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Must You Wait for the Heart to Change First?
Many people believe that a neurotic or bad or unhappy child must have parents who have produced his negative state, while on the contrary the happy and healthy child has a correspondingly happy and healthy environment. In fact parents have taken the whole of the blame for the unhealthy development of a child on themselves and equally so the praise for the happy outcome of childhood. All data show that they should have not done so. Here is a good example: A psychoanalyst may see a very neurotic, distorted person with a terrible child and say, “It is obvious that the childhood experiences have produced this unhappy outcome.” If one would only ask oneself, however, how many people one had seen who came from the same type of family constellation and turned out to be remarkable happy and healthy people, one would begin to have doubts about the simple connection between childhood experiences and the mental health or illness of a person. The first factor which accounts for this theoretical disappointment must lie in the analyst’s ignoring the differences in genetic dispositions. Take a simple example: One can see even among newborn infants a difference in degree of aggressiveness or timidity. If the aggressive child has an aggressive mother, this mother will do one little harm or perhaps even much good. It will learn to fight with her and not be frightened of her aggressiveness. If a timid child is confronted with the same mother, it will be intimidated by the mother’s aggressiveness, it will tend to become a frightened, submissive and later on perhaps a neurotic person. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Indeed, we touch here upon the old and much discussed problem of “nature versus nurture” or genetic disposition versus environment. The discussion of this problem has by no means yet led to conclusive results. From my own experience I have come to the conclusion that genetic dispositions play a much greater role in the formation of a specific character than most analysts credit it with doing. I believe that one aim of the analyst should be to reconstruct a picture of the character of the child when it was born in order to study which of the traits one finds in the analysand are part of the original nature and which are acquired through influential circumstances; furthermore, which of the acquired qualities conflict with the genetic ones and which tend to reinforce them. What we find very often is that by the wish of the parents (personally an as representatives of society) the child is forced to repress or to weaken one’s original dispositions and to replace them by those traits which society wants one to develop. At this point we find the roots of neurotic developments; the person develops a sense of false identity. While genuine identity rests upon the awareness of one’s suchness in terms of the person one is born as, pseudo-identity rests upon the personality which society has imposed upon us. Hence a person is in constant need of approval in order to keep one’s balance. Genuine identity does not need such approval because the person’s picture of oneself is identical with one’s authentic personality structure. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
If throughout childhood, a child were convinced that nobody would ever care for one unless one wanted something from them, that there was no sympathy or love which was no the payment for services or a bribe to preform, a person may go through life without ever having experienced that somebody cares or is interested and does not want anything in return. However, when it happens that such a person experiences another person’s having a real interest without wanting anything, this might drastically change such character traits as suspicion, fear, the feelings of being unlovable, et cetera. Furthermore, the relationship between parents and children is usually seen as a one-way street, namely the effect parents have upon children. However, what is often ignored is that this influence is by no means one-sided. A parent may have a natural dislike for a child and even for a newborn baby, not only for reasons which are often discussed—that it is an unwanted child or that that the parent is destructive, sadistic, et cetera—but for the reason that child and parent just are not compatible by their very natures, and that in this respect the relationship is no different from that between grown-up people. The parents may just have a dislike for the kind of child one produced and the child may feel this dislike for the kind of parents one has and being the weaker, one is punished for one’s dislike by all kinds of more or less subtle sanctions. The child—and equally the mother—is forced into a situation where the mother has to take care of the child and the child has to accept the mother in spite of the fact that they heartily dislike each other. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The child cannot articulate that it does not like the mother; the mother would feel guilty if she admitted to herself that she did not like a child she gave birth to, and so both behave under a special kind of pressure and punish each other for being forced into an unwanted intimacy. The mother pretends to love the child and subtly punishes it for being forced to do so, the child pretends in some way or another to love the mother because one’s life depends totally on her. In such a situation a great deal of dishonesty develops which the children often express in their own indirect ways of rebellion and which the mothers usually negate because they feel that nothing could be more shameful than not to like one’s own children. Only one who believes is obedient, and only one who is obedient believes. Jesus says: “First obey, perform the external work, renounce your attachments, give up the obstacles which separate you from the will of God.” Do not say that you have not got faith. You will not have it so long as persist in disobedience and refuse to take the first step. People generally assume that our beliefs and attitudes determine our actions. So if we want to change the way people act, their hearts and minds had better be changed. This assumption lies behind most of our teaching, preaching, counseling, and child rearing. And to some extent it is true: behaviour follows attitudes. However, if social psychology has taught us anything during the last thirty year, it is that the reverse is also true: we are as likely to act ourselves into a new way of thinking as to think ourselves into action. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Evil acts shape the self. People induced to harm an innocent victim typically come to disparage their victim. Those induced to speak or write statements about which they have misgivings will often come to accept their little lies. Saying becomes believing. More action affects the actor, too. Children who resist a temptation tend to internalize their conscientious behaviour. Helping someone typically increases liking for the person helped. Those who teach a moral norm to others subsequently follow the moral code better themselves. Generalizing the principle, it would seem that one antidote for the corrupting effects of evil action is repentant action. Act as if you love your neighbour—without worrying whether you really do—and before long you will like the person more. Racial attitudes have followed racial behaviour. Racial attitudes have followed racial behaviour. Prior to desegregation in the United States of America it was often said that you cannot legislate racial attitudes—you must wait for the heart to change first. However, after the initiation of desegregation European American racial attitudes became noticeably less prejudiced. Moreover, as different regions of the country have come to act more alike, they have also come to think more alike. Political socialization techniques have effectively employed the principle. For instance, many people seem to be in support of undocumented people coming into America, even though it is a crime, but are enforcing more laws and restrictions on legal Americans. Many Americans have expressed discomfort at the contradiction of demanding that people follow the law, and their support for undocumented immigration. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Prevented from say what they really believe, they try to establish their psychic equilibrium by consciously making themselves believe what they said, which is essentially “Most people should have to follow the law, but I support crime in certain circumstances.” But what happens when they start to rationalize illegal actions of their own, will that lead to lawlessness on a wide scale? Many modern therapy techniques make a more constructive use of action. Behavior therapy and rational-emotive therapy and rational-emotive therapy both prompt their clients to rehearse and practice more productive behaviour. We can all learn a practical lesson here. Like Moses, Jonah, and other biblical heroes, we do not feel like doing what we know we ought. The remedy is to get up and act anyway—to put our fingers on the keyboard and force ourselves to begin that essay or letter, to go to the phone and dial that number, to confront or hare with that person, to turn off the TV and begin studying for that exam. When we do so, we often find that our forced behaviour begins to gain momentum as a real interest in our subject takes hold. Our feelings are hard to control, but we can control our behaviour and by doing so indirectly influence our feelings. To be sure, the attitudes-follow-behaviour principle is more potent in some situations than others—especially in those where people feel some choice and responsibility for their behaviour rather than attributing it to coercion. Nevertheless, it is now a fundamental rule of social psychology that behaviour and attitude generate one another in an endless spiral, like chicken and egg. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
This principle affirms the biblical understanding of action and faith, or an obedience and belief. Depending on where we break into this spiraling chain, we will see faith as a source of action or as a consequence. Action and faith, like action and attitude, feed one another. Much as conventional wisdom has insisted that our attitudes determine our behaviour, Christian thinking has usually emphasized faith as the source of action. Faith, we believe, is the beginning rather than the end of religious development. The experience of being “called” demonstrates how faith can precede action in the lives of the faithful. Elijah is overwhelmed by the Holy as he huddles in a cave. Paul is touched by the Almighty on the Damascus Road. Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos are likewise invaded by the Word, which then explodes in their active response to the call. In each case, an encounter with God provoked a new state of consciousness, which was then acted upon. This dynamic potential of faith is already a central tenet of Christian thought. For the sake of balance, we should also appreciate the complementary proposition: faith is a consequence of action. Throughout the Old and New Testaments we are told that full knowledge of God comes through actively doing the Word. Faith is nurtured by obedience. We come to know truth by reason and quiet reflection. This view, translated into Christian terms, equates faith with cerebral activity—orthodox doctrinal propositions. The contrasting biblical view assumes that reality is known through obedient commitment. “The Lord touched their eyes, saying ‘It shall be done to you according to your faith,’” Matthew 9.29. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
If an individual wants to change one’s life, that change must be conceived on the inside. Once that new and improved image shows up, the God will easily develop I on the outside. Living your dream is that simple. Anyone can enjoy a happier and healthier lifestyle. However, the change will not happen immediately and it will not be easy. However, for any improve me, the inception of your vision must occur within your heart and mind first, then it will manifest in your life. “Praise be to the name of God forever and ever; wisdom and power are His. He changes times and seasons; He sets up kings and deposes them. He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to he discerning. He reveals deep and hidden things; He knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with him. I thanks and praise you, O God of my fathers; you have given me wisdom and power, you have made known to me what we asked of you, you have made known to us the dream of the king,” reports Daniel 2.20-23. When we close our eyes, we should be big dreamers, an see our whole family serving God, and rising to new levels of effectiveness. One should see themselves achieving more success next year, and their family healthy and happy. You might even see yourself getting better looking. Believe that you will get a promotion at work. Know that you will pay off that house. Understand God is using you in a better way. Trust that you are stronger, healthier, and living a life full of God’s grace. Walk by faith and not by sight. When you look into the future, see your children happy and successful and marrying excellent people. Take a few moments everyday and pray for your dreams to come true. Envision yourself there. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Entropy by its very character assures us that though it may be the universal rule in the Nature we know, it cannot be universal absolute. If a person says, “Humpty Dumpty is falling,” you see at once that this is not a complete story. The bit you have been told implies both a later chapter in which Humpty Dumpty will have reached the ground, and an earlier chapter in which he was still stead on the wall. A nature which is “running down” cannot be the whole story. A clock cannot run down unless it has been wound up. Humpty Dumpty cannot fall off a wall which never existed. If a Nature which disintegrates order were the whole of reality, where would she find any order to disintegrate? Thus on any view there must have been a time when processes the reverse of those we now see were going on: a time of winding up. The Christian claim is that those days are not gone for ever. Humpty Dumpty is going to be replaced on the wall—at least in the sense that what has died is going to recover life, probably in the sense that the inorganic Universe is going to be re-ordered. Either Humpty Dumpty will never reach the ground (being caught in mid-fall by the everlasting arms) or else when he reaches it he will be putt together again and replaced on a new and better wall. Admitted, science discerns no “king’s horses and men” who can “put Humpty Dumpty together again.” However, you would not expect her to. She is based on observation: and all our observations are observations of Humpty Dumpty in mid-air. They do not reach either the wall above or the ground below—much less he King with the horses and men hastening towards the spot. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The Transfiguration or “Metamorphosis” of Jesus is also, no doubt, an anticipatory glimpse of something to come. He is seen conversing with two of the ancient dead. The change which His own human form had undergone is described as one to luminosity, to “shining whiteness.” A similar whiteness characterizes His appearance a he beginning of the book of Revelation. One rather curious detail is that this shining or whiteness affected His clothes as much as His body. St. Mark indeed mentions the clothes more explicitly than the face, and adds, with his inimitable naivety, that “no laundry could do anything like it.” Taken by itself this episode bears all the marks of a “vision”: that is, of an experience which, though it may be divinely sent and may reveal great truth, yet is not, objectively speaking, the experience it seems to be. However, if the theory of “vision” (or holy hallucination) will not cover the Resurrection appearances, it would be only a multiplying of hypotheses to introduce it here. We do not know to what phase or feature of the New Creation this episode points. It may reveal some special glorifying of Christ’s manhood at some phase of its history (since history it apparently has) or it may reveal the glory which that manhood always has in its New Creation: it may even reveal a glory which all risen humans will inherit. We do not know. It must indeed be emphasized throughout that we know and can know very little about the New Nature. The task of the imagination here is not to forecast it but simply, by brooding on many possibilities, to make room for a more complete and circumspect agnosticism. It is useful to remember that even now sense responsive to a different, almost beyond recognition, from the space we are now aware of, yet not discontinuous from it: that time may not always be for us, as it now is, unilinear and irreversible: that other parts of Nature might some say obey us as our cortex now does. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
It is useful not because we can trust these fancies to give us an absolute truths about the New Creation but because they teach us not to limit, in our rashness, the vigour and variety of he new crops which this old field might produce. We are therefore compelled to believe that nearly all we are told about the New Creation is metaphorical. However, not quite all. That is just where the story of Resurrection suddenly jerks us back like a tether. The local appearances, the eating, the touching, the claim to be corporeal, us be either reality or sheer illusion. The New Nature is, in the most troublesome way, interlocked at some points with the Old. Because of its novelty we have to think of it, for the most part, metaphorically: but because of the partial interlocking, some facts about it come through into our present experience in all their literal facthood—just as some facts about an organism are inorganic facts, and some facts about a solid body are facts of linear geometry. Even apar from that, the mere idea of a New Nature, a Nature beyond Nature, a systematic and diversified reality which is “supernatural” in relation to the World of our five present senses but “natural” from its own point of view, is profoundly shocking to a certain philosophical preconception from which we all suffer. I think Kant is at the root of it. It may be expressed by saying that we are prepared to believe either in a reality with one floor or in a reality with two floors, but not in a reality like a skyscraper with several floors. We are prepared, on the one hand, for the sort of reality that Naturalists believe in. That is a one-floor reality: this present Nature is all that there is. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Say no to self and mean it, or one will never find oneself a free human—that is what Jesus told His Disciples, that is how Matthew recorded it (16.24), and that is what He is telling us, My dear friend. Until that sweet time comes, count oneself a prisoner, under house arrest, in one’s own body. Well, one feels as if one owns one’s own self, are one’s own best friend, lust for tacky stuff to decorate one’s own domain, peep through the arras at others more fortunate than oneself. One feels one is something of a dervish whirling in a circle until one turns to butter, or a Sybarite seeking soft sheets for oneself instead of the rock-hard life of Jesus Christ. Paul wrote much the same thing to the Philippians (2.21). Maybe one feels one is one of those thinkers who spend their time thinking up and putting together gadgets. They will work for a time, but then they will break down. Which is another way of saying, I think no project is likely to be successful unless it has its source somewhere in Jesus Christ. Here are some words of advice that one could never logick one’s way to. Give up everything, and one will find everything. Leave greed behind, and one will find rest. With this sort of attitude and his sort of resolve, one will understand all things. Father, because of You, I will dare to dream big dreams. With faith and confidence in You, I know what I can accomplish the goals that You have placed within my heart. The basis of higher healing work is the realization of humans as Mind. However, the latter is a dimensionless unindividuated unconditioned entity. It is not my individual mind. The field of Mind is a common one where as the field of consciousness is divided up into individual and separate holdings. This is a difference with vast implications, for whoever can cross from the second field to the first, crosses at the same time from an absurdly limited World into a supremely vital one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Consequently, genuine and permanent healing is carried on without one’s conscious association and can be effected by dropping the ego-mind and with it all egoistic desires. Hence the first effort should be to ignore the disease and gain the realization. Only after the latter has been won should the thoughts be allowed to descend again to the disease, with the serene trust that the bodily condition may safely be left in the hands of the World-Mind for final disposal as It decides. There should not be the slightest attempt to dictate a cure to the higher power nor the slightest attempt to introduce personal will into treatment. Such attempts will only defeat their purpose. The issues will partly be decided on the balance of the Universal Law and evolutionary factors concerned in the individual case. And yet there are cults which do not find it at all incongruous to suggest to the Infinite Mind what should thus be One surrender is truly made, the desires of the self go with it and pace reigns in the inner life whether illness still reigns in the external life or not. Thus there is a false easy yielding of the will which deceives no higher power than the personal self, and there is an honest yielding which may really invoke the divine grace. It is a mistake, however, to turn the higher self into a mere convenience to be used chiefly for obtaining healing or getting guidance, for healing the sickness of the physical body, or guiding the activities of the physical ego. It should be sought for its own sake, and these other things should be sought only occasionally or incidentally, as and when needed. They should not be made habitual. In one’s periodic meditations, for instance, the aspirant should seek the divine source of one’s being because it is right, necessary, and good for one to do so and one to do so and one should forget every other desire. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Only after one has done that and found the source, and only on one’s backward journey to the day’s activities, may one remember these lesser desires and utilize the serenity and power thus gained for attending to them. Your assertion that Jesus primarily wished to free humans of disease and viruses, or to teach them how to become so, is untenable. Whoever has entered into the consciousness of one’s divine soul—which Jesus had in such fullness—has one’s whole scale of values turned over. It is then that one sees that the physical is ephemeral by nature, whereas the reality whence it is derived is eternal by nature; that what happens inside a person’s heart and head is fundamentally more important than what happens inside one’s body; and that the divine consciousness may and can be enjoyed even though the fleshly tenement is sick. The sufferer should use whatever physical medical means are available—both orthodox and unorthodox ones. At the same time one should practise daily prayer. However, one should not directly ask for the physical healing for its own sake. One should ask first for spiritual qualities and then only for the physical healing with the expressed intention of utilizing one’s opportunity of bodily incarnation to improve oneself spiritually. Healing is but a mere incident in the work of a self-actualized person. Such a one will always keep as one’s foremost purpose the opening of the spiritual heart of humans. It is from the first moment of life that one must learn to deserve to live; and since birth one shares the rights of citizens, the moment of our own birth should be the beginning of the exercise of our duties. If there are laws for those of mature age, there should also be some for the very young which teach them to obey others. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
And since each human’s reason cannot be allowed to be the sole arbiter of one’s duties, a fortiori the education of children cannot be abandoned to the light and prejudices of their fathers, since it is of even more importance to the state than it is to their fathers. For according to the natural course of things, the death of the father often strips one of the last fruits of this education, but sooner or latter the country feels its effects. The state remains; the family dissolves. Now if the public authority, in taking the fathers’ place and charging itself with this important function, acquires their rights by fulfilling their duties, the fathers have that much less reason to complain, because strictly speaking, in this regard, they are merely changing a name, and will have in common, under the name “citizens,” the same authority over their children they exercised separately under the name of “fathers,” and will be obeyed no less well when they speak in the same of the law than they were when they spoke in the name of nature. Public education under the rules prescribed by the government and under the magistrates put in place by the sovereign, is therefore one of the fundamental maxims of popular or legitimate government. If children are raised in common and in the bosom of equality, if they are instructed to respect above all things, if they are surrounded by examples and objects that constantly speak to them of the tender mother who nourishes them, of the love she bears for them, of the inestimable benefits they receive from her, and in turn of the debt they owe her, doubtlessly they thus will learn to cherish one another as brothers, never to want anything but what the society wants, never to substitute the actions of humans and of citizens for the sterile and vain babblings of sophists, and to become one day defenders and the fathers of the country whose children they will have been for so long. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
I will not discuss the magistrates destined to preside over his education, which certainly is the state’s most important business. Clearly, if such marks of public confidence were lightly granted, if this sublime function were not, for those who had honorable and sweet repose of their old age and the high point of all their honors, the entire understanding would be useless and the education unsuccessful. For whatever the lesson is unsupported by authority, or the precept by example, instruction remains fruitless, and virtue itself loses its influence in the mouth of one who does not practice it. However, let the illustrious warriors bent under the weight of their laurels preach courage; let upright magistrates, whitened in the wearing of purple and in service at the tribunals, teach justice. Both of these groups will thus train virtuous successors and will transmit from age to age to the generations that follow the experience and talents of leaders, the courage and virtue of citizens and the emulation common to all of living and dying for one’s country. I know of but three peoples who in an earlier era practiced public education, namely, the Cretans, the Lacedemonians, and the ancient Persians. Among all three it was the greatest success and brought about marvels among the latter two. Since the time the World was divided into nations too large to be governed well, this method has not been practicable. And other reasons the reader can easily see have also prevented it from being tried by any modern people. It is quite remarkable that the Romans were able to do without it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
However, Rome was for five hundred years a continual miracle that the World cannot hope to see again. The virtue of the Romans, engendered by the horror of tyranny and the crimes of tyrants and by an inborn love of country, made all their homes into as many schools for citizens. And the unlimited power of fathers over their children placed to much severity in private enforcement that the father, more feared than the magistrates, was the censor of mores and the avenger of laws in one’s domestical tribunal. In this way an attentive and well-intentioned government, constantly valiant to maintain or restore love of country and good mores among the people, anticipates far in advance the evils that sooner or later result from citizens’ indifference to the fate of the republic, and restricts within narrow limits that personal interests which so isolates private individuals that the state is weakened by their power and has nothing to hope for from their good will. Anywhere the populace loves it country, respects its laws and lives simply, little else remains to do to make it happy. And in public administration, where fortune plays less of a role than it does in the lot of private individuals, wisdom is so close to happiness that these two objects are confounded. Waters, you are the ones who brings us the life force. Please help us to find nourishment so that we may look upon great joy. Please let us share in the most delicious sap that you have, as if you were loving mothers. Please let us go straight to the house of the one for whom your waters give us life and give us birth. For our well-being please let God be an assistant to us, the waters be for us to drink. Please le hem cause well-being and health to flow over us. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Mistresses of all the things that are chosen, rulers over all peoples, the waters are the ones I beg for a cure. God has told me that within the waters are all cures and Jesus Christ who is salutary to all. Water, please yield your cure as an armour for my body, so that I may see the sun for a long time. Waters, carry for away all of this that has gone bad in me, either what I have done in malicious deceit or whatever lie I have sworn to. I have sought the waters today; we have joined with their sap. O Jesus Christ full of moisture, come and flood me with splendour. O God, we beseech Thee, please save! O please save! O God! like sheep we all have gone astray; from out Thy book wipe not our nae away. Please save! O save! O God! sustain the sheep for slaughter;–see these deal with wrathfully and slain for Thee. Save! O save! O God! Thy sheep! the sheep whom Thou didts end in pasture; Thy creation and Thy friend. Save! O save! O God! they lift their eyes to Thee, long sought; please let those who rise against Thee count as naught. Save! O save! O God! they pour out water, worshipping—let them be drawing from salvation’s spring. Save! O save! O God! to Zion saviours send at length, endowed of Thee, and saved by Thy name’s strength. Save! O save! O God! in garb of vengeance clad about, in mighty wrath cast all deceivers out. Save! O save! O God! and Thou wilt surely not forget her, by love-tokens bought, that hopeth yet. Save! O save! O God! they seeking Thee with willow bough, regard their crying from Thine Heaven now. Save! O save! O God! as with a crown bless Thou the year; yea, Lord, my singing, I beseech Thee, hear. Save! O save! I beseech Thee, O God, save! O save, I beseech Thee. Thou art our Father. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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The Devil Loveth No Salt in His Meat!
