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May the Father of Compassion Have Mercy Upon a People Who He Lovingly Tended!
As long as you are curious, you defeat age. Experience is what enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. Out everything into final perspective. You live and work in this century, but the judgment, Final Appraisal, of who you truly are will come at the end of time. Yes, you will stand before the Judge of Judges, as Paul promised the Romans (14.10), you and everyone else who has lived on the face of the Earth. Look smart. This judge cannot be hoodwinked—that is what Job found out (31.14). He cannot be softened up with a bribe. He knows a bad alibi when He hears one. All He has to do is render a just verdict, and He can do that in no time flat. O thrice miserable and thoroughly insipid sinner, just what do you think you are doing? What will you respond to the God who knows no tremble, but all of your evil? You will turn jelly, that is what you will do. Why now, you start to shiver and to shake when someone just makes a face at you! On the Day of Judgment, you will need to bring papers, proof of all the stuff you did. Why? Well, you will have to defend yourself; no defense counsel here. Each defendant will be presented with a detailed indictment. Examine it closely. Not an error on the list! All that is the indefinite future. Today your labour can bear fruit, plums and pomegranates. Your spiritual pain can bear fruit too, elephant tears, waterfalls of sorrows. Fortunately, they can be considered purgative and, happily, in an amount equal to your guilt. Purgatory is a lot like the life of a patient self-actualized person on Earth. One bears up under the terrible weight of injustice. One worries more about the human who hit one in the mush than the bloody nose one sustained. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
One prays for the contrarians who always seem to be buzzing about. One indulges the bad behaviour of others; and yet one is slow to seek indulgence for one’s own shortcomings. One is quicker o pardon a mugger than the mugger to pummel one. Such violence as one may engage in is directed only toward oneself as one vainly tries to whip one’s flesh into spiritual submission. Purge your sins, exercise your vices—that is the message of Purgatory. And better now than later, in the hairy hands of another. One more thing, and I wish it were not so, but in all of this there is just one continuing and complicating factor. It is that flaming love we have for the flesh! What else will that Fire of fires devour but your sins? As for now, you make a serious mistake when you spare yourself the spiritual rigors. Follow the flesh, an easier path now, but it is the harder one down the line. In fact, keep going as you are, and you will just be piling up the kindling for your own pyre. However, fire is not the only grief. Each sin has its own particular punishment. The Lazy will be pricked with pointy tips. The Gluttonous will be choked with the glutinous. The Lustful will burn like pitch and stink like sulfur. And for their own particular grief, the Envious will be set to how like rabid dogs at midnight. In Hell ever vice will have its own excruciating punishment. For example, the Prideful will be flustered with confusion. The Greedy will be bent over like famine victims. One hour in this hellhole will produce more pain than a hundred years of penitential practice. There, there is no rest for the Wicked, no consolation for the Condemned. At least here on Earth, there is some respite from the spiritual rigors—one does not have to fast forever—and some consolation from one’s spiritual friends. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
The Day of Judgment is approaching at a gallop. So now is the time to look to your life. Do daily sorrow for your sins, and the Blessed above will greet you at the terminus of time. As the Great Solomon said in his book of Wisdom, “The just will stand in great constancy against those who pinned them down” and oppressed them (5.1). At the Final Bar you who subject yourselves to the judgments of Humankind will be able to stand up and look the Final Judge in the eye. Then the Poor and the Humble will come into new boldness, and the Proud will face fear for the first time. In Heaven everything will be turned upside down. The one who gave up everything to follow Christ—a dreadful mistake in the eyes of the World, as Paul found out, to his own discomfort, and passed the word on in his First Letter to the Corinthians (4.10)—will be considered wise. The one who endured every trail and tribulation will be pleasantly surprised when one is called patient. As the Psalmist has sung, “Every iniquity will be nailed to the wall once and for all” (107.42). Every religious person will rejoice, and every irreligious person will recoil. The cheeks of those who have never shown cheek to others will have a Heavenly glow. Modest designs will become the rage, and designer raiment will be left on the rack. The pauper’s hovel will attract visitors while weeds will overrun the magnate’s manse. Patience will overpower Force. Obedience will outwit Cunning. In Heaven there will be many rewards. Clear conscience will rejoice over Learned Philosophy. Contempt of Riches will weigh in over Earthly Goods. Devout Prayer will be more consoling than Delicious Food. Guarded Silence will out-talk Excessive Conversation. Holy Works will have more value than Pretty Words. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Strict Life and Hard Penance will be more than a match for Silkness and Softness. School yourself in how to suffer a little now so that you will know how to suffer a lot later on. Practice now what you will have to put into practice then. If you can sustain so little pain in your regular spiritual regiment now, how will you be able to suffer eternal torments then? If just a handful of penitential practices gives you the hives now, what will Gehenna do? Face up to it. You just cannot have two joys. Either regale yourself in this World, or rule with Christ in the next. Pick one. Suppose you lived every day up to your hip, up to you lip even, in honors and pleasures. If you dropped dead this instant, what good would they do you? Not a whit! That is why I say, everything is vanity, except to love God and serve Him alone. However, what good do love and service do? Well, you who love God from your whole heart have nothing to fear, neither death nor punishment nor judgment nor Hell. That is why perfect love makes so much sense; that is to say, it makes access to God a sure thing. Summing it up, then, love alone should be enough to call you back from the brink of spiritual disaster; but if it is not, then fear of Gehenna should do the trick. What is the trick? To stay good for as long as you can. Sad to say, whoever postpones one’s commitment to God will not have the strength to stay god for very long. What then? No matter which way the traipses through the forest, or so Paul wrote in his First Letter to Timothy (6.9), one will not be able to outstep the Devi’s outlandish snares. The principle of agriculture was known long before its practice was established, and it is hardly possible that humans, constantly preoccupied with deriving their subsistence from trees and plants, did not rather quickly get the idea of the methods used by nature to grow plant life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
However, their industry probably did not turn in that direction until very late either because trees, which, along with hunting and fishing, provided their nourishment, had no need of their care; or for want of the means of preventing others from appropriating the fruits of their labor. Having become more industrious, it is believable that, with shape stones and pointed stick, they began by cultivating some vegetables or roots around their huts long before they knew how to prepare wheat and had the tools necessary for large-scale cultivation. Moreover, to devote oneself to that occupation and to sow the lands, one must be resolved to lose something at first in order to gain a great deal later: a precaution quite far removed from the mind of the savage human, who, as I had said, finds it quite difficult to give thought in the morning to what one will need at night. The invention of the other arts was therefore necessary to force the human race to apply itself to that of agriculture. Once humans were needed in order to smelt and forge the iron, other humans were needed in order to feed them. The more the number of workers increased, the fewer hands there were to obtain food for the common subsistence, without there being fewer mouths to consumer it; and since some needed foodstuffs in exchange for their iron, the others finally found the secret of using iron to multiply foodstuffs. From this there arouse farming and agriculture on the one hand, and the art of working metals and multiplying their uses, on the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
From the cultivation of land, there necessarily followed the division of land; and from property once recognized, the first rules of justice. For in order to render everyone what is ones, it is necessary that everyone can have something. Moreover, as humans began to look toward the future and as they say that they all had goods to lose, there was not one of them who did not have to fear reprisals against oneself for wrongs one might do to another. This origin is all the more natural as it is impossible to conceive of the idea of property arising from anything but manual labor, for it is not clear what humans can add, beyond their own labor, in order to appropriate things one has not made. It is labor alone that, in giving the cultivator a right to the product of the soil one has tilled, consequently gives one this right, at least until the harvest, and thus from year to year. With his right, at least until the harvest, and thus from year to year. With this possession continuing uninterrupted, it is easily transformed into property. When the ancients, says Grotius, gave Ceres the epithet of legislatrix, gave the name Thesmophories to a festival celebrated in her honour, they thereby made it apparent that the division of lands has produced a new kind of right: namely, the right of property, different from that which results from the natural law. If talents had been equal, and if the use of iron and consumption of foodstuffs had already been in precise balance, things in this state could have remained equal. However, this proportion, which was not maintained by anything, was soon broken. The strongest did the most work; the most adroit turned theirs to better advantage; the most ingenious found ways to shorten their labor. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
The farmer had a greater need for iron, or the blacksmith had a greater deal while the other barely had enough to live. Thus inequality occasioned by the socialization process. Thus it is that the differences among humans, developed by those of circumstances, make themselves more noticeable, more permanent in heir effects, and begin to influence the fate of private individuals in the same proportion. With things having reached this point, it is easy to imagine the rest. I will not stop to describe the successive invention of the arts, the progress of languages, the testing and use of talents, the inequality of fortunes, the use or abuse of wealth, nor all the details that follow these and that everyone can easily supply. I will limit myself exclusively to taking a look at the human race placed in this new order of things. Thus we find here all our faculties developed, memory and imagination in play, egocentrism looking out for its interests, reason rendered active, and the mind having nearly reached the limit of the perfection of which it is capable. We find here all the natural qualities put into action, the rank and fate of each human established not only on the basis of the quantity of goods and the power to serve or harm, but also on the basis of mind, beauty, strength or skill, on the basis of merit or talent. And since these qualities were the only ones that could attract consideration, one was soon forced to have or affect them. It was necessary, for one’s advantage, to show oneself to be something became two completely different things; and from this distinction there arose grand ostentation, deceptive cunning, and all the vices that follow in their wake. On the other hand, although humans had previously been free and independent, we find them, so to speak, subject, by virtue of multitude of fresh needs, to all of nature and particularly to one’s fellow humans, whose salve in a sense one becomes even in becoming their master; rich, one needs their service; poor, one needs their help; and being midway between wealth and poverty dose not put one in a position to get along without them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
It is therefore necessary for one to seek incessantly to interest them in one’s fate and to make them find their own profit, in fact or in appearance, in working for one’s. This makes one two-faced and crooked with some, imperious and harsh with others, and puts one in the position of having to abuse everyone one needs when one cannot make them fear them and does not find in it one’s interests to be of useful service to them. Finally, consuming ambition, the zeal of raising the relative level of one’s fortune, less out of real need than in order to put oneself above others, inspires in all humans a wicked tendency to hard one another, a secret jealousy all the more dangerous because, in order to strike its blow in greater safety, it often wears the mask of benevolence; in short, competition and rivalry on the one hand, opposition of interest[s] on the other, and always the hidden desire to profit at the expense of someone else. All these ills are the first effect of property and the inseparable offshoot of incipient inequality. Both secure and insecure people may be tormented, sad, full of doubt and anguish and uncertainties. This is not what distinguishes ontologically secure people from others. Being secure does not mean being happy, only being secure. There are three kinds of danger which characteristically beset the insecure. First the danger of engulfment—I may be taken over and swept away by someone of something. Second the danger of implosion—I may be invaded and impinged upon and totally filled with whatever they put into me when I am empty. In reaction to these dangers, I may withdraw, which leads to the third danger, which is the danger of depersonalization—I may feel that nothing and no one is real anymore: “This is not happening to the ‘me’ that matters.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
I may begin to thing of my “real” self as inviolable—no one can reach it. I may tell myself that whatever I am being forced to do, whatever roles they feel I must play, this is not happening to my real self. And indeed this is so—ontologically insecure people are not consenting to what they are saying or doing. Their true self is hidden away. Their behaviour and their bodies are being coerced, but somewhere is a “me” that is not involving itself. This is the “unembodied self.” It I as though the person said, “I must keep in mind that this is not happening to me, only to my body; it does not touch the real me.” Instead of being the core of his or her true self, the body is felt as the core of a false self which a detached, disembodies “inner,” “true” self looks on at with tenderness, amusement of hatred as the case may be. However, this divorce of role from self destroys the integrity of the personality. We shall suggest that it was on the basis of one’s exquisite vulnerability that the unreal human became so adept at self-concealment. One learnt to cry when one was amused, and to smile when one was sad. One frowned one’s approval, and applauded one’s displeasure. “All that you see is not me” one says to oneself. However, only in and through all that we do see can one be anyone (in reality). If these actions are not one’s real self, one is irreal: wholly symbolical and equivocal. One is a purely virtual, potential, imaginary person, a “mythical” human, nothing “really.” If, then, one stops pretending to be what one is not, and steps out as the person one has come to be, one emerges as Christ, or as a ghost, but not as a human: by existing with no body, one is no-body. “Here are people constantly reminding themselves “This is not happened to the essential me,” “This does not touch the real me,” “What they say and do to me does not really matter,” “This is a dream.” What is happening to that part of the person which the person does experience as “me”? What does “touch me”? The answer is, nothing from the senses touches “me”. That part of the person has retreated from the World of ideas. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
However, the sense of self started with body-imagery, which, if all goes well, is refined and structured and in various ways continually confirmed by messages from the sensory World. If, now, there is a constant inhibition of messages from the sense which would confirm that the World exists, then the body-image, the self-image, and they very self are inevitably weakened. The experience of being connected with the body will be weakened and confused. However, the body-imagery has been connected with the sense of well-being from the early days on, when all well-being was physical, and so the sense of well-being is dissipated. Moreover, even when good things are happening (regular breathing, good digestion, regular heartbreak, the soft touch of clothes, the good taste of food), the effect does not enhance well-being as it would do in a less divided self. As the science of medicine becomes more reverent, it will bring the spirit to the healing of the body in addition to its medicine. Life on Earth is so short, so beset by dangers of many kinds, so exposed to our own ignorance and Nature’s indifference, that we cannot afford to turn our eyes away as to the Christian Scientists from the discoveries and knowledge of humans who have devoted their years to patient sacrifice and research for the alleviation of human sickness. It is usually wise to consult a physician, wiser still to consult a specialist. Why reject the knowledge they have accumulated, the experience they have gained? However, blindly to follow their advice is quite another matter. Here a critical judgment is needed, for medicine is immensely far from being the perfect science that mathematic is. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
So long as orthodox medicine fails to recognize the mental or emotional origin of so many cases of sickness, so long will its cures be temporary and incomplete. Ever drawing us toward Itself, Its power to attract block by the layers of thoughts, emotions, desires, and passions which compose the personal self, much time and many lives are needed to unblock a passage to the soul. Follow the self’s track within, not slipping down into its muddy bogs but ascending up to its diviner sources. Is it possible to recapture these wonderful sensations? Long intervals of aridity may inspire a negative answer to this question, but adequate knowledge of the laws at work and the mental process involved inspire a beneficial one. Know Consciousness without its objects—and you are free! If one is willing to take the training of one’s mind seriously in hand one can, either during or at the end of one’s course, live again in such experiences. In that condition of passive emotions and paralysed thoughts, consciousness can receive That which otherwise shuts it out. When one retreats to one’s center, one has retreated to the point where the Glimpse of truth may be had. An event, a book or a person, a piece of music or a piece of landscape may bring the mind to brief spiritual consciousness. The evanescence of all these glimpses is saddening to most of us, but the causes once understood, the remedy is at hand. It is harder to find amid the din of city streets, and when found, easier to lose in the press of thronging crowds. Believe in the higher Self and look up to it. Sometimes one word may flash a light into one’s mind which goes far and wide. At other times a short phrase may do the same work for one. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
One realizes that one has had an important experience which will be followed at intervals by others, when one stands on the fringe of cosmic consciousness. Through proper metaphysical study, meditation practice, and philosophic action, it will not be difficult for one to come into the awareness of one’s own Overself to some extent, although it is difficult to acquire full consciousness in the present age, when the opposition of a materialistic society is so strong and intense. However, even to enjoy a fraction of this wider consciousness is to transform one’s life in every way. Look back into imagination upon those wonderful glimpses and try to recapture the feeling they produced. Just as the lotus flower opens its buds bit by bit, so should one open one’s mind to this great truth. It becoming conscious of the not-thinking hinterground of my personality, I attain true being. When its thinking faculty is put out of gear in the proper way, what peace fills the mind! What ever-remembered moments of illumination this happening produce! Eating food of a special kind or sitting in an isolated cave cannot of itself make anyone spiritually minded. However, it can lessen the number of obstacles in the way of anyone who seeks to become spiritually minded. The sensitive and humane person who does not pause to consider one’s guilt in life’s matters have let oneself take the easy conscience-drowning way, partly because it is the popular way and partly because one is duped by a science and religion which are blindly playing the ego’s game. The road to truth ought to be persuasive education, and not vehement propaganda. The cause for it ought to be presented temperately and prudently, not aggressively and fanatically. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Here we are, God—a planet at prayer. Please attuned our spirits that we may hear your harmonies and bow before your creative power, that we may face out violent discords and join with your Energy to make heard in every heart your hymn of peace. Here we are, God—a militarized planet. Transformed our fears that we may transform our war fields into wheatfields, arms into handshakes, missiles into messengers of peace. Here we are, God—a polluted planet. Please purify our vision that we may perceive ways to purify our beloved lands, cleanse our precious waters, de-smog our life-giving air. Here we are God—an exploited Planet. Please heal our hearts, that we may respect our resources, hold priceless our people, and provide for our starving children an abundance of daily bread. May the Father of compassion have mercy upon a people who He lovingly tended. May He remember the covenant with the patriarchs; may He deliver us from evil times, curb the evil inclinations in the people whom He has tenderly protected, and graciously grant us enduring deliverance. May He abundantly fulfill out desires and grant us salvation and mercy. May His Kingdom soon be revealed and made visible unto us, and may He be gracious unto our remnant and unto the remnant of His people, the house of America, granting them grace, kindness, mercy and favour; and let us say, Amen. Let us all ascribe greatness unto our God, and render honour to the Scriptures. Blessed be He who is His holiness gave the Scriptures to His people America. And you who cleave unto the Lord your God, are alive everyone of you this day. Bless the Lord who is to be praised. Praised be the Lord who is blessed for all eternity. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
CRESLEIGH RIVERSIDE AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA |
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Invite Him in and Ask Him What Took Him so Long—The Tea Has Been Getting Cold!
Even in the darkest glimmers of despair, there is what we call truth. But what if the glimmers of light is something to which the rest of the World is blind? Sooner than you think, Death will come to call. While you can, look over your shoulder to see how you have been doing. Terrible tigers one day, dust kittens the next! Do look at First Maccabees (2.63). Whenever a Devout is out of eyesight, one is out of mind-set. Oh, the blobbiness and blabbiness of the human heart! It meditates only on the present and makes no provision for the future! In everything you think and do, you ought to conduct yourself as though you were going to die tomorrow. If you have a god conscience, there is not much to fear. Hide, yes, but not from Death; it is your sins you should take cover from. However, what if there is no tomorrow and you are not ready today? And in the unlikely event that there is a tomorrow, what then? A long life is good to have, but how does it compare to a changed life? Let me put it another way. Is there really a connection between length of life and amount of change for the better? Often just the opposite is true. The longer you live, the more guilt you rack up. One day—just imagine one day—of your life devoted to spiritual change! If you could find just one such day in your life, you would be better off than the rest of Humankind. Many self-actualized reflect on the fact that year have passed since their conversion. However, I would contest that what they underwent so long ago was a real conversion. Why? The fruit of that change is barely visible to the unassisted eye today. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
A short life has its fears, but a long life has its dangers. Always keep before your eyes the hour of your own death, and daily prepare yourself for the moment of death. That would please Jesus son of Sirach (7.36). Do this, and happiness will be yours. Often you have been present when a self-actualized dies. Just drink that scene in, in the full knowledge that you will soon be making this very same journey. Jesus son of Sirach promised that (38.22), and, of course, he too has fulfilled his own promise. When morning comes, think to yourself that night will never come. When nigh falls, dare no to promise yourself another dawn. Hold yourself in readiness, as the Gospel of Luke urges (21.36), and do not miss a beat. Why? We all know people who have died before they said a prayer or changed their life. When Death knocks, surprise him. Invite him in and ask what took him so long—the tea has been getting cold. Physical death is the separation of the spirit from the mortal body. The Fall of Adam brought physical death into the World. “And he said unto them: Because that Adam fell, we are; and by his fall came death; and we are made partakers of misery and woe,” reports Moses 6.48. Yes, there will be a knock at the door. And yes, the Son of Man will come as surely as Death. Problem is, we still do not know when to put the kettle on. Death is an essential part of Heavenly Father’s plan of salvation. “For as death hath passed upon all men, to fulfill the merciful plan of the great Creator, there must needs be a power of resurrection, and the resurrection must needs come unto man by reason of the fall; and the fall came by reason of transgression; and because man became fallen, they were cut off from the presence of the Lord,” reports 2 Nephi 9.6. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
How happy and prudent is the person whose life is lived up to one’s eulogy! What steps did one take to attain such perfection? Complete contempt for the World and everything in it. Fervent desire to make spiritual progress. Love of discipline. Labour of penitence. Promptness of obedience. Abnegation of self. Bearing up under every adversity for the love of Christ. Having become expert in all these virtues, one can feel confident that one will die a good death. However, for many, the life of the sing Jewel may be floating around in their subconscious. “Who will save your souls? After all those lies that you told. Now, who will save your souls, if you don’t say your own?” (Who Will Save Your Soul, song by Jewel). When the physical body dies, the spirit continues to live. In the spirit World, the spirits of the righteous “are received into a state of happiness, which is called paradise, a state of rest, a state of peace, where they shall rest from all their troubles and from all care, and sorrow,” reports Alma 40.12. A place called spirit prison is reserved for “those who [have] died in their sins, without knowledge of the truth, or in transgression, having rejected the prophets,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 138.32. The Spirits in prison are “taught faith in God, repentance from sin, vicarious baptism for the remission of sins, the gift of the Holy Ghost by laying on of hands, and all other principles of the gospel that [are] necessary for them to know,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 138.33-34. If they accept the principles of the gospel, repent of their sins, and accept the ordinances performed in their behalf in temples, they will be welcomed into paradise. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
While you have your health, you can do many good things. However, once sickness comes, I do not know what you will be able to do. Few are able to turn sickness to their spiritual advantage. Or so I have been able to observe. As for those poor pilgrims who think that making the rounds of all the Martyr’s shrines will improve their own chances at death, they are just deluding themselves. Friends and neighbours are nice, but do not put your confidence in them for long, and certainly do not expect them to stand in for you at Final Bar. Why? Because they will forget you more quickly than you had guess. Now is the time for you to do something about it. Do provide for yourself, and do set aside a bit of the good for the future. Worry about yourself, yes, and do it now. Why? Who will worry about you in the future? The present moment is precious, as the Apostle Paul said in his Second Letter to the Corinthians. Now is “the day of salvation; now, the perfect time” (6.2). Oh, what an outrage it is! You live your life without a plan. You fill your day with indifferent acts. Do not you realize what is at stake? It is your eternal life. Just one day more, just one hour more, to change your life for the better—that is what you will petition the Almighty for sometime soon, someday soon. And what you want to know from me today is whether your request will be honoured. Well, I really do not know. Just the thought of death is paralyzing, dearest friend, and there is nothing your can do about it. All you can do is build up your strength, your spiritual strength—that is what you will need in the Final Hour. Then you will rejoice, not recoil, at the thought of death. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Now is the time, when you have got your physical strength, to stop living with the World and start living with Jesus Christ—that was Paul’s advice to the Romans (6.8), to condemn everything in the World and forge ahead for Christ. To face death with confidence, you must commit your creaking corpus to a grueling program of penance. Ahh, what a Dummkopf! You think you will live a long life when you do not know if you can survive till the end of the day! Lots of people have had the same thought, but now they are no longer with us, swept off the face of the Earth before they had a chance at a second thought. How many have died recently—is not that often the subject of casual conversation? This one has been stabbed; that one has been drowned. So-and-so has had a great fall and broke his thick neck. What’s-his-name has choked to death on his dinner. You-know-who began his game, but someone else had to finish it. Fire, war, plague robbery—killers all! So it may be said, and it is true in several senses, death is the end of all of us. Did we really need the Ancient Preacher in Ecclesiastes (7.20) to tell us this? What is after all? It is like a cloud formed by the wind into a Puff, sang the Psalmist (144.4), and yet by the very same wind wheezed away in all directions. Death will surely come, but who will remember you after death? And who will pray for you? Do it, dear soul; just do it now. You do not know when you will die. And when you do drop dead, you do not know what will happen right after. Once you have made the time, gather around you only immortal riches, or so the Gospel of Luke exhorted (12.33). Think of nothing else but your own salvation. Take care only for thing things of God. Also use the time you have left to make some new friends for yourself: the Saint of God. Venerate them and imitate their lives. Then, when it is time to leave your wretched hut, as Luke would say (16.9), “They will welcome you into their tents.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
While you are on this Earth, abandon your citizenship, but preserve your status as a wanderer who knows no home but a hostel. That is how the First Letter of the Apostle Peter summed it up (2.11). Pay no attention o the commerce of this World. Keep your affections unencumbered and always raised to God. Why? You know why. You do not have here a lasting dwelling place, warned the Letter to the Hebrews (13.14). To that Heavenly Domicile, then, direct your daily prayers and tearful practices. If you do not, what will happen to your spirit after death? One thing is sure. It will not deserve to pass happily through to the Lord. Amen. To say that God “is a particular Thing” does seem to obliterate the immeasurable difference not only between what He is and what all other things are but between the very mode of His existence and theirs. I must at once restore the balance by insisting that derivative things, from atoms to archangels, hardly attain to existence at all in comparison with their Creator. Their principle of existence is not in themselves. You can distinguish what they are from the fact that they are. The definition of them can be understood and a clear idea of them formed without even knowing whether they are. Existence is an “opaque” addition to the idea of them. However, with God it is no so: if we fully understood what God is we should see that there is no questions whether He is. It would always have been impossible that He should not exist. He is the opaque center of all existences, the thing that simply and entirely is, the fountain of facthood. And yet, now that He has created, there is a sense in which we must say that He is a particular Thing and even one Thing among others. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
To say this is not to lessen the immeasurable difference between Him and them. On the contrary, it is to recognize God an absolute perfection of being creative. He is so brim-full of existence that He can give existence away, can cause things to be, and to be really other than Himself, can make it untrue to say that He is everything. It is clear that there never was a time when nothing existed; otherwise nothing would exist now. However, to exist means to be an absolute Something, to have (metaphorically) a certain shape or structure, to be this and not that. The Thing which always existed, namely God, has therefore always had His own absolute character. Throughout all eternity certain statements about Him would have been true and others false. And from the mere fact of our own existence and Nature’s we already know to some extent which are witch. We know that He invents, acts, creates. After that there can be no ground for assuming in advance that He does not do miracles. Why, then, do mystic talk of Him as they do, and why are many people prepared in advance to maintain that, whatever else God may be, He is not the concrete, living, willing, and acting God of Christian theology? I think the reason is as follows. Let us suppose s mystical limpet, a self-actualized among limpets, who (rapt in vision) catches a glimpse of what Man is like. In reporting it to his disciples, who have some vision themselves (though less than he) he will have to use many negatives. He will have to tell them that Man has no shell, is not attached to a rock, is not surrounded by water. And his disciples, having a little vision of their own to help them, do get some idea of Man. However, then there come erudite limpets, limpets who write histories of philosophy and give lectures on comparative religion, and who have never had any vision of their own. What they get out of the prophetic limpet’s words is simply and solely the negatives. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
From these, uncorrected by any positive insight, they build up a picture of Man as a sort of amorphous jelly (he has no shell) existing nowhere in particular (he is not attached to a rock) and never taking nourishment (there is no water to drift it towards him). And having a traditional reverence for Man they conclude that to be a famished jelly in a dimensionless void is the supreme mode of existence, and reject as crude, materialistic superstition any doctrine which would attribute to Man a definite shape, a structure, and organs. Our own situation is much like that of the erudite limpets. Great prophets and saints have an intuition of God which is absolute and concrete in the highest degree. Because, just touching the fringes of His being, they have seen that He is plenitude of life and energy and joy, therefore (and for no other reason) they have to pronounce that He transcends those limitations which we call personality, passion, change, materiality, and the like. The absolute quality in Him which repels these limitations is their only ground for all the negatives. However, when we come limping after and try to construct an intellectual or “enlightened” religion, we take over these negatives (infinite, immaterial, impassible, immutable, et cetera) and use them unchecked by any absolute intuition. At each step we have to strip off from our idea of God some human attribute. However, the only real reason for stripping off the human attribute is to make room for putting in some absolute divine attribute. In St. Paul’s language, the purpose of all this unclothing is not that our idea of God should reach nakedness but that it should be re-clothed. However, unhappily we have no means of doing the re-clothing. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
When we have removed from our idea of God some puny human characteristic, we (as merely erudite or intelligent enquirers) have no resources from which to supply that blindingly real and concrete attribute of Deity which ought to replace it. Thus at each step in the process of refinement our idea of God contains less, and the fatal picture come in (an endless, silent sea, an empty sky beyond all stars, a dome of white radiance) and we reach at last mere zero and worship a nonentity. And the understanding, left to itself, can hardly help following this path. That is why the Christian statement that only He who does the will of the Father will ever know the true doctrine is philosophically accurate. Imagination may help a little: but in the moral life, and (still more) in the devotional life we touch something concrete which will at once begin to correct the growing emptiness of our idea of God. One moment even of feeble contrition or blurred thankfulness will, at least in some degree, head us off from the abyss of abstraction. It is Reason herself which teaches us not to rely on Reason only in this matter. For Reason knows that she cannot work without materials. When it becomes clear that you cannot find out by reasoning whether the cat is in the linen-cupboard, it is Reason herself who whispers, “Go and look.” This is not my job: it is a matter for the senses.” So here. The materials for correcting out abstract conception of God cannot be supplied by Reason: she will be the first to tell you to go and to try experience—“Oh, taste and see!” #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
For of course she will have already pointed out that your present position is absurd. As long as we remain Erudite Limpets we are forgetting that if no one had ever seen more of God than we, we should have no reason even to believe Him immaterial, immutable, impassible, and all the rest of it. Even that negative knowledge which seems to us so enlightened is only a relic left over from the absolute knowledge of better human—only the pattern which that Heavenly wave left on the sand when it retreated. The human understanding, from is peculiar nature easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds. People readily see correlations or cause-effect links where there are none. Thus they all too readily make sense out of nonsense, by believing that astrological predictions predict the future, that their favourite gambling strategies can defy the laws of chance, or that superstitious rituals bring good luck. So consistent is our human tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our judgments that some researchers refer to this phenomenon as “cognitive conceit.” For example, if people’s answers to a factual question—such as, “Which is longer, the Panama or the Suez Canal?”—as 60 percent of the time correct, they will typically feel 75 percent sure. Even when they feel 100 percent sure, they still err about 15 percent of the time on such questions. The available evidence indicates that they overconfidence phenomenon extents to scientists as they evaluate their own theories, to clinicians as they diagnose their psychology troubled client, and to theologians as they expound their doctrines. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Some humans become attached to particular sciences and contemplations, either from supposing themselves the authors and inventors of them, or from having bestowed the greatest pains upon such subjects, and thus become most habituated to them. Coal, rail, textile, steel, auto, rubber, machine tool manufacture—these were the classical industries of the Second Wave. Based on essential simple electromechanical principles, they used high energy inputs, spat out enormous waste and pollution, and were characterized by long production runs, low skill requirements, repetitive work, standardized goods, and heavily centralized controls. From the mid-1950’s it became increasingly apparent that these industries were backward and waning in the industrial nations. In the United States of America, for example, while the labour force grew by 21 percent between 1965 and 1974, textile employment rose by only 6 percent and employment in iron and steel actually dropped 10 percent. A similar pattern was evident in Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Japan, and other Second Wave nations. As these old-fashion industries began to be transferred to so-called “developing” countries, where labour was less expensive and technology no as advanced, their social influence also began to die out and a set of dynamic new industries shot up to take their place. These new industries differed markedly from their predecessors in several respects: they were no longer primarily electrotechnical and no longer based on the classic science of the Second Wave era. Instead, they rose from accelerating breakthroughs in a mix of scientific disciplines that were rudimentary or even nonexistent as recently as twenty-five years ago-quantum electronics, information theory, molecular biology, oceanics, nucleonics, ecology, and the space sciences. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
And they made it possible for us t reach beyond the grosser features of time and space, with which Second Wave industry concerned itself, to manipulate, as Russian physicist B. G. Kunetsov has noted, “very small spatial regions (say, of the radius of an atomic nucleus, id est, 10^-13 centimeters) and temporal interval of the order of 10^-23 seconds.” It is from these new sciences and our radically enhanced manipulative abilities that the new industries arose—computers and data processing, aerospace, sophisticated petrochemicals, semiconductors, advanced communications, and scores of other. In the United States of America, where this shift from Second Wave to Third Wave technologies began earliest—sometimes in the mid-1950’s—old regions like Merrimack Valley in New England sank into that statues of depressed areas while places like Route 128 outside Boston of “Silicon Valley” in California zoomed into prominence, their suburban homes filled with specialists in solid-state physics, systems engineering, artificial intelligence, or polymer chemistry. Moreover, one could track the transfer of jobs and affluence as they followed the transfer of technology, so that the so-called “sun-belt” states, fed by heavy defense contracts, built an advanced technological base while the older industrial regions in the Northeast and around the Great Lakes plunged into lassitude and near-bankruptcy. The long running financial crisis of New York City was a clear reflection of this technological upheaval. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
