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Where Passion Rules, Truth Trembles!
The World is full of people that will try to take advantage of the less fortunate and thin it is cool but it is not and should instead be looking for ways to help each other so we all can live in peace. More than 70 percent of Americans are on medication, 30 percent of Americans are overweight, and 50 percent of American eat unhealthily, while only 19 percent of Americans exercise regularly. Meanwhile, former President Biden has set an unrealistic goal for the transition to electric vehicles. In just 5 years, 50 percent of all new vehicles sold in the United States of America are mandated to be electric. The reason being that “accelerated adoption of electric vehicles can improve air quality, reduce emissions, and position U.S. industries to lead global efforts.” However, should the United States of America not be more concerned about the health of their cities and be encouraging them to adopt lifestyles that include fitness and healthy food? Should the United States of America not be leading global efforts to have the healthiest population in the World? Many benefits of physical activity for brain health happen right after a session of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Benefits include improved thinking or cognition for children 6 to 13 and reduced short-terms feelings for adults. Regular physical activity can help keep your thinking, learning, and judgment skills sharp as you age. It can also reduce your risk of depression and anxiety and help you sleep better. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Physical activity is beneficial to health and well-being and conversely, physical inactivity increases risk for noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and other poor health outcomes. NCDs describes a wide range of conditions, diseases, and disorders. These have genetic, lifestyle, or environmental causes rather than viral or bacterial, and they are characterized as health conditions that: Are not caused by acute infections or illness, result in long-term health issues, and require long-term treatment and care, such as lifestyle changes or medication. Health conditions that are consider NCDs are: Cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic lung illness, injuries that cause permanent damage, and mental illness. NCDs are the number 1 cause of death and disease around the World, killing more then 42 million people Worldwide on an annual basis. This accounts for 74 percent of all deaths globally. Each year, 15 million people around the World die prematurely, between, the ages of 30 and 69 years old, from an NCD. Cardiovascular diseases make up most NDC deaths, followed by cancer, respiratory diseases, and then diabetes. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that members should obey the Word of Wisdom, eat nutritious food, exercise regularly, control their weight, and get adequate sleep. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Members are taught to eat a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and meat. They are also taught to shun substances or practices that abuse their bodies or minds and that could lead to addiction. Members should also practice good sanitation and hygiene, bathe every day, and obtain adequate medical and dental care. Not all NCDs are preventable, but you can lower your risk by maintaining healthy habits. Stop smoking and drinking liquor. Get more physical activity. Regular physical activity offers a multitude of health benefits. If exercise is not part of your day, set a goal to get moving for 20 minutes a day. You can walk, jog, bike, hike, row, or anything else. Set up an exercise plan that does not require a gym at all. Do 20-30 minutes of strength training two days a week. Strat with bodyweight exercises. Use free weights and weight machines only when an expert can help you. The global recommendation is of at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity per week. Together, physical inactivity and sedentary behaviours are contributing to the rise in NCDs and placing a burden on healthcare systems. So why is it that former President Biden has placed such huge importance on mandating electrical vehicles, instead of working to produce a healthier population? Because electrical vehicles are profitable and he likely benefits for the sale of them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Also, mandating the people eat healthier and get more exercise may reduce consumer demands on medication and vehicles and producers can only charge so much for food because everyone has to eat. So, it is important to keep people on medication and keep them focused on electrical cars to generate profits. Maintaining the best possible physical health has been a gospel ideal throughout the ages—from the strict dietary laws of ancient Israel, with the example of Daniel and his associates, to the Word of Wisdom. The physical body is a gift from God and should be properly cared for and respected. Mental health is also important and should not be overlooked, as it can affect us both physically and spiritually. We must do all we can to take care of both our bodies and minds. The Lord sets a high standard for us in telling us to consider our bodies a temple. He has established some basic standards for the governance of our physical bodies and mental health so that we may become more self-reliant and better prepared to progress personally, strengthen the family, and serve in the Church and community. Throughout the Christian Bible, God asked His people to abstain from certain foods. Today is no different. God has given wise counsel to help all His children be healthy. Those who follow God’s counsel in the Word of Wisdom are promised that they will receive health, find wisdom, and “run and not be weary, and walk and not faint,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 89.18-20. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Winners are programed, too. Instead of a curse, there is a blessing: “Long life!” or “Be a great man.” The injunction is adaptive instead of constricting: “Do not be selfish!” and the come-on is “Well done!” With such benevolent controls, and all his permissions, there is still his demon to contend with, lurking in the murky caverns of his primal mind. If his demon is a friend instead of, then he will have it made. Does everyone have a script? At the present, there is no way to answer this question with any degree of certainty, but it is certain that everyone is programed to some extent from early years. As previously mentioned, some people can become autonomous through drastic external circumstances, others by internal reorganization, and still others by applying the antiscript. The key lies in permissions. The more permissions a man has, the less he is bound by his script. On the other side, the more severely the script controls were reinforced, the more script-bound he is. It is likely that the human race as a whole forms a curve. At one end are those who become autonomous by one means or another, and at the other end are those who are script-bound, with most people in between, subject to changes in circumstances or outlook. Among the script-bound, there are two types. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Script-driven people are those who have lots of permissions, but must fulfill the demands of their scripts before they can enjoy them. A good example is the hard worker who can have fun in his spare time. Script-ridden people are those who have few permissions, but must spend as much time as possible fulfilling their scripts at any cost. A typical example is the heavy drinker or drug addict who must speed toward his doom as quickly as he can. The script-ridden are the victims of tragic or “hamartic” scripts. On the other hand, it is a rare person who has not at one time or another heard the voice of the demon in his head, telling him to buy when he should sell, or stay when he should go, or speak when he should remain silent. The predom taboo against genetic consumerism surfaced when citizens became morally outraged by genetic engineering and cloning. The emergence of a new taboo is always a sign for evolutionary rejoicing. Today’s new taboo is tomorrow’s advance. Agents who create new crimes are automatically promoted to the Gut-Caste Hall of Fame. Examples of relatively new crimes include bootleg radio broadcasting, psychedelic drug manufacturing, nuclear research, computer larceny, leaving a country without an exit visa, DNA research and cloning. The passions of men are so resistant to control that in no single method is there sure hope of overcoming them. Only in a combination of methods does this. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
The high moments of Heavenly inspirations are laid low in the dust of obscenity or lust. The effect of passional indulgences spreads out on physical and mental levels. If we learn by bitter experience to drop the burden of one particular desire, we do so only to pick up another soon after. We are not content to be at peace. The desires of human beings are never satiated, nor can they ever be since human beings must go on searching for final satisfaction. It is in their nature to do so. However, what cannot be satiated by outer things can turn in one itself and find rest at last within. How morally helpless many persons allow themselves to become is shown by the compulsive nature of their deeds and the obsessive nature of their thoughts. It is the strength or feebleness of his attachments and desires which largely govern his first and earlier paces in the relinquishment of ego. When insight arises, the passions become subdued and the problems which beset man become solved of their own accord. We may quarrel and kill whilst we remain in ignorance, but we must needs feel for and with each other when we comprehend at long last that in the Overself we are one. All too easily do luxurious habits become insatiable habits, ever demanding more and more and meanwhile creating tension of discontent. Whereas the conventional good man seeks to leave behind only the gross flagrant forms of sin, the philosophic disciple is much more scrupulous. Whereas the one is content to moderate the strength of his lower nature, the other tries to subjugate it altogether. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
There is one side of a person that always has to come out on top. That is the person who is always successful or dominant in the field. Your top-dog self is critical, judgmental and always has to be right. It gets the best of people, rather than trying to help or support them. Most people have been playing that side so long, they believe that it is all of them there is. However, that is not it. There is another side, the underdog, the one who has little chance of winning. This is the side that comes out in some when dealing with someone they care about. The soft, supportive side. That side that does not have to win every battle. Every man has to accept that he may be a loser and that sometimes it is good to lose. It feels good to let down the defenses and just give in to someone else. However, sure it feels good to always be successful at everything, but what does it get a person? A man who gets everything done, who makes all the money. He is sometimes seen by others as worthless. Yet, what is so worthless about feeling good? Does having all that success and money ever make a man feel really good? Is not being able to feel love worth something, too? People who are used to coming out on top need someone to humanize them. They need someone to take care of them and keep them in line. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
It is nice to come home to someone who goes to an import place and spends $1,500 on beautiful things for your homecoming. Blue Tiffany lamps that look great in your bedroom. Blue bed sheets from India. Colour of the sky, two blue pillows, incense, candles, Danish cheeses, Holland cheeses, smoked oysters, artichoke hearts. Carrot juice and more food. Soft Kleenex to wipe your nose. Fruit from the fruit stand. Coming home from a business trip to a nice ranch house where everything is sunny. Fresh baked bread, freshly picked apples, berries, plumbs. Then seeing the lake. How beautiful and fresh it is, and then taking a nice steam bath. Imagine a loving home near a mossy meadow, falling down in the sun and breathing deeply. This is much better than being a prisoner of success alone. A prisoner whose unbounded imagination gave birth to him, and they became one. Being alone, imprisoned in a bloodstained Bastille, entirely constructed around a still unsatisfied, and henceforth undirected, desire for please. Some men have only triumphed in a dream and those ten volumes crammed with philosophy and atrocities recapitulate an unhappy form of asceticism, an illusory advance from the total no to the absolute yes, an acquiescence in death at least, which transfigures the assassination of everything and everyone into a collective suicide. When a man only has success and no love, he is killed in his imagination. Others end up on an improvised stage with other lunatics. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Success without love is nothing more than a derisory equivalent of the satisfaction that the order of the World failed to give a man. We are to discipline, and when necessary, abstain from satisfying the lower impulses of our nature because we are to cultivate its higher intuitions. The clamant voice of the one drowns the soft whisper of the other. Ww must try to turn the flow of our passions into a sublimer channel than the sense alone. Variations in the muscle tonus of parts of a person’s body may reflect repressed emotions and the need tensions. A flaccid handshake may disclose a lack of sincerity. A soft, suckling mouth may reveal unconscious wishes to be passive and dependent. A female college student complained that men were forever “making passes” at her, yet she denied any erotic interest in males. Observation revealed her bodily movements were very provocative. She wiggled her hips when walking and pushed her chest high. When talking with a man, she glued her eyes, alternately opened and narrowed, to his. Men and women who have reached or passed the age of the late forties are more ready for, and better suited to, disciplining the animal nature and human passions than younger folk. It is more difficult to conquer lust than to walk on the edge of a sword. However, it can be done. No matter how much you feed your desires, they will never be satisfied. Therefore, direct them gradually towards the Infinite, in which they may ultimately merge, and from which there is no return. Repressed hostility may be manifested by excessive muscular tension in the forehead, neck, or shoulders, often resulting in headaches, a “pain in the neck,” and back pain. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
The traditional mission of the Sacramento Fire Department was saving lives and protecting property from fire. However, today, the Sacramento Fire Department also prevents harm. Preventing fire, injuries, and disease by understanding what causes harm to firefighters, their systems, their members, and community is the most effective form of preventing harm. The ability to manage risks is essential for success and survival. “We were working night shift on Engine X. I sometimes work on my model fire engines, but that night I had gone over to have dinner with the captain of Engine Y, who was going to retire. I had just returned to the firehouse when the alarm came in. All of a sudden Engine X’s crew came running out of the kitchen like a football team, and the second alarm came in. With that, I knew that my older brother, Z, who was a battalion chief, was there. We had quite a bit of rain on the street, and driving there was slow going. On the way over, I heard Z, I knew it was his voice, asking for a third alarm and all the ambulances that were available. I now knew there was an explosion, but I didn’t know the extent. When I pulled in there, the scene was one of utter desolation, it was like a sea of bricks and fire of low intensity. The nearby buildings were just starting to catch. People were hobbling all over the place. All the firemen there were on rescue. Knowing that help was coming, I told the battalion to make sure the engine company stretched lines. I didn’t want them all going on rescue work, which there was a natural tendency for them to do. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
“I looked and saw our rigs completely smashed. It was a sickening sight. The aerial ladder of Truck A had been blown across the street about thirty feet. It was crushed. The whole middle of the truck was flat down on the street, the tiller sticking up in the air like a sinking ship. Bricks were all over Engine B, one engine caved in, and there were men lying all over the place. It was just mind-boggling. We have the fire spreading in four different directions, so I called for more help. Two members of Rescue C brought Z over, just so I could see him. He was all bandaged and bloody. All he kept saying to me was, ‘I’m all right. I’m all right.’ I said, ‘You’re going to the hospital.’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah.’ They said, ‘We’ll see he goes right away.’ So now I was the chief in charge. Z had a broken collarbone and a dislocated shoulder, and I didn’t know it at the time, but he had a five-inch wooden stake drive into the side of his throat and resting against the carotid artery. I didn’t know it, because they had bandaged right over it, deciding rightly that they shouldn’t try to remove it at the scene. They have bandaged his whole face and neck, and he looked like a mummy, all bloody. Of course, it was a shock to me to see my older brother like that, but I had the idea in my head that he was going to be all right. The fellows had control of the situation, and they were taking him to the hospital, so I didn’t really dwell on it. There was so much going on that I had to turn to the fire. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
“I knew some of our men had died, they were laying all over the place, and there had to be people under the sea of bricks and rubble. And there were people in the nearby house fires who were hollering. I went to a fifth alarm and then got an additional two engines and two trucks, because I knew the first alarm was wiped out. I didn’t know how badly, but they were gone. By the time I put one company to work there was another one there looking for assignment. The rubble was starting to burn near Ladder B, and all I could think of was, if there was anyone underneath it and still alive, I didn’t want them to burn to death. I thought that would be a horrible thing. So I had the first lines keep the fire away from the rigs. It ended up that they weren’t under the truck, they were under Engine B. It was like looking for someone under water, you had no idea where to start in the tremendous confusion. Some of the victims had already been taken to various hospitals in police cars and private cars, and it took us quite a while to get an accurate head count, to find out who was missing. We finally broke it down that the entire crew of Ladder B were dead, all five of them. It was several hours before I found out what had happened. The building was a four-story warehouse, and they had a huge propane tank on the fourth floor, a five-hundred-gallon tank, I believe. It was completely illegal to have it in the building at all. One of the workers was moving the tank with a lift truck near the elevator shaft. It fell off the truck, the valve broke, and the liquid propane poured down the elevator shaft. The entire building got to the explosive stage at once. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
“The workers ran out of the place and were out in front when Z arrived. They told him they had a propane tank that had burst. He assumed it was a twenty-gallon job or something like that. He asked them how big is it, and they said, ‘About as big as your car.’ He said that was the last thing that he remembers. That’s when the propane hit the wood stove on the first floor and blew the whole warehouse to pieces, totally destroyed it. It’s too bad that it didn’t blow sooner, we wouldn’t have had any problems. On the other hand, if it had blown later, we would have had more men killed. There wasn’t much left of the building, there was so much open fire, we kind of dismissed the possibility of more explosions in a warehouse. But some of the nearby houses had shifted and broken some of the natural gas lines into the houses. That got ignited. We also had a large frame church burning being the warehouse, which probably in itself would have been a third alarm, and for quite a while we had just one engine company working a turret on it. There were about nine or ten houses that were heavily damaged, and there were innumerable houses that got damage and window breakage for miles around the area. It was a tremendous sight. Once we got enough help in there to work on all the perimeter of the fire and hold it, then it was several more hours, I would say after midnight, when Commissioner C said they had the final count of casualties. It was the five members of Ladder B and two civilians. Then I got his permission to replace every company at the scene, because the weather was bitterly cold and the men were physically shot and emotionally shocked. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
“I stayed until all the companies were replaced, then I went back to quarters and had a bowl of hot soup. Then I went to the hospital for the second time that night. By this time Z had been operated on and they said he was all right, so I didn’t even go in to see him. The first time I had gone, he was still in the emergency room along with some of our fellows who were burned, so I had a chance to talk to them. I also had the very unpleasant task of identifying one of the bodies. The chaplains and the commissioner and his deputy went to each individual’s house to notify the family of the deaths. They did the same thing with the injured. They brought their wives in and met them at the hospital. It was complete chaos there. The families were very cooperative. They realized that nothing could have been done to avert the tragedy. The companies had pulled up, just as you do on every box you go on, to find out what was going on. The five men of the ladder company had gotten off the truck and were standing together across the street from the building, waiting for orders. And Engine Y had pulled in, and they were on the back of their rig getting masks on in case they were needed. We’ve had people say that shouldn’t have been that close. Well, nobody had any idea what was going on. The members of Engine Y were just blown back, except for one who, along with my brother, was blown into the chief’s car. The member of Engine E was also blown back and, other than burns, were not hurt badly at all. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
“But Ladder B’s crew just ended up being buried by all the debris. They were not blown away like the other fellows. In fact, one of the men from Engine E was talking to one of the men from Ladder B, and he was blown about sixty feet, and the man beside him was buried under the bricks and killed. Tw two who were blown into the chief’s car were badly injured. X was one of them. The other, named F, is not out on disability pension, at age thirty-two. He was very badly smashed up, a lot of broken bones. It was the second to last night on the job for the captain of Engine E, and he was going to get out, and the driver said to him, ‘Why don’t you stay in the rig, Cap, there’s nothing going to be doing here.’ Well, the bricks caved in the roof of the cab and they both received some bad lacerations, but it came out okay in the end. I always knew it could happen at any time. I felt that after all the fires I have been on, all the years I have put in, I had never had a man killed in a fire, whether I was in charge or just working at it. And it just caught up with me. Fate caught up with me. I went to all the wakes. They varied from some of the wives sobbing uncontrollably to others more or less accepting it. The younger wives seemed to take it harder. The families themselves were good to us. They even helped to console us. We’re all family. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
“X was in the hospital for about three weeks and out of the job for above five months. He most his hearing. He had to get hearing aids. He’s getting there. He says he has no real bad afteraffects from it. We had the funerals for the five men on New Year’s Eve, and it was bitter cold. Oh, God, it was a cold day. And we had thousands of men who came from all over the country. It hit every one of us in the department emotionally, to think that on New Year’s Eve, on a butter cold day, all those guys would come up It was just amazing, and it really helped. The case of the illegal usage of the propane tank is still in litigation. It’s been kicked around. The grand jury indicted them, but then they played a little game. The one guy got immunity to testify against the others, then he claimed he was the one who put the tank in there. One of those things.” The Sacramento Fire Department has to be equally committed to reducing civilian deaths as they are to reducing firefighter deaths, and aggressively managing risks will help them do this. The Sacramento Fire Department’s mission is fire protection and to respond to emergency situations, and they make a point to do this with compassion. You can help save lives by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. And remember, even if things are not going well, and you are a bit tired and sad, raise your children to love America and be patriotic citizens. Also, let them know how important it is to love God and Jesus Christ and to be ethical and moral, and to obey the laws. It is also important to buy American made goods and services, such as cars, clothes, meat, produce, poultry, dairy and fish. We must keep America farms and the automobile industry thriving. We can help stop corruption and evil one person at a time. It only takes five good people to facilitate a change in a small group. To show support for America, remember to buy American cars and American made products. Respect law and order and treat others with dignity and kindness. 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. God is in His holy Temple, Earthly thoughts be silent now, while reverence we assemble, and before His presence bow. He is with us, now and ever, when we call upon His name, aiding every good endeavour, guiding every upward aim. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
The Winchester Mystery House
Only one more week until the mansion is fully decked out in its holiday finest 🎄✨It is estimated that is you were to try to recreate The Winchester Mystery House, because it is so large, has extremely unique architecture, and many of the materials used are very expensive, rare, and even impossible to find, it would cost well over $500,000,000.00 USD, so preservation, restoration and diligent care is very important to preserve this 8th Wonder of the World and an important piece of American history. Although they do not accept donations, you can contribute by taking tours, buying items in the gift shop, and at the online store.
