Home » Articles posted by Randolph Harris II International Institute (Page 15)
Author Archives: Randolph Harris II International Institute
Does it Feel that Way to You?
Through life, some people have as a dominant value their strength. A man’s physical strength is sometimes obvious. However, he also may use his intelligence as an asset to do what his physical strength cannot do. After an injury, a man may no longer be able to come out on top by using his physical force, when this happens, he must use his acumen successfully. Due to addictions that sometimes occur when a person is disabled or because of physical constraints, some men find that they are no longer able to manage their money, and they have no where to turn. He may perceive that inability as a weakness, and rather than admit the weakness and deal with it, he might decide to avoid it, pretending that it is not there. Thus, his money situation will simply get worse. Viewing strength and weakness as a duality, a man might believe that his only choice is to have one or the other—not both. In his mind, to admit weakness is tantamount to giving up his physical prowess. And from a man’s point of view, strength is what has kept him alive. He is therefore a slave to brute force. He cannot abandon it. He is “stuck” on it. It takes courage to move from strength to weakness and back again. It takes a brand of courage some men do not have. Many men are “stuck” on strength because of their inability (or at least unwillingness) to experience weakness by going through and getting in touch his inner core, his being. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
A man who is not able to use his physical strength to support himself or his family may see himself as a spaceship without a pilot—in a sense, empty. He does not see himself as having a core, or essence. In his mind, he is not a complete human being. He is no more than a shell he carries himself around in. That is why some men who become disabled have the constant, gnawing feeling that “something is missing.” Since men with physical limitations see themselves, and therefore others, as “things,” their lives can become an endless round of manipulation, using his own “strengths” and others’ “weaknesses” to constantly come out on top. This, then, is how some men become manipulators. And their styles of manipulation may be quite simple. He merely overpowers people in getting what he wants. As boys growing up in less affluent neighbourhoods, some of them overpower people with their superior body strength. However, as men in business and in marriage, they overpower people with what they believe to be their superior intelligence. A man becomes a walking embodiment of his own attachment to strength. What a man is looking for, though he does not have words for it, is a balance between the values of strength and weakness—a state of emotional mastery, where he can be in touch with his own core, his real self. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Whereas a man, the manipulator, is saying, “I am out here, all alone, and I have to be strong to survive,” a man who is a master would say, “I am a man, and I am tough and strong. I have strength and I have weakness. Even thought I am strong sometimes and weak other times, the real me always survives/ It is OK for me to be weak; it is OK for me to need people. I am not my strength, nor am I, my weakness. I am something more. I am me, and that is enough.” This is the essence of a man’s journey. It is a journey which might very well resemble your own. The strength/weakness polarity is a common one, especially among men. How does it apply to where you are, in your World? Well, your life is like a stream. And if you are a manipulator, the twigs and rocks are the values to which you cling so desperately. If you are like most people, security is what prompts you to keep clinging. The polarity in life is that it consists of clinging to your security—your dubious, unwanted yet comfortable situation, and taking a chance by opening up your innermost self, making yourself vulnerable, risking insecurity. In choosing to take a risk, you go to your core, you find your being, you become what others will call “Messiah.” You become a master. However, those who cling to their comfort zones tend to become manipulators. They are “stuck” on their exaggerated values. Though unwilling to risk letting go themselves, they nevertheless condemned the “Messiah” creature for his willingness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
A man who lets of what does not strengthen him is not necessarily smarter, stronger or better than any of the other men. What separates him from the rest is his willingness to risk. In risking, he goes into his core, finds courage, and through it becomes truly free. This is something that manipulators—and indeed all of us—have yet to learn fully. When you truly learn to take strength, you take the first step on your journey from manipulation to mastery. This allows a man to experience the loss of his physical strength and survive it. He is able to see that there is still a whole, completely person left, a person who can be weak and still exist. Men will also find that weakness—which they avoid and deny their whole life—also has power to it. Men learn their weakness has the power to make them more “real” and brings people closer to them. For many men, weakness opens the door to power of loving, the power which comes from letting others be strong. Weakness enables us to relax, stop competing, let go and regain our strength for another time. When a man learns to have an encounter with weakness, sometimes people will offer to help him get his finances straightened out. However, it is difficult for most men to admit to others that they are in financial trouble and that they cannot handle it themselves. It is an admission of weakness. Yet it is something that a man is able to do when he confronts his weakness in Church and/or therapy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
A real man can survive weakness. However, this weakness still may cause a man to withdrawal from his friends and loved ones because he still cannot face himself. For many, his strength is still too important to him and discovering more weakness would be too uncomfortable. Yet once his journey has begun, and once begun can never be turned back. For a brief moment, some men are able to give up strength, retreat to their inner core and find something there. It is something he will never be able to “unexperience.” And it will assist him in his journey many times in the future. However, other men continue to grow. Man’s true intelligence is feeble while it remains imprisoned in egoism and narcotized by sensuality. He must liberate it by the philosophic discipline before it can become strong. So many of our feelings and so many of our thoughts have until now been dictated by the body. Is it not time to think and feel also as the true self would have us do? The terrestrial heritage has given him instincts, appetites, impulses, and desires; the human holds out higher possibilities to be worked for and realized. One message of the Sphinx is to balance the human mind with the brutish terrestrial being in us. This is not the same as the ascetics’ message, which is to exterminate the terrestrial being altogether. He who has not overcome his passions finds himself compelled to act against the clearest warnings of his reason. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
What really moves a man to act is his feeling; that is why the passion which are strong feelings, need more deliberate effort of the will to bring them under restraint. An action which is spontaneous and not a calculated one—that can be safe only for the enlightened man. For others it may be mere impulse or mere passion. The point is not that natural impulses of the body are wrong—how could that be?—but that men have made them wrong. Originally the satisfaction of the pleasure-instinct was in harmony with higher will as a lesser part of a greater function. However, now human will have reversed its role and exaggerated it to first place. The result is disharmony and disease. On one thing all men in all lands are agreed, that it is immeasurably more preferable to be released from anxieties than to suffer them. Yet, these same men throw themselves into situations or bring about events which will rivet the chains of anxiety upon them. How is it that such a contradiction exists everywhere? What causes them to do this? It is the strength of their desires, the power of their ambitions, the tendencies inherited from past births. This being the cause of the trouble, the remedy for it becomes plain. The more a man frees himself from desires, that is, the more he masters himself, the more is he freed from numerous anxieties. And even if he too is subject to the painful tests and unpleasant ordeals which inescapably affect human existences, he does not consider them to be misfortunes but as devices to draw out his latent qualities. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
The way out from tyrannical desires may have to be staged. First becomes a witness—indifferent and dispassionate—every time there is a surrender. This way is taking a new direction, starting to disidentify from the desire. On the one hand, he must tear himself away from his Earthly passions. On the other hand, he must give himself up to his sacred aspirations. The eagerness of desire betrays him into romantic self-deceptions and leads him into wounding frustrations. The ego lures his hopes constantly onward only to lacerate them in the end. Whilst we are still limited by the body and its inescapable needs, it is an impossible task to extirpate desire and negative self-interest. Philosophy adds that it is also an undesirable one. Only, put desire and self-interest down in their proper place, it says, do not permit them to obstruct higher and spiritual needs. It is not that they have to abandon joy but to purify it. If the joy which comes from debased pleasures is thereby lost, the joy which comes from ennobled thoughts and refined feelings is gained. When Earthly desires are extinguished, calm befalls a man. He must needs declare open war on his own passions, for he now sees that he cannot have them and peace too. Like all war this one will witness both victories and defeats, hardships and sufferings. However, out of these battles with himself he may progress, learning discrimination and gaining willpower. If uncontrolled, he realizes that he has to break his passions, or they will break him. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
In this work of purification, the need for mortal intellectual and emotional honesty will have to be stressed. It is satisfied by discriminating examination of thoughts, feelings, and motives, with constant self-distrust as a guide in the work. The more he trains himself to recognize and reject the impulses that come from his lower nature, the more will clarity of comprehension become his. The brute creature that he is most be kept at bay; his freedom as a man must be gained by degrees. Personally, I knew about my wife’s World to understand something of how life was to her. I even knew the terror of it because once, before we were married, I got swept into her agony, his suicidal chaos, and all the World became morbid to me in a most frightening, unmitigated and unmitigable way—everything was going haywire and out of control. I wanted to kill myself. I said so. She spoke to me as though I were a peasant who thought she new the passions of a kind. She thrust me out. In two shakes I thought, “Whew! I will never get into that again.” In thrusting me out, she got out of it herself (when she became the King?” but to be in it at all was too dangerous for me. Of course, I have wondered through the years since her suicide whether there was anything I could have done to help her. Everything I read or heard of psychotherapy I thought of in relation to my wife, questioning, and always I got the same answer: “With her, it would not have worked.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
This made me wonder whether I was white-washing my own failure. However, if so, why could I not ever be satisfied? Why did I not let it drop? Did I know that I was guilty, deep down in some sub-non-unconscious way? (When I mistrust me, there is no end to it, because then what I live with is mistrust.) If I were guilty, why could I not feel that?—instead of living with the knowing that I had tried very hard, I had loved her very much, and I had stayed too long. I received a latter from a man who stayed too long with his wife, in which he said “I have tentatively concluded (for me) that more time and more suffering than make sense are required to get on top of the mores and our personal motivations and unenlightened advice, to work through to the point where you can know yourself free of guilt for the life you can’t save.” It was only last spring, nearly twenty years after my wife’s suicide, that I understood something that I might have done. My relief expressed itself in a sign (letting go). I felt better about it. Not good, but better, and better is a kind of good. And then I knew—by feeling it clearly within myself—that the “bad” that I had been feeling was not guilt but sad. My “better” feeling was because it was not solidly inevitable that people like my wife must suffer so much all their lives and wipe out other people along the way. I do not know that I could have helped. However, I could have been more in touch with my thoughts and feelings (acceptance of myself) and more acceptant of his distress, sharing it her. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Instead of both of us trying to shove out her distress and replace it with a happiness which was phoney, I could have let her agony be, and then there might have been the beginning of change. Where to everything else I had said, “No, it would not have worked. She would not have let it,” when I thought of this in relation to my wife, I remembered the times when I might have got through to her. Even if I had not, I would have been more me and that would have been better for all of us. The most beautiful times that I remember with my wife are the many hours that we spent together saying only a few words now and then, like a touch on the shoulder or a hand touching hand. Our chairs were yards apart, but we were together. At such times she was in touch with the wordless resonance, the love that was in her and in me, and let it live awhile. However, then I would be sure that I, eighteen years younger, must be unhappy, must want to be “doing something,” and then I lost my awareness of all that was going on in myself and between us, and the sensing with all my senses that I had been enjoying, and I thought that I had to reassure her. She never did entirely take my word for it, and I never asked her, “Does it feel that way to you?” My wife was exceptionally good at explaining astronomy, anthropology, medicine, English literature and history, Greek and Latin poetry, and probably some other things which I have forgotten. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
However, in the person sense, my wife explained nothing. Perhaps she was so out of touch with herself that she could not. There were times and ways in which I understood (or heard) her no better than she did herself, and that was because at those times I did not hear me too. The human needs varied stimulation, not just to avoid boredom but actually to preserve the ability to perceive and to act adequately. When a person is radically deprived of the customary variety of sights, sounds, smells, conversation, and so on—as happens in solitary confinement—he or she begins to feel strange and may show signs of deteriorating as a person. “Sensory deprivation” experiments show that when volunteer subjects are placed in a special room that is soundless, with their vision closed off by special goggles, and immersed in warm water kept at body temperature (to reduce the experience of tactile stimulation), some begin to hallucinate and go through other psychoticlike experiences. I have been in such an isolation chamber, and I found it tranquil and conducive to meditation. Variety in “stimulus input,” then, may be regarded as a basic need, even though deprivation as extreme as that produced in the laboratory seldom occurs in everyday life. The “evil twin” of varied experience is boredom—a form of dispiriting in style of life. Travel, risk-taking, excitement, and simply trying something new in the way of clothes, reading, vacations, or challenges are the antitheses of boredom—varying one’s experience of life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Even moonrises and sunsets can get monotonous for the jaded tastes of the daily skywatcher. The healthy personality is also nurtured by meaningful variety. Excitement has often been thought of as a need for the young only. We now recognize that it is part of the fullest of lives in all generations. The excitement experience is one of the most difficult to create. Not all excitements involve risk-taking, and excitements are quite individually determined. One person may be thrilled by the firs parachute jump—another is equally excited about the first sighting of the sandhill crane. The Correspondence Principle requires that every new theory contain a limiting transition to the old theory it replaces. Insofar as the old theory has fitted some sound experiments, the new theory must concur. If Planck’s constant h tends towards zero, the quantum equations become just the classical ones. If the speed of light approaches infinity, Einstein’s kinematic and dynamical equations go over to Newton’s, and so on over a large number of examples from contemporary physics. As we apply the Correspondence Principle to sociobiology and exo-psychology, we expect that each new Einsteinian, relativistic theory of human behaviour and neurogenetic evolution will include a translation back to the old theory it replaced. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Darwinians are clearly in violation when they fanatically summarily reject the Monotheistic Creation theories of the Judeo-Christian Bible. Newer theories of evolution must provide new insights into the validity of the older theories—specifying the historical neurotechnical factors which limited the earlier metaphours. Any new theory of neurogenetics must relate to and lovingly demonstrate why the previous philosophic theory was “right” for its time arid its gene-pool—knowing that those to come will affectionately do the same for our theories. Historically speaking, the first coherent offensive is that of Sade, who musters into one vast war machine the arguments of the freethinkers up to Father Meslier and Voltaire. His negation is also, of course, the most extreme. From rebellion Sade can only deduce an absolute negative. Twenty-seven years in prison do not, in fact, produce a very conciliatory form of intelligence. Such a long period of confinement produces either weaklings or killers and sometimes a combination of both. If the mind is strong enough to construct in a prison cell a moral philosophy that is not one of submission, it will generally be one of domination. Every ethic based on solitude implies the exercise of power. In this respect Sade is the archetype, for in so far as society treated him atrociously, he responded in an atrocious manner. The writer, despite a few happy phrases and the thoughtless praises of our contemporaries, is secondary. He is admired today, with so much ingenuity, for reasons which have nothing to do with literature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
He is exalted as the philosopher in chains and the first theoretician of absolute rebellion. He might as well have been. In prison, dreams have no limits and reality is no curb. Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity. The only logic known to Sade was the logic of his feelings. He did not create a philosophy, but pursued a monstrous dream of revenge. Only the dream turned out to be prophetic. His desperate demand for freedom led Sade into the kingdom of servitude; his inordinate thirst for a form of life he could never attain was assuaged in the successive frenzies of a dream of universal destruction. In this way, at least, Sade is our contemporary. The militaristic history of Germany has many imagines of a strong silent sentry soldier on guard, watching, protecting, which made the Germans feel secure and strong. The content of the American news media was once honourable, but most of the enterprises are managed in a way that has made it impossible for them to function as a business. The first duty of TV news media has become that of the propagandists, to win over people who can subsequently be taken into the organization. And they train men and women to carry on their propaganda. The second duty of the TV news media has become to disrupt the existing order of things in America and thus make room for the penetration of the new teaching of sin, lawlessness, and corruption. The organizers of the propaganda department (the TV News media) have been fighting for the purpose of securing power, so that their doctrine of sin and corruption may finally triumph. After propaganda has converted the entire population over to an idea, only a handful of men are needed to finish the job. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Great theorists are rarely great organizers. The greatness of a theorist lies in his ability to understand and establish correct, abstract laws, while the organizer must primarily be an expert in understanding the human mind. The script controls are inserted and take effect early in life, while the counterscript slogans only become meaningful later. Added difficulty are scripts that tell it like it is: people really do act clumsy, as the child well knows; while the counterscript is usually square as far as his experience is concerned: he may or may not have seen someone attain happiness by working hard, being a good person, saving money, or being on time, not eating starches, avoiding public toilets, taking laxatives, and not masturbating. The problem we are having in America currently is that American people are being ignored and public works projects that have been in desperate need of completion are being ignored to add things like new bike lanes that people do not use anyway. Also, democrats are teaching Americans to expect everything for free, to feel entitled, to ignore the law, to rebel and be destructive and that breaking the law and discrimination is acceptable. The way you live your life determines your ultimate destiny. If you are harmonious, you may pass by unnoticed on the inside of the pages, but if you are in conflict, you may bring surprises and make headlines. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Thus, Hard-Working Church Deacon may end up President of Council, Retires After Thirty Years, or Jailed For Embezzlement, and Devoted Housewife comes out Mother of the Year, Celebrates Golden Anniversary, or Leaps From Roof of Building. In fact, it seems as though there are two kinds of people in the World: real people and plastic people, as the Flower Children used to say. The real people make their own decisions, while the plastic people are run by fortune cookies. The Fortune Cookie Theory of human living says that each child gets to pull two cookies from the family bowl: one square and one jagged. The square one is a slogan, such as “Work hard!” or “Stick with it!” while the jagged one is a scripty joker, such as “Forget your homework,” “Act clumsy,” or “Drop dead.” Between the two, unless he throws them away, his lifestyle and his final destiny are written. The conflict which we have sought to avoid is upon us. It is a comfortable, self-indulgent cop-out to look for conventional economic-political solutions. This is a war for survival. There is no choice left but to defend life against the genocidal machine. There are no neutrals in genetic warfare. Do not be deceived. It is a classic stratagem of genocide to camouflage their wars as law-and-order police actions, but democrats are telling illegal aliens how to evade ICE. Remember the Sioux and the pogroms and the African slaves and the indignation over airline hijackings and 9/11! If you fail to see that we are the victims of genocidal way you will not understand the rage of the oppressed, the fierceness of the Weathermen, and the pervasive resentment of the young. We cannot allow our government to become a lethal instrument. Remember the buffalo, the Iroquois, and the deer in the Sacramento Valley! #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The members of the Sacramento Fire Department are professionals dedicated to providing services that are innovative and progressive, ensuring the safest environment for their community. “I’m going through EMT right now. I was an ECA, that’s emergency care attendant. With that I could run first aid for the fire department. There are widespread deaths from vehicle accidents in the Sacramento area. We have a lot of busy intersections, and we also have people who go out and party, and they get on the roads and bring death with them. I have handled a lot of situations. We had a baby born on one run. It was pretty exciting, even though I’ve done it with my wife. We were called out to a house, and a lady was having good contractions. She was in the third stage of delivery. So, in the ambulance, I assisted a paramedic and we delivered the child. We set him up on the mother’s stomach so that the two of them could be pretty comfortable together, for the hospital was maybe seven miles away.” “We responded to a fire at an apartment. On arriving at the scene, we saw black smoke billowing into the sky from the nineth floor, and tenants were out on the balconies waving for help. Our company, Engine X, entered the lobby just as Rescue Y brought down a lady who was pretty charred. This was the first time that the seriousness of the fire dawned on us. We went to the fifth floor and took a lone up to the nineth. There we searched and found about five occupants whom we helped to exit the fire. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
“It appeared to be a racing fire, which engulfed the elevator and much of the nineth floor. The carpets and wall coverings were involved. A flash fire raced down the corridor. There was a lot of heat and smoke. They had a lot of plastics, and the smoke was black and thick, like flowing oil. If you held your hand in front of your face, you couldn’t see it, the smoke was that bad. The exit lights couldn’t be seen. We could hear people talking, and we could hear people screaming. People were trying to find their way out. They were helpless. We led some of them back into their rooms and out onto their balconies. Others we led to the fire escape that came down through the entire building. Some of them were in wheelchairs and could not walk. Then, as our air pipes were running low, we came across a man in one of the rooms. He was wedged under a vanity or dresser of some type. He appeared to be dead, so Lieutenant X took his self-contained and gave the guy some air. We saw his lips move a little, so we knew he was alive. Our next thought was to rescue him. The exit we wanted to take him to was about seventy-five feet away. When we tried to remove him from under the vanity, it was quite a tug. We realized that he had been burned through his clothing, and his skin was stuck to the carpet. We managed to pull the guy up and drag him down the floor. He was a large individual, weighing about 300 pounds. We started the three-man carry and got him down the hallway about fifty feet from the exit, when we ran out of air. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
“Our oxygen supplies ran out simultaneously because we had all entered the building at the same time. It was his only chance, now or never. I helped carry the guy maybe twenty feet from the exit. I knew the smoke was filled with PVC, and I knew it was toxic. So what I did was hold my breath while we were carrying him, until I couldn’t hold it anymore. I told Lieutenant X and Y that I had to leave. I dove out of the exit, but not before I did breathe in some of it, and I went through the coughing and the spit and that stuff. Lieutenant X and Y succeeded in carrying the guy the rest of the way out. A relief crew was there to resuscitate him. X and Y were taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation. Since then, Y has retired from the department for respiratory problems, and Lieutenant X is still on the job. So it affected one firefighter enough to end his career. I didn’t take nearly as much smoke as they did, but it had some effects on me. I have sore throats and a skin problem, but all in all, I don’t think it had too much of a lasting effect. The victim’s name was O.G. That’s all I know, we called him The O.G. What his real name was, I have no idea. I never got to talk to him, but he sent us some letters, saying that he was grateful for what we had done. I think he was a veteran, and, as far as I know, he is alive and well. If you weren’t spiritual before, this job would probably make you that way. It has made me appreciate life, believe me. If you asked if I would do it again, I would tell you yes. I know I would do not again. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“After that, going on fires, it isn’t the fire I worry about, it’s finding somebody in that same position again. I think that bothers me more than anything else. Because that stuck with me for a long time. To see an individual I rescued, see him that close to death, it really bothered me for a long time. one time I went on a call to that building there was a big guy. We all knew he had been dead for at least twelve hours. His body was cold, but there were about ten of us. A few of us guys spent nearly an hour trying to resuscitate the body. There was a little boy and a distraught woman there and I guess we wanted to give them hope. We all knew he was dead. That building is like a warzone. A lot of people end up dead, there are a lot of suspicious fires, a lot of crime and an extremely large number of emergency calls. I worry about the people who live there. Something is wrong. The building constantly wreaks of drugs and foul odors and is filthy.” Because of the Sacramento Fire Department, Sacramento City has been blessed with a great and noble heritage that offers a pathway to salvation. The dedicated EMTs, Fire Fighters, CHP and Police risk their lives to protect that community and keep people safe. The people of Sacramento do not underestimate the worth of emergency services. The Sacramento Fire Department has a firm adherence to a code of moral and ethical standards: Honesty, Trust, and Accountability. You can help save lives by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. It is also very important to raise your children to love America and to be patriotic. By having pride in America, and purchasing American made cars and other goods and services, we can make America a creditor nation again and ensure that this sacred land will be enjoy by your family for generations to come. Teaching children to love God and Jesus Christ will also preserve our American heritage and allow us to make sure our children are set on a path that will lead them to success and help them reserve a seat in Heaven. The Ten Commandments in the Christian Bible are a good guideline of how everyone should live. Furthermore, by respecting law and order, we will ensure the tranquility of this great nation and make sure that we are setting an exemplary example for other nations to follow. And by treating others with dignity, respect, and compassion, this will ensure that we are following the golden rule, “Do on to others as you would have them do on to you,” reports Luke 6.31. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Welcome to 816 Cross Creek Lane in Lincoln, CA—a spacious single-story gem at Cresleigh Havenwood! While it’s the smallest of our floor plans, this home boasts an impressive 2,293 square feet of thoughtfully designed space. With three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a den, great room, and dining room, there’s plenty of room for everyone in the family to carve out their own cozy corner. Need an extra bedroom? The den can easily be converted into a fourth bedroom to suit your needs!
🚗 The two-car garage offers ample storage, and a covered patio is included for those perfect outdoor moments. Plus, each Cresleigh home is fully equipped with our All Ready connected home package. This smart home bundle includes a video doorbell, digital deadbolt, connect home hub to set personalized scenes and routines, two smart switches, USB outlets, and we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Home Mini to complete the package!
Don’t miss out on making 816 Cross Creek Lane your future home! Contact us at 📞(916) 409-5595 or 📩 Havenwood@Cresleigh.com for details!
Rates provided on 10/03/2024. Payment example: Home price $745,982, down payment 10%, loan amount $646,469, term 30 years, FICO 780, fixed rate 4.99% (APR 5.514%), monthly payment $3,466.44. Monthly payment does not include taxes or insurance. Rates provided on 10/11/2024. Payment example: Home price $718,299, down payment 10%, loan amount $646,469, term 30 years, FICO 780, fixed rate 7.25% (APR 7.852%), monthly payment $4,410.06. Monthly payment does not include taxes or insurance. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/
How Far Would You Go to be Remembered?