So, too, was the stagnation of Lorraine, France’s center of steelmaking. And so, at yet another level, was the failure of British socialism. Thus, at the end of World War II the Labour government spoke of seizing the “commanding heights” of industry and did so. However, the commanding heights it nationalized turned out to be coal, rail, and steel—precisely those industries being by-passed by the technological revolution: yesterday’s commanding heights. Regions or sectors of the economy based on Third Wave industries boomed; those based on Second Wave industries languished. However, the changeover has hardly begun. Today many governments are consciously seeking to accelerate this structural shift while reducing the pains of transition. Japanese planners in MITI—the Ministry of International Trade and Industry—are studying new technologies to support the service industries of the future. German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and his advisers speak of strukturpolitik and look to the European Investment Bank to facilitate the move out of traditional mass production industries. Today, four clusters of related industries are poised for major growth and are likely to become the backbone industries of the Third Wave era, brining with them, once more, major shifts in economic power and in social and political alignments. Electronics and computers clearly form one such interrelated cluster. The electronics industry, a relative newcomer on the World scene, reached a value of nearly $1,097.7 billion, and now accounts for more than $1261165 million in sales per year, and is expected to grow by 6 percent, and will reach $1731053 million in 2025. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The largest industries in the World are Telecommunications, automobile manufacturing, oil and gas, food industry, and information technology. The speed with which computers have spread is so well known it hardly needs elaboration. Costs have dropped so sharply and capacity has risen so spectacularly that, according to Computerworld magazine, “If the auto industry had done what the computer industry has done in the last 30 years, a Rolls-Royce would cost $2.50 and get 2,000,000 miles to the gallon.” Today, inexpensive mini-computers are invading the American home. In recent years, media players for digital signage have gone from bulky devices to pieces of equipment that can fit into the palm of your hand. As technology has evolved, smaller devices are now incredibly capable and power-efficient. They can fit into compact spaces, mobile applications and offer comprehensive, reliable connectivity for remote management. Every home now has a computer and most people walk around with mini computers in their pockets or on their arms. Computers are as standard as toilets. Linked to banks, stores, government office, to neighbours’ homes, workplace, cars and human beings, such computers are reshaping not only business, from production to retailing, health and beauty, but the very nature of work and, indeed, even the structure of the family. Like the computer industry to which it is umbilically tied, the electronic industry has also been exploding, and consumers have been deluged with hand-held music players, mini computers, watch computers, and TV screen games. These, however, provide only the palest hint of what lies in store to take over: tiny, inexpensive climate and soil sensors in agriculture; infinitesimal medical devices built into ordinary clothing to monitor heartbeat or stress levels of the wearer—these and a multitude of other applications of electronics are just starting to lurk into the present. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The advance of Third Wave industries, moreover, is being radically accelerated by the energy crisis, inasmuch as many of them carry us toward processes and products that are miserly in their energy requirements. Second Wave telephone systems, for example, require virtual copper mines beneath the city streets—endless miles of snaking cable, conduit, relays, and switches. We have now converted to fiber optic systems that use hair-thin light carrying fibers to convey messages and wireless technology. The energy implications of this switchover have been staggering: it takes about one thousandth the energy to manufacture optical fiber that it took to dig, smelt, and process an equivalent length of copper wire. The same ton of coal required to produced 90 miles of copper wire can turn out 80,000 miles of fiber. At the height of his career, the pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla became obsessed with an idea. He theorized that electricity could be transmitted wirelessly through the air at long distances—either through a series of strategically positioned towers, or hopping across a system of suspended balloons. Things did not go to plan, and Tesla’s ambitions for a wireless global electricity supply were never realized. However, the theory itself was not disproved: it would have simply required an extraordinary amount of power, much of which would have been wasted. Now, research has suggested that the architects of the 5G network may have unwittingly built what Tesla did not manage to construct at the turn of the twentieth century: a “wireless power grid” that could be adapted to charge or power small devices embedded in cars, homes workplaces and factories. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Because 5G relies upon a dense network of masts and a powerful series of antenna, it is possible that the same infrastructure, with some adjustments, could beam power to small devices. However, the transmission will still suffer from the key drawback of Tesla’s towers: high energy wastage, which may be difficult to justify given the urgency of the climate crisis. The shift to solid-state physics in electronics moves in the same direction, each step forward producing component that require smaller and smaller inputs of energy. This characteristic of the electronic revolution suggests that one of the most powerful conservation strategies for energy-starved high-technology economies may well be the rapid substitution of low-energy Third Wave industries for energy-wasting Second Wave industries. More generally, the World’s economic activity has been substantially altered by the electronics explosion. Indeed, reality is outstripping fiction in the rate of introduction of new and often unexpected applications of electronics. The electronics explosion has only been one step in the direction of an entirely new techno-sphere. We all at times fall into the habit of speaking of suburbia as if it is a relatively homogeneous area. That is, a place of beautiful free-standing single family homes with emerald green lawns where everyone is a professional, middle-class or more affluent, and has children. We of course know better; we are aware that there are rich suburbs and poor suburbs, estate suburbs and garden apartment suburbs, residential suburbs and industrial park suburbs. Still we keep the standard image of a convenient shorthand and tend to forget that some suburbs vary widely from the norm. There is a remarkable range of types of suburbs. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
In terms of income, suburbs range from very rich, such as Kenilworth, Illinois, outside Chicago, where the income per capita (not family income, but per person income) is $104,301, with a median homes value of $1,000,000, and Bloomfield, Michigan, outside Detroit, the median income per capita in the township is $89,205, and the median house price is $533,635, to the poorest of suburbs, such as Ford Heights, Illinois, outside Chicago, where the per capita income is $12,217 and median home value is $80,200, or Cudahy, California, outside Los Angeles, where the per capita income is $14,385, but the median homes price is $532,834. In addition to the above income category, we can differentiate suburbs in a number of fashions. Suburbs can, in addition to socioeconomic status of income, education, and occupation, be differentiated by age, ethnicity, race, and function. In categorizing suburbs we can contrast older versus newer, growing versus stagnant, ethnic versus WASP, and incorporated versus unincorporated. The fact is, suburban settlements are so diverse that no single typology adequately encompasses all suburban types. One of the most used postwar typologies is between those suburbs that essentially serve as bedroom communities (residential suburbs) and those have primarily a manufacturing, trade, or business function (employment suburbs). Mixed-usage suburbs, combining the characteristics of the other two, can also be delineated. There are clear differences among these three categories of suburbs in terms of age of residents, ethnic composition, fertility rates, population growth, socioeconomic status, and housing characteristics. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Systematically there are difference in social and economic characteristics in each type of suburban community. Employment suburbs contain higher proportions of both foreign born and non-European American inhabitants than do residential suburbs, with mixed suburbs in the middle. Socioeconomic status, as measured by percentage having completed high school, percentage in white-collar occupations, and median income level, was highest in the residential suburbs. The mixed suburb was in the middle, and the employment suburbs were lowest. Residential suburbs as a group also had faster growth rate than employment suburbs. Other systems of categories have also been developed. Within the general category of residential suburbs, the pollster Louis Harris classified suburbs in for categories on the basis of income level and the rate of growth. The categories are: First, affluent bedroom: Affluent bedroom communities include such places as New Canaan, Connecticut; Leawood, Kansas; and Irving, California. They come closet to the traditional stereotype of a suburb. Such places rank at the top in terms of resident income levels, degree of home ownership, and proportion of residents employed as professionals and managers. Second, affluent settled: Affluent settled communities such as Oak Park, Illinois; Cherry Hill, New Jersey; and Fairfield, Connecticut are past their period of growth and may even be losing population. Since their land is developed, they are beyond the building-boom stage, and some may have considerable older housing. The housing stock is in good repair, and the neighbourhoods are comfortable. Affluent settled communities tend to have a wider range of economic activities and to be more self-sufficient and les purely residential than affluent bedrooms suburbs. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Third, low-income: Low-income, growing suburbs are often the home of upwardly mobile white-collar and blue-collar workers. These communities, such as El Monte, California; Sylvania, Ohio; and Millerica, Massachusetts are much less likely to fit the stereotype of suburbia. Forth, low-income stagnant: Low-income stagnant suburbs are places that are suburbs by definition but do not at all fit the suburban stereotype. Places such as East Orange, New Jersey; McKeesport, Pennsylvania; and Joliet, Illinois are essentially satellite cities rather than suburbs, and they have the full range of economic activities associated with central cities. In 2021, we would probably make some additions to the above list, such as the mixed, nonresidential and residential out-city suburbs that combine office parks, shopping malls, and residential neighbourhooods. However, whatever typology or categories are used, the important thing to note is that there are predictable patters of variations. Suburban growth is not as random or chaotic as it is often portrayed. Persistent and systematic differences exist. Suburban growth, in spite of its bas press, is not haphazard. Infinite Spirit, when I pray each day for shelter for those without homes, let me not ignore the pet without a home; as I ask protection for those in areas of turmoil and unrest, let me not forget endangered species of life; when I pray that the hungry be fed, please let me be mindful that all God’s creatures have need of sustenance; as I ask Divine assistance for those afflicted by fire, flood, earthquake, storm or drought, please let me remember that this included every living thing. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
In seeking miracle cures for human disease, may I also speak for the well-being of the planet itself. Please let the word of my mouth, the meditations of my heart and the actions of my life be as one, that I may live each day in harmony with Mother Earth. Amen. May God’s great name be blessed forever and ever. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises; hymns and blessings that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. If we want to hear the voice of the Overself, we have to create a quiet all around us and all within us and we have to listen and go on listening with patience. To enjoy a glimpse it is better to be alone, undisturbed, and undistracted, better to be with nature than with people, better to be among the woods and lakes and mountains than in the offices, the drawing rooms, and the factories of society. Some, like the poet Keats, find Truth through beauty while others, like the poet Dante, find it through suffering. That is a valuable meditation which, whether at odd moments or for fixed periods, return again and again to dwell on the nature of the Overself and disregards all lesser topics. Such frequent remembrances and such fixed meditations become indeed a kind of communion and are usually rewarded sooner or later by the glimpse. The contemplation in memory of those glimpses will help one to weaken the power of negative thoughts to weaken, however slightly, the very source of those thoughts, the ego. One must look ardently forward to, and eagerly await, each time when the Overself takes over more and more. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
The Lightening-flash may occur either after reason reaches the peak of its performance and has been exhausted, or by deliberately abandoning intellectual activity for the utmost faith and devotion. In both cases, one has to let go and sink back into the Nothing and stop furher efforts on one’s own. Sometimes, by destiny the Lightning-flash can occur unexpectedly when no effort is made. Accept my prayer, O Lord, and please answer me with Thy great mercy and with Thy great mercy and with Thy saving truth. Amen. And it came to pass that when the Ark moved forward, Moses said: Rise up, O Lord, and let Thine enemies be scattered; and let them that hate Thee flee before Thee. For out of Zion shall go forth the Torah, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. Blessed be He who, in His holiness, gave the Torah to His people of American. Extol the Lord with me, and together let us exalt His name. Thine, O Lord, is the greatness and the power, the glory, the victory and the majesty; for al that is in Heaven and on the Earth is Thine. Thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and Thou art exalted supreme above all. Exalt the Lord our God, and worship at His footstool; holy is He. Exalt the Lord our God, and worship at his holy mountain for the Lord our God is holy. If one can come to this belief in the reality of one’s own higher self, one can come into all the knowledge one needs, all the help one needs, by heeding its guidance (felt intuitively) and by applying its injunctions to one’s daily life. If the ego would be willing to abdicate its rule for a short period, the way to a glimpse would be opened. The paradox is perfect: when one is most empty of petty ends, the shinning glimpse reveals itself. The Universe is such a vast and mysterious labyrinth that those who choose to explore its depths may end up lost there forever. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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The same qualities that make most of us unique also prevent us from changing who we are, even if it might be a change for the better. It is sometimes said that to be more creative, one should try to see the World without preconceptions, as if through the eyes of a child. Any one-year-old child has no trouble turning a metal bowl and a wooden spoon into a rock star’s drum. However, as we get older, knowledge and experience increasingly displace imagination and our ability to see an object for anything other than its original purpose. This is called functional fixedness and while you may not need to build a drum set during your professional career, chances are you do suffer from it and it is impacting your work. Many of us suffer from Functional fixedness. When I was young, I used to sometimes watch the trendy situational comedy Friends. The show was based on young, successful, attractive singles, who were roommates, living in a hip and swinging apartment in New York City. So, it made me believe that is what life in the city would be like and made me think living in a mid-level rise or high-rise building in the city would be cool and I would meet young, attractive people. However, my experience has been anything but that. Living in an apartment house in the city has been a horrible experience. The people are old, unattractive, means, and down right evil. They also smell awful, so bad that it makes people sick. And it nothing like living in the city. It is more like living in a small town in the country side that is not deemed to be very sophisticated. The nearby stores are also expensive, and have a limited selection. So this experience makes me want to move to a beautiful community like Cresleigh Ranch. Where the people are friendly and attractive and care about their reputation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Functional fixedness is a well-known cognitive bias. Companies often struggle to develop breakthrough products because they are hobbled by Functional Fixedness. Technologists, engineers, and designers not only have their own expertise, they have their own way of applying their expertise. Ironically, the more success they have had with their approach to a solution, the harder it is to imagine a different one. If you suspect your Research and Development team will get upset at anything that challenges their abilities, consider setting up a Functional Fixedness SWAT team—a trained group of innovators who embrace the idea of collaborating with solution providers outside their industry specialty. This will allow the Research and Development team to become more creative and please and attract new clients and revenue, instead of being an unfriendly, impenetrable fortress of know-it-alls who are stagnate in their careers and cognitive functions. Functional fixedness is just one of the mental blocks that prevent insight. Here is an example of another: A $20 bill is placed on a table and a stack of objects is balanced precariously on top of the bill. How can the bill be removed without touching or moving the object? A good answer is to split the bill on one of its edges. Gently pulling from opposite ends will tear the bill in half and remove in without topping the objects. Many people fail to see this solution because they have learned not to destroy money. Notice again the impact of placing something in a category, in this case, “things of value” (which should not be destroyed). The list that follows identifies other common mental blocks and fixations that can hinder problem solving. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Emotional barriers: inhibition and fear of making a fool of oneself, fear of making a mistake, inability to tolerate ambiguity, excessive self-criticism. Example: An architect is afraid to try an unconventional design of adding a turret and a stained-glass window to the blue prints of a new house scheduled for development because he fears that other architects will think it is frivolous. However, many buyers are looking to get some aspects of Victorian culture in their homes, which is why farmhouse designs are becoming so popular. Cultural barriers: values that hold that fantasy is a waste of time; that playfulness is for children only; that reason, logic, and numbers are good; that feelings, intuitions, pleasure, and humour are bad or have no value in the serious business of problem solving. Example: A corporate manager wants to solve a business problem but becomes stern and angry when members of his marketing team joke playfully about possible solutions. Being too strict can stifle, but playing around and joking too much can be disruptive and waste a firm’s time and money. Learned barriers: conventions about uses (functional fixedness), meanings, possibilities, taboos. Example: A cook does not have any clean mixing bowls and fails to see that one could use a frying pan as a bowl. Being a cook, it is important to find solutions to problems on demand. The restaurant industry is a fast pace business and customers expect perfection for the high prices of the food they are paying for. Perception barriers: habits leading to a failure to identify important elements of a problem. Example: A beginning artist concentrates on drawing a vase of flowers without seeing the “empty” spaces around the vase are part of the composition, too. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Being an artist requires one to be visual and open to new interpretations. To pay attention to light, dark, textures, lines, and be creative. Much of what we know about thinking comes from direct studies of how people solve problems. Yet, surprisingly, much can also be learned from machines. Computerized problem solving provides a fascinating “laboratory” for testing ideas about how you and I think. Church sermons sometimes have surprisingly little impact. When the people from twelve churches were interviewed at home shortly before and after they heard sermons opposing racial bigotry and injustice, it was found that during the second interview, only ten percent recalled reading anything about racial prejudice or discrimination even though the material had been presented. When the remaining 90 percent were asked directly whether their minister “talked about prejudice or discrimination in the last couple of weeks,” more than 30 percent denied hearing such a sermon. So it is hardly surprising that the sermons had little impact on racial attitudes! However, there are certain requirements that have to be met for an effect sermon. For a sermon to be effect, one has to make sure the worshipper is paying attention. Then it must be clear that the worshipper comprehends the message, which is why audience participation is advised. Many teachers ask questions to the audience to get feedback. The questions are usually things others need clarity on as well. Also, it is important to make sure your audience believes your message, or you are jus wasting your time. They have already made their decision. If the audience believes your message, it is important they remember it. This is why many lecturers provide colourful examples so people are better able to relate to the stories and keep them in mind. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Furthermore, if instruction is to be useful, the worshippers have to follow through and amend their behaviour accordingly to be an example for others to follow and show you that they are practicing these doctrines. And of course, actions speak louder than words. For example, you should not have to verbally reassure someone you love them, your actions should make that clear. Love is no real definition of love, but you can behave in a way to show someone you deeply care about them. This is why many women love when their husbands buy them flowers, diamonds, cars, clothes or compliment them on their new hairstyle, dress or the cuisine they prepared. When you stop to think about it, the preacher has so many hurdles to surmount that it is no wonder preaching so often fails to affect our actions. The preacher must deliver a message that not only gets out attention but it is understandable, persuasive, memorable, and likely to compel action. After all, does it not make you suspicious when someone says, “I’m sorry,” or “I love you”? Because it means they did something wrong or are about to do something wrong. If a person is really sorry, they will repent from the upsetting or deviant behaviour and make a gesture to show remorse. Nonetheless, our concern here is neither theological content nor oratorical style, but with how to create and receive a memorable, persuasive message. What factors make for effective communication? How might ministers apply these factors in the construction of more potent messages? For that matter, how might any of us who teach, speak, or write do so with greatest effects? Finally, what can we ordinary people to receive an extraordinary benefit from what we hear and read? #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Well, vivid, concrete examples are more potent than abstract information. Human judgements and attitudes are often swayed by specific illustrations than by abstract assertions of general truth. Research studies show that a few good testimonials usually have more impact than statistically summarized data from dozens of people. A single vivid welfare case has more impact on opinions about welfare recipients than does factual information running contrary to the case. Another study finds that student impressions of potential teachers were influenced more by a few personal testimonies concerning the teacher than by a comprehensive statistical summary of many students’ evaluations. No experienced writer will be surprised by this principle. As William Strunk and E.B. White asserted in their classic, The Elements of Style, “If those who have studied the art of writing are in accord on any one point, it is on this: the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete. The greatest writers—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare—are effective largely because they deal in particulars.” Preachers and teachers should do the same, and so should we listeners, by conjuring up our own examples when the speaker begins to get abstract. However, a sermon is never just a string of unrelated examples; the preacher aims to communicate a basic point. We might say that theological truth is to a good sermon what the base of an iceberg is to its tip. Jesus’ vivid parables, for example, embodied basic truths in memorable pictures. And what pastor has not received compliments from adults for a simple but concrete children’s sermon? The children may not have grasped the analogy, but the adults understood and remembered it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
This illustrates the power of principle number one: vivid, concrete examples are more potent than abstract information. Messages that relate to what people already know or have experienced are more easily remembered. Public-speaking experts have long supposed this to be true. Aristotle urged speakers to adapt the message to their audiences. Experimental psychologists have confirmed the point: messages that are unrelated to people’s existing ideas or experience are difficult to comprehend and are quickly forgotten. The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different groups. Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. After the procedure is completed, one arranges the materials into different groups again. Then they can be put into their proper places. Eventually they will be used once more and the whole cycle will then have to be repeated. However, that is part of life. The statement above may not be what you think it is about. It is actually about laundry. If you knew it was about laundry, it might be easier to remember because it is something most people are familiar with. If you reread it, you will probably understand it better. A message that is hooked to some cue—something we will think about or experience again—is more likely to come to mind in the future. When the cue pops up, it may call to mind the message associated with it. For example, one memorable sermon likened American religion to waiting-room Muzak—bland and soothing. A year after this “sound of Muzak” sermon was preached, we found ourselves eating dinner in a room with music softly playing in the background. Someone noticed the music—and recalled the sermon. This illustrates principle number two: messages that relate to what people already know or have experienced are most easily remembered. Spaced repetition assists memory. If the repetitions are spaced over time rather than grouped together, as every student of human learning knows well, we remember information much better. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
The experimental psychologist Lynn Hasher found that repeated information is also more credible. When statements such as “The largest museum in the World is the Louvre in Paris” were repeatedly presented, people rated them as more likely to be turn when the statements had been presented infrequently. Social psychologists have uncovered a parallel phenomenon: repeated presentation of a neutral stimulus—whether a human face, a Chinese character, or a piece of unfamiliar music—generally increases people’s liking of it. Speakers can capitalize on this finding that repetition, especially spaced repetition, makes messages more memorable and appealing. When preparing a talk or sermon they might ask themselves, What do I most want people to remember from this? They can then repeat that one key idea many times. (We suspect that a little informal testing of parishioners’ recall would reveal that few people can recall the main points of the last three-point sermon they heard.) Given the limitations of human memory, a sermon should probably be the embodiment of only one vigorous idea. Perhaps this could even be taken a step further: that idea should be embodies in the whole worship service—the Scriptures, music, prayers, and closing charge to the congregation. A parishioners we should look for a unifying theme, or at least identify one idea in every service that is significant for us. Sometimes the key idea can be captured in a single statement or pithy saying that becomes the trunk of a talk or sermon, unifying the illustrative branches that grow from it. What listener can forget the refrain in Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” sermon? Principle number three therefore bears repeating: space repetition assists retention. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Active listening assists memory and facilitates attitude change. People remember information best when they have actively processed it—that is, when they have put it in their own words. Experiments reveal that when we read or hear something that prompts a thought of our own, we will often more readily remember our thought than the information that prompted it. Not only do we better remember information we produce ourselves but our attitudes are also more likely to be changed by that information. Social psychologists have found that passive exposure to information, through reading or listening, has less effect on people’s attitudes than information they get through active participation in a group discussion. Other research confirms that when we learn something passively our attitudes toward it usually do no change much. When we are stimulated into restating information in our own terms, we are much more likely to remember and be persuaded by it. Preachers, teachers, and even parents may fail to recognize that their spoken words are more prominent to them (as active speakers) than to their passive listeners. Parents are often amazed at their children’s capacity to ignore them. If instead of constant harping, the parent gently asks the child to restate the request (“Leo, what did I ask you to do?”), the child’s act of verbalizing the request will make the child more aware of it. Mr. Rogers, the television friend of preschoolers, applies this principle by asking a question and then saying nothing for a few moments, allowing children to answer themselves. Preachers would be well advised to do likewise, pausing after giving an instruction or raising a thought-provoking question. As listeners we can discipline ourselves to listen actively. Taking notes on a sermon, as any serious student does in class, forces us to repeat and restate its main points. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
So does discussing it with someone else. No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression—this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget. Therefore, anticipate that active listening assists memory and facilitates attitude change. Attitudes and beliefs are shaped by action. If social psychological research has established anything, it is, as we emphasize that our actions influence our attitudes. Every time we act, we amplify the idea lying behind what we have done, especially when we feel responsibility for having committed the act. It seems that we are as likely to believe in what we have stood up for as to stand up for what we believe Moreover, this principle is paralleled by the biblical idea that growth in faith is a consequence as well as a source of obedient action. The implication of his “attitudes follow actions” principle is clear: a message is most likely to stimulate faith if it calls forth a specific action. The effective talk or sermon will not leave people wondering what to do with it. It will suggest specific actions, or it will stimulate listeners to form their own place of actions. “How will ‘Love your neighbour’ affect you?” the speaker might ask. “Who are you going to phone or visit this week?” In the twenty-one months Joseph Smith had possessed the golden plates, no one expect Joseph Smith had seen them. They were kept wrapped in a cloth when not in use. When Joseph translated, he sat behind a curtain which prevented others from seeing them. God was not yet ready for others to see the precious book. This was a great responsibility for Joseph, because others had to believe the things he said and could not see for themselves. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
However, the Lord had promised Joseph that he was not to be the only one to see them, that three others should be shown the wonderful plates. Joseph was anxious to share his wonderful secret. Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris desired to be the three people who were to see the plates. They asked Joseph to pray to God about this. After Joseph prayed earnestly o God, a revelation came to these three men telling them that is they had faith they should see the golden plates, the breastplate, the Urim and Thummin, the sword of Laban, and the Liahona or compass. The Lord said: “After you have obtained faith, and have seen them with your eyes, you shall testify of them, by the power of God; and this you shall do…that I may bring about my righteous purposes unto the children of men, in this work. Ye shall testify that ye have seen them, even as my servant Joseph Smith, Jr., has seen them, for it is by my power that he has seen them, and it is because he had faith. And he has translated the book, even that part which I have commanded him, and as your Lord and your God liveth, it is true.” A few days after this revelation was received in June, 1829, Joseph, Oliver, David, and Martin were out in the woods discussing this revelation and praying that God would show them the plates. Joseph prayed first. Then each man turned and prayed; but there was only silence in the stillness of the forest. Joseph prayed again, followed by each of the other men. When God did not answer their prayers, Martin Harris blamed himself, think he was not good enough, and that he was keeping them from having their prayers answered. He went away to pray by himself. After Martin Harris left, Joseph and Oliver and David knelt and prayed again. While they were thus praying, a very bright light appeared in the air and rested upon them, extending all around them. It was not like the light of the sun, nor the light of fire, but was more glorious and beautiful. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
An Angel stood before them in this light, and there appeared a table on which were many plates as well as the golden plates from which Joseph had translated. Beside the plates were the Urim and Thummim, the breastplate, the sword of Laban, and Liahona, or compass. The Angel turned the pages of the golden book one by one so the three men could see the engravings. The men were allowed to handle the plates, to feel them as well as to see them, so they would know for sure they real. Then a voice came from out of the bright light above them, saying, “These plates have been revealed by the power of God, and they have been translated by the power of God. The translation of them which you have seen is correct, and I command you to bear record of wat you now see and hear.” When the Angel, the precious thing, and the bright light had disappeared, Joseph went to find Martin Harris to tell him of the wonderful vision they had seen. He found him in another part of the woods praying. Joseph knelt with him and together they prayed that Martin Harris might be the third witness to share the vision. As they were praying, the same bright light came to them as it has to Joseph, Oliver, and David. The Angel showed Martin Harris the golden plates and other precious things, just as he had shown them to others. The four men then went back to the Whitmer home and told the family what had happened. All rejoiced in their wonderful experience. They knew they must make a record of it so that all people might know. They carefully wrote their story. Briefly the words of the “Testimony of the Three Witnesses” are these: “Be it known to all nations and people to whom this work shall come, that we, through the power of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, have seen the plates which contain this record. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
“We know they have been translated by the gift and power of God, for his voice has told us so. Wherefore, we know for sure that this work is true. We also testify that we have seen the engravings which are on the plates. They were shown to us by the power of God and not of man. We declare that an Angel of the Lord came down from Heaven and brought and laid them before our eyes, and we saw the plates and the engravings on them. We know that it is by the power of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, that we saw and we make a record that these things are true. It is marvelous to us, and to be obedient to the commandments of God, we bear testimony of these things. We know that is we are faithful in Christ, we shall dwell with him forever in the Heavens, and the honour be to the Father, and to the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.” Then Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris signed their names to the document. Never in all their lives, even in times of great trouble, did they every deny their testimony. At the time of their deaths, when they were old men, they still told all who would listen the wonderful story of how the Angel visited them and showed them the golden plates. These three men were not the only witnesses who were to see the golden plates. The Lord told Joseph Smith that others were to be permitted to see them. A few days later when several men were meeting together, Joseph showed them the golden plates. They saw them as Joseph turned the pages, leaf by leaf, showing them the writings in the strange language. They were permitted to touch and handle them. There were eight men in this group. They did not see the Angel nor the other things which had been shown to the first three witnesses, but they knew they must bear record of the things they saw. They carefully wrote their story, and the “Testimony of the Eight Witnesses” briefly is this: “Be it known unto all nations and people unto whom this work, has shown to us the plates, which have the appearance of gold. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
“As many of the pages as he translated we did handle with our hands and saw the engravings thereon. We bear record that we have seen and lifted and know for sure that Joseph Smith has the plates of which we have spoken. We give our names to witness unto the World that we have seen, and we lie not, God bearing witness of it.” These eight men then signed their names to the document: four Whitmer brothers, Peter, Christian, Jacob, John; two brother of Joseph Smith, Hyrum and Samuel; Joseph’s father, Joseph Smith, Sr..; an a man named Hyrum Page. The book printed from the translation was called the “Book of Mormon” because Mormon was the man who had prepared the plates many hundreds of years before. The complete testimonies of the “three witnesses” and the “eight witnesses” have been printed in every copy of the Bool of Mormon that has ever been printed. Nearly every man over the age of twenty years who had anything to do with helping in the Lord’s work of translating the golden plates saw and handled the plates. Throughout their lives they testified to the truth of the work. Not one of these men every denied that he had seen the golden plates. Several of these men had not yet been baptized. This had been a wonderful experience as they worked closely with God, and those who had not yet made their promise to God in the waters of baptism did so within the next few months. At every point Christianity has to correct the natural expectations of the Pantheist and offer something more difficult, just as Schrodinger has to correct Democritus. At every moment he has to multiply distinctions and rule out false analogies. One has to substitute the mapping of something that has a beneficial, concrete, and highly articulated character for the formless generalities in which Pantheism is at home. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Indeed, after the discussion has been going on for some tie, the Pantheists is apt to change one’s ground and where one before accused us childish naivety now to blame us for the pedantic complexity of our “cold Christs and tangled Trinities.” And we may well sympathise with him. Christianity, faced with popular “religion” is continuously troublesome. To the large well-meant statements of “religion” it finds itself forced to replay again and again, “Well, not quite like that,” or “I should hardly put it that way.” Thus troublesomeness does not of course prove it to be true; but if it were true it would be bound to have this troublesomeness. The real musician is simply troublesome to person who wishes to indulge in untaught “musical appreciation”; the real historian is similarly a nuisance when we want to romance about “the old days” or “the ancient Greeks and Romans.” The ascertained nature of any real thing is always at first a nuisance to our natural fantasies—a wretched, pedantic, logic-chopping intruder upon a conversation which was getting on famously without it. But “religion” also claims to base itself on experience. The experiences of mystics (that ill-defined but popular class) are held to indicate that God is the God of “religion” rather than of Christianity; that He—or It—is not a concrete Bing but “being in general” about which nothing can be truly asserted. To everything which we try to say about Him, the mystics tend to reply, “Not thus.” What all these negatives of the mystics really mean I shall consider in a moment: but I must first point out why it seems to be impossible that they should be true in the sense popularly understood. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
It will be agreed that, however they come there, concrete, individual, determinate things do now exist: things like flamingoes, German generals, lovers, sandwiches, pineapples, comets and kangaroos. These are not ere principles or generalities or theorems, but things—facts—real, resistant existences. One might even say opaque existences, in the sense that each contains something which our intelligence cannot completely digest. In so far as they illustrate general laws it can digest them: but then they are never mere illustrations. Above and beyond that there is in each of them the “opaque” brute fact of existence, the fact that it is actually there and is itself. Now this opaque fact, this concreteness, is not in the least accounted for by the laws of Nature or even by the laws of thought. Every law can be reduced to the form “If A, then B.” Laws give us only a Universe of “Ifs and Ands”: not this Universe which actually exists. What we know through laws and general principles is a series of connections must be given something to connect; a torrent of opaque actualities must be fed into the pattern. If God created the World, then He is precisely the source of this torrent, and it alone gives our truest principles anything to be true about. However, if God is the ultimate source of all concrete, individual things in the highest degree. Unless the origin of all others thing were itself concrete and individual, nothing else could be so; for there is no conceivable means whereby what is abstract or general could itself produce concrete reality. Book-keeping needs something else (namely, real money put into the account) and metre need something else (real words, fed into it by a poet) before any income or any poem can exit. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