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. Chester the Elf is looking forward to seeing you! https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Morally Outraged Citizens
You have more choices and more opportunities than ever before. Like so many things in life, this is both a blessing and a curse. Too many choices and the fear of making bad decisions often lead to decision paralysis, which is one of the challenges of your generation. Only when the gathering of Earthly gains seems futile, and the gains themselves mere dross, will he stop bartering his precious years for them. When a desire lurks hidden in the heart, it may sway actions or influence thoughts without resistance. However, when it rises to the surface and is seen for what it is, then it can be fought and conquered. As his desires quieten, he finds to his surprise that many things hitherto thought indispensable to existence, he can do well without. He who submits his emotions and passions to reason, and his reason to intuition, will save himself from many regrets. So long as he is buffeted between his passionate desire and his self-hating guilt, so long will a distressing tension be sustained. So far they distract the mind and disturb its peace, the struggle against the passions must go on. If he is willing to be instructed–when passion, uncontrollable and blind, irrational and violent, is behind action, the consequences may be harmful to its owner but they may also be instructive. For life is an educational process, which everybody has to undergo whether the pupils like it or not. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
We are not always the same person. At one period of life, a desire may almost enslave us which has no power over us at a later period. The World can be overcome only to the extent that we overcome ourselves, our endless desires and snaring ambitions, our passions and habits. He has not only to deal with his tendencies but also with his compulsions. However, passion is an insurgent, a rebel against reason whose counterbalance it fears and avoids. Even such normal factors as curiosity and ambition become disturbing when they become excessive, unbalanced, and drive the enslaved mind. As the heart opens to this call of the inner self, the demand comes to the will for a more austere habit of living. It is the difference between gentle austerity and harsh asceticism. We continuously try to “read” our own and others’ motives. The most common bases employed for inferring the intentions, feelings, and need of the other people are observation of facial expression, tone of voice, and gestures, which generally disclose what the person is feeling; and observation of the person’s actions and its consequences, from which we try to infer what he or she is up to. Ordinarily, we can check our inferences about the other person’s motives by asking a direct question. When are we justified in assuming that our own or another person’s motives are unconscious? #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
We can never be absolutely certain, but we can entertain the hypothesis of unconscious motivation when the person acts in ways that produce consequences he or she denies intending to produce; when the person shows many signs of emotion without admitting he or she is experiencing strong feeling; and when there are obvious inconsistencies in action at different times, for example, kindness and brutality, intelligent and stupid behaviour. In addition to these general signs of unconscious motivation, there are other more subtle indicators that a person is not conscious of real influences upon his or her behaviour. These include: Dream content that seems bizarre and incomprehensible to the dreamer. Daydreams that surprise the daydreamer. Errors and “slips” in speech and writing. Body postures and evidence of bodily tensions. The forgetting of intentions, and of the names of people and places. Accidents of all kinds. Performance on certain projective tests of personality. When I am surrounded by pretending people, I sometimes feel so swamped by meaningless two-dimensional cardboard characters that I feel I may be on my way to the madness that is recognized in madness. I think that this may be the way that some of it comes about. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Nothing has to come about in one way only, and the discovery of one way eliminates others because then they are not explored. That does not put them out of existence—just out of mind, like all the other possible approached to bodily illness which the American Medical Association will not admit. I think that when we have found one way, we should use it tentatively, as the best that we have latched onto at this time, and at the same time should go on exploring other ways—with the same tentativeness. It sometimes seems to me that madness that is called insanity may sometimes be a reaction produced by the madness (as I see it) that is called sanity, or “realism.” A patent in a mental hospital told a therapist, “You want me to come into your World, but I lived there for twenty-three years and I don’t like it.” The patient was a very mixed up person, but I don’t think that he was mixed up about that. The more mentally ill a person is, the more they are caught in egocentricity, selfishness and uselessness. As for a “schizophrenic person”—there is no such thing. A person scared out of his wits is not person at all. The mission of the Sacramento Fire Department is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and information in personnel matters relating to the fire service; provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and information; to advocate for the fire service in public matters; promote a modern fire; develop general improvement in fire services throughout that state and encourage a fraternal friendship among firefighters and their families. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
“When the alarm came in at nine-thirty that Wednesday morning, we were in class about the enhanced 911 system. All we knew was it was a baby trapped down a well. We were all told to go back to our stations and wait. Only our captain, X, was taken out there, possibly because he’s a small-boned man, yet real aggressive at whatever he does. We just got bits and pieces of what was going on out there during the rest of the day and through the night. We kept calling the dispatcher and asking is they needed relief people, and they never would let us go over there. I got to bed at the station at about two A.M. and got up at seven, so I had five hours’ sleep. Thursday was supposed to be my day off, when I was going to take care of our youngest child. But my wife, Y, got him ready and took him to the sitter’s. The more I thought about the baby in the well, the more I though I should be out there: I’m skinny, and they’re going down holes, and I can fit down holes. So I loaded up and told the dispatcher they probably needed a paramedic, and he agreed. I just went over there on my own. You could say I volunteered myself. This was about eight-thirty Thursday morning. I had to park two blocks away because all the cars and trucks. There were a could of hundred people there, trying to help. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
“The news people were starting to come in. The well was in the backyard of a house in the middle of the block. Z was already there, standing by the air cascade system they were using to send oxygen down to the trapped baby. The battalion chief and the EMS chief and everybody else were listening to the microphone they had lowered down the well. I saw the hole they had drilled down the day before, about five and a half feet from the well, and they were sending guys down there to drill horizontally across to the well. The well itself was just a metal casing sticking up about two or three inches above ground. It was about eight inches in diameter. They had a yellow tent over it like workers use over manholes in the streets. A fire captain was guarding the air house, a real Mr. By-the-book type guy, who just broke out and started jumping all over anyone who came close to it. Actually, he did a good job. Police officers A and Officer B did all the monitoring of the hole. The baby in the well” (will remained unknow and be called “C” for privacy). “Her parents lived out in the country, and this well was in the backyard of her sister’s house, where she was operating an unlicensed day care center. There were five or six kids in the backyard when C went down the well. The older kids were playing by themselves, and the younger kids were playing by themselves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
“There was supposed to be a rock over the hole, and I saw some big rocks near there. Then we heard that there was a potted plant sitting on it, and I observed a bucker with what looked like a cactus plant in it that had been turned over and pushed out of the way. They couldn’t tell exactly how far down the well the baby had fallen, because the other small children threw stuff in after her, foliage from the yard. So we could only seen down eighteen feet and lower the mike that far. They were afraid to disturb the plant material, for fear they would make more stuff fall on C. They had lowered flashlights, and when I looked down I saw the lights shining on the green foliage stuff. I listened at the mike and could hear her moaning. That was the last time I looked down the well, but I kept going and checking with the officers on what they were hearing. Supposedly the night before she had slept for about three hours because they didn’t hear noises from her in that time. I don’t know why the kids threw the stuff down the well after her. They were so young they didn’t know the gravity of the situation. Perhaps they were just being playful. There was a story that two older kids put the baby in there, or she might have been pushed. But from the position in which I found her, I feel that she stepped in with one foot, lost her balance, and went down, because one foot was down and one was up. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
“My captain, X, had twice been down digging and hard worked for a day and a night, and he had been ordered to go home because he looked exhausted. He could have kept going, he’s in excellent condition, but they felt they had to order him to leave. Chief K of the fire department and Chief D of the police department were pretty much in control of the whole operation. The drilling engineer, Mr. L, was in charge of the digging. And Captain E was a coordinator. There was talk that the first person to reach the baby should take her out. But because there might have been serious injuries to the baby’s neck and back, we thought it should be a paramedic. We talked to the doctors there, and Dr. F and Dr. H, and Dr. I talked to the chiefs for us, and it was agreed it would be a paramedic who would bring the baby out. The only exception would be if, when they broke through to her, she just kind of grabbed somebody and she looked good and healthy, then they could bring her out. We had the smallest backboard all ready, cut down still further in size. The hole they drilled straight down was about thirty inches wide, a pretty good-sized shaft, big enough for two small, skinny guys like Z and myself to stand in it side by side. The tunnel they were digging across to the well was much narrower, but some pretty big guys were doing the drilling. One guy had a forty-six-inch chest, so we figured we shouldn’t have any trouble at all. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
“They were digging through hard rock to a point in the well below where the baby was wedged, then coming up vertically beside her, and a window between the two was being chopped out to get to her. They put a sort of bubble or inflated air bag below her to protect her from the drilling. It wasn’t until one o’clock on Friday that the drillers told us they were ready for us to go down. We went over to the hole. Any time we moved toward it, the media went crazy, thinking the rescue was coming up. But the chiefs made us go back to the ambulance. We were brought over to Chief D’s motor home for a last conference, Z and myself and this other guy, J, who was a rapeller, a rope man. Then we went down. I went in first. I was real apprehensive. I don’t go into caves a lot. I’ve been in tight places, but usually by choice, not by need. I’m real cautious, aggressive but cautious. I try to evaluate everything before I do it. Mr. L was still in the hole. He took the bubble out and talked to me for a minute. Then I went into the tunnel. I had no room at all. I had to decide whether to go on my stomach or my back. My shoulders were pressed on both sides. I had to position the light so it would shine up into the well. I got my first look at her. But I couldn’t touch her. To get my arm in there, I had to crawl back out and start back in with my arm ahead of me. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
“The width of the tunnel was probably fifteen to sixteen inches, and its height was no more than twelve to fourteen inches. I had no headroom. When my head was at the back of the tunnel was the only time I could see up into the well. I got scratched all over my forearm and elbow forcing my arm up into the well. I though, ‘Oh, God, how am I going to do this?’ All I saw dangling down was her left foot. So first off, I started an evaluation of her physically. How is she doing? What can she move? What can’t she move? People had told us they thought she was horizontal in some kind of widening of the shaft. So I couldn’t just start pulling because I was afraid I would snap her back or her neck. They had said I could reach her. But reaching up with my right arm, I could feel her left leg and her buttocks, and that was it. I couldn’t reach any higher or find her right leg or anything else. She was conscious. Not crying, but moaning. I got her to move her left foot for me. She did that. I told her to move her upper body, and I could feel her move somewhat. It looked like she was trying. I told her to push as hard as she could with her right foot, and it seemed that she went up a little bit. I communicated all this to the doctor by the phone line they had down there. They gave me a wedge made of a two-by-four and a round piece of plywood on top, supposedly to push her up and feel around her. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
“I was able to push her no more than three inches. It sounded like she was throwing up. I told her to turn her head to the side and spit it up. I didn’t want her strangling on her own throw-up. I determined that we couldn’t get her out right then. I didn’t know what position she was in, and I didn’t have enough room. So I told her we’d be back. To me, on God’s green Earth, that’s the hardest thing I ever did in my life, leave that little girl in the well that first time. I came back out. We went into conference, and all the chiefs and doctors were there. And every time I would get close to talking about having to leave her there, I would get teary-eyed, and my voice would crack. The doctors took this as a sign of emotional instability or whatever. It was the first time I had been in a situation like that, and with me, the first time I go into something, as a paramedic or firefighter, I always get real emotional. When we got out of the hole, Z was first, and his face was so solemn that people thought it meant that the baby was dead. This big water drill had been there since early in the morning, but they hadn’t put it in use because Mr. L thought it was too dangerous. They had flown it from Memphis to Huston on a United Parcel 747. It took a place that size to carry it. So Chief A and Chief D insisted that Mr. L use the water drill. So they took it down there, and they really did a good job with it. Meanwhile, the doctors were talking to the chief, expressing their concern about whether I was emotionally and physically able to go back down in. #RadolphHarris 10 of 17
“He took me aside. He said, ‘We don’t need any macho trips. There’s no shame. If you can’t go down in, just tell me, just be honest with me.’ I told him, ‘Chief, I can go down one more time. If we don’t get her out this time, there is no way I can go down again. I would be mentally, emotionally, and physically wiped out.’ So he understood that, and he backed me. Assistant Chief M backed me. Evidently Chief D did, too. And N, the EMS chief, really backed me. He said I was the one to do it. They had confidence in me. We had plenty of guys in the department who were willing to go down, so they really had to feel good about me or they wouldn’t have let me. We went down a second time. I’m not really sure of the time, I know it was still daylight, six-thirty or seven. We had done a lot of sitting around, waiting. Everybody was saying, this is our last chance. Nobody said it to me personally, but the word was, if we had to break bones, break bones. Whatever we had to do to get her out. J, the rope man, came up with a device I could lift her with, a tripod pole maybe an inch wide, with the tape on the top. He was the guy who did all the rigging in the hole. He helped us a lot. Down in the tunnel, Mr. L said, “This is it, O. This is the best it’s going to get.” They had chipped away with the water drill and give me some headroom and more shoulder room. So he went to the surface, and Z came down with the stuff we thought we were going to need. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
“I had the tripod pole with me. I went into the hole and talked to baby C. I tried to lift her with the tripod pole, and it was too short. So Z got J on the phone, and he found me a longer tripod pole. This one had a rubber stopper on the tip of it. I tried to push the baby with it, and I couldn’t move her at all. I was lying there trying to figure out what to do. Looking at the tripod pole, I saw that the other end of it had a rubberized point that couldn’t hurt anybody. So I used it as a probe to see if I could figure out the position of her body. I poked it up the wall of the well shaft along her spine. I knew if I encountered anything solid, that would give me some indication of what body part was where. I ran it up along her spine past her head, and air rushed down at me from the well above her. That meant she was in a vertical position. Her back was straight up and down. I did the same thing with the pole at the side of the shaft where the right leg should be. It went all the way up, and air rushed through again. So I knew her right foot was up by her head somewhere. I went all the way around her body with the pole. Then I knew that she wasn’t in any crevice or bubble-shaped position. The metal casing I had seen at the top of the well didn’t go very far down, and the rest of the well was lined with a sticky petroleum-type substance. It was like glue or tar. I had it all over my hands. If you got into the stuff, you just stuck to it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
So then I knew she wasn’t lying down and I could pull on her without breaking her back or injuring anything. I talked to Dr. P and the female pediatrician, Dr. Q, and I called for the K-Y jelly. They sent down some baby forceps that they use at childbirth, but they were useless in this tunnel. Earlier I had tried to use goggles to keep stuff from falling in my eyes, but they fogged up immediately. It was real warm and humid down there. I was down there close to an hour and a half. All activity above the hole had totally ceased. Z opened the K-Y jelly and gave it to me, but there was a seal that had to be broken, so I had to throw it back to him to break that. This whole time he was doing great. He was having to deal with those at the top on the phone, and he was having to deal with me, because when I wanted something I wanted it two seconds ago, not later. And his legs were cramping real bad at the same time, and I didn’t know it. I smeared the K-Y jelly over the walls of the well all the way up to the baby’s bottom. Now I needed paper towels because I’ve got this stuff all over the place. I told Z that is the paper towels hit him on the head and knocked him out, I was going to kill him. My attempted at a joke. Now came the pulling time. I was totally confident. I felt we were going to get her out, no matter what it took. And I wasn’t going to some out of that hole without her, unless they came and dragged me out. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
“She had on snap-on pants. They had come undone from the left leg, and I was using them to pull on. She was stuck to the walls, and she was crying and whining. I would pull as hard as I could, and she would tense up; then as soon as she would relax, I would pull again. The first couple of inches were the hardest to get her to move. They were really pressuring us from the top. I had Z tell them we had moved her a quarter of an inch, to get them to leave us alone for a while. I was pulling as hard as I could, and she kept tensing up. Both of my arms were exhausted. My right arm went numb two or three times. Once I got her started in the K-Y jelly, I was able to move her a half inch at a time, and she would tense up again. I knew she was coming down. Z got the backboard ready. When I got her all the way into the K-Y jelly, I had no more problems. I got her out of the hole and turned over on my stomach. I reached for the backboard, but there wasn’t room for it, because her right leg was beside the right side of her head. All the time I was telling her to stay calm, that we were going to get her out, we weren’t going to leave her again. When I got her in the K-Y jelly, she was quieter, because it wasn’t hurting her anymore. She didn’t say a word. Of course, she was only eighteen months old. She made different sounds, but nothing I could understand. She knew someone was there trying to help her. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
“I couldn’t get her out on the board, so I pulled her onto my right arm, supporting her back and neck. The light hit her left pupil and she reacted, which was great. It was a good sign. I pulled her right leg in far enough so I could get her on the backboard. Z was getting stuffy out of the way, and while I was waiting, I said something like ‘Great’ or ‘Fantastic.’ I said it too loud, and she jumped a little bit. To me that was a good sign, too. But all she was doing was lying on the board, just looking around, real relaxed. I slipped her out, supporting her with my legs, and Z wrapped her waist to her chest. We used a Velcro strap across her chest to make sure she stayed on the board. Z put a towel on her neck, because the cervical collar was too small. I took white surgical tape and went all around the board and around the towel. Her hands were welded to her temples by the sticky substance. We left her right hand where it was. We didn’t try to straighten out any limbs. We finished getting her strapped. Then Z stood in the shaft holding her. I secured her to him with seat belt straps. I secured them both to the tether line of the back board, and I attached him to the main cable of the rig. So he went up with her. The only thing that fell down from her was a pair of toy binoculars and a few twigs. When I first got her, there was a big twig between her right arm and her chest. I thought it was embedded, but when I moved her arm I saw that it wasn’t, so I threw it out of the way. Nothing else, none of the green stuff. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
“I heard them yell and scream up top, everybody was just ecstatic. I was yelling, too. Nobody could hear me, but I didn’t care. I was totally calm. As a matter of fact, I was totally exhausted, mentally and emotionally. I was light-headed, I was having a hard time focusing. I just felt I needed oxygen. So I was trying to get stuff together, and the chief said, ‘Come out now.’ He meant now, and he said it a couple of times. So I said, ‘The heck with this stuff.’ They brought me out, and I shook the chief’s hand. He’s a big man, and I just laid my head on his shoulder for a minute. I did see little C and her parents at the hospital. She looked a lot different, a lot better. She looked somewhat swollen, and I hadn’t realized that mark on her forehead was such a bad scrape. They planted a tree in that backyard that will live as long as she does. And we’re going to put a plaque on that backboard and put it in our museum. It was great to be part of it. The next time I might not be so lucky. I know that the job I do is well worth all the time and all the nonsense we go through, and the good times and the bad times. If I end up dying of cancer because of the smoke, or if I end up dying in a fire, I never think about that. I know it can happen, but that’s my job, and I love doing it. I’ve thought in the past about switching, but this guy’s going to be there until they run me off. Until I can’t do it anymore.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
The Sacramento Fire Department provides the citizens of Sacramento with the ability to create safer communities; they assist and support the fire service community and the protection of life and property; and they promote and enhance firefighter safety; the Sacramento Fire Department also provides a fire service leadership presence in the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security in order to direct policy and legislation on all fire related matters. Their core values are innovation, inclusivity, dedication, courageousness, excellence, ethicality, professionalism, and transparency. You can help save lives by making a donation to the Sacramento Fire Department. In an effort to keep the country cohesive, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus Christ and buy American cars and other American goods and services. As along, respect law and order, and treat others with kindness and respect. And to ensure you have a bright future, please take your education seriously. 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. O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountains majesties above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grace on three, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea! O beautiful for pilgrim feet, whose stern, impassioned stress, a thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness! America! America! God mend thine every flow, confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law! O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years, Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears! America! America! God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea! God never gave us express allowance, only He gave us reason, charity, nature and good example to bear us out. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
The Winchester Mystery House
Our exclusive Flashlight Tour is back for one night only this December, Friday the 13th! 🔦🌙
Venture through the dark, winding halls of the mansion at night—armed only with a flashlight and your courage. And when the lights go out… there’s no turning back! (link in bio)
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/
The Skull-Rapping of Internal Dialogue
Being filled with God’s love shields us in life’s storms but also makes the happy moments happier. At the age of twenty-one, Max quit the seminary, frustrated but sure that he had, as usual, gotten the best of the bargain. He was young, ambitious, and held a bachelor’s degree which had been paid for by his parents. One of his plans included a profession whose practitioners also had a corner on being right: medicine. So after a minimum two-years army stint, Max enrolled in a prestigious California medical school, knowing from the first day that he wanted the most sought after and highest paying specialty of all: surgery. The years of school, internship and residency seemed to drag on forever. Max’s ambition made him impatient, but he invested his time wisely. He cultivated friendships with the ranking doctors in his hospital. He made sure he was on the lists to join their clubs when the time was right. Later, as he began practicing “for real,” all his investments paid off. Max became a good surgeon. Not the best, but certainly able to appear like one of the best. There were men on the staff who were better than he, but Max made it his business to see that they did not stay with the hospital long. He found out which ones drank a bit more than they should. He hired investigators to follow the surgeons who were above him on the hospital’s ladder. Should one of the ranking men be followed to an “indiscreet” apartment, Max would learn of it, confront the man about it, and that man would willingly seek an association with a different hospital. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
In this way, Max worked himself up in rank until there was no one above him but the chief surgeon, a tough, dictatorial man who took orders from no one, not even the hospital’s top management. Though Max was only number two, he had the authority to run his part of the organization as he chose. One of his priorities was to concentrate on doing the kinds of surgery which paid the best for the least amount of work. Max liked money, but he never did relish a great deal of work. And yes, he did make a great deal of money. Early in his career, Max had met and married Alana, a young lady who was also Catholic, and who had come to California from Harrisburg, South Dakota, in the hope of becoming a movie star. After several futile years of walk-on parts and waiting tables, she had resigned herself to marriage, babies and a home. Max considered Alana the ideal wife for his purposes: good-looking, passive, and best of all, devoted. She kept a clean home, doted over the children and dutifully held dinner until he arrived. He was as much in control at home as he was in the hospital. He managed to always be “right” and always have the last word—like a judge in his own courtroom. It was in the early-2000’s that Max’s carefully constructed little empire began to fall apart—and it started with pleasures of the flesh. After years of unsatisfying pleasures of the flesh with Alana, Max craved a more exciting woman. Alana was warmth; he wanted passion. She was giving; he wanted to be taken. She surrendered; he wanted someone who refused to submit. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
One day Max was presiding over a meeting in which his staff was discussing instituting a new surgical procedure. One of the nurses, a woman named Bianca, had taken issues with him over the procedure. Angered, Max pointed his finger at her and said, “Look, little girl, I’ve been carving up people in this hospital for a long time and I know when something won’t work. This won’t work.” Much to his surprise, Bianca slapped his had away with eyes blazing, shot back, “Don’t you dare point your finger at me, you male chauvinistic pig! I’m a woman, not a little girl, and I know something about surgery too. If you’re so damn smart, why are you paying me $250,000 a year to help you, then not accepting the help when I offer it? This procedure will work, and I’ll be happy to take it to any other hospital while you sit here, admiring your own face in the mirror!” Max was infuriated. Ordinarily, he would have had a nurse discharged on the spot for talking to him that way. However, this was different. This was a spicy and passionate woman! He had to have her. He knew it was dangerous to get involved with a woman from the hospital. He knew it was a mortal sin, adultery. He knew that seeing Bianca was a dead end because he was still too Catholic to get a divorce. However, Bianca ignited him sexually. She did not give him pleasures of the flesh, she took it from him. In their conversations, she battled him, cursed at him, and outwitted him. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
For the first time in his life, Max was able to lose battles without feeling beaten. Though Max was a formidable opponent, she was not a threat. She was not after his position; she only sought to maintain hers. In quiet moments at her apartment, he could be soft, vulnerable, frightened. He could tell her what scared him. He could lay his head in her lap and confess his sins the way he never could to any priest. In the midst of this, Max’s boss decided to do the only thing that could possibly undermine Max’s position: disband his unit. He was nearing retirement and was enamored with the thought of retiring in a blaze of glory rather than leaving the unit for Max to mold to his own way of doing things. Max fought the idea, but the old man was adamant. Later one afternoon, in the middle of a routine discussion, the chief surgeon glanced at his watch and said, “Hey, I’ve gotta go. I’ll be late for group.” “Late for what?” Max asked. “Group therapy. You know, like in psychology.” “What for? You’re not crazy. Or are you?” “No, I’m not crazy,” the old doctor said. “It’s just that I’ve got a few problems. It helps to air them out—in a nonthreatening situation.” Max thought of his evenings with Bianca. “Yeah, I know. That is good, sometimes.” “Besides,” the older man continued, “it really gives me a lot of insight about people, what make them tick. I’m getting so I can almost guess what people are going to do and say next.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
A warning light went on in Max’s head. “You mean, with this psycho stuff, you can anticipate what someone—like me, for instance—might do in a given situation?” “Not always. But I’ve tried it, and it’s worked.” Max did not relish the notion of his enemies having weapons which he himself did not possess. He decided to look into group therapy. In our first sessions, it was obvious Max was there to learn about other people, not about himself. His questions were intelligent and to the point, but his interest was more academic than personal. However, gradually, in the frankness and comfort of the sessions, he began to open up. He started telling the others what he thought of them—and was interested to hear how they felt about him. Lark surprised us one night when she blurted, “You know, Max, you’re a chauvinistic pig. But in a strange way, you’re lovable.” “Thanks,” he said. “I consider both of those evaluations to be compliments.” “Don’t try to be smart,” she snapped. “What I’m trying to say is that I could love you. Not as—as a lover, or anything, but for who you are. If only you weren’t trying to be so touch all the time.” With that remark, the door to the interior Max opened a crack. In the months that followed, we did get to know him as he told us of his childhood, his career and finally, his affair. He began to “fill out” as someone quite human. We felt our affection for him growing with each disclosure. And he knew it. What intrigued him most was the notion that the women in the group could love him without feeling sexual attraction to him—something he had never run into before. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
The blemishes in a romantic relations or marriage are diminished with a focus on love. One thing you never want to do is constantly manipulate people. Manipulators often end up in trouble with the law. Sometimes criminals become too “hot.” And they have to leave the country. Or else, who knows. They live on the run. Under the gun. Messing up. Holding on. Learning, we hope. Black leaders say they want a popular front with whites and browns and reds and technicolor kids. They see the old structure crumbling. They sense the change. Like everyone else, they want to channel it their way. Who can blame them? They say they want to work with white kids. Maybe they want to use them. They are under pressure from everyone. They say they are nonracists, internationalists. They publicly back every antisystem group. Reverand Al Sharpton and Dr. Cornel West have supported long hair, new life-style, women’s lib. They insist they are the vanguard. The coming new year will tell a lot. Reverand Al Sharpton calls himself a supporter of the U.S. Constitution. He calls himself Supreme Commander. Dr. Cornel West is always a ruthless enigma. There is one way to find out where the Panthers are. Black leaders sometimes welcome white kids who do not fit in with the establishment. However, if you want to stay of a good legal ground, you may want to follow the law and try to become part of the establishment. Have lunch around the campfire. Eat organic flour pancakes. Fresh vegetables. Steamed soup. Enjoy tender good-byes to your hosts. Otherwise, for the next ten years you will only see the underground network form in communes. You will ride with the dealers and talk over tepee fires with new tribes, and have to get used to animal skins and rifles on the wall, while listening to the Chief speak quietly of the prophecies. About how the white machine men will destroy themselves with greed, and being a young white man, it might be kind of conflicting, unless you accept that you have a black soul, light skin with a Cadillac and a perm and blue eyes. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Acts of self-denial, austerities, are to be valued not for their own sakes but for the sake of the purification of the soul. They can take to a simpler life. It does not demand a bare and spartan existence. It means only that they can eliminate useless luxuries and excessive pleasures, stop buying what they need not buy and keep money they cannot afford to spend. By living a simpler life, by becoming more frugal and less spendthrift, they can cut down their wants, diminish their desires, lessen discontent, and perhaps even become happier. It will be easier to call their soul their own. We live on different layers of desire from the beastly to the angelic. When lust is merely submerged and not supplanted, it will sooner or later reassert itself. Let is an extreme intoxication of the bodily senses, a fire of carnal passion which submerges reason, and an enslavement of desire which tyrannizes over countless victims. A wiser course than total suppression is to limit desires and govern passions. We are conscious of an animal in us. If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity, I would go to see him forthwith. When the pursuit of pleasure, and especially physical pleasures, becomes excessive, it becomes a vice. Where is his mind’s peace when he is racked by desires, irritated by frustrations, and denied even the compensation of knowing why he is suffering? Instinct fights with intellect but purified, elevated, and instructed, it can harmonize with the other, both working together for the benefit of man. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The irony of this picture of men rejecting their freedom and preferring their chains would be unbelievable, did we not know how gilded those chains are. The terrestrial nature in man may be recognized by the ferocity, the gluttony, the hate, and the violence in man. It is certain that the heart which is agitated again and again by the yearning for sensual joys will not know the calm happiness of spiritual joys. To what better use can a man put his will than the eradication of hatreds and the subduing of passions? For out of those two sources alone come so many wrong deeds and so much consequent suffering. A man may be so infatuated with his lower nature that he prefers to be agitated and disturbed by its passions rather than to attain the unruffled calmness of his higher nature. When I see people showing Christlike love for one another, it feels to me as if that love contains more than just their love; it is love that also has divinity in it. When we love one another in this way, as completely and fully as we can, Heaven gets involved too. So, if someone we care about seems distant from a sense of divine love, we do things that bring us closer to God ourselves and then do things that bring us close to them—and unspoken beckoning to come to Christ. Sometimes people are surrounded by a chorus of voices of discouragement and darkness that weighs into their thoughts, messages telling them they are too wounded and confused, too weak and overlooked, too different or disoriented to warrant Heavenly love in any real way. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
