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He Opened the Book and a Demon Spoke to Him
All good religions need some kind of Apocalypse. Thelema—the new religion of Aleister Crowley—was no exception. The Great Beast fully expected his new holy age, the Aeon of Horus, to be ushered in with an orgy of violence and bloodshed. With the advent of the First World War, the prophecy seemed to have been satisfied. Over four long years, the optimism and complacency of nineteenth-century Europe drowned in the mud of the Western Front, along with hundreds of thousands of young soldiers. However, Crowley seemed curiously indifferent to the whole affair. With typical arrogance, when the British Government refused his offer to produce war propaganda, the Luciferian man of letters travelled to the US to write anti-British propaganda. If he could not find recognition on the side of the angels, the Great Beast was always ready to side with the opposition. However, Crowley later claimed he wrote deliberately absurd material to discredit the German cause. His article on the bombing of London by Zeppelin airships gives credence to this eccentric defense: “For some reason or other in their last Zeppelin raid on London the Germans appear to have decided to make the damage as widespread as possible, instead of concentrating it in one quarter. A great deal of damage was done at Croydon, especially at its suburb Addiscombe, where my aunt lives. Unfortunately her house was not hit. Count Zeppelin is respectfully requested to try again. The exact address is Eton Lodge, Outram Road.” If World War One had been too minor a cataclysm to introduce Crowley’s Age of Horus, 1939 heralded a new orgy of human suffering. The Beast always maintained that the first nation to adopt his Book of the Law as a state religion would dominate the World. During the 1930s, however, as the Third Reich came to power, his ambivalence towards Germany—the country where his magical doctrines were taken most seriously—is perhaps understandable. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Some of his German followers saw in their new Fuhrer a political equivalent to their prophet, the Great Beast (perhaps even his “magical child”)—a new World order was to be created by the pure will-power of those extraordinary men. Some of his German followers saw in their new Fuhrer a political equivalent to their prophet, the Great Beast (perhaps even his “magical child”)—a New World Order was to be created by the pure will-power of these two extraordinary men. However, in 1935 the Nazis banned the Ordo Templi Orientis and the Order of the Silver Star, throwing numerous occultists (including Karl Germer, one of Crowley’s foremost disciples) into the concentration camps. There may have been similarities between Crowley’s Thelemic doctrines and emergent Nazi dogma (elitism, irrationalism, transcendence of morality), but the Great Beast could see on which side his future depended: Britain would “knock Hitler for six!” he announced. Whether or not the horrors of the Second World War signalled the advent of the Age of Horus, Adolf Hitler emerged from the blood and pain of that conflict as a secular Satan. Indeed, a minor literary industry has grown up around the idea of Hitler as a very literal Satanic figure suggests that the Fuhrer really did, in Dennis Wheatley’s words, “use dark forces.” The roots of this belief return us to the occult lodges of the late nineteenth century. In 1875, the writer and occultist Guido von List climbed a hill overlooking Vienna to conduct a strange ritual. Von List was dedicated to returning greater Germany to an older purer faith—the worship of Wotan, and the other pagan gods of the Teutonic race Upon the hill he commemorated the summer solstice by buying a number of empty wine bottles, carefully arranged into a sacred symbol: the swastika. In 1908 von List Founded the Armanen Initiates, the inner order of his modestly-titled Guido von List Society. His doctrines centered around ideas of racial purity—von List believed the German peoples, the Armenen, had originally been a race of supermen, but mongrelistation had weakened the race until bashful old Guido was its last pure-blood survivor. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
According to the race mystic, “The hydra-headed international Jewish conspiracy” was behind it all. To reverse matters, von List prescribed a study of ancient Teutonic religious runes and –more practically—laws to precent further racial interbreeding. His eventual gal was a racial state ruled by “a self-chosen Fuhrer to whom [Germany] willingly submits.” Alongside the swastika, the emblems of this new state would include the sig rune: the symbol later used to form the insignia of the SS. Guido von List was one of the leading Germanic mystics dedicated to “volkisch” occultism. “Volkisch” basically translates as “folkloric,” but this was also leavened with a hard-edged nationalism. Chief obsession among the volkisch orders were the sacred nature of race (or “blood”), an interest in the culture and beliefs of the Germanic peoples in the early Middle Ages, and a strong current of anti-Semitism. Among the most important of the volkisch occultists—some of whom fancied themselves the priests of a revived Norse religion—was Dr. Jorg Lanz von Libenfels. In many ways, a sorcerer in the classic mould, von Liebenfels adopted his aristocratic name to increase his mystique (his real name was Adolf Lanz), and began his career as a Catholic priest before being defrocked for “harbouring carnal and Worldly desires.” His response was to found an “order of New Templars”—quite what the original Templars had to do with racial purity is not clear, but it did not stop von Libenfels preaching a message of race war from his temple on the banks of the Danube. In 1909, a young Austrian named Adolf Hitler secured an audience with von Liebenfels to secure some back issues of Ostara, the journal of the New Templars. In 1932, von Liebenfels would write to a fellow occultist that “Hitler is one of our pupils…You will one day experience that he, and through him we, will one day be victorious, and develop a movement that will one day make the World tremble.” The most direct link between the occult underground and the Third Reich is the Thule Society. Thule, according to northern European myth, was a version of Atlantis, and island that sank beneath the sea. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Thule Society ideology decreed this legendary island to be the home of the German supermen, who they hoped to contact using magical techniques. In 1919, the Thule Society formed a tiny political group called the German Workers Party in Munich—the seed from which Hitler’s National Socialist Party grew. In the 1920s Germany of the Weimar Republic, volkisch occult groups sense that their time was coming. Losing the First World War left Germany politically chaotic, economically bankrupt and profoundly demoralized. Weimar Berlin earnt a reputation for decadence exceeding that of 1890s Paris—though there was a cynical desperation among the German hedonist that never surfaced amongst their French counterparts. For many ordinary citizens of “Greater Germany” (which included Austria), however, their feelings of disillusionment hardened into suspicions of betrayal. One such was the young war hero Hitler—who was convinced Germany’s forces were defeated by treachery at home, rendering the huge loss of life futile. Hitler, along with many others, was sure that the “November criminals” (government signatories of a peace treaty in November 1918) were responsible for the fatherland’s defeat and humiliation. And behind the November criminals were the treacherous Jewish people. In this environment, volkisch occultists found an eager audience for their fables of an ancient, noble Ayran race. They not only offered up a scapegoat for their defeat, but also created the mythology of a sacred Germanic blood heritage from which a humbled people could rebuild their pride. It is a long way from accepting that volkisch occultism helped create a spiritual environment friendly to Nazism to believing the Third Reich was a Satanic cult. (Buffy the Vampire Slayer was said to be symbolic of the rebirth of the Third Reich, maybe you can see the symbolism. This interesting thing is that Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played Buffy Summers is Jewish, but also reminiscent this Ayran super race.) #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The relationship between Nazism and volkism is similar to that between the radical African-American political groups and Black Islamic leaders who proclaim that the Man (the White Man) to be the Devil. Political leaders, as soon as they achieve any real power, are usually quick to distance themselves from such emotive spiritual propaganda. However, it is interesting how light and dark are used in Christian terms not to reflect colour, but the nature of one’s spirit. And when you see these people with soft features, pale skin, and these colourful eyes, it is hard to believe they do dark things, but when one sees someone with darker skin, people almost always consider them guilty. It is as if religious light has also been used to frame people based on skin colour, but when it comes down to it, people are capable of things that are bad no matter what colour their skin is, and as one grows up, once can see that skin colour matters very little in guilt or innocence. Nonetheless, total revolution also demanded a spiritual revolution. The Russian Revolution of 1917 had a similarly religious aspect. Communists were determined to uproot the Christian Church and replace it with religious loyalty to the State, and its socialist principles, which is why so many religious symbols in America are now banded on public builds, and next to be banned with be the America flag. Many people may thing that journalist Tomi Lahren of FOX News is a racist, but one should actually listen to what she is saying, and be objective about it. America is actually becoming a communist nation where the people have no power, laws are just recommendations, and the U.S. Constitution is being removed and stored in someone’s basement, much the Confederate Statues, and flags. Next, slavery will just be a conspiracy theory—it will be considered a myth. It is just like music, most real artists listen to all genera of music, but they have a typical style they love, and many scholars read all kinds of material so they can have a comprehensive view of what is going on in the World, instead of just be told only what the masses want them to know, but people love to label, which is why they are stuck in ignorance. #RandolpHarris 5 of 21
Bolsheviks held wild revels, called “African nights,” where Christian festivals were parodied in atheistic rites such as “Red Prayers,” and “Red Mass.” Obscene hymns were sung, and children were encouraged to spit upon and destroy puppets representing God, and other holy figures, in powerful echoes of the Black Mass medieval peasants. Hitler’s doctrines were no less revolutionary. Nazism was designed to revolutionize every aspect of life—even the way people thought—and the old ways were denounced as “Jewish,” “liberal.” Hitler despised “intellectuals,” advocating intuition, or even irrationalism, over logic and rational thoughts. In many ways the Nazis turned back the clock two hundred years, to when science and sorcery were still reluctant bedfellows. In the field of military technological innovation and instinct were promoted at the expense of methodology, liberating German scientist to creates some of the most efficient weapons of war the World had seen. Alfred Rosenberg, an intimate of Hitler and high-ranking Nazi official drew up plans for a National Reich Church, which was not going to destroy Christianity but “supercede” it, and called his new faith “positive Christianity.” He concluded: “On the day of its foundation, the Christian cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals, and chapels and it must be superseded by the only unconquerable symbol, the Swastika.” However, what did the Swastika symbolize? Rosenberg wrote: “Today a new faith awakens: the myth of the blood, the faith that by defending the blood were defend also the divine nature of man. The faith, embodies in scientific clarity, that the Nordic blood represents the mystery which has replaced and conquered the ancient sacraments.” The historian Konrad Heiden beings his book on Der Fuhrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power with a curious story concerning Rosenberg: “One day in the summer of 1917 a student was reading in his room in Moscow. A stranger entered, laid a book on the table, and silently vanished. The cover of the book bore in Russian the words from the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew: “He is near, he is hard by the door.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
The sent sensed the masterful irony of higher powers in this strange happening. They had sent him a silent message. He opened the book, and the voice of the demon spoke to him. It was a message concerning the antichrist, who would come at the end of days. The Antichrist is no mythical being, no monkish medieval fantasy. It is the portrait of a type of man who comes to the fore when an epoch is dying. The Antichrist was supposedly Hitler. The Nazi began suppressing occultists and secret societies in 1934, in a purge that reached its peak in 1937. Thousands of astrologers and mystic disappeared into the concentration camps, never to appear again, which also proves Whoppie Goldberg’s states, “The Holocaust was about race.” Anyone who was deemed a threat to national security was sent to concertation camps, but in the same sense, the holocaust was about race, it was about preserving the Ayran race. Just anyone who was not Aryan could be a target, as it was more about preservation of their bloodline. Volkisch occultists were not spared. Even the Thule Society—the magi at the nativity of Nazim—was devoured by its ravenous offspring. The Nazi State would not tolerate anything outside its control, or that it had not created itself. Its tenant of faith was the destiny of the Aryan race, as expressed by its prophet Hitler. If this policy of spiritual and intellectual monopoly sounds familiar, it is because it resembles the doctrines of one of the institutions of the Nazis sought to replace: the Church. The Nazi party created its own priesthood—the Black Oder, better known as the Schutzstaffel, or SS. The SS began as Hitler’s bodyguards, but under Heinrich Himmler, manoeuvered and massacred their way to become the most powerful organization in the Nazi establishment. Like “house of God” of the medieval Inquisition, the SS policed the souls of those under their ever-expanding jurisdiction. The faithful were monitored, the suspect—even the volkish occultist who shared the Nazi vision of race—purged, the unholy exterminated. Himmler became the second most powerful man in the Third Reich. Any occultist who wished to survive in Nazi Germany was well-advised to find a place under Himmler’s wing. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Several men did—most significantly Karl Weisthor. Weisthor was born Karl Maria Wiligut in Vienna, 1866, to a family with a long military tradition, and was decorated for his service during the First World War. Following the war he became involved in volkisch occultism, adopting doctrines which were extreme even by volkisch standards. With the modesty characteristic of his ilk, Weisthor claimed to be descended from Ayran gods, the last living representative of the Irminist Church. The Irminists—who worshipped the true Christ, an Aryan called Krist—had been opposed throughout history by the false religion of the Catholic Church, their racial enemies the Jewish people, and Aryan heretics who worshipped the pagan god Wotan. Weisthor knew all of this because he possessed clairvoyance that allowed him to recall the heroic lives of his ancestors, thousands of years ago. Not everyone was impressed by the evidence, however, an in 1924 he was committed to a lunatic asylum. Undeterred, when he was released, he changed his name and headed to Munich. In 1933 he attracted the attention of Himmler, who installed the cranky medium in the Ahnenerbe department of the SS. Under Weisthor’s advice, a castle at Wewlsburg in north-west Germany was chosen as the spiritual headquarters of the Black Order. It became the Nazi equivalent of the Vatican, with great echoing chambers dedicated to the heroes of the Aryan race, and a central hall where Himmler and his twelve closet disciples would meet. Weisthor designed the SS “Totenkpfring” –a scared ring decorated with skulls and runes, personally bestowed upon SS members by Himmler and retuned to Wewelsburg upon their deaths. He also conceived and presided over neo-pagan solstice ceremonies, and the Weddings of SS officers to good Aryan girls. The Black Order was not just a military organization but a sect, a fraternity of warrior priests. Though it never claimed the heritage of the Knights Templar, the parallels between these two orders are striking. Both snowballed into vast international forces. Both maintained independent economic systems that allowed them to accumulate vast wealth. Both were composed of highly-disciplined warriors, fanatically dedicated to their creeds. Both were exempt from the laws that governed their contemporaries, answerable only to the head of their orders (Himmler of the Grand Master) and the representative of the sacred creed on Earth (Hitler or the Pope). Both planned to establish their own independent states. And both were, at least ostensibly Christian. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Weisthor’s faith may have incorporated much bizarre German paganism, but at the core he believed he was preaching Christianity. One of the oaths taken by SS candidates before the full initiation ran, “We believe in God, we believe in Germany which He created in His World and in the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, whom he has sent us.” One of the titles Himmler had bestowed on him by is peers was “the Black Jesuit,” as he based the structure of the SS upon the fanatically-secretive Catholic Society of Jesuits. Himmler, brought up in a devoutly-Catholic Bavarian household, never lost his belief in the importance of ritual symbolism. When he used the term “Satanic,” or evoked the Devil, it was applied to the enemies of the Aryan race—never in connection with his own faither. Persecution of Jewish people was often inspired by accusation that they poisoned wells and drank the blood of children, or, more traditionally, that they had killed Jesus. They were commonly believed to be part of an international conspiracy—sometimes decreed to be Satanic—against all Christian values. The Catholic Church, concerned that the Third Reich was stealing souls that were rightfully theirs, had certainly preached against this new paganism. Nazis believed that they were breeding babies for God, or “for race and nation.” Occultic suggestions that the Third Reich was, as one author puts it, a “demonocracy” with the Fuhrer himself as a black magician, a “psychic vampire,” demonically possessed, even as the Antichrist himself—are based on Hitler’s skill at taking political military gambles (precognition), his inner voiced and violent rages (possession), and the way simultaneously drew upon and released great emotion with his speeches (physic vampirism). Some still say that there is no evidence for one to consider the Third Reich as a manifestation of supernatural evil. Yet people believed because Hitler consulted an astrologer that Hitler was evil; Satan is Evil personified, therefore Hitler is Satan. Even level-headed historians have described Hitler as possessing almost supernatural powers—whereas the terms “mesmeric” or “hypnotic” best described the psychological effect this frantic, grim little man has on the vast audience at Nazi rallies. Political figures such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King also based their careers on charismatic oratory, and few would suggest either man was possessed by demons. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
However, it is worth confessing that the Third Reich is of legitimate interest to occultists. Something about Hitler’s meteoric rise—from penniless tramp to omnipotent dictator—and Germany’s similarly rapid rise—from near-collapse to near-World domination—confounds rational explanation. Still, the philosophy of Hitler, and the psychological symbolism employed by the Nazis, are no more inherently Satanic than that of the Catholic Church. However, there were eyewitness accounts of wartime sorcery in England: Witches cast spells to stop Hitler landing after France fell. They met, raised the great cone of power and directed the thought at Hitler’s brain: “You cannot cross the sea. You cannot cross the sea. Not able to come. Not able to come.” We are not saying they stopped Hitler. All we say is that we saw a very interesting ceremony performed with the intention of putting a certain idea into his mind and this was repeated several times afterwards; and though all the invasion barges were ready, the fac that Hitler never even tried to come. The witches told us that their great-grandfathers had tried to project the same idea into Boney’s [Napoleon’s] mind. Exploration of the Great Beast’s (Aleister Crowley) darker doctrines—of a World divided into masters and slaves, with good and evil sacrificed on the bloody alter of a new morality—would be the province of a far less gaudy crew than the hippies. Marianne Faithfull—a former child of the upper-middle classes—was a long-time consort of English rock band the Rolling Stones, and an icon of “swinging London.” In her autobiography, written much later, she displays little doubt as to the source of the era’s dynamism. Speaking of her most famous lover, Mick Jagger, she says: “Her harnessed all of the negative forces into entities. Out of these destructive impulses, he created all the incredible personate of the late sixties: the Midnight Rambler, Lucifer, Jumpin’ Jack Flash. They are all manifestations of malignant and chaotic forces, the ungovernable mob. The dark, violent, group mind of the crowd—chaos, Pan. That frenzied power caused many of the causalities of the sixties.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Foremost among the musicians who pioneered the first colourful wave of psychedelia were the Beatles. Their high-profile transformation from chirpy, mop-headed scousers to long haired peaceniks reflected the cultural tide of their generation. However, in the United States of America, the FBI compiled a two-inch thick file on Lennon upon which FBI director J. Edgar Hoover scrawled, “All extremists should be considered dangerous.” Fundamentalist Christians—with their endearing disrespect for facts or common sense—discovered the occultic secrets behind the Beatles’ success. They maintained that the Lennon-McCartney sound was a magical beat stolen from the ancient Druids. According to them, in ancient times these pagan priests would beat out the demonic rhythm on drums made of human skin to summon evil spirits. In the hands of the Beatles, this Druid beat could be used to send the young people of American insane—or even worse, pinko. There were Christian protests of the Beatles, where the Ku Klux Klan burnt their records and Lennon was held up as a Satanists or something. The next years, Christian suspicions of the Beatles were confirmed by detailed perusal of the cover of their catchy, innovative Sgt. Pepper album. The cover design is a collage of people admired by the Beatles, all standing being the band: among them, in the top row, can be seen Aleister Crowley. In 1994, a prominent Vatican official, Father Corrado Balduci, would reinforce the Christian view that the Beatles were “the Devil’s musicians.” Sadly, in 1980, Lennon was shot dead outside his New York apartment by a dazed-looking young man named Mark Chapman. Chapman had become a big Beatles fan, but had become increasingly convinced that Lennon was evil. An interview with Chapman by a psychiatrist, published in Rolling Stone magazine, reported that the holy assassin could feel the presence of Satan’s demons around him. “I can feel their thoughts. I can hear their thoughts. I can hear them talking, but not from the outside, from the inside.” The unfortunate Chapman had become a “born-again” Christian, learning about the evils of Beatles music from his new faith. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Next to the affable efficiency of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones were a maelstrom of creative chaos. Black Magicians thought that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were acting as unknow agents of Lucifer and others thought hey were Lucifer. One of the “Black Magicians” Richards referred to was Kenneth Anger. Anger stood at the crossroads where many of the Satanic elements of the 1960s met. Anger happily announced Crowley’s dictum that the Key of joy is disobedience, and declared that not only was the Aeon of Horus upon, but the Aeon of Lucifer. Shortly before he became involved with the Rolling Stones, Anger helped found the Church of Satan. His blend of Crowleyism and Satanism entranced the band, though—in a familiar pattern—Anger was often keen to dissociate from Satanism, referring to his personal Prince of Darkness by the less inflammatory title of Lucifer. He later confessed, however, that his Lucifer had always been the “cosmic villain,” the Miltonic Satan. Whatever effect Anger had on the band’s professional lives, he touched them personally to varying degrees. Keith and his lover Anita later got into this black magic stuff. Mick Jagger dabbled in it. However, every one was just a little afraid of Kenneth Anger. Inexplicable things involving him would happen. Stores about the magus’ association with the band include Anger seeming to appears and disappear in various places. He offered to perform a pagan ritual wedding for Keith and Anita that involved a golden door. When they awoke the next day, a heavy oaken door had been painted gold, with the paint already dry. The house was heavily secured, and nobody could explain this occultic interior decoration. Faithfull talked about falling off a mountain during the making of Anger’s second version of Lucifer Rising, sustaining only a mild concussion. Anita Pallenberg was so spooked by all of this that she slept in a protective circle of candles with a string of garlic around her neck. Anger’s next overtly magical project Lucifer Rising was his first religious film, a weird, mesmeric narrative combined with a real magical ritual, it also embodied his love/hate relationship with the 1960s counter culture—both in the film itself, and the events surrounding its strange history. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
As Anger once observed, “Making movies is casting spells.” A screen director and editor, the theory ran that the magus could fully control both the characters to screen and the entities they invoked. Lucifer Rising depicted the downfall of the oppressive Aeon of Osiris (or Christian era), and the movement into the Aeon of Horus (or Lucifer). “My reason for filming has nothing to do with “cinema” at all, explained Anger. “It’s transparent excuse for capturing people…I consider myself working Evil on an evil medium.” On 21 September 1967, Anger organized a celebratory event titled the Equinox of the Gods at the Straight Theatre in Haight-Ashbury, the epicenter of hippie culture in San Francisco. However, Beausoleil proved a more capricious Lucifer than Anger anticipated—according to Anger, the pretty hippie he called “Cupid” ripped off 1600 feet of footage from Lucifer Rising and some camera equipment before the performance. Anger was livid, smashing a rare magical cane that once belonged to Crowley. He then pronounced a cruse upon Beausoleil, sealing it with an amulet he put around his neck. On one side was a picture of his erstwhile protégé, on the other a toad with the inscription “Bobby Beausoleil—who was turned into a toad by Kenneth Anger.” Cupid never turned into a toad, but a could of uncommonly dark fortune did follow him as he headed south for Los Angeles. In 1970 Anger remade his masterpiece, Lucifer rising—though even then he still tinkered with elements of the film to produce dozens of subtly different versions. Once again, Anger himself plays the Magus, invoking a new aeon through the door opened by the occult events of the 1960s: A film about the love generation—the birthday part of the Aquarian Age. Showing actual ceremonies to make Lucifer rise. Lucifer is the Light God, not the Devil—the Rebel Angel behind what is happening in the World today. His message is that they key of joy is disobedience. Isis (Nature) wakes. Osiris (Death) answers. Lilith (Destroyer) climbs to the place of Sacrifice. The Magus activates the circle and Lucifer—Bringer of Light—breaks through.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Bad luck had begun calling upon the Rolling Stone, in the shape of a series of tragedies. The first was the death of the band’s guitarist, Brian Jones. It was Jones who, in 1962, formed the band named it after a Muddy Waters song. On 2 July, in classical rock ‘n’ roll styles, he drowned in his swimming pool on a cocktail of vodka and pills. Two days after Jones’ death, the Stones turned their free concert in London’s Hyde Park into a memorial for their ex-guitarist. Jagger read a poem by Shelley, then tried to release hundreds of white butterflies from boxes by the stage. They have been in the boxes too long and most of the delicate creatures were dead. The summer Woodstock free festival, in New York State, represented for many the hazy apex of the Love Generation. At the suggestion of scheduled support band the Grateful Dead, the Stones hired the Hell’s Angels as security for their Altamont gig. The Angels were very affordable, but their brand of frightening freedom still had a devilish chic in the naïve 1960s. The Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club was formed after the Second World War, by bike-loving ex-servicemen who found civilian life too bland to bear. The Hell’s Angels moniker was taken from a notorious American Air Force squadron, but the Satanic implications of the name became increasingly appropriate. The Angeles were hellraisers, prototypes for the whole biker culture—particularly the outlaws, or “1%ers” (the “one percent of motorcyclists’ labelled as ‘hoodlums and troublemakers” by the American Motorcycle Association in 1967). Many 1%er gangs emulated the Angels’ Satanic-sound title, adopting infernal names like the Straight Satans, Satan’s Slavers and the Pagans. Some took their title at face value. One member of the powerful Canadian gang Satan’s Angels said in a 1970s interview, “There are definite spirits and we identify with that particular one that has been called Satan. It’s an upsidedown World. Our virtues are other’s vices. You could say we were Satanists.” Hell’s Angels, and other outlaw gangs, are symbols of the more destructive, volatile aspects of the Satanic canon. Their readiness to fight, their revelling in intimidation and fear, their rapacious passion for pleasures of the flesh in all their basest forms, all these characteristics made them into icons of willful alienation and violent self-indulgence. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
When Jagger finally came onstage at Altamont on 6 December 1969, things were beginning to get ugly. Marty Balin of support act Jefferson Airplane had been in in the face with a pool cue by a Hell’s Angel. He tried to intervene when he saw the Angels beat up an African America kid in front of him. Paul Kantner, band founder, began to shout at the Angels until his microphone was snatched from him in the brawl that immersed the from of the stage. Jagger took the stage clad in his psychedelic sorcerer’s robes. Dancing under the red lights, surrounded by the dark wall of threatening, black-clad Angels, the vocalist could have been Anger’s Lucifer served by a surly army of warlike demons. Two songs into the set, things just kept getting uglier. Naked hippies cast themselves at the stage as offerings for their rock gods, and the Angels cast them back into the audience after beating them bloody. The third song began, “Sympathy for the Devil,” and all Hell broke loose. In the audience, an African American youth named Meredith Hunter pulled a gun. According to some he was aiming it at Jagger, other claimed he was defending himself against the Angels. Whichever is true, it was scant moments before a pack of black-leather Angels fell upon him and, in a flurry of kicks and knife blows, Hunter was killed. The Stones could see that the Angels were brutalizing the audience rather than controlling them—but Jagger was out of his depth, bleating weakly for everybody to “cool it.” As the killing of Meredith Hunter played itself out to the strains of “Sympathy for the Devil,” the song had to be stopped briefly as Jagger quipped, with unintended understatement, that “something very funny always happens when we start that number.” As the tide of panic and fury rose, the death count escalated to three with 100 injured. Following Altamont, the shaken Stones turned their back on the whole Satanic scene. Jagger wore a large wooden crucifix for some time after. The revolutionary stance and allusions to street violence were quietly dropped in favour of the stately image of rock ‘n’ roll aristocrats. The Rolling Stones abandoned any pretension to occultic chic or streetwise cool, letting themselves into the World of polite high society through the back door. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
