The idea that we belong to communities and that these communities provide benefits and responsibilities is one that has gained a growing appreciation in the last few decades. As a reaction to the urbanization faced by many people, globalization, cross-national forms of media and their impact on cultures, physical and social isolation from family and friends, and a growing fear of change and the unknown, images of community, belonging and support have become paramount. However, what is meant by community, how a community functions, and what are the benefits and costs of community membership has not necessarily been well explored. For many, the idea of community evokes images of the small town or close neighbourhood. People know each other, often have been resident for some generations, and provide various types of instrumental or emotional support to other members of the community. It is an idealization in place and time of other members of the community. It is an idealization in place and time of feeling a part of a place, with those around knowing us and caring about us. In many ways, it is a village in which relationships are governed by kinship and centered on the parish church. Integration and fulfillment of needs reflects the benefits that people derive from their membership of a community. Some of the needs can be fulfilled through community membership status achieved through group membership, demonstration of competence by members, and the shared values that are exhibited by the group. For them, strong communities can provide these opportunities for their members, thus reinforcing the value of membership of the community. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

There is also a shared emotional connection. This refers to the sharing of significant events and the amount of contact that members have with each other. Because the community has had significant events, whether the members have taken part in them, there is a bond that can be developed between the members. The number of events, the salience of these events, and the importance of them in conferring merit or status to the community and its members all influence the development of a shared emotional connection between community members. Whether the events are positive or negative, they still have significant impacts on the development of emotional connections between members. Intelligence has an effectiveness as an instrument in modifying the World. Thinking is not a series of transcendent states or acts interjected into a natural scene. Knowledge is a part of nature, and its end is not mere passive adjustment but the manipulation of the environment to provide consummatory satisfactions. An idea is a plan of action rooted in the natural impulses and responses of the organism. The “spectator theory of knowledge” is pre-Darwinian. The biological point of view commits us to the conviction that mind, whatever else it may be, is at least an organ of service for the control of the environment in relation to the ends of the life process. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

The ultimate refuge of the standpatter in every field, education, religion, politics, industrial and domestic life, has been the notion of an alleged fixed structure of mind. If mind is conceived as an antecedent and ready-made thing, institutions and customs may be regarded as its offspring. Intelligence operates within a series of objectively “indeterminate” situations. It is from the indeterminateness of the situations, from the element of contingency in nature, that the discriminating intellect derives its special significance. The significance of morals and politics, of religion and science, have their source and meaning in the union in Nature of the settled and the unsettled, the stable and the hazardous. Without this union there can be no such things as “ends,” either in the form of human consummations or as purposes. There is only a block universe, either something ended and admitting of no change, or else a predestined march of events. There is no such thing as fulfillment where there is no risk of failure, and no defeat where there is no promise of possible achievement. Philosophers must shift their attention from the sterile aspects of epistemology and metaphysics to politics, education, and morals. Philosophy will become, among other things, a moral and political diagnosis and prognosis. When psychology is founded upon the primary fact of impulse, the positive motivation of the organism is just the fact needed to give firm support to the main contentions in life. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

The elimination of conflict from society is a hopeless and self-contradictory ideal, but it is possible to direct the struggle to eliminate waste. In the continual sacrifice of the individual to the conditions of progress, we see a hopeless confusion about the relation of ends and means. The individual forever sacrifices himself to the welfare of future generations, but since the individual of future generations do the same, the process never reaches any consummation in human satisfactions. Man always sacrifices toward an end which is by definition never attained. It is the reductio ad absurdum of the philosophy of progress. Direct participation in events is necessary to genuine understanding. No universal proposition can be laid down to determine the functions of a state. We must bring to order out of the moral confusion caused by the apparently conflicting aims of morality and science. What man thinks consciously is determined by forces which operate behind his back, that is, without man’s knowledge; man explains his actions to himself as being rational or moral and these rationalizations (false consciousness, ideology) satisfy him subjectively. However, being driven by forces unknown to him, man is not free. He can attain freedom (and health) only by becoming aware of these motivating forces, that is of reality, and thus he can become the master of his life (within the limitations of reality) rather than the slave of blind forces. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The ethical process, like the activity of the gardener, is one of constant struggle. We can never allow things simply to go on of themselves. If we do, the result is retrogression. However, what is the significance of this apparent opposition between the ethical process and the cosmic process, in the light of our idea of the evolutionary process as a whole? The conflict is not one in which man is pitted against his entire natural environment, but one in which man modifies one part of the environment with relation to another. He does not work with anything that is totally alien to his entire environment. The gardener may introduce foreign fruits or vegetables into a particular locale, and he may assist their growth by conditions of sunlight and moisture unusual on his plot of ground; but these conditions fall within the wont and use of nature as a whole. The survival of the fittest is different from the survival of the ethically best. Yet must not the conditions be interpreted as a whole complex, including the existing social structure with all the habits, demands, and ideals which are found in it? Under such an interpretation the fittest would in truth be the best. The unfit would be practically equivalent to the antisocial, but not to the physically weak or the economically dependent. The dependent classes in society may be quite “fit” when measured by the whole of the environment. The prolongation of the period of dependency in man has developed foresight and planning and the bonds of social unity; the care of the sick has taught us how to protect the healthy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