What part, in this Universe, could pleasure play or the exquisite joy of acquiescent and accomplice bodies? In it we find an impossible quest for escape from despair—a quest that finishes, nevertheless, in a desperate race from servitude to servitude and from prison to prison. If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the first for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation. We must be come, according to Sade’s formula, nature’s executioner. However, even that position is not achieved too easily. When the accounts are closed, when all the victims are massacred, the executioners are left face to face in the deserted castle. Something is still missing. The tortured bodies return, in their elements, to nature and will be born again. Even murder cannot be fully consummated: “Murder only deprives the victim of his first life; a means must be found of depriving him of his second.” Sade contemplates an attack on creation: “I abhor nature…I should like to upset its plans, to thwart its progress, to halt the stars in their courses, to overturn the floating spheres of space, to destroy what serves nature and to succor all that harms it; in a word, to insult it in all its works, and I cannot succeed in doing so.” It is in vain that he dreams of a technician who can pulverize the Universe: he knows that, in the dust of the spheres, like will continue. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The attack against creation is doomed to failure. It is impossible to destroy everything, there is always a remainder. “I cannot succeed in doing so…” the icy and implacable Universe suddenly relents at the appalling melancholy by which Sade, in the end and quite unwillingly, always moves. “We could perhaps attack the sun, deprive the universe of it, or use it to set fire to the world—those would be real crimes…” Crimes, yes, but not the definitive crime. It is necessary to go farther. The executioners eye each other with suspicion. They are alone, and one law alone governs them: the law of power. As they accepted it when they were masters, they cannot reject it if it turns against them. All power tends to be unique and solitary. Murder must be repeated: in their turn the masters will tear one another to pieces. Sade accepts this consequence and does not flinch. A curious kind of stoicism, derived from vice, sheds a little light in the dark places of his rebellious soul. He will not try to live again in the World of affection and compromise. The drawbridge will not be lowered; he will accept personal annihilation. The unbridled force of his refusal achieves, at its climax, an unconditional acceptance that is not without nobility. The master consents to be the slave in his turn and even, perhaps, wishes to be. The scaffold would be for me the throne of voluptuousness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
A man told me when I was very sick, “I have never known anyone so hell-bent on self-expression as you are!” He sounded both friendly and exasperated. I did not feel capable at that time of what I thought of as “self-expression” but I felt guilty just the same, with the piled-up accusations of the past. I had tried very hard to be “normal” but had not been successful enough to escape criticism. At the same time that I felt guilty, a little growingness is me protested, saying, “Well…I guess everyone is doing that really—expressing himself in one way or another.” I was very confused, and gropingly trying to understand what I do now. “Yes…” said my friend. “I guess you could say that a person is expressing himself when he makes a slightly different stew. But you have to go over it that way.” He gestured with his arms, showing the two ways over the hill. I realized then that he meant that I was trying to find my own way out of being sick, instead of “accepting it” and “making the best of it” as people said I should. I “saw” a hill—that is, I visualized it…Habits are certainly difficult to break. It visualized itself, spontaneously, as a dream does. I had nothing to do with it except that it happened in me…There was a picture in my mind of an endless train of passenger cars full of laughing people going over the hill on one side, while I was wearily plodding over it on the other side, alone. (When I am confused, I am always weary—worn out by conflict.) #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
I felt “wrong” for not going the way that everyone else did. However, my “vision” told me clearly, “They are not happy. They are just pretending to be happy. They have done it for so long they have fooled themselves.” Laughter can be a cover for unhappiness, particularly when signs of happiness are acceptable and those of unhappiness are tabu. Is not pretending being out of touch with reality too? Caught in the mesh of a script apparatus, men meanwhile have their own autonomous aspirations. These usually appear to him in daydreams in his leisure hours, or in hypnagogic hallucinations before he falls asleep; the brave deeds he should have done this morning, or the tranquil scenes he looks forward to in later years. All men and all women have their secret gardens, whose gates they guard against the profane invasion of the vulgar crowd. If they could do as they please, these are visual pictures of what they would do. The lucky ones find the right time, place, and person, and get to do it, while the rest must wander wistfully outside their own walls. And that is what this essay is about: What happens outside those walls, the external transactions that parch or water the flowers within. What people want to do is shown in visual pictures, the home movies they make inside their skulls. What they do do is decided by voices, the skull-rapping of internal dialogue. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Each sentence they say and each scripty decision is the result of such a dialogue: Mother says and Father says and Adult says You had better, while Child, thus encircled, tries to break through to get what he wants. No one can know the enormous, amazing, and almost infinite amount of dialogue he has stored up in the dim-lit caverns of his mind. There are complete answers there to questions he never even dreamed of. However, if the right button is pushed, sometimes they pour out in sheer poetry. Grasp your right forefinger in your left hand. What is your hand saying to your finger, and what does finger have to say for himself? If you do this right, you will soon find a lively and meaningful conversation going on between them. The amazing part is that it was there all the time, and so are hundreds of others. If you have a cold and an upset stomach, what is your churning stomach saying to your congested nose? If you are sitting with your foot swinging, what has your foot got to say to you today? Ask it and it will answer. The dialogue is right there in your head. All this was discovered, or at least brought into full light by the originator of Gestalt therapy, F.S. Perls. Similarly, all your decisions are made by four or five people in your head, whose voices you can overlook if you are too proud to hear them, but they will be there next time if you care to listen. Script analysts learn how to amplify and identity these voices, and that is an important part of their therapy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The object of script analysis is to free the individual so they one can open the garden of their aspirations to the World. It does that by cutting through the Babel in their heads until the Child can say: “But this is what I want to do, and I would rather do it my own way.” The dom-species impose two sets of taboos to maintain its equilibrium and hive-solidarity—exdom taboos condemn the past and predom taboos condemn the future. In other words, the dom-species is held together by its opposition to the proximal past and future stages. The shames attached to cannibalism, violence, violation of property, dishonesty, and rape are examples of exdom taboos. The Ten Commandments are a valuable index of the neurogenetic stage of the time. Thou shall honour thy parents; thou shall not steal, kill, lie, sexually trespass, or violate territory within the hive. Thou shall adore the hive-totem and not worship past pagan Gods or Future Gods. Social welfare countries, exemplified by retiring elders, place under taboo all forms of individuality—both past and future. Domesticated adults’ societies—the demoncratic-bourgeois—place under taboo stage ten barbarian teenager feudal elitism as well as the retiring elders state power brains and Me-generation grown-up post-familial individuality. The predom brain-reality consumer taboo in the latter 20th Century condemned intervention into brain control—either by others or self. Thus, the revulsion against CIA brain experiments using drugs or bioelectrical means. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The predom self-actualized brain reality taboo against self-directed brain change was even more rigid. While there was some liberal hand-wringing about CIA experiments with LSD, there was stark terror at the thought of self-appointed individuals using psychedelic drugs to change their own realities. The predom accelerated brain reality fused taboo against intentional communes of individuals linking to create new realities was very pervasive in the 20th Century. Every attempt to construct such communities was routinely snuffed. If they are expedient and success justified the use of arms, Marxism always held the point of view that weapons are to be used. The accuracy of this point of view was demonstrated in the days from the November 7 to 11, 1918. At that time, Marxism did not care at all for parliament of democracy and killed them both through howling and gun firing criminal gangs. The privileged-class chatter-boxes were defenseless in this moment. To be aware of a need means to experience and identify some lack. Thus, a person may be deprived of pleasures of the flesh, admit it, and set about the task of obtaining gratification with pleasures of the flesh. However, suppose the person regards wishes for pleasures of the flesh as forbidden? Under these conditions, acknowledgment of real feelings might give rise to powerful guilt or anxiety. The guilt or anxiety will then motivate the person to rid his or her mind of the offending thoughts. This effort is called repression. Repression of wishes and feeling does not annihilate them; it renders them unconscious. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
A healthier direction would be for the person to keep the feelings in the conscious realm, learn to understand them, and choose to either have an experience involving pleasures of the flesh or not, depending upon his or her personal value system and the ethical-religious beliefs that are a part of the person’s conscious life. One of Dr. Freud’s greatest contributions to human understanding was his effort to decipher unconscious motivation through the study of dreams, slips of the tongue, and accidents. The mission of the Sacramento Fire Department is to protect the community from the devastating effects of fire. Of course, one of those methods is to extinguish them but, they are more cost-effective when they are “proactive” in preventing them. Therefore, the ultimate goal of the Sacramento Fire Department is to precent as many fires as possible and put into place systems which allow for the earliest detection of fires rather than simply waiting until they occur. They do this to avoid greater loss of life, property and potential injuries to both firefighters and the residents they serve. “In these California brush fires, there are two basic types of situations. There’s the situation where you’re busting your behind the entire time you’re on the fire line. And the reverse situation, where you’re in a ready reserve area and end up doing nothing. They’re not the type of thing, like in urban areas, where a fire department comes running in, Johnny-on-the-spot, and puts the fire out. The fire service in California is at the whim of the weather. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
“These things are very difficult to combat, because you’re often fighting a fire fueled by chaparral or other brush that hasn’t burned through for over a hundred years. The fuel load is tremendous and often in inaccessible areas, so that the firefighters don’t become so much involved in the actual extinguishment attempts as in protecting structures. You might have ten or fifteen companies assigned to one block in a hillside area to prevent the homes from going on fire. I remember several fires where we were doing just that. We were up on the roof wetting down in preparation for a fire sweeping through or using heavy stream application onto the brush areas surrounding the homes. But usually, when the fire comes through, it’s almost as if your efforts were totally fruitless. The area becomes on intense that it’s necessary for you to seek shelter inside the home. That’s the only way you can get away from it. There’s nothing that hiding under the fire truck is going to do for you. You just have to drop the hose line and run. A few years ago, I was assigned to Engine X in south central Los Angeles, and we were dispatched to a major brush fire in Mandeville Canyon, along with four other engine companies, to form a brush strike team. On arrival, we were given the assignment to protect a particular home on a street in the immediate area. The fire was some distance away but was expected to hit our area after dark. I knew we were in for a long night. I expected this fire to be like others I had been on: long hours of nothing, punctuated by moments of sheer terror. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“We laid out the hoses and prepared the residence by removing combustibles from the outside of the home. We closed all the windows and made sure the doors were all unlocked and the lights were on, in case this became our refuge when the fire swept through the heavy brush surrounding the house. I remembered previous situations, pending hors soaking the home and everything around it only to have the hot, dry Santa Ana winds and the winds from the fire turning everything bone dry in seconds. In this case, we were almost immediately engulfed in a hailstorm of burning embers blown by the fifty-mile-an-hour winds. We stood our ground, soaking the wood-shake shingle roof with an inch-and-a-half line, when the captain gave the order to drop the house line and get insides the house. It was the only place that offered us any safety from the heavy smoke and the furious ember-laden winds. We had three lines around the home. We dropped them, and we all congregated in the main hallways of the house. I was relieved that no one had suffered much more than the usual heavy dose of smoke and a few burns from the flying embers. We were in there only three or four minutes when the fire engulfed the whole surrounding area. The hallway was positioned in such a way that we could see out through the large number of glass patio doors in the back. You do not want to be close to the windows or that number of glass doors, when you’ve got that kind of superheated wind blowing around. We were still able to see, but from a distance from the windows. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
“The idea, of course, is that the fire will mover swiftly past in the force of the wind. The thought certainly occurred to us that the fire could take the building, too. It’s always a distinct possibility. Given the two choices of being outside in the furious winds and the embers that are blowing around and chunks of tree branches and everything that’s carried by these tremendous winds, being in the house is probably the better of the two choices. Besides, it was tremendously hard to breathe out there. We weren’t using anything more than bandannas across our faces, because the breathing apparatus in this type of environment is more restrictive than it is helpful, so you don’t use it. You just resort to the old brushfire standby, the bandanna over the nose and face. It’s still difficult to breathe, not only because of the heavy smoke, but the hot dry winds, of themselves, make it difficult. It was nighttime, and the scene through the patio doors was spectacular, like millions of fireflies, though they were really embers blown by the tremendous wind. They were more like balls of hail—fireballs of hail going past. As soon as the fire sweeps through your area, that’s when you spring back into action, retrieve your house line, and start putting out the roof fires or whatever else may have become ignited. It’s a scary situation. When you’re in the house, you’re praying like heck that the house doesn’t burn down. In this case, when we went outside we were greatly relieved to see only a few small wisps of smoke coming off the roof, and we doused them. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“This is not such an exceptional thing. Hundred of other guys out here have been in the same situation.” The Sacramento Fire Department protects people in Sacramento, in other parts of California and across the United States of America every single day—but did you know that they are looking after everyone’s future, too? You can help save lives by being patriotic and donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. Being patriotic means being proud of who you are as an American. It is important to raise your children to love America. When you choose American-made cars and other goods and services, this results in higher quality products that save money in the long run due to their quality, safety standards, and long-lasting durability. It is imperative to love God and His Son, Jesus Christ. When we love God and Jesus Christ, we experience joy and fulfillment. As citizens, we respect the laws because they are clearly communicated and fairly enforced. Everyone is held accountable to the same laws, and those laws protect our fundamental rights. The United States Constitution is the foundation of the rule of law in America. Education provides stability in life, and it is something that no one can ever take away from you. By being well-educated, and holding a college degree, you increase your chances for better career opportunities and open new doors for yourself. From an early age, it is important to read books. Reading books may have several physical and mental benefits. These include strengthening your brain, increasing your ability to empathize, reducing stress, building your vocabular, and it will help you with spelling and to become a better writer. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Reading also reduced stress, can alleviate depression, and reduce age-related cognitive decline. Showing respect to others, especially the elderly benefits everyone. When people feel valued, their emotional well-being improves, and they will have better health outcomes. Younger people will also gain perspective and enjoyment from intergenerational relationships. Pledge allegiance to the American flag is a symbolic act that represents loyalty and devotion to one’s country. It used to be a ritual in every school during first period. Pledging allegiance to the American flag is often seen as a patriotic gesture, reflecting a sense of unity and shared values among citizens. We are willing to humble ourselves before God, willing to repent, willing to learn, and willing to change. The flag of the United States of America represents not just our country as a political unit, but the principles that bind us together as Americans, namely individual liberty, and unalienable natural rights, endowed by our Creator, which the government shall not infringe upon. Reciting the Pledge is not a compulsion, but a mark of patriotism to the country. 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. God of Might, God of Right, Thee we give all glory; Thine all praise in these days as in ages hoary, when we hear, year by year freedom’s wondrous story. Now as erst, when Thou first made’st the proclamation, warning loud every proud, every tyrant nation, we, Thy fame still proclaim, bend in adoration. “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you,” reports John 13.34. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
The Winchester Mystery House
Did you know that when Mrs. Winchester was alive, in addition to her mansion, there were other Victorian houses on the estate as well as gazebos?
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/
You are Already Dead to the World
Always make those senior to you feel comfortable in their superiority. Never take your position for granted and never let any favours you receive go to your head. For Sade, the law of power implies barred gated, castles with seven circumvallations from which it is impossible to escape, and where a society founded on desire and crime functions unimpeded, according to the rules of an implacable system. The most unbridled rebellion, insistence on complete freedom, lead to the total subjection of the majority. For Sade, man’s emancipation is consummated in these strongholds of debauchery where a kind of bureaucracy of vice rules over the life and death of the men and women who have committed themselves forever to the hell of their desires. His works abound with descriptions of these privileged places where feudal libertines, to demonstrate to their assembled victims their absolute impotence and servitude, always repeat the Duc de Blangis’s speech to the common people of the One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom: “You are already dead to the World.” Sade himself also inhabited the tower of Freedom, but in the Bastille. Absolute rebellion took refuge with him in a sordid fortress from which no one, either persecuted or persecutors, could ever escape. To establish his freedom, he had to create absolute necessity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Unlimited freedom of desire implies the negation of others and the suppression of pity. The heart, that “weak spot of the intellect,” must be exterminated; the locked room and the system will see to that. The system, which plays a role of capital importance in Sade’s fabulous castles, perpetuates a Universe of mistrust. It helps to anticipate everything so that no unexpected tenderness of pity occurs to upset the plans for complete enjoyment. It is a curious kind of pleasure, no doubt, which obeys the commandment: “We shall rise every morning at ten o’clock”! However, enjoyment must be prevented from degenerating into attachment, it must be put in parentheses and toughened. Objects of enjoyment must also never be allowed to appear as persons. If man is “an absolutely material species of plant,” he can only be treated as an object, and as an object for experiment. In Sade’s fortress republic, there are only machines and mechanics. The system, which dictates the method of employing the machines, puts everything in its right place. Hos infamous convents have their rule—significantly copied from that of religious communities. Thus, the libertine indulges in public confession. However, the process is changed: “If his conduct is pure, he is censured.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Sade, as was the custom of his period, constructed ideal societies. But, contrary to the custom of his period, he codifies the natural wickedness of mankind. He meticulously constructs a citadel of force and hatred, pioneer that he is, even to the point of calculating mathematically the amount of the freedom he succeeded in destroying. He sums up his philosophy with an unemotional accounting of crimes: “Massacred before the first of March: 10 After the first of March: 20. To come: 16. Total: 46.” A pioneer, no doubt, but a limited one, as we can see. If that were all, Sade would be worthy only of the interest that attaches to all misunderstood pioneers. However, once the drawbridge is up, life in the castle must go on. No matter how meticulous the system, it cannot foresee every eventuality. It can destroy, but it cannot create. The masters of these tortured communities do not find the satisfaction they so desperately desire. Sade often evokes the “pleasant habit of crime.” Nothing here, however, seems very pleasant—more like the fury of a man in chains. The point, in fact, is to enjoy oneself, and the maximum of enjoyment coincides with the maximum of destruction. To possess what one is going to kill, to copulate with suffering—those are the moments of freedom toward which the entire organization of Sade’s castles is directed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
However, from the moment when sexual crime destroys the object of desire, it also destroys desire, which exists only at the precise moment of destruction. Then another object must be brought under subjection and killed again, and then another, and so on to an infinity of all possible objects. This leads to that dreary accumulation of erotic and criminal scenes in Sade’s novels, which paradoxically, leaves the reader with the impression of a hideous chastity. To some people, being “right” is not just important—it is necessary for survival. The chief advantage of being a tyrant in your every day life is that you get what you want. For some people, from the time they are born, nothing comes easy. Some families use their life savings to open a business so that they can be their own employer and they work as hard as they can to make sure their business is a success. Their children start working as soon as they are able to, often by the age of six or seven. When a child starts work at an early age, they certain do learn the value of a dollar. A youth learns from observation and dealing with customers that people who have money get whatever they want and they get money by taking it from others. Being young and working and coming from a family that is frugal, some boys learn that it is important to save the money they make. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
By saving money, some boys are able to lend money to their friends. If the friends are not able to pay it back, then they can work it off. As a boy learns that the harder he works, the more money he will make, as soon as he becomes efficient, he takes on more work so he can earn more money. However, by being one of the only children with money and having the ability to lend it to others, to ensure that they do work it off, some boys essentially become loan sharks. They gather information about their peers that their parents do not know and threat to expose their secrets to their parents with the information. One may think that such a manipulative youngster is unloved and comes from an impoverished household and has poor grades, but sometimes their children are babied by their mothers, have hard working father and are reprimanded from having anything lower than an “A” on his report card. This boy in particular, who we will call Max, went to a Catholic school, where he found that the nuns, with their strict rules and stiff paddles, had the power. Max never challenged this power openly, preferring to work his mischief at times and in places the nuns could not detect. His idols were the priests, who drove long black cars, had a cook, a maid—and the final word on everything. Their power was greater than that of the nuns and the lure of it led him to study for the priesthood. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Yet from the day he entered the seminary, Jason knew he would not last. What bothered him was the vow of obedience, the Church’s stubborn insistence that he obey every whim of his superiors. This was the brick wall against which his stubbornness eventually crashed. Passion conquers the young man in the end and forces him into an affair, a relationship, or a marriage. However, he who withstands it drive, conquers passion itself, is a hero. A blind obedience to the urges of physical sense-satisfaction, indifferent to the restraints of ideals, reason, knowledge, or intuitive feeling, weakens concentration and meditation, but strengthens the lower nature. The unruled passions are responsible for a substantial part of the difficulty in summoning up enough aspiration to make men do what they ought, and enough penetration to clear the mind of its illusions. Those with some mental development wisely add tomorrow to today, consequences to causes, and thus finish the picture. Others are ruled by the moment’s impulses or the day’s trend or by passion rather than reason. It is supposed to go so far that even such a lofty desire as one for desirableness itself can no longer remain acceptable. He may feel the temptation but he need not submit to it. It is the emotion, sill more the passion, which anyone pours into an attachment which may make it an obstacle on his quest. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Men who are driven by strong ambitions will have little energy left for strong aspirations. In the Sphinx sits the symbol of that enterprise which offers the candidate for initiation his greatest reward but which paradoxically brings his greatest suffering. This is the conquest of passion by reason and will and the overcoming of personal emotion by impersonal intuition. The Sphinx is a perfect image of the adept in whom the man controls the animal. The attainment is a rare one—too many are satisfied to remain hardly more than animal, with a few human traits. If he cannot put the objects of his desires completely outside his heart, then he must do the next best thing and put them on its borders. Thought creates attachment, and this in turn leads to desire. When a man, with his impulses and passion, meets life with its paradoxes and illusions, he soon falls victim to the deceit of appearances. If the passions dry up, is there any real loss? Are anger, hate, and lust worthy expressions of a being whose spiritual possibilities are so wonderful as man’s? The man who has learnt in some way—whether by personal experience or by a wise old man’s instructions or through an inspired book—that excessive ambition may be folly, excessive luxury has no end to the labour of collecting it, knows that the self-actualized Christians who are content to live barely and simply may not be fools after all. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
However, it is also possible for another man who has cultivated an inner detachment to have the same feelings and nevertheless seek to enjoy life. To feel free at last of nagging desires and frustrating attachments brings a large measure of contentment. What is the use of studying philosophy unless we are to become wiser in the future and unless we use its lessons to discipline the impulses and dominate the senses? The white lotus lives in the black mud. It is both an example and an inspiration to man. There is danger in a view of life which makes men unable to be satisfied with a similar life and which stimulates their desires endlessly. Even if it is beyond his power to kill these passions without Grace, it is within his power to curb them. We get muddled and worried by problems which have been manufactured for us by our own desires, instincts, and passions. The need of disciplining them is evident. If the energy used in the pursuit of ambitions or pleasures could be diverted to the following aspirations, if he had the strength to remove everything else from his life except the quest, how could he fail? He may discovery that the battle is not really over, that atavisms of the old animalistic life, rooted either in the present or in former births may come pouring over the threshold of the conscious ego. When the intellect is enslaved by desires, by greeds, by ignorance, it readily finds several defenses against the call of the Quest. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
When the ego has become a little freer and listened to the call, it just as readily finds defenses against making any practical application of what it has learnt. If your passion is transferred from a passing object or human body to the more durable and beautiful soul, you will be progressing from a lower to a higher plane. People may sicken in consequence of excessive life stress or from infection ensuing from lowered resistance. An inability to gratify needs by effective action contributes to physical sickness in direct ways. If a person is obligated to persist in ways of acting that are required by familial, occupational, or age roles, when these ways fail to produce basic need gratification, the person will gradually become dispirited. Dispiritation refers to a state of lowered morale, diminished zest in living, and a sense of hopelessness that lowers one’s resistance to infection by germs, bacteria, and viruses. A student may develop the flu after being rejected by his girlfriend. A woman may be deprived of feeling love in pleasures of the flesh, affection, and appreciation and yet persist in living the joyless life because she can envision no other; her chances of contracting various illnesses are increased. Any prolonged need deprivation dispirits a person and reduces that person’s commitment to life. This reduced commitment to living appears to be responsible (in ways not fully understood) for alterations in the efficiency of the immunity mechanisms of the body. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Everyday life itself is stressing, and persons rest in order to regain strength to cope with the challenges of existence. If a person is living a joyless existence, and cannot alter it, it is necessary for that person to force himself to fight the impulse to flee the scene. This unremitting struggle to remain in a thwarting situation imposes even more stress and can contribute to cardiovascular diseases and respiratory and eliminative disorders. However, perhaps more importantly, the dispirited person finds less and less joy or fun in work, family, or in life itself. Thus, in the same fashion that one needs to see a physician or change some part of one’s life in the face of continuous physical illness, one also needs to attend to the self in the condition of dispiriation. How does one defeat dispiritedness? First, recognition of the state and of the need for change is helpful or a professional counselor, psychologist, social worker, or psychiatrist. On most college campuses such help is provided by a counseling center or student mental health service. One should not look upon this as an embarrassment but rather as indicative of your knowing yourself and knowing when it is time to seek help. There are also other roads to escape from being dispirited—changing one’s job; changing one’s life objectives; getting out and seeking new, successful, yet exciting alternatives. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
It also may help to seek good friends who will not try to talk you into their solutions, but who will, rather, help you to talk out your own ideas and seek your own solutions—this is also a successful approach to coping with the very normal occurrence of being dispiritied. Normal though it might be, it demands attention in order for one to maintain a healthy personality. The script equipment is the nuts and bolts from which the script apparatus is built, a do-it-yourself kit partly supplied by the parents and partly by the child himself. Antonia was depressed by an unhappy love affair. She was afraid to be frank with her lover because she might lose him. On the other hand, if she were not frank, she was afraid she might lose him. There was nothing sinister in it, actually. It was just that she did not want him to know how passionate she really was. The conflict sometimes made her frigid and sometimes panicky. When she talked about it, she felt so mixed up that she clutched her head. What would her parents say about it? Well, her father would say: “Take it easy. Do not lose your head.” And her mother? “He is taking advantage of you. Do not get too attached to him. He will leave sooner or later. You are not good enough for him. He is not good enough for you.” She went on to tell an adventure. When she was about five, an adolescent uncle had got sexy with her, and made her feel sexy, too. She never told her parents. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
