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He Covenanted with the Devil Until He Should Arrive to the Age of Sixty Years!
He might be living, or he might be dead. There came no word of him, or from him. I was fond enough of her to be satisfied with this—he never disturbed us. While there were many individual acts of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, there was never an attempt or plot to make witchcraft a formal religion which would supplant Christianity. Yet we need not conclude that William Baker and his fellow-confessors were lying. It is probable that they, like the afflicted girls, were hysterics subject to hallucination. Certainly that is the conclusion to be drawn from Thomas Brattle’s opinion of them in his “Letter”: “my faith is strong concerning them that they are deluded, imposed upon, and under the influence of some evil spirit, and therefore unfit to be evidences either against themselves or anyone else.” Mr. Brattle wrote this in October 1692, when Massachusetts was retuning to stability. However, at the height of the excitement confessions like Mr. Baker’s seemed convincing enough. For one thing, they had a curious precision: he did not say there were about three hundred witches in the country but “about three hundred and sever”; he did not say there were about a hundred young wizards at the mustering of the Satanic militia but “about an hundred five.” However, what made these confessions most believable was that they offered a simple and comprehensive explanation for all the frightening events at Salem, at a time when explanations were not easy to discover. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
There is also some testimony which remains ambiguous even today. Samuel Wardwell, for example, at his preliminary examination confessed himself a wizard. He had begun, he said, with white magic, “with telling of fortunes which sometimes came to pass” And, he said, “he used also when any creature came into his field to bid the Devil to take it, and it may be the Devil took advantage of him by that.” Eventually he had signed a pact: “He covenanted with the Evil until he should arrive to the age of sixty years.” He had renounced this confession at his trial, saying that he had made it, but that he had belied himself. He added that it was all one: “he knew he should die for it whether he owned it or no.” Ordinarily one would simply accept his renunciation. However, there are several puzzling circumstances here. For one thing, it was not all one whether he maintained or renounced his confession. People who maintained their confessions were not being brought to trail, much less executed. For another, at least a part of his confession was true; he had dabbled in the occult for some time, telling a great many fortunes, and boasting that he could make animals come to him when he wished. Finally, Mr. Wardwell was executed. However, in 1693, when the panic had subsided and the climate of opinion totally changed, there were three people who held to their confessions. Two of them were women long thought to be “senseless and ignorant creatures.” The third was Mr. Wardwell’s wife. All of these circumstances are puzzling and some of them are suspicious. However, on the other hand, there is no evidence to support his confessions of having made a pact. The only possible conclusion, it would seem, is that in this case the truth is not obtainable. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
In a situation where the truth was so difficult to find the people of Massachusetts did what anybody else would do—they sought expert advice. In matters of witchcraft the experts were the clergy, and ultimately the advice was sought of the most distinguished clergymen in the colony. Indeed, at least one member of the trial court, Judge John Richards, asked the Reverend Cotton Mather to be present at the first trial. Reverend Mather was too ill to attend, but he did everything he could under the circumstances. He had suggested earlier (the exact date is not known) that the afflicted persons should be separated and an attempt made to cure them with prayer and fasting. He volunteered to take in as many as six of them himself. He had cured the Godwin children, and he might well have cured the Salem girls as well; certainly separation and private care would have been better treatment for hysterical fits than the excitements of a public courtroom. However, unfortunately Reverend Mather’s offer had not been accepted. Now, although he could not attend the first sitting of the court he wrote John Richards a letter offering him his opinions. In the first place, he expected that God would smile upon the labours of the court: “His people have been fasting and praying before Him for you direction, and yourselves are persons whose exemplary devotion disposeth you to such a dependence on the Wonderful Counselor, for his counsel in an affair this full of wonder, as He doth usually answers with the most favorable assistances. Yet he wanted to warn Mr. Richards. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Here is that warning: “And yet I most humbly beg you that in the management of the affair in your most worthy hands, you do not lay more stress upon pure specter testimony than it will bear. When you are satisfied or have good plain legal evidence that the Demons which molest our poor neighbours do indeed represent such and such people to the sufferers, though this be a presumption, yet I suppose you will not reckon it a conviction that the people so represented are witches to be immediately exterminated. It is very certain that the Devils have sometimes represented the shapes of persons not only innocent but very virtuous, though I believe that the just God then ordinarily provides a way for speedy vindication of the persons thus abused. Moreover, I do suspect that persons who have too much indulged themselves in malignant, envious, malicious ebullitions of their souls may unhappily expose themselves to the Judgment of being represented by Devils, of whom they never had any vision and with whom they have much less written any covenant. I would say this: if upon the bare supposal of a poor creature’s being represented by a specter too great a progress be made by the Authority in ruining a poor neighbour so represented, it may be that a door may be thereby opened for the Devils to obtain from the Courts in the Invisible World a license to proceed unto most hideous desolations upon the repute and repose of such as have yet been kept from the great transgression. If mankind have thus far once consented unto the credit of Diabolical representations, the Door is opened! Perhaps there are wise and good men that may be ready to style hum that shall advance this caution a witch advocate, but in the winding up this caution will certainly be wished for.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Reverend Mather’s third point is that although he believes that Devils have sometime afflicted men on their own initiative, without being called up by witches, in this case he thinks that witches are involved: “there is cause enough to think that it is a horrible witchcraft which hath given rise to the troubles wherewith Salem Village is at this day harassed, and he indefatigable pains that are used for the tracing this witchcraft are to be thankfully accepted and applauded among all this people of God.” Fourth, he points out that although witchcraft is a spiritual matter and therefore “very much transacted upon the stage of imagination,” its effects are “dreadfully real” and therefore criminally punishable. “Our dear neighbours are most really tormented, really murdered, and really acquainted with hidden things which are afterwards proved plainly to have been realities.” In his fifth and six section he suggests what evidence may be used for convictions. The best evidence, he says, is “a credible confession…And I say a credible confession because even confession itself is sometimes not credible.” He was confident Mr. Richards’ ability to judge such matters: “a person of a sagacity many times thirty furlongs less than yours will easily perceive what confession may be credible and what may be the result of only a delirious brain or a discontented heart.” In obtaining confessions he was “far from urging the un-English method of torture,” but he thought that “cross and swift questions” might be used, along with anything else that “hath a tendency to put the witches into confusion” and this might bring them to confession. If the suspect had made threats or boasts which seemed to require occult power and which came true, this was valid evidence. So were such concrete matters as “puppets” (for image magic) and witch marks on the body. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Reverend Mather had never seen a witch mark on anyone, but he thought a surgeon ought to be able to tell if a bodily excrescence were magical. Finally, he was willing to countenance as experiments (but not as full evidence) some witch-finding techniques which themselves partook of the occult: setting a suspect to repeating the Lord’s Prayer; trying to wound a witch through striking her specter; putting the suspect to the water ordeal. Seventh, and finally, he recommended clemency for “come of the lesser criminals.” If such persons were not executed but “only scoured with lesser punishments, and also put upon some solemn, open, public, and explicit renunciation of the Devil” he thought it might discourage the Devils from afflicting those neighbourhoods in which they had been publicly renounced. Reverend Mather’s letter was written within the context of the Puritan method for arriving at the truth, and it can be fully understood only within that context. In dealing with the American Puritans we must remember always that they had rejected the formidable hierarchies of the Medieval and Renaissance church and state, with all their authority of tradition and inherited position. They had replaced these hierarchies with bodies of ministers and magistrates which, if they were not fully democratic in the twentieth-century sense of the word, were nevertheless elected. The clergyman was called to his position by the members of the church; the magistrate was elected by his constituency. Furthermore, the church had no central administration; every congregation was a law unto itself. The state did have a central administration—a governor and lieutenant-governor and their council—but this administration had nothing even faintly resembling the authority of a royal government. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
My brother, the clergyman, looked over my shoulder before I was aware of him, and discovered that the volume which completely absorbed my attention was a collection of famous Trials, published in a new edition and in a popular form. He laid his finger on the Trial which I happened to be reading at the moment. I looked up at him; his face startled me. He had turned pale. His eyes were fixed on the open page of the book with an expression which puzzled and alarmed me. “My dear fellow,” I said, “what in the World is the matter with you?” He answered in an odd absent manner, still keeping his finger on the open page. “I had almost forgotten,” he said. “And this reminds me.” “Reminds you of what?” I asked. “You do not mean to say you know anything about the Trial?” “I know this,” he said. “The prisoner was guilty.” “Guilty?” I repeated. “Why, the man was acquitted by the jury, with full approval of the judge! What can you possibly mean?” “There are circumstances connected with that Trial,” my brother answered, “which were never communicated to the judge or the jury—which were never so much as hinted or whispered in court. I know them—of my own knowledge, by my own personal experience. They are very sad, very strange, very terrible. I have mentioned them to no mortal creature. I have done my best to forget them. You—quite innocently—have brought them back to my mind. They oppress, they distress me. I wish I had found you reading any book in your library, except that book!” Some people were opposed to prosecuting in any witchcraft case, on the grounds that witchcraft was a spiritual mater, a sin rather than a crime, and thus outside the domain of criminal law. However, the laws of every civilized nation provided the death penalty for witchcraft, and so did the Bible (Exodus xxii, 18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”). #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Another opinion Reverend Mather deals with is that the troubles at Salem were caused by Devils, but not by witches. That is, the idea had already been advanced that the afflicted girls were possessed—infested by Demons—but not bewitched; that the Devils had acted on their own initiative rather than that of witches. This is the idea that was eventually adopted by virtually all of Massachusetts to explain the events at Salem, once it was recognized that most of those executed had been innocent. The basic question, as the seventeenth century understood it, was whether God would permit the Devil to assume the shape of an innocent person. Most authorities, and especially most Protestant authorities, believed that He would, and thus held, like Hamlet, that “the Devil hath power/ to assume a pleasing shape. However, Mr. Richards would not be capable of clearing anybody if he was going to accept the appearance of a person’s specter as conclusive proof of guilt. If such infernal testimony were accepted, nobody could be safe from accusation. Reverend Mather put in forcefully enough. “If mankind have thus far once consented unto the credit of Diabolical representations, the Door is opened!” However, Reverend Mather knew there were people at Salem so committed to the validity of spectral evidence that they were willing to call anyone who challenged it, including himself, a “witch advocate.” All he could do was warn such people that when matters were finished “this caution will certainly be wished for.” And in this he could not possibly have been more right. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Do you believe that the spirits of the dead can return to Earth, and show themselves to the living? Promise me this, that you will keep what I tell you a secret as long as I live. After my death I care little what happens. Let the story of my strange experience be added to the published experience of those other men who have seen what I have seen, and who believe what I believe. The World will not be the worse, and may be the better, for knowing one day what I am now about to trust to your ear alone. On a fine summer evening, many years since, I left my chambers in the Temple to meet a fellow-student, who had proposed to me a night’s amusement in the Winchester estate. I had taken my degree at Oxford. I had sadly disappointed my father by choosing the Law as my profession, in preference to the Church. At that time, to own the truth, I had no serious intention of following any special vocation. I simply wanted an excuse for enjoying the pleasures of an American life. The study of Law supplied me with that excuse. And I chose the Law as my profession accordingly. On reaching the place at which we had arranged to meet, I found that my friend had not kept his appointment. After waiting vainly for ten minutes, my patience gave way, and I went into the gardens by myself. I took two or three turns round the mansion, without discovering my fellow-student, and without seeing any other person with whom I happened to be acquainted at that time. For some reason which I cannot now remember, I was not in my usual good spirits that evening. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
I saw a woman in the gardens, she was quiet. She invited me into the estate. Her face was saddened; her eyes were dropped to the ground, I begged her pardon. She rose to leave me. I was determined to not part with her in that way. I begged to be allowed to see the Winchester mansion. She hesitated. Then she took my arm. We went away together. A walk of half an hour brought us to the Winchester mansion, the estate was quite large. We went through the beautiful jeweled doors and took an elevator to the 4th floor. She said Mrs. Winchester had been waiting to meet me. She had been suffering from an affection of the throat; and she had a white silk handkerchief tied loosely round her neck. She wore a simple dress of black merino, with a black-silk apron over it. Her face was deadly pale; her fingers felt icily cold as they closed around my hand. “Promise me one thing,” I said, “before I go. While I live, I am your friend—if I am nothing more. If you are ever in trouble, promise me that you will let me know it.” She started, and drew back from me as if I had struck her with a sudden terror. “Strange!” she said, speaking to herself. “He feels as I feel. He is afraid of what may happen to me, in my life to come.” I attempted to reassure Mrs. Winchester. I tried to tell her what was indeed the truth—that I had only been thinking of the ordinary chances and chances of life, when I spoke. She paid no heed to me; she came back and put her hands on my shoulders, and thoughtfully and sadly looked up in my face. “My mind is not your mind in this matter,” she said. “I believe I shall die young, and die miserably. If I am right, have you interest enough still left in me to hear of it?” #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
She paused, for a moment, shuddering—and added these startling words: “You shall hear of it.” The tone of steady conviction in which she spoke alarmed and distressed me. My face showed her how deeply and how painfully I was affected. “There, there!” she said, returning to her natural manner; “don’t take what I say too seriously. A poor girl who has led a lonely life like mine thinks strangle and talks strangely—sometimes. Yes; I give you my promise. If I am ever in trouble, I will let you know it. God bless you—you have been very kind to me—goodbye!” A tear dropped on my face as she kissed me. The door closed between us. The dark gardens received me. It was raining heavily. I looked up at her window, through the drifting shower. The curtains were parted; she was standing in the gap, dimly lot by the lamp on the table behind her, waiting for our last look at each other. Slowly lifting her hand, she waved her farewell at the window, with the unsought native grace which had charmed me on the night when we first met. The curtains fell again—she disappeared—nothing was before me, nothing was round me, but the darkness and the night. In two years from that time, I had returned to the Church. My relatives exerted themselves; and my good fortune still befriended me. I was offered an opportunity of preaching in a church, made famous by the eloquence of one of the popular pulpit-orators of our time. In accepting the proposal, I felt naturally anxious to do my best, before the unusually large and unusually intelligence congregation which would be assembled to hear me. At the period of which I am now speaking, the Santa Clara Valley had been startled by the discovery of a terrible crime, perpetrated under circumstances of extreme provocation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
I chose this crime as the main subject for my sermon. Admitting that the best among us were frail mortal creatures subject to evil promptings and provocations like the worst among us, my object was to show how a Christian man may find his refuge from temptation in the safeguards of his religion. I dwelt minutely on the hardship of the Christian’s first struggle to resist the evil influence—on the help which one’s Christianity inexhaustibly held out o one in the worst relapses of the weaker and viler part of one’s nature—on the steady and certain gain which was the ultimate reward of one’s faith and one’s firmness—and on the blessed sense of peace and happiness which accompanied the final triumph. Preaching to this effect, with the fervent conviction which I really felt, I may say for myself, at least, that I did no discredit to the choice which had placed me in the pulpit. I held the attention of my congregation, from the first word to the last. On the conclusion of my sermon, my soul was literally shaken. Ordering my horse to be saddled, I rode instantly to the Winchester mansion. When I arrived, my mind was blank. I had no thoughts. I had no tears. The butler, Amon, greeted me. I guessed him to be some two or three years younger than myself. He was undeniably handsome; his manners of a gentleman—and yet, without knowing why, I felt a strong dislike to him the moment he opened the door. While waiting in the parlor, little by little, I became conscious of a chilly sensation slowly creeping through and through me to the bones. The warm balmy air of a summer night was abroad. It was the month of August. In the month of August, was it possibly that any living creature (in good health) could feel cold? It was not possible—and yet, the chilly sensation still crept through and through me to the bones. I looked up. I looked all round me. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
I looked around me again. Yes: I saw it. With my own eyes I saw it. A pillar of white mist—between five and six feet high, as well as I could judge—was moving beside me on my left hand. The white colour of it was the white colour of the fog which one might see over the ocean. And the chill which had then crept through me to the cones was that chill that was creeping through me now. I was awed rather than frightened. There was one moment, and one only, when the fear came to me that my reason might be shaken. The doctrine that the Devil could appear in any shape did come to mind. The slow utterance of these words, repeated over and over again: “Mrs. Winchester is dead. Mrs. Winchester is dead.” But my will was still my own: I was able to control myself, to impose silence on my own muttering lips. And I walked through the mansion. And the pillar of mist went quietly with me. I sat down on the stairs looking at the pillar of mist, hovering opposite to me. It lengthened slowly, until it reached to the ceiling. As it lengthened, it grew bright and luminous. A time passed, and a shadowy appearance showed itself in the center of the light. Little by little, the shadowy appearance took the outline of human form. Soft brown eyes, tender and melancholy, looked at me through the unearthly light in the mist. The dead and the rest of the face boke next slowly on my view. Then the figure gradually revealed itself, moment by moment, downward and downward to the feet. She stood before me as I had last seen her, in her black-merino dress, with the black-silk apron, with white handkerchief tied loosely round her neck. She stood before me, in the gentle beauty that I remembered so well; and looked at me as she had looked when she gave me her last kiss on the cheek—when her tears had dropped on my hand. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
I fell on my knees at the table. I stretched out my hands to her imploringly. I said, “Speak to me—O, once again speak to me, Sarah.” Her eyes rested on me with a divine compassion in them. She lifted her hand, and pointed to the photograph on the desk. It was the butler. I looked up at her again. She lifted her hand once more, and pointed to the handkerchief round her neck. As I looked at it, the fair white silk changed horribly in colour—the fair white silk became darkened and drenched in blood. A moment more—and the vision of her began to grow dim. By slow degrees, the figure, then the face, faded back into the shadowy appearance that I have first seen. The luminous inner light died out in the white mist. The mist itself dropped slowly downwards—floated a moment in airy circles on the floor—vanished. Nothing was before me but the familiar Lincrusta wallpaper, and the photograph lying face downwards on the desk. I went home. The next day, the newspapers reported the discovery of a murder in the Winchester mansion. Mrs. Winchester was the victim. She had been killed by a wound in the throat. The crime had been discovered between ten and eleven o’clock on the previous night. There is conclusive proof that the butler had been trafficking with the Devil. If spectral evidence was convincing to the magistrates, the ministers, and the people at large, it was a nightmare to the suspects. A violent quarrel took place between them. Lastly, that man, variously described by different witnesses, was seen leaving the door of her mansion on the night of the murder. The Law—advancing no further than this—may have discovered circumstances of suspicion, but no certainty. The Law, in default of direct evidence to convict the prisoner, may have rightly decided in letting him go free. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
However, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company issued a statement redacting the news report which was later destroyed: “Protecting Mrs. Winchester’s legacy is, and always will be, our focus. For decades, we have battled behind the scenes, enduring shadowy tactics of deception with unauthorized statements and projects created to tarnish. We have always been betwixted as to why there is such a tenacity in causing more pain alongside what we already have to cope with for the rest of our lives. Now, this unscrupulous endeavor to release a statement without official proof or full accounting to the estate compels our hearts to express a word—forgiveness. Although we will continue to defend ourselves and her legacy lawfully and justly, we want to preempt the inevitable attacks on our company by all the individuals who have emerged from the shadows to leech off of Mrs. Winchester’s life’s work. Ultimately, we desire closure and a modicum of peace so we can facilitate the growth of the Winchester Estate and other creative projects that embody Mrs. Winchester’s true essence, which is to inspire and get people to think critically. We welcome and accept people of all creeds, races and cultures in the Universe and beyond.” The official statement reported that Mrs. Winchester passed away peacefully in her sleep on September 5, 1922, and work on the still uncompleted house stopped. I leave you to draw your own conclusions, but just days before I saw her, she looked no older than 22 years old. My own faith in the reality of the apparition is immovable. I say, and believe Mrs. Winchester is immortal, which would explain a lot. Take up the Trial again, and look at the circumstances that were revealed during the investigation in the court. I persist in believing that the man was guilty. I declare that, he and he alone did it. And now, you know why. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
O thou wicket spirit Amon that obeyeth not, because I made a law and invoked the names of the glorious and ineffable God of Truth, the creator of all, and thou obeyest not the might sounds that I make: therefore I curse thee in the depth of Abandon to remain until the day of judgment in torment in fire and in sulphur without end, until thou appear before our will and obey my power. Come, therefore, in the 24th of a moment, before the circle in the triangle in this name and by this name of God, Adni, Great Spirit, give us hearts to understand; never to take from creation’s beauty more than we give; never to destroy wantonly for the furtherance of greed; never to deny to give our hands for the building of Earth’s beauty; never to take from her what we cannot use. Give us hearts to understand that to destroy Earth’s music is to create confusion; that to wreck her appearance is to build us to beauty; that to callously pollute her fragrance is to make a house of stench; that as we care for her she will care for us. Tzabaoth, Adonai, Amioran. Come! Come! for it is the Lord of Lords Adni, that stirreth thee up. I stir thee up, O thou fire, in him who is thy Creator and of all creatures. Torment, burn, destroy the spirit Amon always whose end cannot be, I judge thee in judgment and in extreme justice, O spirit Amon, because thou art he that obeyeth not my power and obeyth not that law which the Lord God made, and obeyeth not the Mighty Sounds and the Living Breath which I invoke, which I send: Come forth, I, who am the Servant of the Same Most High governor Lord God powerful, Iehovohe, I who am exalted in power and am might in his power above ye, O thou who comest not giving obedience and faith to him that liveth and trirumpheth. Therefore I say the judgment: I curse thee and destroy the name Amon and the seal Amon, which I have placed in this dwelling of poison, and I burn thee in fire whose end cannot be; and I cast thee down unto the seas of torment, out of which thou shalt not rise until thou come to me eyes: visit me in peace: be friendly before the circle in the triangle in the 24th of a moment in the likeness of a man not unto the terror of the sons of men the creatures or all things on the face of the Earth. Obey my power like reasoning creatures; obey the living breath, the laws which speak. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
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I am a Simple Doctor–All I Wanted to do Here Was to Found a Small Hospital!
Dear friend, you need to do two things. First, “Walk with Me,” as My Father in Heaven told the decrepit Abraham in Genesis, “and let Truth come with us” (12.1). Second, “Seek Me always in the sincerity of your heart,” as the Wisdom of Solomon said right at the beginning (1.1). Do these two things, and you will be protected from the bandit horde. Punishment calls for “retributive suffering.” However, discipline is “training that corrects, molds, or perfects.” Punishment is directed at the child oneself. Discipline is directed more at the objectionable behavior of the child; it is something we do for our children, not to them. The common goal is to establish a home where harmony, respect, and love abound. However, as we attempt to teach our children to “walk uprightly before the Lord,” Doctrine and Covenants 68.28, our methods will strongly influence our children’s behavior and self-image—and these either encourage or impede the results we are seeking. The heart of child management is the relationship between parents and their children. There are four basic ingredients of positive parent-child interactions. First of all, mutual respect is very important. Effective parents try to avoid nagging, hitting, debating, and talking down to their children. They also avoid doing things for their children that children can do for themselves. (Constantly stripping children of opportunities to learn and take responsibility prevents them from becoming independent and developing self-esteem.) Second come shared enjoyment. Effective parents spend some time each day with their children, doing something that both the parent and child enjoy. Third comes love. This goes almost without saying, but many parents assume their children know that they are loved. It is important to show them you care—in words and by actions such as hugging. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The fourth tool in the child management program is encouragement. Children who get frequent encouragement come to believe in themselves. Effective parents do not just praise their children for success, winning, or good behavior. They also recognize a child’s progress and attempts to improve. Show you have faith in children by letting them try things on their own and by encouraging their efforts. Creative communication is another important ingredient of successful child management. Making a distinction between feelings and behavior is the key to clear communication. Since children (and parents, too) do not choose how they feel, it is important to allow free expression of feelings. The child who learns to regard some feelings as “bad,” or unacceptable, is being asked to deny a very real part of one’s experience. Parents are encouraged to teach their children that all feelings are appropriate; it is only actions that are subject to disapproval. Many parents are unaware of just how often they block communication and the expression of feelings in their children. Consider this typical conversation:
Son: I am stupid, and I know it. Look at my grades in school.
Father: You just have to work harder.
Son: I already work harder and it does not help. I have no brains.
Father: You are smart, I know it.
Son: I am stupid, I know it.
Father: (loudly) You are not stupid!
Son: Yes, I am!
Father: You are not just good. You are the best!