It is always just a few days before the Winter Solstice when the forces of darkness are at their most powerful. Because the immense size of the Winchester Mansion, Mrs. Winchester included forty-seven fireplaces in her mansion, and seventeen chimneys. One rambling section in particular, the Hall of Fires, was designed to produce as much heat as possible—perhaps to ease Mrs. Winchester’s extreme arthritis. In addition to many windows that let the sunlight stream through, the three adjoining rooms have four fireplaces and three hot air registers from the coal furnace in the basement. Mrs. Winchester is very significant, not only for a vast estate, but one of many reasons was because she was known to have encounters with the supernatural. While I was at Mrs. Winchester’s mansion, I was asked to meet with a group of high school students who had gotten into spiritualism just for kicks. We had a meeting that night and I listened as the young people told me their experiences. At a part a friend had fascinated them with stories of trances and séances. He told them how to use a Ouija board and how to enter a state of trance. They were seeking spirit manifestations. When they began to get reactions, they became frightened. The spirit had guided them back in time. A boy appeared and stated to tell a story, he said: “When I was about ten years old, I came to visit my aunt Sarah. I met a girl who lived on the estate Ethel—aged eight. I never had the courage to speak to her. My aunt Sarah asked me to stay three months, and I did.” The statement was so quietly serious, so destitute of any suspicion of humor, that the audience looked on with great apprehension. “I had to work hard in those days. I saw Ethel, later that evening, asleep in one of the carriages, and that was the last time I saw her. I ended stay with my aunt for three years. There was a glimmer of a summer gown under the trees; a figure passed from the shadow to sunshine, and again into the cool dusk of a leafy lane. While I was walking in the garden, I found her seated in the shade of a pine. She looked up serenely, as though she had expected me, and we faced each other. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
“When I stroke to speak, my voice had an unknow tone to me. Her upturned face was my only answers. The breeze in the pine-tops, which had been stirring monotonously, ceased. Her delicate face was like a blossom lifted in the still air; her upward glance chained me to silence. The first breeze broke the spell; I spoke a word, then speech died on my lips; I stood twisting my shooting-cap, confused, not daring to continue. The girl leaned back, supporting her weight on one arm, fingers almost buried in the deep green moss. ‘It has been three years today,’ I said, in a dull voice of one who dreams—’three years today. May I not speak?’ In her lowered head and ears I repeated acquiescence; in her silence, consent. ‘Three years ago, today,’ I repeated; ‘the anniversary has given men courage to speak to you. Surely you will not take offense—we have travelled so far together!’ –from the end of the World to the end of it, and back again, here—to this place of all places in the World! And now to find you here on this day of all days—here within a step of our first meeting-place—three years ago today! And all the World we have travelled over since, never speaking, yet ever passing on paths parallel—paths which for thousands of miles ran almost within arm’s distance—’ She raised her head slowly, looking out from the shadows of the pines into her sunshine. Her dreamy eyes rested on acres of gold-rod and green grass in the December coolness. ‘Will you speak to me?’ I asked. ‘I have never even heard the sound of your voice.’ She turned and look at me, touching with idle finger the soft hair curling on her temples. Then she bent her head once more, the faintest shadow of a smile in her eyes. ‘Because,’ I said, humbly, ‘these long years of silent recognition count for something! And then the strangeness of it!—the fate of it,–the quiet destiny that ruled over our lives,–that rules them now—now as I am speaking, weighting every second with its tiny burden of fate.’ She replied, ‘I have never forgotten you—never!’ She looked into my eyes. ‘Dear, do you not understand? Have you forgotten? I died three years ago today.’ The unearthly sweetness of her white face started me. A terrible light broke in on me; my heart stood still.’ #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“And that very day, I died of a broken heart. Legend has it that I came to visit my aunt Sarah to pick up a check and no one ever saw me after that day, but truth is I never left. When God takes the mind and leaves the body alive there grows in it, sometime, a beauty almost supernatural. ‘Be with me when the new moon comes,’ she whispered. ‘It will be so sweet. I will teach you how divine is death, if you come.’” About 4 o’ clock in the morning, one of the students started to levitate, and he saw all kinds of beautiful sights. I asked him if he were concerned whether or not this was from God. He said it must be because it was in the spiritual realm. The one of the other students went into a demonic tantrum. I asked God to rebuke the demons and set her free. The demons said, “We are going, but we will come back.” And come back they did, with reinforcements. I worked with this young woman for several months, but because she was unwilling to give up this traffic with spirits she was later placed in a mental institution. I am convinced that she could be perfectly healed of this oppression and indwelling by demons if only she would consent. Sometimes lewd demons trick well-meaning people into following their sensual behavior. Not all spirits are evil. However, it is a serious matter to become involved with spiritualism in any form, but also the atoning blood of Christ always gives us His purity and power. All who desire protection from Satan and His demons will receive it. In the case of levitations, apports, and telekinesis, God allows the physical and natural laws of the Universe to be superseded temporarily and in a restricted sense by higher laws of the spirit World. The Winchester mansion is known for having spiritual events take place, even today. These phenomena are diabolic miracles. In distinction to divine miracles, diabolical miracles are supernatural acts that imitate the power and benevolence of divine miracles. It is as if God said to the powers of darkness what he said to the sea in the day of creation: “Hitherto shalt thou come but no father, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed,” reports Jon 38.11. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
The demonic powers are allowed only a very small intrusion into the orderly realm of nature, and the miracles they produce are characterized by a rigid sameness. Everywhere in the domain of occultism there are reminders of God’s absolute sovereignty. He is in majestic control. Demonic power makes such a poor show by its severe restrictions and drab sameness, that it actually advertises the glory of God for those who can see evil supernaturalism in the proper focus of divine revelation. Levitations (from the Latin verb levito, “to raise or lift”) are objects or people that are raised up and appear floating in their air. Such phenomena are frequently reported in occult literature and experienced in haunted houses, where strongly psychic people have lived and died or where spiritistic séances have been heled. Objects on occasion sail through the air as if thrown by an invisible hand, or spooks (ghost) appear hovering in space. Furniture is lifted, often when a strong medium is present. Human, either in a conscious or unconscious state, are included in the phenomena of levitation. We would oppose the belief that a word has any power of its own, and that the charmer is only the representative of this power. Words are only neutral instruments. They can be used for either good or evil. It depends on the inspiration behind the words. A Christian employs the Word on God’s authority. The magician and charmer employs his words and phrases as demonized instruments of magic. One of Mrs. Winchester’s servants had died. The man in question had the reputation of being a magician—it makes sense that a house built by spirits would have some magical employees. Two weeks before his death, as he lay in bed seriously ill, he began to groan, “Take the charm away from me, take the charm away from me.” The relatives had gone to the minister for advice, but he had warned them against doing as the man requested. The magician finally died in terrible agony. The minister told Mrs. Winchester that the man looked black as coal when he had seen him in the coffin. Many magicians only find rest when someone takes the spell of charm away from them, together with the responsibility of carrying on the occult practice. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
A description of magic ritual can be found in various books on magic. These books have the same significance to the magicians as the Christian Bible has for the Christian. There is a great amount of literature on the subject of magic, the most widely distributed book on the spiritual subject being the 6th and 7th Book of Moses. Unhappily a publisher in Braunschweig has published new editions of this book. The use of the name Moses is only a camouflage. Magicians look on the miracle connected with the staff of Moses as a piece of magic. In this way they try to elevate Moses to the position of their patron saint. The first part of the book reveals how a human may enter into a relationship with the devil. The latter part gives instructions as to how a person can achieve dominion over all the forces of nature as well as the powers of Heaven and Hell through the use of magic. The book has already caused untold harm in the World and people who read it invariably suffer in the process. A house in which the book is kept is also a place where misfortunes often occur. There are many examples which illustrate this fate and we will deal with this problem soon in greater detail. In or about the 27 of December of 1899, a girl about eighteen years of age, Miss Mary Dunbar, was hired as a maid by Mrs. Winchester. Mrs. Winchester described her as “having an open and innocent countenance, and being a very intelligent young person.” She and her aunt, Mrs. Haltridge, were staying at Winchester mansion. A rumor was afloat that the latter had been bewitched into her grave, and this could not fail to have its effect on Miss Dunbar. Accordingly, on the night of her arrival, her troubles began. When she retired to her bedroom, accompanied by another girl, they were surprised to find that a new mantle and some other wearing apparel had been taken out of a trunk and scattered through the house. Going to look for the missing articles, they found laying on the parlour floor an apron which two days before had been locked up in another apartment. This apron, when they found it, was rolled up tight, and tied fast with string of its own material, which had upon it five strange knots. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
These she proceeded to unloose, and having done so, she found a flannel cap, which had belonged to old Mrs. Haltridge, wrapped up in the middle of the apron. When she saw this she was frightened, and threw both cap and arpon to young Mrs. Haltridge, who was also alarmed, thinking that the mysterious knots were boded evil to some inmate of the mansion. That evening Miss Dunbar was seized with the most violent fit, and, recovering, cried out that a knife was run through her thigh, and that she was most grievously afflicted by three women, who she described particularly, but did not then give any account of their names. About midnight she was seized with a second fit; when she saw in her vision seven or eight women who conversed together, and in their conversation called each other by their names. When she came out of her fit she gave their names as Janet Liston, Elizabeth Cellor, Kate M’Calmont, Janet Carson, Janet Mean, Latimer, and one who they termed Mrs. Ann. She gave so minute a description of them. Mrs. Dunbar said there was something in her stomach which she would be glad to get rid of. She fell into such violent fits of pains that three men were scarce able to hold her, and cried out, “For Christ sake take the Devil out of the room.” In her fits she often had her tongue thrust into her windpipe in such a manner that she was like to choak, and the root seemed pulled up into her mouth. Upon her recovery she complained extremely of the one Mean, who has twisted her tongue and spoke of someone who had tore her throat, and tortured her violently by reason of her crooked fingers and swelled knuckles. Her joints where all distorted and the tendons shriveled up, as she had described. However, through 38 years of residence, Mrs. Winchester’s employees remained fiercely and faithfully loyal, defending every eccentricity. Although usual things did occur in her home, they said she was very strong minded and firm, but always fair and kind. Laziness, theft, gossip or revealed confidences met with instant dismissal. Mrs. Winchester, they claimed, was deeply concerned with the welfare of their families. They were well paid and often additionally rewarded with gifts, even homes or real estate, and left lifetime pensions. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
The Winchester Mystery House on a rainy day is a sight to see 😍 Come see for yourself this weekend!
🎟 link in bio. https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
One Side’s Abundant Eden is the Other’s Vast Wasteland
The real community of humans, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers of all humans to the extent they desire to know. The face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings—is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the World was mad in the past; humans always though they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all. Many students, of course, cannot defend their opinion. It is something with which they have been indoctrinated. The best they can do is point out all the opinions and cultures there are and have been. What right, they ask, do I or anyone else have to say one is better than the others? Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more of less explicit, more or less a result of reflection; but even the neutral subjects, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person. In some nations the goal was the pious person, in others, the warlike, in others industrious. As a nation, we began with the model of the rational and industrious human, who was honest, respected the laws, and dedicated to the family. Above all one was to know the rights doctrine; the Constitution, which embodies it; and American history, which presented and celebrated the founding of a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all humans are created equal.” A powerful attachment to the letter and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each humans’ reason, was the goal of the education of democratic humans. This called for something very different from the kinds of attachment required for traditional communities where myth and passion as well as severe discipline, authority, and the extended family produced an instinctive, unqualified, even fanatic patriotism, unlike the reflected, rational, calm, even self-interested loyalty—not so much to the country but to the form of government and its rational principles—required in the United State of America. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
There is no enemy other than the human who is not opened to everything. However, when there are no shared goals or visions of the public good, is the social contract any longer possible? Hobbes and Locke, and the American Founders following them, intended to palliate extreme beliefs, particularly religious beliefs, which lead to civil strife. The members of sects had to obey the laws and be loyal to the United States of America’s Constitution; if they did so, other had to leave them alone, however distasteful their beliefs might be. The insatiable appetite for freedom to live as one pleases thrives on this aspect of modern democratic thought. In the end it begins to appear that full freedom can be attained only when there is no such knowledge at all. The effective way to defang the oppressors is to persuade them they are ignorant of the good. History and social science are used in a variety of ways to overcome prejudice. We should not be ethnocentric, a term drawn from anthropology, which tells us more about the meaning of openness. We should not think our way is better than others. Then intention is not so much to teach the students about other times and places as to make them away of the fact that their preferences are only that—accidents of their time and place. Their beliefs do not entitle them as individuals, or collectively as a nation, to think they are superior to anyone else. Instinct and intellect must be suppressed by education. The natural soul is to be replaced with an artificial one. The dominant majority gave the country a dominant culture with its traditions, its literature, its tastes, its special claim to know and supervise the language, and its Protestant religions. The reactionaries did not like the suppression of class privilege and religious establishment. For a variety of reasons, they simply did not accept equality. Critics knew full well that the Constitution’s heart was a moral commitment to equality and hence condemned segregation. The Constitution was not just a set of rules of government but implied a moral order that was to be enforced throughout the entire country. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The Americans who were demanding civil rights, were the true Americans because they understood that equality belongs to them as human beings by natural and political right. It was a demand for American identity. However, with history, nothing has taken place except a smattering of facts learned about other nations or cultures and a few social science formulas. None of this means much, partly because little attention has been paid to what is required in order truly to convey the spirit of other places and other times to young people, or for that matter to anyone of other places and other times to young people, or for that matter to anyone, partly because the students see no relevance in any of it to the lives they are going to lead or to their prevailing passion. No longer is there a hope that there are great wise humans in other places and times who can reveal the truth about life—except for the few remaining young people who look for a quick fix from a guru. Gone is the real historical sense of a Machiavelli who wrested a few hour from each busy day in which “to don regal and courtly garments, enter the courts of the ancients and speak with them.” Some critics of the United States of America’s Constitution, which provided rights for all citizens, truly believed that some people were inferior to them, and they thought that Jim Crow was necessary, as it was part of their unique way of life. Different strokes for different folks. Like said before, the only way to defang them is not with hate, but to show them the beauty of equality. The point is to persuade students to recognize that there are other ways of thinking and that Western ways are not always better. It is again not the content that counts but the lesson to be drawn. Such requirements are part of the effort to establish a World community and train its members—the person devoid of prejudice. However, if the students were really to learn something of the minds of any of these non-Western cultures—which they do not—they would find that each and every one of these cultures is ethnocentric. All of them think their way is the best way, and all others are inferior. Western phenomenon, and in its origin is obviously connected with the search for new and better ways, or at least for validation of the hope that our own culture really is the better way, a validation for which there is no felt need in other cultures. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The reason for the non-Wester closedness, or ethnocentrism, is clear. Humans must love and be loyal to their families and their peoples in order to preserve them. Only if they think their own things are good can they rest content with them. A father must prefer his child to other children, a citizen his country to others. That is why there are myths—to justify these attachments. And a man needs a place and opinions by which to orient oneself. This is strongly asserted by those who talk about the importance of roots. The problems of getting along with outsiders is secondary to, and sometimes in conflict with, having an inside, a people, a culture, a way of life. A very great narrowness is not incompatible with the health of an individual or a people, whereas with great openness it is hard to avoid decomposition. When people take on the good from another culture, this may be considered a dangerous business because it tends to weaken wholehearted attachment to their own, hence to weaken their peoples as well as to expose themselves to the anger of the family, friends, and countrymen. Loyalty versus quest for the good introduced an unresolvable tension into life. However, the awareness of the good as such and the desire to possess it are priceless humanizing acquisitions. Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit of openness, without recognizing the inherent political, social, or cultural problem of openness as the goal of nature, has rendered openness meaningless. Cultural relativism destroys both one’s own and the good. True openness is the accompaniment of the desire to know, hence of the awareness of ignorance. To deny the possibility of knowing good and bad is to suppress true openness. A proper historical attitude would lead one to doubt the truth of historicism (the view that all thought is essentially related to and cannot transcend its own time) and treat it as peculiarity of contemporary history. Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether humans are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation. Prejudices, strong prejudices, are visions about the way things are. They are divinations of the order of the whole of things, and hence the road to a knowledge of that whole is by way of erroneous opinions about it. Error is indeed our enemy, it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment. The mind that has no prejudices at outset is empty. It can only have been constituted by a method that is unaware of how difficult it is to recognize that a prejudice is a prejudice. Without getting misty-eyed about it, I think we can fairly say that universities have a sacred responsibility to define for their society what is worthwhile knowledge. These definitions are most clearly visible in university catalogues, where you will find lists of courses, subjects, and “fields” of study. Taken together, they amount to a certified statement of what the university thinks a serious student ought to think about. In what is omitted from a catalogue, you may also learn what a serious student need not think about. However, these are bad times for scrupulous efforts at gatekeeping, and, happily, many universities are now busily engaged in rewriting their catalogues. Some tend to think that living in California; Florida, and other warm climates tends to shrivel the brain and makes people dumber than those living in colder climates, such as New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Iowa. There was a study by two doctoral students at Texas Technical University who found that the ten states with the highest average SAT scores all had cold winters. Indeed, every state with an average of 540 or higher on both the verbal and quantitative parts of the SAT had an average higher temperature in January of less than 42 degrees Fahrenheit. At the other end, five of the ten states with the lowest SAT scores were warm-weather states. Moreover, temperature has a significant relationship to SAT scores even when the researchers took into account such factors as per-pupil expenditures on schooling. So there! Now, there is also an important reason to keep authority figures on the right side of the law. Not only will it accord them more respect, but also more compliance. In the face of what they construe to be legitimate authority, most people will do what they are told. Or, to put it in another way, the social context in which people find themselves will be a controlling factor in how they behave. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Many people who consider themselves scientists, are not. Dr. Freud’s work is exemplary—indeed, monumental—but scarcely anyone believes today that Dr. Freud was doing science, any more than educated people believe that Marx was doing science, or Max Webber or Lewis Mumford or Bruno Bettelheim or Carl Jung or Margret Mead or Arnold Toynbee. What these people were doing was weaving narratives about human behavior. Their work is a form of storytelling, not unlike conventional imaginative literature although different from it in several important ways. The work of these people is called storytelling because this suggest that an author has given a unique interpretation to a set of human events, that one has supported one’s interpretation with examples in various forms, and that one’s interpretation cannot be proved or disproved but draws its appeal from the power of its language, the depth of its explanations, the relevance of its examples, and the credibility of its theme. And all of this has an identifiable moral purpose. The words “true” and “false” do not apply here in the sense that they are used in mathematics or science. For there is nothing universally and irrevocably true or false about these interpretations. There are no critical tests to confirm or falsify them. There are no postulates in which they are embedded. They are bound by time, by situation, and above all by the cultural prejudices of the researchers. Quite like a piece of fiction. There is more hypocrisy in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in some of our philosophies. What we know about ourselves—can be more terrifying than what we do not know. Most of us generate piles of junk—unconvincing stores without credible documentation, sound logic, or persuasive argument. Books are, in many cases, written by men and women who are concerned not to improve scholarship but to improve social life. Thus, the purpose of doing this kind of work is essentially didactic and moralistic. The purpose of social research is to rediscover the truths of social life; to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people; and finally, to put forward metaphors, images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity. Specifically, the purpose of media ecology is to tell stores about the consequences of technology; to tell how media environments create contexts that may change the way we think or organize our social life, or make us better or worse, or smarter or dumber, or freer or more enslaved. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Sometimes the stories media ecologists have to tell are rather more important than those of other academic storytellers—because the power of communication technology to give shape to people’s lives is not a matter that comes easily to the forefront of people’s consciousness, though we life in an age when our lives—whether we like it or not—have been submitted to the demanding sovereignty of new media. And so we are obligated, in the interest of humane survival, to tell tales about what sort of paradise may be gained, and what sort lost. We will not have been the first to tell such tales. However, unless our stories ring true, we may be the last. Now the TV tends to be a beast, too, as so many people know. The TV news media is usually there to frame certain stories they way they feel will be more entertaining, and they will also suppress or ignore others when they are involved in the corruption or paid to cover it up. To fight corruption, people need to learn the legal system, its tactics, and their means of manipulating media. To learn these, individuals have to restructure their mind and conceptions. And so to stand against the enemy, many engage of the process of self-destroying what remained of their own culture. When news television crews learn of a struggle they want to profit from, reporters are flown out from Hollywood and other areas to shoot images following the networks news guidelines for “good television” and “balanced reporting.” When it comes to the people, they often juxtapose with the people, others in suits and ties, who are responsible government officials concerned about jobs, and a lot of savage-looking types in funny clothes, speaking jive about their land, which does not seem credible because they way the people are dress and the emotions of their language. People are most likely to believe a professional in a suit, than someone who is wearing regular clothes and has been a victim of crime. After 40 million viewers see a Caucasian, modishly dressed TV newsman explain the crosscurrents in the struggle, and plaintively ask whether something of an earlier culture could not be permitted to remain, he finishes his report by saying, “From Sacramento, California, this is John Doe reporting.” This is followed by a commercial for the need to build affordable housing, how it creates jobs, and how green energy will be used to power the buildings during this energy crisis. The next is a story talking about gas prices and the need to suspend the gas tax. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Surely this story and the advertisements did not help the people concerned about their land. It was certain that they did not come through as well as the businessmen, the government officials and the reporter’s objective, practical analysis. They were attempting to convey something subtle, complex, foreign and ancient through a medium which did not seem able to handle any of that and which is better suited to objective data, conflict and fast, packaged information. When a struggle is revealed, usually the people become fixed into the model of artifact. The medium cannot be stretched to encompass their message. On the other hand, what if one had four minutes, or even one minute, to convey the essence of a product? A BMW? A stereo set? A toy? Could one accomplish that efficiently? One certainly could. It is obvious that a product is a lot easier to get across on television than a several acres of land or a cultural mind-set. Understanding cultural ways enough to care about them requires understanding a variety of dimensions of nuance and philosophy. You do not need any of that to understand a product, you do not have problems of subtlety, detail, time and space, historical context or organic form. Products are inherently communicable on television because of their static quality, sharp, clear, highly visible lines, and because they carry no informational meaning beyond what they themselves are. They contain no life at all and are therefore no capable of dimension. Nothing works better as telecommunication that images of products. Might television itself have no higher purpose? Most Americas, whether on the political left, center, or right, will argue that technology is neutral, that any technology is merely a benign instrument, a tool, and depending upon the hands into which it falls, it may be used one way or another. There is nothing that prevents a technology from being used well or badly; nothing intrinsic in the technology itself or the circumstances of its emergence which can predetermine its use, its control or its effects upon individual human lives of the social and political forms around us. The argument goes that television is merely a window or a conduit through which any perception, any argument or reality may pass. It therefore has the potential to be enlightening to people who watch it and is potentially useful to democratic process. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
If you accept mass production, you accept that a small number of people will supervise the daily existence of a much larger number of people. You have to accept that human beings will spend long hours, every day, engaged in repetitive work, while suppressing any desires for experience or activity beyond this work. The workers’ behavior becomes subject to the machine. With mass production, you also accept that huge numbers of identical items will need to be efficiently distributed to huge numbers of people and that institutions such as advertising will arise to do this. Once technological process cannot exist without the other, creating symbolic relationships among technologies themselves. If you accept the existence of advertising, you accept a system designed to persuade and to dominate minds by interfering in people’s thinking patterns. You also accept that the system will be used by the sorts of people who like to influence people and are good at it. No person who did not wish to dominate others would choose to use advertising and all technologies created to serve it will be consistent with this purpose, will encourage this behavior in society, and will tend to push social evolution in this direction. In all of these instances, the basic form of the institution and the technology determines its interaction with the World, the way it will be used, the kind of people who use it, and to what ends. And so it is with television. Far from being “neutral,” television itself predetermines who shall use it, how they use it, what effects it will have on individual lives, and, if it continues to be widely used, what sorts of political forms will inevitably emerge. Television is not reformable. If our society is to return to something like sane and democratic functioning, it must be gotten rid of totally. This is not about the television itself. It is about a process, already long underway, which has successfully redirected and confined human experience and therefore knowledge and perceived reality. We have all been moved into such a narrow and deprived channel of experience that a dangerous instrument like television can come along and seem useful, interesting, sane and worthwhile at the same time it further boxes people into a physical and mental condition appropriate for the emergence of autocratic control. Television has been used and expanded by the present powers-that-be, and that was inevitable, and it should have been predictable at the outset. The technology permits of no other controllers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
