The rode to redemption can express itself in many forms. And yet, sometimes the greatest obstacle we face can be found within our own conscience. Those who make religion their god will not have God for their religion. Having eliminated the confusion which come from ignoring the relations of thought, imagination, and speech, we may not return to the questions. The Christians say that God has done miracles. The modern World, even when it believes in God, and even when it has seen the defencelessness of Nature, does not. It thinks God would not do that sort of thing. Have we any reason for supposing that the modern World is right? I agree that the sort of God conceived by the popular “religion” of our own times would almost certainly work no miracles. The question is whether that popular religion is at all likely to be true. I call it “religion” advisedly. We who defend Christianity find ourselves constantly opposed not by the irreligion of our hearers but by their real religion. Speak about beauty, truth and goodness, or about a God who is simply the indwelling principle of these three, speak about a great spiritual force pervading all things, a common mind of which we are all parts, a pool of generalized spirituality to which we can all flow, and you will command friendly interest. However, the temperature drops as soon as you mention a God who has purposes and performs particular actions, who does one thing and not another, a concrete, choosing, commanding, prohibiting God with a determinate character. People become embarrassed or angry. Such a conception seems to them primitive and crude and even irreverent. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

The popular “religion” excludes miracles because it excludes the “living God” of Christianity and believes instead in a kind of God who obviously would not do miracles, or indeed anything else. This popular “religion” may roughly be called Pantheism. Pantheism is usually based on a quite fanciful picture of the history of religion. According to this picture, Man stars by inventing “spirits” to explain natural phenomena; and at first he imagines these spirits to be exactly like himself. As he gets more enlightened they become less manlike, less “anthropomorphic” as the scholars call it. Their anthropomorphic attributes drops off one by one—first the human shape, then human passions, then personality, will, activity—in the end every concrete or positive attribute whatever. There is left in the end a pure abstraction—mind as such, spirituality as such. God, instead of being a particular entity with a real character of its own, becomes simply “the whole show” looked at in a particular way or the theoretical point at which all the lines of human aspiration would meet if produced to infinity. And since, on the modern view, the final stage of anything is the most refined and civilized stage, this “religion” is held to be a more profound, more spiritual, and more enlightened belief than Christianity. Now this imagined history of religion is not true. Pantheism certainly is (as its advocates would say) congenial to the modern mind; but the fact that a shoe slips on easily does not prove that it is a new shoe—much less that it will keep your feet dry. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

Pantheism is congenial to our minds not because it is the final stage in a slow process of enlightenment, but because it is almost as old as we are. It may even be the most primitive of all religions, and the orenda of a savage tribe has been interpreted by some to be an “all-pervasive spirit.” It is immemorial in India. The Greeks rose above it only at their peak, in the thought of Plato and Aristotle; their successors relapsed into the great Pantheistic system of the Stoics. Modern Europe escaped it only while she remained predominantly Christian; with Giordano Bruno and Spinoza it returned. With Hegel it became almost the agreed philosophy of highly educated people, while the more popular Pantheism of Wordsworth, Carlyle and Emerson conveyed the same doctrine to those on a slightly lower cultural level. So far from being the final religious refinement, Pantheism is in fact the permanent natural bent of the human mind; the permanent ordinary level below which humans sometimes sinks, under the influence of priestcraft and superstition, but above which one’s own unassisted efforts can never rise one for very long. Platonism and Judaism, and Christianity (which has incorporated both) have proved the only things capable of resisting it. It is the attitude into which the human mind automatically falls when left to itself. No wonder we find it congenial. If “religion” means simply what humans say about God, and not what God does about humans, hen Pantheism almost is religion. And “religion” in that sense, has in the long run, only one really formidable opponent—namely Christianity. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

Hence, if a Minister of Education professes to value religion and at the same time takes steps to suppress Christianity, it does not necessarily follow that one is a hypocrite or even (in the ordinary this-Worldly sense of the word) a fool. One may sincerely desire more “religion” and rightly see that the suppression of Christianity is a necessary preliminary to his design. Modern philosophy has rejected Hegel and modern science started out with no bias in favour of religion; but they have both proved quite powerless to curb the human impulse towards Pantheism. It is nearly as strong today as it was in ancient India or in ancient Rome. Theosophy and the worship of the life-force are both forms of it: even the German worship of a racial spirit is only Pantheism truncated or whittled down to suit barbarians. Yet, by a strange irony, each new relapse into his immemorial “religion” is hailed as the last word in novelty and emancipation. This native bent of mind can be paralleled in quite a different field of thought. Humans believed in atoms centuries before they had any experimental evidence of their existence. It was apparently natural to do so. And the sort of atoms we naturally believe in are little hard pellets—just like the hard substances we meet in experience, but too small to see. The mind reaches this conception by an easy analogy from grains of sand or salt. It explains a number of phenomena; and we feel at home with atoms of that sort—we can picture them. If later science had not been so troublesome as to find out what atoms are really like, the belief would have lasted for ever. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

The moment it does that, all our mental comfort, all the immediate plausibility and obviousness of the old atomic theory, is destroyed. The real atoms turn out to be quite alien from our natural mode of thought. They are not even made of hard “stuff” or “matter” (as the imagination understands “matter”) at all: they are not simple, but have structure: they are not all the same: and they are unpicturable. The old atomic theory is in physics what Pantheism is in religion—the normal, instinctive guess of the human mind, not utterly wrong, but needing correction. Christian theology, and quantum physics, are both, by comparison with the first guess, hard, complex, dry, and repellent. The first shock of the object’s real nature, breaking in on our spontaneous dreams of what that object ought to be, always has these characteristics. You must not expect Schrodinger to be as plausible as Democritus; he knows too much. The true state of the question is often misunderstood because people compare an adult knowledge of Pantheism with a knowledge of Christianity which they acquired in their childhood. They thus get the impression that Christianity gives the “obvious” account of God, the one that is too easy to be true, while Pantheism offers something sublime and mysterious. In reality, it is the other way around. The apparent profundity of Pantheism thinly veils a mass of spontaneous picture-thinking and owes its plausibility to that fact. Pantheists and Christians agree that God is present everywhere. Pantheists conclude that He is “diffused” or “concealed” in all things and therefore a universal medium rather than a concrete entity, because their minds are really dominated by the picture of a gas, or fluid, or space itself. The Christian, on the other hand, deliberately rules out such images by saying that God is totally present at every point of space and time, and locally present in none. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

Again the Pantheist and Christian agree that we are all dependent on God and intimately related to Him. However, the Christian defines this relation in terms of Maker and made, whereas, the Pantheist (at least on the popular kind) says, we are “parts” of Him, or are contained in Him. Once more, the picture of a vast extended something which can be divided into areas has crept in. Because of this fatal picture Pantheism concludes that God must be equally present in what we call evil and what we call good and therefore indifferent to both (either permeates the mud and the marble impartially).  The Christian has to reply that this is far too simple; God is present in a great many different modes: not present in matter as He is present in humans, not present in all humans as in some, not present in any other human as in Jesus Christ. Pantheist and Christians also agree that God is super-personal. The Christian means by this that God has a beneficial structure which we could never have guessed in advance, any more than a knowledge of squares would have enabled us to guess at a cube. He contains “persons” (three of them) while remaining one God, as a cube contains six squares while remaining one solid body. We cannot comprehend such a structure any more than the Flatlanders could comprehend a cube. However, we can at least comprehend our incomprehension, and see that if there is something beyond personality it ought to be incomprehensible in that sort of way. The Pantheist, on the other hand, though one may say “super-personal” really conceives God in terms of what is sub personal—as though the Flatlanders thought a cube existed in fewer dimensions than a square. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

