Home » Business (Page 10)
Category Archives: Business
Who Would Keep a Cow of their Own that Can Have a Quart of Milk for a Penny?
No one has yet fully realized the wealth of sympathy, kindness, and generosity hidden in the soul by God. The human mind is fascinating. A young officer working on a ship wrote that he would awaken during the night and discover himself under an undesirable physical and mental condition. He seemed to be clearly in a mesmerized condition, caused by someone or something giving the powerful posthypnotic suggestion to wake up and obey. The remedy is to use the same technique in reverse. That is, practise auto-hypnosis, give the self-suggestion that on waking up there will be full conscious and full rejection of the negative idea. If one must hate something, let one hate hatred itself. The storms of violent passion are to be resisted as the smoothness of inner peace is to be invited. To keep one’s temper in a single provocative situation may be easy, but to keep it consistently equable is a real feat. Life is a conflict. One must not let these negative feelings take up lodgement within in one longer than a single moment. All humankind must awake from its materialistic apathy and cast out something of its selfishness. It is called upon to renounce its violence and meannesses, its intolerance, unkindnesses, and injustices. It must either emerge from its animal brutality or else suffer itself to be extinguished by it. It must come out from the shadows of ignorance, selfishness, and materialism. Only then will it find the sunshine of a larger life that awaits it. It is not always one oneself who acts in a particular way at a particular time. Impulses from lower sources or outside contacts may be strong intuitions from higher levels or outside sources may influence one to wise choices which bless one’s future. We must not hate those who are born of the same divine essence as ourselves but we may hate the sins they perpetrate and the evil they radiate. The seeker has to contend not only with limiting environments but also with internal enemies. Apathy delays one, depression obstructs one, and loneliness frustrates one. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The more one becomes sensitive, intuitive, responsive to the spirit, the more one is unfolding exceptional passivity. However, this puts one in peril, for one feels the negative presence too. Hence the more one must restrict one’s contacts until one’s strength is above them. It is prudent to escape from a situation where there is much pressure to commit a foolish action or to make a foolish decision leading to calamitous results—and not continue to stay in it until the danger materializes. One whose presence is felt to be odious, whose personality is regarded as distasteful, is better left alone. One should never allow the actions or words of ignorant human to arouse in one reactions of anger, envy, or resentment. The years are too few and there is too much to be done—both on oneself and for oneself—to waste them in negative, resentful thought and decaying, neurotic emotion. When one comes to understand its importance, one will begin to exercise some vigilance over one’s thoughts. Resist beginnings—that is the most practical way to deal with negatives. The destructive thoughts of fear and self-doubt which whine at your door, whine at the door of every human. However, you can make them powerless to hurt you. For—there is n chance, no destiny, no fate can circumvent, can hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul! If the negative thought persists then one has to wrench oneself away from it with the assent and use of all one’s being—feeling, reason, intuition. One’s own attitude towards events holds the power to make them good or bad, whatever their nature of itself may be. Those who are unable to think correctly about this tragic World situation must be pardoned, but those who refuse to think correctly about it do not deserve pardon. The counsel of Jesus to “resist not evil” does not apply to other men’s acts but to our own thoughts. We are to turn aside from a negative thought-habit by the simple method of substituting the opposite and the beneficial one. We need not to spend our strength resisting the thought of misery, for example. We are to substitute hope for misery, whenever the latter appears. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Wrong-doing will be avoided not because it is punished by the law of recompose even when it is not punished by the law of society, but because of the strong inner conviction that right-doing is its own reward, its own satisfaction. The beautiful is allied to the good. If we cultivate beautiful feelings, evil ones begin to get dissolved. One will not risk rebuffs by expressing one’s views and describing one’s experienced to the uncomprehending of the unsympathetic. It I cowardice to refuse to face the fact that one has made a mistake and to continue following the same course because it is to stop it and return to the right road. The easier way is too often the worse way, leading to trouble for one’s self and others. There is a limit to the extent of concessions to prejudice; we must not beyond it. Beware of those whose mind is vindictive and whose speech is venomous. If they are born of emotional prejudice or passionate bias, it is of little use to meet irrational arguments with rational statements. The ancient saying that where goodwill exists agreement will not be hard to find, still remains true. The crowds which delighted in the gladiator shows of ancient Rome and, to a lesser extent, those which delighted in the bullfights of modern Spain, do not see to understand how bestial they allow themselves to become at such times. If one is to be distinguished from a member of the savage species, the true human being, the fully evolved human, must have the quality of pity in oneself. Do not attempt to fight evil with evil. Overcome it by calling on a higher power to bring out the good in you wherewith to meet it. In this way you obey Jesus’ counsel, “Resist not evil.” Synesis (fourth century): “This would be the most extreme of ills—not to be conscious of the presence of evil. For this is the condition of those who no longer try to rise…for this reason repentance is elevating means…[but] both deeds and words [must] lend a helping hand.” A philosopher may not ignore the negative side of one’s or another’s life: one has to deal with it because circumstances force one, like everyone else to do so. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, one’s way will be different, because one will use all one’s faculties and capacities: intellectual, practical, and intuitive. One will keep calm and not let passion or negative emotion carry one away. However, all that done, one hands over the results to the higher power (which includes destiny). One’s mind must stay in That which transcends negativity, sin, evil, even if one must grapple with them. Philosophy will not disregard the bad in others, and the sin in ourselves, but having seen them clearly it does not react negatively in useless condemnation. Instead, it reacts constructively in trying to realize the meaning of evil, the consequence of sin, and then proceeds to cultivate the opposite quality, the good of that particular evil—as honesty where there is dishonesty and so on. If practical dealings are involved, we may regret the existence of these faults in others, but we may not refuse to recognize them. Amid all the pessimistic reflections which the state of the World so easily induces in the thinking human, one may yet be buoyed up by the hope which the eternal verities must again and again give one, that is, the hope that the end of it will be immeasurably better. The existentialist view—so popular with so many young people today—that we begin with oblivion and end with annihilation, that what comes between is either meaningless or mysterious, with no solutions to problems, no answers to questions, is a view which the tragedy and evil and catastrophe of our times tempt us to accept. However, religion and philosophy release us from this despair. In such critical times as these even some faith in the existence of a higher power, and some aspiration towards serving it, has protective value. Trust, not tension: trust in the higher power producing serenity rather than tension; because of the pressures of life this is a great need today. However dark or desperate World history may seem at times, we must always remember no one can disrupt the divine World-Idea, or spoil its manifestation, or prevent its glorious outcome. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Fear of the power and cunning of these evil opponents causes them to rely on obvious but ordinary human forces and weapons for protection. They forget the divine forces they could, and should in this crisis, call on—and neglect the superhuman and extraordinary. To express a half-amused contempt for the intelligence of our time is not at all the same thing as to make a jaundiced indictment of it. To witness the magnificent parade of a civilization of almost unredeemed triviality is less likely to arouse bitterness in the soul and more likely to give it a good half-hour’s amusement. On the one hand, carried away by the idealistic enthusiasm and millennial promises of merely emotionalist cults, some believe that a spiritual teaching has only to be propagated and it will spread triumphantly everywhere. On the other hand, confronted by the formidable spectacle of a whole World plunged in ignorance, conscious that the ordinary individual can do so little to uplift it, others drift into bewildered defeatism and actually do nothing at all. However, this second attitude, although much more sensible and much more justifiable than its opposite one, is not quite philosophical. According to the old classical fable, we had to look for truth in the bottom of a well; today we have to look for it in the bottom of a bitter disillusionment. In the dismal World conditions of today it is a paramount necessity to obtain some glimpse, however meagre, of the divine plan which is working out for all our lives. Only in this way can we co-operate with it understandingly and adequately. Instead of relying on flight into the unknow and uncertain, it is better to rely on God. In the first case one may be making a false escape and duping oneself, but in the second case one opens the way for true guidance in the matter. With peace in the mind and harmony in the feelings, both completed by knowledge of the universal presence of divinity—who could harbour evil thoughts, hatreds, or destructive plans? #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Every evil person who crosses our path provides an opportunity, in the injury one attempts to do us, to keep ourselves from being provoked into retaliation, anger, or resentment. If we succeed in overcoming our own feelings, we mount upward a step. In a negative situation, where negative criticism and negative emotions are rampant, other persons may try to involve one in it, or at least get one to support their attitude and endorse their criticism. However, a feeling may come over one preventing one from doing so. If so, one should obey and remain silent. With time the rightness of this course will be confirmed. One the injunction to return good for evil, the question arises, with what then will you return go? Return good for good, but justice for evil. Is this not wiser counsel? Does not the other punish goodness to an extremist position, rendering it almost ridiculous by condoning bad conduct? Inner and outer difficulties are often related. What appears to be an ugly state of affairs may well be a definite attack of certain evil forces using interested human instruments. In such a situation, the individual should never practise nonresistence in any way, but, on the contrary, should fight them off as hard a one can. At the same time, one must remember that weakness in self-control can give these evil forces an opening which they might not have had otherwise. If one wishes to emerge victorious in the struggle, one must be on one’s guard. If one does not throw off this condition, one, oneself, unwittingly erects a barrier though which the divine help sent one finds it difficult to penetrate. Although the temptation to seek release as such a time through, for example, the easy way of drink is understandable, one must nevertheless remember the duty one owes to one’s spiritual life, to one’s personal interest on the relative plane, and to others. Although the student must forgive those who mistreat one, one need not think tht forgiveness implies one has to associate with such people thereafter. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Whenever the thought of them, or their abuse, comes into one’s mind one must exert one’s willpower to drive it out, and immediately direct one’s thoughts toward God, or toward any inspired individual in whom one had faith. Only the actualized Christian is entitled to dismiss evil and to deny its existence: all others must look it in the face, understand it, and overcome it by slow gradations. It is better to keep out of the way of evil humans, especially when they are in power, until or unless we are driven by the necessity of circumstance of the inward voice of duty to oppose ourselves to them. It is always a certainty that the practice of active goodwill directed toward those who regard one harshly will benefit one’s own development, while it is always a possibility that this practice may dissolve the harsh feeling against one. It is all gain and no loss. This is one part of the case for Jesus’ advice to return good for evil. It is a technique of this evil power to paralyse its intended victims by frightening them. If we give way to fear, we give assistance to its effort. It cannot be beaten without open defiance and ready valour. One must remember that one will meet with those individuals who are themselves the bearers of antagonistic forces, instruments of darkness—sometimes consciously, most unconsciously, people used by evil forces. So far as possible one must avoid such people. Certainly never enter into intimate associations with them, whether the relation be business or personal. If one does one will find that sooner or later some of their unfortunate behaviour will be returned by Universal Law and tumble on one and one with have to suffer with the afflicted individual. These people make talk as believers in spiritual things—indeed, they often belong to some cult or other. However, they do not understand truth or live it. They cannot help one and one is not strong enough to carry them. So leave them alone. And that is not always easy, because often they are people of a kind that force themselves into one’s life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Sometimes one can know them by this hallmark, by this aggressive way which they try to entangle another individual. It may even be necessary at times to deal with such people with a firm hand, even mercilessly and relentlessly. If so, do not hesitate, but do it without any personal feeling of any kind. The American landscape has been badly corrupted. European writers no longer even notice the natural wonder of it, they are so put off by the ugliness and conformity of the towns. However, worse than the ugliness and conformity is the neglect that baffles pride of place. Our poets try to move themselves by nostalgically repeating the names of towns: “Biloxi and Natchez, Pascagoula and Opelousas”—but beware of paying a visit. The Americans disesteem public goods, and improving the landscape is a big expense. Historically, the neglect of appearance and plan of our scores of thousands of villages and small towns, especially in the Middle West and South—the diner, the Woolworth’s, and two filling stations—can be analogized to the neglect of the present-day less affluent. In the tide of expansion, appearance was disregarded as not essential; later, the matter would be mopped up. However, the neglect rigidifies, it is a hard core not easy to change. Instead, the present tendency is to impose on the countryside a new corporation style altogether, in the form of shopping centers (=national chain supermarkets) on the highway. This works out disastrously for the communities, for these “centers” are not centers of villages, and there cease to be villages at all, simply scattered family houses. This is the end of a long process of disruption, for in any case the industry is gone, then men work in plants thirty miles away. It is possible to travel many miles even in New England and not see a single activity a man could make a living at, except automobile agencies and filling stations; not even a food store. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
The schools too are large and centralized. The families tend to move away frequently, but even while they are put, they are driving around. This does not make much community to grow up in. In more primitive societies, a chief community activity is working together, thatching a roof, net fishing. However, with us, precisely this co-operative labour, for instance the work in a factory, is removed from its community setting ad emptied, by the relations of production, of any community spirit. Places that have no shape have no face-to-face functioning, for the shape is the functioning community. The loveliness of so many hamlets in Europe is that they have shape and are built of local materials by local craft. Perhaps the people had to cluster to attend early masses. In Ireland, where they farm out the back door, the rows of thatched houses line both sides of a little street. In France, where men go off to their farms, there may be a square. In our own early New England villages, where congregational and political spirit was strong, there was a common green with public buildings, though the families lived scattered on the farms they worked. There was the shape of a community, with its economy, its crafts, and its ideas. The advantage of growing up in such a community in one’s early years is evident. It is not family supervision, on which the physicians of juvenile delinquency are now laying such stress; quite the contrary! it is that the family does not have to bear the burden of teaching the culture. In a community, everybody knows the child face to face. There is an easy grading of overlapping ages, right up to the adults who are going about their business in a going concern, and not paying too much attention to children. A good city neighbourhood works in the same way. From this point of view, the swarm of kids in a city housing project form a better community than present-day country boys or the kids on Park Avenue. Therefore they have more local patriotism. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The bother with this community chain, however, is that it terminates abruptly before it reaches the adults, who belong to a different World; so the kids are a gang and the local community spirit turns into loyalty to a Code; it does not eventuate in anything socially cohesive and culturally worthwhile. And such a gang in prone to be delinquent because, as we shall see, in such conditions it is the forbidden tht best cements loyalty. Politically, a delinquent gang is not lawless and not in the state of nature. Balked in its growth, the local loyalty turns on itself and simple reinvents the feud-code of Alfred the Great, marking out safe territories and making provision for special classes of revenge. On this view, if one teenage gang, pursuing its vendetta, falls on another and murders a kid, it would not be our business to interfere in the law of that differently constituted society. Also, like Danes or Vikings of Alfred’s time, they regard our larger society merely as a field of sports and plunder; they have not yet reinvented International Law. However, we, of course, cannot view it so, for we live in an advanced state of politics and law: they are members of our community. We are not children but more experienced and somewhat wiser, and therefore responsible, so we cannot simply annihilate them like pirates (they are small in size, few in numbers, and armed with primitive weapons); and we cannot let them hurt themselves. (I think it is wise sometimes to regard disaffected groups as if there were plausibly these two viewpoints, rival patriotisms. It is better humanity and it might make better law. The advantage is that it takes the disaffected seriously as disaffected, rather than merely pathological; it keeps in the foreground the question of allegiance. We must deserve allegiance.) However, they are children. Let us consider rather the peculiar patriotic problem of an older disaffected group, the Hipster young men, for then we can see that it is a patriotic problem. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Here too, I think, there has often been a strong community influence of growing up together. For instance, fellows who went to Black Mountain College, which was oriented to community and creative arts—a powerful, and powerfully disaffecting, combination—are pillars of Hipster society. Other fellows were buddies in the armed services. However, it was, as Hispters their community spirit is strong. They barge in to sleep, they share property, they share a culture. Now think of this community, disaffected from America, as engaged in a pathetic quest for some other big patriotism, an adult peer group. We saw how, appointing themselves outcast, they affirm the accidental symbol of other marginalized groups: African American, Puerto Rican, the less affluent, and others. However, this is pretty thin gruel for intellectual young men, many of whom have been to college. On the other hand, they are unable to make the jump to the great international humanists community because, simply, they do not know anything, neither literature nor politics. (I once taught at Black Mountain College, and to my astonishment I found that the students had never read the Christian Bible, Milton, Dryden, Gibbon, etcetera, etcetera, nor did they feel—as a lack—that such things existed. However, they knew odd facts about Mayan hieroglyphics which their teacher had been interested in.) What then? Since it is necessary for grown fellow to have some major allegiance or other, they have latched on to the late Japanese masters of Zen Buddhism. (This is a late effect of the early-century discovery of Japan by Fenollosa, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Misses Lowell and Ayscough, and Ezra Pound, suddenly reinforced by the postwar occupation under General MacArthur.) Now, as we shall see, Zen is not irrelevant to those young men’s needs, for it is a theology and style of immediate experience. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
However, the pathos is that Zen was the flower of an intensely loyal feudal system that fed, protected, and honoured its masters, and to which the Zen masters in turn had fealty. For example, it is said that the haiku was invented by a poet as a public service when one was suicidally despondent because one’s Emperor had died. However, Zen without farmers and servants is an airy business; and the young men, as we have seen, are betrayed into dubious devices to keep body and soul together, nor do they have a flag to salute. Community approaches have worked to resolve many problems. In looking at mental health, the broadest approach for the treatment of schizophrenia is the community approach. In 1963, partly in response to the terrible conditions in public mental institutions, the U.S. government ordered that patients be released and treated in the community. Congress passed the Community Mental Health Act, which stipulated that patients with psychological disorders were to receive a range of mental health services—outpatient therapy, inpatient treatment, emergency care, preventative care, and aftercare—in their communities rather than being transported to institutions far from home. The act was aimed at a variety of psychological disorders, but patients with schizophrenia, especially those who had been institutionalized for years, were affected most. Other countries around the World put similar sociocultural treatment programs into action shortly thereafter. Thus began four decades of deinstitutionalization, an exodus of hundred of thousands of patients with schizophrenia and other long-term mental disorders from state institutions into the community. On a given day in 1955 close to 600,000 patients were living in state institutions; today only around 60,000 patients reside in those setting. The unfortunate result is that mental health lost most of its funding and a lot of people with mental illnesses have to where to go, but jail or to live on the street. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Clinicians have learned that patients recovering from schizophrenia can profit greatly from community programs. However, the actual quality of community care for many of these people has been inadequate through the United States of America. The result is a “revolving door” syndrome: the few patients, who are lucky enough to be treated, have been released to the community, readmitted to an institution within mothers, released a second time, admitted yet again, and so on, over and over. A lot of people who want mental health care are not able to access this precious resource. In fact, 10.3 percent (over 4.7 million) of adults with a mental illness remain uninsured. And, 56 percent of patients want access to a mental health care facility. As COVID-19 continues to rage, Americans are experiencing anxiety and depression. More than 42 percent of U.S. adults reported symptoms, up 11 percent in the previous years. Nearly 1 in 5 Americans has some type of mental health condition. Spending on mental health treatment and social services has reached over $250 billion, which is up approximately 60 percent since 2009. This cost includes spending on things like therapy and prescription medications as well as stays in psychiatric or substance abuse rehabilitation facilities. However, it does not take into account indirect costs, such as lower workforce participation rates and decreased productivity. In fact, depression alone is estimated to account for $44 billion in loses to workplace productivity. And access to care can be prohibitively expensive—even more so than physical health costs. An hour-long traditional therapy session can range from $65 to $250 for those without insurance. A patient with major depression can spend an average of $10,836 a year on health costs. Meanwhile, a person with diabetes taking insulin can spend $48,000 to manage their condition. On a national level, research shows that the United States of America is likely to continue to experience a shortage of mental health professional through 2025. If you are looking for excellent health and wellness coverage, consider becoming a Kaiser Permanente member. You do not need a referral for mental health and addiction care services. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Other ways to help keep health and wellness in check is celibacy. However, there is the double standard that is a Worldwide phenomenon that has many layers of meaning. The first is that one and one is not always two, because the woman or man of the evening is a criminal but their client is a “john,” an also because women are expected to be virginal at marriage and chaste afterward, and some men are expected to be chaste before a relationship and after, and during the marriage and relationship, but one’s husband is not bound by the same constraints. The double standard implies, in other words, that chastity is primarily and woman’s and small percent of men’s domain. Nonetheless, only women are typically judged more harshly than all men whose conduct is identical. Even today, the discrimination is thunderously obvious, preached from pulpits and parliaments and specifically mandated in the law. The double standard is nefarious not only because it embodies egregious gender inequality but because it condoned solicitation as an acceptable outlet for unchaste men. Though it condemns people of “the evening” as social scum and consigns them to lives of degradation and danger and disease, it sanctions their profession. The reason is obvious: without solicitation, lascivious people might seduce rather than marry the virgins of their own social class. It is particularly chilling that the members of many churches and other organizations in positions of authority support the double standard and, albeit reluctantly, swallows the equation that no men or women of the evening equals no chastity. Laws essentially force women to abide by a higher standard of regard in the matters of chastity than men. They also denounce solicitation but at the same time partially exonerate it as the safety valve that kept virgins pure. It is unsurprising, then, that the double standard matured as a code of conduct in pleasures of the flesh that demand female chastity and at the same time approve, or at least tolerate, the dominant group of mostly men, and their carnality expressed in the use of other humans as toys, though this meant sacrificing certain women and sometimes other to unchaste, unrestrained men and a small fraction of women. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Furthermore, not all men honour their obligations to marry their child’s mother. And when men who came from a higher social echelon seduced a working-class girl, they almost never honoured that class’s code. Domestics and shop girls in particular were the pray of privileged men, but being with child destitute these women rather than pushing them into marriage with the baby’s father. However, often times, after these men who have money start to become older and nearing retirement, they will then leave their wives for young women of other ethnic backgrounds and of lower social standings because these women tend to be considered more exotic and attractive. The women will marry for older man for security and to escape labour. However, in a few cases, it is real love. In society, another problem is many people seem to scarcely be able to comprehend what chastity means, or to regard it as a virtue. Among the middle and upper classes, chastity’s double standard wreaked havoc on social decency. Some of these moral puritanical, which even frown on premarital male activities involving pleasures of the flesh, young women are coached to trap husbands without surrendering beforehand even a taste of the delights to come. Men are, in some cases, are frustrated at this implacable wall of chastity and take it as a challenge. They play games. In large numbers, they form unholy crusades to seduce young virgins. This upper-class deviance was depicted on shows like the original on Gossip Girl. “Resist, resist!” the virgins’ elders urge them. “Just say a resounding ‘No’ to your pleading, inveigling, deceiving young suitors.” After all, as the old adage went, “Who would keep a cow of their own that can have a quart of milk for a penny?” However, at the same time, ladies, and a small percentage of men, forgive them for trying to ruin you. This double standard of conduct involving pleasures of the flesh is necessary, because unlike you, the dominant class of men and a small percentage of dominant women, by nature have an urgent, irrepressible need. Brothels used to be officially licensed. Unchaste people play a crucial role in upholding their societies’ notions about chastity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Now, nowhere is a failure to achieve perfect synchronization more lamented than in the bedroom—unless it is when the U.S. Federal Reserve or the Bank of Japan rises or lowers interest rates and get the timing wrong. Timing, as any comedian can tell us, is everything. However, we are, for the most part unwittingly, changing our links to time, and that is no joke. As interested as investors and economists may be about exact timing in finance, they re remarkably uniformed about the role of synchronization—and, even more so de-synchronization—in the creation of wealth and poverty. Yet understanding these can give us a wholly new way of thinking about wealth creation. Some degree of synchronization has been needed ever since hunters and gatherers began working in groups. Historian William McNeill argues that mass rhythmic activities have been used throughout history to promote synchrony, which in turn improved economic productivity. Tribal dancing, he suggests, strengthened teamwork and made hunting more efficient. For thousands of years fishermen have chanted in unison as they hauled in their nets, the musical beats indicating when to pull and when to breathe. Agrarian economies also reflected seasonal change. According to anthropologist John Omohundro, writing about the Philippine island of Panay, “Through the dry season…and into the rainy season…businessmen are in their slowest season. All aspects of the distribution system slow down. By September or October the rice crop begins to arrive in town…Because the wealth of the province is regulated by agrarian cycles, city business activity rises and falls the these cycles.” Economic anthropologist Willem Wolters adds: “Purely local banks have never been viable in the semi-arid tropics because of the seasonality and synchronic timing.” Early industrial economics operated under completely different temporal conditions. Assembly-line work required a different rhythm. Thus, the factory whistle and the time clock were invented to coordinate work schedules. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
By contrast, today, as we will see, business activities are speeding toward real time. In addition, the uses of time are becoming increasingly personalized and irregular, if not erratic. More different tasks need to be integrated, and the acceleration effect truncates the time available for each task. All this makes synchronization harder to achieve. And that is only the beginning. If we look deeper, we find that every economy throbs and vibrates with unnoticed rhythms. We may buy a newspaper daily, pick up soap or milk at the supermarket weekly, gas up the car every ten days or so, cash a paycheck every two weeks and pay credit card bills monthly. We might call a broker sporadically according to what is happening in the stock market, buy a movie ticket or a book on a whim a few times a year, pay taxes quarterly or annually, go to the dentist when a toothache strikes and purchase a gift for a relative who is getting married in June. These and countless other transactions create rhythms that flow through banks, markets and lives. With the very first slap on our infant behind, every one of us becomes part of this ongoing economic music. Even our biorhythms are affected (and in turn influence) the marvelously complex, orchestrated process that pulse around us as people work—making things, providing services, managing others, caring for one another, financing companies or processing data and information into knowledge. At every moment, some tempos speed up, others slow down. New melodies and harmonies are introduced, then fade out. There are choruses, counterpoints and crescendos. Beyond these, throughout the entire society and economy, there is a generalized pulse of life that is itself the average, as it were, of all its subordinate tempos. The “economic music” never stops. The result is not patternless chaos because, within every wealth system, various components or subsystems are continually adapting their speeds, phases and periodicities to one another. In biology this process is called “entertainment.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Neurons, it turns out, do not work alone. They form temporary teams—much as businesses increasingly do today. In the words of Science magazine, “Neurons frequently fall into step with one another, forming ensembles that play the same tune, as it were, firing in relative synchrony for brief periods, before some neurons drop out of synch, perhaps to join another ensemble.” Firing in sync, moreover, apparently predisposes the neurons to “joint processing” at high levels of the system. Today’s breakup of monolithic corporations into congeries of short-lived project team, alliances, partnerships and joint ventures parallels these ephemeral “ensembles” in the neural system. One way the World could survive in joy is if the whole World worships God. We hear you, fellow-creatures. We know we are wrecking the World and we are afraid. What we have unleased has such momentum now, we do not know how to turn it around. Do not leave us alone, we need your help. You need us too for your own survival. Are there power there you can share with us? In the Service of the Heart, nothing is further from the truth than the widespread notion that to pray is synonymous with to beg, to request, or to supplicate. To be sure, to pray means to call upon God to help us. However, we need Him not only when we are physically in danger. We need Him also when we are spiritually in danger. To pray means to seek God’s help, “to keep our tongue from evil,” “to purify our hearts,” “to put into our hearts to understand, to learn and to fulfill in love, the words of the Christian Bible,” and thus to keep us unswervingly loyal to truth, goodness, and beauty. To pray is to feel and to give expression to a deep sense of gratitude. No intelligent, healthy, normal human being should take for granted, or accept without conscious, grateful acknowledgement the innumerable blessings which God in His infinite love bestows upon one daily—blessings of parents and loved one, of friends and country, of health and understanding. To pray is to express renewed allegiance to the moral and ethical principles which we accept as the guides of our personal lives, and which we recognize as the indispensable foundation stones for a decent human society. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
The love fest continues for our newest community at #Havenwood! 😍 This one, obviously, is a great use of kitchen space!
A large porch entry welcomes you into the home, where a spacious great room opens into the dining and modern kitchen area featuring a large prep island.
Breathtaking and incredibly spacious living is yours in this gorgeous single-story home. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/
All our homes come with owned solar, and you can choose from four distinct floorplans!
#CresleighHomes
That was Heinous Crime–Do Not Waste Granny’s Delicious Chess Pie Like that!