If anything is to exist at all, then the Original Thing must be, not a principle nor a generality, much less an “ideal” or a “value,” but an utterly concrete fact. Probably no thinking person would, in so many words, deny that God is concrete and individual. However, not all thinking people, and certainly not all who believe in “religion,” keep this truth steadily before their mind. We must beware of paying God ill-judged “metaphysical compliment.” We say that God is “infinite.” In the sense that His knowledge and power extend no to some things but to all, this is true. However, if by using the word “infinite” we encourage ourselves to think of Him as a formless “everything” about whom nothing in particular and everything in general is true, then it would be better to drop that word altogether. Let us dare to say that God is a particular Thing. Once He was the only Thing: but He is creative, He made other things to be. He is not those other things. He is not “universal being”: if He were there would be no creatures, for a generality can make nothing. He is “absolute being”—or rather the Absolute Being—in the sense that He alone exists in His own right. However, there are things which God is not. In that sense He has determinate character. Thus He is righteous, not a-moral; creative, not inert. The Hebrew writings here observe an admirable balance. Once God says simple I AM, proclaiming the mystery of self-existence. However, times without number He says, “I am the Lord”—I, the ultimate Fact, have this determinate character, and not that. And humans are exhorted to “know the Lord,” to discover and experience this particular character. The error which I am here trying to correct is one of the most sincere and respectable errors in the World; I have sympathy enough with it to feel shocked at the language I have been drive to use in say the opposite view, which I believe to be the true one. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
In countless writings the prophets of the Lord have been trying to teach us that throughout time and all eternity the most important organization is the family. A loving Father in Heaven organized His church here on the Earth as a means of teaching families how to be eternally happy. We know that none of us can receive the fulfillment of true happiness except at a member of an eternal family. We also know, or should know, that the success we experience in our homes as families, is going to have a most significant effect on the eternal happiness of each of us. Happiness in the life hereafter is geared to our learning and living celestial laws while we are here on the Earth. This being so, then our great need is to establish in our homes an atmosphere that will encourage the learning and living of the teachings of the Saviour. Satan knows that He can cause unhappiness in our homes if he can bring about disunity, discontent, disharmony, and a host of other spiritual illness. By this insidious process He has gained no small measure of success in His plan to lead astray the children of our Father in Heaven. For instance, He knows that if He can cause parents to quarrel with each other, their children may well follow the example. He knows that if parents show little respect for each other, so will their children. He knows that children mirror the actions of their parents. One of Satan’s most effective tools is at work among us today—it is a destroyer of happiness, peace, contentment, family solidarity. Families are stumbling and falling because of is hobbling and crippling effect. This tool of Satan is called the contention. The word contention means: to argue, to bring discord or strife, to dispute, to quarrel. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Now, sone will say, “This is our way of life—everybody is doing it.” Lest we think these acts are not serious and are just our way of life, to be accepted and lived with, let us hear the word of the Lord as expressed by an ancient prophet. “And according as I have commanded you thus hall ye baptize. And there shall be no disputations among you, as there have hitherto been; neither shall there by disputations among you concerning the points of my doctrine, as there have hitherto been. For verily, verily I say uno you, one that hath the spirit of contention is not of me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, and He stirreth up the hearts of humans to content with anger, one with another. Behold, his is not my doctrine, to stir up the hearts of humans with anger, one against another,” reports 3 Nephi 11.28-30. It does not take great faith to believe in something that never fails. God has never failed. Lack of understanding of many confused people is due to our own unconscious unwillingness to understand them (and ourselves), and they are confused due to the divided self because we need them (and us) confused. People have identities. However, they may also change quite remarkably as they become different others to others. It is arbitrary to regard any of these functions or “alter” actions as basic and the others as variations. Not only may people behave quite differently in their different alterations, but they may experience themselves in different ways. They are liable to remember different things, express different attitudes, even quite discordant ones, imagine and phantasize in different ways, and so on. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
This a theory of natural splits. It maintains that people will feel they have integrity and identity, provided first that they are not under pressure to be wildly different in different role-relationships, and second that each role-relation is fairly consistent from day to day. Overall, both city dwellers and suburbanites tend to overemphasize the differences between them. Actually, when one controls for income and other social-status variables, there is little difference between the city and country cousins. There is little that makes suburbanites stand out from other similar-status persons. When one looks at similar populations in city and suburb, their ways of life are remarkably alike…The crucial difference between cities and suburbs, then, is that they are often home for different kinds of people. If one is to understand their behaviour, these differences are much more important than whether they reside inside or outside the city limits…if populations and residential areas were described by age and class characteristics, and by racial, ethnic, and religious ones, our understanding of human settlements would be much improved. The truth is that those living in the suburbs are not all that different from city dwellers with similar backgrounds. In many respects suburbs have been maligned by being portrayed as a monochromatic landscape of beautiful boxes holding look-alike middle-class and upper-middle class families. Suburbs now house nearly 60 percent of the American population, and this population is remarkably complex in terms of age, family status, income, ethnicity, and race. Individual suburbs, as is true with urban neighbourhoods, are often homogenous, but suburbia as a whole is diverse. There is a mosaic of all ages, lifestyles, races, cultures, educational and political backgrounds. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
In discussing suburbs and suburbanites, it is important to remember their complexity as well as their commonalities. Not everyone would agree with the portrait of suburbs presented in the statement above. More negative view of suburban life, and especially suburban family life by critics such as M.P. Baumgartner. In a social-anthropological examination of an upper-middle-class commuter suburb of 16,000 outside New York, she describes a community that appears to it Riseman’s, and others’, criticism of suburbia. Baumgartner argues that the pattern she found in the community can be generalized to suburbia elsewhere (or at least upper-middle-class suburbia). She describes suburbia as a place of a “culture of weak ties” and “moral minimalism.” The surface tranquility of suburban life covers an unwillingness to address real conflicts and tensions. Weak bonding to family and neighbours leads not to discussing and resolving conflicts, but to conflict avoidance and suppression as major characteristics of suburbia. As put by Guest in his review work, “Since ties are weak and unimportant, sub urbanities have allegedly little reason to resolve differences. Thus, almost paradoxically, the apparent harmony of suburbia stems from a lack of communal feeling. Suburbia is too diverse to be simply and uniformly categorized. In general, one can say that suburbs have characteristics that tend to fall between those of cities and those of small towns. When one compares suburbs with small towns suburbs have less neighbouring, less community participation, and less localism. Suburbs also are more private and anonymous, possibly because they are not “whole” communities but only the residential piece. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
The suburbs lack the overlapping social networks found in small towns where people work and shop as well as live together. In most suburbs residents must commute outside the proximate community for work or shopping. Suburbs, while having more neighbouring than cities, have less than small towns Suburbs similarly lack the strong informal social control mechanisms of small towns, which leads to suburbs having greater freedom, more anonymity, and more peace and quiet, and less crimes because people are busy working and demand a peaceful environment while they are at home. Socially as well as physically, suburbs are a middle landscape. Wherever you are, whatever you turn to, you are in a wretched state, unless you turn to God. So you do not succeed in everything you do? What is the big fuss? What self-actualized gets everything one wants? Not I, not you, not anyone else on the face of this Earth. No even a king, pope, or Paris Hilton. All Worldlings must wade through the gutters or tribulation and anguish. If anyone fares better, then one is in a good position to suffer rather more for God’s sake. “Look, there goes a man who has got a good life!” That is what the general public says. “He has got a lot of money, a big Cresleigh Home, a 2007 high performance luxury sports car BMW Concept CS, friends in high places!” However, there is another way. Look to the Celestial, and you will see that the Temporal does not amount to a great deal. Possessions are here one day, gone the next. If you are overly possessive, then your mind plays a trick. Everyone you meet is plotting to swipe them. Ten of everything? Having ten BMWs will not make your bottom ten times happier. One of everything will do. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
Misery, if you want the true definition of the word, is just living on this Earth. The more your attention to the sweetness of spiritual things, the more you realize how bitter the experience is. That is because you feel more dearly and see more clearly the defects of human corruption. To eat, drink, watch, sleep, relax, labour, and be subject to all the bodily functions, to have to do all these things, that is the truly great misery. That is the great affliction, one has o conclude. Free from sin, and free for Heaven—that is the freedom to pray for. The bag of bones we have to lug around this World is a rackety load. The Psalmist knew (27.17). Hence, his heart-rendering cry, “Grasp my body with one hand, O Lord, and with the other rip my heart from it!” Imagine a place with out air, noise, and water pollution. Imagine a place where there was peace and quiet and happiness. Imagine a land of long white vistas, ice cold saviours, gleaming glaciers, breaking into the sea. Imagine the Earth so awesome, so vast, so pure, we can hardly breathe its air. Imagine the Earth alive with morning, shimmer white nights, no end of sky, no end of sea. Lord God of our fathers, God of American, please keep this forever in the inward thoughts of the heart of Thy people, and direct their heart unto Thee, for Thou, being merciful, full of compassion, forgiveth iniquity and destroyeth not; yea, many a time Thou turnest anger away. For Thou, O Lord, art good, and ready to forgive, and abounding in mercy unto all who call upon Thee. They righteousness is everlasting, and Thy Law is truth. Thou wilt show faithfulness to Jacob and mercy to Abraham, as Thou hast promised unto our fathers from the days of blessed. Blessed is the Lord who day by day bears our burden. It is said that our relations deepen the secrets hidden from the truth. It may be said, however, there are some stones better left unturned. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
Cresleigh Homes
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More Often than Not, You Will Find in Your Cell What You Lost in the Streets!
We denounce bigotry of the past, unlike our own. However, if we encounter a race totally different from our own, are we doomed to repeat that past? Peering down into those mysterious depths of the “I” which are far deeper than its human and bestial layers, one will come to a region where personality becomes essence. The psychoanalyst cannot reach it by one’s intellectual and hypnotic methods, but the mystic, by one’s intuitive and contemplatives ones, can. The Soul has its chance to have its voice heard also when the conscious self it too fatigued by the troubles of life to offer resistance. If one understands that the origin of these spiritual moments is one’s own best self, one will understand too that the shortest and quickest way to recapture them is to go directly to that self, while the surest way to keep their happiness for life is to keep constantly aware of the self. Only when the heart has been utterly emptied of all its ties can the divine presence come into it. If you can empty it only for a few moments, do not lament in despair when the visit of the presence comes to an end after a few moments. Sometimes one is lifted up by the beauty of Nature’s forms or man’s arts, sometimes by the discipline of moral experience or religious worship, sometimes by the personal impact of a great soul. Some people have even felt this calmness, which precedes and follows a glimpse, in a warm-water bath; while enjoying or luxuriating in its comfort, they have half-given themselves up to a half-drowsy half-emptiness of mind. Some self-actualized are able to pass from this calmness to the deeper stage, or state, of the glimpse itself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
If one understands the process where by one arrived at illumination, one will know how to recover it if and when it fades away. However, if arrived at it by an unconscious process, then when one loses it one will not know how to help oneself. Is it possible, if the Divine is formless, motionless, voiceless, and matterless, to recognize It when the quest brings us to a glimpse of It? The answer is Yes! but either intuition well-developed or intelligence well-instructed is needed: otherwise it happens by faith. Whether it be a mountain scene or a peaceful meadow, a distinguished poem or an impressive opera, the particular source of an unaccustomed exaltation is not the most important thing. Such a visitation can also have its origin in no outside source but within oneself. It should be remembered that whatever kind of prayer is adopted, the glimpse which comes from it comes because we have provided the right condition for its appearance, not because our own doing makes the glimpse appear. For it comes from the realm of timelessness with which we come into some sort of harmony through the intuitive nature. What we do is in the realm of time, and it can only produce effects of a like nature. It contracting the Overself, one does not really sense a bigger “I.” One senses SOMETHING which is. This is first achieved by forgetting the ego, the personality, the “I.” However, at a later stage, there is nothing to forget for then one finds that the ego, the personality, and the “I” are of the same stuff as this SOMETHING. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Who does not seek transitory joy? Who does not occupy oneself with the World? We all do. However, the one who has a good conscience, serves all tentacles to attachment, mediates on divine and salutary things—one has the one who places one’s whole hope in Go. One has the one who sails one’s yacht on a sea of calm. No one can ascend to Heavenly Consolation. That is because there is no sure stair. One solid step, though, is our heart’s True Sorrow. And where else can this sorrow be found but in one’s cubicle. There you can shut out the hubbub of the World. “In your cubicles, on your cots, work out your sorrowful contrition,” said the Psalmist (4.4). More often than not, you will find in your cell what you lost in the streets. A cell that is much prayed in is a pleasant spot. A cell that is rarely prayed in is a forbidding place. That makes sense, does it not? In the first blush of your conversion you cultivated the solitude of your cell, and guarded against all invasion of your quietude. Now you find it warming, welcoming, like a Victorian mansion or a cottage in the forest. In quiet and silence the faithful soul makes progress, the hidden meanings of the Scriptures become clear, and the eyes weep with devotion every night. Even as one learns to grow still, one draws closer to the Creator and farther from the hurly-burly of the World. As one divests oneself of one set of friends and acquaintances, one’s visited by another, God and His Holy Angeles. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Two courses of action. Better, to lie still in one’s cubicle and worry about one’s spiritual welfare. Worse, to roam the streets a wonder-worker for others to the neglect of one’s own spiritual life. Laudable it is for the Religious to go to market only rarely. Laudable too is that, even when one does go, one refrains from meeting the eyes of others; from one’s very mien they know that one lives in another World. Why do you want to go out and see what you really should not need to see? “The World passes, as does its concupiscence,” wrote John the Evangelist in his First Letter (2.17). Our sensual desires promise us a promenade, but deliver us only a dragonnade. A sprightly step in the forenoon turns into a draggled tail in the afternoon. All-nighters of roister-doistery lead only to mornings of hugger-muggery, that is to say, of sickness and sadness. Need I ask? Every carnal joy begins with a caress, or so the Proverb goes (32.31-32), but in the end curls up into a furry ball and dies. I ask the question again. What can you see outside the monastery walls that you cannot see inside? Behold Heaven and Earth and all the elements; from these all things are made. What can you see on the outside that will survive the Sun? That was the sort of question the Ancient Preacher in Ecclesiastes asked (2.11). What is your answer? Perhaps you can find satisfaction somewhere out there, but truth to tell, you still cannot reach out to touch it. If you were to see all the things in all the World crammed into one still life, no matter how large the canvas, you would still be no better off. “Raise your eyes to God in the highest,” said the Psalmist (123.1). #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Pray for your own sins and negligences. Forgive the vain things vain people have done to you. Look to the precepts God gave you. “Shut he door behind you,” wrote the Evangelist Matthew (6.6). Call Jesus, your Beloved Friend, to join you. Remain with Him in your cell. Why? You will no find peace like this anywhere else in the World. If you had not gone outside the walls, you would not have heard the disturbing rumors; better for you to have stayed inside in blissful ignorance. From which it follows that you may delight in hearing the latest news on the strand, but you will surely have to deal with the terrible dislocation that results. In January 1950, just as the second half of the twentieth century opened, a gangling twenty-two-year-old with a newly minted university diploma took a long bus ride through the night into what he regarded as the central reality of our time. With his girl friend at his side and a pasteboard suitcase filled with books under the seat, he watched a gunmetal dawn come up as the factories of the American Middlewest slid endlessly past the rain-swept window. America was the heartland of the World. The region ringing the Great Lakes was the industrial heartland of America. And the factory was the throbbing core of this heart of hearts: steel mills, aluminum foundries, tool and die shops, oil refineries, auto plans, mile after mils of dingy buildings vibrating with huge machines for tamping, punching, drilling, bending, welding, forging, and casting metal. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
The factory was the symbol of the entire industrial era and, to a boy raised in a semi-comfortable lower-middle-class home, after four years of Plato and T.S. Eliot, of art history and abstract social theory, the World it represented was as exotic as Tashkent or Tierra del Fuego. I spent five years in those factories, not as a clerk or personnel assistant but as an assembly hand, a millwright, a welder, a forklift driver, a punch press operator—stamping out fans, fixing machines in a foundry, building giant dust-control machines for African mines, finishing the metal on light trucks as they sped clattering and screeching past on the assembly line. I learned firsthand how factory workers struggled to earn a living in the industrial age. I swallowed the dust the sweat and smoke on the foundry. My ears were split by the hiss of steam, the clank of chains, the roar of pug mills. I felt the heat as the white-hot steel poured. Acetylene sparks left burn marks on my legs. I turned out thousands of pieces a shift on a press, repeating identical movements until my mind and muscles shrieked. I watched the managers who kept the workers in their place, white-shirted men themselves endlessly pursued and harried by higher-ups. I helped lift a sixty-five-year-old woman out of the bloody machine that had just torn four finger off her hand, and I still hear her cries—“Jesus and Mary, I won’ be able to work again!” The factory. Lone live the factory! Today, even as new factories are being built, the civilization that made the factory into a cathedral is dying. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
And somewhere, right now, other young men and women are driving through the night into the heart of the emergent Third Wave civilization. Our task from here on will be to join, as it were, their quest for tomorrow. If we could pursue them to their destinations, where would we arrive? In the launching stations that hurl flaming vehicles and fragments of human consciousness into outer space? In oceanographic laboratories? In communal families? In teams working on artificial intelligence? In passionate religious sects? Are they living in voluntary simplicity? Are they climbing the corporate ladder? Are they running guns to terrorists? Where is the future being forged? If we ourselves were planning a similar expedition into the future, how would we prepare our maps? It is easy to say the future begins in the present. However, which present? Our present is exploding with paradox. Our children are supersophisticated about contraband, pleasures of the flesh, space shots; some know far more about computers than their parents. Yet educational test scores plummet. Divorce rates continue their climb—but so do remarriage rates. Counterfeminists arise at the exact same time that women win rights even the counterfeminists endorse. Gays demand their rights and come charging out of the closet—only to find Anita Bryant, Tim Wildmon and the spirit of Jerry Falwell Sr. waiting for them. Intractable inflation gripped all the Second Wave nations, yet unemployment continued to deepen, contradicting all our classical theories. At the very same time, in defiance of the logic of supply and demand, millions are were demanding not merely jobs but work that was creative, psychologically fulfilling, or socially responsible. Economic contradictions multiplied. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
In politics, parties lose the allegiance of their members at the precise moment when key issues—technology, for example—are becoming more politicized than ever. Meanwhile, over vast reaches of the Earth, nationalist movements gain power—at the exact instant that the nation-state comes under intensifying attack in the name of globalism or planetary consciousness. Faced with such contradictions, how might we see behind the trends and countertrends? No one, alas, has any magic answer to that question. Despite all the computer printouts, cluster diagrams, and mathematical models and matrices that futurist researchers use, our attempts to peer into tomorrow—or even to make sense of today—remains, as they must, more an art than a science. Systematic research can teach us much. However, in the end we must embrace—not dismiss—paradox and contradiction, hunch, imagination, and daring (though tentative) synthesis. In probing the future in the pages that follow, therefore, we must do more than identify major trends. Difficult as it may be, we must resist the temptation to be seduced by straight lines. Most people—including many futurists—conceive of tomorrow as a mere extension of today, forgetting that trends, no matter how seemingly powerful, do not merely continue in a linear fashion. They reach tipping points at which they explode into new phenomena. They are reverse direction. They stop and start. Because something is happening now, or has been happening for three hundred years, is no guarantee that it will continue. We shall, in the pages ahead, watch for precisely those contradictions, conflicts, turnabouts, and breakpoints that make the future a continuing surprise. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
More important, we will search out the hidden connections among events that on the surface seem unrelated. It does little good to forecast the future of semiconductors or energy, or the future of the family (even one’s own family), if the forecast springs from the premise that everything else will remain unchanged. For nothing will remain unchanged. The future is fluid, not frozen. It is constructed by our shifting and changing daily decisions, and each event influences all others. There is a growing use of Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) devices that are being used to improve and maintain health of machines and people. MEMS technology supports motion sensors that detect, report, and collect information on anything that moves. The data these sensors generate are applied to many aspects of our daily lives, ranging from necessary and practical safety standards to augmented reality entertainment. There are three sensors that detect specific types of motion: accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers. An accelerometer sense, title, acceleration, vibration, and impact. With calculations and sampled measurements, acceleration measurements can be used to determine speed. A gyroscope senses rotation relative to an axis. A magnetometer detects magnetic fields on Earth. Like a compass, which also responds to magnetic fields, a magnetometer indicates which way is North. These components are often used together either on a board or integrated in an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). AN IMU may comprise two or three sensors. For example, a 6-axis IMU contains a 3-axis accelerometer and a 3-axis gyroscope; adding a 3-axis magnetometer create a 9-axis IMU. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
This technology is applied in many ways that can enhance our daily lives. These devices can revolutionize things like automotive repair and health care. These MEMS are as small as a grain of coffee, but they are tiny computers that can be embedded into a vehicle and made to make engine repairs. Only one our as many as a group of 30 can be used to do the repair without harming the system. An accelerometer is part of many safety devices. It is often used to trigger an alarm when abrupt acceleration occurs, helping prevent physical damage. Accelerometer are also used for maintenance. With ongoing stress of motion, when moving parts eventually become worn or misaligned a new vibration occurs. By monitoring active machinery, accelerometers detect such vibrations at an early stage, long before you can feel or see the effects of wear and tear. This capability of detecting this minute beginning of wear and tear allows lower-cost maintenance to be performed, long before significant and expensive damage occurs. MEMS are used to monitor the health and wellness of people. They can also monitor the body from the inside and make getting blood test and checks of vitals unnecessary. Biosensors also have Early Warning System (EWS). They constantly monitor the body from the inside and send codes to make the necessary adjustments to the system. Additionally, vital signs are transmitted from the patient to the EWS. The information is processed with advanced algorithms that provide caregivers with the status of a patient’s current condition. When medical intervention is needed, the EWS sends an alert. They can also be used to perform surgery. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Many people are personally interested in maintaining and improving their health. Imagine if these MEMS could detect how much sugar, fats, salt and water and other nutrients is needed that day to keep you at optimal health. And could also tell you how much exercise you needed that day to gain or lose with or maintain weight, and come up with a healthy program for that day. MEMS can also provide enhanced self-care a step further by reminding a person when medication is necessary. Second Wave civilization placed an extremely heavy emphasis on our ability to dismantle problems into their components; it rewarded us less often for the ability to put the pieces back together again. Most people are culturally more skilled as analysts than synthesists. This is one reason why our images of future (and of our selves in that future) are so fragmentary, haphazard—and wrong. Our job here will be to think like generalists, not specialists. Today I believe we stand on the edge of a new synthesis. In all intellectual fields, from the hard sciences to sociology, psychology, and economics—especially economics—we are likely to see a return to large-scale thinking, to general theory, to the putting of the pieces back together again. For it is beginning to dawn on us that our obsessive emphasis on quantified detail without context, on progressively finer and finer measurement of smaller and smaller problems, leaves us knowing more and more about less and less. Our approach in what follows, therefore, will be to look for those streams of change that are shaking our lives, to reveal the underground connections among them, not simply because of these is important in itself, but because of the way these streams of change run together to form even larger, deeper, swifter rivers of change that, in turn, flow into something till larger: the Third Wave. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Like that young man who set out in mid-century to find the heart of the present, we now begin our search for the future. This search may be the most important of our lives. The negative attacks on the suburbs was short-lived. Events on the national and international scene soon shifted elsewhere. The outbreak of urban riots in central cities, the focus on the War on Poverty, and growing protests regarding the continuing wars in other counties all contributed to attention sharply shifting away from suburbs lacking rootedness and maturation. The focus of researchers, politicians, and citizens now was on the inner city. The pressing needs of the city eclipsed other urban activities. The emphasis was on “relevancy,” and suburban patterns and concerns were not judged to meet the test. With all the inner-city problems, why “waste” attention on suburbs? By the late 1970s, terms “urban research” and “urban studies” had all but become synonymous with the study of central-city problems such as poverty, racial conflict, crime, and drugs. Suburbs continued to rapidly expand, but there was only minimal interest by researchers and funding agencies in carrying out new suburban-based research. As a result, new suburban-oriented research came to a virtual halt. There were a few exceptions to the general fixation on inner cities. One of the most promising was the emergence of emergence of urban history as a distinct and viable area of historical research. City residents emphasized the importance of location, while suburbanites ranked the quality of house and the characteristics of neighbours ahead of location. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Another sign of our growing understanding of suburbs was the comparative examination of suburbanization in different settings. The higher-density garden apartment and high-rise, mid-level rise, and low-rise buildings of the suburbs in Sweden were built both to be self-contained and to have easy access to the city by public transportation. By contrast, the dispersed American pattern of detached single-family homes provides less social support and access to the larger area for groups such as woman and children. The 1980s saw the study of suburbanization experience a mild revival. Suburbia was losing it solely residential character. Looking toward the future of multicentered metropolises. The 1990s was the rise of the Mc Mansions and gated communities. These larger than average homes, nearly the size of mansions, and some actually legally are mansions, made suburban research fully come into its own. They were called Mc Mansions because they were not mansions like those produced in the gilded ages, but they were more like baby mansion track homes with custom features and oversized rooms, which caused a lot of people to envy products of new money. They were grander than the typical homes produced, and came with butler’s panty’s, walk in pantries, floor to ceiling windows, vaulted ceilings, zero-threshold showers, wider door openings, wider hallways, backing for future grab bars, lowered light switches, upstairs lobbies, workshops, sever patio areas, California Rooms, Florida Rooms, and there was a reemergence of formal dining rooms. These changes made it increasingly clearly recognized that the outer cities are not an aberration from, or extension of, the old core-periphery model. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Rather, outer cities (suburbs) represent a new organizational model. The increasing ethnic diversity in suburbs also is beginning to receive major attention. It is now apparent that for North America, the twenty-first century will be suburban dominated. This represents a major departure from how we have for centuries viewed our urban places. Overlapping but somewhat separate from the question of suburban lifestyles is that of a unique suburban ideology. By ideology we mean the set of belief that provide a symbolic rendering of social reality. Community ideologies not only provide shared views of the World as it is perceived to be, they also provide a community moral landscape of what is identified at the “good life.” In the case of suburbs, the mass postwar migration was for many the pursuit of the “American Dream.” This was he belief that there was something about living in lower-density, single-family homes outside the city that produced new forms of community. This is what was discussed earlier as the “myth of suburbia.” Here, when we discuss ideology, as was the case with lifestyles, the focus is on the ideology of upper-middle and middle-class residential suburbs. We definitely are not speaking of older industrial suburbs such as Cudahy, Wisconsin; Calumet City, Illinois; or Hamtramck, Michigan. In fact, our image of what a suburb looks like who lives there, and how they view themselves does not at all fit these old, working-class, industrial communities. If not antagonistic, Americans continue to have an ideology that is largely ambivalent about great cities. There is nothing particularly recent about this ambivalence. Throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, Americas have been pouring into the cities while idealizing the country. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The writings of Thomas Jefferson are typically American in equating the city with evils and corruption of the old order while having the yeoman farmer and his wife and children typify wholesome virtue. As expressed by Jefferson in a letter to his friend and neighbour James Madison: “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant land in many parts of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.” The image of the Jeffersonian self-sufficient yeoman working the Earth as the real genuine American as opposed to someone associated with the pomp, artifice, and degeneracy of the city still resonates today. The anti-Washington ideology of recent political campaign certainly is, in some respects, a lineal descendant of Jefferson’s views as to the corrupting effect of urban life. American ideology for two hundred years has viewed individualism and self-reliance as more compatible with rural than urban habits. The frontiersman clearing the wilderness or the cowboy riding he range have been glorified into American myths. Immigrant factory workers or less affluent women garment workers slaving in sweatshops are somehow less laudable. In practice, we behave as if we consider the history of our urban ancestors as somewhat discreditable and, thus, best forgotten. Henry David Thoreau, sitting in rural solitude at eventide at Walden Pond, is ideologically acceptable. Mr. Thoreau sitting on this front stoop in Boston during the evening rush hour creates a less acceptable image. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Surveys clear demonstrate the abiding strength of antiurban images and ideologies in American life. In fact, in a 2021 survey, 40 percent said they plan to move out of San Francisco, California USA because of increasing crime and homelessness. Some 43 percent of Boston residents, 48 percent of those living in Los Angeles, and a full 60 percent of those living in New York City say if they could leave, they would. The extent of suburban disconnection is apparent among New York’s suburbanites over half (53 percent) visited the city for nonbusiness purposes fewer than five times a year; 25 percent of the suburbanites totally avoided the city, and 75 percent felt their lives unaffected by what occurred in the city. However, most disconcerting to those believing the Big Apple is the essential center of the Universe was that over half (54 percent) the New York suburbanites felt they did not even belong to the New York area. They did no want to be thought of as New Yorkers. Ideologically, they had disassociated themselves from the city. At the same time we denigrate urban living, we idealize rural life. The mental construct of “rural” living continues to enjoy an existence that is antithetical to reality. This can be clearly seen when American are polled on the basic question of where they desire to live. The reality is that America counts over half its population living in metropolitan areas of a million or more, while less than two percent of the population still resides on farms. Americans nonetheless, show a considerable gap between where they say they want to live and where they actually live. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Put in simplest terms, Americans live in cities and metropolitan suburbs, but they say they prefer farms and small towns. With the cost of affordable housing becoming hard to find, and major cities becoming less desirable, many people are turning to the website Instagram and looking at site like old_house_life, and www.cheapoldhouses.com to find Victorian houses in small towns that are often between 3,000 to 5,000 square feet and priced between $100,000.00 to $250,000.00, often times with acers of land that need restoration, and choosing to buy them. There is also another site on Instagram called syrlandbank. They have many Victorian houses in Syracuse, New York that are for sale for between $2,000.00 to $10,000.00, but need approximately $100,000.00 in renovation. The Home Ownership Choice program allows someone to purchase the home, as long as they show proof of funds in the amount of purchase price and renovation costs, and sometimes they require that the home remains owner-occupied. Essentially, one can buy a house for approximately $100,000.00. Nonetheless, three quarters (77 percent) of Americans live in metropolitan areas of over 100,000 persons, but slightly less than a quarter (23 percent) say they want to live in metropolitan areas that large. Polls over the years have contined to demonstrate the lure of rural and smaller places. Today only 2 percent of the population still live on a farm, but 17 percent of the population express the wish to live on a farm, and an additional 8 percent would like to live in a rural area but not on a farm. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Rural images and supposed rural values continue to hold popular appeal (often while simultaneously being judged to be dull and confining). In seems to make no difference that our ideas of what constitutes rural life and the nature of rural values come to us largely from the urban-based mass media. For most of us, our image of small-town life comes to us from television productions written in New York or Los Angeles and produced in Hollywood, California; Atlanta, Georgia; and Toronto, Canada. Commercials also play to our yearning for open spaces and honest relationships. Advertisements for everything from cereal to cars rely heavily on Norman Rockwell nostalgia filled with friendly “down-home” folks. The manipulative use of vintage cars and trucks, farmhouses, and verandas with porch swings fills out the essentially ideal images of rural life. How much of this glorification of rural and small-town life is nostalgia for a World that is now gone, and that most Americans alive today never knew, is difficult to day. There is also considerable expressed support for small-town living. Nonetheless, it is clear that among those expressed support for small-town living. Nonetheless, it is clear that among those saying they want to move out to rural areas, there is no real desire to isolate themselves from urban advantages. Research continues to indicate that the bulk of those seeking to live within 30 miles of a big city. Are greatest achievements do more than heal the sick, and give strength to the weak. They also lead us to a place of hope and light. With each new generation, hopes of a brighter future are rekindled, but until we shrug off the shackles, we will remain prisoners of our own ignorance. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Attacks on the idea that we are self-made people—that thanks to our free will we are independently capable of righteousness—have come not only from determinist but also from several theological masterminds, among them Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonatan Edwards. Together they remind us that our conception of human responsibility must not deny three attributes of God: foreknowledge, sovereignty, and grace. Scripture portrays the selling of Joseph into slavery, the evil acts of Pharaoh, Peter’s denial, Judas’s betrayal of Christ, and the crucifixion as all the result of human choices that God anticipates. Such evidence moved Luther to conclude, “If we believe it to be true that God foreknows and foreordains all things; that He cannot be deceived or obstructed in His foreknowledge and predestination; and that nothing happens but at His will (which reason itself is compelled to grant); then, no reason’s own testimony, there can be no “free-will” in man, or Angel, or in any creature. God’s foreknowledge need not imply divine determinism. Surely, God is unbound by time and therefore able to see out past, present, and future. Consider, however, the implication of God’s sovereignty and grace: John Edwards would not give so much as an inch to human free will, because to the extent that human will is indeterminant—spontaneous and free—God’s plans become dependent on our decisions. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
However, this said Edwards, would necessitate God’s “constantly changing his mind and intentions” in order to achieve His purposes. “They who thus plead for man’s liberty, advance principles which destroy the freedom of God Himself,” the sovereign God of whom Jesus Chris said not even a sparrow falls to the ground apart from His will. Nor is human will added to God’s will such that the two together equal 100 percent. Rather, agreed Augustine, “Our wills themselves are included in that order of causes which is certain to God.” God is working in and through our lives, our choices. Spirit that hears each one of us, hears all that is—listens, listens, hears us out—please inspire us now! Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s heart, and also there within the flowered ground beneath our feet, and— please teach us to listen! We can hear it in water, in wood, and even in stone. We are Earth of this Earth, as we are bone of its bone. This is a prayer I sing, for we have forgotten this and so the Earth is perishing. However, happy are they that dwell in Thy house; they will ever praise Thee. Happy is the people who thus fare; yea, happy is the people whose God is the Lord. I will extol Thee, my God, O King, and I will bless Thy name for ever and ever. Every day will I bless Thee, and I will praise Thy name for ever and ever. Great is the Lord, and highly to be praised; His greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall laud Thy works to another, and shall declare Thy might acts. On the majestic glory of Thy splendor, and on Thy wondrous deeds will I meditate. And humans shall proclaim the might of Thy tremendous acts; and I will recount Thy greatness. They shall make known the fame of Thy great goodness, and shall exult in Thy righteousness. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Jdaarch
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Make No Mistake About it–Which of the Five is in Need of Psychiatric Treatment?!