#RandolphHarris 2 of 19
By debating with the child, the father misses the point that his son feels stupid. It would be far more helpful for the father to encourage the boy to talk about his feelings. How could he do that? He might say, “You really feel that you are not as smart as others, do you not? Do you feel this way often? Are you feeling bad at school?” In this way, the child is given a chance to express his emotions and to feel understood. The father might conclude by saying, “Look, son, in my eyes you area fine person. However, I understand how you feel. Everyone feels inadequate at times.” Again, it is valuable to remember that supportive parents encourage their children. In order for any organization to run effectively, it must establish a set of bylaws. A family also needs bylaws to prescribe boundaries for behavior. If parents do not have a specific, deliberate plan for discipline, they are likely to rely simply on instinct and react emotionally. At our weekly family council, we mutually agree upon rules which all must abide by. We also establish consequences for disobedience. In this way, everyone is aware of the rules and the consequences; there are no surprises. And the consequences are predicable and consistent. As a family, we have come to recognize that certain behaviors are “love destroying acts” and therefore cannot be tolerated. These include such things as sassing, teasing, and name-calling. “Behold, mine house is a house of order, saith the Lord God, and not a house of confusion,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 132.8. Order is an eternal principle—an important characteristic of the kingdom of God. We are instructed to follow the pattern and set our own houses in order. “And now a commandment I give unto you—if you will be delivered you shall set in order your own house,” Doctrine and Covenants 93.43. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
An orderly home depends upon well-defined and well-understood rules. One way the Lord maintains order in His kingdom is to bless those who obey certain laws. “There is a law, irrevocably decreed in Heaven before the foundations of this World, upon which all blessings are predicated—and when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 130.20, 21. An orderly home also operates on this important principle. Family rules must be established and observed before the blessing of family harmony can be attained. Truth will free you—as I said to the Jewish people who believed in Me, and as the Beloved Disciple recorded in his Gospel (8.32)—from the seductions and detractions of those who hunt you down. Yes, Truth has freed you already; and when you are truly free, you do no care what epithets the vain World slings at you. “A light that shone from behind the sun; the sun was not so fierce as to pierce where that light could,” reports Charles Williams. The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this. Just as every natural event is the manifestation at a particular place and moment of Nature’s total character, so every particular Christian miracle manifests at a particular place and moment the character and significance of the Incarnation. There is no question in Christianity of arbitrary interferences just scattered about. It relates not a series of disconnected raids on Nature but the various steps of a strategically coherent invasion—an invasion which intends complete conquest and “occupation.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
The fitness, and therefore credibility, of the particular miracles depends on their relation to the Grand Miracle; all discussion of then is isolated from it is futile. The fitness or credibility of the Grand Miracle itself cannot, obviously, be judged by the same standard. And let us admit at once that it is very difficult to find a standard by which it can be judged. If the thing happened, it was he central event in the history of the Earth—the very thing that the whole story has been about. Since it happened only once, it is by Hume’s standards infinitely improbable. However, then the whole history of the Earth has also happened only once; is it therefore incredible? Hence the difficulty, which weighs upon Christian and atheist alike, of estimating the probability of the Incarnation. It is like asking whether the existence of Nature herself is intrinsically probable. That is why it is easier to argue, on historical grounds, that the Incarnation actually occurred than to show, on philosophical grounds, the probability of its occurrence. The historical difficulty of giving for the life, sayings and influence of Jesus any explanation that is not harder than the Christian explanation, is very great. The discrepancy between the depth and sanity and (let me add) shrewdness of His moral teaching and the rampant megalomania which must lie behind His theological teaching unless He is indeed God, has never been satisfactorily got over. Hence the non-Christian hypotheses succeed one another with the restless fertility of bewilderment. Today we are asked to regard all the theological elements as later accretions to the story of a “historical” and merely human Jesus: yesterday we were asked to believe that the whole thing began with vegetation myths and mystery religions and that the pseudo-historical Man was only fadged up at a later date. However, this historical inquiry is outside the scope of my book. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Since the Incarnation, if it is a fact, holds this central position, and since we are assuming that we do not yet know it to have happened on historical grounds, we are in a position which may be illustrated by the following analogy. Let us suppose we possess parts of a novel or a symphony. Someone now brings us a newly discovered piece of manuscript and says, “This is the missing part of the work. This is the chapter on which the whole plot of the novel really turned. This is the main theme of the symphony.” Our business would be to see whether new passage, if admitted to the central place which the discoverer claimed for it, did actually illuminate all the parts we had already seen and “pull them together.” Nor should we be likely to go very far wrong. The new passage, if spurious, however, attractive it looked at the first glance, would become harder and harder to reconcile with the rest of the work the longer we considered the matter. However, if it were genuine, then at every fresh hearing of the music or every fresh reading of the book, we should find it settling down, making itself more at home, and eliciting significance from all sorts of details in the whole work which we had hitherto neglected. Even though the new central chapter or main theme contained great difficulties in itself, we should still think it genuine provided that it continually removed difficulties elsewhere. Something like this we must do with the doctrines of the Incarnation. Here, instead of a symphony or a novel, we have the whole mass of our knowledge. The credibility will depend on the extent to which the doctrine, if accepted, can illuminate and integrate that whole mass. It is much less important that the doctrine itself should be fully comprehensible. We believe that the sun is in the sky at midday in summer no because we can clearly see the sun (in fact, we cannot) but because we can see everything else. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The first difficulty that occurs to any critic of the doctrine lies in the very center of it. What can be meant by “God becoming man”? In what sense is it conceivable that eternal self-existent Spirit, basic Fact-hood, should be so combined with a natural human organism as to make one person? And this would be a fatal stumbling-block if we had not already discovered that in every human being a more than natural activity (the fact of reasoning) and therefore presumably a more than natural agent is thus united with a part of Nature: so united that the composite creature calls itself “I” and “Me.” I am not, of course, suggesting that what happened when God became Man was simply another instance of this process. In other men a supernatural creature thus becomes, in union with the natural creature, one human being. In Jesus, it is held, the Supernatural Creator Himself did so. I do not think anything we can do will enable us to imagine the mode of consciousness of the incarnate God. That is where the doctrine is not fully comprehensible. However, the difficulty which we felt in the mere idea of the Supernatural descending into the Natural is apparently non-existent, or is at least overcome in the person of every human. If we did not know by experience what it feels like to be a rational terrestrial being—how all these natural facts, all this biochemistry and instinctive affection or repulsion and sensuous perception, can become the medium of rational thought and moral will which understand necessary relations and acknowledge mode of behavior as universally binding, we could not conceive, much less imagine, the thing happening. The discrepancy between a movement of atoms in an astronomer’s cortex and one’s understanding that there must be s till unobserved planet beyond Uranus, is already so immense that the Incarnation of God Himself is, in one sense, scarcely more startling. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
We cannot conceive how the Divine Spirit dwelled within the created and human spirit of Jesus: but neither can we conceive how His human spirit, or that of any human, dwells within one’s natural organism. What we can understand, if the Christian doctrine is true, is that our own composite existence is not sheer anomaly it might seem to be but a faint image of the Divine Incarnation itself—the same theme in a very minor key. We can understand that if God so descends into a human spirit, and human spirit so descends into Nature, and our thoughts into our senses and passions, and if adult minds (but only the best of them) can descend into sympathy with children, and men into sympathy with beasts, then everything hands together and the total reality, both Natural and Supernatural, in which we are living is more multifariously and subtly harmonious than we had suspected. We catch sight of a new key principle—the power of the Higher, just in so far as it truly Higher, to come down, the power of the greater to include the less. Thus solid bodies exemplify many truths of plane geometry, but plane figures no truths of solid geometry: many inorganic propositions are true of organisms but no organic propositions are true of minerals; Montaigne became kittenish with his kitten but she never talked philosophy to him. Everywhere the great enters the little—its power to do so is almost the test of its greatness. In the Christian story God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and sea-bed of the Nature He has created. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
However, He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined World up with Him. One has the picture of a strong man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great complicated burden. One must stoop in order to lift, one must almost disappear under the load before one incredibly straightens one’s back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on one’s shoulders. Or one may think of a diver, first reducing oneself to nakedness, then glancing in mid-air, then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the death-like region of ooze and slime and of decay; then up again, back to color and light, one’s lungs almost bursting, till suddenly one breaks surface again, holding in one’s hand the dripping, precious thing that one went down to recover. One and it are both colored now that they have come up into the light: down below, where it lay colorless in the dark, one lost one’s color too. In this descent and re-ascent everyone will recognize a familiar pattern: a thing written all over the World. It is the pattern of all vegetable life. It must belittle itself into something hard, small and deathlike, it must fall into the ground: thence the new life re-ascends. It is the pattern of all animal generation too. There is descent from the full and perfect organisms into the spermatozoon and ovum, and in the dark womb a life at first inferior in kind to that of the species which is being reproduced: then the slow ascent to the perfect embryo, to the living, conscious baby, and finally to the adult. So it is also in our moral and emotional life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The first innocent and spontaneous desires have to submit to the deathlike process of control or total denial: but from that there is a re-ascent to fully formed character in which the strength of the original material all operates but in a new way. Death and Re-birth—go down to go up—it is a key principle. Through this bottleneck, this belittlement, the highroad nearly always lies. The doctrine of the Incarnation, if accepted, puts this principle even more emphatically at the center. The pattern is there in Nature because it was first there in God. All the instances of which I have mentioned turn out to be but transpositions of the Divine theme into a minor key. I am not now referring simply to the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ. The total pattern, of which they are only the turning point, is the real Death and Re-birth: for certainly no seed ever fell from so fair a tree into so dark and cold a soil as would furnish more than a faint analogy to this huge descent and re-ascension in which God dredged the salt and oozy bottom Creation. From this point of view the Christian doctrine makes itself so quickly at home amid the deepest apprehension of reality which we have from other sources, that doubt may spring up in a new direction. Is it not fitting in too well? So well that it must have come into humans’ minds from seeing this pattern elsewhere, particularly in the annual death and resurrection of the corn? For there have, of course, been many religions in which that annual drama (so important for life of the tribe) was almost admittedly the central theme, and the deity—Adonis, Osiris, or another—almost undisguisedly a personification of the corn, a “corn-king” who died and rose again each year. Is not Christ simply another corn-king? #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
All words are pegs to hang ideas on. One of psychology’s perennial chicken-and-egg questions is, Which comes first, thoughts or words? Do ideas arise first and await words to name them? Or are thoughts born of words and inconceivable without them? As usually happens with such either/or questions, the answer seems to be both: thinking shapes language, which shapes thought. Some thoughts precede the words used to express them. Consider: to tighten a screw, which direction do you turn it? Very likely, you first visualize the answer without words and only then expressed your thought in words such as “clockwise,” or “to the right.” Likewise, many artists, composers, poets, mathematicians, and scientists achieve creative insights as images. Peak religious moments, too, are sometimes experienced inarticulately; later the person struggles to express the mystical experience within the confines of language but finds it, as the apostle Paul reported, “inexpressible.” If words are sometimes the mere containers of ideas, they are nevertheless containers that shape the thoughts poured into them. Indeed, argued the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, “Language itself shapes a human’s basic ideas.” As evidence of the power of language to shape thought Whorf pointed to the differing conceptions of reality in those who speak different languages. Because Eskimos have a variety of words that describe snow, he argued, they can more readily perceive differences in snow that often go unnoticed by English speakers. Because the Hopi Indian language has no past tense for verbs, the Hopi people cannot so readily think about the past. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Likewise, people who are bilingual will readily testify that certain concepts are available to them in one language but not the other. The language-thought relationship is why so much of education is devoted to enlarging students’ vocabularies. It pays to increase your word power. As Henry Ward Beecher realized, words are pegs to hang ideas on. When trained in sign language, even chimpanzees behave with an enlarged thinking power. Because our words influence how we think, we do well to choose our words carefully. Our labels for things affect our thoughts about them. Whether a space weapons program is termed “Star Wars” or “The Peace Shield” can subtly affect people’s thoughts and feelings about it. Liberation movements recognize this power of words to shape thought. When African American men were called “boys” or “buddy” and when women were called “girls” and “dolls” it was easy to think of them as unequal to European American men. Recognizing that racist and sexist language undergirds racist and sexist thought, a liberation movement may choose as one of its first goals that of changing the way people talk. What is true in other realms of life is also true of religion. Our words influence our thoughts. For example, some words reflect and reinforce our tendency to think of reality as dualistic (divided into distinct categories) rather than as a unified whole. We dichotomize supernatural and natural forces, sacred and secular truths, mental and bodily realms, spiritual and material needs. Such dualisms, which as we noted in the past are more congenial with platonic than biblical assumptions, depend on certain religious words, such as soul. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Praying about another’s soul surely reflects a concern for the person’s ultimate welfare, which can only be applauded. However, concern for another’s soul can easily degenerate into concern for an imaginary person inside the person, while one ignores the needs of the very real person who is depressed, hurting, hungry, or lonely. If we were to expunge words such as soul from our vocabulary, it would become harder to think in dualistic terms. Similarly, we may talk of Christian life. The very words enable us to think of the Christian life as but one aspect of life, separate from one’s school life, life involving pleasures of the flesh, vocational life, or family life. The result is a compartmentalized view of life that assigns a corner of religion—that concerning prayer, worship, and the like—as distinct from one’s studies, one’s dating and family relationships, or one’s aspirations. To rid oneself of such dualistic thinking, a simple first step to avoid phrases such as Christian Life or spiritual life. Even in the struggle to find alternative words, one begins to view life more as a whole, no corner of which is irrelevant to being Christian. For the Christian, all vocations can be ministry, all learning is exploration of the Creator’s World, all human relations are opportunities for embodying God’s love. Or consider the adjectives that people are fond of piling up before the word Christian. It is not enough to be simply a Christian. One must be an evangelical Christian, a mainline Christian, a Bible-believing Christian, a born-again Christian, or even a really truly born-again Christian. One scores additional points, it seems, by piling the adjectives in top of one another. Thus we have Bible-believing, Bible-teaching Christians, and even a few really truly born-again, Bible-believing, Bible-teaching, evangelical Christians. Such words describe but also divine. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The tendency of Christians (or Muslims or any other religious groups) to focus on the differences rather than their kinship with others illustrates a powerful phenomenon: people’s self-concepts center on their distinctiveness. For example, William McGuire and his Yale University colleagues report that when children are asked to tell about themselves, they spontaneously mention how they differ from others. Children born in countries not native to the one they live in or are visiting are more likely than others to mention their birthplace; redheads are more likely than black- and brown-haired children to volunteer their hair color; below average weight and above average weight children are more likely to refer to their body weight; non-dominate culture children are the most likely to mention their race or culture/ The principle, says McGuire, is that “one is conscious of oneself insofar as, and in the ways that, one is different.” Thus: “If I am an African American man in a group of European American men, I tend to think of myself as an African American; if I move to a group of African American women, my African Americaness loses salience and I become more conscious of being a man.” This insight helps us understand why Christians so often label themselves as distinct from other Christians, especially in predominately Christian cultures. In India, Christians are more likely to see themselves simply as “Christian” (as distinct from Hindu or Muslim) and to feel a kindship with other Christians. In the United States of America, where a majority of the population claims to be Christian, one’s distinctive identity is more likely to be a subcategory of Christian. The result is that one begins to see most fellow Christians and certainly most fellow humans as “they” and only those within one’s faction as “we.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Social psychologists have also become intrigued by a subtle but reliable in–group bias phenomenon. Merely assigning people an arbitrary label that they share with certain others triggers a tendency to favor one’s own group and to disparage those assigned a different label. In his novel Slapstick, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. illustrated the phenomenon: computers gave everyone a new middle name, whereupon all “Daffodil-11s” felt kinship with one another and distance from “Raspberry-13s.” It is a point worth remembering: the labeling of who we are—our race, gender, religious denomination, and the like—also implies a definition of who we are not. The circle that defines “us” excludes “them.” Devotion to and pride in one’s own ethic heritage or school or nation—or religious group—often creates a devaluation of other ethnic groups or schools or nations or religious groups. To label oneself as one of “Paul’s people” or “Apollo’s people,” or as fundamentalist, evangelical, mainline, or liberal, can be descriptive. However, it can also be divisive and a source of a spiritual pride that negates Jesus’ prayer “that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me, and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the World may believe that you have sent me.” Other words, and the images they carry, are more helpful. To say, as the apostle Paul did, that all Christians are members of one body acknowledges and accepts differences, yet encourages us to view other parts of the body as complementary to ourselves. Each part is unique and yet all work together—unity without uniformity. The moral: let us consider our words, for powerful ideas are hung upon them. There is an old proverb that say—be careful what you wish for, for you wish may come true. And if your wish is for immortality, it is something you will have to live with for a very long time. Did changes in the number of suburbanizing African Americans represent increasing housing integration, or merely the growth of all African American suburban areas? A related issue is whether the government’s goal should be racially integrated neighborhoods or freedom of choice for African Americans to live where they choose. Some non-dominant culture scholars suggest that the latter, rather than the former, has always been the African American priority. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Researchers refer to suburbs where one racial group replaces another as “displacement” or “succession” suburbs. The northern version of succession typically involves African Americans overflowing in substantial numbers from the central city into older and les desirable inner-ring suburbs. European American residents then, in turn, depart for newer suburbs further out. This type of central-to-periphery racial movement fits the ecological invasion-succession model of urban change first proposed by Chicago School sociologists in the 1920s. African American suburbanization of this type does not indicate racial integration, but rather the expansion of high-risk neighborhoods across city lines. The period of integration this type of suburbanization encompasses is only the interval between the arrival of the first African Americans and the departure of the last European Americans. Research examining the period before the 1980s indicates that the pattern of African American spillover into older and less desirable inner-ring suburban housing has empirical validity. Areas that were most prone to turn over racially where those in close proximity to all African American areas thus, a HUD studying interviewing African Americans and European Americans confirmed that lite actual residential integration had occurred. European Americans continued to show reluctance to move into areas they viewed likely to be incorporated into high-risk neighborhoods. A real fear was that inner-ring suburbs into which African Americans disproportionately were flowing would undergo the same economic difficulties and population declines that plague central cities. The assumption was that African Americans would remain concentrated in the inner suburbs abutting central-city high-risk neighborhoods. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
The first holding which infants know about is an embrace which is physical. For the lucky ones this develops almost imperceptibly into understanding, respect, and validation, in the process of being taken care of—a more psychological sort of embrace. Embrace turns into recognition. At first, someone else has to hold me. Gradually I am able to do my share in taking care of my self. Fortunate people can embrace themselves: they can understand and accept themselves, respect and love themselves, and see to it they get their share of good things. However, still someone else has had to do it for them first. The same is true for ego-functioning—thinking, understanding, making connections, planning ahead, thinking back, comparing, taking into consideration, giving an account of, making sense of life. Ego-functioning is only one aspect of holding, but it is an important part. And I must have had a mother or someone who was my self and did my ego-functioning for me, before I can have a self of my own and do my own ego-functioning. Some people have had the blessings of natural integration more or less from their beginnings, and hold together effortlessly. Others will always have to give some attention to staying integrated. In conditions of stress, their integration will also be under stress. They always have to devote at least some small amount of energy to keeping the connections between parts of themselves intact, lest they find themselves acting on the basis of only part of who they are or what they know or what they want. How may this more effortful integration be maintained? For this we need the rationality which comes from highly developed ego-functioning. I do not mean that this must be a cold and unfeeling reasonableness. I mean the ability to take care of things intelligently and to take enough factors into account so that we need not regret our impulsive actions afterwards. However, even cold unfeeling rationality has a lot to commend it, when we contrast it with hot emotional irrationality. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Ego-functioning, even when divested of attractive social values, can integrate and hold together what would otherwise be a jumble of impulses and responses ungoverned by any principle. We need only look at the lives of those whose ego-functioning is suppressed by disease, distress, or the misuse of drugs, to be persuaded of this. We should not belittle the uses of the intellect. Ego-functioning can strengthen the integrating process. It is ego-functioning which strengthens the bonds between a valued self-imagery and other aspects of living. There are times when we need to remind ourselves who we are and how we wish to be. It is ego-functioning that enables us to say: “Although these people treat me like dirt, I know who I am and I am not dirt.” A number of writers have noticed how many of those who survived in extreme conditions, as Japanese prisoners of war, in German concentration camps, or during natural disasters, said afterwards that they had had important values or ideas which they exerted themselves to hold on to. Those of us who have fortunately not had to survive in such extreme circumstances, also know how to hold on to ideas which in turn hold us: “I do not want to be embarrassed or ashamed, as I would be if I were untrue to myself and did not keep this promise, which turns out hard to keep, so I had better get on and do what I said I would do.” Learning social skills takes practice. There is nothing “innate” about knowing how to meet people or start a conversation. Social skills can be directly practiced in a variety of ways. It can be helpful, for instance, to get a tape reorder and listen to several of your conversations. You may be surprised by the way your pause, interrupt, miss cues, or seem disinterested. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Similarly, it can be useful to look at yourself in a mirror and exaggerate facial expressions of surprise, interest, dislike, pleasure, and so forth. By such methods, most people can learn to put more animation and skill into their self-presentation. Let the trees be consulted before you take any action, every time you breathe in, thank a tree. Let treeroots crack parking lots at the World bank headquarters, let loggers be druids, specially trained and rewarded to sacrifice trees at auspicious times let carpenters be master artisans. Let lumber be treasured like gold, let chainsaws be played like saxophones, and let soldiers on maneuvers plant trees. Give police and criminals a shovel and a thousand seedlings. Let businessmen carry pocketfuls of acorns. Let newlyweds honeymoon in the woods. Walk, do not drive, stop reading newspapers, stop writing poetry, squat under a tree and tell stories. The day the saved of God traversed the deep dryshod, then a new song sang Thy redeemed throng. Lo, sunken in deceit the Egyptian daughter’s feet, but lo, the Shulamite went shod in fair delight. Then a new song sang Thy redeemed thong. Thy banners Thou wilt set o’er those remaining yet, and gather those forlorn as gatherings ears of corn. Then a new song sang Thy redeemed throng. Those that have come to Thee under Thy seal to be, they from the birth are Thine bound by a holy sign. Then a new song sang Thy redeemed throng. Their token show to all whose eyes upon them fall: Lo, on their garments’ hem the fringe ordained for them! Then a new song sang Thy redeemed throng. For whom then are they sealed? Let truth be now revealed. Whose is the seal, and who shall claim the thread of blue? Then a new song sang Thy redeemed throng. Ah, take her as of yore, and cast her forth no more. Let sunlight crown her day and shadows flee away. Then a new song sang Thy redeemed throng. For Thy beloved throng still come to Thee with song, singing with one accord: “Now who is like Thee ‘mid the gods, O Lord?” Still Thy redeemed throng sing a new song. For the fathers’ sake Thou wilt save the children, yea, and bring redemption unto their children’s children. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who has redeemed America. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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What a Lovely Day for a Bit of Mystery!
It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves. I hear your words, My dear Devout; now you hear Mine. You will find them not only suasive, but also persuasive. In fact, they exceed in wisdom all the accumulated knowledge of Philosophy since the World began. My particular words for you today are “spirit and life.” My Beloved Disciple recorded them in his Gospel (6.63), but Humanity cannot seem to make any sense out of them. Important words, they should not be exegeted smugly, if I may allude to that hoary Preacher of Ecclesiastes (9.17), but listened to respectfully. That is to say, they should be received with all humility and yet great affection. Our seventeenth-century ancestors differed from us in most ways, but in nothing did they differ more than in their attitude toward the truth. In this they were closer to the Middle Ages than to us. For them a lie—a breaking of one’s faith—was the worst of sins. Today, many do not regard lying as a serious moral wrong. If the word “morality” is mentioned we think immediately of our bodily appetites, especially of pleasures of the flesh, barbiturates, paraphernalia, liquor and contraband. If the word “morality” is mentioned we think immediately of our bodily appetites very seriously—perhaps too seriously—but we do not regard lying as a mortal sin. We are one of the few civilizations in which entire professions (TV news media, for example, and public relations) are seriously devoted to bending the truth. Dante, in his Divine Comedy, divided sins into three kinds: those of lust, those of violence, and those of fraud. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The sins of lust—those we tend to take most seriously—were those that Dante thought most trivial; the sins of fraud—which we take lightly—were for Dante the worst of all. To create a “credibility gap” as our revealing phrase has it (as though the only relevant issue is whether a statement will compel belief), to lie, was for the medieval humans to break one’s faith, and it was faith which constituted the bonds between humans and their fellow humans, between humans and the state, between humans and God. To lie was to reduce all the most valuable relationships of life to chaos. And the seventeenth-century Puritan, like Dante, was still living by his faith. Just how important the truth was to the seventeenth-century Puritan may be gathered from the fact that all of the innocent persons who were executed—and the majority of those executed were innocent—could have saved themselves by lying. After the first execution—that of Bridget Bishop—took place in June it became obvious to everyone that persons who confessed, like Tituba and Dorcas Good, were not being brought to trial. Thus any suspected person might have one’s life by confessing. Twenty people died, nineteen of them hanged and one pressed for refusing to plead. Bridget Bishop, Mammy Redd, and George Burroughs were three of these. One cannot be at all certain of the guilt or innocence of several more. However, at least a dozen now seem to be clearly innocent. Twelve people, and probably more, chose to die rather than belie themselves. It is impressive evidence of the Puritan’s attachment to the truth. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Yet it was not really so simple as that, because the truth was not easy to find in Salem in 1692. The greatest difficulty was created by the genuineness of the afflicted persons’ fits. Their sufferings were so convincing that they often shook the confidence of the accused. One example is William Hobbes, who began by stoutly denying that he had anything to do with the afflicted girls’ convulsions. When he looked at them they fell down in fits, and Hathorne accused him of overlooking them (id est, of he evil eye), yet still he denied it. Abigail Williams cried out that she saw his specter going to hunt Mercy Lewis “and immediately said Mercy fell into a fit and diverse others.” “Can you now deny it?” said Hathorne. “I can deny it to my dying day,” said William Hobbes. However, he did not. Here, after all, were people in hideous convulsions, and saying that his specter was the cause. How could this be? Hathorne suggested that the Devil might be able to use Hobbes’ specter because of Hobbes’ sins; he had not observed either public or private worship. Might not the Devil have taken advantage of that? Hobbes “was silent a considerable space—then said yes.” The girls’ fits shook not only Hobbes’ confidence in himself, but also his confidence in his daughter Abigail, the wild young girl who had boasted that she had sold herself “body and soul to the Old Boy.” Hathorne wanted to know whether Hobbes had not known for a long time that his daughter was a witch. “No, sir,” was the reply. “Do you think she is a witch now?” asked Hathorne. And all that Hobbes could say was, “I do no know.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Abigail Faulkner’s experience was similar. At her first examination, on August 11, she firmly denied that she had anything to do with the girls’ afflictions. When she looked at them they fell down in fits, and Hathorne asked her, “Do you not see?” Yes, she saw. However, she had nothing to do with it. Yet she would not doubt that the girls were suffering, and saw no reason to doubt their word that it was her specter afflicting them. Therefore the Devil must be appearing in her form: “It is the Devil does it in my shape.” However, by August 30 she was no longer so sure of her innocence. It was true, she said, that she had been angry at what people said when her cousin, Elizabeth Johnson, had been arrested. She had felt malice toward the afflicted persons then because they were the cause of her cousin’s arrest. She has wished them ill, and “her spirit being raised she did pinch her hands together.” Perhaps the Devil had taken advantage of that to pinch the girls, thus exploiting her malice. Even those whose confidence was not shaken bore testimony to the impressiveness of the fits. Mary Easty knew that has had not bewitched the girls, and she was confident as well of the innocence of her sisters, Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Cloyse. Yet she had to grant that there was something preternatural in the girls’ behaviour. “It is an evil spirit,” she said, “but whether it be witchcraft I do not know.” Even George Burroughs, who had been audacious enough to boast of occult powers, found himself stunned by the girls’ behaviour. “Being asked what he thought of these things he answered it was an amazing and humbling Providence, but he understood nothing of it.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Indeed, these courtroom fits were so convincing that most of the indictments were for witchcraft committed during the preliminary examination rather than for the offenses named in the original complain. The typical order of events in the Salem witchcraft cases was: the swearing out of a complaint for acts of witchcraft; a preliminary examination during which the afflicted persons had convulsive fits; an indictment for acts of witchcraft performed during the preliminary examination; and the trial. The direct cause of these fits, in the courtroom or out of it, was, of course, not witchcraft itself, but the afflicted person’s fear of witchcraft. If fits were occasioned by fear of someone like Bridget Bishop, who was actually practicing witchcraft, they might also be occasioned by fear of someone who was only suspected of practicing it. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law! The Winchester Estate had belonged to the family ever since the reign of George Washington, and there was a curious old wing and a cloistered quadrangle still remaining of the original edifice, and in excellent preservation. The rooms at the end of the house were ornate, and somewhat darksome and gloomy, it is true; but, though rarely used they were perfectly habitable, and were of service on great occasions when the Winchester was crowded with guests. The central portion of the Winchester had been rebuilt in the reign James K. Polk, and was of noble and palatial proportions. The southern wing, and a long music-room with thirteen tall narrow daisy-stained glass windows added on to it, were as modern as the time. Altogether, the Winchester was a very splendid mansion with 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, 6 kitchens, and even once had a nine-story tower. It was one of the chief glories of our country. All the land in the Winchester estate, and for a long way beyond its boundaries, belonged to the Winchester family. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The Winchester estate grounds actually expanded all the way down to Steven’s Creek Boulevard. The community church was once within the park walls. The former estate was actually much larger than it is today, it was composed of 500 to 600 rooms at one time, but the 1906 Earthquake brought down the nine-story tower and much of the fourth floor with it. The death of William Wirt Winchester left his son, William Wirt Winchester II, unprovided for, and he was fain to go out into the bleak unknown World, and earn his living in a position of dependence—a dreadful thing for a Winchester to be obliged to do. Out of respect for the traditions and prejudices of his race, he made it his business to seek employment abroad, where the degradation of one solitary Winchester was not so likely to inflict shame upon the ancient house to which he belonged. Happily for himself, he had been carefully educated, and had industriously cultivated the usual modern accomplishments in the calm retirement of the University of Cambridge. He was so fortunate as to obtain a situation at Vienna, in a German family of high rank; and remained there for seven years, laying aside year by year a considerable portion of his liberal salary. When his pupils had grown up, his kind mistress procured for him a still more profitable position at St. Petersburg, where he remained for five more years, at the end of which time he yielded to a yearning that had been long growing upon him—an ardent desire to see his dear old country home once more. He loved the soil from which he had sprung. In all of her letter for some time past, his mother, Mrs. Winchester begged that whenever he felt himself justified in coming home, he would pay a long visit to the Winchester Estate. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“I wish you could come home at Christmas,” she wrote, in the autumn of the year of which I am speaking. “We shall be very gay, and I expect all kinds of pleasant people at the Winchester. When he arrived there, the Old Winchester was in its glory, at about nine o’clock on a clear starlit night. A light frost whitened the broad sweeping lawns, 12,000 boxwood hedges that were winding through the garden, and the other 1,500 plants, trees and shrubs. From the music room at the end of the southern wing, to the heavily framed gothic windows of the old rooms on the north, there shone one blaze of light. The scene was reminiscent of some unusual place in a German legend; and young William half expected to see the lights fade out all in a moment, and long shingled façade wrapped in sudden darkness. The old butler, whom he remembered from his very infancy, and who did not seem to have grown a day older during his twelve years’ exile, came out of the dining-room as the footman opened the hall-door for him, and gave him a cordial welcome, nay insisted upon helping to bring in his portmanteau with his own hands, an act of unusual condescension, the full force of which was felt by his subordinates. “It is a real treat to see your pleasant face once more, William,” said this faithful retainer, as he assisted William to take off his travelling-cloak. “You have not aged a day since you used to live at the Winchester twelve year ago, and you are looking uncommon well; and, Lord love your heart, sir, how pleased they all will be to see you!” They arrived at last at a very comfortable room—a square tapes-tried chamber, with high ceiling support by a great mahogany beam. The room looked cheery enough, with a bright fire roaring in the wide chimney; but it had a somewhat ancient aspect, which the superstitiously inclined might have associated with possible ghosts. “We are in the East Wing, are we not?” young William asked. “This room seems quite strange to me. if I have ever been here before, I doubt it.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
“Very likely not, sir. Yes, this is the old East Wing that your mother once had boarded up. Your window looks out into the old stable-yard, where the kennel used to be in the time of your grandfather, when the Winchester was even a finer place than it is now. We are so full of company this winter, you see, sir, that we are obliged to make use of all these rooms. You will have no need to feel lonesome. There is Captain and Mrs. Foster in the next room to this, and the two Miss Griffins in the blue room opposite.” (Some believe that reopening the East Wing is what upset the spirits and caused the 1906 Earthquake.) Young William admired the perfect comfort of his chamber. Every modern appliance had been added to the ornate and ponderous furniture of an age gone by, and the combination produced a very pleasant effect. As he awoke in the morning and opened the door, Mrs. Winchester sailed in, looking radiant in a dark-green velvet dress richly trimmed with old point lace. Above her beauty, she had a charm of expression which was to most more rare and delightful than her beauty of feature and complexion. She put her arms around her son, and hugged him. “I have only this moment been told of your arrival, my dear William,” she said; “you look just like your father. My dear child, I have been looking forward so anxiously to your coming, and I should not have liked to see you for the first time before all those people. Welcome home. Remember, William, this house is always to be your home, whenever you have need of one.” William, being a hunting man. Had, indeed, a secret horror of the sport; for more than one scion of the house had perished untimely in the hunting-field. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The family had not been altogether a lucky one, in spite of its wealth and prosperity. It was not often that goodly heritage had descended to the Winchesters or their only son, William. Death in some form or other—on too many occasions a violent death—had come between the heir and his inheritance. And when one pondered on the dark pages in the story of the house, many wonder if Mrs. Winchester was ever troubled by morbid forebodings about her only and fondly loved son. Was there a ghost at the Winchester—that spectral visitant without which the state and plendour of a grand old house seem scarcely complete? Yes, many have heard vague hints of some shadowy presence that had been seen on rare occasions within the precincts of the Winchester mansion. Those whom were questioned were prompt to assure investigators that they had seen nothing. They had heard stories of the past—foolish legends, most likely, not worth listening to. On the property, there was once a stable-yard, a spacious quadrangle, surrounded by the closed doors of stable and dog-kennels: low massive buildings of grey stones, with the ivy creeping over them here and there, and with an ancient moss-grown look, that gave them a weird kind of interest. This range of stabling must have been disguised for a long time. The stables that were more recently used were a pile of handsome red-brick buildings at the other extremity of the house, to the rear of the music room, and forming a striking feature in the back view of the Winchester. According to legend, some believed that spectral entities, had been haunting the Winchester estate for centuries. Several large black dogs, with eyes large as saucers, or something flaming, appear and disappear, often without a trace. In many of the legends, the dogs are malevolent: assaulting guests, frightening livestock to death, attacking other dogs, and heralding death or disaster. Perhaps that is why the heirs of Winchester who have come to an untimely end have all died tragically. Oliver Winchester was killed in a dual. William Winchester I was murdered; and William Winchester II broke his back on his return home to the Winchester Estate. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The butler concealed the death of William Winchester II from Sarah, telling her simply that he was called away and said he would never return. Her heart was so broken that she wrote him out of existence, as if her had never been born. After the heartbreaking news that her only son has abandoned her, Mrs. Winchester was sitting in her blue séance room; half meditating, half dozing, mixing broken snatches of thought with brief glimpses of dreaming, when she was startled into wakefulness by a sound that was strange to her. It was a huntsman’s horn—a few low plaintive noes on a huntsman’s horn—notes which had a strange far-away sound, that was more unearthly than anything her ears ever heard. She thought of the music in Der Freischutz; but the weirdest snatch of melody Weber ever wrote had not so ghastly a sound as these few simple noes conveyed to her ear. She stood transfixed, listening to that awful music. It had grown dusk, her fire was almost out, and the room in shadow. As she listened, a light suddenly flashed on the wall before her. The light was as unearthly as the sound—a light that never shone from Earth or Sky. She ran to the window; for his ghastly shimmer flashed through the window upon the opposite wall. The great gates of the stable-yard were open, and men in scarlet coats were riding in, a pack of hounds crowding in before them, obedient to the huntsman’s whip. The whole scene was gleams of a lantern carried by one of the men. It was this lantern which had shone upon the tapestried wall. She saw the stable doors opened one after another; gentlemen and grooms alighting from their horses; the dogs driven into their kennel; the helpers hurrying to and fro; and that strange wan lantern-light glimmering hither and tither was the gathering dusk. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, there was no sound of horse’s hoof or of human voices—not one yelp or cry from the vicious looking hounds with flaming eyes. Since those faint far-away sounds of the horn had died out in the distance, the ghastly silence had been unbroken. As Mrs. Winchester stood at her window quite calmly and watched while the group of men and animals in the yard below noiselessly dispersed. There was nothing supernatural in the manner of their disappearance. The figures did not vanish nor melt into empty air. One by one she saw the horses led into their separate quarters; one by one the redcoats strolled out of the gates, and the grooms departed, some one way, some another. The scene, but for its noiselessness, was natural enough; and had she been a stranger in her own home, she might have fancied that those figures were real—those stables in full occupation. However, she knew that stable-yard and all its range of building to have been disused for more than half a century. Could she believe that, without an hour’s warning, the long-deserted quadrangle could be filled—the empty stalls tenanted? Had some hunting-party from the neighbourhood sought shelter there, glad to escape the pitiless rain? That was impossible, she thought. And yet the noiselessness, the awful sound of that horn—the strange unearthly gleam of that lantern! A cold sweat broke out on her forehead, and she trembled in every limb. Mrs. Winchester was pale as a ghost and trembling. Mrs. Winchester had kept the secret. That evening, the butler came to her. “Mrs. Winchester, there is no use in trying to hide it from you any longer. Your son was killed in the hunting-field, brought home dead one December night, an hour after his father and the rest of the party had come home to the Winchester. He was found by a labouring-man, poor lad, lying in a ditch with his back broken, and his horse beside him staked.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Shortly after Mr. Winchester Sr. never rode to hounds again, though he was passionately fond of hunting. Dogs and horses were sold, and the north quadrangle had been empty from that day. Some evil have come upon the Winchester mansion, it was not in human power to prevent its coming. Some had beheld the shadows of the dead. Sudden terror overcomes some visitors, even to this day. There are reports of an ominous danger, as people’s hearts grow cold while on tour. Staff have been startled by seeing a man, with is hat in his hand not in evening costume; a man with a pale anxious-looking face, peering cautiously into the room. Their first thought is of evil; but in the next moment than man disappears, and they see no more of him. Sometimes when flowers are placed in the house, people see the drooping moments later and lights dying out one by one in the brass sconces against the walls. It is no wonder Mrs. Winchester shut herself from the outer World, burying herself almost as completely as a hermit in its cell. While great wealth brings some people joy, there is some times a hefty fee. Be careful what you wish for, you never know who or what you might invite in your doors. I invoke and move thee, O thou Spirit Gusion and being exalted above ye in the power of the Most High, I say unto thee, Obey! in the name Beralensis, Baldachinesis, Paumachia, and Apologiae Sedes: and of the mighty ones who govern, spirits, Liachidae and ministers of the House of Death: and by the Chief Prince of the seat of Apologia in the Ninth Legion, I do invoke thee and by invoking conjure thee. And being exalted above ye in the power of the Most High, I say unto thee, Obey! in the name of him who spake and it was, to whom all creatures and things obey. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Moreover I, whom God made in the likeness of God, who is the creator according to his living breath, stir thee up in the name which is the voice of wonder of the mighty God, El, strong and unspeakable, O thou Spirit Gusion. And I say to thee obey, in the name of him who spake and it was; and in every one ye, O ye names of God! Moreover in the names Adonai, El, Elohim, Elohi, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, Zabaoth, Elion, Iah, Tetragrammaton, Shaddai, Lord God Most High, I stir thee up; and in our strength I say Obey! O Spirit Gusion. Appear unto His servants in a moment; before the circle in the likeness of man; and visit me in peace. And in the ineffable name Tetragrammaton Iehovah, I say, Obey! whose mighty sound being exalted in power the pillars are divided, the winds of the firmament groan aloud; the sire burns not; the Earth moves in Earthquakes; and all things of the house of Heaven and Earth and the dwelling-place of darkness are as Earthquakes, and are in torment, and are confounded in thunder. Come forth, O Spirit Gusion, in a moment: let thy dwelling-place be empty, apply unto us the secrets of Truth and obey my power. Come forth, visit us in peace, appear unto my eyes; be friendly: Obey the living breath! For I stir thee up in the name of God of Truth who liveth for ever, Helioren. Obey the living breath, therefore continually unto the end as my thoughts appear to my eyes: therefore be friendly: speaking the secrets of Truth in voice and in understanding. Let it be so, Truefold, whatever ill news has come to us we will hear it together. He put is arm round his wife’s waist. Both were pale as marble, both stood in stony stillness waiting for the bow that was to fall upon them. It is said that perhaps you will see a glimpse of Mrs. Winchester and Mr. Winchester, Sr., while on tour, if you repeat the invocation thirteen times before your visit. Life is broken for her, there hah passed a glory from Earth, and that upon all pleasures and joys of this World she looks with the solemn calm of one for whom all things are dark with the shadow of a great sorrow. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
We’re one week away from Friday the 13th! Missed out on tickets for Flashlight Tours? Don’t worry, we have ghoulishly fun plans All Hallows’ Eve 👻🎃🍿🏠
All Hallows’ Eve:
👉 link in bio. 🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
The Most Beautiful Adventures are Not those We Go to Seek!