One also has to worry about the effects of television upon individual human bodies and minds, the effects which fit the purposes of the people who control the medium. Furthermore, television has no democratic potential. The technology itself places absolute limits on what may pass through it. The medium, in effect, chooses its own content from a very narrow field of possibilities. The effect is to drastically confine all humans understanding within a rigid channel. And as mentioned before, these aspects of television are reformable. What is revealed, however, is that there is ideology in the technology itself. To speak of television as “neutral” and therefore subject to change is as absurd as speaking of the reform of a technology such as social media. The medium is the message. Many do not recognize the transformative power of new communication technologies. They need to come with a warning about the threat the power poses—and the risk of being oblivious to that threat. The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind, and mute about its encounter with on and through which the American way of life was formed and is changing. When people start debating (as they always do) whether the medium’s effects are good or bad, it is the content they wrestle over. Skeptics, with equally good reason, condemn the crassness of the content, viewing it as signaling a “dumb down” of culture. One side’s abundant Eden is the other’s vast wasteland. The Internet is the latest medium to spur this debate. In the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the World, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it—and eventually, if we us it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society. The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts. Rather, they alter patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the nervous system. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Our focus on a medium’s content can blind us to these deep effects. We are too busy being dazzled or distributed by the programming to notice what is going on inside our heads. In the end, we come to pretend that the technology itself does not matter. It is how we use it that matters, we tell ourselves. The technology is just a tool, inert until we pick it up and inert again once we set it aside. We are too prone to make technological instruments, like guns, scapegoats for the sin of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value. However, it is also our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that count, which is the numb stance of the technological idiot. People have been replacing God with false idols and that is the problem. So many people say they believe in God, but so few read the Bible or pray daily. They are too busying watching TV and using the Internet to. Many people are essentially being sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine because is it calmly, coldly, discounting their memory circuits that control their brains. Many people can feel it, too. They have an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with their brains, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. Their minds are not going—so far as they can tell—but it is changing. They do not think the way they used to think, and it can be felt most strongly when they are reading. Several people are no longer able to immerse themselves into a book or a lengthy article. Their minds used to get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and they spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. For many, that is rarely the case anymore. Now their concentration starts to drift after a page or two. They get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. They feel like they are always dragging their wayward brains back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. The Net has become the all-purpose medium, the conduit for most information that flows through one’s eyes and ears and into their mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich and easily searched store of data are many, and they have widely described and duly applauded. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
While the Inter is an astonishing boom to humanity, gathering up and concentrating information and idea that were once scattered so broadly around that World that anyone could profit from them, now all this information is at your fingertips. When one is writing a report for school and using mostly book sources, some of the information may be outdated, and now what they can do it go online, find a reputable site and supplement the new information. It is better than gathering all your information from the silicon memory system. The more people use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some worry they will become chronic scatterbrains. Because of the Internet, some people have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a long article on the web or in print. Even electronic Web pages that are more than three or four paragraphs is too much for some to absorb. They just skim it. There are people that think the Internet is the most creative thing that was invented. One could hardly meet anyone who says it has not been helpful. Many individuals like to go online because they love the ability to review and scan tons of information on the web. It is believed that reading lots of short, linked snippets online is a more efficient way to expand one’s mind than reading a 250-page book. These technopagans also believe in superiority of the Internet and think others have not been able to recognize it yet because they are measuring it against our old linear thought process. In many ways, the Internet is making people less patient readers, but could possible be making them smarter. They have more connections to documents, artifacts, and people, which means more external influences on their thinking and thus on their writing. Regardless, more people know they have sacrificed something important, but they will not go back to the way things used to be. For some people, the very idea of reading a book has come to seem old-fashioned, maybe even a little silly—like driving your own car when you can just schedule a ride share service. This generation thinks thing sitting down and reading a book from cover to cover does not make sense. It is not a good use of their time, as they can get the information they need faster through the Internet. These skilled Internet hunters think books are superfluous. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The digital immersion has even affected the way people absorb information. They do not necessarily read from left to right and from top to bottom. They might instead skip around, scanning for pertinent information of interest. The Net has become essential to their work, school, or social lives, and often to all three. Some log on only a few times a day—to check their e-mail, follow a story in the news, research a topic of interest, or do some shopping. And there are, of course, many people who do not use the Internet at all, either because they cannot afford to or because they do not want to. What is clear, though, is that for society as a whole the Net has become, in just the thirty years since software programmer Tim Berners-Lee wrote the code for the World Wide Web, the communication and information medium of choice. The score of its use is unprecedented, even by the standards of the mass media of the twenty-first century. We seem to have arrived, at an important juncture in our intellectual and cultural history, a moment of transition between two very different types of thinking. What we are trading away for the riches of the Internet is our old linear thought process. Calm, focused, undistracted, the liner mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole our information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better. When people go online, they feel their brains light up, and feel like they are getting smarter. The feelings are intoxicating—so much so that they can distract people from the Net’s deeper cognitive consequences. Many people miss the days of the old box TV with rabbit ears sitting on the floor, and the bulky avocado telephone fixed to the wall in the kitchen with its rotary dial and long, coiled cord. And the den filled with books on the bookshelves—lot of books—with their many-colored spines, each bearing a title and the name of a writer. There was something calming in the reticence of all those books, their willingness to wait, years, decades, our centuries even, for the right reader to come along and pull them from their appointed slots. Take your time, the books whisper. We are not going anywhere. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The computer, however, is more than just a simple tool that does what one tells it to do. It is a machine that, in subtle but unmistakable ways, exerts an influence over you. The more one uses it, the more it alters the way one works. Reading lone feels new and liberating because for many kids who did not like reading books because of the lack of pictures, not have hyperlinks and search engines which deliver an endless supply of words to their screen, alongside pictures, sounds, and videos. People have started letting their newspaper and magazine subscriptions lapse. Who needed them? By the time the print editions arrived, dew-dampened or otherwise, the felt like that have already seen all the stories. The Internet is exerting a much stronger and broader influence over any one than their old stand-alone personal computer ever could. Their way their very brains work is changing. And this when most start worrying about their inability to pay attention to one thing for more than a couple of minutes. It is not just a symptom of middle-age mind rot. One’s brain is not just drifting. It is hungry. It is demanding to be fed the way the Internet feeds it—and the more it is fed, the hungrier it becomes. Should I check another e-mail, clink another link, look at another web page. Cause I am falling on the floor. I am climbing up the walls and everytime I get a grip, I seem to lose myself just a little more. Cause I am here and it eats me up, but I love the way it feels. I really should not stay online, but I cannot give up. The more it hurts, the more I need it more. It is like an addiction. I want to be connected. Just as Microsoft Word had turned me into a flesh-and-blood word processor, the Internet, one may sense, is turning one into something like a high-speed data-processing machine. Maybe that is a good thing because today more than every we are governed, all over the World, by the students of economics professors. Presidents and politicians, treasury secretaries or ministers of finance and chancellors of the exchequer, central bankers, investment bankers and senior officials of the World’s biggest and more powerful corporations have all dutifully sat in their classrooms listening to them, pouring over their key ideas. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The same goes for brokers, financial advisers and newspaper and television pundits who take these ideas to the public. Unfortunately, many ideas remembered from college days belong in the “obsoledge attic,” or better yet, in the cemetery of ideas. The media is sometimes behind big bloopers. In February of 2004 U.S. president George W. Bush stiff-armed his own Council of Economic Advisers, refusing to publicly back its forecast that the economy would provide 2.6 million new jobs that year. But as The Washington Post reported, That forecast, derided as wildly optimistic, was one of the more modest predictions the administration has made about the economy over the past three years. Two years ago, the administration forecast that there would be 3.4 million more jobs in 2003 than there were in 2000. And it predicted a budget deficit for discal 2004 of $14 billion. The economy ended up losing 1.7 million jobs over that period, and the budget deficit [for 2004]…is on course to be $521 billion. No doubt, some of this is political exaggeration. Any statistic can be tortured into submission. Nor are the torturers jut Republicans. The discrepancies between the forecast and subsequent results began to widen under the previous Democratic administration. It was clear that, even allowing for political fact manipulation, something was seriously amiss. In the words of a Republican White House press spokesman, “The old theories…proved themselves wildly wrong…Nobody saw this happening—not on Wall Street, not Vegas, not Poor Richard, not Nostradamus.” Economists have failed to anticipate more than job numbers and deficits. They have contributed to some of the most publicized, embarrassing financial debacles in recent decades. In the last two months of 2022, inflation has averaged 0.85 percent. If these hikes continue over the next three months, the headline inflation rate would approach 9 percent by spring. If they persist for a year, it would surpass 10 percent—the first time the United States of America would have a double-digit inflation since the early 1980s. President Biden’s entire economic team has consistently played down inflation’s threat all year. They lied about helping the American people through the pandemic and ignored the warnings from former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers that the American Rescue Plans massive size would reduce inflation. Then said initial upticks in prices were simply statistical glitches caused by the dramatic price drops during the pandemic’s initial phase and would fade away once that glitch dropped out of the calculations. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
When that did not happen, they started blaming supply chain woes for the problem, even though that cannot possible explain things such as the fast and steady rise in housing costs. When consumers are fast losing purchasing power during two-digit inflation, consumers’ goods industries suffer symptoms of contraction and recession, especially unemployment of capital labor. Two-digit inflation only comes to an end with the advent of three-digit inflation which signals the approaching demise of the paper currency. In the final convulsion of inflation fever, millions of men and women will be in a panic rush to exchange their rapidly depreciating money for real goods. When there are mistakes made during a financial crisis by macroeconomists of the International Monetary Fund—errors can trigger ethnic clashes. Experts also occasionally miss anticipating major changes like the industrial slowdown in 1995, as we have seen with the 2020 pandemic. Along with the hyperinflation of the late 1980s, which we are also starting to see happening now and more so in late 2022-2023. The Fed does not know if it wants to raise interest prices because that will hurt human capital and businesses, while this war is going on and gas prices are skyrocketing, as well as consumer goods and services, and home prices. So we turn to our crucial problem: What to do that is self-justifying when the great social World is pretty unavailable? The essential Hipster problem is: to heighten experience, and get out of one’s usual self. To heighten experience is a common principle of Hipster and Delinquent, but the difference are marked. Among the Hipsters, the craving for excitement and self-transcendence is darkly colored with violence and death wish, and they therefore dread flipping, which they interpret as weakness, castration, and death. Among the younger delinquents, we shall see, it is fatalism, the wish is to get caught and be brought back into society. However, for some others, it is a religious hope that something new will happen, a revival. Not everyone gets self-destructive. The risks of delinquency, criminality, and injury rouse some in a normal apprehension, and they express a human amazement at the brutality and cruelty of some with whom they keep company. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In taking drugs for the new experience, many largely steer clear of being hooked by an addiction. On the other hand, if the aim is to get out of the World, one can hardly play it safe. So if they push their stimulants, sleeplessness, and rhythmic and hallucinatory exercises to the point of having temporary psychotic fugues, or flipping, it is not surprising. For some people, going to the municipal psychiatric hospital is an expected and regular occurrence. The young actualized Christians seek enlightenment, and the city hospital succors them when they break down. Let us now go back to the jargon. The supreme words are “crazy,” “far out,” “gone,” ‘high,” “gas,” “sent.” These mean not in this World but somewhere, not rational but something. “Flip” is generally used with enthusiastic self-deprecation. When the crazy or far-out moment can be maintained for long enough to be considered a something and somewhere, it is “groovy,” that is, one is like somebody else’s phonograph record. One is “with it” or falls in.” The “it” or the understanding “where” is not, of course, definite, for the pure being has no genus and differentia. “Swinging with it” is the condition of passing from here and now to the heightened experience of “it.” Contrariwise, it is bad and painful to be “nowhere,” to “fall out” (take an overdose), or to be “drug” (dragging). The way of being-in-the-World, that is, is to be either cool and mask-faced, experiencing little; or to be sent far out, experiencing something. However, since the cool behavior of these usually gentle middle-class boy looks like adolescent embarrassment and awkwardness rather growth in experience would not be a more profitable enterprise and ultimately get them much further out. A possibility that has interestingly dropped from popular culture as the exploitation of shared athletic or wildly physical agitation, which belonged grandly to the old jazz-for-dancing and revival meetings. This is certainly an important truth that jive is energetic, in words like “go” and “dig.” (To the jazz-for-listening one is not supposed to respond overtly by more than a quietly tapped toe. It can be hypnotic and speak to the listener like a crustal ball or a foundation or a hearth fire. As it is remarkably thin gruel (no doubt I am tone deaf). For the performer, of course, it provides the deepening absorption of any simple improvised variations, plus the solidarity of the group.) #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
I can think of two reasons why the overtly shared crazy physical rhythms are spurned. First is that this motion is in fact too much in the extremities of the body rather than in the solar plexus, it is too superficial an excitement and more fit for teenagers. The difference is between the lostness in juvenile jitterbugging and the “central” experience of an Eastern Dance or Mary Wigman. Some young men have taken to the Eastern dance, but most who love popular culture do not practice physiological yoga either, just as their Zen is without breathing-exercises or correction of posture. So perhaps another reason for their dropping the old physical jazz and revival is just the opposite, that the display of energy would upset their coolness, it would be embarrassing and make them feel too young. I would wonder if this is not the simple explanation of their disdain social dancing as “dry” pleasures of the flesh; for certainly one of the reasonable uses of social dancing is body contact and sometimes foreplay involving pleasures of the flesh. However, these boys are embarrassed to get excited, to betray feeling, in public, though they are more than willing to get into their birthday suits and exhibit themselves, or to beat a drum wildly in public as an exhibition for others, but not as contact with them. Celibacy necessitated by castration—the excision of the private parts—sends shudders through our modern sensibilities. Yet for more than four thousand years, millions of males have endured this mutilation. The Persians were perhaps its first authors. As an eighteenth-century scholar noted, “The Latin word spade, which comprehended several sorts of eunuchs, was taken from a village of Persia called Spada, where…the first execution of this nature was made…The first eunuch mentioned in the holy scriptures was Patiphor…who brought Joseph from the Midianites…and it is observed…that Nebuchadnezzar caused all the Jewish people, and other prisoners of war, to be gelt or cut.” Throughout the centuries, a large percentage of eunuchs have been youngsters from families whose poverty precipitated the decision to castrate the child. In these cases, parents expected to advance their son’s career in areas closed to all but eunuchs: certain types of domestic service in aristocratic homes or royal courts, or as castrati opera singers. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Other boys were neutered after their enslavement by enemies victorious in wars: Nebuchadnezzar’s policy of castrating male prisoners of war that he might have none to attend him in his private service but eunuchs is a case in point. Sometimes older males voluntarily sought out the surgery, almost always as a means of earning a living as an entertainer or court functionary. Occasionally, men gelded themselves in full adulthood for religious reasons—the Church Father Origen; the obscure Valesii, a heretical Christian scet of the third century about whom little is known; and the nineteenth-century Russian Skopts are examples of these self-determined celibates. Much closer to home and closer in time is California’s Heaven’s Gate celibate computer cult, the members of which committed mass suicide in 1997 and whose leader, Marshall Applewhite, had turned to castration as a desperate measure to obliterate his uncertain sexuality. Hundreds of thousands of people have also been subjected to castration as punishment for imagined or real crimes ranging from “self-love” to nonconsensual pleasures of the flesh. The mentally or physically disabled have been neutered to prevent them from reproducing. African-American men have been brutally desexed by lynch mobs, which some say are starting to pop up again in a different form, terrified of their sexuality. We shudder at castration for a host of reasons. It assaults the private core of human existence. It has almost always been a butchery, performed inexpertly by unqualified quacks and costing the lives of a majority of its victims. Its consequences are lifelong, visible, and far-reaching, affecting appearance, stance, and above all, psychological development and adjustment. We know now how important, perhaps crucial, the male organ is to psychosexual development. However, some men are now choosing to castrate themselves and keep their manly appears, which creating another gender’s private part in its place. Lessons harshly learned from routine circumcisions gone wrong have hardly taught us that gender is not an amorphous variable physicians can successfully alter simply by radical surgery. When we read about eunuchs, whether in medieval China or the Ottoman empire, or as victims of Nazi eugenics, our growing knowledge of the effects of castration colors our perceptions. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The issues surrounding castration are complex and as fascinating as they are disturbing. Eunuchs who have left written records reported that they reflected deeply and incessantly on their mutilation. Though a dearth of such documents prevents a thorough study of eunuchs’ reactions, all anecdotal evidence suggests that most of them brooded bitterly about the physical effects of castration and about the contempt and ostracism that mainstream society directed at them, including the mightiest military commanders of the Byzantine empire. However, eunuchs often simultaneously understood and valued another dimension of their condition, seeing it as a means—their only means—of gaining access to certain positions. They or their parents neutralized poverty by trading their sexuality for opportunity, often nit not always realized. Afterwards, eunuchs had lifetimes of confronting the other, less desirable consequences of the procedure. In particular, they had to deal with incessant humiliation and enforced celibacy, though much evidence exists that they experienced longings for intimate passions their ravaged bodies could not satisfy. And these were the luckier men who could at least rationalize about their situation. Others, victims of brute force alone, had not even that consolation. “Search me [thoroughly], O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there is any wicked or hurtful way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting,” Psalm 139.23-24. A light exists in Spring, not present in the Year at any other period when March is scarcely here. A color stands abroad on Solitary Fields that Science cannot overtake but human nature feels. When you pass through waters, God will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you; when you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon you. I shall strengthen you, yea, I shall help you, yea, I shall uphold you with the power of righteousness. Behold, all they that contend with you shall be ashamed and confounded; they say that strive with you shall be as naught and shall perish. In righteousness shall you be established; you shall not fear. You who have been forsaken, shunned and hated, now will I make you an eternal pride, a joy to all ages. Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God. Every weapon that is formed against you shall fail, and every tongue that shall rise against you, shall disprove. This is the inheritance of the Lord’s servants, and their salvation from Me, saith the Lord. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Battle Against the Laws of Nature—With God Comes Worlds without End
This Earth will eventually pass away, but not to worry, through God we will have a new Earth and Eternal Life. We want to see humanity in pursuit of knowledge for the mind is fascinating, for it looks on things with the hidden generosity in the soul. Few words in recent years have fueled as much hatred and controversy around the World as globalization—and few have been used more hypocritically—and naively—by all sides. For many anti-globalists, the real target of their wrath is the United States of America, World headquarters of free-market economics. The U.S. drive over past decades to globalize (or, more accurately, to reglobalize) the World economy also flew a false flag. Successive administrations, especially that of former President Bill Clinton and currently President Joe Biden, have preached a mantra to the World. The so-called Washington Consensus held that globalization plus liberalization in the form of privatization, deregulation and free trade would alleviate poverty and create democracy and a batter World for all. Both pro- and anti-globalist ideologues typically lump globalization with liberalization, as though they were inseparable. Yet countries can integrate economics without liberalizing. Liberalizing countries, by contrast, can sell off their state enterprises, deregulate and privatize their economies, without necessarily globalizing. None of this guarantees that long-term benefits will flow from the macroeconomy to the microeconomy in which people actually live. And none of it guarantees democracy. It is now perfectly clear that both sides in the ideological war over reglobalization have been perfectly and deliberately unclear. Thus the Web site of a protest movement that has waged a ceaseless campaign against globalism listed “actions” in Hyderabad, India; Davos, Switzerland; Porto Alegre, Brazil; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Washington, D.C.; and Barcelona, Spain, as well as others in New Zealand, Greece, Mexico and France. Demonstrators surrounded World leaders in their luxury hotels at numerous international meetings from Seattle to Genoa or forced them to seek refuge in remote locations—and to call up security forces to maintain the peace. Now protestors are invited to meet these leaders and much of the fizz has gone out of the movement. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
It hardly escapes notice, however, that much of this purportedly anti-globalist activity is coordinated by interlinked Web sites on the Internet, itself an inherently global technology. The political impact of the movements comes largely from television coverage delivered by global satellite systems. Many of the demands of these groups—for lower-cost medications, for example—can be met only by global corporations the protesters could not fly to their demonstrations without globally linked airlines dependent on global reservation systems. And the goal of many of the protesters is to create a movement with global impact. In fact, the movement has split into many different, often short-lived groups with dizzyingly diverse goals, from eliminating child labor to outlawing tobacco to protecting the rights of all inmates. A few are dewy-eyed anarcho-localists, glorifying the supposed authenticity of face-to-face life in pre-industrial villages—conveniently forgetting the lack of privacy, gender discrimination, and the narrow-minded local tyrants and bigots so often found in real villages. Others are back-to-nature romantics. Still others are United States—and European Union—hating supernationalists identified with neofascist anti-immigrant political movements. However, many others are, in fact, not “anti-global” at all but “counter-global.” These counter-globalists, for example, strongly support the United Nations and other international agencies. Many long to see something approximating a single World government, or at least better, stronger global governance financed, perhaps, by a global tax. What many of them do want, however, is a World crackdown on global corporations and global finance, which they blame for exploiting workers, damaging the environment, supporting undemocratic governments and an infinity of other ills. The antis make the most noise. However, even if all the chanting, marching anti- and counter-globalization protesters were to steal away in the night, the advance of economic re-globalization might still slow or stop in the years immediately ahead. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Powerful factors now loom before us that could halt the continued extension of spatial reach and make even the anti-globalists sorry to see that happen. The re-globalization period has seen the World economy suffer one devastating regional or national crisis after another—in Asia, in Russia, in Mexico, in Argentina. In each case, investors, business decision-makers and governments all over the World worried about financial “contagion.” Would Argentina’s collapse destroy the Brazilian economy? Could the COVID pandemic cause a Worldwide meltdown? (It is still coming close to.) Because economic integration today is far more dense, multilayered and complicated, linking so many diverse economies at so many different levels, it requires systemically designed fail-safes, redundancies and other safety devices. Unfortunately, overenthusiastic re-globalizers are constructing a gigantic financial cruise ship lacking the watertight compartments that even the Titanic had. U.S. stock markets have “circuit breakers” intended to stop a crash in its tracks. For example, if the Dow Jones index falls 10 percent before 2.00 p.m. on a trading day, the New York Stock Exchange will call a one-hour halt in trading. If prices move too far above or below a preset limit, so-called collars are imposed on certain trades. Similar measures are in place or under discussion in many countries from India to Taiwan. These may or may not be adequate locally or nationally. However, trade, currency and capital markets at the global level lack equivalents of even these cautionary measures, let alone a comprehensive system of firewalls, compartments, backups and the like. By integrating faster than we are inoculating ourselves against contagion, two processes are out of sync—setting us up for a global epidemic that could send individual nations rushing back, head over heels, into their protective financial shells. Their frenzied responses could include yanking foreign investments back home, restoring trade barriers, drastically reshuffling import-export patterns and relocating businesses, jobs and capital around the planet—in short, reversing the recent direction of change. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