Our terrestrial God is fascinating, and the Judeo-Christian Bible is an invaluable index to the neurogenetic level of the period in which it was written. The genetic stage of gene pool can be identified by the personality characteristics of the Local God. God of Genesis is an Earth God. He generously created the Heaven and the stars and the World, but, much like the Mrs. Winchester, provides no technical details or replicable blueprints. His preoccupation, whims, anxieties, jealousies, rules and gender roles have come to represent the traditional society. God owns the Garden—which many think is where the idea of The American Dream and nuclear family came from—and allows Adam and Eve their tenancy there. He has the right to ban them from the garden for disobeying His laws. God puts his warrior guards on the periphery of His turf to scare off intruders. God exemplifies stage five demanding with the intelligence of a Lion. A post-terrestrial God would not be concerned with possession of territory. Such a DNA ecological-engineer God would understand that all creatures must evolve through the marine, territorial, artifact, and social technologies and that they must self-actualize at each evolution, passing the second stage infant fish-brained mentality, the fifth stage mammalian-brained demanding, the eight-stage detailed-brained pedantic juvenile and eleventh stage domesticated adult, as well as those advanced stages of self-divinity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
When their precious little baby says, “My…and mine” wise parents smile because it is the beginning of the definition of reality and self in terms of territory. When the like stage eight detailed-brained juvenile humanoid proudly presents a crayon drawing or some original symbolic creation, every wise parent smiles praise. When the children fool around with the Tree of Good and Evil—the socio-sex rituals of the local give-it is true that terrestrial parents get upset. However, this is no reason to throw the children out of the house and put a flaming torch at the front door to keep the poor errant youngster from contritely creeping back. The God has not reached the technological level of the civilized stage of parental cultural transmission. The fact that pleasures of the flesh is not a concern of the Genesis supports the suggestion that in this folk legend we are dealing with the reality of a seventh stage parrot-brained Paleolithic-herding tribe obsessed with territory-moving uneasily into an eight-stage inventive self-actualization brain. Thus, the Holy Bible is revealed to be the word of God. It is a collection of sacred books written by ancient prophets and historians. These authors recorded the relationship between God and His people for over 4.000 years. The inspired words are what we know today as the Holy Bible. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
The power of the Christians who follow the Bible that emerged from the Old Testament tradition is rural, pre-urban. Fundamentalist Christianity appeals to pre-civilized, prudish tribal people who are not Worldly and not ready for urban feudal pleasures. The Bible becomes a valuable ethological document to help us locate the evolutionary stage which emerged in the Middle East at biblical times. The Principle of Correspondence keeps us from rejecting the Judeo-Christian Bible as erroneous. The same power which, when misgoverned, drags men down into materialism, also lifts them into spiritual awareness when directed upward. Where all a man’s acts are merely the reflex behaviour dictated by his sense-impressions, he has hardly any life higher than an animal one. It is the business of this quest to insert the influence of consciousness of the causes and results of his actions, reason, and will into such behaviour. There are certain indestructible truths which reveal themselves through the ages to every man who, for a time at least, sufficiently masters his animal self and sufficiently quietens his human self. Those which we most need to learn today are simple and ancient, yet completely relevant to the modern scene and completely adequate to the modern need. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
It is everywhere the state today that most people are automatons, merely reacting to the outward World of the five senses in a mechanical manner. They do not really control what is happening to them but merely drift with the forces playing through the sense-stimuli. The consequence is that they do not actually possess or use the power of free will. They are puppets on Nature’s stage. When any emotion takes full possession and reaches an extreme stage, it becomes a passion. One does not easily discard the various passions. The decision to do so does not lead, or even contribute much, to their conquest. It merely announces the beginning of a long war. They return, in spite of one’s wishes, again and again for they belong to the animal body which, itself, cannot be discarded. However, in the end a man must claim his birthright to a higher kind of life, must fulfil his nobler possibilities, must set up reason and intuition as his most reliable guides. If your thoughts are energized by a noble passion and your deeds inspired by a lofty enthusiasm, they are the better for it. However, if your thoughts are distorted by a foolish passion and your deeds wasted by a misdirected enthusiasm, they are the worse for it. The same ambition which stretched his mind and capacity for money-making power-hunting can, when transformed into aspiration, stretch them for truth-seeking and character building. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
It is not even that he has to give up all desires but that he has to purify them and put them all under the dominance of his one supreme desire for attainment—which may or may not mean their extinction. The Victorian periods was not only a haunted age, lending itself to every type of illusions, event at the level of bricks and mortar. One autumn evening in 1890, I found myself at the Observational Tower. It was dark, the Tower has a kind of airy vastness about it. That night, at the witching hour, the three doors to one of the rooms were firmly closed and the curtains drawn as I sat down in the company of my niece Daisy, and dog Zip. The room, its walls nearly nine feet deep, were the home to the most formidable ghosts. The fireplace projected far into the room, and an oil painting hung over it. Daisy set with her back to the fire, as I cried out “Good God—what is that?” Hanging above the oblong table was what I can only describe as a translucent cylinder about three inches in diameter, and within it a bluish and white colour commingled in constant flux. It moved behind Daisy, and she shrank away from it, exclaiming, Oh Christ!! It has seized me!” One of the servants swiftly jumped into action and hurled a chair towards it just as it crossed the upper end of the table and vanished into the recess of a window. He dashed out of the room and summoned more servants. Even now when writing I feel the fresh horror of the moment. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The Tower held spirits that were thought to have been dead and tortured for thousands of years. However, some of the Tower’s ghosts were more subtle—a baby crying; a hand on the shoulder while sitting in a bath; the smell of incense and horse sweat coming from nowhere—but the rest make up a tableau of blood. Screams are heard emanating from the Tower and servants often see a woman being pursued by a headsman, who eventually hacks her to the ground. Pools of blood that appear on the floor come from a fourteenth century nobleman who died of his wounds after battling the French incursions which made the Isle of Wight almost uninhabitable during that period. One particularly harrowing night, I woke to find myself not in my bed, but standing at the entrance to one of the basements. The heavy wooden door creaked open of its own accord, revealing a staircase that seemed to descend into infinite darkness. From below came the sounds of chains rattling and distant, agonized moans. As I stood there, paralyzed with fear, I felt an unseen force beginning to pull me down the stairs. It took every modicum of strength I had to resist, to turn and flee back to the safety of the upper floors. Daisy found herself drawn to the ancient mirror in her room, spending hours staring into its depths. She began to see things in its silvered surface—glimpses of the past, of the atrocities committed by the Winchester Rifle. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
However, more terrifying were the glimpses of possible futures, each more horrific than the last. In one, she saw a creature of darkness, a vicious monster, stained with blood, stalking the halls alongside other spirits. In another, she witnessed the gruesome demise of my estate at the hands of a spectral baron. His eyes ranged over us; his mouth formed into a cruel smile. He laughed, deep and loud, and with a sudden careless gesture dropped my entire home to the ground. Not only did we all perish, but legions of the dead had just lost their home. The specter then wiped some blood from the corner of his mouth with his arm, and smiled again. It was as he smirked in triumph that he held out a small gold crucifix. Daisy ran to me in tears. “Aunt Sarah,” she said, “I understand nothing except horror and misery!” “Things will get better,” said I gently, “when we have done what we have to do.” Cautiously, I moved nearer to Daisy. Her eyes blazed with fury. With a grisly grin, she back away from me to the door-to-nowhere. Daisy delivered a horrible squeal. Her withering body seemed to fade into tiny specks, forming a floating shape which slipped under the narrow crack at the bottom of the door. Stepping up to the door, I stood blinking in astonishment. I stretched out my arms to her, but she did not return. Putting my head in my hand, I sobbed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The trapdoor in the floor now opened of its own accord, the darkness below calling to me with promises of release from the terror—if only I would descend those winding stairs. I went down into the darkness, and at the very bottom, lighting a candle. The room became a prison. The walls seemed to close in on me, the ancient bricks whispering secrets that threatened to drive me mad. I tried everything I could think of to bring Daisy back and rid myself of this evil presence. I brought in priests to perform exorcisms, but the holy water turned to blood as soon as it touched the floors of Llanada Villa. Crucifixes twisted themselves into pentagrams. Mediums fled as flames from the fireplace took on a life of their own, forming themselves into fiery apparitions that chased them through the halls and sent them screaming from the property, speaking in malevolent tongue. As the sanity of the servants began to fray, they would find themselves slipping into fugue states, coming to awareness hours later with no memory of what had transpired. I squeezed Mr. Hansen’s arm as we traversed the miles and miles of hallways and rooms looking for my dear Daisey. Mr. Hansen gasped when we opened on of the doors. There was Daisey. In the quiet of one of the beds, resting from the horrible impulses which made her stalk the night. She was beautiful. Her eyes were closed, her expression serene. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
“Is she dead?” Mr. Hansen breathed. “No,” I replied. “She is not dead. But my home will never be at peace until we release Llanada from this evil cruse. My family and I will die, and new victims and multiplying evils will be unleashed on this World. Souls are in torment. Mr. Hansen, I need you to perform an act of great love and great courage. For although my home is the size of many mansions, if we do not continue to build, we will all be killed!” Mr. Hansen stepped forward. “I’m ready,” he said. Mr. Hansen took a small book from his pocket and began to recite a prayer. The ancient words of worship echoed around the labyrinth. A hideous, blood curdling screech came from Daisy’s open lips. The house shook and twisted wildly; it bones groaning in agony. Mr. Hansen picked up a hammer, retrieved my notes from the bureau and called the carpenters back to work. The foul things that had taken over Daisey’s body had gone, and in its place lay the real Daisy. Her face was very beautiful, but she was ravaged with pain and suffering. “So we did the right thing,” one of the carpenter said. “Did you doubt it?” asked Mr. Hansen. The evocative language of cutting and shaping wood produced a distinct rustling sound. High-pitched whines evoked an urgency and intensity. The crisp slicing of the saw, the rhythmic thumping of the hammering and nailing which reverberated through the air, and as well as the creaking chorus of grating and groaning wood produced a symphony that was very soothing and invigorating. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
A week later, in the downstairs study, Mr. Hansen was sitting at the desk frowning in concentration. He had called the carpenters all together for an important meeting. “One part of our work is over,” he said. “But a greater task remains. It is imperative that the haunting groan of timber, the ominous creek of stained wood, the hypnotic beat of the hammer, continues to carry its emotional weight, never ceasing. That is the only way we can stop the author of all our sorrow. And…”He paused, looking slowly at the expectant faces in front of him. “And keep Mrs. Winchester and her family alive,” Mr. Hansen said vehemently, to murmurs of agreement. Now that the battle was finally out in the open, I regained all my strength and spirit. I no longer felt like I was alone in the World, battling this curse on my own. I now had a team. “We all know what happened to poor Annie and Mr. Winchester,” Mr. Hansen said gravely, “and those of you who weren’t already familiar with Sarah Winchester’s journal have now read it. Very few people,” he said with admiration, “have faced what she has faced and lived to tell the tale. Her journal provides an invaluable insight into the powers and habits these ghosts and demons on humanity.” Mr. Hansen began to pace up and down the length of the study, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “I have made it my task to learn as much as possible about the many dangers we face in The Winchester Mansion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
“Arkie will testify to the days and night I have spent in this room, in that chair, reading Mrs. Winchester’s diagrams and interpreting her architectural notes, reading books and papers untouched for centuries. My purpose in calling this meeting is to shape my knowledge—my knowledge of the ghosts killed by Yellow Boy.” Abruptly he stopped pacing up and down, stood behind his chair and thumped the table. “There are such beings as demons, ghouls, and ghosts. Spring Heeled Jack is the greatest and most evil demon there has ever been. He is as strong as twenty men and has the cunning that comes from living over a thousand years. He has claws, eyes as red as fireballs, and wings.” I suddenly interrupted. “Correct. He can rip anyone to shreds with his bare hands. And he has other tricks. He can cause fogs, he can fade into the walls. All he was wants to do is harm the living. So, please, keep building nonstop.” A chilling wind whipped around us, carrying with it the echoes of tormented souls. Spectral hands clawed at the carpenters from the shadows, leaving icy trails across their faces. “Be careful,” Mr. Hasen warned, his grip on his hammer tightening. “Try not to get too impatient or angry.” They all fell silent. With steadfast purpose they walked in a single file from one room to another, gathering tools to continue construction. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
After the men returned to work, I buried my noise in my old books. I wanted to keep myself busy so I would not worry about the curse. I needed to know as much as possible about the enemy. The men were systematically working. The book frightened me. I snaped it shut and decided to go to bed. What I needed was a good night’s sleep. In the process of working on the west wing, the men had become too confident. “Saw a ghost just then,” Emrys observed, as he nailed wood to the wall. “A ghost over there,” Silas said. “Masses of them here,” Ambrose said a little lighter, just as he was opening his toolbox. Of the fifteen men that were on duty, only four remained. The men glanced up from their work and looked around the room. Ghosts were appearing from nowhere, floating and hovering across the mansion’s floor, horribly flying over their heads. Mr. Hansen heard their screams and came running into the room. “We must continue building!” he shouted, looking at the horror of the ghosts around them. “Now prepare for blood to flow,” an incarnate voice said. “Shut up!” Arkie shouted, desperately running from the room. “Hurry!” Mr. Hansen called from the door. The other three men had already run out of the room. Arkie made a last, frantic lunge, and just managed to get safely into the hallway. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Immediately ghost converged into the hallway, and in less than a second, they were smothered in complete darkness. They felt as if they were being frozen to death. The ghosts were clawing at their faces, whispering in their ears. They tried to fight their way out of it. The men thought this was the end. At that moment, the lights came on and the ghosts vanished. While I was sleeping, the chambermaid witnessed a white mist. It came creeping under the door, low like a snake, and pressed itself against the walls and windows. Then it seeped into the new room through the wall. She looked down at me and was pleased that I was sleeping so soundly. However, in the morning, as the chambermaid was telling me about the night’s events, Mr. Hansen noticed I did not look very well. “Mrs. Winchester, are you coming down with something?” he asked. I admitted, “I feel so tired and weak.” “Although I am very thankful to be employed in your service, I was going to ask you if I could take leave?” “For how long, Mr. Hasen?” “Permanently.” “Good architects are the very devil to find these days, Mr. Hansen,” I said, “and there can be no one else like you. Do stay on, there’s a good chap. I would be lost without you.” By all rights, Mr. Hansen should have long ago retied, spent his savings on a country cottage and devoted the rest of his life to his own garden. However, I had been insistent that he should stay on. So many employees had disappeared. His place being taken over by someone else sounded strange, unfathomable. I could not have him absent from the house. Mr. Hansen was a good-heated old soul, and his job was secure for as long as he wished it to be. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
The Winchester Mystery House
We heard you! We’re giving you another chance to grab tickets for Unhinged: Hotel at 20% off – 48 HOURS ONLY! ⏰🚨
Use code: UNHINGED at checkout. This is your last chance to snag discounted tickets. Don’t miss out!
Note: Code is valid now until Friday, October 25th at 9am PST. Not valid on previous orders. Blackout Dates Apply – discount is not valid on Thursday October 24th and Saturday, October 26th. Code is case sensitive. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Maybe a friendly Victorian ghost will come home with you and haunt your closet and watch over you to keep you safe.
Weak One Minute, Dead the Next?
Some people are raised in vicious crumbling corners of the city, where their chances of survival are only as good as the strength in their muscles of the quick wits in their head. Those who have both—physical strength and size are lucky. However, it also helps to have calculating intelligence. It is also important not to get caught in the syndrome of unemployment, drugs, and despair. When live in an age when, as the Lord foretold, men’s hearts are failing them, not only physically but in spirit. Many are giving up heart for the battle of life. Death by suicide ranks as a major cause of deaths to college students. As the showdown between good and evil approaches with its accompanying trials and tribulations, the adversaries are increasingly striving to overcome the Saints with despair, discouragement, despondency, and depression. Sometimes this happens when a person’s spouse leaves them, the paychecks stop coming in, and the payments on the Corvette fall months behind. This is when it is most important to remember God and have assurance that he is directing us through the troubled times ahead. “He that remaineth steadfast and is not overcome, the same shall be saved,” reports Matthew 1.11. Also, never forget your intelligence, your education, and your competitiveness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Even people who are successful and feel like they own the World fell like something very important is missing. Some fell alone, like a spaceship rocketing to the stars with nothing but emptiness all around them. They may also feel out of touch with themselves, with who they are. It is often times like a spaceship that has no pilot, no crew—just an engine driving it mindlessly ever upward to nowhere. Many people are, as always, a success. They have energy, style, charisma. They seem to have it “all together.” And they fool everyone but themselves. On top of that, they carry a deep, gnawing guilt. In the rise to the top, one must often leave many people behind: their friends from poor neighbourhoods, their spouse, and sometimes even their families. These individuals know something is wrong with them personally. They want to relax, but cannot. They want to be loved, but have no idea how a person goes about doing that. They get sick and tired of competing, keeping up, looking good, winning for the sake of winning alone. “Wickedness never was happiness,” reports Alma 41.10. Sin creates disharmony with God and is depressing to the spirit. Therefore, a man would do well to examine himself to see that he is in harmony with all of God’s laws. Every law kept brings a particular blessing. Every law broken brings a particular blight. Those who are heavy laden with despair should come unto the Lord, for his yoke is easy and his burden is light. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Strong. You want to know that you are strong all the time. Not just when things are going smoothly. However, if you tell yourself—all the time—that you are strong, then after a while you will believe it. You will really know it. So when something unfortunate happens, you will know you can handle it. However, no one is strong all the time. There are times when you will be weak. Look man, not everyone has the luxury of being weak. Weak, for some, is like one step from being dead, you understand? You will be weak one minute, and you will be dead the next. However, prayer in the hour of need is a great boon. From simple trials to our Gethsemanes, prayer can put us in touch with God, our greatest source of comfort and counsel. “Pray always that you may come off conqueror,” Doctrine and Covenants 10.5. This is also a key to use in keeping depression from destroying us. In the lives of some people, there are a number of direct polarities, that is, opposites which are independent, but at the same time complementary. With regard to their outside World, there are the polarities of their two cultures: one, the poverty-ridden low-income neighbourhood and the other, the World of business. They know their roots are in one culture, but their everyday life is in the other. Their inability to be in both of these Worlds, alternately, as the situation might demand, is a source of great conflict, guilt and embarrassment to them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The other polarity exists in their own perception of themselves: the polarity of strength and weakness. Having grown up in an environment where strength was equated with survival, some come to see weakness as something to be avoided at all costs. Thus they will deny their own weakness and set about structing their lives such that one could demonstrate only strength to oneself and others. To understand this, we have to focus on the exact meaning of the word polarity, which is different from the concept of duality. Polarities exist at either end of a continuum. One such continuum might have “yes” at one end and “no” at the other, with degrees of “maybes” in between. Another continuum might have strength at one end and weakness at the other. (There is a zero point in the center and the intensity of the strength and weakness increases as each moves away from the other. Differences exist only in degree. On the other hand, a duality is a complete separation of two entities into mutually exclusive or contradictory conditions such as: Alive of Dead.) These are related by their oppositeness—an oppositeness which is independent, but not complementary. Also, there cannot be degrees of deadness. Something is either dead, or alive. It cannot be a “little bit” dead. Many people often mistake polarities for dualities. In the minds of some, there are two kind of people “ghetto” and successful businessmen. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Since some people view themselves as successful businessmen, they cannot allow themselves to be viewed as “ghetto,” as they perceive the people left in the less affluent hometowns. To these successful men, it is necessary to embrace one and reject the other. Some cannot see that one does not have to do that. Rather, one can hold the two polarities in tension, appreciating both Worlds. One can be human and ambitions, cool and successful. One can speak in slang dialect to their friends and family and slide into their university English when he is in the executive suite. He can be both at the same time without guilt. Recognizing that he need not constantly fight the situation as a duality, but allow both to exist in creative tension, will lead to a dissolving of what could become a neurotic conflict. The Universe is literally held together by such dynamic tension. For every positive charge in a molecule, there is an equal and opposite negative one. For every planet that is spinning wildly, straining to hurtle off into space, there is another planet holding it to its orbit. The positive does not reject the existence of the negative. It uses the negative to hold itself in place. The Universe uses both the positive and the negative to accomplish a variety of useful tasks. The result of this dynamic tension between polarities is balance and balance is literally “what makes the World go ‘round.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
If everything exists in a state of dynamic tension, then why not out inner life, our own being? Should not out being also thrive best in a condition of dynamic tension on a nurturing continuum of feeling and growth, rather than at a rigidly fixed position which seeks to deny the existence of another, opposite position? In that the children of Cain have triumphed, increasingly, throughout the centuries, the God of the Old Testament can be said to have been incredibly successful. Paradoxically, the blasphemers have injected new life into the jealous God whom Christianity wished to banish from history. One of their most profoundly audacious acts was to recruit Christ into their camp by making His story end on the Cross and on the bitter note of the cry that precedes His agony. By this means it was possible to preserve the implacable face of a God of hate—which coincided far better with creation as the rebels conceived it. Until Dostoievsky and Nietzsche, rebellion is directed only against a cruel and capricious divinity—a divinity who prefers, without any convincing motive, Abel’s sacrifice to Cain’s and, by so doing, provokes the first murder. Dostoievsky, in the realm of imagination, and Nietzsche, in the realm of fact, enormously increase the field of rebellious thought and demand an accounting from the God of love. Himself. Nietzsche believes that God is dead in the souls of his contemporaries. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Because Nietzsche believes that God is dead in the souls of his contemporaries, he attacks, like his predecessor Stirner, the illusion of God that lingers, under guise of morality, in the thought of his times. However, until they appear upon the scene, the freethinkers, for example, were content to deny the truth of the history of Christ (“that dull story,” in Sade’s words) and to maintain, by their denials, the tradition of an avenging god. On the other hand, for as long as the Western World has been Christian, the Gospels have been the interpreter between Heaven and Earth. Each time a solitary cry of rebellion was uttered, the answer came in the form of an even more terrible suffering. In that Christ had suffered, and had suffered voluntarily, suffering was no longer unjust and all pain was necessary. In one sense, Christianity’s bitter intuition and legitimate pessimism concerning human behaviour is based on the assumption that overall injustice is as satisfying to man as total justice. Only the sacrifice of an innocent god could justify the endless and universal torture of innocence. Only the most abject suffering by God could assuage man’s agony. If everything, without exception, in Heaven and Eart is doomed to pain and suffering, then a strange form of happiness is possible. However, from the moment when Christianity, emerging from its period of triumph, found itself submitted to the critical eye of reason—to the point where the divinity of Christ was denied—suffering once more became the lot of man. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Jesus Christ profaned is no more than just one more innocent man who the representatives of the God of Abraham tortured in a spectacular manner. The abyss that separates the master from the slaves opens again and the cry of revolt falls on the deaf ears of a jealous God. The freethinkers have prepared the way for this new dichotomy by attacking, with all the usual precautions, the morality and divinity of Christ. Callot’s Universe sums up quite satisfactorily this World of hallucination and wretchedness whose inhabitants begin by giggling up their sleeves and end—with Moliere’s Don Juan—by laughing to high Heaven. During the two centuries which prepare the way for the upheavals, both revolutionary and sacrilegious, of the eighteenth century, all the efforts of the freethinkers are bent on making Christ an innocent, or a simpleton, so as to annex Him to the World of man, endowed with all the noble or derisory qualities of man. Thus the ground will be prepared for the great offensive against a hostile Heaven. The adept who attains perfect inner serenity can do so only by paying the price of forgoing the emotional agitations, attractions, and repulsions which constitute much of the inner life of most people. Having attained it himself, he can lead other to it only by pointing towards it as a reachable goal for them, too. He may not yield to personal favouritism or egotistic caprice based on likes and dislikes in selecting those whom he is to help. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Indeed, because of this it is said that he is not more interested in mankind collectively rather than as individuals. Now if he had to commit emotional suicide to reach his present height, it is unreasonable to expect that he should flatter or encourage those who, although seeking the same height, seek also to preserve or nourish their egoistic emotions. The latter are nearly always closely linked to egoistic desires. An inward detachment from all eagerness for Earthly life is the grim price that must be paid before entry into the kingdom of Heaven can be got. Such detachment requires soft sentimentality to yield to hard recognition must assuredly lead the seeker far away from conventional points of view concerning his personal duties, his family relations, and his social behaviour. It is not that he will not feel desires and aversions, attractions and repulsions, but that he will not be moved by them. They will be under control, not only of the ego but of a power higher than the ego. Thus the tensions which animate him, will not be present. It is an error to regard him as inhuman, as lacking in feeling. What he rejects is negative feeling: what he seeks to overcome is animal wrath, lust, hatred; what he affirms is positive feeling of the best kind—delicate, sensitive, aesthetic, compassionate, and refined. Thus his stoic imperturbability is not rigor mortis. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
To talk of his condition as simply being one of controlled emotion is not quite correct; much rather it is one of balanced emotion—which is markedly different. The idea of a philosopher being an utterly aloof person, coldly indifferent and quite unapproachable, a man who restricts his human feelings to the degree that hardly any are left, is applicable only to those who follow narrow, rigid, and incomplete systems. The notion that a philosopher is melancholy is arguable: there is no reason why he should not show joy and appreciate humour. However, since he is a balanced person, he will put the governor of deep seriousness to control these qualities. If a human price has to be paid for such emotionless behaviour, let us remember that it must also be paid for too emotional behaviour. A portentous gravity is not at all a hallmark of the self-actualized Christian. Is mental tranquility indistinguishable from emotional death? Is it not better to guide feelings, educate desires, and uplift emotions into the proper channels than to kill them? Such questions show a confused comprehension of the philosophic discipline. The latter’s aim is not to produce an insensible human stone but a true human being. If a child is boxed in by contradictory controls, there may be only one way out which allows him some measure of self-expression. He is then forced into that kind of activity or response no matter how inappropriate it may be. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
In such a case, it is often evident to the people around him that he is responding to what is in his head rather than to the external situation, and he is then said to be in a bag. If his bag is backed up by some talent or ability, and by a winning payoff command, it may be a winner’s bag, but in most cases people in a bag are losers because their behaviour is nonadaptive. A person who breaks out of a bag (or “container,” as it sometimes called) will immediately proceed to do his thing, that is, whatever he has always wanted most to do. If that happens to be adaptive and is controlled with some Adult rationality, he may turn out to be a winner, but if he indulges too often and too well, he will end up being a loser. In fact, when a person starts to do his thing, after he break out of his bag, his payoff command will determine whether he does it judiciously so as to be a winner, or overdoes it like a loser. In some cases, however, he may be able to leave his payoff command in the bag along with the rest of his parentally programmed script apparatus, and then he is really his own man and can decide his own destiny. However, it is difficult to know, without the appraisal of an objective outsider, whether he is really a maverick of liberated person, or is only an angry rebel, or maybe even a schizophrenic who has jumped out of his bag and into a bottle, with or without pulling the cork in after him. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
To ask about the purpose of human life is to raise an existential question, rather than one answerable through experiment or logic. Existential questions are answered by the way one lives. Every person’s life, and the daily actions and decisions that comprise it, represent that person’s answer to the question, “How, then, shall I live?” These answers are almost by definition the embodiment of a person’s religion. The chief function of religion is to provide ultimate answers to the questions that existence pose. In the absence of credible and lifegiving answers to the questions, “How shall I live, and why?” a person enters the state called noogenic neurosis—a kind of despair or cynicism. Much depression and neurotic suffering stem from a failure to find meaning in life or to find new meaning when old goals have been consummated or have lost their inspiriting power. Fromm regards “a frame of orientation and devotion” to be as essential to healthy personality as food. The process of self-actualizing, of which Maslow wrote, and the achievement of selfhood (in Jung’s sense) appear to be impossible without such a religious orientation. Of course, it does not matter whether the religion is theistic, and it is possible to judge whether or not a person’s objects and ways of worshiping are life-giving. However, life for human beings is impossible without something to live for. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The mission of the Sacramento Fire Department is to serve the community by protecting lives, property, and the environment in a safe, efficient, and professional manner. The Sacramento Fire Department also insures to provide timely, effective and efficient fire protection, suppression, prevention, education, and investigation services to the citizens of Sacramento. “It was a fire in a high school at two o’ clock on a Monday morning, and one of our rescue crews was coming back from the hospital, where they had a job. They smelled smoke. They drove all around looking for the fire, but they just couldn’t find it. The trouble was that this school, like many buildings in South Sacrament, was completely windowless, for reasons of vandalism and air-conditioning. So they couldn’t see the fire. At six in the morning we got the run. This fire had been burning in a windowless structure for twelve hours. We felt the door, and it was hotter than hell itself. We stretched our preconnected line, a long stretch, and we put it into position. Then we forced open the door and felt the air rush in. Right there, I knew that was the closet we had ever come to blowing ourselves to kingdom come. Why that building didn’t backdraft, I don’t know. We crawled in with the line, and the smoke was real black, almost to the floor. We were in the library learning center. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
“I got close to the wall, and there was a telephone on one of the desks, just above the level of our heads. It was melted to a blob. Now our ears were burning, really tingling, because we weren’t using helmets with earflaps and we didn’t have any ventilation. We went along way in, thinking, cover your ears, cover them up and push the line along. By this time everything was in a smoldering state and picking up. We stretched that thing, we must have stretched it a hundred feet. This other guy and I were up front, and the rest of the guys were twenty or thirty feet back. We cracked that line, and the water upset the thermal balance. The stream came down, and we couldn’t see a damn thing. The steam rolled down, and I told the guy, ‘I got to leave, I’m burning up.’ He didn’t get the burns I did. I said, ‘I got to go, I’m burning up.’ I turned around and tried to follow the hose line out, but it was all tangled around a chair we had knocked over on the way in. It was being a receptionist’s desk, and I remember going there. In retrospect you say, ‘Feel the male and female coupling, and you know you’re heading in the right direction.’ When you’re burning up, you don’t feel anything. I started to stand up, and I was telling myself to get back down. This was the closet I have ever come to losing control of myself because I was burning up. I finally did get outside. To be honest, I had left that guy on the line. I had told him, ‘Come on, come on, come on.’ He came out a minute later and was okay. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
“They worked on me in the emergency room at the hospital, and they put ice packs on my ears. They were second-degree burns. Why we didn’t kill ourselves by forcing that door and letting that air in, I don’t know. I think it was just God saying, ‘Hey, it’s not your time to get killed.’ There are always other times, though. Like, we had a sire in another of those Sacramento Country houses, where a lady and a baby were trapped inside. So the guys pulled the line, they were good firemen, but they were attacking the fire at the front. It’s hard to make yourself go around back of the fire when the fire’s in the front. I said, ‘Hey, X, if there is anybody alive, they’re in the back of the house. Go there.’ Well, anyway, the firemen went in the back and found the lady while I was getting my self-contained mask on. They came out and they were burned. They were helping the lady, but the baby was still in there because I could hear it crying. I went in with a line. The fire was one of those where it was burning up over your head. I intentionally didn’t open the line, because I knew that steam would come down and I wouldn’t be able to see the kid. Also, I would steam the hell out of myself. This time I did have my earflaps down. I could hear the baby crying and I said, ‘Oh, man.’ I jumped through doorways, and I melted the eye shield on my helmet. I found the baby. It was in the back bathroom. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
“I got burned, but I eventually found the baby. That was the first experience in which I heard a baby crying, and I thought, ‘Well, you just better stay in here, and you just better suffer until you find the baby.’” Not only does the fire department save lives and reduce property loss, but they also prevent harm. Public education and prevention is of equal importance to fire suppression in the role of the fire service in the community. You can help the Sacramento Fire Department’s mission by making a donation. Americans love to see America prosper. Please remember to raise your children to love America, love God and Jesus Christ and to be patriotic. Also, to keep America strong, it is important to buy American cars and other goods and services produced by Americans, such as American beef, poultry, dairy, produce and other products. In order to keep our city streets safe, remember to respect law and order, and always treat your elders with dignity and reverence. Getting an education will help you maintain stability as an adult, and you can and will use everything you learn in school. Reading your assigned textbooks before class will help your grades improve, help you to understand the material, teach you critical thinking skills and make class more interesting because you will be able to engage with the teach and other students and the time will fly by. As always, remember to be thankful for being an America and never forget how armed forces have made it possible to live in peace. 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 16 of 16
The Winchester Mystery House
The nearer one gets to visit a haunted place, the more frantic do the restless ones become, to make sure, perhaps, that you do not overlook them!