Various scientists around the World are trying to build cells from scratch. Marileen Dogterom has been piecing together a cytoskeleton in the Netherlands. Kate Adamala is attaching receptors to a lipid bilayer in Minnesota. And Tetsuya Yomo built RNA that can evolve like the real thing in Japan. However, by and large they have been independently working on different cell parts. Now, a growing number of collaborations are melding these efforts together and speeding progress toward an audacious goal: building a living cell out of non-living molecules. A cell constructed from the ground up would let researchers better test drugs, enable bioengineers to build the next generation of cellular machines, and help biologists answer the fundamental questions: What does it mean to be alive? The efforts to find out is driving toward a common purpose: constructing organisms that have some properties of cells, such as the ability to divide and pass on information to their offspring. Scientists can also customize these new creations, building cells to do things that might not occur in nature. Perhaps most interestingly, they might build something that meets our definition of “alive” but looks nothing like existing cells—perhaps it has a different information storage molecule than DNA, or it is enclosed not by lipids but by proteins. Creating and studying such a thing might help answer the basic question of what it means for something to be alive. Researcher J. Craig Venter Institute announced that they had created a minimal bacterial cell—a Mycoplasma bacteria that contained just enough genes to stay alive. That number is 473. Cut one more gene off, and the bacteria will not work properly. Add an extra gene, and not the bacteria is carrying unnecessary baggage. However, at the time of the study’s publication, the scientists only knew the function that 324 those genes actually served. The remaining 149 did something to keep the cell chugging along, but scientists do not know what. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
As cellular chemistry became more and more complex, requiring increasing numbers of different enzymes to direct the many separate metabolic reactions on which life depended, the problem of ensuring that the individuals of each generation received a complete complement of the corresponding types of DNA molecules must have become more and more critical. It seems unlikely that modern cells, with their survival requiring the successful completion of complex reaction sequences depending on thousands of different enzymes, could ever have developed if a way had not been found to pass DNA along from parent to offspring in an orderly manner. Fortunately, orderly procedures were possible and evolution succeeded in finding one. All the principles governing continuity of general characteristics withing species and inheritance of detailed characteristics by individual derive from the nature of the particular procedure that is now universally employed by living organisms for the precise handling of DNA. The processes we are about to consider occur in the nucleus. With a small exception, to be discussed later, that is where all the DNA of the cell resides. In very primitive organisms such as bacteria, in which a definite nucleus/cytoplasm boundary is hard to detect, there is still a localized nuclear region within which the processes in question take place. The key to the modern genetic protection mechanism is packaging. Within the nucleus the thousands of different DNA molecules do not simply mill around, each performing its functions of self-replication and manufacture of complementary RNA molecules independently of the rest. Instead, the DNA molecules carry, a big step further, the long-chain structural concept that led to their own formation. They themselves hook together end to end, thereby forming nucleic acid “strands”—giant giant molecules composed of individual DNA components, each of which is already a giant molecule because of its own linking together of hundreds or thousands of nucleotides. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
In the cell of a complex organism there may be thousands of different DNA molecules strung together to form each such gigantic array. All of such strands or arrays possessing the same configuration of DNA molecules then line up side by side, along with some protein material about whose function we shall later speculate. The resulting package is called a chromosome. (Evidence suggests that, in most cells, there are only few copies—perhaps only one—of each type of giant giant molecule. However, certain special cells, such as those in the salivary gland of the fruit fly, develop giant chromosomes containing thousands of times as much DNA as the average cell. In such special cases the chromosome appears to be a bundle of thousands of parallel and identical strands of DNA.) The separate types of DNA molecules that compose the chromosome are called genes. Higher organisms package many more different genes in each chromosome than do lower organisms, in order to carry the book of instructions that directs the complex chemistry of the cell. Frequently there are also more chromosomes. Thus only 8 chromosomes are found in the nuclei of fruit-fly cells, 46 in those human cells. Each stand of a chromosome acts partly as if it were a single molecular entity, partly like a loose aggregation of separate molecules. It reproduces itself as a unit—each ordered array of DNA molecules begets another similarly ordered array of the same types of DNA molecules. On the other hand, the individual DNA molecules seem able to perform their chores of manufacturing messenger RNA independently of one another. However, in the movement of DNA from the nucleus of an old cell to that of a new one, during cell division, again unit action occurs: the separate DNA molecules are evidently tied together tightly enough that only completely strands participate in the migration. It is, of course, cell division (mitosis) that plays for modern organisms the same kind of reproduction role that plays for modern organisms that same kind of reproduction role that was once played by the physical forces of wind and wave as they broke into smaller pieces the primitive coacervates. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Nowadays, however, it is the chemical state of the cell, rather than the physical conditions of the environment, that sets into motion the reproduction process. For example, it is possible that the complex interrelated chemical activities of mitosis are triggered by the approach to some built-in limit by the amount of DNA in the nucleus. Certain it is that, between successive divisions of a growing cell, the amount of nuclear DNA doubles. Whatever may be the initiator of the processes of mitosis, the events that take place are known to every student of elementary biology. They are featured by a doubling of each of the chromosomes, a dissolution of the nuclear membrane, and an orderly migration of the two resulting sets of chromosomes to opposite sides of the cell. This is followed by a pinching together of the walls of the extended cell to form two separate cellular units and finally by the reestablishment of nuclear membranes to contain the chromosomal material. The result is two cells instead of one, each possessing approximately half of the original cytoplasmic material and a set of nuclear DNA molecules identical with that with which the parent cell started life. However, we have explicitly localized these DNA packaging and distribution mechanisms in the nucleus. And references have been made to the fact that not quite all of the DNA of the cell is confined in the nucleus. The time has come to explain thee references and to examine whether the existence and properties of the nonnuclear DNA can be accommodated in our picture of the DNA protection mechanisms. The nonnuclear DNA—of an amount totaling a very few percent of that located in the nucleus—is found in some of the organelles of the cytoplasm. Mitochondria contain a small amount of DNA; so do chloroplasts, the chlorophyl-containing inclusions that perform photosynthesis in green plants. And this DNA clearly carries out genetic functions. This is been proved by experiments in which mutations were induced in the DNA of the cytoplasmic organelles by microbeams of ultraviolet radiation so directed as to miss the nucleus; physically abnormal organelles were then observed to occur in all subsequent descendants of the irradiated cell—showing that the undamaged nuclear DNA did not provide the structural specifications involved. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Further elaboration of the details of the nonnuclear genetic mechanisms, which is under way today in a number of research laboratories, is clearly of great scientific importance. The discoveries already made render it untenable to attribute all of the genetic control of an organism to the nucleus, as was once done. However, there is as yet no evidence calling for other major changes in the picture we have drawn of the genetic mechanism. For the experimental results are compatible with the hypothesis that the nucleic acid/enzyme processes related to the small amount of DNA of the organelles are just like those related to the much larger amount of DNA in the nucleus. The organelle DNA appears to manufacture messenger RNA which assembles corresponding enzymes. And, during mitosis, not only does the nucleus of the cell divide but so also do the organelles we are considering. It seems likely, too, that there are chromosomal mechanisms within the organelles that cause their genetic material to be accurately apportioned between parent and offspring, just as in the case of the nucleus. Thus, while it is interesting to speculate about the course of evolutionary development that has withheld from the nucleus of modern cells, there is as yet no indication that the anomaly of nonnuclear DNA requires any other major revision in our basic concepts pertaining to the genetic mechanisms. Whether we have in mind the nuclear or the nonnuclear DNA packaging arrangements, it is clear that their net effect is to remove most of the element of chance from the basic mechanism of genetics. The precise propagation of DNA molecules from one generation of cells to the next results in similar precision in the chemical and physical nature of the progeny. A splitting amoeba process more amoebae, a paramecium more paramecia, a human cell more human cells. Even though the environmental conditions within which the new generations develop differ somewhat from those which nourished their parents—in temperature, chemical composition of the surrounding fluids, and so on—the relatively tight control over the specific cellular chemical processes exercised by the powerful protein enzymes, which in turn owe their creation to the specific roster of DNA molecules in the chromosomes, results in the remarkable continuity of species characteristics that features modern living forms. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
A final comment about what may seem to be a curious inconsistency in one aspect of our argument would appear to be in order. We have just expressed admiration for the effectiveness of the chromosomal mechanisms in preventing change in the nature of the vital DNA material in going from one generation to another. And yet, only a few days ago or so, our sympathies seemed quite different. For the development of our theories then we emphasized the existence of mechanisms capable of causing accidental changes in the ingredients responsible for the structure and metabolism of our organisms. We even went so far as to postulate the presence in the primordial seas of a small quantity of “nucleotide-linking catalyst” that encouraged the accidental formation of nucleic acid molecules of increased length and complexity. We could in addition have expressed satisfaction with the knowledge that thermal collisions and radioactive particles are also capable of causing mutations in the structure of nucleic acid molecules. Is our earlier emphasis on change consistent with our later emphasis on genetic stability? Fortunately, it is not too difficult to reconcile these apparently incompatible points of view. During the era of preanimate coacervates, when extensive refinement in structure and metabolism was necessary before anything like living organisms could exist, there was obviously a premium on “mutagenic agents.” This led not only to a corresponding emphasis in our literary treatment but probably also, by the normal economics of the evolutionary processes, to a relative abundance of such agents in the primordial seas. However, after eons of the trial-and-error refinement of the properties of organisms, a time must ultimately have come when random change in their properties was so much more likely to be harmful than helpful to the species that the advantage would all have been on the side of a combination of environment and organisms leading to relatively low rates of mutation in the hereditary mechanisms. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Natural selection would then not only have brought to prominence such techniques for protection of the property-determining ingredients as we have just considered in connection with the nuclear DNA but might even have acted to diminish the abundance in the environment of some of the mutagenic agents. For example, if in certain regions primitive organisms were spilling into the seas such a quantity of nucleotide-linking catalyst as to lead to an undesirably high rate of mutation in the properties of most other organisms in the vicinity, there would have been a tendency for the main line of evolutionary development to be retarded in such regions; the result would ultimately have been the starving out of the undesirable mutagen-producing species as the course of evolution in remoter regions accelerated the proliferation of more modern strains. Whether such developments occurred to slow down the rate of mutation or whether it was always slow (with the extensive accomplishments of evolution attribute only to the great time periods available), it is certain that today the combination of environment and organism seem usually to emphasize stability rather than change. When modern cells successively divine and send some of their precious DNA to guide the construction of new individuals, we expect the DNA that each new individual ultimately sends on to its progeny to be identical with that which it received, and we are rarely disappointed. It is likely that, on the average, each individua DNA molecule duplicates itself 100,000 or more times without the change of even a single atom in the thousands of which it is composed. Changes do occur occasionally, to be sure; if they did not, evolutionary development would be impossible. However, in terms of the few dozen or few thousand years over which the human species makes most of its observations, the protection provided to the large majority of the DNA by its nuclear environment and the precision of the mitotic distribution mechanisms, together with the relative scarcity of mutagenic agents, now contributes a remarkable degree of stability to the structure and metabolism of living organisms. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The sophisticated membrane properties of the modern cell, the ribosomal and mitochondrial structures, the nucleic acid/enzyme mechanisms, the chromosomal/mitosis processes—these and other features have been achieved at a tremendous cost of time and painstaking trial-and-error experiment. It is fortunate that the natural forces of evolution operate in such a way as to require convincing evidence of superiority before novel processes are allowed to replace such tried-and-true structural and metabolic principles. Looking ahead, does bullying qualify as a national crisis? Bullying is an unacceptable behaviour that adults and students have a responsibility to stop. Most people think of bullying as teasing someone and make lighthearted jokes about an individual. However, it is a blanket term to downplay serious crimes. Bullying and cyberbullying can become a crime if you: physically assault someone, vandalize property, harass someone especially if the harassment is based on gender or racism. Furthermore, violent threats, death threats, obscene and harassing phone calls and texts are also criminal acts. The list goes on to include explicit photos of an adult or minor used to extort the person, or sharing these photos with other, stalking someone, committing hate crimes, taking a photo of someone in a place where they expect privacy, and extortion. Do not think these acts are not a crime. The Secret Service released a report examining the dozens of school shooting that have taken place across the United States of America since 1997. It found that bullying was a factor in two-thirds of them. In some cases, the shooters had been bullies; much more often, they had been the victims of bullying. A survey released by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Nickelodeon asked a national sample of children aged 8 to 15 what issues in school concerned them most, and all age groups pointed to teasing and bullying as “big problems” that ranked higher than racism, deadly illnesses, and peer pressure. Reports such as these have elevated bullying from a narrow concern that is best dealt with by students themselves (or perhaps by the teachers and parents of those directly involved) to wide speared problems that requires the attention of school-level programs and statewide policies. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
A recent study found that a full 30 percent of American students are involved in moderate or frequent bullying—11 percent have been victims, 13 percent have been bullies, and percent have been both. Other studies report even higher results. When you sit down to talk to someone who has been a victim of noted death threats, felony assault and vandalizing, stalking, and trespassing never says, “So you are being bullied.” That is totally making the situation seem like someone has just been teased by children on the playground. However, when someone in a political position is hit in the face with a pie, it suddenly becomes a very serious problem and is called “assault,” no bullying, or “just horsing around.” In 2016, when Sean Thompson walked up to the defunct mayor of Sacramento, Kevin Johnson, and hit him in the face with a pie. The Johnson then tackled Thompson, then punched him more than half a dozen times until his face looked like a “bloody pulp.” Sean Thompson hit Kevin Johnson with a pie because he put more than half a billion dollars into the King’s arena, instead of projects that could actually help people in the community. Sacramento then charged Sean Thompson with many believe was the stiffest potential penalty a pie-thrower has ever received: felony assault and misdemeanor battery, with a bail of $100,000. Many believe the punishment was unconstitutional. However, when you look into Kevin Johnson, many may wonder why he got away with so much when he was far more than a bully, then rewarded by becoming mayor, where he racked up more crimes that as of yet, have still gone unpunished? Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot and a European American mayor had responded to a young African American male the same way. The World would have been outraged. While the issue of equality is important, African Americans do not want to be perceived as aggressive victims. The issue is equal rights under the law for all. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
How easy can it be for clinicians to identify which children will turn dangerously violent if indeed 33 percent of all children have experienced bullying? One thing to keep in mind about self-defense, is often times it is, in many cases, better to walk away from the situation because it may not go the way you think it will. Certain people, and those in certain positions get more leeway when it comes to how they react to “bullying.” However, keep in mind, when it comes to self-defense, you will need to prove you had a reasonable belief that you were in imminent danger of suffering harm or death, you have reasonable belief that using force was necessary to prevent such harm, and you used an amount of force that was necessary to stop that threat. Because if some person hits you in the face with a pie, and you beat them to a bloody pulp, you might actually go to jail for that because that is called excessive force. How can we rid ourselves of a problem as pervasive as this? Short of raising kinds in isolation chambers…bullying behaviours can never be eliminated entirely from the sustained hazing ritual knows as growing up. Remember bullying and the force you use to defend yourself can be considered a criminal act. Think about it, is assault or a hate crime worth being sent to jail for? Is being mean and cruel and hurting other people worth running their life and yours? Next time you think it is funny to hurt someone in person or online, think carefully about the consequences. You may think it is funny at first, but think about how much fun it would be for you to be spending time in jail! Think about how being in jail could prevent you from attending college, having a great career? Think about having a criminal record for the rest of your life, which could even impact who is willing to marry you, rent to you, or hire you for a job. Think about how funny you think it is when you bully others. However, if you go to jail, think about how others will feel about you. None of these things would be too much fun…would they? #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Equal to some businessmen, some of our government and public spokesmen have a knack for debasing the noble and making the excellent trivial. The current disease is to make Cold War capital out of everything, no matter what. We cannot dedicate a building of William Carson’s of Sarah Winchester’s in California without criticism for being so beautiful and creative. This type of criticism is tasteless; the matter becomes serious when our freedoms are involved. Many civil rights leaders and organized friends of culture keep repeating freedom of speech, freedom of culture. (You would think that we did not have our own means of censoring, by commercial selections and by swamping.) However, many Americans are facing Cold War censorship, not only have they been forced to wear masks, and get two and three vaccinations, there is also talk out of Washing about having Americans receive a COVID vaccine every year. In addition, many people had to shut down their businesses and stay locked in their homes during the pandemic. The concern is that this sort of treatment could turn into tyranny. This resulted in an inconceivable loss of revenue and tourists. Such behaviour is inconceivable by Americans. We are not at Cold War with the American Dream of working hard will afford you a nice lifestyle. However, tyranny is patriotically disastrous; it teaches that our spokesmen and women are not earnest; they pick and choose when to stand up from freedom of thought. How then can a boy be proud? (But to be sure, we have little such freedom, compared with the British, for our mass media are not, like their, open to fundamental controversy. It is not surprising, therefore, that for English Angry Young Men an important topic is their outraged patriotism, whereas our Beats do not care about that.) Racial antipathy leading to actual violence is not limited to humans, although it is only the less evolved humans who resort to it. In the tropics one sees black ants fighting the red ones, mutilating and even ending the lives of one another. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The final tragedy of Humans: that they let themselves go along with destructive forces which in the end could gravely injure the whole species, when they could go alone with the constructive ones. This fleshly body, in which we live and move and have our being, has, through pleasures of the flesh and sport, become a cult to the modern World. We fall in our millions, prostrate votaries at its shrine, forgetful that its quick growth is followed by quick decay, that our idol is doomed to crumble. Too many moments of highest enthusiasm on the part of youth are often reserved for the new religion—sport. A whole theology has been built up around the strokes of a bat and the throws of a ball; hard hitters are now canonized as saints. One who throws one’s ball far enough may yet send oneself, with it, to the new Heavenly America! And as far as pleasures of the flesh, the passions and emotions of the young are deliberately stimulated by the arts of literature, journalism, cinema, and advertising just at the age when they ought to be disciplined. How little humans collectively learn from the past is show by every textbook of history, which teems with constant repetitions of the ugliest passions. The Worldwide condition of human mass, its hates, ignorance, and violence, brings despair to many a thoughtful mind. Violence is a destructive force which in the end and when excessive destroys even itself. Among the negative emotions we must include prejudice and bias. The negative emotions include arrogance and vanity, cowardice and moral weakness. All the negative thoughts and feelings show a misuse of mental power. Temptations and beguilements, illusions and deceptions, beset the path of ordinary life just as they do the inner life of the quest. However, in the latter case they may also assume a subtler form. Here there are telepathic, psychic, spiritualistic, and neurotic possibilities. There are times when a person is more vulnerable to attack by negative thought than at other times. In great emotional excitement, anger, or passion of any kind, we are most susceptible. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Yet, there are three great types of life and thought representing three different solutions of the problem of ethics in historical change: first, the static supranaturalistic solution, represented by the Roman Catholic church and expressed in the ethics of Thomas Aquinas; second, the dynamic-naturalistic solution, represented by the National Socialist movement and expressed in the ethics of the philosophers of life; third, the rationalistic-progressive solution, represented by Anglo-Saxon common sense expressed in the ethics of the philosophers of reasons. With tremendous psychological power the static supranaturalistic solution maintains the eternal and immovable character of the ethical norms and commands. Philosophy and theology co-operate in this direction. The World is conceived as a system of eternal structures, preformed in the divine mind, which are substance and essence of everything and which establish the norms and laws for a human’s personal and social practice. Philosophy discovers these structures and laws, and revelation confirms and amends them. Revelation adds some superstructures of its own that are new and higher laws, but equally eternal and immovable. Both the natural and the supranatural together form a hierarchy of powers and values that control nature and are supposed to control human activities. The church, itself a hierarchical system, teaches this system, educates for it, fights for its political realization, and defends it against new systems. However, in so doing the church cannot disregard the actual situation and historical changes. The church must adapt its ethical system to new problems and new demands. The Catholic church has been able to do just this, admirably, for centuries, and the living authority of the Pope is still a marvelous instrument for achieving adaptations without losing its immovable basis. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the Catholic church did not fully succeed in dealing with the presuppositions and demands of the bourgeois era. Protestantism and the Enlightenment created new systems of ethics standing in opposition to the supposedly eternal system of the medieval church. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
And when the church tried to proceed with the stream of the rising bourgeoisies, as, for example, in the moral preachings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuitism and in the teachings of nineteenth-century modernism, either it lost its seriousness and authority or it gave the unhappy impression of rearguard action in which every position is defended as long as possible and then surrendered. And the important utterances of the Holy See during the nineteenth century concerning social and political problems presuppose, in order to be applicable, the unbroken unity and authority of the Christian church, which no longer exist. Therefore, they did not at all influence the spirit of modern ethics and the direction of bourgeois society. The price paid by the static supranaturalistic answer to our question has been the loss of a determining influence on the changing World of the last centuries. The opposite solution, represented by national socialism, was prepared for in two main ways—by the Continental vitalistic philosophy and by Angelo-American positivism and pragmatism, the latter being only a different form of the vitalistic philosophy. National Socialism has used and abused philosophical motives of the Continental philosophy of live, especially of Nietzsche, Pareto, and Sorel. Philosophy must express life in its changing forms and trends. Truth, according to Nietzsche, is that lie which is useful for particular species of being. Values are produced and withdrawn in the dynamic process of life—biologically speaking, by the strongest kind of living beings; sociologically speaking, by the strongest kind of living beings; sociologically speaking, by the new elite; and politically speaking, by the eruptive violence of a revolutionary group. Change, being the chief character of life, is also the chief character of ethics. There are no independent norms above life, no criteria by which power can be judged, no standards for a good life. Good life is strong life, or violent life, of the life of a ruling aristocracy, or the life of conquering race. This implies that the individual, instead of being guided by the ethical norms that are manifest in one’s conscience, is obliged to merge one’s conscious with the group conscience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
One must co-ordinate one’s standards with the group standards, as represented by the leaders of the group. The dynamic-naturalistic type of answer to the question of ethics in a changing World has a primitive-tribal character. It is, historically speaking, at the same time the most recent and the most ancient of all solutions of the ethical problem. Now a quantum leap, from reasoned dedications about the general principles governing the behaviour of long-vanished societies to three real societies: traditional and modern China, ancient Greece, and several nations in today’s Muslim Middle East, all demanding bribes preserve their virginity for their husbands. For long periods of history, the Chinese increased the chances of maintaining large-scale chastity by crippling little girls’ feet so that, as nubile woman, they could barely hobble from room to room, much less down past the garden gate to indulge in pleasures of the flesh adventures. Nonetheless, some unmarried women—maimed and unmaimed—were unchaste. Of these, many concealed the fact or got caught by their families or were publicly exposed—for example when the bridegroom feld from the wedding chamber, bleating about having married a “wing-broken bird.” How did these lapses occur? In the usual way, and sometimes, even women with bound feet defined probability and were wanton, willful, or seduced. These unmaidenly maidens felt no spiritual guilt, for their deed had no religious connotations—as females, after all, they were considered lesser beings than males. However, they had violated China’s pervasive principle of yin and yang, the essential harmony that governed society. Those who were caught dreaded the consequences, for the price of unchastity was dishonour for the entire family. They had defiled the national culture of mianiz, honouring one’s family’s prestige. For women, a peccadillo in pleasures of the flesh was costly in other ways. It was difficult or impossible to find a husband for sullied women except by subterfuge—passing her off as a virgin. And if a man agreed to accept a nonvirgin, he would not send his bride’s family the expensive gifts they could otherwise have expected five or six times a year. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
In China today, the old values have not disappeared, though communism and modernity have modified culture expectations. However, female virginity is still very crucial to a love relationship. For chaste bride’s, the groom’s family often paid a large price forth the wedding. However, sometimes weddings are just an economic affair. As in China, celibacy in ancient Greece was also a uniquely female virtue. As we have seen, the Greeks did not value celibacy, but their daughters had to remain virginal. Because they regarded girls as lustful, early marriages seemed sensible—less time for brides to succumb to temptation. Sometimes, however, marriage did not come soon enough. If she was caught, the young woman was in terrible trouble. Fathers were obligated to obliterate all reminders of such shameful daughters from the household. Selling them selves into slavery was a common solution. One Athenian official took more drastic action: he fed his “ruined” daughter to a starved horse. Why not? By her unchastity, the girl had rendered herself a nonentity whose worthless body might as well sate another sort of bestial hunger. It was, of course, natural for a young woman whose secret lover had actually cause her to be with child to fight with the wiliness of desperation against her dreadful fate. The most common ploy was to swear the pearl inside was holy and that one of the gods had done this to her. Any girl (Parthenos) who managed to pull this off—and a few did—was not merely saved but was afterward treated as someone protected by divine immunity. After all, punishing a Parthenos, whom a god rather than a moral man had made unchaste, would inevitably provoke divine retribution. Palestinian Muslims are reminiscent of the ancient Greeks in their fanatical concern about premarital virginity. If they even suspect a girl has been unchaste, then brothers and fathers’ storm into action, terminating their own sists and daughters in sacrifice rituals. Often, these are disguised as accidents by burning the body. This usually happens to one woman a week. “They feel that women should take care to be a virgin when married, and not sleep around,” said Suheir Azzonuni Mashi, director of the Women’s Affairs Technical Committee in Ramallah, West Bank. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Now, moving on to the economy. The dream of a perfectly synchronized, machinelike society tantalized many of the “modernizers” who influenced the industrial age. The object was to create a state and a society that ran with the efficiency of a machine: every bureaucracy acting as one, every individual moving in lockstep. However, human beings and human societies are, in fact, open systems. Messy and imperfect. In our lives and in our societies, regions of chaos and chance alternate with, and give rise to, regions of temporary stability. We need both. Stability and synchronization provide the degree of predictability we need to function as individuals in social groups and especially in the economy. Without some stability and time coordination, life is reduced to oppression by anarchy and chance. However, what happens when instability and de-synchronization take over? Despite decades of bloodshed and internal suppression, the United States of American never complete the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. In modern times, many people fear that COVID and high inflation could lead to the middle class being frequently being reduced to eating nothing but potatoes and cabbage. And that we will wander through ghostly supermarkets with virtually empty shelves. Some can envision in their mind’s eye the few jars of gray, moldy pastas that are on sale. And the freezing old woman standing on the steps of public buildings trying to sell a single ballpoint pen or a potholder—their only possession. Fearing a total economic breakdown, they very social order on which the country depends on will dissolve, and along with it any pretense of synchronized efficiency. Imagine is no knew when, or even if, promised products will arrive. Picture instead of just-in-time, American enterprises running on not-on-time. During a trip, one may be prevented from flying to New York from California as scheduled, forced to take a midnight train instead because, one was tole, no one is sure whether aviation gas will arrive in time for flight #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
People fear hungering for things to work, for predictability, for someone—as the Italian dictator Mussolini once put it—“to make the trains to run on time.” However, societies need more than just trains that run on time. They need institutions that run on time and law enforcement which does their jobs and listens to citizens before things snowball into an avalanche. What happens, however, when one institution runs at such high speeds that it leaves society’s other vital institutions miles behind? No one can answer this question scientifically. The hard data are not there. Nevertheless, it is revealing to see what is happening to key institutions in America, where the race in the twenty-first-century economy is, at least for now, most advanced. What follows, then, is a first sketch, purely conjectural and surely controversial, that may help not just business leaders and government policy makers, but all of us as we try to cope with rapid change. And while we use the United States of America as the example, the implications are international. Let us focus, then on rates of change. Start with a mind’s-eye image of a freeway. At its side a police officer sits astride a motorcycle, pointing a radar gun at the road. On the highway are BMWs, each representing a major institution in America. Each BMW travels at a speed that matches that institution’s actual rate of change. Tomorrow we will look more into this equation. Grey Wolf, we are sending you to the Great God. Please tell Him that we, who invented forgiveness do not forgive; that we, who speak of trust can not trust; that we, who invoke faith would not believe. I write as though you could read. However, I know you understand. When you have left the forests and tundras and no longer lave your sinewy trails with the snows, tell Him that you were made on a different day. Your howls of bewilderment will echo with the mountain winds. And your songs will join those of the whales. Please tell Him for me, “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
There may be those who feel that they can live quite happily without either religious discipline or communion with God. However, they are grave error. The restlessness which characterizes us, the confusion which has come on our times, the increasing percentage of neuroses among us, and the general unhappiness of all of us in the midst of the greatest affluence the World has yet seen, has come upon us primarily because of the lack of that sense of communion with God which made our forefathers happy in spite of their poverty and their physical suffering. We relearned to interpret the symptoms of weariness and hunger, cry when bedtime or mealtime comes, and yet refuse either to go to bed or take their food. Living in a gilded palace, as it were, we are still miserable, for we are essentially orphans, having lost that most precious of all values in life, the sense of the Fatherhood of God. The feeling of deprivation grows sharper and more poignant, instead of less severe, as we grow older. The time comes to each of us when the burdens of life seem far too heavy to carry, when the brightness of youth begins to fade, and we notice the lengthening shadows which presage our end. More than ever then do we become homesick; homesick, not for our houses or for our countries, but homesick for the Universal Parent of all of us, for that deep affection which is the heart of the Universe itself, for the mercy of God; yet a wall of iron has been placed between us and Him, and we cannot find Him. What greater good can a human achieve, either for oneself or for the World, than to contribute one’s effort to piercing this wall and bring the Father and the children once more into loving communion with one another! Also, the about the national security risk racist against fellow Americans is. You are all American and if you use racism to suppress other Americas and keep them from advancing, it is a loss to the economy, it is a loss of tax revenue, and it is a loss of skill that may keep America number one. Remember, China has a population of 1.4 billion and America only has 3.25 million. Therefore, every American who can work needs to be allowed to work so they can innovate and keep the country strong. Politicians should address racism as a threat to national security. You do not have to welcome people you do not like into your homes, but it is important to respect the United States Constitution and give everyone equal opportunity. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Live in luxury like you have always wanted to in a Cresleigh Home. These thoughtfully designed floor plans allow you to customize your home with added features and upgrades.
Enter on the first level to find a stunning open concept kitchen, dining room and great room where you’ll spend much of your fun time.
In the still of the night, I held my Cresleigh Home tight, ‘cause I love you so. Promise I will never let my Cresleigh Home go.
I the still of the night, I remember that night in May, the stars were bright above. I’ll hope and I’ll pray to keep your precious love.
“The more I live in this Cresleigh community, the more I realize that it’s such a caring community. It’s much more than welcoming and friendly. It’s a place where people are respectful.”
That’s what it means to be part of a friendly community.
#CresleighHomes
Life is Very Short When You Look Back and Realize How Long You Spent Not Living Your Dreams
One of the interesting things that has happened in extant genetic codes is the discoveries that have to do with the degeneracy of the genetic code—the existence of several different sequences of bases in the messenger RNA molecule that can cause the same amino acid segment to be incorporated in the protein under construction. For example, the evidence strongly suggests that the amino acid arginine can be evoked by any one of three messenger RNA triplets CGC, AGA, and UCG. The related inference also appears to be correct: that three different types of transfer RNA molecule, each capable of carrying the amino acid arginine, correspond to these three messenger RNA triplets. Such degeneracy in the code is compatible with the fact that 4 X 4 X 4, or 64, different messenger or transfer RNA triplet combinations can be made of the 4 bases of the nucleic acid molecule, whereas only 20 amino acids must be specified by the various combinations. The evidence to this point suggests that every one of the 64 possible combinations may ultimately be found to be “meaningful” in the sense of specifying one or another of the 20 amino acid constituents of the end-product protein molecules. It should be noted that this kind of degeneracy does not lead to ambiguity in the genetic code. To be sure, it means that messenger RNA molecules with different base sequences can govern the production of the same kind of protein. And the existence of such alternative “words” within the genetic language suggests that different species of organisms may employ somewhat different dialects in the nuclear books of instruction with which they control their cellular chemistry. Nevertheless, the code could still be universal in the sense that a given messenger RNA molecule, if capable at all of operating the genetic mechanisms of different types of foreign organisms, would always produce the same kind of protein molecules. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Not only did Bonner’s successful crossbreeding of the genetic mechanisms of pea plants and E. coli cell-free extracts in experiments with synthetic messenger RNA has provided further confirming evidence. While much less work has been done with mammalian than with bacterial components, it has at least been established that the messenger RNA triplets that evoke specific amino acids in the finally fabricated protein molecules are the same for mammalian as for bacterial systems in the case of the half-dozen kinds of messenger nucleic acid that have been tested. In general, while making allowance for some degree of variation from species to species in the details of the genetic mechanisms, biochemists today are confident that the genetic code has essentially been “broken”—that they are on the point of being able to line up every possible messenger RNA triplet with a particular amino acid in the resulting protein molecule. However, the specific sequence of amino acid segments in the manufactured protein molecules determine their catalytic properties and therefore controls the specific set of chemical reactions that take place in the cell. Therefore, the solution of the genetic code in this way implies the ultimate ability of the scientist to “read” the molecules of messenger RNA (or the nuclear DNA which produces them) and thereby learn the properties of the cell whose metabolism they control—whether the cell is to have the properties of pea plant or intestinal bacillus, for example. Inasmuch as the higher organisms, including humans, are believed to employ the same system of genetic control (plus a few complications yet to be treated), the implications of this work are that one day the biochemists are now able to determine the colour of eyes and shape of the nose of a yet-to-be-developed human individual by analysis of the structure of the nucleic acid molecules in the cells of the embryo! #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Before we move on to some of the additional complexities that characterize the structure and metabolism of higher organisms, we should make sure that we understand how the discussion how all of this information contributes to our basic thesis as to the purely physical origins of life. The experimental evidence reported here can only strengthen our faith in the soundness of our nonvitalistic philosophy; for strong support for the thesis of the fundamentally physical nature of the life processes is provided by the success of the biochemists in extracting from living cells the pertinent nucleic acid/enzyme apparatus and in stimulating it to perform its architectural functions by means of the addition of nucleic acid from other organisms. Ans the successful employment of human-made chemicals for this purpose even verges on the dramatic in its demonstration of the workability of our physical explanations. Not even the evidence for the similarity of the principal features of the genetic mechanisms in all forms of life is particularly disturbing. To be sure, this might at first glance appear to be more reconcilable with the vitalistic view of the supernatural purposiveness of life than with the materialistic view that everything has happened as the result of the blindly probabilistic physical laws of the Universe. However, there is really no great problem in imagining evolutionary developments that could have led to a considerable degree of ultimate standardization in the nucleic acid/enzyme mechanisms. And such evidence of variety as the degeneracy of the genetic code, with the accompanying implication of divergence from species to species in some of the details of the genetic mechanism, seems comfortably consistent with our views of the normal consequences of the evolutionary process. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
As we address ourselves to some of the further complexities that characterize modern higher organisms, we shall find that our considerations will continue to be intimately involved with the genetic mechanisms that have occupied so much of our attention to this point. We shall not be able to escape being enormously impressed by their overriding power and importance in the phenomena of life. While evolution is clearly the great technique employed by nature for developing its biological novelties, we shall find it easy to conclude that the genetic mechanisms may constitute the most ingenious and important invention yet achieved by the use of that technique. Now, looking ahead. Did you know that your DNA determines your reaction to caffeine? Caffeine is widely consumed in foods and beverages and is also used for a variety of medical purposes. Despite its widespread use, relatively little is understood regarding how genetics affects consumption, acute response, or the long-term effects of caffeine. Twin studies find the heritability of caffeine-related traits to range between 0.36 and 0.58. Analysis of poly-substance use shows that predisposition to caffeine use is highly specific to caffeine itself and shares little common disposition to use of other substances. Genome association studies link variations in adenosine and dopamine receptors to caffeine-induced anxiety and sleep disturbances. Polymorphism in the metabolic enzyme cytochrome P-450 is associated with risk of myocardial infraction in caffeine users. Modeling based on twin studies reveals that genetics plays a role in individual variability in caffeine consumption and in the direct effects of caffeine. Both pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic polymorphisms have been linked to variation in response to caffeine. These studies may help guide future research in the role of genetics in modulating the acute and chronic effects of caffeine. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Caffeine is the World’s most widely used stimulant. Nearly 90 percent of adults in the United States of America alone consume an estimated 30 million pounds of this psychoactive substance annually. It is the most consumed psychoactive substance in the World. Seventy-five percent of this caffeine is taken in the form of coffee (from the coffee bean); the rest is consumed in tea (from the tea leaf), cola (from the kola nut), chocolate (from the cocoa bean), and numerous prescription and over-the-counter medications, such as Excedrin. Caffeine’s popularity Worldwide can be attributed to its ability to promote wakefulness, enhance mood and cognition, and produce stimulatory effects. It is used clinically to treat premature neonatal apnea and as an analgesic adjuvant. Around 99 percent of ingested caffeine is absorbed by the body and reaches its peak concentration with an hour. It acts as a stimulant of the central nervous system, again producing a release of the neurotransmitters dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine in the brain. Thus it increases arousal, mild euphoria, alertness, enhanced cognitive performance and motor activity and reduces fatigue. It also disrupts the performance of motor tasks and may interfere with sleep. Finally, it increases the rate of breathing and gastric acid secretions in the stomach. More than two to three cups of brewed coffee (250 milligrams of caffeine) can produce caffeine intoxication, which may include such symptoms as restlessness, nervousness, anxiety, stomach disturbances, twitching, and increased heart rate. Grand mal seizures and fatal respiratory failure or circulatory failure can occur at doses greater than 10 grams of caffeine (about 100 cups of coffee), but there is a decreased risk in neurodegenerative disorders. Many people who suddenly stop or cutback on their usual intake of caffeine experience withdrawal symptoms—even some individuals whose regular consumption is low (two and a half cups of coffee daily or seven cans of cola). #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
It is likely that several factors contribute to individual differences in responses to caffeine, including demographic and environmental factors such as age, other drug use, circadian factors, and sleep hygiene. One important source of variability that has received some attention in the recent year is genetic predisposition. There is growing evidence that individual differences in caffeine response or caffeine consumption are related to genetic factors. Genetic factors may influence responses to caffeine directly, by altering acute or chronic reactions to the drug, or indirectly, by affecting other psychological or physiological processes that are related to the drug effect, such as sensitivity to anxiety, rewarding and reinforcing effects of substances in general, or related personality traits. Finally, genes can also alter the body’s adaptive responses to long-term caffeine use. The biological mechanisms of these possible sources of variation likely involve interactions at multiple sites. One study had adult subjects consume their usual caffeine-filled drinks and foods for two days, then abstain from such foods for two days while taking actual caffeine pills. More subjects experienced headaches (52 percent), depression (11 percent), anxiety (8 percent), and fatigue (8 percent) during the two-day placebo period then during the caffeine periods. In addition, subjects reported using more unauthorized medications (13 percent) and performed experimental tasks more slowly during the placebo period than during the caffeine periods. Genetic contribution to caffeine consumption changes through different stages in life. It appears that genetic contribution becomes more pronounced throughout adolescence and then stabilized during adulthood. Researchers found that genetics influence individual sensitivity to caffeine toxicity, tolerance, and withdrawal in female twins. On average the woman reported slightly higher level of caffeine-induced insomnia and greater sleep disturbances in general health than men. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Epidemiological studies indicate that smokers drink more coffee than nonsmokers, but it is not clear whether these associations are related to genetic factors or to drug interactions, social conditioning, or other variables. One approach to solving this question is to correlate the use of caffeine to other drugs and using the common pathway model and mapping the genetic contribution to a common joint use factor and substance-specific factors. Using this technique, researchers found that the heritability for coffee use overlapped with that of nicotine and alcohol, though 0.72 of the total heritability was specific to caffeine, which was considerably higher than that for nicotine and alcohol. Investigators often assess caffeine’s impact by measuring coffee consumption, yet coffee also contains other chemicals that may be dangerous to one’s health. Thus, although some studies hint at links between caffeine and cancer (particularly pancreatic cancer), the evidence is not conclusive. Similarly, studies demonstrating correlations between caffeine and heart rhythm irregularities (arrhythmias) or high cholesterol levels are not fully reliable. Caffeine does, however, appear to cause at least a slight increase in blood pressure over time in regular users and a larger but short-lived increase during the first few days of consumption by new users. As public awareness of these possible health risks has increased, caffeine consumption has declined. Around half of Americans now drink coffee daily, whereas 80 percent did so in 1983. Heavier caffeine users appear to be more influenced by genetics than lighter caffeine users. People who tend to consume more alcohol also tend to drink more coffee. Genetic association studies have been used to identify specific genes that are responsible for the heritable components of these caffeine-related traits. Caffeine and its metabolites belong to the methylxanthine class, which are structurally similar to cyclic nucleotides, and interact with cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterases. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Caffeine is absorbed rapidly and completely from the gastrointestinal tract. It is metabolized by cytochrome P-450 enzymes, which represent the rate-limiting step for plasma clearance, and its elimination follows first-order kinetics. P-450 1A2, which is coded for by gene CYP1A2, is the primary isoenzyme responsible for the demethylation of caffeine into dimethylxanthine metabolites paraxanthine, theobromine, and theophylline. Each of these metabolites is subjected to further demethylation into monimethylxanthines. Variation in the CYP1A2 activity, both within and between individuals, represents a major source of variability in pharmaco-kinetics of caffeine. The clearance of caffeine can vary to up to 40-fold within and between individuals. Notable exogeneous factors that affect clearance include numerous drugs, medications, and smoking status, as well as caffeine itself. Endogenous factors include pregnancy, ethnicity, and genetics. Asian and African populations, for instance, appear to metabolize caffeine at slower rate than Caucasians. Genetic variations in a number of neurotransmitter functions could influence responses to caffeine. Because 10 grams of caffeine can be fatal, the substance is classified as a medical poison. The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we will miss it, but that it is too low and we will reach it. A leader is someone who has the capacity to create a compelling vision that takes people to a new place. In 1783 Washington sent a circular letter to the States, describing the situation of the new nations as he saw it. “We have equal occasion to felicitate ourselves,” he said, “on the lot which Providence has assigned to us, whether we view it in a natural, a political, or moral point of light.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
He pointed to the natural resources of the new nation, its independence and freedom, the Age of Reason during which it had come of age, an age of “the free cultivation of letters, the unbounded extension of commerce, the progressive refinement of manners, the growing liberality of sentiment, and above all the pure and benign light of Revelation….if these citizens,” he concluded, “should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be certainly their own. Such is our situation and such are our prospects.” It is hard to read these sentences without agitation and tears, for they are simply true and simply patriotic. In the next generations, almost to our own times, patriotic rhetoric did not cease to sound, more pompously and falsely, but never without a core of truth. There was always something special in the American destiny to be proud of. In 1825 it was the broad democracy. In 1850 it was the magnificent spread and settlement from coast to coast. In 1875, the material progress, the cable and the Pacific railroad, the building of modern industrialism. In 1900, America was the melting pot, the asylum of the poor and the oppressed. In our century, the patriotic rhetoric began to be unbelievable—not by accident, for foreign wars (1898 and 1917) are incompatible with reasonable rhetoric. In recent decades there has been almost a surcease of such speech. Even references to the American Way, free enterprise, high production, and the economy of abundance have finally died out, because they call up the idea of tail fins and TV commercials. Highbrow journalists mention the American Way with scorn. Our case is astounding. For the first time in recorded history, the mention of country, community, place has lost its power to animate. Nobody but a scoundrel even tries it. Our rejection of false patriotism is, of course, itself a badge of honour. However, the positive loss is tragic and I cannot resign myself to it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
