humans, is the Universe a dream for God? The answer is that the World-Mind controls its dream, humans do not. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Mind is the first and last Real, the Doer Maker and Destroyer. It imagines the World even as it creates it. The Universe is the imaginative construction of the World-Mind. The core and the surface of life are essentially the same. Every form of existence can be reduced to a form of consciousness. The final essence of all these consciousnesses is God. The tree of mental ideas raise from a common but unknow root—God. One who knows God as the root and the Universe as the branch of the tree of life fears not. As spears, as swords, as arrows, the Sun sends out its rays, as weapons from the hands of a mighty warrior, to strike down falsehood and untrue ways. As spears, as swords, as arrows, send out your rays, as weapons from the hands of a might warrior, to strike down falsehood and untrue ways. In mercy God gives light to the Earth and to those who dwell thereon. In His goodness, God renewest each day the work of creation. O King, God alone is exalted of yore, glorified and extolled from the days of old. O everlasting God, in Thine abundant mercy, have compassion upon us. Lord of our strength, Rock of our stronghold, please Shield our salvation, Thou art a stronghold unto us. There is none to be compared to Thee, neither is there any besides Thee; there is none but Thee. Who is like unto Thee? There is none like unto Thee, O Lord our God, in this World, neither is there any besides Thee, O our King in the World to come. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
Cresleigh offers charming architecture with generous home sites at Mills Station. Enjoy a prime location with access to amenities, award-winning schools, and easy commuter routes. This luxury community offers modern single-family homes in a truly picturesque location.
You don’t need to live on Pinterest to know the best way to make your table pop — we’ve done that all for you. 😉 Check out today’s blog to learn some tips and tricks for making the perfect table setting! Link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/blog/
Randolph Harris II International Institute 