The United States of America was primarily established to serve as a base for the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We have not celebrated often or deeply enough the birth of this promised land, this choice and beautiful and still-young land, which we possess as the Lord’s gift in freedom and joy—just as long as we serve Him. Men and women and children of courage and vision and faith, strengthened by God as a part of His plan, who struggled, froze, starved, and when necessary died, that these free states in union might me born, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “To assume, among the powers of the Earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them. It is worth a lot to the new Americans of that hour to begat this nation—worth all they had, all they were, and all that they had dreamed. What it was worth today, to you and me, and especially to us Christians, who alone know that the Lord is doing, to asset our free agency toward the fulfilling of His plan? The religious commitment of the self-actulized depends more on the grace of God than on one’s own wisdom. One always relies on one’s vows no matter what the labour one puts one’s hand to. Humans proposes, but God disposes, as the Book of Proverbs has it (16.9). And as a sad prophet has happily noted, “A human’s path is not always a product of one’s own planning”; do look at Jeremiah (10.23). If a scheduled spiritual exercise is omitted for a good reason—say, so that you can hide an act of charity or help a needy brother—it can easily be rescheduled. If, however, the reason it is left undone is soul weariness or just plain negligence, that is enough to make it culpable in itself, and may be considered injurious to spiritual progress. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Try through we do, we know we are going to fall short in many ways. However, that is no excuse. Let us try again as hard as we can. Second Wave civilization not only built up new images of time and space and used them to shape daily behaviour, it constructed its own answers to the age-old question: What are things made of? Every culture invents its own myths and metaphors in an attempt to answer this question. For some, the Universe is imagined as a swirling “oneness.” People are seen as a part of nature, integrally tied into their lives of their ancestors and descendants, stitched into the nature, integrally tied into the lives of their ancestors and descendants, stitched into the natural World so closely as to share in the actual “livingness” of animals, trees, rocks, and rivers. In many societies, moreover, the individual conceives of herself or himself less as a private, autonomous entity than as part of a larger organism—the family, the clan, the tribe or the community. Other societies have emphasized not the wholeness or unity of the Universe but its dividedness. They have looked upon reality not as a fused entity but as a structure built up out of many individual parts. Some two thousand years before the rise of industrialism Democritus put forward the then extraordinary idea that the Universe was not a seamless whole but consisted of particles—discrete, indestructible, irreducible, invisible, unsplittable. One called these particles atomos. In the centuries that followed, the idea of a Universe built out of irreducible blocks of matter appeared and reappeared. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
In the middle of the seventeenth century a French abbe named Pierre Gassendi, an astronomer and philosopher at the Royal College in Paris began arguing that matter must consist of ultra-small corpuscula. Influenced by Lucretius, Gassendi became so forceful an advocate of the atomic view of matter that his ideas soon crossed the English Channel and reached Robert Boyle, a young scientist studying the compressibility of gas. Dr. Boyle transferred the idea of atomism from speculative theory into the laboratory and concluded that even air itself was composed of tiny particles. Six years after Dr. Gassendi’s death, Dr. Boyle published a treatise arguing that any substance—Earth, for example—that could be broken down into simpler substances is not, and could not be, an element. Meanwhile, Rene Descartes, a Jesuit-trained mathematician whom Dr. Gassendi criticized, contended that reality could only be understood by breaking it down into smaller and smaller bits. In his own words, it was necessary “to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible.” Side by side, therefore, as the Second Wave began its surge, philosophical atomism advanced with physical atomism. Here was a deliberate assault on the notion of oneness—an assault promptly joined by wave after wave of scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers who proceeded to break the Universe into even smaller fragments, with exciting results. Once Descartes published his Discourse on Method, writes the microbiologist Rene Dubos, “innumerable discoveries immediately emerged from its application to medicine.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
In chemistry and other fields the combination of atomic theory and Descartes’s atomic method brought startling breakthroughs. By the mid-1700’s the notion that the Universe consisted of independent separable parts and subparts was itself conventional wisdom—part of the emerging indust-reality. Every new civilization plucks ideas from the past and reconfigures them in ways that help it understand itself in relationship to the World. For a budding industrial society—a society just beginning to move toward the mass production of assembled machine products composed of discrete components—the idea of an assembled Universe, itself composed of discrete components, was probably indispensable. There were political and social reasons, too, for the acceptance of the atomic model of reality. As the Second Wave crashed against the old pre-existing Firs Wave institutions, it needed to tear people loose from the extended family, the all-powerful church, the monarchy. Industrial capitalism needed a rational for individualism. As the old agricultural civilization decayed, as trade expanded and towns multiplied in the century or two before the dawn of industrialism, the rising merchant classes, demanding the freedom to trade and lend and expand their markets, gave rise to a new conception of the individual—the person as atom. The person was no longer merely a passive appendage of tribe, caste, or clan but a free, autonomous individual. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Each individual had the right to own property, to acquire good, to wheel and deal, to prosper or starve according to his or her own active efforts, with the corresponding right to choose a religion and to pursue private happiness. In short, indust-reality gave rise to a conception of an individual who was remarkably like an atom-irreducible, indestructible, the basic particle of society. The atomic theme even appeared, as we have seen, in politics where the vote became the ultimate particle. It reappeared in our conception of international affairs as consisting of the self-contained, impenetrable, independent units called nations. Not only physical matter but social and political matter were conceived in terms of “brick”—autonomous units or atoms. The atomic theme ran through every sphere of life. This view of reality as composed of organized sparable chunks, in turn, fitted perfectly together with the new images of time and space, themselves divisible into smaller and smaller definable units. Second Wave civilization, as it expanded and overpowered both “primitive” societies and First Wave civilization, propagated this increasingly coherent and consistent industrial view of people, politics, and society. Implicit in the developing myth regarding suburbanites and their lifestyles was a naïve determinism that assumed that the characteristics of the built environment changed how people believed and acted. Thus, moving from city to suburb could and would change patterns of socialization to say nothing of modifying political, religious, and child-reading practices. In brief, suburban residence changes social behaviour. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
William H. Whyte, if willing to make broad-stroke statements about life in Park Forest, was more careful in his generalizing to other types of suburbs and suburbanites. Other writers showed restraint. Even some scholars such as David Riesman got carried away, charging that the suburban family was surrendering all individuality and creativity. Implied was the view that all suburbs were similar and all produced conformity and a long list of social maladies. As portrayed in the postwar caricatures, suburbia was a producer of conformity, compulsive socializing, adultery, alcoholism, divorce, and boredom. Psychiatrists argued that the stress of suburban living additionally led to psychosomatic illness, suicide, and mental illness in general. Typical of the stereotypic statements was that of the late Margaret Mead, who stated that, “Settled in their new homes and finding themselves with nothing to do at home, suburbanites are caught in the boredom characteristic of the American family when its members are imprisoned with one another.” Suburban life had, in her view, degenerated into “a living room or a recreation room which often resembles a giant playpen into which the parents have somewhat reluctantly climbed.” Particularly influential was an article by David Riseman, “The Suburban Dislocation” (later reprinted as “The Suburban Sadness”), which further popularized the stereotype of suburbs as a monocultural destroyer of urban diversity. Suburbs were, in his view, antithetical to developing a true urban culture, which could only be found in the density and diversity of large unban centers. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Moreover, when men (and Mr. Riseman’s focus in this earlier era, when there were few female suburban commuters, was on males) moved from the city to the suburbs, they were accused of removing their attention and abilities from important urban concerns and problems. They were portrayed as wasting their talents on parochial suburban activities such as Little League. They had become obsessed with family concerns to the detriment of their civic responsibilities. Such portrayals of suburban life were widely accepted as factual. Interestingly, the criticisms of husbands being overinvolved with family matters was the reverse of the criticism of progressive writers at the turn of the century. Then, the concern was the middle-class husbands did not become sufficiently involved in, nor spend enough time with, their families. According to the wisdom of the 1950s, suburban husbands and fathers were too family focused. Currently, the pendulum has swung again, and fathers are again portrayed in popular magazines as needing to be more involved in day-to-day family life. A much-quoted social-psychological study of an affluent suburb, Crestwood Heights, (actually not a suburb, but an outer-city neighbourhood of Toronto), carried out by John Seeley and his colleagues, seemed to provide empirical support for the belief that suburban lifestyles were bad for one’s mental health. Crestwood Heights was in many respects a fine ethnology of a suburb where people worn minks and were driven around in limousines, but its analysis was prone o psychological overanalysis. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Also, there is the technicality of Crestwood Heights, one of Canada’s wealthy residential districts—not being a suburb, but an outer area of Toronto. In Crestwood Heights there supposedly little individuality. Children were carefully socialized to conform to their parents’ culture of status consciousness and using their homes more for status displays then for living. Suburbia, thus, was seen as encouraging pathological family and child-rearing behaviours. The children were seen as “overprivileged” because the parents in general took an enlightened rather than a frightened attituded toward their children’s mental hygiene. Because they were enlightened and because they could afford it. The parents and children probably spent more time on personality tests and on psychiatrists’ couches than any comparable group in Canada. The mental health services among these fewer than 2,000 pupils were rated among the best in the country. However, the community was attacked so newspapers could produce something sensational by picking out exciting bits. Such as the descriptions of the large homes being cold and lacking in life, or looking like department stores. There was also an interpretation that one and five of these affluent children needed psychiatric attention. Stories sprouted up about a woman whose fanatic devotion to broadloom caused her to lay it wall to wall—right into the fireplace. Others were censorious: tales of rich children dwelling like mushrooms in the basements of their immaculate homes, or of that school were many kids walked around naked. Many more of these stories were unprintable. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
The immediate result was that demand in Crestwood Heights increased. These shocking stories of Stepford Wives, and children from Keeping Up With The Joneses actually made the community more appealing. These problems that normal people did not have. They were struggling to keep their kids out of jail, pushing their husbands to find jobs, and praying that the rent money would not get “stolen” out of the sock drawer this month. Affluent Crestwood Heights children, baffled at first by the odd stories in the papers, eventually found them hilarious. Five would pose together in yearbook group pictures, and ask, “Which of the five is in need of psychiatric treatment?” The picturesque community full of parks and parkettes, not only were the houses one hundred and fifty thousand dollars more expensive than surrounding communities, but they were ringed by churches. Woman played a distinctly subsidiary role. Their place was seen as restricted largely to child rearing, consumerism, and coffee klatching. The postwar studies took it for granted that suburban women did not work outside the home. The studies also assumed that all suburban women were married. The studies, with the exception of Crestwood Heights, also said relatively little about the effect of suburbs on children, although suburbia was criticized for having a particularly pernicious impact on children rearing practices. It is amazing, in retrospect, that article after article would purport to show parents suffering from suburban-induced conformity, alcoholism, or promiscuity in respects to pleasures of the flesh, but little of this seemed to rub off on the children. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Suburbia might be deadly for adults, but there was little suggestion that suburbia ruined children or was in any way bad for them, as it was for their parents. The studies have no indication that for the suburban adolescents growing up in this simpler age, there were any serious family or community problems with delinquency, drugs, or dropping out. These topics were noticeable for their absence. Reading works of the 1950s, one gets the impression that most serious problems facing teenage makes was “momism,” brought on by overprotective and overpossessive mothering. According to one of he most quoted books of the time, an excess of female-dominated domesticity was raising a generation of sons lacking independence from the domination of their mothers (Philip Wylie, A Generation of Vipers, Ferrar and Rinehart, New York, 1942). Other problems rarely surfaced. Only in the occasional controversial movie such as Rebel Without a Cause or Clueless was there any suggestion that there could be a dark side to growing up in the suburbs. And even in the movies James Dean’s problems were clearly blamed on his parents’ drinking and neglect, and Alicia Silverstone’s problems were blamed on her father’s hard work and success, which robbed her of a female role model, and replaced her with money and designer clothes. Not surprisingly, adults criticized the “negativism” of these films, while teenagers in these simpler eras “rebelled” by seeing these films over and over and tried to emulate the characters. It was as if they found the holy grail. The experience that “I depend on parents who do not care” or that “I depend on another who does not care” will, in relatively mild circumstances, lead the individual (in us) to the sense that “I cannot direct my hopes toward my parents or others. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
In more severe circumstances, there is likely to be a sense that “the parents in whose power I am, is against me.” I believe that in truly severe cases, not only does the child feel “You and I are not us,” but the sense of “us” does not develop at all. Hence neither does the sense of you-as-part-of-us, nor the sense of me-as-part-of-us. The individual then has to live by relationships between “I” and “them,” and “him,” “her.” There is no real “you.” The object(s) of guardianship or dependence can then be experienced only as impinging and exploiting, never as protecting or sharing. When there is no “us” in which “I” and “they” are embedded, it must seem natural that others should resent any reminder that I have feelings and needs of my own in competition with theirs. The other disappears except as a menace: “I must not leave myself open to attack—I must not be found. I must keep myself safe from the guardian or object of dependence.” (We need perhaps to be reminded again at this point that we are not considering the guardian or object of dependence as known by other people—we are here considering how some dependent individuals may experience the World. However, perhaps we need also to remind ourselves that there are many more desperate and occasionally out of control guardians and people who others depend on than we dare publicly acknowledge.) “I” keep “myself” safe from “them.” This sentence, which is grammatically correct, is fully of splits and boundaries. It might indeed describe a person’s mind correctly, but a person on whose map such splits and boundaries are very marked could not be happy and rich and psychologically integrated personality. The “I” regions are cut off from “myself,” and both are cut from “them.” “We” and “you-as-part-of-us,” both integrating structures, are not established. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Such splits would cut off a person’s conscious “I” from much that is going on with “me” at the level of the body—the level of feelings and emotions, needs and impulses. In order to survive, I may have to make a habit of disregarding or disowning my feelings and my needs—I may have to alienate some regions of my self from other regions which have to do with feeling and needs. (Theory is assuming that needs and feelings are impulses and hopes are originally part of my “self” regions as these get established, so that a major effort has to be made to separate them out, a deliberate disintegrative effort.) A patient, in the following example, shows the depths at which “a cruel despising of weakness” can maintain a dramatic split between an active “I” and a suffering “me.” “She would rave against girl children and in fantasy would describe how she would crush a girl is she had one, and would then fall to punching herself (which perpetuated the beatings her mother gave her). One day I said to her, ‘You must feel terrified being hit like that.’ She stopped and started and said, ‘I’m not being hit. I’m the one that’s doing the hitting.’” This woman achieved an almost complete split of “I” from “me” and withdrew consciousness from these regions of herself which were “me.” Differentiation between self-regions is obviously a necessary ego-function. We all have to establish a split between “I” and “me.” When I say “I can see what is happening to me,” I reveal a split between “I” and “me,” but it is a necessary one, not a dangerous one. It is clear that I am not unconscious of “me,” rather that my consciousness can cover both “I” and “me.” However, sometimes there is too great an erosion of the natural connections between regions, as when someone says, “I do no know what is happening to me.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
It is in silence, and not in commotion, in solitude and not in crowds, that God best likes to reveal Himself most intimately to humans. Humans are by nature social beings What is true of nature in general—that no being exists on its own resources—is plainly true of humans as well. Babies, before and after birth, depend on their mothers and fathers. Beggars are dependent on the charity of the rich. The rich in turn are dependent on the services of those who make them rich and bring food to their table. Recognizing our interdependence, we value togetherness, communal fellowship, group activities, team sports, close relationships, self-disclosure, social support. To be withdrawn, a hermit, a loner, is an aberration. In recent psychology we have, however, seen a complementary awareness emerge. Too much social stimulation can be stressful. Crowding, noise, sensory overload, loss of privacy, anonymity, social anxiety, fear of victimization, extreme competitiveness, and impatience all take a toll on human well-being. What is more, times of social solitude can heal and renew. Such is the conclusion of an impressive series of studies conducted by the University of British Columbia researcher Peter Suedfeld and his colleagues. Dr. Suedfeld knew from earlier studies of sensory restriction that being alone in a monotonous environment heightens a person’s sensitivity to external or internal stimuli. So he offered hundreds of people an opportunity to tune more deeply into themselves through a twenty-four-hour experience of Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy—a literal day of REST. For a day, the person does nothing but lie quietly on a comfortable bed in the isolation of a dark and soundproofed room. Food, water, and a chemical toilet are available to service the body, and communication is possible over an intercom system through which brief persuasive messages may also be transmitted to the person. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
The day of REST has been notably successful in assisting people who wish to increase their self-control—to gain or lose weight, reduce alcohol intake, improve speech fluency, reduce hypertension, overcome irrational fears, boost self-confidence, or stop smoking. People report that the experience is a pleasant and stress-free way of reducing external stimulation to the point where still, small internal voices can be heard. The healing power of a period of aloneness can also be found in the lives of people who, by choice or necessity, have experienced periods of solitude. If one feels threatened, helpless, or malnourished, to be shipwrecked, to be placed in solitary confinement, or to be a solitary voyager can be traumatic. However, often there is a beneficial side to such experiences. The lone explorer or sailor may have a deep mystical experience—a new relationship with God, a feeling of oneness with the ocean or the Universe, a life-changing new insight into one’s personality. If prisoners in solitary confinement are otherwise assured of humane care, free of privation and torture, they often alleviate the boredom by studying, thinking, solving personal problems, or even planning their own rehabilitation. Scores of cultures on the American, African, Asian, and Australian continents incorporate a period of solitude into the life history of every individual, or at least of every male. The boy entering manhood leaves his community to wander alone in the desert, mountains, forest, or prairie. During this time he searches his soul, dreams a vision, communicates with the gods, or experiences the oneness of nature. Through the experience the boy grows beyond his previous self to a new level of consciousness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Backpacking Outward Bound adventuring (a monthlong program of outdoor physical activities) can offer similar experiences to level up. During the “Solo” component of Outward Bound and of many camping programs, the participants sometimes have mystical experiences that would do credit to any meditator. One study of 361 graduates of the twenty-six-day Australian Outward Bound programs found that the experience produced enduring improvements in self-concept. Traditional folk therapies for psychological disorders often have isolated the disturbed person for a time of aloneness. Many of today’s institutions for mentally disturbed juvenile or adult offenders use “time out” rooms in which an agitated person experiences solitude. In Japan, “quiet therapies” combine solitude with traditions inherited from Zen Buddhism. The depressed or anxious person may commence therapy with a week of bed rest and mediation, after which activities are gradually reintroduced. Dr. Suedfeld notes that many autobiographies and biographies confirm the creative power of solitude. Philosophers, scientists, and artists have experienced novel ideas while isolated. When we are freed from distraction and social demands, unusual things sometimes happen-vivid fantasies and memoires, relaxed emotions, beautiful sensory experiences, deep insight. You can experience a modest form of sensory restriction by practicing what Herbert Benson calls the relaxation response. Assume a comfortable position, breathe deeply, and relax your muscles from foot to face. Now, concentrate on a single word or phrase. (About 80 percent of Dr. Benson’s patients choose to focus on a favour prayer.) Close your eyes and let other thoughts drift away when they intrude as you repeat your phrase continually for ten to twenty minutes. As stress worsens pain, infertility, and insomnia and suppresses the immune system, so meditative relaxation counteracts all these effects, Dr. Benson reports. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Mediation is a modern phenomenon with a long history. Food does not directly supply energy but its presence in the body during the process of metabolism acts as a channel for energy to be set free in the body. This is why those who fully undergo the purification process of the Quest and this regenerate their body, not only need less food than others do, but subsist on finer forms of food. When meditating: Sit down alone and in silence. Lower your head, shut your eyes, breathe out gently, and imagine yourself looking into your own heart. As you breathe out, say Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me…Try to put all other thoughts aside. Be calm, be patient, and repeat the process very frequently. From yesterday’s hermits, monks, and nuns to today’s spiritual seekers, retreat, solitude, and quiet have enabled people to hear a still small voice—the whispers of intuition. God’s spirit dwells within, their faith teaches them. In prayer and meditation, a spiritual presence is felt as one sense something beyond self and as unexpected thoughts surface in consciousness. The foremost examples are the great religious visions that have followed times of solitude and contemplation. Jesus Christ, who began his ministry after forty days alone and who lived a rhythm of retreat and engagement, provides the most noteworthy example. Other religious visionaries, including Moses, Muhammad, Buddha, and countless mystics, monks, hermits, and prophets, have found inspiration in times of contemplative silence. The Christian discipline of a daily quiet time affirms the value of restricted simulation—not as an otherworldly end, but as a spiritual recharging for living in this World. “It is in silence and not in commotion, in solitude and not in crows that God best likes to reveal Himself,” wrote Thomas Merton in The Silent Life. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
The Old Testament reminds us of this in its account of Elijah’s encounter with God: “Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was no in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.” And it was in the sound of silence that Elijah heard God’s voice. We live in a time when the hustle and bustle of working, shopping, and entertainment has become a seven-day-a-week affair. Ironically, our European and American cultures are tuning away from the day of rest at the very time that researchers are affirming the healing and renewing power of a day of REST. And should renewing power surprise us? We are, after all, made in the image of the one who on the seventh day “finished one’s work which one had done, and…rested…So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation.” A narcotic experience may give a distorted reflection of the real; it cannot give the real itself. Even so, the price that must be paid for the mirrored images is even greater than the attendant perils. Drugs weaken and may eventually even destroy reason. Alcohol is a drug which removes symptoms. However, like most drugs, it removes the only temporarily Even a little liquor may excite a person, and much liquor makes one mentally unbalanced. G.K. Chesterton wrote voluminously in defense of drinking wine and beer (he never touched spirits), yet drank himself into a long serious illness which nearly cost him his life and after which he was forbidden for some years to take any alcohol at all. Do not confound the drugged vision of God with an authentic one. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
It is not only intoxicating drinks which can cause humans to become heedless and lose self-control; certain drugs can have the same result even though the symptoms are different. Therefore they are banned except when used medically in some situations. Contrary to common belief, the drinking of alcohol does not make a person more “human.” It deprives one of truly human characteristics and makes one more Worldly. Those who try to find the kingdom of Heaven through drugs, whether plants like magic mushrooms or hashish, or chemicals like lysergic acid, may gain glimpses, gets signs, and receive hints, but they may get stuck in an altered state of relative and experience neurosis, or psychosis, and they will not, and cannot escape paying the price of inner deterioration in the end. The fascination which follows the taking of those drugs which seem to have given instant mystic experience is deceptive. A scrutiny of such experience shows that there are liabilities because the seeming enlightenment is illusory, and the taker has no control over the drug and its effects—some of which can be quite bad. One has no means of judging in advance how tolerant one’s body and mind are towards it, whether it will give one nausea, sickness, headaches, nightmares, or momentary insanity instead of the alleged enlightenment. Both drugs and alcohol interfere with the proper practice of meditation, and after taking one or the other one would have to wait a period until the effect wore off before the real practice of mediation could begin. Just as the imagination can weave all kinds of phantasies and experiences in dream which are simply not true, so can it do precisely the same during drug usage. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
The resort o drugs for spiritual purposes can never be justified, for the same drug which raise or widens the taker’s consciousness today may cast one into a pit of devils and horrors the next week. One of the bad effects of drugs, in certain cases, is to create schizophrenia. To gain apparent serenity at the cost of real sanity is hardly a profitable transaction. By using drugs to have spiritual experiences you are saying hat the Kingdom of Heaven is not within you but within a pill or a tablet. It takes time to have a true glimpse of Heaven and it cannot be rushed artificially. It is true that a number of persons who have used a plant (not chemical) drug have had visions of previous embodiment in animal and human forms. However, because they got it in an illegitimate way, they often have to suffer a penalty, either in self-damage or in self-entangled karma. It is an ancient knowledge although a neglected modern one, that many vegetables and fruits have strong medicinal properties. Some people do not drink alcohol because they fear it will interfere with the efficiency of their work, and much more because of one’s spiritual effort at self-conquest. Some do not smoke, first because one regards smoking as physically unhealthy, and second because one’s body becomes so refined as to feel a physiological reaction of strong nausea to it. Thus, these renunciations are both preoccupations with bodily welfare and with ethical ideals; indeed, they are actually tokens of one’s balanced ideals. One can find within oneself, the Stillness of the Void. One will then know, and always will know one’s spiritual being. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
The true self cannot come to those who live on the surface of things, for merely to discover and recognize its existence requires the deepest attentiveness and the strongest love. All the human forces must unite and look for this divine event. The affirmations of the true self made by some creeds are contributions as useful as the denials of the false self made by other creeds. Both are on the same plane, and therefore both have only a limited usefulness as one-sided contributions only. They do not solve the problem of eliminating that false self or of uniting with the true self. Only the Quest n all its integral many-sided nature can do that. It uses every function of the psyche in the effort to change the pattern of the mind—not the imagination alone, nor the intellect alone, nor the intuition alone, nor the will alone, nor the emotions alone, but all of them combined. If one has freed oneself from the ego’s domination, one is entitled to receive the Overself’s benedictory influx. One’s contemplation of the Divine has to become so absorbing as to end in self-forgetfulness. Predestination is the foreknowledge and preparation of the benefits of God, by which whoever are freed will most certainly be freed. Predestination most certainly and infallibly takes effect; yet it does not impose any necessity, so that, namely, its effect should take place from necessity. For it was said that predestination is a part of providence. However, not all things subject to providence are necessary; some things happen from contingency, according to the nature of the proximate causes, which divide providence has ordained for effects. Yet the order of providence is infallible. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
So also the order of predestination is certain; yet free-will is not destroyed; whence the effect of predestination has its contingency. Moreover all that has been said about the divine knowledge and will must also be taken into consideration; since they do not destroy contingency in things, although they themselves are most certain and infallible. The crown may be said to belong to a person in two ways; first, by God’s predestination, and thus no one loses one’s crown: secondly, by the merit of grace; for what we merit, in a certain way is ours; and thus anyone may lose one’s crown by mortal sin. Another person receives that crow thus lost, inasmuch as one takes the former’s place. For God does not permit some to fall, without raising others. “He shall break in pieces many and innumerable, and make others to stand in their stead,” reports Job 34.24. Thus humans are substituted in the place of fallen angels; and the Gentiles in that of Jewish people. One who is substituted for another in the state of grace, also receives the crown of the fallen in that eternal life one will rejoice at the good the other has done, in which life one will rejoice at good whether done by oneself or by others. Although it is possible for one who is predestinated considered in oneself to die in mortal sin; yet it is not possible, supposed, as in fact it is supposed, that one is predestinated. Whence it does not follow that predestination can fall shot of its effect. Since predestination includes the divine will as stated above: and the fact that God wills any created thing is necessary on the supposition that He so wills, on account of the immutability of the divine will, but is not necessary absolutely; so the same must be said of predestination. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Wherefore one ought not to say that God is able not to predestinate one whom He has predestinated, taking it in a composite sense, thought, absolutely speaking, God can predestinate or not. However, in this way the ceretainity of predestination is not destroyed. The life of a good being must be seen as strong in all the virtues. However, often what Humanity sees is only the spit and polish; that is to say, in some respects the interior life lags behind the exterior. Therefore, the good self-actualized should appear to the rest of the World not as one really is, but as one wishes one were. Nonetheless, one’s interior life is always to be evaluated on a higher scale than one’s exterior life. The reason for all this is that our Inspector General is God, whom we ought to reverence in all our pomps a poops. We never leave His sight. Wherever we go, we should walk, step smartly, march with the Angels. Every day we ought to renew our commitment and excite ourselves to fervor. We should recapture the excitement of that first day of our conversion. To that end we should say: “Help me, Lord God, in good commitment and holy service, and grant that I may begin this day as though it were my birthday in the Lord, for what I have done up to now is more the work of a mole than the self-actualized.” The course of our spiritual progress has already been charted by our religious commitment. That is to say, the self-actualized of goodwill has to progress with all possible diligence toward the ultimate goal. The self-actualized who lives out one’s commitment slapdashedly rarely succeeds. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
Make no mistake about it! A slippage in religious commitment, regardless of who makes it and however slight it is, causes sin to seep in and damage to the fabric of all monasticism. We have forgotten who we are. We have forgotten who are are. We have alienated ourselves from the unfolding of the cosmos. We have become estranged from the movements of the Earth. We have turned our backs on the cycles of life. We have forgotten who we are. We have exploited simply for our own ends. We have distorted our knowledge. We have abused our power. We have forgotten who we are. Now the land is barren, and the waters are poisoned, and the air is polluted. We have forgotten who we are. Now the forests are dying, and the creatures are disappearing, and humans are despairing. We have forgotten who we are. We ask forgiveness. We ask for the gift of remembering. We ask for the strength to change. We have forgotten who we are. Eternal God, who sendest consolation unto all sorrowing heart, we turn to Thee for solace in this, our trying hour. Though bowed in grief at the passing of our loved ones, we reaffirm our faith in Thee, our Father, who art just and merciful, who healest broken hearts and art ever near to those who are afflicted. May the Christian prayer, proclaiming America’s hope for Thy true Kingdom here on Earth, impel us to help speed that day when peace shall be established through justice, and all humans recognize their brotherhood in Thee. With trust in Thy great goodness, we who mourn, rise to sanctify Thy name. Life is good and life’s tasks must be performed. Help us, O Lord, to rise above our sorrow and face the trials of life with courage in our hearts. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA |
Now Selling!