Every night in the year, four of us sat in the parlous of the Winchester Mansion. This particular night, there was a thin, bright moonshine: it was bitter cold, windy, and frosty; the town had not yet awakened, but an indefinable stir already preluded the noise and business of the day. The ghouls had come later than usual, and they seemed more than usually eager to be gone. They wished, and declared their wish, that their blood might be the last innocent blood shed. They prayed that God would discover the witchcraft were among us. They forgave their accusers. The fervency of the spirits were very affecting and drew tears from many. Affecting and melting to the hearts of some considerable spectators. They prayed earnestly for pardon for all other sin and for an interest in the precious blood of our dear Redeemer, and seemed to be very sincere, upright, and sensible of their circumstances. One of the ghouls said, “I have been put to death, and my grandfather suffered, and all his estate seized because of my own vile and wretched heart, confessed several things contrary to my conscience and knowledge, though to the wounding of my own soul—the Lord pardon me for it. But oh! the terrors of a wounded conscience, who can bear? Blessed be the Lord; He would not let me go in my sins, but in mercy I hope so my soul would not suffer me to keep it in any longer, but I was forced to confess the truth. Gunshots in the hills and the echo of that awful hellspawn voice in my head. I was sought after by a sorcerer, which resulted in fatal mishaps for those sorcerers because they caught me in the wrong mood, and I turned into a lethal weapon. Dear Mrs. Winchester, let me beg your prayers to the Lord on my behalf, and please send us a joyful and happy meeting in Heaven.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Mrs. Winchester replied, “But the Lord He know it is, if it be possible, that no more innocent blood be shed, which undoubtedly cannot be avoided in the way and course you go in. I question not but your honours do to the utmost of your powers in the discovery and detecting of witchcraft and witches, and shall not be guilty of innocent blood for the World.” A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon the soul of the unhappy student and the other ghouls. “My God! she cried, “but what have I done? and when did I begin?” Nothing could be explained any further because we realized that we had long since ceased to pay attention to anything said by the suspect. Our minds and hearts were so filled with the hideous torments of the afflicted and the frightful tales of the confessors that we were quite unable to absorb anything else. The student was violent, and it was said that she had beaten to death a former teacher and other students in the classroom before she and her accomplices were shot dead by a Winchester model 1866. They were much addicted to sorcery in the said town, and there were forty men in it that could raise the Devil as well as any astrologer. Time had little changed this small town. It stood then, as now, upon a crossroad, out of call of human habitations, and buried fathom deep in the foliage of six thousand cedar trees. The cries of the sheep upon the neighbouring hills, the streamlets upon either hand, one loudly singing among pebbles, the other dripping furtively from pond to pond, the stir of the wind in mountainous old flowering chestnuts, and once in seven days the voice of the bell and old tunes of the precentor, were the only sounds that disturbed the silence around the rural Winchester Mansion. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
The Resurrection Man was not to be deterred by any of the sanctities of customary piety. It was part of his trade to despise and desecrate the scrolls and trumpets of old tombs found on the estate, the paths worn by the feet of legions of spirits and mourners, and the offerings and the inscriptions of bereaved affection. To rustic neighbourhoods, where love is more than commonly tenacious, and where some bonds of blood or fellowship unite the entire society of a parish, the body-snatcher, far from being repelled by natural respect, was attracted by the ease and safety of the task. To bodies that had been laid in Earth, in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there came that hasty, lamp-Iit, terror-haunted resurrection that often happened at the Winchester Mansion, which was fully of uneasy ghosts. It was pitch dark; and we had just raised a few souls from the dead. Their bodies awaited them in the basement. Here and there a white gate or a white stone in the wall guided them for a short space across the night; but for the most part it was at a foot pace, and almost groping, that they picked their way through the resonant blackness to their solemn and isolated destination. In the basement the last glimmer failed them, and it became necessary to kindle a match and reillumine one of the lanterns of the gig. Thus, under the dripping pipes, and environed by huge and moving shadows, they reached the scene of their unhallowed labours. However, the devil, imagining that he had found the right moment for taking possession of one of these resurrected bodies. A creeping chill began to possess my soul. It grew upon my mind that some unnatural miracle had been accomplished, that some nameless change had befallen one of the dead bodies, and in fear of their unholy burden wolves were outside the mansion howling. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The curse of evil had come into one of the bodies, and the evil malediction spread into his parts with a strange kind of screaming sound that made me turn pale with fear. He then rose to his feet, proclaiming he was the Devil and that he would take these other resurrected bodies with him to the underworld and speak with the dead. Mrs. Winchester said, “I rebuke you, Satan!” The Devil laughed and said he was not at all afraid of us. “You insult me with these testimonies as if you were Divine Oracles!” he said. Then departed in a black cloud of smoke with the resurrected bodies. How often I have read in books written by Jesuits that Martin Luther was a wizard, and that he did himself confess that he had familiarity with Satan! The Holy Son of God himself was reputed a magician, and one that had familiarity with the greatest of Devils. The blaspheming Pharisees said, “He casts out the Devils through the Prince of Devils,” reports Matthew 9.34. There is then not the best saint on Earth, man or woman, that can assure themselves that the Devil shall not cast such an imputation upon them. At the time when Luther died all the possessed people in the Netherlands were quiet. The Devils in them said the reason was because Luther had been a great friend of theirs, and they owed him that respect as to go far as Germany to attend his funeral. But the Father of Lies is never to be believed. He will utter twenty great truths to make way for one lie; he will accuse twenty people of witchcraft if he can but thereby bring one innocent person into trouble. However, it is better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned. The Devil makes his witched to dream strange things of themselves and others which are not so. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The Greek philosopher Pythagoras of Samos, who invented the Pythagorean theorem, a^2+ b^2 = c^2, also lead seances in approximately 540 BC, using something like a Quija board. Grim reapers are purely psychic entities, with power over time and perception. They can change the way a human sees one’s surroundings, and change their own appearance, usually to ease the transition from life into death. If it is by virtue of some contract with the Devil that witches have the power to do such things, it is hard to conceive how they can be bid to do them without being too much concerned in that Hellish covenant. We ought not to practice witchcraft to discover witches. The Devil have of late accused some eminent persons. It is an awful thing which the Lord had done [id est, permitted] to convince some among us of their error. To take away the life of anyone merely because a specter or Devil in a bewitched or possessed person does accuse them will bring the guilt of innocent blood on the land where such a thing shall be done. What does such an evidence amount unto more than this: either such an one did afflict such an one, or the Devil in one’s likeness, or one’s eyes were bewitched. The natural way for a living person to see a reaper is as a wraith-like figure wearing tattered winding sheets or burial cloth. Black dogs are also buried in the foundations of churches to guard and protect the gates between here and the afterlife. What will be the issue of these troubles God only knows. I am afraid that ages will not wear off that reproach and those stains which these things will leave behind them upon our lands. It is possible that bewitched and possessed person are afflicted by the Devil, but without agency of witches. Yes, there are witches, and there have been since the beginning of the World. Their craft is performed with the Devil’s assistance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
During one evening at the mansion, Mrs. Winchester invited the maid in for a séance. She chanted, “By the virtue of the holy resurrection and the torments of the damned, I conjure and exorcise thee, spirit of Malphas, thirty-ninth Spirit, to answer my liege demands, being obedient unto these sacred ceremonies, on pain of everlasting torment and distress. Arise, arise, arise, I charge and command thee.” A black man appeared, I do not think he was human. His skin was black as midnight and I could not see his eyes, teeth, or any other features. He was just black and in the shape of a man. He offered her a book to sign. The book was supposed to contain witches’ pacts, and he told her that is she touched it, it would cure her of the hauntings. In all, Mrs. Winchester was tempted from three boos. The third she demanded that they let her read before she think of signing it. The man refused. In general the book seemed a journal of the chief things acted or designed a their great witch-meetings, not without some circumstances that carried an odd resemblance of the Koran. It has in it the methods to be used in seducing of people unto the service of the Devil, and the names of them that had been seduced, with terms which they were to serve. It particularly surprised some in the room, on the even of May 13, 1888, to overhear her, in the book then opened unto her, spelling a word that was in Latin. The letters she recited was “Quadragesima.” Mrs. Winchester conversed at length with the spirit(s) who visited her, and the voices were “big, low, thick,” as they had been reported to be in European witchcraft accounts. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
We saw flames arise from the cauldron on the table, and the room smelled of brimstone. The spirit of a bird appears. It attacked the maid and the next morning, she was found tied to the tree top. She was excessively sore when we brought her down from the tree. There were blisters raised upon her. To cure the soreness which last night’s fiery trail gave to her, we were forces sometimes to apply oil commonly used for the cure of scads. And yet (like other witch-wounds) in a day or two all would be well again. Only the marks of some wounds thus given her, she will probably carry to her grave. I may add that once they thrust an hot iron down her throat, which though it were to us invisible, yet we saw he skin fetched off her tongue and lips. Indeed, her sufferings were so severe that Mrs. Winchester thought the rapid healing of her wounds was part of a design to keep her in continual torment. She was, Mrs. Winchester wrote, “wounded with a thousand pains all over, and cured immediately that the pains of these wounds might be repeated.” One of the maid’s symptom occurred when her hallucinations were peopled by specters bring her a little cup that had a whitish liquor in it (unto us wholly invisible), which they would pour down her throat, holding her jaws wide open, in spite of all [her] shriekings and strivings. We saw her swallow this poison, though we saw not the poison, and immediately she would swell prodigiously and be just like one poisoned with a dose of rats-bane [arsenic trioxide]. After these potions she was capable ordinarily to beg of us that we would he her to some salad-oil, upon the taking whereof the swelling would in a little while abate. Sometimes our laying our hands on the mouth of the maid, when she perceived the specters forcing their poisons into her mouth, did keep her from taking of them in. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The maid, Agnus, was unable to hear prayer or religious instruction directly. However, not only did she hear the spectral Christmas dance, but several times Agnus had her arms cruelly scratched and pins thrust into her flesh by Fiends while they were molesting her. Several persons did sometimes actually lay their hands upon these Fiend. The wretches were palpable while they were not visible, and several of our people though they saw nothing, yet felt a substance that seemed like a dog. And though they were not fanciful they died away [id est, fainted] at the fright. And at this time, Mrs. Winchester believed much of this unchristian practice was the result of someone delivering curses. A curse delivered by a woman, Margaret Rhodes Crocker, known to have dabbled in witchcraft, although again it is not absolutely certain that she practiced malefic witchcraft. It was upon the Lord’s Day, the 8th of September, in the year 1889, that Margaret Crocker, after some hours of previous disturbance in the Old St. Mary’s Cathedral, fell into odd fits, which caused her friends to carry her home, where her fits in a few hours grew into a figure that satisfied the spectators of their being preternatural. Some of the neighbours were forward enough to suspect the rise of this mischief in an house hard-by, where lived a miserable woman who had been formerly imprisoned on the suspicion of witchcraft, and who had frequently cured very painful hurts by muttering over them certain charms, which I shall not endanger the poisoning of my reader by repeating. This woman had, Mary Frances Sherwood Hopkins Searless, the evening before Margret fell into her calamities, very bitterly treated her and threatened her. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
However, the hazard of hurting a poor woman that might be innocent, notwithstanding surmises that might have been more strongly grounded than those, caused the pious people in the vicinity to try whether incessant supplication to God alone might not procure a quicker and safer ease to the afflicted than hasty prosecution of any supposed criminal. Mary Francis was assaulted by eight cruel specters, whereof she imagined that she knew three or four, but the rest came still with their faces covered, so that she could never have a distinguishing view of the countenance of those who she thought she knew. She was very careful of my reiterated charges to forbear blazing the names, lest any good person should come to suffer any blast of reputation through the cunning malice of the great Accuser. Nevertheless, she having since privately named them to myself, I will venture to say this of them, that they are a sort of wretches who for these many years have gone under as violent presumptions of witchcraft as perhaps any creatures yet living upon Earth, although I am far from thinking that the visions of this young woman were evidence enough to prove them so. Margaret Crocker’s hallucinations were somewhat varied. She saw not only spectral witches and the “Black Man….their master” who was often seen in abandoned mansions, where he resisted new residents, but also a “White Spirit” who she took to be an Angel. Such a figure had also been seen at the Winchester and in several Oakland witchcraft cases, such as at the Ellen Kenna Mansion, Emma Bray’s Mansion, and at Alexander Dunsmuir’s mansion. The white spirit comforted and advised Margaret during her attack. Among other things, the Angel told her that Oliver Winchester was her spiritual father. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The Angel had always maintained the Devils might appear in the shape of an innocent person. Mrs. Winchester cried for the Lord, as for the deliverance of these women from the malice of Hell, for the deliverance of the powers of Hell has now seized upon all of them. And that the whole plot of the Devil to reproach her poor maid, Angus, be defeated by the Lord Jesus Christ. During a séance Mrs. Winchester was told that one of the several beings that was haunting her and these other grand estates was a Rakshasa. A being reincarnated from evil human beings. They are a type of demon. Rakshasa have the power to change their shape at will and appear as animals, as monsters, or in the case of female demons, as beautiful women. They also have magical powers, including invisibility. They are cannibalistic, and particularly target anything religious or holy. In addition to human flesh they, they will eat spoiled food. Their finger nails are poisonous. They are most powerful in the evening, particularly during the dark person of a new moon, but are dispelled by the rising sun. They especially detest sacrifices and prayer. Most powerful among them is their kind, the 10-headed Ravana. Many believe him to be Satan. Margaret had the common inability of afflicted persons to hear religious words, especially, in her case, the words of prayer. She had a full catalog of physical symptoms. She would be strangely distorted in her joins an thrown into such extravagant convulsions as were astonishing unto the spectators in general. She would be cruelly pinched with invisible hands very often in a day, and the black and blue marks of the pinches became immediately visible unto the standers by. She was also afflicted with pins, both real ones found about her person and spectral ones. The psychosomatic skin lesions would in a few minutes ordinarily be cured. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
As with Mary Frances, her specters burnt her with spectral brimstone, and she would be so bitterly scorched with the unseen sulphur thrown upon her that very sensible blisters would be raised upon her skin. Like Angus, Margaret was forced to swallow spectral poison. She would sometimes have her jaws forcibly pulled open, whereupon something invisible would be poured down her throat. We all saw her swallow, and yet we all saw her try as she could that she might not swallow. She would cry out “as of scalding brimstone poured into her” and would be so monstrously inflamed that it would have broken a heart of stone to have seen her agonies. The spectators would testify also that the Crocker Mansion often reeked “so hot of brimstone that we were scarce able to endure it.” And one of the occasion “the standers by plainly saw something of that odd liquor itself on the outside of her neck.” There was a spectral powder thrown into her eyes, and “one time some of this powder was fallen actually visible upon her cheek, from whence the people in the room wiped it with their handkerchiefs.” Mrs. Winchester was also afflicted by spirits. “We once thought we perceived something stir upon her pillow at a little distance from her, whereupon one present [the Butler Clayton] laying his hand there, he to his horror apprehended that he felt, though none could see it, a living creature not altogether unlike a vampire bat, which nimbly escaped from him. And there were diverse other persons who were thrown into a great consternation by feeling, as they judged, at others times the same invisible animal.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, the most starling phenomenon in Mrs. Winchester’s case was levitation. “Once,” said Clayton, “her tormentors puled her up to the ceiling of the chamber and held her there before a very numerous company of spectators, who found it as much as they could all do to pull her down again.” Clayton obtained signed confirmations of this and other instances of levitation: “I do testify that I have seen Mrs. Winchester in her hauntings from the invisible World lifted up from her bed, wholly by an invisible force, a great way towards the top of the room where she lay. In her being so lifted she had no assistance from any use of her own arms or hands or any other part of her body, not so much as her heels touching her bed or resting on any support whatsoever. And I have seen her thus lifted when not only a strong person hath thrown his whole weight across her to pull her down, but several other persons have endeavoured with all their might to hinger her from being so raised up, which I suppose that several others will testify as well as myself when called unto it. Witness my hand,” Clayton Straus. “We can also testify that we have several times seen Mrs. Winchester so lifted up from her bed as that she had no use of her own limbs to help her up, but it was the declared apprehension of us, as well as others that saw it, impossible for any hands but some of the invisible World to life her.” Henry Brown, Frank Drew, Phillip Goodwin. “We whose names are underwritten do testify that one evening when we were in the chamber where Mrs. Winchester then lay in her haunting, we observed her to be by an invisible force lifted up from the bed whereon she lay, so as to touch the garret floor, while yet neither her feet nor any other parent of her body rested either on the bed or any other support, but were also by the same force lifted up from all that was under her, and all this for a considerable while. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
“We judged it several minutes, and it was as much as several of us could do with all our strength to pull her down. All which happened when there was not only we two in the chamber, but we supposed ten or a dozen more whose names we have forgotten.” W. R. Leigh and Spenser T. Olin. These accounts could not be the power of suggestion because these people were not just bystanders. They believed that they witnessed levitation, and they were engaging in violent physical activity, trying to bring her body back to the bed. Such activity would, ordinarily, break the power of suggestion. And levitation has been so frequently reported, from so many times and places (from the 5th century to the 21st century), that one cannot be at all sure there is a satisfactory explanation for it, particularly since so many witnesses insisted that no part of Mrs. Winchester’s body was touching the bed. However, whatever the explanation for these symptoms, Mrs. Winchester and her estate are truly a mystery. However, it is also noted the other prominent Queen Anne Victorian Mansions and other built during the Victorian times experienced afflictions. Witchcraft is one of the most hidden works of darkness. Although some people and some estates were more haunted than others, the Bay Area, during Victorian Times, had its full share of obscurity. All publications on witchcraft and supernatural events have been forbidden by these prominent families at the time. Their desire was to quail tempers, and use wisdom to relax fear, while upholding their honour, integrity, and reverence for the Victorian era. “All things are possible to one that believeth,” reports Mark 9.23. Who that beareth it upon one shall not dread one’s enemies, to be overcome, nor with no manner of poison be hurt, nor in no need misfortune, nor with no thunder one shall be smitten nor lightning, no in no fire be burnt suddenly, nor in no water be drowned. Nor one shall not die without shrift, nor with thieves to be take. Also one shall have no wrong neither of Lord or Lady. This be in the names of God and Christ. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Winchester Mystery House will be going dark this weekend for All Hallows’ Eve, but we will be back to haunt you Thursday, September 30th! Purchase your tickets for next weekend early and let the ghoul times roll 👻
See link in bio for ticket info 🎟 winchestermysteryhouse.com
May the World Used to be Flat–How do they Dare to be so Arrogant?!
God touch will come and it will heal. That is what He said to the Centurion, when he asked the Lord to help His paralyzed servant; Matthew had the story correct (8.7). Out of your skin you may be, but God is not the cause. It is the grizzly temptation that bothers you, the groundless fear that dithers you. Why do you work now about what is going to happen in the future? That way you will be shedding tear after tear year after year! “Every day has its own malice,” or so that Great Matthew has pointed out (6.34). Useless, and less than useless, it is to feel puzzled or pleased about the future. Either way you have little to gain. That is because such wool-gathering rarely produces a cloak. However, it not that just Humankind, to play about with fanciful projects? Your spiritual progress has been modest, I must say, if you allow yourself to be dazzled by the Enemy. Why? One does not care a joy whether one’s illusions or deceptions are right or wrong. They cause prostration, all right, but one does not care a tittle whether it is out of love for the present or fear of the future; I say something about that in John (14.27). Humans can orient themselves in two contradictory modes: one’s main interest, love, concern—or as Dr. Freud puts it, one’s libido (energy dealing with pleasures of the flesh)—can either be directed toward oneself or toward the World outside: people, ideas, nature, humanmade things. Narcissism is a necessary intermediate stage between autoeroticism and “object-love.” It is not primarily a perversion of pleasures of the flesh, the passionate love for one’s own body, but it is a complement of the instinct of self-preservation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
The most important evidence of the existence of narcissism came from the analysis of schizophrenia. Schizophrenic patients were characterized by two features: megalomania and diversion of their interests from the external World—from people and things. The interest they had withdrawn from others they directed to their own person—and thus developed megalomania; the image of their own self as omniscient and omnipotent. This concept of psychosis as a state of extreme narcissism was one basis of the idea of narcissism. The other was the normal development of the infant. Dr. Freud assumed that the infant exists in a completely narcissistic state, at the moment of birth, as it had been in the intrauterine state. Slowly the infant learns to take an interest in people and things. This original state of “libidinal cathexis of the ego” fundamentally persists and is related to the object-cathexis “much as the body of an amoeba is related to the pseudopodia which it puts out. Dr. Freud’s discover of narcissism not only explained the nature of psychosis but it also showed that the same narcissism exists in the average adult as exists in the child; to put it differently, that the “normal person” partakes to some lesser or greater degree in that attitude which, when quantitatively stronger, constitutes psychosis. Narcissism plays a huge role in survival. While from a standpoint of values the maximal reduction of narcissism is desired, from the standpoint of biological survival narcissism is a normal desirable phenomenon. If humans did not put their own goals and needs before those others, how could they survive? One would lack the energetic qualities of egoism necessary to take care of one’s own life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
To put it differently: the biological interests of the survival of the race requires a certain amount of narcissism among its members; the ethico-religious goal of the individual, on the contrary, is the maximal reduction of narcissism toward the zero point. In Victorian times, love for most men did not exist expect as the attachment of the male to the feeding women. To be loved (the male by the conquered woman) gives strength, to love actively weakens. While it was presumed the male’s love was anaclitic, id est, it had its object the person who feeds him, it was assumed that woman’s love is narcissistic, that they only can love themselves, and cannot participate in that great “achievement” of men: to love the hand that feeds them. Several men in Victorian times were unaware that the woman of the elite class were cold precisely because their men wanted the cold, id est, to behave like property, and not even to grant them “separate but equal” role in the sleeping chambers. The bourgeois man got the woman as he imaged her and he rationalized his superiority by believing this limited female—limitations imposed by him—was only concerned with wanting to be fed and take care of. This is of course typical male propaganda in the war between the genders, another example of which is that woman are less realistic and less courageous than men. Indeed, this insane World which does not seem to stop running into catastrophe is governed by man, but would a society run by woman be any better? All dominant groups tend to be just as corrupt, if not more so than the processor. In fact, some even try to inflict the pain and oppression on purpose because they are hurting, even though people have been enlightened. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
However. As to courage, many people know that in most cases of illness women are usually much better able to cope with difficulties than the typical male, who wants mother to help them. As to narcissism, women are forced to present themselves attractively, because they are exhibits on the slave market; but when they love they usually love more deeply and reliably than the average man, who is characterized as roaming around and trying to satisfy their narcissism, invested in their male organ of which they are so proud of. To narcissistic persons the only sector that seems fully real is their own person. Feeling, thoughts, ambitions, wishes, body, family, everything that they are or what is theirs. What they think is true, because they think it, and even their bad qualities are beautiful because they are theirs. Everything related to them has colour and full reality. Everybody and everything outside is gray, ugly, and without colour, hardly existing. Here is an example: A man called me to ask for a meeting. I answered that I had no free time in the week but could see him during the following week. He responded by pointing out that he lived very near to my office and hence it would take him little time to come over. When I answered that this was indeed convenient for him but it did not alter the fact that I had no free time, he was unimpressed and continued with the same argument. This is an example of a rather sever case of narcissism, because he was totally unable to distinguish between my needs and his. It is obvious that it makes a great difference how intelligent, artistically talented, knowledgeable a very narcissistic person is. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Many artists and creative writers, music conductors, dancers and politicians are extremely narcissistic. Their narcissism does not interfere with their art; on the contrary it often helps. They have to express what they subjectively feel, and the more important their subjectivity is to their performance, the better they perform. The narcissistic person is often particularly attractive for one’s very narcissism. Think for example of a narcissistic entertainer. One is filled with oneself; one exhibits one’s body and one’s wit with the pride of owning a rare jewel. One has no doubts about oneself as a less narcissistic person necessarily has. What one says, does, the way one walks and moves is enjoyed by oneself like a precious performance and one oneself is one of one’s greatest admirers. I assume that the reason for the attractiveness of the narcissistic person lies in the fact that one portrays an image of what the average person would to be: one is sure of oneself, has no doubts, feels always on top of the situation. The average person, in contract, does not have this certainty; one is often plagued by doubts, prone to admire others as being superior to oneself. One may ask why extreme narcissism does not repel people. Why do they not resent the lack of real love? This question is easy to answer: real love is so rare today as to be almost outside the field of vision of most people. In the narcissist one sees someone who at least loves one person, oneself. The completely untalented narcissist, on the other hand, may be only ridiculous. If the narcissistic person is extremely gifted, one’s success is virtually guaranteed. Narcissistic people are often to be found among successful politicians. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
Even if they are talented or gifted they would not be so impressive without the narcissism that, as it were, oozed out of them. Instead of feeling “How do they dare to be so arrogant?” many people are so attracted by the narcissistic self-image projected that they see in it nothing more than the adequate self-appreciation of a very talented person. It is important to understand that narcissism, which may be called “self-infatuation,” is in contrast to love, if we mean by love the fact of forgetting oneself and caring more for others than oneself. Of equal important is the contradiction between narcissism and reason. Since I have just talked about politician as examples of narcissistic personalities, a statement about the conflict between narcissism and reason seems absurd. However, I am not speaking of intelligence but of reason. Manipulative intelligence is the capacity to use thinking for manipulating the World outside for humans’ purposes. Reason is the faculty to recognize things as they are, regardless of their value or danger to us. Reason aims at the recognition of things and persons in their suchness, undistorted by our subjective interest in them. Cleverness is a form of manipulating intelligence, but wisdom is an outcome of reason. If one’s manipulative intelligence is, the narcissistic person can be extremely clever. However, one is apt to make sever mistakes, because one’s narcissism seduces one into overestimating the value of one’s own wishes and thoughts and into assuming that the result has already been accomplished, simply because it is one’s wish or one’s thought. Narcissism is often confused with egoism. An egoistic person may have an undistorted view of the World. One may not give to one’s thoughts and feelings a greater value than they have in the outside World. One may see the World, including one’s role in it, quite objectively. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
Egoism is basically a form of greediness; the egoist wants everything for oneself, one does not like to share, one perceives others as threats rather than as possible friends. Self-interest prevails in them more or less completely; but the prevalence of self-interest does not necessarily distort the egoist’s picture of oneself and the World around one, as it does with the narcissistic person. Among all character orientations narcissism is by far he most difficult to recognize in oneself. To the extent to which a person is narcissistic one glorifies oneself and is unable to see one’s defects and limitation. One is convinced that the image one has of oneself as a wonderful person is correct, and since it is one’s image one sees no reason o doubt it. Another reason why narcissism is so difficult to detect in oneself is that many narcissistic persons try to demonstrate that they are anything but narcissistic. One of the most frequent examples of this is the attempt of narcissistic persons to hide their narcissism behind behaviour which is characterized by concern and help for others. They spend so much energy and time in helping others, even making sacrifices, being kind, ex cetera, all with the aim (usually unconscious) of denying this narcissism. The same goes, as we all know, for persons who are particularly modest or humble. Not only do such people often try to hide their narcissism, they satisfy it at the same time by being narcissistically proud of their kindness or modesty. A nice example of this is the joke about a dying man overhearing his friends who were at his bedside praise him—how learned he was, how intelligent, how kind, how concerned. The dying man listened and when they had finished praising he angrily shouted, “And you failed to mention my humility!” #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