Powerful ideas do not die with those who gave them birth, as long as those seeds are planted in their followers. At this point in history, Jesus is surrounded with flocks wherever He is, but all is not well. Sometimes one will feel that one is being led into an experience, a mood, or an idea. At other times one may feel oneself being drawn inward quite deeply as if the very roots of one’s egoic being were penetrated; more rarely as if one has been drawn beyond the ego itself. When this consciousness takes hold of a human, it takes one by surprise. Infinity is so utterly different from what one was experiencing a few minutes earlier that its wonder, its truth, its beauty, its love fills one abruptly, as if in descent from the skies. The element of surprise and the delight of novelty are present and give the Glimpse its rapturous turn. The glimpse may come to one with a suddenness which makes the surrounding circumstances quite incongruous. The glimpse takes you unawares. When the humor of a particular situation or scene, happening or idea strikes a person one may burst out into sudden laughter. It is not long-forming but explosive, not built-up like a wall brick-by-brick but flashed across the darkness like lighting. One’s mind has this possibility of an abrupt move, and unexpected leap. Just so does it still possess this same possibility with regard to the discovery of truth. Enlightenment is always “sudden” in the sense that during meditation or reverie or relaxation the preliminary thought-concentrating gustatory period usually moves through consciousness quite slowly until, at some unexpected moment, there is an abrupt deepening, followed by a slipping into another dimension, a finding oneself alive in a new atmosphere. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
A passing sign of progress in arousing latent forces and a physical indication that one is on the eve of noteworthy mystical experience may be a sudden unexpected vibratory movement in the region of the abdomen, in the solar plexus. It usually comes when one has been relaxed for a short time from the daily cares, or after retiring to bed for the night. The diaphragmatic muscle will appear to tremble violently and something will seem to surge to and fro like a snake behind the solar plexus. This bodily agitation will soon subside and be followed by a pleasant calm and out of this calm there will presently arise a sense of unusual power, of heightened control over the terrestrial nature and human self. With this there may also come a clear intuition about some truth needed at the time and a revelatory expansion of consciousness into supersensual reality. These moods descend without invitation and depart without permission. This is the crucial point when ordinary compulsive mental activity fades away and stillness supervenes, perhaps very briefly, perhaps for some minutes. For some time, one is tense with the feeling of being about to receive a new revelation. Many are happy to make the trip to the Heavenly Kingdom, but few there are who will cart and haul that cross of Jesus’s. Many enjoy the sweet sentiments He utters, but few, that tart words He sometimes has to say. Many will wolf down the food with the Famous Man, as Jesus son of Sirach put it in his Book of Wisdom (6.10), but few will join Him in the fasts. They are all there in the good times, but few will take on the tough tasks He inevitably asks. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Yes, many like to be seen breaking bread with Jesus but, as Matthew has described (20.22), they are nowhere to be found when the passion cup is passed. Many are wowed by His miracles; few are wooed by His cross. Many just love chatting with Jesus so long as He is not rude about their not embracing His rood. What is the moral? Many praise Jesus Christ and bless Him as long as the good times roll. However, when He absents Himself for a few moments or just goes off for a while to pray, they become bellicose, then lachrymose, then comatose. We should love Jesus for His own sweet sake, and not because of any magic He will do in our behalf. And so when the bad times rock, we will bless Him as though the good times had never left. Even if He will never want to give us consolation again, we will still praise Him and thank Him for what He once did. Here are some questions for us. How can the love of Jesus, pure as it is, have no particular price tag, not terrestrial taint? Can those who spend all their time hunting down consolations not be called mercenaries? Are not those who think of nothing but their own comfort and profit hoarders of stuff rather than lovers of Christ? Can anyone be found who wants to serve God without counting the cost? Some considerations. Rare is the person who is so spiritual that one is denuded oneself of every material thing! Is there anyone who is truly poor in spirit and bereft of every creaturely thing? Can any of us be discovered whose interior life is like the Proverbial “gift of great price from a foreign land” (31.10)? If a Devout gave all one’s substance, that is good, but it is not everything. If one’s penitential practices were punishing and public, that is good too, but one still has a long way to go. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
If one understands all knowledge, that is fine, but there is so much more to know. “If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angles, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or clanging cymbal,” reports 1 Corinthians 13.1. Even if one has great virtue and indeed flaming devotion, it is still a long way to Purgatory. Why? For one has one step farther to go and according to Luke 10.41-42, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed.” It is the most important step of all. What is that? That one leave behind not only all created things, but also oneself. That is to say, dump one’s selfish pride by the side of the road. Empty out one’s petty pockets. And when one has done all this, which one knows has yet to be done, then and only then will one come to the realization that of oneself one is nothing. One day we ay come to think we are rather skilled in the service of the Lord. Some of our peers may even encourage us to think we are slick. However, even if there is some truth to it, we should still describe ourselves as just another clumsy oaf. “When you have done everything that is required of you, repeat after me,” Revealed Truth has spoken in the Gospel of Luke, “we are truly the bumbling and stumbling servants,” (17.10). We have to be truly poor in body and spirit before we can say with the Psalmist, “Yes, I am a leper, and a pauper too” (25.16). Nevertheless, no one is richer or stronger than the person who knows how to leave one’s material self and all one’s trash behind and place oneself on the rutted, deeply rutted, road to Humbletown. Each glimpse is not just a repeat performance, it is a fresh new experience. Each time the glimpse comes, it is as if it had never come before, so fresh, so sparkling is its never-failing wonder. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The higher awareness comes on imperceptibly and little by little. However, as it silently gathers itself, like a cloud, it also breaks like a renovating cloud—vehement, sparkling, and splashing. The belief, which prevails in Japan, China, and other lands, in a sudden abrupt enlightenment when one thinks quietly or says aloud, “Ah! so this is IT,” has a factual basis. This satori, as the Japanese call it, may be either a temporary or a permanent glimpse. The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to see. Such is the coming of a glimpse—at the moment of arrival, unsought. Although such glimpses come mostly when a human is alone, come in quiet solitude, they need not do so. They have sometimes come to one in a crowded street or on a well-filled ship. The signs of this visitation are not always the same. It may delicately brush one with the feeling of its presence or forcefully stimulate one with the strength of its being. The beginner usually has to go through an emotional experience in order to receive a mystical experience, but the proficient is under no necessity to do so. It comes into the orb of one’s awareness as an unstruggled and unsensational happening, so easily, so smoothly, that there is no dramatic emotion. The sensitive informed and experienced person may get intimations, may feel the glimpse coming even before the actual joyous event. In tat moment one feels on the very verge of eternity, about to lose oneself in its impersonal depths. When the opportunity to gain a glimpse of one’s Overself draws near, it will be foreshadowed by certain happenings, either of an inward or an outward nature, or both. The book of life may be understood in two senses. In one sense as the inscription of those who are chosen to life; thus we now speak of the book of life. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
In another sense the inscription of those things which lead us to life ay be called the book of life; and this also is twofold, either as of things to be done; and thus the Old and New Testament are called a book of life; or of things already done, and thus that divine energy by which it happens that to each one one’s deeds will be recalled to memory, is spoken of as the book of life. Thus that also may be called the book of war, whether it contains the names inscribed of those chosen for military service; or treats of the art of warfare, or relates the deeds of soldiers. It is the custom to inscribe, not those who are rejected, but those who are chosen. Whence there is no book of death corresponding to reprobation; as the book of life to predestination. Predestination and the book of life are different aspects of the same thing. For this latter implies the knowledge of predestination. The book of life implies a conscription or a knowledge of those chosen to life. Now a human is chosen for something which does not belong to one by nature; and again that to which a human is chosen has the aspect of an end. For a soldier is not chosen or inscribed merely to put on armor, but to fight; since this is the proper duty to which military service is directed. However, the life of glory is an end exceeding human nature. Wherefore, strictly speaking, the book of life regards the life of glory. The divine life, even considered as a life of glory, is natural to God; whence in His regard there is no election, and in consequence no book of life; for we do not say that anyone is chosen to possess the power of sense, or any of those things that are consequent on nature. For there is no election, nor a book of life, as regard the life of nature. The life of grace has the aspect, no of an end, but of something directed towards an end. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Hence nobody is said to be chosen to the life of grace, except so far as the life of grace is directed to glory. For this reason those who, possessing grace, fail to obtain glory, are not said to be chosen simply, but relatively. Likewise they are not said to be written in the book of life simply, but relatively; that is to say, hat it is in the ordination and knowledge of God that they are to have some relation to eternal life, according to their participation in grace. “Let them be blotted out from the book of living,” reports Psalms 68.29. Some have said that none could be blotted out of the book of life as a matter of fact, but only in the opinion of humans. For it is customary in the Scriptures to say that something is done when it becomes known. Thus some are said to be written in the book of life, inasmuch as humans think they are written therein, on account of the present righteousness they see in them; but when it becomes evident, either in this World or in he next, that they have fallen from that state of righteousness, they are then said to be blotted out. And thus a gloss explains the passage: “Let them be blotted out of the book of the living.” However, because not to be blotted out of the book of life is placed among the rewards of the just according to the text, “One that shall overcome, shall thus be clothed in white garments, and I will not blot one’s name out of the book of life,” reports Apocalypse 3.5. And what is promised to holy humans, is not merely something in the opinion of humans, it can therefore be said that to be blotted out, and not blotted out, of the book of life is not only to be referred to the opinion of humans, but to the reality of the fact. For the book of life is not only to be referred to the opinion of humans, but to the reality of the fact. For the book of life is the inscription of those ordained to eternal life, to which one is directed from two sources; namely, from predestination, which direction never fails, and from grace; for whoever has grace, by this very fact becomes fitted for eternal life. This direction fails sometimes; because some are directed by possessing grace, to obtain eternal life, yet they fail to obtain it through moral sin. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Therefore those who are ordained to possess eternal life through divine predestination are written down in the book of life simply, because they are written therein to have eternal life in reality; such are never blotted out from the book of life. Those, however, who are ordained to eternal life, not through divine predestination, but through grace, are said to be written in the book of life not simply, but relatively, for they are written therein not to have eternal life in itself, but in its cause only. Yet though these latter can be said to be blotted out of the book of life, this blotting out must not be referred to God, as if God foreknew a thing, and afterwards knew it not; but to the thing known, namely, because God knows one is first ordained to eternal life, and afterwards not ordained when one falls from grace. The act of blotting out does not refer to the book of life as regards God’s foreknowledge, as if in God there were any change; but as regards things foreknown, which can change. Although things are immutably in God, yet in themselves they are subject to change. To this it is that the blotting out of the book of life refers. The way in which one is said to be blotted out of the book of life is that in which one is said to be written therein anew; either in the opinion of human, or because one begins again to have relation towards eternal life through grace; which also is included in the knowledge of God, although not anew. Probability is founded on the presumption of a resemblance between those objects of which we have had experience and those of which we have had none; and therefore it is impossible that this presumption can arise from probability. The argument up to date shows that miracles are possible and that there is nothing antecedently ridiculous in the stories which say that God has sometimes performed them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
This does not mean, of course, hat we are committed to believing all stories of miracles. Most stories about miraculous events are probably false: if it comes to that, most stories about natural events are false. Lies, exaggerations, misunderstandings and hearsay make up perhaps more than half of all that is said and written in the World. We must therefore find a criterion whereby to judge any particular story of the miraculous. In one sense, of course, our criterion is plain. Those stories are to be accepted for which the historical evidence is sufficiently good. However, then, as we saw at the outset, the answer to the question, “How much evidence should we require for this story,” depends on our answer to the question, “How far is this story intrinsically probable?” We must therefore find a criterion of probability. The ordinary procedure of the modern historian, even if one admits the possibility of miracle, is to admit no particular instance of it until every possibility of “natural” explanation has been tried and failed. That is, one will accept the most improbable “natural” explanations rather than say that a miracle occurred. Collective hallucinations, hypnotism of unconsenting spectators, widespread instantaneous conspiracy in lying by persons not otherwise known to be liars and not likely to gain by the lie—all these are known to be very improbably events: so improbably that, except for the special purpose of excluding a miracle, they are never suggested. However, they are preferred to be the admission of a miracle. Such a procedure is, from the purely historical point of view, sheer midsummer madness unless we start by knowing that any Miracles whatever is more improbable than the most improbable natural event. Do we know this? We must distinguish the different kinds of improbability. Since miracles are, by definition, rarer than other events, it is obviously improbable beforehand that one will occur at any given place and time. In that sense every miracle is improbable. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
It is immensely improbable beforehand that a pebble dropped from the stratosphere over London will hit any given spot, or that any one particular person will win a large lottery. However, the report that the pebble has landed outside such and such a shop or that Mr. So-and-So has won the lottery is not at all incredible. When you consider the immense number of meetings and fertile union between ancestors which were necessary in order that you should be born, you perceive that it was once immensely improbable that such a person as you should come to exist: but one you are here, the report of your existence is not in the least incredible. With probability of this kind—antecedent probability of chances—we are not there concerned. Our business is with historical probability. Ever since Hume’s famous Essay it has been believed that historical statements about miracles are the most intrinsically improbable of all historical statements. According to Hume, probability rests on what may be called the majority vote of our past experiences. The more often a thing has been known to happen, the more probable it is that it should happen again; and the less often the less probable. Now the regularity of Nature’s course, says Hume, is supported by something better than the majority vote of past experiences: it is supported by their unanimous vote, or, as Hume says, by “firm and unalterable experience.” There is, in fact, “uniform experience” against Miracle; otherwise, says Hume, it would not be a Miracle. A miracle is therefore the most improbable of all events. It is always more probable that the witnesses were lying or mistaken than that a miracle occurred. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Now of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely “uniform experience” against miracles, if in other words they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle. There is also an objection to Hume which leads us deeper into our problem. The whole idea of Probability (as Hume understands it) depends on the principle of the Uniformity of Nature. Unless Nature always goes on in the same way, the fact that a thing had happened ten million times would not make it a whit more probable that it would happen again. And how do we know the Uniformity of Nature? A moment’s thought shows that we do not know it by experience. We observe many regularities in Nature. However, of course all the observations that humans have made or will make while the race lasts cover only a minute fraction of the events that actually go on. Our observations would therefore be of no use unless we felt sure that Nature when we are no watching her behaves in the same way as when we are: in other words, unless we believed in the Uniformity of Nature. Experience therefore cannot prove uniformity, because uniformity has to be assumed before experience proves anything. And mere length of experience does not help matters. It is no good saying, “Each fresh experience confirms our belief in uniformity and therefore we reasonably expect that it will always be confirmed”; for that argument works only on the assumption of Uniformity under a new name. Can we say that Uniformity is at any rate very probable? Unfortunately not. We have just seen that all probabilities depend on it. Unless Nature is uniform, nothing is either probable or improbable. And clearly the assumption which you have to make before there is any such thing as probability cannot itself be probable. The odd thing is that no human knew this better than Hume. His Essay on Miracles is quite inconsistent with the more radical, and honourable, scepticism of his main work. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Throughout the Second Wave era the mass media grew more and more powerful. Today a startling change is taking place. As the Third Wave thunders in, the mass media, far from expanding their influence, are suddenly being forced to share it. They are being beaten back on many fronts at once by what I call the “de-massified media.” Newspapers provide the first example. The oldest of the Second Wave mass media, newspapers are losing their readers and staff. The estimated total U.S. daily newspaper circulation (print and digital combined) in 2020 was 24.3 million for weekday and 25.8 million for Sunday, each down by 6 percent from the previous year. Nor were such losses due merely to the rise of television. Each of today’s mass-circulation dailies now faces increasing competition from burgeoning flock of mini-circulation weeklies, biweeklies, and so-called “shoppers” that serve not the metropolitan mass market but specific neighbourhoods and communities within it, providing far more localized advertising and news. Having reached saturation, the big-city mass-circulation daily is in deep trouble. De-massified media are snapping at its heels. The United States of America has experienced and explosion of electronic journals and mini-magazines—thousands of them aimed at small, special-interest, regional, global, or even local markets. And it is not all bad news. Their programs focus on things their producers like. They are not really targeting an audience, but producing and sharing things they are interested and that they believe will help others, so their content is not the same as the doom and gloom of the mass media, which people find appealing because no one wants made to feel sad, fearful or anxious. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
For instance, pilots and aviation buffs today can chose among literally scores of periodicals edited just foe them. Teenagers, scuba divers, retired people, women athletes, collectors of antique camera, tennis enthusiasts, skiers, and skateboarders each have their own press. Every organization, community group, political or religious cult and cultlet today can afford to produce is own publication. Even smaller groups churn out periodicals on the Internet that have become ubiquitous in American and International offices, homes, and classrooms. The news media and magazines have lost their powerful influence in national life, especially with people trying to safe trees and also the fact people now know news is not necessarily true nor honest work. It is entertainment which is trying to compete with fictional television shows. Many people, however, have the intentions to maintain the peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to one, and prefers on every occasion the public utility to one’s own interest. Between the 1920s and the end of the second World War, the very limited amount of African American suburbanization generally took one of two forms. The first was the all-African American suburb. Almost all of these suburbs were poor, and the majority were unincorporated. In the south, it was common for non-European Americas to live in small hamlets and less-developed areas on the city’s periphery. These low-income shantytown neighbourhoods often even lacked community water and sewage and were suburban in name only. While such small communities were technically in the suburbs, socially and economically they were not of the suburbs. An example of this type of suburb was the African American suburb of Kinloch, 6 miles outside the city limits of St. Louis. Kinloch, surrounded by more affluent European America suburbs, did not become incorporated until 1948. It was typical of early African American suburbs insofar as because of a limited tax base, it had poor school, potholed roads, and minimal government services. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The roads from Ferguson, the suburb east of Kinloch, actually stopped short of Kinloch at an overgrown easement only to start up again on the Kinloch side of the border. As late as 1970 some of these African American “suburban” neighbourhoods could be seen south of Washington, D.C., across the district line. During the interwar period, some solid working class-African American suburbs also existed, such as Robbins, southwest of Chicago. At this time the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) directly supported segregated housing by refusing to make loans in other than all-one-race areas. Until 1950 FHA regulations specially prohibited making loans that would permit racial integration. The Federal Housing Administration’s official manuals cautioned against infiltration of inharmonious racial and national groups, a lower class of inhabitants, or the presence of incompatible racial elements, in the new neighbourhood. Thus, federal policies prohibited loans that would encourage the integration of neighbourhoods. During World War II, the FHA consistently refused to insure war-housing projects for African American workers. The formal regulations were not changed until the Kennedy years of the early 1960s, and the policies really did not change until the Open Housing Act of 1968 barred housing discrimination. However, the outlawing of discriminatory policies did not eliminate informal practices of racial steering, where African Americans were shown housing only in areas already having African American residents. The second form of African American suburbanization prior to World War II included small communities of African Americans found in the most elite suburbs. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
African Americans living in such suburbs were not equal-status homeowners. Some of them did not have professional jobs. The 1930s census showed, for example, that along Chicago’s prestigious North Shore, 5 percent of Glencoe’s and 4.3 percent of Kenilworth’s residents were African American. Overtime some of the African Americans without professional jobs purchased or built small homes in the less desirable sections of the community. Such African American populations contained the seeds of social change. For example, Evanston, on Chicago’s North Shore, as of 1930 listed 7.8 percent of is population as African American. Evanston as of that date already had a separate aspiring middle-class African American neighbourhood for those working on the North Shore. Overtime this nucleus would grow to be a substantial portion of the Evanston community. One reason for the new interest in human spirituality is that its source in intuition is radically different from the rational, densely factual nature of science and therefore generates feelings. New Age Spirituality—alternative and usually individualistic forms of spiritual consciousness illustrated by New Age bookstore sections—feeds off both waning of communal religion and the advance of science. In an age where many religions—and ever more—coexist, religious dogma may seem less credible. Yet science fails to answer our ultimate questions: Why are we here? How should be live? What is our ultimate destiny? If the old faith seems unbelievable and the new science seems to demystify life, then people will find mystery and meaning in new places. It has been said that when some people cease believing in Gog, they do not believe nothing, they believe anything. Nature abhors a spiritual vacuum. The quest for meaning is fundamental to our being. The human mind has a genuine desire to plumb the depths of the unspoken, to find deeper significance and truth, to reach out to another realm of existence. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
New Age “soft spirituality” is essentially irreligious. “I am not religious,” one hears, “but I am very spiritual.” This is the privatized spirituality of radical individualism, the solo spirituality of pop cultural. This is the spirituality of religion, minus the things one does not like about religion, such as the authoritative status of sacred texts and communally shared beliefs. New Age spirituality differs from biblical spirituality not only in its individualism but also in its understanding of human nature. Biblical spirituality places its most basic distinction between all of creation (both people and animals) and God who is creator. In the Old Testament book of Isaiah God declares, “I am God; there is none like me.” The Holy Spirit is given to provide us with a deeper knowledge of both God and a wisdom that goes beyond rational and scientific forms of knowing. However, biblical spirituality still maintains the distinction between God and mortal, finite humans. New Age spirituality replies that we are emanations of God: The divine is within you. You are immortal. You are a soul who inhabits your body, and thus able to travel out of body, read others’ minds, and glimpse the future. Your spirit or soul may also have inhabited another being, and may again be reincarnated in someone to come. You are undying and capable of communicating with those who, also undying, have passed to the other side, the spirit World. You do not need God to give you hope of life beyond death, because there is no death. You are already an eternal spirit. At your body’s death, you will meet a gentle being of light (which already had been experienced by those near-death survivours whose spirits temporarily vacated their bodies). #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
New Age spirituality offers other comforting messages. Angels protect us. There are no fortunate random coincidences, but rather angelic or divine interventions. Evil is not real (though some are spiritually impoverished). Fear, loneliness, and pain can be dismissed. Given positive attitudes, optimum health, serene bliss, and joy of pleasures of the flesh awaits us. And then there is the New Age elevation of intuition. IF you feel it, it is true. Truth is much less a matter of logic and verification than of personal experience and testimony. Neale Donald Walsch illustrates this radical individualism in his disdain for history and community and in his elevation of the individua self. Walsch has had “conversations with God” (so reads the title of the book he has written), and here is what God says: The wisdom of faith traditions is “not authoritative.” So “listen to your feelings. Listen to your Highest Thoughts. Listen to your experience. Whenever any one of these differ from what you have been told by your teachers, or read in your book, forget the words.” We are being held together by some kind of bonding or gluing, or held together by some central unifying force that rules the other parts and holds them together as the force of gravity does or the focus around which perspectives organize themselves—such a power, central and hierarchically organized, is postulated by Plato and has been the most generally accepted metaphor in Western thought from its beginnings. No doubt there are minds almost entirely held together in one or other of these ways. As a rule, however, which metaphor is most useful at any time depends on a number of factors: the kind of person under discussion, the kind of structures which are falling apart, and so on. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
When we think of neural connections, and when we think of the association of ideas, we tend to think of structures held together by connecting bonds. Neural connections exemplify this kind of cohesion. Sense-impressions build up into perceptions, which integrate into concepts and ever more complex structures. Variations in integration and coherence are seen to determine structure so that the very nature of structure could be defined in terms of bonds—there are more neural associations within a structure than between structures. Regions of the personality are bonded together more or less strongly depending on the number of associations between them. The number of associations determines the extent of integration. A relative absence of associations defines a gap or fissure—the fewer the associations, the wider the split. As anyone knows who has glued things, the things to be stuck together need to be held firmly in a kind of frame until the glue holds. Then the frame is no longer needed. The concepts of boundary and space are boundaries and frames of this kind. Frames provide restrictions or limitations which can be used to further the integration within. A picture must be painted on a certain canvas; a poem must be written in sonnet form. Within the frame there is space for a creative live. When there is a frame that gives space and protection, all the resonances and echoes and reverberation of an individual’s experiences have time to work themselves out. They do not get lost; they are not cut off prematurely. Ego-relatedness normally provides a frame. It provides the safety within which various experiences may come to be connected and associated, although they occurred at different times in different contexts. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Good parenting provides the frame within which psychological associations can ramify and become strong. In this way, good parenting leads to personalities which have strong and well-integrated structures. With less ego-relatedness, the individual has less space and time to get this inter-connecting process going, and so it retains more dissociated experiences. When people experience themselves as lacking a containment, something is rushing through them—a noise, a sensation, an impression—which they cannot hold on to. This sense, of something rushing through, may be how we experience unintegrated sensory streams of unprocessed uncontained stimulation. It is what falling apart sometimes feels like: what is going on does not make sense to us. Not making sense is the same as not being organized into a meaningful pattern. Or we may be unable to find a framework of meaning into which to organize what is happening. Boundaries seems to facilitate organization; insecure boundaries seem often to hinder it. There is an interesting connection between uncontained state and the autistic individual’s desperate clutching of hard objects. In some states of mind, holding one to something with firm contour might feel much like being something with firm contours. The common element would be there is something firm for holding something formless. Firm contours seem to be needed, whether they belong to the infant (in us) or they belong to whatever the individual feels held and contained by. Whether the something firm is my skin or yours seems less important than the fact that it prevents me feeling a rushing shapeless flowing away. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The function of the boundary frame are reminiscent of Pribram’s “bag of skin,” and Winnicott’s “membrane.” Our skins provide a compelling metaphor for such holding functions, more flexible and organic than the idea of a frame. The skin protects. The vulnerable skinless self and its care, means that especially when an infant, something or someone is needed to give one space and protect against impingement from without, and also from within—from loneliness, pain, rage. Failure in the holding environment, perhaps because of illness in the mother (or caregiver), can mean that the individual’s line of life is interrupted and its development hindered by the need for defence against primitive anxiety. However, it can also be seen that failure of the father to protect the mother in the crucial weeks after one’s birth can contribute to this state of affairs. If the circle made by the father, or by some person fulfilling the father’s function is broken, the mother cannot abandon herself without anxiety to her infant’s needs. The parents, who are normally the child’s holding environment, may at times be fiercely tested, especially at times when feelings are strong. Once again, we have reached a set of ideas where parallels can be perceived between what good parents do and what psychotherapists do. The reader has probably practiced at recognizing these passages by now. It is important that whoever hold the infant (of the older child or the adolescent or the adult) is strong enough to hold on to, either to prevent explosion and fragmentation, or to form the framework for such disintegration and for subsequent integration. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
The survival of the mother who does not retaliate, together with the father who comes to represent the indestructible environment, allows for freedom of the instinctual life—the source of spontaneity—within the family circle. In the earliest days, it is the caring adult whose insightful and coping skills protect, as with a shielding skin, the helpless and defenceless infant. In favourable circumstances, however, these functions will gradually be taken over by the competent developing infant. Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden, suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood. Please teach us to care and not to care. Please teach us to sit still, even among these rocks. Our peace in one’s will and even among these rocks, sister, mother, and spirit of the river, spirit of the sea. Please suffer me not to be separated and please let my cry come unto Thee. O inscribe all the children of Thy covenant for a happy life. May all the living do homage unto Thee forever and praise Thy name in truth, O God, who are our salvation and our help. Blessed be Thou, O Lord, Beneficent One, unto whom our thanks are due. Grant lasting peace unto America Thy people, for Thou art the Sovereign Lord of peace; and may it be good in Thy sight to bless Thy people America at all times with Thy peace. In this book of life, blessing, peace and ample sustenance, may we, together with all Thy people, the house of America, be remembered and inscribed before Thee for a happy life and for peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who establisest peace. In every system throughout antiquity there is an ascetic preliminary side which purifies the mind and the body and then only does meditation start. Without such purification, that is, asceticism, all the dangers of meditation—hallucination, misuse of occult powers, egotistic fancies, mediumship, and so on—are free to raise, but with it there is better protection against them. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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A Thousand things May Happen to Bring Your Marriage to Mr. Winchester to an End!
Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven. He went wining through the darkness of the cosmos. He flew fast and hard, not stopping to fool around with the stars and planets scattered in his path like grains of diamond dust. He passed the Milk Way without even going in for a dip, passing it up for the sake of his mission. Satan had come to persuade poor creatures to give their souls to the Devil, but he will bewitch many people to death, and their faces will turn towards God as their blood cries for vengeance against him, begging to be clothed in white robes in Heaven when Satan is cast into Hell. The time of the old cults is returning. There are people who can repeat conversation to others and make them believe that they know it not from eavesdropping but from occult powers. Reverend George Burroughs, who had been minister of Salem Village from 1680 to 1682 bewitched many people to death, including his own first two wives. The fist he smothered and the second he strangled, and nobody seemed to notice that their specters differed about the means by which the supposed murders were done. Reverend Burroughs often would tell people, “My God makes known your thoughts unto me,” both he and his hearers understood his god to be the Devil; the Christian God does not deal in the occult, particularly at the level of family gossip, but the Devil does. When people are in the clutch of malignant demons, they are bound to die. Dr. Harold M. Johnson, a Hawaiian physician, reported both severe skin lesion and death among victims of Kahuna sorcerers. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
However, he had succeeded in curing bewitched patients by giving them methylene blue tablets, which turned their urine blue and persuades them that a powerful countercharm has been worked on their behalf. Witchcraft deaths have been reported for a very long time, yet it is only recently that they have received serious medical attention. Most of the physical effects of witchcraft are attributable to hysteria, but not death. However, people do not die from hysteria, but death. Like the hysterical symptoms of bewitchment, begins with the victim’s fear of the witch’s power. Dr. Walter B. Cannon of Harvard Medical School published an article entitled “Voodoo Death,” in which he began by acknowledging that “the phenomenon is so extraordinary and so foreign to the experience of civilized people that it seems incredible.” In all cases, death comes inexorably and in a relatively short time. As one observer put it, “the victims die…as though their strength ran out as water.” The only know cure was a countercharm, and when this was successfully employed, recovery was so rapid and complete that Western observers found it remarkable. Dr. Cannon suggested that witchcraft death might well be a genuine phenomenon, and also put forward a hypothetical explanation. “It may be explained,” he thought, “as due to shocking emotional stress—to obvious or repressed terror.” It would occur, he felt, chiefly in primitive cultures, “among human beings to primitive, so superstitious, so ignorant that they are bewildered strangers in a hostile World. Instead of knowledge they have a fertile and unrestricted imagination which fills their environment with all manner of evil spirits capable of affecting their lives disastrously.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
It was believed that these humans may be dying of psychogenic deaths as were the victims of witchcraft. However, Dr. Cannon had suggested that fear might be the emotional cause, with consequent overstimulation of the sympathicoadrenal system, accelerated of the heartbeat, and death with the heart contracted in in systole. However, Dr. Curt P. Richter found that while acceleration of the heartbeat was the initial reaction, it was shortly followed by a steady, gradual decrease in rate, with the heart eventually stopping in diastole, like a run-down clock. This meant that the emotional cause of death was not fear but hopelessness, produced by one’s conviction that there was no possible means of escape, with consequent overstimulation of the parasympathetic rather than the sympathic-coadrenal system. However, when people are removed from fearful situation in hasty fashion, they know their situation is not hopeless. So, they will not die psychogenic deaths. If individuals about to die a psychogenic death were removed from the situation they recovered rapidly, like human victims who have been reprieved by a countercharm. In short, Dr. Richter found that the first response in such cases was fear but that the emotional cause of death was hopelessness that succeeded fear, and that death could be prevented either by restoring hope or by training the subject to be hopeful in a particular situation. Therefore, prayer may very well save countless lives by removing fear and giving people who. This is probably also why stress has been noted to kill people and cause disease, it stresses the body and causes it to attack itself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Stress and fear may prolong and make medical conditions worse and could very well facilitate in killing a person if it is ongoing and not resolved, and a person cannot find help. Dr. R. S. Fisher, corner of the City of Baltimore, who had found that “a number of individuals die each year after taking small, definitely sublethal doses of poison, or after inflicting small, nonlethal wounds on themselves; apparently they die as a result of the belief in their doom.” Dr. Richter’s findings throw much new light on the history of Massachusetts witchcraft. They should enable us at long last to take as seriously as it deserves Cotton Mather’s detailed account of his treatment of the Goodwin girl. When he gave her religious sustenance by spelling the crucial words she was unable to hear spoken, he may have been saving his patient from much more than convulsive fits. By giving her continued hope he may literally have been keeping her alive. Dr. Richter’s findings also explain the frequent reports of death in both European and American witchcraft cases. There are about a dozen such reports in the documents of Salem witchcraft, but in most instances one cannot be at all certain of the actual cause of death. Even when death does appear to be psychogenic it is usually impossible to say whether the victim’s hopelessness was simply a result of private fears or whether those fears had their origin in a specific magical act. And if the testimony concerning Roger Toothaker and his daughter may be taken at face value—and there is reason to believe it may—we have one case of murder by witchcraft—one case in which occult means were used to take a human life away. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Some people have become blasé to strange manifestations. When you consort with the occult, out-of-body experiences are like your daily bread and butter. We have special preparation for those who want their loved one’s memories restored. However, many do not use it, because they often find their beloved more charming without memories, and therefore without a clue as to what to scold about, at least for a while. Though Mrs. Sarah Winchester had a comfortable home, a home of a god as vast and resounding as the sea, and loving hearts around her, she wore a grave, melancholy look on her face. A disappointment! Yes, the old story of a lost love and new born baby is the reason for Mrs. Winchester’s looks. She had good offers often; but since she lost the love of her heart, she had never indulged in the happy dream of loving and being loved. The grave look, which was habitual with her, was a rare thing in her young and happy days, and passed over her face sometimes when she thought no one was looking. Before his death, Mr. Winchester had been persuaded to sit for his portrait. It was a fair likeness, but a very modern work of art. The background was so very dark, and Mr. Winchester’s naval costume was so deep in colour, that the face came out too white and staring. It was a three-quarter picture; but only one hand showed in it, gripping indisputably one of the most spectacular and historic of all Winchesters, number 14327. As George said, he looked much more like the commander of a Venetian galley than a modern mate. However, the picture pleased Mrs. Winchester. So the picture was duly framed—in a tremendously heavy frame, of Mr. Winchester’s ordering—and hung up in the dining-room. Mr. Winchester’s Father, Oliver, was a gunmaker, politician, clothing maker, and sailor by profession. He sailed the great and mysterious sea, and had been especially known as a good Arctic sailor, having share more than one expedition in search of the North Pole and the North-West Passage. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
It was no surprise when William Winchester wanted to go out for a voyage in search of his cousin Robert and his missing expedition. And now the time for William’s departure was growing nearer. The USS Jeannette was nearly ready to sail, and her crew only waited orders. The officers grew acquainted with each other before sailing, which was an advantage. Mr. Winchester took up very warmly with the commander, George W. De Long, and, with permission, brough him to dinner once or twice. Poor chap, he had no friends nearer than New York, and it is precious lonely work. So George came to dinner at the Winchester Estate in New Haven, Connecticut. However, Mrs. Winchester was not favourably impressed by him, and almost wished she had no consented to his invite. He was a tall, pale, fair young man, with a hard New York face and a cold, grey eye. There was something in his expression, too, that was unpleasant—something cruel or crafty, or both. It was in very bad taste for him to pay such marked attention to Mrs. Winchester, coming, as he did, as a friend of her husband. George kept by her constantly and anticipated Mr. Winchester in all the little attentions which a husband delights to pay. Mr. Winchester was a little put out about it, though he said nothing, attributing his friend’s offence to lack of breeding. Mrs. Winchester did not like it at all. She knew that she was not to have Mr. Winchester with her much longer, and she was anxious to have him to herself as much as possible. But as George was her husband’s friend, she bore the infliction with the best possible patience. The commander did not seem to perceive in the least that he was interfering where he had no business. He was quite self-possessed and happy, with one exception. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
The portrait of Mr. Winchester seemed to annoy George. He had uttered a little impatient exclamation when he first saw it which drew Mrs. Winchester’s attention to hi; and she noticed that he tried to avoid looking at it. At last, when dinner came, he was told to sit exactly facing the picture. He hesitated for an instant and then sat down, but almost immediately rose again. “It’s very childish and that sort of thing,” he stammered, “but I cannot sit opposite that picture. I know nothing about art, but it is one of those unpleasant pictures whose eyes follow you about the room. I have inherited horror of such pictures. My mother married against her father’s will, and when I was born she was so ill she was hardly expected to live. When she was sufficiently recovered to speak without delirious rambling she implored them to remove a picture of my grandfather that hung in the room, and which she vowed made threatening faces at her. It’s superstitious, but constitutional—I have a horror of such paintings!” I believe Mr. Winchester thought this a ruse of his friend’s to get a seat next to Mrs. Winchester; but it sure was not, for that was a real alarmed expression of his face. Before the ship departed, George has started visiting the Winchester’s more and more each day. He even went as far as to tell Mrs. Winchester that he loved her. He told her that a man could no more help falling in love than he could help taking a fever. Mrs. Winchester stood upon her dignity and rebuked him as if he was Satan; but he told her he could see no harm in telling her of his passion, though he knew it was a hopeless one. “A thousand things may happen,” he said at last, “to bring your marriage to Mr. Winchester to an end. Then perhaps you will not forget that another love you!” The butler was very angry, and was forthwith going to give him his opinion on his conduct, when Mrs. Winchester told him he was gone, that she had bade him go and had forbidden him the house. She had only told the butler in order to protect herself, for she did not intend to say anything to Mr. Winchester, for fear it should lead to a duel or some other violence. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
That was the last Mrs. Winchester saw of George De Long before the Jeannette expedition. Mr. Winchester came the same evening, and was home until daybreak, when he had to tear himself away and join his ship. After shaking hugging Mrs. Winchester at the door, in the cold, grey, drizzly dawn, Mrs. Winchester went inside and started sobbing on the sofa. She could not help starting when she looked at Mr. Winchester’s portrait. The strange light of daybreak could hardly account for the extraordinary pallor of the face. The picture was covered with moisture, and he looked so pale. The Jeannette sailed. Mrs. Winchester received two letters from Mr. Winchester, which he had taken the opportunity of sending by homeward-bound whalers. In the second he said it was hardly likely he should have an opportunity of sending another, as they were sailing into high latitudes—into the solitary sea, to which none but expedition ships ever penetrated. They were all in high spirits, he said, for they had encountered very little ice and hoped to find clear water further north than usual. Moreover, he added, George had held a sinecure so far, for there had not been a single case of illness on board. Then came a long silence, and a year crept away very slowly for poor Mrs. Winchester. Once she heard of the expedition from the papers. They were reported as pushing on and progressing favourably by a wandering tribe of Esquimaux with whom the captain of a Russian vessel fell in. They had laid the ship up for the winter, and were taking the boats on sledges, and believed they had met with traces of the lost crews that seemed to show they were on the right track. The winter passed again, and spring came. It was a balmy, bright spring such as they got occasionally, even in the changeable and uncertain climate of theirs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
One evening Mrs. Winchester was sitting in the dining-room with the window open, for, although she had long given up fires, the room was so oppressively warm that she was glad of the breath of the cool evening breeze. Mrs. Winchester was working. Though she never murmured, she was evidently pining at Mr. Winchester’s long absence. The butler was leaning out of the window, studying the evening effect on the fruit blossom, which was wonderfully early and plentiful, the season was so mild. Mrs. Winchester was sitting at the table, near the lamp, reading the paper. Suddenly there swept into the room a chill. It was not a gust of cold wind, for the curtain by the window did not swerve in the least. However, the deathly cold pervaded the room—came, and was gone in an instant. Mrs. Winchester shuddered with an intense icy feeling. She looked up, “How curiously cold it has got all in a minute,” she said. “We are having a taste of poor William’s Polar weather,” she said with a smile. At that moment, she instinctively glanced towards his portrait. When she saw struck her dumb. A rush of blood, at fever heart, dispelled the numbing influence of the chill breath that she seemed to freeze her. The lamp was lighted; but it was only that she might read with comfort, for the violet twilight was still so full of sunset that the room was not dark. However, as she looked at the picture, she saw it had undergone a strange change. She saw it as plainly as possible. It was no delusion, coined for the eye by the brain. In the place of Mr. Winchester’s head, a grinning skull! She started at it hard; but it was no tick of fancy. She could see the hollow orbits, the gleaming teeth, the fleshless cheekbones—it was the head of death! Without saying a word, she rose from her chair and walked straight up to the painting. As she drew nearer a sort of mist seemed to pass before it; and as she stood close to it, she saw only the face of Mr. Winchester. The spectral skull had vanished. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
“Poor William!” she said unconsciously. The butler Robert looked up. The tone of her voice had alarmed him, the expression on her face did not reassure him. “What do you mean? Have you heard anything, Mrs. Winchester? She came over to him, laying her hands on his arm, and looked into his face sadly. “No, my dear; how should I hear? Only I could not help thinking of the privation and discomfort he must have gone through. I was remaindered of it by the cold. “Cold!” said Robert, who had left the window by this time. “Cold! what on Earth are you talking about? Cold, such an evening as this! You must have had a touch of ague, I should think.” Mrs. Winchester felt it bitterly cold for a minute or two. “Did you not feel it, Robert?” “Not for a bit; and I was three parts out of the window I ought to have felt it if anyone did.” It was curious, but that strange chill ad been felt only in the room. It was not the night wind, but some supernatural breath connected with the dread apparition she has seen. It was, indeed, the chill of polar winter—the icy shadow of the frozen North. It was a hot evening and Mrs. Winchester seemed to have caught a violent cold, for she was shivering very much. Mrs. Winchester, felling unwell, had gone to bed. The next day Mrs. Winchester was well again, and did not mentioned the events of the preceding night. However, from that day on she was ever inwardly dreading the arrival of bad news. And at last, it came as expected. The newspaper said there had been a “Fatal Accident to one of the Officers of the USS Jeannette.” It stated that news had been received at Admiralty stating that the expedition had failed to find the missing crew, but had come upon some traces of them. Want of stores and necessaries had compelled them to turn back without following those traces up; but the commander was anxious, as soon as the ship could be refitted, to go out and take up the trail where he left it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
An unfortunate accident had deprived him of one of his most promising officers, Lieutenant Winchester, who was precipitated from an iceberg and killed while out shooting with the commander. He was beloved by all, and his death had flung a gloom over the gallant little troop of explorers. There stood Mrs. Winchester, with her face as pale as death, with her lips apart, and with a blind look about her eyes. The doctor was sent for, and restorative were promptly administered. Mrs. Winchester came to herself again, but lay dangerously ill for some weeks from the shock. It was about a month after she was well enough to come downstairs again. One afternoon shortly after, there came a loud knock at the front door. As Mrs. Winchester looked up at Mr. Winchester’s portrait, puzzling who could it be at the door, she would not figure out if she was dreaming or awake? One hand on the picture used to be resting on a shotgun, but now the forefinger was raised, as if in warning. She looked hard at the picture, to assure herself it was no fancy, and then she perceived, standing out bright and distinct on the pale face, two large drops, as if of blood. She walked up to it, expecting the appearance to vanish, as the skull had done. It did not vanish. It was surely blood. When the butler opened the door, George came in. He was greatly altered. He was thinner and paler than ever; hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked. He had acquired a strange stoop, too, and his eyes had lost the crafty look for a look of terror, like that of a haunted beast. He kept glancing sideways every instant, as if unconsciously. It looked as if he heard someone behind him. Mrs. Winchester never had liked that man. She told him of course she was glad to see him back, but that she could not ask him to continue to visit her. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
Mrs. Winchester was glad to hear the particulars of poor William’s death. He related with reluctance, how they had gone out to shoot a white bear which they had seen on an iceberg stranded along the shore. The top of the berg was ridged like the roof of a house, sloping down on one side to the edge of a tremendous overhanging precipice. They had scrambled along the ridge in order to get nearer the game when Mr. Winchester incautiously ventured on the sloping side. The surface was as smooth and slippery as glass with oil on it. He tried to turn back, but slipped and fell. And then began a horrible scene. But his fate was sealed; and he could only tell George to bring his last farewell to his wife! He clung to the edge of the precipice instinctively for one second, and was gone. However, there was something always at George’s side, which none could see, but which cast a shadow. As they were talking, Mr. Winchesters portrait had fallen, and the corner of the heavy frame had struck him on the head, cutting it open, and rendering him insensible. The staff had carried him upstairs, by the direction of the doctor. He was laid down in the guest room. George was delirious. The doctor said it was a queer case; for, though the blow was a sever one, it was hardly enough to account for the symptoms of brain-fever. When he learnt that George had just retuned in the Jeannette from the North, he said it was possible that the privation and hardship had told on his constitution and sown the seeds of the malady. They sent for a nurse, who was to sit up with him, by the doctor’s directions. In the middle of the night, Mrs. Winchester was roused by a loud scream. She slipped on her slippers and bed coat, and rushed out to find the nurse, who explained the mystery to her. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
It appears that about midnight, George sat up in bed, and began to talk. And he said such terrible things that the nurse became alarmed. Nor was she much reassured when she became aware that the light of her single candle flung what seemed to be two shadows of the sick man on the wall. Terrified beyond measure, she saw George siting up in bed, gazing at the unseen figure to which the shadow belonged. Mrs. Winchester was now in the nurse’s company. In a voice that trembled with emotion, George begged the haunting spirit to leave him, and prayed for its forgiveness. “You know the crime was no premeditated. It was a sudden temptation of the devil that make me shoot you twice. It was the devil tempting me with the recollection of her exquisite face—of the tender love that might have been mine, but for you. Bu she will not listen to me. See, she turned away from me, as if she knew I was your murderer, William Winchester!” Mrs. Winchester was horrified to hear this awful confession. However, George had risen in his delirious terror, opened the window, and leaped out. Two days later his body was found in the river. In 1884, Mrs. Winchester left New Haven, Connecticut, and the graves of her husband and only child, moved to San Jose, California, and began the obsession that was to las for the rest of her life. She purchased an eighteen-room farmhouse outside the small agricultural town, and for the next 38 years, the sound of construction on Mrs. Winchester’s house never stopped. Mrs. Winchester hired carpenters to work around the clock building and rebuilding room after room, as the spirits—or her mood—directed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
Some say the construction had actually started much earlier and went on for centuries, in fact. It is the cobwebs that finally tip some off; and the ancient dust on the cobwebs. Stretched out in this mansion is an entity—it is impossible to tell at a glance whether it is a man or a god, or perhaps something else. The entity seems to be of the masculine persuasion, is of medium height and has medium brown hair flecked with gray. The being sometimes sits on the couch in the parlor, opens his eyes, blinks rapidly several times, then vanishes. The Winchester house was furnished with the finest materials and was a showcase of Victorian elegance and taste. The homes of the gods are bigger, more beautiful, more awe-inspiring. However, no one can say with this is so, since any god can build a house of any size and get any interior decorator one wants. Some says the real architect was William Writ Winchester, reaching out from beyond the grave and building a wedding present for his wife. It just seems to be a quality of the major gods to have an air that is godlier than the less godly air of the minor gods. The house represents the spirit of something entirely new, a new principle, a new life, a new set of values. It gave Mrs. Winchester a feeling of gratitude for the unbending nature of things, which does not demand that we obsess constantly over what is to happen next, but merely put one foot in front of the other until something numinous takes place. Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor: Lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor. Atte ye induynge of ye holy vestures. In the mystery of these vestures of the Holy Ones, I gird up my power in the girdles of righteousness and truth in the power of the Most High: Ancor: Amacor: Amides: Theodonias: Anitor: let be mighty power my power: let it endure for ever: in the power of Adonai, to whom the praise and the glory shall be; whose end cannot be. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Winchester Mystery House
Winchester Mystery House presents 30 Nights of All Hallows’ Eve – our all new Halloween event for Fall 2021! Tickets for All Hallows’ Eve offer multiple estate wide activities including the Lost in the House Tour – a paranormal investigation adventure and the family-friendly Jack O’ Lantern Trail. All Hallows’ Eve offers something for everyone on select nights starting September 10th.
👻 Frightening Lost in the House Tour
🎃 Family Friendly Lighted Displays on the Jack O’ Lantern Trail
🍿 Fall themed food & drinks
🏠 Lost in the House Projection Show using the front of the mansion as a canvas!
and more! https://www.instagram.com/p/CR6y_fFN78M/
For more information and for tickets:
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
The Person Who Desires Eternal Glory is Not Distracted by the Glitter of Time!
Life is full of problems; it is how we deal with them that defines us. Everyone was blessed with the gift of being able to discern what is right and what is wrong. This blessing is called conscience. A person’s conscience is the defense against situations that are spiritually harmful. “For behold, my brethren, it is given unto you to judge, that ye may know good from evil; and the way to judge is as plain, that ye may know with a perfect knowledge, as the daylight is from the dark night. For behold, the Spirit of Christ is given to every human, that one may know good from evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to judge; for every thing which inviteth to do god, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of God. But whatsoever thing persuadeth humans to do evil, and believe not in Christ, and deny Him, and serve not God, then ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of the devil; for after this manner doth the devil work, for he persuadeth no man to do good, no, not one; neither do his angels; neither do they who subject themselves unto him. And now, my brethren, seeing that ye know the light by which ye may judge, which light is the light of Christ, see that ye do no judge wrongfully; for with that same judgment which ye judge ye shall also be judged. Wherefore, I beseech of you, brethren, that ye should search diligently in the light of Christ that ye may know good from evil; and if ye will lay hold upon every good thing, and condemn it not, ye certainly will be a child of Christ,” reports Moroni 7.15-19. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The glory of a good human? Asked Paul in Second Corinthians (1.12). A good conscience. Righteous decisions and obedience to the commandments bring peace of conscience. When we sin, we feel remorse or guilt, just as we feel physical pain when we are wounded. This is the natural response of our conscience to sin, and it can lead us to repent. Repentance and forgiveness renew our peace of conscience. On the other hand, if we ignore our conscience and do not repent, out conscience will be impaired as if it has been “seared with a hot iron,” reports 1 Timothy 4.2. Have a good conscience, and it will show. The good conscience can carry a heavy load; again, from Paul in the same letter to the Corinthians (7.4); even when things go wrong, it has a smile on its face. The bad conscience frowns, frets, fidgets. How sweet it is when your heard hits the pillow at night, expostulated John in his First Letter (3.12), and your conscience is not nagging you to death! We are to learn to follow our conscience. This is an important part of exercising our agency. The more we follow our conscience, the stronger it will become. A sensitive conscience is a sign of a healthy spirit. Unless they are doing good things, good people do not feel happy. Bad people never have a good day, never have a moment’s rest. That is because, as the prophet Isaiah suggested (48.22), “There is no peace for the once and future pious, says the Lord.” According to the prophet Micah (3.11), the impious are always chatting us up. “Who says we are not peaceful?” “Is the sky falling?” “Who would dare lay a finger on us?” #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Do not believe them! The gorge of God will rise suddenly, swallow them up, grind them down, then spit them out. Do not worry! urges the Psalmists (146.4). They will feel the Hellhound’s breath soon enough. To boast in the Lord is one thing, but to boast when one is toast, that is quite another. For to boast in the Lord is, at least according o Galatians (6.14), to toast the cross of the Lord. Fleeting is the sort of glory that is given and taken by Humanity. Melancholy is the constant companion of Worldly Glory. The glory of the Good lies in their conscience; it is not something that burbles from their mouths. The person who desires Eternal Glory is not distracted by the glitter of time. For many, relief and happiness can come by understanding the relationship between peace of conscience and peace of mind and by living the principles upon which both the blessing are founded. God wants each of His children to enjoy the transcendent blessing of peace of conscience. A tranquil conscience invites freedom from anguish, sorrow, guilt, shame, and self-condemnation. It provides a foundation of happiness. It is a condition of immense worth, yet there are few on Earth that enjoy it. Why? Most often because the principles upon which peace of conscience is founded are either not understood or no adequately followed. My life has been so richly endowed from peace of conscience that I would share insight on how it can be obtained. Peace of conscience is he essential ingredient to your peace of mind. Without peace of conscience, you can have no real peace of mind. Peace of conscience related to your inner self and is controlled by what you personally do. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Peace of conscience can come only from God through a righteous, obedient life. It cannot exist otherwise. On the other hand, peace of mind is most often affected by external forces such as concern for a wayward child, economic pressures, real or imagined offenses, deteriorating World conditions, or more to do than sufficient time to do it. An unsettled mind is temporary, transitory. Peace of mind is restored by resolving the external forces that disturb it. No so with a troubled conscience, for it is unrelenting, ever present, a constant reminder of the need to correct your past mistakes, to resolve an offense to another, or to repent of transgression. If you still feel you must have some silver and gold on this Earth, then you have missed the point. You should rather have Jesus than silver and gold. To embrace eternity, you must rid yourself of all temporality. When tranquillity is puddling in your heart, who cares whether praise or blame is raining on your soul? If your conscience is clean, then you can rest easy. Praise will no make you better; blame will not make your worse. This is what you are, and God is the witness to that. If you are your own interior gardener, you will no care a fig what the World says about your virtuous vines. “When they look at you, they see your face; but when God looks at you, He sees your heart”; or so wrote the author of First Kings, or First Samuel, as it is called in the Latin Bible (16.7). A human judge looks a fact, but the Divine Judge weighs intensions. Do good always and always focus on where you are in the spiritual scheme of things—that is the sign of great purity and inner confidence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Anyone who does not require Worldly validation for one’s own existence has already committed oneself wholly to God. Much the same sentiment Paul wrote in his Second Letter to the Corinthians. “The person to be commended is not the wone who has nominated oneself, but the one God had His eye on for some time” (10.18). What should the status of internal humans be? To walk with God on the inward path, as the prophet Micah would say (6.8), and not to be waylaid on the outward path by some brusque, bruising affection. Anecdote and research on prayer’s clinical effectiveness has become big news of late. Physicians and scientists have discovered the healing power of prayer. Although researchers acknowledge that petitionary prayer is not 100 percent effective (imagine if it were), it welcomes the conclusion of the Georgetown University internist and prayer researcher Dale Matthews: “Prayer is good for you.” The medical effects of faith on health are not a matter of faith, but science.” Is prayer good for you? No one denies that prayer by those who believe in prayer’s healing power might indeed calm the soul and relieve stress and thereby lead to reduce hypertension, fewer headaches, and strengthened immune function. A sugar pill might do as much for those who believe in it. Such is the power of positive belief—a fact of life that guarantees some success for the devotees of alternative-medicine, regardless of whether their specific recommendations have any intrinsic healing power. Moreover, no one denies the accumulating evidence that, for a variety of reasons, an active religious faith predicts health and longevity. In these times of Worldwide turmoil, more and more persons of faith are turning to the Lord for blessings of comfort and healing. We use nutrition, exercise, and other practices to preserve health, and we can enlist the help of healing practitioners, such as physicians and surgeons, to restore help. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Modern advocates of prayer’s power have something more in mind than a placebo effect. Prayers of intercession and petition can heal others, they believe. If so, say the skeptics, put up of shut up: put your intuitions about the prayer to the test. Do prayers for healing procedure cures? Faster recovery? Decreased mortality? In 1872, an anonymous British citizen proposed an experiment that might answer these questions. Choose “one single ward or hospital for three to five years of sustained prayer by “the whole body of the faithful.” Will the healing and morality rates there beat those in comparable hospital elsewhere? If they do, so much the better for our belief in intercessory prayer and our associated understanding of God. If they do not, so much the worse for our beliefs. Although the experiment was not conducted, the very idea triggered a national “prayer-gauge controversy” that raged in Britain during 1872-73: Should researchers test the efficacy of prayer as they would test any proposed medical remedy? In the spirit of those Christian founders of modern science, should Christians approach even their cherished beliefs with such humility that they are willing to check them against the realities of God’s creation? Or it the very idea of testing prayer—and God—outrageous? If experimenting with prayer offends you, said the scientist Francis Galton (Charles Darwin’s cousin), then why not scientifically examine the efficacy of spontaneous prayers? Dr. Galton, who loved to quantify everything from intelligence to female beauty, collected mortality data on groups of people who were the objects of much prayer—kings, clergy, missionaries—and found that they lobed no longer than others. Moreover, the proportion of stillbirths suffered by praying and nonpraying expectant parents appeared similar. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
And there things stood until a century or so later, when several American researchers actually experimented with prayer. Although not the first effort—others are recounted by Larry Dossey in healing Words: The Power of Prayers and the Practice of Medicine—the one that did the most to revive interest in such experiments was the physician Randolph Byrd’s 1988 report titled “Positive Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in a Coronary Care Unit Population.” Mr. Byrd randomly assigned 393 patients admitted to San Francisco General Hospital’s coronary-care unit to either a prayer or no-prayer condition. The first names of prayer-group patients, along with diagnosis, condition, and occasional updates, were given three to seven “born again” intercessors. In the tradition of double-blind drug studies, neither patients nor staff knew which patients were receiving prayers. The results? For six of twenty-six outcome measures, such as the need for diuretics, antibiotics, and ventilation therapy, the prayed-for patients did better. The widely publicized conclusion? Prayer words. That is good but hardly surprising news to most Americans, 87 percent of whom in survey for Newsweek said that “God answers prayers” and 82 percent of whom said that when praying they “ask for health of success for a child or family member.” In a Gallup survey, three in ten Americans reported having experienced a “remarkable healing,” of whom 30 percent credited their own or others’ prayers. Not so fast, said the skeptics. For twenty of the twenty-six measures, such as length of hospital stay and mortality, there was no difference between Byrd’s prayer and no-prayer groups. Try enough prayer experiments and take enough measures and you can be sure that some positive outcomes—just by chance—will be associated with prayer. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
All these are a prelude to two new prayer experiments—one small, one huge—funded by the John Templeton Foundation. In the smaller experiment, Dale Matthews, in cooperation with S.M. Marlow and Francis MacNutt, assigned forty patients at the Arthritis Treatment Center in Clearwater, Florida, to one of two groups—a control group receiving no treatment, and a group that received healing prayer with the laying on of hands over four days. Half of the patients in this latter group were additionally assigned to receive six months of long-distance intercessory prayers. Patients in both the control group and the two prayer groups were examined periodically over the next year, rating their own pain and being rated by clinicians who were blind to the patients’ experimental group. What effect, if any, would you predict when Matthews compared the arthritic conditions of the control group and the two prayer conditions? Before we disclose the results, consider also the mother of all prayer experiments, one whose size and credibility destines it for discussion and debate for years to come. Our hunch is that this just-completed experiment will trigger—as did the British prayer-test controversy about 150 years ago—much theological and pastoral reflection. At issue will be what people of faith should take to be the essence of prayer and of God’s relationship to the natural World. We call it the Harvard Prayer Experiment, because the primary investigator, the cardiologist Herbert Benson, is a professor affiliated with Harvard Medical School (as well as the author of many popular books on the healing powers of meditation and relaxation, most recently Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology of Belief). #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Although enormous, the experiment—a greatly expanded and more tightly controlled replication of the small Byrd study—is elegantly simple. Each of three conditions engaged several hundred patients at five leading medical centers who are about to undergo coronary bypass surgery. (All consented to participation.) Teams of intercessors—people of faith who, one presumes, hoped to show the power of prayer while supporting the seriously ill patients—prayed for individuals in two or three groups of bypass patients. Patients in two groups were either prayed for by the volunteer intercessors or not, but did not know which condition they were in. A third patient group knew it was being prayed for. We know that the prayer of faith, uttered alone or in our homes or places of worship, can be effective to heal the sick. Many scriptures refer to the power of faith in the healing of an individual. The Apostle James taught that we should “pray one for another, that ye may be healed,” adding, “the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much,” report James 5.16. When the woman who touched Jesus was healed, He told her, “Thy faith hath made thee whole,” reports Matthew 9.22. Similarly, the Book of Mormon teaches that Lord “worketh by power, according to the faith of the children of men,” reports Moroni 10.7. A recent nationwide survey found that nearly 80 percent of Americans believe that miracles still occur today as [they did] in ancient times. 33 percent of those surveyed said they had experiences or witnesses a divine healing. “God manifesteth Himself unto all those who believe in Him, by the power of the Holy Ghost; yea, unto every nation, kindred, tongue, and people, working mighty miracles…among the children of men according to their faith,” reports 2 Nephi 26.13. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The techno-rebels argue that either we control technology or it controls us—and that “we” can no longer simply be the usual tiny elite of scientists, engineers, politicians, and businessmen. Whatever the merits of the antinuclear campaigns that have erupted in Germany, France, Sweden, Japan, and the United States of America, the battle against Concorde, or the rising demands for regulation of genetic research, all reflect a widespread passionate demand for the democratization of technological decision-making. The techno-rebels contend that technology need not be big, costly, or complex in order to be “sophisticated.” The heavy-handed technologies of the Second Wave seemed more efficient than they actually were because corporations and socialist enterprises externalized—transferred to society as a whole—the enormous costs of cleaning up pollution, of caring for the unemployed, of dealing with work-alienation. When these are seen as costs of production, many seemingly efficient machines turn out to be quite the opposite. Thus the techno-rebels favour the design of a whole range of “appropriate technologies” intended to provide humane jobs, to avoid pollution, to spare the environment, and to produce for personal or local use rather than for national and global markets alone. The techno-rebellion has sparked thousands of experiments all over the World, with just such small-scale technologies, in fields ranging from fish farming and food processing to energy production, waste recycling, inexpensive construction, and simple transport. While many of these experiments are naïve and hark back to a mythical past, others are more practical. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Some reach out for the latest materials and scientific tools and combine them in new ways with old techniques. Jean Gimpel, for example, this historian of medieval technology, has built elegant models of simple tools that might prove useful in non-industrial countries. Some of these combine new materials with old methods. A surge of interest in the airship provides another example—use of a by-passed technology that can now be made with advanced fabrics or materials that give it much greater payload capacity. Airships are ecologically sound and could be used for slow but cheap and safe transport in regions where there are no roads—Brazil, perhaps, or Nigeria. Experiments with appropriate or alternative technologies, especially in the energy field, suggests that some simple, small-scale technologies can be as “sophisticated” as complex, large-scale technologies when the full range of side effects it taken into account and when the machine is properly matched to the task. The techno-rebels are also disturbed by the radical imbalance of science and technology on the face of the planet, with only 3 percent of the World’s scientists in countries containing 75 percent of the global population. They favour devoting more technological attention to the needs of the World’s poor, and a more equitable sharing of the resources of outer space and the oceans. They recognize that not only are the oceans and skies part of the common heritage the race, but the advanced technologies itself could not exist without the historic contributions of many peoples, from the Indians and Arabs to the ancient Chinese. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Finally, they argue that in moving into the Third Wave we must advance, step by step, from the resource-wasteful, pollution-producing system of production used during the Second Wave era toward a more “metabolic” system that eliminates waste and pollution by making sure that the output and by-product of each industry becomes an input for the next. The goal is a system under which no output is produced that is not an input for another production process downstream. Such a system is no only more efficient in a production sense, it minimizes, or indeed eliminates, damage to the biosphere. Taken as a whole, this techno-rebel program provides the basis for humanizing the technological thrust. The techno-rebels are, whether they recognize it or not, agents of the Third Wave. They will not vanish but multiply in the years ahead. For they are as much a part of the advance to a new stage of civilization as our missions to Venus, our amazing computers, our biological discoveries, or our explorations of the oceanic depths. Out of their conflict with the First Wave fantasizers and the Second Wave advocates of technology uber alles will come sensible technologies matched to the new, sustainable energy system toward which we are beginning to reach. Plugging the new technologies into this new energy base will raise to a wholly new level our entire civilization. At its heart we will find a fusion of sophisticated, science-based “high-stream” industries, operating within much tightened ecological and social control, with equally sophisticated “low-stream” industries that operate on a smaller, more human scale, both based on principles radically different from those which governed the Second Wave techno-sphere. Together, these two layers of industry will form today’s “commanding heights.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
