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The Awareness of Human Destructiveness Bursts!
Many humans, at one time, were primarily isolated, but enter relationships with members of the human family in order to satisfy their striving for please. Many of the relationships were sought after and conceived in a way that resemble relations in the marketplace. Each was only concerned with the satisfaction of one’s needs, but it is precisely for the sake of this satisfaction that one had entered into relations with others who offer what one needs, and need what one offers. Each living cell is supposed to be endowed with the two basic qualities of living matter, Eros (love) and the striving for death. We are struck by the significance of the possibility that the aggressiveness may not be able to find satisfaction in the external World because it comes up against real obstacles. If this happens, it will perhaps retreat and increase the amount of self-destructiveness holding sway in the interior. Impeded aggressiveness seems to involve a grave injury. It really seems as though it is necessary for us to destroy some other thing or person in order not to destroy ourselves, in order to guard against the impulsion to self-destruction. A sad disclosure indeed for the moralist! However, the most powerful impeding factor of all and one totally beyond any possibility of control is the death instinct. In theory of death instinct, the awareness of human destructiveness bursts forth in full strength, and destructiveness becomes the one pole of existence which, fighting with the other pole, Eros, forms they very essence of life. Destructiveness becomes a primary phenomenon of life. It is true that evil forces do exist but not true that they exist on the highest level. Insight into the ultimate sees the not. Evil is certainly present, plain to sight and unpleasant to experience, but it is not altogether, nor only what it seems. It is really an appearance, and reconcilable with the benign source of good. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Eros, present in every cell of living substance, has as its aim the unification and integration of smaller units into the unity of humankind. This is love that does not involve pleasures of the flesh, also known as the “love instinct”; love is identified with life and growth, and—fighting with the death instinct—it determines human existence. Humans are no longer conceived of as primarily isolated and egotistical, as l’homme machine, but as being primarily related to others, impelled by the life instincts which make one need union with others. Life, love, and growth are one and the same, more deeply rooted and fundamental then pleasures of the flesh and other pleasures. The change is vision shows clearly in this new evaluation of the Christian biblical commandment, “Though shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Anything that encouraged the growth of emotional ties between humans must operate against war. These ties may be of two kinds. In the first place they may be relations resembling those toward a loved object, though without having an aim for pleasures of the flesh. There is no need for psychoanalysis to be ashamed to speak of love in this connection, for religion itself uses the same words: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” This, however, is more easily said than done. The second kind of emotional tie is by means of identification. Whatever leads humans to share important interests produces this community of feeling, these identifications. And the structure of human society is to a large extent based on them. Why is history such a record of wars, oppressions, exploitations, invasions, and persecutions? Why have all the saviours, avatars, prophet, and saints succeeded only with individual humans here and there, not with the mass of humankind? #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Is the religious dream of universal goodness nothing more than a dream? It is not a help but a self-deception to ignore the double polarity of existence, the yin-and-yang in the Universe, the shadow-self in humans. Only outside of religion, in the philosophic realm of the ultimate being, the Unique, the Real, where the entire World itself is cast out, can we talk of friction-free consciousness, and only in the deepest meditation can we share it. Although the experience is a temporary one, the peace in it so passes the understanding that “the Kingdom of Heaven” is its fit name. Here indeed is the Good raised to its highest degree. Here is a demonstration that human evil is but privation of good. What may be true on the ultimate level—the non-existence of evil, the reality of the Good, the True, the Beautiful—becomes false on the level of duality. Here the twofold powers, the opposites, do not exist, do hold the World in their sway. To deny relative evil here is to confuse different planes of being. The human who would deliberately harm one’s fellows for one’s own ends is a sinner. Evil arises only when an entity goes astray into the delusions of separateness and materialism, and thence into conflict with other entities. There is no ultimate and eternal principle of evil, but there are forces of evil, unseen entities who have gone so far astray and are so powerful in themselves that they work against goodness, truth, and justice. However, by their very nature such entities are doomed to eventual destruction, and even their work of opposition is utilized for good in the end and becomes the resistance against which evolution tests its own achievements, the grindstone against which is sharpens humans’ intelligence, the mirror in which its shows one one’s flaws. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The lower nature in incurably hostile to the higher one. It prefers its fleeting joys with their attendant miseries, its ugly sins wit their painful consequences, because this spells life to it. Everything and everyone has a negative side. One could fill up a lifetime looking for and finding it. One could go on grumbling, criticizing, ranting, and hating. However, there is also the beneficial side of it. The philosophical attitudes seeks deeper, keeps calmer, for it finds equilibrium on another plane. The descent from faith in Holy Spirit to faith in unholy spirits happens to those who are either too weak to remain at such a high altitude or too incapable of rising from a sensate view of existence. Evil can take every form, even that of the guru, the quest, and the leaner. Some yeas ago someone asked me, “What about absolute evil?” The answer is this: with Confucius we say that sin is due to ignorance, and with Pythagoras that evil is due to the absence of good. Ignorance leads to selfishness and extreme ignorance leads to extreme selfishness, which in turn leads to extreme evil. Now, all these are relative conditions and pass away in time as the person leans one’s lessons though the series of experience and corrects one’s mistake during reincarnations. There cannot be an absolute evil because there is only one Absolute Power, one God, one Supreme Being; and it is this which inspires the highest goodness know to humans when one discovers its presence, through the Overself, in one’s heart. In that sense only I said there was an absolute good. The pairs of opposites exist only in the finite, relative, and limited World. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
There is no opposite to the Supreme Power in the timeless and infinite World, no Satan with whom God is in everlasting conflict. However, on its own level, Mind knows neither good nor bad. There is only IS-ness. It seems that there is evil in the World, but why? What bad humans have done is to let their evil grow like a noxious weed too large and their good too little, whereas good humans have cultivated a high proportion of goodness. There is no absolute evil. It is truer to talk of absolute god for that is there first. Why? Because God is there first. Humans came later and broke the divine laws little by little. They created their own evil consequences. Or for different reasons they harm others and have later to suffer for it. Humans were once looked at as machines driven by chemical processes: feelings, affects and emotions were explained as being caused by specific and identifiable physiological processes. Most of hormonology and of the neurophysiological findings of the last decades were unknown to these humans, yet with daring and ingenuity they insisted on the correctness of their approach. Needs and interests for which no somatic sources could be found were ignored, and the understanding of those processes which were not neglected followed the principles of mechanistic thinking. The model of human behaviour could be repeated today in a properly programmed computer. One develops a certain amount of tension which at a certain threshold has to be relieved and reduced, while this realization is checked by another part, the ego, which observes reality and inhibits relief when it conflicts with the needs for survival. This Freudian robot would be similar to Isaac Asimov’s science-fiction robot, but the programming would be different. Its first law would be not to hurt human beings, but to avoid self-damage or self-destruction. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
However, the new theory does not follow this mechanistic “physiologizing” model. It is centered on a biological orientation in which fundamental forces of life (and its opposite: death) become the primal forces of motivating humans. The nature of the cell—that is, of all living substance—becomes the theoretical basis for a theory of motivation, not a physiological process that goes on in certain organs of the body. The new theory was perhaps closer to a vitalistic philosophy than to the concept of the German mechanistic materialists. What motivated Dr. Freud to postulate the death instinct? One factor was probably the impact of the First World War. He, like many other humans of his time and age, had shred the optimistic vision so characteristic of the European middle class, and saw oneself suddenly confronted with a fury of hate and destruction hardly believable before August 1, 1914. From there, Dr. Freud became a man preoccupied with death. He thought of dying every day, after he was forty; he had attacks of Todesangst (“fear of death”), and sometimes he would add to his “goodbye”: “You might never see me again.” One might surmise that Dr. Freud’s disposition would have impressed him as a confirmation of his fear of death, and thus contributed to the formulation of death instinct. This preoccupation with death grew in intensity and led him to a concept in which the conflict between life and death was at the center of human experience, rather than the conflict between the two life-affirmative drives, pleasures of the flesh and ego drives. To assume that humans need to die because death is the hidden goal of one’s life might be considered a kind of comfort destined to alleviate one’s fear of death. And it is true, when people’s lives are in danger and they lack security that they learn not to fear death. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
It seems likely that many hearts in American society have waxed cold since September 11, 2001, when there was an attack on American soil that claimed the lives of over 3,500 people. Many people were too young to realize how devastating it was at the moment, but I believe the tragedy affected everyone much like Dr. Freud was confronted with the fury of hate and destruction from August 1, 1914. Acts on war in your homeland make people realize that life is not promised and it can have a psychological impact. “What is faith? It is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen. It is the evidence of things we cannot yet see,” reports Hebrews 11.1. Begin today to believe that what you have hoped for is going to happen, that good things are on their way. Notice, faith has to do with the unseen World. You may not be able to perceive anything beneficial happening in your life with your natural eyes today. In fact, everything may be falling apart—your finances, your health, your business, your relationships with your family and friend. All kind of problems may be on the horizon. However, do not be discoursed, turn your focus to the supernatural World, look to God and Jesus Christ for solutions and know that your harmony and peace will be restored. The World tells you that you need to live out loud and seeing is believing. However, God says seek ye the Kingdom of Heave first, and all these things will be added to you. Look through your Heavenly eyes of faith, and once you confirm something by faith, it will manifest in the physical World. What do you do when you see others being honored or elevated? You could feel bad about their feeling good. Or you could consider these as occasions for your feeling good about feeling bad. Why? #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
If only you knew it, the contempt of humans on Earth should not cause you to shed a single tear. What should you do? Direct your heart toward God in Heaven. In the past, many men did not view woman as equals with men, but some did. Overall, there was a patriarchal bias. However, the very essence of the Platonic myth is that male and female were once one and were then divided into halves, which implies, of course, that the two halves are equals, that they form a polarity endowed with the tendency to unite. Eros (love) aims at complicating life and preserving it, and hence is also conservative, because with the emergence of life an instinct is born which is to preserve it. However, we must ask, if it is the nature of the instinct to re-establish the earliest state of existence, inorganic matter, how can it at the same time tend to re-establish a later form of existence, namely life? Well, according to Plato’s report in the Symposium concerning the original unity of man who was then divided into halves by Zeus, after this division, each desiring his other half, they came together and threw their arms about one another eager to grow into one. The living substance at the same time of its coming to life was torn apart into small particles, which have ever since endeavoured to reunite through martial union and procreation. These instincts, in which the chemical affinity of inanimate matter persisted, gradually succeeded, as they developed through the kingdom of the protists, in overcoming the difficulties put in the way of that endeavour by an environment charged with dangerous stimuli—stimuli which compelled them to form a protective cortical layer. These splintered fragments of living substance in this way attained a multicellular condition and finally transferred the instinct for reuniting, in the most highly concentrated form, to the combination of two souls. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
So it is no wonder so many people feel so fractured and incomplete. Their living substance was torn apart. Do you see things getting better in your life? Or are you just drifting along, accepting whatever comes your way? “I know I was not going to get that Cresleigh Havenwood House Residence 4. Noting good ever happens to me.” “This is just my lot in life. I knew I would never get that BMW 750Li with Xdrive.” “I knew I would never be blessed.” In the face of God’s blinding glory, many of us have to be blinkered. Perhaps that is why, without our peripheral vision, we are so easily hoodwinked by Vanity. If I assess myself correctly, never has an injury been done to me by another creature, and hence I have no right, at least not yet, to make a ruckus against God, my Righteous if Riotous Lord. Why? Because I have sinned against God frequently and gravely. Deservedly, therefore, should every creature pick up one’s pike against me. So it is only reasonable to conclude that confusion and contempt are my just due. Yours, however, is praise, honour, and glory. And in the light of these considerations, unless I prepare myself—by being looked down upon by every giraffe, outsped by every gazelle, overlooked by every gryphon—I can be neither pacified and stabilized interiorly, spiritually illuminated, nor fully one with God. Do not limit God with your small thinking. Have extraordinary vision for your life and live with faith and expectancy. You will be surprised that you will become what you believe. Some of the reasons are blessings are delayed in the fulfillment of the promise for year after year, is simply the fact that we cannot see it through our eyes of faith. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Is God trying to do something out of the ordinary in your life? Be sure to get into agreement with God. Do not tell God the reasons why things cannot happen. All the time God is trying to plant new seed of success inside of us. He is showing us that if we do not conceive in our hearts through faith, it will never come to pass. “The things which are impossible with humans are possible with God,” reports Luke 18.27. Let that word plant faith inside of your heart. You do not have to figure out how God is going to solve your problems, but turn the situation over to God. God can do what human beings cannot or will not do. God is supernatural. If you can put your trust and confidence in the Lord, God will surely bring it to pass. If you can see the invisible, God will do the impossible. In God, the love of a friend should stand. God is Ever-living, Everlasting Truth, your friend will not shed a tear if you live of die. It is because of God that love of a friend should stand. It is because of God that one should be loved, that is to say, everyone who is seemed good to you and who is very dear in this life. Without God the love of friendship will not have the strength to last. Nor is the love of friendship true and clear unless God is an integral part of it; that is as His Augustine described it in his Confessions (4.4). Which is another way of saying, you ought to be dead to two-person friendships, especially when the other person is another creature. However, when the other person is God, then something odd happens. The closer you approach God, the farther you recede from every friendly solace. Also the higher you ascend to God, the deeper you descend into yourself and the viler you appear to yourself. I want to get a grander vision for my life, Father, and then live it out with faith and expectancy, knowing that I will become what I believe. Today, I will focus on You, who You are and what You can do in and through me. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Whoever attributes good to oneself only makes it more difficult for oneself to receive the grace of God. Why? Because, as the spiritual wisdom echoing Proverbs (3.34), Psalms (55.22), and First Peter (5.5) has it, the grace of the Holy Spirit always seeks the humble heart. To annihilate yourself, to empty yourself of all created love—that is what you ought to do. And what I ought to do is fill that very same space with a very great grace. When you warm to the wonderfulness of the created World, the Creator’s respect for you begins to cool. Because of the Creator, if for no other reason, learn how to conquer yourself in all things. Do that, and you will have the strength to reach out to Divine Knowledge. However slight it may be, unruly love and irregular respect delay, even detour, your spiritual progress. The anal libido has a deep affinity to the death instinct. Now, controlling and possessing are certainly tendencies opposite of loving, furthering, liberating, which form a syndrome among themselves. However, “possession” and “control” do not contain the very essence of destructiveness, the wish to destroy, and hostility toward life. No doubt, the anal character has a deep interest in and affinity to feces as part of their general affinity to all that is not alive. Feces are the product finally eliminated by the body, being of no further use to it. The anal character is attracted by feces as one is attracted by everything that is useless for life, such as dirt, death, decay. We can say that the tendency to control and possess is only one aspect of the anal character, but milder and less malignant than hatred of life. Eros (love), therefore is looked upon as the biologically normal aim of development, while the death instinct is seen to be based on a failure of normal development and in this sense a pathological, though deeply rooted striving. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
If one wants to entertain a biological speculation one might relate anality to the fact that orientation by smell is characteristic of all four-legged mammals, and that the erect posture implies the change from orientation by smell to orientation by sight. The change in function of the old olfactory brain would correspond to the same transformation of orientation. In view of this, one might consider that the anal character constitutes a regressive phase of biological development for which there might even be a constitutional-genetic basis. The anality of the individual could be considered as representing an evolutionary repetition of a biological human functioning. The theoretician arrives at the conclusion that humans have only the alternative between destroying oneself (slowly, by illness) or destroying others; or—putting it in other words—between causing suffering either to oneself or to others. The humanist rebels against the idea of this tragic alternative that would make war a rational solution of this aspect of human existence. An alternate is repression of the instinctual demands, which are the development of culture and civilization. Some people say the Europeans created such a successful society because they learned the art of self-control. The repressed instinctual drive was “sublimated” into valuable cultural channels, but still at the expense of full human happiness. On the other hand, repression led not only to increasing civilization but also to the development of neurosis among the many in whom the repressive process did not work successfully. Lack of civilization combined with full happiness or civilization combined with neurosis and diminished happiness seemed to be the alternative. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The contradiction between the death instinct and Eros confronts humans with a real and truly tragic alternative, a real alternative because one can decide to attack and wage war, to be aggressive, and to express one’s hostility because one prefers to do this rather than to be sick. That this alternative is a tragic one hardly needs to be proven. Something very remarkable, which we should never have guessed and which is nevertheless quite obvious. What happens to the aggressor when one renders one’s desire for aggression innocuous? One’s aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from—that is, it is directed toward one’s own ego. There it is take over by a portion of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of “conscience,” is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals. The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within one to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city. The transformation of destructiveness into a self-punishing conscience does not seem to be as much as an advantage as it may seem to imply. According to this theory of conscience, it would have to be as cruel as the death instinct, since it is charged with its energies, and no reason is given why the death instinct should be “wakened” and “disarmed.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Rather, it would see that the following analogy expresses the real consequences of this thought more logically: a city that has been ruled by a cruel enemy defeats one with the help of a dictator who then sets up a system that is just as cruel as that of the defeated enemy; and this, what is gained? The instinct of destruction, moderated and tamed, and, as it were, inhibited in its aim, must, when it is directed toward objects, provide the ego with the satisfaction of its vital needs and with control over nature. This is a good example of sublimation; the aim of the instinct is not weakened, but it is directed toward other socially valuable aims, in this case the “control over nature.” This sounds, indeed, like a perfect solution. Humans are freed from the tragic choice of destroying either others or themselves, because the energy of the destructive instinct is used for the control over nature. However, we must ask, can this really be so? Can it be true that destructiveness becomes transformed into constructiveness? What can “control over nature” mean? Taming and breeding animals, gathering and cultivating planets, weaving cloth, building Cresleigh Homes, manufacturing pottery and many more activities including the construction of Ultimate Driving Machines, railroads, airplanes, skyscraper: al these are acts of constructing, building, unifying, synthesizing, and, indeed, if one wanted to attribute them to one of the two basic instincts, they might be considered as being motivated by Eros rather then the death instinct. With the possible exception of killing animals for their consumption and killing humans in war, both of which could be considered as rooted in destructiveness, material production is not destructive but constructive. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