What was fit among carnivora is not fit among men. Man lives in such a changing and progressive environment that in his case it is flexibility, readiness to adjust to the conditions of the morrow as well as the present, that constitutes fitness. As the meaning of environment changes, the meaning of the struggle for existence changes also. The biological promptings of self-assertion have potentialities for good as well as evil. The essence of the human problem is controlled foresight—ability to maintain the institutions of the past while remaking them to suit new conditions; in short, to maintain a balance between habits and aims. The term “selection” can mean not only that one form of life, one organism, is selected at the expense of another, but also that various modes of action and reaction are selected by an organism or a society because of their superiority over other modes. Society has its own mechanisms, public opinion and education, to select the modes it finds most suitable. There is, then, no bifurcation between the ethical process and the cosmic process. The difficulty has been created by static interpretations of biological functions and their applications out of context to the unique and dynamic conditions of human environment. It is not necessary to go outside of Nature to find warrant for the ethical process; one need only recognize the natural situation in its totality. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Man’s consciousness is determined by his being, his being by his practice of life, his practice of life by his mode of producing his livelihood, that is, by his mode of production and the social structure, mode of distribution and consumption resulting from it. Pragmatism, the cash-value of ideas, is not an abject apology for the acquisitive spirit of business culture. Society only influences his being by greater or lesser repression of his innate physiological and biological equipment. Dr. Freud believed that man can overcome repression without social changes. Marx on the other hand, was the first thinker who saw that the realization of the universal and fully awakened man can occur only together with social changes which lead to a new and truly human economic and social organization of mankind. For any experience to come into awareness, it must be comprehensible in accordance with the categories in which conscious thought is organized. I can become aware of any occurrence, inside or outside of myself, only when it can be linked with the system of categories in which I perceive. Some of the categories, such as time and space, may be universal, and may constitute categories of perception common to all men. Others, such as causality, may be a valid category for many, but not for all forms of conscious perception. Other categories are even less general and different from culture to culture. For instance, in a pre-industrial culture people may not perceive certain things in terms of their commercial value, while they do so in an industrial system. #RandolphhHarris 7 of 20

However this may be, experience can enter into awareness only under the condition that it can be perceived, related, and ordered in terms of a conceptional system. With the problem of childhood amnesia of childhood memories, and with the difference between the categories (“schematas”) employed by the child and those employed by the adult, the incompatibility of early childhood experience with the categories and organization of adult memory is largely due to the conventionalization of memory. Furthermore, the problem is not only that of memory, but also that of consciousness in general. This system is a result of social evolution. Every society, by its own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feeling and perceiving, develops a system, or categories, which determines the forms of awareness. This system works, as it were, like a socially condition filter: experience cannot enter awareness unless it can penetrate this filter. The question, then, is to understand more concretely how this “social filter” operates, and how it happens that it permits certain experiences to be filtered through while others are stopped from entering awareness. First of all, we must consider that many experiences do not lend themselves easily to being perceived in awareness. Pain is perhaps the physical experience which best lends itself to being consciously perceived; desires for pleasures of the flesh, hunger, etcetera, also are easily perceived; quite obviously, all sensations which are relevant to individual, or group survival have easy access to awareness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

However, when it comes to a more subtle or complex experience, like “seeing a rosebud in the early morning, a drop of dew on it, while the air is still chilly, the sun coming up, a bird singing” –this is an experience which, in some cultures, easily lends itself to awareness (for instance, in Japan), while in modern Western culture this same experience will usually not come into awareness because it is not sufficiently “important” or “eventful”  to be noticed. Whether or not subtle effective experiences can arrive at awareness depends on the degree to which such experiences are cultivated in each culture.  There are many affective experiences for which a given language has no word, while another language may be rich in words which express these feelings. In a language in which different affective experiences are not expressed by different words, it is almost impossible for one’s experiences to come to clear awareness. It may be said that an experience rarely comes into awareness for which the language has no word. This fact is of social relevance about such experiences which do not fit into our intellectual rational scheme of things. In English, for instance, the word “awe” (like in Hebrew “nora”) means two different things. Awe is the feeling of intense fright as it is still indicated in “awful”: and awe also means something like intense admiration, as we still find it in awesome (and in awed by). #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