A man has only one life and if during it he has no great environment, no community, he has been irreparably robbed of a human right. This loss is damaging especially in growing up, for it deprives outgoing growth, which begins with weaning from Mother and walking out of the house, of the chance of entering upon a great and honourable scene to develop in. Culture is, first of all, city and patriotic culture. Patriotism is the culture, we come with a fatal emptiness to the humane culture of science, art, humanity and God; and this emptiness results in the best people not turning back, like Plato’s philosopher who has emerged from the cave, to serve their country. Many of the best Americans have a strong philanthropic and local community zeal, yet it would seem odd for somebody nowadays to put himself to a big and hard task just to serve his country, to make her better, and be proud of that. Young people aspire mightily to appearances on television and other kinds of notoriety, but I doubt that many now thing of being honoured by a statue in the park and winning “immortal” fame, the fame of big culture. Let me make the same point by analyzing a remarkable proposition of Otto Jespersen, the grammarian. He shows that, contrary to expectation, a child does not learn his mother tongue at home from his mother and immediate family, he does not pick up their accent. The accent, vocabulary, syntax, and styles that form his speech are learned from his first peer groups, outside the home. Jespersen does not explain it, but the psychology seems evident. Speech occurs at the stage of the developing of the “I,” it is a forming of the image of the self, it is a self-appointment to one’s ideal and putting on its uniform. Changes occur as we appoint ourselves to one peer group after another. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
At certain stage a lad appoints himself or commits himself to a band of friends and puts on its jargon, jacket, tattoo, and masculine ring on the fourth finger of the left hand. If he is insecure and disturbed, this conformity is a cowering protection and the band is a delinquent gang, but in every case it is also, we see by the blazon, an achievement. And one way in which the Governor of California does not take the juveniles seriously, when he speaks of giving them a sense of belonging, is that he does not offer an ideal that promises equal manliness. He has none to offer. It is tragic when there is no great adult peer group to meet growth. Consider the case of an artist, my own case. To have simple and sounding language, rather than merely the lovely colloquialism of Sherwood Anderson or William Carlos Williams, it is necessary to believe in the great national culture of one’s people. Our popular culture does not warrant the belief, even to make the sacrifice that Virgil made when he sadly gave up his best vision because strife-torn Rome needed a national poet. True, an artist can then jump to the international and universal, for a mankind and God do not let him down (mankind is the fellow on one’s own block), but this is at the loss of pomp and glitter, of the glancing present. Without a patriotic peer group, it is impossible to have the brilliance of Handel, the material grandeur of Venice. With us the style of the big bright sensation belongs to cheap musical dramas on Broadway. Now, an analogy to the “triumphant conscience,” as developed by Luther personally as well as theologically, appeared in the enthusiastic philosophy of Giordano Bruno. The moral conscience is overcome by the “heroic affect” toward the Universe and the surrender to its infinity and inexhaustible creativity. Participation in the creativity of life universal liberates the moral conscience, the bad as well as the good. Humans, standing in the center of being, are bound to transform life as it is into higher life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
These living souls take upon themselves the tragic consequences, connected with the destructive side of finite creativity, and must not try to escape them for the sake of a good moral conscience. While in Bruno the transmoral conscience is based on a mystical naturalism, Nietzsche’s transmoralism is a consequence of his dramatic-tragic naturalism. Nietzsche belongs to those empiricists who have tried to analyze the genesis of moral conscience in such a way that its autonomy is destroyed—Hobbes and Helvetius, on the ground of a materialistic metaphysics; Mandeville and Bentham, on the ground of a utilitarian psychology; Dr. Darwin and Dr. Freud, on the ground of an evolutionary naturalism—all have denied any objective validity to the voice of conscience, according to their rejection of any universal natural (rational) law. Nietzsche carried these ideas further, as the title and the content of Genealogy of Morals shows. He says, “The bad conscience is a sickness, but it is a sickness as pregnancy is one.” It is a creative sickness. Humankind had to be domesticated, and this has been done by its conquerors and ruling classes. It was in the interest of these classes to suppress by sever punishments the natural instincts of aggressiveness, will to power, destruction, cruelty, revolution. They succeeded in suppressing these trends. However, they did not succeed in eradicating them. So the aggressive instincts became internalized and transformed into self-destructive tendencies. Humans have turned against themselves in self-punishment; they are separated from their innocent terrestrial past from which they had derived strength, joy, and creativity. However, humans cannot prevent their instincts from remaining alive. They require permanent acts of suppression, the result of which is the bad conscience, a great thing in human evolution, an ugly thing if compared with humanities real aim. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Nietzsche described this aim in terms which remind one of Luther’s descriptions of the transmoral conscience: “Once in a stronger period than our morbid, desperate present, one must appear, the man of the great love and the great contempt, the creative spirit who does now allow his driving strength to be turned to a transcendent World.” Nietzsche call him the man “who is strong through wars and victories, who needs conquest, adventure, danger, even pain.” The man is “beyond good and evil” in the moral sense. At the same time, he is good in the metaphysical (or mystical) sense that he is in unity with life universal. He has a transmoral conscience, not on the basis of a paradoxical unity with God (such as Luther has), but on the basis of an enthusiastic unity with life in its creative and destructive power. Recent “existential” philosophy has developed a doctrine of transmoral conscience that follows the general lines of Luther, Bruno, and Nietzsche. Heidegger, the main representative of existential philosophy, says, “The call of conscience has the character of the demand that humans in their finitude actualize their genuine potentialities, and this means an appeal to become guilty.” Conscience summons us to ourselves, calling us back from the talk of the market and the conventional behaviour of the masses. It has no special demands; it speaks to us in the “mode of silence.” It tells us only to act and to become guilty by acting, for every action is unscrupulous. One who acts experiences the call of conscience and, at the same time, has the experience of contradicting one’s conscience, of being guilty. “Existence as such is guilty.” Only self-deception can give a good moral conscience, since it is impossible not to act and since every action implies guilt. We must act, and the attitude in which we can act is “resoluteness.” Resoluteness transcends the moral conscience, its arguments and prohibitions. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The good, transmoral conscience consists in the acceptance of the bad, moral conscience,which is unavoidable whenever decisions are made and acts are performed. The way from Luther’s to Heidegger’s idea of a transmoral conscience was a dangerous one. “Transmoral” can mean the re-establishment of morality from a point below morality. The empiricists from Hobbes to Dr. Freud have analyzed moral conscience, but they have not destroyed it. Either they were dependent in their concrete ethics on Anglo-Saxon common sense; or they identified utility with the social conventions of a well-established bourgeoisie; or they cultivated a high sense of conscientiousness, in scientific honesty as well as in the fulfillment of duties; or they did not dare, unconsciously or consciously, to draw the radical moral consequences of their dissolution of the conscience. In Nietzsche and Heidegger none of these inhibitions is left. However, it is not without some justification that these names are connected with the antimoral movements of fascism or national socialism. Even Luther has been linked with them, as have Machiavelli and Bruno. This raises the questions: is the idea of a transmoral conscience tenable? Or is it so dangerous that it cannot be maintained? However, if the idea must be dismissed, religion as well as analytic psychotherapy would also have to be dismissed. For in both of them, the moral conscience is transcendent—in religion by the acceptance of the divine grace that breaks through the realm of law and creates a joyful conscience, and in-depth psychology by the acceptance of one’s own conflicts when looking at them and suffering under their ugliness without an attempt to suppress them and to hide them from oneself. Indeed, it is impossible not to transcend the moral conscience because it is impossible to unite a sensitive and good conscience. Those who have a sensitive conscience cannot escape the question of the transmoral conscience. The moral conscience drives beyond the sphere in which it is valid to the sphere from which it must receive its conditional validity. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The celibacy movement was rather interesting. The “silent strike,” with its contingent of proud spinsters, generated an inevitable backlash. This came in the form of gender discrimination. Scientists started to expressed the biological differences been men and women. Havelock Ellis said that, “women’s special sphere is the bearing and the rearing of children, with the care of human life in the home. Man’s primary sphere remains the exploration of life outside the home, in industry and inventions and the cultivation of the arts.” With this observation of the status quo cloaked in scientific garb, Ellis proceeded to extrapolate conclusions. One was the ideal the relations involving pleasures of the flesh would be between male dominance and female submissiveness. Another was that the ideal female, a paragon of Motherhood, was very definitely not a spinster, a word that in Ellis’s writings elaborated on the nasty connotations our century has inherited from his. Like so many Motherhood aficionados, Ellis claimed and was credited with a feminist agenda: surely praising the wonderful work of mothers must be women-positive. In Ellis’s case, this seemed irrefutable, for he also preached the novel idea that women should, indeed must, enjoy pleasures of the flesh. No more lying rigid, clenching fists, and teeth, enduring bimonthly intimate invasion by obliterating it with thoughts of England and the empire. (Ironically, Ellis himself had earlier lost an adored lover because he failed to reach a “proud status” during romantic interlude. His predilection in pleasures of the flesh was to observe the other species using the water closet, which stemmed from his unforgettable boyhood experience of watching his mother relieve herself of fluid in the garden.) #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Ellis’s espousal of the great Motherhood or, in Germany, Mutterschutz, movement particularly explains his enormous influence. From the 1800s onward, fewer children were born but infant mortality soared. Physical exams revealed the poor condition of many schoolchildren, and military recruits were rejected at a high rate for a plethora of disabilities. Something was wrong—at least, these authorities now knew something was wrong—and the solution seemed to be a nation of Super Moms who would reverse the physical decline. In Ellis’s words, these women would undertake the “regeneration of the race” and the “evolution of a supermankind.” Women, too bought into the Motherhood ideal. Some felt it validated the roles they had chosen or that had been chose for them. Others were persuaded that this form of biology was scientific truth and so believed the conclusions its thinkers so convincingly reported. These conclusions clashed with feminist beliefs, particularly the silent strike, the voluntary spinsters’ movement in which women took control of their lives by refusing to surrender their rights to husbands. Censuring spinster became the keynote of antifeminist attacks. One Motherhood proponent, herself a woman, decried spinsters with an analogy to a beehive, in which infertile workers were like “surplus woman” who refused or had no opportunity to marry. Since the workers bee’s poisoned sting required the egg laying tube, spinsters who relinquished “the power of life” would, by definition, gain possession of “the stinging weapon of death.” Another male antifeminist spoke in alarmist terms of eventual civil war between wives and spinsters, “the waste products of our female population.” In Modern Woman and How to Manager Her, another male writer called spinsters “man-condemning, man-hating…women who are ‘independent of men,’ a motely host, pathetic in their defiance of the first principle of Nature, but of no serious account in the biological sense.” He even proposed polygamy as a solution to “spinsterhood, and the right to live one’s life—the supreme consummation of a large number of revolutionary British women.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
In later years, charges of women who lonely loved other women and frigidity, both caused or worsened by spinsterhood, bolstered the attacks on single, independent women. Given that British women outnumbered men by 2 million, this was heavy artillery indeed. The women were acknowledged—negatively—as the prime movers behind reforms for all species, human and animal. The “fanaticism and crankiness” of these dangerous virgins, charged virulent antifeminist Charlotte Haldane, impelled them to espouse “freak science, freak religions, and freak philanthropy,” and to embrace wholeheartedly such contemptible crusades as antivisection, the bane of England’s scientific advancement, dogs’ homes and cats’ homes, missionary endeavors, and “‘Kill-joy’ propaganda.” Furthermore, “enough is known [about the psychological effects of permanent virginity],” Haldane opined, “to make us aware that in entrusted responsibility towards individuals and the State to elderly virgins we may be acting unwisely.” Women and loved other women, styled “intermediate women,” were even more problematic. They should be allowed only inferior jobs because as educators or nurses or doctors, “intermediate women may do an enormous amount of harm.” In the manipulative hands of the “anatomy biologists” and their unlikely Motherhood allies, the celibacy that women seeking independence had once embraced with such delight and firm purpose was now portrayed as sullied and suspicious, a witch’s mantel for freaky madwomen or a masquerade for reviled women who love women. Society still demanded virgin brides, but their virginity was their supreme offering to a husband who would maneuver them through the rest of their life. Aging girls—women—who failed to contract a marriage were pitied, but self-styled spinsters with agendas, no matter how noble and important, were condemned in vitriolic terms, their brand of feminism repudiated as antisocial and unworthy of any regard but the most evil eye. Their celibacy had become as loathsome as its object: women’s independence and personal fulfillment. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
With so many people in the World today whose outlook is negative, whose emotions are twisted and thinking is warped, it is more needful to stand firm in one’s own spot of optimistic thinking that ever. Whoever doubts the truth of this message, thereby deprives oneself of its benefits. However, this is equally true of the believer who fears its truth. If the future holds distress and suffering, blows and disasters, it is to be met with courage sought and asked from the higher self. According to our faith, it will be given us. It is not a question of what we like or prefer to believe. It is a question of accepting quietly, or else defying vainly, the chose of events and the trend of destiny. If catastrophe and obliteration threaten humanity and if the individual is hopeless when confronted by them, it is logical to conclude that although humanity might not be able to save itself, the individual can save oneself from these disasters if one believes that inner salvation is at least a possibility where outer salvation is not. Yes, you and I can save ourselves from within even when we cannot save ourselves from without. That at least is a better lot than the one of the humans who can save oneself neither from within nor from without and puts one’s faith in political action alone. For politics is merely a system of human bargaining actuated by self-seeking. It can invoke the assistance of no higher power because it does not rise higher than this self-seeking interest itself. However, the individual is free to life oneself above this sordid plane and therefore one is in a position to invite the attention and assistance of higher powers. One who consciously inhabits reality will live independent of the mutations of fate, the catastrophes of history, and the crises of an epoch in dissolution. Even in crisis of war, where danger or even death is lurking, philosophy reveals its immense practicability. For the philosopher can meet them with the utter calmness, effective capacity, and resolute heroism with which one’s studies, reflection, disciplines, and ideals have formed one’s character. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Amid the surging tides of postwar chaos, one sets the example and shows the value of philosophic principles by standing firm as a rock. Just as one kept cool in the very midst of global conflagration, so one now keeps clear-sighted amid the gloom of its dusty aftermath. In the very midst of World confusion, one becomes a little oasis of strength and peace, wisdom and certitude, calm and holiness. If one has to live in a chaotic disordered environment, the sad heritage of war, one still lives one’s own constructive ordered pattern of existence. The very example of such a human keeping steady and balanced thus silently helps some others who are bewildered or aimless. Now, when considering American capitalism, there are a few things we should keep in mind. According to Adam Smith, “Labour was the first, price, the original purchase—money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all wealth of the World was originally purchased.” It many come as a surprise that, until field of labour was replaced by factory work, few of our ancestors ever held a job. This surely was not because they were rich. Most were wretchedly poor. They did not hold jobs because the “job,” in today’s sense of formally committed work in return for stipulated pay, had not yet been invented. Like the steam engine and other industrial innovations, jobs and wage labour became widespread only during the last three centuries. Work itself was transferred from outdoors to indoors, or schedules set no longer by sunrise and sunset but by the punch clock. Most payments came in the form of wages based on hours worked. Indeed, these arrangements essentially define the term job. However, the job is only one way of packaging work. And as the latest, knowledge-based wealth systems unfold, we are moving toward a future in which, as we will see, more people “work” but fewer hold “jobs.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
It will drastically alter labour relations, human resources departments, legislation and the overall labour market how the offices of employment are conducted in the future. It is bad news for trade unions as we know them. The deep fundamental of work is changing more profoundly than at any time since the industrial revolution. Division of labour, like work itself, traces back to hunting and gathering, when the division was mainly based on gender. However, here, too, we are approaching a turning point. Ever hear of a “metallurgy and failure analysis litigation consultant” or a “post-harvest horticulturalist”? Neither have most of us. (The latter is the superspecialist who determine such things as how many microscopic holes are needed to admit oxygen into the plastic bag that holds vegetables in the supermarket.) Adam Smith in 1776 called the division of labour the source of “the greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour.” And this has been true ever since. However, the more refined and specialized tasks become, the harder and more expensive it becomes to integrate them—especially in an innovation-driven competitive economy. At some point, the costs of integration may exceed the value of such superspecialization. Moreover, narrowly focused specialists may be good at incremental innovation. However, breakthrough innovation is often the product of temporary teams whose members cross disciplinary boundaries—at a time when breakthroughs in every field are, in fact, blurring those very boundaries. And this is not just a matter for scientists and researchers. The new wealth system demands a complete shake-up in the way increasingly temporary skill sets are organized for increasingly temporary purposes throughout the economy. Nothing is more deeply fundamental to the creation of wealthy. Now only are work and the division of labour changing, but income distribution itself—the “who gets what?”—may be heading, over the long term, toward truly revolutionary change. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
The temple of the animals has fallen into disrepair. The pad of feet has faded. The panthers flee the shadows of the day. Tired, I recall the animals of last year: the altars of the bear, tribunals of the ape, solitudes of elephantine gloom, rare zebra-stripped retreats, prophecies of dog, sanctuaries of the pygmy deer. Were there rituals I had forgotten? Animal calls to which those animal voices replied, called and called until that jungle stirred. Were there voices that I heard? Love was the very animal made his lair, slept out his winter in my heart. Did he seek my hear or ever sleep there? I have seen the animals depart, forgotten their voices, or barely remembered—like that last speech when the company goes or the beloved face that the heart knows, forgets and knows—I have heard the dying footsteps of fall. The sound has faded, but lingers here. Ah, bitterly I recall animals of last year. Thine, O Lord, is the greatness and the power, and the glory and the victory and the majesty; all that is in the Heaven and in the Earth is Thine; Thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and Thou art exalted above all. Both riches and honour come from Thee, and Thou rulest over all; in Thy hand is power and might, and in Thy hand it is to make great, and to give strength unto all. Therefore, our God, we thank Thee, and praise Thy glorious name. O give thanks unto the Lord who alone doeth great wonders; His lovingkindness endureth forever. Sing unto the Lord with thanksgiving; sing praise upon the harp unto our God; He covereth the Heavens with clouds, He prepareth rain for the Earth, and maketh the mountains to be green with grass. He maketh your borders peaceful, He giveth you the fat of the wheat in plenty. He is good to the Earth, and watereth her with His rivers that are full of water. He maketh the Earth soft with showers, and blesseth the growth thereof. He crowneth the year with His goodness, and showereth the Earth with rich bounty. #RandolpHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
Stand-out style meets convenience with airy living spaces for sparkling entertainment.
This Valentines Day, we can’t let the holiday pass by without sharing our love for our new address at Mills Station Residence 1. Amazing home; amazing view; amazing life! 💖💖💖
Whatever Person Posses this Book, Lucifer Promises to Carry Out One’s Plans
The latter part of the nineteenth century was an anguished and tortured period. Gentility was a terrible strain. Beneath the appearance of stiff propriety there ran currents of anger and aggression frightful in their intensity. Some indication of the dark, baleful aspect of the lives of our great-grandparent went untold. Black and white magic. Contemporary forms of magic are being studied carefully by parapsychologists. (Parapsychology is the study of apparently supernatural phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, apparitions, and related forms of ESP.) Researcher in this field who operate from a completely naturalistic standpoint deny the existence of a personal devil or evil spirits. They may speak of two vital forces in the Universe, however, one working upward in an evolutionary manner, and the other counteracting these ascending steps. These investigators of psychic phenomena do not make any effort to explain the origin of these invisible powers, and simply declare that some people have special psychic gifts which give them access to these forces. They may even say that some religious practitioners appear to have superhuman power, and refer to their work as white magic. They may also acknowledge that some individuals can mysteriously bring harm to their enemies, and this evil use of power they call black magic. The majority of these parapsychologist insist, however, that they do not believe in a personal God or the devil, and simply affirm that at the present time we do not fully understand some of these esoteric powers in this Universe. The Christian student of occultic activity has a distinct advantage over the naturalist, for one accepts the reality of a personal God and an invisible World of angels and evil spirits. This does not mean that one rejects a scientific approach to the problems that are encountered. One must avoid the temptation to declare dogmatically that every unexplainable occurrence is the result of supernatural activity—either by God or the forces of evil. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Some manifestations that now puzzle us may in the future be understood within the framework of the natural. The fact remains, however, that Satan is a real personality, and that a multitude of evil spirits have joined him in opposition to God and His people. The Christian Bible records numerous instances which clearly reveal their activity, and we have good reason to believe that some of the unexplainable phenomena in evidence today are the works of these demonic beings. Practitioners of black magic usually declare openly that they are serving the devil. Many of them say that have made a pact with Satan, and some have indicated their allegiance to him by signing a document with their own blood. Missionaries have reported that acts with the devil are not at all unknown among many primitive peoples. Reputable followers of Jesus Christ are convinced that these religious leaders actually can bring illness or death to people through ritualistic incantations. Black magic is practiced extensively today in many parts of Germany, France, and Switzerland, as well as in primitive cultures. Dr. Kurt Koch cites numerous instances of conjurers casting spells which have brought about the death of animals and even humans. He also tells us of amazing healings, but points out that when a person is cured of a physical disease by such a practitioner, one usually suffers such severe mental depression that the new condition is worse than the old. As one reads the examples of black magic—cattle being milked dry in a mysterious manner, the sudden unexplainable death of animals, healings followed by terrible psychic disturbances, and the appearance of frightful apparitions—he finds his credulity stretched almost to the breaking point. If one has not witnessed such occurrences, one is likely to dismiss these reports as untrustworthy. However, serious scholars who have investigated these accounts do not deny the reality of such phenomena. They may not believe them to be the work of Satan or evil spirits, but they admit that many of them cannot be explained at the present time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Professor Adolph Koberle, from the University of Tubingen, in the introduction to Christian Counseling and Occultist, says: Readers who approached this study with a purely rationalistic bent will experience spiritual difficulty in following the author in many areas because we have here a report of cases and experiences which seems to conflict with all sound human intelligence. However, perhaps such persons can be brought to listen, since research first tries the immanent solution of the problems and only where this is proved to fail does one break out and propose the added dimension, the dimension of the eternal. Even though research may evoke contradictions here and there—from medics and pastors, from parapsychologists and psychotherapists—yet the questions that are here posed cannot be evaded by any person who concerns oneself in a genuine and responsible manner with a fruitful diagnosis and a helpful therapy. Clearly sane, scholarly, and since humans have examined the apparently superhuman powers evidenced in black magic and other forms of occultism, and made every effort to find naturalistic explanations, before finally concluding that Satan and evil spirits are actually at work. Black magic as a specific form of witchcraft has its own literature. The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses are the primary source, and are well known in Europe. They constitute one volume, and are alleged to have been written by Moses himself. Strangely enough, they maintain that this great national leader was a servant of Satan, and set fourth detailed instructions for establishing a mystical relationship with the devil. This research tells readers how they can gain power through black magic over all the people they will encounter both in this World and the next. It makes this solemn assertion: “To whatever person possesses this book at any given time, Lucifer makes promise to carry out one’s commands, but only as long as one possess this book.” Dr. Koch comments on the strange and sinister nature of this writing by saying, “In the many cases which the pastor-counselors have come to know, there is no possessor of The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses who have no psychic complication.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
White magic is declared by its practitioners to be in direct opposition to black magic. Whereas black magic includes an open allegiance with the powers of darkness, in white magic the name of God is invoked, and Biblical phrases are utilized. Most people who practice it, however, have no understanding of the basic doctrines of the Christian faith. Some possibly are endowed with an unexplainable psychic power, and their desire to use it was not totally selfish at the beginning. However, many find very soon that they become enslaved to a yearning for self-exaltation. The Radio Bible Class has received letters from a number of people for a time had engaged in a “healing ministry” of this kind, but who abandoned it because it led to a gradual departure from God. Although some cult leaders and those endowed people, they are using the name of God and Christ in a manner that violates the Lord’s will. The danger of mistaking an enigmatic psychic power for the gift of the Lord must be recognized. Dr. Kurt Koch points out that Dr. Henry Drummond, fellow-worker of D.L. Moody, possessed psychic ability which enabled him to have mental power over person who were miles away. While working with Moody, Drummond found that he could hypnotically influence the large crows who had gathered, but concluded that to use this power would be a hindrance to the activity of the Holy Spirit. One prayed that the Lord would take this psychic gift away from him, and his prayer was answered. Had Dr. Drummond decided to exercise this ability, he would soon have established a Worldwide reputation as a great healer. However, his accomplishments would not have honoured the Lord, and real blessings would not have resulted from his ministry. In Biblical faith, trust is placed solely in the Lord Jesus Christ. In white magic it is deflected to someone else (the human agent) or to something else (one’s own faith, etcetera). In the Biblical prayer of faith, the praying person subjects oneself to the will of God. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
In white magic, the help of God is demanded under the assumption that exercising such power is in accordance with God’s will. Also in white magic the Christian markings are mere decorations that camouflage the magical means of knowledge for power. Certain influences, as we might call them, can be termed elementary forms of magic. Firstly, we have an example of the criminal use of hypnosis. A girl reported in a counselling session that a doctor who she had consulted had hypnotized her. While hypnotized he had seduced her. The doctor had done the same to her girl friend. It was later discovered that he has also done this with other girls. When these stories leaked out, the doctor left the town and settled elsewhere. The girl said that for a long time after this incident she had not been able to read her Christian Bible. She had felt a strong aversion towards religion, and evil thoughts had always come to her mind when praying. Another example, a doctor at a hospital had indecently assaulted women and girls under hypnosis. Once the ward sister caught him in the act. To cover up his scandalous behaviour, he used to question the patients about their sexual relationships and included their answers in their case histories. He thus tried to protect himself in the event of anything being discovered. A respectable gurl who was engaged to a Christian young man became pregnant at the hospital. Following this her fiancé left her. The girl herself denied all knowledge of having an intimate relationship with anyone. The doctor had lain with her when she had been hypnotized. The assistant matron and the ward sister had finally reported the doctor. However, the result was that they themselves were dismissed by the medical superintendent. The doctor in question stayed. Other nurses, who also had incriminating evidence against him, were forced to keep quiet now because of the fear of dismissal. After a few years, though, when the situation became too hot for the doctor, he left and went abroad. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Scientific advocates of hypnosis believe that a man could not be forced to do anything under hypnosis that he would not be prepared to do when conscious. They are of the opinion that crimes are not possible under hypnosis. However, not all the experts share this opinion. Moreover, in my counselling work I have met many cases in which crimes have taken place under hypnosis. From the point of view of the Scriptures it is understandable that an innocent girl can be molested this way. Jesus Christ said that out of the heart come evil thoughts and so on. Evil lies dormant even in the most moral of people. Normally these instinctive reactions are held in check by one’s consciousness, which is moulded by education, religious training and is affected by one’s disposition. Under hypnosis however, this regulator is switched off. Instinctive impulses can arise unhindered from the subconscious, and can be exploited by unscrupulous and uninhibited people. Besides this, some take no account of the fact that magical hypnosis exists in addition to the normal type of hypnosis, and that this can have far deeper effects. Magical hypnosis can often be recognized by the fact that afterwards the patient is no longer able to pray or to keep one’s faith. Here are some actual examples. A Christian girl went to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist used magical hypnosis far more often than he did ordinary hypnosis. I have occasionally come across such doctors in areas where magic is commonly practised. In reply to the girl’s question, the doctor admitted that he had not received his gift from God. He went on to tell the girl that he had wanted to conduct suggestive experiments on her. After the treatment, the girl lost her faith and could no longer pray. She suffered from doubts and other serious difficulties in believing. I think a lot of people who have had good lives, and then are abused and tortured over a long period of time have these same problems. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
When they restart reading the Christian Bible, it may make them upset and angry and they do not know why, but they keep going and praying hoping to overcome their situation. They know that God is there and guiding them, but they have just been able to sustain, not yet overcome the situation. So they keep forcing themselves to pray and thank God so they can rebuild their faith, and it can really take a lifetime, especially when the situation has been going on for decades. Abusers just kind of rob some people of faith and joy. And year after year, they keep praying it is over, and it never is, so it makes it hard for them to trust anyone, including God. So they have to keep reminding of his words and praying and seeking mental health treatments so they can live, and they pray they will still have some youth left, if the situation is ever resolved. Another example is a man, in his spare time a minister dabbled in magic. He experimented in various areas and learned card-laying, how to use a pendulum, magic charming and magical hypnosis. Since he had no suitable people to experiment on, he used his wife for the purpose. As his magical abilities increased, so too did his own and his wife’s dislike for the Christian Bible and prayer. This dislike developed into a strong resistance, and as time went on psychic disturbances appeared in the wife. She exhibited a serious anxiety hysteria and always had to lock the door of whichever room she happened to be in. There also was once a businessman who had the strange ability of being able to influence his customers hypnotically or magically, causing them to accept the business offers that he makes to them. In this way, his yearly income exceeds $75,000.00. He rejects Christianity altogether. A woman allowed a masseur to hypnotize her. Before the treatment she had regularly read her Christian Bible, prayed and attended the local church services. Afterwards when she tried to pray, she felt a compulsion to blaspheme and to curse. She then lost her faith. These effects indicate that the masseur had used magical hypnosis. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Plato derived the etymology of the word “demon” (Greek, daimon) from an adjective meaning “intelligent” or “knowing.” If this derivation is correct, it suggests that intelligence was considered a prominent characteristic of demons. If demons are fallen angels, this would be expected. As Satan’s vast wisdom became vitiated when he sinned (Ezekiel 28.12, 17), the great wisdom that characterizes angels in general (2 Samuel 14.20) must also have been corrupted in his followers. This is undoubtedly why demons use their great but perverted knowledge so relentlessly in an effort to frustrate God’s purpose. Humans who consult professional mediums and use other methods of divination to obtain knowledge of the future seem to imply a degree of confidence in the intelligence of evil spirits. The superior knowledge demons possess is not a holy or saving knowledge. Demons “believe” but only to “tremble” (James 2.19). They are confirmed in depravity and never seek forgiveness. As preeminently unclean spirits, they never long for purity. They confess Jesus Christ is Lord, but they do not trust Christ or submit to him. Although they recognize his authority (Mark 1.24; 5:6, 7). They cleverly withhold knowledge of his incarnation and completed redemption (1 John 4:1-6), corruption sound doctrine (1 Timothy 4.1-3), discern between those who have God’s seal and those who do not (Revelation 9.4), and know full well their own tragic destiny and inevitable doom (Matthew 8.29). Their superhuman intellect is accomplished by superphysical strength. The psalmist celebrates this angelic characteristic: “Bless the Lord, ye His angels, that excel in strength, that do his commandments, hearkening unto the voice of His word,” reports Psalm 103.20. The Apostle Peter also speaks of the “power and might” of angelic spirits (2 Peter 2.11). Our Lord Himself indirectly referred to demonic strength (Matthew 12.29). #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Perverted power and strength are thus conscious attributes of fallen angels. This titanic energy is displayed in the supernatural strength demons can impart to the human body when they enter it and possess it. The Gadarene demoniac who was dominated by a “legion” of demons (Mark 5.9) could not be bound even with chains. “Because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetter broken in pieces: neither could any man tame him,” reports Mark 5.4. The great strength of this demoniac was due to the vast number of demons who possessed him. “A legion” in Roman military history consisted of three-to-six-thousand-foot soldiers, and three to seven hundred cavalries. The term “legion” was not only the name of the possessed human but probably also served to indicate the phenomenal strength of the demoniac. The demons were so powerful that when the Lord ordered them to enter a herd of two thousand swine, they cased the entire herd to rush violently down a hill into the sea (Mark 5.13). No wonder the demon-possessed human was disturbed physically, mentally, and emotionally. However, the superphysical strength of demons is not limited to the physical energy they impart to their victim. Their power is broad enough to cause occult oppression of mind and body. They can produce physical disabilities and sickness unrelated to organic disorders and which medicine or natural therapy cannot alleviate. Perhaps the most terrible power of demons is to derange the mind by upsetting the nervous system. In this way they can afflict the body with a psychosomatic disease. Demons are aware of the close relationship between physical and mental health. By jangling the nerves and the emotions, they can cause mental Instability (Luke 8.26-36), producing suicidal mania (Mark 9.22). Their purpose is to drive their occult-enslaved victim to self-destruction. “I’m tired of his bleary-eyed tootling—I have warned him to lie down and nap. So now that I have told him to stop it, I will give him a sharp little rap.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Dealing with necromancers who claim to contact the dead. The writer of 1 Samuel 19.9-10 describes in incident in which King Saul tried to impale David on his javelin. His attack is attributed to an “evil spirit from the Lord.” This indicates that God allowed a demon spirit to enter Saul and possess him. The kingdom of evil spirits is within God’s control, though not acting on his direction. God allows spirit activity, just as he allows evil men to prosper, within the boundaries of his ultimate plan for humans. God’s sovereign control over the realm of evil spirits is further illuminated in 1 Kings 22:18-23. “And the king od Israel said to Jehoshaphat, Did I not tell you that he would not prophesy good concerning me, but evil? And Micaiah said, Therefore hear the word of the Lord; I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, and all the hosts of Heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left; and the Lord said, Who will entice Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead? And one said one thing, and another said another. Then a spirit came forward and stood before the Lord, saying, I will entice him. And the Lord said to him, By what means? And he said, I will go forth, and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And he said, You are to entice him, and you shall succeed; go forth and do so. Now therefore, behold, the Lord has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; the Lord has spoken evil concerning you.” From this passage, too, it is clear that God overrules the World of evil spirits and permits them to do their work when it accords with His sovereign will and purpose. A unique incident involving spirits of the dead is recorded in 1 Samuel 28. King Saul had banished mediums and wizards out of the land as commanded by God (v.3). When confronted by the philistine army he was fearful and sought guidance from the Lord. When no guidance came, he told his servants to seek out a medium who could give him counsel (vv. 5-7). Having found one at Endor, Saul went to her in disguise. She feared a trap because of Saul’s decree against mediums, but Saul promised her protection and asked her to bring forth the spirit of dead Samuel (vv. 8-11). #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The medium screamed in fear when she saw Samuel himself—apparently she was used to communicating only with evil spirits. This is the only account in the Old Testament of God’s permitting a departed person’s spirit to return to Earth. This was not by the lower of the medium, however; in fact, she was not prepared for it at all. Samuel told the piteous kin it was no use: God would take the kingdom from Saul and give it to David (vv. 15-17), and the Philistine army would rout Saul’s army (v.19). 1 Chronicles 10.13 provides the epitaph to the tragic story: “So Saul died for his unfaithfulness; he was unfaithful to the Lord in that he did not keep the command of the Lord, and also consulted a medium, seeking guidance.” Saul’s case is a chilling warning from Scripture against consulting with mediums or trying to communicate with departed souls; the judgment of God is upon it. A case of supposed witchcraft occurred in Cork, Ireland in the year 1685-1686, the account of which is contained in a latter from Christopher Crofts to Sir John Perceval (the third Baronet, and father of the first Earl of Egmont) written on the fifteenth of March in that year. Though the natator professes his disbelief in such superstitions, yet there seems to have been an unconscious feeling in his mind that his strict administration of the law was the means of bringing the affliction on his child. He says: My poor boy Jack to all appearances lay dying; he had a convulsion for eight or nine hours. His mother and several others are of opinion he is bewitched, and by the old woman, the mother of Nell Welsh, who is reputed a bad woman; and the child was playing by her that day she was upon her examination, and was taken ill presently after she was committed to Bridewell. However, I have not faith to believe it was anything but the hand of God. I have committed the girl to Bridewell, where she shall stay some time.” At one period in their history that peculiar people, known amongst themselves as the Society of Friends, and by their opponents as Quakers, appear to have been most troublesome, and to have caused a good deal of annoyance to other religious bodies. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Not unnaturally their enemies credited any wild tales which were related about them to their detriment, especially when they had referenced to their doctrine of the influence of the Spirit. Dr. More, in his continuation to Glanvill’s book, has in the sixth Relation an account of man, near Cambridge in England, who was possessed by an evil spirit which led him to do the most extraordinary things in its attempts to covert him to Quakerism. In the Life of Mr. Alexander Peden, late Minister of the Gospel at New Glenluce in Galloway, who died in 1686, there is an account of a Quakers’ meeting in this country which the Devil appeared in most blasphemous parody of the Holy Ghost. As Mr. Peden was travelling one time by himself in Ireland, “the night came on, and a dark mist, which obliged him to go into a house belonging to a Quaker. Mr. Peden said, ‘I must beg the favour of the roof of your house all night.’ The Quaker said, ‘Thou art a stranger, thou art very welcome and shalt be kindly entertained, but I cannot wait upon thee, for I am going to the meeting.’ Mr. Peden said, ‘I will go along with you.’ The Quaker said, ‘Thou may, if thou please, but thou must not trouble us.’ He said, ‘I will be civil.’ When they came to the meeting, as their ordinary is, they sat for some time silent, some with their faces to the wall, and others covered. There being a void in the loft above them there came down the appearance of a raven, and sat upon one man’s head, who started up immediately, and spoke with such vehemence that the froth flew from his mouth; it went to a second, and he did the same; and to a third, who did as the former two. Mr. Peden sitting near to his landlord said, ‘Do you not see that? Ye will not deny it afterwards?’ When they dismissed, going home Mr. Peden said to him, ‘I always thought there was devilry among you, but never thought that he did appear visibly among you till now that I have seen it.’ The poor man fell a-weeping, and said, ‘I perceive that God hath sent you to my house, and put it into your heart to go along with me, and permitted the Devil to appear visibly among us this night. I never saw the like before. Let me have the help of your prayers.’ After this he became a singular Christian.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Mr. Peden was also somewhat of a prophet, and his specialty appears to have been the prognostication of unpleasant events, at all events to persons in Ireland. Two instances will suffice. When in a gentleman’s house in Co. Antrim he foretold that a maid-servant was enceinte, that she would murder the child, and would be punished. “Which accordingly came to pass, and she was burnt at Craig Fergus.” On another occasion two messengers were sent to inform the Lord-Lieutenant that Presbyterian ministers in Ireland should affirm that they had nothing to do with the rebellion at Bothwell Bridge. Mr. Peden said they were on the Devil’s errand, but God would arrest them by the gate. Accordingly one was stricken with sickness, while the other fell from his horse and broke his leg. In another cause of the supernatural, during the late 1800s, the Santa Clara Valley, in California presented sweeping vistas of rural open space. It was a serene setting for Mrs. Winchester to begin her building project, which she did with steadfast determination. She immediately hired carpenters to work in shifts around the clock. By the turn of the century the eight-room house had grown into a nine-story mansion! The estate eventually grew to about 730 acres of farmland (according to documents), which included orchards of apricots, plums, and walnut trees to supplement Mrs. Winchester’s income. Her dried plums, which turned into prunes were very popular. Some people believe that prune juice is what kept Mrs. Winchester’s screen so wrinkle free, gave it a natural growth, and made her look so young, as it flushes toxins out of the body (word of caution, make sure to use it in moderation and start in the morning with a few ounces, and do not go anywhere for 24 hours until you see how it work with your system). Nonetheless, Mrs. Winchester also owned homes in Atherton, Los Altos, and Palo Alto. The combination of her wealth and her eccentric building of this beautiful mansion gave rise to many rumors in the local community. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Jeremiah Haralson was waiting for a tour of Mrs. Winchester’s beautiful mansion, and he had been waiting an hour to have tea with her—he was really impressed with the mansion as it seemed to twinkle. It was really a rural setting and very pretty. The estate had a lot of thick green foliage and beautiful flowers and what seemed to be miles of green lawns. So he waited for her. It was August 1894, and the chill of an unusually evening entered into his bones. The construction workers passed him with a surely response to his “Good Night.” Many of the servants went by him like ghosts with soft voices; and it was nearly midnight, and she still had not come. He then heard a ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion. The bell in the belfry high in the gables began to toll. Jeremiah shrugged his shoulders and turned towards the gates that lead to the main road. He looked back, but there was still no sign of movement about the mansion, so sign of life, no lights even in the windows. He paused by the gate, wondering. Then he noticed that the front doors were open—wide open—and the porch lamp shone a little way into the foyer. There was something about this that did not please him—that scared him a little, indeed. The house had a gloomy and deserted air. It was obviously impossible that it harboured a rich widow. The must be away on business. In which case—Jeremiah walked up the path, tower the stairs to the front porch, and listened. Yet, still no sign of life. He passed into the foyer. There as no light anywhere. Where was everybody, and why were the beautiful jeweled front doors open. There was no one in the front parlour, nor the drawing room, the dining room and the study were equally empty. Everyone was out, evidently. However, the unpleasant sense that he was, perhaps, not the first casual visitor to walk through that open door impelled him to look through the house before he went anyway and closed it after him. So he went upstairs, and at the door of the first bedroom, Jeremiah turned on the gasolier, as he had done in the siting rooms. Even as he did so, he felt that he was not alone. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Jeremiah was prepared to see something, but for what he saw he was not prepared. For what he saw lay on the bed, in a white loose gown—and it was Mrs. Winchester, and her throat was cut from ear to ear. He did not know what happened then, nor how he got downstairs and into the street; but he got out somehow, and the policeman found him in a fit, under the lamp-post at the crossroads of the road. He could not speak when they picked him up, and he passed the night in the police cells, because the policeman had seen plenty of drunken men before, but never one in a fit like Jeremiah Haralson. The next morning he was well, though still very pale and shaky. However, the tale he told the magistrate was convincing, and they sent a couple of constables with him to her house. There was no crowd about it as he had fancied there would be, and the curtains were open. As Jeremiah stood, dazed, in the front of the doors, they opened, she Mrs. Winchester came out. Jeremiah held on to the upside-down posts on the front porch for support. “See, my boy! Mrs. Winchester is just fine as can be,” said the constable, who found him hiding before one of the posts. “I told you, you were drunk, but you would know best!” When Jeremiah was alone with Mrs. Winchester, he told her how he had come into the rambling mansion, and had found the front doors open and the lights out, and how he had seen something—in even trying to hint at which he turned sick and broke down and had to have a little Vin Mariani given to him. “Oh, heavens, boy,” Mrs. Winchester said, “I dare say the house was dark, for we were all at St. Joseph’s Cathedral with Daisy, and no doubt the door was open, for the maids will run out if they are left. However, you could not have been in any of the bedrooms on the second floor, because I have my staff lock them when I am away, and my dear sweet boy, they key was in my pocket. I dressed in a hurry and I left my odds and ends laying about.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
“I know,” Jeremiah said; “I saw a gold scarf on the chair, and some gold gloves, and a lot of hairpins and ribbons, and a prayerbook, and a lace handkerchief on the dressing table. Why, I even noticed the almanack on the mantlepiece—16 January 1895. At least it could not be that because this is 16 August 1894. And yet it was. Your almanack is at 16 January 1895, is it not?” “No, of course it is not,” said Mrs. Winchester, smiling rather anxiously; “but all the other things were just as you say. You must have had a nightmare, of a vision, or something.” Jeremiah was a very ordinary, commonplace, City young man, and he did not believe in visions, but he never rested day or night still he got away from the Winchester mansion. Now the curious and quite inexplicable part of this when Mrs. Winchester came down to breakfast on the morning of 17 January 1895, she found Jeremiah looking like death, with the Oakland Tribune in his hand. He caught hers—he could not speak, and pointed to the paper. And there she read that on the night of the 17th a young lady had been found with her throat cut from ear to ear, in a second story bedroom of that Beautiful, but Bizarre Winchester Mansion. Although demons reveal various degrees of wickedness (Matthew 12.45), they all are depraved. This aspect of their character appears in the terrible things they do to their victims. The Christian Bible often refers to them as spiritually and morally “unclean” (Matthew 10.1; Mark 1.27; 3.11; Luke 4.36; Acts 8.7; Revelation 16.13). People who deal in the occult are sometimes found to be vulnerable to Satan and demonic powers. Sometimes these “unclean spirits” take possession of vulnerable people. The character of demons reveals what they can do to their victims. Invisible, extremely intelligent, strong, and totally depraved personalities can do a great deal of harm to the vulnerable person. Since the supernatural exists and does interact with the natural World, the truly scientific investigator must take this into consideration. Prayer and faith can heal the mind and the body supernaturally, just as medicine and rest can do it naturally. By the same token, unbelief and sin can harm body and mind as a result of demonic bondage. (However, many mental and emotional illnesses are, of course, due to natural causes, such as overwork, tension, fatigue, malnutrition, organic disease, etcetera. Such disorders can be treated effectively by a physician, neurologist, psychologist, or psychiatrist. Demonic spirits may have little or nothing to do with such disorders of the mind. The causes are purely natural and may be corrected by purely natural means. This is not surprising since the Creator has placed the creation and His creatures under the normal operation of the laws of cause and effect.) #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
Beautiful day to stroll the gardens which will turn into a beautiful night to roam around the Winchester Mystery House ☀️🌜Flashlight Tours Tonight!