As a result of a little speculation, we have come to suppose that this instinct is at work in every living creature and is striving to bring it to ruin and to reduce life to its original condition of inanimate matter. Thus is quite seriously deserved to be called a death instinct, while procreation is the instinct represented by the effort to live. The death instinct turns into the destructive instinct when, with the help of social organs, it is directed outwards, on to objects. The organism preserves its own life, so to day, by destroying an extraneous one. Some portion of the death instinct, however, remain operative within the organism, and we have sought to trace quite a number of normal and pathological phenomena to this internalization of the destructive instinct. We have even been guilty of the heresy of attributing the origin of conscience to the diversion inwards of aggressiveness. If this process is carried too far, you will notice that it is by no means a trivial matter; it is possibly unhealthy. On the other hand if these forces are turned to destruction of the external World, the organism will be relieved and the effect must be beneficial. This would serve as a biological justification for all the ugly and dangerous impulses against which we are struggling. It must be admitted that they stand nearer to Nature than does our resistance to them for which an explanation also needs to be found. When the good is absent, the evil is present. The cynic who denies the existence of the good, the dreamer who denies the existence of the evil—each ignores the other half of life as evidence in history and in the World around one. When we go to the roots—that is what “radically” literally means—and discover that a great deal of our conscious thinking only veils our real thoughts and feelings and hides the truth; most of our conscious thought is a sham, a mere rationalization of thoughts and desires which we prefer not to be aware of. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
This is revolutionary because it leads people to open their eyes to the reality of the structure of the society they live in and hence to the wish to change it in accordance with the interests and desires of the vast majority. Much of the liberal middle class was suspected of being neurotic because their liberation of pleasures of the flesh is largely part of the ever-increasing consumerism. If people are taught to spend and spend, rather than, as in the nineteenth century, to save and save, if they were transformed into “consumers,” one had not only to permit but encourage consumption of pleasures of the flesh. It is after all the most simple and the cheapest of all consumption. Conservatives used to have a strict code of chastity and liberty of pleasures of the flesh lead to an anticonservative revolutionary attitude. If anything, historical development has shown that liberation of pleasures of the flesh has served the development of consumerism and weakened political radicalism. What more people really want is not to become more human, more free, more independent—that would mean more critical and revolutionary-minded—but they want to suffer no more than the average member of their class. They hardly see a really happy person, only a few people who have succeeded in being relatively satisfied with their lot, especially if they are successful and admired by others. Naturally, quite a few people, having a sympathetic listener to talk to, feel better, aside from the fact that as years go by experience in living makes the average person improve one’s lot, except those who are too sick to learn from experience. The contemporary capitalist society is considered to be the highest, most developed form of social structure. It is because all other social structures are more primitive or utopian, and not really successful. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
An ever-growing number of people have become aware that capitalist society is just one of innumerable social structures and is neither more nor less “real” than the societies of Central African tribes. The invention of artillery and fortifications has in our times forces the sovereigns of Europe to reestablish the use of regular standing troops to guard their fortresses. Yet however, legitimate the motives, there is reason to fear that the effect will be no less fatal. It will be no less necessary to depopulate the rural areas in order to raise armies and garrisons. To maintain them it will be no less necessary to oppress the peoples. And these dangerous establishments have in recent times been growing so rapidly in all of our part of the World, that no one can foresee anything but the imminent depopulation of Europe, and sooner, or later, the ruin of the people who inhabit it. Be that as it may, it should be noted that such institutions necessarily subvert the public domain, leaving only the wearisome resources of subsidies and taxes, which remain for me to discuss. It would be remembered here that the foundation of the social compact is property, together with its first condition that each person should be maintained in the peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to one. It is true that by the same treaty each person at least tacitly obliges oneself to be assessed for public needs. However, since this commitment cannot hard the fundamental law and presumes that contributors acknowledge the evidence of need, it is clear that to be legitimate, this assessment should be voluntary. It is not based on a private will, as if it were necessary to have the consent of each citizen, who should pay only as much as one pleases. This would be directly contrary to the spirit of the confederation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Rather, it should be through the general will, by majority vote, and on the basis of proportional rates that leave no room for an arbitrary imposition of taxes. This truth (that taxes can be legitimately established only by the general consent of the people or its representatives) had generally been recognized by all the philosophers and jurists who have any reputation in matters of political right. While some of them have established maxims that appear contrary, it is easy to see the private motives that moved them to do so. They stipulate so many conditions and restrictions that it all boils down to exactly the same thing. For whether the people can reuse it or whether the sovereign should not demand it, is a matter of indifference as far as right is concerned. And if it is only a question of force, it is utterly pointless to inquire what is or is not legitimate. The contributions levied on the people are of two kinds: real taxes (levied on things) and personal taxes (paid by the head). Both are called taxes or subsidies. When the people sets the amount it pays, it is called a subsidy; when it grants the entire proceeds of an assessment, it is a tax. In The Spirit of the Laws we find that a head tax is more in keeping with servitude, while a real tax is more suited to liberty. This would be incontestable, were everyone’s head share equal. For nothing would be more disproportionate than such a tax. It is especially in an exacting observance of proportions that the spirit of liberty consists. However, if a head tax is exactly proportioned to the means of private individuals and is thus at once both and personal, it is the most equitable and, as a result, the one best suited to free humans. At first these proportions appear quite easy to observe, because, being relative to each person’s position, the indications are always public. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
However, besides the fact that greed, influence-peddling, and fraud know how to leave no evidence behind, it is rare that an account is taken of all the elements that should enter into these calculations. First, one ought to consider the relationship of quantities according to which, all things being equal, someone who has ten times more goods than someone else should pay ten times more. Second, one ought to consider the relationship of use, that is, the distinction between what is necessary and what is superfluous. Someone who has only the bare necessities of life should not pay anything at all. Taxing someone who has superfluities can, in time of need, be extended to everything over and above the necessities of life. To this one will declare that, given one’s rank, what would be superfluous for a human of inferior standing is necessary for one. However, that is a lie. For humans of superior standing have two legs, just like a cowherd, and, like the cowherd, has only one stomach. Moreover, this alleged necessity of life is so little necessary to one’s standing that, if one knew how to renounce these things for some worthy cause, one could only be respected more. The people would prostrate themselves before a minister who would go on foot to the council because one had sold one’s Ultimate Driving Machines when the state had a pressing need. Finally, the law does not demand magnificence of anyone, and propriety is never reason against right. A cultivated human of taste and feeling can find much that is beautiful in nature and art; and if one is also a moral idealist, one will find much that is good and virtuous in human life and experience. However, it would be incomplete to stop there and ignore the fact that there is also around us much that is base, dark, and even evil. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The two sides put together form a complete observation. However, it is only the mystics and philosopher who can see—because it requires a deeper penetration than the intellect and the sense can give—that the dark side deals with the World of appearances, a World which is fleeting and ephemeral, whereas the good side and the beautiful side is merely a hint of that other World closer to Reality. Evil is a very real problem in this World of time and space. Evil forces exist and must be fought with all our strength. Nevetheless the Power out of which all things and all entities come is a beneficent one. Love is its radiation. There is no evil and no pain in it. They begin only on the lower level of separation and differentiation. Wild air, World-mothering air, nestling me everywhere, that each eyelash or hair girdles; goes home betwixt the fleeciest, frilest-flixed snowflake; that is fairly mixed with riddles, and is rife in every least thing is life; this needful, never spent, and nursing element; my more than meat and drink, my meal at every wink; their air, which, by life’s law, my lung must draw and draw now but to breathe its praise. Please give rain. We are the pure who camped by water. For Jacob’s sake who set the rods in water, O speed us! He strained and rolled the stone from off the water. Please give rain! Blest heirs to Torah’s quickening water, O save us! To win for them and for their offspring water. Please give rain! Today as then we cry for water. For Moses’ sake who found his people water, O speed us! He smote the rock and lo! out gushed the water. O save us, mighty God! Please give us rain! Our sires sang round the well of water. O save us! Because of Moses at Meribah’s water, O speed us! At Thy command he gave the thirsting water. O save us, mighty God! please give rain! Thy holy servants poured Thee water. O save us! For Thy chief minstrel’s sake who longed for water, O speed us! Yet turned and made libation with the water, O save us, mighty God! Please give rain! Four plants we wave that love the water, O save us! For American’s sake, the home of living water, O speed us! The parched Earth open to the Heavens’ water, O save us, mighty God! #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Located off of Virginiatown Road and McCourtney Road, residents of the 83 homesites of Cresleigh Havenwood will benefit from a brand new neighborhood in the charming City of Lincoln. Palo Verde Park, is just down the street and there’s plenty of recreation to take part in all around town. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/
It is so Remarkable You Have the Ability Become What You Believe!
Dreams can be wish fulfillments, dreams can express mere anxiety, but dreams can also—and this is the important point—express deep insights into oneself and into others. In order to appreciate this function of dreams, some consideration concerning the differences between the biological and psychological functions of sleeping and waking maybe useful. In the waking state thoughts and feelings respond primarily to challenge—the task of mastering our environment, changing it, defending ourselves against it. Survival is the task of waking humans; one is subject to the laws that govern reality. This means that one has to think in terms of time and space. While we sleep, we are not concerned with bending the outside World to our purposes. We are helpless, and sleep, therefore, has rightly been called the “brother of death.” However, we are also free, freer than when awake. We are free from the burden of work, from the task of attack or defense, from watching and mastering reality. We need not look at the outside World; we look at our inner World, are concerned exclusively with ourselves. When asleep we may be likened to a fetus or a corpse; we may also be likened to angels, who are not subject to the laws of “reality.” In sleep the realm of necessity has given way to the realm of freedom in which “I am” is the only system to which thoughts and feelings refer. Mental activity during sleep has a logic different from that of waking existence. As indicated before, sleep experience need not pay attention to qualities that matter only when one copes with reality. If I feel, for instance, that a person is a coward, I may dream that one changed from a man into a chicken. This change makes sense in terms of what I feel about the person, not in terms of my orientation to outside reality. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Sleep and waking life are the two poles of human existence. Waking life is taken up with the function of action, sleep is freed from it. Sleep is taken up with the function of self-experience. When we wake from our sleep, we move into the realm of action. We are then oriented in terms of this system, and our memory operates within it; we remember what can be recalled in space-time concepts. The sleep World has disappeared. Experiences had in it—our dreams—are remembered with great difficulty. The situation has been represented symbolically in many a folktale: at night ghosts and spirits, good and evil, occupy the scene, but when dawn arrives, they disappear, and nothing is left of the intense experience. Consciousness is the mental activity in our state of being preoccupied with external reality—with acting. (The qualities of consciousness are determined by the nature of action and by the survival function of the waking state of existence.) The unconscious is the mental experience in a state of existence in which we have shut off communications with the outer World, are no longer preoccupied with action but with our self-experience. The unconscious follow from the nature of this mode of existence. The “unconscious” is the unconscious only in relation to the “normal” state of activity. When we speak of “unconscious” we really say only that an experience is alien to that frame of mind which exists while we act; it is then felt as a ghostlike, intrusive element, hard to get hold of and hard to remember. However, they day World is as conscious in our sleep experience as he night World is in our waking experience. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
The term unconscious is customarily used solely from the standpoint of everyday experience; and thus I fails to denote that both conscious and unconscious are only different states of mind referring to different states of experience. It will be argued that in the waking state of existence, too, thinking and feeling are no entirely subject to the limitations of time and space; that our creative imagination permits us to think about past and future objects as if they were present, and of distant objects as if they were before our eyes; that our waking feeling is not dependent on the physical presence of the object nor on its coexistence in time; that, therefore, the absence of the space-time system is not characteristic of sleep existence in contradistinction to waking existence, but of thinking and feeling in contradistinction to acting. This welcome objection permits me to clarify an essential point in my argument. We must differentiate between the contents of thought processes and the categories employed in thinking. Rational thought processes in the waking state are subject to categories which are rooted in a special form of existence—the one in which we relate ourselves to reality in terms of action. In my sleep existence, which is characterized by lack of even potential action, categories are employed which have reference only to my self-experience. The same holds true of feeling. Whatever I feel, in the waking state, with regard to a person whom I have not seen for twenty years, I remain aware that one is not present. If I dream about the person, my feeling deals with the person as if one were present. But to say, “as if one were present” is to express the feeling in “waking life” concepts. In sleep existence there is no “as if”; the person is present. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Humans have a deep need to explains themselves, why one does or feels something. This is generally observed and recognized fact, usually called rationalization. If we dislike somebody, for instance, we are not satisfied with carrying this feeling but we strive to make it appear as a reasonable consequence of certain facts; thus we endow the disliked person with qualities, real or often invented, which make our dislike appear to be reasonable. The same course holds true in the case of liking or admiring a person, and can be found in its most obvious form in the mass enthusiasm for certain leaders or the mass dislike for members of certain classes or races. Dreams, on the other hand, are the result of an inherent tendency to bend feelings to the requirements of reasonableness. While we are asleep, we are not occupied with managing outer reality. We do not perceive it and we do not influence it, nor are we subject to the influences of the outside World on us. From this it follows that the effect of this separation from reality depends on the quality of reality itself. If the influence from the outside World is essentially beneficial, the absence of this influence during sleep will tend to lower the value of our dream activity, so that it will be inferior to our mental activities during the daytime when we are exposed to the beneficial influence of outside reality. However, are we right in assuming that the influences of reality is mainly a beneficial one? May it not be that it is so harmful and that, therefore, the absence of its influence tends to bring forth qualities superior to those we have when we are awake? #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
In speaking of the reality outside ourselves, reference is not made primarily to the World of nature. Nature as such is neither good nor bad. It may be helpful to us or dangerous, and the absence of our perception of it relieves us, indeed, from our task of trying to master it or of defending ourselves against it; but it does not make us either more stupid or wiser, better or worse. It is quite different with the human-made World around us, with the culture in which we live. Its effect upon us is quite ambiguous, although we are prone to assume that it is entirely to our benefit. Indeed, the evidence that cultural influences are beneficial to us seems almost overwhelming. What distinguishes us from the World of animals is our capacity to create culture. Is, then, the human-made reality outside ourselves not the most significant factor in the development of the very best in us, and must we not expect that, when deprived of contact with the outside World, we regress temporarily to a primitive, animal-like, unreasonable state of mind? Much can be said in favour of such an assumption, and the view that such a regression is the essential feature of the state of sleep, and thus of dream activity, has been held by many students of dreaming from Plato to Freud. From this viewpoint dreams are expected to be expressions of the irrational, primitive striving in us, and the fact that we forget our dreams so easily is amply explained by our being ashamed of those irrational and criminal impulses which we express when we are not under the control of society. Undoubtedly to some extent, this interpretation of dreams is true, but the question is whether it is altogether true or whether the negative elements in the influence of society do not account for the paradox that we are not only less reasonable and less decent in our dreams but that we are also more intelligent, wiser, and capable of better judgment when we are asleep than when we are awake. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Our dreams do not only express irrational desires but also deep insights and the important task of dream interpretation is to decide when the one and when the other is the case. Take the heart from those of the heroes of faith who exemplify Godly qualities. If we are most troubled by the small-mindedness of those whose lives seem to deny the good-news message of love, peace, and reconciliation, we are also most encouraged by those whose lives bear witness to the power of deep faith. It was a young Martin Luther King Jr. who sermonized in Montgomery, Alabama, that “standing up for the truth of God is the greatest thing in the World…The end of life is to do the will of God, come what may.” Only through spiritual transformation, he said, “do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the World in a humble and loving spirit. Such hope has empowered other heroes to fight tyrannical governments. It is no accident that the only open challenge to the totalitarian state has come from humans of deep religious faith. For in their faith they are vindicated as immoral souls, and from this enhancement of their dignity they find reason why they must offer a perpetual challenge to the dominion of humans over humans. Whenever our adversaries will demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the Gospel, we must resist. I do not know of any race, I would know of human beings. The Romanian pastor Laszlo Tokes, who, having protested the brutal oppression by his country’s dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, suffered being banned, harassed, beaten, and stabbed. Finally his people formed a protective human chain around his church and parsonage, igniting a revolution that in three days swept the country and toppled Ceausescu. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