Narcissism wears many masks: saintliness, obedience to duty, kindness and love, humility, pride. It ranges from the attitude of a haughty and arrogant person to that of a modest and unobtrusive one. Everybody has many tricks to disguise one’s narcissism and is hardly aware of them and their function. If the narcissistic person is successful in persuading others to admire one, one is happy and functions well. However, when one is without success in convincing others, if one’s narcissism is pricked, as it were, one many collapse like a deflated balloon; or one may be intensely furious, filled with unforgiving rage. To inflict a wound on a person’s narcissism may either produce a depression or an unforgiving hate. Therefore, have faith in God’s mercy. Often when you think that you have gone a step too far, you will find another chance for earning even more merit than before. When something bad happens to you, no, it is not a total loss. Do not make long-term commitments to do or not to do in the light of present pleasure or displeasure. Do not cling overlong to a mood or mode, no matter what its source; people will think it is chronic. If from time to time God’s sends one some tribulation or withdraws some consolation, do no think you are a derelict, a beached and abandoned hulk. After all, it all lead to the same destination, that is to say, to the Kingdom of Heaven. “It is You who blesses the righteous person, O LORD; You surround one with favour as with a shield,” reports 5.12. For me and the rest of the Devouts, it is more helpful to be exercised by adversity than entertained by prosperity. God knows our hidden thoughts and what is wrong with that? He finds it helpful in planning our salvation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Doing without consolation for a while is not all that bad. It prevents us from feeling too good about the spiritual tracks one is making or the ladder of perfection one is climbing. What God has given, He can take back, and what God has taken back, He can give again. Whenever He wants. When God gives, it is His to give. When He takes it back, it is not really ours to keep. Every gift of God’s is good, and “all gifts are good,” at least according to the Letter of James (1.17). If God sends us a gift that hurts, do not get uppity, do not let one’s heart go pit-a-pat. God can soon lighten the load, and every burden will be changed into joy. As for God’s dealings with us, He trust we will find them satisfactory; that is to say, fair and just in every way, with a little mercy mixed in. So, we are right in recommended God to others. “When men began to increase in number on the Earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of human were beautiful, and they married any of hem they chose. Then the LORD said, ‘My Spirit will no contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years.’ The Nephilim were on the Earth in those days—and also afterward—when the son of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown. The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the Earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the Earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the LORD said, ‘I will wipe humankind, whom I have created, from the face of the Earth—humans and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and bird of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them.’ However, Noah found favour in the eyes of the LORD. This is the account of Noah,” reports Genesis 6.1-9. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Every time you encounter a road block on your spiritual journey, you should not go sit by the side of the road and be sad; rather, you should rejoice and give thanks. Why? God has afflicted us with woes, yes, but you are not the only one. Yes, God knows the lash of John has let this be known to us. “As the Father has loved Me, so I love you,” report John 15.9. That is a lot of comfort to many pour souls, seeing how things eventually get sorted out between God, Jesus Christ, and ourselves. “I will exalt You, O LORD, for you lifted me out of the depths and did not let my enemies gloat over me. O LORD my God, I called You for help and you healed me. O LORD, you brough me up from the grave; you spared me from going down into the pit. Sing to the LORD, you saints of His; praise His holy name. For His anger lasts a lifetime; weeping may remain for a nigh, but rejoicing comes in the morning,” reports Psalm 30.1-5. God has sent us off not to minor joys but to great battles; not to honour ceremonies but to contempt encounters; not to leisurely activities but to laborious exercises; not to relax without anxiety, but to endure with patience, like the seeds that fell on the good soil in His parable in Luke (8.15). As hey germinated, so should you. All words worth remembering. “The LORD is my portion; I have promised to keep Your words. I sought Your Favour with all my heart; be gracious to me according to Your word,” reports Psalm 119.57-58. We must wake up every morning and declare God’s favour in our lives. Every morning, thank God for opening doors of opportunity and brining success into your life. God will make people desire to help you because they can see His love and light in your soul. They know that there is something special about you. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Anytime you get into a hard situation, declare the favour of God in your business. Yet, I think it is important we remain rational because limitless expectations can breed endless frustrations. “Blessed is one who expects nothing, for one shall never be disappointed,” counseled the poet Alexander Pop in a 1727 letter. Life’s greatest disappointments, as well as its highest achievements, are born of the most optimistic expectations. In saying that, it is a balancing act to expect the most extraordinary things, but to also know life happens on God’s timeline and when He sees fit. Yet, it is important to remain optimistic and not be depressed. Meaning and purpose is derived from spiritual insight. Intellectual knowledge is inseparable from the emotional and spiritual. Forgiveness of others who cause distress (including parents) complete the therapeutic restoration of self. Therefore, even in the mundane aspects of life, we will not be imposing on God’s goodness by declaring His favour. He wants us to act on it. For example, maybe you are deciding between a Cresleigh Havenwood home, and there is someone else interested in the same lot you are. Simply declare, “Father, I thank You that I have Your favour, and that You are going to make a way for me where it appears that there is no way right now.” Then keep trusting God and looking for the opportunity to open. God is supreme. Humility, acceptance of (divine” authority, and obedience (to the will of God) are virtues. God has your best interests at heart, and He is working everything for your good. Like a good parent, Goes does not always give you what you want. However, He will always give you what you need. A delay may spare you from something you are not supposed to experience, or maybe something else is opening up for you that will encourage you even more. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Personal identity is eternal and derived from the divine. Relationship with God defines self-worth. When you live favour-minded, you will begin to see God’s goodness in the everyday, ordinary details of the architecture in your home, at work job, in the landscape, or in your soul. You may be at Cresleigh’s Design Center picking out the materials for your house and praying you get the lot someone else just purchased, when a sale agent taps you on the shoulder and says, “Come with me. I have this lot that would be perfect for you, and this particular house has a few incentives from the builder, which will cost you nothing.” When you are living in favour-minded, God’s blessings seem to chase you down and overtake you. Also, when you are a Christian, remember that your values may be quite different from those of other people. Many people expect psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers to be guided by value-free professionalism and objective science, but much of their research, theories, and techniques are implicit expression of humanistic and naturalistic belief system that dominate both psychology and American universities generally. So antireligious prejudice would not be surprising. To them, Christians are perceived as religious nuts. However, religious communities provide both a relief structure and loving, emotional support which often inhibits the manifestation of psychological and physical disorders. There is a code of self-control in terms of absolute values, strict morality, and universal ethics. Christian groups also often endorse high standards of impulse control and as a result have low rates of alcoholism, drug addition, divorce, and emotional instability. There tends to be a stable marriage and family life, which pays psychological and social dividends. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Christian values are important and should be acknowledged more openly because they tend to strongly support humanistic values of love, freedom of choice, and honesty. Nevertheless, values that permeate psychotherapy should be openly acknowledged and tested; moreover, psychologists should consider the possibility that genuine spiritual-religious values may indeed have beneficial, health-promoting consequences. Therefore, when those kind things you have been praying for happen, be grateful. Be sure to thank God for His favour, and for His special assistance in your life. Do not take God’s favour for granted. When you are living favour-minded, God’s blessings seem to chase you down and overtake you. You will not be able to outrun the good things of God. Everywhere you, go things are going to change in your favour. Someone is going to want to share God’s blessings with you and they may not even know why. That is why one should get in the habit of consistently speaking God’s favour over our lives. And not simply over our own lives, but over our businesses, our employees, our children, our ultimate driving machine, and our families. “Father, I thank You my clients are loyal to me, and that this property is going to sell I thank You that Your favour is leading me to the right people. Your favour is causing people to want to buy this home.” That is why one must speak God’s favour over every area of one’s life. Remember, the more favour-minded you are, the more God’s favour you are going to experience. God sends His Disciples off not to minor joys but to great battles; not to honours ceremonies but to contempt encounters; not to leisurely activities but to laborious exercises; not to relax without anxiety, but to endure with patience, like the seeds that fell on the god soil in His parable in Luke (8.15). As they germinated, so should you. All words worth remembering. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Thank You, Father, that You are opening doors for me that no one can shut. Thank You for causing people to be kind to me and to assist me. You make a way for me where it seems there is no way. The big corporation was the characteristic business organization of the industrial era. Today thousand such behemoths, both private and public, bestride the Earth, producing a large proportion of all the goods and services we buy. Seen from the outside, they present a commanding appearance. They control vas resources, employ millions of workers, and they deeply influence not merely our economies but our political affairs as well. Their computers and corporate jets, their unmatched ability to plan, to invest, to execute projects on a grand scale, make them seem unshakably powerful and permanent. At a time when most of us feel powerless, they spear to dominate our destinies. Yet that is not the way they look from he inside, to the men and women who run these organizations. Indeed, many of our top managers today feel quite as frustrated and powerless as the rest of us. For exactly like the nuclear family, the school the mass media, and the other key institutions of the industrial age, the corporation is being hurled about, shaken, and transformed by the Third Wave of change. And a good many top managers do not know what has hit them. The most immediate change affecting the corporation is the crisis in the World economy. For three years, the Second Wave civilization worked to create an integrated global marketplace. Periodically these efforts were set back by wars, depressions, or other disasters. However, each time the World economy recovered, emerging larger and more closely integrated than before. Today a new crisis has struck. However, this one is different. Unlike the crises during the industrial era, it involves not only money, but countless human lives and goods, services and supplies. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
The current pandemic is bringing inflation, unemployment, death, disability, lack of resources, surpluses of jobs openings, stagnant wages, immigration crisis, high demands of good and services, lack of supply, simultaneously, not sequentially. Unlike those of the past, it is directly linked to health care, housing shortages, low incomes, ecological problems, an entirely new species of technology, and to the introduction of a new level of communications into the production system. Finally, it most certainly is not, as Marxist’s claim, a crisis of capitalism alone, but one that involves socialist industrial nation as well. It is, in short, the general crisis of the age of information civilization as a whole. The upheaval in the World economy threatens the survival of the corporation as we know, it throwing its managers into a wholly unfamiliar environment. Thus from the end of World War II until the early 2000’s the corporation functioned in a comparatively stable environment. Growth was the key word. The dollar was king. Currencies remained stable for long periods. The current financial crisis from the government shutting the economy down and making people stay in their homes for months, threatened the escalator to affluence as it was still ascending, and economists were so confident of their ability to predict and control the economic machine that they spoke casually about “fine tuning’ it. Today the phrase evokes only derisive snorts. The President wisecracks that he knows a fortune-tell from Mexico who is a better forecaster then the economists. Secretary of the Treasury, says that “the economics profession is close to bankruptcy in understanding the present situation—before or after the fact. Standing in the tangled wreckage of economic theory and the middle of the rubble of the pandemic infrastructure, corporate decision-makers face rising uncertainties. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
Interest rates zigzag. Currencies gyrate. Central banks buy and sell money by the carload to damp the swings, but the gyrations only grow more extreme. The dollar, yuan, yen and cryptocurrency perform a Kabuki dance, while people in the Middle East stock pile American weapons and military supplies, frantically off-load billions of dollars worth of American paper. God and silver prices break all records. While all of this is occurring, technology and communications restructure World markets, making transnational production both possible and necessary. And to facilitate such operations, a jet-age money system is taking form. A global electronic banking network—impossible before the computer and satellite—now instantaneously links Hong Kong, Manila, or Singapore with the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, and New York. This sprawling networks of banks, with its Citibanks and Barclays, its Sumitomos and Narodnys, not to mention Credit Suisse and the National Bank of Abu Dhabi, creates a balloon of “stateless currency”—money and credit outside the control of any individual government—which is really innovative in ways yet imagined. The bulk of this stateless currency consists of Eurodollars—dollars outside the United States of America. The accelerated growth of cryptocurrency is a wild card in the economic game. “Here the ‘Crypto’ contributes to inflation, there they shift the balance of payments, in another place they undermine the currency—as they stampede from place to place” across national boundaries. At this time there is a total value of $2.02 trillion in such cryptocurrencies. Bankers dealing with the supranational currency are free to issue unlimited credit and—not be required to hold any cash reserves—and are able to lend out at bargain-basement rates with no credit check, fast funding (as little as in a few hours) and choice of loan currency. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
The Third Wave economic system in which the corporation grew up is based on national markets, national currencies, and national government. This nation-based infrastructure, however, is utterly unable to regulate or contain the new transnational and electronic “Crypto-bubble.” This is why China has made Cryptocurrencies illegal as well as the mining and trading of them to protect their own Yuan. The structures designed for a Third Wave World are no longer adequate. Indeed, the entire global framework that stabilized World trade relations for the giant corporations is rattling and in danger of coming apart. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the American Stock Market are all under heavy attack. Governments around the World scramble to bolt together a new structure to be controlled by them. The “less developed countries” n one side, and the Middle East brandishing their petrodollars on the other, clamour for influence in the financial system of tomorrow and speak of creating their own counterparts to the IMF. The dollar is being dethroned, and jerks and spasms rip through the World economy. All this is compounded by erratic shortages and gluts of energy and resources; by rapid changes in the attitude of consumers, workers, and managers; by rapidly shifting imbalances of trade; and above all by rising militancy of the non-industrial World. This is the volatile, confusing environment in which today’s corporations struggle to operate. The managers who run them have no wish to relinquish corporate power. They still battle for profits, production, and personal advancement. However, faced with soaring levels of unpredictability, with mounting public criticism and hostile political pressures, our most intelligent managers are questioning the goals, structures, responsibility, the very raison d’etre of their organizations. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Many of our biggest corporations are experiencing something analogous to an identity crisis as they watch the once stable introduction of the Third Wave framework disintegrate around them. Of particular interest is group narcissism. Group narcissism is a phenomenon of the greatest political significance. After all, the average person lives in social circumstances which restrict the development of intense narcissism. What should feed the narcissism of a poor human, who has little social prestige, whose children even tend to look down upon one? One has nothing—but if one can identify with one’s nation, or can transfer one’s personal narcissism to the nation or corporation, then one is everything. If such a person said, “I am the most wonderful person in the World; I am the cleanest, cleverest, most efficient, best educated of all people; I am superior to everybody in the World,” anybody who heard his would be disgusted and feel that the person was a bit crazy. However, when people describe their nation in these terms, nobody takes exception. On the contrary, if a person says, “My nation is the strongest, the most cultured, the most peace-loving, the most talented of all nations,” one is not looked upon as being crazy but as a very patriotic citizen. The same hold true for religious narcissism. That millions of adherents to a religion can claim that they are the only possessors of the truth, that their religion is the only way to salvation, is considered to be perfectly normal. Other examples of group narcissism are political groups and scientific groups. The individual satisfies one’s own narcissism by belonging to and identifying oneself with the group. Not one the nobody is great, but one the member of the most wonderful group on Earth. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Someone will say to me that anyone who has humans to govern should not seek outside their nature a perfection of which they are incapable, that one should not desire to destroy their passions, and hat the execution of such a project should be no more desirable than it is possible. I will agree more strongly with all of this because a human who had no passion would certainly be a very bad citizen. However, one must agree that even though humans cannot be taught to love nothing, it is not impossible for them to learn to love one object more than another and what is truly beautiful more than what is deformed. If, for example, they are trained early enough never to consider their own persons except in terms of being related to the body of the state, and not to perceive their own existence except as part of the state’s existence, they will eventually come to identify themselves in some way with this larger whole, to feel themselves to be members of the country, to love it with that exquisite sentiment that every isolated human feels only for oneself, to elevate their soul perpetually toward this great object, and thus to transform into a sublime virtue this dangerous disposition from which arises all our vices. Not only does philosophy demonstrate the possibility of these new directions, but history furnishes us with a thousand striking examples. If they are so rare among us, it is because no one is concerned about whether there are any citizens, and sill less does anyone give any thought to take steps early enough to train them. It is too late to alter our natural inclinations when they have taken their course and habit has been joined with self-love. It is too late to draw us out of ourselves, once the human self concentrated in our hearts has acquires that disputable activity which absorbs all virtue and constitutes the life of mean-spirited people. RandolphHarris 19 of 22
How could love of country develop in the midst of so many other passions which choke it? And what is left for our fellow citizens of a heart already dividing its affections among greed, a mistress and vanity? One might object to the evaluation of one’s group and claim it is not realistically correct. For one thing, a group can hardly be as perfect as its members describe it; the more important reason, though, is that criticism of the group is responses to with intense rage, which is the reaction characteristic of one whose individual narcissism is wounded. In the narcissistic characteristic character of national, political and religious group reaction lies the root of all fanaticism. When the group becomes the embodiment of one’s own narcissism, any criticism of the group is felt to be an attack against oneself. In cases of cold or hot wars, the narcissism takes on a still more drastic form. My own nation is perfect, peace-loving, cultured, et cetera; the enemy’s is the contrary—vile, treacherous, cruel, et cetera. In reality most nations are equal in the overall balance of good and evil traits; however, virtues and vices are specific for each nation. What narcissistic nationalism does is to see only the virtue of one’s own and the vices of the enemy’s nation. The mobilization of group narcissism is one of the important conditions for the preparation of war; it must begin much earlier than the outbreak of the war, but it becomes reinforced the closer nations move towards war. The feelings at the beginning of the First World War are a god example of reason’s becoming silenced when narcissism rules. British war propaganda accused the German soldiers of bayoneting infants in Belgium (a complete lie but believed by many in the West); the Germans called the British a nation of treacherous traders while they themselves were heroes fighting for freedom and justice. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Can this group narcissism ever disappear and with it one condition for war? Indeed, there is no reason to assume that it cannot. The conditions for its disappearance are manifold. One is that the life of individuals must be so rich and interesting that they can relate to others with interest and love. This in turn presupposes a social structure that engenders being and sharing and discourages having and possessing. With the development of interest in love for others, narcissism tends to be increasingly reduced. The most important and most difficult problem, however, is that group narcissism can be produced by the basic structure of society, and the question is how this happens. The first condition for the increasing development of narcissism in industrial society is the separateness and antagonism of individuals toward each other. This antagonism is a necessary consequence of an economic system that is built on ruthless selfishness and on the principle of seeking advantages at the expense of others. When sharing and mutuality are absent narcissism is bound to thrive. However, the more important condition for the development of narcissism, and one which has been given full measure only in the last decades, is the worship of industrial production. Humans have made themselves into a god. They have created a New World, the World of human-made things, using the old creation only as raw material. Modern humans have laid bare the secrets of the microcosmos as well as the macrocosmos; one has discovered the secrets of the atom and the secrets of the cosmos, relegating our Earth to an infinitely small entity among the galaxies. The scientists making these discoveries had to perceive things as they are, objectively and hence with little narcissism. However, the consumer, in the same way as the technicians and practitioners of applied science, has not had to have the scientist. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
The overwhelming part of the human race has not had to devise the new technics; they have been able to build it according to the new theoretical insights and admire it. Thus it happens that modern human has developed an extraordinary pride in their creation; one has deemed oneself to be a god, one has felt one’s greatness in the contemplation of the grandeur of the human-made new Earth. Thus admiring one’s second creation, one has admired oneself in it. The World one has made, harnessing the energy of coal, of oil, and now of the atom, and especially the seeming limitless capacity of one’s brain, had become the mirror in which one can see oneself. Humans’ gaze into this mirror which reflects not one’s beauty but one’s ingenuity and power. Will one drown in this mirror as Narcissus drowned gazing at the picture of his beautiful body mirrored in the lake? God, please save us with Thy mighty hand. Please adorn us with the radiance of a victorious host. Please cause us to cleave close to Thee. Please bring us near to the time of redemption. Please lead us to Thy house with song and gladness. Please glorify us with salvation and joy Please bless us with ample substance and deliverance. Please hearten us with the rebuilding of Thy city to its former glory. Please exalt us to that we may merit respect everywhere. May we be remembered for gladness and rejoicing. Please cause us to lie down in a fertile valley, bright with Thy splendour, and do Thou save us. Please fortify us, O God of Jacob, and do Thou save us. We overcome this wind. We desire the rain to fall, that it be poured in showers quickly. Ah, thou rain, I adjure thee fall. If thou rainiest, it is well. A drizzling confusion. It rains and our food ripens, it is well. If the young men sing, it is well. A drizzling confusion. If our grain ripens, it is well. If our women rejoice, if the children rejoice, if the young men sing, if the aged rejoice, an overflowing in the granary, a torrent in flow, if the wind veers to the south, it is well. If the rain veers to the south, it is well. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Myself Grows to Myself of Cost
God please forgive me and help me to do the right thing! Now that I am in the middle of this mischief, my heart keeps pounding, and I am breaking out all over. Father and Friend, what can I say, now that I have got the troubles except, perhaps, “Save me from this hour”—that is what You prayed to Your Father in the garden, or so the Beloved Disciple reported in his Gospel, and that is what I prayer to You now. “But that is just why I have come to this hour”—that is what You also prayed in the same place and the same verse, and so, I suppose, in the present fix I am in, should I. I hope You will feel glorified when You have humbled me and then raised me up again. “If it please You, O Lord,” as the Psalmist cried, “rescue me” (40.13). Poor beggar that I am, what can I do without You? Where can I go with You? Grant me patience, O Lord, at this very fine turn of events. “Help me, my Lord,” as the Psalmist cooed (109.26), no matter how catastrophic my fall has been! “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you my know that you have eternal life. This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to His will, he hears us. And if we know that He hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of Him. If anyone sees his brother commit a sin that does not lead to death, he should pray and God will give life. I refer too those whose sin does not lead to death. We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the one who was born of God keeps one safe, and the evil one cannot harm one. We know that we are children of God, and that the whole World is under the control of the evil one. We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know Him who is true. And we are in Him who is true—even in His Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. Dear children, keep yourselves from idols,” reports 1 John 5.13-21. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
Still in the middle of this muddle, what shall I say, O Lord? Some words from Matthew come to mind (26.42). “Your will be done”—that sounds appropriate. That is what You said in the Great Prayer to Your Father; and that is what I should say too. I have richly deserved to be flayed and flattened. So I have to endure it, wait patiently. However, the storm will pass. Things will get better. Thankfully, Yours is the right hand that rocks the Cradle of the Universe. If You want, please lift this temptation from me. At least soften its impact before it crushes the life out of me. “Many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the World. Any such person is the deceiver and antichrist. Watch out that you do not lose what you have worked for, but that you may be rewarded fully. Anyone who runs ahead and does not continue in the teaching of Christ does not have God; whoever continues in the teaching has both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not take one into your house or welcome one. Anyone who welcomes that individual shares in one’s wicked work,” reports 2 John 1.7-11. Mercifully, many times before You have saved me, if I may take some words from the Wisdom of Solomon (11.17), although I cannot help noting You waited until the last possible moment, no doubt for dramatic effect. I have tried to save myself before, my Life-saving and Life-savouring Friend, but it is more than could so. However, You, You could save me, You could make it easier for me. And, if I might paraphrase the Psalmist (77.10), with less energy than it takes the Almighty to bat an eyelash. “Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and from Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son, will be with us in truth and love,” reports 2 John 1.3. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
God is strength in the face of weakness. We should come to God when things are not going well—that is what He said in Matthew (11.28). Why? God has all this Celestial Consolation at His beck and call. So why are we so slow to turn to prayer? And why is God always our last resort? We can plead our own cases whenever we have a mind to. However, often in the past, God has noticed we like to spend what He considers an indecent interval searching for relief in a variety of other venues and avenues. There is some titillation in each, no doubt, but not a lot of tintinnabulation. That is to say, ere a clink, there a clink, but no one clear tone. “Though art the glory of their strength; and in thy favour our horn shall be exalted,” reports Psalm 89.17. Many people who are the best at what they do endure unfair compensation for years. And, beyond that they endure all sorts of injustice and ridicule from their coworkers. The reason some of them go almost a decade without a pay increase or a bonus of any kind may be because their supervisor does not like the individual. It seems rational to grow bitter, quit and find work elsewhere; or become anti-social and take on the attitude of a victim and mad at everyone. However, several Christians have learned that it is best to continued to do high quality work because they are working to please God, not anyone else. One day, someone will notice you hard work and the favour of God will make them call you so they can elevate your status in the career World. And perhaps, one day, you will own your own company. That is what happens when we follow the ways of Christ and build our faith. God will make you back and make turn the injustice into blessings. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
God is the rescuer, the St. Bernard in the Alps, for all who hope in Him. Without God there is no help for what ails an individua, no pointed advice, no lasting remedy. However, already, after the avalanche, with colour returning to your cheeks one can recover with help of God’s ministrations. God is always close by, as He says in the Psalms. What can He do? God can not only restore our basic necessities, but also add a few niceties of His own. Understand, we serve a God who wants to do more than one can ask of think. Regardless of how people are treating you, keep doing the right thing; do not get offended or upset; do not try to pay them back, returning evil for evil. Instead, keep extending forgiveness; keep responding in love. If one does that, then when it comes time for one to be promoted, God will make sure it happens. Gd will make sure one gets everything one deserves, and more! Remember, one touch from God can change one’s circumstances. Open your heart and trust God’s plan for your live, and start anticipating His grace and favour. God wants to be something of a Lovejoy and be nice to be with. Stand firm and hold fast to your faith. I know, Father, that grace and blessings come from you that can turn around any situation in my life. I believe that You have divine favour ready to pour out in my life, and I will expect good things to come my way today because of You. The records represent Christ as passing after death (as no human has passed before) neither into a purely, that is, negatively, “spiritual” mode of existence not into a “natural” life such as we know, but into a life which has its own, new Nature. It represents Him as withdrawing six weeks later, into some different mode of existence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
The Resurrection says—Jesus says—that He goes “to prepare a place for us.” This presumably means that Christ is about to create that whole new Nature which will provide the environment or conditions for His glorified humanity and, in Him, for ours. The picture is not what we expected—though whether it is less or more probable and philosophical on that account is another question. It is not the picture of an escape from any and every kind of Nature into some unconditioned and utterly transcendent life. It is the picture of a new human nature, and a new Nature in general, being brought into existence. We must, indeed, believe the risen body to be extremely different from the mortal body: but the existence, in that new state, of anything that could in any sense be described as “body” at all, involves some sort of spatial relations and in the long run a whole new Universe. That is the picture—not of unmaking but of remaking. The old field of space, time, matter, and the sense is to be weeded, dug, and sown for a new crop. We may be tired of that old field: God is not. And yet they very way in which this New Nature begins to shine in as a certain affinity with the habits of the Old Nature. In Nature as we know her, things tend to be anticipated. Nature is fond of “false dawns,” of precursors: thus, as I said before, some flowers come before true spring: sub-men (the evolutionists would have it) before the true men. So, here also, we get Law before Gospel, animal sacrifices foreshadowing the great sacrifice of God to God, the Baptist before the Messiah, and those “miracles of the New Creation” which come before the Resurrection. Christ’s walking on water, and His raising of Lazarus fall in this class. Both give us hints of what the new Nature will be like. #RandolphHarrs 5 of 8
In the Walking on the Water, we see the relations of spirit and Nature so altered that Nature can be made to do whatever spirit pleases. This new obedience of Nature is, of course, not to be separated even in thought from spirit’s own obedience to the Father of Spirits. Apart from that proviso such obedience by Nature, if it were possible, would result in chaos: the evil dream of Magic arises from finite spirit’s longing to get that power without paying that price. The evil reality of lawless applied science (which is Magic’s son and heir) is actually reducing large tracts of Nature to disorder and sterility at this very moment. I do not know how radically Nature herself would need to be altered to make her thus obedient to spirits, wen spirits have become wholly obedient to their source. One thing at least we must observe. If we are in fact spirits, not Nature’s offspring, then there must be some point (probably the brain) at which created spirit even now can produce effects on matter not by manipulation or technics but simply by the wish to do so. If that is what you mean by Magic then Magic is a reality manifested every time you move your hand or think a thought. And Nature, as we have seen, is not destroyed but rather perfected by her servitude. The raising of Lazarus differs from the Resurrection of Christ Himself because Lazarus, so far as we know, was not raised to a new and more glorious mode of existence but merely restored to the sort of life he had had before. The fitness of the miracle lies in the fact that He who will raise all humans at the general resurrection here does it small and close, and in an inferior—a merely anticipatory—fashion. For the mere restoration of Lazarus is as inferior in splendour to the glorious resurrection of the New Humanity as stone jars are to the green and growing vine or five little barley loaves to all the waving bronze and gold of a fat valley ripe for harvest. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
The resuscitation of Lazarus so far as we can see, is simple reversal: a series of changes working in the direction opposite to that we have always experienced. At death, matter which has been organic, begins to flow away into the inorganic, to be finally scattered and used (some of it) by other organisms. The resurrection of Lazarus involves the reverse process. The general resurrection involves the process universalized—a rush of matter towards organization at the call of spirits which require it. It is presumably a foolish fancy (not justified by the words of Scripture) that each spirit should recover those particular units of matter which one ruled before. For one thing, they would not be enough to go round: we all live in second-hand suits and there are doubtless atoms in my chin which have served many another human, many a dog, many an eel, many a dinosaur. Nor does the unity of our bodies, even in this present life, consist in retaining the same particles. My form remains one, though the matter in it changes continually. I am, in that respect, like a curve in a waterfall. However, the miracle of Lazarus, though only anticipatory in one sense, belongs emphatically to the New Creation, for nothing is more definitely excluded by Old Nature than any return to a status quo. The patterns of Death and Rebirth never restores the previous individual organism. And similarly, on the inorganic level, we are told that Nature never restores order where disorder has once occurred. Shuffling is the thing Nature never undoes. Hence we live in a Universe where organisms are always getting more disordered. These laws between them—irreversible death and irreversible entropy—cover almost the whole of what St. Paul calls the “vanity” of Nature: her futility, her ruinousness. And the film is never reversed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
The moment from ore order to less almost serves to determine the direction in which Time is flowing. You could almost define the future as the period in which what is now living will be dead and in which what orders still remains will be diminished. They who have the ocean as their eldest flow out of the sea, purifying themselves, never resting. God with the thunderbolt, opened a way for them; let the waters, who are goddesses, help me here and now. The water of the sky or those that flow, those that are dug out or those that arise by themselves, those pure and clear waters that seek the ocean as their goal—let the waters, who are goddesses, help me here and now. Those in whose midst God moves, looking down upon the truth and falsehood of people, those pure and clear waters that drip honey—let the waters, who are goddesses, help me here and now. Those among whom God drinks in ecstasy the exhilarating nourishment, those into whom Jesus of-all-men entered—let the waters, who are goddesses, help me here and now. O Eternal, we beseech Thee, please save us now. Please restore us to a position of honour and praise. Please bring us back unto our lot and inheritance, and exalt us higher and higher. Please establish us as Thy chosen vineyard and make us a tree planted by streams of water. Please redeem us from all plague and disease, and crown us with perfect love. Please gladden us in our house of prayer, and lead us by still waters. Please fill us with wisdom and discernment; please clothe us with strength and greatness; adorn us with the diadem of perfection. Lead us forward on the way of righteousness and please guide us upon the straight path of equity. Please grant us Thy mercy and compassion. May it be said of us again, Who is this that goeth up?” Please save us with Thy mighty hand. Please adorn us with the radiance of a victorious host. Please cause us to cleave close to Thee. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
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The Office itself or Even Simply a Uniform Makes One into a Worshipable Person!