While most glimpses come naturally and unexpectedly, it is possible to develop the experience systematically by the technique of prayer. If the glimpse is not to remain an isolated event, one must try to put less of one’s mind on oneself and more on the Overself, less into emotional reactions to it and more into pure contemplation of it. It may come upon you without warning at any time and in any place. However, if you provide conditions which are proper and propitious for it, it is more likely to come. Once a human has had this scared experience one will naturally want to provoke it again. However, how? One will find prayer to be part of the answer. The first principle in releasing your potential is to gain the knowledge of God. The Christian Bible is the fountain of knowledge. The author of that extraordinary text is God, the Holy Spirit. Remember, God often chooses difficult seasons to increase our anointing. Do not walk out on your season! Do not call I quits; just call it a night, get some rest and try again tomorrow. God is restoring to you all that the enemy stole! He will do it without fail—He is faithful. If one is tempted by these sudden glimpses to enquire whether there is a method or technique whereby they may be repeated at will, one will find that there is and that it is called prayer. If one wishes to go farther and enquire whether one’s whole life could continuously enjoy them all the time, the answer is that it could and that to bring about it one needs to follow a way of life called The Quest. It is useful to exercise, to bring the experience back to mental sight and emotional presence, to evoke the glimpse as vividly as one can. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

The Glimpse is to be recalled frequently and enjoyed reminiscently. Let it help one in this way to dedicate the day to greater obedience of intuitive urge. Let it bring forth afresh that love of and aspiration toward the Overself which are necessary prerequisites to a stable experience of it. If few attain the wonder of Overself consciousness, it is because few can lift their minds to the level of impersonality and anonymity. However, what all cannot do with their minds, they can do much more easily with their hearts. Let them approach enveloped in love, and the grace will come forward to meet them. By its power, the ego which they could not bring themselves to renounce will be forgotten. If the mind and the feelings are properly balanced, and if, at the same time, the body is purified, its organs co-operated with, and it forces regenerated, these glimpses will last longer and come more easily, hence more often. When the glimpse happens, a human comes out of oneself. It may follow one’s admiration of a beautiful scene in Nature or one’s appreciation of a beautiful poem or one’s simple relaxed mood, but in each case one lets go of one’s taut self-consciousness. This allows the entry of grace. If one works intensively on oneself, according to the prescription of philosophy, one will be blessed with such glimpses. However, be wise who you share your secrets with—some are sabotaging your destiny! We have seen some convincing arguments from the terrestrial World that attachment and separation-anxiety are biological phenomena, and there is visual evidence of the sufferings of little children ill-prepared for separation from those to whom they are attached. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

According to this viewpoint, they infant terrestrial being has built-in as well as built-up expectations that its needs will be met by an attachment-figure, normally the mother. If there is a delay in having these needs met, two kinds of distress result: first, distress caused by the unmet need—hunger, cold, pain, or whatever, and second distress at the loss of the attachment-figure. Accordingly, the crying young of the species is biologically bound to create tension and anxiety in adults who her it, and this does not abate until the distress-signals cease. The adult comforts the infant both by meeting its needs and by relieving the fright it got when it found itself unattached and subject to unmanageable distress. It is this distress which one of our patients described as a black hole—a hole where there should be a button to attach the infant to the selfobject and the facilitating environment; it is distress caused when the illusion of omnipotence has to be given. In self psychology, one’s experience of another person (object) as part of, rather than as separate and independent from, one’s self, particularly when the object’s actions affirm one’s narcissistic well-being. There is a time in infancy, when body-experiences and other processes have not yet integrated into a coherent and whole self; there is not yet a single dominant self-image, nor yet a set of interrelated ego-functions. The development of an identity is the growth of self-experience as a physical and mental unity which had cohesiveness in space and continuity in time. The mother’s exultant response to the total child (calling him or her by name as she enjoys his presence and activity) supports, at the appropriate phase, the development from auto-erotism to narcissism—from the stage of the fragmented self to the stage of the cohesive self. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

The mother’s (and other people’s) love of the baby is he beginning of the baby’s self-love. Empathic, competent, loving people generate a selfobject state of mind when which enables the infant to experience itself as whole, lovable, in control and capable—“grand.” It is love that causes integration—“cathexis”—between the different experiences which happen to an infant, so that it feels to be “grand.” A fragmented self is the consequence of a poorly cathected self and falls more easily apart. The cause of such disintegration lies in the unmanageable loss of the selfobject state: the infant abruptly loses the sense that it is whole, loveable, and competent—a sense which god care would normally provide—before it can cope with such a discovery by looking after itself. Whole a relationship to an empathically approving parent is one of the preconditions for the original establishment of a firm cathexis of the self, and while in analysis disturbances in this realm are once more open to correction, the opposite sequence of events (from a cohesive self to its fragmentation) can often be observed both in analysis and in a child’s interplay with its pathogenic parents. The fragmentation of the self, can, for example, be studied in patients who, with the assistance of the analyst’s presence and attention, have tentatively re-established a feeling of the cohesiveness and continuity of the self. Wherever the mirror-transference cannot be maintained, the patient feels threatened by the dissolution of the narcissistic self. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

An empathic and competent mothering figure (or therapist) will understand and provide for the baby’s needs in such a way that the child (in us) can begin to build on a foundation of self-confidence and trust in the goodness of the World. However, the abrupt failure or loss of the selfobject state damages the child’s sense of itself as a whole person: to be cut off from one’s selfobject, before one has grown out of this state in a natural way, must be like being cut off from one’s arm or leg, certainly as traumatic. Thereafter the person is prey to a host of related anxieties, all to do with what it feels like when you are falling apart: fear of loss of the reality-self, caused by longing for ecstatic merging with an idealized parent-figure; fear of loss of contact with reality and fear of permanent isolation because of experiences of unrealistic grandiosity; frightening experiences of shame and self-consciousness, caused by the intrusion of exhibitionism; hypochondrial worries about physical or mental illness due to obsessional interest in disconnected aspects of the body or the mind. These are commonly interpreted in psycho-analysis as castration fears. However, these fears also come from earlier breaks in integrity. Let me emphasize again that rage and destructiveness are not primary givens but arise in reaction to the faculty empathic response of the selfobject. An isolated striving to search for an outlet for rage and destructiveness is not part of the primary psychological equipment of humans, and the guilt with regard to unconscious rage that we encounter in the clinical situation should not be regarded as a patient’s reaction to the primal infantile viciousness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

Drives are normally integrated into the personality in the course of development. However, when there is fragmentation, when the person falls apart, they become important in isolation from the self-organization, which no longer provides a context which transcends and contains them. Healthy drive-experiences always include both self and selfobject. However, if the self is seriously damaged or destroyed, then the drives become powerful in their own right. Such drive manifestations only establish themselves in isolated after traumatic and/or prolonged failure in empathy from the selfobject. A facilitation environment allows a child to notice its needs and wishes, and to begin to imagine what would make it happy, and then to find its wish answered. For this to happen, the mother or other care-taking persons need not be there all the time, but they must not be away so long that the baby feels abandoned. They can safely be away for a little while and the baby will not mind, picking up the thread of its phantasy of their continued care at the point where it loses the sensory stimulus of their actual presence but still retains the remembered sense of their presence (= care). There may, however, be a brief delay between the first arousal of need and the coming of the mother (or other care-taking person). When this happens, the baby may cry, and this will bring, let us say, the mother, to do what is needed. There is a mathematical metaphor for the amount of frustration or desolation an infant may be able to tolerate. The baby can recover without ill-effects from x amount of delay before someone comes to cope. The baby may even be able to stand an absence for x + y amount of time, and still be able to pick up the threads of its god phantasy. However, sometimes there may be a ye longer interval: x + y + z. This is too long, and the infant becomes traumatized—wounded, damaged. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