It is rare indeed that a person has the good fortune to meet a saint, but sometimes people come as close to it as we can imagine. This is what we must emulate through a life that is empowered by prayer, Bible reading, and mediation. Being God-controlled in thought, judgment, actions, and words are fruits of the Spirit. The Spirit teachings us to display: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Again, what troubles us most about Christianity is not so much the philosophical puzzles as the seemingly un-Christian behaviour of so many of us Christians. However, then again, what inspires us most is the witness of unpretentious lives empowered by faith. We have to be able to testify to the peace and love that can flow from lives touched by grace. People have to be able to encourage others in times of uncertainty, discouragement, and self-pity to keep on—to fight the fight, to finish the race, to keep the faith. To that end, My dear Devout, you ought to tend diligently. That is to say, in every place and in every act, whether occupation or diversion, you should feel more comfortable with yourself and in command of yourself. Everything should be under your control, and not the other way around. You should be the lord and tailor of your own actions, not the slave or mercenary. You should be above it all and a true Christian, enjoying the lottery and the liberty of being a child of God. Keep an eternal perspective. “It shall be done to you according to your faith,” reports Matthew 9.29. Our expectations wield tremendous power and influence in our lives. We do not always get what we deserve, God always gives us more than we deserve. We also receive what we believe. Unfortunately, this principle works as strongly in the negative as it does in the positive. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Many people tend to expect the worst. Some people have had their faith broken by corruption and oppression and are in the process of healing from expecting the best, but having things not in their favour. Others expect defeat, failure, and mediocrity. And usually get what they expect; they become what they believe. However, you can believe for good things just as easily as you can expect the worse. It is possible to believe for more, to see yourself performing at increasingly higher levels in every area of life. The key is to expect good things from God. When you encounter tough times, do not expect to stay there. Expect to come out of that trouble. When business gets a bit slow, do not assume you will go bankrupt; do not make plans for failure. Pray and expect God to bring you more profitable business. “Repent (think differently; change your mind, regretting your sins and changing your conduct), for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” reports Matthew 3.2. Know that low expectations will destroy your situation; your own thinking will bring you down. Instead, ask God for wisdom, and change what you expect. Quit expecting to fail, and start believing that you are going to succeed. The fabric of the Universe was created by the Lord God and cut and sewn by the Great Tailor Himself, having this meticulosity about everything in its place, not a frill our of place. Whatever the onslaught, you must stand firm, let the smoke and din of battle settle, and see what actually happened, not what you would have liked to happen. That is to say, do everything you can to make an accurate assessment of everything you saw and heard. In this, you would have common cause with the Great Moses. When bedeviled with problems and perils he could not handle, he fled to the Tabernacle, as the Exodist reported it (33.8), where he consulted with the Lord. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
What did he learn? Never ever to shut his eyes and ears to the Divine Response! And Moses never did. No wonder he left the Tabernacle refreshed, much wiser on many accouns concering the present and the future. And so should you. That is to say, you should flee to the secret garden of your heart, there to impore Divine Help more intensely. That is what God advised in His Matthew’s Gospel (6.6). God will help you, bu you have to cast he deciding vote. Let God use this situation for your good. Know that God is going to bring you out of this stronger than ever before. Do not agree to be defeaed. You are conspiring with the enemy by opening the door and allowing destructive thoughs, words, actions, and attitudes to dominate your life. On the other hand, if you will get into agreement with God, if you will stay focused on your possibilities, your faith can cause God to show up and work supernaturally in your life. Your faith wil help you overcome your obstacles and allow you to reach new levels of success. However, it is up to you. It depends on your outlook. Are you going to focus on your problems, or will you focus on your God? Always bring your case to God. He will dispose of it well when the Final Court sits. Do not worry. God will straighten things out. Just the thought of that should give you the strength to go on making spiritual progress now. Believe beyond that shadow of a doubt that the Lord can heal you. Know that God is able. Trust God and have confidence in God. Faith can turn any situation around. No one can have faith for you. Other people can pray for you, they can believe for you, the can quote the Scripture to you, but you must exercise faith for yourself. If you are depending on somebody else to keep you happy, or to encourage you, or to get you out of trouble, you will live in perpetual frustration and disappointment. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Humankind gets so antsy about acquiring jus one more bauble, one more bangle. Odd thing, though. When they actually have it in their hands, there is always something wrong with it. It has this desperate flaw. That is to say, their affections play with it, then get tired of it. And it is off again on a not-so-merry chase from one unsatisfied desire to another. Therefore, when in comes to desirables, two conclusions. Obviously, one should leave the maxiatures alone. Not too obviously, the same goes for the miniatures. The truly spiritual activity of Humankind is saying no to self. The result? Abnegated Man. He is denuded himself of all material things, but still he has managed to be a breezy sort and quite secure in his own self-esteem. The Ancient Enemy, on the other hand, is a nervous, queasy sort, a skulker, always on the prowl; that is as Peter’s Firs Letter described him (5.8). Everyone he meets on the road he considers a perfect target. He never lets up, even in the field. Day and nigh he beats the bushes to arouse the unsuspecting and drive them toward invisible nets and covered traps. What is the defense? “Watch and pray,” God said in Matthew, “that you enter not into temptation,” (26.41). Take charge of your life and decide, No matter what comes against me, I believe in God. I am going to have an optimistic outlook for my life. What you believe has a much greater impact on your life than what anybody else believes. Become what you believe. Are you believing that God can help you to rise above your obstacles, to live in health, abundance, healing, and victory? Remember, you will become what you believe. Father, I believe You are able to do amazing things in my life, far beyond what I can even understand. No matter what comes my way today, I will exercise my faith and believe for spectacular things that will honour You. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
We see what appears to be evil rampant in the World, especially in this century, but it is not absolute evil. It is destined to disintegrate and vanish. How can you be so sure? Because if humans grow, they come to the truth. If one does not then, one loses one’s adulthood for a time. One’s evil goes with one. The human who lives in the truth lives in ethereal light, beautiful peace, even if the shadows are there. One sees on deeper levels where evil cannot penetrate and where the senses of unevolved humans cannot extend. If you are not able to know the great truths for yourself, then believe in them. There is that in humans which repeatedly works against their finer aspirations, which provides them with opposition. Upon this anvil one’s character is hammered out, shaped, and developed. So soon as a being limits interests and welfare to its own self exclusively, so soon is it bound to become into conflict with other beings. Thus evil originates through the first being’s ignorance, not through the presence of an absolute and eternal principle of evil. Where there is total ignorance there is total self-love. From this proceed all negativity, sensuality, indulgence, and discord. Where there is total knowledge there is total turning to the eternal IS. From this proceeds harmony, optimism, goodwill. Where hate and cruelty comes to excess, there is denial of the divine principle and reversal of the twofold truth. Where attention and attraction are partly turned to the THAT WHICH IS, there is sharing of mind and will between good and evil. The universal pretense of evil to be good and the occasional presence of some good in most evil create confusion or bewilderment in many minds and lead to wrong judgment in other minds. #RandolpHarris 11 of 17
Is there any absolute way of distinguishing good from evil? The Russian Staretz Silouan, of Mount Athos, thought there was—that however good an end might seem, if the means used to attain it was bad, then it was to be rejected. It is easy for us to see falsehood intended to lead others to act against their own welfare could be such a bad means, as also could malicious cruelty. Not to see the World as it is, with all its depravity and malice, is to be a fool, even if one happens to be a saint as well. The philosopher, like the ordinary human, sees its actuality but, unlike the ordinary human, is no stained by it. Moreover, one sees also the goodness and aspiration and, more importantly, the divine World-Idea. Evil is something which humans encounter on their journey to Good. Evil doing is what one expresses when still far from one’s destination. The redefinition is not a matter of choice but a necessary response to five revolutionary changes in the actual conditions of production. Change in the physical environment, in the lineup of social forces, in the role of information, in government organization, and in morality are all pounding the corporation into a new, multifaceted, multipurposeful shape. The first of these new pressures springs from the biosphere. In the mid-1950’s, when the Second Wave reached its mature stage in the United States of America, World population stood at only 2.75 billion. Today it is over 7.4 billion. In the mid-1950’s the Earth’s population used a mere 87 quadrillion of Btu of energy a year. Today 167.93 quadrillion Btu. In the mid-50’s, our consumption of a key raw material like zinc was only 2.7 million metric tons a year. Today it is 13.49 million tons a year. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Measured any way we choose, our demands on the planet are escalating wildly. As a result the biosphere is sending us alarm signals—pollution, desertification, signs of toxification in the oceans, subtle shifts in the climate—that we ignore at risk of catastrophe. These warnings tell us we can no longer organize production as we did during the Second Wave. Because the corporation is the main organizer of economic production, it is also a key “producer” of environmental impacts. If we want to continue our economic growth—indeed if we wish to survive—the managers of tomorrow will have to assume responsibility for converting the corporation’s environmental impacts from negatives into positives. They will assume this added responsibility voluntarily or they will be compelled to do so, for the changed conditions of the biosphere make it necessary. The corporation is being transformed into an environmental, as well as an economic, institution—not by do-gooders, radicals, ecologists, or even government bureaucrats, but by a material change in the relationship of production to the biosphere. The second pressure springs from a little-notice change in the social environment is now far more organized than before. At one time each firm operated in what might be termed underorganized society. Today the socio-sphere, especially in the United States of America, has leaped to a new level of organization. It is packed with a withering, interacting mass of well-organized, often well-funded, associations, agencies, trade unions, and other groupings. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
In the United States of America today, some 1,370,000 companies interact with well over 90,000 schools and universities, 330,000 churches, and hundreds of thousands of branches of 13,000 national organizations, plus countless purely local environmental, social, religious, athletic, political, ethnic, and civic groups, each with its own agenda and priorities. It takes 144,000 law firms to mediate all these relationships! In this densely crowded socio-sphere, every corporate action has repercussive impacts not merely on lonely or helpless individuals but on organized groups, many of them with professional staffs, a press of their own, access to the political system, and resources with which to hire experts, lawyers, and other assistance. In his finely strung socio-sphere, corporate decisions are closely scrutinized. “Social pollution” produced by the corporation in the form of unemployment, community disruption, forced mobility, and the like is instantly spotted, and pressures are placed on the corporate to assume far greater responsibility than ever before for its social, as well as economic, “products.” A third set of pressures reflects that changed info-sphere. Thus, the de-massification of society means that far more information must be exchanged between social institutions—including the corporation—to maintain equilibrial relationships among them. Third Wave production methods further intensify the corporation’s hunger for information as raw material. The firm thus sucks up data like a gigantic vacuum cleaner, processes it, and disseminates it to other in increasingly complex ways. As information become central to production, as “information manager” proliferate in industry, the corporation, by necessity, impacts on the informational environment exactly as it impacts on the physical and social environment. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
The new importance of information leads to conflict over the control of corporate data—battles over disclosure of more information to the public, demands for open accounting (of oil company production and profit figures, for example), more pressures for “truth in advertising” or “truth in lending.” For in the new era, “information impacts” become as serious a matter as environmental and social impacts, and the corporation is seen as an information producer as well as an economic producer. A fourth pressure on the corporation arises from politics and the power-sphere. The rapid diversification of society and the acceleration of change are everywhere reflected in a tremendous complexification of government. The differentiation of society is mirrored in the differentiation of government, and each corporation must therefore interact with more and more specialized units of government. These units, badly coordinated and each with its own priorities, are, moreover, in a perpetual turmoil of reorganization. In the past there was no Environmental Production Agency or any others. Many of these organizations are relatively new. Every company thus finds itself increasingly ensnarled in politics—local, regional, national, or even transnational. Conversely, every important corporate decision “produces” at least indirect political effects along with its other output, and is increasingly held responsible for them. Finally, as Second Wave civilization wanes and its value system shatters, a fifth pressure arises, affecting all institutions—including the corporations. This is a heightened moral pressure. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Behaviour once accepted as normal is suddenly reinterpreted as corrupt, immoral, or scandalous. Thus the Lockheed bribes topple a government in Japan. Gulf Oil’s chairman is forced to resign in the wake of a bribery scandal. The reluctance of Distillers Company in Britain to repay the victims of Thalidomide adequately, the failures of McDonnell Douglas with respect to the DC-10—all trigger tidal waves of moral revulsion. The ethical stance of the corporation is increasingly seen as having a direct impact on the value system of the society, just as significant to some as the corporation’s impact on the physical environment or the social system. The corporation is increasingly seen as a “producer” of moral effects. These five sweeping changes in both the material and non-material conditions of production make untenable the Second Wave school-book notion that a corporation is nothing but an economic institution. Under the new conditions the corporation can no longer operate as a machine for maximizing some economic function—whether production profit. The very definition of “production” is being drastically expanded to include the side, as well as the central, effects, the long-range as well as the immediate effects, of corporate action. Put simply, every corporation has more “products” (and is now held responsible for more) than Second Wave managers ever had to consider—environmental, social, informational, political, and moral, not just economic products. The purpose of the corporation is thus changed from singular to plural—not just as the level of rhetoric or public relations but at the level of identity and self-definition as well. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
In corporation after corporation we can expect to see an internal battle between those who cleave to the single-purpose corporation of the Second Wave past and those who are ready to cope with the Third Wave conditions of production and to fight for the multipurpose corporation of tomorrow. Thank you Father for your free gift of life. Because it is through this life that you draw near to us every day. It is with this life that you constantly bless us. Our Father, bless this life today. With your power enter into it. Make this life a worthy thing. A thing that carries your blessing. Let it become a reminder of your love. A reminder of life without end. Please make the life of these people to be baptized like you have requested in the Holy Bible. A thing that shines for the sake of people. A think that shines for your sake. Father, please heed this sweet life. Please make their life also sweet smelling. A thing sweet smelling that raises to God. A holy thing. A thing fitting for you. For those who sought in exile for Thy face, who knew Thy secret, who to gather grace and shun defilement, ate but pulse and water—save them that call Thee, grieving from heir place, save them, our Father. For one who witnessed wisdom’s light arise, the ready scribe of yore, who made us wise with outspread truth like spaces wider of water—O save that once full city, when she cries Save us, our Father. For their sake who with all their soul this day have come to pour their heart out and to pray, begging from Thee Thy rains of mighty water—save them who sang to Thee upon their way, save them, our Father. For their sake who have said: “Thy name be blest,” thine heritage, the sons of Thy behest, longing for Thee like land that faints for water—save them for who so long Thou seekest rest, Save them, our Father. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
CRESLEIGH HAVENWOOD
Lincoln, CA | from the mid $600s
Now Selling!
Now selling! Cresleigh Havenwood features four distinct floor plans ranging from 2,293 – 3,489 square feet and offering up to five bedrooms. Each plan has been thoughtfully designed and includes great features such as single story homes, guest suites, optional offices, garage workshops, and more!
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Located off of Virginiatown Road and McCourtney Road, residents of the 83 homesites of Cresleigh Havenwood will benefit from a brand new neighborhood in the charming City of Lincoln. Palo Verde Park, is just down the street and there’s plenty of recreation to take part in all around town. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/
More Wonders of the Invisible World
Witchcraft is one of the most hidden works of darkness. And California had its full share of obscurity. People groping their way in the dark are unlikely to be either stable or judicious, and thus it is hardly surprising that much of the legends about witchcraft are violent and partisan. The Devil improves the darkness of this affair to push us into a blind man’s buffet, and we are even ready to be sinfully, yea, hotly and madly mauling one another in the dark. Some people want to contact the dead and consider seances, but they are dangerous because it is easy for a gate to be opened and something evil to come along with the spirit you want to contact. There is an old urban legend about “Bloody Mary.” If you chant “Bloody Marry” thirteen times into a mirror in a dark room, her spirit will appear. Some say she will prophesize for you, other versions say she will attack you. Historically, Bloody Mary was a nickname for Mary I of England, who suffered several miscarriages. She was also alleged to be a witch and was burned at the stake. Divination by mirror has been practiced in nearly all cultures for as long as mirrors have been around. Before that, any reflective surface, especially still water, was used to prophesy or catch a glimpse of the future. In many of these legends, the danger is that while you are trying to catch a glimpse of your future, you might also see some aspect of Death. Tradition also holds that at the moment of death, all the mirrors in the house should be covered so hey do not trap the departing spirit. Ancient Greeks and Native Americans believed that the reflection contained the soul, and could be capture by water. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
It is bad luck to break mirrors because they are reflections of the soul, and also because they hold the future. That is why the seven years of bad luck occurs, you have broken your future. Many of the persons confessing these myths are witches by their own confession and have therefore abjured God and Chris, and given themselves up to the Devil, the Father of Lies. And what credit is to be given to the testimony of such against the lives of others? Many historians believe these early American legends are important and endeavor that the complete history of secret California witchcrafts and possessions might not be lost. The preservation of that history might in a be a singular benefit unto the church and unto the World, which makes many solicitous about it. Mrs. Winchester, who has been strangely visited by some shining spirits during the construction of her mansion, believed they were good Angels in her opinion of them. She intimated several things unto her friends, whereof some were to be kept secret. She also said that a new storm of witchcraft would fall upon the country to chastise the iniquity that was used in the willful smothering and covering of the last, and that many fierce opposites to the discovery of witchcraft would be thereby convinced. Many people are looking to acquire authentic, single-family Victorian homes because they believe in the renaissance of witchcraft and these homes possess souls, spirit, ghost, hidden occult symbol, and are supposedly spiritual nexuses. They are a power source to contacting the other World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
All spirits have something in common, but it matters who they are haunting. It matters what their traditions were when they were alive. In many Native American legends, they have thousands of Gods, and each of them had attendant monsters and demons. Pishachas are beings who haunt places where violent deaths have occurred. They eat human flesh and are supposed to be the sons of anger. They haunt cemeteries and places where cremations have taken place and can change their shape and become invisible. Sometimes they attack and eat their victims, in other instances they possess them and drive them insane. It is believed because there was some covenanting with the Devil they had committed and it was an unpardonable sin, that sin of which the scriptures said we must not pray for. Sometimes anyone who was not in a proper covenant with God was considered to be a witch. Witches are known to change into rabbits, cats, other familiar animals. Halloween costumes are a surviving remnant of the belief that transformed witches would be abroad before All Hallow’s Eve. Some of the Indian Powows [id est, pries-magicians] in this country during the 17th century, having received the Gospel and given good evidence of a true conversion to God in Christ, had with much sorrow of heart declared how they had, whilst in their Heathenism, by the hands of Evil Angels murdered their neighbours. A Nagual is a human being, a Shaman, who has acquired the power to shapeshift. Some Nagual have vampire qualities, changing into bats or owls to drain blood; in other cases the nagual is a respected and feared member of the community. In some places nagual are said to attack Indians who have too much contact with mestizo or Anglo populations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
There are myriad instances of witchcraft both in history and in the Bible, but some of the demonologists personal experiences are remarkable enough to make us wish they had given a more detailed account of the. In referring to Balaam, the biblical conjurer of familiar spirits, one of them said, “we have seen and know such wizards among the Heathen in our own land.” If I meant anything, it was that a ghost story would have a great pull over other ghost stories if one could see the person it happened to. One does get rather provoked at never coming across him or her. In April, nearly fifteen years after the Winchester Mansion opened for tour, it was a clear spring day, with no fog or half-lights about, and it was not yet four o’clock in the afternoon—not very ghost-like circumstances, you will admit. I had come home early from my club—it was a sort of holiday time with me just then for a few weeks—intending to get some letters written which had been on my mind for some days, and I had sauntered into the library of the mansion, a pleasant, fair-sized room lined with books, on the first floor. Before setting to work I sat down for a moment or two in an easy-chair by the fire, for it was still cool enough weather to make a fire desirable, and began thinking over my letters. No thought, no shadow of a thought of Mrs. Winchester was present with me, of that I am perfectly certain. The door was on the same side of the room as the fireplace; as I sat there, half facing the fire, I also half faced the door. I had not shut it properly on coming in, I had only closed it without turning the handle, and I did not feel surprised when it slowly and noiselessly swung open, till it stood right out into the room, concealing the actual doorway from my view. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