What other events or conditions could limit or reverse re-globalization? Plenty. If not the age, we have entered the age of export overload—or, at least the interval. Starting in the 1970s, Japan soared to prosperity by combining computerized design and manufacture, relatively closed domestic markets and aggressive exports. That strategy was soon emulated by South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and later by Malaysia and Indonesia. All pumped their products into American and European markets, and more “things” that ever in history moved across the Pacific by containership, tanker and cargo planes. Exports—a spatial phenomenon by definition—came to be regarded as the magic bullet for development. In all these Asian countries, exports grew faster than domestic demand—another example of large-scale de-synchronization. At that point, China roared into the fray, cramming even cheaper products into the crowded global market and especially into the United States of America. Suddenly America was awash with Chinese hair dryers, hoses, handbags, clocks and calculators, tools, and toys. Overcapacity and rapacity marched hand-in-hand. If the United States of America’s economy, which alone accounts for more than 30 percent of World demand, were at any time to lurch into a free fall, it hardly needs to be noted that the relocations of wealth in the World would be shattering for many other countries—including some of the poorest. Among those hardest hit would be countries whose governments are dangerously overdependent on a single export for their day-to-day revenue. This could be copper, as in Zambia. It could be bauxite, sugar, coffee, cocoa or cobalt. Or it could be oil. With crude-oil prices at record highs, it may seem unlikely. Yet the unlikely happens again and again, and a severe slowdown in the United States of America or a crash in China could, despite producers’ efforts to control supply, send oil prices plummeting again. Even if the decline is temporary, the results could shake many governments out of power. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Fully 80 percent of Nigeria’s government revenue comes from oil, as does 75 percent of Saudi Arabia’s. Much the same can be said of Kuwait, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Angola. For Venezuela the number is 50 percent, for Russia close to 30 percent. Unstable or politically fragile at best, oil-funded governments could be forced to cut domestic subsidies and social benefits at the risk of triggering upheaval in their streets. More bad news for re-globalization. The war between Russia and Ukraine is increasing pressure on the global system and increasing oil prices higher than they have ever been. The cost of a barrel of oil is currently $115 and is expected to reach $150 a barrel. That could send gas prices from $6.00 a gallon to around $9.60 a gallon, which would cause a supply shock. The average American could end up paying $1250 a month for gas. Canceling the Key Stone Pipeline may have been Joe Biden’s biggest mistake. However, he says all Americans need to do is buy electric car. Yet let us forget that we are still in a pandemic and many people have been spending money just to get through it, and with inflation and rising gas prices, no one has money to go out and buy electric cars and a lot of people have already bought new vehicles. In fact, in 2021, sales of light trucks accounted for about 78 percent of the approximately 15 million light vehicles sold in the United States of America. So currently gas prices are really hurting Americans and if they continue to state at this rate and increase, that will be a significant bill. Therefore, people will spend less money dining out, shopping, and traveling. The decades ahead may also see a further formation of supranational blocs and trade groups following the wake of the European Union (EU). The is the World’s largest trading bloc, and second largest economy, after the United States of America. In 2014 the value of the EU’s output totaled $18.5 trillion. The five largest Economies, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain, account for around 70 percent of the 28-country trading bloc. Ranging from Mercosur in South America to emergent groupings in Asia, these blocs, since they create larger-than-national markets, can be seen as half steps toward global integration and more open trade. That is how they are usually portrayed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
However, despite protestations to the contrary, they can also, under extreme pressures, flip the protectionist switch and become large-scale deterrents to further openness and globalization. With respect to global integration, area-wide supranational blocs could prove to be a double-edged switchblade. And so could the next explosion of scientific and technological breakthroughs. Propelled by the fusion of information and biological technologies, it could reduce the need for some previously imported raw materials and other goods. Radical miniaturization, customization and the partial substitution of knowledge content for raw material means that tomorrow’s economies may no longer need as many of the bulk commodities that now form so large a part of the global market. Teaspoons of a nanoproduct tomorrow could replace tons of material that today needs to be shipped across the World. This may be long in coming, but its impact will be felt in major port cities around the World, from Qingdao to Los Angeles to Rotterdam. Again, all this points to more do-it-at-home processes and less reliance on a globalized marketplace. Furthermore, we cannot rule out war and its partner, terror, the most obvious de-globalizers. Both, as we are currently seeing, can physically destroy energy and transportation infrastructures needed for the movement or relocation of oil, gas, raw materials, finished products and other goods. Both can also unleash capital flight and unstoppable tidal waves of cross-border refugees. Bother will target critical information infrastructures in knowledge-intensive economies. Unfortunately, the period ahead is likely to see high geopolitical instability and frequent outbreaks of military conflict—leaving not only dead and wounded on the field but, as in the past, the disintegration of what has already been integrated. Beyond these potential de-globalizers are what futurist call wild cards, scenarios that, though highly improbable, cannot be ruled out: strange new pandemics and quarantines, asteroid strikes and ecological catastrophes that could knock the entire economic firmament off its current course and reduce it to Mad Max conditions. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
It is useful to reserve at least a speck of mind space for thinking the unthinkable, for history is little more than a sequence of high-impact events that began as utterly improbable and exploded into actuality. We cannot know with certainty which of these thrust-reversers might come into play, or how they might converge. However, any one of them could prove a far more potent force for turning back re-globalization than all the headline-grabbing protest movements put together. Moreover, it is easy to imagine two or more of these de-globalizing events coming into play simultaneously—and in the not-so-far-off future. It is a lot harder to imagine a future in which none of them occurs. The most likely scenario is a split—a possible slowdown in further economic integration as such, even as World pressures rise for globally coordinated action on such issues as terror, crime, environmental issues, human rights, slavery, and genocide. This should put to bed any dream of linear progress toward a fully integrated, truly global economy—and any illusions about a World government in the foreseeable decades. It points, instead, to more not fewer, faster not slower, bigger not smaller, spatial jolts to job markets, technologies, money and people around the planet. It points to an age of accelerating spatial turbulence. What we have seen so far, therefore, is not only a massive shift of wealth toward Asia, a growing importance of region-states and a change in spatial criteria in advanced economies, but a gigantic—though reversible—process of re-globalization. Any of these, by itself, represents an important change in the way revolutionary wealth is related to the deep fundamental of space. Yet, as we will soon see, one final spatial change may, some distant day, dwarf all these put together. Now, one striking characteristic of modern education is the unanimous disapproval of exploiting the powerful feeling of shame, the hot blush and wanting to sink into the ground out of sight. It is claimed that this injures personal dignity and either makes a child vengeful and not belonging, or breaks his spirit. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Youth workers with delinquents make a fetish of protecting self-esteem, as contrasted with the polices’ “You young Punk!” Yet in ancient education, exempli gratia, in the Socratic dialogues, this very arousal of shame is a chief device; the teacher greets the hot flush as a capital sign that the youth is educable, he has noble aims. Such a youth has dignity in his very shame. The difference seems to be that we cannot offer available opportunities of honor, we do not have them; and therefore we must protect what shreds of dignity the youth has. If we make him ashamed of his past, since he has no future, he is reduced to nothing. In other ages, the community had plenty of chances of honor, and to belong to the community itself was honor. (Let me make an analogy from psychotherapeutic practice: when a patient is schizoid, you give reassurance, protect the weak ego; when he is neurotic and can take care of himself, you attack the character resistances.) Now shame is the only direct attack on conceit, the defensive image of oneself. Conceit is the common denominator of the Organization Man, the hipster, and the juvenile delinquent—this is why I have been lumping them together. The conceited image of the self is usually not quite conscious, but it is instantly woundable; and people protect it with a conformity to their peers (oneself is superior). However, the conceited groups differ in their methods of confirming and enhancing conceit: the juvenile delinquent by surly and mischievous destructiveness of the insulting privileged outgroup; the hipster by making fools of them with token performances; the Organization Man by status and salary. To this inner idol, they sacrifice the ingenuous exhibition and self-expression that could make them great, effective, or loved in the World; but if it is mistaken, out of place, or disproportionate, that can also be shamed. Being ashamed ought to mean that a youth gives up some cherished error or conceited image of himself, and goes on, without loss of dignity, to achieve an ideal that is real; this is honor. Only the community can bestow honor, on those who enhance the community, who follow the useful callings, or bring new culture. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
In New York, those who have kept out of jail for a generation are not made much of by a grateful and admiring citizenry. It is hard achievement but, like other public gods, it is not esteemed. Among cities, Venice had magnificence; but it is Florence that knew how to pay honor to her sons. She made it hard for them, with neglect and exile, to be themselves and serve her; but when nevertheless they achieved their ideals, her praise was loud. Boys today hardly aspire to immortal honor, the honor of self-fulfilling achievement. It is highly disapproved of in the code of the organized system. Instead, they devote themselves to protecting their “personal honor” against insults; and conversely they dream of the transient notoriety which will prove that they are “somebody,” which they doubt. The personal honor that they protect does not include truthfulness, honesty, public usefulness, integrity, independence, or virtues like that. A reputation for these things does not win respect, it has no publicity value; it is believed to be phony anyway, and if it is true, the person is hard to get along with. A British disaffected young man, an Angry Young Man, can make his protest by simply being a Cad, like Osborne’s George Dillion; but that would not much distinguish him on this side of the sea. A bad reputation naturally makes people prudent in their personal dealings, but it generally does not do much hard in the press or on TV, even to a public official, for the plugs is more important than the content of it. On the other hand, any official bad mark that gets on an IBM card, like being arrested and fingerprinted—and even if her was exonerated it–no matter what the charge, it can be disastrous to a young man, for his name can thereby drop out of the system. Nobody, but nobody, may disesteem a man for something, or he may even get wished for notoriety for something, that at the same time makes him unemployable. Just try to imagine nowadays the administrator of old-fashioned juvenile fiction who says, “You man, I do not care what Personnel reports, you have an honest face and we will give you a chance!” #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Rather, a good man will be asked to resign for the sake of Public Relations. And correspondingly, suburban “good families” increasingly shun “bad families” that have had troubles, such as divorces or delinquency or even death of a parent (!), for that makes the family untypical. (A few years ago an editorial in Life complained that our novels always contain alcoholics, jailbirds, addicts, crazy people, perverts, etcetera, and do not portray average families who have none such. James Farrell, pointing out that the combined numbers of these deviants come to much more than the number of families, drily offered that the editor of Life probably did not have a material family, a very abnormal case.) There is an organized system of reputation that is calculated statistically to minimize risk and eliminate the unsafe; likely it succeeds in this. It may make the enterprise as a whole less efficient, for it guarantees excluding the best, but be that as it may; the important thing is that there has ceased to be any relation whatever between “personal honor” and community or vocational service. Conversely, the way in which our society does do honor to its indubitably great and serviceable men—say, Schweitzer, Einstein, Picasso, Buber—is a study in immunizing people against their virus; it would be a remarkable and melancholy subject for a sociologist. They are transformed into striking images and personalities, and we assign to them the Role of being great men. We pay respectful attention to their birthday sayings. They are the menagerie of Very Important People who exist only for ceremonial occasions and to sponsor funds and drives for enterprises in which they will have no further function. This effectually prevents the two practical uses that we could make of them. We neither take seriously the simple, direct, fearless souls that they invariably are, whether humble or arrogant, to model ourselves after them because they make more sense as human beings; nor do we have recourse to them please to help us when we have need of exceptional purity, magnanimity, profundity, or imagination, giving them a free hand on the assumption that their action is really better. Though we publicize the image, we do not behave as though we really believed that there were great men, a risky fact in the World. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
They are likely to be and do the damnedest things: Picasso is a communist; Einstein sponsored the atom bomb; Bernard Shaw was arrogant and peculiarly celibate; Frank Lloyd Wright was wildly arrogant and immoral when it came to pleasures of the flesh; Bertrand Russell was a convicted pacifist and has practically advocated free love; etcetera. Few great men could pass Personnel. Or, as if we believed that the affairs of our World were alternatively significant enough for the intervention of great men. For instance, no one would think of looking for actualized Christians to intervene in our racial troubles—that is not their “field of competence” (though we did have the sense to get some good sociology on the subject from Gunner Myrdal). We would not officially ask a man of letters, as the British used Bernard Shaw, to criticize the penal system. When it comes to improving the high schools, we choose a well-licensed administrator, we do not try to persuade some extraordinary scholar or natural philosopher, a man who has actually learned something and therefore perhaps knows how it is done; naturally we come out with an excellent administrative report, but no ideas. John Dewey was called on, by passionately interested people, to make an impartial inquiry into the death of Trotsky; that seems a reasonable use of a judicious and incorruptible man; but we do not much imitate it. However, even when there is no doubt of the field of competence, when we choose a man to beautify our towns, we do not automatically call on the major artists of the World; for instance, we now lavishly praise Frank Lloyd Wright, but we never made any community use of him, though he longed for the chance and kept badgering the country with community projects. My belief is that one can easily put great men to work, even against their own freedom and advantage, for they allow themselves to be imposed on, noblesse oblige; but one must, of course, then take the consequences. As if they were a useful public resource, I understand that to consider powerful souls is quite foreign to our customs. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
In a small sense it is undemocratic to consider powerful souls as a public resource, for it assumes that some people really know better in a way that must seem arbitrary to most. In a large sense it is certainly democratic, it that it makes the great man serve as a man. Either of these choices, to eschew them or to use them, however, is preferable to creating glamorous images with empty roles. Now, schoolteaching in Tsarist Russia was little different from anywhere else. The profession was undervalued, underpaid, and overworked, and subject to unutterably petty rules and regulations spewed forth by a strangulating educational bureaucracy. Russia’s legal code granted government officials the right to deny any soldier or civil servant permission to marry, but by the late nineteenth century, only schoolteachers who married lost their rent-free lodgings, seniority, even their jobs. In fact, women teachers were the real target and were routinely fired for marrying, while men seldom were. In 1897, the St. Petersburg Duma (the name for elective municipal councils) formalized this discrimination, passing a law that banned the hiring of married women teachers and terminated those who married after their appointment. The reasons? With fewer employment opportunities than men, single, well-educated young women were grateful for teaching positions. Since they needed less money to live (so the authorities reasoned), they demanded lower salaries. Teaching youngsters was natural for them and prepared them or marriage, at which time they would be dismissed. Off they went to their husbands, at a net saving to St. Petersburg because they were given no pension benefits and were replaced by another contingent of eager, hardworking, docile young spinsters. Why were women singled out for singleness? Married men, after all, were permitted to teach. The reasoning was that a man merely provided his family’s living, but a mother had much heavier responsibilities. She might, for example, have to nurse a baby during school hours or stay at home to nurse a sick child or husband. She might even transfer to her family some of the interminable hours previously dedicated to her teaching. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Elementary-school teaching in St. Petersburg paid better than elsewhere in Russian, and the city’s rich cultural life, with concerts, ballets, and lectures, was an additional lure for eager young minds. School conditions, on the other hand, were less delightful. Classes were held in the teachers’ rented apartment, dark and cramped, unequipped and noisy, and scattered throughout the city, preventing camaraderie with other teachers. Their often cold, hungry, desperately poor, and sometimes abused pupils were divided into three grades, for which one teacher alone was responsible. To ease the children’s suffering, teachers were supposed to dip into their own meager purses and provide after-hours food, clothing, and lodging. When teachers dared complain, it was of overwork and nervous exhaustion. This, however, was not the end of their employer’s demands. Teachers had to provide certificates of political reliability, and in some areas (but not St. Petersburg), the women had to submit medical proof of virginity. In Moscow, female but not male teachers had to abide by a strict 11 P.M. curfew and were monitored to ensure they did so. Clearly, women teachers were expected to be more than just unmarried. Virtue and virginity were of the highest importance. Frightened teachers dared protect only collectively, through the women’s movement and teachers’ mutual-aid societies. A 1903 survey revealed their conflicting views on the issue of celibacy as a prerequisite to teaching, which many abhorred but practiced for wants of alternatives. As one liberal legislator expressed it, “This situation weighs heavily upon city teachers and is tantamount to serfdom. Women teachers are primarily poor girls, needing a scrap of bread; the city administration gives them the chance to work and not die of hunger, but under conditions which cripple their natures, condemning them to eternal celibacy.” Thirty-five teachers reported financial insecurity as their motivation for remaining single and celibate; twenty-nine were afraid of losing their jobs; seven were too exhausted by their teaching responsibilities to lead a personal life; and seven worked too long hours to meet potential husbands. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
A minority of women teachers readily accepted the celibacy imposed on them. Two did not want to marry anyway, one to avoid wedding an unsuitable man, as she noticed so often happened. A few believed teaching was emotional reward enough: “THEY DO NOT NEED A FAMILY. They have found their family among those whom the Lord called His pupils.” Others argued that teaching provided them with independence and a satisfying profession without the constraints of marriage or parental authority, and they defended both their celibacy and their right to reject marriage. The vast majority, however, would have loved to marry and raise families and believed married women were better teachers than spinsters. One anonymous writer agreed: “The Duma’s vestal virgins! How sad and pitiful that sounds…What intelligent woman would give up her right to be a mother? What educated young woman, having known the soul of a small child, would give up the right to bring up her own children and give the motherland useful citizens?!” Some blamed a host of physical and emotion problems on their legislated celibacy: “Celibacy has a harmful effect on everything—on health and on character: it causes selfishness, irritability, nervousness, and a formal relationship to the children,” one woman declared. To avoid all this, a tiny number of defiant women teachers simply had secret love affairs or married and hid the fact. If discovered, they were summarily fired. The simmering discontent boiled over late in 1905, when the Duma voted, by majority of one, to maintain the marriage ban. The authorities had won, just barely, their “battle against the laws of nature.” Eight years later, the “laws of nature” were reestablished, when in a nearly unanimous vote, the marriage ban was repealed. Celibacy was not longer a requirement for St. Petersburg’s women teachers. This episode, replanted in variations through the Western World, including Canada, was a telling indictment of coercive celibacy. Most teachers observed it, reluctantly and even bitterly, simply to keep their jobs. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The professional and economic risks were too great, and the news of cheaters caught and fired maintained the ambience of fear. Far from finding it rewarding, these unwilling teachers attributed a multitude of ailments to their unnatural celibacy. The few who embraced it voluntarily, on the other hand, respected it as a means to an independent and respected profession and adopted it as a desirable and fruitful way of life. Several revelations were given at Kirtland during the Winter months of 1831-1832. After Oliver Cowdery and John Whitmer left Kirtland for Independence with the revelations, Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon returned to their work on the Inspired Version of the Scriptures. While they were thus engaged, a revelation came to them in which the Lord gave them these instructions: “Open your mouth in proclaiming my gospel, the things of the kingdom, expounding the mysteries thereof out of the Scriptures. Call upon the inhabitants of the Earth, and bear record, and prepare the way for the commandments and revelations which are to come.” Newell K. Whitney was called to the office of bishop in Kirtland. He was to be an assistant to the bishop in America. It was his duty to receive the funds of the church in Kirtland, to keep that part of the Lord’s storehouse, and to administer to the wants of those who were in need. The Lord said: “It is required of the Lord, at the hand of every steward, to render an account of his stewardship, both in time and in eternity. For he who is faithful and wise in time is accounted worthy to inherit the mansions prepared for them of my Father.” After Joseph and Sidney Rigdon had preached about two months in Kirtland and in neighboring towns, God revealed that they should resume their work on the Scriptures. The Lord said: “It is expedient to translate again, and, inasmuch as it is practicable, to preach in the regions round about until Conference, and after that it is expedient to continue the work of translation until it be finished.” As Joseph and Sidney Rigdon read and studied the Bible, God helped them understand the Scriptures by His Holy Spirit. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Sometimes the Lord gave them direct revelations about things which puzzled them, as he did when He said: “And it came to pass that the children being brought up in subjection to the Law of Moses…believed not the gospel of Christ. Wherefore this cause the apostle wrote unto the church that a believer should not be united to an unbelieve, expect the Law of Moses should be done away among them. And that the tradition might be done away, which saith that little children are unholy. However, little children are holy, being sanctified through the atonement of Jesus Christ; and this is what the Scriptures mean.” The elders were instructed that it was their duty to provide for their own families, to find places for them to live, and then perform their work for the church. The Lord promised his elders: “Let my servants proclaim the things which I have commanded them: and inasmuch as they are faithful, lo, I will be with them even unto the end. Let every human be diligent in all things. And the idler shall not have place in the church, except one repents and mends one’s ways.” On February 10, 1832, Joseph and Sidney Rigdon received a vision in which they saw and talked with Jesus Christ. They saw Jesus Christ sitting at the right hand of God. They saw the holy angels and all those who were pure in heart bow, worshiping God and His Son. Because of this vision they were able to say concerning Jesus Christ: “And, now, after the many testimonies which have been given of him, that he lives; for we saw him, even on the right hand of God. And we heard the voice bearing record that He is the only Begotten of the Father; that by Him, and through Him, and of Him, the World are and were created; and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God.” In this vision they saw that before the World was created, one of the angels, Lucifer, was evil, having rebelled against the Son of God. As a result he was thrust from the presence of God and he fell from Heaven, and became Satan. Of this part of their vision, Joseph writes: “We beheld Satan, that old serpent, even the Devil, who rebelled against God, and sought to take the kingdom of our God and His Christ. Wherefore he maketh war with the saints of God…And we saw a vision of the sufferings of those with whom he made war and overcame, for thus came the voice of the Lord unto us.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Then the Lord revealed to Joseph and Sidney Rigdon how men should live after death in places that are called “glories.” The glory of a human is to occupy depends upon one’s works while one lives on the Earth. In vision Joseph and Sidney Rigdon saw these three glories and they wrote of what they saw: First, the celestial glory, or the glory as of the sun. Those who will inherit the celestial glory: “They are they who received the testimony of Jesus, and believed on His name, and were baptized. And received the Holy Spirit by the laying on of the hands of one who is ordained and sealed unto this power. And who overcome by faith. They are they who are priests of the Most High after the order of Melchisedec. These shall dwell in the presence of God and His Christ for ever and ever: these are they whom He shall bring with Him, when He shall come in the clouds of Heaven, to reign on the Earth over His people. These are they who shall have part in the first resurrection who shall come forth in the resurrection of the just. Second, the terrestrial glory, or the glory as of the moon. Those who will inherit the terrestrial glory: These are they who died without law…who received not the testimony of Jesus in the flesh, but afterwards received it. These are they who are honorable humans of the Earther, who were blinded by the craftiness of humans. These are they who are not valiant in the testimony of Jesus. These are they who receive of His glory, but not of His fullness. These are they who receive of the presence of the Son, but not of the fullness of the Father. Third, the telestial glory, or the glory as of the stars. Of this glory, and those who would inherit this glory, Joseph wrote: These are they who received not the gospel of Christ, neither the testimony of Jesus Christ. These are they who deny not the Holy Spirit; these are they who are thrust down to hell. These are they who shall not be redeemed from the Devil, until the last resurrection, until the Lord, even Christ the Lamb, shall have finished His work. These are they who are liars, and whosever loves and makes a lie; these are they who suffer the wrath of God. These are they who receive not of his fullness in the eternal World, but of the Holy Spirit through the ministration of the terrestrial and also the telestial receive it of the administering of angels. As one star differs from another star in glory, even so differs one from another in glory in the telestial World. Last of all, these all are they who will not be gathered with the saints, to be caught up unto the church of the Firstborn, and received into the cloud. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
God made it known that eventually all will acknowledge Him as the Lord, for Jesus Christ said of those who inherit telestial glory: These are all shall bow the knee, and every tongue shall confess to him who sits upon the throne for ever and ever; for they shall be judged according to their works; and every human shall receive according to one’s own works, but where God and Christ dwell they can not come, Worlds without end. Many wonderful things were shown to Joseph and Sidney Rigdon in this vision. Many of them were so glorious that God commanded they should not write about them. In March four revelations were given. One gave further information on the storehouse and how to care for the poor. In others some of the elders were sent to different parts of the country to preach the gospel. Good advice was given to Frederick G. Williams when the Lord said: Be faithful, stand in the office which I have appointed unto you, succor the weak, lift up the hands of which hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees. And if thou art faithful unto the end, thou shalt have a crown of immortality and eternal life in the mansions which I have prepared in the House of My Father. “Only fear the Lord and serve Him faithfully with all your heart; for consider how great are the things He has done for you,” I Samuel 12.24. An Angel inclines the will as something loveable, and as manifesting some created good ordered God’s goodness. And thus one can incline the will to the love of the creator of God, by way of persuasion. Everywhere is the green of new growth, the amazing sight of the renewal of the Earth. We watch the grass once again emerging from the ground. O Lord, may we today be touched by grace, fascinated and moved by this your creation, energized by the power of new growth at work in your World. Prayer is an invitation to God to intervene in our lives, to let His will prevail in our affairs; it is an effort to make Him the Lord of your soul. If it does not add to the glory of God, what is pride worth? We forfeit our dignity when we abandon loyalty to what is sacred; our existence dwindles to trifles. We barter life for oblivion, and pay the price of toil and pain in the pursuit of aimlessness. Through prayer we sanctify ourselves, our feelings, our ideas. In prayer we establish a living contact with God, between our concern and His will, between despair and promise, want and abundance. Life is fashioned by prayer, and prayer is the quintessence of life. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes
Love sharing just one of our three bedrooms at Brighton Station Residence 2 at #CresleighRanch!
Choosing a statement wall is a great way to customize your home and add some flair. ✨
When you tour this model, you’ll see how much space there can be in a single story home!