This is where we locate the basic fault. The environment has now ben irrevocably experienced not as facilitating but as indifferent at best, hostile at worst. The infant is now forced to develop ego-functions, so that it can look after itself—before it has reached the phase of development where a self arises naturally out of play experiences. A problem has to be faced prematurely—how to get along in an unhelpful environment. A False Self (a set of cognitive functions disconnected from the life of feelings and emotions) begins to develop and to manage the environment so that further traumatic experiences may be avoided. However, the sense of indwelling may have been impaired by repeated bad experiences, and a rather lifeless self will develop, in which thinking and feeling and doing are dissociated from each other, with no strong sense of being or of being whole. Here is the place of the basic fault, where the break may come. Trauma implies that the baby has experienced a break in life’s continuity, so that primitive defences now become organized to defend against a repetition of “unthinkable anxiety” or a return of the acute confusional state that belongs to the disintegration of the developing self-structures. A break in being is different from a frustration, and here again we see that it may not be castration-anxiety. Frustration belongs with “male-element” Drive-satisfaction-seeking. To the experience of being belongs something else, not frustration but maiming. Something should be there which is not there—the indwelling self. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

The pain of x + y + z amount of desolation may have created a practically permanent agony, of which a person may not be continuously aware, but which is nevertheless there al the time, sapping the capacity for work and happiness. Important to those who live with this agony and to their therapists—that the fear of breakdown may in fact be a fear of reviving the memories of a previously experienced breakdown: there is a basic fault. In other words, there was a time when the process of integration was devastatingly interrupted and the infant had to remain in its distress; it could not return to the safety of a mother’s enveloping and holding presence, but was left with the chaos of half-individuated processes not properly synchronized with one another. This state is called agony. The pain is so great that “anxiety” does not seem a strong enough word. There are five primitive agonies. The first—the fear of retuning to an unintegrated state—being the most basic, while the others in one way or another represent memories of later developmental disasters: failure of indwelling, when the body seems no to be the place where “I” dwell, loss of the sense of reality, loss of the capacity to relate to other people and things, the sense of falling for ever with nothing to hold on to. We must assume that the vast majority of babies never experience the x + y + z deprivation, a baby has to start again permanently deprived of the root which could provide continuity with the personal beginning. This allows us to afford more hope. It is permissible to think that, while some parts of the growing order remain intact and make a rebuilding of the destroyed possible. Only repeated deprivation in major areas of development would be likely to wipe out the possibility of reconnecting with the early roots of experience, the True Self. Babies are constantly being cured of the effects of x + y + z degree of deprivation by the mother’s comforting her localized spoiling that mends the ego-structure. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

This is an important issue for psychotherapists: can this person be helped to find enough associations of goodness, and to bring them into operation often enough to have them contribute to greater ego-strength? If not, is there any point in helping one become more aware? Or will such efforts leave the unfortunate person as disabled as ever? The services of a physician skilled in the knowledge of diseases and in the care of their sufferers should never be slighted. Orthodox allopathic medicine deserves our highest respect because of the cautiously scientific way it has proceeded on its course. It has achieved notable cures. However, it also has many failures to its debit. This in in part due to the fundamental error which it accepts in common with other sciences like psychology—the materialist error of viewing humans as being nothing more than their body. Only by setting this right can it go forward to its fullest possibilities. Its deficiency in this respect has forced the appearance and nourished the spread of unorthodox healing methods, of which there are many. Most of these have something worthwhile to contribute but unfortunately—lacking the caution of science—make exaggerated claims and uphold fanatical attitudes, with the result that they too have their failures and incur public disrepute. The extreme claims made by credulous followers and unscientific leaders of mental healing cults revolt the reason of those outside their fold and lead to distrust of the justifiable claims that should be made. However, they have enough success to justify their existence. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

Only by a mutual approach and interaction will they modify each other and thus bring a truly complete system of healing. If the World of sick and suffering patients is to benefit by the full extent of present-day human knowledge, they have to do it willingly and quickly. The cults which allow power only to the Spirit, which would deny it to all other means or media, even as secondary causes, are too extreme and fanatical. Some people egotistically try to better the gift God has given them to their own detriment and disease. The difficulties of keeping to one’s own rigid mode of protective habit usually becomes too much in the end for a fastidious traveler. It is a mistake to take a meal when mentally tired or emotionally disturbed. The benefit of food intake will be offset by the harm of upset digestion. One’s experiments in dietary reform must come to this end: one will find that one returns to the philosophic admonition of expertly balanced feeding, but with some better understanding of what constitutes “balance.” Even taken to excess may lead to death, even beneficial vitamins also. Thus, if too much too quickly is eaten or drunk, science knows any food item or product can be fatal. This verifies my often-used phrase that “a good overdone becomes the bad.” Are we determined or free? Imagine a questioned posed to two completely identical persons, two persons who are in every way—heredity, past experience, current brain states—replicas of one another. If we now confront them with identical choices in an identical manner (coffee or tea?), will each necessarily respond the same? Or could they act differently? #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

Note that the answer to this mind teaser is either yes or no. As William James said, “The issue…is a perfectly sharp one, which no eulogistic terminology can smear over or wipe out. The truth must lie with one side or the other, and its lying with one side makes the other false.” An answer of “Yes—there is nothing to differentiate them because all possible influences are identical” assumes determinism: behaviour is lawfully related to causal influences. Although the people each made a conscious choice, it was not their power to have chosen otherwise. Many psychologist—most, we suspect—would answer yes. However, others would answer no. Some of these reject determinism because they assume an element of indeterminism—of inherent unpredictability. Much as elementary particles behave with apparent randomness, so might human behaviour exhibit a lack of orderly causation. Others answer no because they believe that just as God is the ultimate source of natural evens, so are people, o some extent, the ultimate cause of their own actions. To be sure, we are influenced by various biological and psychological factors; still, say the proponents of agent causation, these factors do not totally determine our behaviour. When all is said and done, you and I can tip the scales this way or that, toward coffee or tea, toward moral or immortal actions. We psychologist agree that our work requires some regularity. We need not assume that behaviour is completely determined to look for what orderly causes or predictors there are. To search out the factors that do, in fact, influence behaviour, we do not need to make a philosophical assumption of absolute determinism; we only need to assume enough determination to provide a delectable regularity. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

Biological factor, current situation, and past experience all anchor the person. As a working hypothesis, it has proven fruitful to assume an underlying regularity to behaviour. Within the complexity of human nature, there is discernible order. When combined and interacting, our biology, our past experience, and our current situation powerfully influenced our behaviour. How powerfully? As research psychologist, we need not assume absolute determinism. We need only assume what is now beyond question—that there is order to human behaviour. For our research it matters little whether this order is rooted in an absolute determinism or whether random indeterminacies or self-determination means that we can only hope to describe behaviour in terms of probabilities. In either case, the enormous complexity of human nature will always limit us to statistical generalizations. Compared with predicting people, predicting the weather is easy. Nevertheless, let us imagine just for a few moments that our behaviour is absolutely determined and therefore, in principle, predictable to an all-knowing and all-wise scientist—the “ideal reasoner.” What then? Are the implications as terrible as most people suppose? (Note: we are not advocating absolute determinism, because we do not know what the ultimate truth is; we are simply attempting to clear away some misunderstandings about determinism.) One approach to this question is to consider the opposite—a World with no determinism and therefore, possibly, with utter unpredictability. Is it not in such a World, rather than the absolutely determined World, that people would adopt a fatalistic whatever-will-be-will-be attitude? #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