The bad news is if you hope to get all, you have to give up all; that is to say, you have to lose yourself, leaving no traces or tracks behind. “A good human will obtain favour from the LORD, but He will condemn a human who devises evil,” reports Proverbs 12.2. Know that love of self does more harm to you than all the calamities of the World. If I were to pick one such calamity, you would find it thriving, unbeknownst to you, among your everyday loves and affections. If your love has been pure, simple, and well ordered, you will not be held captive by material things. Do not look for what it is not allowed to have. Do not acquire what can impede your progress and deprive you of your interior freedom. It is amazing, is it not, that you do not, from the bottom of your heart, commit yourself to the Lord, in whom you can desire or have everything your soul should ever need. “However, while Joseph was there in prison, the LORD was with him; he showed him kindness and granted him favour in the eyes of the prison warden. So the warden put Joseph in charge of all those held in the prison, and he was made responsible for all that was done there. The warden paid no attention to anything under Joseph’s care, because the Lord was with Joseph and gave him success in whatever he did,” Genesis 39.20-23. Therefore it is important to discover how to experience more of God’s favour so one can live the American Dream. “God has crowned us with glory and honour,” reports Psalms 8.5. Wherefore, why consume yourself with false labour? Why weary yourself with worries that are not yours? #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
If you are always on the quest, if you simply have to have this convenience or that advantage, then you will be in an uproar ad nauseam. You will never be in quietude; in fact, you will be up to you bum in solicitude. Why? Because nothing is perfect. That is to say, in every enterprise some defect will flare, and in every endeavour some contrarian will say it cannot be done. Creepers and other wildly successful plants, therefore, do not really help; unfortunately, they choke all the life out of your spiritual garden. Pretty they may be for a time, but, eventually you will have to root them out. God wants to make your life easier. He wants to take you to a higher level and show you extraordinary things. This is not just about counting coin or amassing wealth It is also about honours and decorations and the inflated citations that go with them. All this stuff turns to dust as the World dies; John said as much in his First Letter (2.17). If it lacks spiritual fervour, your soul is poorly defended. To have fervour for God means that you are releasing faith and believing that God is currently assisting and want to increase His grace and blessing in your life because He is your Heavenly Father, and He loves you. Put up a monument to Peace with the World as foundation, and it will not stand for long. Erect n obelisk within, with God as base, and it will never stop pointing to the sky. You are a child of the Most High God and he has His Angels protecting you. Your Father created the entire Universe, and He has crowned you with favour. This grace and blessing from God makes people want to go out of their way to show your kindness and assist you with whatever you require. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
You can change yourself, but you will not necessarily change yourself for the better. Try it, and see what happens. Changes are you will meet your same old self coming and going. Confirm me, O God, through the grace of the Holy Spirit, if I may echo the Psalmist. Strengthen the interior man, if I may echo the Ephesians. Please empty my hear from every useless solicitude and distress. Discourage me various desires from shopping for stuff, no matter how cheap or dear. Grant that I may see that everything is fading, if I may echo Ecclesiastes, and that I am fading with it. Nothing under the sun remains where it is. Everything is vanity and affliction of their spirit. God is the King of kings, and with this heritage, we can live with confidence and expect good things. While it is also important to remain humble, keep in mind this will help you receive preferential treatment because you are a child of God. When one starts to declare God’s greatness, one will be astonished by how people will go out of their way to help one. Oh, that I were wise as the person who knows this! Please grant me, O Lord, the Celestial knowledge, if I may echo the Wisdom of Solomon, to seek and king You in all things, to be wise and love You above everything, and to understand the rest, according to the order of Your wisdom, for what it is. Allow me to prudently decline the flatter and to patiently bear the slanderer. Why? Great wisdom it is for a person who has set sail on a spiritual voyage not to be swayed by, as Paul put it to the Ephesians, Doctrinal Hearsay or Daresay—Sirens both, meant to distract, then to destroy!—but to continue with some serenity on the charted course. Lord, help to me wake up every day and declare that no matter how the situation appears, I have the favour of God. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Lord, please assist me in staying in an attitude of faith. I thank You, Father, that I have Your favour, and that I have favour with other people not because of who I am but because of who You are, and that I am Your child. When someone trashed me in public or torches my ears, please allow me to stay humble, and think less of myself than the slanderer thinks of me. If I am already treading the downward-inward path, I will not pay much attention to whatever slanders come flying in my direction. When times are bad, it is no small prudence to keep my peace, that is to say, to turn myself toward God—that is how His John put it (16.33). That way I will not be knocked off my course by some outrageous judgment about my person or conduct. My you help me, God, not to look for my peace to come from the mouths of humans. Heir animadversions, whether for good or for bad, do not make me either a better or worse person. Just where is True Peace and True Glory? Should it not be in God? Pleasantries, unpleasantries, it really does not matter. Either way, the true Devout will enjoy great peace. Out of unruly love and ungainly fear, there arises every inquietude of heart, every distraction of sense. The Glimpse that comes from God provides overwhelming confirmation of the belief in a divine principle, absolute certainty that it rules the World, and renewed assurance that one day all humans will obey its benign prompting towards goodness and wisdom. These moments of spiritual insight give one more than much study could give one. One learns then that there is another part of oneself not the ego which has hitherto dominated one’s thoughts and days—a delightful beautiful unpressured part. One knows then what peace of mind really means. One sees that one has lived only as a fraction of oneself, and even that have been made miserable by inner or outer friction. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
It is a mysterious condition of the mind, when the normal doubts and hesitations vanish, when certitude is complete and understanding direct, when one knows that truth has visited one and feels that peace has held one. One perceives that this is a new kind of experience, a new way of knowing, a new level of happiness, a new quality of life. The proper use of mystic experience is as a counter to the merely intellectual and theoretical stages which usually come before such experience. With the coming of this climax one may experience a profound sense of liberation, which later justifies itself, as the problems which had beset one’s mind slowly begin to dissolve and vanish under its wise tuition. One may think of Keats’ joyful lines: “Then I felt like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken.” For there will be present all the magnificent exhilaration, the intellectual intoxication which is born when the mind alights upon new-found truth guidance or inspiration. One who as tasted the immeasurable joy of the Overself’s peace will not care to shrink back again into the little self’s confines. For one will know then that the Infinite, the Void, the Transcendent—call what one will the loss of one’s ego—is not a loss of happiness but an unlimited magnification of it. Each glimpse generates afresh confidence in the existence and wisdom of the World-Mind. One now has a revelation which throws its vivid light on humans, their lives, characters, and histories. There is now a spacious meaning in existence. The Glimpse may be different from any experience one has known, as well as overwhelming in its several implications. However, if one has been exposed to the full power, one will trust it, and can hardly do otherwise. It is as if one’s inner being clears up, becomes transparent, and obscurities covering one’s essence roll away. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The Glimpse is like light being enkindled in the mind. It is the will to believe and the determination that backs up its belief. We need a vision of the things to be light up the rough pathway of the things that are. Without it no great work would be done. If the glimpse is accompanied by a revelation, then one will understand more on the particular subject or subjects it concerns than one has ever understood before. Each glimpse brings a grace. It may be a message or an awakening, a revelation or a warning, a reconciliation or a confirmation, a strengthening or a mellowing. Sometimes the mind slips into a dazed beatitude as Sarah Winchester’s did when she received the blueprints for her mansion in the blue séance room of mystical enlightenment. Here in the heart is He who witnesses to your divine identity, and in the head comes the confirmation. Such mystical experiences will open one to the true meaning of one’s humanhood. In these brief but glorious moments we discover that we are divine beings. If most of us are worse than the front we present to our neighbours, all of us are better than they think through our afflation with divinity. In these hallowed moments, one learns one’s essential oneness with the Universal Mind. Unless a genuinely scientific and metaphysical basis is found, it will be discovered, as one famous healing cult has already discovered, that although cures are effected which cannot be doubted, many of these cures are not permanent. The principle which is the key to such healing—if it is to be real healing and not a temporary suppression of symptoms—and which overrides all others is the surrender of the conscious will, the personal will, to a higher power behind all bodies. The cure is not effected and cannot be effected by the patient oneself or by any professional healer who may be employed. It is done only by the Overelf itself, which means that it is essentially a bestowal of grace. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Now grace is an active force, not a mere intellectual thought or emotional attitude. It is the cosmic willpower, or what Indians called kundalini. This bestowal in turn requires that not merely the body alone be touched, but also the mind. Hence a cure which is genuine and permanent will always involve to some extent a mental re-adjustment, a correction of outlook, even an ethical conversion. Those who do not understand the Overself’s workings expect it always to manifest at all—in all its naked purity. If they desire healing, they think that the Overself’s help can show itself only in a direct spiritual healing, for instance. The truth is that they may get the cure from a purely physical medium, like a fast, a diet, or medication; yet that which roused them to seek this particular medium or gave it its successful result was the Overself. Jesus’ primary intention was to heal the inner man, to promote a directional change in one’s thought and feeling, to divert one from a sinful to a righteous attitude toward life, and to convert one from spiritual indifference to spiritual enthusiasm. The healing of the body was but a byproduct and took place only after these inner processes had been successfully carried out. When the higher elements in a humans’ character got these better of one’s lower ones, the victory was followed by, and symbolized in, a return of health to the sick body. It was a visible sign of the reality of the invisible healing. If the sufferers had not previously felt His greatness, repented of their former way of life, asked forgiveness, and resolved to become righteous, Jesus could not have cured the physical sickness. The Gospels record the cases of those who were able to do this; they do not record the cases of the far larger number who could not and whose bodily maladies therefore remained uncured. Most readers erroneously believe that Jesus could heal any and every person. Nobody can do that because nobody can force faith, conversion, penitence, moral evolution, and spiritual aspiration into a stubborn humans’ heart. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
There is a further factor in Jesus’ healing. They were often accompanied by the proclamation that the patient’s sins were forgiven one. This means first, that the aforesaid prerequisite conditions had been established and second, that the humans’ Overself had intimated its gracious cancellation of the particular bad destiny which had expressed itself in the sickness. The forgiveness came through Jesus as a medium; it did not originate in Him. Those who believe that Jesus personally could unburden all humans’ evil fate, err. One could do it only in those cases were a humans’ own higher self willed it. Jesus then became a medium for its grace. The healing does no come from the healer oneself; it comes through one. What one does is to prepare conditions rendering it possible for this to happen. However, this is no guarantee that the Overself will necessarily make use of them every time. We eagerly seek to be relieved of sickness or trouble, but where relief is followed by a feeling of relationship to the Overself, we have gained something far more valuable than we originally sought. When every form of available or affordable physical treatment—the unorthodox as well as the orthodox—has been exhausted without success, it is time to try spiritual healing. For the desperate it is the last hope. The actual cure is so swift in time and so unethical in method that one may be seized with the most exhilarating astonishment. Genuine cures are quite possible and valid. The person responsible for it may have been used by the higher self of the sufferer as an actual instrument of spiritual healing. So powerful is the force of suggestions implanted from outside that a human may be exercising the gift of healing direct from one’s own Soul yet one will believe, and believe firmly, that one is exercising and deriving it from the spirit of a dead man. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Spiritual healing cannot be successfully practiced by anybody who has merely pocked up its jargon and intellectually familiarized oneself with its ideology. It can be successfully practiced only by one who has entered into the consciousness of, and surrendered one’s ego to, the divine spirit within oneself. If, when the process of the quest are not definitely directed towards the eradication of disease, they are still successful in contributing to such eradication, how much more successful can they be when they are quite definitely directed toward it! This presence whose contact is directly felt has healing values emotionally. It frees one from frustrations and alienations. “I am not a healer. Jesus is the healer. I am only the little heiress who opens the door to nowhere and says, ‘Come in.’”—Sarah Winchester, in explanation of her hundreds of miraculous cures. The spirit can operate to ameliorate bodily ills directly and internally or indirectly through an external agent or medium. The latter does not replace but only co-operates with or is used by the spirit. As this Spirit-Energy passes through the human, one feels dynamized, empowered in some direction, inwardly or physically or both together. One understands well enough that this power is not one’s own, that it must be ascribed to the Overself, and that practicing humility while using it is one’s best protection against the sin of pride. That which is Heavenly is also healing. The divine self cannot be aristocratically ordered by its lowly offspring to do this or that, although it may be humbly implored to do so. The ego cannot impose its will. The attunement of humans’ mind to the Universal Mind, of one’s heart to the fundamental love behind things, is capable of producing various effect. One of them maybe the healing of bodily ills. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
What makes transference particularly interesting is that it grows out of the situation rather than the qualities of the analyst. This concept was the result of clinical observation. Dr. Freud found that analysands develop a very strong bond to the person of the analyst during the treatment, a bond which is in itself of a complex nature. It is a blend of love, admiration, attachment; in what is called “negative transference” it is a blend of hate, opposition and aggression. If the analyst and the analysand are of different genders, the essence of transference can be described easily as a case of the analysand’s falling in love with the analyst (If the analyst was of the same gender, in the case of homosexual analysands, the same would). The analyst becomes the object of love, admiration, dependency and intense jealousy to the extent that anyone else is considered a possible rival. In other words, the analysand behaves exactly like a person who has fallen in love. No analyst can be so stupid or unattractive as not to produce this effect on an otherwise intelligent person who would not care to look at one if one was not one’s analyst. While this transference can be found in relation to many physicians, Dr. Freud was the first to pay full attention to this phenomenon and to analyze its nature. He came to the conclusion that the analysand in the analytic process developed many feelings which one has as a child toward one of the parents. One explained the phenomenon of the loving or (hostile) attachment to the figure of the analyst as a repetition of the earlier attachment to father or mother. In other words, the feelings toward the analyst were “transferred” from the original object to the other person of the analyst. An analysis of transference made it possible, so Dr. Freud thought, to recognize—or reconstruct—what the attitude of the infant had been toward one’s parents. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
It was the child in the analysand who experienced one’s transferred feelings so intensely that it was often difficult for one to recognize that one did not love (or hate) the real person of the analyst but the parents who the analyst represented for one. Until Dr. Freud, nobody had care to investigate the affective attitude of a patient toward the physician. Usually the physicians accepted with satisfaction that the patients “adored” them, and if they did not, often disliked them for not being “good patients.” In fact transference is one factor conducive to the professional sickness of analysts, namely the confirmation of their narcissism by receiving the affectionate admiration of their analysands regardless of the degree to which they deserve it. Psychoanalysts mention that the analyst should be a blank piece of paper for the analysand so that all reactions to the analyst can be considered as expressions of transference rather than expressions of one’s feelings toward the real person of the analyst. The latter reasoning is of course an illusion. Just to look at a person, to sense the quality of one’s handshake, to hear one’s voice, to notice one’s fragrance, to see one’s whole attitude toward you when one is speaking, is plenty of material to enable you to know a lot about the analyst, and the idea that the analyst remains as unknown as one is invisible, is very naïve. The transference phenomenon, namely the voluntary dependence of a person on other persons in authority, a situation in which an individual feels helpless, in need of a leader of stronger authority, ready to submit to one’s authority, is one of the most frequent and most important phenomena in social life, quite beyond the individual family and the analytic situation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Anybody who is willing to see can discover the tremendous role that transference plays socially, politically and in religious life. One only has to look a the faces in a crows that applaud a charismatic leader like Elvis, Aaliyah, Beyonce, or Shawn Mendes, and one see the same expression of blind awe, adoration, affection or something in fac which transforms the face from its humdrum daily expression into that of a passionate believer. It does not even have to be a leader with the voice or the stature of a Jay Z or with the intensity of Britney Spears. If one studies the faces of Americans who are looking at presidential candidates, or, more obvious examples, at the president oneself, one finds the same particular facial expression, and expression that could almost be called religious. As in the psychoanalytic transference this has almost nothing to do with the real, human qualities of the admired person. The office itself or even simply a uniform makes one into a “worshipable” person. Our whole social system rests upon this extraordinary effect of people who have appeal, to a greater or lesser degree. The transference in the analytic situation and the worship of leaders in adult life are not different: they have their basis in the sense of helplessness and powerlessness of the child which lead to its dependence on the parents, or in the transference situation on the analyst as a substitute for the parents. Indeed who could deny that the infant could not live for a day without being care for, fed, protected by mother or her substitute? Whatever narcissistic illusions the child may have, the fact remains that with regard to its total situation in the World it is helpless and hence longing for a helper. What is often overlooked, however, is the fact that the adult is helpless too. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
In many situations which the child could not manage, the adult knows what to do but is, in the last analysis, also extremely helpless. One is confronted with natural and social forces which are so overwhelming that in many cases one is as helpless against them as the infant is in one’s World. True enough one has learned to defend oneself in many ways. One can form ties with others, so as to be better equipped to withstand attacks and dangers, but all this does not alter the fact that one remains helpless in one’s fight against natural dangers, in the fight against better armed and more powerful social classes and nations, the fight against disease, and finally against death. One has better means of defense but is also much more aware of the dangers than the child is. If follows that the alleged contrast between the helpless child and the powerful adult is to a large extent fictious. The adult, like the child, is longing for somebody who could make one feel certain, secure, safe, and it is for that reason that one is willing and prone to worship figures that are, or readily lend themselves to being considered saviours and their helpers even if in reality they are half mad. The social transference born out of the same sense of helplessness as the psychoanalytic transference is one of the most important social phenomena. Even though humans are helpless not only as a child but as an adult, this adult helplessness can be overcome. In a society which is rationally organized, which does no need to confuse a person’s mind in order to deceive one about the real situation, in a society that encourages rather than discourages a person’s independence and rationality, the sense of helplessness will have disappeared and with it the need for social transference. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
A society whose members are helpless needs idols. This need can only be overcome to the extent to which humans are fully away of reality and of one’s own forces. The insight that one must eventually die does not have to make one helpless because this knowledge too represents a piece of reality which one can cope with. Applying the same principle to the analytic situation I suggest that the more real the analyst is to the analysand and the more one loses one’s phantomlike character, the easier it is for the analysand to give up the posture of helplessness and to cope with reality. However, it is not desirable and even necessary that the patient in the analytic situation regress to a state of childhood, so that one can express those desires and anxieties one is taught to repress as a condition of being accepted as an adult? It is, but with an important qualification. If the analysand during the analytic hour becomes a child together, one might as well be dreaming. One would lack judgement and independence which one needs in order to be able to understand the meaning of what one is saying. The analysand during the analytic session constantly oscillates between the infantile and the adult existence; on this very process rests the efficacy of the analytic procedure. Behind all this confusion and turmoil, a new Third Wave family system is coalescing, based on a diversity of family forms and more varied individual roles. This de-massification of the family opens many new personal options. Third Wave civilization will not try to stuff everyone willy-nilly into a single family form. For his reason the emergent family system could free each of us to find one’s own niche, to select or create a family style or trajectory attuned to individual needs. However, before anyone can perform a celebratory dance, he agonies of transition must be dealt with. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Caught in the crack-up of the old, with the new system not yet in place, millions find a higher level of diversity bewildering rather than helpful. Instead of being liberated, they suffer from overchoice and are wounded, embittered, plunged into a sorrow and loneliness intensified by the very multiplicity of their options. To make the new diversity work for us instead of against us, we will need changes on many levels as once, from morality and taxes to employment practices. In the field of values we need to begin removing the unwarranted guilt that accompanies the breakup and restructuring of families. Instead of exacerbating unjustified guilt, the media, the church, the courts, and the political system should be working to lower the guilt level. The decision to live outside a nuclear family framework should be made easier, not harder. Values change more slowly, as a rule, than social reality. Thus we have not yet developed the ethic of tolerance for diversity than a de-massified society will both require and engender. Raised under Second Wave conditions, firmly taught that one kind of family is “normal” and others somehow suspect, is not “deviant,” vast numbers remain intolerant of the new variety in family styles. Until that changes, the pain of transition will remain unnecessarily high. In economic and social life, individuals cannot enjoy the benefits of widened family options so long as laws, tax codes, welfare practices, school arrangements, housing codes, and even architectural forms all remain implicitly biased towards the Second Wave family. They take little account of the special needs of women who work, men who stay home to take care of their children, of bachelors, and “spinsters” (hateful term!), or of between-marrieds, or “aggregate families,” or widows living alone together. All such groupings have been subtly or openly discriminated again in Second Wave societies. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Even while it piously praised housekeeping, Second Wave civilization denied dignity to the person performing that task. Housekeeping is productive, indeed, crucial, work, and needs to be recognized as part of the economy. To assure the enhanced status of housekeeping, whether done by women or by men, by individuals or by groups working together, we will have to pay wages or impute economic value to it. In the out-of-the-home economy, employment practices in any places are still based on the obsolete assumption that the man is the primary provider or breadwinner and the wife a supplemental, expendable earner, instead of a fully independent participant in the labour market. By easing seniority requirements, by spreading flextime, by opening part-time opportunities, we not only humanize production, we adapt it to the needs of a multistyle family system. Today there are many indications that the work system is beginning to accommodate itself to the new diversity of family arrangements. Shortly after Citibank, one of the largest banks in the United States of America, began to promote women to managerial jobs, it found that its male executives were marrying their new colleagues. The bank had a long-standing rule barring the employment of couples. It had to change that rule. According to Business Week, the “company couple” is now flourishing with benefits both for company and for family life. It is likely that before long we will go far beyond such minor adaptations. We may see demands not merely for the hiring of “company couples” but whole families to work together as a production and promotion team. Because this was inefficient in the Second Wave factory does not mean it is necessarily inappropriate today. No one knows how such policies would work out but, as in other family mater, we ought to encourage, perhaps even publicly fund, small-scale experiments. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Such measures could help us ease our way into tomorrow, minimizing for millions the pain of transition. However, whether painful or not, a new family system is emerging to supplant the one that characterized the Second Wave past. This new family system will be a core institution in the novel socio-sphere taking shape alongside the new techno-sphere and info-sphere. It is part of the act of social creation by which our generation is adapting to and constructing a new civilization. Nuns are taught not to rush across a room nor to run along a corridor. A paced, slowed walk is the proper way. This helps recollection, remembrance, self-control, and a growth of inner calm. Entering a room, going to a chair, or walking in a street should not be done by a soul-guided man too quickly or too violently. It is ungraceful and unspiritual in appearance, while disturbing mentally. Gentle, leisurely movements are more suitable. Even one’s bodily movements must be brought into conformity with one’s mental attitude. One’s gait in walking must be brought frequently to conscious attention and harmonized with the deliberations, the patience, the equilibrium, and the uprightness which, ideally, exist there. When we remember that so much of the day we are doing these very things—sitting, standing, walking, breathing, resting, or sleeping—the importance of doing them in the right way may be realized. They are functions which may easily be done in the wrong way, and continue so for years, and even for a whole lifetime. Whether it be to practice prayers or to fall and lie asleep, the position of the body should be such as to prevent it from becoming cramped or taut. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Shall the mystic walk with anaemic face and flat feet through life and let only the materialist walk with forceful steps and resolute mien? The New World physical exercises seem designed to create bulging muscles, an over-expanded chest, and special athletic skills. It is enough for the healthful development of a blanaced human being to bring the muscles no father than the point of easy and instant obedience, to make the body perform its varied functions adequately and gracefully. Whereas the New World gymnastic exercises are intended to develop muscle, the Old World exercises are intended to develop control. All physical techniques have an indirect helpfulness but their value should not be overrated, as the advocates and teachers of these techniques almost always do. They misplace their emphasis on the body and on the tricks it is able to perform. Only detail of the human organism deserves their greater emphasis and that is intuition. Let the reeds pander to the wayward wind, I am the mountain range that determines the course of the wind. Let the seaweed flatter the inconstant tide, I am the moon that controls the tide’s ebb and flow. Let the magnet succumb to the unbending north and south, I am the greater Earth: Only I have directions. Please save us for the sake of Abraha cast into flames of fire; for the sake of Isaac who was bound upon the wood and the fire; for the sake of Jacob who wrestled with a prince of fire; for the sake of Moses who was received on high and exalted as the Angels of fire; for the sake of Aaron Thy representatives who was amid the Angels of fire; for the sake of the tabernacle canopied beneath curtains and a cloud of fire; for the sake of the fair mountain whereon Thou didst descend in fire; for the sake of the beloved habitation which Thou didst love more than the Heavens of fire; for the sake of Moses who abode in prayer until the sinking of the fire; for the sake of Aaron who with fiery censer allayed Thy displeasures with fire; for the sake of Phineas who burned with a jealousy great as fire. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
This was done for the sake of Joshua who waved his hand and there fell stones of fire; for the sake of Samuel who placed upon the altar a suckling lamb, an offering consumed by fire; for the sake of David who stood on the threshing-floor and won grace by his offerings of fire; for he sake of Solomon who interceded in the Temple-court till there descended fire; for the sake of Elijah who rose and was received loft with chariot and horses of fire; for the sake of Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah who were cast into the furnace of fire; for the sake of Daniel who behold many myriads of ministering Angels and streams of fire; for the sake of the desolations of Thy city, burnt with fire;—O do Thou save us. Save us for the sake of the generations of Judah’s princes whom Thou wilt purify as a refining furnace of fire. O, Eternal, we beseech Thee, please save us now. Saviour of mighty ones that dwelt with Thee in Lud, the land whence Thou didst set them free; so save Thou us! As Thou didst save together God and nation, the people singled out for God’s salvation; so save Thou us! The host of Thy redeemed, with manifold Angelic hosts were saved by Thee of old. So save Thou us! From bondage grim Thy power brought forth the pure, Thou, Gracious One, didst all their grief endure! So save Thou us! They passed between the deep divided sea; and with them for their guide, the light from Thee. So save Thou us! “He saved” : Thy stock with joyful singing told; then saved was He, who gave them birth of old. So save Thou us! “And I will bring you out,” the mandate said: “And I went out with you,” the mystics read. So save Thou us! “And I will bring you out,” the mandate said: “And I went out with you,” the mystics read. So save Thou us! Thy sons with circling step, (their guardian Thou!) Around Thine altar bore the willow bough. So save Thou us! Thine Ark was won by marvels from the foe, Philistia, sinful, by Thy wrath laid low. So save Thou us! And with Thy banished throngs to Babylon journeyed in love Thy presence, Gracious One! So save Thou us! Helper of Jacob’s captive tribes of yore, return, and Jacob’s exiled tents restore, and save Thou us! #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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How I Overcame Anger, Selfishness, and Doubt!