One day when Antonia was taking a bath, her father told her how cute she was. There were some visitors in the house and he had held her up naked for them to see. They sexy uncle was one of them. What were he reactions? “I want to hide. I want to hide.” “My God, they will find out what I have been doing.” How did you feel toward your father doing that? “I wanted to kick him in the privates. I knew what a man’s private parts looked like, too, from my uncle’s ‘excitments.’” Was there any ha ha? “Yes deep down, there was. I had a secret. And worst of all, I knew I liked it under all the other feelings.” From these reactions Antonia had constructed a script, which was to have passionate love affair and then get left. Along with that, however, she also wanted to get married, stay married, and have children. There were two counterscript slogans from her father: “Take it easy,” and “Do not lose your head.” These fitted in with her aspirations of getting married and raising a family. There were dive injunctions from mother, all telescoped into, “Do not get attached to anyone.” There was a strong seduction to be passionate and sexy from her uncle, reinforced by the nude provocation from her father. These seductions and provocations from Parental demons had reinforced her own demon throughout her life. There was a strong implication of a built-in release: the familiar Prince with the Golden Apples—not like father; if she could only find one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
The interesting thing is that his whole bit came out in one session. As someone remarked, she was quite happy to hold it up for everyone to see. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Let us use the old term “madness” for awhile. There are two kinds of madnesses, only one of which is generally recognized. That is the one that we call “abormal” or “out of touch with reality.” The other one seems to me to be out of touch with reality too, although it is called “normal” because a majority of people are that way in our society. In this sense, it is a reality—like the reality in many parts of the World that most people go to bed hungry every night. This is not a reality which most of us would recommend adjusting to although where it exists it is “normal.” Ther are two normal too, only one of which we usually recognize. That is the statistical normal which is nobody, like the average Harvard man who has 3.5 children. The other normal is unknown because it is me if I had not been interfered with, what I might have become, my own norm—a constantly changing potentiality becoming actuality. This happens to nobody too—but it could happen. Why should not we increasingly make it possible for this to happen. When people hold themselves to any pattern it cripples them. It robs one of the confidence in their ability to grow as a person and to become independent. The recognized “abnormal” is a very lonely one, because no matter how many other people are in it, the individual lives in so much isolation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Abnormal people are cut off from other people because they reject people who are different, and the individual’s response to them may also be chopped off too—perhaps in the way it happens when one is overtired and cannot even enjoy doing what he likes to do. It evokes no response in the individual. The other madness, which is called “normal,” is not lonely—or rather one’s loneliness has got buried so that one does not notice it so much. One can “forget it.” They may remember the vision they have had, but they cease to regret it, maintain themselves by the common routine, learn to avoid excessive expectations, become tolerant of themselves and others, giving and taking, in the usual actions what there is to give and take, They do not repine; are contented with the morning that separates and with the evening that brings together for casual talk before the fire two people who know they do not understand each other, breeding children whom they do not understand and who will never understand them…and the other life will be only like a book you have read once and lost. However, the loneliness is still there. When one has substituted a superficial togetherness for the basic being-together, one has built a superstructure with no structure underneath it. That is fantasy, even though the fantasy may become a second-order reality by many people engaging in the same fantasy. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
A man can be linked with many other people through his surface, or mask, or disguise—by approved actions. This is phoney, or veneer, because it is put on, but as long as he keeps his mind focused on it, he has the illusion of being in touch with other people and himself by interacting with their phoney surfaces. Even if he has done this for so long that the surface seems real to him, it is more like apples bobbing in a tub of water, skin touching skin, with no awareness of the flesh or core. We are all apples and that is enough, is it not? What more do you want? Not satisfied with being an apple? Just do what the other apples are doing and you will be already. Not to do this is “bad.” (A threat to my veneer, which might crack and split if exposed to the weather of humanness?) The Self-Actualization Movement originated—where all individual freedoms start—on the Western Frontier. On nursery planets the military warrior-caste is responsible for developing new technologies for faster mobility and communication. Soon afterwards, the citizens in the Western Frontier coopt the technology for their own action. Genetic causes exist for human problems. Discovering this is a big breakthrough—resisted, of course, by stage twelve retiring socialist demo-poll cultures. Genetic determination focuses on gene pool statistics and caste-differentiation, thus minimizing the importance of hive managers. Socialist-welfare cultures insist that the collective super-hive—also known as “The State”—assume responsibility for everything. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
When we human begin to face the fact that genes determine the varied destiny of our different children, then we are ready to see that genes determine our own caste. Next comes the catastrophic discovery that each gene pool is a time-hive, a genetic molecule, made up of many elements called “castes” and that the whole game is genetic robotry. After genetic counseling courses began studying genetic potentials and self-selected breeding soon emerged on the Western Frontier. Neither China or Russia offered courses on genetic elites. As our intelligence evolves the definition of genetic counseling will evolve from an emphasis on pathology to one of excellence and growth. The definition of genetic counseling might read like this: “A communication process which deals with the human potentials associated with the occurrence, or the possibility of occurrence, of genetic advance in the gene pool.” The dom-species on the Sunset Strip move from twelve social-sacrifice to stage thirteen self0consumerism. PreDom ideas emerging on the western frontier: Stage 14: Self-Actualized Adults: Bodily intelligence self-actualization “My Body is my Time Ship.” Stage 15: Hedonic Networkers: Voluntary civilian space migration “We Are Not Terrestrials.” Stage 16: Brain-Reality Consumer: Brain Reality Consumerism “I Can Select My Own Reality.” Stage 17: Brain-Reality Self-Actualized: Brain Reality Self-Actualism “I Can Create My Own Reality.” Stage 18: Brain Reality Fusion: Brain Reality Fusion “We Can Fabricate an External Reality.” Stage 19: Genetic Consumer: Genetic Consumerism “I Can Select My Own Genetic Reality.” Stage 20: Genetic Engineer: Genetic Engineering “I Can Fabricate My Own Genetic Reality.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Terrestrial dom-species place all notions of the future under hive-taboo. The ideas of bodily-sensory-hedonic consumerism—fiercely taboo in domesticated adults and retiring elder societies—crumbled by the late 20th Century on the Western Frontier. The predom self-actualized adult stage taboo against bodily self-actualization similarly crumbled—as exemplified by the legalization of marijuana, the classical tool of one who wishes to control one’s own hedonic reality. The predom hedonic networker taboo of the late 20th Century condemned civilian space migration was a “preadolescent” idea and he was precisely correct. If preadolescence is defined as age eleven, then a preadolescent idea will become a young-voter idea in seven years and will be legalized in California ten years later. How few of the images which fill his mind come from his higher self, how many from his animal self! It is not enough to refrain from sensual acts. It is no less needful to refrain from sensual thoughts. As this diviner self displaces the Earthly one in his will, heart, and mind, it is natural that what he hitherto felt as temptation will be felt as such less and less. On the philosophic path he will attain to this without immuring himself in any cloister, but rather in the very midst of Worldly activity. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
The Sacramento Fire Department is committed to providing excellent service to their customers in a professional and humanitarian way. They protect lives, property and the environment through safe and timely response. They are innovative in fire prevention, suppression, rescue, emergency medical services, training, community outreach, public education, and other services. “It was nine o’clock in the morning, and the alert came in that there was a fire in an occupied dwelling. We pulled up to the place, and Captain X and Lieutenant Y yelled for a ladder. It sounded like there was somebody trapped on the second floor, because there was a lot of screaming going on. One woman, who looked like she was burned, was screaming the most. I grabbed the twenty-foot free beam and ran to the side of the house. However, the woman was screaming that her baby was in there on the first floor. “In the crib,” she said. It’s in the crib.” So Lieutenant Y got on his knees under the first-floor window, and I jumped on his back. I tried to get in the window sideways, but I could not. So I had to go in straight, diving head first. There was a bunch of junk in there. The people had just moved in the day before. It was a small room, maybe ten by ten. I could feel my ears burning. I remember kneeling at the crib, looking over my shoulder at the window. Then it got terribly hot. That’s the last thing I remember. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
“Captain X, senior man at Engine Z, dove in after me, lugged me to the window, and they pulled me out. I must have gone into respiratory arrest because Captain X was beating on me. Then the squad came, scooped me up, and took me to the hospital. I was in that room only about a minute all told. What was weird about that fire, was that my dad, who had been in the department for twenty-five years, was driving to the union office when he saw the smoke, and he figured that his kid was at that fire. Then he said, ‘nah, I’ve seen him work,’ so he passed up the exit to go there. But something made him turn back at the next exit to go there. He pulled up in front of the house, and he saw a guy lying there, and they were working on him. Chief A said to day, “That’s your boy.” So Dade rode in the squad with me. I remember waking up in the squad, and Dad was straddling me. They were trying to give me oxygen, and I didn’t want it. I didn’t know what was going on. I was burned up bad, but I didn’t know that. I felt like there was a ton of ice on my face. I remember trying to kick my boots off, and it was all pain. I knew then I was hurt. Then I blacked out again. They were wheeling me in, I remember that. They cut my clothes off. B, a guy I went to Hawaii with, was there. I said, “I loused up, I loused up, I loused up.” Then I asked him what I looked like. B’s eyes were bulging, they were bigger than I’ve ever seen, bigger than plates. He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, C. You just lost your suntan.’ He didn’t want to tell me. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
“I don’t really remember much of being in the hospital. I remember a bunch of firemen coming to see me. I was only in for two days because of the danger of infection; you get more infection in the hospital than you would at home. I had second- and third-degree burns on my entire face, ears, and left hand. They did an experiment on me because I was so young, only nineteen. They did this biobrane. It’s like a skin that they put on a leg burn, a thigh burn, or an arm burn. They put that on my face, and it saved years of reconstructive surgery. Aside from that, all I’ve had to do was get eyelid surgery, because the fire burned through my eyelids. So they took skin from my neck over my left clavicle and redid my eyelids for me. I still need a little bit more nose work and then some eye surgery, and that’s it. They did laser surgery on my eyeballs. I had burned corneas, stuff like that, and I had a lot of edema. My biggest problem, though, is photophobia, sensitivity to light. But the best thing they did was let me go home and let my family take care of me. My sister did. My mom was so busted up she couldn’t even be in the room with me. And my dad, who’s not a big drinker, took it really hard and started drinking a lot. I stayed at my mom’s for a month while they took care of me. The smartest thing I did was, I never looked in the mirror. I didn’t have the slightest idea how badly I was burned up. And all my running mates, they’d bring the rigs by, and they’d spend time with me—that really meant a lot to me—to see me, the monster man. I mean, I was horrible-looking. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
“My captain took it hard, because he’d never had a son on the job, and I was young enough to be his son. Lieutenant Y took it hard, too. What happened at the fire was, there was a mother, she had about five kids with different fathers, and she was in bed with some live-in boyfriend. The baby was in bed with them. The other kids were playing with matches under the dining room table, and the house took off. She and the guy jumped through the window and left the baby in the bed. Then they told us the baby was in the crib. The baby was obviously dead. They ended up suing our arson squad, because Arson reported it as kids playing with matched. They weren’t worried about their baby. If I had a tragedy like that and my child died like that, I’d definitely not want to dwell on it, I’d want to get it behind me and end it. D got some minor burns on his neck and brined the tops of his ears, because that room was going when he pulled me out. It flashed over, and flames burst out the window. And he went in there. He’s a little black guy, real shy, doesn’t talk loud at all. He won the Medal of Valor, the highest award you can win in the Sacramento Fire Department, for pulling me out of that fire. If anyone ever says anything bad about him, I’ll fight to the death for that man. He saved my life. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
“That biobrane, to me, is the greatest thing since sliced bread, because I would be Mr. Scar. I would just be totally scarred. It’s evident from where it didn’t take, at the corners of my mouth and my lips. My lips always peel now, they’re always dry. I’ve got scars at the corners of my mouth, over my upper lip, right on my nose, on the ends of my nostrils, and under my chin, where the biobrane didn’t take. But biobrane is the best thing that ever happened to me. Lieutenant Y wants to get in touch with the doctor who did it, a young aggressive plastic surgeon, but he went down to New Orleans, and it’s hard to get in touch with him. When to the burn center for the eyelid surgery, they sewed my eyes shut for six days, and that was the worst part of it. I was super depressed then. The nurses understood. The firefighters were pretty serious about the whole thing, but the first day I came home the doctor put this net over my head to hold the biobrane mask on so it wouldn’t fall off. Captain X laughed and said I looked like a ham. That kind of broke the ide for the other guys. They took pictures of me every day, and they wanted to use one of them for the Burn Tournament poster for the burn center, but it was too hideous. The caption was going to say, “They never ask what happened to the firefighter who tried to save the baby.” It was just too horrible. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
“It takes a year for you skin to heal up. But I was going stir crazy. I was bored, lethargic, gaining weight. I just wanted to get back to work. I told the doctor I would wear my Nomex hood all the time, so I went back to work after less than nine months. I would have gone back sooner if I didn’t have such trouble with my eyesight. I still wear sunglasses outside. It’s going to be a long time before that clears up. The skin is really sensitive. I wear my Nomex hood, and I still get the tops of my ears a little bit friend, and my face blisters up. I had a good one last night and got burned a little. But I’ve stayed on duty because it’s not that burned, just a little blistered. I’ve got to work for a guy tomorrow, and I don’t want to screw up his work release. That dive I took into that room wasn’t so good. For one thing, my mask was knocked off, and I kind of busted my nose, and my left cheek was swollen up pretty bad, so I must have hit something. My helmet must have come off, too, because I had burns on top of my head. But the helmet is still living. It looks like a good squad helmet. It’s all black. “The Sacramento Fire Department provides their customers safer and healthier neighbourhoods through an engaged, educated, and diverse workforce dedicated to life safety and improved quality of life. You can help save lives and property by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. And remember, parents, teach your children to love America and be patriotic, to love God and Jesus Christ, to buy American made goods and services and cars, to respect law and order, and teach others with compassion, respect, and dignity, especially their elders. Release all captives, we beseech Thee, Lord whose mighty hand doth set men free; and hear the glad acclaim of all Thy people who praise and glorify but Thee. Preserve the righteous ones who seek Thee, and, in love, Thy unity proclaim; O guard and bless with Thine abundant goodness, Thy people who revere Thy name. Thou, Lord, who art alone exalted, please turn to us and hearken to our plea. We bless Thee, Thou who knowest all things hidden, Thy kingdom is unto eternity. 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. O Guardian of American, guard the remnant of America; let not American people perish, the people which proclaims: Hear, O America. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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It Comes on You Like a Spell and Your Poor Mind is Full of Hell
Every cross roads has a story. The Devil and his works have long assumed many forms. In modern America, rebellion for the sake of rebellion has taken precedence over genuine need for change. The frozen sperm of Satan’s magical children have been born upon the Earth. The child is no longer made in the image of God, but in the form of Satan. The quality of children has become more important than the quantity because relative material stability has been reached with the help of technology. A child who can produce is more important than having many children. A swordsman needs but a good smith to forge him a stout blade. Christians are facing a conflict because as man becomes more able to extend his life and prevent death, many consider this to be due to witchcraft and demonic elixirs which are not natural. Some question if Christians will want to experience immortality because they cannot afford to be aligned with things of the Devil. Satanism differs from other religion because it does not hold man enthrall of a fantasy, it rather President a little slice of Heaven here on Earth, known as The American Dream. Satanism is taken out of logical rather than desperation. The need for a cultural stimulus and aesthetic satisfaction has been with us every since the struggle to stay alive ceased to be so whelming that it absorbed all of man’s time and energy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
William was a general practitioner in an isolated area in the Rockies. There was no other doctor for miles around. He worked day and night, but no matter how hard he worked there was never enough to support his large family and he was always in debt to the bank. For a long time, he had advertised in medical journals for a partner to give him some relief, but he insisted that no one suitable had ever shown up. He operated in fields, homes, and hospitals, and sometimes at the bottom of a mountain crag. He was immensely resourceful and almost completely exhausted, but not quite. He came for treatment with his wife because they were having marital problems, and his blood pressure was going up. In the end, he found a University Hospital not far away which has some fellowships for general practitioners who wanted to become specialist. This time he did find someone to take his pace as a country doctor. He gave up his complex and lucrative practice and found that he had enough assets to keep his family going while he settled down as a surgical resident with a small stipend. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” he said. “But I never thought I’d get away from my driving Father Part until I’d had a coronary. But I didn’t have a coronary, and this is the happiest time of my life.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
It is evident that his spellbreaker was to have a coronary, and he thought that was the only way he would ever get off the hook. However, with the help of the group, he did manage to break out of his script in good health. William illustrates in a relatively simple and clear-cut way the action of the whole script apparatus. His counter script came from both parents: “Work hard.” His father than gave him the pattern of a hard-working doctor. His mother’s injunction was “Never give up. Work hard until you drop dead.” However, his father gave him the spellbreaker: “If you have a coronary, you can relax, ha ha.” With his treatment did was get into that part of his brain or mind whence all these voices sent their directives. The injunction was then lifted by giving him permission: “You can relax without having a coronary.” When this permission made it way through all the shells and devices protecting the script apparatus, it broke the curse. Note that it was useless to say to him “If you keep on this way, you will have a coronary.” He was well aware of that threat, and telling him again only made him feel more miserable because he wanted a coronary, which would free him one way or another. What he needed was not a threat, nor an order (he already had enough orders in his head), but a license that would liberate him for those orders, and that is what he got. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Then he ceased to be a victim of his script, and became his own master to do his thing. He still worked hard, and he still followed his father’s medical pattern, but he was no longer script-ridden to overwork nor script-driven to drop dead. Thus, at the age of fifty, he became from to fulfill the autonomous aspirations of his own choice. Make sure what you really want before you go after it. The bitter experience in life is to find after years of effort that the thing you have gained is not the thing you want. It is admittedly painful to tear one’s will away from one’s desires but it is still more painful to have it torn away by life’s experiences. Hence, the philosophical method to conquer desire is a twofold one. We must let it wear itself out by submitting to it through experience and letting it come up against inevitable disappointment, disillusionment, or suffering whilst alongside this we must become reflectively and analytically aware of its causes, self-deceptions, and consequences. It is a matter of gradually letting the desires lost their intensity until we become free of them not through their forcible renunciation nor through the long-drawn process of waiting for the golden years to comes but through the process of learning to live more and more within the satisfactory beatitude of the Overself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
We give up our desires not by negating them but partly by comprehending their mechanistic cause and mentalistic nature and partly by superseding them with the exalted peace of the Overself. The undeveloped mind lives only for the day. It can see the immediate events in a series but cannot conjure up the ultimate ones. The disciple dares not risk such a blind condition. He must deliberately set out to bring the two together, by the use of creative imagination or by analytic reflection or by both. If passion rises in him, at least its counterbalance, the mental picture of the evil consequences of passion, rises a second later with it. If a man is not free from lust, fear, and anger, be sure he is not united with the Overself, whatever other qualities, powers, or virtues he shows. Long continued reflection turned sharply and analytically upon desires and cravings helps to counter them, but does not basically weaken them. For that, contrary emotions must be aroused. This is most effectually done by happenings and experiences. However, because these are mostly beyond our choice, the third way left to us is to seek Grace. One way to invite this Grace is by sitting in mediation upon the non-self. He may complain of his weakness and immediately submit to a temptation. Or he may recognize that the Higher Self is also him; he may try to use will and grow in strength by this resistance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
He finds that he is perceptibly pulled away from fleshly lust to a deeper level where the calmness and the judgement enable him to realize that the lust belongs to his animal physical inheritance and not to his inmost character and that, therefore, it may be brought under control and discipline. If he acquires the power to achieve this, it will come imperceptibly for it will come mostly by grace. The satisfaction of passion has a claim on the animal body, but it must always be subject to the higher claims of reason and intuition and the need for the sense of human responsibility. The amoral is always the first step to the immoral. The idea that he has to attain mastery over the desires of the flesh is a correct one. However, that this mastery will lead to reunion with a “soul-mate” is not the teaching of the best mystics or philosophers. What really happens is a reunion with the true “Beloved,” who is none other than the Soul of the individual, his higher Self. This is a real living entity, whose presence is felt, whose words are heard, and whose beauty arouses all one’s love. Where man is open only to Worldly forces and not to inner ones’ where he submits to the World’s demands and ignores the soul’s; and where he succumbs to his own terrestrial forces without thoughts of regulating, controlling, and disciplining them, we may expect to find that he is quite insensitive to any teaching of this kind. He is like a person who has been caught in a mire and with every movement gets deeper into it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
He will learn the pleasure of self-control. It is not always easy but all effort for the rewards bear fruit. The man who can develop emotional placidity and rise above passions begins to know what peace of mind means. That is only a beginning for in its fullness it can come only with the knowledge and the enlightenment of Truth. Until then this placidity will free him from the constant alternation, the rise and fall of feeling, the elation and depression to which the average person is subject. Whether it be to acquire fame or accumulate wealthy or any of the other major desires, what he wants from life will in the end rest on his stage of spiritual evolution. The terrestrial man is there, but it must be brought under control or it will claim too much and diminish his aspirations. Then they become fitful, coming less and less, departing more and more. The passions contain futility, danger, and defilements. Self-conquest must be his secret wish’ deliverance must become his impassioned yearning. When wholetime meditations and his spare time thoughts are unremittingly given to uprooting passions that hinder spiritual progress and cultivating ideas that promote it, the neophyte will not be left without reward. Restricted by no monastery’s vows and obeying no order’s rules, he may yet be purer in thought and conduct than most of the self-actualized Christians. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The terrestrial of our inheritance will then be kept in its proper place, subjugated, its strength absorbed into his higher will. Within this highly structured and orderly society, the exterior developments of industrialism and progress within the natural sciences has brought not only material wealth but also increased pollution and waste, without forgetting increased ill health in the wake of this pollution and stress. The focus must now lay on health, nature, spirituality, and so forth. However, the contemporary focus on a profitable present and an almost superstitious belief in a science for the future should bring about a romantic longing for distant pagan pasts. The current generation born in America is fed up with what is being offered. What better way to protest than to just head out into nature in a highly romanticized state of mind? They have also found out that there have already been precursors in older generations who have explored exciting phenomena like nudism and vegetarianism. Americans have also simply started acting out rather than just talking about change. And I do not mean these Americans who are perceived by the World as being so weak because they cannot deal with the outcome of the American election. I am talking about those who have stopped placing their faith in a human being and place it in God. They are minding their own business and working with their hands to amass money so they can live a life they desire. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
In an age where even kids playing hopscotch and hiking has become politicized, turning to spirituality is one of the most mature things a man can do. Being able to step out and embrace the California morning sunshine is much better than seeing a guard in the gun tower. The threat of being in the center of the most cellblock of a prison in the State, where men are kept in cages with walkways above so it is possible for guards to stroll around and look down into the pits; cells with no furniture except a drain-hole toilet, and when the prisoners go out guards are carrying clubs surround them is often where people who do not go to Church and fear God end up. No students of American politics could fail to see the inevitable uprising of this revolutionary tribe of young Christian activists, religions offspring of the first social media-Einstein-multidimensional-simultaneous-immediate-energy generation. All the computers are turned on. Jet streams across WiFi, seamlessly transitioning spiritual healing as it sweeps through the homes and corridors of those in desperate need of the gospel of Christ, turning on fourteen-year-olds through the computer screen. Wise ancient children, the smartest, best endowed, healthiest. Time’s sweet pollen laughing answer to the lethal pressure of computerized humnoids pumping out propaganda over Obama TV. As these reports smoke and laugh, they do not realize that their days are numbered and streaming content is stealing thousands of viewers away from free TV daily. With lower ratings, the station’s revenue declines, the quality of programs suffers and less people tune in to the fake news. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
And everyone complains about everything becoming so political, but it is because that it what the TV news finds profitable and it is all that people talk about. However, for decades, people have been complaining that the news is rubbish. It is not what they consider news to be. People used to think news was investigative reports about things like the artic ice, or how there were actually Pilgrims, like Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, who had peaceful dinners with the Native Americans on Thanksgiving Day. Or how planet TOI 700 d, the outermost known planet in the system and the only one in the habitable zone, is 20 percent lager than Earth and can sustain life. Everything has become political or about getting famous because that is what people focus on. Once you turn your attention to more important things, like learning to cultivate the land, how to create the perfect drought resistant lawn, or why ICE cars are important for our future, then you will start to see the beauty in life again. The advocate of crime really only respects two kinds of power: one, which he finds among his own class, founded on the accident of birth, and the other by which, through sheer villainy, an underdog raises himself to the level of the libertines of noble birth whom Sade makes his heroes. This powerful little group of initiates knowns that it has all the rights. Anyone who doubts, even for a second, these formidable privileges is immediately driven from the flock, and once more becomes a victim. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Thus, a sort of aristocratic morality is created through which a little group of men and women manage to entrench themselves above a caste of slaves because they possess the secret of a strange knowledge. The only problem for them consists in organizing themselves so as to be able to exercise fully their rights which have the terrifying scope of desire. They cannot hope to dominate the entire Universe until the law of crime has been accepted by the Universe. Sade never believed that his fellow countrymen would be capable of the additional effort needed to make it “republican.” However, if crime and desire are not the law of the entire Universe, if they do not reign at least over a specified territory, they are no longer unifying principles, but ferments of conflict. They are no longer the law, and man returns to chaos and confusion. Thus, it is necessary to create from all these fragments a World that exactly coincides with the new law. The need for unity, which Creations leaves unsatisfied, is fulfilled, at all costs, in a microcosm. The law of power never has the patience to await complete control of the World. Even if it means surrounding it with barbed wire and observation towers, it must fix the boundaries, without delay, of the territory where it holds sway. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
At its best, criticalness is a sincere effort to help other improve. At its worst, it is the compulsion to get other people before they get you. If you are a manipulator who exaggerates the values of criticalness, you distrust and blame others. This keeps you “above” their level, but it often keeps you isolated and lonely as well. It is as if you were playing a game which you often win, but cannot enjoy winning because it is a secret game, and only you know about it. If you expose it, you cannot play anymore. So you sit at home, all alone, never admitting to anyone the secret of your game. The game is called, “I am better than you,” and you can find all the evidence you need to support the fact that you are winning. However, with no one to share the victory with, you only feel more isolated from others and think less of them. If you are a master, you are learning to trust others more and more every day. You are becoming more willing to forgive them for their natural tendency to be human. In particular, you are learning to appreciate your own humanness. Having done this, you see yourself, not as above others, yet not below them either. You begin to regard them as friends, rather than enemies or competitors. Your actions toward them are rewarded with love and caring rather than a hollow victory in being “right.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