Cresleigh Meadows is now selling! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.
Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes.
Homeowners will love the convenient commuter access to nearly Sacramento and Yuba City.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Go! https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/
Here is All the Invisible World, Caught, Defined, and Calculated!
Here is all the invisible World, caught, defined, and calculated. Some come to do the Devil’s work, but life is God’s most precious gift. No principle, no matter how glorious it may be, may justify the taking of it. Even if great stone may lay upon their chest, Reverend Lawson, like Cotton Mather, thought prayer a more certain cure for the witchcraft that the children of Salem were afflicted by during the Salem Witch trials. They did not believe the magistrates might do any good with their methods, partly because it was so difficult to catch a witch. Martha Corey, who had been accused of witchcraft in 1692, would not sign her pact with Satan on Main Street in broad daylight, nor practice her black arts there. Witchcraft was by its nature secret, and hard to be found out. Yet witches had been caught, and many examples were a matter of record, as were many theories on catching them. There were, to begin with, commonly recognized grounds for investigation. If an apparition was appearing to the citizenry and afflicting them, one would surely want to investigate the person represented in that apparition. One would also look for evidence of malice, since witchcraft was an expression of ultimate malice, the diametrical opposite to Christian charity. And one could hope that an investigation would produce credible confessions. Confessions were often easy to obtain, particularly if one used the technique of “cross and swift questions” recommended by virtually all authorities from Malleus Maleficarum to Cotton Mather, but it was not always easy to judge whether they were credible. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Satan was the Prince of Lies and witches were his servants; the word of confessed witches was therefore suspect in the accusations both of others and themselves. Furthermore, it was known that desperate persons had sometimes confessed to witchcraft as a bizarre means of committing suicide. And the mentally disturbed had also been known to imagine themselves witches and confess. In spite of all these difficulties, however, confession was often the best evidence one could hope for. More concrete evidence was occasionally to be had. A diligent search, for example, might turn up some of the tools of the witch’s trade: images with pins in them, ointments and potions, books of instruction in the magical arts. And one could search the body of the accused for the so-called Devil’s Mark. It was believed that when a pact was made, the Devil placed upon the witch’s body a piece of flesh from which He, in His own person or that of a familiar, might such the blood of the witch. (The blood has traditionally been thought to be the carrier of the spirit; in sucking blood the Devil was feeding on the witch’s soul.) since this “witch’s tit” was created by the Devil, rather than by God, it lacked the warmth of normal flesh (hence the still-current expression about being cold as a witch’s tit). It also lacked sensation, and one could rest for it by running a pin through it to see whether it was a genuinely preternatural excrescence or only a wart or a hemorrhoid. Yet pricking for the Devil’s Mark was most haphazard and uncertain. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
It was common for examiners, physicians included, to disagree over whether an excrescence was natural or preternatural. And it was not unheard of for them to find what they thought to be a Devil’s Mark on one occasion, only to discover that there was nothing left of it but a piece of dried skin on a second examination. The common people believed in a number of tests for witches. The best known was the water-ordeal, in which the suspect was bound and “swum”: thrown into or dragged by a rope thought the nearest body of water. If she floated, she was a witch; the water was rejecting her as she had rejected Christian baptism. If she sank, she was innocent; the mod would try to drag her out before she drowned. If they failed, they professed to be sorry. Guilty until proven innocent, which would often result in the death of innocent people. (It was generally mod-action when a witch was swum; the courts seldom countenanced it, even when the accused requested it as a means of proving her innocence.) Another such test was asking the accused to repeat the Lord’s Prayer. It was believed that a witch could not say it correctly, even after prompting, since she regularly said it backwards at her witches’ Sabbaths. It was also believed that a witch could not weep. Because she had rejected Christian charity in favour of demonic malice, she would remain dry-eyed at the most heart-rending spectacles. Many of the learned, including Increase Mather and Deodat Lawson, rejected such tests outright as superstitions as white magic or both. Others like Cotton Mather, were wiling to countenance experiments with them but refused to accept them as certain evidence. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Rebecca Nurse was accused of witchcraft. Girls who had been afflicted testified that not only was the apparition of Rebecca Nurse tormenting them; they said they had seen it leave her body and return to it. However, Rebecca denied this allegation, and it was at that point that Judge John Hathorne, for the second time prayed that she be cleared if innocent; and if guilty, that be discovered. If he could not doubt that the girls’ afflictions were genuine, neither could he doubt that Rebecca Nurse was telling the truth, at least so far as she knew it. Perhaps, he thought, the Devil had made her a witch without her knowledge. Therefore he said to her “Possibly you may apprehend you are no witch, but have you not been led aside by temptations that way?” “I have not,” she answered, and Judge Hathorne could reply only be reflecting on “what a said thing” it was to see church members accused of such a crime. “What, he asked, did she make of the girls’ behaviour? “hey accuse you of hurting them, and if you think it is not unwillingly, but by design, you must look upon them as murderers.” “I cannot tell what I think of it.” Nothing testifies more to the genuineness of the fits than the fact that Rebecca Nurse, like majority of the accused persons, could not tell what to think of them. Later, when Judge Hathorne asked whether she thought the afflicted persons bewitched, she answered yes, “I do think they are.” So he appealed to her again. “When this witchcraft came upon the stage there was no suspicion of Tituba….She professed much love to that child, Betty Parris, but it was her apparition that did the mischief. And why should not you also be guilty, for your apparition doth hurt also.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
“Would you have belie myself?” said Rebecca Nurse. To repeated testimony that her apparition was tormenting people she replied “I cannot help it. The Devil may appear in my shape.” In the end the magistrates committed her for further examination. Rebecca Nurse’s arrest and examination did more than raise temporary doubts in the mind of John Hathorne; it evoked the first open expression of opposition to the witchcraft proceedings. Mary Warren, one of the afflicted girls, was the servant of a farmer named John Procter. On the morning after Rebecca Nurse’s examination, he came to Salem Village “to fetch home his jade,” as he put it. He expressed his opinion of the afflicted persons’ testimony in no uncertain terms. “If they were let alone,” he said, “we should all be devils and witches quickly. They should rather be had to the whipping post. However, he would fetch his jade home and thrash the Devil out of her. And more to the like purpose, crying ‘Hang them! Hang them!’” He added that when Mary Warren “was first taken with fits he kept her close to the wheel and threatened to thrash her, and then she had no more fits till the next day [when] he was gone forth. And then she must have her fits again, forsooth.” Historians have taken John Procter’s statement as evidence that Mary Warren’s fits were false, and in this they have been quite wrong. The seventeenth-century community took hem as evidence of Procter’s malice and brutality, and they were partly right. However, only partly. Because no matter how brutal it may be to beat the hysterical out of their fits, the fact remains that such treatment often works. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
A fit of uncontrolled laughter can often be stopped with a judiciously timed slap in the face. And we should remember that in the eighteenth century one of the commonest treatments for many forms of insanity was beating the patient. Such treatment was probably motivated in part by the “normal” person’s exasperation with the insane for so conspicuously losing their rationality. However, surely it was also motivated by the fact that it frequently worked. And for that matter, it should be recognized that we are still beating the insane. Even in modern times, people who work in lunatic asylums, on rare occasions, beat the patients because no one will believe them because they have no credibility due to the fact that they have been accused of being “crazy.” Imagine that. Calling someone “crazy” in modern times is just a new form of witch hunting, which allows one to do whatever one wants to a person. Most people no longer administer the blows themselves; it is done through technology, and with more precision than our ancestors. However, this should not disguise the fact that electric shock is just as brutal for the patient as the thrashing John Procter proposed for Mary Warren. Perhaps he did thrash her, and perhaps it did in part work, because Mary Warren was the only person who even temporarily recovered from her affliction. As we moved into the 19th century, more people moved from hunting witch to hunting animals for food and fur. Sarah Winchester inherited a fortune, as she was heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms company, but unfortunately, and it really may have been unfortunate, she could not take all her wealth with her. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
At the time of Mrs. Winchester’s death in 1922, there were rooms full of ornate treasures still waiting to find a niche in the massive home. And there still may be treasures untold hidden away in the Winchester mansion, even though it took six trucks, working day and night, for six weeks to loot the mansion after her death. However, for some reason, they still left behind enough materials to continue construction on the mansion for another 38 years. At one time Mrs. Winchester enjoyed the finest vintage wines and liqueurs. However, one evening wen she went to the wine cellar to locate a special bottle, she same across a black handprint on the wall. It was most likely a dirt smudge left by a workman, yet she took it as an omen and ordered the cellar boarded up. To this day the wine cellar has not been rediscovered, which means that there might still be spirits in the Winchester Mystery House—if only the intoxicating kind! The late Mrs. Winchester had been a great reader of Shakespeare, at a time when this pursuit implied more freedom of thought than at the present day, and in a community where it required much courage to patronize the drama even in the closet. Mrs. Winchester also had an inordinate love of dress, and the very best tastes in the World. Often she would sit alone, combing out her long hair. When it would get too dark to see, she would light two candles in their sockets, on the frame of her mirror, and then go to the window to draw her curtains. It was a grey September evening; the landscape was bare and bleak, and the sky heavy with cumulonimbus clouds. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Her bedroom door stood ajar, as she could vaguely see in the gathering darkness, and moved slowly to and fro, as if someone were swaying it. She was about to drop her curtain, when she stumbled and fell on her bed. Later Mrs. Winchester would be found dead. She died peacefully in her sleep at the age of 83. Although people in the town gossiped about her, many dreamed of getting their hands on her riches. Mrs. Winchester also had many finery and jewels. Before he passed away, Mr. Winchester had liberality covered her hands with rings, and she had the finest night dresses trimmed with lace ruffles. People coveted Mrs. Winchester’s rings and her laces more than they coveted her home sometimes. Before her untimely death, Mrs. Winchester wanted to leave her rings and laces and silks to Annie. It was a great wardrobe—there was not such another in all of California; it would have been a great inheritance for her daughter, if she had ever grown up into a young woman. There were things that a man never buys twice, and if they are lost you will never again see the like. So she watched the well. It was such a providence that Annie would have been Mrs. Winchester’s colour; and she could wear her gowns; and she had her mother’s eyes. For the same fashion usually come back every twenty years. Annie would have been able to wear Mrs. Winchester’s gowns as they were. They would lie there quietly waiting till Annie grew into them—wrapped in camphor and rose-leaves, and keeping their colours in the sweet-scented darkness. Even though Annie passed six weeks after her birth, Mrs. Winchester still had the gowns in several great chests in the attic of the Winchester mansion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
After Mrs. Winchester passed away, the house was locked up. Dozens of women waited at the auctions in San Francisco to bid on Mrs. Winchester’s copious wardrobe, but it still lay languishing in thankless gloom in the dusty attic. It was a revolting thought that such exquisite fabrics should be awaiting no one. Was it not a pity that so much finery should be lost?—for lost it would be, what with colours fading, and moth eating it up, and the change of fashion. After the mansion was sold Lewis Dupont and his wife Bianca spent months combing through the items left behind in the mansion. They could not figure out why the mover left so many beautiful and rare items. When they stumbled upon the attic with Mrs. Winchester’s wardrobe, Bianca asked if she could wear them. Her husband told her that he did not want to disturb any ghost and to leave them be. Nine moths went by, however, and brought with them new needs and new visions. Bianca’s thoughts hovered loving about Mrs. Winchester’s relics. She went up and looked at the chests in the attic in which they lay imprisoned. There was a sullen defiance in its three great padlocks and its iron bands which only quickened her cupidity. There was something exasperating in its incorruptible immobility. It was like a grim and grizzled old household servant, who locks his jaws over a family secret. And then there was a look of capacity in its vast extent, and a sound as of dense fullness, when Bianca knocked one chest’s sides with the toe of her little shoe, which caused her to flush with baffled longing. “It’s absurd,” she cried; “it’s improper, it’s wicked”; and she forthwith resolved upon another attack upon her husband. On the following day, after dinner, when he had had his wine, she boldly began it. But he cut her short with great sternness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
“Once for all, Bianca,” said he, “it’s out of the question. If you return to this matter, I shall be gravely displeased.” “Very good,” said Bianca. “I am glad to learn the esteem in which I am held. Gracious Heaven,” she cried, “I am a very happy woman! It’s an agreeable thing to feel one’s self sacrificed to a caprice!” And her eyes filled with tears of anger and disappointment. Lewis had a good-natured man’s horror of a woman’s sobs, and he attempted—I may say he condescended to explain. “It’s not a caprice, dear, it’s a promise,” he said—“an oath.” “An oath? It’s a pretty matter for oaths! and to whom, pray?” “To Mrs. Winchester,” said the young man, “Everyone knows the clothes were meant for her late baby girl! That’s probably why the movers left them behind. Mrs. Winchester—ah, Mrs. Winchester!” and Bianca’s tears broke forth. Her bosom heaved with stormy sobs—sobs which were the long-deferred sequel of the violent fit of weeping in which she had indulged herself on the night she had discovered Mrs. Winchester’s betrothal. She had hoped, in her better moments, that she had done with her jealousy; but her temper, on that occasion, has take an ineffaceable hold. “And pray, what right had Mrs. Winchester to dispose of my future?” she cried. “What right had she to bind you to meanness and cruelty? Ah, I occupy a dignified place, and I make a very fine figure! I am welcome to what Mrs. Winchester has left! And what has she left? I never knew till now how great it was!” Lewis put his arm around his wife’s waist and tried to kiss her, but she shook him off with magnificent scorn. Poor fellow! he has coveted a “devilish fine woman,” and he had got one. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Bianca’s scorn was intolerable. He walked away with his ear tinging—irresolute, distracted. Before him was his secretary, and in it the scared key which with his own hand he had turned in the triple lock. He marched up and opened it, and tool the key from a secret drawer, wrapped in a little packet which he had sealed with his own honest bit of glazonry. Fe garde, said the motto—“I keep.” However, he was ashamed to put it back. He flung it upon the table beside his wife. “Put it back!” she cried. “I want it not. I hate it!” “I wash my hands of it,” cried her husband. “God forgive me!” Mrs. Dupont hastily took possession of the key. At the habitual supper-hour Lewis Dupont came back from his counting-room. It was the month June, and supper was served by daylight. The meal was placed on the table, but Mrs. Dupont failed to make her appearance. The servant who his master sent to call her came back with the assurance that her room was empty, and that the woman informed him that she had not been seen since dinner. They had, in truth, observed her to have been in tears, and supposing her to be shut up in her chamber, had not disturbed her. Her husband called her name in various parts of the house, but without response. At last it occurred to him that he might find her by taking the way to the attic. The thought gave him a strange feeling of discomfort, and he bade his servants remain behind, wishing no witness in his quest. He reached the foot of the stair case leading to the topmost flat, and stood with his hands on the banisters, pronouncing his wife’s name. His voice trembled. He called again louder and more firmly. The only sound which disturbed the absolute silence was a faint echo of his own tones, repeating his question under the great eaves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
He nevertheless felt irresistibly move to ascend the staircase. It opened upon a wide hall, westward, and admitted the last rays of run. Before the window stood the great chests of clothes. Before one of the chests, on her knees, the young man saw with amazement and horror the figure of his wife. In an instant he crossed the interval between them, bereft of utterance. The lid of one of the chests stood open, exposing, amid their perfumed napkins, its treasure of stuffs and jewels. Bianca had fallen backward from a kneeling poser, with one hand supporting her on the floor and the other pressed to her heart. On her limbs was the stiffness of death, and on her face, in the fading light of sun, the terror of something more than death. Her lips were parted in entreaty, in dismay, in agony; and on her blanched brow and cheeks there glowed the marks of thirteen hideous wounds from a vengeful ghost. Legend has it that Mr. and Mrs. Dupont were never heard from again and the ghost sealed off this portion of the attic, creating the stairs to the ceiling. Astaroth is a Mighty, Strong Duke, and appears in the form of an hurtful Angel riding on an Infernal Beast like a Dragon, and carrying in his right hand a Viper. Thou must in no wise let him approach too near unto thee, lest he do thee damage by his Noisome Breath. Wherefore the Magician must hold the Magical Ring near his face, and that will defend him. He giveth true answers of things Past, Present, and to Come, and can discover all Secrets. He will declare wittingly how the Spirits fell, if desires, and the reason of his own fall. He can make humans wonderfully knowing in all Liberal Sciences and is said to guard the Winchester. He rules 40 Legions of Spirits. His Seal is this, which wear thou as a Lamen before thee, or else he will not appear not yet obey thee. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Some of the architectural oddities of the Winchester mansion may have practical explanations, others may have supernatural origins. The miles of twisting hallways are made even more intriguing by secret passageways in the walls. Mrs. Winchester traveled through her house in a roundabout fashion, supposedly to confuse any mischievous ghosts that might be following her. This wild and fanciful description of Mrs. Winchester’s nightly stroll to the Séance Room appeared in The American Weekly in 1928, six years after her death. “When Mrs. Winchester set out for her Séance Room, it might well have discouraged the ghost of the Indian or even the bloodhound, to follow her. After traversing an interminable labyrinth of rooms and hallways, suddenly she would push a button, a panel would fly back and she would step quickly from one apartment into another, and unless the pursuing ghost was watchful and quick, he would lose her. Then she opened a window in that apartment and climbed out, not into the open air, but onto the top of a flight of steps that took her down one story only to meet another flight that brought her right back to the same level again, all inside the house. This was supposed to be very discomforting to evil spirits who are said to be naturally suspicious of traps.” We who prayed and wept for liberty from kinds and the yoke of liberty accept the tyranny of things we do not need. In plenitude too free, we have become adept beneath the yoke of greed. Those who will not learn in plenty to keep their place must learn it by their need when they have had their ways and the fields spurn their seed. We have failed Thy grace. Lord, I flinch and pray, please send Thy necessity. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Oh deer, the weekend is here! What a better way to spend time than strolling through the gardens of the Winchester Mystery House.
🎟️ Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com/recent-links
Mr. Cresleigh Builds His Dream House and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies!