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The Spirits Connected to Her Haunted Mansion
One of the many signs of someone being possessed is when one starts speaking in different voices, languages, and explaining things like you just met them that are out of context for the situation. However, scientific research has been unable to find an explanation for some well-documented speech occurrences. The so-called charismatic movement in our own country with its emphasis upon speaking in tongues has focused a great deal of attention upon this subject. Many people in Christian churches believe they are reproducing the gift of tongues reported in the book of Acts and discussed by the apostle Paul in the first letter to the believers in Corinth. The Biblical soundness of their belief lies outside the scope of this study, but we can report that scientifically conducted investigations have shown all instances of tongues-speaking to have the same characteristics wherever they are encountered. The variation between the tongues spoken in a state of hysterical frenzy among primitives is only superficially different from that practiced in a quiet, composed Christian setting. He considers that all tongues experiences are a means by which uneasy and unsatisfied people identify with the supernatural, securing psychological compensation for the spiritual vacuum in which they live. Some Christian scholars believe that added to the psychological element is the possibility that demons are involved in tongues-speaking, but results of investigations in this field are not yet conclusive. Tongues-speaking can be a language of ecstasy; that is, articulated sounds which do not constitute an actual language. Reports keep coming of an even more astonishing phenomenon—speaking a real dialect that was never learned. Hundreds of missionaries, especially those working among people in Asia, report that they often have encountered the mysterious ability of natives to speak in real languages that they never knew. These accounts come from Christian workers who represent widely divergent opinions regarding the charismatic movement. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
One of Mrs. Winchester’s staff members that worked in the greenhouses on her property, who was born and reared on the Tibetan border used to report hearing the Tibetan monks in their ritual dances speak in English with quotations from Shakespeare, with profanity like drunken soldiers, or in German and French, or in languages unknown. A maid also reported the same experiences in the mansion. Reports of this nature are so numerous and come from such reputable people that one cannot set them aside lightly. Perhaps this is the reason Mrs. Winchester installed the mysterious windows in the Grand Ballroom? Christians must not jump to hasty conclusions on such delicate and complicated subjects, but they certainly must recognize the possibility of demonic activity and exercise extreme caution in an attitude of prayerful dependence upon God. We will be able to analyze these reports far more adequately after they have been thoroughly researched by competent investigators. Research teams have found that many of the physical and psychical phenomena declared impossible by the rationalistic scientists of the early 1900’s actually do take place. Most researchers do not even pretend to have a full explanation of how or why these occurrences transpire, but Christians are aware that some of them may be the result of evil spirits who work under the control of Satan. Regarding the occultic, the believer should walk the pathway of extreme caution. One should avoid any so-called magic that claims to bestow unusual knowledge or power through a psychic gift or ritualistic performances. It goes without saying that one must keep a safe distance from any form of black magic, and that one must examine carefully the doctrinal teaching of anyone who purports to provide healing or other temporal benefits in the name of the Lord. Biblical faith is built upon trust in God and expresses itself in submission to His will. Every follower of Christ should be wary of magical cures and all outward demonstrations of allegedly supernatural power. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
As children of God, we must remember that we “walk by faith, not by sight,” reports 2 Corinthians 5.7, and that the faith through the senses. When we received Christ, we were brought into a vital union with Him, and the apostle Peter was writing to us when he said, “Who, having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and fill of glory,” reports 1 Peter 1.8. When a believer discovers the emptiness of this World’s enchantments, Satan tries to lure one into accepting his help through some form of occultism. Through these devices, the devil and his organization of evil spirits may attempt to bring defeat and misery into the lives of God’s children. Satan is unable to harm a believer, however, if that person accepts the instruction of the Bible, maintains a life of prayer, and submits oneself to God, and resists the devil. If one is hypocritical and dishonest, one will successfully resist and overcome the evil influence of Satan and his armies. The child of God must not merely say that one desires victory over sin, but must truly long for it. One’s spiritual vows and public statements must always be sincerely spoken, for the devil has no difficulty in defeating the hypocritical and half-hearted. The devil cannot effectively tempt a Christian who is actively living a joyful Christian life. Some believe that the door-to-nowhere in The Winchester Mystery House is just a wing of the mansion that was never finished, but perhaps it was a biblical metaphor. “I am the door; by me if any one enter in, one shall be saved,” reports John 10.9. It is elevated to a high level on the estate with no entrance reminds use to raise or consciousness, but by going the wrong way through the door, it may be a plunge into the pit of hades. There was once a woman who worked at Mrs. Winchester’s estate whose hand was terribly mangled by a gun explosion. Little did Mrs. Winchester know, that some men on the estate, amiable farmers, when not performing their specific functions, they were wizards, necromancers, exorcists, but above all priests, representatives of the people in offering sacrifices and making contact with the spirits. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Over one hundred years ago, human sacrifices had been made in some places, members of the community offered up by the noblest lords, but now animal sacrifices are made. They exhort their listeners about Heaven and hell in which they firmly believe, the one a place of joy and the other of torment…They keep the register of all males born and are intimate contact with sorcerer-priests, who can read ancient manuscripts and incantations for use on all religious occasions. While working on the estate, a man of Asian decent went to the farmers and asked for medical assistance for his wife. It was a moment of weakness—but he needed help. After the wizards, sorcerer-priests, necromancers, and exorcists evaluated the grounds keeper’s wife several times, they found she was suffering a higher fever also. While making preparations to treat her, they noticed the husband cutting three little bamboo sticks about eight inches long and a quarter of an inch in diameter. Oblivious to all that was taking place around him, he silently moved across the room with these three sticks and a rice bowl. After placing a little water in the bottom of the bowl and ordering his wife to dip the fingers of her right hand in it, he waved the bowl over her prostrate body. His next act was to place the bowl on the floor and try to balance the three sticks in the center of it. While this balancing process was going on, he kept calling out the names of demons. The men of supernatural powers soon awakened to the fact that this man was preparing to call a demon out of his wife. The men of supernatural powers suggested that the man’s wife’s fever was probably due to an attack of malaria, but the man insisted that she was demon-possessed. The naming of demons continued until the name of “Lin,” and then the sticks stood on end. Upon learning this was the demon’s name, the man placed some rice in the blow and mixed it with the three sticks—a little salt was added to give it flavor. He then waved the bowl in circles over his wife and politely called out, “Please, Mr. Lin Demon, come out—come out—look at this, tasty bowl of rice—it’s for you if you’ll only come out—please, oh, please come out, Mr. Lin Demon.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Then he moved slowly toward the door and outside, sprinkling a little of the rice along the way and begging the demon to follow him. When he reached the end of the estate, he flung the remaining portion of rice as far out as he could and then returned to the house. This was too much for some of the men of supernatural magic. They were determined to find out the shenanigans behind this thing, even if it meant calling down the wrath of the gods and demons combined. They asked the fellow if her would let them try to stand those sticks on end. He smilingly gave them the go-ahead signal; but he tried and those things just would not stand. Still not satisfied, they asked the man with the injured wife if he would show them how to do it. The whole process was reverently repeated, even to the standing of the sticks when the name “Lin” was called out. However, the men of supernatural magic finally despaired of ever making those sticks stand. They asked the man where did he learn this art. He answered through a séance with Mrs. Winchester. Six scrolls of some ancient script containing incantations appeared in the Blue Séance Room, along with other radical writings. The men of supernatural magic then realized this was the employment of evil angels they were dealing with. They were dealing with the rulers of darkness of this World, and spiritual wickedness in high places. In another case at the Winchester Mansion, these men who doubled as farmers met a fifteen-year-old girl who had a disease of the eyes. She spent quite a time in an eye clinic, but in spite of the treatment she was not cured. Since medical help had failed, she turned to the men of supernatural magic. These men, using white magic, case some spells over her. Within 24 hours of the charming, the girl’s eye trouble disappeared, but thereafter she felt a terrible inner unrest. She prayed but found no peace. Later, when she visited her former eye specialist, he could only shake his head in astonishment and ask her how she had been healed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Although white magic has been able to heal people, some still believe it is inspired by the powers of darkness. Through white magic some may even obtain what they actually desired, and so it is often only in the effects that its true nature is revealed. The boundary between prayer and magic can be very fluid. If one is able to differentiate between the genuine and the imitation articles, it is essential to have the gift of discerning of spirits. However, whether it sails under a black, white or neutral flag, many people believe they have evidence to prove that the effect of magic in any form is the work of the devil. Yet, that is not what I believe. I have met some very nice people who claim to be witches and warlocks, and they are some of the most kindest people you will every meet. They define those that Christians, who pontificate about the bible, harass and attract and really listen and get to all sides of the story, some it makes some wonder, who is really evil? I am not saying that all Christians are bad, but the witch hunts were started by Christians, as well as lynching in the Southern states. I am not telling anyone what to believe, I am just presenting information that is fascinating. Part of being educated is to remain unbiased and be able to have a discussion, until you draw your own reasonable conclusion based on the evidence presented. If one does not have a case, or does not want to be contradicted by evidence that would prove their argument false, of course they turn to slander, harassment, and terrorism. That is what ignorant people do. They gang up and try to lie so loud to make sure no one can hear the truth they are suppressing. But as the Bible says, all things will come to the light. Everyone has things they need to deal with inside of themselves and sometimes it is more comfortable to try to find fault with others and blame others instead of taking responsibility. For instance, the dynamic of idolatry is demonism since idolatry is in reality the worship of other gods who are demons (1 Corinthians 10.20), headed by Satan the “god of this World,” (2 Corinthians 4.4). #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Occultism involves dealing with demonic forces through fortune-telling, magic, spiritism, or religious cults, which are supposedly closely allied to idolatry. Persons who deal in the occult often discover that they have spiritistic sensitivity, extrasensory perception, or abnormal intellectual powers enabling them to engage in clairvoyance, precognition, divination, psychometry, magic, and spiritism. Dealing in the occult often results in the subjection to the powers of darkness to such a degree that the mind becomes blinded to truth, immersed in deception and error. This frequently results in acute depression with thoughts of self-destruction. However, not all emotional problems or suicidal tendencies should be attributed to occultism. However, demons can also oppress that human mind. Enslavement to demons sometimes reaches a point in which the demonic spirits harass and torment their victims. In the preceding stage of subjection, the evil spirits sporadically dominate their victims, but they do not necessarily harass them, at least not as they do in this deeper and more tragic state of oppression. Oppression in some form will be the final outcome of all who become psychically enslaved, even though some are not psychically gifted with spiritistic or magical powers. One well-attested and widely occurring form of demonic oppression is poltergeist phenomena. “Poltergeist” is German for “noisy ghost.” In such a case, the oppressed person is hounded by strange noises and sounds, such as shouts and obscene threats, rattling of chains, moaning, weeping, or piercing laughter. Dishes clatter, furniture is moved by invisible hands, and myriads of other strange happenings occur, invisibly produced by spirits connected with a haunted house where spirit activity has been practiced. Some who are oppressed continue to be tormented even though they may move to another residence. Also, common in the victims of demonism are the appearances of ghosts, specters, and monstrous phantasms. These phenomena are often explained away as hallucinations, but are well attested in occultism as spirits appearing as dwarfs, animals, dismembered parts of a human body, etcetera. At times these hideous spirits will strangle, bite, strike, or attack their victims in some way. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Perhaps the most terrible and revolting form of demonic oppression is what is known in the history of religion as incubi and sccubae experiences. This is the assault by an unclean spirit upon its enslaved victim for the purpose of lust involving pleasures of the flesh. Both men and women have been attacked and molested by “seducing male and female demons.” Such fully established phenomena show that angelic-human union, a major cause of the flood (Genesis 6.1-4; 2 Peter 2.4; Jude 1.6-7), has its parallel in occultism today. The account of the following portent is given us in Aubrey’s Miscellanies. “When King James II first entered Dublin after his Arrival from France, 1689, one of the Gentlemen that bore the Mace before him, stumbled without any rub in his way, or other visible occasion. The Mace fell out of is hands, and the little Cross upon the Crown thereof stuck fast between to Stones in the Street. This is well known all over Ireland, and did much trouble King James himself with many of his chief Attendants”; but not doubt greatly raised the hopes of his enemies. A few years later a witch-story comes from the north of Ireland. “At Antrim in Ireland a little girl of nineteen (nine?) years of age, inferior to none in the place for beauty, education, and birth, innocently put a leaf of sorrel which she had got from a witch into her mouth, after she had given the begging witch bread and beer at the door; it was scarce swallowed by her but she began to be tortured in the bowels, to tremble all over, and even was convulsive, and in fine to swoon away as dead. The doctor used remedies on the 9th of May 1698, at which time it happened, but to no purpose, the child continued in a most terrible paroxysm; whereupon they sent for the minister, who scarce had laid his hand upon her when she was turned by the demon in the most dreadful shapes. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
She began first to rowl herself about, then to vomit needles, pins, hairs, feathers, bottoms of thread, pieces of glass, window-nails, nails drawn out of a cart or coach-wheel, an iron knife about a span long, eggs, and fish-shells; and when the witch came near the place, or looked to the house, though at the distance of two hundred paces from where the child was, she was in worse torment, insomuch that no life was expected from the child till the witch was removed to some greater distance. The witch was apprehended, condemned, strangled, and burnt, and was desired to unto the incantation immediately before strangling; but said she could not, by reasons others had done against her likewise. But the wretch confessed the same, with many more. The child was about the middle of September thereafter carried to a gentleman’s house, where there were many other things scarce credible, but that several ministers and the gentleman have attested the same. The relation is to be seen in a pamphlet printed 1699, and entitled The Bewitching of a Child in Ireland.” People in ancient times used to rely more on the spiritual, witchcraft, magic, séances, curses, potions, and meditation. Perhaps that is why there were so many more instances of supernatural things happening today. Some of these claims sound so outrageous and many of them report the same types of instances. Then today, we have all these technologies and medications and machines that we rely on and people who tell us what is actually possible and how many of these stories from the past happen to be something else explained by medication or a camera that so many people start to disbelieve in the supernatural. However, just because it can be explained by science, does not mean it is not supernatural. The Christian Bible even speaks about miracles, which are things that are supernatural. Supernatural phenomenon is real. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
However, supernatural phenomena may be less common today because land is so densely packed, so many people turn into TV and Music and digital entertainment, so they spend less time praying and tuning into nature. In the 1800s, one could life in a house and not see another person for years because there was so much space to spread out on. People had time to read books and gaze at the moon and the sky and think up inventions. By now, everyone has probably heard of the legendary Sarah L. Winchester. She is the one who built the most mysterious mansion in the World. One thing that surprises me is that no one has, as of yet, tried to duplicate or create something just as wonderful. Nonetheless, it has been said that Mrs. Winchester slept in a different bedroom every night, supposedly in order to confuse evil spirits. And it totally makes sense. Because even now, people say when bad things are happening to you, you need to figure out what you are doing to cause it and draw closer to God. Back in Mrs. Winchester’s day, the 1800s, people were into spiritualism and also believed that spirits were the source causing bad things to happen to people. So they would try to appease them to protect themselves from curses and demons and so forth. Every generation has their methods and religions and that is just how it is. Some say Mrs. Winchester also held special dinner parties for her spirit friends. Legend has it that she would serve her phantom friends on solid gold plates, offering them delicious cuisine like caviar, truffles, and pheasant stuffed with pate. The mansion’s staff was also well-fed. On a stormy night, the front of the house was dark and silent, for it was long past bedtime. It was thirteen past one, and raining like blazes. It was thirteen years ago this day that Louis Le Prince had been seen alive, for Black Knight, one of Mrs. Winchester’s mares kicked the life out of him in the house stable one morning. One could feel the present and all its dangers towering around. Staff who walked by the horse stable this day reported feeling lost, a ghost dislodged from time. Indeed, it struck many people as unusual that the lad was left for the to care for the horses by himself. It might have been a fancy stable, but there was a queer feel about the place. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The sun was just beginning to set as they headed back to the estate. By the time they got inside, the night was as black as your hat: not a vestige of a moon, not a single star to break the uniform of darkness of the sky. With sunset a noisy blustering wind had sprung up, rattling about one of the chimneys, clashing the wet branches, and deadening the sound of cautious footfalls creeping across the paddock in the direction of the stables. The wind dropped suddenly, making the silence all the more intense by contrast with the previous roar; and through the stillness, Mrs. Winchester heard the clink of a bucket, and the sound of someone moving about in the stables. She sprang to her feet and snatched up her lantern. She thought that someone was trying to get at one of her horses, and her hand was on her father-in-law’s ivory-gripped Winchester pistol when she opened the door. So strong was the impression that she was absolutely surprised to find no sign of an intruder. The horses were perfectly quiet. Mrs. Winchester looked all around. There was certainly nothing to see, but it struck her that the air felt very cold, and she shut the door. The instant it closed behind her, a dark shadow fell across the square of light issuing from the entrance to the saddle-room. She figured it must have been the wind she heard and locked the door and went back inside. However, the butler Henry Boynton Clitz, was also suspicious. He turned the key in the lock and looked into the horse stable; then he gave a slight start, and drew quickly back. There was light inside, but where is came from would have been difficult to say. Beyond the shadow lay black and impenetrable, a wall of darkness. As he crossed the threshold Henry felt a blast of cold air sweep towards him, striking a strange chill into his very bones. Straight opposite stood a horse, and before him was an old man who appeared to be asleep. However, even in that intense stillness the tout could catch no sound of his breathing. His own heart was thumping against his ribs with the force of a sledge-hammer. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Henry felt his flesh creeping with a sensation of fear that was almost sickening. Fear? Yes, that was the word; he was horribly afraid. And of what? Of a weak old man, for whom he would have been more than a match single-handed, and they were two to one. What a fool he was, to be sure! With desperate effort he pulled himself together and went forward, his eye warily fixed on the silent figure. Neither man nor horses moved. As Henry moved forward, he heard a low chuckling laugh. The man was looking at him. The gleaming eyes fixed on him with a sort of mesmeric power. His face fastened on the figure, taking in every item of the quaint dress, the high gill collar and ample bird’s eye stock, the drab coat and antiquated breeches and gaiters. His mouth was open, but for the life of him he could not speak. He was waiting in the helpless fascination of horror to see the face of a man who had been dead and buried for thirteen years. Slowly, like an automaton, that strange watcher turned his head. The square, resolute mouth was open as if to speak; the shrunken skin was a greenish yellow color, like the skin of a corpse; along the temple ran a dull black mark in the shape of a horse’s hoof; but the eyes burned like two living coals, as they fixed themselves on the face of the terrified publican. Next, Henry heard the crash of a lantern on stones and the sound of Louis’s flying feet, and an awful terror came upon him, a great fear, which made his teeth chatter in his head and curdled the blood in his veins. The place seemed full of an unnatural light—black flames. The air was foul with the horrible odors of decay. Above all, Henry felt the fearful presence of that which was neither living nor dead—the semblance of a man whose human body had for thirteen long years been rotting in the grave. It was not living, but it moved. Its cold, shining eyes were looking into his, were coming near. There was no mistaking the look of that helpless body, the limp flaccidity of those outstretched arms. “He’s dead,” said Henry, as he turned up the white face. Its coat was wet with—something. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
It was blood. But it was strange there should be no marks of violence about him, and yet he looks as if he had died hard. And truly, the dead man’s face was terrible in its fixed expression of mortal fear. The eyes were staring and wide open, the teeth clenched, a little forth hung about the blue lips. It was a horrid sight. Henry locked the door on the corpse until the police could arrive, and spent the remainder of the night in the butler’s pantry. However, when the Henry awoke, he could throw very little light on the matter. There was no one in the horse stables. No body, no foul odor, no broken lanterns. Just the horses and an old noose in one of the empty stalls. Whatever happened remain a mystery. The old living soul who knew the truth held her tongue. Mrs. Winchester simply told him, “Leave it to other staff members and never set foot in that cursed place. The poor boy is dead, and there is no reason for me to get myself mixed up in the business.” Demons can cause physical ailments such as dumbness (Matthew 9.32-33), blindness (Matthew 12.22), and various other defects and deformities (Luke 13.11-17). In all such cases medical and psychiatric treatment are of no avail, because the cause is demonic. Only be dealing with the spiritual causes of the malady can it be cured. Besides actual sickness, demons can cause speech and behavior abnormalities. In demon possession, which is an extreme form of enslavement and oppression, the speech and behavior abnormalities appear in greatly accentuated form with such violent physical manifestations as retching, screaming, blaspheming, cursing, foaming at the mouth, convulsions and display of tremendous physical strength. So completely does the demonic spirit gain mastery that one takes over the body of the victim and speaks through it with one’s own voice and language, which may be completely foreign to the language of the demonized. Sometimes evil spirits endanger humans’ temporal safety by exercising a certain control over natural forces. “I’ve covered my brother completely (That bump on the right is his knee) I will dig him out when I am ready to find how he liked it, you see.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
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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
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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
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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/
When Asked His Name He Said “Legion” Because Many Demons Were Entered into Him!
It is easy to imagine how the combined grief of losing both a child and a spouse could be very crippling. However, if you have $20,000,000 (2021 inflation adjusted $347,910,691.82), and all the time in the World to help you cope, what would you do? Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester’s response to the deaths of her child and husband left a bizarre and impressive architectural reflection of her soul. After a series of violent confrontations, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company hires a private investigator to follow her. Mrs. Winchester ascends into mystery and it is soon clear that she is hiding a much bigger secret—one that is both inexplicable and shocking. A “possessed” person may have symptoms much like those that are apparent in the mentally ill. One may be deeply melancholic or depressed, appear to be withdrawn from reality, or may manifest emotions that range from ecstatic joy to violent screaming or wild ferocity. These various states may present themselves from time to time during “attacks.” Demon possession may be distinguished from insanity, however, by observing the manner in which the afflicted person speaks. An insane individual may have a mistaken concept of one’s own identity, wear clothing by which one attempts to look like the person one thinks oneself to be, but speak in one’s own voice, and in such a manner that one can tell one is doing only a superficial impersonation of the individual one thinks oneself to be. A demon-possessed person, on the other hand, is obviously controlled by the indwelling evil spirit. The wicked being may use a language or dialect the individual never knew, and sometimes will name oneself. Therefore, one should carefully note the symptoms of a disturbed person, never making the diagnosis of demon possession on the basis of a superficial judgment. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
If a believer should meet a demon-possessed individual, one would be unwise to make a frontal attack upon the powers of darkness by immediately issuing a command in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Dr. Kurt Koch, an evangelical Christian who has made a lifetime study of Satan and occultic activities, declares that whenever Christians lightly engage in an effort to cast out demons, they run the risk of being attacked by evil spirits. Such people often suffer deep spiritual depression and find themselves in an attitude of complete hopelessness. Since this is true, a believer should band together with others in a time of prayer, and no efforts should be made to expel the evil spirits until the Holy Spirit prompts someone to issue the command. Unbelievers and adherents of the non-Christian religions apparently can command evil spirits without suffering bad consequences. Archeologists have found manuscripts containing incantations and magical formulas for the expulsion of demons; and today in the Philippines and other countries of the far East, as well as in some areas of South America and Africa, pagan religious leaders seriously perform rituals to ward off or cast out evil spirits. Sometimes they beat the person who is demon-possessed, prick one with needles, or even burn portions of one’s body, thinking that this pain will drive out the evil spirits. The Jewish people in Christ’s day also used spells, magical phrases, and religious rituals to expel demons. That they sometimes appeared to be successful is clear, for Jesus said, “if I, by Beelzebub, cast out demons, by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore, they shall be your judges,” reports Matthew 12.27. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
In this statement the Lord Jesus Christ acknowledged that evil spirits sometimes left the bodies of their victims when incantations, spells, or magical rites were used by Jewish religious leaders. However, Christ did not say these men accomplished their goal by the power of God, nor did He imply that they were actually doing damage to the cause of Satan. He was answering the charge that He was casting out demons in the power of Beelzebub, the prince of demons. He declared that is such were the case, the kingdom of Satan would be divided against itself. Actually, the exorcists, whether Jewish or pagan, did not really possess authority over the invisible World, but the evil spirits merely cooperated with them, leaving the bodies of some of their victims to give the appearance that they had been forced out. By working with these unbelieving sorcerers, the devil aided his own cause. The demons either temporarily left the person, only to return a short time later, or entered the body of some other victim. No one should attempt to deal with the forces of evil by using the name of Jesus unless one is a child of God. Luke, in Acts 19, graphically portrays the seriousness of hypocritically dealing with the powers of darkness. Seven sons of Sceva, a professional exorcist who had no personal faith in Christ, tried to combine the words “in the name of Jesus” with their magical formula. The evil spirits, recognizing that these impostors had no right to use Jesus’s name, reacted in a violent manner. The demon-possessed individual attacked these men with superhuman strengths, so that with torn clothing and bleeding bodies they fled from the Winchester mansion. The frequency of demon possession—the record of history establishes without a doubt that demon possession was known before the Lord Jesus Christ came to Earth, and the testimony of missionaries indicates that it has continued down through the centuries. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The public ministry of Christ, however, was accompanied by an outburst of demon possession unparalleled in history. It seems that Satan threw all his power into his battle with Jesus Christ. True, the devil is not omniscient, but he knew that Christ had come to earth to atone for sin, conquer death, and bring about the defeat of evil. John tells us that “the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil,” reports 1 John 3.8. Satan used every device at his disposal to frustrate the purpose of God in Christ. Subtle temptations, the wrath and wickedness of men, and a rash of demonic activity were part of his vain effort to prevent Jesus from performing the work He had come to accomplish. Demon possession gradually subsided during the first century A.D., and usually is not conspicuous in areas where a fairly large percentage of people have placed their faith in Jesus Christ. It appears that demons are hesitant to enter the bodies of people when informed believers are likely to cast them out in the name of Christ. Luke is the same one that is translated “bottomless pit” seven times in the book of the Revelation. We read, “And Jesus asked him, saying, ‘What is thy name?’ And he said, ‘Legion’; because many demons were entered into him. And they besought him that he would not command them to go out into the deep. And there was there and herd of many swine, feeding on the mountain; and they besought him that he would allow them to enter into them. And he permitted them,” reports Luke 8.30-32. Revelation 9 tells us that at some future time the “bottomless pit” will be opened, and a great army of evil spirits will be set free to plague humankind. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