Everyone wants peace and is willing to sweat a little for it; but not everyone cares to pay the ultimate price for the ultimate peace. “The Moses and Aaron fell facedown in front of the whole Israelite assembly gathered there. Joshua son of Nun and Caleb son of Jephunneh, who were among those who had explored the land, tore their clothes and said to the entire Israelite assembly, ‘The land we passed through and explored is exceedingly good. If the LORD is pleased with us, He will lead us into that land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and will give it to us. Only do not rebel against the land, because we will swallow them up. Their protection is gone, but the LORD is with us. Do not be afraid of them.’ However, the whole assembly talked about stoning them. Then the glory of the LORD appeared at the Tent of Meeting to all the Israelites. The LORD said to Moses, ‘How long will these people treat me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of all the miraculous signs I have performed among them? I will strike the down with a plague and destroy them, but I will make you into a nation greater and stronger than they.’ Moses said to the LORD, “Then the Egyptians will hear about it! By your power you brought these people up from among them. And they will tell the inhabitants of this land about it. They have already heard that you, O LORD, are with these people and that you, O LORD, have been seen face to face, that your cloud stays over them, and that you go before them in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. If you put these people to death all at one time, the nations who have heard this report about you will say, ‘The Lord was not able to bring these people into the land He promised them on oath; so he slaughtered them in the desert.’ #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
“Now may the Lord’s strength be displayed, just as you have declared: ‘The LORD is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet He does not leave the guilty unpunished; He punished the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.’ In accordance with your great love, forgive the sin of these people, just as you have pardoned them from the time they left Egypt until now.” The LORD replied, “I have forgiven them, as you asked. Nevertheless, as surely as I live and as surely as the glory of the LORD fills the whole Earth, not one of the men who saw my glory and the miraculous signs I performed in Egypt and in the desert but who disobeyed me and tested me ten times—not one of them will ever see the land I promised on oath to their forefathers. No one who has treated me with contempt will ever see it. However, because my servant Caleb has a different spirit and follows me wholeheartedly, I will bring him into the land he went to, and his descendants will inherit it. Since the Amalekites and Canaanites are living in the valleys, turn back tomorrow and set out toward the desert along the route to the Red Sea,” reports Numbers 14.5-25. This is a truly inspirational story. Where does God’s peace dwell? In the humble and gentle of heart; that is how His Matthew remembered God (11.29). Where does your peace reside? In deep patience. Hear God’s voice, follow His advice, and you will enjoy much peace. “If anyone is in Christ, one is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come,” reports 2 Corinthians 5.17. Fulfill your God given destiny. Be the person God wants you to be. Believe in bigger and better thing, and expect the supernatural favour of God. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Develop a mentality of, “If there is a will, there is a way.” Everything counts. Do not be careless. Watch every word. Guard every step. All of which means, do not jump to conclusions about what others say or do. Stick to God’s monastic rule. And the result? You will discover that your rage erupts rarely, and when it does, does little damage. That does not mean you will not be thumped and thwacked from time to time—that is the way it is in the present life, but in the next? Ahhh, well! However, do not think you have found True Peace just because you find no hubbub in your heart! Do not think everything is good jus because you do no bump into the Devil on your daily rounds! Do not think you have arrived at monastic perfection just because your fellow Devouts have stopped annoying you to death! Do not think you are ready for sainthood just because you have had some fleeting moments of devotion and sweetness! Why all these “do nots”? Because in all of these behaviours I cannot for the life of godliness discover a true admirer of virtue! However, your best days are ahead of you. God wants to do more than you can even ask or think, so do not be satisfied with past glories, and do not get stuck in the rut of past failures. Begin believing for bigger and better things. If you do not think your dreams will ever come to pass, they will never. If you do not think you have what it takes to rise up and set that new standard, it is not going to happen. The barrier is in your mind. “The weapons we fight with are not weapons of the World. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. And we will be ready to punish every act of disobedience, once your obedience is complete,” reports 2 Corinthians 10.4-6. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
And although many of us is doing so well, we wish God would tell poor souls like us just what spiritual progress and human perfection consists in? It is a wrong thinking pattern that keeps us imprisoned in defeat. And that is why it is so important that we think optimistic thoughts of hope, faith, and success. Reject the lies that tell you success is not in your future. After all, if God is for you, no one can be against you. Let go of the limitations and let your mind focus on fresh, beneficial attitudes of faith. By focusing on things that are of righteousness and success, you will change your life and the lives of your descendants. Your offspring will go further than people ever once believed, and it will because you were willing to walk by faith and not by sight, setting a new standard, and leading the future generations. The obstacle is in your mind. However, because of some people’s disobedience and lack of faith, they wander around in the wilderness, going around the same paths, time after time, not making any progress. How sad! Therefore, offer yourself from the bottom of your heart to the Divine Will. Do not seek out your own will, whether antsy or elephantine, in time or in eternity. For God has prepared a place of great abundance, a place of great freedom for His people. Do these, and nothing will ruffle your calm. And continue to give thanks, in prosperous times as well as desperate ones. Be stout of heart and long in hope. That way, when interior consolation vanished, your heart and soul can sustain a heavier load. Do not feel you have to justify yourself all the time; especially do not ask why you, of all people, should have to suffer all these things. Do justify God, in all your many moves and moods, and do praise God as holy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Then if your praise God, stay in faith, act righteously, and have a spirit of perseverance, you will walk the straight and narrow to the Land of Peace and Honey, where Hope and Doubt are no more; where, as Job put it to his Maker (33.26), you and I will be well met, finally, face to face, in dulci jubilo. But that is then, and this is now. In the unlikely event that you do arrive at complete contempt of self while there is still a breath in your, know that the peace of soul accompanying it is about as good as it gets, according to the Psalmist (72.7), at least on this side of the Final Veil. However, some people have been beaten down by their oppressors for so long—mistreated, used, abused, and taken advantage of—now, even though God wants a better life for each of them, they cannot conceive it. Rather than moving forward with an attitude of faith, expecting good things, they insist on going around with a poor, defeated mentality. Around and around they go, focusing on their problems, always complaining, fretting about the obstacles standing between them and their destiny. Yet, as we understand the Lord, He wants us to strive for perfection because He never relaxes His grip on the Celestial. Why? because in His daily round God has to step smartly around and through the many and varied dumpings and dumplings of the World without so much as soiling His sandal. And He has to do it as if He had not a care in the World, and not at the pace of a slug, but in the sprightly manner of a person with a free and bright mind. How? By allowing no creaturely affection to cling to His soul. There, God will jolt us out of our complacency. He will say to us, “You have stayed long enough at the mountain,” reports Deuteronomy 1.6. Therefore we cannot keep going in circles, doing the same thing year after year, and expect things to change. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
It is time to move on, to let go of past hurts, pains, or failures. It is time for increase, promotion, and favour. It is time to believe for the extraordinary and supernatural. Father, I do not want to be counted among the doubters; I am a believer. I trust You to lead me in the right direction as I break through the barriers of my past. Thank You, Father, that You have good things in store, not just for me, but for my entire family! I beseech You, Most Pious God of mine, preserver me from the care of this life lest I trip myself up; lest I be seized by the many necessities of the body; lest I seize up from too much pleasure; lest I become depressed by the universal obstacles of the soul, broken on the wheel of trouble. I am not talking about the clumsy imperfections that Worldly Vanity often causes, but about those miseries that result from the Primal Malediction of Mortality. These latter seriously affect the soul; that is to say, they weigh it down and slow it down. The result is that one has not had the strength to enter into the freedom of the spirit as often as one desired. O my God, Ineffable Sweetness, as far as I am concerned, turn bitter every carnal consolation that drags me from the love of Eternals. Why? Its allure is evil. It affects my intuition. It draws me to a delectable good of the present. Do not let it conquer me, my God, do no let the flesh and blood conquer me! Do not let the World and its brief glory deceive me! Do not let the Devil and his cleverness, his bag of tricks, overwhelm me! Please grant me the fortitude of resisting, the patience for enduring, the constancy of preserving. Please grant for all the consolations of the World the discreet yet manly cologne of Your spirit, and in place of carnal love, please flood me with the love of Your name. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Just count them—food, drink, clothing, and the other innumerable articles that keep the body going—all these are necessary, or so they say, but they are also insufferable to the fervent spirit; so said the Great Bernard in his First Sermon for Septtaugesima. Grant that I may use as little of this excess baggage of the soul as possible; that is to say, do not let me spend all my time on baggage management to the detriment of daily prayer. Truly, I would like to ditch all these extras, but I cannot. Nature has its minimal claims, and it would be unwise to meddle with them. However, to rummage about in the things that dither the soul? Holy Law prohibits that. Why? Because the flesh has this sudden capacity of overpowering the soul with its fragrance. Because of all these, I beg You, O Lord, let Your hand direct me and protect me lest something catastrophic happen. Is Christianity beneficial or hazardous to your mental health? “Do not be anxious about your life,” reports Matthew 6.25. Consider Francis, the popular son of a wealthy textile merchant family who is known for his flashy dressing and his enthusiastic partying. After hearing a vice, which he believes to be that of God, Francis undergoes a religious transformation, forsakes partying, gives away his possessions, and even sells some of his father’s textiles, giving away the money. His father responds by confining the youth to he house and beating him to bring him to his senses, but Francis is unrepentant. Exasperated, the irate father takes Francis to court, which orders Francis to repay his father. In protest, Francis gives back everything his parents have given him, even the clothes off his back, and walks out of the court naked. He forms a religious sect whose members sleep in abandoned churches, possess nothing, and are not above begging for their food. Never does he return to a normal social life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
For Francis (to whom we will shortly return), is religion beneficial or hazardous to mental health? For you and me, is religious devotion good or bad for mental health? Our culture offers us, at the extremes, two sharply contrasting answers. Some televangelist have suggested that with sufficient faith, prayer, and positive thinking we can get Jesus to lift our burdens, to exorcise the demonic within us, to heal our emotional agonies, even to bless us with prosperity. Religious paperbacks have offered hopeful testimonies of how one can get God to give us happy homes, robust love lives, inner peace, or liberation from depression. In Christian inspirational magazines one can find ads for things such as the “Christian weight-loss plan,” which promises results superior to those of non-Christian weight-loss plans. Diametrically opposed to those who say that faith is the key to inner healing are those who say that religion erodes mental health or even that religion is a sickness—an “obsessional neurosis,” said Dr. Freud. Religion is said to promote neurotic guilt, repression of feelings for pleasures of the flesh, and suppression of negative emotions. Religion also impedes efforts to relieve human misery by teaching that people deserve their fate, that to believe that misfortune and suffering are divine judgments on sinners legitimates the blaming the depressed, the miserable, and the angry for their feelings. Who is right? Is religion more often beneficial or hazardous to mental health? Let us approach this question first scientifically, by looking at research on religion and mental health, and then theoretically, by reflecting on the likely emotional consequences of being a Christian disciple. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Are there any links between people’s religiosity and their mental health? This question has no simple answer, because the answer depends on what we mean by religiosity (orthodoxy? Church attendance? Strength of religious feeling?) and what we mean by mental health (positive self-esteem? absence of mental illness? happiness?). Across many studies reported in the Oxford University Press Handbook of Religions and Health, religious beliefs and practices have, in more studies than not, been associated not only with greater self-reported happiness, but also with greater hope and optimism; greater purpose and meaning; higher self-esteem; better coping with bereavement; less loneliness; less depression; fewer suicides; less anxiety; less drug and alcohol abuse; less delinquency and crimes; and greater marital stability. A word of caution is in order: these studies merely establish a correlation between religion and mental health. It is a familiar lesson, but true: correlation does not indicate the direction of cause and effect. One’s mental health may affect one’s religion (some religious cults have been a haven for disturbed people). Or religiosity and mental health may be jointly influenced by underlying factors, such as one’s socioeconomic, or educational status. Will a real Christian ever act crazy? Indeed yes. If Christ’s followers march to the sound of a different drummer in what they regard as a crazed World, they may, at times, seem a little crazy. So it was with St. Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan order and a thirteenth-century missionary and religious pioneer. Francis dared to be different, to renounce his family’s materialism, to value higher things, and to suffer rejection for doing so. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
And so it was with Jesus and some of his early followers. They knew negative emotions—righteous anger in response to injustice, anxiety when confronted by danger, grief in the face of death. They willingly experienced humiliation, even death, as the price for not adjusting to their culture. For the heroes of the Bible, good adjustment—thinking well of oneself and feeling optimistic about the World—was not the aim of life. Adjusting (or conforming) to a sick society may itself be a sick response. Christ’s followers are offered the way of the cross, something that many who serve in war- and disease-ravaged lands know all too well. It is ironic that popular religion should promise its followers serenity and success when the Bible itself depicts its people as so imperfect. The heroes of the faith experienced more tribulation than triumph. In the Old Testament, Noah becomes a drunken fool, David commits homicide out of lust, and Jacob is a blasphemous, polygamous, ungrateful cheat. Likewise, in the New Testament we find the afflicted Paul struggling constantly to resist what he ought not to be doing and to do the good that he ought to be. Moreover, one doubts that any of the disciples could have offered persuasive testimonies of “how I overcome anger, selfishness, and doubt.” Peter loses his temper, is prejudiced against the Gentiles, and denies Christ. After almost three years with Jesus, Andrew cannot conceive of a miracle with loaves and fishes. The proud and prejudiced Nathaniel is skeptical that anything good could come out of Nazareth. Unless Jesus would “show us the Father,” Philip refuses to believe that Jesus and God are one. James and John, the sons of Zebedee, crave the highest-status positions for themselves in the kingdom. Thomas doubts Christ’s resurrection and is skeptical of Jesus’s promise to prepare a place in the Father’s house. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Simon the Zealot, Bartholomew, Matthew, and Jude cannot manage so much as to say awake during Jesus’ agony before his betrayal. The Bible makes no pretensions about the perfections of its people. Nor does it need to, for its hope rests not in the power of human faith but in the steadfast love of God. As the experience of Job reminds us, God’s people are not promised an Earthly haven from misery. Recent evidence indicates that people active in faith communities have longer life expectancies than others. Yet no matter how much faith we have, nor how many faith healers we visit, our mortality rate will still be 100 percent. It is easy to be tempted to the illusion that the child of God will be accorded special protection from the capricious forces of the natural World or a special immunity from the vindictive passions of angry humans. Any such faith is bound to suffer disillusionment. Better to root our faith in the hard truth than in temporarily comforting fantasies. If Christianity is untrue, then what honest person would want to believe it, however comforting it might be? And if it is true, even if it were not immediately comforting, what honest person would want to disbelieve it? Among the capricious forces of the natural World are oppressive environments (in which, at times, it is perfectly natural to feel depressed), biochemical and neurological deficits (for which schizophrenia may be a natural outcome), and genetic predispositions to respond maladaptively to stressful circumstances. Faced with psychological disorders such as depression and schizophrenia, Christians had therefore best respond not with simplistic snap judgments (as Job’s friends did in response to his misery) but with compassion and understanding. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
We should all do well to keep in mind the Christian psychologist Glenn Weaver’s documentation of the spiritual pilgrimage of a devout Christian woman suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. After a life of regular attendance at church services, where she was well known as a gentle Christian with deep concern for her fellow Christians, she began to develop telltale symptoms of increasing forgetfulness. She struggled with the problem in the way that many people do, but she was fighting a losing battle. She found that she could no longer remember the names of those she wanted to pray for, and her letters became verbose and lost much of their content. This is turn made her increasingly anxious; and anxiety led on to depression and the classic textbook description of Alzheimer’s disease, and more. She was also deeply troubled about her relationship with God. She felt that she was personally responsible for falling away from a former close walk with God, and that she was deserting her friends through her lack of friendship and prayers. She concluded that because of her lack of faith, God was setting her aside because she was no longer fit for His service. Eventually she lost all interest in her daily devotions and prayers. With neural changes there are psychological consequences, and these in turn affect spiritual awareness. Such is the unity of the human person, and we should never forget this. For some, a Christian response to such suffering may mean doing or supporting research. For others, it means entering a helpful profession as a clinician, counselor, or social worker. For many more it simply means being loving, caring, and patient. Although Christian faith does not promise escape from the stresses and woes of life, it can help us walk through the valley of deepest darkness. It does so first by offering us an identity—a knowledge of who we are, of our ultimate values, of our mission in life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Many patients, in the second half of life, are all struggling to find a religious outlook on life. More recent questionnaire studies confirm that adults who have a strong sense of purpose in life experience greater-well-being, live with less dread of death, and are less likely to abuse alcohol and other drugs. Second, religious communities offer social support in times of stress. Recent research indicates that people who are upheld by close relationships are less vulnerable to illness and premature death than are those who bear their stresses alone. When we are faced with a threat, caring friends can help us evaluate the problem, restore our self-esteem, reduce our anxiety, and confide our painful feelings—all of which can be good medicine. This helps explain the longer than average lives among those who in faith communities feel “blessed by the ties that bind.” Furthermore, religious experience has the potential to be therapeutic—at times by providing peak experiences of joy, peace, and enlightenment, but more often by reassuring us that, come what may, we are loved. Researcher have found that people’s God-concepts are linked with their self-concepts: those who view God as stern and punitive tend to have low self-images; those who view God as loving and accepting tend to express higher self-esteem. And that leads us to the experience of grace. We expect them to tell of a risen life which is purely “spiritual” in the negative sense of that word: that is, we use the word “spiritual” to mean not what it is but what it is not. We mean a life without space, without history, without environment, with no sensuous elements in it. We also, in our heart of hearts, tend to slur over the risen manhood of Jesus, to conceive Him, after death, simply returning into Deity, so that the Resurrection would be no more than the reversal or undoing of the Incarnation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
That being so, all refences to the risen body make us uneasy: they raise awkward questions. For as long as we hold the negatively spiritual view, we have not really been believing in that body at all. We have thought (whether we acknowledged it or not) that the body was not objective: that it was an appearance sent by God to assure the disciples of truths otherwise incommunicable. However, what truths? If the truth is that after death there comes a negatively spiritual life, an eternity of mystical experience, what more misleading way of communicating it could possibly be found than the appearance of a human form which eats broiled fish? Again, on such a view, the body would really be a hallucination. And any theory of hallucination breaks down on the fact (and if it is invention it is the oddest invention that ever entered the mind of humans) that on three separate occasions this hallucination was not immediately recognized as Jesus (Luke xxiv. 13-31; John xx. 15, xxi. 4). Even granting that God sent a holy hallucination to teach truths already widely believed without it, and far more easily taught by other methods, and certain to be completely obscured by this, might we not at leas hope that He would get the face of the hallucination right? Is He who made all faces such a bungler that He cannot even work up a recognizable likeness of the Man who was Himself? It is at this point that awe and trembling fall upon us as we read the records. If the story is false, it is at least a much stranger story than we expected, something for which philosophical “religion,” psychical research, and popular superstition have alike failed to prepare us. If the story is true, then a wholly new mode of being has arisen in the Universe. The body, which lives in that new mode is like, and yet unlike, the body His friends knew before the execution. It is differently related to space and probably to time, but by no means cut off from all relation to them. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The body is so related to mater, as we know it, that it can be touched, though at first it had better not be touched. It has also a history before it which is in view from the first moment of the Resurrection; it is presently going to become different or go somewhere else. That is why the story of the Ascension cannot be separated from that of the Resurrection. All the accounts suggest that the appearances of the Risen Body came to an end; some describe an abrupt end about six weeks after the death. And they describe this abrupt end in a way which presents greater difficulties to the modern mind than any other part of the Scripture. For here, surely, we get the implication of all those primitive crudities to which I have said that Christians are not committed: the vertical ascent like a balloon, the local Heaven, the decorated chair to the right of the Father’s throne. “He was caught up into the sky (ouranos),” says St. Mark’s Gospel, “and sat down at the right hand of God.” “He was lifted up,” says the author of Acts, “and a cloud cut Him off from their sight.” It is true that if we wish to get rid of these embarrassing passages, we have the means to do so. The Marcan one probably formed no part of the earliest text of St. Mark’s Gospel: and you may add that the Ascension, though constantly implied throughout the New Testament, is described only in these two places. Can we then simply drop the Ascension story? The answer is that we can do so only if we regard the Resurrection appearances as those of a ghost or hallucination. For a phantom can just fade away; but an objective entity must go somewhere—something must happen to it. And if the Risen Body were not objective, then all of us (Christian or not) must invent some explanation for the disappearance of the corpse. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
And all Christians must explain why God sent or permitted a “vision” or “ghost” whose behaviour seems almost exclusively directed to convincing the disciples that it was not a vision or a ghost but really a corporeal being. If it were a vision, then it was the most systematically deceptive and lying vision on record. However, if it were real, then something happened to it after it ceased to appear. You cannot take away the Ascension without putting something else in its place. Rich diversity of family forms will not come into being without pain and anguish. For any change in family structure also forces change in the roles we live. Every society, through its institutions, creates its own architecture of roles or social expectations. The corporation and trade union between them more or less defined what was expected of workers and bosses. Schools fixed the respective roles of teachers and pupils. And the Second Wave family allocated the roles of breadwinner, housekeeper, and child. As the nuclear family goes critical, so to speak, the roles associated with it begin to shiver and crack—with excruciating personal impact. From the day that Betty Friedan’s bombshell book, The Feminine Mystique, launched the modern feminist movement in many nations, we have seen a painful struggle to redefine the roles of humans in terms appropriate to a postnuclear-family future. The expectations and the behaviour of both genders have shifted with respects to jobs, legal and financial rights, household responsibilities, and even performance dealing with pleasures of the flesh. “Now,” write Peter Knobler, editor of Crawdaddy, a rock music magazine, “a guy’s got to contend with women breaking all the rules…Many regulations need breaking,” he adds, “but that does not make it much easier.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Roles are shaken by the battle over ending a pregnancy, for instance, as women insist that they—not politicians, not priests, not doctors or even husbands—have a right to control their bodies. Gender roles are further blurred as homosexuals demand and win “gay rights.” Even the role of the child in society is changing. Suddenly advocates spring up to lobby for a Children’s Bill of Rights. Courts are swamped by cases involving role redefinition, as alternatives to the nuclear family multiply and gain acceptability. Do unmarried spouses have to share their property after they break up? Can a couple legally pay a woman to bear a child for them by artificial insemination? (Costa Rican courts have said no—but for how long?) Can a lesbian be a “good mother” and retain custody of her child after a divorce? (An American court say yes.) What is meant by being a good parent? Nothing underlines the changing role structure more than the lawsuit filed in Boulder, Colorado USA, by an angry twenty-four-year-old named Tom Hansen. Parents can make mistakes, Mr. Hansen’s lawyer argued, but they must be held legally—and financially—responsible for the result. Thus Mr. Hansen’s court action claimed $350,000 in damages on an unprecedented legal ground: parental malpractice. It is one of the most important items of business for the government to prevent extreme inequality of fortunes, not by appropriating treasures from their owners, but by denying everyone the means of acquiring them, and not by building hospitals for the poor but by protecting citizens from becoming poor. Humans unequally distributed over the territory and crowded into one place whole other areas are underpopulated; arts of pleasure and pure industry favored over useful and demanding crafts; agriculture sacrificed to commerce; the publican made necessary by the bad administration of state funds. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Finally, venality pushed to such excess that esteem is measure in gold coins and the virtues themselves are sold for money: such are the most readily apparent causes of opulence and poverty, of the substitution of private interest for public interests, of the mutual hatred of citizens of their indifference to the common cause, of the corruption of the people, and of the enfeebling of all of governmental power. Such, as a consequence, are the ills that are difficult to treat once they make themselves felt, but which a wise administration ought to prevent in order to maintain, along with good mores, respect for the laws, love of the country and the vitality of the general will. However, all these precautions will be insufficient without going further still. A country cannot subsist without liberty, nor can liberty without virtue, nor can virtue without citizens. You will have everything if you train citizens; without this you will merely have wicked slaves, beginning with the leaders of the state. However, training citizens is not to be accomplished in one day, and turning them into adults requires that they be taught as children. Cover my Earth mother four times with many flowers. Let the Heavens be covered with the banked-up clouds. Let the Earth be covered with fog; cover the Earth with rains. Great waters, rain, cover the Earth. Lightning cover the Earth. Let thunder be heard over the Earth; let thunder be heard; let thunder be heard over the six regions of the Earth. Save the Earth from the curse, our cattle from sterility, our threshing-floor from the locust, our corn from fire, our substance from catastrophe, our feed from destruction. Please guard the olives from falling, and save the wheat from the grasshopper. Please protect our granaries from the worm, our vines from the caterpillar, the vineyard from the cankerworm, the autumn-fruit from blight. O protect our produce from the devouring locust, our souls from terror, our plenty from the winged-locust. Please keep our flocks from ravaging disease, our fruits from the blasting wind. Please shield our sheep from the plague, our harvest from ruin, our abundance from leanness. Please save the barley from mildew, the field’s increase from the palmer-worm. O do Thou save us, we beseech Thee. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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New Creation—A New Chapter in Cosmic History Has Opened!