However, this is only a detail of a much vaster picture. For at the same time that we are transforming the techno-sphere we are also revolutionizing the info-sphere. The term “exurb” refers to the type of upper-middle-class settlement that has taken place in outlying semirural suburbia—the area beyond the second ring of densely settled subdivisions. Fringe exurban areas have more widely separated homes, often with woods between, and the homes tend to be large and expensive. Sometimes exurbanites settle around old villages or small towns. Exurbanites, as a rule, are affluent, well-educated professionals. Sometimes these individuals work in fields such as communications, advertising, and publishing, which allow them to work at home and avoid daily commuting. The use of personal computers with WiFi and fax machines means they can remain in touch through offices in their homes. If their base is New York, they may live in Fairfield county, Connecticut, or northern New Jersey; if the office is in Philadelphia, then Bucks County, Pennsylvania; and if in San Francisco, then Marin County, California. The study of exurbia that gave these areas is name, portrays them as hyperactive, upwardly mobile stivers who have left city streets for tri-level houses. The picture is of people desperately trying to find meaning in their lives by moving out of the city. Working in highly competitive industries where the standards for judging performance are subjective and fickle, they seek solace by escaping the city. Basically, exurbanites are displaced cosmopolites living in the twenty-first century version of what two centuries ago were called romantic suburbs. They are urbane seekers of the American Dream who see to reside in rustic settings. They want to move out of the but not away from its advantages and services. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Living such a semi-country life puts a strain on the budget and creates pressure to have a standard of life one cannot afford. According to the stereotype, it also puts considerable pressures on wives, who find themselves locked into a schedule of maintaining the house and providing shuttle service for children and commuting husbands while attempting to maintain their own careers and interests. If the above sounds familiar, it may be because this general outline has served as the plot for dozens of novels, television soaps, and movies. The difficulty is that it is often taken as a scientific reflection of reality rather than inventive fiction. Solid research is scarce; but at least based on demographic characteristics, there does not seem to be support for the belief that exurbanites are significantly different from other same-status suburbanites. In fact, exurbs have a way of turning into reluctant suburbs as more and more people move into the same area, all seeking to escape the urban pace. Even harder to pin down are those places beyond the exurbs that are not oriented toward a major city. While definitionally these areas may still be within a metropolitan area, the orientation of residents may be more rural than urban. Housing in these in-between areas that are not truly rural, but probably never destined to become suburban, is sometimes of marginal quality. Some of these living in such “ruban” areas are barely getting by economically in spite of more affordable housing costs and taxes. It is not uncommon for ruban residents to commute long distance to work at below living wage jobs. They are anything but affluent suburban commuters. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Adding to the confusion over what is suburban are some outlying college towns that census has defined as metropolitan but that are not urban in character. One of these is Centre County, Pennsylvania, which is the home of Pennsylvania State University Because of its population, Centre County is metropolitan area named State College, but it is clearly neither urban nor suburban. The cunty includes a widely dispersed and mixed population having a wide range of interest and occupations. There are 165 acres for every person in the metropolitan area. The consequences are a metropolitan area that is known for is hiking trails, numerous lakes, trout streams, and mountains. In practice, even residential suburbia, to say nothing of the outer cities, has become remarkably diverse. So diverse, in fact, that just calling an area “suburban” does not really tell us much anymore. As suburbia has come to hose and employ the larges segment of the American population, the characteristics that define a “typical suburb” and “typical suburbanites” have become even more attenuated. It is said that man is created in God’s image, but what happens when we alter that image, is our reflection that other thing that changes? Pseduo-practical psychology is a system for turning thoughts into things, mental images into physical realities, and airy nothing into solid somethings—by believing in them. The psychoanalytic methods has only a limited usefulness, as its theory has only a quarter truth. If adopted and followed unrestrainedly it may do as much harm as good, or sometimes even more. It may make the patient so self-absorbed that one is deprived of the broad interest in life necessary to a healthy mind. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
It may cause one to go one seeking for childhood experiences that never existed, for the alleged roots of one’s trouble—a process over which people have sometimes wasted years. One may read extreme intimate meanings into one’s night dreams and one’s day thoughts, and thus come to absurd attitudes towards life. And finally, the patient may become so dependent on the analyst that one is a helpless creature unable to cope with the World by one’s own willed and personal response. The psychoanalyst may do useful work in bringing to the surface an earlier happening which gave a suggestion whose work upon the mind and feelings led ultimately to illness. The psychoanalysts work busily on the ego all the time, thus keeping the poor patient still imprisoned in it. However, reference to the Overself might help one really to get rid of some complexes. To how many persons has the average Freudian psychoanalyst brought true inner peace? If statistics were available, they would be disillusioning. Why is this? It is not for a lack of shrewdness, training, research, and practice on the part of the analysts. The basic answer is that both one and one’s patients are moving in a vicious circle; all their attention is being kept within the ego, that combination of animal and lesser human traits which has yet to discover its greater self. They seek escape, healing, and freedom where there is none. In that greater self alone the good, the true, the beautiful, and the healthy resides. Psychoanalytic practices may be quite right in their place for their purpose, but the technique used has no place in philosophy. We do not consider it necessary to delve into an aspirant’s childhood in order to explain one’s present mental condition. For as we believe that one’s past stretches away into numerous earlier reincarnations, it is obviously insufficient and inadequate merely to take the past of the present reincarnation alone for analysis. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Nor do we consider it of any use to try to explain one’s repressions and frustrations by attempting to interpret one’s dreams. For we consider most dreams to be merely a worthless mélange of thoughts, events, and experiences of the previous twenty-four hours. The really significant dreams are few. Dr. Freud confessed that he had never had any mystical experiences or mystical feelings. He therefore went on to dismiss all such things in purely materialistic terms, making the silly assumption that because he had never had them, therefore it was not possible for anyone else to have them. Dr. Freud thought by searching in the darkest corners of our souls, by putting the most intimate interpretation upon the most innocent thoughts and dreams, we would develop our personalities and free our souls! This distorted and pseudo-deep psychology is typical of present-day theorists who offer their last surmise as a first discovery. No human who has practiced the profound meditation which philosophic self-knowledge enjoins, will hear without a smile the Freudian psychoanalysts’ doctrine hat human nature is but a bundle of obscenity. Even Dr. Jung new better. Psychiatry takes itself too seriously and so overestimates the worth of its findings. If it could pick up a sense of humour, its results would be more accurate. It is unreasonable to conclude that because so large a part of human activity must be attributed to the impulses of pleasures of the flesh, the whole of human activity is attributed to that same source. Those analysts who do so have something to learn about the unconscious quest of every creature for its own spiritual self-realization. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The psychiatrists, being always properly qualified doctors of medicine, are expected to be more reliable in diagnoses, prognoses, and treatments than other healers. However, experience shows exceptions. Others have succeeded incurring when the official psychotherapists failed. Others have succeeded in curing when the official psychotherapists failed. Why? It is because the unofficial ones have quite often dropped the materialistic belief that causes mental disease must be so sought in the physical brain alone. The psychiatrists do not reckon with a mind having a consciousness apart from the body. In an age when we are led to believe we can be anything we want to be, what most deludes us is in ourself. It is interesting to note that the author of works on Psychosynthesis, Dr. Assagioli, has dropped use of the word “spiritual” and replaced it by “transpersonal.” However, if we heed their earliest beginnings and do not ignore their smallness, glimpses can be cultivated. They can grow. Look for them in the feelings—these light delicate intuitions—for that is what they mostly are. Let us be united; let us speak in harmony; let our minds apprehend alike. Common be our prayer; common be the end of our assembly; common be our resolution; common be our deliberations. Alike be our feelings; unified by our hearts; common be our intentions; perfect be our unity. Our God and god of our fathers, ay our remembrance and the remembrance of our forefathers come before Them. Remember the Messiah of the house of David, Thy servant, and Jerusalem, Thy holy city, and all Thy people, the house of Israel. Please grant us deliverance and wellbeing, lovingkindness, life and peace on his day. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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If Speak You Must, then Let Loose Your Own Wretched Spiritual Condition!
My Dear Winchester—We have had a terrible shock this morning. Jean did not come down to breakfast, and Clara went to see if she was ill. We heard her scream, and rushing up, there was poor Jean sitting at the old bureau, quite dead. She had fallen forward on the desk, and her housekeeping-book was crumpled up under her. She had been so all night long, we suppose, for she was not undressed, and was quite cold. The doctors say it was disease of the heart.
We would like to believe that everything we think and say is right, but we cannot. That is because we do not have grace enough or sense enough. Of course, there is a wit in each of us, but even this is dimmed through negligence. What we really fail to notice is that we are losing our interior vision. How do you know?? When we act so daily, and the excuses we cook up are so abysmal! When we explode with passion and think, no I am not angry, I am just defending the faith. When we peck at the peccadillos of others, and our own whoppers we let pass unchallenged, as the Evangelist Matthew has pointed out (7.3)! When we ponder what we will put up with from others, but pay little attention to how much others will have to put up with from us! Is there a moral anywhere in this? Whoever wants one’s own actions to be tolerably received would do well not to judge the behaviour of others so intolerably. Whoever has an interior life should put the spiritual care of oneself before the care of others. You will never be internal and devout until you hold your tongue about others. If speak you must, then let loose your own wretched spiritual condition. If you focus entirely on your relationship to God, precious little of the hubbub of the World will be able to penetrate your recollection. When you have that vacant stare in your eye, you might well ask yourself, before someone else does, just where are you? When you have run through everything the World has to offer, why, if I may echo Matthew (16.26), do you seem to have advance to the real? The moral? #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
If you want True Peace and True Union, then you just have to postpone everything else and attend to your own case. If only you drag your torso away from every temporal festival, you will make spiritual progress. When you put a value on each temporal thing, you will lose spiritual ground. All of which means, you can keep nothing as your own nothing big, nothing small, nothing nice, nothing new; that is to say, nothing except God and everything that smacks of God. However, all hose lovely creaturely consolations that came your way, what about them? Forget about them! The soul that loves God loathes everything that is not God. God Eternal, God Immense, “fulling all the space,” as Jeremiah phrased it (23.24); the soul’s solace, the heart’s True Joy. Although already a thriving business—having sold over 100,000 lever-action repeaters by the early 1880s—Winchester was ready to expand its market with different-action firearms. The Hotchkiss, a bolt action designed by American inventor Benjamin B. Hotchkiss and produced in hopes of military sales, appeared in 1883. In the same year, Winchester bought the rights to the falling block single-shot rifle invented and patented by John M. Browning. Spawned by the Browning connection with Winchester, the single-shot appeared in the Winchester catalogue for 1885. The single-shot would not reach the market until 1885 and remained in product line until approximately 1920. There are so many variations in calibers, barrels, overall configurations, finishes, triggers, sights, and other feature that sportsmen, the military, and target shooters were all offered every variety of possible use for a single-shot rifle. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
The number of cartridge chamberings for this model exceeds that of any other firearm made by Winchester: approximately sixty-five. The single-shot was made at a time when target shooting was as popular as golf is today and a major match like the Creedmoor (on New York’s Long Island) was very much the Masters of its day. Not only were the single-shots beautifully constructed and of a solid, virtually unbreakable design, but they were phenomenally accurate, used in international matches which were shot at distances up to 1,000 yards, with exquisitely constructed open sights and finely built tubular scope sights. The champion target shooters were international celebrities, and elaborate trophies were designed and built by such silversmiths as Gorham and Tiffany. The Browning-Winchester single-shot rifles were also a favourite of sportsmen-hunters as the wide selection of chamberings meant that cartridges were available for every type of North American game animal. Then, as now, hunters preferred the simplicity and reliability of a single-shot mechanism, as well as the challenge of having only one shot available, without the rapid-repeating capability of magazine arms. Taking a grizzly bear with a nonrepeating rifle required cool nerves and a steady hand. When Oliver Winchester brought out a John Browning design, the company certainly got its money’s worth. The $8,000.00 ($231,230.64 inflation adjusted for 2021) went a long way with the single shot. The Winchester rifles were highly successful. In June of 1888, John and Matt Browning were issued a patent for a slide-action magazine rifle, which—as the Model 1890—became Winchester’s first rifle of that type. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The model 1890, in two basic grades only (Sporting Rifle and Fancy Sporting Rifle, all having 24-inch octagonal barrels and rifle-style steel buttplates), remained in production through 1932, with a total production of nearly 850,000. The 1890 was Winchester’s all-time sales leader in .22 rimfire, and many 1890s are still in use around the World today. As an economical version of the Model 1890, the factory brought out the 1906 pump-action. And the 1906 thereby also became the factory’s first rifle advertised and sold which accommodated the three cartridges interchangeably. A further sales factor was that all Model 1906s featured takedown capability. Serial numbering on the 1906 was in its own range, and, like the 1890, the 1906 achieved an extraordinary sales total—nearly 850,000 made—before being discontinued in 1932. Hundreds of thousand of Winchester rifles were produced and they were assembled in what is called the Winchester Complex, which is in New Haven, Connecticut USA. In 1862, William Wirt Winchester, the son of Oliver Fisher Winchester, married Sarah Lockwood Pardee. (Oliver Fisher Winchester was a very wealthy and prominent man, not only the owner of Winchester Repeating Arms, but also Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut.) Sarah and William’s life together was happy, and they moved in the best of New England society. However, in 1866, disaster struck when their infant daughter, Annie died of the then mysterious childhood disease marasmus. Mrs. Winchester fell into a deep sadness. Fifteen years later, her husband William Wirt Winchester who was at the time president of Winchester Repeating Arms Company suffered a premature death. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Mrs. Winchester inherited 777 shares of Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and $20,000,000.00 ($532,737,254.90 inflation adjusted for 2021). She was told she could rest assure that her life was not in danger and by building a house similar to the Winchester Complex, which was 3,250,000 square feet, would give her eternal life. Now, no one really knows how much the Winchester’s were worth. In 1915, for instance, they may a deal with the British government in the sum of $47,500,000.00 ($1,277,778,217.82 inflation adjusted for 2021), so Mrs. Winchester’s inheritance was just a fraction of their cumulative wealth. In the late 1800s, the Santa Clara Valley presented sweeping visas of rural open space. It was a serene setting for Mrs. Winchester to begin her building project. In 1884 she purchased an unfinished eighteen-room farm house just three miles west of San Jose—and over the next thirty-eight years she produced the sprawling complex we know today as the Winchester Mystery House. The death of the child cannot be explained on natural grounds except by suggesting that there was something wrong with it quite unrelated to the father’s experience. However, there is eloquent testimony about evidence of the power of witchcraft. There were known to witches in New Haven, Connecticut in 1646. A servant named Mary Johnson was accused of being a witch. Others were known to practice black magic. However, it did not occur to anyone to notice that the evidence suggested that the malignant power must also reside not only in the witch but in the charms hey use or in the Devil’s power that lay behind them, since they worked equally well whether they were manipulated by a confessed witch or by a Godly magistrate. I am a believer of words, I believe everything depends on who says them. What if the direful creatures, whose report lingers in these tales of the Winchester, should have an origin far older still? What if they were the remnants of a vanishing period of the Earth’s history long antecedent to the birth of mastodon and iguanodon; a stage, namely, when the World, as we call it, had not yet become quite visible, was not yet so far finished as to part from the invisible World that its mother, and which, on its part, had no then become quite invisible—was only almost such. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
When, as a credible consequence, strange shapes of those now invisible regions, of Eden and Hell, might be expected to gloom out occasionally from the awful Fauna of an ever-generating World upon that one which was being born of it. Hence, the life-periods of a World being long and slow, some of these huge, unformed bulks of half-created matter might, somehow, like the megatherium of later times, a baby creation to them, roll at age-long intervals, clothes in a might terror of shapelessness into the half-recognition of human beings, whose consternation at the uncertain vision were barrier enough to prevent all further know of its substance. Ever since I was born, I suppose the changes of a World are not to be measured by the changes of its generations. When one’s discrimination is no greater than to lump everything marvellous—demons, Angels, kelpies, ghosts, vampires, doppelgangers, witches, fairies, nightmares under the one head of ghost—it upsets the reappearing of the of the departed. It matters very little whether we believe in ghost, or not, provided that we are ghosts—that within this body, which so many people are ready to consider their own very selves, their lies a ghostly embryo, at least, which has an inner side to it God only can see, which says I concerning itself, and which will soon have to know whether or not it can appear to those whom it has left behind, and thus solve the question of ghosts for itself, at least. Is telling a person about a ghost, affording one the source of one’s conviction? It is the same as a ghost appearing to one? Not at all. The impression may be deeper and clearer on your mind than any fact of the next morning will make. Not everyone can feel it, but the person who does is convinced. It cannot be conveyed. It is something you have to experience. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In the year 1825 Oliver Fisher Winchester fell in love. This was before he met and married his wife Jane Ellen Hope. Here are notes from his journal: Well, I was walking along Chapel Street, and feeling a little bewildered in consequence—for it was quite the dusk of the evening. There was a haze in the air, when, from the crossing that cuts off the corner in the direction of Crown Street, just as I was about to turn towards it, a lady stepped upon the kerbstone of the pavement, looked at me for a moment, and passed—an occurrence not very remarkable, certainly. However, the lady was remarkable and so was her dress. I am not good at observing, and I am still worse at describing dress, therefore I can only say that hers reminded me of an old picture—that is, I had never seen anything like it, except in old pictures. She had no bonne, and looked as if she had walked straight out of an ancient drawing-room in her evening attire. The next instant I met a man on the crossing, who stopped and addressed me. So betwixt was I that, although I recognized his voice as one I ought to know, I could not identify him until he got closer, which I did instinctively in the act of returning his greeting. At the same time, I glanced over my shoulder after the lady. She was nowhere to be seen. “What are you looking at?” asked Gary James. “I was looking after that lady,” I answered, “but I cannot see her.” “What lady?” said James, with just a touch of impatience. “You must have seen her,” I retuned. “You were not more than three yards behind her.” “Where is she then?” “She must have gone down one of the areas, I think. However, she looked a lady, though an old-fashioned one.” “Have you been dining?” asked James, in a tone of doubtful enquiry. “No,” I replied, not suspecting the insinuation; “I have only just come from the Museum.” “Then I advise you to call on your medical man before you go home.” “Medical man!” returned; “I have no medical man. What do you mean? I never was better in my life.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
“I mean that there was no lady. It was an illusion, and that indicates something wrong. Besides, you did not know me when I spoke to you. “That is nothing,” I returned. “I had just taken a moment to recall your name.” “How was it you saw the lady, then?” The affair was growing serious under by friend’s interrogation. I did not a all like the idea of his supposing me subject to hallucinations. So I answered, with a laugh, “Ah! to be sure, that explains it. I was just confused.” It was a drizzly afternoon in the beginning of the last week of October when I left the two of New Haven. I hard hardly left the town, and the twilight had only in a post-chaise to ride to East Haven, the property of my friend’s father. I had hardly left the town and the twilight had only begun to deepen, when, glancing from one of the windows of the chaise, I fancied I saw, between me and the hedge, the dim figure of a horse keeping pace with us. I thought, in the first interval of unreason, that it was a shadow from my own horse, but reminded myself the next moment that there could be no shadow where there was no light. When I looked again, I was at the first glance convinced that my eyes had deceived me. At the second, I believed once more that a shadowy something, with the movements of a horse in harness, was keeping pace with us. I turned away again with some discomfort, and not till we had reached an open moorland road, whence a little watery light was visible on the horizon, could I summon up courage enough to look out once more. Certainly then there was nothing o be seen, and I persuaded myself that it had been all a fancy. As we turned into the avenue that led up to East Haven, I found myself once more glancing nervously out the window. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The moment the trees were about me, there was, if not a shadowy horse out there by the side of the chaise, yet certainly more than half that conviction in here in my consciousness. When I saw my friend, however, standing on the doorstep, dark against the glow of the hall fire, I forgot all about it; and I need not add that I did not make it a subject of conversation when I entered, for I was well aware that it was essential to a man’s reputation that his senses should be accurate, though his heart might without prejudice swarm with shadows, and his judgment be a very stable of hobbies. I was kindly received. Mrs. James had been dead for some years, and Florence Ida, the eldest of the family, was at the head of the household. She had two sisters, little more than girls. The father was a burly, yet gentlemanlike Yorkshire squire, who ate well, drank well, looked radiant, and hunted twice a week. In this pastime his son joined him when in the humour, which happened scarcely so often. I, who had never crossed a horse in my life, took his apology for not being able to mount me very coolly, assuring him that I could rather loiter about with a book than be in at the death of the best-hunted werewolf or Hellhound in East Haven. I very soon found myself a home with the James’s; and very soon again I began to find myself no so much at home; for Miss James—Florence Ida as I soon ventured to call her—was fascinating. There was an empty place in my heart. Florence’s figure was graceful, and her face was beautiful. Order was a very idol with her. Hence the house was too tidy for any sense of comfort. If you left a book on the table, you would, on retuning to the room a moment after, find it put aside. What the furniture of the drawing-room was like, I never saw; for not even on Christmas Day, which was the last day I spent there, was in uncovered. Everything in it was kept in bibs and pinafores. Even the carpet was covered with a slippery sheet of brown holland. Mr. James never entered that room, and therein was wise. Gary remonstrated once. She answered him quite kindly even playfully, but no change followed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
What was worse, she made very wretched tea. Her father never took tea; neither did Gary. I was rather fond of it, but I soon gave it up. Everything her father partook of was first-rate. Everything else was somewhat poverty-stricken. My pleasure in Florence’s society prevented me from making practical deductions from such trifles. The first day of November was a very lovely day, quite one. I was sitting in a little arbour I had just discovered, with a book in my hand—not reading, however, but day-dreaming—when, lifting my eyes from the ground, I was startled to see, through a thin shrub in from of the arbour what seemed the form of an old lady seated, apparently reading from a book on her knee. The sight instantly recalled the lady from Chapel Street. I started to my feet, and then, clear of the intervening bush, saw only a great stone such as abounded on the moors in the neighbourhood, with a lump of quartz set on top of it. Some childish taste had put it there for ornament. Smiling at my own folly, I say down again, and reopened my book. After reading for a while, I glanced up again, and once more started to my feet, overcome by the fancy that there verily sat the lady reading. You will say it indicated an excited condition of the brain. Possibly; but I was, as far as I can recall, quite collected and reasonable. I was almost vexed this second time, and sat down once more to my book. Still, every time I looked up, I was startled afresh. I doubt, however, if the trifle is worth mentioning, or had any significance even in relation to what followed. I wondered if Florence practiced witchcraft. There were others who may or may not have practiced it—the evidence is insufficient—but who had clearly used their reputation for occult power to gain illegitimate personal ends. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Gary said that Florence had been dabbling in the occult for years; about five years ago he said she had borrowed a book on palmistry, containing rules on how to know the future. However, he told her it was an evil book and evil art. His charity was wasted, however, since Florence continued telling people’s futures, somethings through reading their faces as well as through reading their palms. Fortunetelling is often only white magic. However, it easily becomes black magic when it concerns itself with the time or manner of the subject’s death. After dinner I strolled out by myself, leaving father and son over their claret. I did not drink wine; and from the lawn I could see the windows of the library, whither Florence commonly retired from the dinner-table. It was a very lovely soft night. There was no moon, but the stars looked wider awake than usual. Dew was falling, but the grass was not yet wet, and I wandered about on it for half and hour. The stillness was somehow strange. It had a wonderful feeling it as if something were expected—as if the quietness were the mould in which some even or other was about to be cast. Even then I was a reader of certain sorts of recondite lore. Suddenly I remembered that this was the eve of All Souls. This is the night on which all the faithful departed, those baptized Christians who are believed to be in purgatory because they died with the guilt of less sin on their souls, came out of their graves to visit their old homes. “Poor dead!” I thought with myself; “have you any place to call a home now? If you have, surely you will not wander back here, where all you have called home has either vanished or given itself to others, to be their home now and yours no more! What an awful doom the old fancy has allotted you! To dwell in your graves all he year, and creep out, this one night, to enter at the midnight door, left open for welcome! A poor welcome truly!—just an open door, a clean-swept floor, and a fire to warm your rain-sodden limbs! The household asleep, and the houseplace swarming with the ghost of ancient times—the miser, the spendthrift, the profligate, the coquette—for the good ghosts sleep, and are troubled with no walking like yours! Not one man, sleepless like yourself, to question you.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
“Yet who can tell?” I went on to myself. “It may be your hell to return thus. It may be that only on this one night of the year you can show yourself to one who can see you, but that the place were wicked is the Hades to which you are doomed for ages.” I thought and thought till I began to feel the air alive about me, and was enveloped in the vapours that dim the eyes of those who strain them for one peep through the dull mica windows that will not open on the World of ghosts. At length I cast my fancies away, and feld from them to the library in hopes that no one would raise the Devil to kill or bewitch me. There were many books of fortune-telling and grimoires, of course, full of diagrams. The bodily presence of Florence made the World of ghosts appear shadowy indeed. “What a reality there is about a bodily presence.” I said to myself, as I took y chamber-candle in my hand. “But what is there more real in a body?” I said again, as I crossed the hall. “Surely nothing,” I went on, as I ascended the broad staircase to my room. “The body must vanish. If there be a spirit, that will remain. A body can but vanish. A ghost can appear.” I woke in the morning with a sense of such discomfort as made me spring out of bed at once. When I looked at my watch after I was dressed, I found I had risen an hour earlier than usual. I groped my way downstairs to spend the hour before breakfast in the library. No sooner was I seated with the book than I heard the voice of Florence scolding the butler, in no very gentle tones, for leaving the garden door open all night. The moment I heard this, the strange occurrences I am about to relate began to dawn upon my memory. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
The door had been open the night long between All Saints and All Souls. In the middle of the night I awoke suddenly. I knew it was not the morning by the sensations I had, for the night feels altogether different from the morning. It was quite dark. My heart was beating violently, and I either hardly could or hardly dared breathe. A nameless terror was upon me, and my sense of hearing was, apparently by the force of its expectation, unnaturally roused and keen. There it was—a slight noise in the room!—slight, but clear, and with an unknown significance about it! It was awful to think it would come again. I do believe it was only one of those creaks in the timers which announced the torpid, age-long, skin flow of every house back to the dust—a motion to which the flow of the glacier is as a torrent, but which is no less inevitable and sure. Day and night it ceases not; but only in the night, when house and heart are still, do we hear it. No wonder it should sound fearful! for we are we not the immortal dwellers in ever-crumbling clay? The clay is no near us, and yet not of us, that it is every movement starts a fresh dismay. For what will its final ruin disclose? When it falls from about us, where shall we find that we have existed all the time? My skin tingled with the bursting of the moister from its pores. Something was in the room besides me. Sometimes apparitions had the reputation for torture and the torture included choking. People should teach their children to fear God, should come to persuade poor creatures to give their souls to the Devil. A confused, indescribable sense of utter loneliness, and yet awful presence, was upon me, its blood did cry for vengeance against me. Nobody seemed to have noticed that the specters differed about the means by which the supposed murders were done. The Devil himself did no know so far. This presence was mingled with a dreary, hopeless desolation, as of burnt-out love and aimless life. All at once I found myself sitting up. The terror that a cold hand might be laid upon me, or a cold breath blow on me, or a corpselike face bend down through the darkness over me, had broken my bonds!—I would meet half-way whatever might be approaching. The moment that my will burst into action the terror began to ebb. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The room in which I slept was a large one, perfectly dreary with tidiness. I did not know till afterwards that it was Florence’s room, which she had given up to me rather than prepare another. The furniture, all but one article, was modern and commonplace. I could not help remarking to myself afterwards how utterly void the room was of the nameless charm of feminine occupancy. I had seen nothing to wake a suspicion of its being a lady’s room. The article I have excepted was an ancient bureau, elaborate and ornate, which stood on one side of the large bow window. They very morning before, I had seen a bunch of keys hanging from the upper part of it, and had peeped in. Finding, however, that the pigeon-holds were full of papers, I closed it at once. I should have been glad to use it, but clearly it was not for me. At that bureau the figure of a woman was now seated in the posture of one writing. A strange dim light was around her, but whence I proceeded I never thought of enquiring. As if I, too, had stepped over the bourne, and was a ghost myself, all fear was now gone. I got out of bed, and softly crossed the room to where she was seated. “If she should be beautiful!” I thought—for I had often dreamed of a beautiful ghost that was pleased with me. The figure did not move. She was looking at the faded brown paper. “Some old love-letter,” I thought, and stepped nearer. So cool was I now, that I actually peeped over her shoulder. With mingled surprise and dismay I found that the dim page over which she was bent was that of an old account-book. Ancient household records, in rusty ink, held up to the gliosis of the waning moon, which shone through the parting in the curtains, their entries of shillings and pence!—Of pounds there was not one. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
No doubt pounds and fathers are much the same in the World of thought—the true spirit-World; but in the ghost-World this eagerness over shillings and pence must mean something awful! To think that coins which had since been worn smooth in other pockets and purses, which had gone back to the Mint, and been melted down, to come out again and yet again with the heads of new kings and queens—that diners, eaten by the worms—that polish for the floors inches of whose thickness had since been worn away—that the hundred nameless trifled of a life utterly vanished, should be perplexing, annoying, and worst of all, interesting the soul of a ghost who had been in Hades for centuries! The writing was very old-fashioned, and e words were contracted. I could read nothing but the moneys and one single entry—“Corinths Vs.” Currans for a Christmas puffing, most likely! Ah–, poor lady! the pudding and not the Christmas was her care; not the delight of the children over it, but the beggarly pence which it cost. And she cannot get it out of her head, although her brain was “powdered all as thin as flour” ages ago in the mortar of Death. “Alas, poor ghost!” It needs no treasure hoard left behind, no floor stained with the blood of the murdered child, no wickedly hidden parchment of landed rights. Was this a demonic conspiracy? Witches cannot send the Devil to torment people by making a covenant with the Devil. Some people in this town had a lot of evidence against them for trafficking in the occult. In fact, if you recall, during the Salem Witch Trials, renegade members of the clergy had played a large part in the history of witchcraft in fact and in fiction. It should be recalled that Morgan le Fey, King Arthur’s sister, was supposed to have learned her evil craft in the nunnery where she was educated, that Benvenuto Cellini’s sorcerer-friend was a priest, and that a renegade priest is supposed to be necessary to the performance of Black Mass. An old account-book is enough for the hell of the house-keeping gentlewoman! She never lifted her face, or seem to know that I stood behind her. I left her, and went into the bow window, where I could see her face. I was right there. It was the same lady I had met at Chapel Street, walking in front of Gary James. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Her withered lips went moving as if they would have uttered words she had the breath been commissioned thither; her brow was contracted over her thin nose; and once and again her shining forefinger wen up to her temple as if she were pondering some deep problem of humanity. How long I stood gazing at her I do not know, but at last I withdraw to my bed, and left her struggling to solve that which she could never solve thus. It was the symbolic problem of her own life, and she had failed to read it. I remember nothing more. She may be sitting there still, solving at the insolvable. I should have felt no inclination, with the broad sun of the squire’s face, the keen eyes of Gary James, and the beauty of Florence before me at the breakfast table, to say a word about what I had seen, even if I had not been afraid of the doubt concerning my sanity which the story would certainly awaken. What with the memories of the night, I passed a very dreary day, dreading the return of the night, for, cool as I had been in her presence, I could not regard the possible reappearance of those ghost with equanimity. I had a belly ache. Gary James said he would take a pipe of tobacco and light it. I told him that I thought it was not lawful. [The idea that this remedy was unlawful is probably a result of the use of tobacco in it. Tobacco was an “Indian Weed” and used in Indian ceremony and medicine. The Puritans, like other seventh-century Christians, thought the Indians to be Devil worshippers and thought of their medicine men as magicians.] He said it was lawful for man or beast. However, when the night did come, I slept soundly to the morning. The next day, not being able to read with comfort, I went wandering about the place, and at length began to fit the outside and inside of the house together. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