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/
What a Lot of Life We Waste
Life can throw all kinds of obstacles in your way, and sometimes these obstacles can take the shape of toxic individuals. A big part of manipulation is intention—the mental effort of trying or striving. As soon as we get intention involved, our focus shifts from the spontaneity of the present to the goal-orientation of the future. Instead of expressing ourselves right now, we manipulate people according to the way we expect them to be in the future. Instead of relating to people—that is, being with them, we are manipulating, or doing to them. Any act can be an expression of relating or manipulation. I can smile out of joy in seeing you, or I can smile to make it look that way. I can cry out of genuine sorrow for you, or I can cry to make you feel guilty. Expression is a welling up, and unrehearsed outpouring; it needs no response. Manipulation is calculated and demands response. Expression is a fountain; manipulation is a whirlpool. With expression I feel moved; with manipulation I feel sucked in, drained…with manipulation life becomes a wrestling match, with expression, it is more like a dance. Relating without manipulating is the experience of expressing yourself effortlessly. It is doing without striving. It is based on the assumption that if we become aware of our core feeling sin the heart, the belly, the “guts,” the awareness of these feelings, you will have to train yourself a bit. You will have to take yourself along the road from manipulation to mastery. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
As you take this fascinating journey, you will unquestionably be surprised at what you may find. You may find that your present system of dealing with certain types of problems is entirely useless, that you have no mechanism in your background to help you learn who you are. You may find that, without thinking about it, you have donned a suit of psychological armour which prevents you from getting in touch with other people as well as yourself. And finally, you may find that who you are—who you really are—is someone quite different from who you think you are. While these surprises may be at first unsettling, they will ultimately be quite pleasant. You will be delighted to discover your uniqueness, the qualities which make you different from anyone who has ever lived or will every live. You will also be pleased—and comforted—to learn that deep down, we are all essentially the same. It is inevitable that you will see parts of yourself in other people. Many of them, like you, are travelers on the road from manipulation to mastery. Stronger by weakness, wiser, men become as they draw near to their eternal home. Ours is a culture that reveres, indeed idolizes strength. Our heroes are warriors, boxers and football players. Not surprisingly, this attitude encouraged many people to seek refuge in their own strength and rely upon it to get along in the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
If you are a person who allows strength to take on such exaggerated importance, chances are you are a manipulator with regard to that value. You depend solely upon your own physical prowess and intelligence, while not allowing others the opportunity to use their brawn or brains. You refuse to acknowledge your failings, fears, inadequacies or weaknesses. You do not allow other to be strong because to do so threatens your self-image of exclusive power. Assuming that you are the only one who knows how to get things done, you tend to be dominating and dictatorial. Chances are you are also guilt-ridden. When you succeed, you bask in the admiration of others, but when things go awry, you withdraw and hide until you can renew your illusions of omnipotence. Yet, you never feel quite strong enough. So you manipulate others into constantly reacknowledging your strength. For you, life is a constant cold war. If you are a master, on the other hand, you must submit your will to God’s will. Strength comes when we seek His will, not our will. He tenderly tells us to “be humble; and the Lord thy God shall lead thee by the hand, and give thee answers to thy prayers,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 112.10. God is the way, and only through Him will we succeed. Therefore, to choose strength is not to deny weakness, and to choose weakness is not to abdicate your strength. One must be willing to acknowledge his failings and weaknesses. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Unthreatened by the strength of others, you will them to be strong. As a master, you recognize strength and weakness as polarities—opposite ends of the same pole. They are both a part of you. When you accept your weakness, you are better able to accept all of yourself—a step toward learning to love yourself unconditionally. When you accept, rather than deny or diminish, the strength of others, you are able to appreciate them, to work and play with them in a communion of mutual respect. You can be forceful and expressive of what you want, but without being dominating. At the same time, you can allow others to be strong and competent, but without playing weak or helpless yourself. To the man you are about to meet, strength was “life.” However, life eventually taught him otherwise. You have to learn the prison lesson. Patience. Your impatience will cause others to hurry all around the state exposed to amphibious slug creatures evolved from recessive mutations and mechanical rape. Your written words must be about to jump about like stranded fish, fusing into fantastic moving sculptures, rearranging themselves in palindromes that read the same from any angle. You phone is tapped. The sound system is operated by spider men, coil-headed pink lizards who weave the mercurial plasma along which the sound is carried. Cool it. Be patient. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Small minds are the victims of every trying situation because they are the victims of every immediate reaction to it. The student of philosophy, with his metaphysical powers and personal self-discipline, is not. He looks many years ahead of it and much more deeply into it. He does not blindly accept the first feelings about it that arise within himself or are suggested to him by others. The need is to live according to principles, not according to impulses. Men who seek a higher kind of life must practise self-restraint whatever faith they hold or to whatever religious society they belong. Those who demand the freedom to live as they wish, who seek to be undisciplined and unregulated by any authority, ask too much. No one can avoid sometimes reacting badly to outer experiences or circumstances, but the aspirant should not react without trying to practise self-control. With regard to the emotions, the path is a crucifixion of the personal ego. The aspirant’s heart must be searched and searched until it is free from all reservations and utterly surrendered to the higher self. It is impossible to pass through such a process without undergoing the terrible ordeal of crushing some feelings and surrendering others. The adept is indeed that man who has triumphed over his emotions, but it would be an indefensible and inexcusable error to think he lives in a complete emotional vacuum, that he is a man without feeling or sensibilities of any kind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Let us not make the mistake of believing that the adept does not know the meaning of ecstasy. He does, but he knows them all within the higher self, which rules them. The only emotions he does not know are those lower ones, such as anger, resentment, hatred, prejudice, bitterness, lust, pride, and intolerance. Yes!—the philosophical life does not lack emotional content but it is not the kind of narrow, selfish, vacillating emotion so many human beings are accustomed to. If a man is to attain a durable peace, he must commit emotional separation. However, does mean he is to become utterly devoid of all feelings? Not at all. It is only the lower emotions that have to be liquidated. Yet it is these which play so large a role in human life today, whether in their grossest form of hatred or their most refined form of romantic nonsense miscalled love. The frenzies passion let loose, the manias of the lower emotions run wild are never again to be known to him. This high standard is the goal. It may seem unattainable to a human entity, yet history and biography prove that it is not. It might be thought that the philosophic discipline seeks to eliminate emotion. The truth is that it seeks to maturate emotion. The disciple’s feelings—no less than his thoughts—must grow up and assume their philosophic responsibilities. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
It will be easy for critics to misunderstand the statement that he is to become intellectually feverless and emotionally passionless. We do not mean that he is to be deprived of all feeling, bereft of all enthusiasm, incapable of all affection. We mean that he is to seek an inward serenity which no feeling, no enthusiasm, and no affection can distract. From this point of view, the New Testament can be considered as an attempt to answer, in advance, every Cain in the World, by painting the figure of God in softer colours and by creating an intercessor between God and man. Christ came to solve two major problems, evil and death, which are precisely the problems that preoccupy the rebel. His solution consisted, first, in experiencing them. The man-god suffers, too—with patience. Evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to Him since He suffers and dies. The night of Golgotha is so important in the history of man only because, in its shadow, the divinity abandoned its traditional privileges and drank to the last drop, despair included, the agony of death. This is the explanation of the Lama sabactani and the heart rending of Christ in agony. If it had been alleviated by hopes of eternity, the agony would have been mild. For God to be a man, he must despair. Ghosticism, which is the fruit of Greco-Christian collaboration, has tried for two centuries, in reaction against Judaic thought, to promote this concept. We know, for example, the vast number of intercessors invented by Valentinus. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
However, the aeons of this particular metaphysical skirmish are the equivalent of the intermediary truths to be found in Hellenism. Their aim is to diminish the absurdity of an intimate relationship between suffering humanity and an implacable god. This is the special role of Marcion’s cruel bellicose second god. This demiurge is responsible for the creation of a finite World and of death. Our duty is to hate him at the same time to deny everything that he has created, by means of asceticism, to the point of destroying, by sexual abstinence, all creation. This form of asceticism is therefore both proud and rebellious. Marcion simply alters the course of rebellion and directs it toward an inferior god so as to be better able to exalt the superior god. Gnosis, owing to its Greek origins, remains conciliatory and tends to destroy the Judaic heritage in Christianity. It also wanted to avoid Augustinism, by anticipating it, in that Augustinism provides arguments for every form of rebellion. To Basilides, for example, the martyrs were sinners, and so was Christ, because they suffered. A strange conception, but whose aim is to remove the element of injustice from suffering. The Gnostics only wanted to substitute the Greek idea of initiation, which allows mankind every possible chance, for the concept of an all-powerful and arbitrary forgiveness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
The enormous number of sects among the second-generation Gnostics indicates how desperate and diversified was the attempt on the part of Greek thought to make the Christian Universe more accessible and to remove the motives for a rebellion that Hellenism considered the worst of all evils. However, the Church condemned this attempt and, by condemning it, swelled the ranks of the rebels. To think about anything without experience is nothing. In the early years of World War II, General Petain, Marshall of France and Chief of State, was condemned for having collaborated with the Germans when they invaded France. It did seem “bad” because of the way that it was presented to us. However, when I sat alone at night with my sleeping children after Pearl Harbor, expecting invasion, and considered what I would do when it came, then Mr. Petain looked very different to me. I tried, most honestly, most searchingly, to know what I should do when invasion came. Should I take the children and run to the hills? Should I fight the Japanese when they came to my door? Should I go out to fight them? Should I make friends with them and hope through that to be able to ameliorate matters for others besides myself? I still do not know what I would have done because it never happened (to me). If I found a burglar in the house, when I was young, I had notions about what I would do. My friends and I used to talk about things like this and say what we would do. What a lot of life we waste! #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
When I actually did meet a burglar in my home—opening the door to my bedroom, I found him directly on the other side, looking into a top bureau drawer with a flashlight—I stood there and exclaimed, “What do you call this?” When it is obvious what anyone calls it, the words sound idiotic, but they were an apt expression of my astonishment. All my thinking about meeting a burglar had left me totally unprepared for the fact itself. When war came to Hawaii and I experienced it, I thought “All that I have read about war,” “All that I have heard about war,” “All that I have thought about war,” “And it is not anything like that at all (to me) I am completely unprepared.” When I might have been living, I had the feeling of waste—of wasted life, of wasted time. As I lived within war, close to others within the same war, I saw how different it was for each of us. A year later, when one evening I felt like writing about it, my story began, “There is no story of Pearl Harbor. It is many stories, each man is his own, made up of his position at the time, his consciousness of war about to come, whether he was alone or had a family to fear for, his own inherent sensitivity to pain, his quickness of perception.” (I would not leave out the word inherent.) The awareness I did not have in the early morning of December 8th. I knew that many people were living in agony. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
However, on that morning after the Japanese attack, and having been awake all night while the children slept, I was so filled with my World that “the end of everything for me” defeated me. “For me.” Within my World it might be the end of all of us. I was painfully afraid, and having to stop the forming fantasies of what might happen to the children. At the same time, I had a sense of grace that so far, we had been spared, and a misery for those whose lives had been chopped off so senselessly. I was concerned about our friends on the other side of the island, about whom we knew nothing. Many people got swept into the agony of others, their suicidal chaos, and all the World became morbid for some in a most frightening, unmitigated and unmitigable way—everything going haywire and out of control. So many people because suicidal. Provocation or seduction is what makes lechers, addicts, criminals, gamblers, and others with losing scripts. For a boy it is the real Odyssey scene of a living Ulysses, mother as a Siren luring him to his doom, or as Circe turning him into a swine. For a girl it is father as the Dirty Old Man. In early years it starts out as a general invitation to be a loser: “He sure is clumsy, ha ha,” or “She sure is a sh*t walker, ha ha.” Then it moves on to more specific jeers and teases. “He is always baning his head, ha ha,” or “She is always losing her pant, ha ha.” In adolescence it is promoted into personal transactions. “Take a good look, baby!” (and maybe an accidental or on-purpose feel), “Have a drink,” “Now is your chance,” “Throw it all in, what is the difference,” each accompanied by its ha ha. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The come-on is the Parent’s voice whispering to the Child at the critical moment: not to stop thinking about pleasures of the flesh or money, not to let them get away with that. “Come on, baby. What have you got to lose?” This is the demon in the Parent, and the demon in the Child responds. Then the Parent does a quick switch, and Jeder falls flat on his face. “There you go again,” say the gleeful Parent, and Jeder answers “Ha ha!” with what is colloquially called “a sh*t eating smile.” The come-on is what promotes hang-ups in children, and for that it must start early. The parent takes the child’s yen for closeness and turns it into a yen for something else. Once this perverted love is fixed, it becomes a hang-up. We do not have to look aloft to flying saucers to find alien intelligence. We are all UFOs—Unidentified Flying Organisms. The first step in interspecies diplomacy is to recognize the species differences among us, exchange basic vocabulary cues as to each other’s realities and establish interspecies diplomatic courtesies so that the womb-planet Earth can be shared harmoniously, and abandoned gracefully. Then new plan-its, carefully designed to fit the differing realities of different species, can be fabricated in High Orbit. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
To keep American hivers from understanding the blunt facts about genetic robot-hood, human castes produce public relations experts, sometimes called philosophers or theologians. From the evolutionary point of view, philosophy is post-hive human ethology. The task of an ethological philosopher is to define the different species of humans and to explain how they interact to assure the survival of the gene pool and of each caste. The dom-species is not yet ready for that. The caste spokespersons for each caste describes reality from the perspective of their species. Since each caste inhabits a very different reality, moral outrage is endemic—Poor, Gays, Holocaust obsessed Zionists, left-wingers, irate homeowners/ Each caste lives in a different time zone. The dogma of the Paleolithic did not work in technological America, but this did not discourage the attempt by our species to impose its hunter-gatherer reality on others. Most bewildered are the retiring liberal humanists who keep shouting: “We are all one! Brotherhood of Man! We are all equal and homogenous.” Genetic heterogeneity has, of course, always been obvious to those geared to look for it. As you walk through the forest, you do not expect each species you meet to be the same or to play survival games by your rules. The insightful ethologist admires each lifestyle—the radar speed of a rabbit, the innocent grace of a wolf, the levity of a bird, the sincere cunning of a spider. The same honour can be extended to each human caste you meet as you swim through the urban coral reef. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
The next eleven people you meet probably belong to eleven different species in mutation—living in different time zones, at different levels of contelligence. Just as human beings need intense involvement to foster full functioning and growth, they also need disengagement. They need to get away from their customary consciousness of themselves and their World. The “getting away” can be literal, as in travel; but it can also take the form of what are now called altered states of consciousness. There are two ways to alter one’s consciousness of one’s situation. One of these is literally to change situations. The other is to suspend the customary way of experiencing a situation, to allow new modes of consciousness to appear. One’s situation functions hypnotically, influencing a person to perceive, recall, think, and even imagine in stereotype ways. One way to break the quasihypnotic spell is to engage in prayer. In prayer, new aspects of the situation are perceived, and they can imagine, think, and remember in more flexible ways. Human beings cannot endure ambiguity or contradiction in their knowledge. In the face of uncertainty, they seem impelled to construct answers, because they can act only when they have made a satisfactory interpretation of the situation. Their interpretation may not be valid, but it seems true that humans prefer a false interpretation to one. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Thus, a person may hear unidentifiable noises in the sky. The experience of not knowing may fill the person with anxiety. He or she may be virtually paralyzed until the noise is explained. In addition to the need for some interpretation of situations, human beings need consistency among their presently held belief. When new cognitions—perceptions and knowledge—are not compatible with those already held, the state of cognitive dissonance is said to exist. Cognitive dissonance influences behaviour like any other basic need. When there is a conflict between present knowledge and new information, people may deny and distort truth to eliminate dissonance. Healthier personalities can tolerate ambiguity better than unhealthy personalities; they resolve cognitive dissonance in ways that do the most justice to logic and evidence. The Sacramento Fire Department protects life and properties through the unwavering commitment of service to all. “When I first went on the rescue squad, we had the old-fashioned Cadillac ambulances because they were the best for heavy-duty work and would stand up best under the wear and tear a hard-running service was going to give it. Of course, in later years, we have gone for a totally different type of ambulance with the modular unit and have gone into a much more advanced type of emergency medical care with EMTs and paramedics. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
“When I first started out with the fire department, the only thing we could do for somebody who had a heart attack was to give him oxygen or, in the case of first aid, put a tourniquet on if there was severe bleeding and patch them up the best we could. I can remember a time when there were no ambulances in Sacramento, and people would lie in the street for forty-five minutes, waiting for a police paddy wagon to come and pick them up. We have come a long, long way in this country, and the fire service has been the main operator of emergency medical service. One time we were at the dinner table, and we had with us one of the local fire investigators and a retired captain. An alarm came in, an older, run-down area in Sacramento with many fires. We were greeted at the street by some frantically waving civilians. They pointed to the rear of the house, screaming, ‘He’s in the back, he’s in the back.’ So I grabbed a Halligan bar and went to the rear of the house, which was two stories in the rear and one story in the front. The people were pointing to the cellar stairs. There were six or eight steps down to the basement. It was a basement fire that had already spread up the interior stairs to the first floor and on up to the attic and roof. So I descended the cellar stairs and opened the door. The fire had already taken the whole basement, it had flashed over and the entire ceiling was involved. As I opened the door, the fire was licking out and going up the siding of the house. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
“I felt the wind drawn in from the doorway behind my back. The smoke was down low, but the wind cleared the air a bit, and I was able to get down low enough to get under the smoke. At floor level it was fairly clear, and I could see because the fire was so bright. I could also see that it was a heavily fire-loaded building. The man was more or less a packrat. He cut up his kindling wood down there with a chain saw. So there were stacks of wood and motor vehicle parts, a conglomeration of junk. Also a large bed. The victim was over by the stairway, about twenty-five feet in, lying face down. Later investigation showed that he was filling his gasoline-powered chain new a large potbelly stove. There was probably a vapour explosion and a flash fire. I was by myself, and the hose line had not yet been stretched to cover me. The man was unconscious and severely burned. His clothes had apparently fused to his body. He was a big man weighing 250 pounds. I weigh 150, so it was a lot of work to get him out of there. By the time I had dragged him to the doorway at the bottom of the outside steps, he was completely naked, because the flash fire had turned his clothes into part of his skin. I did not know if he was dead or alive, just that he was a dead weight. I was able to get him out the door, and I closed the door behind us. I got him as high up the steps as I could, then couldn’t go any further. It took three other men to get him up. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
“I stayed with him and performed first aid. I turned him over and opened his air passages. I looked for a pulse, and, much to my surprise, I found one. He wasn’t breathing real great, so we assisted his breathing with oxygen and began treating for burns. We wrapped him in burn sheets and wet him down. On the way to the hospital, from my understanding, he was sitting up and talking. I felt good about that. Unfortunately, his burns were too severe. He only lived about four days before he died. At the time, I had about ten years’ experience. School is great and training classes also, but experience is the teacher. So observing the conditions and mentally adding up the risks, I had elected to go in. I don’t know how long I was in there. I was struggling with him so much I just wanted to get out. I was able to do that. You just have to concentrate on what you’re doing. I had seen his injuries, and in the back of my mind I was surprised that he had lived the night. So when I saw the obituary four days later, I was sadden, but I had done everything I could do. That’s one way I get by these things. As long as I’ve done all I can do, it’s out of my hands. It helps me cope with losses like that.” The Sacramento Fire Department dedicates themselves to a lasting partnership with the community, to support a higher quality of life through public education, loss prevention, and service response. 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 18 of 18
The Winchester Mystery House
Feeling a little wrapped up today? Our haunt is open tonight, today and Sunday starting at 6:30pm PST.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
If I Do Not Look Away Soon
Every now and then, we would have someone disappear. There was ample reason for the frightening events to take place. The breeze coming in the window suddenly turned slightly cool and smelled of the sea. The door near the porch atop the stairs would not stay closed, the door seemingly unlocked itself, and Zip would freeze when approaching the staircase leading to the second floor. As if recently painted with blood, the walls dripped. I doubt I could ever remove the blood stains. This Victorian structure was a monument to things long dead. As if seeking a victim, its windows, like malevolent eyes, leer out at the quiet evening. Peering at them, people often wondered what lurked inside. I felt a chill creep up my spine. Although I had come to terms with my ESP faculty and was no longer frightened by it, I knew if I did not look away soon that a dim, ghastly face would appear at one of the windows. A moment later, I slipped away. I sudden found myself staring at the farther attic window. A bone chilling cold have crept up my spine. The skin on the back of my neck felt tight and tingly. At the far end of the room is a tower. It has a witch’s cap. As I looked down on the floor, I discovered the skeleton of a hand and a foot and scraps of scalp placed there in a perfect triangle. Looking at what I knew were human remains, I screamed running quickly out of the room, and up the spiral stairs. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
Slowly, I regained control of myself. The knot of fear in my stomach had loosened. When I saw the tall, dark, man, I screamed and cowered. His face was obscured by a long, brown beard, and a large, black hat. However, nothing could obscure the fact that his eyes flashed red in the blackness of the night. He observed me, smiling from a cruel-looking mouth, his voice harsh and malevolent. “Now,” he commanded, “Mrs. Winchester, come with me.” There was nothing I wanted less than to be led through my home by the tall, dark man. However, I felt that I had no choice, so I went with him. My anxiety was not was not eased when the door to the attic flew open on its own accord, trembling on its hinges. And when we walked out of the room, the door slammed shut behind us so hard that the noise echoed throughout the house. Then before I could move, my body was compelled forward and I was swept away into the night. The journey through my labyrinth took hours. Bats flitted above us in great numbers, and at the end of the hallway, there were hundreds of shadows. Everything was so terrifying; I wish I had stayed unconscious longer. As we journeyed along the forbidden East wing of the mansion, I could hear hounds of hell malevolently howling into the darkness of the night. The souls of the dead cry out for its blood. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
Not a ray of light came from the high windows. When I arrived at the altar room, I was left alone. Directly in front of me was a huge, wooden door. Very slowly, the door creaked open. I felt like I was walking down a dark street, stalked by stealthy footsteps, afraid of what I might find sneaking up on me if I should dare to glance over my shoulder. I had to look. I searched the windows. Though nothing showed through their blackness, my skin went tight and crawly. Suddenly, I broke into a run. I raced down the hallway and around the corner. I had seen something. Awful, desperate feelings built up and tears blurred my vision as I struggled to get away. I ran into the bathroom and tripped over the end of the bathtub. Falling toward the water, I noticed it was red. An unclothed maiden was reclining in the bath, with her arms stretched out. Her wrists were crossed-hatched with slashes and eyes wide, gazing toward the ceiling. Her face was contorted with pain and horror. Her shredded gown, a white the had gone red. The tatters covered little more than her bosom and loins. The exposed flesh, from neck to thighs, was punctured and stripped with raw wounds. Bright crimson sheathed her body. Goosebumps scurried up my skin. Then there was a sound which froze my blood. Knocking a chair to the floor, I listened in terror. It was a low, sweet rippled of laughter. The laughter of the ghouls. I built this house with blood money. Blood comes of blood. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
The house was searched from attic to basement. They found more torn, chewed bodies of more victims on the second floor. And the most horrific sight was reserved for the third floor. Two bodies lay facedown between the mahogany beds. Their bloody nightshirts were ripped to shreds, and so was their skin. In despair, I made a long, exhausting journey back to the Daisy Bedroom. I collapsed on the bed and looked out at my estate. For as long as I lived (which did not look as if it was going to be very long) I would never, ever forget the gruesome horrors I witnessed. It must have been the middle of the night when I awoke with a jolt. I had a feeling of a presence in the room. I looked around and at the foot of my bed stood a woman dressed in pioneer clothes. Her figure was completely white and as I looked at her, she seemed to fade away slowly. Deciding that I was dreaming, I turned over and went back to sleep. A moment later when I was still not fully asleep, I heard sounds by the side of my bed. It sounded as if an animal were passing by. I turned and to my horror, saw the perfect imprints of a bear’s pawprints on the side of the bed. I screamed. His warm breath on my face smelled of the Earth and wild, uninhabited forests. He lay his hands upon my shoulders. Claws bit into me. I stood before the demon, helpless with fear and wonder. Sobbing loudly, I pressed one hand across my eyes. My other hand shook. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
Petrified of what was going to happen to me, and jumping in fright at even the tiniest sound. I realized that I was all alone. I never felt so desolate in my life, knowing that I had been left here as a porcelain doll for the terror feast of demons, ghosts, and ghouls! I knew I had to escape, but it would ultimately be fatal. It broke my heart to know that I would never see my beloved William or Annie again, or perhaps this was the moment our souls would be reunited. I must have drifted off, because some hours later I woke up. I gave a little cry of fright. I could not see anything, but I could sense that someone was in the room. I peered into the darkness with dread, my heart thumping, and my forehead damp with perspiration. “Is anyone there?” I said. There was a short silence, and then a noise, a sort of scary, rustling noise, just inches away from my bed. Whole body began to tremble. There was such a terrible wind outside and something sinter in the air. I fled my bedroom in panic, frequently falling over furniture. I continued on. The horror of this began to oppress me as never before, and I could not keep from thinking of my maddening dreams, of the frightful legends which lay behind my fortune. I did not know how long or how far—or indeed, in just what direction—I had walked. However, I knew there would be rooms opening on the right, and at the farther end of stairs that wound down to still lower depths. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
I questioned how did I know that there was a level far underground? How did I know that the path leading to the Observational Tower should have been behind me? How did I know the secret passage to the Crystal Bedroom ought to lie on the left level above me? How did I know that the room of rare antiquities, and the rightward-leading passageway to the central library, ought to lie two levels below? How did I know that there would be one of those horrible, metal-banded trap-doors at the very bottom, four levels down? Bewildered by the frightful atmosphere, I found myself shaking and bathed in a cold perspiration. My home was fraught with infinite suggestions of knighted mystery. As if in the clutch of some compelling fate, I seemed to move almost automatically. I felt dim memories tugging at my mind. A figure leaned toward me, a blackened shape whose features for the moment remained unseen. I cringed inward, my body tightening, shrinking. Nothing was ever lost from Llanada Villa’s labyrinth vaults: although traumas may be hidden, perhaps placated, not all can be laid to rest; some merely lie low in anticipation of future arousal. I could see an energy field that was frantically moving about. It suddenly moved quickly towards me, and I tried to move out of its path just as quickly. It stopped, and then moved back to a door near the end of the hall, flittering back and forth. I felt an overwhelming vibration of anxiety in the atmosphere. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
I took a deep breath and walked to the door where the energy seemed to concentrate its activity. I felt a terrible dread consume me as I stepped forward. Then I froze, for I saw this image of a woman, and she was throwing herself at this door. I could hear a crash as she would hit it. And then I was overcome with information that there was great danger for her family. After the spirit in the hallway had demonstrated such an incredible explosion of energy, it was suddenly gone. In the stillness, the creaking of door sounded as loud as a scream. With infinite reluctance, I climbed down thirteen steps and entered a clandestine room. My heart raced and pounded, and I peered into the night, anxiously waiting for the horrible approach of what might be making a horrible approach. I waited for ages. It seemed to get colder and darker. I signed deeply, the breath sounding like the wind sweeping autumn leaves along the pavement. There was a hammering at the front door. Treading cautiously, glass crunching beneath my boots, I made my way to the front door and peeped through the window. Clearly standing on the veranda was a young boy and I could see the posts through him! I was not sure I could believe my eyes and when I turned around, he was gone. Then everything in the room was thrown about and smashed. Tables were lifted and overturned, chairs smashed to pieces, bookcases upset, and heavy settees thrown over. There was no one there. Confused thoughts and troubled emotions ran through my mind. I lay in the darkness, remembering the look and feel and voice of William #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
The Winchester Mystery House
A GIVEAWAY SO GOOD IT’S SCARY!!!! 😈
For the first time ever, @thespinafarmspumpkinpatch and @winchestermysteryhouse has joined forces to bring you the spookiest giveaway of the season! One lucky winner will receive 4 SPINA FARMS PARK PASSES and 4 WINCHESTER MYSTERY HOUSE UNHINGED: HOTEL TICKETS! Rules and info below! Best of luck! We’re dying to see y’all soon! 🧟♂️🖤
How to Enter:
🎃🏨Follow both @thespinafarmspumpkinpatch AND @winchestermysteryhouse
🤍🧡Like this post
👻🧛♀️Tag a friend! (each tag counts as an entry)
Closes Monday 10/21/24 at noon!