If people’s actions tomorrow were not influenced by the circumstances created today, then nothing we do today could make a difference. To act responsibly, we must have some idea of the effects of our actions. Indeed, it is a World in which our actions do have predictable effects that hope reigns eternal. If “you reap whatever you sow,” then we have a responsibility for the future. In a deterministic World the stream of causation runs from the past to the future through our choices today. Our decisions are on the cutting edge of reality; they make all the difference. A determinist such as the psychologist B. F. Skinner would therefore agree that we should “train children in the right way” and would understand how the sins of the parents are predictably laid upon their children “to the third and the fourth generations.” Morality requires at least some regularity and predictability. Here the mind boggles. Does not morality also require freedom to choose? How can a determined person be held morally accountable? What real choice does a determined person have? In one sense, an absolutely determined person can have complete freedom—freedom in the practical, political sense that people care about. The opposite of determinism is not freedom in this practical sense, but indeterminism. Whether determined or not, our hypothetical person experienced a genuine, uncoerced choice—coffee or tea. To repeat, even if our actions were absolutely determined, we would nevertheless be free to choose consciously among alternatives, knowing that what we decide can make a great difference and that society may hold us accountable. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

Indeed, we have freedom to decide and control our own future destinies. Personal causation—the effect of what we believe and choose—is a tremendously important concept in contemporary psychology. What determinism denies is not the practical consequences of our inner beliefs and choice, but the philosophical idea of agent causation—that people are ultimately self-determining. It is said our lives are measured by what we leave behind, but the most valuable legacy of all is a mind. Plan to take some time off, and give some thought to what you would do with that time; hopefully, you will spend part of it reviewing God’s favours to you in the past. What else? Lock up ye olde curiosity shoppe. Devote more time to reading your spiritual books than your survival manuals. Withdraw from causal conversations and leisurely pursuits. Do not contract for new ventures, and do not gossip about old ones. After you have done all these, you will find more than enough time to undertake a program of prayer. Most of the Saints did just that—avoided collaborative projects whenever they could, choosing instead to spend some private time with God. Seneca, that old pagan philosopher and playwright, had it right so many centuries ago. When he went out with the intelligentsia or hung around with entertainers, he retuned home utterly talked out and terribly hoarse, or so e said in one of his letters. Quite often we have the same experience when we horse around with our friends and associates for hours, even days, on end. What is the remedy for a talkathon? It is easier to cut out the conversation altogether than it is to cut down the size. What is the point? It is easier to stay at home alone than to stroll about the rialto with an entourage? #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

What is certain? Whoever wants to arrive at interiority and spirituality has to leave the crowd behind and spend some time with Jesus Christ. The Evangelists Mark (6.31) and Luke (5.16) wrote as much. What is the general wisdom? Nobody is comfortable in public unless one has spent a good deal of time in the quiet of one’s home. Nobody speaks with assurance who has not learned to hold one’s tongue. Nobody has a success as general who has not already survived as soldier. Nobody respects decrees who has not already obeyed writes. If you want to feel secure, then you have to have a good conscience. St Paul made that clear in his Second Letter to the Corinthians (1.12). And that is how the Saints did it. Virtue and Grace shone from their faces, but Fear of God ran deep in their very veins; even then they were subject to fits of spiritual anxiety and secular stress. As for the depraved, what security they do feel in their being rises from a swamp of pride and presumption. Is there a moral? On the outside you may appear modest as self-actualized or holy as a hermit; but on the inside, at least while you are on this Earth, you are seething and frothing and feeling anything but secure. More often than they might suspect, people of reputation have been in grave danger and did not know it. They are good people, but they have extended their self-confidence beyond its natural limit. From this one could draw the conclusion that it is helpful to be tempted from time to time. One might even say that to be tempted to the point of endurance could help deflate interior desolations and deflect exterior consolations. Your proper motivation should be, “I love the Lord.” #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

Spirit of love that flows against our flesh set it trembling moves across it as across grass, erasing every boundary that we accept, and swings the doors of our lives wide—this is a prayer I song: Save our perishing Earth! Spirit that cracks our single selves—eyes fall down eyes, hearts escape through the bars of our ribs to dart into other bodies—save this Earth! The Earth is perishing. This is a prayer I sing. Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the World which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His Kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all the house of America, speedily, yea, soon; and say ye, Amen. May His great name be blessed for ever and ever. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises, hymns and blessings that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. May there be abundant peace from Haven, and life for us and for all America; and say ye, Amen. May He who establish peace in the Heavens, grant peace unto us and unto all America; and say ye, Amen. Lord of the World—Lord of the World, the King supreme, ere aught was formed, He reigned alone. When by His will all things were wrought, then was His sovereign name made known. And when in time all things shall cease, He still shall reign in majesty. He was, He is, He shall remain all-glorious eternally. Incomparable, unique is He, no other His Oneness share. Without beginning, without end, dominion is might is His to bear. He is my living God who saves, my Rock when grief or trials befall, my Banner and my Refuge strong, my bounteous Portion when I call. My soul I give unto His care, asleep, awake, for He is near, and with my soul, my body, too; God is with me, I have no fear. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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July 9, 2021 1:36 am

If we mock that which we do not understand, we may learn too late that the penalty for such arrogance is annihilation. One mystery remains. Industrialism was a flash flood in history—a brief three centuries lost in the immensity of time. What caused the industrial revolution? What sent the Second Wave surging across the planet? Many streams of change flowed together to form a great confluence. The discovery of the New World sent a pulse of energy into Europe’s culture and economy on the eve of the industrial revolution. Population growth encouraged a movement into the towns. The exhaustion of the Britain’s timber forests prompted the use of coal. In turn, this forces the mine shafts deeper and deeper until the old horse-driven pumps could no longer clear them of water. The steam engine was perfected to solve this problem, leading to a fantastic array of new technological opportunities. The gradual dissemination of indust-real ideas challenged church and political authority. The spread of literacy, the improvement of roads and transport—all these converged in time, forcing open the floodgates of change. Any search for The cause of the industrial revolution is doomed. For there was no single or dominant cause. Technology, by itself, is not the driving force of history. Nor, by themselves, are ideas or values. Nor is the class struggle. Nor is history merely a record of ecological shifts, demographic trends, or communications inventions. Economics alone cannot explain this or any other historical event. There is no “independent variable” upon which all other variable depends. There are only interrelated variables, boundless in complexity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25

Faced with this maze of casual influences, unable even to trace all their interactions, the most we can do is focus on those that seem most revealing for our purposes and recognize the distortion implicit in that choice. In this spirit, it is clear that of all the many forces that flowed together form the Second Wave civilization, few had more traceable consequences than the widening split between producer and consumer, and the growth of that fantastic exchange network we now call the market, whether capitalist or socialist in form. The greater the divorce of producer from consumer—in time, in space, and in social and psychic distance—the more the market, in all its astonishing complexity, with all its train of values, its implicit metaphors and hidden assumptions, came to dominate social reality. As we have seen, this invisible wedge produced the entire modern money system with its central banking institutions, its stock exchange, its World trade, its bureaucratic planners, its stock exchanges, its World trade, its bureaucratic planers, its quantitative and calculating spirit, its contractual ethic, its materialist bias, is narrow measurement of success, its rigid reward systems, and its powerful accounting apparatus, whose cultural significance we routinely underestimate. From this divorce of producer from consumer came many of the pressures toward standardization, specialization, synchronization, and centralization. From it came differences in gender roles and temperament. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25