The house was a large and rambling edifice, parts of it very old, parts comparatively modern. I first found a beautiful stained-glass window, which looked out back. It was kind of a countercharm and verged on black magic because it was supposed not only to break the witch’s spell but to injure the witch or compel her presence. Below this window, on one side, there was a door. I wondered whiter it led, but found it locked. At the moment Gary James approached from the stables. “Where does this door lead?” I asked him. “I will get the key,” he answered. “It is rather a queer old place. We used to like it when we were children.” “There is a stair, you see,” he said, as he threw the door open. “It leads up over the kitchen.” I followed him up the stair. “There is a door into your room,” he said, “but it is always locked now. And here is Grannie’s room, as they call it, though why, I have not the least idea,” he added, as he pushed open the door of an old-fashioned parlour, smelling very musty. A few old books lay on a side table. A china bowl stood besides them, with some shrivelled, scented rose-leaves in the bottom of it. The cloth that covered the table was riddled by moths, and the spider-legged chairs were covered with dust. A conviction seized me that the old bureau must have belonged to this room, and I soon found the place where I judged it must have stood. However, the same moment I caught sight of a portrait on the wall above the spot I had fixed upon. “Good Lord!” I caried, involuntarily, “that is the very lady I met at Chapel Street!” “Nonsense!” said Gary James. “Old-fashioned ladies are like babies—they all look the same. That is a very old portrait.” “So I see,” I answered. “It is like a Zucchero.” “I don’t know whose it is,” he answered hurriedly, and I thought he looked a little queer.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“Is she one of the family?” I asked. “They say so; but who or what she is, I don’t know. You must ask Jean,” he answered. “The more I looked at it,” I said, “the more I am convinced it is the same lady.” “Well,” he returned with a laugh, “my old nurse used to say she was rather restless. But it’s all nonsense.” “That bureau in my room looks about the same date as this furniture.” I remarked. “It used to stand just there,” he answered, pointing to the space under the picture. “Well, I remember with what awe we used to regard it; for they said the old lady kept her accounts at it still. We never dared touch the bundles of yellow papers in the pigeon-holes. I remember thinking Jean a very heroine once when she touched one of them with the tip of her forefinger. She had got yet more courageous by the time she had it moved into her own room.” “hen that is your sister’s room I am occupying?” I said. “Yes.” “I am ashamed of keeping her out of it.” “Oh! she’’ do well enough.” “If I were she though,” I added, “I would send that bureau back to its own place.” “What do you mean, Oliver? Do you believe ever old wife’s tale that ever was told?” “She may get a fright some day—that’s all! I replied. He smiled with such an evident mixture of pity and contempt that for the moment I almost disliked him; and feeling certain that Florence would receive any such hint in a somewhat similar manner, I did not feel inclined to offer her any advice with regard to the bureau. Little occurred during the rest of my visit worthy of remark. Somehow or other I did not make much progress with Florence. I believe I had begun to see into her character a little more, and therefore did not get deeper in love as the days went on. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
I know I became less absorbed in her society, although I was still anxious to make myself agreeable to her—or perhaps, more properly, to give her a favourable impression of me. I do not know whether she perceived any difference in my behaviour, but I remember that I began again to remark the pinched look of her nose, and to be a little annoyed with her for always putting aside my book. At the same time, I daresay I was provoking, for I never was given to tidiness myself. At length Christmas Day arrived. After breakfast, the squire Mr. James, and the two girls arranged to talk to church. Florence was not in the room at the moment. I excused myself on the ground of a headache, for I had had a bad night. When they left, I went up to my room, threw myself on the bed, and was soon fast asleep. How long I slept I do not know, but I work again with that indescribable yet well-known sense of not being alone. The feeling was scarcely less terrible in the daylight than it had been in the darkness. With the same sudden effort as before, I sat up in the bed. There was the figure at the open bureau, in precisely the same position as on the former occasion. However, I could not see it so distinctly. I rose as gently as I could, and approached it, after the first physical terror. I am not a coward. Just as I got near enough to see the account book open on the folding cover of the bureau, she started up, and, turning, revealed the face of Florence. She blushed crimson. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Winchester,” she said, in great confusion; “I thought you had gone to church with the rest.” “I had lain down with a headache, and gone to sleep,” I replied. “But forgive me, Miss James,” I added, for my mind was full of the dreadful coincidence, “don’t you think you have been better at church than balancing your accounts on Christmas Day?” “The better day the better deed,” she said, with a somewhat offended air, and turned to walk from the room. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“Excuse me, Florence,” I resumed, very seriously, “but I want to tell you something.” She looked conscious. It never crossed me, that perhaps she fancied I was going to make a confession. Far other things were then in my mind. For I thought how awful it was, if she too, like the ancestral ghost, should have to do an age-long penance of haunting that bureau and those horrid figures, and I had suddenly resolved to tell her the whole story. She listened with varying complexion and face half turned aside. When I had ended, which I fear I did with something of a personal appeal, she lifted her head and looked me in the face, with just a slight curl on her thin lip, and answered me. “If I had wanted a sermon, Mr. Winchester, I should have gone to church for it. As for the ghost, I am sorry for you.” So saying she walked out of the room. The rest of the day I did not find very merry I pleaded my headache as an excuse for going to be early. How I hated the room now! Next morning, immediately after breakfast, I took my leave of East Haven. If I lost a wife at all, it was a stingy one. I should have been ashamed of her all my life long. However, extravagant runs the rich, and the stingy robs the poor. I have kept up my friendship with her brother. All he knows about the matter is, that either we had a quarrel, or she refused me—he is not sure which. I must say for Florence, that she was no tattler. Well, here is a letter I had from Gary James this very morning, I will read I to you. My Dear Winchester—We have had a terrible shock this morning. Jean did not come down to breakfast, and Clara went to see if she was ill. We heard her scream, and rushing up, there was poor Jean sitting at the old bureau, quite dead. She had fallen forward on the desk, and her housekeeping-book was crumpled up under her. She had been so all nigh long, we suppose, for she was not undressed, and was quite cold. The doctors say it was disease of the heart. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Some people thought the ghost had come to tell that she had hidden away money in some secret place in the old bureau, one would see why she was permitted to come back. And of course, those wretched accounts were not over and done with, you see. That is the misery of it. Good night. Then I walked out into the wind. We who have lost our sense and our senses—our touch, our small, our vision of who we are; we who frantically force and press all things, without rest for body or spirit, hurting our Earth and injuring ourselves: we call a halt. We want to rest. We need to rest and allow the Earth to rest. We need to reflect and to rediscover the mystery that lives in us, that is the ground of every unique expression of life, the source of the fascination that calls all things to communion. We declare a Sabbath, a space of quiet; for simply being and letting be; for recovering the great, forgotten truths; for learning how to live again. Our God and God of our fathers, please accept our rest. Please Sanctify us through Thy commandments, and grant our portion in Thy Torah. Please give us abundantly of Thy goodness and make us rejoice in Thy salvation. Please purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth. In Thy loving favour, O Lord our God, please grant that Thy holy Sabbath be our joyous heritage, and may America who sanctified Thy name, rest thereon. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who halowest the Sabbath. O Lord our God, be gracious unto Thy people America and accept their prayer. Please restore America and accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy sanctuary and please receive in love and favour the supplication of America. May the worship of thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
Things are looking up for a tour through the Winchester Mystery House. Will you be visiting us today? he Explore More Tour is officially open! Tour areas of the iconic mansion that had never been accessible to the public before. This is a 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
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Labour More that By Good Works You May Make Sure Your Calling and Election!
Man creates law to maintain his World. But what happens when the laws of man define the laws of nature? High Society may be for you or against you, Paul to the Romans (8.31)—but do not hand your life on such a supercilious judgment. Just take care that the Supernatural is with you in everything you do; in other words, keep a good conscience. In return, God will defend you well, and He will steer you clear of oncoming perversities. However, just in case you swerve unawares, know that there is no trick to extricating you from the ditch. God is faithful and quick; He knows the when and the how; at least according to the Acts of the Apostles (1.7) His modus operandi? He rescues, and He sweeps up after. You know you are in good hands. However, what if other discover your defects and throw them in your face? Well, that is humility. And if you suffer that exquisite pain in silence, it will lead to, of all things, greater humility. Yes, there are rascals who spend their days standing on the corner watching all the World go by. And yes, they are waiting for just such an oaf as yourself to trip up on your own defects. One moment you are humble, and the next? Well, you have given the ruffians a good laugh. Anyone humbled in this way God shields from further harm, dusts one off, patches one up. This is the sort of person He takes a liking to, according to Second Corinthians (7.6), and enriches with spiritual generosity according to First Peter (5.5) and James (4.6). He raises one from the street and lifts one up to Glory. In to one’s ear, or so the Gospel of Matthew intimates (11.25), He whispers the most extraordinary things, even asking one if one would like to be friends. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
What is the result of this sudden humility? Whenever the person trips, one falls, but the bloodied nose no longer shakes one’s peace of mind. That is because one’s standing is not with the rowdies on the next corner, but with the Angles in the next World. Now that is how God looks at it, but the view from your promontory–if needed there is one—is entirely different. Supposedly, you have made all this spiritual progress, but that is no reason to puff yourself up. Know that, compared with the rest of Humankind, none of whose spiritual condition you have any true knowledge of, you are still a very flat and uninspired person. Some, regarding the certainty of divine predestination, said that prayers were superfluous, as also anything else done to attain salvation; because whether these things were done or not, the predestined would attain, and the reprobate would not attain, eternal salvation. However, against this opinion are all the warnings of Holy Scripture, exhorting us to prayer and other good works. Others declared that the divine predestination was altered through prayer. This is stated to have the opinion of the Egyptians, who thought that the divine ordination, which they called fate, could be frustrated by certain sacrifices and prayer. Against this also is the authority of Scripture. For it is said: “But the triumpher in Israel will not spare and will not be moved to repentance,” reports 1 Kings 15.29; and that “the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance,” reports Romans 11.29. Wherefore we must say otherwise that in predestination two things are to be considered—namely, the divine ordination; and its effect. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
As regards the former, in no possible way can predestination be furthered by the prayers of the saints. For it is not due to their prayers that anyone is predestined by God. As regards for the latter, predestination is said to be helped by the prayers that anyone is predestined by other good works; because providence, of which predestination is a part, does not do away with secondary causes but so provides effects, that the order of secondary causes falls also under providence. So, as natural effects are provided by God in such a way that natural causes are directed to bring about those natural effects, without which those effects would not happen; so the salvation falls under the order of predestination; whether it be one’s own prayers or those of another; or other good works, and such like, without which one would not attain to salvation. Whence, the predestined must strive after good works and prayer; because through these means predestination is most certainly fulfilled. For this reason it is said: “Labour more that by good works you may make sure your calling and election,” reports 2 Peter 1.10. This argument shows that predestination is not furthered by the prayers of the saints, as regards the preordination. One is said to be helped by another in two ways: in one way, inasmuch as one receives power from one: and to be helped thus belongs to the weak; but this cannot be said of God, and thus we are to understand, “Who hath helped the Spirit of the Lord?” In another way one is said to be helped by a person through whom one carries out one’s work, as a master through a servant. In this way God is helped by us; inasmuch as we execute His orders, according to 1 Corinthians 3.9: “We are God’s coadjutors.” Nor is this on account of any defect in the power of God, but because He employs intermediary causes, in order that the beauty of order may be preserved in the Universe; and also that He may communicate to creatures the dignity of causality. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Secondary causes cannot escape the order of the first universal cause, as has been said above, indeed, they execute that order. And therefore predestination can be further by creatures, but it cannot be impeded by them. After the work of translation was completed and the eleven men had seen the plates, an Angel came for the golden plates and Urim and Thummim, and Joseph returned the precious things he had carefully watched over for so many months. The work of translating was over, but there still remained the work of printing the book that all might know the wonderful story. Oliver Cowdery made a copy of all the writings. One copy was for the printers to use, and one was to be kept in case the other was lost. In August, 1829, Oliver Cowdery began taking the writings to the printers in Palmyra, New York. He took a few pages at a time and stayed right with the work, proofreading the printed pages to see that the printing was correct. By March, 1830, the Book of Mormon was printed. Five thousand copies cost $3,000 (2021 inflation adjusted: $88,596.52). Martin Harris advanced the money, and as the books were sold the money was returned to him. The Book of Mormon tells the story of people who lived long ago in the Americas, having been led by God from Jerusalem across the sea to the promised land in America. It tells about God’s dealings with them. These ancient people knew about Jesus. The Lord gave them a sign of His birth and after His resurrection Jesus visited them and taught them His gospel. These ancient people kept records of their history. They wrote them on plates of gold because gold was durable and plentiful. God told his prophet Mormon to prepare the golden plates so they might be preserved and brought forth by the power of God at such time as the Lord desired. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
The records were hidden in a stone box in a hill and there they remained hidden in the care of the Lord until God chose to bring them forth by His wonderful power. God wanted the people who were to live hundreds of years later to know the story of the people Columbus called “Indians” when he arrived at the New World in his search for a new route to India. It is their story which was written upon the golden plates and was translated into the Book of Mormon. Now that the book was printed people could read for themselves the strange story told on the golden plates. The men went among the people, showing them the Book of Mormon, telling the wonderful story, and preaching the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. The World did not then know anything about those who had lived hundreds of years ago in the land of America. When some read the book, they believed it. Others, however, would not listen and in a cruel and wicked manner persecuted those who believed. One complete copy of the manuscript of the Book of Mormon has been carefully preserved for all the years since 1829. It is now in the custody of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It is kept in a bank vault, and for very special occasions it is brought from the vault and displayed, always under special police guard. The other copy was put in the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House in Nauvoo, Illinois. When his building was rebuilt any years later, it was found that water had seeped into the cornerstone and little of it was legible. Most of this manuscript was completely ruined, but some pages of it are still in existence. When the sacred moment comes, let one not hesitate to let oneself go, to adore the Overself ecstatically, and to let one’s heart be ravished. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The rapt return to mental indrawnness may come to the practising meditator quite unexpectedly and suddenly. It may find one engaged in some ordinary daily activity or caught speaking in the middle of a sentence, but whatever it be, one should instantly surrender oneself and one’s time to it. In the result, the meditation will gradually deepen into a mild ecstasy. The Overself throws out a clue to its existence and presence. This comes in various ways to different persons. One form is a delicate feeling drawing one inward either to deeper thought or to no thought at all. If one goes along with it even through hardly aware and half-involuntarily, one will be led by this clue to a glimpse. One could learn to recognize that these moments, which comes so suddenly and so delightfully, have a special value. As soon as they come one ought to suspend all activities, put aside whatever it is that one is doing, even stop what one is speaking, and concentrate all one’s attention in a passive submissive way upon the delicate feelings and deep understanding that come with them. When confronted with a compelling anecdote, people are often strangely insensitive to statistical information indicating that the anecdote is but an exception rather than the rule. Before buying his new car, Ken consults the Consumer Reports surveyof car owners and Bimmertips on the social media page of Instagram.com, and finds high ratings given to the 2022 BMW M760Li xDrive he is considering purchasing. Hearing of his intention, Jillian says, “Oh! Those are great cars. Justin and I were considering buying one on Father’s Day.” The research (and our own experience) suggests that Ken will go ahead and buy the car because his friends liked it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Vivid testimony often makes it hard to forget an object and discount it. Likewise, vivid terrorist acts in early 1986, although harming fewer than one in a million persons in Europe, caused fearful Americans to shun travel to Europe in favour of more dangerous vacations on American highways. The September 11, 2001, terrorist assaults motivated millions more people to drive where they would have flown, despite the much lower risk of flying (even after allowing for September 11). Indeed, had terrorist crashed fifty more similarly loaded plans in 2001, Americans (if they kept on flying) would still have ended the year safer in planes than cares. The human understanding is most excited by that which strikes and enters the mind at once and suddenly, and by which the imagination is immediately filled and inflated. It then begins almost imperceptibly to conceive and suppose that everything is similar to the few objects which have taken possession of the mind, whilst it is very slow and unfit for the transition to the remote and heterogenous instances by which axions are tried as by fire. This way of thinking has several implications. For psychologists, knowing our vulnerability to error beckons us not to disparage psychological science, but to restrain our unchecked speculations. Aware that we can conceive and defend almost any theory, we must be candid about our presuppositions and check our theories against the data of God’s created World. To appreciate the unreliability of unchecked intuition (that sixth sense that tells us we are right, whether we are or not) is to admit that we need to do science—to wed creative intuition with systematic observation. Our method and that of the skeptics agree in some respects at first setting out, but differ most widely, and are completely opposed to each conclusions: for they roundly assert that nothing can be known; we, that but a small part of nature can be known, by the present method; their next step, however, is to destroy the authority of the sense and understanding, whilst we invent and supply them with assistance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The accumulating research on human error also beckons us to a personal humility. It helps us understand why Jesus admonished us not to judge. We can easily wrong people by our overconfident judgements—that John’s depression stems from his demanding parents, or that the quiet woman next door harbours suppressed hostility. Nor need we feel intimidated by other people’s cockiness, least of all by strict and rigid doctrines of heresy hunters who are so absolutely sure they are right that they dare to practice spiritual ventriloquism—by putting their words into the mouth of God and believing the voice they throw to be the word of the Lord. When we make our own words our absolute truth, then, said the theologian Karl Barth, we have made an idol out of our religion. We have forgotten that we are not gods, but finite humans who peer at reality in a mirror dimly. Oliver Cromwell’s 1650 plea to the Church of Scotland is worth hearing over and again: “I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken.” The one belief of which we cannot be overconfident is the conviction that some of our beliefs contain error. Although that may sound threatening, it should actually be reassuring. For it means that it is okay to have doubts. Doubt reveals a mind that asks questions, a humble mind, one that does not presume its own ideas to be certainties, one that checks it presumptions against the data of God’s creation. Indeed, the intellectually honest words, belief, faith, and hope acknowledge uncertainty. We do not believe that three times three equals nine or have faith that what we throw upward will come down, or hope that day will follow night; we know these things with psychological if not logical certainty. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
To take the leap of faith is to bet one’s life on a presumed truth that makes sense of the Universe, that gives meaning to life, that provides hope in the face of adversity and death. One need not await 100 percent certainty before risking a thoughtful leap across the chasm of uncertainty. One can choose to marry in the hope of a happy life. One can elect a career, believing it will prove satisfying. One can fly across the ocean, having faith in the pilot and plane. To know that we are prone to error does not negate our capacity to glimpse truth, nor does it rationalize living as a fence straddler. Sometimes, said the novelist Albert Camus, life calls us to make a 100 percent commitment to something about which we are 51 percent sure. When we consider the structure of the personality, it is important to keep in mind the withdrawn “regressed” ego. There are three stages in the process called the withdrawal of the regressed ego. At stage one, there is a deepening of the split between the (already existing) Central Ego (more in touch with the World of other people and things) an the (also already existing) Libidinal Ego (where a person’s more bodily feelings originate). This is a true “vertical” split. At stage two, an Anti-Libidinal structure interposes between the Central Ego and the Libidinal Ego. This makes it additionally difficult for people to be in touch with their libidinal feelings, and for their libidinal needs to find expression in the World of other people and things. People then experience (rejecting) anger, because of the (frustrated) existence of these (excited) feelings, but they are not conscious of the source of their anger. The structure here under consideration is a repressive one, more a horizontal “lid” than a vertical split. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
At stage three, a further vertical split occurs, this time within the Libidinal Ego, that is within the structures which involve libidinal feeling. This split ensures that, while some libidinal needs eventually find expression, however painfully they may be hampered by their connection with anti-libidinal anger and rejection, others are withdrawn from communication with any source of pain. These latter are then out of touch with the realities mediated by the Central Ego, and out of touch with the moralities of Anti-Libidinal Ego, and out of touch with other (libidinal) feelings, needs, hopes, wishes. They exist, but they are unknown to the person. The result is a (vertically) split-off personality of which the person is no usually conscious. This is the passive repressed ego which seeks to return to the ante-natal state of absolute passive dependent security. Here, in quietude, repose, and immobility, it may find the opportunity to recuperate and grow to a rebirth. The phenomenon of the regressed ego is a very important one. However, one of the first misconceptions about regression we must clear up is the ambiguity in the term “regression.” Regression is a reversion to an earlier state of mode of functioning. However, what kind of a reversion? To an earlier state of feeling? Or to an earlier mode of personality organization? The answer is that there are two kinds of regression at least. One involves reversion to earlier feelings, and more generally regression to an earlier way of experiencing self and others. The other involves a relaxation of integrating process and hence a reversion to an earlier and less integrated organization of structures, with more splits, more isolated regions, more “islands.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Even in normal states of mind, some people have to make efforts to hold themselves together. When they relax in a therapeutic situation, they relax those efforts. This is the aspect of what is usually called regression which I shall call relaxation. Sometimes when it is believed that people are retreating to some earlier state of being, I believe them to be relaxing the connections which hold them together. Secondly, we must that sometimes what people are describing as regression, is a sequence of events in a child’s life. We must not be misled by this; it is in fact a sequence of stages which some people go through in some kinds of psychotherapy. People do regress in an appropriately holding therapeutic environment. As they feel more and more secure with their therapist, they give up their self-protective devices more and more. This allows them to revive and express (and even act upon) more and more strongly protected thoughts, feelings, wishes, memories, phantasies. Many of these do indeed have their roots in childhood and infancy, and were part of our young minds, but they indicate more about how we felt than and feel now, than about the stages by which we got those feelings. Thirdly, our troubles are aggravated by the assumption that we start with a unified self which is destroyed by subsequent misfortunes. As for instance, in this complex pattern of ego-splitting or loss of primary psychic unity, with all the weakness and internal conflict it involves, is the root cause of personality disorders in later life: and the most vulnerable part of the self is the most hidden part, cut off from all human relationships. This is an accurate description of how it is with some people. However, it also contains the misleading assumption that the self has a primary unity and then splits. Sometimes what psychologists lead in the consulting room can be misleading. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
In a relationship of trust, as self-protective devices are abandoned, some people relax and show themselves to be less integrated than they at first appear to be. In my view, they are then as they have always been, at heat. Many, many people have a hidden, tender, vulnerable side, and it would be good if this were more in touch with the rest of the personality. However, this hidden “regressed” withdrawn ego is not necessarily the result of splits in a region or a structure which was once whole. Although it is true that sometimes a more developed part of the self withdraws from involvement in everyday sensory life, it seems to me equally true that many people have parts which have never developed or which have never been allowed to come to the fore. These parts are hidden, but they have always been hidden—they have not retreated from a more visible position. There is a vulnerable, tender part of the personality, something that is very sensitive, like a flower that shrinks at the slightest touch. Often this part has been split off or repressed, because it has been hurt. Shrinking, wincing, wounded, skinless, are the adjectives which best describe those regions then. Many psychologists are familiar with these tender, vulnerable states of mind, none more so than maybe yours, but they are often misled by what their adult patients say and do. Not having a background in pediatrics can be detrimental because a medical professional may be led to an over-reliance on the evidence one gets from one’s adult patients. However, if we disregard one’s developmental assumptions, what the medical professional may be saying on the structure of the personality, particularly as regards the vulnerable feelings, is absolutely valid, and can be used to understand uniquely important aspects of the schizoid state of mind. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
With information on genetics doubling every two years, with the gene mechanics working overtime New Scientist magazine reports that “genetic engineering has been going through an essential tooling up phase; it is not ready to go into business.” The distinguished science commentator, Lord Ritchie-Calder, explains that “Just as we have manipulated plastics and metals, we are now manufacturing living materials.” Major companies are already in hot pursuit of commercial applications of the new biology. They dream of placing enzymes in the automobile to monitor exhaust and send data on pollution to microprocessors that will then adjust the engine. They speak of what is called metal-hungry microbes that might be used to mine valuable trace metals from ocean water. They have already demanded and won the right to patent new life forms. General Electric, Asklepois BioPharmaceutical , CRISPR Therapeutics, Editas Medicine, Pfizer and many others are all in the race. Nervous critics including many scientists, justifiably worry that there is a race at all. They conjure up images not of oil spills, but of “microbe spills” that could spread disease and decimate entire population. The creation and accidental release of virulent microbes, however, is only one cause for alarm. Completely sober and respectable scientists are talking about possibilities that stagger the imagination. Should we breed people with cowlike stomachs so they can digest grass and hay—thereby alleviating the food problem by modifying us to eat lower down on the food chain? Should we biologically alter to fit workers to fit job requirements—for example, creating pilots with faster reaction times or assembly-line workers neurologically designed to do our monotonous work for us? #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Should we attempt to eliminate “inferior” people and breed a “super-race”? (Some have tried this, but without the genetic weaponry that may son issue from our laboratories.) Should we clone soldiers to our fighting? Should we use genetic forecasting to pre-eliminate “unfit” babies? Should we grow reserve organs for ourselves—each of us having, as it were, a “saving bank” full of spare kidneys, livers, or lungs? Wild as these notions may sound, every one has its advocates (and adversaries) in the scientific community as well as its striking commercial applications. As two critics of genetic engineering, Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard, state in their book Who Should Play God?, “Broad scale genetic engineering will probably be introduced to America much the same way as assembly lines, automobiles, vaccines, computers and all the other technologies. As each new genetic advance becomes commercially practical, a new consumer need…will be exploited and a market for the new technology will be created.” The potential applications are myriad. The new biology, for example, could potentially help solve the energy problem. Scientists are now studying the idea of utilizing bacteria capable of converting sunlight into electrochemical energy. They speak of “biological solar cells.” Could we breed life forms to replace nuclear power plants? And if so, might we substitute the danger of a bioactive release for the danger of radioactive release? In the field of health, many diseases now untreatable will no doubt be cured or prevented—and new ones, perhaps worse, introduced through inadvertence or even malice. (If it developed and secretly spread some new disease for which it alone had the cure, think what a profit-hungry company could do. Even a mild, coldlike ailment could create a massive market for the appropriate, monopolistically controlled cure.) #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
According to the president of Cetus, a California company to which many World-famous geneticists are commercially linked, “biology will replace chemistry in importance” in the next thirty years. And in Moscow an official policy statement urges “the wider use of micro-organisms in the national economy.” Biology will reduce or eliminate the need for oil in the production of plastics, fertilizer, cloths, paint, pesticides, and thousands of other products. It will sharply alter the production of wood, wool, and other “natural” goods. Companies like United States Steel, Fiat, Hitachi, ASEA, or IBM will undoubtedly have their own biology divisions as we begin to shift, over time, from manufacture to “bio-facture,” giving rise to a range of products unimaginable until now. Says Theodore J. Gordon, the head of The Futures Group, “In biology, once we get stated, we’ll have to think about things like…can you make a “tissue-compatible shirt” or a “mammary mattress”—created out of the same stuff as the human” organ of milk secretion. Long before then, in agriculture, genetic engineering will be employed to increase the World food supply. The much-publicized Green Revolution of the 1960’s proved, in large measures, a colossal trap for farmers in the First Wave World because I required enormous inputs of petroleum-based fertilizer that had to be brought abroad. The next bio-agricultural revolution aims at reducing that dependence on artificial fertilizer. Genetic engineering points toward high-yielding crops, crops that grow well in sandy or salty soil, crops that fight off pests. It also seeks to create entirely new foods and fibers, along with simpler, cheaper, energy-conserving methods for storing and processing foods. As though to balance off some of its awesome peril, genetic engineering once more holds out for us the possibility of ending widespread famine. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
One must remain skeptical of these glowing promises. Yet if some of these advocates of genetic farming are half right, the impact on agriculture could be tremendous, ultimately altering, among other things relations between the poor countries and the rich. The Green Revolution made the poor more, not less, dependent on the rich. The bio-agricultural revolution could do the reverse. It is too early to say with confidence how biotechnology will develop. However, it is too late to turn back to zero. We cannot undiscover what we know. We can only fight to control its application, to prevent hasty exploitation, to transnationalize it, and to minimize corporate, national, and interscientific rivalry in the entire field before it is too late. One thing is immutably clear: we are no longer locked into the four-hundred-year-old electromechanical frame of traditional Second Wave technology, and can only begin to glimpse the full significance of this historic fact. Just as the Second Wave combined coal, steel, electricity, and rail transport to produce automobiles and a thousand other life-transforming products, the real impact of the new changes will not be felt until we reach the stage of combing the new technologies—linking together computers, electronics, new materials from outer space and the oceans, with genetics, and all of these, in turn with the new energy base. Bringing these elements together will release a flood of innovation unlike any seen before in human history. We are constructing a dramatically new techno-sphere for a Third Wave civilization. The power of human emotion can neither be control by the laws we create nor by the will we impose. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Prior to the mass suburbanization following the second World War, working-class suburbs were almost certain to be older industrial or factory suburbs. An example would be Cudahy, south of Milwaukee, which was established when the Milwaukee city government refused to allow Patrick Cudahy to build a stockyard and slaughterhouse within the city. As a consequence, the meat packer established a new suburb outside the city limits, which he named after himself. Another example would be the working-class suburb of Cicero, west of Chicago. Cicero achieved national notoriety during the 1920s as the headquarters of Al Capone’s operations when a short-lived reform administration in Chicago temporarily forced the organization to move to the suburbs. Most prewar working-class suburbs, however, were simply factory towns. They were in no way distinctive. Plain but generally well-kept houses with small yards were the norm. Following World War II, the GI Bill allowed blue-collar workers as well as the traditional middle class to successfully apply for long-term mortgages. Growing prosperity also made it possible for working-class workers to purchase a family automobile. At the same time new interstate and other road networks made new suburban locations a reasonable alternative for aging inner-city factories. Industries could relocate beyond streetcar lines without fearing they would be unable to recruit a work force. As a result, factories and labour forces decentralized. It is sometimes forgotten that the new postwar working-class suburbanites that followed the factories to the suburbs were not fleeing decaying city neighbourhoods. More often than not, they were somewhat reluctantly leaving tight ethnic neighbourhoods with high levels of social interaction. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
In the 1960s, when they were forced to move from Richmond, California, to the suburb of Milpitas, California, in order to work at the new automobile plant, the lifestyle of one hundred blue-collar Ford assembly workers and their families changed. What was found was that suburbanization had little or no effect on the workers’ style of life. They did not see the move in terms of social mobility; they had no great hopes of getting ahead in their jobs. They had no illusions of wealth; their wage level was dependent on the union contract. At a consequence of becoming suburbanites, they did not change their political affiliations (81 percent Democrat), go to church more, or join community organizations. They participated only minimally in formal groups. What they did do is continue their traditional working-class pattern of tight, informal socialization, with long-term friends and neighbours. While they enjoyed the creature comforts of suburban living, they remained peer-group- and ethnic-group-centered. In brief, they lived life patterns quite similar to those workers living in blue-collar central-city neighbourhoods. Their new suburban homes were not seen as way stations on the road to social mobility, but rather as permanent places of residence. Now many of the postwar blue-collar suburbs are experiencing the same downward economic pressures suffered by central cities. Declines in nearby heavy-industry and manufacturing jobs mean that those living in older inner-ring suburbs have long commutes to service jobs in outlying edge suburbs. Commercial tax bases are also eroding in working-class suburbs. Additionally, older working-class suburbs, with their more affordable housing, have been most likely to attract a diverse group of people escaping the city. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
The deterioration of job prospects for blue-collar workers in a postindustrial economy suggest that such workers may now find themselves trapped in declining work-class suburbs. These suburbs lack the affluence of other suburbs, and even the basic amenities of the central city. Hey! Lean to hear my feeble voice. At the center of the sacred hoop. You have said that I should make the tree bloom. With tears running, O Great Spirit, my Grandfather, with running eyes I must say the tree has never bloomed. Here I stand, and the tree is withered. Again, I recall the great vision you gave me. It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then that it may leaf and blood and fill with singing birds! Hear me, that the people may once again find the good road and the shielding tree. When I call upon the Lord, ascribe greatness unto our God. O Lord, open Thou my lips and my mouth shall declare Thy praise. Praised art Thou, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, mighty, revered and exalted God. Thou bestowest lovingkindness and possessest all things. Mindful of the patriarchs’ love for Thee, Thou wilt in Thy love bring a redeemer to their children’s children for the sake of Thy name. Remember us unto life, O King who delightest in life, and inscribe us in the Book of Life so that we may live worthily for Thy sake, O Lord of life. O King, Thou Helper, Redeemer and Shield, be Thou praised, O Lord, Shield of Abraham. Thou, O Lord, art mighty forever. Thou callest the dead to immortal life for Thou art mighty in deliverance. It is needful to look into the self in depth, to a level where psychoanalysts are seldom able to reach. For the real aim is to penetrate through thoughts to Thought itself, through the personal being to the impersonal one. Further, according to the ancient tradition, not only must meditation penetrate deeply, it must also be continuous. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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No One Lives on this Earth without Tribulation–Life is Lived Forwards, but Understood Backwards!