Winner announced shortly after!
No purchase necessary. Must be 18+ to enter. This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Instagram. Open to legal resident of the 50 U.S. states and D.C. Giveaway begins at 12pm PST on 10/16/2024 and ends at 12pm PST on 10/21/2024.
The Ring of Fear
Many young people try drugs to fill voids in their lives, but this decision always leads to broken hearts and bodies. Whether they feel a need for friends, or peace, or happiness, or love, these teens always find drugs to be an unfulfilling substitute for what they really need. Turning to the Lord and to our families, instead of to other sources, will truly fill our needs. Abusing drugs can never do that. Another reason people do drugs is because states like California legalized recreational use of marijuana, and as it goes, the excuse is “weed is okay, everyone does it,” but if that were true, the federal government would not consider marijuana an illegal substance. It is absolutely important to teach your children to obey all laws, as best you can. So, marijuana should not be a substance that is considered acceptable in your home. Nevertheless, youth also turned to marijuana because adults they admire use it. If you use drugs, as an adult, you should never use them in front of children or other impressionable people because it could lead to them becoming addicted to marijuana and making some unsavory choices in life. Marijuana could also land your child behind bars or cause them to have an accident that could cost someone their life. Continue to nurture your connections with trusted peers and trusted adults. This is critical. Develop the self-awareness to recognize the connection between being tempted and feeling a need for acceptance. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
No aspirant is asked to remain emotionally neutral regarding his personal hopes and fears. He is asked to strive for impartiality in his decisions, to recognize that it is wrong action which secures his own enjoyment at the cost of other people’s suffering or his own gain at the cost of their rights. He is to try at all times to see directly into his own personal situation without being misled by emotions, blinded by passions, or confused by suggestions; that is, he is to see it just as it really is. This practice is intended to help disentangle him from his ego. When you feel that need, it is important to fill it in healthy, gospel-centered ways. Stay close to your family and the Church. The same human characteristic of emotion which enslaves and even harms him when it is attached to Earthly things alone, exalts and liberates him when it is disciplined and purified by philosophy. Just as inordinate fear evoked by sudden catastrophe could drive someone quite insane, so clam resignation evoked by sudden bereavement could bring a glimpse of full spiritual sanity. He who keeps a silent tongue in his head when the air is filled with anger is on the way to holding down his own wrath. However, he who keeps a silent mind will conquer it more quickly and easily. There is the caution which comes from timidity and the caution which comes from experience. They are not the same. He must keep a part of himself in such reserve that no event and no person can ever touch it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
In the case of an ordinary man, the emotional reaction to a situation is all he is conscious of during the situation itself. If at all, the intellectual or intuitional judgment of it comes some time afterwards. However, in the disciple’s case, his self-training should be directed toward a side-by-side working of the two at one and the same time. The silent, taciturn, reserved man makes fewer friends but guards his present and future better. To be cautions in speech and writing today—whether private or public—is to save trouble tomorrow. A single indiscretion may mar a lifetime’s honourable reputation. The same act which is wrong when done in anger and on impulse may become right when done in calmness, after due reflection. Such an act might be, for instance, the protection of other persons against an unjust invasion of their rights or a violent aggression against their bodies. At a certain stage of one’s evolutionary development, personal emotions form the greatest obstacle of all. It is extremely difficult and painful to stand aside from one’s emotional nature at a time when it wants most to be insistent—but, if he does, that is the very time the quickest progress can be made. One should try, so far as possible, to avoid anxiety about his problems, whether they are of a Worldly or spiritual nature. It is necessary to develop a calm, hopeful attitude toward the future. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Anything that may be written or thought at a time when one is plunged in pain or grief must be evaluated again after enough time has elapsed to allow the upheaval of emotions to subside, lessening the hurt. Only then can a calm, philosophical appraisal of the entire situation be satisfactory achieved. Inner strength of a remarkable nature can be shown in the manner in which one responds to disappointment. One could so easily become wildly hysterical at the breakdown of his hopes. We are forced into admiration for the way in which another may take the breakdown of his dreams. Nothing should ever be done in a great hurry or in a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. He should sleep on his decisions and discuss them with older people who have themselves demonstrated by their own success that their judgments are worthwhile. Mastery resides at the core. The life of a master is lived at the core and through the core. To help in our understanding of how this happens, it might be useful for us to borrow a concept from philosophy. In the early 1800’s, the German philosopher Georg Hegel developed the idea of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Basically, this idea (often called Hegel’s Dialectic) holds that when one force (the thesis) comes into contact with its opposite force (the antithesis), the result is a third force (synthesis) which is unlike the first two. A common way of imagining this is to picture driving down a road (thesis), then reaching a stop sign (antithesis), and making a sharp left and going up hill (synthesis). #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Thesis and antithesis are “synthesized” into a new, entirely different thing. For example, when the colour yellow is mixed in equal proportions with the colour blue, they produce green. Thesis (yellow) meeting antithesis (blue) produces synthesis (green), which is neither yellow nor blue, yet contains both. The colour green is a new “thing” which has resulted from the combination of the two old “things.” In the journey to mastery, this process takes place within us. It involves our thoughts, our feelings, and combinations of thoughts and feelings, which are called “values.” The word “value,” may have a broader meaning than you would normally attach to it. It consists of an intellectual element and an emotional element, a thought and a feeling. When a thought and a feeling come together, they synthesize into a “value”: Picture the thought as the starting point on the road, the feeling as a stop sign further down the road, and the value as the destination after reaching the stop sign and making a sharp left uphill. Through the entire realm of experience consists of countless thoughts, feelings, emotions and values in infinite variety, to simplify matters, we can say there are eight basic values: Strength, weakness, anger, love, criticalness, support, control, dependency. To imaging this graphically, picture a daisy flower with eight petals and each value being a petal. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
Therefore, strength and weakness, anger and love, criticalness and support, control and dependency are all values, that is, emotionally laden ideas about life. This might conflict with traditional notions about feelings. Having considered anger, for example, a pure feeling or emotion, you might find it hard to think of anger as a “value.” Yet that is what it is. When you were a children and first displayed anger as a pure emotion, you might have been told it was not nice to be angry, that it made people feel uncomfortable and you ought to “hold your temper.” Thus, a value judgment became attached to the feeling of anger. From that time on, whenever anger came up, you felt it and also mentally shut it off because your anger was a “bad” feeling to have. Anger became something in addition to the feeling; it became a value. Values are more than simple feelings in that they consist of intellect and feeling. Theya re ideas charged with the power of feeling. They are similar to attitudes. Viewed in this way, values eliminate the apparent conflict between the thinking and feeling sides of your nature. In experiencing your values, you use your mind and your heart simultaneously. You are being human. When one value—anger, love, strength, weakness, criticalness, support, control or dependency—is exaggerated and used to the exclusion or minimization of every other, manipulation is a result. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
If, for example, you relied consistently upon your strength, you would almost become your strength. You would constantly be showing the World a mask of strength, while denying your weakness. In so doing, you render yourself incapable of using your weakness in situations that demand it. You become like an eight-cylinder engine of a BMW 740iL, constantly trying to run on only one cylinder. Like that engine, you can chug along, but only with great effort and at the expense of smooth, effortless operation. To be fully expressive and totally alive, to run on all your cylinders, to be a real BMW 740iL, a master, to be the Ultimate Driving Machine you must experience all of your values and be a fully functioning 4.4-liter M62B44 V8 engine. And this experience requires the process of synthesis. For example, when strength and weakness are experienced at the same time, they synthesize into courage, like this: strength is a starting point down the road, weakness is the stop sign down the road, and courage is obeying the law and making a sharp left up a hill and reaching the point of courage. Each time a synthesis occurs, it occurs at the core. So, just imagine once you arrive at the point of courage up the hill, there is a radius at the courage point which contains the core and you will notice that the road to courage and strength start to run parallel, but in more of the form of an angle. Much like an isosceles triangle without a bottom. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
Similarly, anger and love synthesize into assertiveness. Criticalness and support become appreciation of differences. Control and dependency become interdependence. To reach the core, to achieve the synthesis, you must be willing to experience all of your values. Yet this can be a terribly frightening prospect. Most of us stick to one value because somewhere in our development we found that it worked for us, it helped us to get what we wanted. We have become comfortable with it and extremely uncomfortable with some or all of the others. If, to further highlight this illustration, as a child, you had a father who melted when you treated him lovingly, who gave you things when you fawned over him adorningly, you may have hit upon the notion that the way to succeed in life by being lovable. You placed an exaggerated value on love. If you were surrounded by people who cowered and gave in when you got angry, you may have decided that anger gets you what you want, and thus you put an exaggerated value on anger. Every value which you, as a human being, are capable of feeling and expressing, can serve you. However, if you come to rely on one value to the exclusion of others, if you begin to call upon that value in every situation—whether it is appropriate or not—you have formed a pattern of manipulation. It is a pattern which can—and already may have severely damaged your relationships with yourself and others. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Yet in spite of the harm these patterns cause, you stick with them. They are comfortable and safe. They are easy to justify by claiming, “Well, that is just the way I am.” However, I disagree with your claim. You as a manipulator, might act that way, but it is not the way you really are. It is not who you are. Who you are is a great deal more than one or two comfortable values. You are more than an engine that is able to operate on only one or two cylinders. Who you are, deep in your core, is a fully expressive, totally alive human being—a master. A master of yourself and your relationships, not a slave of your manipulations. There is a concept called the “ring of fear”; all of us are fearful of expressing our polarities. Thus, fear becomes a barrier. However, it can be penetrated. The first step involves admitting you are afraid to express the fear, because the very act of expressing it is frightening in itself. This usually causes the other person to invite you to express it anyway. Once you express the fear, the way is open for you to experience the polar value. Picture the daisy, each of its eight petals represents a value either positive or negative: anger, control, strength, support, love, dependency, weakness, criticalness. Now, all of these petals are attached to the pistil of the daisy and around the outer ovary of the pistil is fear, at the center of the pistil is the core. The pistil is the ring of fear, and in the center of the ring of fear is the core. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Though the ring of fear initially acts as a barrier, keeping us from experiencing the values on the other side, this effect is temporary. Once we have penetrated the barrier, we can experience the opposite value and arrive at the synthesis or “integrated value” in the core. This is called a transforming experience, or an Experience of Mastery. After such an experience, imagine the daisy with the eight petals, and the pistil of the daisy representing courage. Now, from the petal of strength there is a road that goes through the pistil of the daisy at about a 15 degree decline across to the petal of weakness, then at a 15-degree angle goes back to the pistil of the daisy at a 15-degree angle which is the point of courage. In the experience of mastery, you live from your core and through your core. You express rhythmically between polar opposite values. You become truly alive, not passive or indifferent. Rather than remain a slave to one exaggerated value, you become a channel for the free and natural expression of all of them. You make contact with the real person in others and you discover that unique individual who is the real you. The emotional hurts which meant so much and felt so deep when you were spiritually juvenile, will come to signify less and less as you become spiritually adult. For you see increasingly that they made you unhappy only because you allowed them to do so, only because, from two possible attitudes, you chose the little ego’s with its negative and petty emotionalism as against the higher mind’s positive and universal rationality. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Real-life injunctions do not take effect by magic, but depend upon the physiological properties of the human mind. It is not enough to say once, “Do not eat those apples!” or “Do not open the chest!” Any Martian knows that an injunction given in that way is really a challenge. For an injunction to be locked in solidly in the mind of a child, it must be repeated frequently and transgressions must be punished, although there are exceptional cases, as with battered children, where a single shattering experience may engrave an injunction for life. The injunction is the most important part of the script apparatus, and varies in intensity. Hence, injunctions can be classified in the same way as games, into first, second, and third degrees. There is a tendency for each type to produce its own kind of person: winner, nonwinner, or loser. (These terms will be explained in more detail later. A nonwinner is someone who neither wins nor loses, but just manages to come out even.) First-degree injunctions (socially acceptable and mild) are straight directives reinforced by approval or discouragement. (“You have been nice and quiet.” “Do not be too ambitions.”) With these it is still possible to grow a winner. Second degree (devious and tough) are crooked directives crookedly enforced by a kind of blackmail of seductive smiles and threatening frowns, which is the best way to raise a nonwinner (“Do not tell your father.” “Keep your mouth shut.”) Third-degree (very rough and harsh) are unreasonable stoppers enforced by fear. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Words become screams, facial expression become nightmarish distortions, and physical chastisement becomes viciousness. (“I will knock your goddam teeth in and turn your pockets inside out.”) This is one of the surest ways to produce a loser. The injunction, like a payoff, is complicated by the fact that most children have two parents. Thus, one may say “Do not act smart!” and the other “Do not make me knock you out! Stop acting stupid.” Such contradictory injunctions put the child in a difficult position. However, most people who marry have compatible injunctions, such as “Do not act smart!” and “Keep quiet or I will knock your goddam brains out!” which make a sad combination. Stoppers are implanted at such a tender age that the parents look like magical figures to the little boy or girl. The part of the mother who gives out injunctions (her Controlling Parent or Child) is called colloquially “the fairy godmother” is she is benevolent, or “the witch mother” is she is not. In some cases, “mother’s crazy Child” seems the most suitable label. Similarly, the Controlling Father is called “the jolly green giant,” “the ugly troll,” or “father’s crazy Child,” whichever is appropriate. There will be times when he, who built on philosophic coolness through the years, who thought himself proof against tears, will yield to them all too readily and all too helplessly. Even when everyone else seethes with violent emotion and bitter prejudice, he should keep a cool, philosophical perspective. Even when everyone else submerges his own in a fashionable party or a popular group, he should preserve his independence. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
It is most comfortable for us to understand human robot-hood by looking at others. Thus, we notice that in “primitive” tribes young children perform baby-care. Older girls help with agriculture while older boys guard the flocks. After puberty, temporal caste assignments change dramatically. In all societies adolescent males pass through a warrior stage. In civilized societies technology and complex labour divisions have diminished the survival value of child-castes. Thus, the elaborate culture of organized play and extended education to prepare youngsters for warrior and post-warrior status. In Lucretius’ epic poem, Epicurus himself becomes the proud rebel he never actually was. “When in the eyes of all mankind humanity was leading an abject existence on Earth, cursed beneath the weight of a religion whose hideous aspect peered down from the heights of the celestial regions, the first to dare, a Greek, a man raised his mortal eyes and challenged the gods…In this way religion, in its turn, was overthrown and trampled underfoot, and this victory elevates us to the Heavens.” Here we can sense the difference between this new type of blasphemy and the ancient malediction. The Greek heroes could aspire to become gods, but simultaneously with the gods who already existed. At that time, it was simply a matter of promotion. Lucretius’ hero, on the other hand, embarks on a revolution. By repudiating the unworthy and criminal gods, he takes their place himself. He sallies forth from the armed camp and opens the first attack on divinity in the name of human suffering. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
In the ancient World, murder is both inexplicable and inexpiable. Already with Lucretius, murder by man is only an answer to murder by the gods. It is not pure coincidence that Lucretius’ poem ends with a prodigious image of the sanctuaries of the gods swollen with the accusing corpses of plague victims. This new language is incomprehensible without the concept of a personal god, which is slowly beginning to form in the minds of Lucretius’ and Epicurus’ contemporaries. Only a personal god can be asked by the rebel for a personal accounting. When the personal god begins his reign, rebellion assumes its most resolutely ferocious aspect and pronounces a definitive no. With Cain, the first act of rebellion coincides with the first crime. The history of rebellion, as we are experiencing it today, has far more to do with the children of Cain than with the disciples of Prometheus. In this sense it is the God of the Old Testament who is primarily responsible for mobilizing the forces of rebellion. Inversely, one must submit to the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob when, like Pascal, one has run the full course of intellectual rebellion. The mind most prone to doubt always aspires to the greatest degree of Jansenism. A schizoid friend and his wife are in constant difficulties. She approaches things intellectually, while he gets tired of words, tired of the misunderstandings that come about through words, tired of the very sound of words going on and on (no silences, no pauses). Sometimes he says that he is giving them up, to live with music for a while. His wife said to me, in complete puzzlement, “How can you communicate without words?” However, her husband’s words do not communicate to her easily. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Even in very simple things, she had to struggle. When he referred to a jazz musician as a “skin and bones drunk” she was baffled. She tussled with it, working it out in her head, and then she said, “Oh, I see. You mean that he is thin and gets drunk. You see, I didn’t understand the modifier.” She teaches English, which can be a limitation. When I was working as a university press editor, I mentioned to a most lovable English professor that a five-line sentence in his manuscript did not say anything. He read it and agreed, but then went over it phrase by phrase, clause by clause, adjective by adjective, and showed me that the sentence was absolutely correct, so therefore it should remain. It seems to me that most psychologists must do something like this with people: they do not seem to read people very well. I do not even know what a modifier if. I think that my friend’s husband probably does not know either, but he has a great respect for the education that he has not had, that his wife has. That is how mixed up we get—all of us, in one way or another. Actually we get mixed up in so many ways that I do not see any way out of it but to go by our own experience, and to limit ourselves to that. I do better when I know that if I have not had the experience, I cannot know anything about it, and can neither approve nor condemn. If interested, I can only explore and inquire. “No one may condemn another until he has walked in his moccasins for ten days.” And then, of course, I will not. This sound passive, and “passive” is a bad word in our society (another tabu). However, to experience “passive” is to know being very much alive, and it is the source from which my right actions spring. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
To think about anything without experience is nothing. To be close to another person physically and emotionally, to be held tightly, to share one’s deepest self-secrets—all of these represent a basic need largely ignored by most behavioural scientists. This tender need seems to be uniquely human in its manifestation. Obviously related to the needs of pleasures of the flesh, intimacy yet has a meaning of its own that includes the physical union, but that can be expressed and can be experienced in the psychological realm alone. Its opposite is true loneliness—just being in the presence of others is insufficient. The need is for a real closeness that affirms the existence of the person. One’s existence as an individual is not only highlighted, like a back-lit photograph, in separation from others, but is also manifested in the phenomenon of intimate closeness. Deprivation of challenge is experienced as boredom, or as emptiness in existence. The need for challenge manifests itself most keenly when a person has made a “successful adjustment” to life, when he or she has been able to fulfill the material needs, and cannot then find anything to do. Without challenging goals, people eat or drink to excess or pass the time getting high on marijuana. The mission of the Sacramento Fire Department is to prevent the loss of life and property in the community due to fire, medical emergencies, and other natural or man-made disasters and catastrophes. This is accomplished through direct mitigation during these types of occurrences and through community wide prevention efforts. The Sacramento Fire Department will assume command of such incidents and will staff and maintain the force with professional, highly trained personnel. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
The Sacramento Fire Department is prepared competently with cognitive, psychomotor, and affective skill levels to handle any challenge. “It was Christmas Day, Christmas before last. I had worked nighttime, eleven to seven, and I had just come home from work. I was having some coffee with my mother, and the radio alarm came in, saying, ‘Reported structure fire, occupants trapped.’ I drove to the firehouse, only a couple of miles up the road, and since there was no traffic that early in the morning I was the first one there. I saw the column of black smoke only a few blocks from the station, and I knew it was a bad one. The radio said the police were already there. I got geared up while Assistant Chief X and driver Y arrived. So we hopped on the engine and drove to the scene. We saw good-sized flames shooting up in the air toward the street. People told us they had seen people at this bedroom window, but they weren’t there anymore. The window was on the second floor, above the garage. There was a ladder there, and the chief told me to go ahead and use it to get to the window. I climbed up, but fire was coming through the garage door, so I had to jump back down. He went to get an inch-and-a-half to knock that down, and I got another inch-and-a half to try to make the doorway. Well, I couldn’t do that, but he had his fire knocked down, so he said, ‘Come on, get back up there. Let’s try it.’ #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
“I got up there, the window was already broken by the heat, and I hopped through. The window was so small that, after the fire, the guys said, ‘I don’t know how you fit through there.’ It was divided into panes by metal strips that you couldn’t break unless you had the right tool. So I jumped through there and landed on a bed. And the room was totally black—black like you never experience, not even when you put tape over your mask for training. I got low to the floor, staying close to the wall, trying to go over in my mind everything I was trained to do in this situation. My job was to go in, look for victims, and rescue, if possible. I crawled along the wall, felt under the bed with my left hand while keeping my right hand on the wall. I came to the foot of the bed, and I felt something on the floor, real spongy, kind of moist, like Playdough or Silly Putty. I picked it up, and it was kind of heavy, but I didn’t know what it was. I dropped it, and you could hear it thump. Then I picked it up again, and I could feel that it was a person. I had picked up the arm. The bedroom doorway was near there, and she had tried to get out the doorway, but she had dropped right there. I tried to pick her up—talk about dead weight, that was really dead weight. She only weighed about 120 pounds, but she felt like a ton. I couldn’t throw her over my shoulder for a fireman’s carry, so I had to bear-hug her with all my strength and carry her back toward the window. And she was slipping away from me. I got another grip, using all my strength, and carried her toward the window, where the bed was. I started to hyperventilate from the excitement and exertion, and I had to take a break. So I set her down on the bed. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
“I was breathing so heavily that my mask couldn’t keep up with me until I could regain my composure and slow my breathing down. I said to myself, ‘Okay, this is what you’re supposed to do. Come on, you can do it.’ The whole house was involved. The fire had started in the basement and traveled through the whole house. The only rooms not burning at the time were two bedrooms, the one I had entered and the one beside it. So I regained my composure, got her in a bear hug again, and put her out the window. At first I thought I had thrown her out and she had fallen to the ground. That was all I needed! The smoke was billowing out the window, I couldn’t see two feet in front of me. And I thought, ‘Oh, my God, there’s nobody here to help me.’ I was yelling, and I lifted my face mask to yell louder. My body was so demanding of oxygen that I accidentally took in some hot air and gasses. The woman had been sort of hanging out the window, then all of a sudden she wasn’t there. The truck company had arrived and put up their own ladder, but they couldn’t see much better than I could. They just happened to reach out and feel the woman’s arms, and they just took her without me even knowing it. So then she wasn’t there, and I thought to myself, Well, it’s time to get out. I climbed over the windowsill onto the ladder I had used to get up there. I started to step down, and there was a rung missing. I hadn’t seen the fire department ladder, so I was on the wrong ladder. I lost my balance and fell backwards about fifteen feet, landing on the air bottle on my back. They thought I had spinal injuries. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
“They dragged me up on the sidewalk, cut the air pack straps, put on a cervical collar, and strapped me on a backboard. I started coming to, and they said my eyes were all glassy and rolled back. Then I started to cough severely, brining up black mucus. Just one or two breaths of gas and hot air was enough to do that. I kept asking about the woman, is she okay, is she okay? They said they were doing CPR on her in the next house. They put me in the first ambulance, because they were afraid I had a broken back. They put her in the next one. I was in a daze. I remember the lights flashing over my head as they wheeled me down the hall at the hospital. Then the doctor and a group of nurses worked on me, getting my clothes off, examining me, drawing blood, hooking up IVs, putting oxygen on me. It was a mass of work being done on me all at once. It was really confusing. I was in the hospital for two days. I had a minor shoulder bruise from landing cockeyed, but basically it was for smoke inhalation. I still had no fear, I still didn’t worry about how bad a situation I had been in. The only time I came to that realization was when a fire chief with about twenty-five years in the service said it was the worst fire he had ever seen, and he couldn’t believe that I had gone in there. I was happy to hear that the woman was still alive, though she had to go the UCD burn center. But I felt kind of guilty because there were two other people in the house who did perish, he daughter and her husband. I hadn’t known they were in there. The woman is now living out of town with the rest of her family. She never came to the firehouse, but I did meet her son, and he thanked me. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
“I heard that the woman was shock-blind for a while. She was in so much shock that she was blind. She later got her sight back. I guess God had a plan for me, and I did what he wanted me to do. I feel closer to him. I have no fear of dying if that’s how God wants me to go. What I do fear is the day when I’m faced with a really bad fire and I say to myself, hey, that’s even too bad for you, there’s no way you can go in there. Am I going to go in there and maybe die, or catch myself before I react? I’ll be testing myself. I kept replaying the fire. The guys at the firehouse kept wanting me to tell the story again, what was it like inside. It was like everybody’s dream, and they wanted to be part of it. I mean, it’s the dream of every fireman to make a successful rescue, to save some human life. And I was lucky enough to have done that.” The leadership of the Sacramento Fire Department are good stewards of taxpayer’s funds. They strive to be fiscally responsible with City funding and make prudent financial decisions. The Sacramento Fire Department is a well-trained and educated workforce and those qualities are essential to an effective fire department. They provide their firefighters and professionals with knowledge support and opportunities to improve their physical health, wellness and fitness in order to enhance job performance and an overall healthy personal lifestyle. Great people can liberate great feelings in others or lift them toward acceptance of true ideas. You can help the Sacramento Fire Department in their mission of saving lives and the community by donating. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Few people know what love really means because with nearly all it is filtered through the screens of bodily and selfish considerations. In its pure native state, it is the first attribute of the divine soul and consequently it is one of the most important qualities which the seeker has to cultivate. Remember parents, please teach your children to love American, to be proud to be American and to be patriotic. It is also important to buy American made cars and other goods and services produced by Americans, like beef, poultry, produce, steel and more. This will ensure that we save American manufacturing jobs, American farms, and the American auto industry. It is also important to teach your children the importance of respecting law and order and showing dignity and concern towards their elders. Also, education is by far one of the best gifts American children have been blessed with and will be an asset in their lives. I bear you my witness of the divinity of the Saviour of the World and of His redemptive love and power to heal, strengthen, and lift us when we are earnestly striving to come unto Him. Conversely, there is no way we can move with the crowd and also toward Jesus. The Saviour has defeated death, disease, and sin and has provided a way for our ultimate perfection if we will follow Him with all of our hearts. “We believe in being subjects to kings, presidents, rulers, magistrates, in obeying, honouring, and sustaining the law,” reports the Articles of Faith. Respect is an expression of our sense of universal brotherhood or sisterhood—a testimony of our membership in the human family. It acknowledges our common humanity and shows our reverence for children of God. The gospel teaches us that we are to hold the same esteem for others that we would hold for ourselves. Acting disrespectfully suggests we do not esteem the other person as ourselves. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