If you think of the door as just hen acting like a screen to the doorway, you will perhaps understand the position better. From where I say I could not have seen anyone entering the room ill he or she had got beyond the door itself. I glanced up, half expecting to see someone come in, but there was no one; the door had swung open of itself. For the moment I sat on, with only the vague thought passing through my mind, “I must shut I before I begin to write.” However, suddenly I found my eyes fixing themselves on the carpet; something had come within their range of vision, compelling their attention in a mechanical sort of way. What was it? I rubbed my eyes and the wavy something that kept gliding, rippling in, gradually assumed a more substantial appearance. It was—yes, I suddenly became convinced of it, it was rippled of soft silken stuff, creeping in as if in some mysterious way unfolded or unrolled, not jerkily or irregularly, but glidingly and smoothly, like little wavelets on the sea-shore. And I sat there and gazed. I sat there still, as if bewitched, or under some irresistible influence, I cannot tell, but so it was. And it—came always rippling in, till at last it began to rise as it sill came on, and I saw that a figure, a tall graceful woman’s figure, was slowly advancing, backwards of course, into the room, and that the waves of pale silk—a very delicate shade of pearly grey I think it must have been—were in fact the lower portion of a long court-train, the upper part of which hung in deep folds from the lady’s waist. She moved in—I cannot describe the motion, it was not like ordinary walking or stepping backwards—till the whole of her figure and the clear profile of her face and head were distinctly visible, and when at last she stopped and stood there full in my view just, but only just beyond the door, I saw—it came upon me like a flash, that she was no stranger o me, this mysterious visitant! #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
I recognized, unchanged I seemed to me since the day, twenty-five years ago, when I had last seen her, the beautiful features of Mrs. Winchester. I should not have said unchanged. There was one great change in the sweet face. You remember my telling you that one of Mrs. Winchester’s greatest charms was her bright sunny happiness—she never seemed gloomy or depressed or dissatisfied, seldom even pensive. However, in this respect the face I sat there gazing at was utterly unlike Mrs. Winchester’s. Its expression, as she—or “it”—stood there looking, not towards me, but out beyond, as if at someone or something outside the doorway, was of the profoundest sadness. Anything so sad I have never seen in a human face, and I trust I never may. However, I sat on, as motionless almost as she, gazing at her fixedly, with no desire, no power perhaps, to move or approach more nearly to the phantom. I was not in the least frightened. I knew it was a phantom, but I felt paralyzed and as if I myself had somehow got outside of ordinary conditions. And there I sat—staring at Mrs. Winchester, and there she stood, gazing before her with that terrible, unspeakable sadness in her face, which, even though I felt no fear, seemed to freeze me with a kind of unutterable pity. I do not know how long I had sat thus, or how long I might have continued to sit there, almost as if in a trance, when suddenly I heard the front-door bell ring. It seemed to awaken me. I started up and glanced round, half-expecting that I should find the vision dispelled. But no; she was still there, and I sank back into my seat just as I heard my brother coming quickly upstairs. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
He came towards the library, and seeing the door wide open walked in, and I, still gazing, saw his figure pass through that of Mrs. Winchester in the doorway as you may walk through a wreath of mist—only, do not misunderstand me, the figure of Mrs. Winchester till that moment had had nothing unsubstantial about it. She had looked to me, as she stood there, literally and exactly like a living woman—the shade of her dress, the colour of her hair, the few ornaments she wore, all were as defined and clear as a real person, or perhaps became so again as soon as my brother was well within the room. He came forward, addressing me by name, but I answered him in a whisper, begging him to be silent and to sit down on the seat opposite me for a moment or two. He did so, though he was taken aback by my strange manner, for I still kept my eyes fixed on the door. I had a queer consciousness that if I looked away it would fade, and I waned to keep cool and see what would happen. I asked George in a low voice if he saw nothing, but though he mechanically followed the direction of my eyes, he shook his head in bewilderment. And for a moment or two he remained thus. Then I began to notice that the figure was growing less clear, as if it were receding, yet without growing smaller to the sight; it grew fainter and vaguer, the colours grew hazy. I rubbed my eyes once or twice with a half idea that my long watching was making them misty, but it was not so. My eyes were not at fault—slowly but surely Sarah Winchester, or her ghost, melted away, ill all trace of her was gone. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
I saw again the familiar pattern of the carpet where she had stood and the objects of the room that had been hidden by her draperies—all again in the most commonplace way: but she was gone, quite gone. Then George, seeing me relax my intense gaze, began to question me. I told him exactly what I have told you. He answered, as every common-sensible person of course would, that it was strange, but that such things did happen sometimes, and were classed by the wise under the head of “optical delusions.” I was not well, perhaps, he suggested. Been overworking? Had I not better see a doctor? However, I shook my head. I was quite well, and I said so. And perhaps he was right, it might be an optical delusion only. I had never had any experience of such things. “Poor” Mrs. Winchester I cannot help calling her. I heard of her indirectly, and probably, but for the sadness of her story, I should never have heard it at all. It was a friend of her husband’s family who had mentioned the circumstances in the hearing of a friend of mine, and one day something brought round the conversation to old times, and he startled me by suddenly enquiring if I remembered Sarah Winchester. I said, of course, I did. Did he know anything of her? And then he told me. She was dead—she had died some months after a long and trying illness, the result of a terrible accident. Something happened one evening when dressed for some grand entertainment or other, and though her injuries did not seem likely to be fatal at the time, she had never recovered the shock. “She was so pretty,” my friend said, “and one of the saddest parts of it is she could have not been any older than twenty when she passed away in 1922. She was such a sweet and bright lady.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
We all thought the she had finished construction of her mansion and moved up north to build another one. I did not tell him my story, for I did not want it chattered about, but a strange sort of shiver ran through me at his words. Not everyone was in agreement that the specters in the Winchester mansion had all been angry spirits or a delusion of the Devil. It having been represented to us that a most horrible witchcraft or possession of Devils hath invested several towns in Our Province of California under your government, and that divers persons have been convicted of witchcraft, like the Prison’s of the River, in Sacramento, California; some whereof have confessed their guilt, but others being of a known and good reputation these proceedings had caused a great dissatisfaction among our good subjects, for which reason you have put a stop thereunto until Our Pleasure should be known concerning the same, We therefore until Our Pleasure should be known concerning the same, We therefore approving of your care and circumspection herein have thought fit to signify Our Will and Pleasure, as We do hereby will and require you to give all necessary directions that in all proceedings against persons accused for witchcraft or being possessed by the Devil the greatest moderation and all due circumspection be used, so far as the same may be without impediment to the ordinary course of justice within Our said Province. And so We bid your very heartily farewell. Given at the Winchester Mansion the 15th day of April, 1947, in the fifth year of Our Reign. By Her Majesty’s Command. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
Although the topic of witchcraft was now explosively controversial in California, nobody was to deny that people practiced it, and there was still some interest in investigating it. There are therefore references to it in many of the sermons in the 19th century. However, after the Winchester mansion was opened for tour, the mysterious disappearance of Mrs. Winchester was thought to be paranormal and a circular letter was sent by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company to investigate the collection of more instances of “remarkable providences” (these would include unusual natural phenomena as well as the preternatural). Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings in the Winchester mansion, on stones in the basement on the walls in the dressing room, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings in forbidden areas of the mansion which interpret to the mystical the inspired secrets of Mrs. Winchester, in the cryptic emblems of her old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practiced at reception by this secret society, there were found indications of a doctrine which was everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed. It is likewise to be understood, those who are desirous to raise any souls of the dead, ought to select those places wherein these kind of souls are most known to be conversant; or by some alliance alluring the souls into their forsaken bodies, or by some kind of affection in times impressed in them in their life, drawing the souls to certain places, things, or persons; or by the forcible nature of some place fitted and prepared to purge or punish these souls: which places for the most part are to be known by he appearance of visions, nightly incursions, and apparitions. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Mrs. Winchester lists convincing evidence that her experience of witchcraft extended well beyond what she had committed to writing: I know a young man who had gone so far as to get ready a Covenant with Satan, written all of it in his own blood. However, before the signing of it, the sinful, I was made the happy instrument of his deliverance. As soon was this man was left alone in the mansion, the devil, imagining that he had found the right moment for breaking his courage, incontinently roused up his own chosen vessel, who appeared to have reposed longer than usual. Having beheld this from afar, he grew stiff with terror by reason of his being alone; but soon recovering his courage, and no place of refuge being at hand, he valiantly withstood the onset of the fiend, who came rushing upon him with a terrible noise, and he struck the axe which he wielded in his hand deep into his body. On receiving this wound, the monster groaned aloud and turning his back, fled with a rapidity not at all inferior to that with which he had advanced, while the admirable man urged his flying foe from behind, and compelled him to seek his own tomb again; which opening of its own accord, and receiving its guest from the advance of the pursuer, immediately appeared closed again. Hence it is that the souls of the dead are not to be called up without blood or by the application of some part of their relict body. In the raising therefore of these shadows, we are to perfume with new blood the bones of the dead, and with flesh, eggs, milk, honey, and oil, which furnish the soul with a medium apt to receive its body. Gosh, it must be terrible to know you witnesses something, but that you will never be able to remember it or tell anyone about it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
I know a woman whose brother was tortured with a cruel, pricking, incurable pain in the crown of his head, which continued until there was found with her a puppet in wax, resembling him, with a pin pricked into the head of it, which being take out her recovered immediately. He goes on about demons. A demon killed his wife, he says, and just expects me to believe it. However, what he looks like to me is someone who let grief turn him into a monster. Whatever happened to his wife, it does not excuse what he had done. He attacks, kills, then springs away before anyone can react. Wicked sorceries have been practised in the land, and, in the late inexplicable storms from the invisible World thereby brought upon us, we were left by the just hand of Heaven unto those errors whereby great hardships were brough upon innocent persons, and (we fear) guilt incurred which we have all cause to bewail with much confusion of face before the Lord. We confess that we ourselves were not capable to understand nor able to withstand the mysterious delusions of the Powers of Darkness and Prince of the Air, but were, for want of knowledge in ourselves and better information from others, prevailed with to take up with such evidence against the accused as on further consideration and better information we justly fear was insufficient for the touching the lives of any, whereby we fear we have been instrumental with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon ourselves and this People of the Lord the guilt of innocent blood, which sin the Lord saith in scripture He would not pardon (2 Kings 24.4), that we suppose, in regard of His temporal judgments. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
I know a person who, missing anything, would use to sit down and muter a certain charm, and then immediately by an invisible hand ben directly led unto the place where the thing was to be found. turquoise carvings placed in Native American graves to attract good spirits and guard the grave. Also, turquoise tied onto a bow was supposed to make you shoot more accurately. The body of saints often times cannot be found when their graves are dug up because their bones were frequently interred in the cornerstones of cathedrals, so their spirits would guard the holy location. Unwilling sacrifices would be more likely to become angry spirits instead of guarding. Canaanites sacrificed infants and put them in the foundations of houses and temples. “At the cost of his first-born shall he se up its gates,” reports Joshua 6.26. Bones were discovered in the basement of the original farm house that was engulfed as part of this estate during the expansion. Sightings of Hell Hounds date back to 1888. Some reports say the creatures are threatening. The Victorian parklike grounds seem to breed sightings of big wolf creatures or beast at night. Since the legends have been uncovered, many people have reported seeing a big black wolf and two men walking around the Winchester mansion at night, even when it is closed. Four kids and a police officer allegedly disappeared after climbing the gate to get a closer look one night. Nearly 134 years of sightings. These people are probably sadly deluded and mistaken, their minds are more likely disquieted and distressed, and we do therefore humbly beg forgiveness, first of God for Christ’s sake for this error, and pray that God would not impute the guilt of it to ourselves nor others. And we also pray that we may be considered candidly and aright by the living suffers as being then under the power of a strong and general delusion, utterly unacquainted with and not experienced in matters of that nature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
I know a woman who upon uttering some words over very painful hurts and sores did use instantly to cure them, unto the amazement of the spectators. Now, thought I, if this wretch can effectually employ Devils to cure hurts, why may not she to cause them also, which is the worst that the witches do? The matter being so dark and perplexed as that there is no present appearance that all God’s servants should be altogether of one mind in all circumstances touching the same and believing the Devil’s accusations. These practices and principles have been the beginner and procurer of the sores afflictions, not to Llanda Villa only, but to this whole country, that did ever befall them. It should be noted in passing that Llanda Villa’s attorneys have concluded that these peoples visions and afflictions are due to illness caused by demonic possession. No specters evidence may be hereafter accounted valid or sufficient to take away the life or good name of any person or persons within this province. God hath a controversy with us about what was done in the time of the witchcraft. I fear that innocent blood hath been shed, and that many have had their hands defiled therewith. Public acknowledgement of guilt, and humiliation for it, and the more particularly and personally it is done by all that have been actors, the more pleasing it will be to God and more effectual to turn away his judgments from the land, and to prevent his wrath from falling upon the persons and families of such as have been most concerned. Moreover, if it be true, as I have been often informed, that families of such as were condemned for supposed witchcraft have been ruined by taking away and making havoc of their estates and leaving them nothing for their relief, I believe the whole country of lies under a curse to this day, and will do till some effectual course be taken by our honored governor and Supreme Court to make them some amends and reparations. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Winchester Mystery House
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Must You Wait for the Heart to Change First?
Many people believe that a neurotic or bad or unhappy child must have parents who have produced his negative state, while on the contrary the happy and healthy child has a correspondingly happy and healthy environment. In fact parents have taken the whole of the blame for the unhealthy development of a child on themselves and equally so the praise for the happy outcome of childhood. All data show that they should have not done so. Here is a good example: A psychoanalyst may see a very neurotic, distorted person with a terrible child and say, “It is obvious that the childhood experiences have produced this unhappy outcome.” If one would only ask oneself, however, how many people one had seen who came from the same type of family constellation and turned out to be remarkable happy and healthy people, one would begin to have doubts about the simple connection between childhood experiences and the mental health or illness of a person. The first factor which accounts for this theoretical disappointment must lie in the analyst’s ignoring the differences in genetic dispositions. Take a simple example: One can see even among newborn infants a difference in degree of aggressiveness or timidity. If the aggressive child has an aggressive mother, this mother will do one little harm or perhaps even much good. It will learn to fight with her and not be frightened of her aggressiveness. If a timid child is confronted with the same mother, it will be intimidated by the mother’s aggressiveness, it will tend to become a frightened, submissive and later on perhaps a neurotic person. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Indeed, we touch here upon the old and much discussed problem of “nature versus nurture” or genetic disposition versus environment. The discussion of this problem has by no means yet led to conclusive results. From my own experience I have come to the conclusion that genetic dispositions play a much greater role in the formation of a specific character than most analysts credit it with doing. I believe that one aim of the analyst should be to reconstruct a picture of the character of the child when it was born in order to study which of the traits one finds in the analysand are part of the original nature and which are acquired through influential circumstances; furthermore, which of the acquired qualities conflict with the genetic ones and which tend to reinforce them. What we find very often is that by the wish of the parents (personally an as representatives of society) the child is forced to repress or to weaken one’s original dispositions and to replace them by those traits which society wants one to develop. At this point we find the roots of neurotic developments; the person develops a sense of false identity. While genuine identity rests upon the awareness of one’s suchness in terms of the person one is born as, pseudo-identity rests upon the personality which society has imposed upon us. Hence a person is in constant need of approval in order to keep one’s balance. Genuine identity does not need such approval because the person’s picture of oneself is identical with one’s authentic personality structure. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
If throughout childhood, a child were convinced that nobody would ever care for one unless one wanted something from them, that there was no sympathy or love which was no the payment for services or a bribe to preform, a person may go through life without ever having experienced that somebody cares or is interested and does not want anything in return. However, when it happens that such a person experiences another person’s having a real interest without wanting anything, this might drastically change such character traits as suspicion, fear, the feelings of being unlovable, et cetera. Furthermore, the relationship between parents and children is usually seen as a one-way street, namely the effect parents have upon children. However, what is often ignored is that this influence is by no means one-sided. A parent may have a natural dislike for a child and even for a newborn baby, not only for reasons which are often discussed—that it is an unwanted child or that that the parent is destructive, sadistic, et cetera—but for the reason that child and parent just are not compatible by their very natures, and that in this respect the relationship is no different from that between grown-up people. The parents may just have a dislike for the kind of child one produced and the child may feel this dislike for the kind of parents one has and being the weaker, one is punished for one’s dislike by all kinds of more or less subtle sanctions. The child—and equally the mother—is forced into a situation where the mother has to take care of the child and the child has to accept the mother in spite of the fact that they heartily dislike each other. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The child cannot articulate that it does not like the mother; the mother would feel guilty if she admitted to herself that she did not like a child she gave birth to, and so both behave under a special kind of pressure and punish each other for being forced into an unwanted intimacy. The mother pretends to love the child and subtly punishes it for being forced to do so, the child pretends in some way or another to love the mother because one’s life depends totally on her. In such a situation a great deal of dishonesty develops which the children often express in their own indirect ways of rebellion and which the mothers usually negate because they feel that nothing could be more shameful than not to like one’s own children. Only one who believes is obedient, and only one who is obedient believes. Jesus says: “First obey, perform the external work, renounce your attachments, give up the obstacles which separate you from the will of God.” Do not say that you have not got faith. You will not have it so long as persist in disobedience and refuse to take the first step. People generally assume that our beliefs and attitudes determine our actions. So if we want to change the way people act, their hearts and minds had better be changed. This assumption lies behind most of our teaching, preaching, counseling, and child rearing. And to some extent it is true: behaviour follows attitudes. However, if social psychology has taught us anything during the last thirty year, it is that the reverse is also true: we are as likely to act ourselves into a new way of thinking as to think ourselves into action. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Evil acts shape the self. People induced to harm an innocent victim typically come to disparage their victim. Those induced to speak or write statements about which they have misgivings will often come to accept their little lies. Saying becomes believing. More action affects the actor, too. Children who resist a temptation tend to internalize their conscientious behaviour. Helping someone typically increases liking for the person helped. Those who teach a moral norm to others subsequently follow the moral code better themselves. Generalizing the principle, it would seem that one antidote for the corrupting effects of evil action is repentant action. Act as if you love your neighbour—without worrying whether you really do—and before long you will like the person more. Racial attitudes have followed racial behaviour. Racial attitudes have followed racial behaviour. Prior to desegregation in the United States of America it was often said that you cannot legislate racial attitudes—you must wait for the heart to change first. However, after the initiation of desegregation European American racial attitudes became noticeably less prejudiced. Moreover, as different regions of the country have come to act more alike, they have also come to think more alike. Political socialization techniques have effectively employed the principle. For instance, many people seem to be in support of undocumented people coming into America, even though it is a crime, but are enforcing more laws and restrictions on legal Americans. Many Americans have expressed discomfort at the contradiction of demanding that people follow the law, and their support for undocumented immigration. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Prevented from say what they really believe, they try to establish their psychic equilibrium by consciously making themselves believe what they said, which is essentially “Most people should have to follow the law, but I support crime in certain circumstances.” But what happens when they start to rationalize illegal actions of their own, will that lead to lawlessness on a wide scale? Many modern therapy techniques make a more constructive use of action. Behavior therapy and rational-emotive therapy and rational-emotive therapy both prompt their clients to rehearse and practice more productive behaviour. We can all learn a practical lesson here. Like Moses, Jonah, and other biblical heroes, we do not feel like doing what we know we ought. The remedy is to get up and act anyway—to put our fingers on the keyboard and force ourselves to begin that essay or letter, to go to the phone and dial that number, to confront or hare with that person, to turn off the TV and begin studying for that exam. When we do so, we often find that our forced behaviour begins to gain momentum as a real interest in our subject takes hold. Our feelings are hard to control, but we can control our behaviour and by doing so indirectly influence our feelings. To be sure, the attitudes-follow-behaviour principle is more potent in some situations than others—especially in those where people feel some choice and responsibility for their behaviour rather than attributing it to coercion. Nevertheless, it is now a fundamental rule of social psychology that behaviour and attitude generate one another in an endless spiral, like chicken and egg. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