As a master, you appreciate your supportiveness as well as your criticalness. You do things for others rather than to them. You stop judging others, because you stop judging yourself. Ultimately, bring right loses importance. Winning loses importance. And being with people grows more important every day. If it is not cultivated, attitudes toward transference, for instance, range from considering it a fiction which protects the therapist from the consequences of his real behaviour and its effects, to viewing it as early stereotypic behaviour which will be extinguished in the natural course of events. Symbolic analysis plays little role, partly because it is usually content-specific and covered by response to emotion. (I believe the so-called archaic symbols are significant, chiefly because they are cleaner communicants; like new words in a foreign language, they shake loose the multiple complexities of conventional meanings, and say just the elementary things each person means them to say.) The unconscious does not currently figure in client-centered literature. It is considered a reductionist assumption about phenomena better understood in terms of attention and “levels of awareness.” An ahistorical bias has always been plain among us, and this is one of the currents which moves us to an appreciation of some of the existential writings. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Diagnosis is a moot point too, though our departures are not as radical as they once were. The word “schizophrenia” becomes a damning designation. To have it once applied to a young man can be to ruin a career, despite all evidence of subsequent healthiness. A name implies a concept; and if this concept is unsound, the diagnosis can ruin treatment; the very naming it can damage the patient who we essay to help. The sick in mind…are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease, mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them; they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in infinite repetition. It is not that we decry classification as such; we recognize it as a useful scientific tool. However, when it leads to reification of terms, it is dangerous. We have been in an unprecedented era of self-actualization. Young people and most intelligent older people who appear to be laid back are taking care of their own situation first. They are “getting their heads together,” discovering and tending their bodies, learning how to produce their reality movies. College students are not charging after partisan dogmas or idealistic rhetoric. However, do not be deceived by this quiescence. It denotes neither apathy nor stupidity. In fact, it may well be the better part of wisdom to lay back until something worthy of your intelligence comes alone. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The existentialists also have pointed out that the self is made through decisions. You become what you decide. If, in the choice between running away or facing an unpleasant task, you choose to face up to the issue, you have become a better person. If you choose the weaker and more cowardly alternative, you become, at that moment, on the basis of your own choice, a weaker, lesser person. The behaviourists have, on the other hand, suggested that you have no “choice” but that your choices are determined by factors that control you, such as your parents’ wishes, your genes, and social demands upon you. Again the existentialists reply that one can also choose to let others make decisions for oneself but that the responsible direction is to recognize that, in almost all difficult decisions, the choice is still yours. The fake-nationalists are such terrible creatures, that on one occasion, they drove our unforgettable former President Clinton to bluntly express his opinion. State authority can guarantee peace and order only when the state World-concept and the World-concept of the people agree. Violent elements promoting a World-concept, one that differs from the people’s, will look like individual criminal groups and will not be seen as champions of a great idea which is opposed to the views of the state. If this were not the case, and the opposition held a World-concept that the people’s World-concept, the state can apply the most violent measures for centuries against the terror threatening it, but, in the end, the state will submit because it is unable to defeat the opposing idea. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The Sacramento Fire Department provides the professional personnel and programs for the citizens of Sacramento and is committed to protecting life and property from fire and explosions through inspection, investigation, training, education, data processing and statistical fire reports. “A child was caught in one of the rooms. The main fire was on the second floor of this apartment building, and there were women and kids downstairs screaming at us. We used every length of hose in the bed, it was a long stretch, because we had to go around a courtyard and up the stairs. The fire was coming around the cracks of the door to the second-floor doorway. I remember thinking, ‘This is it, this is where the stuff hits the fan.’ We had to knock down the fire before the guys from the truck could get in to search. I was on the nozzle, and we crawled through the doorway, and suddenly I had excruciating pain in my knees. The heat went right through my boots. We first hit the doorway with the line, then the hallways and the ceiling. The heat was extraordinary. We didn’t do it scientifically, we went in very, very fast because there was somebody in there. Halfway down the hall, I screamed, ‘My knees are burning.’ My officer said, ‘My knees are burning, too, but we have a job to do. Move in.’ I said to myself, ‘He’s right.’ #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
“It was the most fire I had ever seen, it was from wall to wall and ceiling to floor. There was all sorts of junk on the floor—a baby carriage frame, a shopping cart. The metal was glowing. It was blocking our way. I said, ‘We’ve got to pass this stuff out.’ I couldn’t move around it, and I couldn’t climb over it. The guy behind me thought I said, ‘I’m going to pass out.’ Realizing that communications were down, I handed the line over to the backup, grabbed the shopping cart, stood up, and moved it out of the way. When I lifted the shopping cart, just for those few seconds, I got second-degree burns on my fingers. I got back down and grabbed for the line, and they gave it back to me. I realized that this must be really bad, because you never get the line back. We went on, and I was thinking, ‘This is it. My sanity is gone. Nobody can stand this much pain. I can’t give in to it.’ Then I told myself, ‘You don’t feel it.’ A lot of guys don’t feel it when they’re burned. I did. I felt the whole thing, the whole time. I was making a conscious effort not to pay attention to it. I just kept moving. I have visions that I wasn’t going to have any knees left, they were just going to be done. Afterwards I really didn’t think I did that good a job. I was disappointed in myself. While I was throwing that stuff out, it must have looked like I was backing out. Maybe I could have climbed over that stuff. I felt I was too slow. I should have moved in a lot faster. And then, when I got outside, my knees were killing me. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
“I found out the rescue had been made by a die-hard fireman I know, X, the salt of the earth. He always has a frown on his face. He had gone up the fire escape and into one of the back windows and found a kid in the bathroom, a three- or four-year-old boy who was in the next bed to me in the emergency room. Rosy pink cheeks, he looked like he was half Black and half Irish. Really beautiful-looking child. They were taking him to the air chamber at the hospital, a decompression chamber for smoke inhalation victims. Anyhow, after the fire was out, we went back up with the hose, and I remember I had trouble walking upstairs because of my knees. The truck really took most of the line up. I wasn’t doing much of anything. I was dragging. I didn’t say anything about my knees. I kept thinking it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. I was making too much of it, and everybody else must be just as sore. I did say to somebody, ‘Boy, my knees are really killing me.’ And he said, ‘God bless you. My wife and I will pray for you.’ I got back to quarters, and my lieutenant said, ‘You don’t look so good. Are you sure you had the right gloves on?’ He was worried about my hands. I told him it wasn’t my hands, it was my knees. He said, ‘Well, all of our knees hurt a little.’ I said, ‘No. They really hurt.’ This was bout forty-five minutes after getting back. He said, ‘All right, let me see.’ #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
“I pulled up my pants, and my knees looked like a couple of golf ball blisters. I said, ‘Holy God.’ I had pulled some of the skin off. The chief took me to the hospital. I was dirty. They put on a sulfa drug, which is supposed to be a miracle drug for burns. They determined I had second-degree burns. At the burn center a few days later, they determined that the burns were third-degree. The doctor at the burn center said it was the most common kind he treats at the hospital. Burned knees. From kneeling on a hot surface. It seems that each time I knelt, I was burning the knees deeper and deeper. The doctor said I had cellulitis, which is a bad infection. ‘You have to be admitted right now. You’re going to have to go on intravenous for six or seven days. Then you’re going to have grafting.’ I was shocked. I had to call my wife and tell her and the family. That was very hard. I spent thirty-three days there, on and off. I’ve had three surgical grafts since then. I don’t think the guys who haven’t been in that situation know how painful it is. The burn is just the beginning. After that is when all the pain starts. Being in the burn center with other firefighters, there is a lot of camaraderie there. You’re all in the same boat. There were two others there, one with knees and the other had a hot cinder down his boot and he grabbed it with his hand. I thought I was in hell. I woke up in this icy room, and I was in a room full of men. God is punishing me, I thought. It was like a MASH unit. What an education. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
“The skin grafts came from my hips and pelvis. Supposedly it wouldn’t show so much there. Because I was a firefighter, they took deeper sections of skin, because I was going to be back on my knees. One of the guys was a probie. His recovery was going to be a lot longer than mine. You’re lying in bed, half naked, but we tried to make the best of it. We became very close. When we were separated at one point, we came to see each other on crutches or in a wheelchair. His wife had a baby since. I remember feeling very close to him. We shared the experience of the job.” The Sacramento Fire Department is committed to working closely with fire service organizations and other proactive groups to enhance solutions to the fire problem. The services provided by the agency include: arson investigations, fire prevention safety in buildings, boiler and pressure vessel safety, the program for petroleum and chemical tanks, collecting and analyzing fire reports, and the personnel standards and education for the firefighters in Sacramento. Awaken compassionate thoughts and actions by helping others realize that, like our Saviour, they too have compassion for others. Please make donate to the Sacramento Fire Department to asset them in their fire prevent duty and other programs. To help keep America a God loving, Christian community, please raise your children to love America and to love God and Jesus Christ. In a afford to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars and other American made good and services. Also, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. 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 19 of 19
The Winchester Mystery House
Paranormal investigators have recorded disembodies voices and witnessed strange shadows following them through The Winchester Mystery House. The enormous 19th century mansion once was nine stories tall, and had 600 rooms, but the 1906 earthquake demolished the nine-story observation tower, and took much of the 4th floor with it. However, 160 rooms, of which 110 are available for tour, still exist in this meandering catacomb.
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/
Happy Veteran’s Day!
Lord, Don’t Let Me Die Like this
There is the blindly instinctive and passioned terrestrial will in man, which violently drives him to seek and be satisfied with bodily satisfactions. There is also a higher will which gently draws him to transcend the body altogether. If the only enjoyment a man knows is that of physical sensations, he is only a dressed-up, walking, and thinking animal. The law of chastity requires that sexual relations be reserved for marriage between a man and a woman. In addition to reserving sexual intimacy for marriage, we obey the law of chastity by controlling our thoughts, words, and actions. Jesus Christ taught, “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: but I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart,” reports Matthew 5.27-28. It is an essential part of the Quest’s work to separate the man from his passions, to subjugate the animal in him so as better to cultivate the godlike in him. Both desires and fears bind a man to his ego and thus bar the way to spiritual fulfilment. They could not exist except in relation to a second thing. However, when he turns his mind away from all things and directs it towards its own still center, it is the beginning of the end for all desires and all fears. The end of all this long self-training to cast out personal grief and terrestrial passion is blessedness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The heart must become empty of all desires. This brings about the emotional void, which corresponds, in its own place, to the mental void experienced in the depth of mystical meditation. To this emptiness he must give himself, with it he must satisfy himself. In this way he obeys Jesus and becomes “poor in Spirit.” Poor in Spirit refers to a spiritual state of humility and dependence on God. It is a recognition of one’s need for God and a growing dependence on Him. It is also a sense of spiritual bankruptcy, powerlessness, and unworthiness before God. What is it worth to a man to be free from the passions, and free from the inner divisive conflicts which their activity must necessarily produce in him? Are they not the chief obstacles which prevent him from attaining that inner calm wherein alone the ego can be faced, caught, and conquered? And this done, what is there to keep the Overself from taking possession of him? Few men are moved by a single motive. For most men the contrary is the fact. This is because first, the ego itself is a complex and second, the higher and lower natures are in conflict. Discrimination is needed to penetrate the thin surface of so many pleasures, while the strength is needed to say “No” when this is wiser than accepting them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
It is not only needful to understand the characteristics of one’s desires but also their source. This knowledge will help him to improve character and attain true self-reliance. It is a strange paradox that on whatever desire a man wields the axe of non-attachment, he will thereafter become possessed of the power to attain it. There is this great paradox on the Quest: that the more the disciple obtains the power to bring about the fruition of his desires, the more he loses those desires! If we lack the willpower to overcome bad habits that have become popular and conventional, at least let us try not to justify our indulgence by specious reasons. The blind impulses must be checked by willpower, the lower nature must be disciplined and the lower energies directed into higher channels. It is perfectly possible, where fate ordains, to live continently and chastely, however strongly sexed a man may be. However, to achieve this, he must utilize the analytic reason, the creative imagination, and the active will in understanding and disciplining his energies and then he must redirect them towards aspirational, intellectual, or moral ideas or transmute them into practical work. He who begins by refusing to be a slave to the palate’s perverted appetite will find it easier to go on to refusing to be a slave to lust. A triumph over the one prepares the way for, and helps in the achievement of, a triumph over the other. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
It is true that we all share a terrestrial body with the lower creatures. However, that does not force us to stay on their level emotionally. Every desire conquered feeds his strength and fortifies his will. The man who has made his way to the top of his profession but failed to make the conquest of his passions, is still an unbalanced creature, an unsatisfied human being. The extremes of abstention which follow repugnance, indifference, or self-struggle and the satiety which follows helpless yielding are both undesirable. The necessities of Nature hold us in their thrall but there is first, a difference between them and the desires of the ego and second, a difference between the true necessities which are inescapable from physical existence and the false ones which have been imposed on us by age-old habits, traditions, environments, and outer suggestions. That desire is a true one whose source lies in a genuine need, not in mere greed. Repentance redeems man, lifts him above the lustful dog to the loving human being, distinguishes him from the mere animal. We are cast out of Heaven by our own passion and kept out by our own attachments. If today we are miserable exiles, the way to remedy such a situation is clear. We must free ourselves from the one and disentangle ourselves from the other. He should desire that which will itself cut off all desires. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
“Experiencing” is defined as an inner stream of feelings to which you can every moment attend inwardly. It is simple, effortless and available to us all. Yet it is maddeningly elusive. Try these experiences: Feel your body from the inside. Is there tension in your muscles? Is your stomach wound tight like a watch spring? Take a deep breath and feel what happens to that tension. Sit a while without moving. Does some prickliness begin to form just under the skin? Recall the full feeling you once had after overeating. Recall the heaviness, the discomfort, the difficulty in breathing. What does being bored really feel like? That strained, impatient deadness almost hurts, does it not? Something deep down screams soundlessly at you to get out of the boring situation. Can you recall feeling that? These are but three examples of experiences. They do not involve learning or doing. You can have them instantaneously. And there are thousands more available to you—each distinct from all the others. To have an experience, to really “get into” a feeling, involves a release or surrender. Behind the surrender is a basic willingness to trust, to accept that the inner core “knows what is best” for you. Thus experiencing holds the solution to all your internal mysteries, the truth of your existence. If experiencing is so wonderful and useful, why is it so elusive? Who do we shun the prospect of getting to our inner core and discovering our true being? Probably because we are afraid. We anticipate the truth will be too painful, that when we look inside at what really is, we will not like what we see. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Ironically, by trying to avoid the pain of looking within, we virtually guarantee the continued pain of our incomplete, manipulative behaviour. True, some will shed some tears on the way into their core, but compared to the tears of helplessness one has already shed, they are a few random raindrops in a storm. And who knows how many future tears he has avoided by reaching down and finding his inner source of power—a source which he can use to untangle the painful web of helplessness his life has become. People who benefit most from therapy are those who are “experience-oriented,” who subjectively follow their feelings even though they have not explicitly thought them all out. Being willing to let your experience talk to you is the first significant step from manipulation to mastery. There are some common ways people approach a problem. One way is to belittle the problem. This is when one says, “It really is nothing…I should not let a few pains bother me.” Such an approach will get you nowhere. If pains are important enough for your body to feel, they are important enough to look into, get inside of, and get clear. You do not make a problem go away by belittling it. In fact, by pushing it aside, you probably make it worse. Often times people analyze their problems. We might assume someone has something to do with our problem. However, the analysis may or may not be correct, and it does nothing to change the feeling. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
You can analyze furiously the whole time you are having the feeling, but if it is there in your guy, with its inexplicable discomforts and tensions, your analysis will not ease or make it disappear. A lot of people also face down the feeling. Some say to themselves, “I will have to grit my teeth, stand up to it, walk through it,” which sounds courageous and noble, but is actually false bravado. This approach does not work because when you do it, you do not touch the place where change takes place: in your body. You are just mouthing a courage which can only be found deep inside, at your core. Another method is lecturing yourself. The script often goes like this, “If I could just grow up and be adult about this, I am sure everything would be all right.” This does not work either. The lecture is based on the mistaken notion that adults do not have feelings, or if they do, they do not have the right to the feelings. When you lecture yourself, all you do is pile guilt on top of whatever the problem is. And the guilt just makes it worse. Drowning the feeling is another method. When you try to tune the problem out because it makes you feel worse, you sink into the discomfort, hoping you will find it less painful, but knowing deep down that you will not. Whenever you sink into this unchanged feeling, it makes you feel as bad as the last time. You are no further ahead. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Since these five approaches are not physical, they cannot work. The feeling is physical and can only be changed by a physical process, such as focusing. When a man finally focuses, a very real change happens in him, something which he can build on. Even though it appears that some people play the victim in life, that circumstances seem to be manipulating him, they are still manipulators. Some people may stay married to a homosexual husband, playing upon one’s own helplessness and their husband’s sense of guilt to take care of her, even though they both resented it. The unspoken (and sometimes even spoken) message is, “I am too weak and helpless to take care of myself and the boys, so you have to.” This manipulation is rewarded by his grudging support, but it has its price: It traps her in an unhappy marriage, it prevents her from going out and learning to make it on her own, it reinforces her own feeling of helplessness. How can you deal with this type of manipulator in your everyday life? Well, for starters, you will have to fight the temptation to take the easy way out. You will have to refuse to do things for the weakling and instead, encourage him or her to be strong and self-directed. I once had a friend whose wife was afraid to go to the store and buy a newspaper. She said she did not like the way the clerks leered at her. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
So my friend would stop in his way home from work and buy the newspaper himself. It was easier than arguing with his wife about it. Finally, he said, “I do not read the evening newspaper, I watch the news on TV. If you want the paper, buy it yourself.” She refused, but she still wanted the newspaper. So my friend began by accompanying her to the store the first few times until she felt more comfortable about it. In time, she went to get the paper without a second thought. My friend used this same technique when it came to his wife’s getting a driver’s license. At first, he refused to drive her places, even though he had been chauffeuring her for years. When she grew tired of taking buses and cabs, he offered to teach her how to drive, and she eventually accepted the offer. Now she had her own car and capably goes wherever she wants. In refusing to be manipulated, my friend made his wife angry and perhaps caused her some pain. However, in the end, he helped her gain strength—and helped free her from a continuing life-script of manipulation. The criminal who acts according to nature cannot, without betraying his office, range himself on the side of the law. “If you want to be republicans, one more effort” means: “Accept the freedom of crime, the only reasonable attitude, and enter forever into a state of insurrection as you enter into a state of grace.” Thus total submission to evil leads to an appalling penitence, which cannot fail to horrify the Republic of enlightenment of natural goodness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
By a significant coincidence, the manuscript of One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom was burned during the first riot of the Republic, which could hardly fail to denounce Sade’s heretical theories of freedom and to throw so compromising a supporter into prison once more. By doing so, it gave him the regrettable opportunity of developing his rebellious logic still further. The universal republic could be a dream for Sade, but never a temptation. In politics his real position is cynicism. In his Society of the Friends of Crime he declares himself ostensibly in favour of the government and its laws, which he meanwhile has every intention of violating. It is the same impulse that makes the lowest form of criminal vote for conservative candidates. The plan that Sade had in mind assures the benevolent neutrality of the authorities. The republic of crime cannot, for the moment at least, be universal. It must pretend to obey the law. In a World that knows no other rule than murder, beneath a criminal Heaven, and in the name of a criminal nature, however, Sade, in reality, obeys no other law than that of inexhaustible desire. However, to desire without limit is the equivalent of being desired without limit. License to destroy supposes that you yourself can be destroyed. Therefore you must struggle and dominate. The law of this World is nothing but the law of force; its driving force, the will to power. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
When it comes to therapy, we really want to think of that person as a person—someone unique with dignity and capacity, worthy of our unreserved respect. If we must have a word for it, “client” seems more expressive of that. Why “client-centered”? This matters much more. Again, the negative purpose is only to distinguish between this and “therapist-centered,” “theory-centered,” “society-centered,” etcetera. There are such things. The positive meaning is immense. It expresses the major goal of the therapist; to understand and accept the perception and feelings of the client; to share the client’s view of reality rather than to impose his own. It follows than that we rely heavily upon the growth capacity of the individual. The therapist is an active and significant person, but he cannot heal—he can only help to create conditions in which the natural regenerative powers take effect. As for motive, the drive toward self-actualization is a primary one; every human being would rather be better than worse, and strives toward the enhancement of self even though the strivings may often be thwarted and regressive. These assumptions about motive and capacity combine into a general ethic, which can simply be called self-determination. Client-centered therapy is founded on the conviction that man should be free, and to this end makes freedom a major means in the therapeutic experience. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
This is not, as some think, a reflection of political attitudes which supposedly prevail in America. It is a personal psychological conviction that the man who is most free will be most healthy. Freedom means the widest scope of choice and openness to experience, therefore the greatest probability of an adaptive response. For the individual, it seems that the urge to freedom is an urge to health, and precedes, rather than reflects, a political order. It is common for a person to experience conflict between wishes. He or she may want to study and also to go to the movies. Someone may want to marry one person and at the same time be in love with another. A person may want to have fun but also to be “good.” The healthy thing to do with conflict is to acknowledge its existence within the self, study all the alternatives as rationally as one can in the light of one’s value system, make a decision, act on it, and accept all the consequences. Among the consequences to be accepted are regrets over what one has lost in connection with the abandoned alternatives. No decision can ever be made without some fear that it is the wrong decision. There is nothing inconsistent with healthy personality in the idea that a decision, once made will still leave the person uncertain that it is the best or “rightest” one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Existential conflicts frequently arise where each choice has positive values and negative implications associated with it. Any alternative, if chose, will affect one’s life profoundly. To make decisions, such as whether to marry or not, to take this job or that, calls for courage. The ability to decide such conflicts is an attribute of healthy personality. Such courage seems to grow out of past experiences at decision-making, experience that fosters independent security. The younger generation is generally viewed as being too laid back, apathetic, narcissistic, self-indulgent, and sensual. There are periods when a species or an individual or a nation needs to lay back, mellow out, cocoon-quiescent and recoup. Intelligent pursuit of happiness is a challenge of the human experience. However, this quiescence is more apparent than real. The spellbreaker, or internal release, is the element which lifts the injunction and frees the person from his script so that he can fulfill his own autonomous aspirations. It is a pre-set “self-destruct” which is obvious in some scripts but has to be hunted for or decoded in others, much like the pronouncements of the Delphic oracle which served the same function in Ancient Greece. Not much is known about it clinically, because people come for treatment just because they cannot find out. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
For example, in a “Waiting for Rigor Mortis” or “Sleeping Beauty: script, the patient thinks she will be freed of her frigidity when she meets the Prince with the Golden Apples, and may very likely feel that the therapist is that Prince. However, he declines the honour, mainly for ethical reasons, but also because when he previous (unlicensed) therapist took on the job, his Golden Apples turned to dust. Sometimes the spellbreaker is merely ironic. This is a common situation in losers’ scripts: “Things will be better after you are dead.” The internal release may be event-centered or time-centered. “When you meet a Prince,” “After you die fighting,” or “after you have three children” are event-centered antiscripts. “When you pass the age at which your father died,” or “After you have stayed with the company thirty years” are time-centered. Whoever puts a moral purpose into life automatically lifts himself above the physical level of mere animality. For him begins a struggle between the slavery of sense and the freedom of enlightenment, between blind emotion and deliberate will, between inward weakness and inward strength. Henceforth, he seeks happiness rather than pleasure, the calm of a satisfied mind rather than the excitement of satisfied senses. If this is a stoic ideal, it is a necessary one, for he must conquer himself. He hates himself, and no man can live in peace with what he hates. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The Sacramento Fire Department protects the people of Sacramento with public education, fire suppression, rescue, and emergency medical services. The Sacramento Fire Department partners with the community to mitigate risks, and responds to all calls for service with skill, dedication, and compassion. “We were asleep, and the alarm came at about 5.55 on a Sunday morning. My company, Engine XX was first in. It was a one-family row house, two floors and a basement. It started as a fire in the basement and had spread to the first floor. I was the nozzle man. We knocked down the floor fire on the first floor, then we tried to find the entrance to the basement. We stumbled around in the living room because there was so much furniture in it and we couldn’t see in the smoky darkness. The family had redone the basement, and instead of opening a door and going down steps to the basement, you had to open the door and walk about eight feet before you came to the steps. We didn’t know that at the time. It’s an unusual arrangement for that kind of house. Anyway, we couldn’t find the basement. It started getting real hot in there, and everything started cracking. The lieutenant, Y, said, ‘Too hot. Let’s get out of here.’ Before we could make a move, the floor collapsed and knocked us down. The fire just took off, and we were trapped in there. I was slightly unconscious for a while, then I had to pause a little while to get my senses together, because I was burned on my forehead. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
“Lieutenant Y was in worse trouble. He was dazed. I had to get him out of there. I grabbed him under the arms and started to lead him toward the back door, but we stumbled over the furniture, and we tripped and fell. So I grabbed him by the hand, and my glove came off. The next thing I knew, my hand was badly burned. Then I started dragging him along the floor, and the next thing I knew, I was stuck. My air mask had stuck on a table or chair or something. I was stuck, and I couldn’t move. It was real scary. It was like being in hell, really. I thought, ‘Lord, don’t let me die like this. I deserve a chance.’ I thought about my wife. We were only married a year. I said, ‘Wow, I’m going to leave my wife right now, and my family.’ The way it happened, it was unbelievable. I was totally stunned. I didn’t believe I would be in a situation like that. From my training and previous experience in other fires, I knew we had to get out of there. I tired as hard as I could to get us out, but every time I tried to move, somehow I was getting weaker and weaker. I thought it was hopeless. Then my air bottle ran out of oxygen. I thought I was going to die of suffocation. I was just hoping I wouldn’t burn to death. But the fire didn’t seem like it was coming toward us anymore. I could hardly breathe in my air mask, and I had too much smoke in my chest. Just then, the other guys managed to get back in there and pull us out. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
“At the hospital they put a tube into my lungs. They could hardly get it down there, my throat was so swollen. It had been burned by the heat. They were showing it down there, and I was scared. They finally got it down. I don’t remember much of my first three days in the hospital. A lot of people said they came up to see me, but I don’t remember who. I asked somebody if everybody had made it out od the fire all right, and they said no. I saw the other two firefighters who were hurt, but I didn’t see Lieutenant Y. I kind of figure he had died. After the third or fourth day, everything started hurting real bad. My hand. My face. I was in a lot of pain. It took me a while to get over that. The first day was hardest for my wife. She was really hurt to see me, but she tried to hold it back. Afterwards, she didn’t want me coming back to the department, but I told her that that was what I wanted to do. So she respects that, and she supports me. I was in therapy for a year and a half for my hand, using grips and putty. Then I went to this physical therapy center and did all sorts of other things, exercising every day, working with my hand to build things. Today my hand is not as good as it was, but it’s okay. The department was excellent, supportive in every way. Everybody came up to see me, even guys I didn’t know. It seemed like the whole fire department was at the hospital. Anything I wanted or needed, they got for me. They treated me excellently. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
“I was off the job for about five and a half months, then I was put on light duty for about a year. Now I’m back on the job full-time. Everything is pretty cool. I’m lucky to be alive, right?” Professionalism leads the Sacramento Fire Department to continuously improve their knowledge and skills, always striving to be “first in” with excellent service. The Sacramento Fire Department also strives to sustain and improve the health, safety, convenience, and welfare of the citizens of Sacramento and to plan for the future development of the community. You can help save lives and property by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. And remember parents, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus, respect law and others, treat others with dignity and respect, and remind them of the importance of education. To help America survive the global recession and bring manufacturing jobs back to America and to get American wages at pace with inflation, it is important to buy America cars, American meat, American produce and other American made goods and services. 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. Our Father, our King, be gracious unto us and answer us, for we are wanting in good deeds; deal with us in charity and lovingkindness, and please save us. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
The Winchester Mystery House
The Menagerie Oddities Market is back this Holiday season!