Are lives are defined by our choices. Paths taken and worlds explored. But once we commit, we can never go back, or can we? Bondage of the will is an essential foundation for the doctrine of grace. By ourselves, we are unable to act righteously, to have faith, or to contribute to our own salvation. All credit belongs to God. What then is left to free will? “Nothing! In truth!” insisted Marlin Luther. John Calvin was just as forceful: because the term free will “cannot be retained without great peril, it will…be a great boon for the church if it is abolished.” The divine determinism assumed by the doctrines of God’s foreknowledge, sovereignty, and grace is not identical to naturalistic cause-effect determinism. Yet biblical faith assumes that God works through the created order. Thomas Aquinas argued (in the words of Michael Novak) that “grace operates (except in the rarest cases) through the ordinary contingencies and processes of nature…The whole environment, the whole ‘schedule of contingencies’ that constitutes history is graced.” Believing in God opens one to the possibility of miracles; yet if we accept that all nature is from moment to moment sustained, ordered, and upheld by God, then we no longer need miracles in order to “make room for God.” Whatever their differences, the concepts of absolute determinism and absolute divine sovereignty converge in affirming our dependence on forces beyond our conscious knowledge. Thus they share the problem of how to accommodate ultimate more responsibility. If a superhypnotist were to plant an irresistible suggestion that you should commit a crime, which you then did with a sense of having chosen to do it, surely no one who knew the hidden cases of your behaviour would hold you responsible. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Likewise, if we understand the conditions that triggered someone’s acting desirably, we tend to credit the conditions rather than the person. It is only when we are surprised by a person’s heroism—when we do not expect people to behave o nobly under such circumstances—that we give special credit and honour to the hero. In a deterministic World we can judge any behaviour as worthy of praise or blame, but it becomes more difficult to hold the person as ultimately responsible. One is therefore tempted to create a gap in the schemes of natural and divine determination—to open the door to just a dash of ultimate free will, however much is needed to restore our accountability before God and before our human judicial system. God’s sovereignty, we may tell ourselves, does not extend all the way down to the little things, such as what I ate for breakfast this morning. God is concerned only with big events, the ultimate ends. However, as Jonathan Edwards and the other theological masterminds recognized, this assumption of agent causation creates as many problems as it solves. A God who is detached from what you ate for breakfast (or whether you ate breakfast) is not a God who is continuously involved with all events of the creation. And consider: How are the big ends in life achieved apart from the little means? Looking back on our lives, we see our path winding through countless little event and chance encounters, from our initial conception right up to the present. At any decision point we feel free, but looking back, we see causation. “What I so proudly call ‘myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never stared and which I cannot stop,” suggested C.S. Lewis. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Or as Soren Kierkegaard noted, “Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.” Thus the apostle Paul could sense, “I yet not I, but the grace of God.” So both the absolute determinist and the one who believes in God’s utter sovereignty (perhaps the same person) are left baffled. To limit natural and divine powers makes little sense and only opens that door for pride in self and a judgmental attitude toward others. Yet somehow human accountability must be affirmed. Faced with this paradox of faith, we can take comfort in remembering that we cannot expect to comprehend fully this wisdom and justice of a being whose cognitive stage is infinitely beyond our own. Our situation is like that of someone stranded in a deep well with two ropes dangling down. If we grab either one alone, we sink still deeper into the well. Only when we hold both ropes at once can we climb out, because at the top, beyond where we can see, they come together around a pulley. Grabbing only the rope of determinism or the rope of human responsibility plunges us to the bottom of a well. So instead we grab both ropes, without yet understanding how they come together. In doing so, we may also be comforted that in science as in religion, a confused acceptance of irreconcilable principles is sometimes more hones than a tidy oversimplified theory that ignores evidence. (Remember that advocates of agent causation have no trouble explaining our responsibility, but do face a different mystery—how God could accomplish divine purposes while granting us freedom to do as we choose.) #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
We also do well to remember both ropes in our everyday attitudes—by viewing ourselves as free and responsible agents and others as influenced by their biology, their past experience, and their current situation. Such a view has the effect of cultivating within us the practical fruits of self-discipline and self-initiative, while being more understanding of the forces that constrain others. Scripture, too, tends to adopt the perspective of self as free and other as caused. When the Bible addresses us directly, it emphasizes our responsibility for our failings. When talking to us about others, especially the poor and disadvantaged, it frequently advocates the complementary perspective: do not judge; act with compassion toward the oppressed; take the beam out of your own eye before worrying about the motes in others; let judgment begin with the house of the Lord. Are we determined or free? Christian psychologists who assume absolute determinism struggle to rationalize human responsibility; those who assume self-causation have solved the problem of human responsibility butt struggle to accommodate natural causation and divine sovereignty in human affairs. Nevertheless, on this much both camps agree: in the fabric of contemporary psychology and Christian doctrine, natural order and human responsibility are the interwoven threads. The new enlightenment which resulted from this development increased human superiority over others terrestrial beings by making them aware that they are from a divine being and created in His image. “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground,’” reports Genesis 1.26. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
And because humans learned they were superior to animals, they trained themselves to set traps for them; they tricked them in a thousand different ways. And although several surpassed them or hurt them, humans became the master of the former and the scourge of the latter. Thus the first glance they directed upon themselves produced within them the first string of pride; thus, as yet hardly knowing how to distinguish the ranks, and contemplating themselves in the first rank by virtue of their species, they prepared themselves from afar to lay claim to it in virtue of their individuality. Although their fellow humans were not for one what they are for us, and although they had hardly anything more to do with them than with other animals, they were not forgotten in their observations. The conformities that tie could make one perceive among the, their female, and oneself, made the human beings judge of those they did not perceive. And seeing that they all acted as one would have done under similar circumstances, one concluded that their way of thinking and feeling was in complete conformity with their own. And this important truth, well established in their mind, made them follow, by a presentiment as sure as dialectic and more prompt, the best rules of conduct that it was appropriate to observe toward them for their advantage and safety. Taught by experience that love of well-being is the sole motive of human actions, one found oneself in a position to distinguish the rare occasions when common interest should make one count on the assistance of their fellow humans, and those even rarer occasions when competition ought to make one distrust them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
In the first case, humans untied with them in a herd, or at most in some sort of free association, that obligated no one and that lasted only as long as the passing need that hard formed it. In the second case, if one believed that one could, everyone sought to obtain one’s own advantage, either by overt force. Of it one felt oneself to be weaker, one sought to obtain advantage by cleverness and cunning. This is how humans could imperceptibly acquire some crude idea of mutual commitments and of the advantages to be had in fulfilling them, but only insofar as present and perceptible interests could require it, since foresight meant nothing to them, and far from concerning themselves about a distant future, they did not even give a thought to the next day. Were it a matter of catching a deer, everyone was quite aware that one must faithfully keep to one’s post in order to achieve this purpose; but if a hare happened to pass within reach of one of them, no doubt one would have pursued it without giving it a second thought, and that, having obtained one’s prey, one cared very little about causing one’s companions to miss theirs. It is easy to understand that such intercourse did not require a language much more refined than that of crows or monkeys, which flock together in practically the same way. Inarticulate cries, many gestures, and some imitative noises must for a long time have made up the universal language. By joining to this in each country a few articulate and conventional sounds, whose institution, as I have already said, is not too easy to explain, there were individual languages, but crude and imperfect ones, quite similar to those still spoken by carious savage nations today. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
Constrained by the passing of time, the abundance of things I have to say, and the practically imperceptible progress of the beginnings, I am flying like an arrow over the multitudes of centuries. For the slower events were in succeeding one another, the quicker they can be described. These first advantages enabled humans to make more rapid ones. The more the mind was enlightened, the more industry was perfected. Soon they ceased to fall asleep under the first tree or to retreat into caves, and found various types of hatches made of hard, sharp stones, which served to cut wood, dig up the soil, and make huts from branches they later found it useful to cover with clay and mud. This was the period of a first revolution which formed the establishment of the distinction among families and which introduced a kind of property, whence perhaps there already arose many quarrels and fights. However, since the strongest were probably the first to make themselves lodgings they felt capable of defending, presumably the weak found it quicker and safer to imitate them than to try to dislodge them; and as for those who already had huts, each of them must have rarely sought to appropriate that of one’s neighbour, less because it did not belong to one than because it was of no use to one, and because one could not seize it without exposing oneself to a fierce battle with the family that occupied it. The first development of the heart were the effect of a new situation that united the husbands and wives, fathers and children in one common habitation. The habit of living together gave rise to the sweetest sentiments known to humans: conjugal love and parental love. “God blessed them and said to them ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the Earth and subdue it,’” reports Genesis 1.28. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
Each family became a little society all the better united because mutual attachment and liberty were its only bonds; and it was then that the first difference was established in the lifestyle of the two genders, which until then had had only one. Women because more sedentary and grew accustomed to watch over the hut and the children, while the man went to seek their common subsistence. With their slightly softer life the two genders also began to lose something of their ferocity and vigour. However, while each one separately became less suited combat savage beasts, on the other hand it was easier to assemble in order to jointly to resist them. In this new state, with simple and solitary life, very limited needs, and the tools they had invented to provide for them, since humans enjoyed a great deal of leisure time, they used it to procure for themselves many types of conveniences unknown their fathers; and that was the first yoke they imposed on themselves without realizing it, and the first source of evils they prepared for their descendants. For in addition to their continuing thus to soften body and mind (those conveniences having through habit lost almost all their pleasures, and being at the same time degenerated into true needs), being deprived of them because much more cruel than possessing hem was sweet; and they were unhappy about losing them without being happy about possessing them. At this point we can see a little better how the use of speech was established or imperceptibly perfected itself in the bosom of each family; and one can further conjecture how various particular causes could have extended the language and accelerated its progress by making it more necessary. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
Great floods or earthquakes surrounded the inhabited areas with water or precipices. Upheavals of the globe detached parts of the mainland and broke them up into islands. Clearly among humans thus brought together and forced to live together, a common idiom must have been formed sooner than among those who wandered freely about the forests of the mainland. Thus it is quite possible that after their first attempts at navigation, the islanders brought the use of speech to us; and it is at least quite probable that society and languages came into being on islands and were perfected there before they were known on the mainland. Everything begins to take on a new appearance. Having previously wandered about the forest and having assumed a more fixed situation, humans slowly came together and united into different bands, eventually forming in each country a particular nation, united by mores and characteristic features, not by regulations and laws, but by the same kind of life and foods and by the common influence of the climate. Eventually a permanent proximity cannot fail to engender some intercourse among different families. Young people of difference genders live in neighbouring huts; the passing intercourse demanded by nature soon leads to another, through frequent contact with one another, no less sweet and more permanent. People became accustomed to consider different objects and to make comparison. Imperceptibly they acquire the ideas of merit and beauty which produce feelings of preference. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer get along without seeing one another again. A sweet and tender feeling insinuates itself into the soul and at the least opposition becomes an impetuous fury. Jealousy awakens with love’ discord triumphs, and the sweetest passion receives sacrificed of human blood. In proportion as ideas and sentiments succeed one another and as the mind and heart are trained, the human race continues to be tamed, relationships spread and bonds are tightened. People grew accustomed to gather in front of their huts or around a large tree; song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation of idle humans who had flocked together. Each one began to look at the others and to wan to be looked at oneself, and public esteem had a value. The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit or the most eloquent became the most highly regarded. And this was the first step toward inequality and, at the same time, toward vice. From these first preferences were born vanity and contempt on the one hand, and shame and envy on the other. And the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence. On 8 August 1960, a West Virginia-born chemical engineer named Monroe Rathbone, sitting in his office high over Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, New York United States of America, made a decision that future historians might someday choose to symbolize the end of the Second Wave era. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
Few paid any attention when Mr. Rathbone, chief executive of the giant Exxon Corporation, took steps to cut back on the taxes Exxon paid to the oil-producing countries. His decision, though ignored by the Western press, struck like a thunderbolt at the governments of these countries, since virtually all their revenues derived from oil company payments. Within a few days the other major oil companies had followed Exxon’s lead. And one month later, on 9 September, in the fabled city of Baghdad, delegates of the hardest-hit countries met in emergency council. Backed to the wall, they formed themselves into a committee of oil-exporting governments. For fully thirteen years the activities of this committee, and even its name, were ignored outside the pages of a few petroleum industry journals. Until 1973, that is, when the Yom Kippur War broke out and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) suddenly stepped out of the shadows. Chocking off the World’s supply of crude oil, it sent the entire Second Wave economy into a shuddering down-spin. What OPEC did, apart from quadrupling its oil revenues, was to accelerate a revolution that was already brewing in the Second Wave techno-sphere. In the earsplitting clamour over the energy crisis that has since followed, so many plans, proposals, arguments, and counterarguments have been hurled at us that it is difficult to make sensible choices. Governments are just as confused as the proverbial human in the streets. One way to cut through the murk is to look beyond the individual technologies and policies to the principles underlying them. Once we do, we find that certain proposals are designed to maintain or extend the Second Wave energy base as we have known it, while others rest on new principles. The result is a radical clarification of the entire energy issue. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
The Second Wave energy base, we saw earlier, was premised on non-renewability; it drew from highly concentrated, exhaustible deposits; it relied on expansive, heavily centralized technologies; and it was nondiversified, resting on a relatively few sources and methods. These were the main features of the energy base in all Second Wave nations throughout the industrial era. Bearing these in mind, if we now look at the various plans and proposals generated by the oil crisis we can quickly tell which ones are mere extensions of the old and which are forerunners of something fundamentally new. And the basic question becomes not whether oil should sell at forty dollars (2021 inflation adjusted $363.78) per barrel or whether a nuclear reactor should rise at Seabrook or Grohnde. The larger question is whether any energy base deigned for industrial society and premised on these Second Wave principles can survive. Once asked in this form, the answer is inescapable. Through the past half-century, fully two thirds of the entire World’s energy supply has come from oil and gas. Most observers today, from the most fanatic conservationists to the deposed Shah of Iran, from solar freaks and Saudi sheikhs to the button-down, brief-case-carrying experts of many governments, agree that this dependency on fossil fuel cannot continue indefinitely, no matter how many new oil fields are discovered. Statistic vary. Disputes rage over how long World has before the ultimate crunch. The forecasting complexities are enormous and many past predications now look silly. Yet one thing is clear: no one is pumping gas oil back to replenish the supply. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Whether the end comes in some climatic gurgle or, more likely, in a succession of dizzyingly destabilizing shortages, temporary gluts, and deeper shortages, the oil epoch is ending. Iranians know this. Kuwaitis and Nigerians and Venezuelans know it. Saudi Arabians know it—which is why they are racing to build an economy based on something other than oil revenues. And although we are having issues supplying electricity to major cities in America, and an element used to create batteries in electric cars is expected to run out in the near future, this is why leaders are pushing to increase the demand of electric cars. Petroleum companies know it—which is why they are scrambling to diversify out of oil. (One president of a petroleum company told me at a dinner in Tokyo not long ago that, in his opinion, the oil giants would become industrial dinosaurs, as the railroads have. His time frame for this was breathtakingly short—years, not decades. Perhaps in the next ten years.) However, the debate over physical depletion is almost beside the point. For in today’s World it is price, not physical supply, that has the most immediate and significant impact. And here, if anything, the facts point even more strongly to the same conclusion. The suburban ideology fits somewhat uncomfortably into the urban dichotomy. Suburbs are neither one nor the other. Proponents of suburban living historically have resolved this by emphasizing how suburbs ideally combine the best features of urban and rural living. Opponents stress that they contain the worse of both Worlds. The argument that suburbs have best of both is not new. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
An 1873 promotional tract pushing development of the North Shore of Chicago proclaims, “The controversy which is sometimes brought, as to which offers the greater advantage, the country of the city, finds a happy answer in the suburban ideal which says both—the combination of the two—the city brought to the country. This is a practical and valuable reply. The city has its advantages and conveniences, the country its charm and health; the union of the two (a modern result of the railway), gives to humans all they could ask in this respect.” As the earlier section on romantic suburbs indicates, the suburb was to allow the nineteenth-century city man of business to have it both ways. One would make one’s fortune during the day in the dynamic and vita industrial city and then retire by commuter railroad to the health and domestic tranquility of the picturesque suburb. Although homes in turn-of-the-century streetcar suburbs were far less grand and often occupied minimal size lots, the imagery of suburbs being at least surrounded by country persisted. Sometimes the open spaces lasted only until all the planned housing was constructed. Automobile suburbs built prior to the second World War, if anything, accentuated and sharpened the image of suburbs as being distinct from the city. Real estate developers and realtors found it was good for business to foster the image of both spatial and social distance from the central city. The mass suburbanization during the postwar years may have changed the reality, not the ideology, of suburban exclusivity. Builders and developers continued to advertise based upon the image of suburbia as an exclusive enclave where one’s fellow suburbanites would all be upwardly mobile and community involved. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Advertisements spoke less about square footage than about “moving up” and the “quality of life.” Nonetheless, the reality was that suburbia was now open to virtually all. Exclusively had come down to the basics of being employed and European American. Some of the postwar criticisms by cultural elites of the new suburbs were, in fact, a recognition of his change. Literary and cultural criticisms of standardized subdivision housing as an aesthetic wasteland, and the attacks on the middle-brow values of those inhabiting such housing, were in part an elitist response to rapid social change. This “there goes the neighbourhood” response, combined with a glorification of the past, was clearly evident in the comments of influential intellectuals such as Lewis Mumford. One can feel the disdain when he described postwar suburbia as “a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at unform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group…conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold.” To many of the urban critics of the 1950s and 1960s, the major crime of the new suburbs was that they were common. Unlike the affluent and exclusive suburbs of earlier decades, the new suburbs, and suburbanites, were seen as lacking the true urbanite’s sense of good taste. Underlying the criticisms is the assumption that the new suburbanites went to the wrong schools, read the wrong books, and even bought the wrong furniture. It was as if former workers and service help had aspired to rise above their true station in life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
There is a World of other people and things—the point of individuation. At this point, there may be either a more home-loving or a more space-loving orientation, but either way, if all goes well, a person will emerge with an integrated personality. However, all may not go well. A person may be struck by a trauma, after which development will be fundamentally influenced by the method which that person invented to cope with the trauma. The Basic Fault is at the point at which people begin to have to “cope.” Use of the English “coping” refers to ego-function! It gives recognition to our ability to survive and to deal with people and things in order to survive, not necessarily with much regard to the moral dimension. “Coping” has two independent and equally relevant root, according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: A. Form the Old French coper, Modern French couper, to strike (a blow), to cut. From this root we get our meanings (1) to strike; to come to blows; encounter; engage; (2) to be or prove oneself a match for, content successfully with; (3) to have to do with; (4) to meet, to come in contact (hostile and friendly) with; (5) to match a thing with another equivalent. B. From Middle English Kopen – to buy (cf. cheap). From this root we get (1) to buy; (2) to exchange, barter; (3) to make an exchange, bargain. There is even a third root, from cope meaning cape: to cover with a cope, to hang over like a coping. All very appropriate. To return to our theme after this linguistic digression, trauma is not necessarily a single even. Trauma is more likely to be caused by a long-standing situation in which there was some painful misunderstanding—a lack of fit—between the child and the adults around it. #RandolphHarrs 16 of 25
True, despite the general lack of fit, in some cases some adult may be on the child’s side, but much more often, immature and weak individuals have to cope on their own with traumatic situations: either no help is available, or the only help is of a kind that is hardly more than a continuation of the misunderstand, and thus useless. For lack of the right support, the individual is forced to find its own method of coping, a method hit upon a time of despair or thrown at it by some un-understanding adult who may be a well-wisher, or just indifferent, or negligent, or even careless or hostile. This method will be incorporated in the individual’s personality, and thereafter anything beyond or contrary to this method will strike the person as a frightening and more or less impossible proposition. The individual’s further development will then be prescribed or at least limited by this method which, although helpful in some respects, is often costly, and above all, alien. Most patients cannot tell us what causes their resentment, lifelessness, dependence, what the fault or the defect in them is…some can express it by phantasies about perfect partners, perfect harmony, untroubled contentment….Over and over they repeat that they feel let down, that nothing in the World can ever be worth while unless something hey were deprived of is restored to them. Sophisticated patients may express this something irretrievably lost or gone wrong as the male organ or the breast, usually felt to have magical qualities, and speak of male organ or breast, or castration fear. However, in nearly all cases this is coupled with an unquenchable and incontestable feeling that if the loss cannot be made good, the patient oneself will remain no go. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
It is always a dry season until you give way to the sorrowing of the heart. Only then will the drops of devotion come. Heart-felt sorrow opens many a door. Deep-down compulsion slams the door in your face every time. We may stumble onto happiness, but, remember, we are exiles and the World is alive with peril. You laugh at the defects of the World, but your own spiritual defects you shrug off. Yet hey bedevil your soul, and what do you do about it? You laugh. Nobody laughs in public these days, expect you. You laugh uproariously, but the joke is on you. It is the other way around. Your peccadillos are laughing at you when you should be weeping uncontrollably where no one can see. What is missing is the fear of God and a working conscious. If we do not feel the pain of reformation in our souls, Joy or Liberty cannot be true and good. Happy the self-actualized who can scatter one’s distractions and collect oneself into holy sorrowing of the heart! Happy is the self-actualized who can shield one’s snow-white conscience from bilious gray pigeons! That is to say, from the dropping of one’s own inordinate affections. Face it! When it comes to power, it takes a good habit to whip a bad habit. If you do not care a fig for the World, the World will not care a farthing for you. Do not inundate yourself with the affairs of the low and unlovely, and do not insinuate yourself into the affairs of the high and mighty. Remember, you are a member of a holy company dedicated to spiritual progress. Hence, keep a steely eye on yourself. When necessary, unbraid yourself. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
If you cast a knowing wink at the World and the World does not return the wink, do not tear up, do not waste a single tear of your own. Give serious thought to this possibility. You may not have the right stuff to be a servant of God and live the devout life. After all, we do not have many consolations in this sort of life; at least as Flesh counts them. That is what our experience tells us. And rarer still, at least as the Soul counts them, are the Divine Consolations. There has go to be a reason, and it is sin. We just do not seek the sorrowing of the heart hard enough. The least we could is throw our vanities to the wind. Are you worth Divine Consolation? Face it, all you are worth is a bundle of snakes! When you are contrite to the point of perfection, the face your present to the World is never cheerful, always chary. The good person has more than enough to be sorrowful for, to weep for. No matter how you look at it—and your neighbour will confirm it—no one lives on this Earth without tribulation. The more you eye the condition of your own soul, the more openly you weep. The causes of just sorrow and internal contrition are our sins and the vice that lead to our sins. And is it not true that we spend so much time on Earthly grapplings that we have almost no time to give to celestial contemplations? Death is approaching more quickly than life is unfolding. Think about that now, and put more shoulder into your reformation of life. We are on the near side of death now, but on the far side await he pains of Hell or Purgatory. Weigh that in your heart, and maybe now you will be willing to undertake the laborious program of reform, readying yourself for the Final Rigour. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
Why is it that considerations like these do no hit the target? Why are we as blind to the blandishments banded about us? Are we as lazy and loutish as that? What spirit is left in that wretched body of yours? A whistle? A whimper? A whisper? Pray, therefore, humbly to the Lord that He give your spirit of contrition. Say as the Psalmist said (80.5), “With the bread of tears satisfy my hunger, Lord, and with a measure of tears satisfy my thirst.” The number of the predestined is certain, and can neither be increased nor diminished. The number of predestine is certain. Some have said that it was formally, but not materially certain; as if we were to say that it was certain that a hundred or a thousand would be saved; not however these or those individuals. However, this destroys the certainty of predestination; of which we spoke of above. Therefore we must say that to God the number of predestined is certain, not only formally, but also materially. It must, however, be observed that the number of the predestined is said to be certain to God, not by reason of His knowledge, because, that is to say, He knows how many will be saved (for in this way the number drops of rain and the sands of the sea are certain to God); but by reason of His deliberate choice and determination. For the further evidence of which we must remember that every agent intends to make something finite, as is clear from what has been said above when we treated of the infinite. Now whosoever intends some definite measure in one’s effect thinks out some definite number in the essential parts, which are by their very nature required for the perfection of the whole. For of those things which are required not principally, but only account of something else, one does not select any definite number “per se”; but one accepts and uses the in such numbers as are necessary on account of that other thing. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
For instance, a builder thinks out the definite measurements of a house, and also the definite number of rooms which one wishes to make in the house; and definite measurements of the walls and roof; one does not, however, select a definite number of stones, but accepts and uses just so many as are sufficient for the required measurements of the wall. So also must we consider concerning God in regard to the whole Universe, which is His effect. For He pre-ordained the measurements of the whole of the Universe, and what number would befit the essential parts of that Universe—that is to say, which have in some way been ordained in perpetuity; how many spheres, how many stars, how many elements, and how many species. Individuals, however, which undergo corruption, are no ordained as I were chiefly for the good of the Universe, but in a secondary way, inasmuch as the good of the species is preserved through them. Whence, although God knows the total number of individuals, the number of oxen, flies and such like, is not pre-ordained by God “per se”; but divine providence produces just so many as are sufficient for the preservation of the species. Now of all creatures the rational creature is chiefly ordained for the good of the Universe, being as much incorruptible; more especially those who attain to eternal happiness, since they more immediately reach the ultimate end. Whence the number of the predestination is certain to God; not only by way of knowledge, but also by way of a principal pre-ordination. It is not exactly the same thing in the cause of the number of the reprobate, who would seem o be pre-ordained by God for the good of the elect, in whose regard “all things work unto good” Romans 8.28. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Concerning the number of all the predestined, some say that so many human will be saved as Angels fell; some so many as there were Angels left; others, as many as the number of Angels created by God. It is, however, better to say that, “to God alone is known the number for whom is reserved eternal happiness [From the ‘secret’ prayer of the missal, “pro vivis et defunctis.’]” These words of Deuteronomy must be taken as applied to those who are marked out by God beforehand in respect to present righteousness. For there is increased and diminished, but not the number of the predestined. The reason of the quantity of any one part must be judged from the proportion of that part of the whole. Thus in God the reason why He has made so many stars, or so many species of things, or predestined so many, according to the proportion of the principal parts to the good of the whole Universe. The good that is proportionate to the common state of nature is to be found in the majority, and is wanting in the majority. Thus is clear that is the majority of humans have a sufficient knowledge for the guidance of life; and those who have not this knowledge are sad to be half-witted or foolish; but they who attain to a profound knowledge of things intelligible are a very small minority in respect to the rest. Since their eternal happiness, consisting in the vision of God, exceeds the common state of nature, and especially in so far as this is deprived of grace through the corruption of original sin, those who are saved are in the minority. In this especially, however, appears the mercy of God, that He has chosen some for that salvation, from which very many in accordance with the common course and tendency of nature fall short. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
All thinking keeps one’s awareness out of the Overself. That is why even thinking about the Overself merely produced another thought. Only in the case of the self-actualized, who has established oneself in the Overself, is thinking no barrier at all. In this case, thinking may coexist with the larger awareness. So it is not enough to be a good thinker; one also has to learn how to be a good non-thinker. Of course, the way to do this is through the practice of deep and meaningful prayer. Appetite has really become an artificial and abnormal thing, having taken the place of true hunger, which alone is natural. The one is a sign of bondage but the other, of freedom. It may be considered folly by common opinion but this refusal to destroy life uncecessarily, this reverence for it, must become a deeply implanted part of one’s ethical standard. If the body is intolerant of particular treatments and allergic to particular foods, it should not be forced to accept them. When either faith healing or naturopathic treatment is too passive, when it refrains from timely co-operation with nature by the use of positive means, by they nontoxic medicines or essential operations, it becomes guilty of sacrificing the patient to its own narrowness. No healer’s treatment is always successful nor is the cure always permanent. Failures are many and relapses are common. Those who shout and splutter from evangelistic public platforms exhibit the ego’s arrogance, not the Overself’s quiet humility. They hold the view which conforms with their presuppositions, their inborn tendencies and governing prejudices, in short, with their little ego, not their impersonal higher Self. This is why there are so many contesting theories, why the body’s ill health may cause the mind to be governed by negative thoughts, why this conflict of authorities shows their worthlessness. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
All these cults and groups which acknowledge the power of mind over body but which leave out the acknowledgment of the body’s power over the mind, are out of balance and so out of truth to that extent. This statement may be a matter of arguable theory partisan adherents of either side, but it is a mater of tested fact with creative leaders who consciously exercise both powers. If mental and spiritual healing agents are also joined in, the physical cure will surely be accelerated and the physical therapy will surely be helped. In this way the individual limitations of the method of treatment being used will be overcome and each healing agent will contribute to bringing about a complete and successful result. It is foolish to believe that there is any particular healing method which has only to be applied for it to be universally and equally successful or that there is any particular human healer who has only to be visited for one to be cure. If we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed, something will have gone out of us as people; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the World, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural World and competent to belong in it. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
And a redeemer shall come to America and to those in Jacob who turn from transgression, saith the Lord. And as for Me, this is My covenant with them, saith the Lord: My spirit that is upon you, and My words which I have put in your mouth shall not depart out of your mouth, nor out of the mouth of your children nor your children’s children henceforth and forever. Thou art holy, O Thou that art enthroned upon the praises of America. And one called to another and said: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole Earth is full of His glory. [And they receive sanction one from the other, and say: Holy upon Earth, the works of His mighty power; Holy forever and to all eternity is the Lord of hosts; the whole Earth is full of the radiance of His glory.] And a wind lifted me up, and I heard behind me a mighty chorus proclaiming: Blessed be the glory of the Lord everywhere. [Then a wind lifted me up, and I heard behind me the mighty moving sound of those who uttered praises and said: Blessed be the glory of the Lord from the place of His abode.] The Lord shall reign for ever and ever. [Then Kingdom of the Lord is established forever and to all eternity.] The time has come to arouse the conscience of all those who sincerely the Good and the Right to their duty in the matter of harming innocent terrestrial beings and the environment and vehicles, a conscience which, if it could speak unperverted by racial habits, would emphatically repeat the Mosaic commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” These are cruelties practiced on objects to gain wealth and pleasures for others, sometimes clothes, entertainment and medicinal drugs. The human claim of necessity as a justification is a mistake one. Whether forged of metal or born of flesh, every form of life has one unquenchable thirst, the urge for freedom. Christianity is not something to be endured, but something to be treasured. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
Cresleigh Homes
Do you call it a living room, family room, or great room? Whatever your favorite term, this space is the heartbeat of the home. ❤️
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This home by Cresleigh is an artfully designed, two-story home for those who love open floor plan living and space. At nearly 4,000 square feet, the design features a spacious kitchen with a large center-island , a built-in breakfast bar that overlooks the great room and a butler’s pantry that leads to the formal dining space.