The Winchester Mystery House
The house known as The Winchester Mystery House has become a museum of the most twisted and macabre kind. It is a monument to its own infamous past. On display inside were once wax figures of its victims. However, some people do not believe The Winchester Mystery House even exists. They are convinced that it is a huge hoax, an elaborate tourist trap. While 160 of the 500 to 600 rooms remain, through some are off limits, The Winchester Mystery House is very real. Will you dare to enter the house at night, when the tourists have gone? When are the ghosts and demons rumoured to come out?
About two decades ago, I got my hands on this really ancient diary that was written in 1899 by Sarah L. Winchester. I found the diary under mysterious circumstances in one of the rooms of The Winchester Mystery House. Nobody knows I have it. Sarah Winchester is the woman who built this labyrinth, and she goes into all kinds of details about how the hauntings manifested, and what they are like, and everything. I mean everything. The diary also goes into the first murder and let me tell you, this is sure not the stuff they tell you on tour!
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/
Why Should Evil be Punished When Goodness is Not Rewarded?
To look only for pleasant effects upon the ego’s feelings, whether it be our own or other people’s, is a mistake. Emotion is expert at inventing reasons for its aversions and dislikes. One of the very important tasks of the Quest is to bring the emotional nature and the passional nature under control. If this is not done, it is certain that man will be so affected by the various persons, so changed by the various environments he meets with as the days move forward, that he will not be able to achieve that serene poise which is the Quest’s goal, nor depend on what he will be like tomorrow. That is, he will not be able to depend upon himself. There are feelings which should be distrusted. There are reasonings which should be discarded. Only when the philosophic discipline has purified the heart and tranquilized the head can we safely rely on ourselves for judgment. Most people are, in fact, very far from the stage where they can sagely trust their emotions or indiscriminately yield to their instincts. Besides the absence of traffic laws, this inner journey is different in many ways from any other you will ever take. It does not cover any ground, geographically. It is a journey inside yourself and inside other people. It may not involve any physical movement—any doing what so ever. The destination is also different, in that it is not a place. It is a process. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Mastery is the process of discovering who you really are—and daring to be that—every day. It is the process of discovering and making contact with the real person in others—and daring to let them be who they are. Accomplishing these things involves getting in touch with your core, a source of inner wisdom which we all possess, a special place—deep within you—that intuitively knows what is best for you. Where is your “core”? If you were to examine an x-ray of your body, you would not be able to see it. However, because you cannot see it does not mean that it does not exist. The same x-ray might reveal the shape and size of your muscles without showing the strength those muscles possess. Yet you feel that strength and know it is there without being able to observe it objectively on the x-ray. And so it is with your inner core. Without ever having seen it, people have described this core as being somewhat like that of an apple, centering around the abdominal area and extending upward to the area of the heart and downward into the genital region. Pictured thus, the core resides in our physical center. At this physical center, we integrate feeling, thinking and bodily responses to make our most significant decisions about ourselves and others. At this center, our spirituality and psychological functioning come together and synthesize with our physical selves. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
This core is the seat of power: the power of our intuitive hunches, our deepest feelings of love, our “right” decisions. Here the power of “conscience” occurs, the power of experiencing our feelings most completely. Is it not better to take counsel of reason than to yield to the ardour of impulse, the throb of emotion, or the stir of passion? For if these are leading in a right direction, they lose nothing but, on the contrary, get confirmed by being reasoned out. If one has to meet other persons who tend to put one into a condition of unease, then the most practical wisdom is to have as little personal contact with them as possible. Emotions must be held within bounds. Intuition and intelligence must set those bounds. Otherwise, imbalance, fanaticism, narrow-mindedness will thrive like weeds in the human heart. Young Aaliyah Haughton, brilliant cinema-acting genius, model, and singer, was not protected by the golden Saint Christopher medal, given her by Joe Lara, which was found close to her battered and broken body at the scene airplane crash which ended her short life. This tragic result was directly caused by some reckless temperament of her crew; it was the bitter fruit of a defect in their character. No religious medal could avert the result itself; only a modification of the temperament of her crew, a correction of their weaknesses, could have done so. To believe otherwise is to believe in superstition. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Incompatibility is inevitable, but not unconquerable. Our private emotions need not less control than our public behaviour. The aim of the self-denial and self-discipline is to bring the aspirant through the period of emotional adolescence into the healthy state of emotional maturity. Are you still hanging on to labels? I am not interested in their single information level. I push enthusiasm and its side effects. If that script is accurate, it will get you free. If I can help you by splitting, I will do it. If you want me to drive the escape car or hide you out, I will do that. If you want me to just go away and leave you alone, tell me. Just do not blow my cover and leave me here. I have no money for bail and no way to free myself. Whisper is just a prison script. If I were a better engraver, I would print the thirty thousand dollars and the ID. I told you it was risky to smuggle that script out. To decompose is to live too. Alone among his contemporaries, Lucretius carries this logic much farther and finally brings it to the central problem of modern philosophy. He adds nothing fundamental to Epicurus. He, too, refuses to accept any explanatory principle that cannot be tested by the senses. The atom is only a last refuse where man, reduced to his primary elements, pursues a kind of blind and deaf immortality—an immortal death—which for Lucretius represents, as it does for Epicurus, the only possible form of happiness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
He has to admit, however, that atoms do not aggregate of their own accord, and rather than believe in a superior law and, finally, in the destiny he wishes to deny, he accepts the concept of a purely fortuitous mutation, the clinamen, in which the atoms meet and a group themselves together. Already, as we can see, the great problem of modern times arises: the discovery that to rescue man from destiny to man—a historical destiny this time. Lucretius has not reached this point. His hatred of destiny and death is assuaged by this blind Universe where atoms accidentally form human beings and where human beings accidentally return to atoms. However, his vocabulary bears witness to a new kind of sensibility. The walled citadel becomes an armed camp. Menai mundi, the ramparts of the World, is one of the key expressions of Lucretius’ rhetoric. The main preoccupation in this armed camp is, of course, to silence hope. However, Epicurus’ methodical renunciation is transformed into a quivering asceticism, which is sometimes crowed with execrations. Piety, for Lucretius, undoubtedly consists in “being able to contemplate everything with an untroubled mind.” However, nevertheless, his mind reels at the injustices does to man. Spurred on by indignation, he weaves new concepts of crime, innocence, culpability, and punishment into his great poem on the nature of things. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
In it he speaks of “religion’s first crime,” Iphigenia’s martyred innocence, and of the tendency of the divinity to “often ignore the guilty and mete out undeserved punishment by slaughtering the innocent.” If Lucretius scoffs at the fear of punishment in the next World, it is not as a gesture of defensive rebellion in the manner of Epicurus, but as a process of aggressive reasoning: why should evil be punished when we can easily see, here on Earth, that goodness is not rewarded? In many cases, it is a grandparent who controls the payoffs in a child’s life, either directly or through the parent. Grandmother may save the patient from a father’s death decree by offering a “life membership” instead. Or she may give mother a Medea script (or “overscript”), which forces her to drive her children to their deaths in one way or another. All this is fed into the Parent of the little boy or girl, and is likely to stay there for life: someone’s gentle hope that he will live forever, or a harsh voice urging him closer to his death. Sometimes there is no animosity in the death decree, but just futility or despair. However, since he drinks her wishes in from the day he is born, it is usually mother who makes the decision for him. Father may join or contradict her later: add his weight to her curse, or commute it. Patients can usually remember their childhood responses to payoff directives, things they did not say out loud. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Mother: “You are just like your father.” (Who got a divorce and lives in a room by himself.) Son: “Good. Smart guy, father.” Father: “You will end up like your aunt.” (Mother’s sister, who is in a mental hospital or experienced death by suicide.) Daughter: “If you say so.” Mother: “Drop dead.” Daughter: “I do not want to, but if you say so I guess I have to.” Father: “With your temper, you will kill somebody some day.” Son: “Well, if it cannot be you, it will be somebody else.” The child is very forgiving, and only makes his decision to follow the directive after dozens or even hundreds of such transactions. One girl from a very confused family, where she got no support from her patents, described very clearly the day she made her final decision. When she was thirteen, her brothers took her out in the barn and put her through all kinds of sexual stunts, which she went through in order to please them. After they finished, they began to laugh at her and talk about her. They decided that now she would either have to become a hooker or go crazy. She thought about it very carefully for the rest of the night, and by morning she had decided to go crazy, which she did very effectively, and stayed that way for years afterward. Her explanation was very simple. “I did not want to be a hooker.” While the script payoff is bestowed or decreed by the parents, it will not take effect unless it is accepted by the child. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
His acceptance speech will not have the fanfare and finish of a Madison Avenue presidential inauguration, but he will say it as clearly as he dares at least once. “When I grow up, I am going to be like mommy” (= get married and have children), or “When I am big, I am going to do what daddy did” (=get killed in a war), or “I wish I was dead.” The patient should be asked: “What did you decide to do with your life when you were little?” If he gives a conventional answer (“I wanted to be a fireman”), this should be clarified with: “What I mean is, how did you decide you would end up?” Since payoff decisions are often first made earlier than he can remember, he may not be able to give the desired answer, but it can be inferred from some of his later adventures. Human beings need to feel recognized and approved by other members of the groups within which they live. Without such recognition, they tend to feel inferior. The quest for power and prestige is universal, though the means of attaining status differ from society to society. A man or woman may work to the point of exhaustion, neglecting personal health and the needs of his or her family, in order to purchase a Rolls Royce. The status symbolized by the Rolls seems worth the cost. The person may not enjoy the work, may not enjoy seeing his or her family suffer from neglect, the limousine may not transport the family any better than a less costly vehicle, but so urgent is the quest for status that the person is willing to pay the price. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Let us not underrate the strength of the status drive in modern humans. The puzzling thing, is how does it become so powerful? One hypothesis is that the fanatic quest for status is in compensation for lack of love or for physical deprivations associated with poverty. It is as if the “success-starved” person is trying to make up in adult years for childhood privations and can never get enough. Related is human beings’ need for a feeling and experience of competence, a confidence that they can control their environment. Humans needs varying degrees of freedom to conduct their lives according to their own wishes and plans. Many wars have been fought in the name of freedom. We can distinguish between objective freedom, which refers to the relative absence of real restrictions on one’s behaviour, and the feeling of freedom. The latter refers to persons’ estimates of how free they are to express themselves. Healthy personalities find an environment within which there is the greatest possible amount of objective freedom. Unhealthy personalities may dread both objective freedom and the feeling of freedom. They find it anxiety-producing. They can only carry on as long as they feel that they are under authoritarian rule or in surrender to charismatic leadership. Human beings not only need room to move and to express their unique ways; they need personal space for solitude and to facilitate uninterrupted intimacy with others. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
In the absence of such assured space, people tend to become irritable and chronically defensive. As we enter an age of vastly increased population and the concentration of this population in crowded cities, the need for more space becomes increasingly urgent. Parallel to the need to love and care for others is the need to be alone for predictable periods of time. The crowding of cities, the constant interaction with other humans, require periods of time for an individual to contemplate the self, to consider personal growth, and to place self in perspective with the rest of the World. It is for this reason that Christians and other ascetics seek long periods of solitude. The popularity of transcendental meditation is partly ascribable to the deprivation from the solitude experience. This solitude is not the same as loneliness, which is a result of deprivation from the company of others. A solitude experienced is created by a healthy person out of a beneficial need to be alone for contemplation or intense meditation. Solitude is harder to create for oneself than is the companionship of a good friend and requires careful planning in our heavily socialized culture. Moustakas has suggested that such experience is essential to the development of the healthy personality. Woman can postpone maternal-matron-morality. The “youth-cult,” that produced middle-aged teeny boppers and married guys sporting Generation X hairstyles and wearing satin football hero satin shirts is another by-product of the newly won control of our neurogenetic brain sequences. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
School children between the ages of five to eleven years old also play a crucial role in the human hive. Young students keep the enormous educational industry going. Schools become bureaucratic paper-factories keeping teachers busy, school administrators occupied, and counselors engaged. The whole insectoid apparatus is designed to imprint the young robots with role-models, making them ready to take their places in a bureaucratic-socialist centralized hive civilization where everyone is trained to play a role. The Barbarian Teenager Caste similarly plays a vital role in the human anthill by providing warriors in times of war. Indeed, teenagers encourage war. Every dictator knows that they way to keep the restless students from rioting in the university is to get them fighting on the border. In times of peace the crime rate rises. More than half of all reported crimes are committed by those under eighteen. During peace time the tasks of teenagers is to keep the police establishment and the judiciary going. If unreported vandalisms, blood-letting fights and automobile wheel coups were included, we would see that 90 percent of all crimes are committed by barbarian teenagers or unmarried, pre-domestic males. If adolescence were eliminated from the human cycle, there would be no Red Brigades, no rock-concert riots. The monolithic police bureaucracy would immediately crumble and in its anguished collapse would take the entire society down with it. Every caste has to be kept occupied. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
This imperfection of science is a most attractive one; for it reflects the fact that science is not monstrous and monolithic, but is a very human enterprise, exhibiting the same lively and useful diversity which one finds in philosophy, art, music, etcetera. We mut bring science back into life as a human enterprise, an enterprise that has at its core the uncertainty, the flexibility, the subjectivity, the sweet unreasonableness, the dependence upon creativity and faith which permits it, when properly understood, to take its place as a friendly and understanding companion to all the rest of life. There must be something simpler; there must be something more in accord with our time. Some things have been harmful but at the same time quite seriously harmful. Many have accepted that harmful and seriously harmful things are “inevitable”—a “fact of life” because they notice it is happening all over. However, now it is becoming clear that rationalizing wrong is not reality. Science is a product of man and in itself is not either human or inhuman: it is according to the humanness or lack of it in the people who use it. The same information on the effects of nuclear fallout is used by one scientist in a way that commits him to work toward disarmament, and by another to insist that we must develop more bombs. When one excludes any part of self their humanness is decreased. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
When my son graduated from Beijing Language and Culture University, I watched the men of his class marching up the central aisle to the platform, and something that I saw in their young faces filled me with such sadness that all of me was weeping. The tears began to flow. What I had “seen” that made me weep was all the young men marching through the centuries from the time of the first academic processions, young men bright with hope and with accomplishment after so much effort, so much giving up of life to this—for what? They marched through history (in my head) as though to slaughter. This could be interpreted as a “vision.” I suppose that the word “mystic” should go along with that. However, I do not like that interpretation so it is not for me. I prefer to see it as like my dreams which tell me what I know but have not been noticing. When I did see this knowing that I already knew, it overwhelmed me. I stopped my tears for the same reason that so often I stopped my words—because I would be seen in reverse. My knowing and my feeling, that produced my tears, was both personal and impersonal, with the personal in place as a small part of the whole—not lost, much present, but not exaggerated to become the whole which it is not. However, others would see in my tears my son and me alone within an alien (to me) context—within some arrangement (according to each person’s own thinking at the time_ of the proud/sad/happy/Father at his son’s Commencement, his graduation from a particularly honoured school. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
To have my tears misunderstood, to be comnforted for what I am not uncomfortable about, to be “understood” through another person’s understanding which is not mine, to be read backwards—this jangles me. It takes me out of what I am in—the source of my tears, the reality of me at the moment, the totality of myself—and because I cannot accept what others think that I am in which is not the truth of me, I am left in nowhere. A connection has been broken. I reject the other, shut him out, so that I can re-concept with the truth of me. A celebrity friend said yesterday on the telephone that it seemed to her that when there is a serious family quarrel, non-verbal communication is being ignored. I told her what I have already put in some of the reports, about the doctor who told me “I’m glad this happened to you, not someone else!” and she laughed joyously that her knowing was shared. I had given her only the sketchiest picture of what happened, but she understood totally. With some people I had to give many more details, and some puzzle over it and never really understand, because there is only intellectual understanding. That is like knowing that a plant needs sunshine or shade, water, an appropriate soil, but never having a feeling for the plant as needing these things in the way that I need what I need. There is no responding to this plant, noticing and observing it, caring for it—not overly, excessively, even neglecting it at times or going against the “rule” of its behaviour when this seems right. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
When I do this, using all of me, not only intellectual knowing, then I have a “green thumb.” In Hawaii where this is also recognized, as it probably is the World over, it is called lima ulu which means “the growing hand.” The major over air news networks, also known as Obama News, are called a “racial-Nationalist” mouthpiece and they have all the strengths connected with such institutions, but also all the faults and weaknesses. The Obama News Stations are being called the Ethnic Observer or People’s Observer. They are specifically and exclusively the Democratic Party, which tends to be affluent Whites. These networks use propaganda which is far below Mr. Hitler’s IQ and is totally unreasonable and downright the publications of lies and fantasies. The reporters are defensive, belligerent, have impotent arguments and make no strong statement, which is completely contrary to his theories on propaganda. They also do not provide any visual imagery to prove their statements, in fact, most of the images they use contradict their proofs. Obama news is basically like watching the Jerry Spring show, it is low brow, and only for entertainment purposes, as there is no educational value, nor facts to the programs. Going to further into actual research, Obama News ignores the subjects and meaning of life. If the Ku Klux Klan produced news like Obama News, they would be under investigation and cancelled by popular culture, but people still tune into the sleezy gossip. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
So often the “truths” we tell ourselves are merely fragments of the truth, and sometimes they are not really the truth at all. Part of our problem in the quest for truth is that human wisdom has disappointed us so often. We have so many examples of things that mankind once “knew” were try but have since been proven false. In some way, we are all susceptible to such strange thinking. The “truths” we cling to shape the quality of our societies as well as our individual characters. All too often these “truths” are based on incomplete and inaccurate evidence, and at times they serve very selfish motives. Part of the reason for poor judgment comes from the tendency of mankind to blur the line between belief and truth, thinking that because something makes sense or is convenient, it must be true. Conversely, we sometimes do not believe truth or reject it—because it would requite us to change or admit that we were wrong. Often, truth is rejected because it does not appear to be consistent with previous experiences. When the opinions or “truths” of other contradict our own, instead of considering the possibility that there could be information that might be helpful and augment or complement what we know, we often jump to conclusions or make assumptions that the other person is misinformed, mentally challenged, or even intentionally trying to deceive. Unfortunately, this tendency can spread to all areas of our lives—from sports to family relationships and from religion to politics. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
The truth is different from belief. It is different from hope. Absolute truth is not dependent upon public opinion or popularity. Polls cannot sway it. Not even the inexhaustible authority of celebrity endorsement can change it. I believe that our Father in Heaven is pleased with His children when they use their talents and mental facilities to earnestly discover truth. Over the centuries many wise men and women—through logic, reason, scientific inquiry, and, yes, through inspiration—have discovered truth. These discoveries have enriched mankind, improved our lives, and inspired joy, wonder, and awe. Even so, the things we once thought we knew are continually being enhanced, modified, or even contradicted by enterprising scholars who seek to understand truth. The adversary has many cunning strategies for keeping mortal from the truth. They offer the belief that truth is relative; appealing to our sense of tolerance and fairness, they keep the real truth hidden by claiming that one person’s “truth” is as valid as any other. Sometimes the adversary entices to believe that there is an absolute truth out there somewhere but that it is impossible for anyone to know it. For those who already embrace the truth, the adversaries want to spread seeds of doubt. For example, they have caused many members of the Church to stumble when they discover information about the Church that seems to contradict what they had learned previously. If you experience such a moment, remember that in this age of information there are many who create doubt about anything and everything, at any time and every place. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Sometimes untrue claims or information are presented in such a way that they appear quite credible. However, when you are confronted with information that is in conflict with the revealed word of God, remember that the blind men in the parable of the elephant would never be able to accurately describe the full truth. We simply do not know all things—we cannot see everything. What may seem contradictory now may be perfectly understandable as we search for and receive more trustworthy information. Because we see through a glass darkly, we have to trust the Lord, who sees all things clearly. Yes, our World is full of confusion. However, eventually, all of our questions will be answered. All of our doubts will be replaced by certainty. And that is because there is one source of truth that is complete, correct, and incorruptible. That source is our infinitely wise and all-knowing Heavenly Father. He knows truth as it was, as it is, and as it yet will be. “He comprehendeth all things, and He is above all things, and all things are by Him, and of Him.” Our loving Heavenly Father offers His truth to us, His mortal children. Now, what is this truth? It is His gospel. It is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life.” If we will only have enough courage and faith to walk in His path, it will lead us to peace of heart and mind, to lasting meaning in life, to happiness in this World, and to joy in the World to come. The Saviour is “not far from every one of us.” If we seek Him diligently, we have His promise that we will find Him. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Through professionalism, dedication, integrity and training the Sacramento Fire Department works to safe guard the lives and property and to enhance the quality of life of the people of Sacramento. This is accomplished by providing a vast range of emergency services, strong public relations and fire safety education. They also protect and preserve the health of their membership and return their personnel safely to their families. I had just gotten my EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) verification in the mail, and I was excited about it. Not ten minutes later, I responded, to the hall for a medical emergency. I got into the truck, and there were two guys in there with me. They just sat there waiting. I thought of my good news, and I said, ‘By the way, guys, I just got my EMT verification in the mail.” And all of a sudden the truck took off. ‘That’s what we were waiting for,’ they said. ‘An EMT.’ So we’re going down the road, and I’m trying to get my mind prepared, going down the list, oxygen, medical kit, suction. Then everything just started to gel, all my training and all my books, and I knew I was ready. I knew what I had to do in case of a heart attack or any other emergency. When we got to the scene, I was excited and grabbed all my equipment and walked into the house. There was a gentleman sitting in a chair. This man had been dead for at least twelve hours. Rigor mortis had already set in. My trained eye noticed that the blood had pooled, and I said to myself, ‘Oh, well, I can’t save this guy.’ #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“One of the guys came up to me later and said, ‘You did a good job on him, Davey.’ And I felt so embarrassed. I had been so excited, and it just didn’t happen the way I wanted it to. I had a case recently where a lady died. She had gone into full arrest, and we responded to the call. We started CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) and gave her oxygen. The whole time we were driving to the hospital, I kept thinking to myself, what a beautiful woman this must have been. She was seventy years old, and her husband, who was following the ambulance, was in his seventies, too. And you could just tell that the two of them had been together for a long time. I get very personal with these people in my mind. Even though she was not responding to CPR, I kept her hair out of her face, and I made sure that she was comfortable. And the ride was pretty rough on me, a lot of curves and some bumpy roads. But I felt that is I was going to be the person to be with her in the last few moments of her life, I was going to make sure she was happy and comfortable. I talked to her in my mind, like mental telepathy, telling her that her husband was right behind us, that he must love her very dearly, and not to worry about anything, that we were doing the best ww could. And I touched her face, just rubbing her cheek, and she was so soft. I could just imagine what a wonderful woman she must have been in her life. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
“They continued the CPR in the hospital, but there was no response, and she never came around. But I felt good, I really did. Maybe it’s all in my mind, but I felt that I made a difference in her life to her. I would sure like somebody like me when me when I die. I really would like someone to care. And I hope that I never lose the sense of human touch…and care.” 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. #RandolpHarris 21 of 21
Yes! We’re open today on Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Explore a range of stunning homes designed to match your style, needs, and budget. The path to finding your perfect home has never been more exciting!