On every Saturday from November 30 to December 28, from 11am to 5pm, Winchester Mystery House will host the 6th annual Menagerie Holiday Oddities & Curiosities Market, with new vendors every week. Join the Yuletide Oddventure and stuff those stockings with something weird they won’t forget this holiday season! 🎄
Link in bio for more information! https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
America Love it or Leave it: How Can a Lost Mind be Recovered?
Our life experiences are distracting us and dulling our spiritual view so much so that we are not focusing on that which matters most. I wonder, do we miss opportunities to learn of the Lord and feel His love? Do we miss opportunities to share with others—especially children—that which matters most, the gospel of the Lord, Jesus Christ? We have all seen children and youth standing in the crowds confused and wanting to know what matter most. I can almost hear this child and other children crying out the words so many of us have sung, “Please teach me to walk in the light.” Are we teaching our children to know, feel, and rejoice in the beauty, power, and miracles of the gospel of Jesus Christ? Let us nurture our children concerning Him whom we call the Lord Jesus Christ. Let us teach our children the grand saving principles of the gospel. Children require the ability to knock that having faith in the Saviour and following Him will help them to receive peace in this beautiful World that is experiencing trials and tribulations. As you include your children at your family dinner table, as you involve them in daily prayer and scripture study and in family home evening, you are following the example of the Saviour by loving and teaching them. As you do this, let them know that together your family is striving to keep the commandments and to be worthy to be an eternal family. #RandolphHarris 1 of 26
It may be during the information one-on-one times that the Spirit will prompt us to ask just the right questions or to say just the right thing to help our children know and feel the light of the Lord. If we make the opportunities, the Spirit will guide us. We have wonderful, capable children in our midst. We can help them find peace in this life and in the life to come. After all, you do not want to raise your children to be on the run, to have to dye their hair to evade law enforcement. Some people who do not walk in the foot steps of the Lord end up having to live underground and join the Weathermen Underground tribe. You do not want your children to have to work with dope dealers to raise a quarter of a million dollars to pay manic guerrillas to keep them safe, to pay for hair dye, and fast cars as they drive up Highway 101 to north Oakland. There is the chance that the police and CHP will throw up roadblocks and you will have to stay at a stash pad and wait it out before the coast is clear to drive to Salt Lake City. It is better to raise your children to be American Legion hunting-fishing guys, or a soft Middle American woman, or everyone’s TV girl—a Holy Family. It is best to become a Holy Family of Elegance. When it comes to psychotherapy, words themselves are vague and insecure and our ignorance so great that we tend in desperation to assume meaning where none exists. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26
Let us recognize that the true nature of psychosis is a mystery. (And the nature of the most prevalent convulsive treatment, electroshock, is called a “mystery within a mystery” by the most authoritative book on the subject.) One of our problems, then, is how to deal with a subject consisting of experience which at its worst is indescribable from the inside and incomprehensible from the outside, and this without using words which are themselves confounding. “Psychosis,” for instance, has an authoritative, antiseptic sound, but its real sterility lies mainly in its lack of clear meaning. It simply replaces “madness”—now a literary term, and “insanity”—which represents a dated legal concept. Falling into pseudoscientific conventions of language will not help. At the present stage of knowledge, the questions are well enough represented by asking simply: What does it mean to “lose one’s mind”? How can a “lost mind” be recovered? For that matter, how is the mind developed in the first place? It is our assumption that “mind” develops and exists beyond brain, and following from this, the assumption of social psychological origin of much mental disturbance. It sounds simple, but there is by no means wholehearted agreement in the field on this issue. Current work on molecular structure and the chemistry of schizophrenia, for instance, challenges psychological assumptions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26
It is possible, of course, that biochemical methos of treatment will develop actual cures for psychotic states, thus outmoding psychotherapy. No less a therapist than Dr. Freud thought so in regard to schizophrenia. Also fashionable are experiments with drugs which induce pseudo-psychotic states, which suggest to some that if such states can be caused by chemical means, they can also be cured by chemical means, and further that the mechanism of disturbance is fundamentally biochemical. Undeniably there is always a biochemical basis for behaviour of the human organism. However, this does not rule out psychological influence, in either the sickening or the healing process. It is certain that anxiety can cause diarrhea. Chemical mechanism? Surely. And a virus or a laxative might cause the same apparent result, but that would not alter the fact that anxiety, a psychological state, can and does cause diarrhea (as surely as a nonchemical state may cause someone ten feet away to blush). Nor would it mean, more obviously but no more truly, that even though the eventual chemistry, mechanism, and result are the same, two different causes (laxative and anxiety) are therefore the same. Nor would it mean than an antidote for diarrhea is a specific treatment for either anxiety or a virus, or that a specific for one is of any use for the other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26
Similarly, a chemically induced psychotic state may not be a true psychosis even though it has the same appearance in terms of hallucinations and like effects. A chemical antidote for the pseudo-psychosis is not necessarily effective for a true psychosis, even though a chemical mechanism exists in either case. Psychological influence is not eradicated by the artificial imitation of its effects. Even though “tranquilizers” will tranquilize, so will a blow on the head, and neither one is equivalent to, or can deny the existence of, “peace of mind.” That which we call a “psychosis” is not a disease. It is a learned behaviour, exaggerated to a point of no return, id est, where control is lost and the exaggerated behaviour “takes on a life of its own” temporarily. Because this exaggeration is so overwhelming, so much beyond our ordinary capacity to assimilate, it appears to us that we are no longer dealing with, for instance, ordinary suspicion, but something quite different—“paranoia.” Then it appears that psychosis is not of the same order, not on the same continuum, as “normal” or “neurotic” behaviour. However, as psychotic behaviour becomes more common it is seen as a form of maladjustment similar in kind ot lesser degrees of maladjustment, though so much greater in quantity that it seems different in quality too. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26
There is one sense, unfortunately, in which it is different. A boulder balanced on the edge of a precipice can be pressed ounce by measured ounce toward rolling off. Each ounce is just like the last, but when the quantity of pressure totals to the “breaking point,” the quality of the consequences changes radically. No longer will the relief or counterpressure of one ounce recover the balance. Even if the boulder is not smashed in the fall, an enormous effort is required to restore it to its original position. It is because of this effort (which so few can make, and so many need) that it is necessary to prevent the “psychotic situation” in life. The “psychotic situation” is a precondition to the psychotic state, which may or may not follow. In our society, there is an overwhelming emphasis on thinking. In school, we were taught almost entirely to think rather than to feel. We were told to “use our heads,” to think through problems, to study hard and be sensible. This approach is supposed to lead to success in the World. The trouble is, while thinking is unquestionably important, it is of limited value. Thinking, you see, is entirely concerned with the past and the future. We cannot think about the present moment; we can only feel it. The present, a microscopic dot on the line from past to future, does not lend itself to thinking—for the simple fact that thinking takes time. The moment we think, even if we think about “now,” it is already in the past. Thinking can help us learn from the past and plan for the future, but it cannot help us experience the now. #RandolphHarris 6 of 26
Thinking results in action. First we think, then we do. We are a society of thinkers and doers. However, we are also a society of manipulators because all this emphasis on the mind has taught us to be cunning and calculating. When we use our heads only, we become manipulators—functioning with only part of our human capacity. So thoroughly are we oriented to doing, we shy from theories that tell us there is nothing we can do about a situation. The truth is, in some situations, there is absolutely nothing we can do. Sometimes no actions can be taken to help a person be confident. One must be confident, be secure, be powerful—and to do that, one must discover his core being. A system based on thinking is limited because it is based on concepts and theories borrowed from others, generally others’ books. It is borrowed knowledge—and borrowed knowledge does not overcome ignorance; it hides ignorance. Borrowed knowledge is “knowing without knowing.” The more of it we amass, the more darkness and ignorance we keep in our inner cores. We can develop our logic, but logic alone leads only to conclusions, never to the truth. Because the truth needs no proof. It does, however, need the heart. This is where experience comes in. Knowledge of the truth comes from our experience of it, from a feeling which originates deep down in our cores. It is totally individual, intensely personal, and entirely subjective. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26
You cannot know what love is by reading about it. You must experience it. You cannot take a course in love—or confidence, or any other value for that matter. Books and course are things of the mind. Values are things of the heart as well as the mind, and they come from within. However, people spend so much time in school and not everyone believes in God, nor do they go to church. Therefore, it might be conducive to offer a psychology class on how to love. People spend so much time learning how to think and how to hate. If we taught people how to express platonic love in college, it might generate better human beings that are able to deal with stressful situations and will be less critical of others’ perceived faults. Some people view themselves as weak and powerless because they have never experienced their own personal power. All of the doing is merely activity at the circumference of one’s true self. In the focusing process, one can break through the circumference and find something else. In surrendering to helplessness, one may discover a capable self in one’s core. The “something” that one finds is the real I. And finding it, one knows, intuitively, that one had and still has power. Note that, in this experience, one does not actually do anything. A man may not know what to do. However, that is not important. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26
When the right thing to do comes alone, he will do it, based on his new, intuitive knowledge that he can do it. Not borrowed knowledge, from books or lectures or friends, but intuitive knowledge from within. Some people will thus have an instantaneous experience of mastery. When control is so perfect that he can never again raise his voice in anger, he needs turn attention to only one other passion—the spiritual. Such a chaste aloofness will help with mental, spiritual, and emotional clarity. When desires die without regrets, he begins to taste real peace. When cravings slough off naturally, like a serpent’s skin, he finds tranquil happiness. If not all of it, the man who can win his way to freedom from anger and finally liberate the mind from passion may need much of his lifetime for the work; but what he gains is of inestimable value. For this brings him closer to awareness of the Overself. As aspiration for the Overself grows stronger, other desires grow weaker. If you are ever to emerge from the darkness, you must possess an insatiable longing for light. He arrives at purity by a cultivated discipline of the mind rather than by a forcible atrophy of the senses. If he can find it and heed it, the thread-like intuition which will lead him out of animality into serenity will be his best guide. It is not possible for these finer elements to become, little by little, paramount in his outlook, consciousness, and conduct without a corresponding decline in the coarser ones. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26
He will gradually become the ruler of his physical appetites and then the master of his bodily desires. Indeed, as all his longings for the Overself slowly gather themselves together into a great dedicated life, there is an equally great shift-over from the terrestrial part of his being to the truly human, allied with an opening-up of the angelic or divine part. The fruits of extravagances involving pleasures of the flesh, the harvest of promiscuity of pleasures of the flesh, the gleanings of irresponsibility with pleasures of the flesh, and the gratifications of license involving pleasures of the flesh must be subjected to the hard discipline of reason. Those who will not do so must sooner or later pay the price in fears, anxieties, irritations, regrets, disillusionments, shames, and despairs. So long as a man identifies himself with the physical body, so long will he perforce have to identify himself with its desires and passions. Only when he transfers this self-identification to the infinite mental being can he completely detach himself from them. When they are still in subjection to passion, of what use is it for men to talk of freeing themselves from subjection to egoism? The student of philosophy will try to comprehend the sensations got from sensual pleasures impartially and impersonally. Man knows instinctively what will give him momentary emotional satisfaction; he must wrestle with reason to know what will give him deep enduring happiness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26
When different pleasures compete for suffrage or when duty competes with desire, reason must arbitrate. Desire carried to an undue extent becomes a passion disturbing to the equilibrium of life and character. When a man finds that despite all his efforts to improve himself and reform his character, he still remains the same, it is an indication that new methods must be tried. The scourging of the flesh may be needed by, and may help, those who find their overheated passions and lusts get out of hand. However, it will not end those troubles of man, even though it may tame them for a time. Something more must be added, or must replace them—first, knowledge; second, work on the process of attention. The instinctual animal urge plus the ambitious drive for power and the personal desire for property keep men from spiritual aspiration. If he is filled with selfish interest alone, seeking the fulfilment of personal ambitions irrespective of any higher considerations; if terrestrial passion drives him and greed dominates him, he blocks his own way. Purification from such attachments must be the first endeavour. Pleasures which corrupt character are undesirable; but those which uplift character (like the finest works of Aaliyah, Beethoven and Handel) are desirable. There is a level of tension below which the person can think rationally and act effectively. #RandolphHarris 11 of 26
When tension increases above this point, efficiency breaks down, and irrational thinking and expressive behaviour takes the place of rational thinking and effective action. This point on the tension continuum is called the frustration threshold. It varies from person to person, and within the same person at different times. A mother wants her house to be clean and orderly. In the forenoon, her three-year-old daughter Annie might spill a glass of milk, leave her Barbie dolls in disarray, and scatter magazines all over the newly cleaned living room. The mother’s reaction at the time is one of mild anger, followed by efficient attempts to set things straight. At five-thirty in the afternoon, the child repeats her efforts at messing up the house. This time, the mother “explores”—she sends the child to her room, screams, and is unable to prepare supper until she has vented her tension. Optimum physical health produces a high frustration threshold. A sick or exhausted person has less energy to cope with tension and is more easily frustrated than one who is fit. People who manage to survive the extremely corrupt Sacramento City—a so-called death camp—have pointed out that a strong commitment to life and a sense of mission to fulfill were definite factors in survival. Individuals with such a sense of mission were less readily frustrated by the deprivations, stresses, and pressure of extremely hostile environments. #RandolphHarris 12 of 26
When Zorba, the Greek, was unable to express his grief following the death of his beloved son, he danced a Cretan dance until he dropped from exhaustion. On another occasion, when he felt he had at last found the solution to a problem of brining logs down a mountainside, again he danced. Finally, when the plan to bring logs down the mountain failed, and his boss’s investment was dismally lost, the boss asked Zorba to show him how to dance, and the two men danced and laughed like madmen. When someone has access to such means of self-expression, as in dance, violent exercise, painting, or song, that person can release the inevitable frustration of life without recourse to mindless, destructive outlets of tension. As Reich pointed out, sexual orgasm also provides a natural means for the dissipation of tension. In fact, prolonged privation of pleasures of the flesh is a common cause of frustration. It is however, a mistake to think that other frustrations, such as material misunderstandings, are all relieved by pleasures of the flesh. Nothing is more revealing in this respect than the famous lampoon, read b y Dolmance in the Philosophie du Boudoir, which has the curious title: People of France, one more if you want to be republicans. Pierre Klossowski is right in attaching so much importance to it, for this lampoon demonstrates to the revolutionaries that their republic is founded on the murder of the King—who was King by divine right—and that by guillotining God on 21 January 1793, they deprived themselves forever of the right to outlaw crime or to censure malevolent instincts. #RandolphHarris 13 of 26
The monarchy supported the concept of a God who, in conjunction with itself, created all laws. As for the Republic, it stands alone, and morality was supposed to exist without benefits of the Commandments. It is doubtful, however, that Sade, as Klossowki maintains, had a profound sense of sacrilege and that an almost religious horror led him to the conclusions that he expresses. It is much more likely that he came to these conclusions first and afterwards perceived the correct arguments to justify the absolute moral license that he wanted the government of his time to sanction. Logic founded on passions reconclusions before the premises. To be convinced of this we only have to appraise the admirable sequence of sophisms by which Sade, in this passage, justifies calumny, theft, and murder and demands that they be tolerated under the new dispensation. It is then, however, that his thoughts are most profound. He rejects, with exceptional perspicacity for his times, the presumptuous alliance of freedom with virtue. Freedom, particularly when it is a prisoner’s dream, cannot endure limitations. It must sanction crime or it is no longer freedom. On this essential point Sade never varies. This man who never preached anything but contradictions only achieves coherence—and of a most complete kind—when he talks of capital punishment. #RandolphHarris 14 of 26
An addict of refined ways of execution, a theoretician of sexual crime, he was never able to tolerate legal crime. “My imprisonment by the State, with the guillotine under my very eyes, was far more horrible to me than all the Bastilles imaginable.” From this feeling of horror, he drew the strength to be moderate, publicly, during the Terror, and to intervene generously on behalf of his mother-in-law, despite the fact that she had had him imprisoned. A few years later Nodier summed up, perhaps without knowing it, the position obstinately defended by Sade: “To kill a man in a paroxysm of passion is understandable. To have him killed by someone else after a calm and serious meditation and on the pretext of duty honorably discharged is incomprehensible.” Here we find the germ of an idea which again will be developed by Sade: he who kills must pay with his own life. Sade is more moral, we see, than our contemporaries. However, his hatred for the death penalty is at first no more than a hatred for men who are sufficiently convinced of their own virtue to dare to inflict capital punishment, when they themselves are criminals. You cannot simultaneously choose crime for yourself and punishment for others. You must open the prison gates or give an impossible proof of your own innocence. Even if only once, from the moment you accept murder, you must allow it universally. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26
Permissions are the chief therapeutic instrument of the script analyst because they offer the only chance for an outsider to free the patient from the curses laid on him by his parents. The therapist gives permission to the patient’s Child by saying either “It is all right to do it,” or “You do not have to do it.” Both say to the Parent “Let him alone.” Thus, there are positive and negative permissions. In a positive permission, or license, “Let him alone!” means “Let him do it!” This cuts off the injunction. In a negative permission, or external release, it means “Stop pushing him into it!” This cuts off the provocation. Some permissions can be regarded either way. This is particularly true of antiscripts. Thus, when the Prince kissed Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, he was offering her both a license to wake up and a release from the witch’s curse. One of the most important permissions is a license to stop acting stupid and start thinking. Many patients of advanced years have not had a single independent thought since early childhood, and have quite forgotten how it feels to think, or even what thinking means. With properly timed permission, however, they are able to come through, and are more than delighted when they say out loud at the age of sixty-five or seventy what may be the first intelligent observation of their adult lives. #RandolphHarris 16 of 26
Often it is necessary to undo the work of previous therapists in order to give a patient permission to think. Some of them have spent years in mental hospitals or clinics where the slightest attempt on their part to think independently came up against powerful resistance from the staff. There they were taught that thinking is really a sin called “intellectualzing,” to which they must confess promptly and promise never to indulge in again. Many addictions and obsessions are based on parental come-ones. “Do not stop taking drugs (or you may stop coming home to ask for money)” says the mother of the heroin addict. “Do not stop thinking about pleasures of the flesh,” says the parent of a lecher or a nymphomaniac. And the whole concept of permissions as a therapeutic instrument was started by a gambler who said: “I do not need someone to tell me to stop gambling, I need someone to give me permission to stop, because somebody in my head says I cannot.” A permission, then, allows Jeder to be flexible, instead of responding with fixed patterns frozen by slogans and controls. This has nothing to do with “permissive up brining,” since that is full of imperatives, too. The most important permissions are to love and to change and to do things well. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26
A person with permission is just as easy to spot as one who is all tied up. “He sure has permission to think,” “She sure has permission to be beautiful,” and “They sure have permission to enjoy themselves,” are Martian expressions of admiration. (One of the frontiers of script analysis is the further study of permissions, primarily through observation of eye movements in very young children. Thus, in some situations the child glances sideways at his parents to see if he has “permission” to do something; in other cases, he seems to be “at liberty” to follow his own inclinations without consulting them. Such observations, carefully evaluated, may result in a significant distinction between “permissions” and “liberties.”) The term Genetic Counseling indicates that a genetic consumer consciousness is dawning. The emphasis is on genetic disorder, not upon genetic endowment, but this is to be expected. A new technology always appeals to hive-security first as a way of dealing with danger. Awareness of genetic disorder precedes awareness of genetic excellence, just as psychiatry precedes self-actualized psychology. Pathology precedes potential. When the experts in a hive begin treating “broken-down personalities” they have recognized the existence of “personality.” The next step is for healthy individuals to take charge of their own “selfs.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 26
New technology always appeals to hive-security first. The Ad Hoc Committee on Genetic Counseling of the American Society of Human Genetics described genetic counseling as a “communication process which deals with the human problems associated with the occurrence, or the risk of occurrence, of a genetic disorder in the family.” This one-day workshop is primarily for health professionals who want to learn how to do genetic counseling or who want to strengthen their skills in this field. Hidden in this course description are valuable neurogenic clues, evolutionary evidence, which is easily overlooked by hive observers because it reveals much about the neurogenetic stage of the give culture—and of the planet. Genetic counseling appeared a generation after personality counseling. When an advanced, post-political culture offers courses in “Job Counseling,” “Personality Counseling” or “Martial Counseling,” Evolutionary Agents know that a move towards self-actualization is occurring—a free-mobile-individually oriented society is emerging. The military defense groups are willing to train those who are willing to be trained and have a good temperament and they simply do not bother training those who lack discipline. Being part of the United States of America’s armed forced is an honour and a privilege. It is ridiculous for an organization to even attempt to train some hundred thousand men in the State’s twilight of decline when, only a few years before, the State disgracefully abandoned one hundred and seventy million. #RandolphHarris 19 of 26
The proud members of the Sacramento Fire Department are committed to providing the highest quality and highest level of courteous and responsive services to the residents, businesses, and visitors of Sacramento. They ensure Sacramento City can respond to, recover from, and mitigate against any hazard that affects their city, the region, the state and beyond. “I like ladder work. It’s probably the most dangerous jobs in firefighting, and the real purpose of it is to go in and look for anyone trapped in a fire. You’re more or less on your own, you’re not with the rest of the men, and you don’t have the benefit of the hose line. I was assigned the SCBA (self-contained breathing apparatus) that day. We got the call to a fire in a three-story dwelling. We are second in. Another engine and ladder company was ahead of us. When I got off the truck, I was all prepared to go in the building. It was a strange fire, actually—a kerosene heater, which was overfilled. It has been knocked over, and the kerosene went between the floor and the wall down into the basement from the first floor and was ignited by the hot water heater. So the fire ran up the walls to the upper floors, and the flames were coming out the third-floor windows when I got there. As I say, I had my air pack on. I went around to the back alley before the other guys. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26
“The first company was still trying to get the ladders up in this narrow alley. I went up some steps to the kitchen door and kicked it open. A couple of guys were already in there on the floor. They didn’t have packs, so they were taking a beating from the smoke. One of their ladder guys also had a pack, so his chief put him on a hose, and he said to me, ‘Go down to the basement with this guy and give him a hand with the tip.’ Engine or ladder man, it didn’t matter to him. He saw we both had packs, and it was pretty smoky. I helped this guy drag the line, and we both went down to the basement from the kitchen very quickly, because it was like a chimney. It was getting real hot, and the fire flashed over us. He hit it with water and knocked it down. There was a small window next to the steps, and he was trying to fog the smoke out the window. The heat was coming toward us the whole time. Then apparently somebody saw how bad it was getting and called, ‘Everybody out of the basement.’ There were only the two of us there. I didn’t hear it. The guy on the tip supposedly did and told me he was leaving. Again, I didn’t hear him. He closed down the hose, and all of a sudden he was gone. I learned later that he went out the window. He had to take the pack off to fit through the window, it was so narrow. I didn’t know he had left. #RandolphHarris 21 of 26
“So the water was stopped, and I was lone in the basement. I couldn’t go back up the steps to the kitchen, because when he shut down the water the fire had flashed over again and set fire to the stairs. You see, the water wasn’t really putting the fire out, but it was keeping the heat away from us. Now it was getting very hot. It was very dark, it was smoky, I couldn’t see. I was down on my stomach on the basement floor, looking for the back door I knew was there, but I couldn’t see it. I was probably only ten feet from it the whole time. I became a little disoriented, but I didn’t panic. I had been in basement fires before, and I knew you shouldn’t panic. I thought, ‘Now, how did I get into this situation. I don’t have any water. I don’t have anyone with me.’ I could see that the fire had engulfed the kitchen steps and I couldn’t make it up there. I knew there was a back door there somewhere, but the people had been remodeling the basement, and I had to feel my way through a lot of debris. There was paneling against one wall, and I thought that might have been the door. I slid on it like a slide and fell to the floor. I say there for a second, and said, ‘I gotta compose myself, or I’m going to be in trouble here in a minute.’ I thought to myself, I’ve been through a lot in my life. I probably should have been dead eight times over. ‘Well,’ I said to myself, ‘I haven’t come this far to die in this person’s basement. This can’t happen to me. I’m going to survive. I’m not going to die in this guy’s basement because he was overfilling his kerosene heater.’ I got mad then. I remember. I said, ‘Dammit, I’m not staying here. I’ve got to get out.’ #RandolphHarris 22 of 26
“So what I had to do was raise my mask and holler for help. If I hadn’t done that, they wouldn’t have found me, because they didn’t know I was in there. This guy didn’t tell them I was still down there, and my lieutenant hadn’t ordered me to go down there; he thought I was on one of the upper floors. It was the chief of the other company who had sent me down there. They heard my hollering, and they were saying, ‘Come this way. This way.’ I would put my mask back on and walk toward their voices. I couldn’t see anything, so I was going by their voice. But they couldn’t hear me with my mask on. They didn’t know where the hell I was. It was getting harder and harder. It was very hot down there. I burned my ears, and I still had my helmet on. I knew if I didn’t get to that door soon, I wouldn’t make it, so I just kept going. I pushed things out of the way, and finally, after what seemed like an eternity, I had my hand stretched out like a blind man, and somebody grabbed my hand, and they pulled me out. One of my boots came off, and my helmet fell off. They never found my helmet, it had melted away, and the only thing left of my boot was the sole. There are points that I don’t recall. I didn’t actually black out, but I think it was my mind acting it out for me. I don’t recall exactly how I got to that back door. I was just glad to feel someone’s hand. I was kissing the floor, and the gentleman who grabbed my hand was in the doorway. He couldn’t advance any further. In fact, he was on the ground, and somebody had hold of his legs. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26
“I didn’t realize I was saved until I was in the rescue squad actually. I was on my way to the hospital, and I was holding the oxygen mask over my face, and I started crying. It finally hit me that I had almost died. I don’t normally cry. I believed I was going to be all right. I knew I was hurt, but I also knew I was going to make it. The first night in the hospital was hell. I had a tube going down my mouth into my lungs. It has a ballon-type thing at the end of it to keep the air passages open. Everything in there was swelling, and I would have chocked otherwise. And they were pulling a lot of things out of my lungs and throat, big pieces of black stuff. I didn’t know I had taken that much smoke, I had thought it was mostly heat. They gave me morphine, but I was conscious when they were putting that thing down my throat. It makes you gag. They refused to give me more morphine, saying they had given me enough already. When I wanted to say something I had to write it down, because I couldn’t speak. So the first night I was going in and out of consciousness. I kept writing down, ‘If you don’t take this tube out of my throat, I’m going to pull it out myself.’ I was a terrible patient that first night. I was in intensive care, and the orderlies, nurses, and doctors were at the desk fifteen feet from me, drinking soda. My mouth was so dry, I wanted some water, and they wouldn’t give it to me. They’d say, ‘Okay, we’ll get you something,’ thinking I’d go to sleep and forget. I would wake up an hour later, and nothing would be there. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26
“My father was there within an hour. He’s a fireman, too, and he heard the call come on the fire radio. He knew, before he was told, that I was in trouble. He heard the call for the rescue squad, and he said, ‘I knew it was you.’ The commissioner came, and so did a couple of guys I work with and my wife and my mother. Everyone showed a lot of concern, and everyone was as nice as could be. It meant a lot to me. Because it was nice to see familiar faces. The next day I was more relaxed. I didn’t fight the tube, I just tried to make the best of it. Then I felt lucky. I felt glad to be alive. I was released from the hospital a week later, and after a few days at home, I was mad. Angry that I got hurt when I shouldn’t have been hurt, that my whole life had changed. I don’t like changes. I’m used to going to work, and now I had to stay home. I wanted to get out of the house and couldn’t. I was miserable as hell, I was climbing the walls. I took a lot of it out on my wife. She had had a back operation less than a year earlier and was bedridden. Then she had had a premature baby, and my son was in intensive care for two months. He had just gotten out of the hospital and weighed only 21/2 pounds (1.14 kilograms). So she was dealing with her back, and the baby was home on a monitor and she was worrying about him breathing, then I came home and she worried about me breathing. So her back was forgotten for a time, and now it’s in terrible shape. #RandolphHarris 25 of 26
“I was miserable even to the kids. I was jumpy all the time. I was physically hurt, and I was still spitting up things. My ears were burned, and the doctors told me I would need glasses, because my corneas were burned. I became depressed, and I was mad. The only ones to take it out on were my wife and kids. I feel bad for them now, but they understood. My wife was great. She had a lot of patience with me.” The Sacramento Fire Department strives to build a safer and more resilient Sacramento. Firefighters and EMT put their lives on the line every day, several times a day to provide the highest quality and highest level of courteous and responsive service possible. In an effort to keep the country cohesive, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus Christ and buy American cars and other American goods and services. Also, please respect law and order, and treat others with kindness and respect. To ensure that you have a bright future, please take your education seriously, and be sure to actually read your books. And remember to “Just Say ‘No’ to Drugs.” Even marijuana can be deadly. 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. O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountains majesties above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grace on three, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea! O beautiful for pilgrim feet, whose stern, impassioned stress, a thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness! America! America! God mend thine every flow, confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law! O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years, Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears! America! America! God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea! God never gave us express allowance, only He gave us reason, charity, nature and good example to bear us out. #RandolphHarris 26 of 26
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Do Not Go Extinct!