It is at least a possibility that whenever demons are cast out of a human being in the name of Jesus Christ, they are sent to the bottomless pit, and will not be released until shortly before Christ returns to establish His kingdom. The realization that they will lose their freedom as members of the army of the “prince of the power of the air,” and be confined in the pit for an indefinite period of time, makes them hesitant to take possession of human beings. The risk is too great in an area where Christians exercise their authority in the name of Christ. People who live in civilized countries where the Gospel has been known for centuries should not rule out the possibility of demon possession, however, just because it has not been a common occurrence in these areas. Satan and his cohorts may conclude that most people, even professing Christians, will not recognize this phenomenon when they meet it. Therefore, as this age draws to a close, Satan may once again become very active in entering human bodies and controlling personalities. He will hope that the majority of humankind will either be deceived into following him or find a naturalistic explanation for the activities of the demons. This supernatural manifestation of the power of Satan and evil spirits is clearly predicted by the apostle Paul. In his second letter to the Thessalonian believers, he declares that just before Christ returns in glory, the devil will have his righthand mand upon the earth performing miracles which make him appear to be a god. Referring to the Antichrists, the apostle says, “Even him whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish, because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved,” reports 2 Thessalonian 2.9, 10. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Inasmuch as we can expect an increase of open opposition to God on the part of the Satanic hordes, we know Christ should humbly maintain fellowship with Him through full submission and ready obedience so that we may receive from Him the strength we need to overcome. James writes, “God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble. Submit yourselves, therefore, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you,” reports James 4.6-7. Peter declares, “Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil, like a roaring lion walketh about, seeking whom he may devour; whom resist steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the World,” reports 1 Peter 5.8-9. No, Satan is not dead. He is like a wounded animal and still has great power to harm those who care careless or proud. Therefore, keep awake, be on alert, read the Christian Bible and the Book of Mormon, and pray! If you do not, he may destroy your effectiveness as a Christian. For the next instance of witchcraft and the supernatural in connection with Ireland, we are compelled to go beyond the confines of our own country. Though in this connection with the Green Isle is slight, yet it is of interest as affording an example of that blending of fairy lore with sorcery which is not an uncommon feature of Scottish witchcraft-trials. In the year 1613 a woman named Margaret Barclay, of Irvine in Scotland, was accused of having her brother-in-law’s ship to be cast away by magical spell. A certain strolling vagabond and juggler, John Stewart, was apprehended as her accomplice; he admitted (probably under torture) that Margaret had applied to him to teach her some magic arts in others that “she might get gear, kye’s milk, love of man, her heart’s desire on such persons as had done her wrong.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Through John Stewart does not appear to have granted Margaret’s request, yet he gave detailed information as to the manner in which he had gained the supernatural power and knowledge with which he was credited. “It being demanded of him by what means he profession himself to have knowledge of things to come, the said John confessed that the space of twenty-six years ago, he being travelling on All-Hallow Even night between the towns of Monygoif and Clary, in Galway, he met with the King of the Fairies and his company, and that the King gave him a stroke with a white rod over the forehead, which took from him the power of speech and the use of one eye, which he wanted for the space of three years. He declared that the use of speech and eyesight was restored to him by the King of Fairies and his company on a Hallowe’en night at the town of Dublin.” At his subsequent meeting with the fairy band, he was taught all his knowledge. The spot on which he was struck remained impervious to pain although a pin was thrust into it. The unfortunate wretch was cast into prison, and there committed suicide by hanging himself from the “cruik” of the door with his garter or bonnet-string, and so “ended his life miserably with the help of the devil his master.” A tale slightly resembling portion of the above comes from the north of Ireland a few years later. “It is storied, and the story is true,” says Robert Law in his Memorialls, “of a godly man in Ireland, who lying one day in the fields sleeping, he was struck with dumbness and deafness. The same man, during this condition he was in, could tell things, and had the knowledge of things in a strange way, which he had not before; and did, indeed, by signs make things known to others which they knew not. Afterwards he at length, prayer being made from him by others, came to the use of his tongue and ears; but when that knowledge of things he had in his deaf and dumb condition ceased, and when he was asked how he had the knowledge of these things he made signs of, he answered he had that knowledge when dumb, but how and after what manner he knew not, only he had the impression thereof in his spirit. This story was related by a godly minister, Mr. Robert Blair, to Mr. John Baird, who knew the truth of it.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The Rev. Robert Blair, M.A., was a celebrated man, if for no other reason than on account of his disputes with Dr. Echlin, Bishop of Down, or for his description of Oliver Cromwell as a greeting (id est, weeping) devil. On the invitation of Lord Claneboy he arrived in Ireland in 1623, and in the same year was settled as (Presbyterian) parish minister at Bangor in Co. Down, with the consent of patron and people’ he remained there until 1631, when he was suspended by Dr. Echlin, and was deposed and excommunicated in November, 1634. He has left a few writings behind him, and was grandfather of the poet Robert Blair, author of The Grave. During the years of his ministry at Bangor the following incident occurred to him, which he of course attributes to demonic possession, through homicidal mania resulting from intemperate habits would be nearer the truth. One day a rich man, the constable of the perish, called upon him in company with one of his tenants concerning the baptizing of the latter’s child. “When I had spoken what I thought necessary, and was ready to turn into my house, the constable dismissing the other told me he had something to say to me in private. I looking upon him saw his eyes like the eyes of a cat in the night, did presently conceive that he had a mischief in his heart, yet I resolved not to refuse what he desired, but I keeped a watchful eye upon him, and stayed at some distance; and being near to the door of the church I went in, and invited him to follow me. As soon as he entered within the doors he fell atrembling, and I awondering. His trembling continuing and growing without any speech, I approached to him, and invited him to a seat, wherein he could hardly sit. The great trembling was like to throw him out of the seat. I laid my arm about him, and asked him what ailed him? But for a time, he could speak none. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
“At last his shaking ceased, and he began to speak, telling me, that for a long time the Devil had appeared to him; first at Glasgow he bought a horse from him, receiving a sixpence in earnest, and that in the end he offered to him a great purse full of sylver to be his, making no mention of the horse; he said that he blessed himself, and so the buyer with the sylver and gold that was poured out upon the table vanished. But some days thereafter he appeared to him at his own house, naming him by his name, and said to him, Ye are mine, for I arled you with a sixpence, which yet ye have. Then said he, I asked his name, and he answered, they call me Nickel Downus (I suppose the he repeated evil, that he should have said Nihil Damus). Being thus molested with these and many other apparitions of the Devil, he left Scotland; but being come to Ireland he did often likewise appear to him, and now of late he still commands me to kill and slay; and oftentimes, says he, my whinger hath been drawn and kept under my cloak to obey his commands, but still something holds my hand that I cannot stroke. But then I asked him who he was bidden kill? He answered, any that comes in my way; but ‘The better they be the better service to me, or else I shall kill thee.’ When he uttered these words he fell again atrembling, and was stopped in his speaking, looking lamentably at me, designing me to be the person he aimed at; then he fell a crying and lamenting. I showed him the horribleness of his ignorance and drunkenness; he made many promises of reformation, which were not well keep’d; for within a fortnight he went to an alehouse to crave the price of his malt, and sitting there long at drink, as he was going homeward the Devil appeared to him, and challenged him for opening to me what had passed betwixt them secretly, and followed him to the house, pulling his cap off his head and his band from about his neck, saying to him, ‘On Hallow-night I shall have thee, soul and body, in despite of the minister and of all that he will do for thee.’” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
In his choice of a date his Satanic Majesty showed his respect for popular superstitions. This attack of delirium tremens (though Mr. Blair would not have so explained it) had a most salutary effect; the constable was in such an abject state of terror lest the Devil should carry him off that he begged Mr. Blair to sit up with him all Hallow-night, which he did, spending the time very profitably in prayer and exhortation, which encouraged the man to defy Satan and all his works. The upshot of the matter was, that he became very charitable to the poor, and seems to have entirely renounced his intemperate habits. Rejecting the supernatural elements in the above as being merely the fruits of a diseased mind, there is no reason to doubt the truth of the story. Mr. Blair also met with some strange cases of religious hysteria, which became manifest in outbursts of weeping and bodily convulsions, but which he attributed to the Devil’s “playing the ape, and counterfeiting the works of the Lord.” He states that one Sunday, in the midst of public worship, “one of my charge, being a dull and ignorant person, made a noise and stretching of her body. Incontinent I was assisted to rebuke that lying spirit that disturbed the worship of God, charging the same not to disturb the congregation; and through God’s mercy we met with no more of that work.” Thus modestly our writer sets down what happened in his Autobiography; but the account of the incident spread far and wide, and at length came to the ears of Archbishop Usher, who, on his next meeting with Mr. Blair, warmly congratulated him on the successful exorcism he had practised.” Spirits of a diabolical and infernal nature, are not only ready upon all occasions to become subservient to exorcists and magicians, but are ever watching opportunities of exciting evil affections in the mind, and of stirring up the wickedly inclined to the commission of every species of iniquity and vice. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Thus by the instigation of infernal spirits, and their own promptitude, they often terrify humans with nocturnal visions; provoke melancholy people to suicide; tempt drunkards and incendiaries to set houses on fire, to burn those who are in them, and allure careless servants and others to sound and incautious sleep; that such unlucky accidents might happen besides innumerable other ways they have of executing the devices of iniquitous spirits through malicious instigations, or secret stratagems, projected for the overthrow and destruction of mortal men; especially when the work to be effected by the devil is too hard for his subtle and spiritual nature to effect, because the same belongs to the outward source or principle to which these dubious spirits more immediately belong. A few nights into Christmas, there was a festival for which the Winchester mansion was making extensive preparations. The narrow streets which had been thronged with people were now almost deserted. In the comfortable coffee-room of the Winchester mansion, Mrs. Winchester had half a dozen guests, principally commercial travellers, sat talking by light of the fire. The talk had drifted from trade to politics, from politics to religion, and so by easy stages to the supernatural. In the flicker of the light of the fire, as it shone on the glasses and danced with shadows on the walls, the conversation proved so enthralling that Henry, the waiter, whose presence had been forgotten, created a very disagreeable sensation by suddenly starting up from a dark corner and gliding silently from the room. Mrs. Winchester then said, “Of course, it is an old idea that spirits like to get into the company of human beings. A man told me once that he travelled down the Great Western with a ghost and had not the slightest suspicion of it until the inspector came for tickets. My friend said they way that ghost tried to keep up appearances by feeling for it in all its pockets and looking on the floor was quite touching. Ultimately it gave it up and with a faint groan vanished through the ventilator.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
“That’ll do, Mrs. Winchester,” said Ludwig Leichhardt. “It is not a subject for jesting,” said Adam Worth,” who had been an attentive listener. “I’ve never seen an apparition myself, but I know people who have, and I consider that they form a very interesting link between us and the after-life. There’s a ghost story connected with this mansion, you know.” “Never heard of it,” said Edward Agar, “and I have visiting this estate for some years now.” “It dates back a long time,” said Ludwig. “You’ve heard about John V. Creely also know as Jesus Procopio?” “Well, I’ve just ‘eard odds and ends, sir” said the Edward, “but I never put much count to ‘em. There was one chap ‘ere what said ‘e saw it, and the gov’ner sacked ‘im prompt.” “My father was a native of this town,” said Ludwig, “and knew the story well. He was a truthful man and a steady churchgoer, but I’ve heard him declare that once in his life he saw the appearance of Jesus Procopio in this mansion.” “And who was this Jesus?” enquired a voice. “His real name was Tomaso Rodendo, one of the most fearless and daring desperadoes that has ever figures in the criminal annals of our state. Anything he could turn his dishonest hand to,” replied Ludwig; “and he was run to Earth in this mansion one Christmas week some five years ago. He took his last supper in this very room, and after he had gone up to bed a couple of thief takers, who had followed him from San Francisco but lost the scent a bit, went upstairs with Mrs. Winchester and tried the door. It was stout oak, and fast, so one went into the yard, and by means of a short ladder got on the window-sill, while the other stayed outside the door. Those below in the yard saw the man crouching on the sill, and then there was a sudden smash of glass, and with a cry he fell in a heap on the stones at their feet. Then in the moonlight they saw the white face of the pickpocket peeping over the sill, and while some stayed in the yard, others ran into the mansion and helped the other man to break the door in. It was difficult to obtain an entrance even then, for it was barred with heavy furniture, but they got in at last, and the first thing that met their eyes was the body of Jesus dangling from the top of the bed by his own handkerchief.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
“Which bedroom was it?” asked two or three voices together. Ludwig shook his head. “That I can’t tell you; but the story goes that Jesus still haunts this mansion, and my father used to declare that the last time he had slept here that the ghost of Jesus Procopio lowered itself from the top of his bed and tried to strangle him.” “That will do” said John Creely. “I wish you’d thought to ask your father which bedroom it was.” “I believe it was my Blue Séance room said,” Mrs. Winchester. “Well, I should take care not to sleep in it, that’s all, said John shortly. “There’s nothing to fear,” said Ludwig. “I don’t believe for a moment that ghosts could really hurt one. In fact my father used to confess that it was only the unpleasantness of the thing that upset him, and that for all practical purposes Jesus’s figures might have been made of cotton-wool for all the hard they could do.” “That’s all very fine,” said John; “a ghost story is a ghost story, sir; but when a gentleman tells a tale of a ghost in the house in which one is going to sleep, I call it most ungentlemanly!” “Pooh! Nonsense!” said Ludwig, rising, “ghosts can’t hurt you. For my own part; I should rather like to see one. Good night.” “Good night,” said Mrs. Winchester and the others. “And I hope that Jesus will pay you a visit,” added John as the door closed.” “Shall I light the gas, Adam?” said Henry. “No; the fires very comfortable,” he said. “Now gentlemen, any of you know any more?” “I think we’ve had enough,” said John; “we shall be thinking we see spirits next, and we’re not all like Ludwig who’s just gone.” Old humbug!” said John. “I should like to put him to the test. Suppose I dress up as Jesus Procopio and go to give him a chance of displaying his courage?” “Bravo!” said Adam huskily, drowning one or two faint “Noes.” “No, drop it, John” said Edward. “Only for the joke,” said John, somewhat eagerly. “I’ve got some things upstairs in which I am going to play in the ‘Rivals’—knee-breeches, buckles, and all that sort of thing. It’s a rare chance. If you’ll wait a bit I’ll give you a full-dress rehearsal, entitled, ‘Jesus Procopio; or, The Nocturnal Strangler.’” #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
“You won’t frighten us,” said Adam, with a husky laugh. “I don’t know that,” said John sharply; “it’s a question of acting that’s all. I’m pretty good, ain’t I, Edward?” “Oh, you’re all right—for an amateur,” said Edward, with a laugh. “I’ll bet you level sov. You don’t frighten me,” said Adam. “Done! said John. I’ll take the bet to frighten you first and Ludwig afterwards. These gentlemen shall be the judges.” “You won’t frighten us, sir,” said Edward “because we’re prepared for you; but you’d better leave Ludwig alone. It’s dangerous play.” “Well, I’ try you first,” said John, springing up. “No gas, mind.” He ran lightly upstairs to his room, leaving the others, most of whom had been drinking somewhat freely, to wrangle about his proceedings. It ended with them going to bed. “He’s crazy on acting,” said Adam, lighting his pipe. “Thinks he’s the equal of anybody almost. It doesn’t matter with us, but I won’t let him go to Ludwig. And he won’t mind so long as he gets an opportunity of acting to us.” “Well, I hope he’ll hurry up,” said Edward, yawning; it’s after twelve now.” Nearly half an hour passed. Edward drew his watch from his pocket and was busy winding it, when Henry, the waiter, who had been sent on an errand, burst suddenly into the room and rushed towards them. “E’s comin’, gentlemen,” he said breathlessly. “Why, you’re frightened, Edward,” said Adam with a chuckle. “It was the suddenness of it,” said Edward sheepishly; “and besides, I didn’t look for seenin’ ‘im in the bar. There’s only a glimmer of light there, and ‘e was sitting on the floor behind the bar. I nearly trod on ‘im.” “He’s taking too long, I’ll go and fetch him,” said Adam. “You don’t know what this mansion is like at night, sir,” said Henry, catching him by the sleeve. “It ain’t fit to look at by yourself, it ain’t, indeed. It’s got the—what’s that?” #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
They all started at the sound of a smothered cry from the staircase and the sound of somebody running hurriedly along the passage. Before anybody could speak, the door flew open and a figure bursting into the room flung itself gasping and shivering upon them. “What is it? What’s the matter?” demanded Edward. “Why, it’s Mr. Creely.” He shook him roughly and then held some spirit to his lips. John Creely drank it greedily with a sharp intake of his breath gripped him by the arm. “Light the gas, Adam,” said Edward. Adam obeyed hastily, John Creely, a ludicrous but pitiable figure in knee-breeches and coat, a large wig all awry, and his face a mess of grease paint, clung to him, trembling. “Now what’s the matter?” asked Edward. “I’ve seen it,” said John, with a hysterical sob. “O Lord, I’ll never play the fool again, never!” “Seen what?” said the others. “Him—it—the ghost—anything!” said John wildly. “Rot!” said Adam uneasily. All distinctly heard a step in the passage outside. It stopped at the door, and as they watched with bated breath, the door creaked and slowly opened. Adam fell back opened-mouthed, as a white, leering face, with sunken eyeballs ad close-cropped bullet head, appeared at the opening. For a few second the creature stood regarding them, blinking in a strange fashion at the candle. Then with a sidling movement, it came a little way into the room and stood there as if bewildered. Not a man spoke or moved, but all watched with a horrible fascination as the creature removed its dirty neckcloth and its head rolled on its shoulder. For a minute it paused, and then holding the rag before it, moved towards Edward. The candle went out suddenly with a flash and a bang. These was a smell of powder, and something writhing in the darkness on the floor. A faint, choking cough, and then silence. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Edward was the first to speak. “Matches,” he said in a strange voice. Adam struck one. Then he leapt at the gas and a burner flamed from the match. Edward touched the thing on the floor with his foot and found it soft. He looked at his companions. They mouthed enquiries at him, but he shook his head. He lit the candle, and, kneeling down, examined the silent thing on the floor. Then he rose swiftly, and dipping his handkerchief in the water jug, bent down again and grimly wiped the white face. Then he sprang back with a cry of incredulous horror, pointing at it. Adam’s pistol fell to the floor and he shut out the sight with his hands, but the others, crowding forward, gazed spell-bound at the dead face of John V. Creely. Before a word was spoken the door opened and Ludwig hastily entered the room. His eyes fell on the floor. “Good God!” he cried. “You didn’t—” Nobody spoke. “I told him not to,” he said in a suffocating voice. “I told him not to. I told him—” He leaned against the wall, deathly sick, put his arms out feebly, and fell fainting into Ludwig’s arms. Many mysteries have taken place in the Winchester mansion over the years. It is an extravagant maze of Victorian craftmanship—marvelous, baffling, and eerily eccentric, to say the least. Tour guide must warn people not to stray from the group or they could be lost forever! Countless questions come to mind as you wander through the mansion—such as, what was Mrs. Winchester thinking when she had a staircase built that descends seven steps and then rises eleven? The Winchester Repeating Arms Company concluding their investigation by saying, “The mystery of the Winchester mansion is unquestionably great and infinite; perhaps spirits can take human shape, and disclose secrets and treasures guarded by this estate, but we must also be aware of skilled deceivers who will talk of Heaven and Hell and the Fall.” (WRA 1888.) After Mrs. Winchester’s death, crimes resulting in the theft of cash, jewels, historical European glass, furniture, and works of art worth over $10 million by Victorian standards (2021 inflation adjusted $291,146,315.79) went missing from the estate. Is the Winchester mansion haunted? Visits and find out for yourself. Their investigation sounds inconclusive. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
“Though she be but little, she is fierce.” ~ William Shakespeare
Did you know Sarah Winchester only stood at 4’10”? Much of the house was built to her specific height measurement including a shower, some doors, and hallways. winchestermysteryhouse.com
Better to Have Liberty Fraught with Danger than Servitude in Peace!
Respect is what we owe; love is what we give. As the moral movement was declining in the late 1800s, due to overcrowding, limited funding, and ineffective hospital treatments in state hospitals across the United States of America, which has continued well into the twenty-first century, two opposing perspectives emerged and began to vie for the attention of clinicians (a doctor having direct contact with and responsibility for patients, rather than one involved with theoretical or laboratory studies): the somatogenic perspective, the view that abnormal psychological functioning has physical causes, and the psychogenic perspective, the view that the chief causes of abnormal functioning are psychological. These perspectives came into full bloom during the twentieth century. The somatogenic perspective has at least a 2,400-year history—remember Hippocrates’ view that abnormal behaviour resulted from brain disease and an imbalance of humors? Not until the late nineteenth century, however, did this perspective make a triumphant return and begin to gain wide acceptance. Two factors were responsible for this rebirth. One was the work of an eminent German researcher, Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926). In 1883 Dr. Kraepelin published an influential textbook which argued that physical factors, such as fatigue, are responsible for mental dysfunction. In addition, he also constructed the first modern system for classifying abnormal behaviour. He identified various syndromes, or clusters of symptoms; listed their physical causes; and discussed their expected course. Dr. Kraepelin also measured the effects of various drugs on abnormal behaviour. New biological discoveries also triggered the rise of the somatogenic perspective. One of the most important discoveries was that an organic disease, syphilis, led to general paresis, an irreversible disorder with both physical and mental symptoms, including paralysis and delusions of grandeur. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
In 1897 Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), a German neurologist, injected matter from syphilis sores into patients suffering from general paresis and found that none of the patients developed symptoms of syphilis. Their immunity could have been caused only by an earlier case of syphilis. Since all patients with general paresis were now immune to syphilis, Dr. Krafft-Ebing theorized that syphilis had been the cause of their general paresis. Finally, in 1905, Fritz Schaudinn (18871-1906), a German zoologist, discovered that the microorganism Treponema pallida was responsible for syphilis, which in turn was responsible for general paresis. The work of Dr. Kraepelin and the new understanding of general paresis led many researchers and practitioners to suspect that organic factors were responsible for many mental disorders, perhaps all of them. These theories and the possibility of quick and effective medical solutions for mental disorders were especially welcomed by those who worked in mental hospitals, where patient populations were now growing at an alarming rate. Despite the general optimism, biological approaches yielded largely disappointing results throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Although many medical treatments were developed for patients in mental hospitals during that time, most of the techniques failed to work. Physicians tried tooth extraction, tonsillectomy, hydrotherapy (alternating how and cold baths), and lobotomy, a surgical cutting of certain nerve fibers in the brain. Even worse, biological views and claims led, in some circles, to proposals for immoral solutions such as eugenic sterilization. In the years 1896, Connecticut became the first state in the United States of America to prohibit persons with mental disorders from marrying. 1896-1933, every state in the United States of America passed a law prohibiting marriage by persons with mental disorders. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Indiana became the first state to pass a bill calling for people with mental disorders, as well as criminals and other “defectives,” to undergo sterilization in the year 1907. Just 20 years later, in 1927, the United States of America’s Supreme Court ruled that eugenic sterilization was constitutional. Between the years 1907-1945, around 45,000 Americans were sterilized under eugenic sterilization laws; 21,000 of them were patients in state mental hospitals. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland passed eugenic sterilization laws from 1929-1932. In 1933, Germany passed a eugenic sterilization law, under which 375,000 people were sterilized by 1940. That very same year, Nazi Germany begin to use “proper gases” to kill people with mental disorders; 70,000 or more people were killed in less than two years. Whenever, therefore, Man takes up the task of ordering life on a rational and human basis, he has to been the problem of deciding what is to be done about this surplus. All human societies have been perpetually concerned with this problem from the outset, to a large extent unconsciously, to an ever-increasing degree consciously. By a systematic survey of the various races of the World, it is clear how the natural tendency to excess of population is among every human race. Naturally, the goal is checked in a great variety of ways, preventive, by the exercise of a restraint on procreation, and positive, by the destruction of the excess due to unrestrained procreation. These positive checks are extremely various and include every cause, whether arising from vice or misery, which in any degree contributes to shorten the natural duration of life. Under this head are enumerated all unwholesome occupations, severe labour and exposure to the seasons, extreme poverty, bad nursing of children, great towns, excesses of all kinds, the entire train of common diseases, and epidemics, pandemics, wars, plagues, famines. The whole of the obstacles to increase of population, preventative and positive, are regarded as resolvable into moral restraint, vice, and misery. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The Eugenics Education Society believes that we need a decrease among the grossly defective class and that may be accompanied by an even greater increase among the less defective class just above them. The whole tone of a nation is permanently affected by the moral and intellectual contagion which is due to the presence in its ranks of persons of inferior type, even thought they are not of the lowest type. No compulsory sterilization can be enforced here; it is a problem which must be met indirectly. There can be no reasonable doubt that it makes for some benefit to the race, and is certainly for the benefit of the children who remain unborn and the parents who are spared the pains and trouble of begetting them, that parents who are mentally abnormal or defective should not begat or conceive children. During World War I in the United States of America, a number of laws were passed in many states for ordaining compulsory sterilization. These laws were often badly made as well as premature, frequently repealed or declared unconstitutional. Modern California has become so liberal, but that was not always the case. The sterilization of the insane or defective began in California in 1927, and it was the ordinary course carried out by agreement with the husband or wife or nearest relations when the patients are not legally competent to give their consent. During that time, in Californian mental hospitals, if strong objections were offered to it, though, by a wise precaution, sterilization was not performed. However, the inmates of mental homes were not allowed out, even for a short period, without sterilization. It has been estimated that the sterilization of even one tenth of the population would produce an appreciably beneficial eugenic effect on the whole nations, which is why so many people are happy that OSHA declared President Biden’s mandated vaccination of termination of employment unconstitutional. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