Do not go poking your nose into the virtues that may be found in the lives of your fellow Devout. And do not sniff about the laundry of their vices. Why? Because your path is in the opposite direction. “Just follow Me.” That was the Evangelist John’s answer, as it was Jesus’ before him (21.22). If one person is a such-and-such or another person says one thing but does another, what business is it of yours? You do not need to be responsible for yourself; that is how Paul put it to the Romans (14.12). And that, believe me, is more than you can handle. Beyond that, you quickly get out of your depth. And before you smack me in the face with that mullet, let me assure you God knows everyone and God see everything that happens under the sun; that is what the Preacher wrote about Him (1.14). Each person God knows inside and out, that is to say, what one thinks, what one wants, and where one is heading; that is how God’s John described Him (2.25). And that includes you. “Truly, truly, I say to you, one who believes in Me, the works that I do, one will do also; and greater works than these one will do; because I go to the Father,” reports John 14.12. So what can God do for you? Everything, if you putt it all into His hands. God wants each generation to go further than the previous generation. He wants each generation to be more blessed, to experience more of His love, goodness, and His influence in the World. He does not want you to stay where you are. What can you do for yourself? Keep the peace. That is to say, forgive the agitator one’s agitation; one stirs the pot against you, but one cannot bring it to a boil. Eventually one will find oneself in a broth of one’s own juices. One cannot deceive God. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
God did not desire one generation to shine, and then the next generation to fade into obscurity. God wants each generation to increase. “These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. When the LORD your God brings you into the land He swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give you—a land with large, flourishing cities you did not build, houses filled with all kinds of good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant—then when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that you do no forget the LORD, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. Fear the LORD your God, serve Him only and take your oaths in His name. Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you; for the LORD your God, who is among you, is a jealous God and His anger will burn against you, and He will destroy you from the face of the land. Do not test the LORD your God as you did at Massah. Be sure to keep the commands of the LORD your God and the stipulations and decrees He has given you. Do what is right and good in the LORD’s sight, so that it may go well with your and you may go well with you and your may go in and take over the god land that the LORD promised on oath to your forefathers, thrusting out all your enemies before you, as the LORD said. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
“In the future, when your son asks you, ‘What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the LORD our God has commanded you?’ tell him: ‘We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Before our eyes the LORD sent miraculous signs and wonders—great and terrible—upon Egypt and Pharaoh and his whole household. However, He brought us out from there to bring us in and give us the land that He promised on oath to our forefathers. The LORD commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the LORD our God, so that we might always prosper and be kept alive, as is the case today. And if we are careful to obey all this law before the LORD our God, as He has commanded us, that will be our righteousness,” reports Deuteronomy 6.5-25. Some things are not worth worrying about. Swanning about in a sphere of influence. Being on a first-name basis with Worldly notables. Dispensing tokens of affection to every outstretched hand. Why? Because these activities, harmless as they may seem, do have a tendency to distract the soul and clutter the heart. I speak God’s words of wisdom and reveal God’s hidden thoughts to you, my beloved friend, but on one condition only. You must keep a weather eye open for His coming and leave the door of your heart unlocked; that is one of God’s instructions in the Last Book of His New Testament (3.20). That is to say, be on the lookout, pray while you watch, and think humble thoughts. You, too, can be so much more than your predecessors, passing on a legacy of Godly attitudes, blessings, and success to your children. Do not ever get satisfied with where you are. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Maybe you come from a family that is not affluent. Or perhaps you come from a family with riches untold. Regardless, you can experience more than the generation preceding you. The adult has—nobody. Indeed one may have friends, a wife, a certain amount of social security, yet even so the possibility of defending oneself and of acquiring what one needs is very fragile. Even if your life and full of hardship, lack and limitation, oppression, poor health, do not pass these negative attitudes down to your children. Break the cycle and change your expectations. Trust and believe that God can make the impossible possible. Thank You, Father, that I am part of a family with a future; no longer will I be limited by my past, but I will trust You today to do things in and through my life that are even greater than the wonderful things You have done previously. The procession of the Word in God is called generation. In proof whereof we must observe that generation has twofold meaning: one common to everything subject to generation and corruption; in which sense generation is nothing but change from non-existence to existence. In another sense it is proper and belongs to living things; in which sense it signifies the origin of a living being from a conjoined living principle; and this is properly called birth. Not everything of that kind, however, is called begotten; but, strictly speaking, only what proceeds by way of similitude. Hence a hair has not the aspect of generation and sonship, but only that has which proceeds by way of a similitude. Nor will any likeness suffice; for a worm which is generated from animals has not the aspect of generation and sonship, although it has a generic similitude; for this kind of generation requires that there should be a procession by ways of similitude in he same specific nature; as human proceeds from a human, and a horse from a horse. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
So in living things, which proceed from potential to actual life, such as humans and animals, generation includes both of these kinds of generation. However, if there is a being whose life does not proceed from potentiality to act, procession (if found in such a being) excludes entirely the first kind of generation; whereas it may have that kind of generation which belongs to living things. So in this manner the procession of the Word in God is generation; for He proceeds by way of intelligible action, which is a vital operation:—from a conjoined principle (as above described):—byway of similitude, inasmuch as the concept of the intellect is a likeness of the object conceived:—and exists in the same nature, because in God the act of understanding and His existence are the same, as shown above. Hence the procession of the Word in God is called generation; and the Word Himself proceeding is called the Son. The act of human understanding in ourselves is not the substance itself of the intellect; hence the word which proceeds within us by intelligible operation is not of the same nature as the source whence it proceeds; so the idea of generation cannot be properly and fully applied to it. However, the divine act of intelligence is the very substance itself of the one who understands. The Word proceeding therefore proceeds as subsisting in the same nature; and so is properly called begotten, and Son. Hence Scripture employs terms which denote generation of living things in order to signify the procession of the divine Wisdom, namely, conception and birth; as is declared in the person of the divine Wisdom. “The depths were not as ye, and I was already conceived; before the hills, I was brought forth,” reports Proverbs 8.24. In our way of understanding we use the word “conception” in order to signify that in the word of our intellect is found the likeness of the thing understood, although there be no identity of nature. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Not everything derived from another has existence in another subject; otherwise we could not say that the whole substance of created beings comes from God, since there is no subject that could receive the whole substance. So, then, what is generated in God receives its existence from the generator, not as though that existence were received into matter or into a subject (which would conflict with the divine self-subsistence); but when we speak of His existence as received, we mean that He Who proceeds receives divine existence are contained both the Word intelligibly proceeding and the principle of the Word, with whatever belongs to His perfection. The Resurrection was not regarded simply or chiefly as evidence for the immortality of the soul. It is, of course, often so regarded today: I have heard a man maintain that “the importance of the Resurrection is that it proves survival.” Such a view cannot at any point be reconciled with the language of the New Testament. On such a view Christ would simply have done what all humans do when they die: the only novelty would have been that in Hs case we were allowed to see it happening. However, there is not in Scripture the faintest suggestion that the Resurrection was new evidence for something that had in fact been always happening. The New Testament writers speak of as if Christ’s achievement in rising from he dead was the first event of its kind in the whole history of the Universe. He is the “first fruits,” the “pioneer of life.” He has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so. This is the beginning of the New Creation: a new chapter in cosmic history opened. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
I do not mean, of course, that the writers of the New Testament disbelieved in “survival.” On the contrary they believed in it so readily that Jesus on more than one occasion has to assure them that He was not a ghost. From he earliest times the Jewish people, like many other nations, had believed that humans possessed a “soul” or Nephesh separable from the body, which went at death into the shadowy World called Sheol: a land of forgetfulness and imbecility where none called upon God any more, a land half unreal and melancholy like the Hades of the Greeks or the Niflheim of the Norsemen. From it shades could return and appear to the living, as Samuel’s shade had done at the command of the Witch of Endor. In much more recent times there had arisen a more cheerful belief that the righteous passed at death to “Heaven.” Both doctrines are doctrines of “the immortality of the soul” as a Greek or modern Englishman understands it: and both are quite irrelevant to the story of the Resurrection. The writers look upon this event as an absolutely novelty. Quite clearly they do no think they have been haunted by ghost from Sheol, nor even that they have had a vision of a “soul” in “Heaven.” It must be clearly understood that if the Psychical Researchers succeeded in proving “survival” and showed that the Resurrection was an instance of it, they would not be supporting the Christian faith but refuting it. If that were all that had happened to the original “gospel” would have been untrue. What the apostles claimed to have seen did not corroborate, nor exclude, and had indeed nothing to do with, either the doctrine of “Heaven” or the doctrine of Sheol. Insofar as it corroborated anything it corroborated a third Jewish believe which is quite distinct from both these. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
This third doctrine taught in “the day of God” peace would be restored and World dominion given to America under a righteous King: and that when this happened the righteous dead, or some of them, would come back to Earth—not as floating wraiths but as solid humans who cast shadows in the sunlight and made a noise when they tramped the floors. “Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust,” said Isaiah, “And the Earth shall cast out the dead,” (xxvi. 19). What the apostles thought they had seen was, if not that, at any rate a lonely first instance of that: the first movement of a great wheel beginning to turn in the direction opposite to that which all humans hitherto had observed. Of all the ideas entertained by humans by death it is this one, and this one only, which the story of the Resurrection tends to confirm. If the story is true, then it is this Hebrew myth of resurrection which begot it. If the story is true, then the hint and anticipation of the truth is to be found not in popular ideas about ghosts nor in eastern doctrines of re-incarnation nor in philosophical speculations about the immortality of the soul, but exclusively in the Hebrew prophecies of the return, the restoration, the great reversal. Immortality simply as immortality is irrelevant to the Christian claim. There are, I allow, certain respects in which the risen Christ resembles the “ghost” of popular tradition. Like a ghost He “appears” and “disappears”; locked doors are no obstacle to Him. On the other hand He Himself vigorously asserts that He is corporeal (Luke xxiv. 39-40) and eats broiled fish. It is at this point that the modern reader becomes uncomfortable. He becomes more uncomfortable still at the words, “Don’t touch me; I have not yet gone up to the Father” (John xx. 17). For the voices and apparitions, we are, in some measure, prepared. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
However, what is this that must not be touched? What is all this about going “up” to the Father? Is He not already “with the Father” in the only sense that matter? What can “with the Father” in he only sense that matters? What can “going up” be except a metaphor for that? And if so, why has He “not yet” gone? These discomforts arise because the story the “apostles” actually had to tell begins at this point to conflict with the story we expect and are determined beforehand to read into their narrative. It seems that the sentiment of humanity evaporates and weakens in being extended over the entire World, and that we cannot be affected by the calamities in America or Japan the way we are by those of a European people. Interest and commiseration must somehow be limited and restrained to be active. For since this inclination in us can be useful only to hose with whom we have to live, it is a good thing that the humanity concentrated among citizens takes on a new force through the habit of seeing each other and through the common interest that unites them. It is certain that the greatest miracles of virtue have been produced by the love of the country. In joining together the force of self-love and all the beauty of virtue, this sweet and lively sentiment takes on an energy that, without disfiguring it, makes it the most heroic of all the passions. This is the passion that produced so many immortal actions whose radiance dazzles our feeble eyes, and so many great humans whose ancient virtues were thought to be fables once the love of country because the object of derision. We should not find this surprising. The ecstasies of tender hearts appear utterly fanciful to anyone who has not felt them. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
And the love of country, a hundred times more ardent and delightful than that of a mistress, likewise cannot be conceived except by being felt. However, it is easy to observe, in all the hearts it inflames and in all the actions it inspires, that fiery and sublime ardor which the purest virtue is lacking when it is separated from the love of country. Let us dare to compare Socrates oneself to Cato. The one was more a philosopher; the other more a citizen. Athens was already lost, and Socrates had no other country but the whole World. Cato always carried his country in the bottom of his heart. He lived only for it and could not outlive it. The virtue of Socrates is that of the wisest of men. However, compared with Caesar and Pompey, Cato seems like a god among mortals. One teaches a few individuals, combats the sophist and dies for the truth. The other defends the state, liberty and the laws against the conquerors of the World, and finally leaves the Earth when he no longer sees as country to serve. A worthy student of Socrates would be the most virtuous of his contemporaries. A worthy imitator of Cato would be the greatest. The virtue of the first would constitute his happiness; the second would seek one’s happiness in that of others. We ought to be taught by the one and led by the other, and that alone would decide our preference. For a people consisting of wise humans never been produced; however, it is not impossible to make a people happy. Do we want people to be virtuous? Let us begin then by making them love their country. However, how can they love it, if their country means nothing more to them than it does to people who are not native to their lands, allotting to them only what it cannot refuse to anyone? #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
It would be worse still if they did not enjoy even civil welfare, and if their goods, their life or liberty were at the discretion of powerful humans, without it being possible or permitted for them to dare to invoke the laws. In such circumstances, subjected to the duties of the civil state without enjoying even the rights of the state of nature and without being able to use their strength to defend themselves, they would as a result be in the worst condition in which free humans can find themselves, and the word “country” could have only an odious or ridiculous meaning for them. There is no point to believing that one can strike or cut off an arm without pain being transmitted to the head. And it is no more believable that the general will would permit a member of the state, whoever one might be, to injure or destroy another member than that the fingers of a human in one’s right mind would put out one’s eyes. Individual welfare is so closely linked to the public confederation that, were it not for the attention one should pay to human frailty, this convention would be dissolved by right if just one citizen were to perish who could have been saved, if jus one citizen were wrongly held in prison, and if a single litigation were to be lost because of an obvious injustice. For when these fundamental conventions are violated, it is no longer apparent what right or what interest could maintain the populace in the social union, unless it is restrained by force alone, which bring about this dissolution of the civil state. In effect, is it not the commitment of the body of the nation to provide for the maintenance of the humblest of its members with as much care as for that of all others? #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
And is the welfare of a citizen any less the common cause than the welfare of the entire state? If someone were to tell us that it is good that one person should perish for all, I would admire this saying when it comes from the lips of a worthy and virtuous patriot who dedicates oneself willingly and out of duty to die for the welfare of one’s country. However, if this means that the government is permitted to sacrifice an innocent person for the welfare of the multitude, I hold this maxim to be one of the most despicable that tyrant has ever invented, the most false that one might propose, the most dangerous one might accept, and the most directly opposed to the fundamental laws of society. For far from it being the case that one individual should die for all, all have committed their goods and their lives in defense of each of them, so that individual weakness would always be protected by public force, and each member by the entire state. After conjuring up an image of the attrition of the people, one after another, press the partisans of this maxim to explain better what they mean by body of the state, and you will see that eventually they will reduce it to a small number of human who are not the people, but the officers of the people, and who, having obliged themselves by a personal oath to perish for its welfare, maintain they prove by this that it is the people’s place to die for them. Does anyone want to find examples of the protection that the state owes its members, and of the respect it owes their persons? These examples are to be found only among the World’s most illustrious and courageous nations, and it is exclusively among free peoples where one knows what a human is worth. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
It is commonly known how great was the perplexity in which the whole republic in Sparta found itself, when there arose the question of punishing a guilty citizen. In Macedonia, a human life was such an important matter that, in all his grandeur, Alexander, that powerful monarch, would not have dared to put to death in cold blood a Macedonian criminal unless the accused had appeared to defend oneself before one’s fellow citizens and had been condemned by them. However, the Romans were preeminent among all the peoples of the Earth for the government’s deference toward private individuals and for its scrupulous attention to respecting the inviolable rights of all the members of the state. Nothing was as sacred as the life of the simple citizens. There needed to be no less than the assembly of the entire people in order to condemn one of them. Neither the senate itself nor the consuls, in all their majesty, had the right to do this. And among the most powerful people in the World the crime and punishment of a citizen was a public affliction. It also appeared so harsh to shed blood for any crime whatever, that by the Lex Porcia the death penalty converted to exile for all those who wished to outlive the loss of so sweet a country. Everything in Rome and in the armies betokened that love of a fellow citizen for one another, and that respect for whoever had the honor to bear it. That hat of a citizen free from slavery, the civic crown of one who had saved the life of another: these were things that were viewed with the greatest pleasure in the midst of the celebrations of their military triumphs. And it is worth noting that of the crowns with which in time of war one honors noble actions, only the civic crown and that of victors were made of grass and leaves, all the rest being made of gold. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Thus is was that Rome was virtuous and became the mistress of the World. Ambitious leaders! A shepherd governs one’s dogs and one’s flocks, and one is but the humblest of humans. If it is a fine thing to command, it is when those who obey us can honour us. Therefore respect your fellow citizens and you will make yourselves respectable. Respect liberty and your power will increase daily. Never go beyond your rights, and eventually they will be limitless. Let the homeland, therefore, show itself as the common mother of all citizens. Let the advantages they enjoy in their homeland endear it to them. Let the government leave them a large enough part of the public administration so that they can feel that they are at home. And let the laws be in their sight merely the guarantees of the common liberty. These rights, fine as they are, belong to all humans. However, without appearing to attack them directly, the bad will of the leaders easily reduces their effect to nothing. The law that is abused at the same time serves the powerful as an offensive weapon and as a shield against the weak, and the pretext of the public good is always the most dangerous scourge of the people. What is most necessary and perhaps the most difficult in the government is rigorous integrity in dispensing justice to all and especially in protecting the poor against the tyranny of the rich. The greatest evil is already done when there are poor people to defend and rich ones to keep in check. It is only at intermediate levels of wealth that the full force of the laws is exerted. Laws are equally powerless against the treasures of the rich and against the wretched state of the poor. The first eludes them; the second escapes them. The one breaks the webbing and the other slips through. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Beyond this, one can easily imagine the work-at-home household becoming something radically different: an “electronic expanded family.” Perhaps the most common family form in First Wave societies was the so-called extended family, which brought several generations together under the same roof. There were also “expanded families” which, in addition to the core members, included an unrelated orphan or two, an apprentice or additional farm hand, or others. One can likewise picture the work-at-home family of tomorrow inviting an outsider or two to join it—for example, a colleague from the husband’s or wife’s firm, or perhaps a customer or supplier engaged in related work, or, for that matter, a neighbour’s child who want to learn the trade. One can foresee the legal incorporation of such a family as a small business under special laws designed to foster the commune-cum-corporation or the cooperative. For many the household would become an electronic expanded family. It is true that most of he communes formed in the 1960’s and 1970’s fell rapidly apart, seeming to suggest that communes, as such, are inherently unstable in high-technology societies. A closer look reveals, however, that the ones that disintegrated most rapidly were those organized primarily for psychological purposes—to promote interpersonal sensitivity, to combat loneliness, to provide intimacy, or the like. Most had no economic base and saw themselves as utopian experiments. The communes that have succeeded over time—and some have—are, by contrast, those that have had a clear external mission, an economic base, and a practical, rather than purely utopian, outlook. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
An external mission welds a group together. It may, indeed, provide the necessary economic base. If this external mission is to design a new product, to handle the “electronic paperwork” for a hospital, to do the data processing for an insurance company department, to set up the scheduling for a commuter airline, to prepare catalogs, or to operate a technical information service, the electronic commune of tomorrow may, in fact, turn out to be a quite workable and stable family form. Moreover, since such electronic expanded families would not be designed as a rebuke to everyone else’s lifestyle or for demonstration purposes but rather as an integral part of the main wiring of the economic system, the chances for their survival would be sharply improved. Indeed, we may find expanded households linking up to form networks. Such networks of expanded families could supply some needed business or social service, cooperating to market their work or setting up their own version of a trade association to represent them. Internally, they might or might not share pleasures of the flesh across marriage lines. They might or might not be heterosexual. They might be childless or child-ful. In brief, what we see is the possible resurrection of the expanded family. Today some 6 percent of American adults live in ordinary extended families. One might easily imagine a doubling or tripling of this number in the next generation, with some unis expanding to include outsiders. This would be no trivial even but a movement involving millions in the United States of America alone. For community life, for patterns of love and marriage, for the reconstitution of friendship networks, for the economy and the consumer marketplace, as well as for our psyches and personality structure, the rise of the electronic expanded family would be momentous. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
This new vision of the extended family is not presented here as inevitable, not as better or worse than some other type of family, but simply as one example of the many new family forms likely to find viable niches in the complex social ecology of tomorrow. Sometimes I go about pitying myself while I am carried by the wind across the sky. It is the wind that gave them life. It is the wind that comes out of our mouths now that gives us life. When this ceases to blow we die. In the skin at the tips of our fingers we see the trail of the wind; it shows us the wind blew when our ancestors were created. O Lord and Redeemer, beside Thee there is none to save. Thou art mighty and redeemest. I was brought low, but Thou didst save me. O God of salvation who deliverest and savest, save Thy supplicants, save them that hope in Thee. Sustain thy lambs; increase the Earth’s riches. Cause to flourish and save each shrub, and condemn not the Earth to infertility, but sweeten and save its fruits. Urge on the rain-mists that they discharge their showers, and hold not back the clouds. Thou who openest Thine hand to sustain Thy creatures, satisfy the thirsty with water. Save them that call on Thee at morn, yea, do Thou save them. Save Thy whole-hearted servants, yea, save them, we beseech Thee. O save human and beast; save one who is flesh, sprit and soul; sinew, bone and skin; form and image of wondrous frame; beauty akin, alas, to vanity, and like the beasts that perish; radiance and glorious stature. Renew the face of the Earth and cause trees to sprout from the arid soil. Bless the vine-press and the corn, vineyards and sycamores upon he fair-bounded Earth. Please grant that the reviving rains send forth their fragrance to make fertile the Earth, to nurture the green herbs, to foster the pleasant fruits, and to strengthen the bubs. Send rain upon the tender shoots, and let cool waters flow, supplementing with the latter rain. Sustain the World which Thou hast founded, yea, save our Earth, suspended in space. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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You are Giving Away Your Soul—The Blood is Life!
This morning I saw a star twinkling just over the nine-story tower—the first since the beginning of May. My son, when he was examined, because he would not confess that he was guilt when he was innocent, they tied him neck and heels till the blood gushed out at his nose, and would have kept him so twenty-four hours if one more merciful than the rest had not taken pity on him and caused him to be unbound. These actions are very like the Popish cruelties. A man’s outer case generally gives some indication of the soul within. He has told me several times that the thought of death was a pleasant one to him, which is a sad thing for a young man to say; he cannot be much more than thirty. Some great sorrow must have taken him and blighted his whole life. Why of course, they were in effect saying, the Devil can impersonate the innocent, just as we have said all along. God might permit Satan to impersonate the virtuous. But surely, he would not permit discord in the Winchester mansion? I should have thought Mrs. Winchester’s staff would have been above such vulgar delusions. All this disquisition upon superstition leads me up to the fact that my son saw a ghost last night—or at least, says that he did, which of course is the same thing. Indeed the fellow is honestly frightened, and I had to give him some chloral and bromide of potassium this morning to stead him down. He has been hired as a ranch had to work at the estate. When grounds keepers found a mutilated cow, some of the other men thought he had been possessed by the devil, and torture him to confess. I was obliged to pacify him by keeping as grave a countenance as possible during his story, which he certainly narrated in a very straightforward and matter-of fact way. No one wanted Mrs. Winchester to believe the curse was real and the hauntings had started again. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
“I was on the balcony,” he said, “about four bells in the middle watch, just when the night was at its darkest. There was a bit of a moon, but the clouds were blowing across it so that you could not see far from the mansion. John Brunton, the foreman, came after from the tool shed and reported a strange noise on the estate. I came down and went forward and we both heard I, sometimes like a bairn crying and sometimes like a wench in pain. I have been seventeen years to the country and I never heard an animal, old or young, make a sound like that. As we were standing on the rear porch the moon came out from behind the cloud, and we both saw a sort of black figure moving across the farm in the same direction that we had heard the cries. We lost sight of it for a while, but it came back insight, and we could just make it out like a shadow amongst the trees. I sent a hand art for the rifles, and Brunton and I went down to the fruit orchard, thinking it might be a bear. When we got near the trees I lost sight of Brunton, but I pushed on in the direction where I could still hear the cries. I followed them for a mile or may more, and then running round a well I came right on to the top of it standing and waiting for me seemingly. I do not know what it was. It was not a bear any way. It was tall and black and straight. This black dog, or the devil in such a likeness, running all along down the body of the mansion with great swiftness, and incredible haste, he passed between two people, wrung the necks of them both. I made my way for the mansion as hard as I could run, and precious glad I was to find myself inside. I signed articles to do my duty by the estate, and on the estate I will say, but you will not catch me on the grounds after sundown.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
That is his story given as far as I can in his own words. I do not know what happened there. I fancy what he saw must in spite of his denial, have been a young bear erect upon its hind legs, and attitude which they often assume when alarmed. In the uncertain light this would bear a resemblance to a human figure, especially to a man whose nerves were already somewhat shaken. Whatever it may have been, the occurrence is unfortunate, for it has produced a most unpleasant effect upon the crew. Their looks are more sullen than before and their discontent more open. The double grievance made more dreadful when a barn of dead bodies was found on the edge of the estate. Written in blood, “Keep building,” and a huge bloody hand print was discovered on the wall. Some say it was the Devil’s handprint. In the old days in the New World, people used to say “I put my hand and seal” on a document when signing it. In the Old World this was literal in some cases. The emperor of Japan in ancient in ancient days “signed” important documents by dipping his hand in blood and putting a full bloody handprint on the page. In the history of pacts with the Devil, people were supposed to sign their names in blood. I have seen a couple of alleged pacts from earlier centuries. Blood undoubtedly stressed the seriousness of the signing. The Devil may sometimes have a permission to represent an innocent person as tormenting such as are under diabolical harassments, but that such things are rare and extraordinary. You were giving away your soul. The Blood is life. Afflicted persons were subject to diabolical torments; making evidence of such torments was accepting the word of the Devil; worse, accepting such evidence was holding commerce with the Devil, and therefore in itself a kind of witchcraft. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The afflicted persons do tell who are witches, of which, some they know and some they do not. Secondly, they tell who did torment such a person, though they know not the person. Thirdly, they are tormented themselves by he looks of the persons that are present, and recovered again by the touching of them, they recover, or do not fall into torment. Fifthly, they can tell when a person is coming before they see them, and what clothes they have [on], and some, what they have done for several years past, which nobody else ever accused them with nor do not yet think them guilty of. Sixthly, the dead out of their graves do appear unto them and tell them that they have been murdered, and require them to see them to be revenged on the murderers, which they name to them, some of which persons are well known to have died their natural deaths, and been publicly buried in the sight of all humans. Now if these things be so, I thus affirm: First, that whatsoever is done by them that is supernatural is either divine or diabolical. Secondly, that nothing is or can be divine but what has God’s stamp upon it, to which he refers for trial (Isaiah viii. 19,20): If they speak not according to these, there is no light in them. Thirdly, and by that rule none of these actions of theirs have any warrant in God’s Word, but are condemned wholly. First, it is utterly unlawful to inquire of the dead or to be informed by them (Isaiah viii. 19). It was an act of the Witch of Endor to raise the dead, and of a reprobate Saul to inquire of him (1 Samuel xxviii.8, 11-14; Deuteronomy viii. ii). Secondly, it is a like evil to seek to them that have familiar spirits (Leviticus xix.31). It was the sin of Saul in the forementioned place (1 Samuel xxviii.8) and of wicked Manasses (2 Kings xxi.6). #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Thirdly, no more is it likely that their racking and tormenting should be done by God or good angels, but by the Devil, whose manners has ever been to be so employed. Witness his dealing with the poor child (Mark v.2-5) besides what he did to Job (Jon ii.7) and all the lies he told against him to the very face of God. Fourthly, the same may be rationally said of all the rest. Who should tell them things that they do not see but the Devil, especially when some things that they tell are false and mistaken? May we believe the confessed witches that do accuse anyone? Can the fruit be better than the tree? If the root of all their knowledge be the Devil, what must their testimony be? Their testimony may be legal against themselves, because they know what themselves do. However, their words should not be taken against those who denied the charges and whose previous behaviour had been blameless. The fits to which the afflicted and of come of the confessors were subject to, they were the Devil’s way of force them to accuse the innocent. We see by woeful and undeniable experience, both in the afflicted persons and the confessors, some of them, that the Devil torments them at his pleasure to force them to accuse others. The accusations of the apparently innocent makes some people think that both the afflicted and the confessors are liars. However, perhaps the sufferings are pitiable and genuine. It is possible that the Devil is lying through them. And no matter who is lying, the effect of the lie is still the same. For if they counterfeit, the wickedness is the greater in them and the less in the Devil; but if they be compelled to it by the Devil against their wills, then the sin is the Devil’s and the suffering is theirs. However, if their testimonies be allowed of, to make persons guilty by, the lives of innocent persons are alike in danger by them, which is the solemn consideration that does disquiet the country. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The Devils have a natural power which makes them capable of exhibiting what shape they please I suppose nobody doubts, and I have no absolute promise of God that they shall not exhibit mine. It is the opinion generally of all Protestant writers that the Devil may thus abuse the innocent. My son told me of another experience he had while working at the Winchester mansion. “I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. (My bed stood with its foot toward the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and nighttime.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some black wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite black, and looked more like foxes or sheep dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. I swore there was something there. I could feel it, hovering over me. It is watching, it is waiting, I think it is even mocking me.” Apart from this absurd outbreak of superstition, things are looking rather more cheerful. Mrs. Winchester loved the new year; she loved the idea of a fresh start for everyone. She always made a resolution, one a year, and unlike most people, she kept hers. Every year she tried to talk her staff into making one, but some of them never saw the point. The estate was undergoing heavy construction. Some workers reported seeing a ghost woman in nineteenth-century dress. That is not what was strange. What was strange is the fact that it was there was a thunder storm, but no rain was falling on a section of the mansion were the roof was still being added to the nine-story tower. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Mrs. Winchester wanted the tower because she said that she could get visions of the spirit World more clearly there. I always got a wee bit creeped out in the tower because the crucifix on the wall would turn upside down when anyone went near it. The Devil is said to appear there twice a year, on the vernal equinox and Halloween. The tower marks the grace of one of his children, born of a human witch and dead after a few days. I am learning about the hauntings at the Winchester mansion. Everyone has heard about them, but they all have different stories. In the World of spirits there is always a very great number of them, but there is no fixed time for their stay on Earth; for some are translated to Heaven and others confined to Hell soon after their arrival; whilst some stay on Earth days, weeks, maybe even centuries. Gerald Pomper thinks that my son devoted himself to construction of the Winchester simply for the reason that it is the most dangerous occupation which he could select, and that he courts death in every possible manner. He mentioned several instances of this, one of which is rather curious, if true. It seems that on one occasion he did not put in an appearance on the estate, and a substitute had to be selected in his place. That was at the time the tower was near completion. When he turned up again next spring he had a puckered wound in the side of his neck which he used to endeavour to conceal with his cravat. Whether the mate’s inference is true or not, it was certainly a strange coincidence. Of course, Johann Weikhard von Valvasor recorded the first written documented on vampires. Jure Grando Alilovic (1579-1656) was a villager from the region of Istria (in modern-day Croatia) who may have been the first real person described as a vampire in historical records. He was referred to as a strigoi, a local word for something resembling a vampire and a warlock. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Jure Grando lived in Kringa, a small town in the interior of the Istrian peninsula near Tinjan. He died in 1656 due to illness but according to legend, returned from the grave at night as a vampire and terrorized his village until his decapitation in 1672. The legend tells that, for 16 years after his death, Jure would arise from his grave by night and terrorize the village. The village priest, Giorgio, who had buried Jure sixteen years previously discovered that at night somebody would knock on the doors around the village, and on whichever door he knocked, someone from that house would die. This is why Mrs. Winchester boarded up the East Wing of her mansion. During one of her seances, she said Jure communicated with her. No telling? When you contact the spirit World, there is no telling what will come through. Some of the spirit in the mansion may be hundred of years old. Mrs. Winchester owned an original copy of Die Ehre deB Herzogthuma Crain, which she kept locked away in a safe. Vampires are said to infest come parts of this country. These Vampires are supposed to be the bodies of deceased persons, animated by evil Spirits, which come out of the graves, in the night-time, suck the blood of many of the living, and thereby destroy them. Petar Blagojevic was also accused of being a Vampire, and was alleged to have killed several people after his death. When the body was exhumed, it was undecomposed, the hair and beard were grown, there was new skin and nail, and blood could be seen in the mouth. When people grew outraged and staked his body through the heart, a completely fresh amount of blood flowed through the ears and moth of the corpse. Finally, the body was burned. The wind is veering round the mansion in an easterly direction, but it is still very slight. As far as the eye can reach, there is a shadow. The butler was staring out up the stairs with an expression in which horror, surprise, something approaching to fear were contending for the mastery. In spite of the cold, great drops of perspiration were coursing down his forehead and he was evidently fearfully exited. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