Join us at our Sales Centers today for an exclusive sneak peek or a personal tour. We’re here to welcome you into our vibrant communities and help you find the place where you truly belong!
This stylish home features thoughtful architectural design with details a modern, open concept, approach to formal dining.
And this is one of the only remaining cul-de-sac locations at Cresleigh Riverside, this home is situated adjacent to the gorgeous orchard and includes an upgraded wrought iron fence to enjoy the view year-round. For more information on this home or one like it, please click on the link. #CresleighHomes
Lives of Quiet Desperation
America is the land of competition. We delight in trying to keep up with the Hilton’s. We have made success and material wealth a way of life. In such a society, what happens to feelings? What happens to concerns for others? Unfortunately, we repress our feelings; we control others; we manipulate. Manipulation has been called the predominant personality pattern in America. We find manipulators among our spouses, parents, children, partners, coworkers, employers, employees, celebrities, migrants and the unhoused; the gardener, teachers and students. The fact is we are all manipulators. We all use deceptive, insidious or unnatural devices to get the particular response we want from another person. At some point in our early development, we formed the notion that we were unacceptable as we are, that other people’s opinion of how we ought to be is more important than our own opinion of ourselves. To show people the “face” we think they want to see, we don a mask—the mask of the manipulator. For some of us, this mask is sinister. It is the mask of the “top-dog,” and we use it to play tough, judgmental, overbearing or mean. For the rest of us, the mask is angelic. It is the mask of the “under-dog,” and we use it to play helpless, protective, gullible or adorning. As manipulators, we refuse to allow ourselves to be who we are. At the same time, we refuse to allow others to be who they are. Instead, we get stuck and stay stuck in unsatisfying relationships. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Deeply ingrained as manipulation may be, we are not doomed to perpetuate it. However, there is an alternative personality pattern; the pattern of the master, and even in your own mirrors. Each of us has the ability to master our tendencies to manipulate, to master the expression of our real feelings in relations with others. Mastery is simply being yourself in the face of the manipulations of the World. Each of us carries within our hearts the seeds of manipulation and the seeds of mastery. Which seeds we choose to sow and to cultivate will determine how we nourish our lives. “Actualizing,” a therapeutic process of continuous self-examination, has its roots in the theories of Abraham Maslow. There is also so much value in developing an awareness of yourself in the context of interpersonal relationships, in learning about yourself and others simultaneously. This natural outgrowth of actualizing serves the purpose of maximizing your own potential as well as the potentials of the other people in your life. This natural outgrowth of actualizing is called “mastery.” Mastery is a state of awareness and aliveness—a condition in which you are so comfortable with yourself and the people around you, that you are able to be, who you are, feel what you feel and express those things—without fear, without faking, without masking, without manipulation. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
While mastery involves being perceptive of who you are, it also involves being perceptive of who others are and allowing them to be themselves. It involved being perceptive of others’ feelings and recognizing their expression of those feelings. In the Western World, we tend to think of mastery as a condition of control or domination. We use the term to describe artists who have reached a level of great proficiency and skill. Masters also operate with a continuing heightened awareness of life and by his role in it. Jesus Christ was called “Master” by his disciples. Each time you gain a greater awareness of yourself and the World around you, you come a step closer to this kind of mastery these enlightened people have achieved. However, do not get it twisted. A master is not someone who has everything “handled,” not someone who has conquered all possible problems, not someone who is eternally free from every kind of trouble and never puts on the manipulator’s mask. No, a master is someone who knows how to solve problems and work through troubles. Mastery is not a final stopping place. If anything, it is a place to begin living on an exciting, fascinating new level. The journey toward mastery is a dual one. It is as if you are traveling on a highway which has two lanes going in your direction, and you have the ability to switch from one lane to the other as the situation calls for. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
The dual lanes represent two kinds of relationships you have in your life. The first kind of relationship is your relationship with yourself. It means to be that self which you truly are. It consists of how you feel about yourself, what you think of yourself, what you tell yourself and how you treat yourself. My own field of psychology has been greatly concerned with this “intrapersonal” relationship for quite some time now. Self-awareness, self-discovery and self-everything has been getting a lot of attention as people try to find congruence, authenticity, genuineness and healing in their own psyche and body. Critics believe it has been getting too much. They feel psychology has been too selfishly oriented. And they may be right. The second kind of relationship is “interpersonal” and includes all the various relationships you have with people around you. It has to do with the way you talk to and treat people and all the things they say and do in return. It involves the degree to which you can listen to others and understand them. It is a simple process, but it has profound implications. In my many years of work with people, I have found that no real progress takes place in one of these “lanes” to the exclusion of the other. Learning about yourself is interesting, but useless unless you can apply it to your relations with others. By the same token, improving your relationships with others is almost impossible to do without first improving your sense of your own self. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Thus, on this journey, both lanes are wide open and you can travel in one, the other or both at the same time. This is the autobahn; speed limits do not apply. In contrast, you can allow your journey to take you to prison. In prison, you will burst through the swinging doors of the visiting room. You visitor waits in the most private corner, table arranged with coffee, rolls, cigarettes. Perhaps your visitor will have a Persian beaded bad. Maybe she is beautiful. And she possibly will have strange news. Metaphysical rebellion presupposes a simplified view of creation—which was inconceivable to the Greeks. In their minds, there were not gods on one side and men on the other, but a series of stages leading from one to the other. The idea of innocence opposed to guilt, the concept of all of history summed up in the struggle between good and evil, was foreign to them. In their universe there were more mistakes than crimes, and the only definitive crime was excess. In a World entirely dominated by history, which ours threatens to become, there are no longer any mistakes, but only crimes, of which the greatest is moderation. This explains the curious mixture of ferocity and forbearance which we find in Greek mythology. The Greeks never made the human mind into an armed camp, and in this respect, we are inferior to them. Rebellion, after all, can only be imagined in terms of opposition to someone. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
The only thing that gives meaning to human protest is the idea of a personal god who has created, and is therefore responsible for, everything. And so, we can say, without being paradoxical, that in the Western World the history of rebellion is inseparable from the history of Christianity. We have to wait, in fact, until the very last moments of Greek thought to see rebellion begin to find expression among transitional thinkers—nowhere more profoundly than in the works of Epicurus and Lucretius. The appalling sadness of Epicurus already strikes a new note. It has its roots, no doubt, in the fear of death, with which the Greek mind was not unfamiliar. However, the pathos with which this fear is expressed is very revealing. “We can take precautions against all sorts of things; but so far as death is concerned, we all of us live like the inhabitants of a defenseless citadel.” Lucretius is more explicit: “The substance of this vast World is condemned to death and ruin.” Therefore, why postpone enjoyment? “We spend our lives,” writes Epicurus, “in waiting and we are also condemned to die.” Therefore, we must all enjoy ourselves. But what a strange form of enjoyment! It consists in sealing up the walls of the citadel, of making sure of a supply of bread and water and of living in darkness and silence. Death hovers over us, therefore we must prove Aurelius, Epicurus banishes death from existence. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
“Death has no meaning for us, for what is indefinable is incapable of feeling, and what is incapable of feeling has no means for us.” Is this equivalent of nothingness? No, for everything in this particular universe is matter, and death only means a return to one’s element. Existence is epitomized in a stone. The strange sensual pleasure of which Epicurus speaks consists, above all, in an absence of pain; it is the pleasure of a stone. By an admirable maneuver—which we shall find again in the great French classicists—Epicurus, in order to escape from destiny, destroys sensibility, having first destroyed its primary manifestation: hope. What this Greek philosopher says about the gods cannot be interpreted otherwise. All the unhappiness of human beings’ springs from the hope that tempts them from the silence of the citadel and exposes them on the ramparts in expectation of salvation. Unreasonable aspirations have no other effect than to reopen carefully bandaged wounds. That is why Epicurus does not deny the gods’ he banishes them, and so precipitately that man has no alternative but to retreat once more into the citadel. “The happy and immortal being has no preoccupations of his own and no concern with the affairs of others.” Lucretius goes even farther: “It is incontestable that the gods, by their very nature, enjoy their immortality in perfect peace, completely unaware of our affairs, from which they are utterly detached.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Therefore, let us forget the gods, let us never think about them, and “neither your thoughts during the day nor your dreams at night will ever be troubled.” A god who does not reward or punish, a god who turns a deaf ear, is the rebel’s only religious conception. However, while Vigny will curse the silence of his divinity, Epicurus considers that, as death is inevitable, silence on the part of man is a better preparation for this fate than divine words. This strange mind wears itself out in a sustained attempt to build ramparts around mankind, to fortify the citadel and to stifle the irrepressible cry of human hope. Only when this strategic retreat has been accomplished does Epicurus, like a god among men, celebrate his victory with a song that clearly denotes the defensive aspect of his rebellion. “I have escaped your ambush, O destiny, I have closed all paths by which you might assail me. We shall not be conquered either by you or by any other evil power. And when the inevitable hour of departure strikes, our scorn for those who vainly cling to existence will burst forth in this proud song: ‘Ah, with what dignity we have lived.’” The payoffs that come up in clinical practice can usually be reduced to four alternatives: be a loner, be a bum, go crazy, or drop dead. Drug or alcohol addiction is the pleasantest way to accomplish any of these. The child may interpret the decree in Martian or legal thinking, which is often to his advantage. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
In one case, where the mother told all the children they would end up in the state hospital, they all did. The girls ended up patients, and the boys as psychiatrists. Violence is a special kind of payoff, and occurs in “tissue scripts.” Tissue scripts are different from all others because their currency is human flesh, blood, and bones. It is probably that a child who has seen, caused, or suffered mayhem or bloodshed is different from other children and can never be the same again. If the parents turn the child out at an early age to fend for himself, he is naturally much concerned with money, and that often becomes the chief currency of his script and his payoff. If they berate him and tell him to drop dead, then words may become the script currency. The script currency must be distinguished from the script theme. The chief themes of life scripts are the same as those which are found in fairy tales: love, hate, gratitude, and revenge. Any of the currencies can be used to express any of these themes. The main question for the script analyst here is: “In how many ways can a parent tell a child to love forever, or to drop dead?” He can say it quite literally, “Long life!” in a toast or a prayer, or “Drop dead!” in a quarrel. It is difficult to realize or admit the almost incredible power which a mother’s words have over a child (or a wife’s over a husband, and vice versa). #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
In my experience, a considerable number of legitimate hospital admissions have taken place shortly after the patient was told by a loved one (or even a hated one) to drop dead. Sometimes when people are in such great confusion, they will also have difficulty with their doctor, although this is in a friendly way and the doctor does not think the individual is mad. People usually have some notion that the doctor knows, from the observable symptoms, what is going on in a person. However, sometimes people will find out that they do not know at all, and that there is a big discrepancy in their two views. The doctor is interested in the patient’s view, as possibly representing what went on in other patients that he did not know about and so did not understand them. Many patients are interested, at first, in trying to “correct” their view to the doctor’s view. However, that does not always work out. The patient’s view is, just as surely as his view is. So then a patient may try to find some way to fuse the two views. The goal is to try to make them come together, with some cockeyed notion that there “should” be only one view. An individual may exhaust himself in trying and give up. When both parties give up, the patient will see both views as different. There is nothing to do about it—no trying to force a reconciliation. When the patient lets them be, he will find that he can live with both of them in his head without confusion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
The patient will no longer drive himself crazy trying to discover which one is “right”—an impossible situation. Then things will begin to move in the direction of more acceptance, in a changing, fluid way. No more collisions in the head—or at least they are briefer when they recur in other circumstances. This acceptance leads to change, and explains to one his lifelong resistance to “acceptance” of the kind which keeps things “as they are.” No one any use for staying in a rut, whether the rut is straight or runs in a circle. That is dying—doing things to occupy one until it is time for the undertaker to pick up his body. He is out of touch with life, which moves and grows in directions unknown to him until he is within them. Living, he never knows where he is going next. The history of man is to go from belief (concept) to belief (concept) and each time to get stuck. The beliefs are useful (releasing) for awhile—a fresh way of looking at something, leading to change—but we accept them as reality and so do not notice when they become a limitation because we stop questioning. A final answer is the end, and that is death. When the feeling of dying (non-living) becomes too cramping for too many, it takes conflict and upheaval for a new belief (new way of looking at the World and life) to come into being. This has happened to many people. However, a new era can happen. No one can prove a theory correct by its consequences. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
If our theory does what we sent out to do, we are already very happy, and need not demand that beyond this we show that it is the only theory which achieves what we set out to do. The most impressive and successful technique used by DNA to increase the intelligence of social species is temporal caste or Beta Reality. Temporal caste refers to the process of maturation in which individuals metamorphosize from one form to another within their life spans. As we pass through developmental stages, we perform different survival functions at each life passage. Temporal casting in an ant hill assigns to the young the tasks of infant care. Slightly older ants are assigned housekeeping and hive-repair functions, metamorphosing into more external functions of exploration, food-gathering and warrior activity. Reflect on the wonderous neurological advantage of temporal caste. Mature ants know how to perform several caste functions, which means that they must have several gears or circuits in their nervous system. An organism that has passed through temporal metamorphic sequences is simply more intelligent. Temporal caste means polyphase brain and thus multiple Beta Realities. Caterpillar to butterfly; pollywog to frog; pre-teenager to adolescent. America is the ecological niche of the dominant species—dom-species—and predominant species—have become an evolutionary pinball machine in which hundreds of genetically different human gene pools and genetic castes bounce around, each caught up in genetic spirals of different Eastmancolor realities and developing new mutational styles in flashing neon. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
The most lovable aspect of human temporal casting is that each stage plays a part in the overall 24-element human molecule. Think of the human gene pool as a complex molecule that builds on new elements as it evolves. Temporal casting allows for temporal flexibility. Each generation is a wave moving through the gene pool, contributing to the locomotion of the gene pool through time. The stage one suckling, floating infant plays an important role in the human ant hill. The suckling infant is the glue that holds the enormous technological civilization together. The infant triggers domestic responses in adults. The baby’s task is to such tits, emit anguished-demanding yowls, dirty diapers, and gurgle winningly. The neonate performing its repertoire of activities is working just as hard as the autoworker or the dutiful parent. Sucking mother’s breast turns on hormones that keeps Mom at home. If Mom’s eleventh stage domesticated adult brain is not fed by gurgle cues and cries, the young mother will be down at the dance hall swinging her hips—or, horrors, competing with men. This the enormous neurogenetic significance of the Pill. It is no accident that the irresistible Women’s Liberation Movement followed the appearance of voluntary birth-control. Speaking of birth control, one thing people fail to realize is that climate change is natural, but it is also a symptom of a World that is overpopulated. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
The World was thought to be overpopulated 50 years ago, when it reached 5 billion people. There are now 8.14 billion people in the World. We need two Earths just to provide our resources and absorb our waste. The World population is growing by over 200,000 people a day. Around the year 2037, the World population could reach 9 billion, and by 2025, it is expected to reach 10 billion people. It is time the people look at the reality of the situation and governments, even in America, follow in China’s footsteps and limit the number of children people can have to two children, or at least recommend people stop having more than two kids. If we do not start radically changing the way we consume the planet, we will be heading for a complete collapse of our consumer society. At current trends, the planet cannot sustain 10 billion people and a World economy many times larger than today. Emotional enthusiasm is not enough. Sentimentality may enfeeble a person and mislead his impulses. To keep emotion under control is one thing; to keep it altogether out is another. It is well to be cautious about how we feel, but not to be so overcautious that the day comes when we can no longer feel at all. The emotional moods between which so many undisciplined men and women oscillate, with morbid despair at one end of the scale and golden joy at the other, belong to the ego. It is not enough to create these new ways of thinking. If they are to be maintained and not lost again, they must be supported by emotional steadiness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
A good actor is inwardly calm and self-possessed even in the most passionate moments of his roles. If he drops many previously held superstitions, such as that it is necessary to be liked by everyone he meets everywhere, he finds that this serenity can be kept. If he starts with wildly unbalanced over-appreciation, glorifying and magnifying only its good points, he will probably end embittered in inevitable disillusion. However, if this is pointed out to him, he is affronted. Two men may be blood-brothers and yet greedily fight each other where property inheritance is at stake; two other men may be close friends and yet treacherously betray each other where a woman’s love is at stake. Where personal desires or ambitions are at stake in the conventional World, such insincerities are always possible. Most basic of all human needs is the affirmation of life, the desire to continue living. When life is under threat, a person will do almost anything, break laws, kill others, and sacrifice wealth, to eliminate the threat and preserve existence. Such occasions are rare, but becoming more common in 2024. It will suffice merely to remind the reader that the wish to live is the most powerful determiner of action that we can know. A person may, however, decide to sacrifice his or her life for love of another or for country. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Paradoxically enough, a person can be persuaded that further existence is neither meaningful nor possible. A long period of suffering or joylessness may so dispirit someone that he or she resigns from life. This person may experience death by suicide, or yield to a sickness that would not be lethal had he retained a desire to live. Loss of zest for life and the choice for sickness or death can be induced in a person by misfortune and tragedy such as prolonged illness, failure, or an intense sense of lack of worth. When you consider that good choices of friends can help one through these otherwise lethal crises, one’s choice of friends and companions takes on added significance. Physical needs refer to food, drink, relief from pain and discomfort, and adequate shelter. Modern society does a better job of satisfying these needs than was true in earlier times, and so the quests for food, shelter, and comfort are less powerful determiners of everyday action than they used to be. However, when we experience a threat to our supplies, or to our access to supplies, of food and shelter, we may take desperate measures to secure these vital things. Its it not only the poets who think of love as having fundamental significance in one’s fate. Two fundamental kinds of love may be identified: natural or unconditional love, and earned or conditional love. The former is seen in the parent’s love for the child, which is unconditional, in that the love exists regardless of how “bad” the child is. It is not “earned,” in that the child ordinarily receives it without reciprocation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
In ordinary development this love proceeds to become reciprocal, with the maturing person recognizing that he must do things for the other person, parent, peer, or even later, lover. This is the earned, conditional love of most of contemporary human relationships—despite the myth of unconditional love among adults. The first phase of learning to love—receiving parental or adult love—is fundamental; a child needs it to survive, to grow, and to know how to carry on that most joyous of human activities: loving, giving and receiving love from peers. If the person has been deprived of parental love, his ability to participate in the adult conditional love may be seriously impaired. The early Freudian psychologists felt that such love was irreplaceable and that withholding such love by the parent led to serious personality problems in the child. Even if one is originally deprived, many contemporary psychologists, however, while they also feel such love to be critical, desirable, and nurturant, also feel that one can learn to love on an adult level, while an adult. It is nevertheless clear that parental love, unconditional and spontaneous, as seen in the dignity-devoid father or mother playing with and cooing to an infant, is crucially important for a happy adult life and for the healthy personality. When the response to these teachings is merely emotionalist, then it is also mostly untrustworthy. He who follows such a regime finds he is more and more the master of himself, better and better able to subdue passions. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
The mission of the Sacramento Fire Department is to be a well-respected and progressive public safety organization. They do this by fostering the mutual trust, respect, and support of the community through continuous improvement guided by the value of every life, integrity, courage, dedication, and compassion. “It was a cold night in January. I was home, we had just finished dinner and done the dishes, and I was going to sit down and watch a James Bond movie on TV. At the time I was working two nights a week in Sacramento training paramedics. I was walking from the kitchen, and I saw headlights on our front lawn. We have a small dirt driveway and a path to the house, but this person didn’t see that and drove onto the lawn. There was a knock on the door, and a woman, standing there said, ‘Excuse me, can I use your phone to call the fire department?’ She was very calm. I said, ‘I’m a fire chief, what seems to be the problem?’ She said, ‘There’s a house down the road that’s on fire, and I don’t know if there’s anybody in there or not.’ She wasn’t a local woman but was only renting a house nearby. She didn’t know the name of the road where the fire was. She agreed to take me back there and show me the way. I threw on a jacket and a pair of sneakers and ran down to my car. I radioed the fire control center at County Dispatch to activate the fire company and have the guys head out our way. In retrospect, I think that was an important move, to get the guys going. They all got there in reasonable speed. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
“I came around the bend on the road, and all of a sudden the house right there, only three quarters of a mile from my house. I knew the house and the neighbors who lived there. It was an old, rundown farmhouse, with a ramp in front. When I pulled up, the fire was through a corner of the house and already up through the roof. The whole second floor was going, venting through the roof. I radioed the position. I threw off my coat and sneakers, put on my turnout coat and bumber boots, grabbed my helmet from the back of the car. I went around the house, just to size it up. I knew I couldn’t make entry through the front, because the windows were popping, they were blowing out as I was going around the house. The first thing I thought was, I need water, I’ve got to have water. There was a creek across the road, with some ice on it. We had just gotten a new four-wheel drive pumper, and the only way it could get to the creek was to drive across a cornfield, but I was sure it could make it. I radioed those orders, and I was joined by X, my chief. Then Fire Dispatch radioed that they had reports that people were still inside the structure. The house was now a flaming ball, fire was showing all through the front of the house. X and I went running around to the back of the house, which was venting heavy black smoke. We heard murmuring inside, and X said, ‘My God, they’re in there.’ #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
‘We both made a run for the back door. He had no turnout gear on, just a helmet. As soon as I hit the door, I crawled. X didn’t get down quick enough and took it right in the face. He had to back out. There was a good thermofire in there, because as I dropped I felt the temperature go down. It was still breathable on the floor. The whole time I was screaming out to him, and he was screaming in to me, just to keep contact. I had no portable radio, no hose line, nothing. I was crawling in through the house, as far as I could go. I had my helmet on, with a flashlight strapped to it. But it was hard to see. Suddenly I was crawling right on top of this woman. Her eyes were open, she was just kind of sitting there, and there was a lock of black mucus on her face and coming out of her nostrils. I was dumped on, because earlier fires the only people I had been asked to go in and get were dead as doornails. So I grabbed her and moved her back across the floor to the door, and I got her out to X. While I was in there, I sensed there was still someone else in the room, nothing specific, just sensed it. So I said to X, ‘There’s someone else in there, and I’m going back in.’ So X took the woman and carried her down the road away from the house, because at that point the flames were banking down and melting the snow by the doorway there. So I went back in and crawled in the same direction that I had before. I came to a loose stack of firewood, and I was trying to get around it when I looked up and saw this big, big woman standing in the corner, pinned there by the flames, which were not about head level. I reached up for her, and probably because of smoke inhalation she suddenly went down like a load was out. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
“So I grabbed her by the scruff of her nightgown behind her head, I cradled her head in my right arm, which is my dominant arm, and I turned to go back out. I didn’t have far to go, because this room was a small add-on to the back of the house. But now the whole wall through which I had come, instead of being smoky, was all of a sudden just a wall or orange. It’s the orange that firefighters look for when they’re chasing smoke, but it was the last thing I wanted to see, because I wanted to get out with this lady. It was so intense I really couldn’t figure out what it was. I said, ‘The door has got to be here.’ I felt trapped, and for a second, I thought, ‘This might be it. This might be the last time.’ But X and I were still yelling to each other, and he knew I was still okay because I was hollering to him from the floor. I yelled, ‘I got her. I’m coming out. He said, ‘Ed, this way. Come this way.’ I wasn’t particularly gentle with the woman. I think I had her torso airborne, and when I got to the door I ad to be basically standing. I didn’t crawl out the door. I lunged through the door, the woman and I locked together, going through a wall of flame. I don’t think it was a flashover. Sometimes fire just consumes. I’m glad I didn’t hit the frame of the door. When we hit the ground, I bounced away. I was face down on the snow. I can still feel the coolness of that, going from fire into cold. I lay there, and there was a very heavy feeling in my chest. A girl I used to date was there, with her whole family. She came to me and rolled me over. She said, ‘Y,’ I said, ‘Z.’ I didn’t say anything else to Z, because I knew I had to keep going. The women I had rescued were badly hurt, and there was no EMS on the scene yet. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
“I got up and made my best time over to my car. I grabbed a resuscitator from the back of the car. By that time another emergency medical technician was there, A, chief of the local rescue squad. Without two resuscitators, we gave oxygen to both of these ladies. The ambulance was there very quickly after that, and they were off to UCD Medical Center. X almost talked me into going to the hospital. We both had inhaled smoke. And when X had gotten hurt, his helmet fell off, and by the time he got back to it, it had burned up. We had trouble with the water and ice, and I really felt I had to stay. From a firefighting tactical standpoint, we had a bad time. We lost a lot of water. The ultimate sin in rural firefighting is to lose water. We ended up losing the house. The first woman I brought out was a cripple, a paraplegic. She had had multiple sclerosis for years. It was clear, in retrospect, that the other woman was probably her companion. She probably dragged her as far as she could until she became disoriented and trapped. Her legs were burned. For a couple of days I knew I had gotten it pretty good, a very tight feeling in my chest, like my lungs were made of concrete. But I wasn’t burned, I had no long-term effects from it. There was only a hole in the back of turnout cost. Don Quixote found his frightening giants were only windmills after all. So exaggerated are many of our fears.” #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
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. 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 23 of 23
Ascent at Montelena
11977 Cobble Brook Drive, Rancho Cordova, California 95742
Nothing is more important than family and having enough space to enjoy each other. The well-thought-out Plan 4 gives growing families with young children, teens, or grandparents a place of their own and plenty of room to spend time together. The first-floor bed and bath are perfect for the second generation, the loft gives extra space for the kids, and the den is ideal for those working from home. https://www.pulte.com/homes/california/sacramento/rancho-cordova/ascent-at-montelena-210916
The Needle or the Gun?