However, it is by the increase in the knowledge of heredity, by the spread of education among the masses of the population, and—perhaps above all—by the growth of the sense of social responsibility, that alone real progress is possible. Not until the 1950s, when a number of effective medications were finally discovered, did the somatogenic perspective truly begin to pay off for patients. The psychogenic perspective—the late nineteenth century also saw the emergence of the psychogenic perspective, the view that the chief causes of abnormal functioning are often psychological. This view, too, had a long history. The Roman statesman’s and orator Cicero (106-43 B.C.) held that psychological disturbances could cause bodily ailments, and the Greek physician Galen believed that many mental disorders are caused by fear, disappointment in love, and other psychological events. However, the psychogenic perspective did not gain much of a following until studies of hypnotism demonstrated its potential. Hypnotism is a procedure that places people in a trancelike mental state during which they become extremely suggestible. It was used to help treat psychological disorders as far back as 1778, when an Austrian physician named Friedrich Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) established a clinic in Paris. His patients suffered from hysterical disorders, mysterious bodily ailments that had no apparent physical basis. Dr. Mesmer had his patients sit in a darkened room filled with music; then he appeared, dressed in a flamboyant costume, and touched the troubled area of each patient’s body with a special rod. A surprising number of patients seemed to be helped by this treatment, called mesmerism. Their pain, numbness, or paralysis disappeared. Several scientists believed that Dr. Mesmer was inducing a trancelike state in his patients and that this state was causing their symptoms to disappear. The treatment was so controversial, however, that eventually Dr. Mesmer was banished from Paris. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
It was not until years after Dr. Mesmer died that many researchers had the courage to investigate his procedure, later called hypnotism (from hypnos, the Greek word for “sleep”), and its effects on hysterical disorders. By the late nineteenth century, two competing vies had emerged. Because hypnosis—a technique relying on the power of suggestion—was able to alleviate hysterical ailments, some scientists concluded that hysterical disorders must be caused by the power of suggestion—that is, by the mind—in the first place. In contrast, other scientists believed that historical disorders had subtle physiological causes. For example, Jean Charot (1825-1893), Paris’s most eminent neurologist, argued that hysterical disorders were the result of degeneration in portions of the brain. The experiments of two physicians practicing in the city of Nancy in France finally seemed to settle the matter. Hippolyte-Marie Bernheim (1840-1919) and Ambroise-Auguste Liebault (1823-1904) showed that hysterical disorders could actually be induced in otherwise normal subjects while they were under the influence of hypnosis. That is, the physicians could make normal people experience deafness, paralysis, blindness, or numbness by means of hypnotic suggestion—and they could remove these artificial symptoms by the name means. Thus, they established that a mental process—hypnotic suggestion—could both cause and cure even a physical dysfunction. Leading scientists, including Dr. Charcot, finally embraced the idea that hysterical disorders were largely psychological in origin, and the psychogenic perspective rose in popularity. Among those who studied the effects of hypnotism on hysterical disorders was Josef Breuer (1842-1925) of Vienna. This physician discovered that his patients sometimes awoke free of hysterical symptoms after speaking candidly under hypnosis about past upsetting events. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
During the 1890s Dr. Breuer was joined in his work by another Viennese, physician, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Dr. Freud’s work eventually led him to develop the theory of psychoanalysis, which holds that many forms of abnormal and normal psychological functioning are psychogenic. In particular, he believed that unconscious psychological processes are at the root of such functioning. Dr. Freud also developed the technique of psychoanalysis, a form of discussion in which clinicians help troubled people gain insight into their unconscious psychological processes. He believed that such insight, even without hypnotic procedures, would help the patients overcome their psychological problems. Dr. Freud and his followers applied the psychoanalytic treatment approach primarily to patients suffering from anxiety or depression, problems that did not typically require hospitalization. These patients visited therapists in their offices for session of approximately an hour and then went about their daily activities—a format of treatment now known as outpatient therapy. By the early twentieth century, psychoanalytic theory and treatment were widely accepted throughout the Western World. The psychoanalytic approach had little effect on the treatment of severely disturbed patients in mental hospitals, however. This type of therapy requires levels of clarity, insight, and verbal skill beyond the capabilities of most such patients. Moreover, psychoanalysis often takes years to be effective, and the overcrowded and understaffed public mental hospitals could not accommodate such a leisurely pace. If you have every struggled with an eating disorder in the past, you know that the path to recovery can be hard. Therefore, it is important that the government offers more funding to help people with dysfunctional behaviour. There is commonly held misconception that eating disorders are a lifestyle choice. Eating disorders are actually serious and often fatal illnesses that are associated with severe disturbances in people’s eating behaviours and related thoughts and emotions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Preoccupation with food, body weight, and shape may also signal an eating disorder. Common eating disorders include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge-eating disorder. People with anorexia nervosa may see themselves as overweight, even when they are dangerously underweight. People with anorexia nervosa typically weigh themselves repeatedly, severely restrict the amount of food they eat, often exercise excessively, and/or may force themselves to vomit or use laxatives to lose weight. Anorexia nervosa has the highest mortality rate of any mental disorder. While many people with this disorder die from complications associated with starvation, others die of suicide. People with bulimia nervosa have recurrent and frequent episodes of eating unusually large amounts of food and feeling a lack of control over these episodes. This binge-eating is followed by behaviour that compensates for the overeating such as forced vomiting, excessive use of laxatives or diuretics, fasting, excessive exercise, or a combination of these behaviours. People with bulimia nervosa may be slightly underweight, normal weight, or above average weight. People with binge-eating disorder lose control over his or her eating. Unlike bulimia nervosa, periods of binge-eating are not followed by purging, excessive exercise, of fasting. As a result, people with binge-eating disorder often are above average weight or obese. Binge-eating disorder is the most common eating disorder in the United States of America. Binge-eating may be considered a medical concern and not dysfunctional behaviour. The ratio of females to males suffering from anorexia nervosa is approximately 10.1. This may be due to the greater concerns with body image, dieting, and weight control among women compared to men. Perhaps owing to the widely held importance of the relationship with the same-sex parent in a child’s development, a great deal of attention has been granted to mother-daughter relationships in eating disorders. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Girls with eating disorders have been known to describe their mothers as overprotective and less caring. In light of such findings, it is not surprising to discover that mothers of daughters with eating disorders have expressed a desire for greater family cohesion than what they currently perceive. A group of young women with eating disorders retrospectively reported maternal relations that involve more emotional coldness, indifference, and rejection, compared to a sample of controls. Some evidence suggests that dietary restraint may be passed on from other to daughter. In this particular sample of mother, they had a history of eating disorders. In a very carefully controlled study, rates of eating disorders in mothers of a group of probands (a person serving as the starting point for the genetic study of a family) diagnosed with bulimia nervosa, but with no history of anorexia nervosa. Their results indicated that 26 percent of the mothers of probands with bulimia nervosa had a lifetime diagnosis of some form of eating disorder (exempli gratia, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, eating disorder not otherwise specified, binge-eating disorder). This rate was significantly higher than that for mothers of a control group with no history of eating disorders. Of course, family studies confound the effects of genes and environment; thus it is not entirely clear whether the association between mothers’ and daughters’ eating disorders is the result of maternal genetic contributions, or of the social environment to which mothers contribute. Investigations of mothers’ attitudes toward their daughters’ body image paint an even more dismal picture of mother-daughter relations. Mothers of girls with eating disorders in one study thought that their daughters ought to lose significantly more weight than mothers of girls without eating disorders thought about their daughters. Sadly, these same mothers rated their daughters as significantly less attractive than the daughters rated themselves! This is particularly amazing, given that people with eating disorders typically have low self-esteem and a negative body image, and hence are unlikely to inflate ratings of their own attractiveness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Data provided by mothers in an interview study indicated that mothers of daughters with bulimia nervosa were more controlling and held higher expectations for their daughters than control mothers. The effects of being in a relationship with a mother prone to such negative and excessive evaluations could be extremely caustic for an adolescent girl. The attention grated to mothers of children with eating disorders has been criticized by feminist scholars as “mother-blaming.” The tendency to see mothers as casually related to child problems is a legacy of the psychoanalytic school, which overemphasized mothers’ roles and devalued the influence of fathers. At the same time, however, psychodynamically oriented theorists argue that many girls with eating disorders use food as a means of fighting a battle (both interpersonally and intrapsychically) with their overprotective but nonempathic mothers. The data on mothers’ roles in the pathogenesis of eating disorders are alluring. Whether they represent a disrespectful and misguided focus, or a theoretically and etiologically meaningful domain of inquiry, will best be resolved through future empirical investigation, particularly with comparative collateral data from fathers. “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you,” reports Isaiah 60.1. A lot of people subconsciously feel like victims and they project this victim mentality on to others. They are so focused on what they have been through, complaining about how unfair it was, and they do not even realize they are living in the past. It is they get up each day with a new story of how hurt and weak they are and want to share that misery with others. However, one has to get some therapy, go to church, or talk to a doctor and get on some medication and let that stuff go! #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The past does not have to poison your future. Just because you have been through the ringer, or perhaps your dreams have been shattered, that does not mean that it is the end for you. God has another plan. God still have a bright future mapped out for you on this journey. However, each and every last one of us needs to understand this one important principal: The past is not present. One cannot undo anything that has happened to one. One cannot relive one moment in the past. However, one can do something right now. Do not dwell on the negative things that have happened. Do not think about all you have lost. Do not focus on what could have been if Taylor Swift did not steal your man. Be like Celine Dion and proclaim a new day has come. If one does that, God will give one a new beginning. God allows people to grieve for a certain period of time, but then He expects them to get up and go one with their lives. However, God does not expect us to be emotionless. It is okay to allow hurts from the past to register and process, but do not hold yourself there for too long or you might miss the new man God has lined up for you. Therefore, do not let that season of mourning turn into a lifetime of dysfunction, living a sour and negative life, going around with static. Some people wake up in the morning and before they groom themselves, brush their teeth or change their underwear, they out there hating on Paris Hilton. It is what brings them joy. However, that is why no one wants them. They are miserable and unhappy, evil and ugly. No man wants that kind of sour patch in his life. We all are living through tough times, no matter how rich one is, but it is important to shake it off, shake it off, and expect good things to happen. Enjoy life. We are so blessed to be alive. Are you still sour because Beyonce got that promotion a couple of years ago instead of you? Is your attitude negative because you were not able to buy that Cresleigh Home at Millionaires Station or the Ultimate Driving Machine? Are you bitter because Paris Hilton got married and your relationship is headed for the rocks? Are you angry because you were abused as a child? #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Are you jealous because Aaliyah’s hair is longer and more shinny than yours? Stop! Stop morning over something you do not have or something that is already over and done. You have to let go of that mentality that you are so pathetic that all you can do is lay around eating, and complaining how hard your life is. Your future can start right now. It does not matter what you have been through. God wants to turn that around. God wants you to invite him into your life. Stop lying and being jealous. No one can make you open the door to God. All others can do is encourage you, but it is your choice what type of life you want to live. Develop a successful mentality. Let love fill your heart. Greet each day with a smile and a flip of your hair. Know that God is going to make it up to you. Just because your parents could not send you to Princeton does not mean that you have to fill your life with poison. There is nothing more than the enemy loves more than to see you sour, jealous and bitter. Many people have made a lot of mistakes, but the good news is we can all repent. God wants to take those negative experiences and use them to you advantage to make you stronger. Forget what lies behind with you and press on. Jesus Christ desires us to receive Him devoutly and reverently. Jesus Christ desires us to lead Him into our home, so He will favour us. Let your soul desire Christ’s Body in your Host. Christ’s heart desires to be united with you. Let Jesus Christ hand Himself over to you, and know that will be enough to satisfy your desires. For without the Holy Presence of Christ, consolation grows stale, falls flat, loses its flavour. Without Jesus Christ, we all have the staggers. Without Jesus’ sacramental visits, we would not have the strength to carry one. Approach the Holy Table frequently. If you do not stop, Jesus will stop the Celestial Alimony, and one will lose what little sense of direction one has. When preaching to the people and healing their maladies, Jesus in His mercy sometimes had to stop cold and says, “Those of you who are fasting, I cannot send you away on empty stomachs for fear you will never make it home.” That is how Matthew put it (15.32). #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The government is here on Earth for our well-being and to protect the rights of our citizens. Never forget that America is one nation under God with liberty and justice for all. The sovereign can entrust the government to the entire people or to the majority of the people, so that there are more citizens who are magistrates than who are ordinary private citizens. This form of government is given the name of democracy. Or else it can restrict the government to the hands of a small number, so that there are more ordinary citizens than magistrates; and this form is called aristocracy. Finally, it can concentrate the entire government in the hands of a single magistrate from whom all the others derive their power. This third form is the most common and is called monarchy or royal government. It should be noted that all these forms, or at least the first two, can be had in greater or lesser degrees, and even have a rather wide range. For democracy can include the entire populace or be restricted to half. Aristocracy, for its part, can be indeterminately restricted from half the people down to the smallest number. Even royalty can be had in varying levels of distribution. Sparta always had two kings, as required by its constitution; and the Roman Empire is known to have had up to eight emperors at a time, without it being possible to say that the empire was divided. Thus there is a point at which each form of government is indistinguishable from the next, and it is apparent that, under just three names, government can take on as many diverse forms as the state has citizens. Moreover, since this same government can, in certain respects, be subdivided into other parts, one administered in one way, another in another, there can result from the combination of these three forms a multitude of mixed forms, each of which can be multiplied by all the simple forms. There has always been a great deal of argument over the best form of government, without considering that each one of them is best in certain cases and the worst in others. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
If the number of supreme magistrates in the different states ought to be in inverse ratio to that of the citizens, it follows that in general democratic government is suited to small states, aristocratic government to states of intermediate size, and monarchical government to large ones This rule is derived immediately from the principle; but how is one to count the multitude of circumstances that can furnish exceptions? One who makes the law knows better than anyone else how it should be executed and interpreted. It seems therefore to be impossible to have a better constitution than one in which the executive power is united to the legislative power. However, this is precisely what renders such a government inadequate in certain respects, since things that should be distinguished are not, and the prince and sovereign, being merely the same person, form, as it were, only a government without a government. It is not good for the one who makes them laws to execute them, nor for the body of the people to turn its attention away from general perspectives in order to give it particular objects. Nothing is more dangerous than the influence of private interests on public affairs; and the abuse of the laws by the government is a lesser evil than the corruption of the legislator, which is the inevitable outcome of particular perspectives. In such a situation, since the state is being substantially altered, all reform becomes impossible. A people that would never misuse government would never misuse independence. A people that would always govern well would not need to be governed. Taking the term in the strict sense, a true democracy has never existed and never will. It is contrary to the natural order that the majority govern and the minority is governed. It is unimaginable that the people would remain constantly assembled to handle public affairs; and it is readily apparent that it could not establish commissions for this purpose without changing the form of administration. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
In fact, I believe I can lay down as a principle that when the functions of the government are shared among several tribunals, those with the fewest members sooner or later acquire the greatest authority, if and only if because of the facility in expediting public business which brings this about naturally. Besides, how many things that are difficult to unite are presupposed by this government? First, a very small state where it is easy for the people to gather together and where each citizen can easily know all the others. Second, a great simplicity of mores, which prevents the multitude of public business and thorny discussions. Next, a high degree of equality in ranks and fortunes, without which equality in rights and authority cannot subsist for long. Finally, little or no luxury, for luxury either is the effect of wealth or it makes wealth necessary. It simultaneously corrupts both the rich and the poor, the one by possession, the other by covetousness. It sells the homeland to softness and vanity. It takes all its citizens from the state in order to make them slaves to one another, and all of them to opinion. This is why a famous author has made virtue the principle of the republic. For all these conditions could not subsist without virtue. However, owing to one’s failure to have made the necessary distinctions, this great genius often lacked precision and sometimes clarity. And one did not realize that since the sovereign authority is everywhere the same, the same principle should have a place in every well constituted state, though in a greater or lesser degree, it is true, according to the form of government. Let us add that no government is so subject to civil wars and internal agitations as a democratic or popular one, since there is none that tends so forcefully and continuously to change its form, or demands greater vigilance and courage to be maintained in its own form. Above all, it is under this constitution that the citizens ought to arm oneself with force and constancy, and to say each day of one’s life from the bottom of one’s heart with a virtuous Palatine said in the Diet of Poland: Better to have liberty fraught with danger than servitude in peace. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Were there are people of gods, it would govern itself democratically. So perfect a government is not suited to humans. The organized politico-economy substitutes for organized religion have hardly proved any better when put into active life rather than mere theory. They have introduced much hate, misery, oppression, persecution, superstition, and war, like the other. In connection with the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, Mao Tsetung wrote that the working classes would from then on take over leadership in all activities. That is to say, the least fitted by natural mental development, experience, and acquired education would dictate what was to be taught in philosophical and similar reflections about life, man, and history, if indeed such subjects would not be dropped altogether as unpractical, hence useless. The Peking Institute of Philosophy, a leading one in China, stopped publishing its journal Philosophical Research in 1966. The fundamental mistakes which is responsible for the harm and evil and misery caused when these teachings of economic equality are put into harsh practice, is to do so in separation from the teachings concerning man’s spiritual life and spiritual needs. If the two were joined together then the fanaticism, delusion, and brutality of such practice would eliminate itself. It is inevitable that a group which espouses belief in atheistic materialism will also espouse belief in the use of force and violence to establish itself and its views. If there will be no peace, it is because they do not really want it. The most frenzied exponents of materialistic values today are those who have developed enough intellect to lose their faith in the hypocrisies of conventional religion but who have lost their true intuition along with their false belief. Such are the leaders and advocates of communism everywhere. Thus the good in their development is offset by the evil. The result is spiritual chaos and social turmoil for the masses who follow them. Since both the religious and their rebels have contributed to this situation, there is no remedy save in a clearer insight on the part of both. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
It is impossible to reconcile the criminal ethics and materialistic ideology of Communism with the lofty ethics and mystical ideology of philosophy. There is no communication and every disparity between them. The itch to meddle in other people’s affairs and to mind their business for them is an ancient one. It reaches its extreme degrees in tyrannies like the Germany Nazi and the Russian Communist and certain American political parties and clubs, where state interference in the people’s lives, culture, religion, and freedom become intolerable. Never before have so many people in so many countries—even educated and supposedly sophisticated people—been so intellectually helpless, drowning, as it were, in a maelstrom of conflicting, confusing, and cacophonous ideas. Colliding visions rock our mental Universe. Every day brings some new fad, scientific finding, religion, movement, or manifesto. Nature worship, ESP, holistic medicine, sociobiology, anarchism, structuralism, neo-Marxism, the new physics, Eastern mysticism, technophilia, technophobia, social media, the Internet, and a thousand other currents and crosscurrents sweep across the screen of consciousness, each with its scientific priesthood or ten-minute guru. We see a mounting attack on establishment science. We see a wildfire revival of fundamentalist religion and a desperate search for something—almost anything—to believe in. Much of this confusion is actually the result of an intensifying cultural war—the collision of an emerging Third Wave culture with the entrenched ideas and assumptions of industrial society. For just as the Second Wave engulfed traditional views and spread the belief system I call indust-reality, so today we see the beginnings of a philosophical revolt aimed at overthrowing the reigning assumptions of the past 360 years. They key ideas of the industrial period are being discredited, discounted, superseded, or subsumed into much larger and more powerful theories. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The core beliefs of Second Wave civilization did not win acceptance during the nearly past four centuries without a bitter struggle. In science, in education, in religion, in a thousand fields, the “progressive” thinkers of the industrialism fought against the “reactionary” thinkers who reflected and rationalized agricultural societies. Today it the defenders of industrialism who have their backs against the wall as a new, Third Wave culture has taken form. Nothing illustrates this clash of ideas more clearly than our changing image of nature. In the past decade a Worldwide environmental movement has sprung up in response to fundamental, potentially dangerous changes in the Earth’s biosphere. And this movement has done more than attack pollution, food additives, nuclear reactors, highways, and hairspray aerosols. It has also forced us to rethink or dependency on nature. As a consequence, instead of conceiving ourselves as engaged in a bloody way with nature, we are moving toward a fresh view that emphasizes symbiosis or harmony with the earth. We are shifting from an adversary to a nonadversary posture. At the scientific level, this has led to thousands of studies aimed at understanding ecological relationships so that we can soften out impacts on nature or channel them in constructive ways. We have just begun to appreciate the complexity and dynamism of these relationships and to reconceptualize society itself in terms of recycling, renewability, and the carrying capacity of natural systems. All this is mirrored in a corresponding shift of popular attitudes toward nature. Whether we examine opinion surveys or the lyrics of pop songs, the visual imagery in advertising or the content of sermons, we find evidence of a heightened, though often romantic regard for nature. City dwellers by the millions of years for the countryside, and the Urban Land Institute reports a significant population shift toward rural areas. Interest in natural foods, hunting one’s own food, and natural childbirth, biorhythms, or body care has boomed in recent years. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
And public suspicion of technology is so widespread that even the most single-minded pursuers of GNP (Gross National Product) today pay at least lip service to the idea that nature must be protected, not raped—that the adverse side effects of technology on nature must be anticipated and prevented, not simply ignored. Because our power to damage has escalated, the Earth now is regarded as far more fragile than Second Wave civilization suspected. At the same time, it is seen as a diminishing dot in a Universe that grows larger and more complex with every passing moment. Since the Third way began some 85 years ago, scientists have developed a whole battery of new tools for probing nature’s most distant reaches. In turn these lasers, rockets, accelerators, plasmas, fantastic photographic capabilities, computers, laser lock cutters, and colliding-beam devices have burst our conception of what surrounds us. We are not looking at phenomena that are bigger, smaller, and faster by orders of magnitudes than any we examined during the Second Wave. Today we are probing phenomena that are as tiny as 1/1,000,000,000,000,000th of a centimeter in an explorable Universe whose edge lies at least 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away. We are studying phenomena so short-lived that they occur in 1/10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th of a second. By contrast our astronomers and cosmologists tell us the Universe is some 20,000,000,000 years old. The sheer scale of explorable nature has burst beyond yesterday’s wildest assumptions. Moreover, in this swirling vastness, we are told, the Earth may not be the only inhabited sphere. Says astronomer Otto Struve, “the vast number of stars that mist possess planets, the conclusions of many biologists that life is an inherent property of certain types of complicated molecules or aggregates of molecules, the uniformity throughout the Universe of the chemical elements, the light and heat emitted by solar-type stars, and the occurrence of water not only on the Earth but on Mars and Venus, compel us to revise out thinking” and consider the possibility of extraterrestrial life. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
This does not mean little green humanoids. And it does not mean (or not mean) UFOs. However, by suggesting that life is not unique to the Earth, it further alters our perception of nature and our place in it. Since 1960, scientists have been listening in the dark, hoping to detect signals from some distant intelligence. The United States of America’s Congress has held hearings on “The Possibility of Intelligent Life Elsewhere in the Universe.” And the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, as it streaked into interstellar space carried with it a pictorial greeting to extraterrestrials. There is a rover on Mars surveying and taking pictures, and even private corporations planning to go into outer space. As the Third Wave dawns, our own planet seems much smaller and more vulnerable. Our place in the Universe seems less grandiose. And even the remote possibility that we are not alone gives us pause. Our image of nature is not what it used to be. Someday, let us be sure, the World will recognize all that it owes to those noble pioneers who, at the risk of obloquy, had the vision to see the fate that Threatens Man and the courage to face it with hope. Dear Lord in Heaven, I know the ashes signify that which has been destroyed in my life, but beginning this moment, I believe You can bring new fire into my life. I refuse to dwell on my disappointments. Instead, I will trust You for new appointments. Remember, remember, the circles of the sky, the stars and the brown eagle, the supernatural winds breathing night and day from the four directions. Remember, remember the great life of the sun breathing on the Earth, it lies upon the Earth to bring out life upon the Earth, life covering the Earth. Remember, remember the sacredness of things running streams and dwellings the young within the nest, a hearth for sacred fire the holy ray of light. Thou sustainest the living with lovingkindness, and in great mercy callest the departed to everlasting life. Thou upholdest the falling, healest the sick, settest free those in bondage, and keepest faith with those that sleep in the durst. Who is like unto Thee, Almighty King, who decreest death and life and bringest forth salvation? Who may be compared to Thee, Father of mercy, who in love rememberest thy creatures unto life? Faithful art Thou to grant eternal life to the departed. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who callest the dead to everlasting. Holy art Thou, and holy is Thy name and unto Thee holy beings render praise daily. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the holy God. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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There Was Terror in His Eyes as Not Often Seen in a Human Being!