His limbs twitched like those of a man upon the verge of an epileptic fit, and the lines about his mother were drawn hard. “Look!” he grasped, seizing me by the seizing me by the wrist, but still keeping eyes upon the window, and moving his head in a horizontal direction, as if following some object which was moving across the field of vision. “Look! There, man, there! Between the palm trees! Now coming out from behind the far one! You see her, you must see her! There still! Flying from me, by God, flying from me—and gone!” His face was so livid that I expected him to become unconscious, so lost no time leading him down the stairs, and stretching him out upon one of the sofas in the parlour. I then poured him out some brandy which I held to his lips, and which had a wonderful effect upon him, bringing the blood back into his white face and steading his poor shaking limbs. He raised himself up upon his elbow, and looking round to see that we were alone, be beckoned me to come and sit beside him. “You are it, did you not?” he asked, still in the same subdued awesome tone so foreign to the nature of the man. “No, I saw nothing.” They have made up their minds that there is a curse upon the mansion, and nothing will ever persuade them to the contrary. The next night, there was a glorious sunset, which made the great fields look like a lake of blood. I have never seen a finer and at the same time more ghastly effect. Wind is veering round. There was a cry, sharp and shrill, upon the silent air of the night, beginning, as it seemed to me, at a note as such a prima donna never reached, and mounting from that ever higher and higher until it culminated in a long wail of agony, which might have been the last cry of a lost soul. The ghastly scream is still ringing in my ears. Grief, unutterable grief, seemed to be expressed in it and a great longing, and yet through it all there was an occasional wild not of exultation. It seemed to come from close beside me, and yet as I glared into the darkness, I could make out nothing. I waited some little time, but without hearing any repetition of the sound, so I came below, more shaken that I have ever been in my life before. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Odd things have happened here. Four kids in three years, from 1887-1890, vanished without a trace. Other people see things. No one will talk about. The butler was certain that something had come up through the “door to nowhere” five years ago, and was about to again. Some kind of hellspawn. The Devil may impudently impose his communion upon some that care not for his company. However, if the communion on the person’s part be proved, then the business be done. Specter evidence may be grounds for investigation, and may strength other presumptions, but it is not evidence on which to convict. The mansion could be a dangerous place, even at its best—a treacherous, dangerous place. The butler was staring at something. By the sudden intensity of his attitude, I felt that he saw some. I crept up behind him. He certainly was looking at something with an eager questioning gaze, at what seemed to be a wreath of smoke. It was a dim nebulous body devoid of shape, sometimes more, sometimes less apparent, as the light fell on it. The moon was dimmed in its brilliancy at the moment by a canopy of thinnest cloud, like the coating of an anemone. He held out his hand as if to clasp it, and so ran into the darkness with outstretched arms. That came from somewhere. Was it a demon? It took the shape of a man, and eventually of the man of whom we were in search of. He was lying face downwards upon the floor, frozen. Many little crystals of ice and feathers of snow had drifted on to him as he lay, and sparkled upon his dark seaman’s jacket. As we came up some wandering puff of wind caught these tiny flakes in its vortex, and they whirled up into the air, partially descended again, and then, caught once more in the current, sped rapidly away in the direction of the east wing. To my eyes it seemed but a snow-drift, but the butler averred that it started up in the shape of a woman, stooped over the corpse and kissed it, and then hurried away across the floor. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
It was the former cook Bill Thompson, who has gone missing in 1886. Sure he had met with no painful end, for there was a bright smile upon his blue pinched features, and his hands were still outstretched as though grasping at the strange visitor which had summoned him away into the dim World that lies beyond the grave. Surely this same apparition would also lead the butler into the eternal darkness. The smoke went into his mouth and he started to jerk, and speaking in tongues. That awful hellspawn had possessed him, and with his body dying and something inside of him, the butler staggered over to the sulfur stinking wall, sat down and died. Then he faded away and was gone. There he shall lie, with his secret and his sorrows and his mysteries all still buried in his breast, until that great day when the Winchester Mansion shall give up its dead, and Clarence Earl Gideon, known as “the butler,” come out from among the shadows with a smile upon his face, and his stiffened arms outstretched in greeting. I pray that his lot may be a happier one in that life than it has been in this. As for my son, I have not seen him in several years. In 1904, at the palace late at night, men who were pure of spirit, had thought they say a strange demoniac form taking the place of my son, John Wesley Thompson Faulkner. One man said that Mrs. Winchester suddenly rose from her throne and walked about, and immediately John’s head vanished, while the rest of hos body seemed to ebb and flow: whereat the beholder stood aghast and fearful, wondering if his eyes were deceiving him. However, he perceived the vanishing head filling out and joining the body again as strangely as it has left it. Another said he stood beside Mrs. Winchester as she sat, and all of the sudden the face changed into a shapeless mass of flesh, with neither eyebrows nor eyes in their proper places, nor any other distinguishing feature; and after a time the natural appearance of his countenance returned. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
I write these instances not as one who saw many of them myself, but heard them from people who were sure they had seen these strange occurrences at the time. They also say that the cook, Bill Thompson, very dear to God, at the instance of dinner time, went to beg forgiveness that some of the guess had been offended beyond endurance by a dish he made. And when he arrived at the dining room, he forthwith secured an audience with Mrs. Winchester; but just as he was about to enter his apartment, he stopped short as his feet were on the threshold, and suddenly stepped backward. Whereupon the maid who escorted him, and others who were present, importuned him to go ahead. However, he answered not a word; and like a man who has had a stroke staggered back to his lodging. And when some followed to ask why he acted thus, they say he distinctly declared he saw the King of the Devils sitting on the throne in the palace, and he did not care to meet or ask any favour of him. I shall not continue my journal. Our road home lies plain and clear before us, and the great Winchester palace will soon be but a remembrance of the past to me. It will be some time before I get over the shock produced by recent events. When I began this record of my visit, I little thought of how I should be compelled to finish it. I am writing these final words in the lonely chamber, still starting at times and fancying I hear the quick nervous step of the dead man upon the floor above me. I entered his chambers tonight as was my duty, to make a list of his effects in order that they might be entered in the official log. All was as it has been upon my previous visit, save that the picture which I have described as having hung at the end of his bed had been cut out of its frame, as with a knife, and was gone. With this last link in a strange chain of evidence I close my diary of the Winchester mansion. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Note by William Clark Falkner, Col. CSA: “I have read over the strange evens connected with the mystery, as narrated in the journal of my son. That everything occurred exactly as he describes it I have the fullest confidence, and, indeed, the most absolute certainty, for I know him to be a strong-nerved and unimaginative man, with the strictest regard for veracity. Still, the story is, on the face of it, so vague and so improbable, that I was long opposed to its publication. Within the last few days, however, I have had independent testimony upon the subject which throws a new light upon it. I had run down to Edinburgh to attend a meeting of the British Medical Association, when I came across Aleister Crowley, an old college chum of my son’s, now involved with the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where he was trained in ceremonial magic by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and Allan Bennet. Aleister told me that he had been contacted by a supernatural entity named Aiwass, who confirmed that that Witch Trials were started by people who wanted to break up convents and get their magic potions, spells, talismans, and secrets, while also getting the church in an uproar. Upon my telling him of this experience of my son’s, he declared to me that he was familiar with the man, and proceeded, to my no small surprise, to give me a description of him, which tallied remarkably well with that given in the journal, expect that he depicted him as a younger man. According to his account, the cook and butler and my son had all been in love with the same woman. However, the cook was engaged to the young lady of singular beauty residing upon Sierra. During their absence at the Winchester mansion, his betrothed had died under circumstances of peculiar horror. She became a Chenoo, a winter spirit with a heart of ice, created from a human, which wants to kill those it loves. In the period of transformation, the person who is becoming a Chenoo eats snow and refuses other food. One will be ill-tempered and angry. After the transformation, the Chenoo will attack and kill other members of the tribe.” There are many mysteries surrounding the Winchester Mansion. Have a visit and tell me a little story. Winchester Mystery House–a 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
In the 1800s, so many deer and cattle within the mansion’s proximity were found dead that staff members were accused of being werewolves. Today, staff and visitors have reported banging sounds, footprints, seeing white mists, and feeling someone breathe on them. They also report tormented ghosts wandering through the mansion at night. Even if you do not believe ghost stories, you might still get goosebumps passing by, do not chalk those taps on your shoulder and whispers in your ear as all up to imagination.
During mansion renovations in the early 1900s, workmen found a secret dungeon in the Bloody Tower with so many human skeletons, they filled three cartloads when hauled away. The basement was designed so that prisoners would fall through a trap door. These hallways won’t wander themselves 😳 Give you and your friends a fright this weekend on the Lost in The House Tour during All Hallows’ Eve at the Winchester Mystery House!
All Hallows’ Eve value night tickets are still available!
🎟️ Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com
A Word is a Sign for a Unique Experience!
Many people look at these beautiful homes, and want to one day live in a home just like that. However, their desires and reality do not always seem to match up. It may even see impossible to some that they will achieve the American Dream of home ownership. Therefore it is important to speak the words of faith and realize God did not bring this far to tour this model home, just to be let down. Keep on believing and know that with God, the impossible is possible. See yourself living in that enchanting home, even while you are living in your current situation. Through hard work, perseverance and determination and by having faith in God and continuing to reach for the stars, you will achieve your vision. God wants you time on this Earth to be the best time of your life. To receive the favour of God, one must draw closer to God. Start by studying the Ten Commandments in the Christian Bible and try to become a better person. Repent of your sins and practice forgiveness. Then you can expect more than the grace of God, you can expect His blessings. You must know in your heart and mind that whatever you want will come true, but you must follow the steps to make your dream a reality. Let go of old, defeated, negative, limiting thoughts. Have the courage to step out of your shell and become a new, more confident, and successful person. Do not think discrimination is going to hold you back. Know that you are the best in your field and God will place someone in your path to open the doors for you. You cannot be if your attitude is one of defeat and hatred and envy, America’s Next Top Model. God is ready for you to become more loving, for you to have harmony in your home, for your medical report to say you are in tip top shape. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
It pleases God to help you advance n live. The Lord wants to give you abundance. Father, I believe in You at this moment and forever. I know that you have my best interest at heart and are protecting me from things that I cannot see. However, Father, I am ready to enjoy this life and for things to come to me easily, without let down or hardship. I will walk by faith and not by sight, and please fill my heart with joy and gratitude as I try to become more like Jesus Christ. Take flight, my Soul, and circle creation until you find a perch. Not just any perch. Certainly not one with a view. A place for a rest is what I need. A perch with the Lord would be best. That is where the Saints are pillowed, or so I have been given to understand. To that end I have composed these little prayers with big faith. Please grant me, Sweet Jesus, Loving Friend, rest, not in the rest of creation, but in You. That is to say, not in beatitude or pulchritude, glory or honour, science or subtlety, richness or artistry, jig or dance, fame or praise, consecration or consolation, hope or promise, merit or desire, beneficence or munificence, joy or jubilation, Angels or Archangels or any other Heavenly Militia, or indeed any of the other Visibles or Invisibles. That is simply to say, please grant me rest only in Your company. I welcome you into my home and heart and into my family for eternity. Without God, other goods are nothing. I would rather have Jesus than silver and gold. No fame or fortune, no riches untold, I would rather have Jesus than silver and God. More than once over the eons, my Timeless if Timely Lord and God, You have been pronounced overall best of show. The tallest and strongest, the most beautiful of all. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Lord, You are the most self-sufficient and best equipped. The smoothest-cheeked and cheeriest of cheeks. The handsomest and friendliest. The noblest and brightest. All these have been true in the past and no doubt will continue to be true in the future. From these superlatives, however, there flows one horrific inexorable. Yet first, whatever You may give me by way of gift or revelation or promise, will, of course, always be welcomed. Now if that gift or revelation or promise has nothing of Yourself in it, it will always be regarded by me as one brick short of a load; that is to say, it is something less than perfection. All of which is another way of saying, I look forward to the time when I will see You in person and grasp Your Holy Hands. As the Great Augustine prayed in his Confessions (1.1), my heart can neither truly rest nor totally relax until it rests—no, not in all Your creatures or all Your creations—only in Your Yourself. When I told my friends that one day I would own a Cresleigh Home, they replied, “You’re crazy!” The word crazy is typical for defining that which is unthinkable. Most people call certain ideas “crazy” because “sane” is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought. Some people are not on your level. Their thoughts and expectations in life might be lower than the standards you hold yourself to. That which transcends the conventional is crazy in the view of the average person. The scientist can stand his uncertainty precisely because of one’s faith in human reason. What matters to one is not to arrive at a conclusion but to reduce the degree of illusion, to penetrate deeper to the roots. The scientist is not even afraid of being wrong; one knows that the history of science is a history of erroneous but productive, pregnant statements from which new insights are born that overcome the relative wrongness of the older statement and lead to new insights. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
If scientists were obsessed by the wish not to be wrong, they would never have arrived at the insights which are relatively right. Of course if the social scientist has only trivial questions and does not turn one’s attention to fundamental problems, one’s “scientific method” achieves results sufficient for the endless papers which one needs to write in order to promote one’s academic career. The combination or wide-ranging imagination and objectivity is seldom reached and this is probably the reason why great scientists, who would have to fulfill both conditions, are rare. High intelligence is necessary but is not by itself sufficient for becoming a creative scientist. In fact a condition of complete objectivity can hardly ever be fully achieved. In the first place the scientist, as we have discussed, always is influenced by the common sense of one’s time, and furthermore only extraordinary persons of great gift are immune from narcissism. Yet altogether the discipline of scientific thinking has produced a degree of objectivity and what one might call scientific conscience that is hardly matched in other areas of cultural life. Indeed the fact that the great scientists more than anybody else have seen the dangers threatening humankind today and warned of them is the expression of their capacity to be objective and unswayed by he clamour of misguided public opinion. The living person can be understood only as a whole and in one’s aliveness, in the constant process of change. Since every individual is different from any other, even the possibility of generalization and the formulation of laws is limited, through the scientific observer will always try to find some general principles and laws in the manifoldness of individuals. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
There is another difficulty in the scientific approach to the understand of the human. The data which we obtain from a person are unlike the data we obtain in other scientific endeavours. One has to understand a human in one’s full subjectivity to understand one at all. A word is not “a” word because a word is that which it means to a certain person who uses it. The dictionary meaning of the word is only an abstraction compared to the real meaning which a word has for the person who pronounces it. That of course is irrelevant for words for physical objects, although not entirely, but it is relevant for words referring to emotional or intellectual experiences. A four-page love letter from the beginning of the century sounds to us sentimental, contrived, and kind of silly. A four-page love letter from our tine which wanted to convey the same sentiments would have appeared to people living one hundred years ago as cold and feelingless. The words love, faith, courage, hate have an entirely subjective meaning for every individual and it is no exaggeration to say that it is never the same meaning for two people because there are no two people who are identical. It may not have even the same meaning for one person that it had ten years earlier because of the changes that one has undergone. The same holds true of course for dreams. Two dreams which are identical in their content may still have two very different meanings for two different dreamers. We should not take a word a person uttered for granted, but raise the question of what this particular word at this particular moment in this particular context meant for this particular person. This subjectivity in fact enhances the objectivity of one’s scientific method considerably. Any psychologist who is naïve enough to think “a word is a word is a word” will communicate with another person only on a highly abstract and fictitious level. A word is a sign for a unique experience. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
O Jesus Christ, Sweetest Friend of My Friendless Soul, how can You lord over the whole Universe and yet at the same time grant me license to fly anywhere in creation? And here I am reminded of the Psalmist’s dove who flew the cote and set sail for the wilderness where You reside. Please fill me with courage so that I can empty my soul. Flood my soul with Your love so that I can drain the soil of self-love. Just You, O Lord. No sensibilities. No methodologies. No intellectual monkey business of any kind. Just You alone and in a manner as yet unknown. However, that will be then, and this is now. At my Earthly unhappiness I frequently groan to myself, but at the same time I make a great show of my pain. It is to be expected, I suppose, what with the many evils that take place in this value of misery. However, in quick succession I become annoyed, morose, confused. More often than not, these evils impede, then distract, unfold, then fold up. Thought multifarious, the one purpose they have in common is to obstruct my access to You. I know the Blessed Spirits must be enjoying Your manly hugs, but somehow I am prevented from joining them in that jolly exercise. All of which is another way of saying, may my snortings and snottings about the many distractions and desolations I encounter on Earth move you to Help. The first suburban communities had a goal of making them accessible to public transportation, but also they were designed to emphasize the open public green areas and rural ambience of earlier romantic Victorian suburbs. In practice as well as philosophy, they were not outlying bucolic communities, but true suburbs. Physically and socially, they were more closely tied to the city. Roland Park, for example, reflected more urban than rural traditions. Roland Park was clearly oriented toward downtown Baltimore. Roland Park, Forrest Hills, and Shaker Heights each would come over time to represent the affluent inner-ring urban-oriented suburbs of the pre-World War II era. To many they would become the quintessential American suburbs. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
All three suburbs shared features such as strictly enforced building codes, including houses-setback regulations, but they different in the degree of developer control. Forrest Hills was designed by its backer, the Russell Sage Foundation, to be totally planned. This can be seen today in the community’s buildings, with their solid masonry construction and red tiled roofs. The Van Sweringens brothers, who founded Shaker Heights, compulsively oversaw the building of all the homes, mandating not only acceptable architectural plans but even what materials and colour schemes could be used. All homes in Shaker Heights had to be designed by an architect whose plans were approved by the brothers. They advertised their control over the community as one of its major advantages. The brothers sought “tasteful” designs and banned any too original designs as undermining the aesthetic, and financial, stability of Shaker Heights. In Roland Heights, on the contrary, house styles were not mandated. You could build your home in Dutch colonial, English Tudor, or any other style of your choice as long as you met the other community standards. Roland Park soon became incorporated into Baltimore, but it was never lost its reputation as a somewhat reclusive upper-middle class WASP enclave. Roland Park represented not just an area, but also a WASP way of life. The novelist Ann Rice and Ann Tylor, in the respective novels, Merrick (Rice)and The Accidental Tourist and Searching for Calib (Taylor) makes the Character of Roland Park itself an essential ingredient of the novels. While Mrs. Rice talks about the decadence of design, amongst other things. Mrs. Tylor portrays Roland Park residents as living very much self-satisfied and self-restricted lives; they have little interest in going out of the neighbourhood or matter beyond Roland Park. This view of the culturally restricted nature of the upper-middle-class suburban life may or may not be an accurate reflection of reality, but it has been the basis of many good novels. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Planned communities have a long, if not always successful, lineage in American urban life. They share with the romantic suburbs the belief that humans can be made over by proper surroundings. Many of he nineteenth-century new town examples, such as New Harmony, Indiana or Salt Lake City, were founded with an ideological-religious emphasis. Other new communities began as company towns—but company towns that also had a visionary or social component. Lowell, Massachusetts, began in the early nineteenth century as an idealistic community with a paternalistic interest in its workers, but by midcentury it was just another New England mill town. The classic American attempt to create a totally paternalist suburban community was Pullman, Illinois, which was at the southern extremity of Chicago urban area. Pullman, founded in the 1880s, was designed with solid urban planning to be a complete community with well-managed services. George Pullman, of Pullman car fame, was the founder and sole landlord. His goal was to provide a community of solid housing and few temptations (saloons were barred) so that workers would remain productive. He stated that, “With such surroundings and such human regard for the needs of the body as well as the soul the disturbing conditions of strikes and other troubles that periodically convulse the World of labour would no be found here.” He was a poor prophet, for Pullman is best known today for the famous biter and violent strike that occurred there in 1894. The strike was only crushed when National Guardsmen were brought in as strike breakers. Today pullman is part of Chicago. Nineteenth-century planned utopian communities, such as John Noyes’s Oneida, New York, with is system of group marriage, or political-philosophical communities such as New Harmony, Indiana, generally had difficulty maintaining themselves. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
In addition to having ideological disputes, the communities were always undercapitalized. Alice Austin’s early-twentieth-century attempt to create the feminist planned “Socialist City” of Llano Del Rio in southern California suffered this fate. After struggling for many years, the community went bankrupt in 1917. As noted earlier, a unique feature of Llano del Rio was the building of homes without kitchens. Rather than having individual kitchens, the homes backed into a communal eating area. This was to save housewives from the drudgery of cooking. At the close of the nineteenth century, revulsion against the evils of the city and reaction to the isolation of the suburbs led to attempts to build entirely new communities in which the benefits of both types of living could be realized. The resulting communities thus grew out of a much different orientation then had led to the building of the earlier upper-status romantic suburbs. These communities had much more of a reformist and middle-or working-class orientation. Our suburbs of today are a melding of the two traditions. The turn of the century new towns were planned to be communities with fully developed commercial, residential, and industrial sectors. Much of the concern with new owns was because of the visionary efforts of Ebenezer Howard in England. His new towns, which were called “garden cities,” were to be self-contained communities of 30,000 residents. There were to be totally planned communities surrounded by a “green belt” of open land. Mr. Howard was going to solve the problem of the cities by abandoning them for a fresh environment of self-sufficient garden cities. Mr. Howard and his Garden City Association stared the first new town a Letchworth, some thirty miles by train from London, in 1902. After many financial troubles, Mr. Howard launched the second town, Welwyn Garden City, in 1920. Today it is a pleasant small city. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Following World II, in 1946, Britain passed the New Town Act, which made the building of new towns an official government policy in Great Britain. Since that time some fifty-six new towns have been constructed. During the 1920s some of the leading planners in the United States of America organized into the Regional Planning Association of America in order to promote comprehensive planning and new towns. The most famous new town which members were associated was Radburn, New Jersey, started in 1928 outside New York by City Housing Corporation. Radburn is often considered the first of the American new towns. Designed by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, the houses were arranged in superblocks that fronted on open parkland while automobiles were restricted to peripheral areas. The superblocks were to be free of traffic and congestion. Radburn was thus the first community specifically planned for controlling the problems of the “motor age.” An extensive pathway system, for example, was designed to separate pedestrians from automobiles. For financial reasons, it was not possible to build the external protecting green belt, and there was no provision for industry. Then English new town model of communal ownership and property leaseholds also was not followed, since it would not be accepted in the American environment. From the first, Radburn, the first homeowners moved into the community in May 1929, and the stock market collapsed half a year later. The community was begun stillborn. Now largely forgotten except by urbanists, three government-sponsored new towns were built over half a century ago by the United States of America’s government. They were built essentially as experimental or demonstration projects during the great Depression of the 1930s. The new towns were authorized with the three goals of demonstrating the advantages of community planning, providing good housing at reasonable rents, and giving jobs to thousands of unemployed workers. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
The three towns constructed were Greenbelt, Maryland, outside of Washington D.C.; Greendale, Wisconsin, southwest of Milwaukee; and Green Hills, Ohio, near Cincinnati. Although they lacked their own industries, all three were successful. However, Congress, responding to claims by the real estate industry that having government-built housing was socialists and a danger to the free-enterprise system, the surrounding green belt be sold. Since then, all new town developers have built their communities in the expectation of making money. They have not always achieved this expectation. Given this flowering of a multiplicity of family forms, it is too early to tell which will emerge as significant style in a Third Wave civilization. Will our children live alone for many years, perhaps decades? Will they go childless? Will we retire into old-age communes? What about more exotic possibilities? Families with several husbands and one wife? (If genetic tinkering lets us preselect the gender of our children, that could happen.) What about homosexual families raising children? The courts are already debating this issue. What about the potential impact of cloning? If each of us moves through a trajectory of family experiences in our lives, what will the phases be? A trial marriage, followed by a dual-career marriage with no children, then a homosexual marriage with children? The possible permutations are endless. Nor, despite the cries of outage, should any of these be regarded as unthinkable. As Jessie Bernard has put it, “There is literally nothing about marriage that anyone can imagine that has not in fact taken place…All these variations seemed quite natural to those who lived with them.” Which specific family forms vanished and which ones proliferate will depend less on pulpit-pounding about the “sanctity of the family” than on the decisions we make with respect to technology and work. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
While many forces influence family structure—communication patterns, values, demographic changes, religious movements, even ecological shifts—the linkage between family form and work arrangements is particularly strong. Thus, just as the nuclear family was promoted by the rise of the factory and office work, any shift away from the factory and office would also exert a heavy influence on the family. It is impossible, in the space of a single essay, to spell out all the ways in which the coming changes in the labour force and in the nature of work will alter the family life. However, one change is so potentially revolutionary, and so alien to our experience, it needs far more attention than it has received so far. This is, of course, the shift of work out of the office and factory and back to the home. Assume for a moment that twenty-five years from now 45 percent of the work force is employed part- or full-time in the home. How would working at home change the quality of our personal relationships or the meaning of love? What would life be like in the electronic cottage? Whether the work-at-home task is programming a computer, writing a pamphlet, monitoring distant manufacturing processes, designing a building, or typing electronic correspondence, one immediate change is clear. Relocating work into the home means that many spouses who now see each other only a limited number of hours each day would be thrown together more intimately. Some, no doubt, would find their marriages saved and their relationships much enriched through shared experience. Let us visit several electronic cottages to see how people might adapt to fundamental a change in society. Such a tour would no doubt reveal a wide diversity of living and working arrangements. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
In some houses, perhaps the majority, we might well find couples dividing things up more or less conventionally, with one person doing the “job-work” while the other keeps the house—he, perhaps, writing programs while she looks after the kids. They very presence of work in the home, however, would probably encourage a sharing of both job-work and housekeeping. We would find many homes, therefore, in which man and wife split a single full-time job. For example, we might find both husband and wife taking turns at monitoring a complex manufacturing process on the console screen in the den, four hours on, for hours off. Down the street, by contrast, we would likely discover a couple holding not one, but two quite different jobs, with each spouse working separately. A cellular physiologist and a CPA might each work at one’s craft. Even here, however, with the jobs differing sharply in character, there is still likely to be some sharing of problems, some learning of each other’s work vocabulary, some common concerns and conversation relating to work. It is almost impossible under such conditions for the work life of an individual to be strictly segregated from personal life. By the same token, it is next to impossible to freeze one’s mate out of a whole dimension of one’s existence. Right next door (continuing our survey) we could well come upon a couple holding two different jobs but sharing both, the husband working as a part-time insurance planner and part-time as an architect’s assistant, with the wife doing the same work on alternating shifts. This arrangement would provide more varied, and therefore more interesting, work for both. In such homes, whether one or several jobs are shared, each partner necessarily learns from the other, participate in the problem-solving, engages in complex give-and-take, all of which cannot but deepen intimacy. Forced proximity, it goes without saying, does no guarantee happiness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The extended family units of the First Wave era, which were also economic production units, were hardly models of interpersonal sensitivity and mutual psychological support. Such families had their own problems and stresses. However, there were few uncommitted or “cooled out” relationships. Working together assured, if nothing else, tight, complex, “hot” personal relationships—a committedness many people envy today. In short, the spread of work-at-home on a large scale could not only affect family structure but transform relationships within the family. It could, to put it simply, provide a common set of experiences and get marriage partners talking to one another again. It could shift their relationships along the spectrum from “cool” to “hot.” It could also redefine love itself and bring with it the concept of Love Plus. The Christian Bible does warn us against self-righteous pride—pride that alienates us from God and leads us to disdain one another. Such pride is at the heart of racism, sexism, agism, and all the other deadly sins that lead one group of people to see themselves as more moral, deserving, or able than another. The opposite side of being proud of our individual and group achievements, and of taking credit for them, is blaming the poor for their poverty and the oppressed for their oppression. Self-control is worth ten times as much as self-esteem. And so for centuries pride had been considered the fundamental sin, the original sin, the deadliest of the seven deadly sins. Vain self-love corrodes human community and erodes our sense of dependence on one another and on God. If we seem confident about the pervasiveness and potency of pride, it is not because we have invented a new idea, but rather because the new findings reaffirm a very old idea. There is indeed tremendous relief in confessing our limits and our pride and in being known as we truly are. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Having been forgiven and accepted, we gain release, a feeling of being given what formerly we were struggling to get: security, peace, love. Having cut the pretensions and encountered divine grace, we feel more—not less—value as persons, for our self-acceptance no longer depends exclusively upon our own virtue and achievement or upon others’ approval. The feelings one can have in this encounter with God are like those we enjoy in a relationship with someone who, even after knowing our inmost thoughts, accepts us unconditionally. This is the delicious experience we no longer feel the need to justify and explain ourselves to be on guard, in which we are free to be spontaneous without fear losing the other’s esteem. Such was the psalmist’s experience: “Lord, I have given up my pride and turned away from my arrogance…I am content and at peace.” And it was St. Paul’s experience: “By the grace of God I am what I am.” Beware, for fiends in triumph laugh over one who learns the truth by half! Beware; for God will not endure for humans to make their hope more pure than His good promise, or require another than the five-stringed lyre which He has vowed again to the hands Devout of one who understands to tune it justly here! In the earliest days of Christianity an “apostle” was first and foremost a human who claimed to be an eye-witness of the Resurrection. Only a few days after the Crucifixion when two candidates were nominated for the vacancy created by the treachery of Judas, their qualification was that they had known Jesus personally both before and after His death and could offer first-hand evidence of the Resurrection in addressing the outer World (Acts i. 22). A few days later St. Peter, preaching the first Christian sermon, makes the same claim—“God raised Jesus, of which we all (we Christians) are witness” (Acts ii. 32). In the first Letter to the Corinthians St. Paul bases his claim to apostleship on the same ground—“Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen the Lord Jesus?” (i.9). #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
As this qualification suggests, to preach Christianity meant primarily to preach the Resurrection. Thus people who had heard only fragments of St. Paul’s teaching at Athens got the impression that he was talking about two new gods, Jesus and Anastasis (id est Resurrection) (Acts xvii. 18). The Resurrection is the central theme in every Christian sermon reported in the Acts. The Resurrection, and its consequences, were the “gospel” or good news which the Christians brought: what we call the “gospels,” the narratives of Our Lord’s life and death, were composed later for the benefit of those who had already accepted the gospel. They were in no sense the basis of Christianity: they were written for those already concerted. The miracle of the Resurrection, and the theology of that miracle, comes first: the biography comes later as a comment on it. Nothing could be more unhistorical than to pick out selected sayings of Christ from the gospels and to regard those as the datum and the rest of the New Testament as construction upon it. The first in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection. They had died without making anyone else believe the “gospel” no gospel would ever have been written. Water. Lakes and rivers. Oceans and streams. Spring, pools, and gullies. Arroyos, creek, watersheds. Pacific. Atlantic. Mediterranean. Indian. Caribbean. China Sea. (Lying. Dreaming on shallow shores.) Arctic. Antarctic. Baltic. Mississippi. Amazon. Columbia. Nile. Thames. Sacramento. Snake. (Undulant woman river.) Seine. Rio Grande. Willamette. McKenzie. Ohio. Hudson. Po. Rhine. Rhone. Rain. After a lifetime of drought. That finally cleanses the air. The soot from our eyes. The dingy windows of our western home. The rooftops and branches. The wings of birds. The new light on a slant. Pouring. Making everything new. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Francis Schlatter replied to a query as to the secret of his successful healings: “I am nothing, but the Father is everything. Have in the Father and all will be well. The Father can grow a pair of lungs just as easily as He can cure a cold.” The secret exercising spiritual power is to turn toward the other and high being which is the soul. The price of exercising it is self-abandonment. This is as true of spiritual healing as it is of spiritual initiation. An hones healer can say only that one’s healing depends on two conditions being fulfilled: the faith of the patient and the permission of the higher powers. A self-actualized who attained great renown and reputation in Rumania for one’s selfless character, inspired preaching, and miraculous healing said that he asked all patients to make a confession privately to him of their wrong attitudes and wrong-doing before the work of healing could begin, as this opened the door. This healing quality in his highly developed being passes into others, although only into those who can absorb it through devotion or receive it through faith. It is risky for one to forget what one primarily still is—layperson, not medical person. One ought not attempt to occupy position which does not belong to one. O Lord and Redeemer, beside Thee there is none to save. Thou art mighty and redeemest. I was brought low, but Thou didst save me. O God of salvation who deliverest and savest, save Thy supplicants, save them that hope in Thee. Sustain Thy lambs; increase the Earth’s riches. Cause to flourish and save each shrub, and condemn not the Earth to infertility, but sweeten and save is fruit. Urge on the rain-mists that they discharge their showers, and hold not back the clouds. Thou who openest Thine hand to sustain Thy creatures, please satisfy the thirsty with water. Please save them that call on Thee, Thou who art mighty to save. Save them that seek Thee at morn, yes, do Thou save them. Please save Thy whole-hearted servants, yea save them, we beseech Thee. O Eternal, we beseech Thee, please save us now. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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Does Not Success Certify Sanity?