This principle affirms the biblical understanding of action and faith, or an obedience and belief. Depending on where we break into this spiraling chain, we will see faith as a source of action or as a consequence. Action and faith, like action and attitude, feed one another. Much as conventional wisdom has insisted that our attitudes determine our behaviour, Christian thinking has usually emphasized faith as the source of action. Faith, we believe, is the beginning rather than the end of religious development. The experience of being “called” demonstrates how faith can precede action in the lives of the faithful. Elijah is overwhelmed by the Holy as he huddles in a cave. Paul is touched by the Almighty on the Damascus Road. Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos are likewise invaded by the Word, which then explodes in their active response to the call. In each case, an encounter with God provoked a new state of consciousness, which was then acted upon. This dynamic potential of faith is already a central tenet of Christian thought. For the sake of balance, we should also appreciate the complementary proposition: faith is a consequence of action. Throughout the Old and New Testaments we are told that full knowledge of God comes through actively doing the Word. Faith is nurtured by obedience. We come to know truth by reason and quiet reflection. This view, translated into Christian terms, equates faith with cerebral activity—orthodox doctrinal propositions. The contrasting biblical view assumes that reality is known through obedient commitment. “The Lord touched their eyes, saying ‘It shall be done to you according to your faith,’” Matthew 9.29. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
If an individual wants to change one’s life, that change must be conceived on the inside. Once that new and improved image shows up, the God will easily develop I on the outside. Living your dream is that simple. Anyone can enjoy a happier and healthier lifestyle. However, the change will not happen immediately and it will not be easy. However, for any improve me, the inception of your vision must occur within your heart and mind first, then it will manifest in your life. “Praise be to the name of God forever and ever; wisdom and power are His. He changes times and seasons; He sets up kings and deposes them. He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to he discerning. He reveals deep and hidden things; He knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with him. I thanks and praise you, O God of my fathers; you have given me wisdom and power, you have made known to me what we asked of you, you have made known to us the dream of the king,” reports Daniel 2.20-23. When we close our eyes, we should be big dreamers, an see our whole family serving God, and rising to new levels of effectiveness. One should see themselves achieving more success next year, and their family healthy and happy. You might even see yourself getting better looking. Believe that you will get a promotion at work. Know that you will pay off that house. Understand God is using you in a better way. Trust that you are stronger, healthier, and living a life full of God’s grace. Walk by faith and not by sight. When you look into the future, see your children happy and successful and marrying excellent people. Take a few moments everyday and pray for your dreams to come true. Envision yourself there. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Entropy by its very character assures us that though it may be the universal rule in the Nature we know, it cannot be universal absolute. If a person says, “Humpty Dumpty is falling,” you see at once that this is not a complete story. The bit you have been told implies both a later chapter in which Humpty Dumpty will have reached the ground, and an earlier chapter in which he was still stead on the wall. A nature which is “running down” cannot be the whole story. A clock cannot run down unless it has been wound up. Humpty Dumpty cannot fall off a wall which never existed. If a Nature which disintegrates order were the whole of reality, where would she find any order to disintegrate? Thus on any view there must have been a time when processes the reverse of those we now see were going on: a time of winding up. The Christian claim is that those days are not gone for ever. Humpty Dumpty is going to be replaced on the wall—at least in the sense that what has died is going to recover life, probably in the sense that the inorganic Universe is going to be re-ordered. Either Humpty Dumpty will never reach the ground (being caught in mid-fall by the everlasting arms) or else when he reaches it he will be putt together again and replaced on a new and better wall. Admitted, science discerns no “king’s horses and men” who can “put Humpty Dumpty together again.” However, you would not expect her to. She is based on observation: and all our observations are observations of Humpty Dumpty in mid-air. They do not reach either the wall above or the ground below—much less he King with the horses and men hastening towards the spot. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The Transfiguration or “Metamorphosis” of Jesus is also, no doubt, an anticipatory glimpse of something to come. He is seen conversing with two of the ancient dead. The change which His own human form had undergone is described as one to luminosity, to “shining whiteness.” A similar whiteness characterizes His appearance a he beginning of the book of Revelation. One rather curious detail is that this shining or whiteness affected His clothes as much as His body. St. Mark indeed mentions the clothes more explicitly than the face, and adds, with his inimitable naivety, that “no laundry could do anything like it.” Taken by itself this episode bears all the marks of a “vision”: that is, of an experience which, though it may be divinely sent and may reveal great truth, yet is not, objectively speaking, the experience it seems to be. However, if the theory of “vision” (or holy hallucination) will not cover the Resurrection appearances, it would be only a multiplying of hypotheses to introduce it here. We do not know to what phase or feature of the New Creation this episode points. It may reveal some special glorifying of Christ’s manhood at some phase of its history (since history it apparently has) or it may reveal the glory which that manhood always has in its New Creation: it may even reveal a glory which all risen humans will inherit. We do not know. It must indeed be emphasized throughout that we know and can know very little about the New Nature. The task of the imagination here is not to forecast it but simply, by brooding on many possibilities, to make room for a more complete and circumspect agnosticism. It is useful to remember that even now sense responsive to a different, almost beyond recognition, from the space we are now aware of, yet not discontinuous from it: that time may not always be for us, as it now is, unilinear and irreversible: that other parts of Nature might some say obey us as our cortex now does. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
It is useful not because we can trust these fancies to give us an absolute truths about the New Creation but because they teach us not to limit, in our rashness, the vigour and variety of he new crops which this old field might produce. We are therefore compelled to believe that nearly all we are told about the New Creation is metaphorical. However, not quite all. That is just where the story of Resurrection suddenly jerks us back like a tether. The local appearances, the eating, the touching, the claim to be corporeal, us be either reality or sheer illusion. The New Nature is, in the most troublesome way, interlocked at some points with the Old. Because of its novelty we have to think of it, for the most part, metaphorically: but because of the partial interlocking, some facts about it come through into our present experience in all their literal facthood—just as some facts about an organism are inorganic facts, and some facts about a solid body are facts of linear geometry. Even apar from that, the mere idea of a New Nature, a Nature beyond Nature, a systematic and diversified reality which is “supernatural” in relation to the World of our five present senses but “natural” from its own point of view, is profoundly shocking to a certain philosophical preconception from which we all suffer. I think Kant is at the root of it. It may be expressed by saying that we are prepared to believe either in a reality with one floor or in a reality with two floors, but not in a reality like a skyscraper with several floors. We are prepared, on the one hand, for the sort of reality that Naturalists believe in. That is a one-floor reality: this present Nature is all that there is. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Say no to self and mean it, or one will never find oneself a free human—that is what Jesus told His Disciples, that is how Matthew recorded it (16.24), and that is what He is telling us, My dear friend. Until that sweet time comes, count oneself a prisoner, under house arrest, in one’s own body. Well, one feels as if one owns one’s own self, are one’s own best friend, lust for tacky stuff to decorate one’s own domain, peep through the arras at others more fortunate than oneself. One feels one is something of a dervish whirling in a circle until one turns to butter, or a Sybarite seeking soft sheets for oneself instead of the rock-hard life of Jesus Christ. Paul wrote much the same thing to the Philippians (2.21). Maybe one feels one is one of those thinkers who spend their time thinking up and putting together gadgets. They will work for a time, but then they will break down. Which is another way of saying, I think no project is likely to be successful unless it has its source somewhere in Jesus Christ. Here are some words of advice that one could never logick one’s way to. Give up everything, and one will find everything. Leave greed behind, and one will find rest. With this sort of attitude and his sort of resolve, one will understand all things. Father, because of You, I will dare to dream big dreams. With faith and confidence in You, I know what I can accomplish the goals that You have placed within my heart. The basis of higher healing work is the realization of humans as Mind. However, the latter is a dimensionless unindividuated unconditioned entity. It is not my individual mind. The field of Mind is a common one where as the field of consciousness is divided up into individual and separate holdings. This is a difference with vast implications, for whoever can cross from the second field to the first, crosses at the same time from an absurdly limited World into a supremely vital one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Consequently, genuine and permanent healing is carried on without one’s conscious association and can be effected by dropping the ego-mind and with it all egoistic desires. Hence the first effort should be to ignore the disease and gain the realization. Only after the latter has been won should the thoughts be allowed to descend again to the disease, with the serene trust that the bodily condition may safely be left in the hands of the World-Mind for final disposal as It decides. There should not be the slightest attempt to dictate a cure to the higher power nor the slightest attempt to introduce personal will into treatment. Such attempts will only defeat their purpose. The issues will partly be decided on the balance of the Universal Law and evolutionary factors concerned in the individual case. And yet there are cults which do not find it at all incongruous to suggest to the Infinite Mind what should thus be One surrender is truly made, the desires of the self go with it and pace reigns in the inner life whether illness still reigns in the external life or not. Thus there is a false easy yielding of the will which deceives no higher power than the personal self, and there is an honest yielding which may really invoke the divine grace. It is a mistake, however, to turn the higher self into a mere convenience to be used chiefly for obtaining healing or getting guidance, for healing the sickness of the physical body, or guiding the activities of the physical ego. It should be sought for its own sake, and these other things should be sought only occasionally or incidentally, as and when needed. They should not be made habitual. In one’s periodic meditations, for instance, the aspirant should seek the divine source of one’s being because it is right, necessary, and good for one to do so and one to do so and one should forget every other desire. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Only after one has done that and found the source, and only on one’s backward journey to the day’s activities, may one remember these lesser desires and utilize the serenity and power thus gained for attending to them. Your assertion that Jesus primarily wished to free humans of disease and viruses, or to teach them how to become so, is untenable. Whoever has entered into the consciousness of one’s divine soul—which Jesus had in such fullness—has one’s whole scale of values turned over. It is then that one sees that the physical is ephemeral by nature, whereas the reality whence it is derived is eternal by nature; that what happens inside a person’s heart and head is fundamentally more important than what happens inside one’s body; and that the divine consciousness may and can be enjoyed even though the fleshly tenement is sick. The sufferer should use whatever physical medical means are available—both orthodox and unorthodox ones. At the same time one should practise daily prayer. However, one should not directly ask for the physical healing for its own sake. One should ask first for spiritual qualities and then only for the physical healing with the expressed intention of utilizing one’s opportunity of bodily incarnation to improve oneself spiritually. Healing is but a mere incident in the work of a self-actualized person. Such a one will always keep as one’s foremost purpose the opening of the spiritual heart of humans. It is from the first moment of life that one must learn to deserve to live; and since birth one shares the rights of citizens, the moment of our own birth should be the beginning of the exercise of our duties. If there are laws for those of mature age, there should also be some for the very young which teach them to obey others. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
And since each human’s reason cannot be allowed to be the sole arbiter of one’s duties, a fortiori the education of children cannot be abandoned to the light and prejudices of their fathers, since it is of even more importance to the state than it is to their fathers. For according to the natural course of things, the death of the father often strips one of the last fruits of this education, but sooner or latter the country feels its effects. The state remains; the family dissolves. Now if the public authority, in taking the fathers’ place and charging itself with this important function, acquires their rights by fulfilling their duties, the fathers have that much less reason to complain, because strictly speaking, in this regard, they are merely changing a name, and will have in common, under the name “citizens,” the same authority over their children they exercised separately under the name of “fathers,” and will be obeyed no less well when they speak in the same of the law than they were when they spoke in the name of nature. Public education under the rules prescribed by the government and under the magistrates put in place by the sovereign, is therefore one of the fundamental maxims of popular or legitimate government. If children are raised in common and in the bosom of equality, if they are instructed to respect above all things, if they are surrounded by examples and objects that constantly speak to them of the tender mother who nourishes them, of the love she bears for them, of the inestimable benefits they receive from her, and in turn of the debt they owe her, doubtlessly they thus will learn to cherish one another as brothers, never to want anything but what the society wants, never to substitute the actions of humans and of citizens for the sterile and vain babblings of sophists, and to become one day defenders and the fathers of the country whose children they will have been for so long. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
I will not discuss the magistrates destined to preside over his education, which certainly is the state’s most important business. Clearly, if such marks of public confidence were lightly granted, if this sublime function were not, for those who had honorable and sweet repose of their old age and the high point of all their honors, the entire understanding would be useless and the education unsuccessful. For whatever the lesson is unsupported by authority, or the precept by example, instruction remains fruitless, and virtue itself loses its influence in the mouth of one who does not practice it. However, let the illustrious warriors bent under the weight of their laurels preach courage; let upright magistrates, whitened in the wearing of purple and in service at the tribunals, teach justice. Both of these groups will thus train virtuous successors and will transmit from age to age to the generations that follow the experience and talents of leaders, the courage and virtue of citizens and the emulation common to all of living and dying for one’s country. I know of but three peoples who in an earlier era practiced public education, namely, the Cretans, the Lacedemonians, and the ancient Persians. Among all three it was the greatest success and brought about marvels among the latter two. Since the time the World was divided into nations too large to be governed well, this method has not been practicable. And other reasons the reader can easily see have also prevented it from being tried by any modern people. It is quite remarkable that the Romans were able to do without it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
However, Rome was for five hundred years a continual miracle that the World cannot hope to see again. The virtue of the Romans, engendered by the horror of tyranny and the crimes of tyrants and by an inborn love of country, made all their homes into as many schools for citizens. And the unlimited power of fathers over their children placed to much severity in private enforcement that the father, more feared than the magistrates, was the censor of mores and the avenger of laws in one’s domestical tribunal. In this way an attentive and well-intentioned government, constantly valiant to maintain or restore love of country and good mores among the people, anticipates far in advance the evils that sooner or later result from citizens’ indifference to the fate of the republic, and restricts within narrow limits that personal interests which so isolates private individuals that the state is weakened by their power and has nothing to hope for from their good will. Anywhere the populace loves it country, respects its laws and lives simply, little else remains to do to make it happy. And in public administration, where fortune plays less of a role than it does in the lot of private individuals, wisdom is so close to happiness that these two objects are confounded. Waters, you are the ones who brings us the life force. Please help us to find nourishment so that we may look upon great joy. Please let us share in the most delicious sap that you have, as if you were loving mothers. Please let us go straight to the house of the one for whom your waters give us life and give us birth. For our well-being please let God be an assistant to us, the waters be for us to drink. Please le hem cause well-being and health to flow over us. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Mistresses of all the things that are chosen, rulers over all peoples, the waters are the ones I beg for a cure. God has told me that within the waters are all cures and Jesus Christ who is salutary to all. Water, please yield your cure as an armour for my body, so that I may see the sun for a long time. Waters, carry for away all of this that has gone bad in me, either what I have done in malicious deceit or whatever lie I have sworn to. I have sought the waters today; we have joined with their sap. O Jesus Christ full of moisture, come and flood me with splendour. O God, we beseech Thee, please save! O please save! O God! like sheep we all have gone astray; from out Thy book wipe not our nae away. Please save! O save! O God! sustain the sheep for slaughter;–see these deal with wrathfully and slain for Thee. Save! O save! O God! Thy sheep! the sheep whom Thou didts end in pasture; Thy creation and Thy friend. Save! O save! O God! they lift their eyes to Thee, long sought; please let those who rise against Thee count as naught. Save! O save! O God! they pour out water, worshipping—let them be drawing from salvation’s spring. Save! O save! O God! to Zion saviours send at length, endowed of Thee, and saved by Thy name’s strength. Save! O save! O God! in garb of vengeance clad about, in mighty wrath cast all deceivers out. Save! O save! O God! and Thou wilt surely not forget her, by love-tokens bought, that hopeth yet. Save! O save! O God! they seeking Thee with willow bough, regard their crying from Thine Heaven now. Save! O save! O God! as with a crown bless Thou the year; yea, Lord, my singing, I beseech Thee, hear. Save! O save! I beseech Thee, O God, save! O save, I beseech Thee. Thou art our Father. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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The Devil Loveth No Salt in His Meat!