However we evaluate the many other forces that launched the Second Wave, this splitting of the ancient atom of production, consumption must surely rank high among them. The shock waves of that fission are still apparent today. Second Wave civilization did not merely alter technology, nature, and culture. It altered personality, helping to produce a new social character. Of course, women and children shaped Second Wave civilization and were shaped by it. However, because humans were drawn more directly into the market matrix and the new modes of work, they took on more pronounced industrial characteristics than women, and women readers will perhaps forgive the use of the term Industrial Man to sum up these new characteristics. Industrial Man was different from all his forerunners. He was the master of “energy slaves” that amplified his puny power enormously. He spent much of his life in a factory-style environment, in touch with machines and organizations that dwarfed the individual. He learned, almost from infancy, that survival depended as never before on money. He typically grew up in a nuclear family, and went to a factory-style school. He got his basic image of the World from the mass media. He worked for a large corporation or public agency, belonged to union, churches, and other organizations—to each of which he parceled out a piece of his divided self. He identified less and less with his village of city than with his nation. He saw himself standing in opposition to nature—exploiting it daily in his work. Yet he paradoxically rushed to visit it on weekends. (Indeed, the more he savaged nature, the more he romanticized and revered it with words.) He learned to see himself as part of a vast, interdependent economic, social, and political systems whose edges faded into complexities beyond his understanding. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25

Faced with this reality, he rebelled without success. He fought to make a living. He learned to play the games required by society, fitted into his assigned roles, often hating them and feeling himself a victim of the very system that improved his standard of living. He sensed straight-line time bearing him remorselessly toward the future with its waiting grave. And as his wristwatch ticked off the moments, he approached death knowing that the Earth and every individual on it, including himself, were merely part of a larger cosmic machine whose motions were regular and relentless. Industrial Man occupied an environment that would have been in many respects unrecognizable to his ancestors. Even the most elementary sensory signals were different. The Second Wave changed the soundscape, substituting the factory whistle for the rooster, the screech of tires for the chirruping of crickets. It lit up the night, extended the hours of awareness. It brought visual images no eye had ever seen before—the Earth photographed from the sky, or surrealist montages in the local cinema, or biological forms revealed for the first time by high-powered microscopes. The odor of night soil gave way to the smell of gasoline and the stench of phenols. The tastes of meat and vegetables were altered. The entire perceptual landscape was transformed. So too was the human body, which for the first time grew what we now regard as its full normal height; successive generations grew taller than their parents. Attitudes toward the body changed as well. Norbert Elias tells us in The Civilizing Process that, whereas up to the sixteenth century in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, “the sight of total nakedness was an everyday rule,” nakedness came to be regarded as shameful when the Second Wave spread. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25

Other changes with the Second Wave: Bedroom behaviour changed as special nightclothes came into use. Eating became technologized with the diffusion of forks and other specialized table implements. From a culture that took active pleasure in the sigh of a dead animal on the table came a shift toward one in which “reminders that the meat dish has something to do with the killing of an animal are to be avoided to the utmost.” Marriage became more than an economic convenience. War was amplified and put on the assembly line. Changes in the parent-child relationship, in opportunities for upward mobility, in every aspect of human relations brought for millions a radically changed sense of self. Faced by so many changes, psychological as well as economic, political as well as social, the brain boggles at evaluation. By what criteria do we judge an entire civilization? By the standard of living it provided for the masses who lived in it? By its influence on those who lived outside its perimeter? By its impact on the biosphere? By the excellence of its arts? By the lengthened life span of its people? By its scientific achievements? By the freedom of the individual? Within its borders, despite massive economic depression and a horrifying waste of human life, Second Wave civilization clearly improved the material standard of living of the ordinary person. Critics of industrialism, in describing the mass misery of the working class during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, often romanticize the First Wave past. They picture that rural past as warm, communal, stable, organic, and with spiritual rather than purely materialist values. Yet historical research reveals that these supposedly lovely rural communities were, in fact, cesspools of malnutrition, disease, poverty, homelessness, and tyranny, with people helpless against hunger, cold, and the whips of their landlords and masters. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25

Much has been made of the hideous slums that sprang up in or around the major cities, of the adulterated food, disease-bearing water supplies, the poorhouses and daily squalor. Yet, terrible as these conditions unquestionably were, they surely represented a vast improvement over the conditions most of these same people left behind. The British author John Vaizey has noted, “the picture of bucolic yeoman England was an exaggerated one,” and for significant numbers the move to the urban slum provided “in fact a dramatic rise in the standard of living, measured in terms of length of life, of a rise in the physical conditions of housing, and an improvement in the amount and variety of what they had to eat.” In terms of health, one need only read The Age of Agony by Guy Williams of Death, Disease and Famine in Pre-Industrial England by L.A. Clarkson to counteract those who glorify First Wave civilization at the expense of Second. Christina Larner, in review of these books, states, “The work of social historians and demographers has highlighted the overwhelming presence of disease, pain and death in the open countryside as well as the noxious towns. Life expectancy was low: about 40 years in the 16^th century, reduced to the mid-thirties in the epidemic-ridden 17^th century, rising to the early forties in the 18^th…It was rare for married couples to have long years together…all children were at hazard.” However justly we may criticize today’s crisis-ridden, misdirected health systems, it is worth recalling that before the industrial revolution official medicine was deadly, emphasizing bloodletting and surgery without anesthesia. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25

The major cause of death were plague, typhus, influenza, dysentery, smallpox, and tuberculosis. “It is often observed by the sages,” Larner writes dryly, “that we have merely replaced these by a different set of killers, but these do leave us till a little later. Pre-industrial epidemic disease killed the young indiscriminately with the old.” Moving from health and economics to art and ideology—was industrialism, for all its narrow-minded materialism, any more mentally stultifying than the feudal societies that preceded it? Was the mechanistic mentality, or indust-reality, any less open to new ideas, even heresies, than the medieval church or the monarchies of the past? For all we detest our giant bureaucracies, are they more rigid than the Chinese bureaucracies of centuries ago, or ancient Egyptian hierarchies? And as for art, are the novels and poems and paintings of the past three hundred and fifty years in the New World any less alive, profound, revealing, or complex than the works of earlier periods or different places? The dark side, however, is also present. While Second Wave civilization did much to improve the conditions of our fathers and mothers, it also triggered violent external consequences—unanticipated side effects. Among these was the rampant, perhaps irreparable damage done to the Earth’s fragile biosphere. Because of its indust-real bias against nature, because of its expanding population, its brute technology, and its incessant need for expansion, it wreaked more environmental havoc than any preceding age. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25

I have read the accounts of horse dung in the streets of preindustrial cities (usually offered as reassuring evidence that pollution is nothing new). I am aware that sewage filled the streets of ancient towns. Nevertheless, industrial society raised the problems of ecological pollution and resource use to a radially new level, making the present and past incommensurable. Never before did any civilization create the means for literally destroying not a city but a planet. Never did whole oceans face toxification, whole species vanish overnight from the Earth as a result of human greed or inadvertence; never did mines scar the Earth’s surface so savagely; never did hair-spray aerosols deplete the ozone layer, or thermopollution threaten the planetary climate. Similar but even more complex is the question of imperialism. The enslavement of Indians to dig the mines of South America, the introduction of plantation farming in large parts of Africa and Asia, the deliberate distortion of colonial economies to sui the needs of the industrial nations, all left agony, hunger, disease, and deculturation in their wake. He racism exuded by Second Wave civilization, the forced integration of small-scale self-sufficient economies into the World trade system, left festering wounds that have not yet begun to heal. However, once again it would be a mistake to glamorize these early subsistence economies. It is questionable whether the populations of even the non-industrial regions of the Earth are worse off today than they were three hundred and fifty years ago. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25