One general consideration may be introduced at this point concerning the concept of happiness. The term “happiness” has a long history, and this is not the place to go into the meaning of the concept from its derivation from Greek hedonism to its contemporary usage. It may suffice to say that what most people experience as happiness today is really a state of full satisfaction of their desires regardless of their quality; if it is conceived in this sense, it loses the important qualifications which Greek philosophy gave it, namely, that happiness is not a state of fulfillment of purely subjective needs but of those needs which have an objective validity in terms of the total existence of man and his potentialities. We would do better to think of joy and intense aliveness instead of happiness. The sensitive person, not only in an irrational society but also in the best of all societies, cannot help being deeply saddened by the inevitable tragedies of life. Both joy and sadness are unavoidable experiences for the sensitive and alive person. Happiness in its present meaning usually implies a superficial, contented states of satiation, rather than that condition accompanying the fullness of human experience; “happiness” may be said to be the alienated form of joy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

It is a crazy gift we have, this trickery. My inside knowing of it is remembered only as far back as my own third year when: My mother and father laugh at me because I am enchanted by a hole in the ground. The hole is being dug on the next street so I cannot go there alone. I wait with excitement for my father to take me. When he does, I look into that ever-deepening hole with the same fascination that I watch my mother peel potatoes, noticing the changing form, the changing colour, the changing texture, and the changing fragrance of both holes in the ground and potatoes. My father tells my mother, “A hole in the ground!” (the way that he says it, I know is not much.) “You’d think there was a magnet at the bottom. If I didn’t hold her hand, she’d tumble right in.” (I do not catch all those words at the time. There are too many that I do not know. I hear them later on, when my father tells someone, and I remember my pain, and what I did about it.) My mother and father laugh together and are tender with me and love me, but they do not understand. I feel alone, and my enchantment is bleeding around the edges. I am the angry which is hurt. Being at the moment true to me, I scowl at my parents. They jolly me then, because children must be kept happy. And then I am not true to me. I laugh, because in that grownup World of which I would like to be a part, that is the thing to do. (A few years later, when I am attracted by a hole in the ground, I drop a marble into it, so that if anyone comes along I can say that I am looking for my marble, not that I am enjoying the hole, which would be ridiculed.) #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

There are times when I scowl at my parents not because I am misunderstood, or not understood, but because I have discovered that that is a way to get their attention. And then, when they have brought me around from scowls to laughter they are very pleased with both themselves and me. And I am pleased with myself for having figured this out. That is a long way from being happy with a hole in the ground. Less than three years in this World, and I have got involved in cleverness. I did not develop that all by myself. Already my parents have been tricking me, and I have watched other trickery go on with aunts and uncles, grandpa…My parents and I love each other and enjoy each other. Most of the time we are sensitive to each other at some level. We do not know that increasingly we are being superficial, that there is a dimension missing, and that their lack of respect for me is developing into me a lack of respect for them. They respect me in the outside things, like letting me paint the railings on the porch and carry things that would break if I dropped them, but they do not respect my insides because they think I have not any. When I am playing on the floor, they talk together or with other people about things I am “too little to understand” and so it is all right to say to them. However, they do not know what my understanding is, and I have no way to tell them. So it goes round and round inside my head. Sometimes I understand some things, and I am hurt. Other times, I do not understand and I try to put things together, with not enough information in my head to arrive at making sense. So what I make of it is nonsense, but I do not know that. And sometimes what I make of it will not stay put. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

I think if it one way and I hurt, so I think of it another way so I will feel comfortable. However, it slips around, and I do not know which way it is. I am too young to know that the word for my trouble is confusion. To my parents, aunts and uncles, my life is good: I have loving parents, aunts and uncles, and “How blessed it is to be a child and have no worries.” To me, if often seems that I must have been born to the wrong parents, or that these are not my parents, because my real parents would know me. My sister, older than I, bewilders me, because sometimes she is a child with me, and then suddenly she switches and talks like a grownup. She tells me what to think and feel. What I thinking and feel she says is silly. A moment ago, she was agreeing with me. Sometimes I fight my sister about this. However, sometimes I say that I think and feel what she does, and then I feel BIG. However, then I get all mixed up and I am crying “Who am I?” And no one helps me with that because it is a silly question. I am me. Who else could I be? This seems so to me, too, so why is it that I do not know? There must be something so wrong with me that no one will tell me about it. I talk to my puppy and my dolls, and to the trees. They do not confuse me because they listen, and I can say anything I want and they do not talk back. They go on listening. And then I begin to hear myself and know it is me. No possessive relationship between two human beings can last forever. To ask such a thing is to ask for the impersonal universe to change its laws of growth for the sake of pleasing its ungrown progeny. God is entirely self-sufficient and if God’s children are to grow increasingly into his likeness, they can do so only by becoming less dependent on others, more sufficient unto themselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