REKINDLE A SPIRIT OF PATRIOTISM, EDUCATE PEOPLE ABOUT THE FOUNDING FATHERS AND THE CONSTITUTION, AND DEVELOP AN AWARENESS OF GOD’S HAND IN AMERICA.
VOTE FOR DONALD TRUMP AND MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Beyond Human Contact
The World is full of people who lead lives of desperation, chained by obscure fears, feeling powerless and helpless. President Donald Trump feels that no one in American history is equipped as he is to bring the Americans to the position of supremacy which all American statesmen have felt they deserved but were unable to achieve. This attitude is not confined to economic prosperity, President Trump also believes himself to be the greatest defender of America and human rights abroad. And it is true that he has made a number of contributions to American defensive and offensive tactics and strategy. And under President Trump Dow Jones made 126 historic all-time highs, and the Dow Jones Industrial average hit historic 30,000 milestone. Then, too, he believes himself to be the greatest of all American architects and spends a great deal of his time sketching new buildings and planning the remodeling of entire cities, and thinks of himself as the only competent judge in this field. It makes little difference whether the field be economics, education, foreign affairs, news, movies, music or fashion, in every field he believes himself to be an unquestioned authority. He also prides himself on his strength and support for law enforcement. “I am one of the biggest supporters of law enforcement America has had for decades, perhaps centuries, equipped with the greatest authority of any American leader…but above all, I believe in my success. I believe in it unconditionally.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
This belief in his own power actually borders on a feeling of omnipotence which President Trump is not reluctant to display. He survived two recent assassination attempts and his legacy also boasts of a 58 story, 664 feet tower in the most influential district in Manhattan, New York known as Trump Tower. Since the events of this year, his faith in his own genius, in his instinct, or as one might say, in his star, is boundless. Those who surround him are the first to believe that he is infallible and invincible. To contradict President Trump is essentially a crime against America; opposition to his plans, from whatever side it may come from, is a definite sacrilege, to which the only reply is an immediate and striking display of an unpatriotic American. When I first met President Trump, his logic and sense of realities impressed me. He is very kind and very fair to the people he does business with. According to unemployment statistics, under the leadership of Biden and Kamla, there are 17.25 million unemployed Americans. The American economy is near total collapse. America virtually has no credit rating, and is almost bankrupt from supporting illegal immigrants. The American people are demotivated, factories are closing down from a lack of money to pay wages, family farms are being sold to China, and benefits are being cut as the American government has no money to pay them and inflation is spiraling out of control. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Inside of four years, this incredible mess was made by Biden and Kamala and now she wants a second chance to totally bankrupt the nation. Under President Trump, unemployment will be banned and will go from 17 million to zero in the space of a few years. He even has a Platinum Plan for Black America which will increase investment in Black Businesses and additional capital for Black entrepreneurs in the sum of $500 billion. President Trump also announced his support for Juneteenth to be recognized as a national holiday. Every unemployed me will have the ability to start his own business or take up a job. Non-Americans will have their citizenship removed and will thus not be eligible for employment. President Trump will stimulate the American economy with spending programs using printed money and signed documents acknowledging debt that companies can cash in after three months when they have taken on more staff, increased production and their output of goods. The Biden Administration has voted on striction emissions regulations that effectively ban the sale of new vehicles with combustion engines. Experts believe this ban will not only lead to safety issues, but will also kill the America auto industry. Already, while many people have been excited to see new models of the Cadillac Deville, Chrysler Concord, Chevy Impala, Chevy Malibu, Chevy Camero, and Lincoln Town Car be revived and rolling on to showroom floors for the 2025 and 2026 model year, many people have had their hearts broken to find out that these projects have been gutted and are no longer in plans for development. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
At one time, electric vehicle development was in overdrive and trends pointed to increasing demand, but alas, times have changed. The sales of electric vehicles have fallen by 15 percent to 20 percent. BMW is now among a growing coalition calling for an end to the ban of internal combustion engines (ICE). BMW CEO Oliver Zipse in October of 2024, that he has deep concerns for the viability of vehicle manufacturers should the ban of ICE vehicles remain in place. He expressed concern for China’s position as a major supplier of batteries, which would give China considerable power over European and Western nations at a time when relations are uncertain and competition is at an all time high. There is also fear that Chinese vehicles will flood the American market, much in the way the Japanese vehicles did in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, which displaced many American vehicles. This is particularly concerning considering there is an unpatriotic spirit sweeping America and many people no longer even see themselves as America and are unwilling to buy American cars, even though they are of superior quality, styles, performance and luxury. Electric vehicles will also lead to the loss of manufacturing jobs and further increase inflation as corporations will be forced to replace their fleet of cars, trucks, and big rigs, and the costs would be passed directly on to the consumer, at a time when housing is at an all time high, which would reduce consumer spending and cause a great recession. Under President Trump, however, ICE vehicles will be allowed to be sold, manufacturing jobs will be brought back to America, corporations and middle-class Americans will also see tax cuts. Also, if companies employ more workers, work teams will be created from unemployed Americans, massive infrastructure-building projects will be established, constructing new highways between major cities, which will stimulate the American Auto industry to build more cars, and employ more people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
President Trump will also sponsor building programs for new football stadiums, enormous housing projects, which will be strictly managed and no crime will be tolerated, nor will the destruction of units be allowed. If people are harassing the community, damaging the property, causing crime, and infesting the units their contracts will be terminated. Also, if there is discrimination in employment and leasing of housing rents based on race, federal funding will be terminated immediately. These communities are expected to be diverse and represent the cities they are in. President Trump also plans to create more funding to manage and maintain forest and will plant new forests. There is also expected to be a new federal-sponsored car manufacturer commissioned by President Trump to provide affordable cars for families. Some believe this program was already in place when he was in office last time, which lead to the birth of the $13,400 Chevy Spark and why GM is in the process of producing a $15,000 pickup truck. Huge public works programs will be established in construction and agricultural labour and workers will be sent to their nearest project to work. This will also reduce the homeless population as the number of Americans working in construction is expected to triple within three years. Many will work renovating and building public buildings. President Trump also plans to place in to law that new Government buildings will follow blueprints of the ones built during the Victorian Era to make them more creative and pleasing to the eye. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
A new program of Military service will take thousands of unemployed young men off the unemployment list and put them into the army. This will mean that a lot more guns, military vehicles, uniforms and kits will be required which will also stimulate the economy by creating more jobs. The army will also be open to other new members from the educated and affluent middle-classes. The goal will be to create new types of defense systems so we no longer have veterans not coming home or coming home disabled. Masses of people are pushing against us, stepping on our toes and cursing us as they go by. While the neon lights seem to be exploding all around you and your heart jumping each time you hear the scream of sirens, the blast of horns, or the piercing hiss of truck brakes, President Trump knows that you are terrified and feel helpless in this hostile World of noise and crime and dirt and strange people. However, know that President Trump is with you. He will hold your hand firmly and pull you out of the potential dangers. He is your protector your source of strength and security. By voting for President Trump and staying physically in touch with God as a source of personal security, you will be able to abandon your fears and be yourself, a “person” filled with wonder and curiosity. Under President Trump, the building of the wall will continue and be completed to protect citizens from deadly drugs, gangs, and terrorists. He will change America from a defeated nation, to one with a thriving economy, lower inflation, and regrow our foreign capital; with America near full employment, under President Trump, we will have the strongest economy and biggest military power in the World. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
As you look back on America, your strongest memory will be an optimistic one, exciting, not the terrifying nightmare it has been under Biden and Kamala. America will remain a traditional Christian, family-oriented country. The American Nightmare will be destroyed and The American Dream will once again become a reality. And you will change. You will become “different” because you will once again realize that you are connected to a source of security known as God. You can trust God and He will free you to look at the World more confidently. Under the Biden and Kamala administration, there was nothing you could have done differently to reduce the terror. If you had tried to play it tough, seeking to convince yourself and others that you were fully in charge and unafraid, it would have perhaps exposed you to even greater dangers. However, if you would have taken on the weak and helpless role, you would have made yourself even more impotent and less able to live. With a strong President, who reminds you that there is a God and He has the ultimate power, you will no longer play the weakling, apparently letting people and circumstances dictate what happens in your life. Unfortunately, the democrats made you abdicate the power of God to them. Thus, they made you believe that you would be secure and powerful only as long as the democratic party was around. They wanted you to believe that once you had gotten separated from a democratic leader, you would be a helpless child again. Yet, we all have a continuing need to get in touch with God. We need a President who believes in God and will remind us to stay connected to our faith. Your future is not determined by a man or a woman, by race or gender. God is the ultimate source of power. He is supreme and it is time to return to Church, and read the Holy Bible. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
When we worship God, we are reminded that “who we are” is adequate and effective. It does not matter how long your hair is, what your body looks like, nor how much money you have. To God the human soul is of greatest value. Also, while many of you are down and out on yourselves, there is something you forgot. You are walking around with more than a million dollars every day. Your eyes, your skin, your organs, your blood and plasma are worth over a million dollars. Therefore, do not abuse your bodies. Paul Tillich tells of there is something called the “ultimate ground of being,” a place deep inside our core which tells us we are enough, we have the power to deal with life in this scary World. Once you get in touch with this source, you will be able to see, perhaps for the first time, that you can feel your helplessness without being stuck on it—without being permanently helpless. By allowing yourself to feel your helplessness, you, your being, are also something else, something with power and ability lying deeply under the helplessness. After going to Church, praying, and spending time with the Lord, many people feel stronger in their core. Nothing outside of them has changed; only they are different—inside. The chief value of focusing on God and our soul, the reason it can illuminate something many have never seen before, is because it is “experiential.” It includes an experience, which is something more than a thought or a feeling or an action. We think with our minds, feel without emotions and act with our bodies. An experience is a simultaneous integration of all three. And while it is all of them, it is none of them. An experience is different. It is defined as a direct participation in life through sensing and feeling as well as thinking. Experiencing is the equivalent of being. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
There is one God and His name is God. If there is only One God, then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only submission or heresy. The word Islam means “submission.” The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling—Thy will be done. Monotheism is the primitive religion that centers human consciousness on hive authority. Monotheism satisfies hive-oriented terrestrials such as barbarian teenagers, domesticated adults, and retiring elders, who eagerly seek to layoff responsibility on some Big Boss. By contrast, monotheism does profound mischief to those who are evolving to post-hive stages of reality. Advanced mutants, operating at stages thirteen to eighteen, do make the discovery that “All is One,” as the realization dawns that “My Brain creates all the realities that I experience.” The discovery of Self is frightening because the novitiate possessor of the automobile body and the automobile brain must accept all the power that the hive religions attributed to jealous God. The First Commandment of all monotheisms is—I am the Lord, thy God. Thou shall have no other Gods before me. All monotheisms are vengeful, aggressive, expansionist, intolerant. However, God is also all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving. His greatest desire is for all His children to return to live with him again. One of the most common images in Western and Eastern religions alike is of God as a parent and of human beings as God’s children. Billions pray to God as their parent, invoke the brotherhood and sisterhood of all people to promote peace, and each out to the weary and troubled out of deep conviction that each of God’s children has great worth. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Each of us has an eternal core and is a beloved spirit son or daughter of Heavenly parents. Each possesses seeds of divinity and must choose whether to live in harmony or tension with that divinity. Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, all people may progress toward perfection and ultimately realize their divine destiny. Just as a child can develop the attributes of his or her parent over time, the divine nature that humans inherit can be developed to become like their Heavenly Father. The desire to nurture the divinity in His children is one of God’s attributes that most inspires, motivates, and humbles members of the Church. God’s loving parentage and guidance can help each willing, obedient child of God receive of His fulness and of His glory. We are to love as God loves, and to prepare for all our loving Father in Heaven wishes for His children. Monotheism is a technology—a tool—to bring pre-civilized tribes’ people and caste-segregated primitives into the collectives necessary to develop the post-hive, post-terrestrial technologies. A major evolutionary step is taken when the individual says: “There is only one God who creates the Universe.” Then one realizes that God has blessed him with a brain. As the driver of that brain, that individual is able to create things through the gifts God has bestowed onto human beings. Human beings also learn to understand that the Universe was, itself, created by a higher level of divinity—DNA—whose mysteries and wonders we seek to understand and harmonize with. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Marquis de Sade dines man and his morality because God denies them. However, he denies God even though He has served as his accomplice and guarantor up to now. For what reason? Because of the strongest instinct to be found in one who is condemned by the hatred of mankind to live behind prison walls: the sexual instinct. What is this instinct? On the one hand, it is the ultimate expression of nature (Sade’s great criminals excuse their crimes on the ground that they were born with uncontrollable sexual appetites about which they could do nothing), and, on the other, the blind force that demands the total subjection of human beings, even at the price of their destruction. Sade denies God in the name of nature—the ideological concepts of his time presented it in mechanistic form—and he makes nature a power bent on destruction. For him, nature is sex: his logic leads him to a lawless Universe where the only master is the inordinate energy of desire. This is his delirious kingdom, in which he finds his finest means of expression: “What are all the creatures of the Earth in comparison with a single one of our desires!” The long arguments by which Sade’s heroes demonstrate that nature had need of crime, that it must destroy in order to create, and that we help nature create from the moment we destroy it ourselves, are only aimed at establishing absolute freedom for the prisoner, Sade, who is too unjustly punished not to long for the explosion that will blow everything to pieces. In this respect he goes against his times: the freedom he demands is not one of the principles, but of instincts. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Sade dreamed, no doubt, of a universal republic, whose scheme he revealed through is wise reformer, Zame. He shows us, by this means, that one of the purposes of rebellion is to liberate the whole World, in that, as the movement accelerates, rebellion is less and less willing to accept limitations. However, everything about him contradicts this pious dream. He is no friend of humanity, he hates philanthropists. The equality of which he sometime speaks is a mathematical concept: the equivalence of the objects that comprise the human race, the abject equality of the victims. Real fulfillmenting, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires and who must dominate everything, lies in hatred. Sade’s republic is not founded on liberty but on libertinism. “Justice,” this peculiar democrat writes, “has no real existence. It is the divinity of all the passions.” Negatives are usually said loud and clear, with vigorous enforcement, while positives often fall like raindrops on the stream of life, making little sound and only small ripples. “Work hard!” is found in copybooks, but “Stop loafing!” is more likely to be heard in the home. “Always be on time” is an instructive motto, but “Don’t be late!” is heard more frequently in real life, and “Don’t be stupid!” is more popular than “Be bright!” So it turns out that most programing is negative. Negative programming can land a child in a dungeon at Folsom where one has to be quiet, remember there are one hundred snitches below who will overhear what they say and run to phone a guard. Every parent fills his child’s head with negative restraints, and a lifetime of them can lead a person to the cell block. However, parents also give their children permissions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Prohibitions hamper adaptation to circumstances (nonadaptive), while permissions are merely permits, like a fishing license. A boy with a fishing license is not compelled to fish. He can use it or not as he wishes, and he goes fishing when he feels like it and when circumstances allow. It should be said again that being beautiful (like being successful) is not a matter of anatomy, but of parental permission. Anatomy makes one pretty or photogenic, but only father’s smile can make beauty shine from a woman’s eyes. Children do things for someone. The boy is bright or athletic or successful for mother, and the girl is bright or beautiful or fertile for father. Or, on the other side, the boy is stupid or weak or clumsy for his parents, and the girl is stupid or unattractive or frigid for hers, if that is what they want. If they want to do it well, it should be added that they have to learn from someone. To do it for someone and to learn from someone is the real meaning of the script apparatus. As already noted, the children usually do it for the patent of the opposite gender and learn from the parent of the same gender. In the complex and challenging field of psychotherapy with the psychoses, client-centered therapy is a relatively new entry. The orientation now known as “client-centered” and formerly by the less accurate term “nondirective” is itself less than seven decades old. Unlike most clinical or therapeutic developments, it has grown up in an academic setting, where its rate of growth and degree of influence has increased enormously in the past several years. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Where it was once considered a radical view, it is now accepted as a partial technique and a general attitude by many orientations, and much of the power and originality evident seventy years ago is obscured. Its influence has spread into the guidance and counseling fields, education, religion, sociology, and social work, as well as industrial and clinical psychology; but it has only recently begun to develop in the field of psychiatry. At one time, doctors were limited from having contact with the frankly psychotic who often may need, or be seen as needing, hospitalization. However, the situation is changing. Therapists have developed in depth and capacity. As more deeply disturbed clients have been seen and helped, further reaches of maladjustment have been explored. Some of these more deeply disturbed clients had been treated elsewhere by physiological or psychotherapeutic means which failed. Some were seen “inadvertently,” beginning, for instance as moderately anxious maladjusted cases which developed much more severe manifestations as defenses peeled off. Also, client-centered therapists have been called upon to demonstrate in Veteran Affairs and state hospitals whatever contribution they might make in work with “psychotics.” (This is a word which we do not yet use with conviction or comfort. It is wrong enough to call a person with diabetes—an established disease entity— “a diabetic.” That is far from being all he is. He has diabetes; but when his sugar-insulin balance is normal, so is he, in that dimension. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Psychosis may simply represent a mode of fluctuating adjustment to a realm of experience within everyone, so that while the existence of “a psychotic state” is undeniable by definition, the term “a psychotic” is very questionable.) A growing number of psychiatrists have taken an active interest in client-centered therapy, usually having invented its rudiments independently, often thinking it most appropriate for their own self-directed personal therapy and wanting to learn more of its spirit and formal elaborations. The main outcome of this trend is that at present we are engaged in the earnest study of treatment of schizophrenia. Although we cannot speak from extensive experience, intensive experience abounds wherever there is therapeutic contact with the schizophrenic condition. It seems certain that this phase of work will bring about modifications of theory and practice, for no one can face the full individual and social impact of psychotic encounters without a “shaking of the foundations.” If we succeed in transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness, much is won. The concept of needs implies a drive toward the satisfaction of these needs. They operate at different levels of demand upon the person at differing times, and blocks or barriers to the satisfaction of any one of these needs results in frustration. Any one of the human needs obstructed can produce severe blocking. When a need is frustrated, this can result in two classic patterns: aggression and regression. The latter refers to reversion to earlier childhood patterns of handling unhappy events. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The adult executive who gets angry, shouts, and pounds a table when her staff does not do her bidding fast enough for her is reverting to a childhood temper tantrum pattern of handling frustration. Similarly, the husband who drinks himself into oblivion in a bad marriage mimics his own infancy when sucking upon the nipple brought relief from pain. The aggression reaction is commonly observed pattern among children and adults. The child who cannot wait for his turn to use the nursey school tricycle may knock the present pilot off the driver’s seat and peddle away to the tune of the classmate’s wails. The adult who for a third time finds that her quarter does not bring her the canned soft drink will violently kick the anal-retentive machine. The adult who is rude or insulting to a companion after the coffee-machine frustration is displacing anger from the true source to a convenient, innocent substitute. Displacement is a favourite form of reaction to frustration for many. The faculty of will is immeasurably more important to the progress of the inner life than that of intellect. For the passion and appetites of the body are controlled by the will; the strength of the lower nature is at the service of the ego’s will rather than of its intellect. He is called on, in his higher life, to transmute the animal calls of his nature to what—however dimly he sees it—is really the god within him. It is unpleasant to break away from long-lived habits, and this is true both in our mental and our physical life. Yet in times of crisis such as severe illness and breakdown, people do do that because they have to. How much better to do it not violently and abruptly—under outward compulsions—but to do it little by little, gently and easily, taking our time by doing it through application of wisdom. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
As a team of well trained and dedicated professionals, it is the mission of the Sacramento Fire Department to provide the highest standard of service to all those who may seek their help. “Those timber fires are rather spooky, and they move something terrible. I was home in the evening and got the call by telephone to go to a fire in north central California, on the west slope of the Sierras, somewhere near Yosemite Park. I had time to pack things like extra socks and get my gear together. Then we were taken by bus to the base camp for the fire. I was what they then called a sector boss with a fifty-man crew of hand laborers. The overall strategy in fighting such a large forest fire is planned by someone else, and we’re given a particular sector of the fire and told what to do and where to go, though the tactics are left to us. This particular incident was at night in a piece of country I had never seen before, very steep and rocky, lots of big trees, three and four feet in diameter. We weren’t able to see the country before it got dark, so we had no idea how the terrain lay or what we were dealing with. That was spooky, literally working in the dark. We were given papers telling the extent of the fire and weather conditions, and a map of the area giving us some idea of where we were going and whether other crews were supposed to be working. This was at a five- or six-thousand-foot elevation. We were to work our way down a slope, cutting a fire line about eight feet wide by removing all the brush on the ground around the trees to keep the trees from going. At the same time there were supposed to be crews coming up from the bottom. We were working solely with hand tools, no chain saws or mechanized equipment. And down the hill we went. We could see the fire a mile or so below us. That’s not really a good tactic, to be coming down will with fire below you. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“Several days before that incident, we were at a large brush fire in southern California. We were given a crew of about forty. The Forest Service flew us up onto a mountain, and we were to back up another crew by working in one direction while they were working in another. The fire had burned from the top of the mountain on down. We started from a good safe point, what we refer to as an anchor point. They started working east and we started west, away from each other, to cut fire lines through the brush and get below that fire to keep it from continuing on down into the canyon bottom. We had to cut brush in a speedy and efficient manner and build a good, safe line. Meanwhile, the other foreman and myself were watching the other end of the fire and saw that it was getting down the mountain a long way ahead of the other crew. That occurs because of rolling things, for burning debris will roll down the mountain and start the brush down there. Then the fire comes rushing back up at you. The further we got, the more we realized that our position was becoming precarious, and we looked around for a place to get out of there. One way was to retreat into the burned-out area, but even that wasn’t real safe, because if the fire came up from below us, we were going to be in trouble from the heat. We had to do something, either totally retreat to where we had started or get over to the top of a ridge and be flown out by helicopter. I got on the radio and called the supervisor for that whole sector, explained that we had to get out of there or we were going to be hurt, certainly from the heat and smoke if not the fire. He told me to find a place to land a helicopter, and if he couldn’t get something moving in five minutes he would call back, and then we would have to start walking out of there just as fast as we could. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
“I saw that the information we had been given didn’t fit, it wasn’t quite right. We were having an awful time, so finally I got the crew together and explained our position. I told them to say in the burned-out area, which was fairly safe, and not to go into the green stuff, where the fire might run onto them. I left them there with one of our supervisors, then took two other fellows and two of the crewmen, and we started walking down toward this other fire to see what was going on. We had radios, but only between ourselves; we had no radio communication with the rest of the firefighters worth a dark. We were walking into a pocket of fire. It was burning not only below us and off to one side, but also way beyond the far side of where our line was supposed to be, so we were walking into a U-shaped cone of fire. When we got close enough, we figure out that this was not part of the main fire but a new fire, ignited by the other but separated by some distance. And the only way to protect ourselves was to move down there and attack that second fire to keep it from spreading up the hill at us. And that took us the rest of the night, cutting and clearing to stop it, keeping ourselves on the edge of the burn, the separation line from what’s already burned and what hasn’t burned, so that if the fire went wrong, we could immediately run into the burned-out area and get away from it. In a situation like that, you concentrate on what to do, how to get yourself out of the mess and not take unnecessary chances, gather information as you go along so that you have at least one of two choices—to abandon your position and get back to a good safe place, or pull off into the burn area and let the fire go by you. You don’t have any other choice. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“One of the other leaders of the crew wanted to go into a burned-out area. I explained to him about three times that it wasn’t a safe area. It has been burned out, but not cleanly enough, and if the fire came roaring through there again, it would reburn; we would be sitting right in dead grass, and we’d have been in bad shape. The man was very determined, and we began to have a heated argument. Finally I had to talk to his crew about their choices, whether to follow us or follow their own leader. I laid it out, what I thought could happen. They decided they wanted to go with us, figuring, I guess, that we had the experience. The boss radioed that he had two helicopters, and did we have a place. I described the ridge top. Then we had to get there by walking through the green, which was not the best plan in the World, but it was the only quick way to cut across the mountain away from the fire coming up from below us and get to the ridge top. There we quickly built a heliport by cutting away the brush and making a forty-foot clearing. It took us about ten minutes. Then the helicopters started flying in, each taking two guys at a time down the mountain. So they were able to get us out. Before I left, I took the obstinate crew leader and showed him the spot he had wanted us to retreat to. I said, ‘You watch that spot.’ And while we were still on the helicopter ridge, we watched the fire make a long run up the mountain, going right through where we would have been standing. His eyes got as big as saucers. He shook my hand and almost gave me a hug and a kiss and said he was very pleased that he hadn’t forced the issue.” #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