In terms of life span, food intake, infant mortality, literacy, as well as human dignity, hundreds of millions of human beings today, from the Sahel to Central America, suffer indescribable miseries. Yet it would be a disservice to them to invent a fake, romantic past in our rush to judge the present. The way into the future is not through reversion to an even more miserable past. Just as there is no single cause that produced Second Wave civilization, so there can be no single evaluation. I have tried to present a picture of Second Wave civilization with its faults included. If I appear on the one hand to condemn it and on the other to approve, it is because simple judgments are misleading. I detest the way industrialism crushed First Wave and primitive peoples. I cannot forget the way it massified war and invented Auschwitz and unleashed the atom to incinerate Hiroshima, Japan. I am ashamed of its cultural arrogance and its depredations against the rest of the World. I am sickened by the waste of human energy, imagination, and spirit in our low-income communities. Yet unreasoning hatred for one’s own time and people is hardly the best basis for creation of the future. Was industrialism an air-conditioned nightmare, a wasteland, an unmitigated horror? Was it a World of “single vision” as claimed by the enemies of science and technology? No doubt. However, it was far more than that as well. It was, like life itself, a bittersweet instant in eternity. However one choses to evaluate the fading present, it is vital to understand that the industrial game is over, its energies spent, the force of the Second Wave diminishing everywhere as he next wave of change begins. Two changes, by themselves, make the “normal” continuation of industrial civilization no longer possible. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25

First, we have reached a turning point in the “war against nature.” The biosphere will simply no longer tolerate the industrial assault. Second, we can no longer rely indefinitely on nonrenewable energy, until now the main subsidy of industrial development. These facts do not mean the end of technological society, or the end of energy. However, they do mean that all future technological advance will be shaped by new environmental constraints. They also mean that until new sources are substituted, the industrial nations will suffer recurrent, possibly violent withdrawal symptoms, with the struggle to substitute new forms of energy itself accelerating social and political transformation. One thing is apparent: we are at the end—at least for some decades—of affordable energy. Second Wave civilization has lost one of its two most basic subsidies. Simultaneously that other hidden subsidy is being withdrawn: inexpensive raw materials. Faced with the end of colonialism and neoimperialism, the high technology nations will either turn inward for new substitutes and resources, buying from one another and gradually lessening their economic ties with the non-industrial countries but under totally new terms of trade. In either case costs will rise substantially, and the entire resource base of the civilization will be transformed along with its energy base. These external pressures on industrial society are matched by disintegrative pressures inside the system. Whether we focus on the family system in the United States of America or the telephone system in France (which is worse today than in some banana republics), or the commuter rail system in Tokyo (which is so bad that riders have stormed the stations and held rail official hostage in protest), the story is the same: people and systems strained to the ultimate breaking point. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25

Second wave systems are in crisis. Thus we find crisis in the welfare systems. Crisis in the postal systems. Crisis in the housing system. Crisis in the school systems. Crisis in the news media operations. Crisis in the health-delivery systems. Crisis in the urban systems. Crisis in the international financial system. He nation-state itself is in crisis. The Second Wave value system is in crisis. Even the role system that held industrial civilization together is in crisis. This we see most dramatically in the struggle to redefine gender roles. In the women’s movement, in the demands for the legalization of alternative lifestyles, in the spread of gender neutral fashions, we see a continual blurring of the traditional expectations for the genders. Occupational role-lines are blurring, too. Nurses and patients alike are redefining their riles vis-à-vis doctors. Police and teachers are breaking out of their assigned roles and talking illegal strike actions. Paralegals are redefining the role of attorney and form clicks with politicians, law enforcement, and reports to spread “legal” gossip (nothing about the slanderous messages are actually lawful, it is called legal gossip because people involved with laws produce it). Workers, more and more, are demanding participation, infringing on traditional management roles. And this society-wide crack-up of the role structure upon which industrialism depended is far more revolutionary in its implications than all the overtly political protests and marches by which headline writers measure change. Furthermore, this convergence of pressures—the loss of key subsides, the malfunctioning of the main life-support systems of the society, the break-up of the role structure—all produce crisis in that most elemental and fragile of structures: the personality. The collapse of Second Wave civilization has created an epidemic of personality crisis. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25

Today we see millions desperately searching for their own shadows, devouring movies, plays, novels, and self-help books, no matter how obscure, that promise to help them locate their missing identities. In the United States of America, as we shall see, the manifestation of the personality crisis are bizarre. Its victims hurl themselves into group therapy, mysticism, or games involving pleasures of the flesh. They itch for change but are terrified by it. They urgently wish to leave their present existences and leap, somehow, to a new life—to become what they are not. They want to change jobs, spouses, roles, and responsibilities. Even supposedly mature and complacent American businessmen are not exempt from this disaffection with the present. The American Management Association finds in a recent survey that fully 40 percent of middle managers are unhappy in their jobs, and over a third dream of an alternative career in which they feel they would be happier. Some act on their dissatisfaction. They drop out, become farmers on ski bums, they search for new life-styles, they return to school or simply chase themselves faster and faster around a shrinking circle and eventually crack under the pressure. Rooting about in themselves for the source of their discomfort, they undergo agonies of unnecessary guilt. They seem blankly unaware that what they are feeling inside themselves is the subjective reflection of a much larger objective crisis: they are acting out an unwitting drama within a drama. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25

One can persist in viewing each of these various crises as an isolated event. We can ignore the connections between the energy crisis and the personality crisis, between new technologies and new gender roles, and other such hidden interrelationships. However, we do so at our peril. For what is happening is larger than any of these. Once we think in terms of successive waves of interrelated change, of the collision of these wave, we grasp the essential fact of our generation—that industrialism is dying away—and we can begin searching among signs of change for what is truly new, what is no longer industrial. We can identify the Third Wave. It is this Third Wave of change that will frame the rest of our lives. If we are to smooth the transition between the old dying civilization and the new one that is taking form, if we are to maintain a sense of self and the ability to manage our own lives through the intensifying crises that lie ahead, we must be able to recognize—and create—Third Wave innovations. For if we look closely around us we find, crisscrossing the manifestation of failure and collapse, early signs of growth and new potential. If we listen closely, we can hear the Third Wave already thundering on not so distant shores. While the first generation of post-World War suburban studies discovered alleged widespread suburban conformity, the 1960s research saw the effects of suburbanization as being far more problematical. Sociologists such as Bennett M. Berger, William Dobriner, and Herbert Gans began examining how much of the popularly accepted view of suburbia was reality and how much was myth. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25

The empirical question being asked was whether the commonly accepted “facts” regarding suburbia were indeed facts or simply widely accepted beliefs. In simple terms, did moving from city to suburb change social behaviour? A major attempt to answer this question was Bennett M. Berger’s Working Class Suburbs. Berger carried out an empirical study of the actual effects of suburbanization on new working-class suburbanites. Berger was able to carry out a natural experiment by studying a group of northern California autoworkers who were forced to suburbanize from industrial Richmond, California, in order to keep their jobs at a Ford Motor Car assembly line that was being relocated to a suburban location at Milpitas, California. The possible effects of social class were all controlled, since all the workers were working class and from the same plant. Berger thus was able to examine the effect of the change of location on the workers’ behaviours, attitudes, and values. He was particularly interested in the effects of the move on political behaviour, religion, leisure activities, and social mobility. What Berger, somewhat surprisingly, discovered was that two years after the move, the workers’ values and social behaviours were virtually unaffected by the suburban move. They did not join neighbourhood groups, change their religious affiliation or practice, or switch from the Democratic part. Nor did they have expectations of social mobility; they knew they were going to remain at their current level. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25