A false, showy, and pretentious cheerfulness which ignores facts, represses truths, and hides evils is not really cheerful at all. It is well to remember not to let oneself become the victim of negative feelings or harsh thoughts. They do not mend matter but only make you suffer more, and also suffer needlessly. It is one of the side effects of philosophy that it purifies human affection, takes the littleness out of it, and lifts it to a higher and wider plane. This may bring some pain or it may bring a shared pleasure, depending on those involved in the experience. If ignorance, credulity, naivete, or imbalance are the accompaniment, it is excellent but not enough to be well-meaning, to have a pure intent, to be guided by feeling alone. For there are traps and quicksands, illusions, and deceits in life as on the quest. No human being has the right to claim another as his own. Each stands ultimately alone and essentially isolated. Each is born out of and must find his way back to spiritual solitude. For each must learn to be divinely self-reliant and self-sufficient. This is so because the soul is of the nature of God. How much misery has come into contemporary life through non-recognition of this fact! How much bitterness has come to the unwilling possessed ones or to the defeated would-be possessors! The way to get rid of an obstinate negative feeling is to supersede it by a new positive one of greater intensity. If success is to be attained, right thoughts about the wrong feeling will help to correct it, right imaginations about the new one will help to bring it in, but feeling itself must be invoked and fostered. In most human relations, egoism in one person is replied by egoism in the other. He has feelings but they are so poised that they never disturb, so balanced with reason that they never agitate, and so harmonized with intuition that they never excite him. If anyone is to carry out Christ’s bidding of reconciliation with enemies and forgiveness of those who have harmed him, he can do so only by giving up the ego.  #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Our dear friend Clare, her whole self-analysis illustrated the validity of one who was able to choose the factors which were involved in her problems which she could grasp at the time, and she refrained from embarking upon problems that were still deeply repressed. With apparent insouciance she never bothered to tackle any problem that did not elicit a response in her, though it might almost stare her in the face. Without knowing anything about the principle of guidance through interest she intuitively applied it throughout her work, and it served her well. One example may stand for many. In the series of associations ending with the first emergence of the daydream of the great man, Clare recognized merely the role that the need for protection played in her relationships. The suggestions concerning her other expectations of men she discarded entirely, though they were an obvious and prominent part of the daydream. This intuitive choice took her on the best course she could have followed. By no means did she merely move on familiar ground. The finding that a need for protection was an integral part of her “love” was a discovery of a factor hitherto unknown. Furthermore, as will be remembered, this discovery constituted the first inroad on her cherished illusion of “love,” a painful and incisive step. To have taken up at the same time the aggravating problem of her sponging attitude on men would certainly have been too hard, unless she had dealt with it in a superficial way. This brings up a last point: it is not possible to absorb more than one important insight at a time. An attempt to do so will be detrimental to both, or all, of them. If it is to “sink in” and take root, any relevant insight needs time and undivided concentration. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Most of the previous writers developed their theories out of an interest in the unhealthy personality. However, almost all of them found it necessary to make some postulations, some suggestions for the concept of the idealized personality. The oldest, most venerable school, that of Dr. Freud and psychoanalysis, fixed the pattern of such emphases. Dr. Freud contented himself by stating that health consisted in the ability to love and to do productive work. Healthy personality, in psychoanalytic terms, is an outcome of harmony among id, ego, and superego. According to the psychoanalysts, personality is divided into three substructures—the id, the ego, and the superego. Id is the term used to refer to instincts. Ego refers to the active, controlling, perceiving, learning functions of personality. Superego refers to the moral ideals and taboos a person acquires as he or she grows up. It is the task of the ego to scan external reality and inner experience and then choose action that will gratify needs without violating moral taboos—in other words, to mediate between id and superego. A healthier personality would be able to gratify needs and yet remain free of guilt or of social blame. Because one would be less prone to prevent some feelings from coming to the surface (such repression consumes energy), energy would be available for productive work. Because one would not be ashamed of feelings and emotions (because of a reasonable conscience), one could be freer in expressing oneself in loving relationships. Hence, the relationship between ability to love and work, and the concept of harmony among id, ego, and superego, can assume greater meaning. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