Every night in the year, four of us sat in the parlous of the Winchester Mansion. This particular night, there was a thin, bright moonshine: it was bitter cold, windy, and frosty; the town had not yet awakened, but an indefinable stir already preluded the noise and business of the day. The ghouls had come later than usual, and they seemed more than usually eager to be gone. They wished, and declared their wish, that their blood might be the last innocent blood shed. They prayed that God would discover the witchcraft were among us. They forgave their accusers. The fervency of the spirits were very affecting and drew tears from many. Affecting and melting to the hearts of some considerable spectators. They prayed earnestly for pardon for all other sin and for an interest in the precious blood of our dear Redeemer, and seemed to be very sincere, upright, and sensible of their circumstances. One of the ghouls said, “I have been put to death, and my grandfather suffered, and all his estate seized because of my own vile and wretched heart, confessed several things contrary to my conscience and knowledge, though to the wounding of my own soul—the Lord pardon me for it. But oh! the terrors of a wounded conscience, who can bear? Blessed be the Lord; He would not let me go in my sins, but in mercy I hope so my soul would not suffer me to keep it in any longer, but I was forced to confess the truth. Gunshots in the hills and the echo of that awful hellspawn voice in my head. I was sought after by a sorcerer, which resulted in fatal mishaps for those sorcerers because they caught me in the wrong mood, and I turned into a lethal weapon. Dear Mrs. Winchester, let me beg your prayers to the Lord on my behalf, and please send us a joyful and happy meeting in Heaven.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Mrs. Winchester replied, “But the Lord He know it is, if it be possible, that no more innocent blood be shed, which undoubtedly cannot be avoided in the way and course you go in. I question not but your honours do to the utmost of your powers in the discovery and detecting of witchcraft and witches, and shall not be guilty of innocent blood for the World.” A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon the soul of the unhappy student and the other ghouls. “My God! she cried, “but what have I done? and when did I begin?” Nothing could be explained any further because we realized that we had long since ceased to pay attention to anything said by the suspect. Our minds and hearts were so filled with the hideous torments of the afflicted and the frightful tales of the confessors that we were quite unable to absorb anything else. The student was violent, and it was said that she had beaten to death a former teacher and other students in the classroom before she and her accomplices were shot dead by a Winchester model 1866. They were much addicted to sorcery in the said town, and there were forty men in it that could raise the Devil as well as any astrologer. Time had little changed this small town. It stood then, as now, upon a crossroad, out of call of human habitations, and buried fathom deep in the foliage of six thousand cedar trees. The cries of the sheep upon the neighbouring hills, the streamlets upon either hand, one loudly singing among pebbles, the other dripping furtively from pond to pond, the stir of the wind in mountainous old flowering chestnuts, and once in seven days the voice of the bell and old tunes of the precentor, were the only sounds that disturbed the silence around the rural Winchester Mansion. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
The Resurrection Man was not to be deterred by any of the sanctities of customary piety. It was part of his trade to despise and desecrate the scrolls and trumpets of old tombs found on the estate, the paths worn by the feet of legions of spirits and mourners, and the offerings and the inscriptions of bereaved affection. To rustic neighbourhoods, where love is more than commonly tenacious, and where some bonds of blood or fellowship unite the entire society of a parish, the body-snatcher, far from being repelled by natural respect, was attracted by the ease and safety of the task. To bodies that had been laid in Earth, in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there came that hasty, lamp-Iit, terror-haunted resurrection that often happened at the Winchester Mansion, which was fully of uneasy ghosts. It was pitch dark; and we had just raised a few souls from the dead. Their bodies awaited them in the basement. Here and there a white gate or a white stone in the wall guided them for a short space across the night; but for the most part it was at a foot pace, and almost groping, that they picked their way through the resonant blackness to their solemn and isolated destination. In the basement the last glimmer failed them, and it became necessary to kindle a match and reillumine one of the lanterns of the gig. Thus, under the dripping pipes, and environed by huge and moving shadows, they reached the scene of their unhallowed labours. However, the devil, imagining that he had found the right moment for taking possession of one of these resurrected bodies. A creeping chill began to possess my soul. It grew upon my mind that some unnatural miracle had been accomplished, that some nameless change had befallen one of the dead bodies, and in fear of their unholy burden wolves were outside the mansion howling. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The curse of evil had come into one of the bodies, and the evil malediction spread into his parts with a strange kind of screaming sound that made me turn pale with fear. He then rose to his feet, proclaiming he was the Devil and that he would take these other resurrected bodies with him to the underworld and speak with the dead. Mrs. Winchester said, “I rebuke you, Satan!” The Devil laughed and said he was not at all afraid of us. “You insult me with these testimonies as if you were Divine Oracles!” he said. Then departed in a black cloud of smoke with the resurrected bodies. How often I have read in books written by Jesuits that Martin Luther was a wizard, and that he did himself confess that he had familiarity with Satan! The Holy Son of God himself was reputed a magician, and one that had familiarity with the greatest of Devils. The blaspheming Pharisees said, “He casts out the Devils through the Prince of Devils,” reports Matthew 9.34. There is then not the best saint on Earth, man or woman, that can assure themselves that the Devil shall not cast such an imputation upon them. At the time when Luther died all the possessed people in the Netherlands were quiet. The Devils in them said the reason was because Luther had been a great friend of theirs, and they owed him that respect as to go far as Germany to attend his funeral. But the Father of Lies is never to be believed. He will utter twenty great truths to make way for one lie; he will accuse twenty people of witchcraft if he can but thereby bring one innocent person into trouble. However, it is better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned. The Devil makes his witched to dream strange things of themselves and others which are not so. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The Greek philosopher Pythagoras of Samos, who invented the Pythagorean theorem, a^2+ b^2 = c^2, also lead seances in approximately 540 BC, using something like a Quija board. Grim reapers are purely psychic entities, with power over time and perception. They can change the way a human sees one’s surroundings, and change their own appearance, usually to ease the transition from life into death. If it is by virtue of some contract with the Devil that witches have the power to do such things, it is hard to conceive how they can be bid to do them without being too much concerned in that Hellish covenant. We ought not to practice witchcraft to discover witches. The Devil have of late accused some eminent persons. It is an awful thing which the Lord had done [id est, permitted] to convince some among us of their error. To take away the life of anyone merely because a specter or Devil in a bewitched or possessed person does accuse them will bring the guilt of innocent blood on the land where such a thing shall be done. What does such an evidence amount unto more than this: either such an one did afflict such an one, or the Devil in one’s likeness, or one’s eyes were bewitched. The natural way for a living person to see a reaper is as a wraith-like figure wearing tattered winding sheets or burial cloth. Black dogs are also buried in the foundations of churches to guard and protect the gates between here and the afterlife. What will be the issue of these troubles God only knows. I am afraid that ages will not wear off that reproach and those stains which these things will leave behind them upon our lands. It is possible that bewitched and possessed person are afflicted by the Devil, but without agency of witches. Yes, there are witches, and there have been since the beginning of the World. Their craft is performed with the Devil’s assistance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
During one evening at the mansion, Mrs. Winchester invited the maid in for a séance. She chanted, “By the virtue of the holy resurrection and the torments of the damned, I conjure and exorcise thee, spirit of Malphas, thirty-ninth Spirit, to answer my liege demands, being obedient unto these sacred ceremonies, on pain of everlasting torment and distress. Arise, arise, arise, I charge and command thee.” A black man appeared, I do not think he was human. His skin was black as midnight and I could not see his eyes, teeth, or any other features. He was just black and in the shape of a man. He offered her a book to sign. The book was supposed to contain witches’ pacts, and he told her that is she touched it, it would cure her of the hauntings. In all, Mrs. Winchester was tempted from three boos. The third she demanded that they let her read before she think of signing it. The man refused. In general the book seemed a journal of the chief things acted or designed a their great witch-meetings, not without some circumstances that carried an odd resemblance of the Koran. It has in it the methods to be used in seducing of people unto the service of the Devil, and the names of them that had been seduced, with terms which they were to serve. It particularly surprised some in the room, on the even of May 13, 1888, to overhear her, in the book then opened unto her, spelling a word that was in Latin. The letters she recited was “Quadragesima.” Mrs. Winchester conversed at length with the spirit(s) who visited her, and the voices were “big, low, thick,” as they had been reported to be in European witchcraft accounts. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
We saw flames arise from the cauldron on the table, and the room smelled of brimstone. The spirit of a bird appears. It attacked the maid and the next morning, she was found tied to the tree top. She was excessively sore when we brought her down from the tree. There were blisters raised upon her. To cure the soreness which last night’s fiery trail gave to her, we were forces sometimes to apply oil commonly used for the cure of scads. And yet (like other witch-wounds) in a day or two all would be well again. Only the marks of some wounds thus given her, she will probably carry to her grave. I may add that once they thrust an hot iron down her throat, which though it were to us invisible, yet we saw he skin fetched off her tongue and lips. Indeed, her sufferings were so severe that Mrs. Winchester thought the rapid healing of her wounds was part of a design to keep her in continual torment. She was, Mrs. Winchester wrote, “wounded with a thousand pains all over, and cured immediately that the pains of these wounds might be repeated.” One of the maid’s symptom occurred when her hallucinations were peopled by specters bring her a little cup that had a whitish liquor in it (unto us wholly invisible), which they would pour down her throat, holding her jaws wide open, in spite of all [her] shriekings and strivings. We saw her swallow this poison, though we saw not the poison, and immediately she would swell prodigiously and be just like one poisoned with a dose of rats-bane [arsenic trioxide]. After these potions she was capable ordinarily to beg of us that we would he her to some salad-oil, upon the taking whereof the swelling would in a little while abate. Sometimes our laying our hands on the mouth of the maid, when she perceived the specters forcing their poisons into her mouth, did keep her from taking of them in. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The maid, Agnus, was unable to hear prayer or religious instruction directly. However, not only did she hear the spectral Christmas dance, but several times Agnus had her arms cruelly scratched and pins thrust into her flesh by Fiends while they were molesting her. Several persons did sometimes actually lay their hands upon these Fiend. The wretches were palpable while they were not visible, and several of our people though they saw nothing, yet felt a substance that seemed like a dog. And though they were not fanciful they died away [id est, fainted] at the fright. And at this time, Mrs. Winchester believed much of this unchristian practice was the result of someone delivering curses. A curse delivered by a woman, Margaret Rhodes Crocker, known to have dabbled in witchcraft, although again it is not absolutely certain that she practiced malefic witchcraft. It was upon the Lord’s Day, the 8th of September, in the year 1889, that Margaret Crocker, after some hours of previous disturbance in the Old St. Mary’s Cathedral, fell into odd fits, which caused her friends to carry her home, where her fits in a few hours grew into a figure that satisfied the spectators of their being preternatural. Some of the neighbours were forward enough to suspect the rise of this mischief in an house hard-by, where lived a miserable woman who had been formerly imprisoned on the suspicion of witchcraft, and who had frequently cured very painful hurts by muttering over them certain charms, which I shall not endanger the poisoning of my reader by repeating. This woman had, Mary Frances Sherwood Hopkins Searless, the evening before Margret fell into her calamities, very bitterly treated her and threatened her. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
However, the hazard of hurting a poor woman that might be innocent, notwithstanding surmises that might have been more strongly grounded than those, caused the pious people in the vicinity to try whether incessant supplication to God alone might not procure a quicker and safer ease to the afflicted than hasty prosecution of any supposed criminal. Mary Francis was assaulted by eight cruel specters, whereof she imagined that she knew three or four, but the rest came still with their faces covered, so that she could never have a distinguishing view of the countenance of those who she thought she knew. She was very careful of my reiterated charges to forbear blazing the names, lest any good person should come to suffer any blast of reputation through the cunning malice of the great Accuser. Nevertheless, she having since privately named them to myself, I will venture to say this of them, that they are a sort of wretches who for these many years have gone under as violent presumptions of witchcraft as perhaps any creatures yet living upon Earth, although I am far from thinking that the visions of this young woman were evidence enough to prove them so. Margaret Crocker’s hallucinations were somewhat varied. She saw not only spectral witches and the “Black Man….their master” who was often seen in abandoned mansions, where he resisted new residents, but also a “White Spirit” who she took to be an Angel. Such a figure had also been seen at the Winchester and in several Oakland witchcraft cases, such as at the Ellen Kenna Mansion, Emma Bray’s Mansion, and at Alexander Dunsmuir’s mansion. The white spirit comforted and advised Margaret during her attack. Among other things, the Angel told her that Oliver Winchester was her spiritual father. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The Angel had always maintained the Devils might appear in the shape of an innocent person. Mrs. Winchester cried for the Lord, as for the deliverance of these women from the malice of Hell, for the deliverance of the powers of Hell has now seized upon all of them. And that the whole plot of the Devil to reproach her poor maid, Angus, be defeated by the Lord Jesus Christ. During a séance Mrs. Winchester was told that one of the several beings that was haunting her and these other grand estates was a Rakshasa. A being reincarnated from evil human beings. They are a type of demon. Rakshasa have the power to change their shape at will and appear as animals, as monsters, or in the case of female demons, as beautiful women. They also have magical powers, including invisibility. They are cannibalistic, and particularly target anything religious or holy. In addition to human flesh they, they will eat spoiled food. Their finger nails are poisonous. They are most powerful in the evening, particularly during the dark person of a new moon, but are dispelled by the rising sun. They especially detest sacrifices and prayer. Most powerful among them is their kind, the 10-headed Ravana. Many believe him to be Satan. Margaret had the common inability of afflicted persons to hear religious words, especially, in her case, the words of prayer. She had a full catalog of physical symptoms. She would be strangely distorted in her joins an thrown into such extravagant convulsions as were astonishing unto the spectators in general. She would be cruelly pinched with invisible hands very often in a day, and the black and blue marks of the pinches became immediately visible unto the standers by. She was also afflicted with pins, both real ones found about her person and spectral ones. The psychosomatic skin lesions would in a few minutes ordinarily be cured. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
As with Mary Frances, her specters burnt her with spectral brimstone, and she would be so bitterly scorched with the unseen sulphur thrown upon her that very sensible blisters would be raised upon her skin. Like Angus, Margaret was forced to swallow spectral poison. She would sometimes have her jaws forcibly pulled open, whereupon something invisible would be poured down her throat. We all saw her swallow, and yet we all saw her try as she could that she might not swallow. She would cry out “as of scalding brimstone poured into her” and would be so monstrously inflamed that it would have broken a heart of stone to have seen her agonies. The spectators would testify also that the Crocker Mansion often reeked “so hot of brimstone that we were scarce able to endure it.” And one of the occasion “the standers by plainly saw something of that odd liquor itself on the outside of her neck.” There was a spectral powder thrown into her eyes, and “one time some of this powder was fallen actually visible upon her cheek, from whence the people in the room wiped it with their handkerchiefs.” Mrs. Winchester was also afflicted by spirits. “We once thought we perceived something stir upon her pillow at a little distance from her, whereupon one present [the Butler Clayton] laying his hand there, he to his horror apprehended that he felt, though none could see it, a living creature not altogether unlike a vampire bat, which nimbly escaped from him. And there were diverse other persons who were thrown into a great consternation by feeling, as they judged, at others times the same invisible animal.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, the most starling phenomenon in Mrs. Winchester’s case was levitation. “Once,” said Clayton, “her tormentors puled her up to the ceiling of the chamber and held her there before a very numerous company of spectators, who found it as much as they could all do to pull her down again.” Clayton obtained signed confirmations of this and other instances of levitation: “I do testify that I have seen Mrs. Winchester in her hauntings from the invisible World lifted up from her bed, wholly by an invisible force, a great way towards the top of the room where she lay. In her being so lifted she had no assistance from any use of her own arms or hands or any other part of her body, not so much as her heels touching her bed or resting on any support whatsoever. And I have seen her thus lifted when not only a strong person hath thrown his whole weight across her to pull her down, but several other persons have endeavoured with all their might to hinger her from being so raised up, which I suppose that several others will testify as well as myself when called unto it. Witness my hand,” Clayton Straus. “We can also testify that we have several times seen Mrs. Winchester so lifted up from her bed as that she had no use of her own limbs to help her up, but it was the declared apprehension of us, as well as others that saw it, impossible for any hands but some of the invisible World to life her.” Henry Brown, Frank Drew, Phillip Goodwin. “We whose names are underwritten do testify that one evening when we were in the chamber where Mrs. Winchester then lay in her haunting, we observed her to be by an invisible force lifted up from the bed whereon she lay, so as to touch the garret floor, while yet neither her feet nor any other parent of her body rested either on the bed or any other support, but were also by the same force lifted up from all that was under her, and all this for a considerable while. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
“We judged it several minutes, and it was as much as several of us could do with all our strength to pull her down. All which happened when there was not only we two in the chamber, but we supposed ten or a dozen more whose names we have forgotten.” W. R. Leigh and Spenser T. Olin. These accounts could not be the power of suggestion because these people were not just bystanders. They believed that they witnessed levitation, and they were engaging in violent physical activity, trying to bring her body back to the bed. Such activity would, ordinarily, break the power of suggestion. And levitation has been so frequently reported, from so many times and places (from the 5th century to the 21st century), that one cannot be at all sure there is a satisfactory explanation for it, particularly since so many witnesses insisted that no part of Mrs. Winchester’s body was touching the bed. However, whatever the explanation for these symptoms, Mrs. Winchester and her estate are truly a mystery. However, it is also noted the other prominent Queen Anne Victorian Mansions and other built during the Victorian times experienced afflictions. Witchcraft is one of the most hidden works of darkness. Although some people and some estates were more haunted than others, the Bay Area, during Victorian Times, had its full share of obscurity. All publications on witchcraft and supernatural events have been forbidden by these prominent families at the time. Their desire was to quail tempers, and use wisdom to relax fear, while upholding their honour, integrity, and reverence for the Victorian era. “All things are possible to one that believeth,” reports Mark 9.23. Who that beareth it upon one shall not dread one’s enemies, to be overcome, nor with no manner of poison be hurt, nor in no need misfortune, nor with no thunder one shall be smitten nor lightning, no in no fire be burnt suddenly, nor in no water be drowned. Nor one shall not die without shrift, nor with thieves to be take. Also one shall have no wrong neither of Lord or Lady. This be in the names of God and Christ. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Winchester Mystery House will be going dark this weekend for All Hallows’ Eve, but we will be back to haunt you Thursday, September 30th! Purchase your tickets for next weekend early and let the ghoul times roll 👻
See link in bio for ticket info 🎟 winchestermysteryhouse.com
May the World Used to be Flat–How do they Dare to be so Arrogant?!