Berger thus labeled the widely held belief that suburbanization affected beliefs and behaviours “the myth of suburbia.” As stated by Berger: “The studies that have given rise to the myth of suburbia have been studies of middle–class, that is suburbs of very large cities populated primarily by people in the occupational groups often thought of as making up the new middle-class—the engineers, teachers, and organization men.” William Dobriner further reinforced this view that there was not one suburban lifestyle but rather that there were a number of lifestyles. He focused on differences between middle-class and working-class suburbs by showing how the original Levittown on Long Island was becoming more heterogenous as more blue-collar and Catholic families moved into the suburb. Social classes rather than suburban residence was the important variable. Suburban newcomers, for instance, were voting on the bases of socioeconomic and ethnic factors rather than the location of their homes. Dobriner also pointed to the age of the community as a second defining variable. Reinforcing the above was Herbert Gans’s now classic participant observation study, The Levittowners  (Gans, 1967). This was a detailed look at a new Levitt and Sons suburban development being constructed 17 miles east of Philadelphia in New Jersey. (The community later changed its nae to Willingboro to escape the Levittown stereotype.) A new Levittown of 12,000 homes was being constructed, and Gans and his wife became two of the new homeowners. He wanted to discover how living in such an instant suburb would affect social behaviour. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25

After two years of residence and a study of two sets of Levittown newcomers, Gans found there were few differences that occurred in lifestyle that could be attributed to city-suburban differences. There were some differences, such as more sociability among neighbourhood couples over back fences while doing lawnwork. Gans, however, suggested that the sociability that occurred within Levittown was not a result of suburban residence, but rather a direct consequence of the homogeneity of residents’ backgrounds, particularly in age and income. He also discovered that there was more diversity in terms of ethnicity, regional background, and religious beliefs than critics of suburbs had allowed. Active sociability only occurred when neighbouring residents shared common values and tastes and had similar child-rearing practices. Gans also discovered that Levittown more than met the social and limited cultural needs of most of its residents while providing good housing for the price. There was no evidence of the suburb creating mental illness or social pathologies. He suggested that any differences from city dwellers that occurred were because of suburbs attracting people with different needs and interests rather than because of the suburban environment per se. In other words, suburbs and cities were home to different sorts of people. Rather than the suburbs forcing people to conform, the move allowed the new suburbanites to have the greater interaction with neighbours they had always wanted. The effect of the environment itself was seen as negligible. If any, residence was seen little effect on behaviour—a view we have had to modify as being as extreme as the earlier view the residence determined behaviour. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25

It also deserves noting that the limitations of suburban life stressed by critics have not been echoed by suburban residents. National surveys going back several decades indicate that suburban residents have a higher degree of satisfaction with their communities than do city residents. Suburbanites also are more likely to rate the cultural opportunities and activities in their areas slightly higher than do city dwellers. Suburbanites, additionally are much more satisfied with a whole range of community facilities and services including schools, police protection, parks and community services. Suburbanites are also more likely to know their neighbours and have friends among neighbours. Residents of new fast-growing suburbs tend to express somewhat lower satisfaction than longer-term residents in fast-growing suburbs are more satisfied with their communities than are city residents. It is likely that differences in evaluation of suburbs and central cities reflects some self-selection, with those desiring a more familistic and neighbouring orientation gravitating toward suburbs. For those seeking home ownership and yard space, the suburb clearly is the preferred choice. Also listed as influencing satisfaction with suburbs have been the general economic advantage of the suburbs and the greater predominance of traditional family patterns. Greater length of residence in the community has also been found to encourage neighbouring. The end result, whatever the causes, is that suburbanites clearly and consistently indicate a preference for suburban living. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25

If decades of suburbanites have been living the shallow lives of quiet desperation portrayed by some novelists and critics, it has been kept secret from most of them. If we teach our children by example, then we only have ourselves to blame for whom they become.  Just as philosophy seeks a full rounded development of the psyche in its approach to spiritual self-realization, so does it seek a full adequate treatment in its approach to the problem of curing sickness. It recognizes that even if a sickness began with evil thought or wrong feelings or disharmonious courses of action, these have already worked their way into and affected the physical body and brought about harmful changes in it, either causing its organs to work badly, or introducing poisons into its blood system, or even creating malignant growth in its tissues. Therefore physical means must also be used to treat these physical conditions, as well as the spiritual means to get rid of wrong thoughts to make an adequate treatment. Consequently philosophy does not, like Christian Science, deny the utility of necessity of ordinary medical treatment. On the contrary, it welcomes such treatment, provided it is not narrow-minded, materialistic, or selfishly concerned more with fees than with healing. Why should we no unite working on the body by physical means with working on it by the healing power of the higher self? Why not give the latter a chance to repair its own work, since the physical-mental ego is its own projection? There is no need to make the mistake of those cults which avoid mention of the body and its sickness, which pretend that both are not here. Let the fact of their existence be there but, at the same time, hold the thought of the Overself’s superior power over them. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25

The art of healing needs all the contributions it can get, from all the worthy sources it can find. It cannot realize all its potentialities unless it accepts them all: the homeopath along with the allopath, the naturopath along with the chiropractor, the psychiatrist along with the spiritual ministrant. It does not need them all together at one and the same time, of course, but only as parts of is total resources. A philosophic attitude refuses to bind itself exclusively to any single form of cure. The integrity of the personality can be disrupted by splits which come about after a period of what had seemed to be normal integration. Psychic structures which were at one time organized together may lost their interconnections and fall apart. This return to simpler structures is variously called “dissociation,” “dedifferentiation,” “disintegration,” “regression” to a simpler state of mind. It is how we feel—to a mild extent—when we feel not very well, as in a bad bout of flu. Everything is simplified, we do not have the energy to maintain a highly differentiated set of responses. We feel surprisingly fretful and in need of indulgence. We revert to childish comforts which we thought we had outgrown—sweet, mouth-filling, warm, relaxing things. Ego-functioning is slack; we are more child-like, more easily distracted, more vulnerable to slights and hurts we can usually take in our stride. The controls are weaker. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the World.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 25

The values at the center do not feel connected with the impulses demanding expression. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. And yet, as the final lines suggest, new and very constructive things may come from such anarchic states. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” This poem by Yeats describes a deep and mysterious process of dissolution and relevant to many kinds of creative work. Nina Coltart (1985) used it to illustrate the work of psycho-analysts. Ehrenzweig (1967) based his whole theory of art on similar premises. If we cannot tolerate incoherence, disorganization, and splitting, we cannot create anything new. Splits which may fragment structures does not seem integrated until a moment of stress cases disruption. The personality is like a landscape with geological history. In this landscape are features caused by long-ago events: mountains and oceans, scraps, crags, and valleys left behind after major upheavals; millennia of weather and the slow grind of glaciers have had their effects. Now plants cover the Earth; not immediately apparent in the landscape are faults in the geological structure—faults not in the sense of errors or sins, but weaknesses in the terrain, where the ground may crumble and crack in times of strain. A number of writers have contributed to our understanding the causes and development of such faults. One kind of fault or permanent weakness is the result of bodily damage. Regardless of a parent’s loving wishes, it may happen that an individual is left for long periods in extreme conditions of hunger, heat, cold, sensory deprivation or whatever. Or it can happen that an individual is born with a physical disability. Or permanent damage may be done by disease, or when an individua is accidently badly hurt in wars or famines or earthquakes—or modern traffic.  #RandolphHarris 20 of 25