A few tickets still available!
🎟️ Link https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
In the Cup of Omens there is a Baptism into Black Magic!
In popular thinking, the term “magic” refers to the tricks of a sleight-of-hand artist, the optical illusions created by a clever trickster, or the cunning exhibition of seemingly supernatural powers by money-hungry charlatans. Undoubtedly many of the amazing demonstrations performed by such people have a completely naturalistic explanation, but honest scholars who have investigated occultic phenomena in many parts of the World agree that science at present is unable to account for some of the apparently supernatural events they have witnessed. The Bible also sets forth the view that not all magic is merely hocus-pocus. In the Biblical portrayal of magic, the Scriptures acknowledge that real superhuman power can be accomplished through sorcery, but clearly teach that the source of such manifestations is evil. The Egyptian magicians actually were able to change their rods into serpents by throwing them on the ground. Some say these rods were really snakes which had been hypnotized into becoming as rigid as a cane, but even so we must admit that no scientist today can explain how these men were able to perform this feat. They also were successful in changing water into blood, and in producing a miraculous multiplication of frogs, thus apparently duplicating what Moses and Aaron had done by God’s supernatural power. The Egyptian sorcerers undoubtedly believed their gods gave them the ability to perform these amazing exploits, and they viewed their encounter with Moses and Aaron as a contest to determine whether or not their gods were more powerful than God. The Bible implies that supernatural beings take advantage of the practices of heathenism to further enslave their adherents, but declares that these invisible agents are neither holy angels nor gods. It states that they are demons—spirit beings who rebelled against God and now are dedicated to Him. For this reason, Moses and Aaron convincingly demonstrated the superiority of God over these demonic forces. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
When Aaron’s rod became a serpent, it swallowed up those the Egyptians had cast to the ground. The greater power of God also was manifested when the pagan sorcerers were unable to remove the plague of frogs, but Moses simply prayed to the Lord, and “the frogs died out of the houses, out of the villages, and out of the fields,” reports Exodus 8.13. God’s servants then brought about the third plague, a changing of dust into lice, a judgment which made life almost unbearable for human and beast. This time the magicians of Egypt were unable to duplicate the miracle, not could they bring about the sudden death of the pests. They therefore humbly acknowledged, “This is the finger of God,” reports Exodus 8.19. In this manner, the Lord demonstrated His absolute superiority over the powers of evil which the Egyptians worshiped as gods. It does important for us to note again that the Bible does not indicate that the magicians were frauds. A careful study of this history of Egypt, Babylon, and other nations of antiquity reveals that heathen priests accomplished many unusual feats, and kept the people under subjection through what appeared to be supernatural abilities. In seeking to understand some of the mysterious phenomena of heathenism, we must bear in mind the declaration of the apostle Paul, “But I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons,” reports 1 Corinthians 10.20. The apostle was definitely saying that the worship of idols involved more than merely bowing down to lifeless images. Furthermore, the fact that the Bible repeatedly forbids sorcery, divination, and every other form of occultism is evidence that God links these practices with actual demonic power. We repeat, the death penalty would not have been the prescribed punishment for all mediums, fortunetellers, and sorcerers if they were only quacks guilty of deception for gain. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Critics of the Bible insist that its attitude toward some forms of witchcraft is inconsistent, and even sincere believers have been puzzled by several passages which appear to condone these practices. A careful examination of these instances, however, reveals that such critical assertions are unwarranted. Genesis 30: 14-18 records the story of Leah and Rachel bargaining for mandrakes, showing that they believed these so-called “love apples” increased a woman’s fertility. However, the fact that Jacob’s wives held to this ancient concept does not necessarily indicate that the Bible expresses approval. Then, too, modern investigation has shown that some primitive medicines, scorned by medics a generation or two ago, actually do possess qualities which make them valuable. At any rate, this passage of Scripture does not indicate that the Bible encouraged the use of magic. In another instance of apparent superstition, Jacob peeled the bark from saplings to give them a spotted appearance become he believed that they offspring of the cattle bred before them would then be speckled and spotted. This story is declared to be an indication that the writer of Genesis held to the notion that the colour of the unborn young would be affected by what the female animal saw at the time of impregnation. (See Genesis 30.37-43.) A careful study of the entire account reveals, however, the truth that God actually was controlling the breeding process through the laws of heredity, not by means of Jacob’s efforts. The angel of the Lord later told the patriarch that the male animals possessed genetic characteristics which brought about the birth of so many striped, speckled, and spotted animals. (See Genesis 31.11-12.) Therefore, we can assert with confidence that this passage of Scripture in no way encourages the use of magic. The statement of Joseph to his brothers about his silver cup also poses a problem for Bible students, because his words seem to indicate that he used it for purposes of divination. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
After the steward had hidden the cup in Benjamin’s sack of grain, Joseph told him what he was to do and say. The King James Version records Joseph’s instructions as follows, “Up, follow after them men; and when thou dost overtake them, say unto them, Wherefore have ye rewarded evil for good? Is not this it in which my Lord drinketh, and whereby indeed he divineth? Ye have done evil in so doing” (Genesis 44.4-5). Scholars today know that the heathen sorcerers of Joseph’s day often sprinkled small particles of gold or sliver into a cup of water, or poured a small amount of oil in it, and then “read” the resulting design in the cup of omens. While it is possible that Joseph fell into this sinful and heathenish practice, we doubt very much that he did, for he had one of the finest characters of all the men portrayed in the entire Old Testament. In addition, we can present good reason for our conviction that Joseph never really used the coup to find out about the unknown. In the first place, Joseph did not need such sources of information. God had spoken to him through dreams and other forms of revelation, and therefore Joseph did possess knowledge ordinarily hidden to humans. In that sense he was able to “divine.” His instruction to his steward may be translated, “Is it not from this cup that my Lord drinks, and concerning which he will assuredly divine?” In other words, Joseph made it clear that he possessed a power which would enable him to find out what happened to the cup. (We must remember that Joseph was play-acting in order to test his brothers. He wanted them to be puzzled by the knowledge he possessed, and did not want to disclose his real identity at this time. For this reason, he did not speak of obtaining information directly from God.) This interpretation of verse 5 fits well with the statement of Joseph recorded in verse 15, “What deed is this that ye have done? Know ye not that such a man as I can certainly divine?” #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
He let his brothers know that he was a special person with unusual powers of perception, but did not reveal the source of his ability. Later he told them about his faith in God. Therefore, the story of Joseph and the silver cup is certainly not an indication of Biblical approval of magic, and the likelihood exists that Joseph never practiced the heathen customs of his day. Certain elements of the Mosaic law sometimes are thought to be a form of magic. In Numbers 5, for example, we are told that if a man suspected his wife of unfaithfulness, he was to take her to the priest for trial. The woman would then drink a liquid potion to determine her guilt or innocence. If certain physical results became apparent immediately, she was deemed guilty. If not, she was innocent. On the surface this appears to be a superstitious practice, but when we remember that Israel lived under a theocracy and that God has ordained this test, we can believe He would in this manner declare infallibly the guilt or innocence of the person being tried. The Urim and Thummim as a means of revelation and the long hair of Samson as the secret of his strength are further examples of divinely ordered and controlled phenomena which cannot be compared to the magic of the heathen. Therefore, we can say assuredly that nothing in the Old Testament or the New can be properly interpreted as divine sanction of sorcery or magic. Shortly before the Exile, the prophet Ezekiel delivered a scorching denunciation of women who were using amulets and veils in a magic ritual to bring joy or sadness, blessing or cursing, even life or death to certain individuals. “Likewise, thou son of man, set thy face against the daughters of thy people, who prophesy out of their own heart, and prophesy thou against them, and say, Thus saith the Lord God: Woe to the women that sew amulets upon all wrists, and make kerchiefs for the head of every person of stature to hunt souls! Will ye hunt the souls of my people, and will ye save the souls alive that come unto you? And will ye pollute me among my people for handfuls of barley and for pieces of bread, to slay the souls that should not die, and to save the souls alive that should not live, by your lying to my people that hear you lies? #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
“Wherefore, thus saith the LORD GOD: Behold, I am against your amulets, with which ye there hunt the souls to make them fly; and I will tear them from your arms, and will let the souls go, even the souls that ye hunt to make them fly. Your kerchiefs also will I tear, and deliver my people out of your hand, and they shall be no more in your hand, and they shall be no more in your hand to be hunted; and ye shall know that I am the LORD. Because with lies ye have made the heart of the righteous sad, who I have not made sad; and strengthened the hands of the wicked, that he should not return from his wicked way, by promising him life; therefore, ye shall see no more vanity, nor divine divinations; for I will deliver my people out of your hand; and ye shall know that I am the LORD,” reports Ezekiel 13.17-23. Exactly what these women did is not easy to ascertain. Some Bible students have conjectured that they performed a rite in which they symbolically bound up the soul of a person so that the individual would gradually waste away and die. Then, for a fee they would bring about his release. Other scholars think that Ezekiel describes features of “sympathetic magic,” whereby the sorceress fastened something around her own wrists or enshrouded her own head to place a curse upon a specific individual. In either case, the practice of these women appeared to have consequences so serious as to warrant divine condemnation and a prophetic declaration that God would deliver His people from their grasp. The Old Testament acknowledges the existence of real magic, and consistently condemns it in every form. Furthermore, the rites and ceremonies prescribed for Israel were not equivalent to the practices of the heathen, but were instructions that came directly from God and over which He would exercise control. At the very threshold of human history stands God’s command, “Fill the Earth and subdue it,” reports Genesis 1.28. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
The task and right of man was the peaceful conquest of the Earth’s powers in accordance with the will of God. In opposition to this command Satan, the great master of confusion came and put forward his arch-temptation, “You will be like God knowing good and evil,” reports Genesis 3.5. Magic is the very antithesis of the commandment of God as it reveals a hunger for knowledge and a desire for power in opposition to the will of God. When faced with this temptation humankind was at the crossroads. The decision has to be made. Either voluntary subordination to the will of God or rebellion against His statues and His ordinances caused by a greed for power and a desire for knowledge. The decision still faces us today. We either conform to God’s revealed way of salvation or we carry on the rebellion, trying to rule the created World in unforgivable opposition to God. Magic is thus at its roots a rebellion, and it has been so from the beginning. It is the climax of man’s revolt against God. Any talk of harmless forces of nature and neutral applications is criminal in the light of this scriptural fact. On the surface, parapsychology (the science of extrasensory experience) still recognizes something of the double nature of magic. The differentiation is made between Psi-Gamma phenomena and Psi-Kappa phenomena. (Gamma representing gignoskein, to perceive; kappa representing kinein, to move). Here we have again the two basic elements of magic: knowledge and power through supernatural means. Through a great deal of pastoral work, I have noticed four ways in which magical powers can originate. These are through heredity, subscription of oneself to the devil, occult experiments and occult transference. The evidence drawn from many actual case histories goes to prove that magical abilities can be passed on by means of heredity. Often mediumistic powers can be traced back over three or four generations in one family. There are two possibilities here, one being that it is a matter of the genes and the other that it is a matter of succession. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
By this we mean the custom of a person on one’s deathbed actually bestowing the magical abilities upon the eldest son or daughter in order to die peacefully. Often tragic scenes occur when the children do not want to have these abilities passed on to them. A person may cry out for weeks on his deathbed for someone to relieve him of his magical powers. Sometimes a distant relative or an outsider is willing to accept the succession. The reason for this may differ from case to case, be it pity, curiosity or maybe lust for power. The death of some magicians can drag on over a period of weeks till the office of “succession” has been settled. This is not an apostolic but a diabolic succession. Magical powers on the other hand may originate through subscription to the devil. One can see in this the counterpart to baptism. To every event recorded in the Bible, there seems to be a demonic parallel to it in the field of magic. Subscription to the devil accounts for some of the most terrible and formidable cases met with by Christian workers. For example, in Paris there is an occult church with the name or title, “We Worship the Prince of this World.” This church has sister congregations in Basle and berne, and a few decades ago one was opened in Rome. In order to become a member of this church, one has to subscribe oneself to the devil. This is a baptism into black magic! For years a man in Toggenburg, Switzerland, had a flourishing practice as a nature healer and charmer. He could even sure come people who the doctors had given up as hopeless. He had healed the blind, the lame, cases of advanced cancer, tuberculosis, leukemia, multiple sclerosis, scleroderma and other serious diseases. On one occasion however, the man’s own personal need came to the surface. He said, “I can help others, but for myself there is no help, no not in all eternity!” In his youth the man had subscribed himself to the devil. It was since that time that he had obtained his unearthly healing ability. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Another way in which magical powers may develop is through experimenting with occultism. A Swiss factory worker grew tired of his job. Since he had often heard that occult healers and mesmerizers made a lot of money, he bought some magic charms, underwent various devil ceremonies and then began healing experiments. His magic healing ability developed rapidly and ultimately his income surpassed his previous earnings many times over. The next example will illustrate all three factors together, that is, the factors of heredity, subscription and experimenting in occultism. A young woman told me this story. Here great-grandmother had subscribed herself to the devil with her own blood. She had practiced black magic and had healed both animals and people. On her deathbed she had suffered terribly as is often the cause with magic conjurers. The daughter, that is the grandmother of my storyteller, took over the magic powers of her mother. The magic literature of her mother also passed into her hands. Later the apparition of the great-grandmother was seen by the relatives. The grandmother however, continued to practice magic. During nights of the full moon, she would charm diseases. She was also in the habit of using a key suspended over a Bible as a pendulum, and she could also successfully stop people from bleeding. If she ever attempted to read the Bible, she found it quite a trial. As she grew older, she began to see black figures in her home, and finally when she died it was again an unpleasant time. Her ghost was also seen after her departure. The story went on that the young woman’s mother had then taken over the magical literature and practices. She too had become a well-known healer, but her fate had been the same as her predecessors’. The fourth member in this terrible line of succession was not the young woman. As a small child, her mother had cast spells over her. Shortly after this, she had become clairvoyant and had also begun to see black figures in the house. Her brother and sister had suffered from depression and she herself had has serious psychic and nervous disturbances which had led her to seek the help of a minister. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Occult transference is the fourth source of magical powers. A young man told me that he had once had three black magicians lay their hands on his head and murmur some magic charms over him. He had afterwards possessed magic abilities which astonished even the family doctor. The doctor had investigated his powers and had to acknowledge that they were genuine. The laying on of the hands of the magicians would again be a counterpart to the scriptural laying on of hands. Another example, a young man saw someone searching for water with a pendulum. He was asked if he would like to have a go, but the pendulum did not react in his hand. When the dowser took hold of his hands, though, the pendulum had at once reacted. Later when he had tried to repent the experiment by himself, he was again successful, and he discovered that he now had the ability to search for water with both a rod or a pendulum. Yet the young man felt a change in his Christian life. Previously he had been regular in his reading of the Bible and in prayer. After this transference of pendulum ability, however, his love for the Word of God and for prayer declined. Spirits are not normally subject to human visibility or other sensory perception. God’s universe operates undeviatingly in accordance with the purpose for which He created it. The all-wise and all-powerful Creator is not permitting Satan and demons to throw his ordered Universe into confusion by violating the laws he has established. Nor is He permitting His own people to do so through haphazard miracles. Though not ignoring the laws of nature, God’s Word also recognizes the possible transcendence of natural law in divine miracle both in good supernaturalism (Exodus 14.19-31; 17: 5-7; Joshua 3.16-17; 6.20; John 2.9; 11:44) and in evil supernaturalism (Exodus 7.10-11, 22; 8.7; 2 Thessalonians 2.8-10; Revelation 13.15). #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
When natural law is transcended by divine miracle, the natural eye may see the spiritual reality. An illustration is provided in 2 Kings 6.17. In answer to Elisha’s prayer, the Lord “opened the eyes” of the prophet’s servant who saw “the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.” In like manner Elisha saw the “chariot of fire, and horses of fire” when Elijah went up by a whirlwind into Heaven (2 Kings 2.11). Similarly John saw the demons coming up from the abyss in their last-day eruption as locusts (Revelation 9.1-12). He also saw the three hideous demons issuing from the months of the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet as froglike spirits (Revelation 16.13-14). The apocalyptic seer glimpsed these fouls spirits prophetically and by supernatural vision. However, when they are sent against human, they will be invisible to the natural eye. Their presence will be known by the excruciating pain they inflict and the gross deception they cause. The harm they inflict will be inescapable, because their victims will be unable to shield themselves from an invisible enemy. However, spirits can become discernible to humans through transcendence of natural law. Evil spirits may be seen and communicated through an intermediary or medium. Just as Peter and Paull saw and talked with an angel (Acts 5.19; 27: 23-24), so human beings today can communicate with evil spirits through magic rites and incantations. Communication with the demon World results in supernatural manifestations, but these, strictly speaking, are not miraculous. Occult enslavement and extrasensory phenomena await people who enter the realm from which God would protect his own people (Deuteronomy 18.10-11) and against which He solemnly warns (Leviticus 19.31; 20.27; 1 Samuel 28.9; 1 Timothy 4.1, 2;1 John 4.1-3). When humans ignore God’s warnings and enter a forbidden realm, they may witness materializations, levitations, and luminous apparitions, as well as experience spirit rappings, trances, automatic writing, magic phenomena, clairvoyance, oral and written communications and other forms of spiritistic phenomena. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Such manifestations are not miracles. They represent the operation of the occult within a certain well-defined sphere tolerated by God. Occult subjection and oppression are the inevitable penalties to all who traffic in the realm of evil supernaturalism. The Scriptures are markedly reticent on the matter of spirits being seen by humans. Here again, the Bible stands in contrast to ethnic and rabbinic systems. Multitudes of demons in bizarre forms are described in ancient semitic demonology. Rabbinic demonology, for example, divides demons into two classes: one composed of purely spiritual beings, the other of half-spirits. The latter were though to have a psycho-sarcous constitution that involved them in physical needs and functions. Although the Bible is silent concerning such “halbgeister,” they would seem to be what the offspring of the angels and mortal women (Genesis 6:1-4) might have been, half-angelic and half-human monsters. Many spiritualists say they accept the Christian Bible as the Word of God. To understand it, however, spiritualists go to the control spirit in the séances, and the spirits reputedly give the proper interpretation. Spiritualists frequently ask, “Why go to the Bible, when you can go directly to the spirit and receive personal instruction from such people as Moses, Abraham, Joshua, Isaiah, David, Peter, James, John, and Paul—even the Master himself?” With that kind of opportunity, few spiritualists prefer to read the Bible—and hence they know little of what it teaches. For the Christian, 2 Timothy 3.16-17, is a key teaching regarding the inspiration and purpose of Scripture: “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfectly, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.” Spiritualists do not accept the plain meaning of that verse, and they distort another key verse, 2 Peter 1.21, which speaks of “holy men of God” producing prophecy “by the Holy Ghosts.” Spiritualists say this means that the prophets were inspired by the spirits. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Dr. Moses Hull, an accepted authority among spiritualists, wrote in Biblical Spiritualism, a book he published in 1895: “The Bible is, I think, one of the best of the sacred books of the ages. It is supposedly the sacred fountain from which two, if not three, of the great religions of the World have flowed…While the Bible is not the infallible or immaculate book that many have supposed it to be, no one can deny that it is a great book…Yet it must be confessed that the age of critical analysis of all its sayings and its environments has hardly dawned…John R. Shannon said to his Denver audience, ‘We do not believe in the verbal inspiration of the Bible. The dogma that every word of the Bible is supernaturally dictated is false. It ought to be shelved away…Verbal inspiration is a superstitious theory; it has turned multitudes in disgust from the Bible; it has led thousands into infidelity; it has led to savage theological warfare’…All these facts would show, if brought out, that the Bible, like all other books, is exceedingly human in its origin. While the Bible is, none of it infallible, none of it unerring—when rightly interpreted it is all of it useful; all of it good. Even the parts which the people called infidels have ridiculed the most, become beautiful when examined in the light of modern spiritualism. In the following chapters the sacred light of spiritualism is applied to the Bible and it becomes indeed a ‘lamp unto our feet and a light to our path.’” To show something of how spiritualists interpret Scripture, I have chosen five examples from Hull’s book. Isaiah 21.4-5. “My heart panted, fearful affrighted me: the night of my pleasure hath he turned into fear unto me. Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink; arise, ye prices, and anointed the shield.” The spiritualists interprets the phrase “prepare the table” as meaning a table to be used for spirit manifestation at a séance. Ezekiel 9.4-6. “And the Lord said unto him, Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
“And to the other he said in mine hearing, Go ye after him through the city, and smite; let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity; slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women; but come not near any man upon whom is the mark and begin at my sanctuary. Then they began at the ancient men which were before the house.” Dr. Hull comments: “Ezekiel was considered an excellent medium, but like many of the nineteenth century he makes wrong predictions. It is thought that very few, if any, of his predictions ever met their accomplishments.” Amos 7.7. “Thus he shewed me: and, behold, the Lord stood upon a wall made by a plumbline, with a plumbline in his hand.” Hull writes: “Mediums see such manifestations in connection with departed human spirits nearly every day.” Acts 8.26-30. “And the angel of the Lord spake unto Philip, saying, Arise, and go toward the south…and, behold, a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch…had come to Jerusalem for to worship, was returning, and sitting in his chariot read Esaias the prophet. Then the Spirit said unto Philip, Go near, and join thyself to this chariot. And Philip ran thither to him.” Dr. Hull asserts that Philip was carried by a control spirit to speak to the Ethiopian. Galatians 1.11-12. “But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.” In his handbook for spiritualist, Hull concludes from this text that the Apostle Paul received the gospel by spirit revelation through the mediumship of Jesus. It is noteworthy that to both the spiritualist and the Christian, Satan is God’s archenemy. I was at a séance one time when Satan supposedly entered. It ended abruptly, and we were told it was because of the presence of an evil spirit. It is tragic that many spiritualists never realize they are being deceived by this very devil who can ingeniously adapt his tactics to lure any type of prey. Satan is openly honoured, of course, by some practitioners of the so-called “black arts” or “black magic.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Generally, some of these people are obsessed with hexes and spells, sexual indulgence, weird rituals, and hints of violence. Spiritualists, who consider themselves followers of God and the “good spirits,” regard such people as self-centered “spiritists” who follow the “bad spirits.” However, these “good” and “bad” spirits serve the same master, Satan, and serve him well, because they each give their followers what Satan dispenses: a sense of goodness and of guidance without dependence on Christ; and a sense of power and self-fulfillment in defiance of God’s commands. However, many spirits do believe in God, and the Christian Bible says there is a Holy Spirit and Angels that guide us, and in many cases, these spirits do prevent people from facing hardships, and these people still depend on Christ. So, it is really hard to generalize and give Satan so much power. Nonetheless, all people are baffled by occult mysteries! Revelations 13.14 says, “Satan’s representative deceiveth them that dwell on the Earth by means of those miracles which he had power to do.” Generally, people think of miracles and blessings as good omens. So, everyone has to make their own decisions as to what they believe, but many people on Earth are always looking for evidence of the supernatural because the very fact that we live on a globe that floats in the sky and provides of with nature and fruit and meat, and sun and a nightlight at night is evidence of a supernatural power. Once upon a time, at the instigation of a ghost, a lawsuit took place at Downpartick in 1685. The account of this was given to Baxter by Thomas Emlin, “a worthy preacher in Dublin,” as well as by Claudius Gilbert, one of the principal parties therein concerned: the latter’s son and namesake proved a liberal benefactor to the Library of Trinity College—some of his books have been consulted for the present work. It appears that for some time past there had been dispute about the tithes of Drumbeg, a little parish about four miles outside Belfast, between Mr. Gilbert, who was vicar of that town, and the Archdeacon of Down, Lemuel Matthews, whom Cotton in his Fasti describes as “a man of considerable talents and legal knowledge, but of a violent overbearing temper, and a litigious disposition.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
The parishioners of Drumbeg favoured Gilbert, and generally paid the tithes to him as being the incumbent in possession; but the Archdeacon claimed to be the lawful recipient, in support of which claim he produced a warrant. In the execution of this by his servants at the house of Charles Lostin, one of the parishioners, they offered some violence to his wife Margaret, who refused them entrance, and who died about a month later (1 November 1685) of the injuries she had received at their hands. Being a woman in a bad state of health littler notice was taken of her death, until about a month after she appeared to one Thomas Donelson, who had been a spectator of the violence done her, and “affrighted him into a Prosecution of Robert Eccleson, the Criminal. She appeared divers times, but chiefly upon one Lord’s Day-Evening, when she fetch’d him with a strange force out of his House into the Yard and Fields adjacent. Before her last coming (for she did so three times that Day) several Neighbours were called in, to whom he gave notice that she was again coming; and beckon’s him to come out; upon which they went to shut the Door, but he forbad it, saying that she looked with a terrible Aspect upon him, when they offered it. However, his Friends laid hold on him and embraced him, that he might not go out again; notwithstanding which (a plain evidence of some invisible Power), he was drawn out of their Hands in a surprising manner, and carried about into the Field and Yard, as before, she charging him to prosecute Justice: which Voice, as also Donelson’s reply, the people heard, though they saw no shape. There are many Witnesses of this yet alive, particularly Sarah (Losnam), the Wife of Charles Lostin, Son to the deceased Woman, and one William Holyday and his Wife.” This last appearance took place in Holyday’s house; there were also present several young persons, as well as Charles and Helen Lostin, children of the deceased, most of whom appeared as witnesses at the trial. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
Upon this Donelson deposed all he knew of the matter to Mr. Randal Brice, a neighbouring Justice of the Peace; the latter brought the affair before the notice of Sir William Franklin in Belfast Castle. The depositions were subsequently carried to Dublin, and the case was tried at Downpatrick Assizes by Judge John Lindon in 1685. On behalf of the plaintiff, Charles Lostin, Counseller James Macartney acted—if he be the Judge who subsequently makes his appearance in a most important witch-trial at Carrickfergus, he certainly was as excellent an advocate as any plaintiff in a case of witchcraft could possibly desire, as he was strongly prejudiced in favour of the truth of all such matters. “The several Witnesses were heard and sworn, and their Examinations were entered in the Record of that Assizes, to the Amazement and Satisfaction of all that Country and of the Judges, whom I have heard speak of it at the time with much Wonder; insomuch that the said Eccleson hardly escaped with his life, but was Burnt in the Hand.” Whether or not one believes in Mrs. Winchester’s superstitions about spirits, it is hard to dismiss occurrences of the number 13 throughout her gorgeous mansion. Many windows have 13 panes and there are 13 bathrooms, with 13 windows in the 13th Bathroom, 13 steps leading to that bathroom. The Carriage Entrance Hall floor is divided into 12 cement sections. There are even 13 hooks in the Blue Séance Room, which supposedly held the different coloured robes Mrs. Winchester wore while communing with spirits. Here are even more thirteens: 13 rails by the floor-level skylight in the South Conservatory, 13 steps on many of the stairways, 13 squares on each side of the Otis electric elevator, 13 glass cupolas on the Greenhouse, 13 holes in the sink drain covers, 13 ceiling panels in some of the rooms, and 13 gas jets on the Ballroom chandelier (Mrs. Winchester had the thirteenth one added!) It is interest to note that Mrs. Winchester’s will had 13 parts and was signed by her 13 times! #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Mrs. Winchester sat by herself on the fourth-floor balcony of her mansion. It was an October evening, and the sun was setting. The west was all aglow with mysterious red light, very strange and lurid—a light that reflected itself in glowing purple of the sky. Mrs. Winchester had a poet’s soul. She sat there long, watching the livid hues that incarnadined the sky—redder and fiercer than anything she ever remembered to have seen growing up as a child. She knew it was getting late and was expecting guests for dinner. Mrs. Winchester was always such a stickler for punctuality and dispatch. However, there was something about that sunset and the lights on the bracken—something beautiful but bizarre—that absolute fascinated her. She took it as a sign from the spirits that something was about to happen. The Universe was always teeming with mysterious secrets to unfold. Many of the guests in her mansion felt something desired to possess their soul, and it made them want to stop and give way to this overpowering sese of the mysterious and the marvellous in the dark depths of the estate. She was expecting Claude Duncan for dinner. Mrs. Winchester dined at 6.00 p.m. punctually. However, Claude seemed to be having some issues that evening. He was an art dealer, and was being haunted by many strange shaped. However, he saw and heard absolutely nothing; yet he realized that unseen figures were watching him close with bated breath, and anxiously observing his every movement, as if intent to know whether he would rise and move on, or remain to investigate this causeless sensation. He could feel their outstretched necks; he could picture their strained attention. At last he broke away. “This is nonsense,” he said aloud to himself, and turned slowly homeward. Ad he did so, a deep sigh, as of suspense relieved, but relived in the wrong direction, seemed to rise—unheard, impalpable, spiritual—from the invisible crowd that father around him immaterial. Clutched hands seemed to stretch after him and try to pull him back. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
An unreal throng of angry and disappointed creatures seemed to follow him over the moor, uttering speechless imprecations on his head, in some unknown tongue—ineffable, inaudible. This horrid sense of being followed by unearthly foes took absolute possession of Claude’s mind. It might have been merely the lurid redness of the afterglow, or the loneliness of the moor, or the necessity of being at the Winchester Mansion, no one minute late for Mrs. Winchester’s dinner-hour; but, at any rate, he lost all self-control for the moment, and ran-ran widely at the very top of his speed, all the way from the barrow to the door of the Winchester Mansion garden. There he stopped and looked round with a painful sense of his own stupid cowardice. This was absolutely childish: he had seen nothing, heard nothing, had nothing definite to frighten him; yet he had run from his own mental shadow, like the verist schoolgirl, and was trembling still from the profundity of his sense that somebody unseen was pursing and following him. “What a precious fool I am,” he said to himself, half angrily, “to be so terrified at nothing! I will go to Mrs. Winchester’s dinner just to recover my self-respect, and to prove to myself, at least, I am not really frightened.” There is nothing like a light for dispelling superstitious terrors. The Winchester Mansion was fortunately updated with electric light; For Mrs. Winchester was nothing if not intensely modern. He went to dinner, however, in very good spirits. He told Mrs. Winchester and her niece Merriam “Daisy” Marriot that, “I felt a most peculiar sensation. Just after sunset, I was dimly conscious of something stirring inside, not visible or audible, but—” “Oh, I know, I know! Said Merriam. “A sort of feeling there was somebody somewhere, very faint and dim, though you could not see or her them; they tried to pull you down, clutching at you like this: and when you ran away frightened, they seemed to follow you and jeer at you. Great gibbering creatures! Oh, I know what all this is. I have been here, and felt it.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
“Daisy!” Mrs. Winchester shouted, “what nonsense you talk! You are really too ridiculous. How can you suppose Mr. Duncan feels haunted?!” Mrs. Winchester darted at him a look of intense displeasure. She said, in a chilly voice, “at a table like this and with such thinkers around, we might surely find something rather better to discuss than such worn out superstitions.” Claude replied, “Mrs. Winchester, it has been shown conclusively that the Winchester mansion, was built on the grave of Aryan invaders, and that they are the real originals of all the San Jose hills and surrounding lands. You have heard the story of how your dark observation tower came, of course. People say the spirits built it because they were deeply religious people, who believed in human sacrifice. They felt they it would have a high spiritual benefit. That it lit up your palace, so that the spirits could find you.” “It is a very odd fact, Mr. Duncan, that only ghosts people ever see are the ghost of a generation very close to them. One hears lots of ghosts in nineteenth-century costumes, because everybody has a clear idea of wigs and small-clothes from pictures and fancy dresses. One hears of far fewer in Elizabethan dress, because the class most given to beholding ghost are seldom acquainted with ruffs and farthingales; and one meets with none at all in Angelo-Saxon or Ancient British or Roman costumes, because those are only known to a comparatively small class of learned people. Millions of ghosts of remote antiquity must swarm about the World, though, after a hundred years or thereabouts they retired into obscurity and cease to annoy people with their nasty cold shivers. However, the queer thing about these long-barrow ghost is that they must be the spirits of humans who died thousands and thousands of years ago, which is exceptional longevity for a spiritual being; do you not think so, Mr. Duncan?” “You mansion must be chock-full of them,” replied Mr. Duncan. “Daisy, my child, go to bed, said Mrs. Winchester. “This is not talk for you. And do not go chilling yourself by standing at the window in your nightdress, looking out on the common to search for the ghosts. You nearly fell to your death last year with that nonsense. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
As Claude Duncan went for a tour of the mansion by himself, he saw a child’s white face gaze appealingly across at him. Slowly the ghost boy raised one pale forefinger and pointed. His lips opened to an inaudible word; but he read it by sight. “Look!” he said simply. Claude looked where he pointed. A faint blue light hung lambent over the door-to-nowhere. It was ghostly and vague. It seemed to rouse and call him. Claude was now in a strange semi-mesmeric state of self-induced hypnotism when a command of whatever sort or by whomsoever given, seems to compel obedience. Trembling he rose, and taking his candle descended the stair noiselessly. Then, walking on tiptoe across the tile-paved hall, he opened the door-to-nowhere, and fell out into the garden below. Claude felt a creep sense of mystery and the supernatural. And he saw the pale face still pressed close against the window, and a white hand still motioning him mutely onward. He looked once more in the direction of where the ghost boy pointed, the spectral light now burnt clearer and bluer, and more unearthly than ever, and the observational tower of the mansion seemed haunted from end to end by innumerable invisible and uncanny creatures. As Claude groped on his way, speechless voices seemed to whisper unknow tongues encouragingly in his ear; ghosts appeared to crowd around him and tempt him with beckoning figures to follow them. As it seemed, by invisible hands, he staggered slowly forward, till at last, with aching head and trembling feet, he stood beside the front door of the mansion. Something clogged and impeded him from moving. His feet would not obey his will; they seemed to move of themselves back into the mansion. Steadying himself, and opening his eyes, Claude walked through the closed front doors. Then at once his feet moved easily, and the invisible attendant chuckled to themselves so loud that he could almost hear them. His terror was infinite, there was a ghostly through of people. They were spirits. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Claude Duncan was powerless in their intangible hands; for they seized him roughly with incorporeal fingers. Their wrist compelled him as the magnet compels the iron bar. A dim phosphorescent light, like the light of a churchyard or decaying paganism, seemed to illuminate the mansion faintly. Things loomed dark before him; but his eyes almost instantly adapted themselves to the gloom, as the eyes of the dead on the first night in the grave adapt themselves by inner force to the strangeness of their surroundings. The Grand Ballroom had a silver chandelier from Germany, and the walls and parquet floors were made of six hardwoods—mahogany, teak, maple, rosewood, oak, and white ash. And there were two mysterious stained-glass windows. The room was full of sumptuous music, the San Francisco orchestra was performing and ghosts dressed for a ball were dancing. Claude’s attention was too much concentrated on devouring fear and the horror of the situation to enjoy the mysterious beauty of it. There was also a grinning skeleton turning its head to reveal to Claude its eyeless orbs with vacant glance of hungry satisfaction. Claude, held fast by the immaterial hands of his ghastly captors, looked and trembled for his fate, too terrified to cry out or even to move and struggle, he beheld the hideous thing rise and assume a shadowy shape, all pallid blue light, like the shape of his jailers. Bit by bit, as he gazed, the skeleton seemed to disappear, or rather to fade into some unsubstantial form, which was nevertheless more human, more corporal, more horrible than the dry bones it had come from. Then it busted into a loud and fiendish laugh. It was a hideous laugh, halfway between a wild beast’s and a murderous maniac’s: it echoed through the long hall like the laughter of devils. It said, “You are mine. You soul now belongs to the Winchester mansion!” The men and women spirits, with a loud whoop, raised hands aloft in unison. Next instant with a howl of vengeance even louder than before, they crowded around Claude and jostled and hustled him. And the moon burned bright and bluer as Claude Duncan now became the Winchester Rifle’s victim. You see it is not a bullet, but an all-powerful spirit, which chooses victims even if they did not die at the hands of the Winchester Rifle. Curious about the Winchester Mystery House? #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Winchester Mystery House
TONIGHT! Roam the halls of the iconic Winchester Mystery House with nothing but a flashlight 👀🔦 You don’t want to miss this. https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Don’t Go Out Like Whitney Huston–Can I Leave A Million at Your House and You Won’t Touch it?