Your solicitude in my behalf has been greater than mine in my own behalf. For a Devout like me seems entirely too casual when one does not forward You all in one’s own solicitude; that is the sort of advice Peter offered in his First Letter (5.7). O Lord, while my will is aimed at and locked firm in You, do for me what You feel and think best. For whatever You do for me cannot be anything but good. If You want me to be blanketed in darkness, my blessing to You. If bathed in lightness, my blessing to You also. If You think me worth a quick hug, blessings on Your house. If you think I deserve a swift kick, more blessings on Your house. All of which is to day, whatever the holy day or holly day, may my blessings festoon Your hallowed halls. Lord, I suffer willingly for Your sake whatever You want to lay on me. I wish to accept from Your hand—I do not care what the sequence—good to bad or bad to good, and so on with the sweet and the bittersweet, the happy and the sad, and to give thanks for all the things that happen to me. Please guard me from every sin and neither Death nor Hell will be a stranger to me. In the meantime do not cast me into eternity, as the Psalmist feared would happen to him (77.7); and please do not delete me from the Book of Life; that is the terrible threat, one of many, in Revelation (3.5). Whatever the tribulation laid upon me, it may hurt me now but will not affect me in the long run. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not see,” reports Hebrews 11.1. We must continue to push for the excellence that God has put in our heart. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Do not be satisfied with a little improvement. Instead, believe for better progress, and persevere for God’s best. Jesus Christ descended from Heaven for the purpose of our salvation. He took on our miseries, drawn not by necessity but charity. Why? So that we could learn patience and consider it a not unworthy task to tote some of our temporal miseries ourselves. We must step out of our comfort zone. God has so much more in store as long as we keep pursuing and believing. It does not take any more effort to believe and stay filled with faith than it takes to develop a negative and defeated attitude. However, perhaps some of us are broken. We have been optimistic in the past, but things kept going wrong and crushing our optimism. Maybe unimagined wrongs were heaped upon us and our faith is still rebounding. However, Christ’s Holy Example and the footprints of the Saints have led the way, and because of that, the trudge is made the more bearable even for the weakest among us. That is not to say the Old Testament did not offer some hope and consolation in the regard. However, in those holy pages the Gate of Heaven appeared to be closed. Did it really matter? So few took pains to seek the Kingdom of Heaven, and those that did often found the road to Heaven heavily fogged. Somehow, though, the Just and their friends made it through to the gate, that brazen barrier, but there they had to wait before they could enter. First, O Lord, You had to pay the entrance fee, that is to say, expunge the debt of debts by dying the death of deaths. How can I thank You enough! #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
To show me and all the faithful the right and good way to Your Eternal Kingdom was a gamble on Your part, and as happened, it turned into a gambol on your part. Yes, Your life is our way, and through holy patience we walked toward You, who are our Crown. However, I have to ask, who on Earth would follow You if You had not already charted the path and acted as guide? If we had no had Your astonishing model of spiritual behaviour before us, we would still be milling around on Earth. Up to the time of Your arrival, You know, Humankind was neither hot nor cold about this Heavenly Enterprise. Of course, there were signs along the way, from the Old Dispensation as well as the New (John 12.37). And are not these great illuminations that John spoke of (8.12)? Without them—which is to say, without You, O Lord—would not we still be stumbling around in he dark instead of staggering up toward the light? It does not come easily. People who see their dreams come to pass are people who have some resolve, some internal strength; people who refuse to settle for second best. Nothing may be going my way right now, but I am going to keep drawing closer to God. I am going to trust God to help me expand my horizons and keep believing for all that He has for me will come to fruition. God will help me make it all the way to the Promised Land. Dear Lord in Heaven, I am excited to be on this new journey of faith with you. Please help me to develop a brand-new vision for my life, to believe You for better days ahead, and to know that You will continually expand my horizons as I trust You to do more in and through my life. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
If the Lord and Tailor of the Universe had to suffer and die, and if the legions of His saintly followers had to suffer, many of them to the point of martyrdom, then, at the very least, will I not have to suffer, too? The answer is, of course, yes, but as for my so-called sufferings to date, I just might paraphrase the Letter to the Hebrews (12.4). “You have suffered all right, and you have made a great squawk about it, but I do not see one single drop of your precious red blood on the pavement!” Whatever one may have suffered to date, is but a jot, a tittle, a smidge, a skosh, especially when compared to those over the centuries who have been battered so much, tempted so relentlessly, troubled so grievously, twisted and tortured in so many hard and horrid ways. Therefore, one should take another look at the rather grand suffering of others. Why? That one might learn to bear one’s own rather grandiose discomfits. To one they seem mountains; to God, they are molehills. How could this happen? One’s impatience has magnified them out of all proportion. Nevertheless, whether the aching of your soul is small or large, be a good patient; strive to endure them all. There is an advantage to one’s bettering one’s attitude toward battering and getting battered. One will begin to appear sagacious and meritorious not only to oneself, but also to others. There is another advantage. No doubt suffering lays a terrible load on a person, but the proper spiritual attitude lightens the load. That will be especially true in one’s case, what with one’s having so carelessly prepared in one’s mind and body up to this point. That is to say, any adjustment on one’s part is bound to be an improvement. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
God created us as visual beings with incredible imagination. “The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. However, if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness,” reports Matthew 6.22-23. Unfortunately, many people have a negative vision for their lives. They do not see themselves rising higher or overcoming their obstacles. Consequently, they are limited by their own vision. “He hit me first, and I just do not have the strength to suffer another blow. I think I must be in the wrong walk of life.” “That person brought a serious charge against me, and harried me with all sorts of horrid stuff I could not possibly think up myself! I cannot accept that, and from him of all people! Is that the sort of miserable suffering I am supposed to put up with, O Lord and Tailor of the Universe?” What vapid and insipid thoughts! First, it does not do justice to the virtue of patience or—ahem—to the Person who rewards all patience. Second, all it does is focus attention on your and the garbage that person dumped on you. If one can dictate just how much and at whose hand, one is not really getting serious about suffering. Another, though, is indeed serious about it when one pays no attention to the person wielding the lash. One does not care whether it is one’s superior, one’s peer, or one’s inferior; it can be a good and holy human with knotted cords or just a vulgarian or barbarian with a whip. As much and as often as the Devout encounters rough skating or tough sledding, one gratefully accepts it all as coming from the hand of God; one even counts it not as a loss, but as a substantial gain. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
How? Nothing in the presence of Good, however minuscule, however majuscule, as long as it is a step taken for God, can be transacted without an increase in merit. Suffering it is then. If you want to have the victor, ready yourself for battle. If you truly want the crown of patience, wrote Paul in his Second Letter to Timothy (2.5), then engage the Enemy. However, what if you change your mind and do not want to suffer? Then you are in the wrong line of work. However, if you truly want to be a Devout, then you will have to fight manfully, endure vigorously. Without huffing and puffing there is no movement along the road to peace. Without slugging it out there is no decisive victory. Make possible through grace, O Lord, what seems so impossible through nature. Is that not what You promised You would do when the people of Jerusalem asked who would be saved? Luke wrote that You did (18.27). You know what little I can put up with and how quickly I give up, even when it is only a tiny adversity that rears its timorous head. What I should really do is consider every tribulation as a token of affection from You. After all, to suffer a little physically and spiritually is no exactly unhealthy for the soul. The Christian Bible says your eye is the lamp of your body. Obviously, that is not talking about your physical sight; it is talking about what you see through your eyes of faith, your spiritual vision. It is talking about the type of image you are keeping in front of you. God is telling us that if we focus on our problems, on what we cannot do, of if we think we have already reached our limits, then that image of mediocrity will keep us stuck right where we are. It is not because God does not want to promote us; it is simply because we are focused on the wrong things. We are developing the wrong images in our mind. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
However, if we can learn to look at life through our eyes of faith and see ourselves rising to higher levels, accomplishing our dreams, receiving more blessings, giving assistance to others, becoming more loving, and enjoying life, seeing our family and friends serving God, then we will experience God’s blessings and favour our over lives. We produce what we continually keep in front of us. “Against my better judgment I will confess my injustice,” sang the Psalmist (32.5). And I too shall confess my infirmity, O Lord. Often it is a small thing that jogs me off my strive; it makes me so mad at first, and then I grow sad. To remedy that, I resolve to act more energetically in the future. However, a modest temptation comes along, and I am completely thrown for a loss. Something trivial trips me, and I end up on my face. Just when I recover and think myself safe again—the moment when I least expect it—the briefest wisp whispers me away. Therefore, O Lord, about my humility and fragility, there is nothing new for You to know. Have mercy on me. “Rescue me,” as the Psalmist has had to cry out on more than one occasion “before I am sucked up by the mire,” (69.14). This thrashing about in the muck has got to stop! Yes, it embarrasses me to have to confess one again that I have made no progress. However, when it comes to putting up a front against the passions, I am still so nervous and cowardly. It is not as though I open the floodgates to them, but the leakage in the dikes is so persistent and pervasive that it is driving me crazy. All of which is another way of saying, do lecture me about my infirmity. I need to know, because these foul fantasies are seeping in more quickly than they are draining out. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
O Warrior God of America, Shepherd King of the faithful souls, would that You would look at the labour and pain in me, Your slavish Devout, and assist me in everything I put my mind to. Please fortify me with oak and Heavenly Fortitude lest the Old Man the New Testament spoke of—that wretches Flesh not yet fully subjected to the whims of the spirit—be strong enough to tumble me in the hay. Against that one it will certainly be necessary to do battle as long as there is breath in my wretched life. Alas, what kind of life is there where tribulations abound, where everything underfoot is game for the Enemy’s snares? What is it when one tribulation ebbs and another flows? What is it when one conflict has been in full throttle for some time and yet, before it has had a chance to choke, others spring up on the horizon? It is a World without hope? How can life be loved? It has so many bittersweet things about it, so many calamities and miseries. And how can life be called life when it is generated so many deaths and diseases? Even so, a wretched life, or so many people are inclined to think, is better than no life at all. When something goes hideously wrong, the World is frequently blamed. However, for many it is not easily left behind; the concupiscences of the flesh still cling for dear life to the diseased soul. Some things about the World are not so attractive, but others apparently still have some allure. Itching flesh, ogling eyes, luxuriant living; that is as John put it in his First Letter (2.16). However, wherever these are found, pangs and throbs are surely present, turning the World into a playground of hatred and unrest. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Depraved Delight, sad to say, has had no such trouble distracting a mind dedicated to the things of this World. Vixen that she is, she has even had the cheek to tell the chickens not to worry. Nor should the rest of Humankind, she says, now that she has got everything under her personal control! Well, I am chuffed! How could this have happened? It could happen only because that poor damaged damsel has neither seen nor tasted the spiritual amenities, that is to say, God in Heaven and God on Earth. We produce what we continually keep in front of us. If we keep an imagine of success in our minds, we are going to move toward success. We must conceive our blessings on the inside through our eyes of faith before they will manifest on the outside. Our vision, what we see, has a tremendous impact on our lives. We benefit by allowing God to use our imaginations to build us up, to help us accomplish our dreams. Devouts, I am rather happy to say, wholeheartedly and wholemindedly condemn he World and strive to live for God under holy discipline. Hence, they are no strangers to the Divine Sweetness promised to all genuine renouncers of the World. These last see quite clearly just how they World has made the Serious Error and, because of it, has disintegrated in a variety of splashy ways. The kind of mental picture we paint is the goal toward which we will move. That image will set the limit for our lives. If one wants to change one’s life, one needs to change the mental image they are creating. Beginning today, I will lift up my head and start to get a new image in my mind of the tremendous potential that God has poured into my life. Please help me, Father, to build a new mental picture of my life, to live with faith, seeing with my spiritual eyes not just what exists today, but the life that is possible because of You. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
The word crazy is typical for defining that which is unthinkable. Most people call certain ideas “crazy” because “sane” is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought. That which transcends it is crazy in the view of the average person. (This, however, is different when the author, artist, becomes successful. Does not success certify sanity?) That the equality of women was unthinkable to some is hard for many to conceive in the modern World. The concept hat half of humankind is biologically, anatomically and psychically inferior to the other half is a way of thinking that is without the slightest redeeming feature, except as a portrayal of a male-chauvinistic attitude. In the past, however, many people were found to be in acceptance of the extreme form of patriarchalism. The key them is one of control. The psychological concept corresponds to the social reality. Just as socially the majority is controlled by a ruling minority, the psyche is supposed to be controlled by the authority of the ego and superego. The danger of the breakthrough of the unconscious carries with it the danger of a social revolution. Repression is a repressive authoritarian method of protecting the inner and outer status quo. It is by no means the only way to cope with problems of social change. However, the threat of force in keeping down what is “dangerous” is only necessary in an authoritarian system where the preservation of the status quo is the supreme goal. How much renunciation of happiness does the ruling minority in a society need to impose on the majority? The answer lies in the development of productive forces in the society, and hence in the degree to which the individual is necessarily frustrated. Human beings can live harmoniously and without the necessity of controlling sinister forces. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
It goes without saying the antiquated grotesque picture of women as essentially narcissistic, unable to love, and cool towards pleasures of the flesh is male propaganda. The middle-class woman was as rule was cold toward pleasures of the flesh. The proprietary character of bourgeois marriage conditioned them to be cold. Since they were property, they were expected to me “inanimate” in marriage. Only women of the upper class and courtesans were permitted to be objects of pleasures of the flesh (or at least to fake it). No wonder that men experienced lust in the process of conquest; the overevaluation of the “sexual object” which according to some exited only in men (another lack in women!) was, as far as I can see, essentially the pleasure in the chase and the eventual conquest. Once the conquest was assured by the first intercourse, the woman was relegated to the task of producing children and to being an efficient housekeeper. However, is there really a such thing as a “love-object”? Does not the loved person cease to be an object, id est, something outside and opposed to me (same root as to object)? Id not love precisely the inner activity which unites two people so that they cease to be objects (id est, possessions for each other)? To speak of love-objects is to speak of having, with exclusion of any form of being; it is not different from a merchant speaking of capital investment. In the latter case capital is invested, in the former, libido. It is only logical that frequently in psychoanalytic literature one speaks of love as libidinous “investment” in an object. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
It takes the banality of a business culture to reduce the love of God, of men and women, of humankind into an investment. There is also some smallness of the imagination of people whose class considers investment and profit to be the meaning of life. One who speaks of love “objects,” means these beings are directed to being possessions of one’s own ego. Love is sexual energy attached to an object; it is nothing but a psychologically rooted instinct directed toward an object. It is a waste product, as it were, of the biological necessity for the survival of the race. “Love,” in men, is mostly of the “attachment” type, id est, attachment to the persons who have become precious through satisfying other vital needs (eating and drinking). That is, adult love is not different from that of the child; they both love those who feed them. That is undoubted true for many; this love is a kind of affectionate gratitude for being fed. Very well, but to say that is the essence of love is painfully banal. (Some say women cannot arrive at this high achievement because they love “narcissistically,” they love themselves in the other.) Loving in itself, in so far as it is longing and deprivation, lowers self-regard, whereas being loved, having one’s love returned and possessing the loved object raises it once more. Loving, by implying longing and deprivation, lowers one’s self-regard. To those who proclaimed the exaltation and strength which loving gives to the lover, all of you are wrong! Loving makes you weak; what makes you happy is being loved. And what is being loved? Possessing the loved object! This is a classic definition of bourgeois love: owning and controlling makes for happiness, be it material property or be it a human being who, being owned, owes the owner love. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Love begins as a result of the child being fed by mother. It ends in the male’s owning the female who still has to feed him with affection, pleasures of the flesh, and food. Indeed what some are saying is that in between the lines is probably fitting for patriarchal society to have the male remain a dependent creature but denying this by boasting of one’s strength and proving it through making the female his property. The main factors in the patriarch male’s attitude are dependence on the female and its denial by controlling her. Patriarchal male love has transformed a specific phenomenon, that of patriarchal male love into a universal human one. Another significant change has been the growth in the number of those consciously choosing what is coming to be known as a “child-free” lifestyle. We are seeing a massive shift from “child-centered” to “adult-centered” homes. At the turn of the 20th century there were few singles in society, and relatively few parents lived very long after their youngest child left home. Thus must households were, in fact, child-centered. By contrast, as early as 1970 in the United States of America only one in three adults lived in a home with children; and in 2020 that number was 48 percent. Today organizations are springing up to promote the child-free life, and a reluctance to have children is spreading in many industrial nations. In 1960 only 20 percent of “ever-married” American women under age thirty were child-free. As of 2021 49 percent were child-free. A vocal organization, the National Alliance for Optional Parenthood, has arisen to protect the rights of the childless and to combat pronatalist propaganda. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
A similar organization, the National Association for the Childless, has sprouted in Britain, and many couple across Europe are also deliberately choosing to remain childless. In Bonn, Germany, for example, Theo and Agnes Rohl, both in their mid-thirties, he a city official, she a secretary, say “We don’t think we’ll have children.” The Rohls are modestly affluent. They own a small home. They manage a vacation trip to California or Southern France now and then. Children would drastically alter their way of life. “We’re used to our life-style the way it is,” they say, “and we like being independent.” Nor is this reluctance to bear children a sign of capitalist decadence. It is present in Russia, too, where many young Russian couples echo the sentiment of the Rohls and explicitly reject parenthood—a fact that worries Russian officialdom in view of the still-high birth rates among several non-Russian national minorities. Turning now to those with children, the breakdown of the nuclear family is even more sharply evidenced in the spectacular increase in single-parent families. So many divorces, breakups, and separations have occurred in recent years—mainly in nuclear families—that today a staggering one-in-seven American children is raised by a single parent and the number is even high—one in four—in urban areas. The huge growth in such household has brought a growing recognition that despite severe problems, a one-parent household can, under certain circumstances, be better for the child than a nuclear household continually torn by bitter strife. Newspapers and organizations now serve single parents and are heightening their group consciousness and political clout. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Nor, once again, is the phenomenon purely American. In Britain today nearly one family in ten is headed by a single parent—nearly a sixth of them headed by men—and one-parent households form what New Society magazine calls “the fastest growing group in poverty.” A London-based organization, the National Council for One-Parent Families, has sprung up to champion their cause. In Germany, a housing association in Cologne has constructed a special block of apartments for such families and provided them with day-time child care so the parents can work. And in Scandinavia a network of special welfare rights has grown up to support these families. The Swedes, for example, give one-parent households first crack at nursey and day-care facilities. In both Norway and Sweden, in fact, it is sometime possible for a single-parent family to enjoy a higher standard of living than that of the typical nuclear family. A challenging new form of family has arisen in the meantime that reflects the high rate of remarriage after divorce. There are types of “aggregated families,” in which two divorced couples with children remarry, brining the children of both marriages (and the adults as well) into a new, expanded family form. It is now estimated that 25 percent of American children are, or will soon be, members of such family units. Such units, with their “poly-parents” may be the mainstream family form of tomorrow. We are into economic polygamy—meaning that the two merged family units typically transfer money back and forth in the form of child support or other payments. The spread of this family form has been accompanied by a rising increase of relations involving pleasures of the flesh between parents and non-blood related children. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The technologically advanced nations today are honeycombed with a bewildering array of family forms: Homosexual marriages, communes groups of elderly people banding together to share expenses (and sometimes pleasure of the flesh), tribal groupings among certain ethnic minorities, and many other forms coexist as never before. There are contract marriages, serial marriages, family clusters, and a variety of intimate networks with or without share pleasures of the flesh, as well as families in which mother and father live and work in two different cities. Even these family forms barely hint at the even richer variety bubbling under the surface. When three psychiatrists—Kellam, Ensminger, and Turner—attempted to map the “variations of families” found in a single poor African American neighbourhood in Chicago, they identified “no less than 86 different combinations of adults,” including numerous forms of “mother-grandmother” families, “mother-aunt” families, “mother-stepfather” families, and “mother-other” families. Faced with this veritable maze of kinship arrangements, even fairly orthodox scholars have come around to the once radical view that we are moving out of the age of the nuclear family and into a new society marked by diversity in family life. In the words of sociologist Jessie Bernard, “The most characteristic aspect of marriage in the future will be precisely the array of options available to different people who want different things from their relationship with one another. The frequently asked question, “What is the future of the family?” usually implies that as the Second Wave nuclear family loses its dominance some other form will replace it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
A more likely outcome is that during Third Wave civilization no single form will dominate the family mix for any long period. Instead we will see a high variety of family structures. Rather than masses of people living in uniform family arrangements, we shall see people moving through this system, tracing personalized or “customized” trajectories during the course of their lives. Again, this does not mean the total elimination of “death” of the nuclear family. It merely means that from now on the nuclear family will be only one of the many socially accepted and approved forms. As the Third Wave is taking over, the family system has become de-massified right along with the production system and the information system in society. Gentle Goddess, who never asks for anything at all, and gives us everything we have, thank you for this sweet water and your fragrance. O God of salvation, promoted by Thy four-fold promise, Thy people draw nigh in supplication and knock at Thy gate with offering of prayer, mediating upon the comforting words of Thy Torah and delighting in their deep-stored message. They pray fervently that Thou mayest hear. They long for salvation, yea, their hearts are close-knit unto Thee. They study and observe the sacred season. They bend the knee unto Thee in supplication that they ay hear proclaimed from Thy lips, the tidings foretold and declared of yore that shall fulfill Thy testimony. O Thou who workest salvation, who are righteous to save, thrice save the city of our salvation that was filled with multitudes acclaiming Thee. Hasten our salvation; yea save, we beseech Thee. May our old center in the ego be mysteriously gone. May our new center in Thee have taken its place. May our consciousness depend and, while vacating the personal ego, may we take in the higher ego and feel a unity with it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
CRESLEIGH HAVENWOOD
Lincoln, CA | from the mid $600s
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 