Twenty-first century humans, in spite of all their scientific and technological advances, are baffled by unexplained forces existent in the Universe. The naturalistic philosophy of the previous generations has been unable to account for all of the mysterious phenomena which have been observed. Many scientists believe that living beings may inhabit other galaxies, and highly educated humans are seriously studying reports of those who insist they have received communications from the dead. Humans of science no longer scoff at the accounts of strange occurrences associated with witchcraft and occultic practices. Although they do not necessarily accept them as proof of the supernatural, many will admit they are manifestations of some kind of power they do not yet understand. Christian theologians and scientists are not perplexed by such reports. They know that both God and Satan are very much alive. Though readily conceding that they cannot explain fully all the mysteries of life, they affirm with confidence the existence of God and an invisible host of intelligent supernatural beings. They are convinced that when one accepts the teachings of the Bible, one begins to understand many of the puzzling facts of existence. For example, the Bible tells of holy angels who dwell in Heaven (Matthew 18.10). It also mentions “angels that sinned” (2 Peter 2.4), rebellious spirit begins who have been cast out of Heaven and now dwell in the atmosphere that surrounds the Earth. We know this because Paul declared that Satan is “the prince of the power of the air,” reports Ephesians 2.2, and the Greek word translated “air” was used to speak of the gaseous envelop that encircles our planet. These wicked beings apparently have unlimited access to Earther, and actively influence every area of human endeavour. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Because they do not possess physical bodies, we cannot typically detect them through our senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell. We do have evidence of their presence, however, for the Word of God gives us information regarding their identification, their nature and their function. Various terms are used in the Christian Bible to denote the evil spirit beings who followed Satan in this initial act of rebellion against God. It refers to “angels that sinned” 2 Peter 2.4 and “angels who kept not their first estate” Jude 6, and many times mentions “spirits” and “demons.” Some scholars believe that these demons must be distinguished from the “angels that sinned” and the “angels who kept not their first estate.” They contend that the Heavenly beings who joined Satan in his revolt against God are fallen angels, but that demons are disembodies spirits of physical and moral creatures who once lived upon the Earth. However, these Bible students disagree regarding an exact identification of the demons. Some say they are the spirits of pre-Adamic beings similar to man, while others identify them as the spirits of the “giants” who were destroyed in the great flood of Noah’s day. If one thinks that demons are the spirits of man-like beings who lived before Adam, then one will no doubt interpret Genesis 1.2 as a declaration that the original Earth, inhabited by the creatures, was cataclysmically destroyed. Genesis 1.2 is then translated as follows: “And the Earth became without form and void…” This theory, while attractive in that it permits a literal interpretation of the days in Genesis 1, must be acknowledged as only a hypothesis. Most Hebrew scholars reject this interpretation because Genesis 1.2 begins with a grammatical construction which makes it highly unlikely that Genesis 1.1 and 1.2 are separated by millions of years. Then, too, the verb translated “became” almost always has the meaning “was.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
However, even if we accept this theory, and believe that a race of man-like beings inhabited the prehistoric Earth, we would have no basis for thinking that their spirits are now free to roam about as the enemies of humankind. Other Bible scholars maintain that demons are the spirits of the “giants” who lived upon the Earth in the days of Noah. They refer to Genesis 6, contending that these “giants” were produced when fallen angels, called the “sons of God,” married the “daughters of men.” “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the Earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all whom they chose. There were giants in the Earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them, the same became mighty men who were of old, men of renown,” reports Genesis 6.1, 2, 4. It is necessary for proponents of this theory to believe that fallen angels became male human beings who married women, produced a mongrel offspring, and took over the role of father in the family. They theorize that Satan hoped thereby to frustrate God’s redemptive plan. The Lord had promised salvation through Christ to human beings only—not for angels or mixed half-human and half-angelic race. Christ could not have been born to offspring of these corrupted creates or provide redemptions for them. Thus God’s plan of redemption would have been thwarted. In addition, both Jude and Peter in their epistles refer to a sin committed by angels, and their words can be blended very nicely into this concept. Jude writes, “And the angels who kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire,” reports Jude 6, 7. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The words “in like manner” (verse 7) are taken to mean that the sin of the angels in having pleasures of the flesh with women was an unnatural act, comparable to sodomy. Peter tells of angels assigned to Tartaros, the nether World of the Greeks considered to be lower than Hades. “For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell [GK Tartaros], and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment,” reports 2 Peter 2.4. Again, it does not take a great deal of imagination to see how these words of Peter may be applied to the wicked angels who committed the monstrous sin of attempting to make mongrels of the human race. Many Bible students, however, reject this interpretation of Genesis 6. Since angels are non-material beings, it would be necessary for them to create physical bodies for themselves capable of impregnating a female member of the human race. This would require nothing less than a creative miracle, and the Bible indicates that this power belongs only to God. In addition, it is not necessary to interpret the statements in Jude and 2 Peter as a reference to sin involving pleasures of the flesh on the part of the fallen angels. Jude’s use of the expression “going after strange flesh” may be figurative language representing spiritual fornication. The prophets often depicted Israel’s unfaithfulness to God in this manner. Peter’s statement that the angels who sinned have been assigned to Tartaros may be a simple declaration that all sinning angels have been designated to this place, and that they are even now under chains of moral and spiritual darkness. The Bible gives little information regarding the origin of demons. We can state with absolute certainty only that they are fallen spirit beings who have committed themselves to Satan and that they hate God and seek to harm His people. No clear distinction can be made between fallen angels and demons, for they are all evil spirits. Some of our questions must remain unanswered, but the Lord has given ample revelation to warn us that these invisible enemies are far too great and powerful for us to defeat in our own strength, and that we can successfully wage war against them only as we live in continual dependence upon the Lord. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
In one respect the case of Dame Alice Kyteler stands alone in the history of magical dealings in Ireland prior to the seventeenth century. We have of the entire proceedings an invaluable and contemporary account, or at latest one compiled within a very few years after the death of Petronilla of Meath; while the excitement produced by the affair is shown by the more or less lengthy allusions to it in early writings, such as The Book of Howth (Carew MSS.), the Annals by Fariar Clyn, the Chartularies of S. Mary’s Abbey (vol. ii), &c. It is also rendered more valuable by the fact that those who are best qualified to give their opinion on the matter have assured the writer that to the best of their belief no entries with respect to trials for sorcery or witchcraft can be found in the various old Rolls preserved in the Dublin Record Office. However, when the story is considered with reference to the following facts it takes on a different signification. On the 29th of September 1317 (Wright says 1320), Bishop de Ledrede held his first Synod, at which several canons were passed, one of which seems in some degree introductory to the events detailed in last week’s report. In it he speaks of “a certain new and pestilential sect in our parts, differing from all the faith in the World, filled with a devilish spirit, more inhuman than heathens…who pursue the priests and bishops of the Most High God equally in life and death, by spoiling and rending the patrimony of Christ in the diocese of Ossory, and who utter grievous threats against the bishops and their ministers exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and (by various means) attempt to hinder the correction of sins and the salvation of souls, in contempt of God and the Church.” From this it would seem that heresy and unorthodoxy had already made its appearance in the diocese. In 1324 the Kyteler case occurred, one of the participants being burnt at the stake while other incriminate persons were subsequently followed up, some of whom shared the fate of Petronilla of Meath. In 1327 Adam Dubh, of the Leinster tribe of O’Toole, was burnt alive on College Green for denying the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity, as well as for rejecting the authority of the Holy See. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
In 1335 Pope Benedict XII wrote a letter to King Edward III, in which occurs the following passage: “It has come to our knowledge that while our venerable brother, Richard, Bishop of Ossory, was visiting his diocese, there appeared in the midst of his catholic people men who were heretics together with their abettors, some of whom asserted that Jesus Christ was a mere man and a sinner, and was justly crucified for His own sins; others after having done homage and offered sacrifice to demons, thought otherwise of the sacrament of the Body of Christ than the Catholic Church teaches, saying that the same venerable sacrament is by no means to be worshipped; and also asserting that they are not bound to obey or believe the decrees, decretals, and apostolic mandates; in the meantime, consulting demons according to the rites of those sects among the Gentiles and Pagans, they despise the sacraments of the Catholic Church, and draw the faithful of Christ after them by their superstitions.” Unlike apocryphal and rabbinical literature, the Biblical description of evil spirits avoids the unusual and grotesque. The Bible does, however, present us with a clear picture of their activity and tells us how to resist them effectively. In the first place, it declares that demons or fallen angels are non-material beings. They do not possess bodies like humans, and therefore are repeatedly called “spirits.” Matthew, for example, says, “When the evening was come, they brought unto him many that were possessed with demons; and he cast out the spirits with his word, and healed all that were sick,” reports Matthew 8.16. Jesus started that the Creator is not made up of physical substance when He said, “God is a Spirit,” reports John 4.24. Later, when His frightened disciples thought He was a ghost, He told them their fears were groundless, for “a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have,” reports Luke 24.39. Paul had in mind the non-physical nature of Satan and his army of evil spirits when he said that our warfare is “not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this World, against spiritual wickedness in high places,” reports Ephesians 6.12. Satan’s demonic hordes are spirit beings, and therefore more dangerous than the “flesh and blood” enemies we may encounter in our daily lives. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Second, the Bible portrays demons as highly intelligent creatures. They recognize Christ when He was here upon the Earth, and knew they could not have fellowship with Him. Luke tells us about an evil spirit who is an example of this. “When he saw Jesus, he cried out, and fell down before him, and with a loud voice said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God, most high? I beseech thee, torment me not,” reports Luke 8.28. The fallen spirits are also aware of their ultimate defeat, for James declared, “Them demons also believe, and tremble,” reports James 2.19. They are, of course, finite creatures, even Satan is limited in knowledge. He has myriads of evil spirit followers, however, and they are able to give him information on almost any person and circumstance in which he is interested. In this manner he can find out much what he wants to know. Truly, believers in Christ can never successfully cope with Satan and his hosts without special help from the Lord. Therefore, we must humbly look to God for wisdom and strength to resist the attacks of our invisible enemies. Third, the World of evil spirits is cruel. These creatures hate God and all who have placed their trust in Him. They seem to find delight in causing human grief and pain. For example, Matthew tells us that a man who was both blind and dumb suffered these afflictions because a demon had entered his body. “Then was brought unto him one possessed with a demon, blind, and dumb; and He healed him, insomuch that the blind and dumb both spoke and saw,” reports Matthew 12.22. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell the story of two demented men who lived in the country of the Gerasenes, and indicate that their insanity was the result of demonic invasion of their personalities. Luke, the beloved physicians, writes of a woman who was bent over with some crippling disease, saying that she had “a spirit of infirmity.” He adds that Jesus said she had been bound by Satan. “And he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And, behold, there was a woman who had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no way lift herself up. And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
“And he laid his hands on her; and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God. And the ruler of the synagogue answered with indignation, because Jesus had healed on the sabbath day, and said unto the people, There are six days in which humans ought to work; in them, therefore, come and be healed, and not on the sabbath day. The Lord then answered him, and said, Thou hypocrite, doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or her ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering? And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, who Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bound on the sabbath day? And when he had said these things, all his adversaries were ashamed; and all the people rejoiced for all the glorious things that were done by him,” reports Luke 13.10-17. While the gospel writers make it clear that not all illness is the work of Satan and demons, they do point out that much human suffering is the result of demonic activity. Finally, the Bible tells us that all fallen angels or evil spirits are confirmed in their wickedness. Though they “believe and tremble,” they will never repent, never seek forgiveness, and never pray for holiness or purity. Though they know that Jesus is the Christ, they never really worship Him. They must acknowledge that He is stronger than they, and may occasionally render Him token submission, but inwardly they hate Him and keenly resent His authority over them. In fact, their nature is so totally evil that the term “unclean” often is applied to them. (See Matthew 10.1; Mark 1.27; 3.11; Luke 4.36; Acts 8.7; Revelations 16.13.) They apparently delight in sin, find great pleasure in leading humans to commit evil deeds, and possess no feelings of guilt nor desire for deliverance. Michael Scot, reputed a wizard of such potency that—when in Salamanca’s cave he listed his magic want to wave and the bells would ring in Notre Dame. Scot has studied successively at Oxford and Paris (where he acquired the title of “mathematicus”); he then passed to Bologna, thence to Palermo, and subsequently continued his studies in Toledo. His refusal of the See of Cashel was an intellectual loss to the Irish Church, for he was so widely renowned for his varied and extensive learning that he was credited with supernatural powers; a number of legends grew up around his name which hid his real merit, and transformed the man of science into a magician. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
In the Border country traditions of his magical power are common. Boccaccio alludes to “a great master in necromancy, called Michael Scot,” while Dante places him in the eighteen circle of Hell. The next, who is so slender in the flanks, was Michael Scot, who of a verity of magical illusion knew the game. Another man to whom magical powers were attributed solely on account of his learning was Gerald, the fourth Earl of Desmond, styled the Poet, who died rather mysteriously in 1398. The Four Masters in their Annals describe him as “a nobleman of wonderful bounty, mirth, cheerfulness of conversation, charitable in his deeds, easy of access, a witty and ingenious composer of Irish poetry, a learned and profound chronicler.” No legends are extant of his magical deeds. King James I of Scotland, whose severities against his nobles had around their bitter resentment, was barbarously assassinated at Perth in 1437 by some of their supports, who were aided and abetted by the ages Duke of Atholl. From a contemporary account of this we learn that the monarch’s fate was predicted to him by an Irish prophetess or witch; has he given ear to her message he might have escaped with his life. We modernize the somewhat difficult spelling, but retain the quaint language of the original. “The king, suddenly advised, made a solemn feast of the Christmas at Perth, which is clept Saint John’s Town, which is from Edinburg on the other side of the Scottish sea, the which is vulgarly celpt the water of Lethe. In the midst of the way there arose a woman of Ireland, the clept herself as a soothsayer. The which anon as she saw the king she cried with a loud voice, saying thus: ‘My lord king, and you pass this water you shall never turn again alive.’ The king hearing this was astonied of her words; for but a little before he had read in a prophecy that in the self same year the king of Scots should be slain; and therewithal the king, as he rode, cleped to him one of his knights, and gave him in commandment to turn again to speak with that woman, and ask of her what she would, and what thing she meant with her loud crying. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
“And she began, and told him as ye have heard of the King of Scots if he passed that water. As now the king asked her, how she knew that. And she said, that Huthart told her so. ‘Sire,’ quoth he, ‘men may “calant” yet take to heed of yon woman’s words, for she is but a drunken fool, and wot not what she saith’; and so with his folk passed the water celpt the Scottish sea, towards Saint John’s town.” The narrator states some dreams ominous of James’s murder, and afterwards proceeds thus: Both afore supper, and long after into quarter of the night, in the which the Earl of Atholl (Athetelles) and Robert Steward were about the king, where they were occupied at the playing of chess, at the tables, in reading of romances, in singing and piping, in harping, and in other honest solaces of great pleasance and disport. Therewith came the said woman of Ireland, that celpt herself a divineress, and entered the king’s court, till that she came straight to the king’s chamber-door, where she stood, till at the last the usher opened the door, marvelling of that woman’s being there that time of night, and asking her what she would. ‘Let me in, sir’ quoth she, ‘for I have somewhat to say, and to tell unto the king; for I am the same woman that not long ago desired to have spoken with him at the Leith, when he should pass the Scottish sea.’ The usher went in and told him of this woman. ‘Yea,’ quoth the king, ‘let her come tomorrow’; because the he was occupied with such disports at that time he let not to hear her as then. The usher came again to the chamber-door to the said woman, and there he told her that the king was busy in playing, and bid her come soon again upon the morrow. ‘Well,’ said the woman, ‘it shall repent you all that ye will not let me speak now with the king.’ Thereat the usher laughed, and held her but a fool, charging her to go her way, and therewithal she went thence. Her informant “Huthart” was evidently a familiar spirit who was in attendance on her. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Considering the barrenness of Irish records on the subject of sorcery and witchcraft it affords us no small satisfaction to find the following statement in the Statute Rolls of the Parliament for the year 1447. It consists of a most indignantly-worded remonstrance from the Lords and Commons, which was drawn forth by the fact that some high-placed personage had been accused of practising sorcery with the intent to do grievous harm to one’s enemy. When making it the remonstrants appear to have forgotten, or perhaps, like Members of Parliament in other ages, found it convenient to forget the nonce the Kyteler incident of the pervious century. There was an Act of Parliament which was intended to put a stop to a certain lucrative form of witchcraft. It is gravely stated by the writer of a little book entitled Beware the Cat (and by Giraldus Camrensis before him), that Irish witches could turn wisps of hay, straw &c. into red-coloured pigs, which they dishonestly sold in the market, but which resumed their proper shape when crossing running water. To prevent this it is stated that the Irish Parliament passed an Act forbidding the purchase of red swine. We regret to say, however, that no such interesting Act is to be found in the Statues books. The belief in the power of witches to inflict harm on others was also a powerful belief in Victorian times. When reflecting on history, one can see that consulting someone with supernatural powers was no different than talking to a friend about one’s life. It was very common. Also, many of these accounts turned out to have some truth to them or evidence of supernatural power. Perhaps this is because people were more in tune with their inner spirit and the planet back then. Many people thought Sarah Winchester was mentally ill or deranged for consulting a medium about how she should deal with the evil spirits that were haunting her, they thought she was even more insane for building the World’s most beautiful and unique mansion. However, what better way could there be to spend your money than by creating something you and the World can enjoy for many centuries and creating a living memorial for your family? #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Perhaps what Mrs. Winchester did was very rational and sane. In contrast, most others express their pain and suffering by becoming destructive and hurting others, and people usually idolize them for that. Mrs. Winchester gradually developed her skill in building, just as she had done with music and language in her youth. She often used the most current innovations in her home. Some historical sources say that Mrs. Winchester was the first to use wool for insulation. Carbide gas lights in the house were fed by the estate’s own gas manufacturing plant, which used a new process. The gas lights were operated by pushing an electric button. A specially designed window catch was patterned after a Winchester rifle trigger and trip hammer, amongst other state of the art designs. I met a man in the Winchester Mansion one day that I knew very well, as I thought, though I had not seen him for years. Without pressing him too soon with a repetition of my idle questions, we walked together to the Blue Séance Room, and there we shook hands. Just then there came a vague vibration in the Earth and air, quickly changing into a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush caused me to start back, as though it had force to draw me down. Next morning, I spoke of this meeting to a mutual friend, and then I learnt, for the first time, that the man had died six months before. The natural inference was that I had mistaken one man for another, an error that, not having a good memory for faces, I frequently fall into. What was remarkable about the matter, however, was that throughout our walk I had conversed with the man under the impression that he was that other dead man, and, whether by coincidence or not, his replies had never once suggested to me my mistake. As soon as I finished speaking to Jared, who had been listening very thoughtfully, asked me if I believed in spiritualism “to its fullest extent.” “That is a rather large question,” I answered. “What do you mean by ‘spiritualism to its fullest extent’?” “Well, do you believe that the spirits of the dead have not only the power of revisiting this Earth at their will, but that, when here, they have the power of action, or rather, of exciting to action. Let me put a definite case. A spiritualist friend of mine, a sensible and by no means imaginative man, once told me that a table, through the medium of which the spirit of a friend had been in the habit of communicating with him, came slowly across the room towards him, of its own accord, one night as he sat alone in the Winchester Mansion, and pinioned him against the wall. Now can any of you believe that, or can you not?” #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
I could believe it. It seems that the difference between what we call the natural and supernatural is merely the difference between frequency and rarity of occurrence. Suppose a person died with the dearest wish of one’s heart unfulfilled, do you believe that one’s spirit might have power to return to Earth and complete the interrupted work? The Winchester Mansion is supposed to be enchanted. According to the legend, William Winchester was a very potent magician, and usually resided in a castle. To this he brought his bride, a beautiful young lady, Sarah Lockwood Pardee, who he loved, and he prevailed upon her her every desire, but with fatal results. One day she presented herself in the chamber in which her husband exercised his forbidden art, and begged him to show her the wonders of the evil science. With the greatest reluctance he consented, but warned her that she must prepare herself to witness a series of most frightful phenomena, which, once commenced, could neither be abridged nor mitigated, while if she spoke a single word during the proceedings the castle and all it contained would sink. Urged on by curiosity she gave the required promised, and he commenced. Muttering a spell as he stood before her, feathers sprouted thickly over him, his face became contracted and hooked, a corpse-like smell filled the air, and winnowing the air with beats of its heavy wings a gigantic vulture rose in his stead, and swept round and round the room as if on the point of pouncing upon her. The lady controlled herself though this trial, and another began. The bird alighted near the door, and in less than a minute changed, she saw not how, into a horribly deformed and dwarfish hag, who, with yellow skin hanging about her face, and cavernous eyes, swung herself on crutches towards the lady, her mouth foaming with fury, and her grimaces and contortions becoming more and more hideous every moment, till she rolled with a fearful yell on the floor in a horrible convulsion at the lady’s feet, and then changed into a huge serpent, which came sweeping and arching towards her with crest erect and quivering tongue. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Suddenly, as it seemed on the point of darting at her, she saw her husband in its stead, standing pale before her, and with his finger on his lips enforcing the continued necessity of silence. He then placed himself at the full length on the floor and began to stretch himself at full length on the floor and began to stretch himself out, longer and longer, until his head nearly reached to one end of the vast room and his feet to the other. This utterly unnerved her. She gave a wild scream of horror, whereupon the castle shook and the nine-story tower of what is now known as the Winchester Mansion came tumbling down. Mr. Winchester is said to have been dead and never lived in the Winchester Mansion, but perhaps his spirit did? Once every seven years, the great William Wirt Winchester would rise, and rides by on his white horse round Llanada Villa. The steed is shod with gold shoes, and when these are worn out the spell that holds Mr. Winchester will be broken, and he will regain possession of his vast estates and semi-regal power. In the closing years of the nineteenth-century there was a living man named Gilbert Plutchik who claimed to have seen Mr. Winchester. Gilbert was a blacksmith, and his forge stood on back of the estate, near a lonely part of the road. One night when there was a bright moon, he was working very late and quite alone. In one of the pauses of his work he heard the ring of many hoofs ascending the steep road that passed his forge, and, standing in his doorway, he saw a gentleman on a white horse, who was dressed in a fashion the like of which he had never seen before. This man was accompanied by a mounted retinue, in similar dress. They seemed to be riding up to the mansion, but the pace slackened as they drew near, and the rider of the white horse, who seemed from his haughty air to be a man of rank, drew bridle, and came to a halt before the smith’s door. He did not speak, and all his train were silent, but he beckoned to the smith, and pointed down at one of the horse’s hoofs. Gilbert stopped and raised it, and held it just long enough to see that it was shod with a gold shoe, which in one place was worn as thing as a shilling. Instantly his situation was made apparent to him by this sign, and he recoiled with a terrified prayer. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The lordly rider, with a look of pain and fury, struck him suddenly with something that whistled in the air like a whip; an icy streak seemed to traverse his body, and at the same time he saw the whole cavalcade break into a gallop, and disappear down the hill. It is generally supposed that for the purpose of putting an end to his period of enchantment Mr. Winchester endeavours to lead someone on to first break the silence and speak to him; but what, in the event of his succeeding, would be the result, or would befall the person thus ensnared, no one knows. If one admits the possibility of spirits retaining any interest in the affairs of this World at all, it is certainly more reasonable to imagine them engaged upon a task such as this, than to believe that they occupy themselves with the performance of mere drawing-room tricks. There was once a great wrong done to the Winchester Mansion. A man stole something priceless from the estate. After that, he felt like he was being followed. However, the course was the whole World, and the stakes his life. It was sixteen hours before he was going to abscond. Passing the estate once more, he asks, “How long since the carriage passed this way, with a tall, fair man inside?” “Such a one passed this morning, Monsieur. The man was ridden by Fear as he looked, and saw before him the door to the Winchester Manion opened, and passing in, knelt down and prayed. He prayed long and fervently, for men, when they are in sore straits, clutch eagerly at the straws of faith. He prayed that he might be forgiven his sin, and, more important still, that he might be pardoned the consequences of his sin, and be delivered from his adversary; and a few chairs from him, facing him, knelt Mr. Winchester praying also. However, Mr. Winchester’s prayer, being a thanksgiving merely, was short, so that when the thief raised his eyes, he saw the face of Mr. Winchester gazing at him across the chair tops, with a mocking smile upon it. He made no attempt to rise, but remained kneeling, fascinated by the look of joy that shone out of Mr. Winchester’s eyes. And Mr. Winchester moved the high-back chairs one by one, and came toward him softly. Then, just as Mr. Winchester stood beside the thief who had wronged him, full of gladness that his opportunity had come, there burst from the bell town a sudden clash of bells, and Mr. Winchester vanished. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Then the thief who had done the wrong rose up and passed out praising God. What became of the body of Mr. Winchester is not known. There was none to identify. Years passed away, and the survivour in the tragedy became a worthy and useful citizen, and a noted man of science. He was employed by Mrs. Winchester and even had a laboratory on the estate were many objects necessary to him in his researches, and prominent among them, stood in a certain corner, a human skeleton. It was a very old and much-mended skeleton, and one day the long-expected end arrived, and it tumbled to pieces. Thus it became necessary to purchase another. The man of science visited a dealer he well knew, and the dealer said he would send a well-proportioned “study” to his laboratory that very afternoon. The dealer was as good as his word. When Monsieur entered his laboratory that evening, the thing was in its place. Monsieur seated himself in his high-backed chair, and tried to collect his thoughts. However, his thoughts were unruly, and inclined to wander, and to wander always in one direction. He opened a large volume and commenced to read. He read of a man who had wronged another and feld from him, the other man following. Finding himself reading this, he closed the book angrily, and went and stood by the window and looked out. He saw before him the sun-pierced nave of East wing of the Winchester Mansion, and on the stones lay a dead man with a mocking smile upon his face. Cursing himself for a fool, he turned away with a laugh. However, his laugh was short-lived, for it seemed to him that something else in the room was laughing also. Struck suddenly still, with his feet glued to the ground, he stood listening for awhile: then sought with starting eyes at the corner from where the sound had seemed to come. However, the white thing standing there was only grinning. Monsieur wiped the damp sweat from his head and hands, and stole out. For a couple of days he did not enter the room again. One the third, telling himself that his fears were those of a hysterical girl, he opened the door and went in. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
To shame himself, he took his lamp in his hand, and crossing over to the far corner where the skeleton stood, examined it. A set of bones bought for a thousand dollars. Was he a child, to be scared by such a bogey! He held his lamp up in front of the thing’s grinning head. The flame of the lamp flickered as though a faint breath had passed over it. The man explained this to himself by saying that the walls of the house were old and cracked, and that the wind might creep in anywhere. He repeated this explanation to himself as he recrossed the room, walking backwards, with his eyes fixed on the thing. When he reached his desk, he sat down and gripped the arms of his chair till his fingers turned white. He tried to work, but the empty sockets in that grinning head seemed to be drawing him towards them. He rose and battled with his inclination to fly screaming from the room. Glancing fearfully about him, his eyes fell upon a high screen, standing before the door. He dragged it forward, and placed it between himself and the thing, so that he could not see it—nor it see him. Then he sat down again to his work. For a while he forced himself to look at the book in front of him, but at last, unable to control himself any longer, he suffered his eyes to follow their own beat. It may have been an hallucination. He may have accidentally placed the screen so as to favour such an illusion. However, what he saw was a bony hand coming round the corner of the screen, and, with a cry, he fell to the floor in a swoon. John Hansen and other people of the house came running in, and lifting him up, carried him out, and laid him upon his bed. As soon as he recovered, his first question was, where had they found the thing—where was it when they entered the room? And when they told him they had seen it standing where is always stood, and had gone down into the room to look again, because of his frenzied entreaties, and returned trying to hide their smiles, he listened to their talk about overwork, and the necessity for change and rest, and said they might do with him as they would. So for many months the laboratory door remined locked, and many of the innovative technologies produced by the Winchester Estate came to a halt. Then there cam a chill winter evening when the man of science opened it again, closed the door behind him. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
He lighted his lamp, and gathered his instruments and books around him, and sat down by the fire before them in his high-backed chair. And the old terror returned to him. He was sitting there when he heard a cry. He held his lamp above his head, and saw figures in the distance, and wet stains stealing down the walls and trickling through the arch. He listened for a moment to the wind in the valley, it sounded unnatural. Standing at the door was a specter. The man of science sat down partly to collect his thoughts again, partly because it had turned him faint. He heard terrible screams and cries. A beautiful young lady had died instantaneously in the parlor. This time the man of science wished to conquer himself. His nerves were stronger now, and his brain clearer; he would fight his unreasoning fear. He crossed the door and locked himself in, and flung the key to the other end of the room, where it fell among beakers and Bunsen Burners with an echoing clatter. Later on, the housekeeper, Angus, going her final round tapped at the door and wished him good night, as was her custom. She received no response, at first, and growing nervous, tapped louder and called again; and at length an answering “good night” came back to her. She thought little about it at the time, but afterwards she remembered that the voice that had replied to her had been strangely grating and mechanical. Trying to describe it, she likened it to such a voice as she would imagine coming from a statue. Next morning the door to the laboratory remained still locked. It was no unusual thing for him to work all night, and far into the next day, so no one thought surprised. When, however, evening came, and yet he did not appear, the servants gathered outside the room and whispered, remembering what had happened before. They listened, but could hear no sound. They shook the door and called to him, then beat with their fists upon the mahogany panels. However, there was still no sound. Becoming alarmed, they decided to burst open the door, and, after many blows, it gave way and flew back, and they crowded in. He sat bolt upright in his high-backed chair. They thought at first he had died in his sleep. However, when they drew nearer and the light fell upon him, they saw the livid marks of bony fingers round his throat; and in his eyers there was such a terror as is not often seen in human eyes. Next evening was a lovely evening, and Mrs. Winchester walked out early to enjoy it. The sun was not yet quite down when she traversed the field-path near where the nine-story tower once stood. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Winchester Mystery House
Saturdays are for the boilers 😉 Do you know where this is in the house?
🎟 Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com
Randolph Harris II International Institute 