The Sacramento Fire Department looks for the most qualified applicants that they can find, and many people cherish their jobs. “I went to college in bits and pieces. I took some fire science work at the community college. I went back to Santa Clara University for a term to get a degree in public administration. The trouble was, I was an officer of our union, a local of the International Association of Firefighters, while most of the professors were management oriented. We had serious ideological clashes about management relations, and finally I just didn’t go back to school. I’ve had some misgivings about that. The fire service did two things for me, really. I provided a service, and yet, for a young man who was looking for some excitement, it provided that, too. Our fire department has changed. When I joined in 1975, it was a very conservative kind of environment. The music in the firehouses was mostly country and western. Not too long ago, I remember getting back from an alarm at two in the morning, and the guys in the day room were watching MTV. I was thirty-three years old and the oldest guy on the crew. It just shows you how things have changed. When I first joined, there was this generational thing. The hair code was a major issue. A lot of social stuff spilled over into the fire service. A guy who came on probation with me had a mustache. The battalion chief told him, ‘You know, we’ve never had anyone with a mustache make it through probation.’ I’m not sure if this guy was naïve or was jacking the chief around, but his response was, ‘Oh, you mean I’ll be the first.’ #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

“We had four weeks of basic training, eight to five, Monday through Friday. We were the first group to use the International Fire Service Training Association material. We were assigned homework each night, and the next morning there would be a quiz. If you failed any of the quizzes, you were out of the program. There were also classes on mechanical proficiency and on the use and maintenance of breathing apparatus. At that you could join the department and be a firefighter, period. Now the program goes for seven weeks and includes emergency medical training and learning how to drive the vehicles. They didn’t have a very good burn facility in our department for training purposes, so they had buildings scheduled for destruction, and they would burn them. They would actually give us a live fire and out us in a real fire station. As it turned out, buildings to burn were in short supply, so my class did not actually get a chance to be in a burning building. As a result, the first actual fire that I went to was a real fire. I was assigned to our downtown station. On my second or third shift, we had a fire in the middle of the night. It was a modular classroom set up behind a grade school. I was in the second-due engine. We used to do a lot more blitz attacks, where the first company would pull a line and go in without masks, and then the second company would lay a fire line from a hydrant and mask up. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

“We were second in, and the lieutenant said to me, ‘Just get a mask on and hang on to my coat. Just follow me. Whatever you do, keep track of where the line is, because if you get lost and go sideways, the line is the only way you have to get back out.’ I remember crawling in there with the old mask that had a full face piece and an eyehole on either side. I couldn’t see a damn thing, the room was filled with smoke. I remember thinking, ‘These people are crazy.’ It was just nuts. And yet, I followed right in, took a turn on the nozzle, and got out. In those days, in the late fifties, we didn’t get much training, just two weeks at the training towers. It’s interesting that we had about 220 firefighters who did around two thousand alarms a year. This year we have 1,100 people in the fire department, and we are going on over a hundred thousand alarms. Big changes obviously. I was twenty years old, so I was a baby in the fire department, and in a very middle-class kind of way. I had worked in construction in the summers when I was going to college, I was a hod carrier when I came into the fire department. So I was used to construction guys, who were strong characters. They wanted you to be tired at the end of the day. I went to Santa Clara University for three semesters and graduated with a degree in fire protection technology, which is what they called it in those days. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

“If you look at the Sacramento Fire Department today, we are probably just a typical fire department. Thirty years ago, it was inhabited by a lot of very good leaders. They had been in the Second World War, they had been through the tail end of the Depression, and they had tattoos. They were tough guys—good leaders, guys who had a strong set of values. If you got out of line, they kicked your expletive. They didn’t know about participatory management, they hadn’t been screwed up in graduate school. They were street guys, and these are the people I look back on, who raised me.” The Sacramento Fire Department is a very important organization. They help keep our community safe and save lives. You can save lives and property, too, by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. Remember to have a safe and happy Independence Day. Be sure to raise your children to love America, love God and Jesus Christ, respect law and order and treat their elders with kindness and honour. It is a great privilege to be American and never forget that. Lord, God of our fathers, as we gather to pay homage to the founders and builders of this, our country, we ask Thy blessing. With courage and vision, they made of these Untied States of America a land of freedom and opportunity. For all that they have so firmly established, we render thanks unto Thee. “Our lines are fallen in pleasant places; yea, we have a goodly heritage.” I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

The Winchester Mystery House

If you are up for a day away with the chance sighting of a ghost, The Winchester Mystery House is open July 4th, 2024 from 10am PST to 5pm PST.

Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/