The Sacramento Fire Department recognizes that they face unique challenges in keeping pace with the changing World in which they live and work. They will not forget the traditions of those that came before them. However, they have adapted and progressed so that they can remain successful. “We are a family of individuals committed to serving others. We will always provide for the welfare of our personnel through a health and rewarding work environment. We are dedicated to respect, integrity, compassion, and leadership amongst ourselves so that we may proudly serve others. The Sacramento Fire Department strives to sustain and improve the health, safety, convenience, and welfare of the citizens of Sacramento and to plan for the future development of the community. You can help save lives and property by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. And remember parents, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus, respect law and others, treat others with dignity and respect, and remind them of the importance of education. To help America survive the global recession and bring manufacturing jobs back to America and to get American wages at pace with inflation, it is important to buy America cars, American meat, American produce and other American made goods and services. 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. Our Father, our King, be gracious unto us and answer us, for we are wanting in good deeds; deal with us in charity and lovingkindness, and please save us. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Over a Game of Cards
To be weak is miserable, doing or suffering. As much as we in the Western culture revere the strong, so do we protect and care and perpetuate the weak. For the person prone to weakness, it becomes an easy, comfortable trap. However, it soon becomes a miserable one. If you are stuck on the weakness polarity, you are a particularly hard-to-handle manipulator. You tend to depend upon others for everything, and when they try to get away, you play weak or helpless, thus sucking them in again. You are an excellent role player. You apologize a lot for everything, using pleas of ignorance or incompetence to avoid responsibility. To reassure yourself, you constantly ask others if you are okay. Unfortunately for you, you are so busy looking into the faces of others for expressions of approval, you never look inside yourself. Your inner self is thus a vast, unexplored territory. In spite of all your admission of weakness and incompetence, you have refused to truly examine those feelings of weakness. Your emotional life has thus remained a shallow one. If you are a master, however, you do not play the helpless role; you have the courage to really face your limitations and define them as your body and emotions guide you. You trust yourself and look inside, appealing to you “inner Supreme Court” for answers. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The weakness you find within is real, not a manipulative game—and not a mask. When you are able to face your limitations inside, you are also able to find strength and competence there. As a master, you know you can look within to find all the answers and all the guidance you need. Having mastered, not exaggerated, your weakness, you improve your physical health. You attend to clues your body gives you as to its condition, rather than allowing them to develop into vague, nagging aches. Among others, you stand on your own feet and are free to relate to others as an equal. You carry your own weight of responsibility in the World. Mustering the strength to shoulder this weight can be a long and difficult process. Some people have been afraid all of their lives. Some infants are afraid of the wind. It howls menacingly across the open fields, then darts through the cracks in the floorboards of their farmhouse, which startles the baby with a sudden chill. On blustery nights, it makes the house shiver with what a baby might imagine is a fear like his own. Next, some children learn to fear their father. He is a stern, brittle man who works his farm from before sunrise until after sunset every day of the year. He seems to be at constant war with the farm and the farm seems to constantly fight back. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The struggle might make a father mean, and he may vent his meanness on everything around him: the land, the animals, his wife and children. As a result, some children learn to never talk back to their father. Breaking one of his rules, even a little, means feeling the awful whack of his hand across the face, neck, shoulders, back. And when he begins to hit, he seldom stops until his hand is too sore to hit anymore. This causes some wives to become just like one of the children. She does her chores, obeys her husband unquestioningly and when she breaks one of his rules, even a little, is whacked just as hard and long. The only time the father did not hit his wife is when she was sick. Growing up in the isolation of a farmhouse, some children also come to fear the outside World, the World of the unknown and unknowable people beyond the wide fields which stretch in ever direction. A child may try a few, tentative friendships in school, but sometime the youth is never able to spend enough time with their peers to get comfortable and familiar the way real friends do. This child’s World is the farm and family and the fear which pervades everything. When abused children turn eighteen, it is often demanded that they get a job. Some youths are not willing to put up with the hard work pay, and constant crude advances of the customers. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Abused youth often enjoy the work—not because it is easy, but because for twelve hours a day it allows the youth to be out of the house, out of the reach of his father’s stinging hand. When he serves someone particularly well, an extra dollar or two appears under the plate. Although these paychecks are sometimes all surrendered to the father, he is able to keep the tips for himself, his private treasure. As an adult, when people live with fear, it can cause pain and sickness. And often, nothing seems to help. Not the medicines, not talking about it, not anything. There will be times in our lives when we find ourselves on an unexpected path, facing severe circumstances. When events, often out of our control, alter the life we had planned or hoped for, how do we respond? No amount of change, trial, or opposition can alter our eternal course. We are God’s spirit sons and daughters, and we accepted his plan by which we could obtain a physical body and gain Earthly experience to progress toward perfection and ultimately realize our divine destiny as heirs of eternal life. The changes, and resulting challenges, that we encounter in mortality come in a variety of shapes and sizes and impact each of us in unique ways. Although each change may be unique to your individual circumstances, there is a common element in the resulting trial or challenge—hope and peace are always available through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The Atonement of Jesus Christ provides the ultimate corrective and healing measures to every wounded body, damaged spirit, and broken heart. Jesus Christ knows, in a way that no one else can understand, what it is that we need, individually, in order to move forward in the midst of change. Unlike friends and loved ones, the Saviour not only sympathizes with us, but He can empathize perfectly because He has been where we are. In addition to paying the price and suffering for our sins, Jesus Christ also walked every path, dealt with every challenge, faced every hurt—physical, emotional, or spiritual—that we will ever encounter in mortality. In this mortal experience, we cannot control all that happens to us, but we have absolute control over how we respond to the changes in our lives. This does not imply that the challenges and trials we face are of no consequence and easily handled or dealt with. It does not imply that we will be free from pain or heartache. Helpless is a place—a place that is real. However, it is important that we do not let ourselves play helpless. Do not give in to it. There is cause for hope and that is due to the Atonement of Jesus Christ, we can move forward and find better days—even days full of joy, light, and happiness. Healing blessings come in many ways, each suited to our individual needs, as known to Him who loves us best. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Sometimes a “healing” cures our illness or lifts our burden. However, sometimes we are “healed” by being given strength to understanding or patience to bear the burdens placed upon us. In the first year that I knew my wife, we played Russian Bank quite often. She had been winning but then she began losing, and one evening she threw her head and arms on the table and sobbed, as though she had lost not a game of cards but everything in the World. That was what I noticed at the time. Instead of letting that thought itself be said, the spontaneous noticing, matter-of-fact, without opinion, neither tender with pain nor hard with accusation, I let myself be scared by seeing this “strong” woman fall apart “over a game of cards,” by seeing her little rib cage heave like a child’s. It was cultural conditioning that made me view this as “weak” or “helplessness”—something that “should not happen” and so must be stopped. In losing my neutrality, I wanted to put her back together. I put a hand on her shoulder. I bent and kissed the back of her neck. She pulled together and smiled at me, her eyes saying thank you. And I thought that I had helped her, too. There were these moments, brief and rare, when my wife’s guard was down, when she was cracking. I had botched them. I did just what she did—tried to put “her” back together, not knowing that this was not her. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
If I had not done this, just possibly she might not have done it herself. There might have been the of an opening. All those years of reassurance were crutch-type helping, and all the times when I prevented her suicide never really saved her life, because her life was what she never lived. If I had said my own thought as simply as I felt it, as it came into my head, my first thought that was my own direct and immediate response and really me, is it not possible that she might have told me what “losing” meant to her? And if I had accepted that (not saying that it was not so, that there were many ways in which she won, was running ahead of others—which was true in the view of the society of which we both were a part, but not in the view of all societies) might she not have been able to speak what she never could say to anyone and so could not hear properly herself? Suppose, that morning after the Japanese attack, I had said, “You sound as though you feel this really is the end for you. I hope it is not.” Those were my true thoughts, my own thoughts at the time, that I let get blacked by what I saw as my World and what I thought that his should be. My World at that time in fact was not superior: it required that she be in it with me. My World did not see that she was in it only more so, and blocked my own immediate and direct response to her. My tenderness for human suffering did not include her. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Some people do not believe that mental illness exists. The phenomena now called mental illnesses [should be] looked at afresh and more simply, be regarded as the expressions of man’s struggle with the problem of how he should live. How do we fit ourselves in a society that gives us so much trouble? That is the wrong question. It is possible to lose all awareness of ourselves as an active participant. In the year before I left my wise, she had almost totally convinced me that I was “insane,” unfit to be a father. “No judge would let you have him (our son).” In fighting not to blame my wife for my hurt and confusion, because I could not bear to have my love change to hate, I arrived at knowing my own part in it, and told a doctor what was true: “I watched her dig the pit, and obligingly fell in.” However, I could not see that clearly while I was under fire. Each time that I almost grasped it, my wife’s words—or even the way she looked at me—threw me into a chaos of uncertainty again—the doubting of myself. No one else seemed to find her behaviour odd, so was it all in me? I had to be away from her, away from everyone with opinions, to find out. It gives me the creeps that children who are told they are “wrong,” “no good,” “worthless,” cannot get away, and that our young people are required to fit into a society which does not fit them. When we require always more doctors, more psychotherapists, more jailers, more police, who is at fault? #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
There are some people who have been in prison for twenty years straight and they talk to themselves. There is no one that they can call on. Their New York lawyers cannot do anything for them. There is no appeal from a .30 caliber summons. Some wonder if Sade is an atheist? He says so, and we believe him, before going to prison, in his Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man; and from then on, we are dumbfounded by his passion for sacrilege. One of his cruelest characters, Saint-Fond, does not in any sense deny God. He is content to develop a gnostic theory of a wicked demiurge and to draw the proper conclusions from it. Saint-Fond, it is said, is not Sade. No, of course not. A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously. Now, all Sade’s atheists suppose, in principle, the nonexistence of God for the obvious reason that He existence would imply that He was indifferent, wicked, or cruel. Sade’s greatest work ends with a demonstration of the stupidity and spite of the divinity. The innocent Justine runs through the storm and the wicked Noirceuil swears that he will be converted if divine retribution consents to spare her life. Justine is struck by lightning, Noirceuil triumphs, and human crime continues to be man’s answer to divine crime. Thus there is a freethinker wager that is the answer to the Pascalian wager. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The idea of God which Sade conceives for himself is, therefore, of a criminal divinity who oppresses and denies mankind. That murder is an attribute of the divinity is quite evident, according to Sade, from the history of religions. Why, then, should man be virtuous? Sade’s first step as a prisoner is to jump to the most extreme conclusions. If God kills and repudiates mankind, there is nothing to stop one from killing and repudiating one’s fellow men. This irritable challenge in no way resembles the tranquil negation that is still to be found in the Dialogue of 1782. The man who exclaims: “I have nothing, I give nothing,” and who concludes: “Virtue and vice are indistinguishable in the tomb,” is neither happy nor tranquil. The concept of God is the only thing, according to him, “which he cannot forgive man.” The word forgive is already rather strange in the mouth of this expert in torture. However, it is himself whom he cannot forgive for an idea that his desperate view of the World, and his condition as a prisoner, completely refute. A double rebellion—against the order of the Universe and against himself—is henceforth going to be the guiding principle of Sade’s reasoning. In that these two forms of rebellion are contradictory except in the disturbed mind of a victim of persecution, his reasoning is always either ambiguous or legitimate according to whether it is considered in the light of logic or in an attempt at compassion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
It is true that thought precedes action, that actions express thoughts, and that to rule mind is to rule the entire life. However, it is also true that man’s battles with himself proceed by progressive stages, that he exerts will more easily than he changes feeling. Therefore, the discipline of inward thinking should follow after—and no before—it. To counsel him to take care of his inner life and that then the outer life will take care of itself, as so many mystics do, is to be plausible but also to show a lack of practicality. Man’s heart will feel no peace as his mind will know no poise until he abandons the lower instincts and gives himself up to this unearthly call. First, he must abandon them outwardly in deeds; later he must do it inwardly even in thoughts. This will inevitably bring him into inner struggle, into oscillation between victories and defeats, elations and despairs. The way up is long, hard, rugged, and slow to tread. It is always a stage for complaints and outcries, battles and falls. Only time—the master power—can bring him to its lofty end. Only when the lessons of birth after birth etch themselves deeply and unmistakably into his conscious mind through dreadful repetition can he accept them co-operatively, resignedly, and this put a stop to the needless sufferings of desire, passion, and attachment. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
When a man’s desire and yearnings, thirst and longings are so strong as to upset his reasoning power and block his intuitive capacity, he is stopped from finding the truth. In this condition, he shuts his eyes to those facts which are displeasing or which are contrary to his desires and opens them only to those which are pleasing or agreeable to his wishes. Thinking bends easily to desires, so that the satisfaction of personal interest rather than the quest of universal truth becomes its real object. Reforms that begin with the lowest in man lead the way to the highest in him. The mastery of terrestrial passion opens the door to the birth of the spiritual intuition. Whether the cage be made of gold or the net fabricated from silk, the reality of their inner captivity still remains. A discipline which is not stern but gentle and easy is best suited to modern man. The astrological Zodiac which has continued to attract the attentions of intelligent people for five thousand years must have some caste-type meaning—and this significance must be explained by the theories which improve it. New theories can improve, can explain, but not reject, the Zodiac. The Genesis version of Creation obviously must have had profound survival validity even through it obviously fails to take into account the newer evidence from Darwinian, Mendelian, DNA, sociobiological and Behaviour genetics. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Correspondence Theory is a “magic stick” for searching out new laws, because it sets formal constraints on new mathematics. As Morrison emphasizes, the Correspondence Principle secures science against the loss of achievements of the past. For innovators it is a warning like Hippocratic maxim for physicians—above all do no harm! Classical mechanics is not a mere blunder that was repudiated in 1905, as the headlines imply. This affectionate maxim holds even more strongly for human ethology—id est, philosophy. All the theological and philosophical systems of the past must be seen as attempts, valid at the preceding, more primitive stage of neurotechnology, to explain the inner-outer (CNS-DNA) reality paradox. Thus the concern in the Starseed Transmissions to trace correspondences among the many occult theories of the past, including Christianity and Buddhism, and the new sciences. Each past philosophy, far from being repudiated, or rejected, joyously fits into an evolving, stage-by-stage theory. Medieval alchemy and astrology were not blunders repudiated by Dow Chemical and Dr. Freud. The demon is the jester in human existence, and the joker in psychotherapy. No matter how well a man lays his plans, the demon can come in at the critical moment and upset them all, usually with a smile and a ha ha. And no matter how well the therapist plans his psychotherapy, the patient always has the upper hand. At the point when the therapist thinks he has four aces, the man plays his joker, and his demon wins the pot. Then he skips merrily off, leaving the doctor to lead through the deck trying to figure out what happened. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Even if he is ready for it, there may be little he can do. The doctor may know ahead of time that just as the man gets his stone rolled up to the brow of the hill, the demon will distract his attention, and it will roll all the way down again. There may be others who know about it, too, but the demon is already at work, and sees to it that the man keeps away from anyone who would interfere. So the patient starts to miss appointments, or drifts away, and if anyone pressures him he just plain quits. He may return after he has Sisyphused out, sadder, but not much wiser, nor even aware of his glee. The demon first appears in the higher, when the man scatters his food on the floor with a merry glint, waiting to see what his parents will do. If they make friends with it, it will go on to later mischief, and then perhaps into humorous fun and jokes. If they beat it down, it will lurk surly in the background, ready to leap out at an unguarded moment and scramble his life as it originally scrambled his food. A substantial proportion of the World’s population lives in cities where trees and grass are seldom seen, where the sounds of birds and babbling streams are not heard. The air they breathe is either filtered through air-conditioning units or heavily polluted with smog. Such persons adapt to the milieu within which they live, but it is an unnatural environment. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Contact with the physical World, with seaside, forests, and parks, with fields and animals, gives persons a sense of rhythm that contrasts with the rhythms of industrialized urban life. These experiences remind the person that he or she does not simply have a body, but that the person is a body, an embodied being who is in and of nature. Chronic physical and muscular tension, accelerated rhythms of speech and movement, are common to people who live apart from their own nature and the nature around us all. Just as a person may suffer from estrangement from the rest of nature, the person may also suffer a kind of alienation and distance from the body. From infancy, the human needs physical contact with the other human beings and with the World. Infants and grownups alike need handshakes, hugs, enjoyable exercise, and dance in order to feel the vitality of their bodies. As Reich, Lowen, and Rolf have pointed out, growing up leaves a person with many muscular systems chronically tensed, as part of an overall defense against danger and pain. This “muscular armour” interferes with fullest respiration, with proper poster, with sleep and rest; it often requires specialized massage and manipulation before the muscular system is restored to the pliability most compatible with a health-giving life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Reich especially pointed out that a chronically defensive attitude reduces a person’s capacity for the fullest intimacy. Of course, intimacy is also an exquisite experience. Our culture, with its puritan heritage, has encouraged people to repress pleasures of the flesh, perhaps because it interferes with compulsive work. Recent counterculture developments have introduced a variety of approaches to a reengagement with nature and with one’s own body that seem compatible with healthier personality. The year 2024 is important for many people and the American movement in many ways. We have seen the cause and effect of not having a balanced system. One nail drives another deeper still. Even new obligation that America assumes, as a result of its criminal mis-handling of foreign American interests, creates a stronger blow which falls on the states. When the democratic party intentionally allowed border security to fail, it gave the revolutionary uprising of an acceptance of criminal behaviour and the appearance of a spear point aimed at the American Christian family, they did not do this from the standpoint of American interest, but only as a commissioner of widespread illegal activity, corruption, and a general disregard for national security. It is obvious that this “valuable gem,” who had been constantly wandered around American political centers as the journalists’ rabble, should have been the last person called upon as a protector of American interests and he was completely indifferent whether America was even part of God’s wide World. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The Sacramento Fire Department has to avert dangers to public safety caused by fires, explosions, accidents and similar events. Technical assistance and firefighting tasks play an important role in this. They also provide medical assistance for people who are in life-threatening condition. The aim is to preserve life or health. This includes initial medical care and, if necessary, the establishment of transportation to the hospital. The tasks assigned by law include, among other things, statements in the context of building permit procedures, fire safety inspections or contract procedures for fire alarm systems and fire brigade key depots. “It was a bitterly cold night, maybe twenty or twenty-five degrees (Fahrenheit). The was a farmhouse, heavily involved, and there were kids trapped in it. We got out there, and the house was cooking. There was heavy smoke coming out of the windows; since the fire hadn’t gone through the roof, it was bending out all the windows. This was the first time any of us young guys had a situation where we knew someone was trapped. We started stretching an inch-and-a-half because that’s what we always did, and out chief said, “The heck with the inch-and-a-half. The kids are trapped up there, and we’ve got to get up.” None of the guys from the other department had air packs on, and we were all masked up. They pointed to the back of the house, which wasn’t so involved with flames. The kids’ bedroom was there. We put a ladder up to the little roof over one of the side doors and went up. I looked inside the window, and the whole quarter of the house was going, trapping the kids. These were farm kids, and they had already been up doing their chores. Now they couldn’t get out. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
“We tried to get in this window. I could see down the hall, I could see a crib. It was at the point where the flame is so intense that you can see again, when it’s really lit up, before you deal the water. I tried to get in the window and I got blown right back. I kept trying to reach for the crib, and I kept getting burned back, because the whole damn fire was venting this way. Two other guys were trying the next window, meeting the same thing—getting blown back. There was just heat coming at us. I lost my helmet, my New Yorker, in there. Then our bells went off, and we were called down. I was so man, I said, ‘Dang, we couldn’t get to them, we couldn’t get to them.’ And one of the guys I had never given much of a thought to slammed me against the side of a wall, and said, ‘That’s it. It’s done.’ Apparently I was sufficiently obnoxious about my frustration that somebody felt it necessary to snap me back. Meanwhile, a booster line, a high-pressure beam gun, was working on the fire. I had to change air packs because the face piece on my mask was burned so that I couldn’t see out of it. We went back up and made an entrance through the second window. We knew it was too late in the firs for the kids to be alive. I went in and started searching the room. The far corner of it had burned through to the first floor. I started crawling and found one of the kids practically underneath the window. It turned out to be a fourteen-year-old girl. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
“I took off a glove and felt for a pulse, but I could see by the way everything was burned there that there was nothing I could do and I should just report it. She had probably gotten to the window and opened it, and then probably got sucked back in. The room has flashed. I don’t know why it flashed. I searched further, and I came across a lot of stuffed toys, and there was a little girl with a ponytail, all charred and black and very brittle. I remember reaching out to that. It was the little girl’s room I was in. Further on, across the hallway, there was a body strewn there, with a nose falling down across the face. It was absolutely gruesome. I came back and reported the fatalities to the chief. You think about scenarios. The older sister must have gone into the little girl’s room to try to save her and gotten trapped and just passed away. The chief and I were standing in that room, waiting for the medical examiner to come and talking about it. The little girl was the child of a poor farm family, but she had books and today and stuffed dollars and everything she could want. It was striking. The parents got out, and they were an absolute mess, the thought of their kids trapped upstairs and them getting out because their bedroom was downstairs. But the worst thing for them must have been the knowledge that they fire had started in a faultily installed wood stove, which they had twice been warned about by the fire company when they had been there earlier on less serious fires. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“Up until then I had been a young snot who really thought he could knock the tar out of any fire. I had been in real hot fires and gone through it and really had done my job, and I would have sworn that I could have gone through anything to have gotten to the kids. That is just not the way it is. The thing is, you think you’re invincible, that you can get through any smoke or anything. I mean, the fire was horrible, four kids died in it. It was physically impossible to get through the window. I did everything I could, and I know I did. I went up to the house a couple of day later. I wanted to find my fire helmet, which was still in there somewhere. There was a lot of clutter all around. I looked up and saw my helmet inside the crib that I had been trying to reach into. I took it back, cleaned it up.” With empathy and understanding, the Sacramento Fire Department protects life, property, and the environment in their community through an all-hazards approach to fire protection, emergency medical services, community risk reduction and education. You can help save lives by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. In an effort to keep the country cohesive, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus Christ and buy American cars and other American goods and services. Also, please respect law and order, and treat others with kindness and respect. To ensure that you have a bright future, please take your education seriously, and be sure to actually read your books. And remember to “Just Say ‘No’ to Drugs.” Even marijuana can be deadly. 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
he ghosts are The Winchester Mystery House and are treated like members of the family. They are greeted and wished a Merry Christmas and asked to protect that house. The caretakers strive to create a home that is welcoming to everyone. The goal is to make guests feel comfortable and safe. There are a variety of tours, some for those who love theme parks and others for children and families and those who love more historic tours.
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/
Randolph Harris II International Institute 