An advantage of biologically programmed behaviour is that it prepares terrestrial beings to survive in their natural environments. A disadvantage is that evolution is slow. Natural selection prepares a species only for a future which resembles the biological past. If know is power, and power corrupts, how will humankind ever survive. As Second Wave civilization pushed its tentacles across the planet, transforming everything with which it came in contact, it carried with it more than technology or trade. Colliding with First Wave civilization, the Second Wave created not only a new reality for millions but a new way of thinking about reality. Clashing at a thousand points with the values, concepts, myths, and morals of agricultural society, the Second Wave brought with it a redefinition of God…of justice…of love…of power…of beauty. It stirred up new ideas, attitudes, and analogies. It subverted and superseded ancient assumptions about time, space, matter, and causality. A powerful, coherent World view emerged that not only explained but justified Second Wave reality. This World view of industrial society has not had a name. It might best be termed “indust-reality.” Indust-realty was the overarching set of ideas and assumptions with which the children of industrialism were taught to understand their World. It was the package of premises employed by Second Wave civilization, by its scientists, business leaders, state’s people, philosophers, and propagandists. There were, of course, contervoices, those who challenged the dominant ideas of indust-reality, but we are concerned here not with the side currents but with the mainstream of Second Wave thought. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
On the surface, it seemed, there was no mainstream at all. Rather, it appeared that there were two powerful ideological currents in conflict. By the middle of the nineteenth century every industrial nation has its sharply defined left wing and its right, its advocates of individualism and free enterprise, and its advocates of collectivism and socialism. This battle of ideologies, at first confined to the industrializing nations themselves, soon spread around the globe. With the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the organization of a centrally directed Worldwide propaganda machine, the ideological struggle grew even more intense. And by the end of World War II, as the United States and Russian attempted to reintegrate the World market—or large parts of it—on their own terms, each side was spending huge sums to spread its doctrines to the World’s non-industrial peoples. On one side were totalitarian regimes, on the other the socalled liberal democracies. Guns and bombs stood ready to take up where logical arguments ended. Seldom since the great collision of Catholicism and Protestantism during the Reformation had doctrinal lines been so sharply drawn between two theological camps. What few noticed, however, in the heat of this propaganda war, was that while each side promoted a different ideology, both were essentially hawking the same superideology. Their conclusions—their economic programs and political dogmas—differed radically, but many of their starting assumptions were the same. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Like Protestant and Catholic missionaries clutching different versions of the Christian Bible, yet both preaching Christ, Marxists and anti-Marxists alike, capitalists and anticapitalists, Americans and Russians marched into Africa, Asia, and Latin America—the non-industrial regions of the World—blindly bearing the same set of fundamental premises. Bothe preached the superiority of industrialism to all other civilization. Both were passionate apostles of indust-reality. The World view they disseminated was based on three deeply intertwined “indust-real” beliefs—three ideas that bound all Second Wave nations together and differentiated them from much of the rest of the World. The first of these core beliefs had to do with nature. While socialists and capitalist might disagree violently about how to share its fruits, both looked upon nature in the same way. For both, nature was an object waiting to be exploited. The idea that humans should hold dominion over nature can be traced at least as far back as Genesis. “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the Heavens and over every living thing that moves on the Earth,” reports Genesis 1.28. Nevertheless, it was decidedly a minority view until the industrial revolution. Most earlier cultures emphasized instead an acceptance of poverty and the harmony of humankind with its surrounding natural ecology. These earlier cultures were not particularly gentle with nature. They slashed and burned, overgrazed, and stripped the forests for firewood. However, their power to do damage was limited. They had no great impact on the Earth and no need for an explicit ideology to justify the damage they did. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Perhaps earlier cultures had no idea the damage they were doing? However, not all capitalist did damage, they may have had good intentions. For instance, Oliver Fisher Winchester, November 30, 1810—December 10, 1880. Went from New England farm boy to World-renowned industrialist and entrepreneur. In addition to his role in building the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, he was a generous patron of Yale University and a founder of the Yale National Bank and the New Haven Water Company, and he was elected lieutenant governor of Connecticut in 1866. The New Haven Palladium eulogized him as “an eminent citizen, to whose public spirit and private enterprise [New Haven] is indebted for much of her present property…The great establishment which he organized, and to which he gave his name, stands to-day as a monument to the great ability and enterprise which marked his whole business career.” Many people credit or blame the Winchester’s for creating guns, but they did not. They only revolutionized gun production. Firearms have been major instruments in the course of history since their first primitive appearance in the fourteenth century. However, in all that time no marker of longarms can equal the international image of adventure attached to the Winchester. The historian, collector, or curator who pursues the Holy Grail of Winchester belongs to a select group of devotees of one of the most fascinating marques in Americana. Arguably it is the Winchester that won the West. And the two most glamorous and sought-after blue chips in gun collecting Worldwide are Colt, primarily a handgun maker, and Winchester, primarily a maker of shoulder guns. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Designed with mechanical ingenuity and made with advanced manufacturing techniques—mass production decades before Henry Ford and the automobile—most Winchester were graceful and handsome in line and form. And for the lover of decorative arts a prized portion of production has the extra merit of hand decoration such as gold-plated engravings of the Goddess of Liberty, inspired engravings on gold plating of deer, and Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave, and other patterns in silver and gold plating. Increasingly the most prized Winchesters are leaving private hands and becoming permanent exhibits in museums. Some are worth in the range of a nice used car, a mansion, while others are priceless. Among the many guns Mr. Winchester own, two of his prized possessions were a deluxe pair of ivory-gripped Volcanic Navy pistols, which were passed down through the family. Mr. Winchester made magnificent guns like the standard silver-plated and blue navy pistol with rosewood grips, or a pocket pistol with walnut. There were also other guns with hand decorations of checkered or carved select-gain stocks, special finishes, engraving and precious- metal inlaying, and sometimes elegant casings. A few were presentations, even gifts of the state. Tracing its origins back to 1849, Winchester is the oldest maker of lever-action repeating firearms in the World, and at is peak in the twentieth century was the largest gunmaker in the World with over 18,000 employees. As an ammunition manufacturer, Winchester remains the World’s largest. The marque is also possessor of one of history’s most famous brand names. In many respects Winchester is to firearms and ammunition as Ferrari is to automobiles and Tiffany is to silver. Now, you may be wondering why is Winchester so important? Well, there are many reasons. When America did not have law and order, people needed a way to protect themselves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
For instance, in a July 14, 1863 newspaper report, in the Louisville Journal, written by its editor George D. Prentice, was highly laudatory: “In the days, when rebel outlaws and raids are becoming common in Kentucky, when guerillas are scouring different countries nightly, and practising the most atrocious outrages, when even the central positions of our State are openly threatened, and when it is understood in high quarters that secret companies are on foot for a sudden and general insurrection as some favorable moment, it behooves every loyal citizen to prepare himself upon his own responsibility with the best weapon of defense that can be obtained. And certainly the simplest, surest, and most effective weapon that we know of, the weapon that could be used with the most tremendous results in case of an outbreak or invasion, is one that we have mentioned recently upon two or three occasions, the newly invented rifle of Henry, now on exhibition, and for sale at Messrs. Jas. Low and Co.’s, Sixth street. This rifle, as we have stated, can be loaded in eight or ten seconds with fifteen cartridges, and the whole number can be fired in fifteen seconds or less, so that one man, with the weapon is equal to fifteen armed with ordinary guns…It may lie loaded for a week at the bottom of a river, and, if taken out, will then fire with as much certainty as if it had been kept perfectly dry all the time. It is remarkably simple, not liable to get out of order, and is utterly free from the objection sometimes urged against other repeating rifles that two or more charges are liable to be fired at once.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Benjamin Tyler Henry was a well-known gun engineer, who was eventually employed by Oliver Winchester when Oliver Winchester became one of the investors in “Smith & Wesson Company,” which changed its name to “Volcanic Repeating Arms Company” in 1855. By 1857, Mr. Winchester had positioned himself as the principal stockholder in the company and relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, changing the name to New Haven Arms Company. The Henry rifle was one of the most noteworthy inventions in the Winchester history. With financial backing from O.F. Winchester, the tooled up revolutionary new repeater had to prove itself. The Henry was of .44 caliber, with a 216-grain conical bullet, backed by a 26-grain powder charge. The birth of this gun was fueled by the Civil War market and by 1862, Henrys were in the field. President Lincoln was so intrigued by them that he test-fired a Spencer repeater on the White House lawn. The future of the Henry was likely boosted by special presentations to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, and even a gift to President Lincoln—all guns with single-digit serial numbers, richly engraved and inscribed, and fitted with rosewood stocks. They Henry was even tested at the Washington Navy Yard (conveniently, Secretary Welles was from Connecticut), reported in May of 1862:187 shots were fired in three minutes and thirty-six second (not counting reloading time). and one of full fifteen-shot magazine was fired in only 10.8 second. A total of 1,040 shots were fired, and hits were made from as far away as 348 feet, at 18-inch-square target—quite impressive accuracy with open sights. The report noted, “It is manifest from the above experiment that his gun may be fired with great rapidity, and is not liable to get out of order. The penetration in proportion to the charge used, compared favorably with that of other arms.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
By July of 1692 the Henry was on the market, and it quickly found popularity with both civilian and military purchasers. An extraordinary encounter between seven Confederates and Captain James M. Wilson, commanding officer of Company M of the 12th Kentucky Cavalry, was widely publicized, appearing in various advertisements and journals. This account shows why protection was needed. H.W.S. Cleveland’s Hint to Riflemen gives an account: “Capt. Wilson had fitted up a long crib across the road from his front door as a sort of arsenal, where he had his Henry Rifle, Colt’s Revolver, et cetera. One day, while at home dining with his family seven mounted guerillas rode up, dismounted and burst into his dining room and commenced firing upon him with revolvers. The attack was so sudden that the first shot struck a glass of water his wife was raising to her lips, breaking the glass. Several other shots were fired without effect, when Capt. Wilson sprang to his feet, exclaiming, ‘For God’s sake, gentlemen, if you wish to murder me, do not do it at my own table in the presence of my family.’ This caused a parley, resulting in their consent that he might go out doors he sprang for his cover, and his assailants commenced firing at him. Several shots passed through his hat, and more through his clothing, but none took effect upon his person. He thus reached his cover and seized his Henry Rifle, turned upon his foes, and in five shots killed five of them; the other two sprung for their horses. As the sixth man threw his hand over the pommel of his saddle, the sixth shot took off four of his fingers; notwithstanding this he got into his saddle, but the seventh shot killed him; then start out, Capt. Wilson killed the seventh man with the eighth shot. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
“In consequence of this feat the State of Kentucky armed his Company with the Henry Rifle.” Wilson’s company was not the only one to be armed with the Henry, but the issuing of such arms was counter to War Department policy. Assistant Secretary of War Peter Watson wrote to O.F. Winchester (August 9, 1862) that “companies arming themselves with Henry’s repeating rifle, will [not] be allowed to retain them in the field…as great inconvenience has resulted from promises heretofore given in other cases to furnish companies of troops with special arms. If you choose to arm and equip a whole regiment at your own expense, or the regiment chooses to arm itself, it will be accepted with the condition that it shall be at liberty to use its own arms and equipments exclusively.” Despite the War Department objections, 240 Henrys were purchased by the federal government for the 1st District of Columbia Cavalry. Inspired by that moral victory, O. F. Winchester gleefully wrote to Brigadier General Ripley stating, “If these arms were sued as efficiently by the men who are to receive them as they have been by our Union friends in Kentucky, the country will have no cause to regret the expenditure.” Still another federal government purchase was 800 more Henrys, to equip the eight companies of Maine cavalry assigned to the 1st District of Columbia Cavalry. Armed also with Spencer rifles, the First Maine had ample opportunity to demonstrate the superiority of breech-loading metallic-cartridge repeaters. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
The regimental chaplain, Samuel H. Merrill wrote in his memoir on the First Maine and the 1st District cavalry units: “This regiment was distinguished by the superiority of the carbines with which it was armed. It was the only regiment in the Army of the Potomac armed with ‘Henry’s Repeating Rifle.’ After having witnessed the effectiveness of the weapon, one is not surprised at the remark, said to have been made by the guerilla chief. Mosby, after an encounter with some of our men, that ‘he did not care for the common gun, or for Spencer’s seven shooter, but as for these guns that they could wind up on Sunday, and shoot all the week, it was useless to fight against them.’” Reports of the successful use of Henrys in the Civil War are numerous, both from the Union point of view and from the Confederates who forced the incessant fire. The incredible firepower, especially in comparison to the muzzle-loading single shots, is evident in Major William Ludlow’s account of the Battle of Allatoona Pass: “What saved us that day…was the fact that we had a number of Henry rifles…These were new guns in those days and [the commander] had held in reserve a company of an Illinois Regiment that was armed with them until a final assault should be made. When the artillery reopened…this company of 16-shooters sprang to the parapet and poured out such a multiplied, rapid, and deadly fire that no men could stay in front of it, and no serious effort was thereafter made to take the fort by assault.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Even though it may have not been the most popular firearm used in the Civil War, it was one of the best and most popular firearm used in the Civil War, the Henry rifle found plenty of use among troops in the Union Army. After the Civil War, O.F. Winchester renamed his increasingly successful firearms company yet one more time, to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Winchester’s lever-action repeating rifles became internationally famous for their speed, ease of use, accuracy, and affordability, the latter of which was assisted by the company’s proprietary use of mass manufactured, interchangeable parts. Sales were also propelled by Winchester’s widespread use of romanticized images of the American west in its marketing. Between the paintings of rugged cowboys, frontiersmen, sportsmen, and enthusiastic endorsements by larger-than-life celebrities like “Buffalo Bill” Cody, and Teddy Roosevelt, who said, “ The Winchester…is by all odds the best weapon I ever had, and I now use it almost exclusively…It is as handy to carry, whether on foot or horseback, and comes up to the shoulder as readily as a shotgun; it is absolutely sure, and there is no recoil to jar and disturb the aim, while it carries accurately quite as far as a man can aim with any degree of certainty…The Winchester is the best gun for any game to be found in the United States, for it is deadly, accurate, and handy as any, stands very rough usage, and is unapproachable for the rapidity of its fire and the facility with which it is loaded.” The Winchester repeating rifle earned an international reputation as “the Gun that Won the West.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
With the coming of the Second Wave civilization one found capitalist industrial gouging resources on a massive scale, pumping voluminous poisons into the air, deforesting whole regions in pursuit of profit, without much thought about side effect or long-term consequences. The idea that nature was there to be exploited provided a convenient rationalization for shortsightedness and selfishness. However, the capitalists were scarcely alone. Wherever they took power, Marxist industrializers (despite their conviction that profit was the root of all evil) acted in exactly the same way. Indeed, they built the conflict with nature right into their scriptures. Marxists pictured primitive peoples not as coexisting harmoniously with nature be as engaged in a fierce life-and-death struggle against it. With the emergence of class society, they held, the war of “man against nature” was unfortunately transformed into a war of “man against man.” The achievement of a Communist classless society would permit humanity to get back to its first order of business once again—the war of man against nature. On both sides of the ideological divide, therefore, one found the same image of humanity standing in opposition to nature and dominating it. This image was a key component of indust-reality, the superideology from which Marxist and anti-Marxist alike drew their assumptions. A second, interrelated idea carried the argument a step further. Humans were not merely in charge of nature, they were the pinnacle of a long process of evolution. Earlier theories of evolution existed, but it was Dr. Darwin, in the middle of the nineteenth century, brought up in the most advanced industrial nation of the time, who provided scientific underpinning for this view. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Dr. Darwin spoke of the bling workings of “natural selection”—an inevitable process that mercilessly weeded out weak and inefficient forms of life. Those species who survived were, by definition, the first. Dr. Darwin was chiefly concerned with biological evolution, but his ideas had distinct social and political overtones that others were quick to recognize. Thus the Social Darwinists argued that the principle of natural selection worked within society as well, and that the wealthiest and most powerful people were, by virtue of that fact, the fittest and the most deserving. It was only a short leap to the idea that whole societies evolve according to the same laws of selection. Following this reasoning, industrialism was a higher stage of evolution than the non-industrial cultures that surrounded it. Second Wave civilization, to put it bluntly, was superior to all the rest. Just as Social Darwinism rationalized capitalism, this cultural arrogance rationalized imperialism. The expanding industrial order needed its lifeline to inexpensive resources, and it created a moral justification for taking them at depressed prices, even at the cost of obliterating agricultural and so-called primitive societies. The idea of social evolution provided intellectual and moral support for the treatment of non-industrial peoples as inferior—and hence unfitted for survival. Dr. Darwin himself wrote unfeelingly of the massacre of the aborigines of Tasmania and, in a burst of genocidal enthusiasm, prophesied that “At some future period…the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the World.” The intellectual front-runners of Second Wave civilization had no doubt about who deserved to survive. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
While Marx bitterly criticizes capitalism and imperialism, he shared the view that industrialism was the most advanced form of society, the stage toward which all other societies would inevitably advance in turn. For the third core belief of indust-reality linked nature and evolution together was the progress principle—the idea that history flows irreversibly toward a better life for humanity. This idea, too, had plenty of preindustrial precedent. However, it was only with the advance of the Second Wave that the idea of Progress with a capital P burst into full flower. Suddenly, as the Second Wave pulsed over Europe a thousand throats began to sing the same hallelujah chorus. Leibniz, Turgot, Condorcet, Kant, Lessing, John Stuart Mill, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and countless lesser thinkers al found reasons for cosmic optimism. They argued over whether progress was truly inevitable or whether it needed a helping hand from the human race; over what constituted a better life; over whether progress would or could continue ad infinitum. However, they all nodded in agreement at the notion of progress itself. Atheists and divines, students and professors, politicians and scientists preached the new faith. Business people and commissars alike heralded each new factory, each new product, each new housing development, highway, or dam as evidence of this irresistible advance from bad to good or good to better. Poets, playwrights, and painters took progress for granted. Progress justified the degradation of nature and the conquest of “less advanced” civilizations. And once more the same idea ran parallel through the works of both Adam Smith and Karl Marx. As Robert Heilbroner has noted, “Smith was a believer in progress….In The Wealth of Nations progress was no longer an idealistic goal of mankind, but…a destination to which it was driven….a by-product of private economic aims.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
For Marx, of course, these private aims produced only capitalism and the seeds of its own destruction. However, this event in itself was part of the long historical sweep carrying humanity forward to socialism, communism, and an even better beyond. Throughout Second Wave civilization, therefore, three key concepts—the war with nature, the importance of evolution, and the progress principle—provided the ammunition used by the agents of industrialism as they explained and justified it to the World. Beneath these convictions lay still deeper assumptions about reality—a set of unspoken beliefs about the very elementals of human experience. Every human being must deal with these elementals, and every civilization describes them in a different way. Every civilization must teach its children to grapple with time and space. It must explain—whether through myth, metaphour, or scientific theory—how nature words. And it must offer some clue to why things happen as they do. Thus Second Wave civilization, as it matured, created a wholly new image of reality, based on its own distinctive assumptions about time and space, matter and cause. Picking up fragments from the past, piecing them together in new ways, applying experiment and empirical tests, it drastically altered the way human beings came to perceive the World around them and how they behaved in their daily lives. The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into one’s head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe one, was the true founder of society. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes of filled in the ditch and cried out to one’s fellow humans: “Do not listen to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the Earth belong to all and the Earth to no one!” However, it is quite likely that by then things had already reached a point where they could no longer continue as they were. For this idea of property, depending on many prior ideas which could only have arisen successively, was not formed all at once in the human mind. It was necessary to make great progress, to acquire much industry and enlightenment, and to transmit and augment them from one age to another, before arriving at this final stage in the state of nature. Let us therefore take things farther back and try to piece together under a single viewpoint that slow succession of events and advances in knowledge in their most natural order. Human’s first sentiment was that of one’s own existence; one’s first concern was that of one’s preservation. The products of the Earth provided one with all the help one needed; instinct led one to make use of them. With hunger and other appetites making one experience by turns various ways of existing, here was one appetites making one experience by turns various ways of existing, there was one appetite that invited one to perpetuate one’s species; and this blind inclination, devoid of any sentiment of the heart, produced a purely terrestrial act. Once this need had been satisfied, the two genders no longer took cognizance of one another, and even the child no longer meant anything to the mother once it could do without her. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Such was the condition of humans in their nascent stage; such was the life of a terrestrial being limited at first to pure sensations, and scarcely profiting from the gifts nature offered one, far from dreaming of extracting anything from her. However, difficulties soon presented themselves to one; it was necessary to learn to overcome them. The height of trees, which kept one from reaching their fruits, the competition of animal that sought to feed themselves on these same fruits, the ferocity of those animals that wanted to take one’s own life: everything obliged one to apply oneself to bodily combat. Natural arms, which are tree branches and stones, were soon found ready at hand. One learned to surmount nature’s obstacles, combat other animals when necessary, fight for one’s subsistence even with humans, or compensate for what one had to yield to those stronger than oneself. In proportion as the human race spread, difficulties multiplied with the humans. Differences in soils, climates and seasons could force them to inculcate these differences in their lifestyles. Barren years, long and hard winters, hot summers that consume everything required new resourcefulness from them. Along the seashore and the riverbanks they invented the fishing line and hook, and became fishermen and fish-eaters. In the forests they made bows and arrows, and became hunters and warriors. In cold countries they covered themselves with the skins of animals they had killed. Lighting, a volcano, or some fortuitous chance happening acquainted them with fire: a new resource against the rigours of Winter. They learned to preserve this element, then to reproduce it, and finally to use it to prepare meats that previously they devoured raw. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
This repeated appropriation of various being to oneself, and of some beings to others, must naturally have engendered in human’s mind the perceptions of certain relations. These relationships which we express by the words “large,” “small,” “strong,” “weak,” “fast,” “slow,” “timorous,” “bold,” and other similar ideas, compared when needed and almost without thinking about it, finally produced in one a kind of reflection, or rather a mechanical prudence which pointed out to one the precautions that were most necessary for one’s safety. Since suburbs during the first half of the century were seen as little more than outlying residential areas, it is perhaps understandable that they attracted minimal literary or scholarly attention. For example, George Babbitt sold real estate in the suburban Glen Oriole development, but he lived in the city of Zenith. Authors and writers in the early decades of the twentieth century largely ignored suburbs while stressing the evils of the city. Typical was Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago,” which praised the raw vitality of the city but also noted the city’s wickedness, and brutality. By comparison suburbs were once just a community of beautiful sprawling homes. Overall, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that until the post World War II era, major American writers generally ignored the suburbs. True, Ernest, Hemingway caustically referred to Oak Park, where he had grown up, as a community “of wide lawns and narrow minds,” but he apparently did not think it merited a novel. Sinclair Lewis’s exposure to the meanness of small-midwestern-town life in Main Street (1920) was far more typical of cosmopolitan writers of the first half of the twentieth century. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
In Babbitt (1922) Mr. Lewis, with equal acid, detailed the life of George Babbit, a small-city real estate developer and subdivider. Mr. Lewis’s fictional city of Zenith was a literary twin of the empirical study by Robert and Helen Lynd of Middletown, which was actually Muncie, Indiana. Generally, writes of the era agreed in their viewing small-town and small-city values as fostering full conformity and repression of creativity. Only in the large metropolitan area could one be truly free. Not until the suburban housing boom following World War II were the charges that early-twentieth-century writers had leveled against the small towns and small cities redirected at suburbia and suburban lifestyles. The evils of Sinclair Lewis’ fictional Gopher Prairie became those of Levittown. One major exception to ignoring suburbia as either a literary site a literary metaphour is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic, The Great Gatsby. Mr. Fitzgerald places the rootless Gatsby in West Egg, one of the newly developing wealthy suburbs of Long Island. These were places without a background for people who were also reinventing themselves. Although he did not further expand the theme in later works, Mr. Fitzgerald is the first to hint at suburbia as a conscious and artificial creation especially designed to accommodate those possessing shallow roots. Whether it is Gatsby’s wealthy established suburb or the post-World War II mass suburbia of Levittown, suburbia began to be portrayed not as a place of stability, but as a temporary residence for transients. Popular-culture images of suburbia prior to the suburban exodus of the 1950s and 1960s was generally more charitable. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Images of suburbia tended toward the comfortable and mildly comic, such as Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post cover showing suburban wives, still in their bathrobes, driving their husbands in the family station wagon to the suburban commuter train station. Movie versions of suburbia were also benign and inclined toward the small-town nostalgia of Andy Hardy-type communities. The comic dimension of the upper-middle-class city dweller seeking a semirural retreat was reflected in the success of stories turned into movies such as Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. Interestingly, the former began as a cautionary article in Fortune on the perils of suburban living. (Eric Hodgins, “Mr. Blandings Builds His Castle,” Fortune Magazine, April 1946, pp. 138-189). On the other hand, Jean Kerr’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies was a satiric and ironic look at women’s life in the 1950s suburbs (Jean Kerr, please Don’t Eat the Daisies, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1957). In reality, the suburban backyard barbecue became an American cliché during the 1950s. It symbolized the close national association of suburban life with family values. It also has been said that prior to the 1960s, urban-area scholars were not particularly astute or insightful in examining the phenomenon of suburbanization. Social science’s treatment of suburbs can be described in few words: suburbs essentially were ignored. They were the focus of neither theorizing nor research. Even textbooks in the rapidly developing field of urban sociology went little beyond Earnest Burges’s 1924 description of suburbia as an outer-commuter’s zone. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
No one seemed to think the area, or the process, merited further elaboration. The major scholars of suburbia, Harlan Paul Douglass, in his 1934 article on “Suburbs” in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, portrayed suburbs as limited to the well-to-do. Living in the suburbs, in his words, was “virtually limited to the most highly paid types of labor and o the upper middle classes” (Harlan Paul Douglass, “Suburbs,” Encyclopedia of the social sciences, Vol. XIV, New York, 1934, p.434). Even as late as the 1950, Queen and Carpenter, in the urban sociology text The American City, (McGraw-Hill, 1953), gave only 4 of its 383 ages to even a mention of suburbs. One should send out experimental feelers in one’s mental-emotional World until one recognizes an element that seems different from all the others—subtler, grander, nobler, and more divine than all the others. Then, catching firm hold of it, one should try to trace its course back to its source. The point where the personal ego establishes contact with the Overself is reached and passed only through a momentary lapse of consciousness. However, this lapse is so brief—a mere fraction of a second—that it may be unnoticed. A presence enters one’s consciousness and comes over one, a benign feeling to which one is glad to surrender oneself, a mysterious solvent of one’s egotism and desires. The value of letting oneself pass this point can hardly be overestimated, even though it be done only during the limited sessions of prayer or the casual periods of unexpected visitations. For from them peace, wisdom, sanity can be emanated. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
At this point there is the mysterious division between human normal prayer and divine contemplation, between discursive thinking and its dissolution as the divine self takes over, between mental concentration and release into still, timeless being, between imagery and pure Consciousness. Koestler got his glimpse by working out Euclid’s geometrical proof of the infinitude of the number of primes. That he was able to learn of the reality of the Infinite by purely mathematical and precise method, without becoming a vague emotional mystic, so satisfied his highly intellectual and scientific nature that, in his own words, an “aesthetic enchantment” fell upon him. This developed until he became one with Peace never before known. The experience passed away, as it usually does, but it remained to hunt his memory. It inspired his journey to India and Japan several years later, where he spent a year trying to meet holy people and self-actualized. These meetings did not bring him what he sought, but his faith in the authenticity of that earlier glimpse never left him. He knew what few mystics know, that he did not need to violate the integrity of Reason, nor become lost in generally hazy gushy feelings, to know Infinity, which is truth of Reality. The difference of people is determined by their nature. If it is true some people are aggressors, it may be that one day, this quality may be their undoing. Those who seek communion with the Overself, this sublime glimpse of its hidden face, must make the Quest their chosen path. Few things that grow here poison us. Most of the animals are small. Those big enough to kill us do it in a way easy to understand, easy to defend against. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
The air, here, is just what the blood needs. We do not use helmets or special suits. The Star, here, does not burn you if you stay outside as much as you should. The worst of our winters is bearable. Water, both salt and sweet, is everywhere. The thing that live in it are easily gathered. Mostly, you can eat them raw with safety and pleasure. Yesterday my wife and I brought back shells, driftwood, stones, and other curiosities found on the beach of the immense fresh-water Sea we live by. She was all excited by a slender white stone which: “Exactly fits the hand!” I could not share her wonder: Here, almost everything does. It is for us to praise the Lord of all, to proclaim the greatness of the Creator of the Universe for He hath not made us like the pagans of the World, nor places us like the heathen tribes of the Earth; He hath not made our density as theirs, nor cast out lot with all their multitude. We bend he knee, worship and give thanks unto the King of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He. He stretched forth the Heavens and laid the foundations of the Earth. His glory is revealed in the Heavens above, and His might is manifest in the loftiest heights. He is our God; there is none else. In truth He is our King, there is none besides Him; as it is written in his Holy Bible: Know this say, and consider it in thy heart that the Lord is God in the Heavens above and on the Earth beneath; there is none else. May your mind be so well purified and so strongly concentrated within the Good, the True, and the Beautiful that it is not affected by Worldly disturbances. Do not allow your mind to be muddy and weak like others. A correct example is better for you. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Ten Minutes on the Clock, but a Thousand Centuries in My Heart!