God touch will come and it will heal. That is what He said to the Centurion, when he asked the Lord to help His paralyzed servant; Matthew had the story correct (8.7). Out of your skin you may be, but God is not the cause. It is the grizzly temptation that bothers you, the groundless fear that dithers you. Why do you work now about what is going to happen in the future? That way you will be shedding tear after tear year after year! “Every day has its own malice,” or so that Great Matthew has pointed out (6.34). Useless, and less than useless, it is to feel puzzled or pleased about the future. Either way you have little to gain. That is because such wool-gathering rarely produces a cloak. However, it not that just Humankind, to play about with fanciful projects? Your spiritual progress has been modest, I must say, if you allow yourself to be dazzled by the Enemy. Why? One does not care a joy whether one’s illusions or deceptions are right or wrong. They cause prostration, all right, but one does not care a tittle whether it is out of love for the present or fear of the future; I say something about that in John (14.27). Humans can orient themselves in two contradictory modes: one’s main interest, love, concern—or as Dr. Freud puts it, one’s libido (energy dealing with pleasures of the flesh)—can either be directed toward oneself or toward the World outside: people, ideas, nature, humanmade things. Narcissism is a necessary intermediate stage between autoeroticism and “object-love.” It is not primarily a perversion of pleasures of the flesh, the passionate love for one’s own body, but it is a complement of the instinct of self-preservation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
The most important evidence of the existence of narcissism came from the analysis of schizophrenia. Schizophrenic patients were characterized by two features: megalomania and diversion of their interests from the external World—from people and things. The interest they had withdrawn from others they directed to their own person—and thus developed megalomania; the image of their own self as omniscient and omnipotent. This concept of psychosis as a state of extreme narcissism was one basis of the idea of narcissism. The other was the normal development of the infant. Dr. Freud assumed that the infant exists in a completely narcissistic state, at the moment of birth, as it had been in the intrauterine state. Slowly the infant learns to take an interest in people and things. This original state of “libidinal cathexis of the ego” fundamentally persists and is related to the object-cathexis “much as the body of an amoeba is related to the pseudopodia which it puts out. Dr. Freud’s discover of narcissism not only explained the nature of psychosis but it also showed that the same narcissism exists in the average adult as exists in the child; to put it differently, that the “normal person” partakes to some lesser or greater degree in that attitude which, when quantitatively stronger, constitutes psychosis. Narcissism plays a huge role in survival. While from a standpoint of values the maximal reduction of narcissism is desired, from the standpoint of biological survival narcissism is a normal desirable phenomenon. If humans did not put their own goals and needs before those others, how could they survive? One would lack the energetic qualities of egoism necessary to take care of one’s own life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
To put it differently: the biological interests of the survival of the race requires a certain amount of narcissism among its members; the ethico-religious goal of the individual, on the contrary, is the maximal reduction of narcissism toward the zero point. In Victorian times, love for most men did not exist expect as the attachment of the male to the feeding women. To be loved (the male by the conquered woman) gives strength, to love actively weakens. While it was presumed the male’s love was anaclitic, id est, it had its object the person who feeds him, it was assumed that woman’s love is narcissistic, that they only can love themselves, and cannot participate in that great “achievement” of men: to love the hand that feeds them. Several men in Victorian times were unaware that the woman of the elite class were cold precisely because their men wanted the cold, id est, to behave like property, and not even to grant them “separate but equal” role in the sleeping chambers. The bourgeois man got the woman as he imaged her and he rationalized his superiority by believing this limited female—limitations imposed by him—was only concerned with wanting to be fed and take care of. This is of course typical male propaganda in the war between the genders, another example of which is that woman are less realistic and less courageous than men. Indeed, this insane World which does not seem to stop running into catastrophe is governed by man, but would a society run by woman be any better? All dominant groups tend to be just as corrupt, if not more so than the processor. In fact, some even try to inflict the pain and oppression on purpose because they are hurting, even though people have been enlightened. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
However. As to courage, many people know that in most cases of illness women are usually much better able to cope with difficulties than the typical male, who wants mother to help them. As to narcissism, women are forced to present themselves attractively, because they are exhibits on the slave market; but when they love they usually love more deeply and reliably than the average man, who is characterized as roaming around and trying to satisfy their narcissism, invested in their male organ of which they are so proud of. To narcissistic persons the only sector that seems fully real is their own person. Feeling, thoughts, ambitions, wishes, body, family, everything that they are or what is theirs. What they think is true, because they think it, and even their bad qualities are beautiful because they are theirs. Everything related to them has colour and full reality. Everybody and everything outside is gray, ugly, and without colour, hardly existing. Here is an example: A man called me to ask for a meeting. I answered that I had no free time in the week but could see him during the following week. He responded by pointing out that he lived very near to my office and hence it would take him little time to come over. When I answered that this was indeed convenient for him but it did not alter the fact that I had no free time, he was unimpressed and continued with the same argument. This is an example of a rather sever case of narcissism, because he was totally unable to distinguish between my needs and his. It is obvious that it makes a great difference how intelligent, artistically talented, knowledgeable a very narcissistic person is. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Many artists and creative writers, music conductors, dancers and politicians are extremely narcissistic. Their narcissism does not interfere with their art; on the contrary it often helps. They have to express what they subjectively feel, and the more important their subjectivity is to their performance, the better they perform. The narcissistic person is often particularly attractive for one’s very narcissism. Think for example of a narcissistic entertainer. One is filled with oneself; one exhibits one’s body and one’s wit with the pride of owning a rare jewel. One has no doubts about oneself as a less narcissistic person necessarily has. What one says, does, the way one walks and moves is enjoyed by oneself like a precious performance and one oneself is one of one’s greatest admirers. I assume that the reason for the attractiveness of the narcissistic person lies in the fact that one portrays an image of what the average person would to be: one is sure of oneself, has no doubts, feels always on top of the situation. The average person, in contract, does not have this certainty; one is often plagued by doubts, prone to admire others as being superior to oneself. One may ask why extreme narcissism does not repel people. Why do they not resent the lack of real love? This question is easy to answer: real love is so rare today as to be almost outside the field of vision of most people. In the narcissist one sees someone who at least loves one person, oneself. The completely untalented narcissist, on the other hand, may be only ridiculous. If the narcissistic person is extremely gifted, one’s success is virtually guaranteed. Narcissistic people are often to be found among successful politicians. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
Even if they are talented or gifted they would not be so impressive without the narcissism that, as it were, oozed out of them. Instead of feeling “How do they dare to be so arrogant?” many people are so attracted by the narcissistic self-image projected that they see in it nothing more than the adequate self-appreciation of a very talented person. It is important to understand that narcissism, which may be called “self-infatuation,” is in contrast to love, if we mean by love the fact of forgetting oneself and caring more for others than oneself. Of equal important is the contradiction between narcissism and reason. Since I have just talked about politician as examples of narcissistic personalities, a statement about the conflict between narcissism and reason seems absurd. However, I am not speaking of intelligence but of reason. Manipulative intelligence is the capacity to use thinking for manipulating the World outside for humans’ purposes. Reason is the faculty to recognize things as they are, regardless of their value or danger to us. Reason aims at the recognition of things and persons in their suchness, undistorted by our subjective interest in them. Cleverness is a form of manipulating intelligence, but wisdom is an outcome of reason. If one’s manipulative intelligence is, the narcissistic person can be extremely clever. However, one is apt to make sever mistakes, because one’s narcissism seduces one into overestimating the value of one’s own wishes and thoughts and into assuming that the result has already been accomplished, simply because it is one’s wish or one’s thought. Narcissism is often confused with egoism. An egoistic person may have an undistorted view of the World. One may not give to one’s thoughts and feelings a greater value than they have in the outside World. One may see the World, including one’s role in it, quite objectively. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
Egoism is basically a form of greediness; the egoist wants everything for oneself, one does not like to share, one perceives others as threats rather than as possible friends. Self-interest prevails in them more or less completely; but the prevalence of self-interest does not necessarily distort the egoist’s picture of oneself and the World around one, as it does with the narcissistic person. Among all character orientations narcissism is by far he most difficult to recognize in oneself. To the extent to which a person is narcissistic one glorifies oneself and is unable to see one’s defects and limitation. One is convinced that the image one has of oneself as a wonderful person is correct, and since it is one’s image one sees no reason o doubt it. Another reason why narcissism is so difficult to detect in oneself is that many narcissistic persons try to demonstrate that they are anything but narcissistic. One of the most frequent examples of this is the attempt of narcissistic persons to hide their narcissism behind behaviour which is characterized by concern and help for others. They spend so much energy and time in helping others, even making sacrifices, being kind, ex cetera, all with the aim (usually unconscious) of denying this narcissism. The same goes, as we all know, for persons who are particularly modest or humble. Not only do such people often try to hide their narcissism, they satisfy it at the same time by being narcissistically proud of their kindness or modesty. A nice example of this is the joke about a dying man overhearing his friends who were at his bedside praise him—how learned he was, how intelligent, how kind, how concerned. The dying man listened and when they had finished praising he angrily shouted, “And you failed to mention my humility!” #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
Narcissism wears many masks: saintliness, obedience to duty, kindness and love, humility, pride. It ranges from the attitude of a haughty and arrogant person to that of a modest and unobtrusive one. Everybody has many tricks to disguise one’s narcissism and is hardly aware of them and their function. If the narcissistic person is successful in persuading others to admire one, one is happy and functions well. However, when one is without success in convincing others, if one’s narcissism is pricked, as it were, one many collapse like a deflated balloon; or one may be intensely furious, filled with unforgiving rage. To inflict a wound on a person’s narcissism may either produce a depression or an unforgiving hate. Therefore, have faith in God’s mercy. Often when you think that you have gone a step too far, you will find another chance for earning even more merit than before. When something bad happens to you, no, it is not a total loss. Do not make long-term commitments to do or not to do in the light of present pleasure or displeasure. Do not cling overlong to a mood or mode, no matter what its source; people will think it is chronic. If from time to time God’s sends one some tribulation or withdraws some consolation, do no think you are a derelict, a beached and abandoned hulk. After all, it all lead to the same destination, that is to say, to the Kingdom of Heaven. “It is You who blesses the righteous person, O LORD; You surround one with favour as with a shield,” reports 5.12. For me and the rest of the Devouts, it is more helpful to be exercised by adversity than entertained by prosperity. God knows our hidden thoughts and what is wrong with that? He finds it helpful in planning our salvation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Doing without consolation for a while is not all that bad. It prevents us from feeling too good about the spiritual tracks one is making or the ladder of perfection one is climbing. What God has given, He can take back, and what God has taken back, He can give again. Whenever He wants. When God gives, it is His to give. When He takes it back, it is not really ours to keep. Every gift of God’s is good, and “all gifts are good,” at least according to the Letter of James (1.17). If God sends us a gift that hurts, do not get uppity, do not let one’s heart go pit-a-pat. God can soon lighten the load, and every burden will be changed into joy. As for God’s dealings with us, He trust we will find them satisfactory; that is to say, fair and just in every way, with a little mercy mixed in. So, we are right in recommended God to others. “When men began to increase in number on the Earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of human were beautiful, and they married any of hem they chose. Then the LORD said, ‘My Spirit will no contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years.’ The Nephilim were on the Earth in those days—and also afterward—when the son of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown. The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the Earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the Earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the LORD said, ‘I will wipe humankind, whom I have created, from the face of the Earth—humans and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and bird of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them.’ However, Noah found favour in the eyes of the LORD. This is the account of Noah,” reports Genesis 6.1-9. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Every time you encounter a road block on your spiritual journey, you should not go sit by the side of the road and be sad; rather, you should rejoice and give thanks. Why? God has afflicted us with woes, yes, but you are not the only one. Yes, God knows the lash of John has let this be known to us. “As the Father has loved Me, so I love you,” report John 15.9. That is a lot of comfort to many pour souls, seeing how things eventually get sorted out between God, Jesus Christ, and ourselves. “I will exalt You, O LORD, for you lifted me out of the depths and did not let my enemies gloat over me. O LORD my God, I called You for help and you healed me. O LORD, you brough me up from the grave; you spared me from going down into the pit. Sing to the LORD, you saints of His; praise His holy name. For His anger lasts a lifetime; weeping may remain for a nigh, but rejoicing comes in the morning,” reports Psalm 30.1-5. God has sent us off not to minor joys but to great battles; not to honour ceremonies but to contempt encounters; not to leisurely activities but to laborious exercises; not to relax without anxiety, but to endure with patience, like the seeds that fell on the good soil in His parable in Luke (8.15). As hey germinated, so should you. All words worth remembering. “The LORD is my portion; I have promised to keep Your words. I sought Your Favour with all my heart; be gracious to me according to Your word,” reports Psalm 119.57-58. We must wake up every morning and declare God’s favour in our lives. Every morning, thank God for opening doors of opportunity and brining success into your life. God will make people desire to help you because they can see His love and light in your soul. They know that there is something special about you. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Anytime you get into a hard situation, declare the favour of God in your business. Yet, I think it is important we remain rational because limitless expectations can breed endless frustrations. “Blessed is one who expects nothing, for one shall never be disappointed,” counseled the poet Alexander Pop in a 1727 letter. Life’s greatest disappointments, as well as its highest achievements, are born of the most optimistic expectations. In saying that, it is a balancing act to expect the most extraordinary things, but to also know life happens on God’s timeline and when He sees fit. Yet, it is important to remain optimistic and not be depressed. Meaning and purpose is derived from spiritual insight. Intellectual knowledge is inseparable from the emotional and spiritual. Forgiveness of others who cause distress (including parents) complete the therapeutic restoration of self. Therefore, even in the mundane aspects of life, we will not be imposing on God’s goodness by declaring His favour. He wants us to act on it. For example, maybe you are deciding between a Cresleigh Havenwood home, and there is someone else interested in the same lot you are. Simply declare, “Father, I thank You that I have Your favour, and that You are going to make a way for me where it appears that there is no way right now.” Then keep trusting God and looking for the opportunity to open. God is supreme. Humility, acceptance of (divine” authority, and obedience (to the will of God) are virtues. God has your best interests at heart, and He is working everything for your good. Like a good parent, Goes does not always give you what you want. However, He will always give you what you need. A delay may spare you from something you are not supposed to experience, or maybe something else is opening up for you that will encourage you even more. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Personal identity is eternal and derived from the divine. Relationship with God defines self-worth. When you live favour-minded, you will begin to see God’s goodness in the everyday, ordinary details of the architecture in your home, at work job, in the landscape, or in your soul. You may be at Cresleigh’s Design Center picking out the materials for your house and praying you get the lot someone else just purchased, when a sale agent taps you on the shoulder and says, “Come with me. I have this lot that would be perfect for you, and this particular house has a few incentives from the builder, which will cost you nothing.” When you are living in favour-minded, God’s blessings seem to chase you down and overtake you. Also, when you are a Christian, remember that your values may be quite different from those of other people. Many people expect psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers to be guided by value-free professionalism and objective science, but much of their research, theories, and techniques are implicit expression of humanistic and naturalistic belief system that dominate both psychology and American universities generally. So antireligious prejudice would not be surprising. To them, Christians are perceived as religious nuts. However, religious communities provide both a relief structure and loving, emotional support which often inhibits the manifestation of psychological and physical disorders. There is a code of self-control in terms of absolute values, strict morality, and universal ethics. Christian groups also often endorse high standards of impulse control and as a result have low rates of alcoholism, drug addition, divorce, and emotional instability. There tends to be a stable marriage and family life, which pays psychological and social dividends. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Christian values are important and should be acknowledged more openly because they tend to strongly support humanistic values of love, freedom of choice, and honesty. Nevertheless, values that permeate psychotherapy should be openly acknowledged and tested; moreover, psychologists should consider the possibility that genuine spiritual-religious values may indeed have beneficial, health-promoting consequences. Therefore, when those kind things you have been praying for happen, be grateful. Be sure to thank God for His favour, and for His special assistance in your life. Do not take God’s favour for granted. When you are living favour-minded, God’s blessings seem to chase you down and overtake you. You will not be able to outrun the good things of God. Everywhere you, go things are going to change in your favour. Someone is going to want to share God’s blessings with you and they may not even know why. That is why one should get in the habit of consistently speaking God’s favour over our lives. And not simply over our own lives, but over our businesses, our employees, our children, our ultimate driving machine, and our families. “Father, I thank You my clients are loyal to me, and that this property is going to sell I thank You that Your favour is leading me to the right people. Your favour is causing people to want to buy this home.” That is why one must speak God’s favour over every area of one’s life. Remember, the more favour-minded you are, the more God’s favour you are going to experience. God sends His Disciples off not to minor joys but to great battles; not to honours ceremonies but to contempt encounters; not to leisurely activities but to laborious exercises; not to relax without anxiety, but to endure with patience, like the seeds that fell on the god soil in His parable in Luke (8.15). As they germinated, so should you. All words worth remembering. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Thank You, Father, that You are opening doors for me that no one can shut. Thank You for causing people to be kind to me and to assist me. You make a way for me where it seems there is no way. The big corporation was the characteristic business organization of the industrial era. Today thousand such behemoths, both private and public, bestride the Earth, producing a large proportion of all the goods and services we buy. Seen from the outside, they present a commanding appearance. They control vas resources, employ millions of workers, and they deeply influence not merely our economies but our political affairs as well. Their computers and corporate jets, their unmatched ability to plan, to invest, to execute projects on a grand scale, make them seem unshakably powerful and permanent. At a time when most of us feel powerless, they spear to dominate our destinies. Yet that is not the way they look from he inside, to the men and women who run these organizations. Indeed, many of our top managers today feel quite as frustrated and powerless as the rest of us. For exactly like the nuclear family, the school the mass media, and the other key institutions of the industrial age, the corporation is being hurled about, shaken, and transformed by the Third Wave of change. And a good many top managers do not know what has hit them. The most immediate change affecting the corporation is the crisis in the World economy. For three years, the Second Wave civilization worked to create an integrated global marketplace. Periodically these efforts were set back by wars, depressions, or other disasters. However, each time the World economy recovered, emerging larger and more closely integrated than before. Today a new crisis has struck. However, this one is different. Unlike the crises during the industrial era, it involves not only money, but countless human lives and goods, services and supplies. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
The current pandemic is bringing inflation, unemployment, death, disability, lack of resources, surpluses of jobs openings, stagnant wages, immigration crisis, high demands of good and services, lack of supply, simultaneously, not sequentially. Unlike those of the past, it is directly linked to health care, housing shortages, low incomes, ecological problems, an entirely new species of technology, and to the introduction of a new level of communications into the production system. Finally, it most certainly is not, as Marxist’s claim, a crisis of capitalism alone, but one that involves socialist industrial nation as well. It is, in short, the general crisis of the age of information civilization as a whole. The upheaval in the World economy threatens the survival of the corporation as we know, it throwing its managers into a wholly unfamiliar environment. Thus from the end of World War II until the early 2000’s the corporation functioned in a comparatively stable environment. Growth was the key word. The dollar was king. Currencies remained stable for long periods. The current financial crisis from the government shutting the economy down and making people stay in their homes for months, threatened the escalator to affluence as it was still ascending, and economists were so confident of their ability to predict and control the economic machine that they spoke casually about “fine tuning’ it. Today the phrase evokes only derisive snorts. The President wisecracks that he knows a fortune-tell from Mexico who is a better forecaster then the economists. Secretary of the Treasury, says that “the economics profession is close to bankruptcy in understanding the present situation—before or after the fact. Standing in the tangled wreckage of economic theory and the middle of the rubble of the pandemic infrastructure, corporate decision-makers face rising uncertainties. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
Interest rates zigzag. Currencies gyrate. Central banks buy and sell money by the carload to damp the swings, but the gyrations only grow more extreme. The dollar, yuan, yen and cryptocurrency perform a Kabuki dance, while people in the Middle East stock pile American weapons and military supplies, frantically off-load billions of dollars worth of American paper. God and silver prices break all records. While all of this is occurring, technology and communications restructure World markets, making transnational production both possible and necessary. And to facilitate such operations, a jet-age money system is taking form. A global electronic banking network—impossible before the computer and satellite—now instantaneously links Hong Kong, Manila, or Singapore with the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, and New York. This sprawling networks of banks, with its Citibanks and Barclays, its Sumitomos and Narodnys, not to mention Credit Suisse and the National Bank of Abu Dhabi, creates a balloon of “stateless currency”—money and credit outside the control of any individual government—which is really innovative in ways yet imagined. The bulk of this stateless currency consists of Eurodollars—dollars outside the United States of America. The accelerated growth of cryptocurrency is a wild card in the economic game. “Here the ‘Crypto’ contributes to inflation, there they shift the balance of payments, in another place they undermine the currency—as they stampede from place to place” across national boundaries. At this time there is a total value of $2.02 trillion in such cryptocurrencies. Bankers dealing with the supranational currency are free to issue unlimited credit and—not be required to hold any cash reserves—and are able to lend out at bargain-basement rates with no credit check, fast funding (as little as in a few hours) and choice of loan currency. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