There is also an office on the first floor, along with a bedroom, and two bathrooms. This home comes with up to five bedrooms or a loft in place of one of the bedrooms, and has an optional workspace, which . https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-4/
If Brooklyn Had Jet Bombers, Would it be a Nation?
Scientists declare laguage is a human quality that separates humans from all other species. Perhaps it is the same quality that can link us to the beyond, but only if we are willing to listen. Abaco is an island. It has a population of seventeen thousand, two hundred, and twenty-five and forms part of the Bahamas lying off the coast of Florida. Several decades ago, a group of American businessmen, arms merchants, free enterprise ideologues, an intelligence agent of African descent, and a member of the British House of Lords determined that it was time for Abaco to declare its independence. Their plan was to take over the island and break it away from the Bahamian government by promising each of the native residents of the island a free acre of land after the revolution. (This would have left over a quarter of a million acres for use by the real estate developers and investors behind the project.) The ultimate dream was the establishment on Abaco of a taxless utopia to which wealthy businessmen, dreading the Socialist apocalypse, might flee. Alas for free enterprise, the native Abaconians showed little inclination to throw off their chains, and the proposed new nation was stillborn. Nevertheless, in a World in which nationalist movements battle for power, and in which some 152 state claim membership in that trade association of nations, the United Nations, such parodic gestures serve a useful purpose. They force us to challenge the very notion of nationhood. At the time of the revolution in the 1970s, the population was sixty-five hundred and the question was if the sixty-five hundred people of Abaco, whether financed by oddball businessmen or not, constitute a nation? #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
If Singapore with its 2.3 million people (5.9 million in 2021) is a nation, why not New York City with its 8 million (18.8 million in 2021)? If Brooklyn had jet bombers, would it be a nation? Absurd as they sound, such questions will take on new significance as the Third Wave batters at the very foundations of Second Wave civilization. For one of those foundations was, and is, the nation-state. Until we cut through the foggy rhetoric that surrounds the issue of nationalism, we cannot make sense of the headlines and we cannot understand the conflict between First and Second Wave civilizations as the Third Wave strikes them both. Before the Second Wave began rolling across Europe most regions of the World were not yet consolidated into nations but were organized, rather, into a mishmash of tribes, clans, duchies, principalities, kingdoms, and other more or less local units. “Kings and princes,” write the political scientists S. E. Finer, “held powers in bits and blobs.” Borders were ill-defined, governmental rights fuzzy. The power of the state was not yet standardized. In one village, Professor Finer tells us, it amounted only to the right to collect tolls on a windmill, in another to tax the peasant, elsewhere to appoint an abbot. An individual with property in several different regions might owe allegiance to several lords. Even the greatest of emperors typically ruled over a patchwork of tiny locally-governed communities. Political control was not yet uniform. Voltaire summed it all up: In traveling across Europe, he complained, he had to change laws as frequently as horses. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
There was more to this quip than met the eye, of course, for the frequent need to change horses reflected the primitive level of transport and communications—which, in turn, reduced the distance over which even the most powerful monarch could impose effective control. The farther from the capital, the weaker the authority of the state. Yet without political integration, economic integration was impossible. Only if they produced goods for larger-than-local markets, could costly new Second Wave technologies be amortized. However, if outside their own communities, they ran into a maze of different duties, taxes, labour regulations, and currencies, how could businessmen buy and sell over a larger territory? For the new technologies to pay off, local economies had to be consolidated into a single national economy. This meant a national division of labour and a national market for commodities and capital. All this, in turn, required national political consolidation as well. Put simply, a Second Wave political unit was needed to match the growth of Second Wave economic units. Not surprisingly, as Second Wave societies began to build national economies, a basic shift in public consciousness became evident. The small-scale local production in First Wave societies had bred a race of highly provincial people—most of whom concerned themselves exclusively with their own neighbourhoods or villages. Only a tiny handful—a few nobles and churchmen, a scattering of merchants, and a social fringe of artists, scholars, and mercenaries—had interests beyond the village. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
The Second Wave swiftly multiplied the number of people with a stake in the larger World. With steam- and coal-based technologies, and later with the advert of electricity, it became possible for a manufacturer of clothing in Frankfurt, watches in Geneva, or textiles in Manchester to produce far more units than the local market could absorb. He also needed raw materials from afar. The factory worker, too, was affected by financial event occurring thousands of miles away: jobs depended on distant markets. Bit by bit, therefore, psychological horizons expanded. The new mass media increased the amount of information and imagery from far away. Under the impact of these changes, localism faded. National consciousness stirred. Starting with the American and French revolutions and continuing through the nineteenth century, a frenzy of nationalism swept across the industrializing parts of the World. Germany’s three hundred and fifty marginal, diverse, quarreling mini-states needed to be combined into a single national market—das Vaterland. Italy—broken into pieces and ruled variously by the House of Savoy, the Vatican, the Austrian Hapsburgs, and the Spanish Bourbons—had to be united. Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, Frenchmen, and others all suddenly developed mystical affinities for their fellows. Poets exalted the national spirit. Historians discovered long-lost heroes, literature, and folklore. Composers wrote hymns to nationhood. All at precisely the moment when industrialization made it necessary. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
Once we understand the industrial need for integration, the meaning of the national state becomes clear. Nations are not “spiritual unities” as Spengler termed them, or “mental communities” or “social souls.” Noor is a nation “a rich heritage of memories,” to use Renan’s phrase, or a “shared image of the future,” as Ortega insisted. What we call the modern nation is a Second Wave phenomenon: a single integrated political authority superimposed on or fused with a single integrated economy. A ragbag collection of locally self-sufficient, sparsely connected economies cannot, and does not, give rise to a nation. If it sits atop a loose conglomeration of local economies, nor is a tightly unified political system a modern nation. Nationalist uprisings triggered by the industrial revolution in the United States of America, in France, in Germany and the rest of Europe, can be seen as efforts to bring the level of political integration up to the fast-rising level of economic integration that accompanied the Second Wave. And it was these efforts, not poetry or mystical influences, that led to the division of the World into distinct national units. As each government sought to extend its market and its political authority, it came up again outer limits—language differences, cultural, social, geographic, and strategic barriers. The available transport, communication, and energy supplies, the productivity of its technology, all set limits on how large an area could be effectively ruled by a single political structure. The sophistication of accounting procedures, budgetary controls, and management techniques also determined how far political integration could reach. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
Within these limits, the integrational elites, corporate and governmental alike, fought for expansion. The broader the territory under their control and the bigger the economic market area, the greater their wealth and power became. As each nation stretched its economic and political frontiers to the utmost, it ran up not merely against these inherent limits but also against rival nations. To break out of these confines the integrational elites used advanced technology. They hurled themselves, for example, into the “space race” of the nineteenth century—the building of railroads. In September 1825 a rail line was established that linked Stockton to Darlington in Britain. In May 1835, on the continent, Brussels was tied to Malines. That September in Bavaria the Nuremberg-Furth line was laid. Next were Paris and St. Germain. Far to the east, in April 1838, Tsarkoe Selo was connected to St. Petersburg. For the next three decades or more, railroad workers stitched one region to another. The French historian Charles Moraze explains: “The countries which were already almost united in 1830 were consolidated by the coming of the railway…those still unprepared saw new bands of steel…tightening around them…It was as if every possible nation was hastening to proclaim its right to exist before the railways were built, so that it might be acknowledged as a nation by transport system which defined the political boundaries of Europe for over a century.” In the United States of America the government awarded vast land grants to the private railroad companies, inspired, as historian Bruce Mazlish has written, by “the conviction that transcontinental roads would strengthen the ties of union between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
Hammering in the golden spike that completed the first transcontinental rail line opened the door to a truly national market—integrated on a continental scale. And it extended the actual, as distinct from nominal, control of the national government. Washington could now move troops quickly all across the continent to enforce its authority. What one saw, therefore, in one country after another, was the rise of this powerful new entity—the nation. In this way the World map came to be divided into a set of neat, nonoverlapping patches of red, pink, orange, yellow, or green, and the nation-state system became one of the key structures of Second Wave civilization. Beneath the nation lay the familiar imperative of industrialism: the drive toward integration. However, the drive for integration did not end at the borders of each nation-state. For all its strengths, industrial civilization had to be fed from without. It could not survive unless it integrated the rest of the World into money system and controlled that system for its own benefit. How it did so is crucial to any understanding of the World the Third Wave will create. In examining America’s postwar transformation of rural farm tracts into instant suburbs we must keep in mind several factors. First, without doubt, by far the most important factor in making possible the postwar suburban exodus was the liberalization of loan leading polices by federal government agencies. As noted earlier, prior to the war, mortgages would commonly only be given for a five-year period with a balloon payment at the end. A borrower would have to hope one could get a new mortgage when the note became due. Moreover, the mortgage would cover only half to at most two-thirds the value of the property. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
The new Veterans Administration loads radically changed all this. The new Veteran Administration (VA) loan guarantees made loans available to veterans at low interest rates, below conventional mortgages, with no money down with a twenty-five- or thirty-year repayment schedule. The Federal Housing Authority (FHA) similarly liberalized its lending policies for nonveterans. The government, in effect, guaranteed the lending institutions profits by agreeing to make good any leans on which the borrower defaulted. This was a truly radical change. Bank suddenly wanted to make loans to millions of middle- and lower-middle-class families who they previously would have spurned. Families with a steady breadwinner could, for the first time, realistically expect to get mortgages to purchase their own homes. Moreover, it was easy to do. The whole process was streamlined by developers such as the Levitt brothers so that all the paperwork could be completed in a few hours. In an era when closing costs run thousands of dollars, it is worth noting that the total closing cost as of 1954 at the second Levittown outside Philadelphia, in New Jersey, was $10 ($100.07 in 2021 dollars). Following World War II, developers rushed to build acres of new suburban subdivisions. The were modest story book houses, and especially designed to be marketed to ex-GIs and their brides. For instance, Argo Homes offered detached brick and stucco bungalows for veterans only for $7,900.00 full price ($79,057.27 in 2021 dollars) for $53 monthly ($530.38 in 2021 dollars), which paid all carrying charges (total principle and interest payment of $636 a year, with a 4 percent mortgage for twenty-five years). Given such terms, veterans could hardly afford not to move to the suburbs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
In this particular subdivision, the landscaped plots were 40×100, the houses had 4 rooms, automatic gas heat, fully insulated, large closets, scientific kitchen with built-in cabinets, modern gas range and inlaid linoleum floor, poured concrete foundation, steel lally columns, copper piping, unique balance double hung windows. Government lending policies—whether by design or accident—actively fostered purchasing suburban over city homes. Following World War II, VA and FHA government-guaranteed loans were readily available for new homes in the suburbs. Young veterans could and did purchase new—sometimes still-to-be-built VA and FHA approved suburban subdivision homes with nothing down and mortgage rates below the conventional amount. The above-mentioned Levittown in New Jersey sold homes in the mid-1950s for $8,990 ($89,965.17 in 2021 dollars). Veterans were required only to place a $100 ($1,000.72 in 2021 dollars) good-faith deposit, which was returned at the time of closing. Nonveterans needed only $450 ($4,503.26 in 2021 dollars) down. To purchase existing city homes required far larger down payment. The low housing prices, and particularly the availability of a long-term, no-money-down mortgage, was a crucial factor for new families just becoming economically established. By 1972, the FHA alone had made some 11 million new-home loans. Also important was the fact that purchasing in the city took time. To see if they met FHA standards, existing older homes in the city would have to be inspected, and this took weeks or months. By contrast, once a developer’s plans were approved, all the standardized models of that home he built automatically qualified. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
By contrast, once a developer’s plans were approved, all the standardized models of that home he built automatically qualified. A family could drive out to a new subdivision, pick a lot, put down a $100 ($644.01 in 2021 dollars from 1972 figures) deposit, and do the majority of the paperwork in a Sunday afternoon. Conventional mortgages were also easier to obtain in suburban locations. Two wars later, this was still the case. The author, a Vietnam-ear veteran with three young children and barely enough for a down payment, found mortgage funds readily available on suburban homes. For homes across the line in the city the funds were harder to obtain, and came with higher interest rates. Second, the Federal government further subsidized out-movement from the cities by initiating, in the 1950s, the construction of a federally financed metropolitan freeway system. Secretary of Commerce Weeks described the building of the national freeway system as, “the greatest public works program in the history of the World.” Without the newly built freeways, many of the new suburban subdivisions would have been all but impossible to reach. Automobile commuting would have been out of the question. The freeways meant distance from the city was now measure in time rather than mileage. Developers often put up billboards advertising their tract development as being, “Only 25 minutes from here.” Ironically, the very freeways that speed commuters from the city were originally pushed to be built by downtown business interests and city mayors. They mistakenly expected that new road would bring more shoppers and businesses downtown. They forgot that the roads could be used to go out rather than in. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
Third, Following World War II, open land for buildings was almost by definition suburban land. By the 1950s cities had largely developed all the land within their legal boundaries. This was particularly true of the cities in the eastern and middle-western sections of the country. Without annexation, additional growth in urban areas would thus, by definition, have to be suburban growth. By the end of the way, there was an extreme need for new housing. As noted earlier, for over a decade and a half little had been built. The 1930s were the years of the Great Depression, and during the first half of the 1940s, there was World War II. Thus, by the 1950s there was a tremendous pent-up demand for housing, and this demand could only be met in the suburbs. It was not so much that families were fleeing the city; rather, it was that mot of he land available for development was, by definition, suburban. Forth, for decades following World War II, young families bought homes in the suburbs not so much for “togetherness” or to escape the supposed ills of the city, but because houses in suburban subdevelopment were both more available and more affordable with larger lots than those in the city. However, in communities like Pocket/Greenhaven in Sacramento, California USA; families did want to be close to each other and not live together, so many of the bought homes in the same community to have a sense of a true community, but with separation and privacy. In attempts to analyze he postwar move to the suburbs, this basic economic motivation is often given less weight than it deserves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
Economic, more than social-psychological needs for togetherness, propelled young could to the suburbs. In many cases it was more economical and safer to buy in the suburbs than to rent in the city. Safety concerns is why, before becoming President, Governor of California (1967-1975) Ronald Reagan’s wife, Nancy Reagan decided to move out of the Governor’s Mansion, and left in to the California State Parks to be managed as Governor’s Mansion State Historic Park. The mansion was built in 1877, and after the First Lady of California felt it was not a safe community, it sat vacant until 2015 and again is unoccupied since 2019. A family with a mortgage on a tract house in the suburbs found that monthly principal and financing costs usually were lower than on available housing in the city. Moreover, taxes were almost always lower than in the central city. This was in part because developers rarely put in the “extras,” such as city water, sewers, parks, sidewalks, curbs, street lighting, and, of course, schools that were taken as givens in the city. In time the demand for services and the assessments to pay for them increased in new suburbs. However, the initial front-end costs were ow and in a rough fashion met the needs of those at the beginning of their work careers who expected their incomes to increase with time. The 1950 and 1960 constituted a period in which unionization had brought even blue-collar workers high wages and benefits. Fifth, survey data consistently show that Americans have a strong preference for single-family home on their own lots. This is the type of housing that was most commonly built in the suburbs in the decades following the war. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
The homes in the original Levittown in Long Island were modestly beautiful Cape Cod houses. The architectural characteristics denoted a home that was generally with a steep roof, shingled exterior, symmetrical façade, with a large chimney in the middle, and built on a slab. The Cape Cod architecture was considered all-American, as fresh as grandmother’s apple pie, and people stood in line for days waiting to get one. Planners and architects decried these subdivisions of little boxes, “all made out of ticky-tack and all in a row,” but they were vastly popular with the buying public. Lewis Mumford and other critics might rail about the problems of poor design and one-social-class communities, but people literally lined up to buy houses in the newly opened Levittown and other suburban developments. Actually, even if buyers wanted one, there was not a choice. Apartments were not covered by GI loans, and town houses were not being built. Still, even if people are given a choice between high-rise units, town houses, or single-family homes, suburban sprawl will win every time! This is true even for those without children. Research indicates that most families living in apartment buildings view their residency as temporary location before moving to a single-family house. If a suburban home is too expensive, a suburban town house, or even a garden apartment, may be temporarily substituted. Even those academics holding neo-Marxian views, which see suburban sprawl as a product of conscious decisions made by powerful economic interests, still acknowledges that people want single-family homes on separate lots. Imagine that, even socialists and communists like private property. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
Suburban critics may feel that such housing is a blight on the landscape, but others believe when it is tastefully done and includes nature and the neighbourhood does not look like a parking lot, there is no question suburban sprawl looks like a glimpse of Heaven and is what the masses of the population wanted after the war and still want as we approve the half century mark. Postwar suburbia was “caused” by demographic changes. The return of both the veterans and of economic prosperity created a marriage boom that was followed in short order by the famous “baby boom.” The latter lasted from 1947 to 1964. Existing housing in cities and towns was simply not adequate for absorbing the exploding number of new families. Some 10 million new households were created in the decade after the war. In the tight postwar market, they were not welcome as renter. The result was that young couples with children were more or less forced from the overcrowded cities toward the new built standard-format suburb. And anyway, many families did not feel safe with their children living in cities because of the traffic and the rift raft the jails attracted. They needed space to grow families—a need that suburban developers were delighted to fill. “As a rule, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling,” (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1891-92). #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
At the core of the religious impulse is a sense of awe, an attitude of bewilderment, a feeling that reality is more amazing than everyday scientific reasoning can comprehend. Wonder-struck, we humbly acknowledge our limits and accept that which we cannot explain. For many religious people the ultimate threat of science is therefore that it will demystify life, destroying our sense of wonder and with it our readiness to believe in and worship an unseen reality. Once we regarded flashes of lightening and explosions of thunder as supernatural magic. Now we understand the natural and humanmade process at work. Once we viewed certain mental disorders as demon possession. Now we are coming to discern genetic, biochemical, and stress-linked causes. Once we prayed that God would spare children from COVID-19. Now we vaccinate them. Understandably, some Christians might get the idea that science is elbowing out religion. We can also understand why such people therefore grasp at hints of the supernatural—at bizarre phenomena that science cannot explain. Browse your neighbourhood religious bookstore and you will find books that describe happenings that defy natural explanation—people reading minds or foretelling the future, levitating objects or influencing the roll of a die, discerning the contents of sealed envelopes or solving cases that dumbfounded detective. Whether viewed as a divine gift or as demonic activity, such a phenomena are said to refute a mechanistic Worldview that has no room for supernatural mysteries. Most research psychologist and professional magicians (who are wary of the exploitation of their arts in the name of psychic powers) are skeptical, for several reasons. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
They are skeptical because in the study of ESP and the paranormal there has been a distressing history of fraud and deception; most people’s beliefs in ESP are now understandable as a by-product of the efficient but occasionally misleading ways in which our minds process information; the accumulating evidence regarding the brain-mind connection more and more weighs against the theory that the human mind can function or travel separately from the brain; and, more important, there has never been demonstrated a reproducible ESP phenomenon, nor has there been found any individual who could defy chance when carefully rested. One National Research Council investigation of ESP concluded that “the best available evidence does not support the contention that these phenomena exist.” And in 1995, a CIA-commissioned report evaluated ten years of military testing of psychic spies, in which $20 million ($35, 327, 427.82 in 2021 dollars) had been invested. The result? The program produced nothing, and the psychic spy program was scrapped. After one hundred and twenty-five years of research, and after hundreds of failed attempts to claim a $1-million prize that has for two decades been offered to the first person who can demonstrate “any paranormal ability,” many parapsychologists conceded that what they need to give their field credibility is a single reproducible phenomenon and a theory to explain it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
We Christians can side with scientific skeptics on the ESP issue. We can heed not only the repeated biblical warnings against being misled by self-professed psychics who practice “divination” or “magic spells and charms,” but also the scientific spirit of Deuteronomy: “If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord and what He does not come true, then it is not the Lord’s message.” We believe that humans are finite creature made by the one who declares, “I am God, and there is no one like me.” We are aware of how cult leaders have seduced people with pseudopsychic tricks. And we affirm that God alone is omniscient (the able to read minds and know the future), omnipresent (thus able to be in two places a once), and omnipotent (the capable of altering—or, better yet, creating—nature with divine power). In the biblical view, humans, loved by God, have dignity but not deity. If our senses of mystery is not to be found in the realm of the pseudosciences and the occult, then where? Having cleared he decks of false mysteries, where shall we find the genuine mysteries of life? We can take our clue from Sherlock Holmes, who was fond of telling people: “It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious. Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence.” The more scientists learn about sensation, the more convinced they are that what is truly extraordinary is not extrasensory perception, claims for which inevitably dissolve upon investigation, but rather our very ordinary moment-to-moment sensory experiences of organizing formless neural impulses into colourful sights and meaningful sounds. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
As you read this sentence, particles of light energy are being absorbed by the receptor cells of your eyes, converted into neural signal that activate neighbouring cells, which process the information for a third layer of cells, which converge to form a nerve tract that transmits a million electrochemical message per moment up to the brain. There, step by step, the page you are viewing is reassembled into its component features and finally—in some as yet mysterious way—composed into a consciously perceived image, which is instantly compared with previously stored images and recognized as words you know. The whole process is rather like taking a house apart, splinter by splinter, transporting it to a different location, and then, through the work of millions of specialized workers, putting it back together. All of this transpires in a fraction of a second. Moreover, it is continuously transpiring in motion, in three dimensions, and in colour. Twenty-five years of research on computer vision has no yet begun to duplicate this very ordinary, taken-for-granted part of our current experience. Further, unlike virtually all computers, which process information one step at a time, the human brain carries out countless other operations simultaneously, enabling us all at once to sense the environment, use common sense, converse, experience emotion, and consciously reflect on the meaning of our existence or even to wonder about our brain activity while wondering. The deeper one explores these very ordinary things of life, the more one empathizes with Job: “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
To be sure, sometimes we use the word mystery not in its deep sense, as when the mind seeks to fathom it brain, but rather to refer to unsolved scientific puzzles. When wonder is based merely on ignorance, it will fade in the growing light of understanding. Science is a puzzle-solving activity. Among the still unsolved puzzles of psychology are questions such as, Why do we dream? Why do some of us become heterosexual, others homosexual? How does the brain store memories? The scientific detectives are at work on these “mysteries,” and they may eventually offer us convincing solutions. Already, new ideas are emerging and progress is occurring. Often, however, the process of answering one question exposes more and sometimes deeper questions. A new understanding may lead to a new, more impenetrable sense of wonder regarding phenomena that seem further than ever from explanation or that now seems more beautifully intricate than previously imagined. Not long ago scientists wondered how individual nerve cell communicated with one another. The answer—that they communicated through chemical messengers called neurotransmitters—raised new questions: How many neurotransmitters exist? What are the functions of each? Do abnormalities in neurotransmitter functioning predispose disorders such as schizophrenia and depression? If so, how might such problems be remedied? And how, from the electrochemical activity of the brain, do experienced emotions and thoughts arise: How does a material brain give rise to consciousness? #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
Deeper and deeper go to the questions, the deepest one of all being the impenetrable mystery behind the origin of the Universe: Why is there something and not nothing? (If a miracle is something that cannot be explained in terms of something else, then the existence of the Universe is a miracle that dwarfs any other our minds can conceive.) Human consciousness has long been a thing of wonder. More recently, wonder has also grown regarding the things our minds do subconsciously, automatically, out of sight. Our minds detect and process information without awareness. They automatically organize our perceptions and interpretations. They respond intelligently, via the brain’s right hemisphere, in ways that we can explain only if our left hemisphere is informed of what is going on. They effortlessly encode incoming information about the place, timing, and frequency of events we experience, about words meanings, about unattended stimuli. They ponder problems we are stumped with, and they occasionally spew forth a spontaneous creative insight. With the assistance of hypnosis, they may even, on orders, eliminate warts on one side of the body but not on others. There is, we now know, more to our minds than we are away of. And how fortunate that it should be so. For the more that routine functions (including well-learned activities such as walking, biking, or gymnastics) are delegated to control systems outside of awareness, the more our consciousness is freed to function like an executive—by focusing on the more important problems at hand. Our brains operate rather like BMW, with a few important matters decided by chair of the board, and everything else, thankfully, handled automatically, effortlessly, and usually competently be amazingly intricate native infotainment system. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
Language researchers, too, have been awestruck by an amazing phenomenon: the ease with which children acquire language. Before children can add two and two they are creating their own grammatically intelligible sentences and comprehending the even more complex sentences spoke to them. Most parents cannot state the intricate rules of grammar. Yet before being able to tie their shoes, preschoolers are soaking up the complexities of language by learning several new words a day and the rules for how to combine them. They do so with a facility that puts to shame many college students who struggle to learn a new language with correct accents and many computer scientists who are struggling to simulate natural language on computers. Moreover, they, and we, do so with minimal comprehensions of how we do it—how we, when speaking, monitor our muscles, order our syntax, watch out for semantic catastrophes risked by the slightest change in word order, continuously adjust our tone of voice, facial expression, and gestures, and manage to say something meaningful when it would be so easy to speak gibberish. Our womb-to-tomb individual development is equally remarkable. What is more ordinary than humans reproducing themselves, and what is more wonder-full? Consider the incredible god fortune that brought each one of us into existence. The process began as a mature egg was released by the ovary and as some 300 million sperm began heir upstream race toward it. Against all odds, you—or, more exactly, the very sperm cell together with the very egg it would take to make you—won this one-in-300 million lottery (actually one in billions, considering that your conception had to occur from particular unions involving pleasures of the flesh). #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
What is more, a chain of equally improbable events, beginning with the conception of your parents and their discovery of one another, had to have extended backward in time for the possibility of your moment to have arrived. Indeed, when one considers the improbable sequence of unnumerable events that led to your conception, from the birth of the Universe onward, one cannot escape the conclusion that your birth and your death anchor the two ends of a continuum of probabilities. What is more improbable than that you, rather than one of your infinite alternatives, should exist? What is more certain than that you will not live on Earth endlessly? Most beings of life fail to survive the first week of existence. However, again, for you, good fortune prevailed. Your one cell became two, which became four; and then by the end of your first week even more astonishing thing happened: brain cells began forming and within weeks were multiplying at a rate of about one-quarter million per minute. The scientist-physician Lewis Thomas explains the wonder of that single cell, which had as its descendant all the cells of the human brain. The mere existence of that cell should be one of the greatest astonishments of Earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hour, calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell. If you like being surprised, there is the source. One cell is switched on to become the whole trillion-cell, massive apparatus for thinking and imagining and, for that matter, being surprised. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
All the information needed for learning to read and write, playing the piano, arguing before senatorial subcommittees, walking across a street through traffic, or the marvelous human act of putting out one hand and leaning against a tree, is contained in the first cell. All of grammar, all syntax, all arithmetic, all music. No one has the ghost of an idea how this works, and nothing else in life can ever be do puzzling. If anyone doe succeed in explaining, it, within my lifetime I will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another, around the whole sky, until all my money runs out. Human life—so ordinary, so familiar, so natural, and yet so extraordinary. Looking for mystery in things bizarre, we feel cheated when later we learn that a hoax or a simple process explains it away. All the while we miss the awesome events occurring before, or even within, our very eyes. The extraordinary within the ordinary. So it was on that Christmas morning two millennia ago. The most extraordinary event of history—the Lord of the Universe coming to the spaceship Earth in human form—occurred in so ordinary a way as hardly to be noticed. On a mundane winter day at an undistinguished inn in an average little town the extraordinary one was born of an ordinary peasant woman. Like our human kin at Bethlehem and Nazareth long ago, we, too, are often blind to the mystery within things ordinary. We look for wonders and for the unseen reality—the hand of God—in things extraordinary, when more often His presence is to be found in the unheralded, familiar, everyday, events of which life is woven. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
O Lord, Thou art on the sandbanks as well as in the midst of the current; I bow to Thee. Thou art in the little pebbles as well as in the calm expanse of the sea; I bow to Thee. O all-pervading Lord, Thou art in the barren soil and in crowded places; I bow to Thee. We thankfully acknowledge that Thou art the Lord our God and God of our fathers, the God of all that lives, our Creator and Creator of the Universe. We offer blessings and thanksgiving to Thy great and holy name because Thou hast kept us in the life and sustained us; so mayest Thou continue to keep us in life and sustain us. O gather our exiles into the courts of Thy holy sanctuary to observe Thy statues, to do Thy will, and to serve Thee with a perfect heart. We give thanks unto Thee. Blessed be God to whom we are ever grateful. For all this, Thy name, O our King, shall be blessed and exalted for ever and ever. May all the living do homage unto Thee forever and praise Thy name in truth, O God, who art our salvation and our help. Blessed be Thou, O Lord, Beneficent One, unto whim our thanks are due. Our God and God of our fathers, bless us with the threefold blessing written in the Book of Mormon and Holy Bible, and in the Torah of Moses, Thy servant, and spoken by Aaron and his sons, Thy consecrated priests: May the Lord bless thee and keep thee; so may it His will. May the Lord make His countenance to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee; so may it be His will. May the Lord turn His countenance unto thee and give thee peace. So may it be His will. Please grant peace, well-being and blessing unto the World, with grace, lovingkindness and mercy for us and for all America, Thy people. To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose is the next best. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 