The Greek philosopher Aristotle had a recipe for handling relationships smoothly. You must be able, he said, “to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way.” Psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer call such self-control “emotional intelligence.” Emotional intelligence refers to a combination of skills, such as empathy, self-control, and self-awareness. People who excel in life tend to be emotionally intelligent. Indeed, the costs of poor emotional skills can be high They range from problems in marriage and parenting to poor physical health. A lack of emotional intelligence can ruin careers and sabotage achievement. Perhaps the greatest toll falls on people who are still developing or marginalized members of the community. For them, having poor emotional skills and being subjected to dealing with those who have substandard emotional skills, makes them become victims of depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, unwanted lifestyle choices, aggression, and violent crimes, or they can also become violent criminals. The Devil has a sure foothold in Massachusetts during the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 because many people seemed to be lacking emotional intelligence. People who were skeptical of witchcraft were thought to must undoubtedly be a witch. For instance, that Martha Corey’s skepticism was held against her is clear evidence that by this time the magistrates’ attitudes had hardened into those of the witch hunter. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
It was at Martha Corey’s examination that one typical kind of behaviour first appeared. She bit her lip, and several of the afflicted children complained that they were bitten She was charged with biting her lip, and she quite naturally asked what harm was there in it. The Reverend Mr. Nicolas Noyes of Salem Town explained: “I believe it is apparent she practiseth witchcraft in the congregation; there is no need of images.” That is, instead of tormenting images she was using her own body as an image, biting the children by biting her own lips, and later pinching them by clenching her fingers together. From Martha Corey’s examination on, any motion on the part of the accused was apt to produce a corresponding effect in the afflicted children. It must have been a most convincing spectacle, as though black magic were being worked before the very eyes of the beholders. And as the effects produced on the children were obviously painful, they were that much more convincing. In some cases there were seen to be marks of bites or pinches on the children’s flesh; on other occasions there were pins literally stuck in their flesh. There are at least three explanations for this behaviour. In the first place, hysterics are extremely suggestible, and for hysterics familiar with the idea of image magic, it would be easy to assume that an accused person biting her lip was trying to bit them. A similar phenomenon is the “arctic hysteria” of North American Indians, in which the group imitates the motions of the shaman. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Secondly, hysteric will often try to injure themselves; they will beat their heads on the floor, or run into fire or water. (But they seldom succeed in injuring themselves seriously because they are most apt to make these attempts when other people are present, an able to stop them.) Surely this is the explanation for the pins in their flesh; the afflicted stuck them there themselves. However, this is not to say there was conscious fraud; people in fits are after all not responsible for their actions. Some of the bites and pinches, too, were probably self-inflicted, but it is also probable that some were not. Skin lesions are among the commonest of psychosomatic symptoms, and surely some of these bites and pinches were psychosomatic. Hathorne and Corwin, of course, thought the cause was witchcraft, and they committed Martha Corey to jail for further examination and eventually trial. And with her commitment to jail, Salem had very nearly committed itself to a witch hunt. Yet there would be moments during the succeeding month when the course of events would seem to hesitate and waver; moments wen the slightest change of circumstances might have averted the final catastrophe. On Saturday, March 19, two days before the examination of Martha Corey, the Reverend Deodat Lawson arrived in Salem Village. He has been its minister from 1684 to 1688 and had now returned as a visiting preacher and for personal reasons as well; the afflicted girls were saying that his wife and daughter, whom he had buried there, had been killed by witchcraft. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Reverend Deodat Lawson tells us that there were at that time ten afflicted persons—three girls from nine to twelve years old: Elizabeth Parris, Abagail Williams, and Ann Putnam; three adolescent girls: Mary Walcott, Mercy Lewis, and Elizabeth Hubbard; and for married women: Goodwives Putnam, Pope, Bibber, and Goodall. He conducted both the morning and the afternoon services on Sunday, but without incident. Several of the afflicted persons were present. This was not Lawson’s first introduction to the behavior of the afflicted. He had lodged the night before at Ingersoll’s Tavern, and there had seen Mary Walcott, who, “as she stood by the door was bitten, so that she cried out of her wrist, and looked on it with a candle we saw apparently the marks of teeth, both upper and lower set, on each side of her wrist.” He had also visited the parsonage, where Abigail Williams “had a grievous fit.” He would see more on Monday, at Martha Corey’s examination, and on Wednesday, when he went to Thomas Putnam’s to see his wife, Ann Putnam, Senior. “I found her lying on the bed, having had a sore fit a little before. She spake to me and said she was glad to see me. Her husband and she both desired me to pray with her while she was sensible, which I did, though the apparition said [id est, to Ann Putnam, Senior] I should not go to prayer. At first beginning she attended but after a little time was taken with a fit, yet continued silent and seemed to be sleep. When prayer was done, her husband going to her found her in a fit. He took her off the bed to set her on his knees, but at first she was so stiff she could not be bended. But she afterwards set down, but quickly began to strive violently with her arms and legs.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Shortly afterward she began to argue with an apparition, and she thought that telling it a passage from the Christian Bible would make it vanish. She said, “I am sure you cannot stand before that text!” Then she was sorely afflicted, her mouth drawn on one side and her body strained for about a minute, and then said “I will tell, I will tell; it is, it is, it is!” three or four times, and then was afflicted to hinder her telling. At last she broke forth and said “It is the third chapter of the Revelations.” I did something scruple the reading it. [Reverend Lawson was reluctant because in this case reading the Bible might be construed as using it as a charm.] However, thought not versed she opened her eyes and was well. This fit [had] continued near half an hour. Her husband and the spectators told me she had often been so relieved by reading texts that she named, something pertinent to her case. The next day was Lecture Day at Salem Village and Reverend Lawson preached the sermon, which he published shortly thereafter under the title Christ’s Fidelity the Only Shield Against Satan’s Malignity. Historians have consistently represented it as an attempt to sir up the emotions of the community, but in fact it was nothing of the sort. To be sure, Reverend Lawson did reaffirm that the girl’s afflictions were the “effects of Diabolical malice and operations, and that it cannot rationally be imagined to proceed from any other cause whatsoever.” Reverend Lawson was far from depending on the magistrates to cure the country of its troubles. In fact he warned the community that there was ultimately no legitimate secular defense against witchcraft. There was, for example, no legitimate means of testing to see whether an accused person was a witch: “we find no means instituted of God to make trial of witches.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Nor could one rightly defend oneself against witchcraft with white magic, such as boiling one’s urine or nailing a horseshoe over the door, because such charms were in themselves, “a kind of witchcraft,” and might well give a more secure foothold to the Devil. Careless accusations of suspected persons might also backfire, Reverend Lawson warned. “Rash censuring of others, without sufficient grounds, or false accusing any willingly…is indeed to be like the Devil, who is a calumniator, of false accuser.” Most important, he warned his listeners that the Devil might appear in the shape of an innocent person. Indeed, he suspected this was precisely what had happened when church members saw the apparitions of other church members afflicting them. The Devil had taken “some visible subjects of our Lord Jesus and [used] at least their shapes and appearances…to afflict and torture other visible subjects of that same Kingdom. Surely his design is that Christ’s Kingdom may be divided against itself.” Given all these difficulties the only sure protection against witchcraft, the “Only Shield Against Satan’s Malignity,” was faith in Christ, and the application of that faith in prayer. And such prayer would be answered, particularly if it came from a people bound to the worship of God, like those of New England, by their church covenants: “whensoever God hath declared a person or people to be in covenant with Him, as the objects of His special mercy and favour, He will assuredly and shortly suppress the malice of Satan, however violently engaged against them.” In the late 19th century, it seemed that San Jose, California had come under a spell. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Mrs. Sarah Winchester moved to San Jose, California after the tragic loss of her baby daughter and husband and began to construct one of the most unique and elaborate Queen Anne Victorian mansions the World had ever witnessed. According to legend, Mrs. Winchester enacted a nightly séance to help with her building plans and for protection from “bad” spirits. While she sometimes drew up simple sketches of the building ideas, there were never any blueprints! In the morning, she would meet with Mr. John Hansen, her dutiful foreman, and go over new changes and additions. During the early years of construction, this resulted in some unusual and impractical concepts such as columns being installed upside down—though some suggest this was done deliberately to confuse the evil spirits. However, this is how the Winchester Mystery House became known as “the house built by the spirits.” Mr. John Hansen stayed with Mrs. Winchester for many years, redoing scores of rooms, remodeling the in one week and tearing them apart the next. It is doubtful whether Mr. Hansen ever questioned his boss. Mrs. Winchester may have been trying to confuse evil spirits, or simply unsure if she was pleased with aspects of traditional designs, but there was so budget ceilings or deadlines to meet. This resulted in many features being dismantled, built around, or sealed over. Some rooms were remolded many times. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
It is estimated that the Winchester mansion once contained 500 to 600 rooms, but because so many were redone, only 160 remains (110 open for touring). This naturally resulted in some peculiar effects, such as stairs that lead to the ceiling, door that go nowhere and that open onto walls, and chimneys that stop just short of the roof! Once a room was completed, and most importantly, not targeted for further alterations, it was adored with some of the best furnishings money could buy. Mrs. Winchester appreciated beauty, and she was a woman with exquisite taste. Freight cars loaded with gold- and silver-plated chandeliers, imported Tiffany art glass windows then valued at up to $1,500 ($39,587.50 in 2021 dollars), German silver and bronze inlaid doors at twice that amount, Swiss molded bathtubs, rare precious woods like mahogany and rosewood, and countless other items were docked onto a side track at San Jose. Everything was then transported to the house, where much of the material was never even installed. However, the employees often times seem to be bewitched by the Devil. “Oh, how I wish I were out of this dreadful, dreadful house!” said Stella the maid. “Please do not think me very ungrateful for saying this, after taking such pains to provide us with a Heaven upon Earth, as you thought, Mrs. Winchester.” What happened could, of course, have been neither foretold, nor guarded against, by any human being. Stella, Mrs. Winchester’s maid came to her with a very long face, and said, “If you please, Mistress, did you know that this house was haunted? #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Mrs. Winchester was so startled. She replied, “Good Heavens! No! is it?” Stella then explained, “Well, Mistress, I’m pretty nigh sure it is,” and the expression of her countenance was about as lively as an undertaker’s; and then she told Mrs. Winchester that cook had been that morning to order in groceries from a shop in the neighbourhood, and on her giving the man the direction where to send the things to, he had said, with a very peculiar smile, “The Winchester mansion–, eh? H’m! I wonder how long you’ll stand it; last cook held out just a fortnight.” He looked so odd that she asked him what be meant, but he only said, “Oh! nothing; only that help never did long at the Winchester mansion. He had known staff go in one day, and out the next, and during the last four years he had never known any remain over a month.” Feeling a good deal alarmed by this information, the cook naturally enquired the reason; but he declined to give it, saying that if se had not found out herself, she had much better leave it alone, as it would only frighten her out of her wits; and on her insisting and urging him, she could only extract from him, that the house has such a mysterious history. “You know, Mrs. Winchester, how firmly I believe in apparitions, and what an unutterable fear I have of them; anything material, tangible, that I can lay hold of—anything of the same fibre, blood, and bone as myself, I could, I think, confront bravely enough; but the mere thought of being brought face to face with the ‘bodiless dead,’ makes my brain unsteady.” Mrs. Winchester had the prettiest mansion in California. She told Setlla, “Most good things that had ever been in the World had had a bad name in their day; and moreover, the grocer probably a motive for taking away the house’s character.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Mrs. Winchester derided Stella’s “babyish fears,” to such an extent that she felt half ashamed, and yet not quite comfortable, either and then came the usual rush of the mansion’s engagements, during which one has no time to think of anything but how to speak, and act, and look for the moment then present. Marriam Marriot, Mrs. Winchester’s niece was to arrive the previous day and, in the morning, the weekly hamper of flowers, fruit, and vegetables arrived. Stella always dressed the flower-vase, while other servants ate so tasteless; and as she was arranging them, it occurred to her—you know Stella’s passion for flowers—to carry up one particular cornucopia of roses and mignonette and set it on Marriam’s toilet-table, as a pleasant surprise for her. As Stella came downstairs, she had seen Ashely, another maid. Ashely was a fresh round-faced country girl—she went into the room, which was being prepared for Mrs. Marriot, with a pair of sheets that she had been airing over her arm. Stella went upstairs very slowly, as her cornucopia was full of water, and she was afraid of spilling some. She turned the handle of the bedroom-door and entered, keeping her eyes fixed on her flowers, to see how they bore the transit, and whether any of them had fallen out. Suddenly a sort of shiver passed over her; and feeling frighten—she did not know why—she looked up quickly. The girl was standing by the bed, leaning forward a little with her hands clenched in each other, rigid, every nerve tense; her eyes, wide open, starting out of her head and a look of unutterable stony horror in them; her cheeks and mouth not pale, but livid as those of one that died awhile ago in mortal pain. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
As Stella looked at her, her lips moved a little, and an awful hoarse voice, not like hers in the least said, “Oh! my God, have see it!” and then she fell down suddenly, like a log, with a heavy noise. Using Mrs. Winchester’s call system, she alerted Mr. Hansen to what area in the mansion they were in. The message was loudly audible and Mr. Hansen came running in, and between the two of them they managed to lift Ashely on to the bed, and tried to bring her to herself by running her feet and hands, and holding strong salts to her nostrils. And all the while they kept glancing over their shoulders, in a vague cold terror of seeing some awful, shapeless apparition. Two long hours she lay in a state of utter unconsciousness. Meanwhile Mr. Hansen, who had been down to his guest house, returned. At the end of the two hours they succeeded in bringing Ashely back to sensation and life, but only to make the awful discovery that she was raving mad. She became so violent that it required all the combined strength of Mr. Hansen and Walley (the butler) to hold her down in the bed. Of course, the sent off instantly for a doctor, who, on her growing a little calmer towards evening, removed her in a carriage to his own house. The doctor had come later to tell Mrs. Winchester that Ashley was pretty quiet, not from any return to sanity, but from sheer exhaustion. Stella, Mrs. Winchester, Mr. Hansen and Walley were, of course, utterly in the dark as to what she saw, and her ravings were far to disconnected and unintelligible to afford them the slightest clue. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Everyone was so completely shattered and upset by the awful occurrence. No one was allowed to occupy that room again. Mrs. Winchester would shudder and run by quickly as she passed the door. Eventually Mr. Hansen boarded it up. Legend has it this room is one of the 50 not opened to guests on tours. Mrs. Winchester was still unconvinced as to the house being at fault. You know, she felt like the mansion was a godmother, a protector to her, and was responsible for its good behaviour. She thought the girl simply had a fit. Why not? She knew of a man who was subject to seizures of that kind, and immediately on being attacked his whole body became rigid, his eyes glassy and staring, his complexion livid, exactly as in that case. Or it was also possible that, if no a fit, that perhaps the girl was subject to madness? The doctor had to ascertain where there was not insanity in her family. Even allowing the possibility, nay, the actual unquestioned existence of ghost in the abstract, is it likely that there should be anything to be seen so horribly fear-inspiring, as to send a perfectly sane person in one instant raving mad, which, after many years of residence in the house that Mrs. Winchester had never caught a glimpse of? According to this hypothesis, everyone in the mansion should have, by that time, been stark raving mad and in a lunatic asylum. Stella told Mrs. Winchester that she was leaving that “terrible, hateful, fatal house. I wish I had escaped from it sooner! Oh, my dear Mrs. Winchester, I shall never be the same woman again if I live to be a hundred.” After Stella left, Ashley was removed to the lunatic asylum, Agnews State Hospital, where she remained in the same state. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Ashely had several lucid intervals, she was closely, pressingly questioned as to what it was she saw; but she maintained an absolute, hopeless, silence, and only shuddered, moaned, and would hide her face in her hands when the subject was broached. Stella went to see her, and on her retuned was sitting resting in the drawing-room, before going to dress for dinner, talking to Mrs. Winchester about her visit, when Theophilus Riesinger walked in, he had always been waling in the last ten days, and Mrs. Winchester always flushed up and looked happy, whenever he made his appearance. He looked very handsome, dear fellow, just came in from the park in a coat that fitted like a second skin, black gloves, and a top hat. He seemed in tremendous spirits, and was as sceptical as Mrs. Winchester to the ghostly origins of Ashley’s seizure. “Let me come here tonight and sleep in that room; Mrs. Winchester,” he said, looking very eager and excited, “with the gas lit and a poker, I’ll engage to exorcize every demon that shows his ugly nose; even if I should find seven white ghostisses, sitting on seven white postisses.” “You don’t mean really?” asked Stella, incredulously. “Don’t I? that’s all,” he answered, emphatically. “I should like nothing better. Well, is it a bargain?” Mrs. Winchester turned quite pale. “Oh, don’t,” she said, hurriedly, “Please, don’t; why should you run such a risk, besides the room has been boarded up? How do you know that you might not be sent mad too?” He laughed very heartily, and coloured a little with pleasure at seeing the interest she took in his safety. “Never fear,” he said, “it would take more than a whole squadron of departed ones, with the gentleman at their head, to send me crazy.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
He was so eager, so persistent, so thoroughly in earnest, that Mrs. Winchester yielded at last, though with a certain strong reluctance to his entreaties. Her eyes filled with tears, she had the room opened up and walked away hastily to the conservatory. Nonetheless, Father Riesinger got his wish; it was so difficult to refuse him anything. Mrs. Winchester gave up her engagements for the evening. And at about 10.00pm, she went to bed. Then he went, jumping up the stairs three steps at a time and humming a tune. The human victims of this tragedy should never be forgotten. With a magnitude registering 7.9, high intensity shaking was felt at 5.13am on April 18, 1906. It felt like the most powerful Earthquake on Earth. All of the sudden the whole Earth started shaking like crazy, and the shaking got worse and worse. Devastating fires soon broke out in the San Francisco Bay Area and lasted for several days. More than 3,000 people died and over 80 percent of San Francisco was destroyed. The position of the people in Agnews was critical; a number of insane persons escaped from the demolished asylum, and were running at random about the country. 117 patients and staff were killed and buried in mass graves on the site. The main building and some others were irreparably damaged. The ground just opened up. Back at her mansion, Mrs. Winchester was in her Daisy Bed Room, when she was awakened by the jolt, “Every time I took a step,” she said, “I fell. I heard an awful sound. The seven-story town went flying up and crashed down onto the house, trappimg me in my bedroom and destroying most of the fourth floor along with it.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
People were running, but the valley just opened up and swallowed them. Dozens of people sank into the Earth. “The house seemed to shake forever and ever. I felt a lump in my throat, a gasping for breath—ten minutes on the clock, but a thousand centuries in my heart. Then again, loud, sudden, a violent banging on the door! I made a simultaneous rush to the door. My servants came and saved me. They said I had been trapped in my room for days. As we walked down the hall, there was Father Riesinger, standing in the middle of the floor of the room we had boarded up, rigid, petrified, with that same look—that look that is burnt into my heart in letters of fire—of awful, unspeakable, stony fear on his brave young face. For one instant he stood thus; then stretching out his arms stiffly before him, he groaned in a terrible husky voice, ‘Oh, my God, I have seen it!’ and fell down dead. Yes, dead. Not in a swoon or in a fit, but dead. Vainly we tried to bring back the life to that strong young heart; it will never come back again till that day when the Earth and the sea give up the dead are therein. I cannot see for the tears that are blinging me; he was such a dear fellow.” Then an omnipresent, malevolent voice, said, “Can you feel that? Drowning deep in my sea of loathing, broken your servant I kneel. Will you give it to me? There is no turning back now. You’ve woken up the demon in me.” This is a true story. The Winchester mansion is a 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester rifle. The study of theology also tells us that a distinction between spirit and soul has remained obtuse till present day. As a result, the learned theologians of the most advanced organized religions take one for the other, keeping the identities and so interrelationship between the two hazy. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
This obtuse relationship has been trickling down for the millenniums, from when humans lived in caves in the Mesolithic era, around 14,000 years BC. Sorcery is also visible in burial rites and construction of monuments. Belief in a deity or an afterlife could be an evolutionarily advantageous by-product of people’s ability to reason about the minds of others. The Victorian period was an era of deep and sustained religious belief in the supernatural. People have a bias for believing in the supernatural. Yet people think there is a dark force behind many of the tragic events that are happening today. A force that has a significant impact on Society. Repeatedly we see cases involving law-breaking, or violence on the rise, and in many cases people believe it proceeds from an unknown dark force. Perhaps the Victorian belief in the spiritual and occult was not too farfetched. And God say everything He had made, and found it very good. And He said: This is a beautiful World that I have given you. Take good care of it; do not ruin it. It is said: Before the World was created, the Holy One kept creating Worlds and destroying them. Finally He created this one, and was satisfied. He said to Adam: This is the last World I shall make. I place it in your hands: hold it in trust. May His great name be blessed for ever and ever. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises, hymns and blessings that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. May the prayers and supplications of the House of America be acceptable unto their Father in Heaven; and say ye, Amen. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
The most expensive window was built on the north side of the house with a room built over it. Ever wonder why? Come learn about this beautiful story at the Winchester Mystery House.
Now open for GUIDED Mansion Tours!
🎟️ Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com/recent-links
Its Inhabitants Live with More Ease, Decency, and Peace than You Can Imagine!
Benefits of expanding trade were not evenly shared. They flowed mainly from the First Wave World to the Second. To facilitate this flow, the industrial powers worked hard to expand and integrate the World market. As trade passed beyond national boundaries each national market became part of a larger set of interconnected regional or continental markets and, finally, part of a single, unified exchange system envisioned by the integrational elites who ran Second Wave civilization. A single web of money was woven around the World. Treating the rest of the World as its gas pump, garden, mine, quarry, and cheap labour supply, the Second Wave World wrought deep changes in the social life of the Earth’s non-industrial populations. Cultures that had subsisted for thousands of years in a self-sufficient manner, producing their own food supplies, were sucked willy-nilly into the World trade system and compelled to trade or perish. Suddenly the living standards of Bolivians or Malayans were tied to the requirements of industrial economies half a planet away, as tin mines and rubber plantations sprang up to feed the voracious industrial maw. The innocent household product margarine provides a dramatic case in point. Margarine was originally manufactured in Europe out of local material. It grew so popular, however, that these materials proved insufficient. In 1907 researchers discovered that margarine could be made out of coconut and palm-kernel oil. The result of this European discovery was an upheaval in the lifestyle of West Africans. “In the main areas of West Africa,” writes Magnus Pyke, former president of the British Institute of Food Science and Technology, “where palm oil was traditionally produced, the land was owned by the community as a whole.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Complex local customs and rules governed the use of the palm trees. Sometimes a man who had planted a tree was entitled to its product for the rest of his life. In some places, women had special rights. According to Pyke, the Western businessmen who organized “the large-scale production of palm oil for the manufacture of margarine as a ‘convenience’ food for the industrial citizens of Europe and America destroyed the fragile and complex social system of the non-industrial Africans.” Huge plantations were set up in the Belgian Congo, in Nigeria, the Cameroons, and the Gold Coasts. The West got its margarine. And Africans became semi-slaves on huge plantations. Rubber offers another example. After the turn of the century when automobile production in the United States of America created a sudden heavy demand for rubber tires and inner tubes, traders, in collusion with local authorities, enslaved Amazonian Indians to product it. Roger Casement, the British consul in Rio de Janeiro, reported that the production of four thousand tons of Putumayo runner between 1900 and 1911 resulted in the death of thirty thousand Indians. It can be argued that these were “excesses” and were not typical of Grand Imperialism. Certainly the colonial powers were not unrelievedly cruel of evil. In places they did build schools and rudimentary health facilities for their subject populations. They improved sanitation and water supplies. They no doubt raised the living standard for some. Nor would it be fair to romanticize precolonial societies or to blame the poverty of today’s non-industrial populations exclusively on imperialism. Climate, local corruption and tyranny, ignorance, and xenophobia all contributed. There was plenty of misery and oppression to go around long before the Europeans ever arrived. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Nevertheless, once torn out of self-sufficiency and compelled to product for money and exchange, once encouraged or forced to reorganize their social structure around mining, for example, or plantation farming, First Wave populations were plunged into economic dependence on a marketplace they could scarcely influence. Often their leaders were bribed, their cultures ridiculed, their languages suppressed. Moreover, the colonial powers hammered a deep sense of psychological inferiority into the conquered people that stands even today as an obstacle to economic and social development. In the Second Wave World, however, Grand Imperialism paid off handsomely. As the economic historian William Woodruff put it: “It was the exploitation of these territories and the growing trade done with them that obtained for the European family wealth on a scale never seen before.” Built deep into the very structure of the Second Wave economy, feeding its ravenous need for resources, imperialism marched across the planet. In 1492 when Columbus first set foot in the New World, Europeans controlled only 9 percent of the globe. By 1801 they ruled a third. By 1880, two thirds. And by 1935 Europeans politically controlled 85 percent of the land surface on Earth and 70 percent of its population. Like Second Wave society itself, the World was divided into integrators and integrates. Not all integrators were equal, however. The Second Wave nations waged an increasingly bloody battle among themselves for control of the emerging World economic system. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
English and French dominance was challenged in World War I by rising German industrial might. The war’s destruction, the devastating cycle of inflation and depression that followed it, the revolution in Russia, all shook the industrial World market. These upheavals brought on a drastic slowdown in the rate of growth of World trade, and, even though more countries were sucked into the trading system, the actual volume of good traded internationally declined. World War II further slowed extension of the integrated World market. By the end of World War II, Western Europe lay in smoking ruins. Germany had been reduced to a lunar landscape. The Soviet Union has suffered indescribable physical and human damage. Japan’s industry was shattered. Of the major industrial powers only the United States of America found itself unharmed economically. By 1946-950 the global economy stood in such disarray that foreign trade was at its lowest level since 1913. Moreover, the very weakness of the war-stricken European dependence. Gandhi, Ho Chi Minh, Jomo Kenyatta, and other anti-colonialists stepped up their campaigns to oust the colonizers. Even before the wartime guns stopped firing, therefore, it was apparent that the entire World industrial economy would have to be reconstituted on a new basis after the war. Two nations took upon themselves the task of reorganizing and reintegrating the Second Wave system: the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The United States of America until then played a limited part in the Grand Imperial campaign. In opening its own frontier it had decimated the Native Americans and cordoned them off in reservations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
In Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, Americans imitated the imperial tactics of the British the French, or the Germans. In Latin America throughout the early decades of this century U.S. “dollar diplomacy” helped United Fruit and other corporations guarantee low prices for sugar, bananas, coffee, copper, and other goods. Nevertheless, compared with the Europeans, the United States of America was a junior partner in the Grand Imperial crusade. After World War II, by contrast, the United States of American stood as the chief creditor nation in the World. It had he most advanced technology, the most stable political structure—and an irresistible opportunity to move into the power vacuum left behind by its shattered competitors as they were forced to withdraw from the colonies. As early as 1941 U.S. financial strategists had begun to plan for a postwar reintegration of the World economy along lines more favourable to the United States. At the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, held under U.S. leadership, forty-four nations agreed to set up two key integrative structures—in International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The IMF thus fixed the basic relationship of the major World currencies. The World Bank, meanwhile, at first established to provide postwar reconstruction funds to European nations, gradually began providing loans to the non-industrial countries, too. These were often for the purpose of building roads, harbours, ports, and other “infrastructure items” to facilitate the movement of raw materials and agricultural exports to the Second Wave nations. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Soon a third component was added to the system: The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade—GATT for short. This agreement, again promoted originally by the United States of America, set out to liberalize trade, which had the effect of making it difficult for the poorer, less technologically advanced countries to protect their tiny fledgling industries. The three structures were wired together by a rule that prohibited the World Bank from making loans to any country that refused to join the IMF or to abide by the GATT. This system made it difficult for debtors of the United States to reduce their obligations through currency or tariff manipulation. It strengthened the competitiveness of U.S. industry in World markets. And it gave the industrial powers, and especially the United States of American, a strong influence on economic planning in many First Wave countries, even after they had attained political independence. These three interconnected agencies formed a single integrative structure for the World trade. And from 1944 to the early 1970’s, the United States of America basically dominated this system. Among nations, it integrated the integrators. As a direct result, the American suburb became more than a geographical location. Suburbs also became more than various collections of certain types of residences. Nor are suburbs simply the abodes of certain types of people. American suburbs are all the above and far more—for suburbia is not just a place, it is an idea. This suburban ideal is called, in one urban scholar’s felicitous term, a “bourgeois utopia.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
The suburbs that best met this idealized goal were the nineteenth-century suburbs of privilege. These well-to-do suburbs represented not only a place, but also a romanticized and idealized image of nature and of the role of the family in such an idyllic setting. The suburb was the humane alternative to the dehumanizing aspects of the city. To popular writer of the time, the suburb represents an escape from the filth, noise, and debauchery of the nineteenth-century industrial city. Suburban life was portrayed in a highly idealized light that stressed numerous advantages, and all but ignored inconveniences and liabilities. Suburbs were to allow families to achieve the benefits of the Jeffersonian rural ideal without having to forgo the comforts and convenience of the city. The suburb was said to be the perfect merger of the energy of the city and the charm and openness of the country. Here proud parents could raise healthy children in the safety and openness of the country. Early country small towns copied the compact pattern of the city. This mean crowding existing structures together and building right up to property and street lines. Such small towns saw themselves as nascent cities, and as such they copied city patterns. The goal of the designed romantic suburb we will presently discuss was quite different. Rather than ape the city, the suburb consciously sought to return its residents to nature. Winding roads and large lots with trees, foliage, and ample emerald green lawns all were designed to suggest the virtues of a comfortable home nestled in benign nature. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
The goal of the idealized romantic suburbs was an improved-upon naturalism. For housewives, living in such planned naturalism—the fresh air, wide vistas, and comfortable cottages—was to allow them to develop their spiritual, sentimental, and intellectual capacities. For the male, the home was to be a refuge from the crowded, dirty, noisy, and dense city. The romantic suburb was designed o counteract the unnatural aspects of urban confusion with the balm of peaceful nature. The American romantic suburb had both American and English roots. It can be seen as an artifact of both Jeffersonian ideals and nineteenth-century British romantic era sensibilities in arts and philosophy. The Englishman J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, writing in 1782, stated that the new American humans lived in a village, “where far removed from the accursed neighbourhood of Europeans, its inhabitants live with more ease, decency, and peace than you can imagine; where, though governed by no laws, yet find in uncontaminated simple manners all that laws can afford. The image of the self-sufficient American was pure Jeffersonian, and it was one of the more enduring symbols of the romantic era. To nineteenth-century writers such as Emerson and Hawthorne, the rural landscape was far preferable to that of the squalid city Creations of nature were preferable to artificial creations of humans. In the view of Emerson, urbanization was a potential danger to the nation in that it was fostering false and artificial tastes. This superficiality was undermining the rural simplicity that was the bedrock of the national greatness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
As expressed by Emerson, “We pave the Earth for miles with stones and forbid the grass. We build streets all round the horizon and shut out the sky and wind.” If such calamities were to continue, not only the artistic sensibilities would suffer; there also would be a sharp undermining of the people’s natural rural virtue. Onto these essentially Jeffersonian beliefs, writers of the nineteenth century then grafted the artistic works of the poets, painters, and writers of the romantic era. Examining the poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson, or even that of Byron or Shelley, is to see a World of picturesque villages and cottages in a bucolic landscape. In American art of the time, the paintings of the Hudson Valley School similarly present a view of nature that is highly idealized and almost mystical. Nature is pure, it is virtuous, and it is basically benign. There is no suggestion that nature can be capricious, evil, violent, or dangerous. It is the nature of Rousseau rather than that of Hobbes. The romantic garden suburb was a pragmatic American response, insofar as it was an attempt to practically prepackage the rural virtues of the affluent suburbanite. The romantic suburb was to provide the jaded urbanite a healthful, restorative return to nature. Thus, moving one’s family from the crowded, sinful city to the pure and open country was not just a practical decision; it was a moral choice. Moving one’s family to a suburban villa, or a large country “cottage,” signified one’s moral rectitude. It was a sign that the home owner was not only well-off, but stable and dependable. In simplest terms, one was a family person. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
By moving to the suburbs, it showed that one was putting down solid rots. One cared for one’s family. One might have to spend one’s days in the hellish city, but one’s spouse and children would be spared. They would abide among flowers and greenery in rural-like domesticity. The line between the home itself and the idealization of the family was blurred. Having the right home became a moral as well as a practical choice. Even before the Civil War, the image of the larger welcoming house with a front porch, a garden, and a spacious tree-shaded lawn was on its way to becoming an American icon. It is generally accepted that architectural and social-morality writers were particularly influential in spreading the gospel of the morality of the suburban villa set in a gracious tree-lined lawn. The most influential of the latter was Catherine Beecher, the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote the immensely popular antislavery potboiler Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Catherine Beecher was the combination Miss Manners, Dr. Spock, and Ann Landers of her day. Her Treatise on Domestic Economy, first published in 1841, became the authority on everything domestic. The book is still a marvel, including everything from how to exercise, to proper manners, to the proper way to eat healthfully, to methods of best caring for infants, to how to raise plants, to skills needed to decorate a parlour, to how to deign a more efficient kitchen. Over a quarter of a century later, in 1869, Catherine and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a new version of Treatise on Domestic Economy titled The American Woman’s Home, which expanded on the idea that not only the home, but also the surrounding community, should provide a tranquil escape from the city. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Also, as the sisters became increasingly doubtful as to weather the city could be reformed and redeemed, the location of the home gradually became as crucial as the home itself. It is one of those interesting side notes of history tht Catherine Beecher, the expert on everything domestic and the advocate of suburban homes, never married or had a home of her own in the suburbs or anywhere else. Nonetheless, for several decades her works publicized the moral as well as practical advantages of living in a suburban country environment outside the city. In her view, women were morally superior to men, and the proper feminine sphere was providing husband and children an elevated home environment. While she never directly advocated leaving the city, it was clear that suburbia, in her view, best provided an environment as free as possible from the corruption of the male-dominated city life. She also stressed the practical and healthful aspects of living a quiet, countrylike life. While relatively few families could afford the ideal suburban villas she championed, Catherine Beecher was very influential with women in setting the image of the suburban home as the physical and moral ideal. The second wrier of great influence was the landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing. Mr. Downing has considerable popularity. He even designed the largely undeveloped Mall in Washington, D.C., into a parklike area having winding carriage drives and a naturalistic setting of trees. (Only at the turn of the century, under the general guidance of the architect Daniel Burnham, did the Mall adopt the classical architecture and proportions with which we now are all so familiar.) #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
However, Mr. Downing and his disciples, such as Calvert Vaux, were primarily concerned with domestic architecture and were great popularizers of the picturesque suburban villa or cottage. Mr. Downing’s popular book Cottage Residences provided models of Italianate, Gothic, rustic, and Victorian-style comfortable middle-class housing, as did his later The Architecture of Country Houses and Victorian Cottage Residences. Mr. Downing saw domestic cottage architecture as providing a sense of balance and tranquility to counter the unsettling negative energy of the city. However, although Mr. Downing borrowed heavily from the ideas of the English landscape architect John Claudius Loudon, he had innovative deigns and used new building techniques. For example, Mr. Downing used the new balloon frame made out of two-by-fours spaces 18 inches apart rather than the older, and more expensive, post-and-beam method of construction. Balloon-frame homes did not require skilled craftsmen and could rapidly be constructed by two or three humans having basic carpentering skills. Housing reformers such as Mr. Downing preferred to refer to the more elaborate homes as “villas,” which suggested a Roman estate for one of the patrician class rather than the more humble designation “cottage.” The home, in Mr. Downing’s view, was o be republican, but not egalitarian. Suburbia was to be a place for those of taste, not for the urban masses. Similarly to Catherine Beecher, Mr. Downing and Vaux stressed the moral value of the suburban home as a refuge from the hectic businesses and moral vices of the city. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Suburban homes in their design, size, and furnishings were to express the moral superiority of their inhabitants. Domestic architecture was not only to reflect taste and beauty, but also the spiritual ideals and moral development of the inhabitants. As noted by Clark, he architectural reformers of the mid-nineteenth century believed, for example, that Gothic-revival style, with its emphasis on verticality, not only harmonized well with nature but also symbolized an eminently Christian type of dwelling. Dwellings were not simply functional, they also possessed a moral element. Thus, whether the American suburb was a unique American phenomenon, as Kenneth Jackson suggests, or a virtual clone of earlier English models, as Robert Fishman argues, American suburbs soon developed into something quite American. Compared to early English estates, the American suburban vision of the ideal home was considerably reduced in scale. The American suburban home also carried in its designer’s eyes an explicit tie to the agrarian Jeffersonian republican ideal. In Mr. Downing’s words, the homes had to be, “built and loved upon the new World, and not old World, ideas and principles; a home in which humanity and republicanism are stronger than family pride and aristocratic feeling.” The American suburban home was more than a place, it was an ideology. The homeowner would not only be a better citizen, one would be a better person because of the more “natural” character of suburban life. Some things you are not strong enough to change either in yourself or others. What you can do but patiently endure until God’s orders otherwise? Yes, this is a trial, and it is meant to prove your virtue under fire. Without experience in long-suffering, such merits as you have will not amount to a hill of beans. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
What you might want to do is ask God for more annoyance rather than less. Perhaps then He will think it worth His while to come to your assistance. In the meantime bear up and benign. Once someone has been admonished a couple of times, one becomes anxious. Do not mess with one. Instead, commit yourself totally to God. Pray to God that His will and honour will appear in Him and all His servants. However, how can He do this? Well, God has converted bad cranberry juice into premium cranberry juice on at least one festive occasion! Strive to be patient by putting up with the defects of others. Why? Because you have saddled onto others the infirmities that are dragging you down. If you cannot express approval of others, how can you possibly expect them to return approval to you? We are quick to want others to appear polished, but why is it that we are so slow to hammer out our own dents? We want others to be held to the letter of the law. Ourselves? We want to swan around barely observing the spirit of the law. Worse, the uncontrollable behaviour of others has spread through the populace like a plague. Better, our own errant behaviour has swept over the lowlands like a flood. Clearly the latter is to be preferred to the former. We want those others to be surrounded with strictures. We want out own behaviour to know no boundaries. Rare it is that we put ourselves on par with our neighbour, allowing one the same amount of slack as we have come to expect ourselves. If all the World and all the Worldlings were perfect, what glory could we give to God! After all, the source of our spiritual progress is all those neighbours who are annoying us to death. God has ordained it, and St. Paul has written to the Galatians (6.2). We should learn “to carry the burdens of another.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
No one’s without a defect, no one is wise enough to represent oneself. Pauline wisdom to the Galatians (6.2) and Second Corinthians (3.5)! We should carry each other, console each other, help, instruct, admonish each other. That is the sort of wisdom found in Proverbs (3.7), Colossian (3.13), and First Thessalonians (5.11). The more virtue you have, the more adversity you will encounter. Confrontation result. They shake a human up, but at the same time they reveal jus what kind of human one is. When they are in high school, today’s youth should have a general idea of what field they would like to work in. It is not necessary for them to have decided that they are going to be engineers, or secretaries, or doctors, but they need to have started to funnel their skills and interests in a direction. The person who does not aim in a given direction, may wander and drift without ever arriving anywhere, while the person who plans ahead will have a better chance of arriving at one’s destination and will know where one is once one has arrived. Even if you aim someplace and find out it is not what you had in mind, at least you have eliminated one alternative. When youths establish goals, they do not wander aimlessly; instead, they exchange them for other goals. There is a strong relationship between home environment and career development. Parents have more influence on their children’s career choices than do their teachers, friends, or counselors. Not only do they pay the bills in many cases, but they also help form attitudes and feelings about various jobs and the training needed to get them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The purpose is to show people how the “Golden Light” is there for everyone to see. However, do you not think that when people do not get struck by that light and do not hear the thunderous voice they feel cheated? However, it can happen to them, too. Through prayer we can all experience this spiritual ecstasy and God will give us direction in life. When the spirit leaves the body, it is not the end. We are here to realize Oneness with God and will come back until we achieve this. The little voice we gain from prayer will make us give up bad habits. Life is your journey. This will remind you of God’s beauty. As you continue your journey you cannot keep asking to see the Grand Canyon again if you are traveling from Los Angeles to New York. God has many faces. What should a human do to live a perfect life in God’s eyes? Simply reaffirm the oneness of your soul with the Infinite Soul. Prayer means to know that you are one with God. God is omnipresent, and the activity of God is here and now. God’s energy can be perceived by the senses, and that is this “Light.” Dark nights of the soul will give us a great humility, which will smash any pride the glimpse might have engendered. The first thing God gave the created World was physical light. The first communication God makes to the human who has attained His presence is the vision of supernatural Light. During this rare experience the human feels that one is free from Earthly attachments and Worldly desires, that the intense peace one enjoys is the true happiness, that God’s reality is the overwhelming fact of existence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
This vision is a gift, a grace, so it may come suddenly, unexpectedly, but more often it comes to someone who has prepared oneself for it by purification and contemplation. Beneficial changes appear in one’s character and one’s outlook. The lower nature is weakened, the baser attributes are thinned down. Spiritual truths are confirmed for one, and certain false beliefs are cancelled. Yet, if the vision of Light brought union with God, intimacy with God, it did not and could not enable one to know God as God knows Himself. One could not penetrate His inmost nature and substance. Seeing the Light in front of one is one state; being merged into it is another, and superior. To describe the wonders and benefits, the delights and beauties of these glimpse will whet the appetite of people without satisfying it. Hence they will then be led to ask how such a glimpse is to be obtained. Wherever you are is home and the Earth is paradise. Wherever you set your feet is holy land. You do not live off it like a parasite. You live in it, and it in you, or you do not survive. And that is he only worship of God there is. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable unto Thee, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Thou who establishes peace in the Heavens, please grant peace unto us and unto all America. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to grant our portion in Thy Holy Bible and may the Temple be rebuilt in our day. There we will serve Thee with awe as in the days of old. Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the World which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His Kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all the house of America, speedily, yea, soon; and say ye, Amen. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
CRESLEIGH RIVERSIDE AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA |
Now Selling!