Many people are seeking love, but sometimes it is infiltrated by hate. We all have our desperate needs. We need freedom from spiritual confusion and Worldly darkness. We need to know for ourselves. One of the great truths of the Restoration is that the Heavens are open—that we too can receive light and knowledge from on high. However, we must be wary of a spiritual trap. Some people believe that with the right dope and good pictures in their heads that they do not need anything more. The prisons are filled with heroin vibrations. Junkies involved in the ancient cult devotion to Mother Opium, and the graves are full of people devoted to Father Fentanyl. Some go to prison with certain naïve, liberal hypothetical prejudices against self-defense. Insulated from the threat of violence, starvation, disease, brute force, they are nonviolent, seeped in middle class serenity not shared by the majority of the World population. Now, they have to figure out what they will do when armed violence threatens their life and their freedom. The needle or the gun? Often, individuals enter prison with a fear of Lady H. (heroin). Logically, they know that no one has the right to put anything in their bodies. However, they maintain a moral superiority about drug users. This is not good because often times when we judge people, we will learn why they suffer the way they do. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
“Judge not, lest ye be judged,” reports Matthew 7.1. Your brain controls everything your body does from breathing to calculus. It is as high-tech as it gets. The various parts of your brain work in a miraculous combination to run your entire body. However, drug abuse can seriously alter how your brain and body work. Harmful narcotics change the way you think and feel by posing as unhealthy substitutes for chemicals that help your brain run normally. These mind-altering drugs can cause addictions that are not easily overcome. And even one-time use can be harmful. After just trying heroin once, every cell in your body whispers her name. One-time drug abuse can be harmful, and even lethal. Continued recreational use of drugs causes brain damage and increasingly compromises your ability to make decisions. Habit-forming drugs not only affect your body, but as you surrender your body and will to them, they will also destroy the other command center of your body—your spirit. Choosing to disobey the Word of Wisdom will lead you away from the Lord. Trying drugs “just once” can physically harm you in some cases. However, “just once” will always harm you spiritually. Narcotic addiction serves the design of eternal death, for it disrupts the channel to the holy spirit of truth. Addiction has the capacity to disconnect the human will and nullify moral agency. It can rob one of the power to decide. Agency is too fundamental a doctrine to be life in such jeopardy. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Stay away from all drugs that are not prescribed by your doctor. Drugs that are not meant for you, can absolutely destroy you. They will take away your powers of reason. They will enslave you in a vicious and terrible way. They will destroy your mind and your body. They will build within you such cravings that you will do anything to satisfy them. The same goes for abusing prescription drugs or any other addictive substance, including alcohol and tobacco. Each of us has had times in our lives when we have made poor choices. We are all in desperate need of the redemptive power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Each of us must repent of any rebellion. “For I the Lord cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance.” He cannot because he knows what it takes to become like Him. Many of us have allowed weakness to develop in our character. Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, we, like the Ammonites, can build spiritual fortifications between ourselves and any past mistakes that Worldly people attempt to exploit. The spiritual protections built around the Ammonite fathers blessed and strengthened themselves, their families, their country, and future generations. The same can be true with us. So how do we build these eternal fortifications. The first step must be sincere, thorough, and complete repentance. Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, each of us can become clean and the burden of our rebellion will be lifted. Remember, repentance is not punishment. It is hope-filled path to a more glorious future. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
The ancients, even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one’s head against a wall. Therefore, the only coherent act of rebellion was to commit suicide (not recommended). Destiny, for the Greeks, was a blind force to which one submitted, just as one submitted to the forces of nature. The acme of excess to the Greek mind was to beat the sea with rods—an act of insanity worthy only of barbarians. Of course, the Greeks described excess, since it exists, but they gave it its proper place and, by doing so, also defined its limits. Achilles’ defiance after the death of Patroclus, the imprecations of the Greek tragic heroes cursing their fate, do not imply complete condemnation. (Edipus knows that he is not innocent. He is guilty in spite of himself; he is also part of destiny. He complains, but he says nothing irreparable. Antigone rebels, but she does so in the name of tradition, in order that her brothers may find rest in the tomb and that the appropriate rites may be observed. In her case, rebellion is, in one sense, reactionary. The Greek mind has two aspects and in its meditations almost always re-echoes, as counterpoint to its most tragic melodies, the eternal words of Edipus, who, blind and desperate, recognizes that all is for the best. Affirmation counterbalances negation. Even when Plato anticipates, with Callicles, the most common type of Nietzschean, even when the latter exclaims: “But when a man appears who has the necessary character…he will escape, he will trample on our formulas, our magic spells, our incantations, and the laws, which are all, without exception, contrary to nature. Our slave has rebelled and has shown himself to be the master”—even then, though he rejects law, he speaks in name of nature. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
So long as anyone lives in a state of uncontrolled emotion, and especially of ungoverned desire, so long does he remain unready for entry into the higher consciousness. For he is unable to bring his mind into that unruffled balance state which is necessary to reflect like a mirror the truth and peace of that consciousness. When anyone is carried away by an emotion, in most cases it happens before he knows it. This is why some sort of training in self-awareness, self-observation, and self-control becomes a requisite. If the day itself is reviewed at night, all of these can be practiced during the day at odd times more easily and effectively. The emotional agitations will certainly come to an end when he finds his real inner peace, for he cannot have the two together. To have the peace he has to give up the agitations. There will be no relief from this continual oscillation between opposite moods until he reaches the sixth degree. His capacity to recover quickly from, and react positively to, the unexpected shocks of life will be one of the benefits of this cultivation of calmness. When uncontrolled, emotion may be very destructive to oneself and to others, but controlled it becomes constructive and beneficial to all. If they uselessly seek to achieve moral perfection, they may hopefully seek to achieve inner peace. The man who holds to this discipline of the emotions will not be easily embarrassed when friends desert him or enemies attack. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
Where the hands of another man may may tremble, his heart bleed, and his eyes fill with tears, the philosopher will know peace. The impression which other persons make on him are to be separated from the emotional and personal feelings they arouse in him. How else is he to know the truth about them? The practice of calmness frees a man from the fretful, nervous tension so many carry around with them; he brings a pleasant air of repose with him. This coolness where other men might see them with passion or emotion, this detachment from events and persons, things and places, is exacerbating to those who misunderstand it. Why was it required of candidates for entry into the Pythagorean School of Wisdom that they be of a “contented disposition”? Why does the ancient Christian Scripture forbid the teaching of the deepest knowledge to one “who is not tranquil in the mind”? The practice of calmness means that no emotions are squandered, no negative thoughts entertained. Walter Hilton, the medieval English religious mystic, remarked on the fact that the advanced Christian is no longer bubbling with religious devotion or weeping with religious fear, since emotional feelings are subject to changes, hence unstable, for he “is now wholly at peace, and there is little outward indication of fervour.” The pathological resentment in their hearts contributes toward the ideological resistance in their heads to truth. He who values inner peace will resist being swept away by strong negative emotions, will try to keep in command when the pressure of fear, anxiety, wrath, or hate threatens this peace. As we win control of our feelings, they become less a source of negative thoughts and more of upholding ones. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
We use the term “emotionalist” in the same derogatory sense that we use “intellectualist.” Only an unflinching devotion to truth and an unyielding exercise of reason can see through these insincerities of sentimentality. Intelligent generosity is philosophical. Sentimental generosity is not. So long as he mistakes his own longings for actualities, so long will disappointment wait for him in the end. If we let it stay in the mind long enough and feed it often enough, a worry can easily become an obsession. Human power in controlling the emotions consists solely in the Understanding, it follows that no one rejoices in blessedness because he has controlled his lusts, but contrariwise his power of controlling his lusts arises from the blessedness itself. The passage from jealousy to hatred is not a long one. The negative, discordant, and disruptive emotions require treatment by psychological means just as much as the physical body may require treatment by medical, surgical, herbal, naturopathic, magnetic, or manipulative means. The first step is to deny every form of outward expression to those emotions which are definitely harmful to his spiritual progress: to resentments, wraths, envies, and hates. If he let them envelop him in a haze of excitement or of emotion, how can he discover the truth that some of his strongest desire arise out of imagined needs? #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
If the value of a calm stability in our emotional life could be sufficiently known and appreciated, we would have less unhappiness, less tragedy, and less inefficiency. In moments of usual calm, he may recognize the truth of these statements, but never in moments of personal agitation, whether it be painful or pleasurable agitation. He must learn to master his baser emotions and to free himself from emotional frailties which, while not objectionable in common everyday life, may weakened his capacity to comprehend the truth. The free indulgence of undesirable personal emotions leads to neuroticism. Those who most need the excellent discipline of checking such emotions by the power of will and eventually extinguishing them by the activity of reason, are unfortunately those who are least ready to submit to it. If he asks himself whether when dying he would like to remember that he had reacted to it in a negative way, when he could have reacted optimistically, he may put each irritating situation of his life in a truer perspective. Since a kind of order reigned in Nature, it should be made by men to reign among themselves. They ought to live in an orderly manner and thus they could live in civilized harmony. This requires them to control emotions and not allow themselves to be swept hither and thither. The individual who is touch and irritable should be lest his traits flare up into open anger, still more least anger grow by degrees into intense hate and aggressive spite. These neurotics seeking comfort, who invade mysticism to its determent, display their self-willed, petty egotism by resenting the discipline of their emotions, and thus contribute to their own further suffering. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
Th man who is constantly petulant and consistently pessimistic obstructs the inflow of higher forces. Structural caste, or alpha reality, involves the genetic division into specialized functions—such as worker hum-ant, warrior hum-ant, drone hum-ant, and builder hum-ant-that characterize hive organisms like social insects and civilized hum-ants. Structural caste in insects is easily identified by visible morphological-ana-tomical-differences. In humans’ neurological differences are more important in determining the behaviour of each caste. Obviously, highly complex neurological differences characterize insect hives. It may well be that individual insects have more illusions of individuality than we credit them. The nervous systems of juvenile worker-ants are imprinted with specific culture cues. Each corridor of each ant hill has its highly characteristic odors, textures and humidities that identify the inhabitants. We are reflex-chauvinists when we naively deny that ant hill cultures—100 million years in building—offer their caste members any less sense of individual and hive uniqueness than is offered the average hum-ant. Structural caste is genetic-anatomical templating that produces involuntary-robot behaviours. For example, a drone bee looks different from worker bees and queen bees. Structural caste differences characterize homo sapiens. Male and female—is one structural caste difference. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
Big, muscled, hyper-adrenalized aggressive are a separate caste—the warriors, the Amazons. Danity, fragile, nurturant minister—types are another caste. Chestmasters like Bobby Fisher, FBI top-cops like J. Edgar Hoover, feisty politicians like Bella Abzug and sultry singers like Aaliyah Haughton and actresses like Marilyn Monroe are caste-exemplars. The caste distinctions are blatantly visible. It is interesting to note that politically repressive countries forbid talk about genetic caste-differences. Discussion of genetic types is taboo among modern humans. For example, Marxism held that society determined behaviour. Caste theories, to a socialist, reek of elitist racism. Although politically incorrect, these differences exist nonetheless and were taken for granted by earlier societies. In western democracies, the Intellectual-Scientists-Caste denies caste differences because of the hive commitment to equality, the revulsion against Nazi, Arab and Zionist genetic fanaticism makes caste discussions verboten among liberals—and most scientists are liberals. By contrast uneducated, lower-class people readily accept the reality of racial and caste-differences. Country bumpkins and illiterate farmers are aware of the effects of breeding and thus are far more ethnologically sophisticated than liberal Nobel Prize laureates. Common sense suggests that there are a limited number of basic genetic castes that characterize the human species, and that new caste differences will emerge as homo sapiens continue its accelerated differentiated evolution. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
Transactional analysts did not start out with the idea that human life plans are constructed like myths and fairy tales. They simply observed that childhood decisions, rather than grown-up planning, seemed to determine the individual’s ultimate destiny. No matter what people thought or said they were doing with their lives, they seemed driven by some inner compulsion to strive for a final payoff that was often different from what they put down in their autobiographies or employment resumes. Many who said they wanted to make money lost it, while all around them others were growing rich. Some who claimed to be seeking love found hate even in the one who loved them. Parents who declared they did everything to make their children happy ended up with addicts, convicts, and children who suffered mysteriously from death by suicide. Righteous Christian Bible students committed murders and child rapes. These were the contradictions which had existed since the beginning of the human race; they were the ones that operas sang about and that sold newspapers. It gradually became clear that while none of this made Adult sense, it did make sense to the Child part of the personality. That was the part that liked myths and fairy tales, and believed that that was the way the World once was or could be. It was not surprising, therefore, to find that when children planned their lives, they often followed the plot of a favourite story. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
The real surprise was that these plans persisted for twenty, forty, or eighty years, and that in the end they usually prevailed over “common sense.” Working backward from a death by suicide, car crash, delirium tremens, jail sentence, or divorce, and ignoring the “diagnosis” to find out what really happened, soon showed that these outcomes were nearly all planned because the age of six. The plans or scripts had certain elements in common, which formed a “script apparatus.” The same apparatus seemed to be at work in good scripts: creators, leaders, heroes, venerable grandfathers, and people eminent in their professions. This apparatus had to do with how the life time was structured, and turned out to be the same as the apparatus used in fairy tales for that purpose. In such stories, the programming is done by giants and giantesses, ogres and witches, fairy godmothers and grateful beasts, and sulky magicians of either gender. In real life, all these parts are played by the parents. Psychotherapists know more about “bad” scripts than about “good” ones because they are more dramatic and people spend more time talking about them. Dr. Freud, for example, cites in numerable case histories of losers, and about the only winders in his works are Moses, Leonardo da Vinci, and himself. Only a few winners bother to find out how they got that way, while losers are often very anxious to know so that they can do something about it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
As we deal with losing scripts, where are knowledge is quite precise, keep in mind that the script apparatus consists of items, translated by the child into Martian imperatives. The parents tell the child how to end his life. “Get lost!” and “Drop dead!” are death decrees. So is “Die rich.” “You’ll end up like your (alcoholic) father,” is a life sentence. Such a command is called the script payoff, or curse. They then give him an unfair negative command that will keep him from lifting the curse: “Do not bother me!” or “Do not act smart!” (=Get lost!) or “Stop complaining!” (=Drop dead!”). This is the script injunction or stopper. Injunctions are given by Controlling Parent or crazy Child ego state. They encourage behaviour that will lead into the payoff: “Have a drink!” or “You are not going to let him get away with that!” This is called the script provocation, or come-on. It comes from a mischievous Child ego state, or demon, in the parent, and is usually accompanied by a “ha ha.” They also give him a prescription for filling in time while waiting for the action. This is in the form of a moral precept. “Work hard!” may mean “Work hard all week so you can get drunk on Saturday night.” “Take care of every penny!” may mean “Take care of every penny so you can lose it all at once.” This is the antiscript slogan, and comes from a nurturing Parent ego state. In addition, they teach him what he has to know in real life to carry out the script: how to mix drinks, how to keep books, how to cheat. This is the pattern or program, a form of Adult instruction. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
The child, on his part, has urges and impulses which fight the whole script apparatus that is laid on him by his parents. “Knock on the door!” (vs. Get lost), “Act smart!” “Take off!” (vs. Work hard), “Spend it all now!” (vs. Save every penny), “Do it wrong.” These are called scripty impulses, or the demon. Tucked away somewhere is a way to life the curse. “You can succeed after you’re forty.” This spellbreaker is called the antiscript or internal release. However, often the only antiscript is death. “You will get your reward in Heaven.” Exactly the same apparatus for structuring time is found in myths and fairy tales. The payoff or curse: “Get lost!” (Hansel and Gretel) or “Drop dead!” (Snow White and Sleeping Beauty). The injunction or stopper: “Do not be too curious!” (Adam and Eve, Pandora). The provocation or come-on: “Prick your finger with a spindle, ha ha.” (Sleeping Beauty). The counterscript slogan: “Work hard until you meet the prince!” (Kari Woodengown), or “Be nice until she says she loves you!” (Beauty and the Beast). The pattern or program: “Be kind to animals and they will help you in time of need.” (Pretty Goldilocks). The impulse or demon: “I will take just one look!” (Bluebeard). The Antiscript or spellbreaker: “You can stop being a frog when she throws you against the wall.” (The Frog Prince), or “You will be free after twelve years of labout.” (Hercules). #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
This is the anatomy of the script apparatus. The curse, the stopper, and the come-on form the script controls, and the other four items can be used to fight them. However, the child lives in a fairy-tale World, beautiful, mediocre, or gruesome, and believes mainly in magic. Thus, he seeks a magic way out, through superstition and fantasies. When that does not work, he falls back on the demon. However, the demon has one peculiarity. When the demon in the child says, “I am going to defy you, ha ha!” the demon in the parent says “That is exactly what I want you to do, ha ha.” Thus, the script provocation and the scripty impulses, the come-on and the demon, work together to bring about the loser’s doom. The parent wins when the child loses, and the child loses by trying to win. Interpretation of experience is another matter. It is easy to go haywire on that, particularly if I insist on one interpretation. When I was sick, my sickness was diagnosed “organic”—the somatic part of psychosomatic—but I did not feel sure about that, so I studied myself. I discovered that while I could decide for either psychic or somatic, as soon as I removed my decision there were both—interacting now as they had through all my life. Next, I asked me if I had brough my sickness upon myself (as some people said). I went into this deeply and found that I could build an equally good case for my sickness having been dealt out to me as a punishment (to make me learn). Or it could be retribution. Or simply cause and effect. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
In a groping, unclear way, I wrote to Aldous Huxley “Perhaps it is all of them and they are all the same thing seen differently.” My difficulty in accepting the truth of my own discovery was purely and simply that I did not know anyone else who saw it as I did. Each person had one view, and that was the way that I was supposed to see it. When I said (experimentally) that my sickness was organic, some people got mad. When I said that it was psychosomatic, others got mad. When I said that it was both, everyone got mad. The effect of everyone being mad at me was to make me feel that I must be “mad” myself. When I tried to express my stumbling beginning knowing that the same experience can be seen in many ways and expressed in different concepts or theories, any of which may be useful to me if I like it and use it wisely, then I was “mad” to other people. “Willam’s smart, but if he thinks he knows more than the experts, he’s crazy.” Which experts? At that time, I didn’t know the ones who would agree with me. I hunted them out, over a period of years, to prove to me that I was not crazy, because when I thought that I was, I became a little crazy—mixed up and everyone else around me was seeing. I am no longer troubled about being “crazy”—for probably the first time in my life—because I know that I can become confused, but also, I can become unconfused. If I let myself to along with it, I can let myself go into confusion with confidence and I will come out all right. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
Many followed the idea that loyalty is more essential than success. This point of view is entirely false. Loyalty in itself is not something that can be seen. It is best expressed through accomplishment. I am no longer afraid that this in itself may be crazy—to let myself go into a kind of madness, to explore it—no matter how many other people may think that it is. Without the fear, there is nothing to be afraid of. I can accept my own experience and know it to be me. It is often difficult to distinguish between a need and a want. Wants are infinite in number, and they change moment by moment. I want an Icon yacht, but I do not need one to survive right now. I may, however, need a yacht to achieve the status that is essential to me. Wants are a person’s interpretation of what he or she needs in order to achieve happiness or wellbeing. Needs are what scientists agree a person requires to sustain life and to foster growth of desirable human potentialities. Incentives, rewards, and reinforcers are what other people believe will move you. A man needs food. His wide knows he really likes rare roast beef. She may reward (or reinforce) his attention to her wishes by cooking it for him. Whoever possess the means of gratifying needs and wants has power to influence action, this makes a person vulnerable to being controlled by others in ways that can undermine personal freedom and dignity. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
A person is vulnerable in this way, however, only when others know what he or she needs or wants—what it takes to “buy” that person. Competence at gratifying one’s basic needs can protect one from being controlled by others. There are situations in which self-concealment may be required in order to elude control. If a person wishes the love of others, on the other hand, they must “open” themselves and disclose their needs and wants to the beloved ones, who can then act in their behalf. It takes trust to accept the love of another. The other must earn this trust by being trustworthy. What do persons need for a healthy personality? What does one need for oneself in order to be free to give to the World as well as take from it? Maslow presents an authoritative analysis of needs. He stated a need can be adjudged basic if: its deprivation breeds illness (mental or physical), gratification of the need prevents illness, identification and gratification of the need restores health in a person who is presently ill, the deprived person prefers gratification of this need over any other, under conditions of free choice. The need is not in a state of tension or privation in healthy persons. A subjective feeling of yearning, lack, or desire prevails when the need is not fulfilled. Gratification of the need feels good; gratification produces a subjective sense of healthy wellbeing. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
There is further implied the idea that when the need is met, the person does not think about it until the next time it arises; he or she is free for other pursuits. While there are may systems of needs, Maslow’s hierarch is perhaps the best known. Without specifying which of the needs are explicitly basic, the system does imply that the lower needs are prepotent, that is, that they must be satisfied before the other, higher needs can be taken care of. Maslow’s list from basic to higher order is as follows: Physiological needs, safety needs, belongingness and love, self-esteem, self-actualization, cognitive and conative, aesthetic needs. Keeping in mind the entire rage of needs, one may get a perspective on the importance of the basic needs. The concept of the basic need is easier to demonstrate with animals than it is with humans. In animals the maternal drive is usually considered to be the most fundamental. Even Maslow’s system for humans has been challenged by some recent research suggesting that the hierarchy of needs is not unassailable as theory. Nevertheless, the system is useful in providing a perspective over the whole need system of the human. Opinions among biologists and psychologists vary about the precise number basic needs in humans. Agreement can be reached on what is required for sheer physical survival, but not on what humans need to fulfill their unfathomed potentialities. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
The City of Sacramento Fire Department proactively and aggressively protects life, property, and the environment with a culture of safety and leadership. They serve all with integrity, respect, and professionalism. “I was working the night shift when an alarm went off. The street side of this old loft building was a lamp store, filled with heavy smoke and high heat. We started to go in for our salvage operation, and one of the firefighters said, ‘There’s no sense going up there because the heat is too high.’ So we backed down. There was nothing for us to do at that point because the fire hadn’t been located yet, just the heavy smoke and high heat. So our officer sent three of us around to the Street side, Pete Pearly, Bob Sampson, and myself. The fire companies came around too, Engine X and Ladder X and one other. One of the battalion chiefs told us to force the door of a store on that side of the loft building, a lingerie store. We did that, and the store was clear. No smoke. We came out and went next door to Wonder Drug. The door was already forced, and there were fire companies in the cellar. Y was one of the lieutenants there. The drugstore was clear. We went down in the cellar to see if there was any salvage operation that we could do. There was nothing. The cellar was clear of smoke. The firemen were pulling ceilings in the back where there was a cinder block partition. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
“We went back upstairs to the drugstore level and started to check it out. We felt the walls, and the wall in the rear was very hot. But there was no smoke. There was a fire in the walls and flooring, but nothing was visible. I learned later that nine successive layers of flooring had been laid there, and that acted as insulation for a time. As we were going out, a chief’s aide was coming in, and we told him what we found. He said, ‘Yeah, we’re brining a line in.’ A couple of guys from X Engine were brining the line in, there was a probie and a guy outside the door feeding the line in. I knew the location of these men as I passed them. We walked out, went next door, and started up the staircase to go above the fire to see fi there was anything we could do, and a fellow from A Truck said, ‘Patrol, get out of there, the heat’s building up, and it sounded like there were cracks.’ We took off down the stairs, and the minute we hit the street, the drugstore just lit up. Heavy flames. A pure white flame. Super heat. Guys were tugging on the line Engine X had taken into the basement. We ran over and tried to help, but we couldn’t pull it. Guys from Ladder X were coming out. Lieutenant Y was burned on the ears and I don’t know where else. Everything happened so fast. Nobody knew what really happened, or who was in there, or if anybody was missing. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
“I tried to tell some chief that I had an idea of where the men were, but in the excitement, he seemed to be devastated. I didn’t realize the building had collapsed. I didn’t hear anything, all I saw was the pure white flame coming out. So firefighter A, B, and I went to the store on the other side of the drugstore, which was a camera store, and we went down in the cellar. I know there was a truck company in the drug store basement, Ladder X, and an engine company, I didn’t know which. I figured, if they’re where I think they are and if they’re alive, we can breach this wall and get to them. There was a wooden partition along that wall, and when we got behind it, we saw that the foundation was built of boulders. We started at it with a pickax, and Chief C heard the sounds. He came down, thinking they were tapping noises from the trapped men alive in the cellar next door. The didn’t see us at first behind the partition, then we showed ourselves and explained what was going on. Then our own officer came down and he had me go up and talk to Commissioner D. I drew maps of the drugstore layout and showed where the men might be. We went to the basement next door again and went over it again with Chief C. I had no pencil or paper, so I drew my map on a cardboard box with a nail. I really didn’t feel that the men were dead at that time. I thought there was hope. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
“Then the chief said, ‘All right, everybody get out of here.’ I started to leave, and he said, ‘No, Patrol, you stay.’ The rescue company came down, I remember it was definitely Rescue X and may another company. I pointed out to them the two places where I though the men might be. They brought down jackhammers, and they had to rig slings with rope from the beams, so that they could wield the heavy jackhammers against the wall. When they opened the hole, that’s where a couple of men were. D from Ladder E, I remember seeing him. And Lieutenant F. They were burned, legs and arms. So we found a couple right off the bat. As the night went on, and the next day, they started to pick them out from upstairs, too. There were twelve who died in this fire, one the largest in the history of the Sacramento Fire Department at one incident. I stayed on the scene for two days, just doing what everyone else was, making a chain, passing debris, until the men were found. I saw a lot of love, a lot of family. There were firemen there from all the districts. It was like one whole family just came together like bees to a hive. They all took their turn on the line. It was a real sad scene. To see six firemen carrying out another dead brother in a wire basket and everybody taking their helmets off as the body passed by was sad. Some of them—grown men—were crying though most of them didn’t know the guy. It didn’t matter, he was their brother. Like being in a battle and seeing one of your comrades go down, you take care of your own. Outsiders don’t realize, even my wife doesn’t understand the comradeship and the closeness. There’s really a family in the fire department. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
“I saw a fireman’s wife outside, crying. Later, after the funerals, she took the time to write me a letter, thanking me. I really think that going through the wall was the quickest way to get to the trapped men. When Chief C wrote me up for a department medal, he stated in his report that I had pinpointed exactly where the men were. That made me feel good. I had felt bad initially when I was not acknowledged by a member of the fire department. Later on, I saw the reason: it was just the excitement and confusion. I think he was in a state of shock himself. The ordeal took its toll on me. I went back to the fire patrol house and stayed there for a whole day, sleeping. At the funeral, the fire patrol was stationed up front, right in the front of Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament. I guess that was kind of an honor. To this day, I couldn’t say if it was a rainy day or foggy or what. It was sad to hear the muffled drums and to see the lines and lines of firefighters who came from all over the country. It was a big shock for everyone to see the apparatus carrying the deceased members. It was quite an experience.” We all have life events that, when we recall them years later, acquire new and important meaning. There is a great benefit in seeing one’s treasures through someone else’s eyes. My concern is that we often take for granted the unique and valuable blessings that we have of membership in the Lord’s Church, and in a state of underappreciation, we are more likely to be complacent about our Church membership and are less valiant contributors to building a community of Saints. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
We are blessed with a great and noble heritage that offers a pathway to truth that veers dramatically from the so-called ways of the World. We need to remind ourselves about the value of our heritage so we do not underestimate its worth. The Sacramento Fire Department has a firm adherence to a code of moral and ethical standards: Honesty, Trust, and Accountability. You can help save lives by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. Also, it is important to raise your children to love America and to be patriotic. By having pride in America, and purchasing American made cars and other goods and services, we can make America a creditor nation again and ensure that this sacred land will be enjoy by your family for generations to come. Teaching children to love God and Jesus Christ will also preserve our American heritage and allow us to make sure our children are set on a path that will lead them to success and help them reserve a seat in Heaven. The Ten Commandments in the Christian Bible are a good guideline of how everyone should live. Furthermore, by respecting law and order, we will ensure the tranquility of this great nation and make sure that we are setting an exemplary example for other nations to follow. And by treating others with dignity, respect, and compassion, this will ensure that we are following the golden rule, “Do on to others as you would have them do on to you,” reports Luke 6.31. By following the golden rule, we will attract more of God’s grace into our lives and others will treat with respect. 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. Earthly longings bid retire, quench the passions’ baneful fire; to the wayward, sin-oppressed, bring thou the divine behest: Thou shalt rest. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
The Winchester Mystery House
The basement is calling! It says to send some snacks…. and your bestie for emotional support! 🔦
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/
Should I Use Force to Escape Death?