Great changes require administrative support and necessary and necessary resources. A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are built for. The World changes faster than the people in it. We must now try to imagine what the nucleic acid molecules, in the late coacervate/early cellular era, could have done besides reproduce their own kind. For definiteness, let us consider a coacervate or cell containing large numbers of nucleic acid molecules of different compositions and lengths. Let us assume, moreover, that much of the nucleic acid is in its single-stranded form at the time we commence our observations. This could be because not enough time has yet elapsed for the growth of the Siamese-twin configurations since the cyclically changing chemistry of the cell last produced the conditions that split the double molecules into single ones. In any event, let us follow the adventures of a single nucleic acid molecule as it floats around in the cellular fluid. We know, of course, that the floating around of such a molecule would not be a completely passive performance. We have already dealt with the tendency, arising from the electric fields associated with atoms and molecules, for some of the small organic and inorganic molecular fragments that inhabit the cellular fluid to attach themselves to local regions of the nucleic acid molecules. In the past, we concentrated on one type of such attachment process—that which cases a single molecule of nucleic acid to grow into a double one by conjugation of its bases. At that time, we did not concern ourselves greatly with competition from other kinds of attaching molecular fragments, although we knew that such other attachments were bound to occur from time to time. Our lack of concern for such competition was based on our awareness that most of these other attachments would be tenuous and quickly broken, since the randomly encountered molecular fragments would usually not “mate” very well with the nearby parts of the nucleic acid. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Our discussion implied that, upon the approach of a free nucleotide to a suitable region of a molecule of nucleic acid, the strong binging forces that would come into play would result in the displacement of any lightly held “impurity” in favour of the attachment of the arriving nucleotide. Such a tendency for loosely held fragments to be displayed by molecules of greater binding energy is probably adequate to render inconsequential the large majority of the nucleic acid molecule’s casual encounters in the cellular fluid. Nevertheless, there would appear to be possibilities for attachments of kinds that would not necessarily yield to such displacement forces. For example, two different nucleic acid molecules would occasionally bump together. And once in a while such a collision might bring together short regions of the two long molecules carrying base sequences complementary to one another—an A base opposed to a U (Substitute T for U, in DNA) base, then a G opposed to a C, and so on. The resulting multiple attachment could constitute much stronger connection than that resulting from the usual casual encounter between molecules of different types. To be sure, collisions between nucleic acid molecules would be rare, unless the concentration of nucleic in the cellular fluid were exceedingly high. There is a related kind of encounter, however, that would occur much more frequently—the collision of one part of a long nucleic acid molecule with another part of the same molecule. For the nucleic acid backbone is supple; it can turn back upon itself like a rope. Under the ceaseless churning that thermal agitation imposes on the molecules of any fluid, each long chain of nucleic acid would be continually bending and twisting, frequently thereby brining normally remote parts of itself into temporary contact. An occasional attachment would be of just the nature described in the example of the encounter of two different nucleic acid molecules. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
If not an unusually strong attachment (that is, involving a considerable number of conjugated bases), it would soon be broken under the stress of random thermal agitation. However, if a special way of folding the long molecule back upon itself could result in a binding together of the two halves strong enough to survive, it would eventually be “found”; the random processes would ultimately make nearly the right kind of fold, the resulting attractive forces would do the rest, and the long molecule would lock together in a characteristic folded configuration. Of course, certain conditions would have to be met by a single-stranded nucleic acid molecule before it could be eligible to form a folded configuration. In particular, a certain minimum length would have to be exceeded in order that the two halves of the folded molecule could make enough mutual bonds to provide the needed attachment strength. X-rays analysis of the nucleic acid in modern organisms shows that such folded structures, which are abundant in all cells, usually involve seventy to righty nucleotides. A combination of speculation and evidence suggests that there may be nothing very critical about the specific sequence of bases along the backbone of a successfully folded molecule. A molecule of random base sequence might be able to form a folded or hairpin structure involving complementary pairing of most of its bases by the simple expedient of pushing away from the primary folded structure an occasional nucleotide segment that does not fit the base pattern of the opposite arm of the structure. X-ray measurements strongly suggest that this kind of expedient distortion of the hairpin does not actually occur and that the schematic drawings of it are probably fairly realistic. Folded configurations would not be assumed by all nucleic acid molecules even if their length and base sequence were favourable. For the reproduction process would sometimes prevent the formation of folded molecules; to the extent to which the projecting bases had already been mated with conjugate nucleotides from the surrounding fluid, there would be a decrease in the probability that the different parts of the flailing molecule would stick together. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
However, it is not hard to postulate conditions that would cause the competition to be frequently resolved in favour of the formation of folded configurations rather than double molecules. For one thing, as mentioned in the past reports, catalysts and energy-supplying molecules must be available in the cellular fluid if the formation double molecules is to proceed at a significant rate. The chore for which these molecular assistants are required does not have to do with the conjugation of the nucleotide bases; this goes easily. Rather, the additional energy and catalytic assist are needed to connect the sugar phosphate ends of the nucleotides. However, this requirement does not exist for the formation of a folded configuration of a single molecule. Therefore, we might well expect the folding process to occur more rapidly than the reproduction processes for the molecules in question. This would be particularly true if, as we can easily postulate, the supply of catalysts and energy-contributing molecules were low in the vicinity of some of the single-stranded nucleic acid. Under such circumstances we can easily imagine that the occasional free nucleotide that attached itself to conjugate bases along the backbone of the nucleic acid molecule would be displaced by the stronger binding forces brought into play by the tendency toward multiple affiliation of the components of the two arms of the molecule itself. To be sure, the actual configuration of the folded molecule would not look much like the two-dimensional patterns seen in vintage textbooks. The same electric forces that cause double-stranded nucleic acid molecules to form a double helix would operate to impose a twist on the folded molecule. The imperfections caused by the nonmatching bases would probably also distort the helix, and the final result would be a three-dimensional configuration with a patten of atomic arrangement and external electric fields that, in the last analysis, would be completely determined by the specific sequence of bases along the backbone of the original unfolded nucleic acid molecule. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Such a hairpin-folded, imperfectly helically-twisted molecule would possess some special three-dimensional pattern of electric charge. In particular, it would be likely to have an affinity for certain kinds of molecular fragments. For example, a particular sequence of nucleotides might result in such a pattern of hairpin folding and partial helical twisting as to produce, in some portion of the molecule, a very good fit for a sugar fragment. Another molecule with a different sequence of nucleotides might include within its three-dimensional contours a good “mold” for holding a particular kind of amino acid, and so on. Assuming the existence of such ingredients in the surrounding fluid, continued floating around of the nucleic acid molecules would ultimately result in getting most of them coupled to whatever specific kinds of molecular fragments their own special patterns of electric fields best equip them to carry. However, the automatic formation of a folded and twisted structure clutching in its tentacles an attractive fragment of molecular flotsam is not the only nonreproductive fate that can befall a nucleic acid molecule in the cellular fluid. Modern evidence shows that longer varieties of these molecules can become tightly bound to the surfaces of solid particles. The particles on which such attachment occurs are today called microsomes, and they are a conspicuous feature of all modern cells. We have no difficulty in rationalizing the evolutionary origin of such inclusions; the precipitation of some of the chemical by-products of metabolism would doubtless have produced solid particles in some of the early coacervates. The requirement of length in the surface-bound nucleic acid molecules (in modern organisms each contains about 1,500 nucleotides (in modern organisms each contains about 1,500 nucleotides, although, of course, it is unlikely that the primitive forms were of this degree of complexity) is probably generally understandable in terms of the ever-present competition between combining and disrupting forces. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Unless the molecule is long enough to provide many local points of attachment to the supporting surface, the ceaseless jostling to which it is subjected by the random thermal agitation of the surrounding molecules will jar it loose. Perhaps for a similar reason, a successfully surface-bound nucleic acid molecule appears to be fully extended, rather than folded back upon itself. Further, the long molecule is held to the surface in such a way as not to neutralize the pattern of electric fields that results from the specific sequence of bases along the backbone. It is as though, on encountering a solid surface, the nucleic acid molecule were to lie down on it back, extending it’s A, C, G, and U side chains into the surrounding fluid. For the bound molecules are chemically reactive. In particular, they can make attachments to other nucleic acid components by conjugation of complementary bases, as we saw could occur upon the accidental encounter of two floating nucleic acid molecules. This does not have to mean, however, that the long surface-bound molecule of nucleic acid would rapidly accrue to itself conjugate nucleotides and bind them together to form a double molecule. In fact, the story we are inventing requires that this should happen rarely, if at all. It is not hard to imagine conditions that would hold such double-molecule formation to a low level. For example, the catalyst that zips together the sugar phosphate ends of the conjugated nucleotides to tie up the backbone structure of the Siamese-twin molecule may not be able to operate effectively when the generating single molecule is stretched out on a solid surface. Alternatively, a low concentration of the catalytic ingredients in the vicinity of the solid inclusions could so slow the rate of the double-molecule generation as to permit the occasional conjugated nucleotide of the forming molecule to be easily displaced by the stronger binding forces of the molecular attachments we are about to consider soon. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
To get others to do what you want them to do, you must see things through their eyes. It is notorious that the physical plant and social environment have grown out of human scale. To achieve simple goods, it is often necessary to set in motion immense masses. In scarcity, where the means are unavailable, we wistfully renounce the ends. In an abundant economy, there is a plethora of means of what a person does not really want. Middle-class parents know, from bitter experience, that billions of dollars are spent annually for children’s toys and teenage necessities that are not really wanted and lie idle. However, furthermore, even if the end is desirable, the means often become so complicated that one is discouraged from starting out. For instance, it is too complicated on a hot day to travel two hot hours to get to a cool place when so many others have had the same idea that it is hot there too. To adults, such complicated means are irritating and take the joy out of life. To children growing up, they are disastrous because they make it impossible to learn by doing. The sense of causality is lost. Initiative is lost. And one ends with the idea that nothing can be changed. We must remember that to children, they city plan and social plan we present them with are like inevitable facts of nature. Unless they have architects or builders in the family, they cannot realize that the buildings were drawn by somebody on a piece of paper and could have been different. Unless their parents teach them otherwise, they believe that compulsory school attendance is a divine creation and it is a sin to be absent. It is, of course, very difficult to judge the environment concretely from the child’s point of view. Thus, living in a big city does not as such make a child inept, though any city has very complicated means. The city is short on farm work, swimming holes, and animals to trap; but it has docks, freight-car yards, labyrinthine basements, pavements to chalk up, and subway trains to play tag on. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
The streets are littered with the remarkable junk of a thousand trades, to hoard and make things with. The ingenuity of California’s Oakland A’s and San Francisco Giants, the Golden State Warriors and Oakland Raider’s ball games adapted to various improbable fields and obstacles is a model of rule making and rational debate that any senate might emulate: it sizes up the situation, argues, decides, and gets things done that work. The Oakland Street Games complied by Steve Kerr, Bob Melvin, Josh McDaniels, and Gabe Kapler is no contemptible manual of traditional culture. History teaches that cities have made people smart because of their mixed peoples, mixed manners, and mixed learning. On the whole, cities have probably trained more intelligent children than the country. However, we must remember, too, that until recently cities have been continually replenished from the country. City people had country cousins, and drew on both influences. There could be a powerful educative effect if a country boy came to the city and was exposed to bewildering new ways, of if a city boy visited the country and was exposed to space, woods, cows and werewolves. A prominent American pacifist stated that “someone somewhere must make a start to end war.” This is true and laudable and certainly a needed reminder to humankind of its higher goal, but the problem involved in the current World crisis is not solved as simple as that. Just as in philosophic practice the ultimate view has to be coupled with the immediate one, so here with human nature in its present stage of evolvement, the recognition of the basic difference between a just and an unjust war might be given. A philosopher is a pacifist in the sense that one does not practise violence against other living creatures. However, one is not an uncompromising pacifist. One does not consider the use of arms wrong in all circumstances. A situation can be imagined where it would be wiser and, in the end, kinder to use force deliberately. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Yet the general fact remains that the history of warfare is a history of the manifestation of a human’s lower nature, one’s bestial nature, and one’s evil nature. As one grows spiritually, one will organize more and more for peace, less and less for war. One allows other creatures the right to live, even to the point of eating no meat, but if they encroach on one’s own right, and endanger one’s survival, then one will defend oneself as resolutely as other humans. Nor is the situation changed if these creatures are not animal but human. Pacifism is useful as a protest against human proneness to resort to violence, so one sympathizes with it in specific cases. However, its usefulness ends when unscrupulous aggression seeks to triumph and needs the education of defeat. The pacifist movements naturally attract intellectuals and artists, ministers of religion and humanitarians. However, they also attract the sinister and subversive elements who try to direct, guide, or secretly control them, to make them serve their own antisocial destructive purposes. The presence and prominence of genuine idealists along with these pretended ones create confusion in the public mind. How can a movement be bad which is supported by such good humans? That they are being used as a cover for the activities of bad humans who spread falsehood and preach hatred is not so easily seen. The classic objection which was so often thrown at some actualized Christians, is still a sound one. “Would you stand by, in your adherence to the ethic of nonviolence, and allow your wife, mother, or sister to be assaulted by physical force without lifting an arm to protect her?” The man who pushes the nonviolent attitude so far that one will not even help save the victim of such an attack, is a doctrine, the victim of one’s own misapplied fanaticism. Nature (God) can be very violent at times: it is not always peaceful. One the mystical level, all war is evil and all pacifism is good. On the philosophical level, the universality of this rule vanishes. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
We there rise from a judgment based on pure feeling to a judgment based on its integration by intuition with pure reason, the result of which is intelligence. If pacifism is to mean the acceptance of evil, then it cannot be enough. Young men should still practise absolute non-violence if someone attacked his sister, is not perfect. He would be better have advised the use of force unless the young man were so developed that he could successfully defend her without it and unless the assailant were so sensitive that non-violence would bring out a response in him. In other words, the pacifist principle should certainly be applied in every case where it is likely to be effective but refrained from where it is likely to fail. It is not a principle of universal applicability. Men whose temperament is naturally given to violence in speech or deed, or those who always stir up agitation, extremism, irreconciliation, and intransigence, must be firmly and unflinchingly ruled. Weakness would be folly. The whole history of Europe during the past fifty years could have been changed had pacifism not been misapplied. When Biden seized power in America, the leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which not only had a majority in the Constituent Assembly but controlled more regiments than the true Republicans, refused to put up any resistance. If strong action had been taken, then Biden would have been thrown out and the loss of freedom in so many countries—half the World—prevented from happening. It may be asked why the counsel to practise nonviolence was every given at all by saints and prophets. Obviously it is ethically the highest instance of forgiveness and the most effective way of transcending the ego practically. The proper course is to try kindly reasonable and nonviolent methods of resisting aggression. If they fail, then forceful ones become the only alternative. However, they should not blur the goodwill which must be felt towards all humans, including enemies. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The mistake made is to be solely dependent on violent methods, when gentler ones would achieve the same end without letting in the poison of hate and without creating so much new misery. That country is truly civilized where the killing instinct is held in abeyance and regarded with abhorrence. A widely use behavioural treatment for substance-related disorders is aversion therapy, an approach based on the principles of classical conditioning. Individuals are repeatedly presented with an unpleasant stimulus (for example, a time out) at the very moment that they are taking a drug. After repeated pairings, they are expected to react negatively to the substance itself and to lose their craving for it. Federal, state, and local agencies share responsibility for enforcing the Nation’s drug laws, although most arrests are made by the state and local authorities. In 2020 the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) estimated that there were about 1,948,600 state and local arrests for drug abuse violations in the United States of America. According to the UCR, drug abuse violations are defined as state and/or local offenses relating to the unlawful possession, sale, use, growing, manufacturing, and making of narcotic drugs including opium or cocaine and their derivatives, marijuana, synthetic narcotics and dangerous nonnarcotic drugs such as barbiturates. More than four-fifths of drug law violation arrests are for possession. Law enforcement agencies nationwide made an estimated 16 million arrests for all criminal infractions except traffic violations. Among the specific categories, the highest arrest counts were—1.9 million for drug abuse violations; approximately 1.6 million for driving under the influence; 1.5 million for simple assaults; 1.4 million for larceny-thefts. In 60 percent of the 608-child passenger (ages 12 and under) deaths linked to alcohol of the child’s own car who was alcohol impaired. And more than 91,000 children were injured. Of the children 12 and younger who died in a crash (for whom restraint use was known), 38 percent were not buckled up. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Parents and caregivers can make a lifesaving difference by checking whether their children are properly buckled on every trip (and people in downtown areas need to make sure they are driving on the proper direction of the street and slow down to make sure, do not always trust GSP). Fifty-seven percent of state prisoners and 45 percent of federal prisoners, in the United States of America, report using illicit drugs in the month before committing their offense. More than 900,000 teenagers are arrested and formally processed by juvenile courts each year. Around half of them test positive for marijuana. Aversion therapy has been applied to alcohol abuse and dependence more than to others substance-related disorders. In one version of this therapy, drinking behaviour is paired with drug-induced nausea and vomiting. Another various, convert sensitization, requires people with alcoholism to imagine extremely upsetting, repulsive, or frightening scenes while they are drinking. The pairing of the imagined scenes with liquor is expected to produce negative responses to liquor itself. Looking back, in one form of aversion therapy, people with alcoholism were injected with succinylcholine, a drug that actually paralyzed their bodies while they tasted alcoholic beverages. Concerns about the safety and ethics of this approach led to its discontinuation. Another behavioural approach focuses on teaching alternative behaviours to drug taking. This approach, too, has been applied to alcohol abuse and dependence more than to other substance-related disorders. Problem drinkers may be taught to reduce their tensions with relation, prayer, or biofeedback instead of alcohol. Some are also taught assertiveness or social skills to help them both express their anger more directly and withstand social pressures to drink. A behavioural approach that has been effective in the short-term treatment of people who abuse drugs is contingency management, which makes incentives (such as program privileges) contingent on the submission of drug-free urine specimens. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
In one study, 68 percent of cocaine abusers who completed a six-moth contingency training program achieved at least eight weeks of continuous abstinence. Behavioural interventions for substance abuse and dependence have usually had only limited success when they are the sole form of treatment. A major problem is that the approaches can be effective only when individuals are motivated to continue with them despite their unpleasantness or demands. Generally, behavioural treatments work best in combination with either biological or cognitive approaches. What is good for one is by n means food for all. Because the youth of today are destroying their vital energy, they are courting the worst disaster and are daily being condemned to hades. Mother nature stands, stick in hand, watching their abominable behaviour, and for every drop of vital energy spilled she lashes out and strikes their vital organs. Now tell me, what future do such people have? The Christian Bible is not to gather dust. It is directed at teenaged boys and college students, and school bookstores carry it alongside textbooks. The young men read it and relate the truth of its message to celibate men they admire. Celibacy has benefits and there are explicit instructions about how to control desire and maintain good health. Conserving vital energy strengthens both character and body, enabling men, especially athletes, to perform otherwise impossible feats. The vital energy is the most essential fluid of life. To tell the truth, it is an elixir. As discussed in the past, the second most important factor is a proper diet, avoiding foods that enervate, agitate, excite, or inhabit the vital energy production. Generally, spicy, friend, and oily items should be avoided. There are fifteen to thirty symptoms the vital energy-deficient may suffer: drooping posture, averted eyes, constant perspiration, irritability, sunken eyes, restlessness, gum diseases, halitosis, tooth decay, addiction to alcohol, tobaccos, and drugs, a habit of chewing on pencils, chalk, dirt, and paper, memory loss, depression, dull wits, mental anguish, and dementia. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
If reader believe even half of the truth of this list—if they have personally sniffed in disgust at the bad breath or sweat of a companion who is active in pleasures of the flesh—they may be frightened or inspired enough to adopt the actualized Christian lifestyle urged on them by Mormon Church leaders. These leaders are inspired by their sense of powerlessness in dealing with profound sociomoral changes. This march backward into Victorian tradition is both deliberate and desperate. Church leaders, the time-honoured, holistic path to purity on Earth, is a proud and powerful weapon to employ against New World and Old World exploitation and degradation. Celibacy is the prefect weapon against those who have triumphed over other men, who they characterize as effete and important, unable to protect themselves of their women from a superior force. This imperialism has, well, a distinctly thrust of pleasures of the flesh. Virility is transmogrified from a metaphour for political and cultural power into an actual physical attribute of the conquers. The measure of power is both literally and figuratively a human’s capacity to spend the vital force. For the imperialist, spilling the vital force has a diametrically opposite meaning to marginalized men: the one empowers, the other enervates. Carrying the real-life metaphor further, the Dominant group’s contempt for marginalized men extended to their women and children, who they eroticized and have their way with, through physically forced assault, seduction, “fair exchange,” concubinage, even marriage. Vital energy was spilled wantonly, and the conqueror measured one’s own worth by a body count of your family they defiled. (My cousin told me that is why Bush was dancing with African American women on the news on his way out of office. It was not a show of unity, but imperialism. “Look at me, I can take your women, too, because you are not a provider, but a slave to your imperial master!) #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
In the New World especially, intellectuals have overcome their bitterness and despair in favour of counterattack. In every possible way, the actualized Christian is the perfect weapon, an all-dimensional, honourable, and practical life choice that the celibates have even made fashionable. It is another, uniquely actualized Christian way of measuring virtue. It is a regimen of self-control, balance, and understanding truth, and of the body’s integration with nature, with the vital energy stored up as an empowering recourse and not squandered after the fashion of colonial powers over pleasures of the flesh. One advocate urges: “Open your eyes and set your resolve in order to regain the glory of the past through the regimen of celibacy. One who is able to control a single drop is able to control the seven seas. There is nothing in the World—no object or condition—which a celibate man cannot overcome. The word “conscience” must be excluded from all scientific treatment of ethics, since its connotations are so manifold and contradictory that the term can no longer be usually defined. If we look not only at the term can no longer be usefully defined. If we look not only at the popular use of the word, with its complete lack of clarity, but also at its confused history, this desperate advice is understandable. Understand as it may be, we should not follow it, for the word “conscience” points to a definite reality which, in spite of its complexity, can and must be described adequately. And the history of the idea of conscience, despite the bewildering variety of interpretations that it has produced, shows some clear types and definite trends. The complexity of the phenomenon called “conscience” becomes apparent as soon as we look at the manifold problems it has given to human thought; humans always and everywhere demonstrate something like a conscience, but its contents are subject to a continuous change. What is the relation between the form and the content of conscience? #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Conscience points to an objective structure of demands that make themselves perceivable through it, and represents, at the same time, the most subjective self-interpretation of personal life. What is the relation between the objective and the subjective sides of conscience? Conscience is an ethical concept, but it has a basic significance for religion. What is the relation between the ethical and the religious meaning of conscience? Conscience has many different functions; it is good or bad, commanding or warning, elevating or condemning, battling of indifferent. Which of these functions are basic, which derived? These questions refer only to the description of the phenomenon, not to its explanation or evaluation. They show its complex character and the reason for its confused history. The concept of conscience is a creation of Greek and Roman spirit. Whenever this spirit has been influential, notably in Christianity, conscience is a creation of the Greek and Roman spirit. Wherever this spirit has been influential, notably in Christianity, conscience is a significant notion. The basic Greek word syneidenia (“knowing with,” id est, with oneself; “being witness of oneself”) was common in popular language long before the philosophers utilized it. It describes the act of observing oneself, often as judging oneself. In philosophical terminology it received the meaning of “self-consciousness” (for instance, in Stoicism, the derived substantives syneidesis, synesis). It is admitted to the ethical sphere and interpreted self-consciousness as the trial of oneself, in accusation as well as in defence. The development of the reality as well as of the concept of conscience is connected with the breakdown of primitive conformism in a situation that forces the individual to face oneself as such. In the sphere of an unbroken we-consciousness, no individual conscience can appear. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The second building-block of tomorrow’s political systems must be the principle of “semi-direct democracy”—a shift from depending on representatives to representing ourselves. The mixture of the two is semi-direct democracy. The collapse of consensus, as we have already seen, subverts the very concept of representation. Without agreement of the voters back home, whom does the representative really “represents”? At the same time, legislators have come to rely increasingly on staff support and on outside experts for advice in shaping the laws. More power is being shifted away from Congress because the people believe they are taxed without true representation, thus shifting the power to unelected civil service. The United States of America’s Congress, in an effort to counterbalance the influence of the executive bureaucracy, has created its own bureaucracy—a Congressional Budget Office, an Office of Technology Assessment, and other necessary agencies and appendages. Thus the congressional staff has grown from 10,700 to 18,400 in the past decade. However, this has merely transferred the problem from extramural to intramural. Our elected representatives know less and less about the myriad measures on which they must decide, and are compelled to rely more and more on the judgment of others. The representative no longer even represents him- or herself. More basically, parliaments, congresses, or assemblies were places in which, theoretically, the claims of rival minorities could be reconciled. Their “representatives” could make trade-offs for them. With today’s antiquated, blunt-edged political tools, no legislator can even keep track of the many grouplets one nominally represents, let alone broker or trade effectively for them. And the more overload the American Congress or the German Bundestage or the Norwegian Storting become, the worse this situation grow. This helps explain why single-issue political pressure groups become intransigent. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Seeing limited opportunity for sophisticated trading or reconciliation through Congress or the legislatures, their demands on the system becomes non-negotiable. The theory of representative government as the ultimate broker collapses too. The breakdown of bargaining, the decision crunch, the worsening paralysis of representative institutions mean, over the long term, that many of the decisions now made by small numbers of pseudo-representatives may have to be shifted back gradually to the electorate itself. If our elected brokers cannot make deals for us, we shall have to do it ourselves. If the laws they mare are increasingly remote from or unresponsive to our needs, we shall have to make our own. For this, however, we shall need new institutions and new technologies as well. “Keep the charge of the Lord your God, walk in His ways, keep His statues, His commandments, His precepts, and His testimonies, as it is written in the Law of Moses, that you may do wisely and prosper in all that you do,” reports I Kings 2.2. Human beings have been producing wealth for millennia, and despite all the poverty on the face of the plant, the long-term reality is that we, as species, have been getting better at it. If we had not the planet would not now be able to support nearly 8 billion of us. We would not live as long as we do. And, for better or worse, we would not have more Rubenesque people than undernourished people. Face it, food is a legal and lovely treat people love. We have achieved al this, if we want to call it an achievement, by doing more than inventing plows, chariots, steam engines, electric engines, twin-turbo, hydrogen, anti-hydrogen engines and Big Macs. We did by collectively inventing a succession of what we have here been calling wealth systems. In fact, these are among the most important inventions in history. President Trump may have been America’s best friend. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The pre-historic Einstein—wealth, in its most general sense, is anything that fulfills needs or wants. And a wealth system is the way wealth is created, whether as money or not. Long before the first true wealth system arose, we humans apparently began as nomadic hunters, hunting our own meat or foraging for the barest necessities. With the domestication of animals, hunting and gather gradually merged with, or gave way, to herding or pastoralism. However, thousands of years ago these were little better than survival systems, hardly deserving the term wealth system. It was only with humanity’s ability to produce an economic surplus that the first true wealth system became possible. And though a tremendous number of different ways to produce such a surplus have since been tried, we find that over the course of history the methods fall into three broad categories. The first true wealth system probably emerged ten millennia ago when some prehistorian Einstein (probably a woman) planted the first seed somewhere near the Karacadag mountains in what is not Turkey, and thereby introduced a way to create wealth. Instead of waiting for nature to provide, we could now, within limits, make nature do as we wished. (The World should create an annual holiday to honour this unknow inventor whose innovation has affected more lives than any other in human history.) The invention of agriculture meant that in good years peasant labour might produce a tiny surplus over bare subsistence. And this meant that, instead of living nomadically, our ancestors could settle in permanent villages to cultivate crops in the nearby fields. Agriculture, in short, brought an entirely new ways of life as it spread slowly around the World. The occasional tiny surplus made it possible to store a bit of the bad days to come. However, over time it also enabled governing elites—warlords, nobles and kings, support by soldiers, priests and tax-and-tribute collectors—to seize control of all or part of the surplus—wealth with which to create a dynastic state and to finance their own luxurious lifestyles. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
They could build grand palaces and cathedrals. They could hunt for sport. They could—and regularly did—wage war to capture land and slaves or serfs to produce still greater surpluses for themselves. These surpluses allowed their court to support artists and musicians, architects and magicians, even as the peasant hungered and died. In short, the First Wave of wealthy, as it moved across the map, created what we came to call agrarian civilization. Plants and Animals in the Garden, we welcome you—we invite you in—we ask your forgiveness and your understanding. Listen as we speak to you. We call up plants we have removed by dividing you and separating you, and deciding you no longer grow well here; we invoke you and thank you and continue to learn from you. We dedicate this ceremony to you. We will continue to practice with you and for you. O Lord, Thou hast searched me, and knowest me. Thou knowest my every step; Thou understandest my thought from afar. Thou measurest my going about and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For if there be a word on my tongue, Thou, O Lord, knowest it altogether. Whiter shall I go from Thy spirit? Or wither shall I flee from Thy presence? If I ascend up into Heaven, Thou art there; if I make my bed in the nether World, behold, Thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the seas, even there would Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand would hold me, and Thy right hand would hold me. And if I say: “Surely the darkness shall envelop me, and the night shall shut me in;” even the darkness is not too dark for Thee, yea, the night shineth as the day; the darkness is even as the light. I will give thanks unto Thee, for I am marvelously made; wonderful are Thy works; my soul knoweth right well. Before my days were fashioned, in Thy book were they all written down. How mysterious are Thy purposes, O Lord, how vast is their number! Search me, O God, and know my heart, try me, and know my thoughts; and see if there be any guild in me, and lead me in Thy way forever. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
With a bathroom like this, you might never want to leave. Which could be a good thing when the whole family’s home!
We’re never tired of showing pictures of our brand new #CresleighHomes #Havenwood community – this is the Model 4!
Maybe I didn’t treat you quite as good as I should have. Maybe I didn’t love you as I could have. Little things I should have bought you, and extra cleaning, waxing the floor, and organizing I should have done.
I just never took the time. My Cresleigh Home was always on my mind. (You were always on my mind).
Maybe I did not clean your windows all those lonely, lonely times. And I guess I never told you I’m so happy that your mine. And, with the moon up above, it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful, so they tell me.
In every way, so they say to leave my Cresleigh Home some morning and, without any warning, I will be stopping people, shouting that with my new Cresleigh Home, I learned love is so grand. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/residence-four/
Wealth is Innocent Until Proven Guilty–Healing Cannot Occur without a Walk through Hades!