Cresleigh Riverside Model Home is OPEN! Nestled at the southern end of Plumas Lake, bordering an orchard to the west, Cresleigh Riverside is home to the largest home sites in the three Plumas Ranch communities.
Its executive-style residences feature space and amenities that are well beyond the norm – many on country lots that back up to the Ranch’s adjacent fruit orchards. With four floor plans available, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.
Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Additional game rooms, bedroom space and three-car garages provide other custom possibilities.
Gain the freedom of large home sites and the extra space and flexibility with Cresleigh Riverside. Homeowners will love the convenient commuter access to nearly Sacramento and Yuba City.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Go! https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/
The Community in the Heavenly Orchard Made History in a Number of Ways!
A great mind said that individualism is a part of being a human being. When the day comes that the mind and body can be separated, what will happen to the soul? No civilization spreads without conflict. Second Wave civilization soon launched a massive attack on the First Wave World, triumphed, and imposed its will on millions, ultimately billions, of human beings. Long before the Second Wave, of course, from the sixteenth century on, European rulers had already begun to build extensive colonial empires. Spanish priests and conquistadors, French trappers, British, Dutch, and Portuguese or Italian adventurers fanned out across the globe, enslaving or decimating whole populations, claiming control of vast lands, and sending tribute home to their monarchs. Compared with what was to follow, however, all this was insignificant. For the treasure these early adventurer and conquerors sent home was, in effect, private booty It financed wars and personal opulence—winter palaces, colourful pageantry, a leisurely workless lifestyle for the court. However, it had little to do with the still basically self-sufficient economy of the colonizing country. Largely outside the money system and the market economy, the serf who scraped a bare living from the sunbaked soil of Spain or the misty heaths of England had little or nothing to export abroad. They scarcely grew enough for local consumption. Nor did they depend on raw materials stolen or purchased in other countries. For them life went on, one way or another. The fruits of overseas conquest enriched the ruling class and the towns rather than the mass of ordinary people who lived as peasant. In this sense, First Wave imperialism was still petty—not yet integrated into economy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The Second Wave transformed this relatively small-scale pilferage into big business. It transformed Petty Imperialism into Grand Imperialism. Here was a new imperialism aimed not at bringing back a few trunkloads of gold or emeralds, spices and silks. Here was an imperialism that ultimately brought back shipload after shipload of nitrates, cotton, palm oil, tin, rubber, bauxite, and tungsten. Here was an imperialism that dug copper mines in the Congo and planted oils rigs in Arabia. Here was an imperialism that sucked in raw material from the colonies, processed them, and very often spewed the finished manufactured goods back into the colonies at huge profit. Here, in short, was imperialism no longer peripheral but so integrated into the basic economic structure of the industrial nation that the jobs of millions of ordinary workers came to depend on it. And not just jobs. In addition to new raw materials, Europe also needed increasing amounts of food. As Second Wave nations turned to manufacturing, transferring rural labour into the factories, they were forced to import more of their foodstuffs from abroad—beef, mutton, grain, coffee, tea, and sugar from India, from China, from Africa, from the West Indies and Central America. In turn, mass manufacturing grew, the new industrial elite needed bigger markets and fresh outlets for investment. In the 1880’s and 1890’s European statesmen were unabashedly open about their objectives. “Empire is commerce,” proclaimed the British politician Joseph Chamberlain. The French premier Jules Ferry was even more explicit: What France needed, he declared, were “outlets for our industries, exports, and capital.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Jolted by cycles of boom and bust, faced with chronic unemployment, European leaders were for generations obsessed by the fear that if colonial expansion stopped, unemployment would lead to armed revolution at home. The roots of Grand Imperialism were, however, more than economic. Strategic considerations, religious fervor, idealism, and adventure all played a part, as did racism, with its implicit assumption of European superiority. Many saw imperial conquest as a divine responsibility. Kipling’s phrase, the “White Man’s burden,” summed up the European’s missionary zeal to spread Christianity and “civilization”—meaning, of course, Second Wave civilization. For the colonizers regarded First Wave civilizations, no matter how refined and complex, as backward and underdeveloped. Rural people, especially if they happened to wear dark skins, were supposedly childlike. They were “tricky and dishonest.” They were “shiftless and lazy.” They did not “value life.” Such attitudes made it easier for the Second Wave forces to justify the annihilation of those who stood in their path. In The Social History of the Machine Gun, John Ellis shows how this new, fantastically deadly weapon, perfected in the nineteenth century, was at first systematically employed against “native” populations and not against pale Europeans, since it was considered unsportsmanlike to kill an equal with it. Shooting colonials, however, was thought to be more like a hunt than a war, so other standards applied. “Mowing down Matabeles, Dervishes or Tibetans,” writes Ellis, “was regarded more as a rather risky kind of ‘shoot’ than a true military operation.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
At Omdurman, across the Nile from Khartoum, this superior technology was displayed with withering effect in 1898 when Dervish warriors led by the Mahdi were defeated by British troops armed with six Maxim machine guns. An eyewitness wrote: “It was the last day of Mahdism and the greatest….It was not a battle but an execution.” In the one engagement twenty-eight British died, leaving behind eleven thousand Dervish dead—392 colonial casualties for every Englishman. Writes Ellis: “It became another example of the triumph of the British spirit, and the general superiority of the White man.” Behind the racist attitudes and the religious and other justifications as the British, French, Germans, Dutch, and others spread around the World, stood a single hard reality. Second Wave civilization could not exist in isolation. It desperately needed the hidden subsidy of cheap resources from the outside. Above all, it needed a single integrated World market through which to siphon those subsidies. The thrust to create this integrated World market was based on the idea, best expressed by David Ricardo, that the division of labour ought to be applied to nations as well as to factory workers. In a classical passage he pointed out that if Britain specialized in the manufacture of textiles and Portugal in making wine, both countries would gain. Each would be doing what it did best. Thus the “international division of labour,” assigning specialized roles to different nations, would enrich everyone. This belief hardened into strict and rigid doctrine in the generations that followed and still prevails today, although its implications often go unnoticed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
For just as the division of labour in any economy created a powerful need for integration and thereby gave rise to an integrational elite, so the international division of labour required integration of a global scale and gave rise to a global elite—a small group of Second Wave nations which, for all practical purposes, took turns dominating large parts of the rest of the World. The success of the drive to create a single integrated World market can be measured in the fantastic growth of World trade once the Second Wave passed through Europe. Between 1750 and 1914 the value of World trade is estimate to have multiplied more than fifty-fold, rising from 700 million dollars ($29,443,203,125.00 in 2021 dollars) to almost 40 billion dollars ($1,076,780,000,000.00 in 2021 dollars). If Ricardo had been right, the advantages of this global trade should have accrued more or less evenly to all aides. In fact, the self-serving belief that specialization would benefit everyone was based on a fantasy of fair competition. It presupposed a completely efficient use of labour and resources. It presupposed deals uncontaminated by threats of political or military force. It presupposed arm’s-length transactions by more or less evenly matched bargainers. They theory, in short, overlooked nothing—except real life. In reality, negotiations between Second Wave merchants and Firs Wave people over sugar, copper, cocoa, or other resources were often totally lopsided. On one side of the table sat money-shrewd European or American traders backed by huge companies, extensive banking networks, powerful technologies, and strong national governments. On the other one might find a local lord or tribal chieftain whose people had scarcely entered the money system and whose economy was based on small-scale agriculture or village crafts. On one side sat the agents of a thrusting, alien, mechanically advanced civilization, convinced of its own superiority and ready to use bayonets or machine guns to prove it. On the other sat representatives of small prenational tribes or principalities, armed with arrows and spears. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Often local rulers or entrepreneurs were simply bought off by the Western, offered bribes or personal gains in return for sweating the native labour force, putting down resistance, or rewriting local laws in favour of the outsiders. Once conquering a colony, the imperial power often set preferential raw-material prices for its own businessmen and erected stiff barriers to prevent the traders of rival nations from bidding prices up. Under such circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the industrial World was able to obtain raw materials or energy resources at less than fair-market prices. Beyond this, prices were often further depressed in the favour of the buyers by what might be termed “The Law of First Price.” Many raw materials needed by Second Wave nations were virtually valueless to the First Wave populations who had them. African peasants had no need for chromium. Arabian sheiks had no use for black gold that they under their desert sands. Where no previous history of trade existed for a given commodity, the prince set in the first transaction was crucial. And this price was often based less on such economic factors as cost, profit, or competition than on relative military and political strength. Typically set in the absence of active competition, almost any price was acceptable to a lord or tribal chief who regarded his local resources as valueless and found himself facing a regiment of troops with Gatling guns. And this First Price, once established at a low level, depressed all subsequent prices. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
As soon as this raw material was shipped back to the industrial nations and incorporated in final products, the low initial price, was for all intents, frozen in place. Example: Suppose Compnay A bought a raw material from Colonia for one dollar a pound, then used I to manufacture widgets selling for two dollars each. Any other company seeking to enter the widget market would strive to keep its own raw-material cost as, or below, that of Company A. Unless it had some technological or other edge, it could not afford to pay significantly more for its raw material and still sell widgets at a competitive price. Thus the initial price set for the raw material, even if arrived at under the shadow of bayonets, became the base for all subsequent negotiation. Eventually, as a World price was gradually established for each commodity, all industrial nations benefited from the fac that the First Price had been set at an “a-competitive” low level. For many different reasons, therefore, despite much imperialist rhetoric about the virtues of free trade and enterprise, the Second Wave nations profited greatly from what was euphemistically called “imperfect competition.” Rhetoric and Ricardo aside, the benefits of expanding trade were not eventually shared. They flowed mainly from the First Wave World to the Second. Many people during the Second Wave also had popular-wisdom reasons for moving to the suburbs. For example, one of the reasons was the filth and crime of the city, and the sharply rising urban taxes, and much higher prices for most goods and services. “White flight” is commonly believed to be a major cause of suburbanization. Two causes of American residential deconcentration were a better quality of life and newer, more affordable housing. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
However, while race, taxes, higher prices for most good and services, crime, or all of these factors doubtlessly were important for individual families, researchers have known for decades that such “commonsense” explanations tend to be overrated as major contributions to postwar suburbanization. In reality, they had little impact on the massive suburbanization that occurred before the late 1960s, when these explanations first became fashionable. This is not to say that race, crime, poor schools, urban decay, and high taxes are not factors in white flight from the city today. However, it is a mistake to project today’s situation back into the past. The fact is that during the 1940s, 1950, and much of the 1960s, cities were doing reasonably well in terms of crime and taxes. Today it is hard to imagine a New York City in which, including family and criminal violence, there were under fifty murders a year, but that was the case during the 1940s. In 1942, for example, there were only forty-four murders in all of New York City. Moreover, white flight to the suburbs was largely irrelevant, because virtually all housing in the United States of America, city and suburban, was de facto segregated. Urban European Americans, particularly those living in the large industrial cities of the North and Middle-West, already lived in segregated, all-European American neighbourhoods. Until the federal open-housing legislation of 1968, city housing was segregated by law in the South and by custom in the North. This meant that African American and European Americans were in separate housing pools. In Northern as well as Southern cities, African Americans could only find housing in segregated African American neighbourhoods. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
New housing units were added to the non-European American communities housing pool through expanding ghastly impoverished communities full of deviance, crime, drugs, disorder, and pests through blockbusting. Blockbusting is the practice of one person of an undesired category buying into a neighbourhood at a higher than market rate price, then persuading other owners to sell property cheaply by making the neighbourhood undesirable for them by making too much noise, having too much traffic, bringing in pests, keeping their house in poor repair, having too many cars parked on the street and in the driveway, selecting odd paint colours for the house, cutting down trees, and having too many people in front of their house, and thus lowering the price of other houses, which causes people to sell before their property values fall too much, and the saboteur then gets their family and friends into a once prestigious community and it begins to decline and become highly undesirable. It is the opposite of gentrification, in this case. However, gentrification is also a form of blockbusting that rehabilitates undesirable communities, driving up prices and making them highly coveted places to life. Currently Harlem, New York is in the process of gentrification. Nonetheless, gentrification is not always bad because as prices increase, people who live in poverty gain equity, can sale, move to another state in experience a higher quality of life. Whereas reverse gentrification is usually always bad, as it makes communities unlivable, undesirable, and brings an increase in crime rates. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
During the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, publicly sanctioned racial segregation kept African Americans confined within specific undesirable deviant neighbourhoods. Established patterns of housing segregation meant that for the vast majority of middle-class European Americans, “White Flight” would have been meaningless. Only during the last fifty years does White flight emerge as a major variable. Following World War II other factors were more important. The mass suburbanization exodus of young couples during the decades immediately following World War II was not caused by flight from the city so much as by the baby boom and by government subsidies for a new suburban housing. The available lower-cost new housing was largely in the suburbs. Research shows that suburbanization in the decades immediately following World War II represented a moment toward the values associated with suburban living, such as privacy, space, cleanliness, and other suburban amenities, rather than a fleeing from perceived urban ills. The suburbs were where young families could find new, affordable, single-family housing subsidized by government loans. Not surprising, young European American families suburbanized in massive numbers. The prototypical example of the tract suburb was Levittown. The Levitt brothers, Bill and Alfred, had a construction company that had built upper-middle-class housing on Long Island dung the late 1930s. Early in World War II, they had obtained a government contract to build 2,350 mass-produced homes for war workers in Norfolk, Virginia USA. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
In the process they had learned just how many things could go wrong, but they also learned how to cut construction costs by standardizing the building process. Bill later served with the Seabees in the Pacific Theatre, where he learned how to invent new ways to put up airfields in minimal time. He came back with ideas about how to revolutionize the housing industry. Instead of building one house at a time, he proposed to mass-produce housing. Instead of building one house at a time, he proposed to mass-produce housing. He did housing construction what Henry Ford had done for automobile manufacture. In 1946 the Levitts began building what was at that time the largest private-housing development in North America on 4,000 acres of potato farms they had purchased some twenty miles from New York City on Long Island. They named it Levittown. The community made in history in a number of ways. First, Levittown was not designed as an upper-middle-class housing development; rather, it was built expressively for young working and middle-class ex-GIs. This originally meant a single housing style having 12-by-16 foot living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bath. Second, the Levitts were the first developers to use mass productions techniques. They did not have an actual assembly line, but they came closer to this approach than any other larger builder of the time. Setting Levittowns apart from other developments was that they were built on a scale not preciously attempted. Most builders then (and now) would build only a handful of houses at a time and use the monies from the sale of one home to purchase materials to build another. The Levitts built hundreds of homes at a time and, in effect, had their own finance company. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Whole areas went up at once. Teams working on specific tasks went from house to house completing each task in assembly line fashion. Construction was broken down into a number of simple steps so it could be done by semiskilled workers who would repeat the same process over and over. Homes were built on identical concrete slabs laid out on identical cookie-cuter 60-foot lots. All the cement foundations in a neighbourhood would be laid at the same time; all the walls went up at the same time; and all the interiors would be finished simultaneously. Even tree planting was routinized. One crew would machine-dig a similar hole in each front lot; another crew would drop a tree off a truckbed near the hole; and a third crew would plant the tree in the hole. Levitt claimed they were able to complete a house every fifteen minutes. To keep down coasts and prevent being stopped by strikes, the Levitts even had their own subsidiary timer company in Oregon. They even owned their own lumber yards and nail works. Levittown revolutionized the housing industry after the World War II by using mass production techniques in the construction of thousands of houses on what had been potato fields. The Levitt brothers claimed their techniques enabled them to complete a house every fifteen minutes. And very importantly, the Levitts did all this at a price well below that of comparable homes while making profit well above that of competitors. They were able to do so because of standardization. Variety, as with the early Fords, was severely limited. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
In fact, originally, all houses were identical 800-square-foot four-room Cape Cods with an unfinished upper floor that could be finished and expanded into two bedrooms as the family grew. The price for all this was only $7,990 ($79,957.92 in 2021 dollars), and a Bendix automatic washer was included. A more expensive rancher mode was later added. A rancher at the new Levitown outside Philadelphia cost the new suburbanites $8,990 in 1954 ($89,965.17 in 2021 dollars). For this home, a veteran would have to put down no payment, and the monthly payment on a thirty-year VA loan would be only $59 ($590.43 in 2021 dollars) a month. This was well below contemporary urban rental costs, much less than other suburban subdevelopments. Total closing costs were only $10 ($100.07 in 2021 dollars). Levittown was designed to be mass suburbia. The original Levittown was planned as an entire community housing over 80,000 people in almost 17,500 single-family homes. Levittown from the first was praised by the popular press and magazines and severely criticized by architects and planners. New York’s intellectual elite scorned its repetitive commonness, and the term “Levittown” entered the language as a derisive term meaning a mass-produced suburb of look-alike homes housing look-alike people. Levittown, however, was an immediate and overwhelming success with the public. Levitt particularly designed his communities for young veterans and growing families. Before its opening, young couples lined up for days to get one of those homes. On one single spring day in 1949, some 1,400 families signed purchase contracts for their own Levittown homes. Mass suburbanization based on subdivisions of detached single-family homes was underway, and suburbia would never be the same. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
We now take the postwar era of building subdivisions for granted, but it was not inevitable that American mass suburbanization would take the form it did. In Great Britain the government sponsored new towns filled with row houses, while in Sweden the emphasis was on suburban high-rise housing. By contrast, in the United States of America, postwar federal government home loan policies and the response of builders like the Levitts virtually assured acre upon acre of identical free-standing homes. Without these government policies and veteran, suburbia today might look far different. Rapid and sustained economic growth following World War II led o rising affluence and optimism regarding the future. For the first time large numbers of Americans had enough money to purchase homes and could also obtain automobiles and household durables such as washing machines, lawn mowers, sewing machines, and more. This era of consumer confidence lasted from the mid-1940s through the 1960s. The decade of the 1970s was one of uncertainty and discontent, but the ethos of prosperity still prevailed. People expected the boom and bust of the 1970s to be an aberration, with prosperity and continual economic expansion to continue. By the 1980s expectations had shrunk to where most consumers simply sought to stay where they were and not fall further behind. The 1990s continue the pattern of uncertainty. Post war suburbanization was fed by economic growth, and median family income adjusted for inflation today is not appreciably higher than that of two decades ago. The real difference is that family income today requires two and sometimes three breadwinners. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Even if interest rates are low, the cost of home ownership is going up. In the mid-1950s, the average thirty-year-old worker could carry a mortgage on a then median-priced home for 14 percent of one’s gross earnings. Three decades later, it took a full 44 percent of the average thirty-year-old worker’s gross earning to purchase the median-priced home. This means that purchase of the average home now requires two incomes (or more) to accomplish what a single income could afford in the 1950s. It is now harder to buy that starter homes in a nice suburb. In 1980, 62 percent of all married couples aged thirty to thirty-five had bought their first home. By 1990, the percent of such couples in their first home had gone down to 52 percent. For younger couples, aged twenty-five to twenty-nine, the decline in homeowning was from 43 to 36 percent. For many young couples the buying of the first home is far more difficult than it had been for their parents. And it does not seem possible, though, that housing cost might decline somewhat during the decade of the 2020s. Declines early in the decade were recession-related, but later in the decade another factor comes increasingly into play. That is the much-heralded aging of the baby boom generation. As boomers age, they are followed by the “baby bust” cohorts. The smaller size of this latter group should result in some weakening demand for housing, and thus some slackening of prices, particularly for first homes. This should be good news for young couples seeking their first home. It will be much less popular with those boomers who bought at peak prices in the late 1980, particularly those boomers who purchased their homes as investment rather than as places to live. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
During the 1980s housing prices rose considerably faster than incomes or inflation. This is less likely to be the pattern of the 2020s. Houses are likely to be purchased more as homes in which to live rather than largely as investment properties. Therefore, a bad deed should never be done, no, not for anything in the World, not even for the love of God or another human being. A good deed sometimes has to be squeezed into the daily routine, especially when it is for the advantage of the poor. The opus interruptum in question would seem to be lost forever, but it is not; it has been converted to a better work. A deed done without charity has no spiritual value. Saint Paul propounded that in his First to the Corinthians (13.3). A deed done with charity, however small or insignificant it may be, is a thoroughly fruitful work. The way God weighs in, it is not what the deed is; humongous does not count. It is the motive, how the deed is done. Done for the love of Jesus Christ is by far the best. He does much who loves much. He does much who does a thing well. He does a thing well who serves his community more than himself. Carnality often mummers as Charity. Human Nature, Selfishness, Retribution, Convenience, they to hide behind the same holy mask, attempting to crash the Final Party. The one who True and Perfect Charity cannot find oneself in the mirror. One desires only that the glory of God flare out in all things. One envies no one; one has no pet peeves, no private toys; one does not rejoice in oneself alone. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
On the contrary, one want to be blessed in God rather than possess all things without God; again, Saint Paul’s First to the Corinthians (13.4). One attributes nothing to anyone, but refers everything to God. One sees all things fluting fountainlike from God. One sees all Saints on the far side of Judgment picnicking in Heavenly Orchard. Charity it is, then, the love for Jesus Christ. From a spark of this True Charity, you would have more than enough light to see that all Earthly things—pressed down, filled to overflowing, beyond all measure, out of all proportion, plentifully, prodigally, extravagantly, superfluously, redundantly, excessively—mount up to nothing at all. It would be just wrong to argue that every physical disease proves a moral fault or mental deformity to exit, as it would be to argue that the absence of such disease proves moral or mental perfection o have been attained. Many other terrestrial beings are quite healthy too! Where physical laws of hygiene have been broken and continue to be broken, where gluttonous or ill-informed eating and intemperate living have led to bodily disturbance, the sufferer must still rectify one’s physical errors whether one’s spiritual healing is successful or not. Nature has implanted true instincts in our body to sustain and protect it. If we, through slavish acceptance of society’s bad habits, pervert those instincts or dull their sensitivity and poison our body, Nature forces us to suffer sickness and pain as the warning consequences of such perversion. Insofar as humans through ignorance fail to observe nature’s laws or through weakness persistently disobeys them, one is everywhere suffering the penalties attached to one’s wrong habits. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The truth is that no human is free to please oneself and eat what one fancies. All human, including all teachers and members of cult which claim this freedom and who trespass against themselves in this matter, will have to pay the penalty in some way or at some time. The human who reveals in one’s sensuality will naturally defend it. However, when some form of great suffering comes to one as a direct consequence, and one see it for the first time as a sin, one will cease doing so. Ill health disturbs the mind, and if prolonged or serious, may bring on neuroses. The way one views oneself and others, one’s life and the World, has too often been affected by chronic disagreeable sensations in a small part of the body, too often been improved by improving the physical condition, to assert that physical cases are unimportant. Why is it that the number of deaths from cancer has been increasing so rapidly in our times, and so disproportionately to the increase in population? Why is it that this is happening in all those parts of the World where civilization has spread? Why is it that those people who live in the most modern way—the Americans—have the most cancer. Is there not a hint here that our present way of living contributes something to its cause? How many people who would never dream of committing murder upon someone else, commit it upon themselves? Health troubles show up the value of good health, since the physical body’s condition has a strong influence upon the mind’s condition. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
It is worth the trouble of studying the body’s true needs to keep it a useful and efficient temple of God. I believe the Earth exists, and in each minim mote of its duty the holy glow of thy candle. Thou unknown I know, thou spirit, giver, lover of making, of the wrought letter, wrought flower, iron, deed, dream. Dust of Earth, help thou my unbelief. Drift of the Earth, help thou my unbelief. Drift, gray become gold, in the beam of vision. I believe with doubt. I doubt and interrupt my doubt with belief. Be, beloved, threatened World. Each minim mote. Not the poisonous luminescence forced out of its privacy, the sacred lock of its cell broken. No, the ordinary glow of common dust in ancient sunlight. Be, that I may believe. Amen. Grant peace, well-being and blessing unto the World, with grace, lovingkindness and mercy for us and for all America, Thy people. Bless us, O our Father, all of us together, with the light of Thy presence; for by that light Thou hast given us, O Lord our God, the Book of Mormon and Holy Bible of life, lovingkindness and righteousness, blessing and mercy, life and peace. O may it be good in Thy sight at all times to bless Thy people America with Thy peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who blessest Thy people America with peace. O Lord, please guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile, and to those who slander me, let me give no heed. May my soul be humble and forgiving unto all. Please open Thou my heart, O Lord, unto Thy sacred Law, that Thy statutes I may know and all Thy truths purse. Please bring to naught designs of those who seek to do me ill; speedily defeat their aims and thwart their purposes for Thine own sake, for Thine own power, for Thy holiness and Law. That Thy loved ones be delivered, answer us, O Lord, and save with Thy redeeming power. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
CRESLEIGH RIVERSIDE AT PLUMAS RANCH
Cresleigh Riverside at Plumas Ranch Residence 3 has a floorplan that is great for a growing family. With up to 5bedrooms, you will have plenty of room for everyone to have space and privacy, yet the open one-level floor plan has nearly 3,000 square feet, which will bring families together, but allows them to have plenty of space. Your stunning kitchen is the heart of the home, and it is perfect for everything from quick weekday dinners to large dinner parties, where your guests will rave about your incredible new home.
You will be hard pressed to a contemporary floorplan that offers this much space. There are four bedrooms, two and one half bathrooms, and a three car garage. Utilize the den as your own private study or convert into an optional fifth bedroom if needed. The Dining Room and Kitchen are well situated to make entertaining a breeze.
The location of the Owner’s Suite makes it feel like a separate wing from the rest of the home allowing for maximum privacy and retreat.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Home Mini! https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/residence-3/https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/residence-3/
Randolph Harris II International Institute 