The joyful news for anyone who desires to be rid of the consequences of past poor choices is that the Lord sees weaknesses differently than He does rebellion. Whereas the Lord warns that unrepented rebellion will bring punishment, when the Lord speaks of weaknesses, it is always with mercy. Prison often leads to thoughts of violence. Should I use force to escape death? Is self-defense against the lethal machine an act of violence? Two thousand years of Christian strict and rigid doctrines? Politics keeps Christ on the cross? Hummingbirds spin by ripping off insects. Cycles of eating and being eaten. Spanish conquistadores and Norman crusaders and Southern Baptists. Should we resist? If an enslaved person defends against the slave master, is he violent? Passive submission to slavery? Personal suicide? Racial genocide? Socrates in the hemlocked death cell? Would I kill to be free? Some people learn to deal with their circumstances. They come up with escape plans that are not criminal. They are occult. Powers of consciousness. They leave the physical plane entirely. Many people do not understand what they are doing here on Earth in physical bodies anyway. Living as a beautiful soul is the goal. The idea is focusing of consciousness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
As a ritual, these people meet regularly. Some night, when the astrological situation is perfect, these individuals form a circle with someone in the middle, and they center their cosmic consciousness with and with the group as a launching pad, they ascend into the astral plane. From whence Blessed One, God will in his mercy and compassion send down assistance to them. Usually, there are ten middle-aged men in prison garb under a full moon chanting the individual in the center over the fence. This is a form of “Martian thinking.” Martian thinking enables the child to find out what the parents “really” want, that is, what they will respond most favourably to. By using it effectively, he insures his survival and expresses his love for them. In this way he builds up the ego state known as the Adapted Child. The Adapted Child wants and needs to behave in an adapted way, and tried to avoid nonadaptive behaviour or even nonadaptive feelings, which will get less than the best responses from those around him. Meanwhile his self-expressed or Natural Child must be held in leash. The balance between the two forms of behaviour is held by the Adult in the child, which must behave like an exceedingly agile computer in order to decide what is necessary and what is permissible from moment to moment in each situation. This Adult becomes very adept at figuring out what people want or will tolerate, or at worst, what they will get the most excited or angry about, or perhaps feel the most guilty, helpless, scared, or hurt about. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Thus, the Adult in the child is a keen and perceptive student of human nature, and is therefore called the Professor. In fact, he knows more practical psychology and psychiatry than any grown-up professor does, although after many years of training and experience, a grown-up professor may know as much as thirty-three percent of what he knew when he was four years old. After he has learned Martian thinking, so that he has a sound Adapted Child, the Professor turns his attention to egal thinking, in order to find more ways for the Natural Child to express himself. Legal thinking starts during the plastic years, but reaches its fullest development in later childhood, and if encouraged by the parents may persist into maturity, giving rise to lawyers. Legal thinking is colloquially called cop-out thinking. (“Cop-out” has several meanings: to arrest, to settle for a lesser sentence, such as a “cop-plea”, to talk too much “fink out, and to find an alibi or a crooked way out.) Cop-out thinking is particularly common in personal sexual ethics. Thus, a girl who is instructed by her parents not to lose her virginity may have mutual masturbation, or perform fellatio or a variety of other sexual acts which enable her to obey the letter of the parental law, although she may know that the parents “really meant” not to get sexy. (However, if she gets pregnant or an STI, then she is in hot water.) #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
If the parents warn her against “pleasures of the flesh,” she may have intercourse without orgasm. (But that is still a violation of the Law of Chastity.) The classical sexual cop-out was that used by the prostitutes of Paris at the beginning of this century. (It may still be used, for all I know.) When they went to confession, they were excused for their profession on the grounds that it was a matter of business, providing they did not get turn on. Only if they enjoyed it was it treated as a sin. What parents do is give a prohibition which they think will cover the situation, not giving enough credit to the shrewdness which they themselves have usually taught to their offspring. Thus, a boy who is told “Do not mess around with women” may take this as a permission to mess around with other boys, or in some cases with sheep or cows, and in a legal way thinking he is in the clear, since he is not doing anything his parents have forbidden. A girl who was told “Do not let boys touch you,” decided that meant it was all right to touch herself. By this cop-out her Adapted Child remained complaint to her mother’s wishes, while her Natural Child enjoyed the pleasures of masturbation. A boy who was similarly told, “Do not fool around with girls,” took this as permission to fool around with himself. Neither of these people was actually breaking a parental prohibition. Because the child treats such restrictions as a lawyer would. Looking for the cop-out, they are often called in script analysis by the legal term “injunction.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Some children enjoy being compliant and do not look for cop-outs. Others have more interesting things to do. However, just as many people devote themselves to the problem of how to transgress without breaking the law, so many children are interested in the question of how to be naughty without actually disobeying their parents. In both cases, this kind of shrewdness is taught and encouraged by the parents themselves, and is part of the parental programming. In some cases, this may result in the formation of an anti-script, whereby the child succeeds in reversing the while intent of the script, without actually disobeying any of the original script directions. Metaphysical rebellion, in the real sense of the term, does not appear, in coherent form, in the history of ideas until the end of the eighteenth century—when modern times begin to the accompaniment of the crash of falling ramparts. However, from then on, its consequences develop uninterrupted and it is no exaggeration to say that they have shaped the history of our times. Does this mean that metaphysical rebellion had no significance precious to this date? In any event, its origins must belong to the remote past, in that we like to believe that we live in Promethean times. However, is this really a Promethean age? #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
The first mythologies describe Prometheus as an eternal martyr, chained to a pillar, at the ends of the Earth, condemned forever because he refuses to ask forgiveness. Aeschylus adds still further to his stature, endows him with lucidity (“no misfortune can fall upon me that I have not myself already foreseen”), makes him cry out his hatred of all the gods, and plunging him into “a stormy sea of mortal despair,” finally abandons him to thunder and lightning: “Ah! See the injustice I endure!” It cannot be said, therefore, that the ancients were unaware of metaphysical rebellion. Long before Satan, they created a touching and noble image of the Rebel and gave us the most perfect myth of the intelligence in revolt. The inexhaustible genius of the Greeks, which gave such a prominent place to myths of unity and simplicity, was still able to formulate the concept of insurrection. Beyond a doubt, certain characteristics of the Promethean myth still survive in the history of rebellion as we are living it: the fight against death (“I have delivered men from being obsessed by death”), Messianism (“I have instilled blind hopes into men’s minds”), philanthropy (“Enemy of Zeus…for having loved mankind too much”). However, we must not forget that Prometheus the Fire bringer, the last drama of Aeschylus’ trilogy, proclaimed the reign of the pardoned rebel. The Greeks are never vindictive. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
In their most audacious flights, they always remain faithful to the idea of moderation, a concept they deified. Their rebel does not range himself against all creation, but against Zeus, who is never anything more than one god among many and who himself was mortal. Prometheus himself is a demigod. It is a question of settling a particular account, of a dispute about what is good, and not of a universal struggle between good and evil. Socialization—the imprinting of harmonious, collaborative behaviour—is tool used by DNA to increase intelligence. A characteristic of advanced socialization is Caste Division—an essential element of socialization and an effective survival device. A species that has developed caste differentiation and enculturation based on multistage imprinting divides into survival specialties—thus complexifying and expanding performance. The two most successful life forms of this planet—insects and humans—are obvious examples of caste specialization. Caste differentiation: Structural Caste defines Alpha Reality, which is defined as genetic hardwiring. Temporal Caste defines Beta Reality, which is the developmental staging of the wiring. The most successful-intelligent species manifest both structural and temporal castes. Until our human species understood how these two-caste systems work, we were unable to understand human psychology and thus unable to manage our own, evolving destiny. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
When I move into other societies, or even sub-cultures withing my own society, I am often astonished by their tabus. I got into one group of people this past year who live in a World that I have pretty much kept myself away from, out of a feeling of not belonging, not being in accord with, having different values. Several people in the group were visibly and audibly shocked when I referred to myself as old. It is only very recently that I have begun to see as tabus those experiences which in my own society must not be talked about, and myself a victim of the edicts of the gods of Science and Reason that have been set up in the western World, superseding all other gods. It seems to me neither scientific nor reasonable exclude any human experience, anything that occurs to any me. However, that is what I have been doing. I have been excluding not only from others but from me those experiences of my life which are tabu. I told myself that they did not happen, and so lost touch with them myself. During the past seven years, I have increasingly found these experiences to be acceptable—although certainly not to everyone—and this acceptance has made it possible for me to accept them in myself and live with them. My life feels much more alive and livelier and freer. First feed the face and then talk right and wrong. The human has needs for survival, food, shelter, and so one that are shared in common with animals. He or she also has needs for self-development, for the appreciation of beauty, that are very characteristic of a high-level or human existence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Healthy personality calls for competence at gratifying basic needs. One is then free to pursue goals beyond personal security. It is difficult to be concerned with truth, justice, or beauty when one is starving or frightened for one’s life. First things come first. In similar fashion, those interested in helping others must first demonstrate that they can take care of themselves. The person who can meet his or her needs through individual skill is independently secure. The child relies on grownups to devote their time and skill to its needs; to the extent that the parents can do this, the child is dependently secure. As the child grows and becomes an adult, he or she gradually takes over more and more of the security needs—providing sustenance, buying a car, earning a living. A young adult who remains dependent upon others to meet his or her basic needs (except for love and companionship) may pay dearly for their intervention; this person may be obliged to conform to restrictive demands, which call for unhealthy suppression of action and repression of experience. Immature dependent security is costly. To be deprived of basic need gratification is painful. There is no denying the agony of starvation, fiery thirst, or terror from someone who is threatening your life. Other needs of a different order, such as love, companionship, freedom from political tyranny, and unfettered artistic and thought expression are to be considered in understanding the healthy personality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
The development of the healthy personality extends beyond the basic needs alone. The healthy person is one who partakes generously of all the joys that life provides—including the artistic or aesthetic satisfactions. Some people try to deal with the pain of deprivation of basic needs by denying that it exists or by anesthetizing themselves to their sufferings with drugs, alcohol, or immature religion, but these responses only postpone the inevitable recognition that problems and pain do not go away until one has acted. The term basic needs usually refer to those needs that have to be satisfied first, before other, usually higher, need can be dealt with. While there are many systems of basic need classification, most agree that the body needs—safety, survival, food, shelter, and so on—are the basic needs. While personal freedom or political freedom and artistic creativity are often thought of as higher order needs, there are many examples of individuals who would give up their safety, their bodily needs, to satisfy the need for political or personal freedom. There are also many instances of starving artists who prefer to paint rather than take jobs that would permit them to eat more regularly. However, these cases are rather rare, and the concept of the basic needs, the bodily needs, including expression of pleasures of the flesh, is of reasonable validity for some people. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
For some, however, they must adhere to the Law of Chastity. Chastity is sexual purity. Those who are chaste are morally clean in their thoughts, words, and actions. Chastity means not having any pleasures of the flesh before marriage. It also means complete fidelity to husband or wife during marriage. Physical intimacy between husband and wife is beautiful and scared. It is ordained of God for the creation of children and for the expression of love within marriage. Many people today believe that sexual intimacy outside marriage is acceptable. However, in God’s sight, it is a serious sin. It is an abuse of the power He has given us to create life. The prophet Alma taught that sexual sins are more serious than any other sins except murder and denying the Holy Ghost. If the participants love one another, sometimes people try to convince themselves that sexual relations outside of marriage are acceptable. This is not true. Breaking the Law of Chastity and encouraging someone else to do so is not an expression of love. People who love each other will never endanger one another’s happiness and safety in exchange for temporary personal pleasure. When people care for one another enough to keep the law of chastity, their love, trust, and commitment increase, resulting in greater happiness and unity. In contrast, relationships built on pleasures of the flesh are immoral and sour quickly. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Those who engage in sexual immortality often feel fear, guilt, and shame. Bitterness, jealousy, and hatred soon replace any beneficial feelings that once existed in their relationship. Our Heavenly Father has given us the Law of Chastity for our protection. Obedience to this law is essential to personal peace and strength of character and to happiness in the home. Those who will keep themselves sexually pure will avoid the spiritual and emotional damage that always comes from sharing physical intimacies with someone outside of marriage. Those who keep themselves sexually pure will be sensitive to the Holy Ghost’s guidance, strength, comfort, and protection and will fulfill an important requirement for receiving a temple recommend and participating in temple ordinances. To recognize truth is not primarily a matter of intelligence, but a matter of character. The most important element is the courage to say no, to disobey the commands of power and of public opinion; to cease being asleep and to become human; to wake up and lose the sense of helplessness and futility. Even and Prometheus are the two great rebels whose very “crimes” liberated mankind. However, the capacity to say “no” meaningfully, implies the capacity to say “yes” meaningfully. The “yes” to God is the “no” to Caesar; the “yes” to man is the “no” to all those who want to enslave, exploit, and stultify him. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
I believe in freedom, in man’s right to be himself, to asset himself and to fight all those who try to prevent him from being himself. However, freedom is more than the absence of violent oppression. It is more than “freedom from.” It is “freedom to”—the freedom to become independent; the freedom to be much, rather than to have much, or to use things and people. Man must bring the forces of nature and of society under his conscious and rational control; but not under the control of a bureaucracy which administers things and man, but under the control of the free and associated producers who administer things and subordinate them to man, who is the measure of all things. The alternative is not between “capitalism” and “communism” but between bureaucratism and humanism. Democratic, decentralizing socialism is the realization of those conditions which are necessary to make the unfolding of all man’s powers the ultimate purpose. One of the most disastrous mistakes in individual and social life consists in being caught in stereotyped alternatives of thinking. “Better dead than red,” “an alienated industrial civilization or individualistic preindustrial society,” “to rearm or to be helpless,” are examples of such alternatives. There are always other and new possibilities which become apparent only when one has liberated oneself from the deathly grip of cliches, and when one permits the voice of humanity, and reason, to be heard. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The principle of “the lesser evil” is the principle of despair. Most of the time it only lengthens the period until the greater evil wins out. To risk doing what s right and human, and have faith in the power of the voice of humanity and truth, is more realistic than the so-called realism of opportunism. Man must get rid of illusions that enslave and paralyze him; he must become aware of the reality inside and outside of him in order to create a World which needs no illusions. Freedom and independence can be achieved only when the chains of illusion are broken. Today there is only one main concern: the question of war and peace. Man is likely to destroy all life on Earth, or to destroy all civilized life and the values among those that remain, and to build a barbaric, totalitarian organization which will rule what is left of mankind. To wake up to this danger, to look through the doubt talk on all aides which is used to prevent men from seeing the abyss toward which they are moving is the one obligation, the one moral and intellectual command which man must respect today. If he does not, we all will be doomed. If we should all perish in the nuclear holocaust, it will not be because man was not capable of becoming human, or that he was inherently evil; it would be because the consensus of stupidity has prevented him from seeing reality and acting upon the truth. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Evenness of temper is a valuable possession where it comes from self-mastery and not from a low vitality physically. When you feel these fits of depression and despondency coming on, you must learn to stand aside from them and refuse to identify yourself with the emotions which express them. They are simply other forms of ego manifestation. With time and practice, you will be able to do this. This Short Path affirmations and meditations are essential at such a time, for they help you to acquire the detachment necessary to recognize the moods for what they are. One student asked: “But how can one identify oneself with something one does not know?” Another replied: “That is where faith in something beyond the intellect comes in!” Yes, if faith is intense enough it will be sufficient to lead to the desired result. If not, if one cannot have faith in the Overself, then a Teacher is necessary. It is through faith in the Teacher that the student is helped to knowledge of the Overself which he finds so difficult to reach by himself. In this matter of sadness and depression, one should also be careful not to take on the moods of others. Sometimes, people who are sensitive do this. If extra-sensitive, they can even take on for a short time the symptoms of their ailments. I believe in the perfectibility of man, but I doubt whether he will achieve this goal, unless he awakens soon. “Watchman, what of the night? The watchman says: Morning comes and also the night. If you will inquire, inquire: return, come back again,” reports Isaiah 21. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The mission of the Sacramento Fire Department is to save lives, protect property, and serve their community as professionals with courage, commitment, and compassion. ‘I’ve been on quite a few medicals. When the alarm comes in, I drop everything. All my gear’s already in my car. Depending on where it’s at, I either respond to the scene or to the hall, whichever is closer. Recently we were sitting down to a big family dinner. I had my parents over, and my sister and wife. We had just sat down to eat when my tones went off. It said there was a man down on the street, only a quarter mile for my house. So I jumped up from the table and said, ‘Sorry, guys.’ And I took off. When I got to the scene, a man was lying on the front lawn having difficult breathing, unconscious. Within two minutes he went into a full arrest. I was the only one there. The police, fire, and ambulance had not responded yet. So I took it upon myself to do one-man mouth-to-mouth and CPR. I revived him. The oxygen came, and they transformed him to the hospital. I was told that I did make the difference, that this man would not have lived if I had not started CPR on him. If I had waited, or if I had gone to get a truck, which was about four and a half miles away, I never would have made it back in time to save him from possible brain damage, or even to revive him. He was a young man, like thirty-two, and he had two little children. His wife was so thankful, and that was really neat. It was quite a bit later that I got back to the family dinner.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
When critical moments arrive in man’s life, his best recourse is first to calm, not to panic, second to remember and turn towards God. In that way, he does not depend on his own small resources alone, but opens himself to the larger ones hidden in his subconscious. You can help save lives by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. Donations made to the Sacramento Fire Department are used for volunteer support and operations, purchases of apparatus, such as an ambulance, community fire safety events, and activities and towards construction of new fire stations, which we desperately need, as the last 15 months have been the hottest on record. Parents, to stabilize America and retain American values, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus Christ, to buy American made cars and other goods and services, to respect law and order, to get their education and read books, and treat others with care, dignity, and respect. 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. Lo! the spring joy doth bring; winter’s frosts are ended. Gladness reigns, life remains, with sweet pleasure blended. God doth bear what His care and His love defended. Let Thy will guide us still, let Thy love be o’er us, let Thy light in our night, show Thy paths before us. Ours Thy love, from above, and Thy light that leads us. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Enjoy your own personal gym at Residence 5 at Magnolia Station! Imagine never having to leave the comfort of your home to get a full workout in. At Residence 5, you’ll have everything you need—spacious workout areas, top-tier equipment, and the privacy to exercise at your own pace.
Whether you’re into strength training, yoga, or cardio, this home gym is designed to cater to your fitness routine. Why hit the crowded gym when you can enjoy all of this just steps from your living room? 🏋️♀️ Your workout has never looked this good! https://cresleigh.com/magnolia-station/
Randolph Harris II International Institute 