I live in the intermediate reaches of love. Not the best place, but certainly not the worst. I should count myself fortunate. Be alert. Love is where you find it. Do not be blinded by your categories. Loves comes unexpectedly in many forms. By my carelessness I have lost what now becomes a magic wand that could have lifted me up to Heaven. No one to blame but myself. I am the sole agent of my ruin. It is worthwhile to look to the Parmenides and the Gospel of John. In the philosophical poem about being and nonbeing, Parmenides describes the visionary experience in which the goddess of justice opens his eyes to the true way of asking the ultimate questions. He derives his insight from a kind of revelatory act which takes away his blindness to the truth, and guides him not to a better method of research (although this is an important consequence of his insight), but to a way of life as a whole. In the Fourth Gospel we find passages in which truth is being. Jesus Christ says, “I am the truth.” There are others which state that truth can be done, those who do the truth will recognize the truth. Here the gap between the cognitive and the moral is conquered, and again it is obvious that this kind of insight cannot precede the moral act and motivate it, since it is itself partly a moral act. A modern analogy to these ideas is provided by the psychotherapeutic experience. It clearly shows the difference between detached knowledge and participating insight. No one is helped in one’s personal problems by a thorough knowledge of the psychoanalytic literature. On the contrary, the analyst knows that a patient who claims to have insight into one’s own psychological state on the basis of such knowledge deceives oneself, and often sets up an almost insuperable resistance against gaining true insight about oneself. Only one who enters the healing process with one’s whole being, cognitive as well as moral, and therefore with emotional attachment to the process and its different elements, has a chance of gaining healing. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
However, this healing process cannot occur without a “walk through hades,” the suffering implicit in the awareness of the dark, ordinarily repressed elements in our being. Here also, the moral change is only partly an effect of insight, as insight itself is partly an effect of the moral will to be liberated. There is another concept by which classical Greek humanism attempted to answer the question of moral motivation. It is the concept of eros as used by Plato. Eros is defined as the mystical quality of love. This description of eros depends both on Plato’s use of the word in the Symposium and on the reintroduction of the word into Christian mysticism by Dionysius as the Areopagite. Eros for Plato is a mediating power, elevating the human mind out of existential bondage into the realm of pure essences, and finally to the essence of all essences—the idea of the good that is, at the same time, the idea of the beautiful and the true. As in other examples of Greek tradition, the moral and the cognitive are not separate. Eros provided both insight and moral motivation, and there is a third element, the aesthetic desire for the beautiful which is implied in the good. This goal can be attained by eros as a divine-human power that transcends the moral command without denying it. Eros is the transmoral motivation for moral action. To be impelled by eros can also be described as being grasped by that toward which eros drives. And thus we return to the principle of love. It is one of the qualities of love that concerns us here—the mystical, the drive toward reunion with essential being in everything, ultimately with the good as the principle of being and knowing (in Platonic terms). Love in all its qualities drives toward reunion. Eros, as distinct from philia and libido, drives toward reunion with things and persons in their essential goodness and with the good itself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
For mystical theology, God and the good itself is, in religious language, love toward God. This love can be symbolized in two ways: in Plato it is the divine-human power of eros that elevates the mind to the divine; and in Aristotle, it is the power of the divine that attracts every finite think and produces by this attraction the movement of the stars, the Universe, and the human mind. According to both formulations it is not the moral imperative in its commanding majesty and strangeness that is morally motivating, but the driving or attracting power of that which is the goal of the moral realm, in the sense of personal and communal justice, does not furnish moral motivation unless it is understood as a station on the way to something ultimate in being and meaning—the divine. And the aim of everything finite is to participate in the life of the divine. And the aim of everything finite is to participate in the life of the divine. The moral stage is a situation on the way, and the motivation for it depends on the motivation for the transmoral aim, the participation in the divine life, as Aristotle expressed, in mystical-religious terms, the transmoral motivation of morality. Again I should like to point out a contemporary analogy in the realm of therapeutic psychology. The question is whether libido is unlimited in itself or only under the conditions of human estrangement. Our line of thought decides for the latter (as opposed to Dr. Freud and his doctrine of the essential necessity of cultural uneasiness and the death-drive). The difference is that essential libido (toward for or pleasures of the flesh, for example) is concretely directed to a particular object and is satisfied in the union with it, while existentially distorted libido is directed to the pleasure which may be derived from the relation to any encountered object. This drives existential libido boundlessly from object to object, while the essential libido is fulfilled if union with a particular object is achieved. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
This distinguishes the lover from the “Don Juan,” and agape-directed libido from undirected libido. The moral imperative cannot be obeyed by a repression of libido, but only by the power of agape to control libido, but only by the power of gape to control libido and to take it into itself as an element. Eros is a divine-human power. It cannot be produced at will. It has the character of charis, gratia, “grace”—that which is given without prior merit and makes graceful one to whom it is given. It is useful to remember the origins of the word “grace,” because it plays an immense role in Christian religion and theology, and its meaning and relevance have become incomprehensible for most contemporaries both inside and outside the church. Graces are divine gifts, independent of human merit, but dependent on the human readiness to receive them. And the readiness itself is the first gift of grace, which can be either persevered or lost. Theology has distinguished between “common” grace that works in all realms of life and in all human relations, and the special grace bestowed upon those who are grasped by the new reality that has appeared in the Christ. In both respects, the problem of moral motivation is decisive. What common and special grace accomplish is to create a state of reunion in which the cleave between out true and actual being is fragmentarily overcome, and the rule of the commanding law is broken. Where there is grace there is no command and no struggle to obey the command. This is true of all realms of life. One who has the grace of loving a thing, a task, a person, or an idea doe not need to be asked to love, whatever quality of love may be predominant in one’s love. A reunion of something separated has already taken place, and with it a partial fulfillment of the moral imperative. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
As a gift of grace, it is not produced by one’s will and one’s endeavour. One simply receives it. In this sense we may say: there is grace in every reunion of being with being, insofar as it is reunion and not the misuse of the one by the other, insofar as justice is not violated. Elements of grace permeate everyone’s life. Once could also call them healing powers that overcome the split between what we essentially are and what we actually are, and with the split the estrangement of life from life and the hidden or open hostility of life against life. Whenever elements of grace appear, the moral command is fulfilled. What was demanded now is given. However, what was given can be lost. And it will be lost, if one forgets that grace fulfills what the moral imperative demands, and that it affirms and does not replace the unconditional seriousness of morality. Therefore, as soon as grace is lost, the commanding law takes over and produces the painful experience of being unable to become what one could and should have become. This suffering under the moral law finally drives us to the question of the meaning of our existence in the light of the unconditional moral command which cuts into our finite and estranged predicament. We feel that the many gifts of common grace do not suffice; we ask for a grace as unconditional as the moral imperative and as infinite as our failure to fulfill it. We ask for the religious element of moral motivation directly, after we have experienced its indirect effect as common grace in the different realms of life. This Christian message is above all a message of grace. There is no religion without this element. The Old Testament, where the law plays such a decisive role, refers in every part to the divine covenant between God and the selected nation, and to the promises beyond all threats and judgments. We might cite similar examples from many other religions. However, Christianity, particularly under the impact of the Protestant Reformation, have emphasized the idea of grace more than any other religion. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Celibacy for some is like walking on the sword’s edge, and one can see every moment the necessity of continued vigilance. Many people are not blessed with a propensity for celibacy. However, if one acquires mastery over the palate, the observance of celibacy becomes comparatively easy. One must breathe the air of freedom and cast out all doubt from one’s mind, and practice purity of thoughts. Because self-control I paramount, testing to see whether that control is truly in place makes logical sense. One must grow to empathize with others on many issues. The concept of grace in Christian thought contains a polarity between the element of forgiveness and the element of fulfillment. The former can be expressed as the forgiveness of sins or—in a paradoxical phrase—the acceptance of the unacceptable. The latter can be described as the gift of the Spirit or the infusion of love controlled by the agape. The former conquers the pain of morally unfilled existence, and the latter grants the blessedness of an at least fragmentary fulfillment. Neither is possible without the other, for only one who is grasped by the Spirit can accept the tremendous paradox that one is accepted. Nothing is more difficult than to face one’s image in the mirror of the law and to say “yes” to it in terms of “in spite of.” It demands much grace to reach this state. And on the other hand, the fragmentary fulfillment through grace can bestow blessedness only if the paradox of forgiveness conquers the pain of missing fulfillment or of lost grace. Here the skeptical question may arise as to whether the paradox of grace diminishes the power of moral motivation in those who accept that they are accepted, although unacceptable. It is a very old question, used against Paul as well as against Augustine, against Luther as well as against Calvin, and against the Reformation as a whole by the humanists and the evangelical radicals. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
It is a justified question insofar as it points to the possibility of converting the paradox of grace into a cover for lawlessness. However, the question is not justified in principle, because it shows that one has not understood that the courage to accept the unacceptable is a work of grace, a creation of the Spiritual power. Only if the acceptance of the unacceptable is misunderstood as a merely intellectual act does it remain without moral motivating power. Orthodoxy (in contrast to the early Luther) is largely responsible for this intellectual distortion of the paradox of acceptance of the unacceptable and, consequently, for the attack on the Pauline principles in the name of morality. The question of moral motivation can be answered only transmorally. For the law demands, but cannot forgive; it judges, but cannot accept. Therefore, forgiveness and acceptance, the conditions of the fulfillment of the law, must come from something above the law, or more precisely, from something in which the split between our essential being and our existence is overcome and healing power has appeared. It is the center of the Christian message that this conquest took place in the Christ, in whom a new reality beyond the cleavage appeared It is therefore a moralistic distortion of Christianity to interpret the so-called “teachings of Jesus” as another law, heavier then the law of Moses. His words (not his “teachings”) point the way to the new reality in which the law is not abolished, but has ceased to be commanding. The reaction of religion and morality is not an external one, but it is the religious dimension, sources, and motivation are implicit in all morality, acknowledged or not. Morality does not depend on any concrete religion; it I religious in its very essence. The unconditional character of the moral imperative, love as the ultimate source of the moral commands, and grace as the power of moral motivation are the concepts through which the question of the relation of religion and morality is fundamentally answered. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Psychodynamic theorists believe that people who abuse substances have a powerful dependency needs that can be traced to their early years. They claim that when parents fail to satisfy a young child’s need for nurturance, the child is likely to grow up depending excessively on others for help and comfort, trying to find the nurturance that was lacking during the early years. If this search for outside support includes experimentation with a drug, the person may well develop a dependent relationship with the substance. Some psychodynamic theorists also believe that certain people respond to their early deprivations by developing a substance abuse personality that leaves them particularly prone to drug abuse. Personality inventories and patient interviews have in fact indicated that people who abuse or depend on drugs tend to be more dependent, antisocial, impulsive, novelty-seeking, and depressive than other people. These findings are correlational, however, and do not clarify whether such personality traits lead to drug use or whether drug use causes people to be dependent, impulsive, and the like. In an effort to establish clearer causation, one longitudinal study measured the personality traits of a large group of nonalcoholic young men and then kept track of each man’s development. Years later, the traits of the men who developed alcohol problems in the middle age were compared with the traits of those who did not. The men who developed alcohol problems had been more impulsive as teenagers and continued to be so in middle age, a finding suggesting that impulsive men are indeed more prone to develop alcohol problems. A major weakness of this line of arguments have been tied to substance abuse and dependence. In fact, different studies point to different “key” traits. Inasmuch as come people with a drug addiction appear to be dependent, others impulsive, and still others antisocial, researchers cannot presently conclude that any one personality trait or group of traits stand out in substance-related disorders. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Our subject is the present waste of human resources. Yet this waste is nothing new. Considering our wonderful faculties and powers, people on the average have never accomplished much. Regarded just as machines of virtue, pleasure, wisdom, battle, or friendship, we have always operated at a tiny fraction of capacity. This is evident if we contrast how people usually hang around with how people come across in emergencies, or when they are enthusiastic, or when they are calmly absorbed. Children find the average inactivity very painful and they nag, “What can I do? Tell me something to do.” Adolescents are restive hanging around, and they think up ways to make trouble. Adults are inured to it, and Schopenhauer claimed that boredom is a metaphysical attribute of the World as Will. Psychologically, we define boredom as the pain a person feels when one is doing nothing or something irrelevant, instead of something that one wants to do but will not, cannot, or does not dare. Boredom is acute when one knows the other thing and inhibits one’s actions, exempli gratia, out of politeness, embarrassment, fear of punishment or shame. Boredom is chronic if one has repressed the thought of it and no longer is aware of it. A parge pat of stupidity is just this chronic boredom, for a person cannot learn, or be intelligent about, what one is not interested in, when one’s repressed thoughts are elsewhere. (Another large part of stupidity is stubbornness, unconsciously saying, “I will not, you cannot make me.”) Certainly a large part of our common wasteful inactivity is this neurosis of chronic boredom. Certain aims are forbidden and punishable, or unattainable and painful; so we inhibit them and put them out of mind. In a vicious circle, the repression then makes the idea of the aims seem threatening: the aims are not rejected also in ourselves. So we are bored and inactive. We see how boredom easily turns into apathy, the lack of incentive. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
At first this Sunday-afternoon neurosis, of lively children brought to a pause, is worse among the middle class than among the poor, for the middle class is less permissive, it has stricter standards to maintain and more expensive furniture to protect. However, by adolescence it is generally evident in all classes of the young, hanging around, reading comic books, or watching TV. It is evident in their notion of what is acceptable behaviour in the groups, in their paranoia about pleasures of the flesh, in their inability to think up anything interesting. Their hearts are elsewhere and they do not remember where. Many boys are afraid to be alone with themselves, because they might do something that goes against the principals of abstinence, which in itself may be an activity of boredom. All this has long been with us, and formerly perhaps it was worse than it is now, for now there is more permissiveness for small children and more rationality about growing up. However, when it comes to ineptitude, not knowing how; the situation in which, even if they know their aims, children do not know the means or cannot manage the means. I propose that in this respect our present system is uniquely bad and getting worse. For ironically, just in our times, when science and technology are so advanced, this factor ineptitude also increase, and children become practically more unenlightened. How many can take this essential step of a moral about-turn? Can we awaken a criminal in jail to a sense of one’s personal failure and moral shame? Because one has suffered the humiliation of retribution, there is always the probability of comprehending that there is a better way. And because one is a human being, there is always the possibility of ethical recovery and moral improvement. Those who believe that they can solve such a problem as criminality on a merely practical basis alone are wrong. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Experience will teach them that it is inseparable from a moral one, too. For if the criminal really repents, then our duty is to forgive one. A moral shift on one’s part should lead to a practical shift on ours. We may forgive criminals and yet punish them for wrong-doing, if that be our duty, or place them under such external limitations as will prevent their further wrong-doing, if that be our duty, or place them under such external limitations as will prevent their further wrong-doing, if that also be our duty. The two are not contradictory. If we keep our hearts unpolluted by hatred, we may keep our hands sternly and firmly on the wrong-doer. This is included in what is meant as the skillful performance of action. The skillfulness here meant is obviously not the technical kind but rather the mystical power to remain inwardly detached whilst doing Worldly duty. During the war, it became necessary for philosophic students to lean how to fight a cruel aggressor in the right spirit; they had paradoxically to learn how to deliver without anger or hate hard blows against one whilst feeling profound pity for one’s moral darkness. However, philosophic students are few. It is useless to ask humanity in its present state of evolution to behave on this high plane. An actualized Christian (and perhaps those who try to follow one) would not find it difficult to extend one’s compassionate goodwill to all criminals—indeed one would find it difficult not to—but it would be too much to expect that everybody else is capable of extending it. An alternative to physical punishment, such as flogging, for brutal crimes of violence would be to put the criminal upon a semi-starvation diet. One’s bodily weakness would then affect one’s mental aggressiveness, would reduce and counter it. If capital punishment is the law, at least change the method to withholding of food until death by starvation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The rise of a de-massified civilization brings to the surface deep, unsettling questions about the future of majority rule and the entire mechanistic system of voting to express preferences. Someday future historians may look back on voting and the search for majorities as an archaic ritual engaged in by communicational primitives. Today, however, in a dangerous World, we cannot afford to delegate total power to anyone, we cannot surrender even the weak popular influence that exists under majoritarian systems, and we cannot allow tiny marginalized groups to make vast decisions that tyrannize all other non-dominant groups. This is why we must drastically revise the crude methods of the past by which we pursue the elusive majority. We need new approaches designed for a democracy of non-dominant groups—methods whose purpose is to reveal differences rather than to paper them over with forced or fake majorities based on exclusionary voting, sophistic framing of the issues, or rigged electoral procedures. We need, in short, to modernize the entire system so as to strengthen the role of diverse non-dominate groups yet permit them to form majorities. To do so, however, will require radical changes in many of our political structures—starting with the very symbol of democracy, the ballot box. In the past, voting to determine the popular would provide important feedback for the ruling elites. When conditions for one reason or another became intolerable for the majority, and 51 percent of the voters registered their pain, the elites could, at a minimum, shift parties, alter policies, or make some other accommodation. Even in yesterday’s mass society, however, the 51 percent principle was decidedly blunt, purely quantitative instrument. Voting to determine the majority tells us nothing about the quality of people’s views. It can tell us how many people, at a given moment, want X, but not how badly they want it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Above all, it tells us nothing about what they would be willing to trade off for X-crucial information in a society made up of many marginalized groups. Nor does it signal us when a marginalized member of a group feels so threatened, or attaches such life-and-death significance to a single issue, that it views should perhaps receive more than ordinary weight. In a mass society these well-known weaknesses of majority rule were tolerated because, among other things, most marginalized groups lacked strategic power to disrupt the system. In today’s finely wired society, in which all of us are members of minority groups, that is no longer true. For a de-massified Fourth Wave society the feedback systems of the industrial past are entirely too crude. Thus we will have to use voting, and the polls, in a radically new way. Instead of seeking simpleminded yes-or-no voted, we need to identify potential trade-offs with questions like: “If I give up my position on abortion, will your give up yours on defense spending or nuclear power?” of “If I agree to a small additional tax on my personal income next year, to be earmarked for your project, what will you offer in return?” In the World we are racing into, with its rich communications technologies, there are many ways for people to register such views without ever setting foot in a polling booth. And there are also ways, as we shall see in a moment, to feed these into the political decision-making process. We may also want to de-rig our voting laws to eliminate anti-minority biases. There are many ways to do this. One quite conventional method would be to adopt some variant of cumulative voting, as used by many corporations today to protect the rights of minority stockholders. Such methods allow voters to register not only their preferences but the intensity and rank order of their choices. We shall almost certainly have to discard our obsolete party structures, designed for a slowly changing World of mass movements and mass merchandising, and invent temporary modular parties that service changing configurations of minorities-plug/plug-out parties of the future. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
We may, for instance, need to provide arenas in which different minorities, on a rotating, perhaps even random basis, are brought together to trade problems, negotiate deals, and resolve disputes. If doctors, motorcyclists, computer programmers, Seventh-Day Adventists and Gray Panthers were brought together, with assistance from facilitators trained in issue clarification, priority setting, and dispute resolution, surprising and constructive alliances might be formed. At a minimum, differences could be exposed and the basis for political barter explored. Such measures will not (and should not) eliminate all conflict. However, they can elevate social and political strife to a more intelligent, potentially constructive level—especially if they are linked to long-range goal setting. Today the very complexity of issues inherently provides a greater variety of bargainable points. Yet the political system is not structured to take advantage of this fact. Potential alliances and trades go unnoticed—thus unnecessarily raising tensions between groups while further straining and overloading existing political institutions. Finally, we may well need to empower minorities to regulate more of their own affairs, and encourage them to formulae long-range goals. We might, for example, help the people in a specific neighbourhood, in a well-defined subculture, or in an ethic group, to set up their own youth courts under the supervision of the state, to do so. Such institutions would build community and identity, and contribute to law and order, while relieving the overburdened government institutions of unnecessary work. We may, however, find it necessary to go far beyond such reformist measures. To strengthen minority representation in a political system designed for a de-massified society, we may even eventually have to elect at least some of our officials in the oldest way of all: by drawing lots. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Thus some people have seriously suggested choosing members of the legislature or parliament of the future the way we choose jury members or armies today. Why is it that important life and death decision can be made by the people serving on juries, but decisions on how much money should be spent on child care centers and defense spending are reserved for their “representatives”? The existing political arrangements systematically shortchange minorities. Poor people, young people, smart but inarticulate people, and many other groups are similarly disadvantaged. Nor is this merely true of the United States of American. Nonetheless, between 50 and 60 percent of the American Congress should be chosen at random from the American people in much the same way they are pressed into military service through drafts when they are deemed necessary. Startling as the suggestion is at first blush, it forces us to consider seriously whether randomly chosen representatives would (or could) do worse than those chosen through today’s methods. If we let ourselves imagine freely for the moment, we can come up with many other surprising alternatives. Indeed, we now have the techniques necessary to choose far more truly representative samples than the jury system or the draft, with their preferential exclusions, ever did. We can build an even more innovative congress or parliament of the future—and do it, paradoxically, with less disturbance of tradition. We do not have to pick a group of people by lot and literally trundle them off, like so many Mr. Smiths, to Washington, London, Bonn, Paris, or Moscow. We could, if we chose, keep our elected representatives, allowing them, however, to cast only 50 percent of the votes on any issue, while turning the other 50 percent of the votes over to a random sample of the public. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
By using computers, advanced telecommunications, and polling methods, it has become simple not only to select a random sample of the public but to keep updating that sample from day to day and to provide it with up-to-the-minute information on the issues at hand. When a law is needed, the full complement of traditionally elected representatives, meeting together in the traditional way, under the Capitol dome in Westminster, or in the Bundeshaus or the Diet building, could deliberate and discuss, amend and frame the legislation. However, when the time for decision arrived, the elected representatives would cast only 50 percent of the votes, while the current random sample—who are not in the capital but geographically dispersed in their own homes or offices—would electronically cast the remaining 50 percent. Such a system would not merely provide a more representative process than “representative” government ever did, but would strike a devastating blow at the special interest groups and lobbies who infest the corridors of most parliaments. Such groups would have to lobby the people—not just a few elected officials. Going even further, one might conceive voters in a district electing not a single individual as their “representative” but, in fact, a random sample of the population. This random sample could “serve in Congress” directly—as though it were a person—its opinions statistically tallied into votes. Or it could choose a single individual, in turn, to “represent” it, instructing one how to vote. Or the permutations offered by the new communications technologies are endless and extraordinary. Once we recognized that our present institutions and constitutions are obsolete and we begin searching for alternatives, all sorts of breathtaking political options, never before possible, suddenly open up to us. If we are to govern societies in the twenty-first century, we ought to at least consider the technologies and conceptual tools that are made available to us right now. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
What is important here are not these specific suggestions. By working at it together, we can no doubt come up with far better ideas, easier to implement, less drastic in design. What is important is the general path we choose to travel. We can fight a losing battle to suppress or submerge today’s burgeoning minorities, or we can reconstitute our political systems to accommodate the new diversity. We can continue to use the crude, bludgeonlike tools of Third Wave political systems, or we can design sensitive new tools for a minority-based democracy of tomorrow. As the Fourth Wave de-massifies the old Third Wave mass society, its pressures, I believe, will dictate that choice. For if politics were “pre-majoritarian” during the First Wave, and “majoritarian” during the Second, they are likely to be “mini-majoritarian” tomorrow—a fusion of majority rule with minority power. Wealth has a future. Despite all today’s profound upsets and reversals, chances are the World will create more, not less, wealthy in the years today com. However, that is not universally regarded as a good thing. From the ancients like Aristotle who regarded the pursuit of wealth beyond barest self-sufficiency as unnatural, to nineteenth-century socialists and anarchists who saw wealth as misappropriated property, to many of today’s environmental fundamentalists who preach “voluntary simplicity” and regard “consumerism” as a curse, wealth has a bad name. Unlike a defendant in an American courtroom, wealth does not enjoy a presumption of innocence. Yet wealth, in itself, is neutral. Which is why, in these pages, wealth is innocent until proven guilty. What matters is who has it and has not got it and what purposes it serves. Wealth is above all an accumulation of possibilities. Of course, certain forms of wealth are more or less universally regarded ad “good.” Health. A strong and loving family. Respect from those we respect. Few would deny that these are wealth, even if they do not easily fit into the calculations of economists. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
In everyday usage, however, the term usually refers, all too narrowly, to financial assets, and often carries a connotation of excess. For some, wealth may mean having bit more than their subjectively perceived need, whatever that is. For others no amount suffices. Among the less affluent, matters are less subjective. For the mother whose child is starving, a daily handful of rice may be wealth beyond measure. Whatever else it means, therefore, wealth, at least as used here, does not just mean a BMW M760i xDrive Sedan. Nor is wealth synonymous with money, as popular misconception might have it. Money is only one of many tokens or symbolic expression of wealth. In fact, wealth can sometimes buy things money cannot. To understand the future of wealth—our own or anybody else’s—in the fullest sense, we need to start with its very origin: Desire. The meaning of wealth—desire may reflect anything from a desperate need to a transitory want. In either case, wealth is anything that satisfies the craving. It applies balm to the itch. It may, in fact, gratify more than one desire at a time. We may want a touch of beauty on our living room wall. A painting, even an inexpensive reproduction, may provide a small surge of pleasure every time we pause to look at it. The same work of art may simultaneously fulfill our desire to impress visitors with our splendid good taste or our social importance. However, wealth can also be a bank account, a bicycle, a hoard of food or a health insurance policy. In fact, we can roughly define wealth as any possession, shared or not, that has what economists call “utility”—it provides us with some form of well-being or can be traded for some other form of wealth that does. In any case, wealth is the child of desire. Which is yet another reason some people detest the very thought of it. Managers of desire—some religions, for example, stigmatize desire. Ascetic beliefs propagate passivity in the face of poverty and tell us to seek happiness by reducing, rather than fulfilling, our desires. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Want less. Live without. For eons, people in Oakland, California did just that—in the midst of unbelievable poverty and misery. By contrast, Protestantism, when it arose in the West, sent, if anything, the opposite message. Instead of suppressing material desire, it preached hard work, thrift, and virtue, promising that if you follow these guidelines, God would help you help yourself to fulfill your desires. The West very largely adopted those values and grew wealthy. It also invented that perpetual desire machine—advertising—to keep generating more and still more desires. Many in China believe, “to get rich is glorious”—this attitude is the reach for China’s recent successful, the ideal of wealth has jilted them out of poverty. In the United States of America, TV screes blare financial advice. Ads for stockbrokers and publications like Money and The Wall Street Journal erupt from the screen. Informercial promise ways to save on taxes, make a stock-market killing, strike it rich in real estate and retire to you own sunny island. An enormous barrage of messages legitimatizes and promotes desire. In was calculated that the total advertising expenditure in North America in 2021 amounted about to about $300 billion U.S.D. However, the spending increased by 19 percent that year. The total advertising expenditure in Japan amounted to 6.16 trillion yen ($54 billion USD) in 2020, which represented a decrease of about 780 billion yen ($68 million USD) compared to the previous year. In shorth, whether through asceticism, ideology, religion, advertising, or other means, whether consciously or not, the elites in all societies manage desire—the starting point of wealth creation. Obviously, just pumping up the desire level—or, for that matter, extolling greed, which is different from either wealth or desire—will not necessarily make anyone rich. Cultures that promote desire and pursue wealth do not necessarily attain it. On the other hand, cultures that preach the virtues of poverty usually get precisely what they pray for. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
O my brothers of the wilderness, my little brothers, may the Master of Life who made you, in the form of the quarry provide you with a forever home; so there may be peace between the World and thy spirit. “The [empty-headed] fool has said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable deeds; there is none that does good or right. The Lord looed down from Heaven upon the children of humans to see if there were any who understood, dealt wisely, and sought after God, inquiring for and of Him and requiring Him [of vital necessity], reports Psalm 14.1-2. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast kept us in life, and hast preserved us, and enabled us to reach this season. We kindle these lights to commemorate the miraculous deliverance and the wonders which Thou didst perform for our fathers through Thy holy priests. During all the blessed days of life, lights are sacred and are not to be used for ordinary purposes; we are only to behold them. We kindle these lights to offer thanks and praise to Thy name for Thy miracles, Thy deliverances and Thy wonders. I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains; from whence shall my help come? My help cometh from the Lord, who made Heaven and Earth. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved, he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, He that keepeth America doth neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is thy keeper; the Lord is thy shade upon they right hand. The Sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the Moon by night. The Lord shall keep thee from all evil; He shall keep thy soul. The Lord shall guard thy going out and thy coming in, from this time forth and forever. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; He maketh me lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul; He guideth me in straight paths for His name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; Thou hast anointed my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life’ and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
Two things to note about this wonderful photo from our Meadows Residence 2 model…
✨ 2022 will see the rise of green as a neutral!
✨ Statement walls will always be one of our favorite ways to decorate. They say you found someone new, but that won’t stop my loving you.
Guess I could find another home, too. But I don’t want no one but you. How could I leave without regret?
A Cresleigh Home is not easy to forget. I long to know the feeling of you sweet embrace, but when we are face to face I just look at you. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/residence-2/
Ready to see what you do when you move into your #CresleighHome at #PlumasRanch!
The Effect of Witchcraft or Devils
One must recognize that over the course of centuries the ideas about witches and their activity have changed. The medieval notion of witchcraft is far different from that of the Christian Bible, and today’s self-styled witches usually resemble the ancient concept more than that of the Middle Ages. The Old Testament word which denotes a witch is kashaph. It is used in various forms, and most often is translated “sorcerer,” “sorcery,” or “sorceries. This means that a witch was a person who used magical formulas, incantations, or mutterings to exercise control over the unseen World. Other kinds of occultism, though equally condemned, were not regarded in the Old Testament as witchcraft. The individual who sought to communicate with the dead was called a necromancer, and this practice was not synonymous with sorcery. Similarly, foretelling the future by means of “reading” the livers of animals, the signs in the Heavens, the flight of birds, or the movements of particles in a liquid, though also forbidden, were not considered equivalent to witchcraft. Strictly speaking, the term “sorcerer” or “witch” referred to any person who summoned invisible powers to help in casting spells or performing feats of magic. It is not easy for us to accurately define and completely separate the specific practices Moses names. In general, it may be said that the enchanter (worker of magic), the witch (incantation-using sorcerer), the charmer (snake-handling hypnotist), and the wizard (the psychically gifted person who appeared to possess extra-sensory perception) came under the general Old Testament heading of witchcraft. In medieval times the concept of sorcery was different from that of the Old Testament. A witch was considered to be a person who sold her soul to Satan in exchange for magical powers. She was said to engage in pleasures of the flesh with demons and people thought she cast evil spells upon animals and people. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
These witches were always looked upon as dangerous and malevolent, while those of the Biblical times, through practicing a craft forbidden by God, often were regarded by the heathen as benefactors of society. The medieval idea that some women actual sold themselves to the devil led to events which are a dark blot in church history. The combination of superstition, cruelty and mass hysteria brought about the persecution and execution of many women on charges of witchcraft. Some historians estimated that in Europe alone more than nine million suspected witches were put to death upon the flimsiest of evidence. Today we realize that the vast majority of these unfortunates never made a pact with the devil, and did not possess magical powers, and did not harm anyone. Most of them were naïve women who came under suspicion because their words and actions departed from what was considered the norm. Some no doubt were brain-damaged, while others suffered from neuroses or psychotic conditions. The concept of witchcraft today differs in some details from both that of Biblical and medieval times. In contrast to the sorcerers of antiquity who believed in many gods, a large percentage of today’s witches are not deeply religious and do not consider their powers to be attributable to the supernatural. Most of these self-proclaimed witches do not speak of making a covenant with Satan, although this dedication to the devil is basic to black magic, as we shall see later. Contemporary witches do insist, however, that they are able to contact and utilize powers that come from the unseen World. Witchcraft today emulates that of the pre-Christian era in many respects. Its practitioners often organize into covens, a group of six males and six female witches with a high priest or priestess. They meet monthly at the time of the full moon, and at eight other festivals called sabbats throughout the year. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
The Halloween sabbat—first the witches remove their clothes and bathe in salt water to purify themselves. Then, still nude (sky-clad, as they call it) they descend to the basement and step inside a 9-foot circle that is drawn about them with a 400-year-old sword by Mrs. Buckland (wife of Raymond Buckland, a Britisher with a Ph.D. in anthropology), who is known in the craft as Lady Rowen. A bewitching ambience is provided by music from a tape recorder and incense burned in a brass censor. Once inside the circle, the witches sing, chant, dance with broomsticks, in commemoration of an ancient fertility rite, drink tea and wine, and listen to the high priestess read from the Book of Shadows. The ceremony ends after Lady Rowen, dressed in only a silver crown, bracelet, necklace, and green leather garter belt, takes a horned helmet and places it on the head of her husband, the high priest, who is known as Robat. This signifies that power has been transferred from the high priestess who reigns during the six months of summer, to the high priest, who rules during the six winter six months. It is obvious that this is a return to ancient pagan practices, and that witchcraft its own religious system. It even has its own Bible, called The Book of Shadows, a compilation of rituals and chants drawn from various books of magic by which the practitioners produce their spells and charms. Witchcraft is therefore a religion that denies or distorts holy Scriptures, ignores or perverts the doctrine of Christ, and offers no deliverance from the guilt and power of sin. However, the very existence of magic is strongly contested. Psychiatry sees the question of magic as being the symptom of mental illness. Psychology would say that when people are subjected to magic it is only the result of an incorrect upbringing, and that such people are superstitiously maladjusted and have a false conception of life. Liberal theology would even, in its modern form, regard magic simply as a system of traditional customs and ideas. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
The ethical character of magic is also a battle ground of opinion. Some praise it as a gift of God while other see in it just neutral forces of nature which can be used either for good or evil. Again others, especially the Christians, know of the demonic character of magic. Why are events involving magic so difficult to judge? Going back to our definition we see that magic is practised through extrasensory forces being called into play. Our five senses have only a limited range. On the physical level people are ready to admit this, since science furnishes us with ample proof of the existence of areas that are beyond our human senses. However, in the spiritual realm such a mathematical demonstration is not possible. Hence the shortsighted rationalist simply deny the very existence of the divine as well as the demonic. We will point out how these extrasensory forces reveal themselves by means of a few example. The two Seiler brothers in Ottenheim, Baden, run a non-professional medical practice. One of the brothers put himself into a trance and in this state, he is able to identify diseases of the patients. The process is always successful. In Alsace a Catholic priest heals by magic. His nickname is Father Slipper. The reason behind this is that all those who desire his help must send him one of their slippers. Through concentrating on the slippers, he can discover what is wrong with the people. During counselling sessions in Austria, I happened to come across a so-called urine taster. The patient’s urine was not examined medically to discover the albumen, sugar and hemoglobin content etcetera, but was used as a psychometrical means of contact for a clairvoyant diagnosis. Such urine tasters are also known in Switzerland, France, Germany and other European countries. The strange thing is that in spite of such curious methods the diagnosis often proves to be correct. These magic healing methods depend on mediumistic and extrasensory forces! Herein lies the reason for their success. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
In the definition the various aims of magic were mentioned. Whereas spiritism seeks to communicate with and to dominate the spirit World, magic enlarges this aim to cover people, animals, plants, and the material World. The black magician endeavours to subjugate and to dominate one’s enemy through magic. Some examples of this will follow later. Others try through magic to influence the animal and the plant Worlds as we see in the next examples. A man dabbled in black magic for many years. He specialized in stealing mile from the neighbouring farmer. He would tie a towel to a door knob, then murmur his magic phrases and squeeze the milk out of the towel. I have heard of similar examples in my counseling work, but was unable to investigate them personally. A missionary told me that on several occasions when she had tried to visit a magician some wild animals had approached her. She felt at once that demonic powers were at work. She had commanded the animals to go in the name of Jesus. They had gone. After this she heard that the magician had boasted that he was able to send out wild animals to kill any foreigner who came to see him. A young man, who a doctor described as schizophrenic, confessed to me during counselling that he had the ability to kill small animals at some distance away from him, merely through using his powers of magic. In Toggenburg, Switzerland, on several occasions in my counselling sessions people confessed that they had the power to kill horses, cows and pigs with the help of black magic. In reply to my question how they had received this ability, they told me that they had subscribed themselves with their own blood to the devil. One actual case of animal killing was examined by some scientists but they could find no natural cause of death. A farmer who had had several bad crops in a row was given the following advice by a magician. He should place three grains of corn under his tongue while sowing, then, having sowed the field, say a magic charm and end by calling on the names of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Calling on the Holy Trinity would then encourage growth and protect the crops from bad weather. As a matter of fact, the farmer was convinced that the charming of his field had been beneficial. Since that time through, his desire to read the Word of God disappeared, ad besides this there was an enormous increase in accidents in his stables. It is not only the organic World, the World of living creatures, that falls within the sphere and influence of magic, but also the inorganic World of dead matter. The following are some examples of this. For years three sisters slept in a single room. From time-to-time stones would fall from the ceiling of this room. When the eldest sister became engaged and finally left the house, this rain of stones stopped. I head of the incident from one of the sisters. Such magical falls of stones are not so rare as one might imagine. I have on several occasions had eyewitness accounts of them. For many years, a man practiced black magic. One of these specialties which he often demonstrated was thrusting a knife into the ground. He would murmur some magical words and several pints of blood would then come out of the place where the knife had been stuck in. The sister of this man was also an expert in the same field. The question is, was this just a clever trick or a genuine piece of magic? This case is very reminiscent of a fakir trick. Nevertheless similar incidents have been reported to me in my pastoral work. In the sphere of magic some of the most unreasonable things take place. Yet even if it were simply all a case of superstition and imagination, if it had no real foundation, the area would still be an abyss of human aberration and need, demanding enlightenment and conselling help. Other questions arising from the definition will come under discussion later. The Christian Bible presents demons as spiritual beings or spirit personalities. The specific attribute of “spirit” is incorporeality of immateriality. “A spirit hath not flesh and bones,” reports Luke 24.39; that is, demons do not possess a material body. #RandolphHaris 7 of 18
On the other hand, they can act upon the human body, as well as the human soul and spirit. They are capable of entering and assuming control of a human body, speaking and acting through it from time to time and even possessing it, as if it were their own property. That demons are spirits is clear from numerous references in the Gospels. “When the even was come, they brought unto him in many that were possessed with demons: and He cast out the spirits with his word,” Matthew 8.16. When the seventy returned and joyfully declared, “Lord, even the demons are subject unto us,” reports Luke 10.17, or Lord replied, “Nevertheless in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you,” reports Luke 10.20. “The demon” who went out of the lunatic boy, as described in Matthew 17.18, is also called a “foul spirit” in Mark 9.25, The Apostle Paul emphatically declares that Satan and his demons are spirits. In describing the believers’ conflict against the powers of darkness, he indicated that the intense warfare “is not again flesh and blood” but against evil spirits, described as “principalities, powers, rulers of the darkness,” and “spiritual hosts of wickedness in the Heavenly places,” Ephesians 6.12. The Apostle John also indicates that demons are spirits. He describes the three unclean spirits issuing from the mouth of the dragon, of the best, and of the false prophet, as the “spirits of demons,” reports Revelation 16.14. The expression may be interpreted either as a common genitive of descriptions, defining the spirits as “demonic,” or better as a genitive of apposition, more particularly defining the general term “spirits,” which may be either good or bad, as bad, or “demon-spirits.” The fact that demons are spirits, and thus immaterial and incorporeal, does not in the least suggest that they lack individuality, with all the elements of personality such as will, feelings, and intellect. Like all God’s creatures, they were constituted with self-determining choice. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Created originally sinless, demons joined Satan in chosen course of rebellion. Their decision was deliberate and in the full knowledge of the infinite goodness and holiness of their Creator. This is why they are incorrigible and confirmed in their depravity with no hope of repentance or change. Like Satan’s, their choice is irretrievable; their doom is sealed (Luke 8.31; Revelation 20.1-2 and 10-15). That demons are individuals is attested by their intelligent and voluntary actions. They think, they speak, they act (Acts 19.15-16) through spiritistic medium or through a person over whom they have acquired control. In the case of the demon possessed, the domination is almost complete (Marl 5.10; Luke 4.34). In the case of demon influence, their control is less complete and direct (1 Timothy 4.1-2; 1 John 4.1-2). Because demons are spirit personalities, they can act upon and influence human’s body and mind. Counselors, parapsychologists and psychiatrists who deny or ignore this sphere of reality render themselves unequipped to deal with patients who may be suffering from occult oppression and subjection in a day when disturbances of both mind and body from this source are becoming more numerous and more pronounced. In the following tale the ghostly portion is rather dwarfed by the strong fairy element which appears in it, and, as we have already shown, many witchcraft cases in Scotland were closely interwoven with the older belief in the “good people”; Lord Orrery, when giving the account to Baxter, considered it to be “the effect of Witchcraft or Devils.” The reader is free to take what view one likes of the matter! The Lord Orrery mentioned therein is probably Roger, the second Earl, who Lodge in his Peerage describes as being “of a serious and contemplative disposition, which led him to seek retirement.” If this identification be correct the following event must have occurred between 1679 and 1682, during which years the Earl held the title. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The butler of a gentleman living near the Earl was sent to buy a pack of cards. As he was crossing a field, he was surprised to see a company of people sitting down at a table loaded with all manner of good things, of which they invited him to partake, and no doubt he would have accepted had not someone whispered in his ear, “Do nothing this company invites you to,” upon which he refused. After this they fell to dancing, and playing on musical instruments, then to work, in both of which occupations they desired the butler to join, but to no purpose. The night following the friendly spirit came to his bedside and warned him not to stir out of doors the next day, for if he did so the mysterious company would obtain possession of him. He remained indoors the greater part of that day, but towards evening he crossed the threshold, and hardly had he done so when a rope was cast about his waist, and he was forcibly dragged away with great swiftness. A horseman coming towards him espied both the man and the two ends of the rope, but could see nothing by pulling. By catching hold of one end, he succeeded in stopping the man’s headlong course, through a punishment for so doing he received a smart blow on his arm from the others. This came to the ears of the Earl of Orrery, who requested the butler’s master to send him to his house, which the latter did. There were then staying with the Earl several persons of quality, two Bishops, and the celebrated Healer, Valentine Greatrakes. Here the malice of the spirits of fairies manifested itself in a different manner. The unfortunate man was suddenly perceived to rise from the ground, and the united efforts of Greatrakes and another were unable to check his upward motion—in fact all that the spectators could do was to keep running under him to protect him from being hurt if the invisible power should suddenly relax its hold. At length he fell, but was caught by them before he reached the ground, and so received no harm. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
That night the spectre, which had twice proved so friendly, appeared at his bedside with a wooden platter full of some grey liquid, which it bade him drink, as he had brought it to him to cure him of two sorts of fits he was subject to. He refused to drink it, and it would appear from another part f the narration that his refusal was based on the advice of the two Bishops, who he had consulted in the matter. At this the spirit was very angry, but told him he had a kindness for him, and that is he drank the juice of plantain-roots he would be cured of one sort of fit, but that he should suffer the other one till his death. On asking his visitant who he was, he replied that he was the ghost of a man who had been dead seven year, and who in the days of his flesh had led a loose life, and was therefore condemned to be born about in a restless condition with the strange company until the Day of Judgment. He added that “if the butler had acknowledged God in all His ways, he had not suffered such things by their means,” and reminded him that he had not said his payers the day before he met the company in the field; and thereupon vanished. Had this story rested alone on the evidence of the butler the “two sorts of fits” would have been more than sufficient to account for it, but what are we to say to the fact that all the main points of the narrative were borne out by the Earl while Mr. Greatrakes (according to Dr. More, the author of Collections of Philosophical Writings) declared that he was actually an eye-witness of the man’s being carried in the air above their heads. By now I see spiritualism in a very different light. However, many people think that spirit phenomena are accomplished by trickery, sleight of hand, or black magic. I agree that many mysterious happenings associated with prominent psychics and small-town fortune-tellers are hoaxes—perhaps 85 percent of them, but I believe the rest are actual deeds of evil spirits counterfeiting the power of the Holy Spirit. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