The effect of disaster at a bodily level may be to inflict so great a wound on the self-image—“a narcissistic wound”—that the memories of it are kept so isolated forever, and the rest of the personality develops out of touch with those memory-traces. That is where the weakness will be, the fault. There is an example of a traumatic bodily event leading to a young woman’s breakdown. In this story, the trauma happened when the child was four. She was not helped to recognize, put into words, express, or accept the pain and the outrage she had experienced at the time of a surgical operation. On the contrary, all around her denied that anything bad had been happening. The experience remained so isolated that the girl had no idea of it, but she did feel the feelings associated with it. She tried to be good, living in a family which was certainly “good enough” in spite of some shortcomings, but she battled ineffectually with the sullen resentment, hatred, and contempt which kept rising up in her, which no one could understand. To me, it seems urgent to have more research into the consequences of injury to the body before body-imagery is stabilized. Body-imagery is the precursor of self-imagery, with which the sense of identity is closely connected. It is surely important to know more about the psychological effects of the incubators used to protect very premature or very ill infant, who necessarily must put up with an abnormal amount of sensory deprivation. And how are those infants affected, whose eyes are treated with a tincture at birth, as a medically approved preventative measure—a procedure which blinds them for the first few days of life? There must be many ways in which the normal gradual development of imagery about what it means to be a bodily person—and of imagery about what the World has to offer—is so disruptive as to leave ill effects which we do not know how to eradicate. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25

Moreover, we must do more research on damage caused, not by bodily distress or injury, but by other bodily circumstances. Who can tell the good and bad effect of living infant on their own in cots for long periods, instead of letting them be in touch with a human being much of the time? Who can tell the psychological advantages and disadvantages of the rocking cradle? Generally the experience starts with inability to sleep at night causing a restless feeling, but around midnight a throbbing of the solar plexus start and this powerful force is felt there. It mounts and then there is a kind of change of consciousness, a feeling of not being the body, almost of being out of it and separated from it, of being weightless and in space yet near to the body, developed. The dynamic character of the experience is followed by a sense of utter peace. Nevertheless, the infant seems to know that there was something beyond this which one has not attained. One wants to attain it so one resolves to continue the experience by crying, if they do not fall asleep first. People need to be shown something besides materialism, and when our spirit leaves our body, it is not the end. We are here to realize Oneness with God and will come back until we achieve this. Do you not think that humanism is a more beneficial answer, one that pleases God just as well as all that spirituality? Many people are not spiritual, yet are god and compassionate. What should a human do to live a perfect life in Gods eyes? Simply reaffirm the oneness of your soul with the Infinite Soul. Prayer means to know that you are one with God. Practical experience in prayer is simply to recognize oneness with God, omnipresence of God, and activity of God within one here and now. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25

Suburbs are like incubators for people who want protection from abnormal aspects of the World.  Here churches become country clubs. When we call on Him, how close is Christ! If only Churches would encourage worshippers to look within as the only place to find God! Light is only the opening of the door, the beginning. The final state is oneness with infinite intelligence. In everything we do we ought to think of God, and thus reduce ego to nothingness. That which is behind our eyes, never dies. Sometimes a beautiful white star appears in the blue light another time intercessionary prayer. “Quiet”, a fourteenth-century Mount Athos mystical system: Its chief tent was that by perfect quiet of body and mind man is able to arrive at vision of the “Uncreated Light of the Godhead.” The result of these practices was ineffable joy and seeing the Light, which surrounded Our Lord on Mount Tabor. It was held that this Light was not God’s essence, which is unapproachable, but his Energy which can be perceived by the senses, and that it was this Light, and not, as Western theologians hold, God’s Essence, which is the object of the beatific Vision. Philotheus Kokkinus in his contribution to the anthology called Hagiortic Tome, written at Mount Athos about 1339, states that the Mount Athos doctrine of Divine Light was revealed experientially to the contemplatives who lived there. The Russian Staretz (experienced spiritual guide) Silouan, who lived on Athos for more that forty years until he died in 1938, saw the Christ at the door leading to the sanctuary of church joining his monastery, saw too a great light all around, felt himself transported to Heaven while joy and peace filled his heart. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25

The vision was ever after regarded as the peak of his inner life, but the uplift it brought slowly faded away. It did not exempt him from further struggles and strains of his ascetic existence, as well as dark nights of the soul. These gave him a great humility, which smashed any pride the glimpse might have engendered. Dionysios, the founder of one of the Athos monasteries, lived in a cave as a hermit high up on a mountainside; he saw one day a strange supernatural light shinning lower down. He felt inspired to build a monastery at the spot and eventually persuaded the emperor to materialize his inspiration. This was in the fourteenth century and the buildings are still there. The first thing that God gave the created World was physical light. The firs communication God makes to the man who has attained His presence is the vision of supernatural Light. This is the doctrine held by the Eastern Church, which calls what is seen “the Uncreated Light.” During this rare experience the man feels that he is free from Earthly attachments and Worldly desires, that the intense peace one enjoys is the true happiness, that God’s reality is the overwhelming fact of existence. This vision is a gift, a grace, so it may come suddenly, unexpectedly, but more often it comes to someone who has prepared himself or herself for it by purification and contemplation. Long ago, the ancients say this land was free and we shared it all with the mountains and the sea, the birds and the trees, we lived in peace long ago. As time went on and the population grew, the birds sang less, trees were cut down; without trees the land became dry. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25

Without the bird to plant the flowers, we too became quiet, watching our mountains die, listening for the birds that no longer flew—but still we lived in peace. What sustained us through those years? The nights of silence and the songs of the frogs, for we know as the ancients said this land will again be free and we will again share it all with the mountains and the sea, the birds and the trees for we still live in peace and we wish you the same for we are all one. Please give us insight this hour of grief, that from the depths of suffering may come a deepened sympathy for all who are bereaved, that we may feel the heart-break of our fellow humans and find our strength in helping them. Heartened by this hymn of praise to Thee, we bear our sorrow with trustful hearts, and knowing Thou art near, shall not despair. With faith in Thine eternal wisdom, we who mourn, rise to sanctify Thy name. Almighty and eternal Father, in adversity as in joy, Thou, our source of life, art ever with us. As we recall with affection those whom Thou, our source of life, art ever with us. As we recall with affection those whom Thou hast summoned into Thee, we thank Thee for the example of their lives, for our sweet companionship with them, for the cherished memories and the undying inspiration they leave behind. In tribute to our departed who are bound with Thee in the bond of everlasting life, may our lives be consecrated to Thy service. Comfort, we pray Thee, all who mourn. Though they may not comprehend Thy purpose, keep steadfast their trust in Thy wisdom. Do Thou, O God, give them strength in their sorrow, and sustain their faith in Thee as they rise to sanctify Thy name. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25

Cresleigh Homes

Whether you’re admiring the guest bedroom or getting ready for spa night in the Primary bedroom’s ensuite, living life at #MillsStation Residence 2 means enjoying clean, modern lines in a familiar family home layout. 😍

Check out the interactive floor plan on our website! Link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-2/

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July 8, 2021 12:06 am