At one of her golden skeleton key séances, to prove that there was no hocus-pocus involved, the control spirit sent the key sailing between the rungs of the chair on which Mrs. Winchester was sitting. Since she was in her own her, she knew there were no props and no strings were attached. The question, then, is just what are these spirits and how do these spiritualist phenomena occur? Some believe they are part of Satan’s strategy to deceive Christians and to enslave those who as yet do not know God. Many Christians are drawn into spiritualism because they assume all spiritual phenomena are produced by God—these people simply may not know their Christian Bibles. I have no adequate explanation of the marvels produced by spirits…but I cannot explain Christ’s miracles, either. However, since everything is energy in one form or another—this is a basic fact of physics—our bodies, too, are composed of energy. I believe that Satan, who is the temporary prince in control of this World (Ephesians 2.2; 6.12-17), is able to convert body energy that is yielded to him into a spiritual force. This spirit then manifests itself in the bizarre happenings associated with séances. I do affirm the reality associated with spiritualist phenomena. Who are the spirits that attend séances? Are they spirits of deceased people, as they claim? The Christian Bible teaches that the spirits of the departed dead do not become either angels or demon spirits. These spirits are either with the Lord, waiting for the day of resurrection of their bodies (1 Thessalonians 4.14-17), or they are in hell. There is much evidence in Scripture that the spirits who appear at séances are rebel angels. Jude 6 speaks about “angels which kept not their first estate.” Many Bible scholars interpret Ezekiel 28.17, “I will cast thee to the ground,” as indicating that the Earth is the realm of Satan’s powerful operations, with the help of his fallen colleagues, the demons. Satan is called the “god of this World,” in 2 Corinthians 4.4. And Christians are under attack by “rulers…. powers…World forces of darkness,” reports Ephesians 6.12. God tells us that hell was “created for the devil and his angels (demons)” reports Matthew 25.41. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
It is important to realize that the spirit World exists as another dimension all around us, not in some far-off place. When the medium at a séance enters a trance, a control spirit takes over and allegedly introduces the spirit of a dead person. In reality, the unseen visitor is a “familiar spirit” who intimately knows the dead person. Apparently these familiar spirits accompany a person throughout life, becoming so well acquainted that they can convincingly imitate the dead person’s mannerisms and knowledge of personal details when called upon at a séance. In this way even close relatives are ticked into believing they are hearing their dead loved one. I believe this was what happened to the late James A. Pike. He went to several mediums who told him they had contracted his dead son, Jim, Jr., and that father and son could communicate in a séance. Mr. Pike supposedly did so on a number of occasions, as he described in his book, The Other Side. Actually Mr. Pike talked to a spirit who was familiar with his son. This spirit impersonated his son so well and favourably that Mr. Pike overcame his remorse about his son’s suicide, and looked forward to rejoining his son. Bishop Pike was a rather easy convert to spiritualism, since he, like the spiritualists, rejected the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, and if Jesus is not God, he cannot be man’s Saviour—nor does man need a Saviour in Mr. Pike’s view. Mr. Pike’s third wife, Diane, was a secretary in a Methodist church before she married Mr. Pike. Her Christian beliefs were shallow also, as revealed in her book, Search. She describes a vision given her while her husband was dying in the Israeli wilderness, and she says she saw him being welcomed in the sky by Christ and a “host of witnesses.” She confesses: “The strangest part for me was to see so literally what I had supposed to be symbolic expressions of meaning.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Diane Pike, and hundreds of thousands of other people, have difficulty believing the extraordinary claims of the Christian Bible, yet they unhesitatingly accept the vagaries of personal fancy or the mysterious manifestations of spirits. This reminds us of the prophecy in 1 Timothy 4.1 about “giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of demons.” A well-known parapsychologist, Hans Holzer, tells in his book, The Psychic World of Bishop Pike, that he made contact with Mr. Pike through a medium named Ethel Meyers. The television publicity linked to the release of the book excited World interest in communicating with the dead. The familiar spirit contacted at a séance will say remarkable things about the dead person to connive loved one that they really are speaking to the one who has departed to the “other side.” The spirits will even say things long forgotten by the listener. The spirits Mrs. Winchester encountered as séances were, for the most part, very moralistic. They encouraged her not to smoke or drink or do anything nor do anything that would harm her mind and body. Ministers during the 19th century were told to preach morality, good manners, and civic pride. There were ministers who actually has spirit messages taken down by their secretaries and then used them from the pulpit! The spirits often talked about an ethical Jesus, but never about a Saviour who died a sacrificial death for sins. In contrast to the high and moral and ethical tone of the séances in the Winchester mansion, Mrs. Winchester attended some where the spirits were blasphemous and sensual. Spiritualist call them Earthbound demons, and they served to reinforce Mrs. Winchester’s conviction that the spirits in her Blue Séance Room were truly from God. However, some believe that Satan uses blasphemous séances as another subtle trick to convince people that there are “good” spirits and “bad” spirits, and that Mrs. Winchester and others were indeed communicating with God or their loved ones. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Supposedly even the spirits who tell people to improve themselves morally and spiritually were doing so to gain their allegiance for themselves and keep them from God. Even mediums are often unaware that they are dealing with the kingdom of Satan. Certain “psychic” persons, having developed their powers, may very well be able to make accurate or partially accurate revelations about coming events. These clairvoyance, mystics, readers, astrologer, or fortune-tellers use various means to foretell the future for individuals. Usually the revelation will be in very general terms, but sometimes it is specific enough to make people shiver after the predicted event has occurred and they remember in awe: “She predicted it would happen!” As is has been said, it is possible that much astrology and fortune-telling is sometimes of satanic spiritualism. Some people like Jeane Dixon believe her gifts of prophecy and visions are from God, but one no one is willing to acknowledge these supernatural gifts could come from Satan. Mrs. Winchester who built the Winchester Mansion which is now 4-stories tall and over 25,000 square feet had a 13-piece tableware set made entirely of pure gold. The set included goblets, plates, chopsticks, and cutlery, each engraved with a daisy which symbolized eternal youth and health. How magnificent they were! However, they say Mrs. Winchester starved herself to death. She was so besotted by the loss of her precious family members that she forgot—absolutely forgot to eat. There was certainly a glance of mysterious around, they also found the butler dead, seated at the table, with a meal in from of him, as he held a gold fork, which was made for a king. There was an odour of sanctity about the affair—a whiff of air from the land of the ghosts. Before the Winchester mansion was emptied out, one of the movers decided to take advantage of this fancy dinner set and some of the delicious food in the ice box. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Jed sat down to a nice steak dinner in the venetian dining room and clarence joined him. As Jed was about to smother his steak with steak sauce, he felt his wrist grasped by—well, by what felt uncommonly like an invisible hand. He was so startled. He dropped the steak sauce and drew his hand back, and was conscious of the slight detaining pressure of unseen fingers. Of course, it was hallucination, but it seemed so real, and was so expected, that—well, how could he not cut into this tender, juicy steak. As Jed was grappling with his meal, it must not have looked very appetizing. However, he felt an unusual degree of excitement—sort of feeling of do or die. Intending to keep complete control over his muscles, he held his knife in his right hand and his fork in his left. His index finger extended down the back of the utensils, as he used the fork to pin through the meat and, with the knife he cut enough for a single bite. Jed realized that clenching the knife and fork in his fist was not classy enough for such a fine dinner service in the beautiful mansion, which seem to require the guest to eat properly and enjoy their ambiance. He was just about to cut another piece of steak, when that unseen grasp fastened on his wrist. He paused with something of the feeling which induces the wrestler to pause before entering on the veritable tug of war. For one thing, he was desirous to satisfy himself as to the nature of the grasp—what it was that seemed to grasp him. It seemed to be a hand. The fingers went over the back of his wrist, and the thumb beneath. The fingers were long and thin—it was altogether a slender hand. However, it seemed to be a man’s hand, and an old man’s hand at that. The skin was tough and wrinkled, clammy and cold. On the little finger there was a ring, and on the first, abut the region of the first joint, appeared to be something an opened wound. It was anything but a beautiful hand, it was altogether too attenuated and clawlike, and it was yellow with age. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
He said, “This is a devil or a ghost!” He moved his hand toward the plate to try to eat without the gold utensils. His hand instantly was grasped. With his left hand, Jed made several passes in the air up and down, behind and before, in every direction so far as he could. It was met with no resistance. There seemed to be nothing tangible but those invisible fingers which grasped his wrist—and he moved his left had towards the streak. That is when something slapped the steak out of his hand. “It is enough. Indeed it is too much. This ribaldry must cease,” he said. Jed was sure it was a ghost. He rose from his seat, and said, “If there is any other person with me in this room, may I asked that person to let me hear his voice, or hers? Just speak one word.” Not a sound. For some reason, almost contemptuous coldness fired his blood. He became suddenly enraged. “I shall not leave! Do you think I am going to be fooled by a conjuring trick which would disgrace a shilling séance? Drive out of the mansion at this time of night by a ghost! And such a ghost! If it were something like a ghost one would not mind; but a fool of a ghost like this!” His passion was ridiculous—children even. However, then the circumstances were exasperating—usually so, one might plead. He was standing three or food feet from the table. Jed dashed forward. As he did so a had was fastened on his throat. Instantly it was joined by another. They gripped him tightly. They madded Jed. With a madman’s fury, he still pressed forward towards that steak. He might as well had fought with fate. They clutched him as with bands of steel, and flung him to the ground. When he recovered consciousness, he found he was laying on the floor. That was a night of dreams. Jed did not know if her was awake or sleeping, but all sorts of strange things presented themselves to his mental eye. He could not shut them from his sight. One figure was prominent in all he saw—the figure of a man. “It must be Mrs. Winchester’s late butler, but how?” Jed said to himself. He was a lean old man, and what Jed noticed chiefly were his hands. Such ugly hands! In some fantastical way he seemed to be contending with them all through the night. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
And yet in the morning when he woke—for Jed did wake up, and that from as sweet refreshing sleep as one might wish to have—it was all gone. The dinner service, the steak, the dinning room table, the chairs—all the furniture was gone. For now, the idea of there being anything supernatural going on in the mansion was funny. The sun was shinning into the great, unfurnished room. He did not realize he had died. As Jed walked around the room, he found a menu. The first course was Vermicelli soup, prepared with tomatoes, onion, and garlic. The second course was baked salmon and oysters. The Entrée was braised beef with broccoli, cauliflower, potatoes, and carrots. With baked bread, a thick gravy and Yorkshire pudding. The final course was Neapolitan cakes with a layer of yellow, chocolate, n strawberry cake with glazed butter cream and coffee. The purpose of a Victorian banquet was to flaunt status, and the best way to do this was through an elaborate expensive dinner. Courses were brought out and carved in from of the hostess, then passed around to each guest at the dinner table. Maybe Jed should have allowed the spirit to stop him from eating. Of course, at all Victorian parties, guest had to be invited. Perhaps if Jed had just taken heed from the spirits, he would not be another of the Winchester’s ghost in the House Built by Spirits. Divine revelation uniformly views demons or evil spirits as denizens of the World of evil supernaturalism operating above the natural law. Spirits are not normally subject to human visibility or other sensory perception. Demons have superhuman intellect and it is accompanied by superphysical strength. However, the superphysical strength of demons is not limited to their physical energy they impart to their victim. Their power is broad enough to cause occult oppression of mind and body. They can produce physical disabilities and sickness unrelated to organic disorders and which medicine or natural therapy cannot alleviate it. Perhaps the most terrible power of demons is to derange the mind by upsetting the nervous system. In this way they can afflict the body with a psychosomatic disease. Demons are aware of the close relation between physical and mental health. By jangling the nerves and the emotions, they can cause mental instability (Luke 8.26-36), producing suicidal mania (Mark 9.22). Their purpose is to drive their occult-enslaved victims to destruction. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Winchester Mystery House
🚨ONE WEEK TILL FEBRUARY FLASHLIGHT TOURS START 🚨 Come visit Mrs. Winchester’s beautiful mansion. This self-guided evening tour allows brave guests to explore the dark halls of the mansion while hearing unnerving stories of the home’s haunted history…. with nothing but a flashlight 🔦👀Tickets are going FAST!
Tours from 7 pm – 11 pm on Saturdays in February. A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
🎟 link in bio. ow.ly/SLJ150Hmo0x
We Wanted it to Last Forever—We Made Promises
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Life often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong. The time is three or four billion years ago—one or two billion years after the Earth was formed. The scene is the open sea; it covers most of the Earth’s surface, just as it will continue to do for eons to come. The principal characters are the coacervates: small, membrane-enclosed bags of organic and inorganic compounds, including catalytic substances that contribute a high level of chemical activity to what would otherwise be inert, uninteresting drops of oily material. The plot, like that of all good dramatic productions, is based on conflict. Indeed, only a small fraction of our initial cast of characters will survive to the end of the play; they rest must die. Despite the superficial similarity of the coacervates, the conflict is essentially a struggle among different “species.” A particular series of reactions that happened to develop in primordial pool number 543 resulted in the formation of droplets of chemically active compounds of adequate stability to work their way to the open sea and there continue their metabolic process. However, a substantially different set of reactions had occurred in pool number 279, and this had led to injection into the ocean of an essentially different species of coacervate. Similarly for pools 59, 176, 798, and all the rest. The tremendous variety of combinations permitted by the basic versatility of organic and inorganic substances had resulted in a correspondingly wide variety of species among the initial cast of character in the drama to consider. As befits the relative simple nature of the members of the cast, the issues that sets them into conflict is a simple one—food. Initially the problem is not serious, for only a few coacervate individuals are widely scattered throughout vast expanses of ocean. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Under these circumstances their ability to grow and reproduce their kind is limited only by their own internal chemistry and a level of concentration of organic and inorganic nutrients in the surrounding water that is insignificantly influenced by the existence of other coacervates. Eventually, however, all this changes. A time comes when the absorption by the growing coacervate population of the nutrients of the ocean is extensive enough to start cutting down on the density of the available food. It is then that the interspecies conflict begins in earnest. For those types of coacervates that have the most effective metabolism, in the sense of being able to assimilate the available nutrients to grow and reproduce most rapidly, then begin to starve the less hardy species out of existence. From the beginning of the conflict, the tactics employed by the successful species are designed to make effective use of the numerical superiority they achieved in the fast-growing early years, while there was still enough food for all. When the era of overpopulation sets in, the continued eating and proliferating of these hungry hordes cause matters to go rapidly from bad to worse, and what started as a minor recession in the coacervate economy quickly becomes a disastrous depression. Of course, all species are affected by the growing food shortage, for each faces extinction if its birth rate falls below its death rate. And this can occur, be cause the decreasing availability of food curtails the birth rate more than it does the death rate. Ultimately, the small and undernourished coacervate droplets of a slowly growing species must get broken up by agitation, collision, and wear, with their contents spilling into the sea to provide food for the more hardy types. Thus the plot becomes clear. As our imaginary play continues for the millions of years that must elapse between opening and final curtain, the abundance of nutrients gradually decreases and the less prolific species, one by one, become extinct. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
At this point we can foresee the final outcome of the drama—the ultimate triumph of the strong over the weak, the emergence from the herd of the species possessed of the qualities most suitable for survival. We may as well anticipate the ending, quit the theater, and reflect on the meaning of what we have seen. Obviously, Charles Darwin, if not actually the author of our imaginary play, is at least entitled to credit for inspiring the theme. Of course, it is unlikely that he had in mind as primitive a conflict for existence as this when he formulated his principles of evolution, but there is no reason why his doctrine of “survival of the fittest” would not have applied to our primeval cast of characters. In fact, as we have seen, nothing could have prevented it. The principles involved are exactly the same as those underlying any number of physical and chemical phenomena in which parallel processes of different and self-aggrandizing rates of activity simultaneously have access to the same source of supply of basic ingredients. “Evolution” may be widely considered to be a law of biology but, like all other biological principles we have encountered, its roots are firmly implanted in the ordinary laws of physics. The ultimate result of the interspecies struggle for existence among the primordial coacervates had to be the same as the ultimate result of all evolutionary competitions—the suppression of the poorly adapted and the proliferation of the well adapted. The seas must have come to abound in droplets containing a mixture of catalysts and other ingredients that supported a variety of internal chemical activities which not only made rapid and effective use of the raw materials then available in the waters of the Earth but also maintained an internal organization and membrane properties that contributed to balanced growth and reproduction. However, despite our imaginary dramatic production, it is not necessary to conclude that only one species finally survived. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Differences in climate and local chemical conditions among different regions of the seas would result in different relative survival values for the competing species and would lead to strong geographical influences on the nature of the local population. Changes in the chemistry of the sea resulting from gradual changes in the Earth’s atmosphere and surface composition would also have preserved a larger number of species than could otherwise have coexisted by preventing the evolutionary processes from going to completion and becoming static. In any event, the principles of evolution would not have led to a static situation, even if the environmental conditions of the coacervates had been uniform and unchanging. For the perpetual random jostling of the organic and inorganic constituents inside the coacervates would frequently result in the formation of new types of molecules. Perhaps one of these molecules out of a million would help catalyze some new chain of reactions within the coacervate. And, in one of a million of these new rection chains, one of the products might be the newly invented molecule. If son, autocatalysis could occur, the new molecular form could be abundant, and the associated set of chemical reactions it facilitated could become part of the standard metabolism of succeeding generations of coacervates. To be sure, in our hypothetical example this would occur only once for every million million random formations of new molecular types, but this would be more than often enough to provide for the coacervates a dynamic pattern of evolutionary development. The time between successive events at the molecular level is so few millionths of a second and the time available is so many millions of years that the raw material of evolutionary change can easily consist of such seemingly unlikely accidental molecular juxtapositions or rearrangements. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
In fact, because of the “trying out” of new combinations that must occur ceaselessly in substance that is not held at the absolute zero of temperature, we can be sure that sooner or later pure chance will lead to the formation of any arrangement of the available materials that the laws of physics and chemistry will permit to hold together. Thus, new and improved molecular types, with their associated autocatalytic chains of chemical reactions, would have been continually “sought out” and incorporated into the architecture and metabolism of the coacervates to improve their growth and reproduction characteristics. The cumulative results of these natural-selection processes would ultimately have included the appearance of other new structural and metabolic features. For example, occasionally a chain reaction that got started would have produced, among other things, substances that tended to coagulate and thus form solid inclusions or membranes within the coacervate. Because of the physical adhesive forces, these new inclusions would have trapped and bound, in an extended two-dimensional configuration, some of the molecules floating in the surrounding fluid. In some instances, the surface-bound configuration of the trapped molecules would have had a higher chemical reactivity than the unbound configuration, thereby increasing the growth rate of the coacervate. Ultimately, therefore, evolutionary selection would have made common place coacervates with composition leading to include membranes. Another likely early aberration in coacervate structure would have been the formation of droplets within droplets. It will be recalled that organic materials in the primeval pools spontaneously coalesced into spherical droplets because of strong attractive forces between their molecules and that this was followed by the development of more or less permanent enclosing membranes. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
In the same way, certain products of the coacervate metabolism could coalesce into “inclusions” separated from the bulk of the coacervate fluids by enclosing their own. (“Inclusion” is used here in a general sense. Modern descendants such coacervate structures would probably include not only the nuclei common to the cells of most organisms but also the smaller anatomic “organelles” that are found in the more primitive bacteria as well as in the cells of more advanced organisms.) The differential permeability of the membranes would block the transmission of certain molecules while allowing others to interpenetrate freely. This would result in the concentration of certain substances within the inclusions and different ones outside. Different series of reactions could then occur in the two regions of the coacervate. Among the countless millions of times that such inclusions spontaneously formed billion of coacervates, there would occasionally be a combination having above-average survival value. The special conditions preserved in the semi-isolated inclusion would support chemical reactions having a certain product that would not only be able to penetrate the enclosing membrane but, once on the outside, would be unusually effective in accelerating the external pattern of chemical reactions. These reactions, in the surrounding “body” of the coacervate, would then have as one product a substance that could enter the inclusion and further stimulate its synthesizing processes. Such a mutually facilitating interaction would contribute above-average growth characteristics to the complex coacervate, with the inevitable ultimate evolutionary popularizing among the coacervate population of an inclusion/body structure and associated chemistry that started out as a rare and improbably combination. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
Even time-varying metabolic processes would be expected to result from the operation of the physical principles of evolution. Consider, for example, a complex coacervate similar to that just described but in which the ingredients that accelerate the growth reactions are not catalysts but instead get “used up” in the reactions thy promote. Suppose further that the body reaction must go on for a substantial period of time before the production of the ingredient that then migrates to the inclusion to participate in its internal chemistry and that the resulting reaction in the inclusion also requires a substantial period before it can generate and send the other accelerating ingredient back to the body. This is a “positive-feedback system” with time lags. Such a system, familiar to electronic engineers, results in oscillatory behaviour. In such a coacervate, in both body and inclusions, the chemical conditions would change periodically. In sophisticated coacervates, comparatively high on the evolutionary scale, the cyclic process would probably not be so simple as merely a successive acceleration and deceleration of a single chain of chemical reactions in body and inclusions. Instead, in addition to the “main chain” of chemistry involved in the cyclic process, there could be “side chains” of secondary reactions with various products, possibly including some useful for the main reaction chain. For example, the periodic exhaustion of the special inclusion-originating ingredient needed in the body of the coacervate could permit new reactions that would not be possible in the presence of the special ingredient. These other reactions might produce a substance needed in some subsequent step of the coacervate chemistry. Thus, temporal cycling of the coacervate chemical activity could have survival value and gradually become “standard equipment” in successive generations of coacervates. Such evolutionary processes would have resulted in a gradual but inexorable speeding up of the rate of development of new species of lifelike structures. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
As natural selection brought to prominence forms of organization of matter characterized by greater and greater efficiency in the use of the raw materials of the seas, the increasing rates of growth and reproduction of these new forms finally must have compressed into centuries of a degree of evolutionary development that had previously required hundreds of millenniums. If the first billion years of the Earth’s history was required for the tortuous development of a handful of coacervate droplets rugged enough to leave their pools of incubation and survive in the open seas, the second billion years must have witnessed increases in chemical and structural sophistication that were fantastic, compared with the accomplishments of the earlier era. Earlier, in our recognition of the lifelike characteristics of the primitive coacervates, we had to ask ourselves whether our discussion had carried us over the line dividing the realm of inanimate mechanism from that of animate organism. As we now contemplate the tremendous increase of sophistication that natural forces of evolution must have brought to the chemistry and structure of the coacervates, the question becomes even more insistent. In fact, from this point on, we should find it awkward if we could not start employing more of the language of biology in discussing the aggregations of matter we must deal with. We must soon start talking about “single-celled organisms” rather than coacervate droplets. However, if the property of “life” has really attached itself to our curious bags of chemicals, this would appear to be a development that no author should allow to slip unheeded into one’s text. After all, there can be no accomplishment more significant than establishing that the prosaic operation of the ordinary laws of physics on the materials and in the environment of the primordial Earth ultimately leads to the appearance of living organisms. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
It would appear that the author would have the responsibility of calling the reader’s attention to the point at which the transition from nonlife to life occurs, so that due notice could be taken of this most important development. The trouble is that no one has designed a definition of life that permits clear-cut distinction between living and nonliving forms of matter. Most would say that a single-celled amoeba is alive and that a primeval pool of hot dilute soup is not. It terms of the organization of this report, there would probably be general agreement that the subject matter of the past was inanimate and that the subject matter even further back on is animate. However, there would be little agreement on precisely where the line between nonlife and life is crossed. This makes it difficult for an author to achieve the dramatic effect to which one feels an event of such importance entitles one. One’s defense must be that the colourlessness of the treatment is a consequence of the peculiarity of the subject matter rather than of one’s own literary inadequacy. Let us therefore take up again the thread of our narrative. We shall do so by exploring the continuing evolutionary development of what we shall now call this single-celled organisms of the late primeval World. As we encounter more evidence of the almost explosive accelerating power of the forces of evolution, we shall, of course, keep constantly in mind the fact that nothing vitalistic or even uniquely “biological” is involved. The appearance of effective evolutionary processes awaited only the development of the competitive conditions fundamental to the operation of the principle of natural selection. When these conditions appeared, so did evolution. The basic rules of the game we are playing are still the laws of physics. Education is about discovering the special skills and talents of students and guiding their learning according to high standards. Education is also about teaching our community basic American values and uncorking that World-renowned American ingenuity that has characterized our country. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
So we had our season in Heaven, we were not cheated. Heaven is never more than a glance and it is gone. We wanted it to last forever. We made our promises. Our lives are operatic. However poorly we sing, we are faithful to our one refrain: love, betrayal, revenge. We cannot settle on love alone, the other two are equally and inalienably our nature. The most we can hope for is to love a lot and go light on the other two. This splendid project has long been a shambles; but the failure, which a palace in ruins, still is grand and has some dignity, yet it has somehow been trivialized. What is left is a very little thing, and what still is possible for us in not very much, nothing that might call for passion or anguish or hope. The pain in our hearts is the meaning. And what does that pain say? Nothing stays. Temples, palaces, and pyramids, and stone heroes on stone horses all swirling into the void. And continents that split apart and drift, and stars that collapse and implode, and we are a flicker of desire in a torrent of fire and ice; it does not mean anything, it all slides away. Once a mysterious and hidden problem, hardly acknowledged by the public and barely investigated by professionals, suicide today is the focus of much attention. During the past 50 years in particular, investigators have learned a great deal about this life-or-death problem. In contrast to most other problems, suicide has received much more examination from the sociocultural model than from any other. Sociocultural theorists have, for example, highlighted the importance of societal change and stress, national and religious affiliation, martial status, gender, race, and the mass media. The insights and information gathered by psychological and biological researchers have been more limited. Although sociocultural factors certainly shed light on the general background and triggers of suicide, they typically leave us unable to predict that a given person will attempt suicide. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
When all is said and done, clinicians do not yet fully understand why some people kill themselves while others in similar circumstances manage to find better ways of addressing their problems. Psychological and biological insights must catch up to the sociocultural insight if clinicians are truly to explain and understand suicide. Treatments for suicide also pose some difficult problems. Clinicians have yet to develop clearly successful therapies for suicidal persons. Although suicide prevention programs certainly reflect the clinical field’s commitment to helping people who are suicidal, it is not yet clear how much such programs actually reduce the overall risk or rate of suicide. At the same time, the growth in the amount of research on suicide offers great promise. And perhaps most promising of all, clinicians are now enlisting the public in the fight against this problem. They are calling for broader public education about suicide—programs aimed at both young and old. It is reasonable to expect that the current commitment will lead to a better understanding of suicide and to more successful interventions. Such goals are of importance to everyone. Although suicide itself is typically a lonely and desperate act, the impact of such acts is very broad indeed. Let us return now to our alert young man of average to good attainments and imagine him growing up in and into this arena. Most likely he will go to work for an organization, in a factory or service job, manual or clerical, with the corresponding job attitude and way of life. However, if he has been to college, he will likely be in the second status of the organized system, in business management, communications, sales or technology, with its job attitude and way of life. After a few years, many such young men will perceive that they are in a Rat Race. The young workers will perceive it as the work speeds up, when they get married, as their installment payments fall due. The Organization Man will perceive it as competition, company pressure to conform, etcetera. Of these, most will race on, but a few will balk and stop running. Now what becomes of these few? #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
They are not likely to choose the other, motely, alternative of trying to remain in society independent of the organization. For their experience has been disillusioning. They have become hip. (We shall see later that this is profoundly organizational attitude.) They know that the independent unorganized are up against it; for they have learned techniques of promotion and they do not think much, or much think, of other methods and kinds of results. However, to be hip and cynical are not attitudes that prompt one to make a go on one’s own. It is not surprising then that many of those who balk in the Rat Race will voluntarily choose the other remaining possibility, poverty “outside” society (whether they choose it, of fall into it, comes to the same thing). These, not boys, but early disillusioned, hip, and resigned young men, are the Fourth Wave Generation. The organization they have quit may be the armed forces or a university that they cannot compound with; these tend to be more naïve. Those who have had experience of working for a firm and making a pretty good living tend to be more cynical. Naturally this cataclysmic transition, between being in and being “outside” society, does not occur without strong accompanying emotional moments: betrayals in love, binges, blow-up at the boss, addiction to forbidden haunts and vices. However, at this point let us stick to the social structure of it. Some men actually treasure their “vital energy,” it is a precious store of God-given fluid one has to dispense frugally enough to last one’s entire virile lifetime. The negative side of this vital energy: how to avoid debilitating/exhausting/weakening one’s manly self. Even the prescribed regimen—wholesome and spiceless food, purity of body and soul—was designed to dodge trouble. However, how is one to energize oneself? Well, one could throw oneself into a sport, which by midcentury, was being touted as an ideal way to stimulate the physical man. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
One delightful consequence of sport was that it would not merely invigorate or reroute a man’s pleasures of the fleshing longings but recharge one’s strength at the same time. This ideology of the “vital energy economy”—budget your seed and spend it wisely—endured for over half a century. A man’s body, unlike his finite volume of seed, could thereby become a renewable resource. One would be a walking, flexing, pulsating specimen of Muscular Christianity. From 1850 to 1890, schools in both North America and England made playing games an important part of their curriculum, and the obsessive role sports in these cultures dates from that period. It became a major instrument in male bonding and in teaching men to be men. It also inculcated in them the notion that they were biologically superior to women and to other, effete breeds of man. (Unlike the Greeks, however, the Victorians were too modest to prove this by competing in the nude.) The vital energy played an equally vital role in this sport-mindedness, partly through seminal sublimation, partly through unexplained physical process. Sports, this vital energy-efficient activity, became associated as well with moral asceticism—temperance, in the nineteenth-century sense of avoiding all evils such as liquor and women. “What are you running here, a Sunday school or a baseball team?” demanded Chicago Cubs star player King Kelly of puritanical manager A.G. Spalding. Spalding’s answer might have been that the two were inseparably connected, moral purity and sportsmanship being two sides of the same coin. In fact, he hired Pinkerton detectives to tail his players and report on their extracurricular movements. At playgrounds, schools, and professional ball fields everywhere, the sportsman’s code applied: no tobacco, booze, gambling, womanizing, or ungentlemanly behaviour. Underlying these strictures was the most outlawed of all sins—onanism, casting irreplaceable vital energy into a moral void. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
In 1889, the Brooklyn Bridegrooms baseball team put their collective celibacy into the headlines when they adopted it as a talisman and won that year’s pennant. This was, admittedly, a desperate measure for a desperate team. However, despite the above-average number of newlywed team members who gave the Bridegrooms their nickname, the players cooperated and avoided their wives until after the play-offs. Pitcher Bob Carruthers went so far as to decline visiting his newborn baby, presumably a consequence of his preseason unchastity. The ideology of Muscular Christianity faded slowly. Today, it still permeates some sports, notably boxing and soccer, and some football teams, all manned by players seeking every possible physical and psychic advantage. Everywhere in the World, men have pondered their physical makeup. Often, the result of such meditations had been the conclusion that the vital energy is an immeasurably important substance and that it plays a role in men’s activities from the cognitive to the carnal, of which sports are arguably the most widespread and beloved. Nonetheless, most contemporary is the psychotherapeutic discovery that the least effective way of treating a person under a destructive compulsion—alcoholism, for example—is to direct one in terms of a moral command, “Stay sober at all times!” No psychoanalyst worthy of one’s profession would commit this destructive error. The law, as stated by the analyst, would produce a tremendous resistance in the patient, and justly so. The patient would withdraw to one’s freedom to contradict oneself, even though one might then destroy oneself. The patient, in this action, defends a decisive element in human freedom. Psychoanalysts who (according to the latest fashion) being to moralize to their patients, however cautiously, should remember that it is precisely the pathological loss of power to respond to moral commands that makes these persons patients. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Most analysts are still conscious of this, preserving one of the deepest insights of psychotherapy, namely, that the law cannot break compulsions, that the “thou shalt” does not liberate. Instead of encountering the law, the patient encounters acceptance on the part of the effective analyst. One is accepted in the state in which one is, and one is not told to change one’s state before becoming acceptable. In some cases, especially in pre-analytic counseling, the acceptance can express itself in a description by the counselor of how one oneself was or still remains in a similar predicament, so that one ceases to be merely the subject, and the patient merely the object, in the healer-patient relationship. One has accused psychotherapy of permissiveness. In particular cases this criticism is just—formerly, even more so. However, so far as the method is concerned, this permissiveness is a result of a simple confusion between acceptance and permission. In the analytic situation there is neither command nor permission, but acceptance and healing. If the power of the compulsion is broken, a counseling exchange between the healer and the healed may take place, and the question may arise as to what the patient should do with one’s newly regained freedom. Only then should the problems of morality, its content, and its motivation come into focus, and the analyst may become a friend or a priest to the patient. However, then the further question for both of them must be raised whether the moral law, appealing to their freedom, has motivating power, or whether it is powerless without a religious element in it—the religious element being an acceptance that transcends the psychotherapeutic distinction between the healer and healed. With all the changes and challenges you face each day, there has never been a greater need to take the time to determine your priorities, and then with renewed focus, align your daily actions with your purpose goals. Since you cannot know it all or do it all, it is vital that you learn to take the time to contemplate what it is you need to know and what you need to do. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
Too many decisions, too fast, about too many strange and unfamiliar problems—not some imagined “lack of leadership”—explain the gross incompetence of political and governmental decisions today. Our institutions are reeling from a decisional implosion. Working with out-of-date political technology, our capacity for effective governmental decision-making is deteriorating rapidly. When all the decisions have to be made in the White House, there is often little time for considering fully any one of them. In fact, the White House is so squeezed for decisions—on everything from air pollution, hospital costs, and nuclear power to the elimination of hazardous toys (!)—that one presidential adviser confided to me, “We are all suffering from future shock here!” Nor are the executive agencies much better off. Each department is crushed under the mounting decision load. Each is compelled to enforce countless regulations and to generate vast numbers of decisions daily, under tremendous accelerative pressures. Thus, a recent investigation of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) found that its council spent all of four and a half minutes considering each class of grant applications. “The number of applications…have far outstripped the ability of the NEA to make quality decisions,” the report declared. Few good studies of this decisional logjam exist. One of the best is Trevor Armbrister’s analysis of the 1968 Pueblo incident involving the capture of a U.S.A. spy ship by the North Koreans and dangerous showdown between the two countries. According to Armbrister, the Pentagon official who performed the “risk evaluation” on the Pueblo mission, and approved it, had only a few hours to appraise the risks of 76 different proposed military missions. The official subsequently refused to estimate how much time he had actually spent considering the Pueblo. The way in probably worked is that he got the book on his desk one morning at nine o’clock with orders to return it by noon. That book is the size of a Sears, Roebuk catalogue. It would be a physical impossibility for him to study each mission in detail. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
Nevertheless, under the pressure of time, the risk on the Pueblo mission was termed “minimal.” This could mean that every military mission evaluated that morning received less than two and a half minutes’ consideration. No wonder things do not work. In the years following the 9/11 attacks in the United States of American and its allies have fought a continuous war on terror. The taxpayer tab for the war totals about $5 trillion, or around $16 per person. Reports from the Inspector Generals’ offices of Ira and Afghanistan estimated that the United States of America’s military has lost $60 billion to waste and fraud in Iraq, $100 billion to Afghan reconstruction efforts, and billions more in wasted equipment either burned or left behind after the withdrawal forces. Part of the problem may be that the Pentagon has 1.7 million contracts open, which makes oversight difficult, if not impossible. In Iraq and Afghanistan there was a huge waste, fraud, and abuse on the part of companies like Halliburton and others that [these companies] were able to get away with in the fog of war because there was not enough scrutiny into what they were doing. In some cases billions of dollars went missing; contractors were overcharging for everything from simple task like doing the laundry for the troops and providing meals to building shoddy facilities for schools and things for water and electricity. Another impetus for fraud stems from the blank checks that the Pentagon write to contractors. The most common method of winning contracts is through the “cost-plus” contracting system, in which the government reimburses contractor expenses and tacks on a commission as profit. The system works in such a way that the more work contractors do, the more profit they get, even if their work is inefficient. It basically says, “If you spend a billion dollars building a weapons system, you will get a 10 percent profit or $100 million.” Essentially, for contractors, “you do better if you are wasteful.” Such spending has swelled the military industry to become the eighth-largest lobbying sector in the nations, spending over $100 million on lobbying the government when the troops all deserve more and maybe even a house for risking their lives, but you know they do it for love of America and the people and not for money. However, paying them more would make sure they get adequate health care and buying them a home would make sure they would not end up homeless after risking their lives. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
This multibillion-dollar bungle, according to a Department of Defense comptroller, has the “lethal potential of a loose cannon rolling around our deck.” He confesses, “The sad fact is that we do not really know how big this [confusion] really is. It will probably be five more years before we will be able to sort it all out.” However, you recall, President Trump wanted to audit budgets and decrease, if not stop, government spending on most foreign aid program. Nonetheless, if the Pentagon, with its complex to manage properly, as may well be the case, what about the government as a whole? The old decision-making institutions increasingly mirror the disarray in the outside World. The fragmentation of society into interest groups and the corresponding fragmentation of congressional authority into subgroups makes it difficult for a president to easily impose his will on Congress. Traditionally, an incumbent president could cut a deal with half a dozen elderly and powerful committee chairmen, and expect them to deliver the votes necessary to approve his legislative program. Today congressional committee chairmen and women can no more deliver the votes to the junior members of Congress than the AFL-CIO or the Catholic Church can deliver the votes of their followers. Unfortunate as it may seem to old-timers and hard-pressed presidents, people—including members of Congress—are doing more of their own thinking, and taking orders less submissively. All this makes it impossible, however, for Congress, as presently structured, to devote sustained attention to any issue or to respond quickly to the nation’s needs. Nonetheless, the roots of revolutionary wealth can be traced to 1956—the year when, for the first time, white-collar and service workers outnumbered blue-collar workers in the United States of America. This sea change in the composition of the labour force was arguably the kickoff point for the transition from an industrial economy based on manual labour to one based on knowledge or mind work. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
The knowledge-based wealth system is till called the “new economy”—and for convenience we will at times continue to call it that here—but the first computers, still huge and expensive, actually were migrating from government offices into the business World by the mid-1950s. And Princeton economist Fritz Machlup, as early as 1962, showed that in the 1950s knowledge production in the United States of America was already growing faster than the gross national product. The 1950s are often pictured as deadly dull decade. However, on October 4, 1957, Russia launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, triggering a great space race with the United States of America that radically accelerated the development of systems theory, information science, software programming and training in project-management skills. It also promoted an emphasis on science and mathematics in the United States of America’s schools. All this began pumping new, wealth-relevant knowledge into the economy. Culture and politics began to change as well. Just as the industrial revolution centuries ago brought new ideas, art forms, values and political movements, along with new technology, so did the knowledge economy in the United States of America. Thus the 1950s saw the universalization of television and the introduction of Elvis Presley, the Fender Stratocaster electric guitar, and rock ‘n’ roll. Hollywood shifted from heroes and happy endings to surely anti-heroes played by actors like James Dean, Sir Sidney Poitier, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge, Antonio Espino y Mora, Anna May Wong, and Marilyn Monroe. The literary Beats and their hippie followers glorified “doing your own thing”—a precision attack on the conformity values in industrial mass societies. By 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was pointing out that “today’s technology has…virtually eliminated the quality of muscular strength as a criterion for filling most jobs, while intensifying American industry’s need for creative intelligence.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
NOW demanded the right of women to participate on fair terms in the “revolution created by automation” and in the economy generally. While the World’s media focused on these dramatic events, almost no attention was paid to the work of top scientists, funded by the Pentagon, on an obscure new technology called ARPANET—a forerunner of what became the World-changing Internet. Given this history, the common belief that the “new” economy was the products of a 1990s stock-market bubble, and that it is going to go away, is ridiculous. A highly exaggerated mystically sponsored Golden Age of the remote past is as supposititious as a materialistically sponsored one of the near future is unrealizable. It is a silly mistake which some mystically minded enthusiasts fall into, that everybody is soon going to follow mysticism! The only basis they have for this assertion would appear to be that they move within a tiny circle where everybody is following mysticism and that they are judging the larger World outside by what is happening inside the circle. The pathway of greedy acquisition upon which humanity now stands must be left for wise co-operation. The old motives will not work today. Destiny is at work and all the multitude of prayers to God are not going to save humanity from what it creates for itself. Nothing could have been more devastating than the bombs falling on Warsaw Cathedral when more than a thousand worshippers were inside praying for God’s protection on Poland. Many in America do not realize how serious, threatening a dangerous war is. There is no battle ground, where no one lives, like the moon, where troops have a video game style show down. People get hurt, populated cities and suburbs are attacked. National defense is very serious. The war period has shown how uncertain are all materialistic standards, how much they are at the mercy of military political and economic shifts. It must therefore articulate in thoughtful minds a quest of higher standards which shall transcend such uncertainties and shifts. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Because humanity must find the solution to their troubles within themselves, all the so-called solutions offered from without have proved disappointing. And because the attempt to find scapegoats in other humans, other political parties, other doctrines of belief, and other nations is really an attempt to relieve themselves of this personal responsibility, they have so far failed to find an end to their troubles. Those inspirers of evil-doing and racial animosity who fondly believe that they can protect themselves against the forces of spiritual evolution which are stirring within the consciousness of humankind, are dwelling in an atmosphere of futile make-believe. To outgrow the instinctive cravings of the primitive terrestrial human and to try to supplant them by the noble aspirations of the well-advanced truly human being, is the only way to guarantee peace on Earth. We shall have to renounce this fetish of achieving absolute agreement and fully unity among those who differ from each other in fundamentals. Human nature and human mentality being in the present unregenerate and diverse conditions as they are, it is futile to purpose an unrealizable ideal. The attempts to prevent war and unify the nations can meet with no success while we make no attempt to discipline the violent impulses and greedy calculations which cause war. Only when human evolution has gone father, and the brute’s instincts have been sufficiently disciplined in us, shall we drop war. However, the clash of egoisms will still remain. Our frictions and battles will continue; their outer form will, however, change for the better and be lifted to a place more truly human and beyond the merely terrestrial. If present-day World misery demonstrates anything at all, it demonstrated the failure of the materialistic outlook, the futility of expecting peace and prosperity from purely material sources, the danger of ignoring the stubborn fact that personal character counts most in the making of a people’s happiness. The old way of sheer materialism has been tried and found to end in a dangerous morass. The new way of a nobler life and deeper faith does not look so tempting. Yet other way there is not except to sink in a still deeper morass. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Types of government that are anti-capitalistic could be defeated and avoided if the appeal they make to the discontented could be eliminated. This in turn requires the cause of discontentment be itself eliminated. That cause is the too unequal distribution of profits, income, and capital. The remedy for profits is to make labour an equal partner with capital in the sharing profits by a system of co-partnership. The remedy to fix income is to correct maximum and minimum incomes. The remedy for capital is inheritance reform. Whatever benefit has come from politics physically has to be paid for spiritually, for it has poisoned human relationships. In the end society is only a society of separate persons; in the end we come back to the individual human problem. There is much demand today for various rights in their totality. Can the right to freedom be fully given to maniacs and those who pose a danger to living beings? Can the right to free expression in speech and writing be given at a level beyond the capacities of those who make it? If life is to be orderly, if crime is to be contained, then there must be limits as well as rights? There is no other way left for us today than the way of looking right through the facts of the contemporary situation, to their underlying significance, their foundational cause, if we are to understand it aright. We must have the courage to acknowledge them for what they are. We must have the strength to be pessimistic if pessimism is required by truth. We must have the humility to confess or errors. When we understand the forces which work being the curtain of history, we stop groping. The punishment of crime should be of such a nature as to be materially useful to society and morally useful to the criminal. When humans misuse their liberty to commit crime, we withdraw it and put them in prison However, legal punishment has two grave defects: it makes no provision for more re-education alongside of the physical punishment, and it makes no difference between the repentant sinner and the nonrepentant one. The criminal is simply a human who has misinterpreted life, failed in self-discipline, accepted the suggestions of an evil environment, or been hurt by a hard social system. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Cresleigh Homes
When you’ve got a home you love, it’s great to update it whenever the kids are ready for something new!
Loving this construction theme in the #Havenwood Model 3; have you checked out the website yet? Four distinct models available! https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/residence-three/
No appointment needed! Cresleigh Havenwood features four distinct floor plans ranging from 2,293 – 3,489 square feet and offering up to five bedrooms.
Each plan has been thoughtfully designed and includes great features such as single story homes, guest suites, optional offices, garage workshops, and more!
Get the most out of your new home with Cresleigh’s All Ready smart home featuring all the connectivity needed to keep your house running. Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes with owned solar included! #CresleighHomes
His Formula Was Wrong: It Was Not Nearly Complicated Enough!
The greatest gift you can give society is the roots of responsibility suffused with excitement, engagement, passion, challenge, creativity, and joy. Before the end of the eighteenth century the attention of chemists had been attracted to a group of organic substances that behaved in an odd manner. These substances, upon being heated, changed from liquid to solid, rather than the other way around. The white of eggs, a component of milk, and a substance in the blood were early identified as having this property. These materials were also found to be similar in a number of other respects. In particular, they were found to consist principally (though not entirely) of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen and to contain approximately (though not exactly) the same percentages of these elements in their composition. Because of certain early clues as to its key importance in vital processes, this strange class of substance was named protein (from the Greek, meaning of first importance”). There has never been a cause to regret the choice of the term “protein.” To begin with, protein substances are found in all living organisms. In the human body, for example, proteins are easily identified in all the tissues and organs. They are also essential in the food we eat. Higher animals can survive quite well on diets that are almost entirely protein (plus a few vitamins), but carbohydrates, fats, oils, and vitamins alone will not sustain life. If there is any one class of substance that deserves to be called the “stuff of life,” it would appear to be protein. Although the techniques available to the early-nineteenth-century chemists permitted them to measure the relative amounts of the different elements in proteins, the determination of the molecular composition of proteins was quite another matter. The evidence did suggest, however, that molecules of protein were much more complicated than those of any other known substances. Indeed, as early as 1839 the Dutch chemist G.J. Mulder proposed a formula for a protein molecule consisting of 40 atoms f carbon, 62 of hydrogen, 12 of oxygen, and 10 of nitrogen. His formula was wrong: it was not nearly complicated enough! #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
While early attempts to work out precise formulas for protein molecules were doomed to failure by the great complexity of the substances, there was another line of exploration that did lead to useful results. To appreciate the significance of this successful trend of development, we must bear in mind that “protein” does not refer to one specific substance, as “urea” does, for example, there are probably tens of thousands of different protein substances in the human body alone. All possess such points of similarity as complexity of molecular structure and approximate proportions of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. However, the differences are important too not only in the precise proportions of the constituent elements but in gross physical properties as diverse as those of muscle fibers and digestive juices. The impressiveness of the work we are about to consider rests, in fact, on these great differences in the appearance and properties of different proteins. For the nineteenth-century chemists discovered that, despite such differences, all proteins are constructed of molecular components of only a few standardized types. A French chemist H. Braconnot, took the first important steps toward an understanding of protein constructions. As early as 1820 he put some gelatin (a protein obtained by boiling animal gristle) in a dilute acid and applied heat to see what would happen. One result was that, after prolonged heating, there appeared some sweet-tasting crystals, which ultimately came to be called glycine (from the Greek word for “sweet”). In a later experiment, by heating muscle tissue in acid, Dr. Braconnot isolated another crystalline substance, this time tasteless and white in colour, which he called leucine (from a Greek word for “white”). Some years later the German chemist J. von Liebig obtained a third crystalline substance by heating a milk-curd cheese in an alkaline solution; the was called tyrosine (from the Greek word for “cheese”). #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Glycine, leucine, and tyrosine were interesting both for their differences and their similarities. Glycine was sweet, but leucine and tyrosine were not; glycine was quite soluble in water, leucine only slightly soluble, tyrosine practically insoluble. Yet each was extracted from an animal protein, each formed crystals, each exhibited acidic properties when in solution, and each would release ammonia when suitably treated. Because of the last two properties—acidity and ammonia content—the three substances came to be known as ammonia when suitably treated. Because of the last two properties—acidity and ammonia content—the three substances came to be known as amino acids. As the years went by, other crystalline substances were obtained from proteins. All were found to possess properties entitling them to be called amino acids. Evidence also accumulated that the amino acids, which may have been obtained by heating a protein in hydrochloric acid, for example, were not formed by chemical recombination of smaller fragments into which the protein might have been torn by the action of the hot acid. Instead, it was ultimately established that the amino acid molecule; the hot-acid treatment seemed to soften the “mortar” that held them in place and thereby permit them to fall out of the structure themselves. The discoveries went further. Not only were molecules of the amino acids structural units of protein molecules, but they were found to be the only structural units involved. Complete analysis of protein material, when it finally could be carried out, shows that it consisted of nothing except amino acid molecules. And despite the discovery of tens of thousands of different kinds of proteins, it was found that they employ only 20 different amino acid components! It must be emphasized that these components are completely standardized. Glycine, leucine, tyrosine, and all the rest, can be obtained out of human protein, whale protein, or bacterial protein. The determination that the tremendously varied class of proteins—the most typically “organic” of all materials—employs only a handful of basic structural units was rendered even more spectacular by the later discovery that these units greatly resemble one another in their molecular structure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
When chemical techniques permitted the determination of the detailed spatial relationships of the atoms in a molecule, it was found that all amino acid molecules have similar “backbones.” Each backbone consists of 2 carbon atoms, 2 hydrogen atoms, 1 oxygen atom, and 1 nitrogen atom arranged in a standardized three-dimensional configuration that stabilized by the cohesive forces produced by the sharing of electric charge among the adjacent atoms. (The formula given here applies to an amino acid constituent of a protein molecule. An isolated amino acid segment in aqueous solution attaches an extra hydrogen ion to one end and an OH ion to the other, to achieve its acidic properties. When two amino acid segments link together in protein formation, these attachments are cast off in the form of a molecule of water.) The chemical and physical properties distinguished one amino acid from another were found to be due to the attachment, always at the same spot of this basic backbone, of one of 20 distinctive “side chains” of atomic configurations. The unique properties of glycine were found to be due to the simplest possible side chain—one hydrogen atom. The leucine side chain consists of a characteristic spatial arrangement of 4 carbon and 9 hydrogen atoms; the tyrosine side chain contains 7 carbon atoms, 7 hydrogens, and 1 oxygen; and so on. (For some amino acids the ide chain contains more atoms and is bigger that what we have called the backbone. Thus it is not necessarily correct to think of an amino acid molecule as a long, narrow structure.) However, different though the side chains and the resulting chemical properties of the different amino acids are, the backbones are all the same—always the same three-dimensional arrangement of 2 carbon atoms, 2 hydrogen atoms, 1 oxygen atom, and 1 nitrogen atom. Befitting the structural utility of the amino acids, the backbone was found to have an important property: because of the natural chemical forces resulting from its configuration of electric charge, one end of the backbone of one amino acid molecule has a strong affinity for the opposite end of the backbone of another amino acid molecule. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Thus, amino acid molecules have a tendency to form long linear arrays by hooking together end to end. Such an array constitutes a protein molecule. The specific kind of protein formed in each case is determined by the specific sequence of amino acid molecules in the liner array. The evidence is that every molecule of a given protein type contains exactly the same number and kinds of amino acid molecules, arranged in exactly the same order, as every other protein molecule of that type. Since each protein molecule may contain hundreds or even thousands of amino acid components and the properties of the protein may be changed if only one of these many components is altered, there exist almost limitless possibilities for variety in protein materials. The number of possible combinations of the 20 basic structural units in an averaged-sized protein molecule of 500 amino acids is an approximately 10^600—a 1 followed by 600 zeroes! The task of the best teacher is to balance the difficult juggling act of becoming vitally, vigorously, creatively, energetically, and inspiritingly a leader no one will ever forget. Cape Cod, August, bring sun, warm sand, children, beach blankets, sling chairs, bikinis, sunscreen, nymphets, novels, I find a table at the edge of the terrace, sit beneath an orange umbrella. Next to me is an Italian family: a young man, slender, tanned, athletic, handsome in the manner of Rudolf Valentino, his wife and baby and a corpulent mature woman with red hair, sedately eating ice cream—the wife’s mother, I think, an image perhaps of what is in store for her. A small black and white do is gnawing at a tennis ball. The young woman is seated under a red umbrella at the table beside me. “How old is the baby?” I ask. For a moment she is blank, then realized that I am speaking to her in English and, to her delight, that she understands. A dazzling smile. “Eight months,” she says. I am astonished, exclaim about the baby, how beautiful. She holds my eyes, knows I speak rather of her. I study her lithe and girlish figure, the small waist, the firm belly. She wears a lot-cut black halter, thin black shoulder straps, silken smooth mocha-brown skin. Now she lies on her back in the grass, hold the baby up in the air before her. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Brief brown shorts, long slender legs. She rocks the baby side to side in her hands, coos at him, squints against the sun. I watch the umbrella bathes her flesh in a dark hair. She brings the baby down to her face, then rapidly up in the air again, rocks him side to side, down to her face again, plays with his face with her own face, rubbing noses, mouths, ears, foreheads. She glances at me, smiles. I think she knows she is torturing me, making me want to ask her own. I turn away from her. The green meadow slopes down to a rushing stream. I look up at the blue sky, white clouds drifting peacefully. All is clam around me, blissful, pastoral. Why am I caught up in such agitation? Why do I pursue such a mad fantasy? What am I after? The World withdrawn into its future without me, and so this narrowing down to the I which knows itself excluded from the common experience of the future. All that remains this the made desire for present identity though a woman. I feel weightless. Would I, if adored, acquired substance? Yes. I do seek this—or something like this—through a woman. These fantasies are anti-mortality dreams. It is my interiority I am trying to save, my spirit, my soul. Consciousness is going to end. That is what I protest, the waste. Ans not just mine but mine multiplied into eternity. Whenever anyone dies, anyone, just such a vast, unique, irreplaceable weight of knowing and of spirit plunges into nothingness. The Universe is a charnel house, a cataract of soul pours unendingly over the brink. We all swim upstream against the overpowering current, ever more doomed and desperate, trying at the last moment to throw something ashore, some little thing that will, remain, bear witness that we were here. I marvel at this girl. Mid-twenties, perhaps, so fruitful, and yet—eight months after childbirth—pristine, slim-waisted, virginal. Could be her wedding day. I am full of admiration. And dizzy. My mouth is suddenly dry. She takes my breath away, is beginning to drive me mad. She glances at me. The pain begins. I veer away—to her mother: corpulent, mid-forties, a short generation removed, yet already, far, far from her daughter. Nothing left of that dangerousness, that mystery. Flaccid, slowly licking her ice cream, and pleasures of the flesh behind her, her only remaining adventure being vanity, and the changing colour of her hair. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
It does not work, I am already caught. I try once more to dodge it turn my attention to the young man. Early twenties, lithe, muscular, dark curly hair. About six feet, a skier perhaps, or a dancer. Perfectly sculptured features, dark sin—more likely a model!—anyway an Adonis, and knows it, his manner and expression serene, perhaps indolent. Nothing in him of my incompleteness, my yearning, my passion; he is content to be the object of desire. Were I of a different disposition I might swoon over him. For a moment I try, put myself in the mood of Achenbach in Death in Venice. It does not work. My take on this boyish beauty is detached, uncaring; it means nothing to me. Then I give up. No way to avoid it or abort it. I am already caught, am being swept away, know with a kind of mournuful inevitability what I am in for. I turn back to her. Again she glances at me. I see in her eyes recognition of what I feel—which but confirms her expectation, she knew without looking Good. And what does she feel—which but confirms her expectation, she knew without looking. Good. And what does she feel? Is she triumphant? What do I want her to feel? I want her acknowledgement of a special connection between us, a sign, a clue, that she knows something has begun, that already between us is the germ of something…what?….something grand or violent. A wound, a deep, burning private and somehow shameful. It can neither be acknowledged not complained about. It will not go away. A fetid sickness rises from the cut. This is the cruelty of a great beauty, that it inflicts this wound, that the pain is forever. The young man gathers up baby, carriage, dog, provisions, and sets off across the meadow with the meadow with the baby in the bouncing carriage, followed by the mother-in-law. The young woman gathers up toys, paper towels, purse, stuffs everything into a large olive-drab rucksack, swinging it over her right shoulder, glances back at me, “Arrivederci!” she says, and strides off across the meadow after her disappearing family. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
God is just, He would not subject us to pain or suffering without a divine purpose. Such a God, therefore, wants His people to experience all the wondrous aspects of the life He created. However, this does not imply free love. In Christianity, marriage along is the proper context for pleasures of the flesh. Once married, spouses may glory their pleasures of the flesh within certain limits. Seed is the means of procreation and consequently deplore its loss as the male’s failure to replenish the Earth. Celibacy is permissible as vigilantly monitored chastity for youth when it comes to premarital virginity. Indeed, it is essential. Everyone else should be married, reveling in what some church leaders call “legitimate physical satisfaction.” (However, I think trying to convince all youth to be celibate is a great idea, it may lower depression, and suicide rates also as they will focus on their education and careers.) However, marriage has the added advantage of promoting the spiritual salvation of both husband and wife by keeping them from carnal sin. Marriage also advances God’s grand design of perpetuating humankind, and it sustains the family as a social unit. Fertile marriage has additional blessings. As a people battling exile, defeat, and other calamities, it is, by fusing family and spirituality, a key instrument of unity. However, what happened in the Garden of Eden, from a Christians view in the Middle Ages, is a reason for the extension of celibacy. Still, God encourages people to make joyful their beloved companions in marriage. “Blessed are you, O Lord, who makes bridegroom and bride rejoice.” Yet, although God wholehearted endorses marriage, some Christians are still attracted the Old World’s ways of celibacy. Some men and women swore to celibacy so they could devote themselves more completely to their spirituality, education, and/or career. Also, even in modern times, and in the East, when there are harsh economic conditions, people encourage their children to consider celibacy as a way to advance and in their studies and careers and become successful before it is too late. A lifelong scholar can even remain unmarried so he or she could dedicate one’s life to one’s studies. Because we live in a World, with slogans like “Sex Sells,” sometimes virgins and/or celibate people are looked at as foreign and unwelcome. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
However, many adults actually admire youth who are virginal and/or celibate or abstinent because it shows a certain level of commitment and self-control. Some of your peers may actually admire you for it because they are spiritual and do not believe everyone needs to test the waters. It is a background awareness that humans have a gap between what one essentially is, and therefore ought to be, and what one actually is, a consciousness of estrangement from and contradicting of their essential being. The emphasis on this estrangement by some radical Protestant thinkers has induced them to reject the theory of natural law completely. Humans have totally lost what one essentially—or by creation—is. There is no knowledge of their true nature in them, unless it be given one by divine revelation. The revelation through a human’s created nature is veiled by his separation from God. A new revelatory experience is necessary, such as that which inspire the Mosaic law of the Sermon on the Mount. However, there is self-deception in every denial of the natural moral law. For those who deny it, must admit that a divinely revealed moral law cannot contradict the divinely creature human nature. It can only be a restatement of the law that is embodies in human’s essential nature. And after having conceded this, these critics must go one step further toward affirming the doctrine of natural law. Human being’s essential nature cannot be lost as long as humans are human. It can be distorted in the process of actualization, but it cannot disappear. They very statement that humans are estranged from their created nature presupposed an experience of the abyss between what one essentially is and what one existentially is. Even a weak or mislead conscience is still a conscience, namely, the silent voice of human’s own essential nature, judging their actual being. To defend the natural law theory against its religious critics is also to attack the nominalist rejection of the idea of universal moral norms and its attempt to explain all ethical demands as expression of social needs or of political power structures. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
If this were possible (which it is not), the concept of “human’s essential nature would have to be eliminated, and the experience of the conflict between what humans essentially are and what they existentially are would have to be explained away. Undoubtedly, the concrete formulation of moral commands and their interpretation in ethical systems are largely conditioned by the social situation. However, in all the varieties of cultures and religions and, consequently, of ethical systems, some basic norms appear. They are rooted in human’s essential nature and ultimately in the structure of being itself. Their elaboration is the task of a developed theory of natural law. And here it might be added that such a theory underlies not only all ethical systems, but also all systems of “law” in the sense of jurisprudence. The discussion of relativism has shown that basic ethical norms must unite an absolute element and a relative element. They must be universally valid and, at the same time, adaptable to the concrete situation. This tension appears conspicuously in the contrast between the Roman Catholic and a possible Protestant theory of natural law. The Roman Catholic theory asserts that it is possible to derive a considerable number of particular demands from certain universal principals through rational deduction. If reached by sound methods of reasoning, such demands are valid for all times and all situations. No revelatory event is necessary in order to discover them, and no change of the historical conditions can undercut their validity. There is, however, a point of uncertainty: those who analyze and deduce are human beings, and consequently, open to errors and distortions. Therefore, the church must decide what is the real natural law. Only the supernatural can confirm the validity of the natural, although the natural is true in itself. In this way the Catholic church has developed a system of natural moral laws which can be established and defended rationally, but which requires, because of human errors, supernatural sanction by the church. The discussions regarding admissible methods of birth control or the educational authority of parents are actual examples. We have to constantly devise new ways to bring about a challenge to these young folds and to provide an outlet for their energies and give then a sense of belonging. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
The statement is on the highest level of current statesmanship. It has been coached by sociologist and psychologists. It has the proper therapeutic and not moralistic attitude, and it does not mention the police. However, after problems, leaders who care about the youth want to play the role that Thrasher assigns to the teenage gang leader. They have to think up new “challenges.” (The would could not have been more unfortunate.) However, it is the word “constantly” that is the clue. If another must constantly and obsessively de devised to siphon off a new threat of “energy,” a challenge can hardly be worthwhile, meaningful, or therapeutic. Is not this raising the ante? Solidly meeting a real need does not have this character. (The leader,” says Thrasher, “sometimes control the gang by means of summation, id est, by progressively urging the members from one deed to another, until finally an extreme of some sort is reached.”) My guess is that in playing games leaders will not have so lively an imagination as the lad on want to displace as leader; unlike the grownups, the gang will never select him. One of the objective factors that make it hard to grow up is the leaders are likely to be men of mediocre humane gifts. The psychology of community leader’s ideas can be puzzling. There often times, are no such undifferentiated energies as one speaks of. There are energies of specific functions with specifically real objects. In the case here they might be partly as follows: In adolescents a strong energy would be carnal reaching. For these boys, as for other adolescents, it is thwarted or imperfectly gratified, but these have probably not learned so well as others to cushion the suffering and be patient; so that another strong energy of the delinquents would be diffuse rage of frustration, perhaps directed at a scapegoat. If they have been kept from constructive activity making them feel worthwhile, a part of their energy might be envious and malicious destructiveness of property. As they are powerless, it is spite; and as they are humiliated, it is vengeances. As they feel rejected, they are humiliated, it is vengeance. As they feel rejected and misunderstood, as by governors, their energy is woe; but they react to this with cold pride, and all the more fierce gang-loyalty to their peers. For which of these specific energies does the governor seriously plan to devise an outlet? #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
What is the sociology of “belonging” here? In the great society they are certainly uprooted. However, in the gang their conformity is sickeningly absolute; they have uniform jackets and uniform morals. They speak a jargon and no one has a different idea that might brand one as queer. Since they have shared forbidden behaviour, they are all in the same mutually blackmailing plight and correspondingly guilty and suspicious toward the outsider. It is a poor kind of community they have; friendship, affection, personal helpfulness are remarkably lacking in it; they are “cool,” afraid to display feeling; yet does the Governor seriously think the he can offer a good community that warrant equal loyalty? Egoistic suicides are committed by people over whom society has little or no control. These people are not concerned with the norms or rules of society, nor are they integrated into the social fabric. This kind of suicide is more likely in people who are isolated, alienated, and non-religious. The larger number of such people living in a society, the higher that society’s suicide rate. Altruistic suicides, in contrast, are committed by people who are so well integrated into the social structure that they intentionally sacrifice their lives for its well-being. Soldiers who threw themselves on top of a live grenade to save others, Japanese kamikaze pilots who gave their lives in air attacks, women who sacrifice their live so they do not have to terminate their pregnancy—all were committing altruistic suicide. Societies that encourage altruistic deaths and deaths to preserve one’s honor are likely to have higher suicide rates. Anomic suicides, are those committed by people whose social environment fails to provide stable structures, such as family and religion, to support and give meaning to life. Such a societal condition is called anomie (literally, “without law), leaves individuals without a sense of belonging. Unlike egoistic suicide, which is the act of a person who rejects the structures of a society, anomic suicide is the act of a person who has been let down by a disorganized, inadequate, often decaying society. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
When societies go through periods of anomie, their suicide rates increase. Historical trends support this claim. Periods of economic depression and pandemic may bring about some degree of anomie in a country, and national suicide rates tend to rise during such times. During 2020, the proportion of mental health-related emergency department (ED) visits among adolescents aged 12-17 years increase 31 percent compared with that during 2019. In may 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, ED visits for suspected suicide attempts began to increase among adolescent aged 12-17 years, especially girls. During February 21-March 2020, 2021, suspected suicide attempt ED visits were 50.6 percent higher among girls aged 12-17 years than during the same period in 2019; among boys aged 12-17 years, suspected suicide attempt ED visits increase 3.7 percent. Periods of population change and increased immigration, too, tend to bring about a state of anomie, and again suicide rates rise. In 34 countries with increase in immigration, each country with a 1 percent increase in immigration was associated with an increase of 0.13 percent in the suicide rate. A major challenge in an individual’s immediate surroundings, rather than general societal problems, can also lead to anomic suicide. People who suddenly inherit a great deal of money, for example, may go through a period of anomie as their relationships with social, economic, and occupational structures are changed. Thus, it has been predicted that society with greater opportunities for change in individual wealthy or status would have suicide rates, and this prediction, too, is supported by research. Despite the influence of sociocultural theories, they cannot by themselves explain why some people who experience particular societal pressures commit suicide whereas the majority do not. The final explanation probably lies in the interaction between societal and individual factors. Suicide prevention requires a comprehensive approach that is adapted during times of infrastructure disruption, involves multisectoral partnerships and implements evidence-based strategies to address the range of factors influencing suicide risk. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
We must also begin a new effort by realizing that the guns may stop shooting, but this is not enough to make peace. We need something more. We need a reconstructed society where the moral and physical causes which may ultimately set guns shooting again will themselves be liquidated. We must proceed by understanding the historical and geographical accidents which divine the people one from another, one class from another, one nation from another, have fostered dislike, suspicion, and even hatred in the past. The limited nationalistic outlook can no longer be accepted uncritically. The developments of modern scientific civilization have filed it with contradictions and imperfections, with dangers and inadequacies. In its prewar form, it has become antiquated. It must now be revised and brought into line with postwar needs. Every major situation today is not only a national one but also an international one. Nations will have to broaden their outlook and give up some fraction of their nationalistic fervour not merely for the benefit of all but more so for their own individual benefit. And they will have to do this not only because the war’s practical lessons have left them no alternative, but also because their moral evolution has left them no alternative. The necessity of curing the power and authority of competitive nationality in the interests of international welfare is pain. One aspect that one of the last furious struggles for nationalism became aggressive and bellicose in an endeavour to save itself from impending and enforced limitation. The animosities and prejudices, the rivalries and hatreds, of the old-fashion nationalistic outlook must be replaced by the co-operative outlook of a new internationalism. Whether we like it or not, we are in the process of swiftly becoming a World community in this Fourth Wave World. The quicker we cut out the time-lag between the dissolution or our prejudices and the realization of our evolutionary needs, the less painful it will be. The sympathetic interest in foreign peoples, the feeling of connection with the wider human race, is something new in history but it is something which has come to stay. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
No continent can now afford to forget—as it has so often in the past—that it is a part of the same planet as the others. The great globe whose monstrous size frightened medieval minds has shrunk to a little ball which humans now play with. The way has taught more people more geography than any school ever did. This is not merely something to make us smile but also something to make us think. For it has forcibly brought home to them the fact that life today is an international affair, that they are being brought into ever-closer relations. We have to realize that we are approaching the first quarter of the twenty-first century and not the middle of the seventeenth. Wireless, cable, Internet, social media, digital streaming, telephone, mobile phone, flying cars, hydrogen and electric car, cars with bi-turbo, steamer, jet, high speed railway, computers, and printing press have made a new international relationship both necessary and possible but they have not made it actual. If we wish, to foster friendships, understanding, and goodwill in the future, the technological and commercial developments which have dissolved so ma of the physical divisions in the present may be used. The problems which have to be settled are now too large to be settled successfully on a prewar basis. A new international order must be instituted as being the only effective way to deal with them. Henceforth, the major events in every country must be looked upon as an integral and inseparable part of the planetary situation. The separate peoples are today too interdependent to carry on successfully with anything short of such an order. Every people is a part of a social organism and must share the general fate of that organism. If such a federation is still far off, it is near enough that a Third World War will precipitate it overnight. For the difficulties of achieving it are really less then the difficulties into which another great war will plunge everybody. One must take a realistic view of the situation, yes, but one need not throw all one’s idealism overboard to do it. We have in the past enlarged the meaning of the word “patriotism” from a merely local to a tribal significance and then from a tribal to a national one. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
It is no longer enough to be only Fiji Islanders or Frenchmen. We must also, and alongside that, be World Patriots. The political frontiers which separate one country from another separate them also from prosperity, peace, and advancement. The time will surely come one day to pull them down, when the United World of America will come to birth as a single entity. The ultimate evolution will certainly be towards a universal humanity. The immediate evolution is towards a consciousness that we are all human beings just as much as we are tribesmen or race members. This need not mean that total destruction of national sentiments and the total wounding of national vanities. It need not necessarily exclude an enlightened patriotism or a balanced devotion to a particular national or racial group It would exclude, however, the hatreds, the prejudice, the dislikes, and the intolerant fanaticism bred by false patriotism and narrow insularity. Just as a large circle does not exclude the smaller concentric one contained within it, so loyalty to humankind as a whole need not exclude the lesser loyalties to race, creed, and class. What is does is to subordinate them. Each people could carry on its own autonomous existence and independent activities within the framework of an international association. The right of freedom and self-rule need not be menaced by the broader rights of such as association. When the forms, interests, and arrangements of humankind become internationalized, the benefit will be moral as well as material. For group selfishness, false national pride, and racial prejudices will be forced down into second place behind human fellowship and common welfare. The administrative essentials of a fully developed new international order must consist of a World legislature, a World executive, and a World tribunal. The link between communications and character is complex, but unbreakable. We cannot transform all our media of communication and expect to remain unchanged as a people. A revolution in the media must mean a revolution in the psyche. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
During the Third Wave period, people were bathed in a sea of mass-produced imagery. A relatively few centrally produced newspapers, magazines, radio and television broadcasts, and movies fed what critics termed a “monolithic consciousness.” Individuals were continually encouraged to compare themselves to a relatively small number of role models and to evaluate their lifestyles against a few preferred possibilities. In consequence, the range of socially approved personality styles was relatively narrow. The de-massification of the media today present a dazzling diversity of role models and lifestyles for one to measure oneself against. Moreover, the new media do not feed us fully formed chunks, but broken chips and blips of imagery. Instead of being handed a selection of coherent identities to choose among, we are required to piece one together: a configurative or modular “me.” This is far more difficult, and it explains why so many millions are desperately searching for identity. Caught up in that effort, we develop a heightened awareness of our own individuality—of the traits that make us unique. Our self-images thus changed. We demand to be seen as, and treated as, individuals, and this occurs at precisely the time when the new production system requires more individualized workers. Beyond helping us to crystallize what is purely personal in us, the new communications media of the Fourth Wave (Internet, social media, digital streaming) turns us into producers—or rather prosumers—of our own self-imagery. In yesterday’s mass media the technical distinction between TV, print, and radio reflects the social division of labour to producers and consumers. Throughout the Second and Third wave ear, this meant that professional communicators produced the messages for the audience. The audience remained powerless to respond directly to, or interact with, the message sender. By contrast, in the Fourth Wave, major, minor, and individual producers are reaching out to interact with their audience. This is a most revolutionary feature of the new means of communication that many of them are interactive—permitted individual users to make or send images and other digital content as well as merely to receive them from the outside. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Internet, social media, digital streaming, mobile phones, two-way video communications systems, text messages, and email all place the means of communication into the hands of the individual. Looking ahead, one can imagine a stage at which even ordinary television becomes interactive, so that instead of merely watching Chicago One, Dynasty, S.W.A.T, Archie Bunker, Steve Harvey, or Mary Tyler Moore of the future, are actually able to talk to them and influence their behaviour in the show. Even now, the Qube cable system makes it technologically possible for viewers of a dramatic show to call on the director to speed up or slow down the action or to choose one story ending over another. The communications revolution gives us each a more complex image of self. It differentiates us further. It speeds the process by which we “try on” different images of self and, in fact accelerates out movement through successive images. It makes it possible for us to project our image electronically to the World. And nobody fully understands what all this will do to our personalities. For in no previous civilization have we ever had such powerful tools. We increasingly own the technology of consciousness. The World we are fast entering is so remote from out past experience that all psychological speculations are admittedly shaky. What is absolutely clear, however, is that powerful forces are streaming together to alter social character—to elicit certain traits, to suppress others, and in the process to transform us all. As we move beyond the Third Wave civilization we are doing more than shifting from one energy system to another, or from one technological base to the nest. We are revolutionizing inner space as well. In the light of this, it would b absurd to project the past upon the future—to the people of the Fourth Wave civilization in Third Wave terms. If our assumptions are even partially correct, individuals will vary more vividly tomorrow than they do today. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
More of them are likely to grow up sooner, to show responsibility at an earlier age, to be more adaptable, and to evince greater individuality. They are more likely than their parents to question authority. They will want money and will work for it—but, except under conditions of extreme privation, they will resist working for money alone. Above all, they seem likely to crave balance in their lives—balance between work and play, between production and prosumption, between headwork and handwork, between the abstract and the concrete, between objectivity and subjectivity. And they will see and project themselves in far more complex terms than any previous people. As Fourth Wave civilization matures, we shall create no a utopian man or woman who towers over the people of the past, not a superhuman race of Goethes and Aristotles (or Genghis Khans) but merely, and proudly, one hopes, a race—and a civilization—that deserves to be called human. No hope for such an outcome, no hope for a safe transition to a decent new civilization is possible, however, until we face one final imperative: the need for political transformation. And it is this prospect—both terrifying and exhilarating—that we explore. The personality of the future must be matched by a politics of the future. We bless you, World as you shine like a king. What you see is yours: all the soft meadows and furry mountains. You are loved by all. Wise Earth, ancient age does not waste you. Feeling and with blood, you are a God. I created the utterance of the lips; peace, peace, to one that is far off, and to one that is near, saith the Lord; an I will heal one. A spirit of inspiration came upon America, chief of captains, and she said: Peace be to thine helpers; for thy God helpeth thee. Then the people of America received God. and thus shall ye say: All hail and peace be both unto thee, and peace be to thine house, and peace be unto all that Thou hast. May the Lord gives strength unto His people; may the Lord bless His people with peace. “Keeping mercy and lovingkindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,” reports Exodus 34. 7. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Cresleigh Homes
Work from home takes on a whole new ring when you’ve got a gorgeous office like ours in the #Havenwood Model 4!
Zing zome zentimental melody about a chapel of an apple tree, about a couple living happily in the Cresleigh Home and I’ll be glad to zing along! I love my Cresleigh Home for sentimental reasons.
I hope you do believe me. I’ll give you my heart. I think of my Cresleigh Home every morning, dream of it every evening.
My darling Cresleigh Home, I am never lonely whenever you are in my sight. You’re every thought, everything, every song I hear.
Time to get some work done…in the most beautiful way possible! https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/residence-four/
Randolph Harris II International Institute 