The Third Wave economic system in which the corporation grew up is based on national markets, national currencies, and national government. This nation-based infrastructure, however, is utterly unable to regulate or contain the new transnational and electronic “Crypto-bubble.” This is why China has made Cryptocurrencies illegal as well as the mining and trading of them to protect their own Yuan. The structures designed for a Third Wave World are no longer adequate. Indeed, the entire global framework that stabilized World trade relations for the giant corporations is rattling and in danger of coming apart. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the American Stock Market are all under heavy attack. Governments around the World scramble to bolt together a new structure to be controlled by them. The “less developed countries” n one side, and the Middle East brandishing their petrodollars on the other, clamour for influence in the financial system of tomorrow and speak of creating their own counterparts to the IMF. The dollar is being dethroned, and jerks and spasms rip through the World economy. All this is compounded by erratic shortages and gluts of energy and resources; by rapid changes in the attitude of consumers, workers, and managers; by rapidly shifting imbalances of trade; and above all by rising militancy of the non-industrial World. This is the volatile, confusing environment in which today’s corporations struggle to operate. The managers who run them have no wish to relinquish corporate power. They still battle for profits, production, and personal advancement. However, faced with soaring levels of unpredictability, with mounting public criticism and hostile political pressures, our most intelligent managers are questioning the goals, structures, responsibility, the very raison d’etre of their organizations. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Many of our biggest corporations are experiencing something analogous to an identity crisis as they watch the once stable introduction of the Third Wave framework disintegrate around them. Of particular interest is group narcissism. Group narcissism is a phenomenon of the greatest political significance. After all, the average person lives in social circumstances which restrict the development of intense narcissism. What should feed the narcissism of a poor human, who has little social prestige, whose children even tend to look down upon one? One has nothing—but if one can identify with one’s nation, or can transfer one’s personal narcissism to the nation or corporation, then one is everything. If such a person said, “I am the most wonderful person in the World; I am the cleanest, cleverest, most efficient, best educated of all people; I am superior to everybody in the World,” anybody who heard his would be disgusted and feel that the person was a bit crazy. However, when people describe their nation in these terms, nobody takes exception. On the contrary, if a person says, “My nation is the strongest, the most cultured, the most peace-loving, the most talented of all nations,” one is not looked upon as being crazy but as a very patriotic citizen. The same hold true for religious narcissism. That millions of adherents to a religion can claim that they are the only possessors of the truth, that their religion is the only way to salvation, is considered to be perfectly normal. Other examples of group narcissism are political groups and scientific groups. The individual satisfies one’s own narcissism by belonging to and identifying oneself with the group. Not one the nobody is great, but one the member of the most wonderful group on Earth. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Someone will say to me that anyone who has humans to govern should not seek outside their nature a perfection of which they are incapable, that one should not desire to destroy their passions, and hat the execution of such a project should be no more desirable than it is possible. I will agree more strongly with all of this because a human who had no passion would certainly be a very bad citizen. However, one must agree that even though humans cannot be taught to love nothing, it is not impossible for them to learn to love one object more than another and what is truly beautiful more than what is deformed. If, for example, they are trained early enough never to consider their own persons except in terms of being related to the body of the state, and not to perceive their own existence except as part of the state’s existence, they will eventually come to identify themselves in some way with this larger whole, to feel themselves to be members of the country, to love it with that exquisite sentiment that every isolated human feels only for oneself, to elevate their soul perpetually toward this great object, and thus to transform into a sublime virtue this dangerous disposition from which arises all our vices. Not only does philosophy demonstrate the possibility of these new directions, but history furnishes us with a thousand striking examples. If they are so rare among us, it is because no one is concerned about whether there are any citizens, and sill less does anyone give any thought to take steps early enough to train them. It is too late to alter our natural inclinations when they have taken their course and habit has been joined with self-love. It is too late to draw us out of ourselves, once the human self concentrated in our hearts has acquires that disputable activity which absorbs all virtue and constitutes the life of mean-spirited people. RandolphHarris 19 of 22
How could love of country develop in the midst of so many other passions which choke it? And what is left for our fellow citizens of a heart already dividing its affections among greed, a mistress and vanity? One might object to the evaluation of one’s group and claim it is not realistically correct. For one thing, a group can hardly be as perfect as its members describe it; the more important reason, though, is that criticism of the group is responses to with intense rage, which is the reaction characteristic of one whose individual narcissism is wounded. In the narcissistic characteristic character of national, political and religious group reaction lies the root of all fanaticism. When the group becomes the embodiment of one’s own narcissism, any criticism of the group is felt to be an attack against oneself. In cases of cold or hot wars, the narcissism takes on a still more drastic form. My own nation is perfect, peace-loving, cultured, et cetera; the enemy’s is the contrary—vile, treacherous, cruel, et cetera. In reality most nations are equal in the overall balance of good and evil traits; however, virtues and vices are specific for each nation. What narcissistic nationalism does is to see only the virtue of one’s own and the vices of the enemy’s nation. The mobilization of group narcissism is one of the important conditions for the preparation of war; it must begin much earlier than the outbreak of the war, but it becomes reinforced the closer nations move towards war. The feelings at the beginning of the First World War are a god example of reason’s becoming silenced when narcissism rules. British war propaganda accused the German soldiers of bayoneting infants in Belgium (a complete lie but believed by many in the West); the Germans called the British a nation of treacherous traders while they themselves were heroes fighting for freedom and justice. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Can this group narcissism ever disappear and with it one condition for war? Indeed, there is no reason to assume that it cannot. The conditions for its disappearance are manifold. One is that the life of individuals must be so rich and interesting that they can relate to others with interest and love. This in turn presupposes a social structure that engenders being and sharing and discourages having and possessing. With the development of interest in love for others, narcissism tends to be increasingly reduced. The most important and most difficult problem, however, is that group narcissism can be produced by the basic structure of society, and the question is how this happens. The first condition for the increasing development of narcissism in industrial society is the separateness and antagonism of individuals toward each other. This antagonism is a necessary consequence of an economic system that is built on ruthless selfishness and on the principle of seeking advantages at the expense of others. When sharing and mutuality are absent narcissism is bound to thrive. However, the more important condition for the development of narcissism, and one which has been given full measure only in the last decades, is the worship of industrial production. Humans have made themselves into a god. They have created a New World, the World of human-made things, using the old creation only as raw material. Modern humans have laid bare the secrets of the microcosmos as well as the macrocosmos; one has discovered the secrets of the atom and the secrets of the cosmos, relegating our Earth to an infinitely small entity among the galaxies. The scientists making these discoveries had to perceive things as they are, objectively and hence with little narcissism. However, the consumer, in the same way as the technicians and practitioners of applied science, has not had to have the scientist. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
The overwhelming part of the human race has not had to devise the new technics; they have been able to build it according to the new theoretical insights and admire it. Thus it happens that modern human has developed an extraordinary pride in their creation; one has deemed oneself to be a god, one has felt one’s greatness in the contemplation of the grandeur of the human-made new Earth. Thus admiring one’s second creation, one has admired oneself in it. The World one has made, harnessing the energy of coal, of oil, and now of the atom, and especially the seeming limitless capacity of one’s brain, had become the mirror in which one can see oneself. Humans’ gaze into this mirror which reflects not one’s beauty but one’s ingenuity and power. Will one drown in this mirror as Narcissus drowned gazing at the picture of his beautiful body mirrored in the lake? God, please save us with Thy mighty hand. Please adorn us with the radiance of a victorious host. Please cause us to cleave close to Thee. Please bring us near to the time of redemption. Please lead us to Thy house with song and gladness. Please glorify us with salvation and joy Please bless us with ample substance and deliverance. Please hearten us with the rebuilding of Thy city to its former glory. Please exalt us to that we may merit respect everywhere. May we be remembered for gladness and rejoicing. Please cause us to lie down in a fertile valley, bright with Thy splendour, and do Thou save us. Please fortify us, O God of Jacob, and do Thou save us. We overcome this wind. We desire the rain to fall, that it be poured in showers quickly. Ah, thou rain, I adjure thee fall. If thou rainiest, it is well. A drizzling confusion. It rains and our food ripens, it is well. If the young men sing, it is well. A drizzling confusion. If our grain ripens, it is well. If our women rejoice, if the children rejoice, if the young men sing, if the aged rejoice, an overflowing in the granary, a torrent in flow, if the wind veers to the south, it is well. If the rain veers to the south, it is well. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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You are Giving Away Your Soul—The Blood is Life!
This morning I saw a star twinkling just over the nine-story tower—the first since the beginning of May. My son, when he was examined, because he would not confess that he was guilt when he was innocent, they tied him neck and heels till the blood gushed out at his nose, and would have kept him so twenty-four hours if one more merciful than the rest had not taken pity on him and caused him to be unbound. These actions are very like the Popish cruelties. A man’s outer case generally gives some indication of the soul within. He has told me several times that the thought of death was a pleasant one to him, which is a sad thing for a young man to say; he cannot be much more than thirty. Some great sorrow must have taken him and blighted his whole life. Why of course, they were in effect saying, the Devil can impersonate the innocent, just as we have said all along. God might permit Satan to impersonate the virtuous. But surely, he would not permit discord in the Winchester mansion? I should have thought Mrs. Winchester’s staff would have been above such vulgar delusions. All this disquisition upon superstition leads me up to the fact that my son saw a ghost last night—or at least, says that he did, which of course is the same thing. Indeed the fellow is honestly frightened, and I had to give him some chloral and bromide of potassium this morning to stead him down. He has been hired as a ranch had to work at the estate. When grounds keepers found a mutilated cow, some of the other men thought he had been possessed by the devil, and torture him to confess. I was obliged to pacify him by keeping as grave a countenance as possible during his story, which he certainly narrated in a very straightforward and matter-of fact way. No one wanted Mrs. Winchester to believe the curse was real and the hauntings had started again. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
“I was on the balcony,” he said, “about four bells in the middle watch, just when the night was at its darkest. There was a bit of a moon, but the clouds were blowing across it so that you could not see far from the mansion. John Brunton, the foreman, came after from the tool shed and reported a strange noise on the estate. I came down and went forward and we both heard I, sometimes like a bairn crying and sometimes like a wench in pain. I have been seventeen years to the country and I never heard an animal, old or young, make a sound like that. As we were standing on the rear porch the moon came out from behind the cloud, and we both saw a sort of black figure moving across the farm in the same direction that we had heard the cries. We lost sight of it for a while, but it came back insight, and we could just make it out like a shadow amongst the trees. I sent a hand art for the rifles, and Brunton and I went down to the fruit orchard, thinking it might be a bear. When we got near the trees I lost sight of Brunton, but I pushed on in the direction where I could still hear the cries. I followed them for a mile or may more, and then running round a well I came right on to the top of it standing and waiting for me seemingly. I do not know what it was. It was not a bear any way. It was tall and black and straight. This black dog, or the devil in such a likeness, running all along down the body of the mansion with great swiftness, and incredible haste, he passed between two people, wrung the necks of them both. I made my way for the mansion as hard as I could run, and precious glad I was to find myself inside. I signed articles to do my duty by the estate, and on the estate I will say, but you will not catch me on the grounds after sundown.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
That is his story given as far as I can in his own words. I do not know what happened there. I fancy what he saw must in spite of his denial, have been a young bear erect upon its hind legs, and attitude which they often assume when alarmed. In the uncertain light this would bear a resemblance to a human figure, especially to a man whose nerves were already somewhat shaken. Whatever it may have been, the occurrence is unfortunate, for it has produced a most unpleasant effect upon the crew. Their looks are more sullen than before and their discontent more open. The double grievance made more dreadful when a barn of dead bodies was found on the edge of the estate. Written in blood, “Keep building,” and a huge bloody hand print was discovered on the wall. Some say it was the Devil’s handprint. In the old days in the New World, people used to say “I put my hand and seal” on a document when signing it. In the Old World this was literal in some cases. The emperor of Japan in ancient in ancient days “signed” important documents by dipping his hand in blood and putting a full bloody handprint on the page. In the history of pacts with the Devil, people were supposed to sign their names in blood. I have seen a couple of alleged pacts from earlier centuries. Blood undoubtedly stressed the seriousness of the signing. The Devil may sometimes have a permission to represent an innocent person as tormenting such as are under diabolical harassments, but that such things are rare and extraordinary. You were giving away your soul. The Blood is life. Afflicted persons were subject to diabolical torments; making evidence of such torments was accepting the word of the Devil; worse, accepting such evidence was holding commerce with the Devil, and therefore in itself a kind of witchcraft. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The afflicted persons do tell who are witches, of which, some they know and some they do not. Secondly, they tell who did torment such a person, though they know not the person. Thirdly, they are tormented themselves by he looks of the persons that are present, and recovered again by the touching of them, they recover, or do not fall into torment. Fifthly, they can tell when a person is coming before they see them, and what clothes they have [on], and some, what they have done for several years past, which nobody else ever accused them with nor do not yet think them guilty of. Sixthly, the dead out of their graves do appear unto them and tell them that they have been murdered, and require them to see them to be revenged on the murderers, which they name to them, some of which persons are well known to have died their natural deaths, and been publicly buried in the sight of all humans. Now if these things be so, I thus affirm: First, that whatsoever is done by them that is supernatural is either divine or diabolical. Secondly, that nothing is or can be divine but what has God’s stamp upon it, to which he refers for trial (Isaiah viii. 19,20): If they speak not according to these, there is no light in them. Thirdly, and by that rule none of these actions of theirs have any warrant in God’s Word, but are condemned wholly. First, it is utterly unlawful to inquire of the dead or to be informed by them (Isaiah viii. 19). It was an act of the Witch of Endor to raise the dead, and of a reprobate Saul to inquire of him (1 Samuel xxviii.8, 11-14; Deuteronomy viii. ii). Secondly, it is a like evil to seek to them that have familiar spirits (Leviticus xix.31). It was the sin of Saul in the forementioned place (1 Samuel xxviii.8) and of wicked Manasses (2 Kings xxi.6). #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Thirdly, no more is it likely that their racking and tormenting should be done by God or good angels, but by the Devil, whose manners has ever been to be so employed. Witness his dealing with the poor child (Mark v.2-5) besides what he did to Job (Jon ii.7) and all the lies he told against him to the very face of God. Fourthly, the same may be rationally said of all the rest. Who should tell them things that they do not see but the Devil, especially when some things that they tell are false and mistaken? May we believe the confessed witches that do accuse anyone? Can the fruit be better than the tree? If the root of all their knowledge be the Devil, what must their testimony be? Their testimony may be legal against themselves, because they know what themselves do. However, their words should not be taken against those who denied the charges and whose previous behaviour had been blameless. The fits to which the afflicted and of come of the confessors were subject to, they were the Devil’s way of force them to accuse the innocent. We see by woeful and undeniable experience, both in the afflicted persons and the confessors, some of them, that the Devil torments them at his pleasure to force them to accuse others. The accusations of the apparently innocent makes some people think that both the afflicted and the confessors are liars. However, perhaps the sufferings are pitiable and genuine. It is possible that the Devil is lying through them. And no matter who is lying, the effect of the lie is still the same. For if they counterfeit, the wickedness is the greater in them and the less in the Devil; but if they be compelled to it by the Devil against their wills, then the sin is the Devil’s and the suffering is theirs. However, if their testimonies be allowed of, to make persons guilty by, the lives of innocent persons are alike in danger by them, which is the solemn consideration that does disquiet the country. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The Devils have a natural power which makes them capable of exhibiting what shape they please I suppose nobody doubts, and I have no absolute promise of God that they shall not exhibit mine. It is the opinion generally of all Protestant writers that the Devil may thus abuse the innocent. My son told me of another experience he had while working at the Winchester mansion. “I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. (My bed stood with its foot toward the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and nighttime.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some black wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite black, and looked more like foxes or sheep dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. I swore there was something there. I could feel it, hovering over me. It is watching, it is waiting, I think it is even mocking me.” Apart from this absurd outbreak of superstition, things are looking rather more cheerful. Mrs. Winchester loved the new year; she loved the idea of a fresh start for everyone. She always made a resolution, one a year, and unlike most people, she kept hers. Every year she tried to talk her staff into making one, but some of them never saw the point. The estate was undergoing heavy construction. Some workers reported seeing a ghost woman in nineteenth-century dress. That is not what was strange. What was strange is the fact that it was there was a thunder storm, but no rain was falling on a section of the mansion were the roof was still being added to the nine-story tower. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Mrs. Winchester wanted the tower because she said that she could get visions of the spirit World more clearly there. I always got a wee bit creeped out in the tower because the crucifix on the wall would turn upside down when anyone went near it. The Devil is said to appear there twice a year, on the vernal equinox and Halloween. The tower marks the grace of one of his children, born of a human witch and dead after a few days. I am learning about the hauntings at the Winchester mansion. Everyone has heard about them, but they all have different stories. In the World of spirits there is always a very great number of them, but there is no fixed time for their stay on Earth; for some are translated to Heaven and others confined to Hell soon after their arrival; whilst some stay on Earth days, weeks, maybe even centuries. Gerald Pomper thinks that my son devoted himself to construction of the Winchester simply for the reason that it is the most dangerous occupation which he could select, and that he courts death in every possible manner. He mentioned several instances of this, one of which is rather curious, if true. It seems that on one occasion he did not put in an appearance on the estate, and a substitute had to be selected in his place. That was at the time the tower was near completion. When he turned up again next spring he had a puckered wound in the side of his neck which he used to endeavour to conceal with his cravat. Whether the mate’s inference is true or not, it was certainly a strange coincidence. Of course, Johann Weikhard von Valvasor recorded the first written documented on vampires. Jure Grando Alilovic (1579-1656) was a villager from the region of Istria (in modern-day Croatia) who may have been the first real person described as a vampire in historical records. He was referred to as a strigoi, a local word for something resembling a vampire and a warlock. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Jure Grando lived in Kringa, a small town in the interior of the Istrian peninsula near Tinjan. He died in 1656 due to illness but according to legend, returned from the grave at night as a vampire and terrorized his village until his decapitation in 1672. The legend tells that, for 16 years after his death, Jure would arise from his grave by night and terrorize the village. The village priest, Giorgio, who had buried Jure sixteen years previously discovered that at night somebody would knock on the doors around the village, and on whichever door he knocked, someone from that house would die. This is why Mrs. Winchester boarded up the East Wing of her mansion. During one of her seances, she said Jure communicated with her. No telling? When you contact the spirit World, there is no telling what will come through. Some of the spirit in the mansion may be hundred of years old. Mrs. Winchester owned an original copy of Die Ehre deB Herzogthuma Crain, which she kept locked away in a safe. Vampires are said to infest come parts of this country. These Vampires are supposed to be the bodies of deceased persons, animated by evil Spirits, which come out of the graves, in the night-time, suck the blood of many of the living, and thereby destroy them. Petar Blagojevic was also accused of being a Vampire, and was alleged to have killed several people after his death. When the body was exhumed, it was undecomposed, the hair and beard were grown, there was new skin and nail, and blood could be seen in the mouth. When people grew outraged and staked his body through the heart, a completely fresh amount of blood flowed through the ears and moth of the corpse. Finally, the body was burned. The wind is veering round the mansion in an easterly direction, but it is still very slight. As far as the eye can reach, there is a shadow. The butler was staring out up the stairs with an expression in which horror, surprise, something approaching to fear were contending for the mastery. In spite of the cold, great drops of perspiration were coursing down his forehead and he was evidently fearfully exited. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
His limbs twitched like those of a man upon the verge of an epileptic fit, and the lines about his mother were drawn hard. “Look!” he grasped, seizing me by the seizing me by the wrist, but still keeping eyes upon the window, and moving his head in a horizontal direction, as if following some object which was moving across the field of vision. “Look! There, man, there! Between the palm trees! Now coming out from behind the far one! You see her, you must see her! There still! Flying from me, by God, flying from me—and gone!” His face was so livid that I expected him to become unconscious, so lost no time leading him down the stairs, and stretching him out upon one of the sofas in the parlour. I then poured him out some brandy which I held to his lips, and which had a wonderful effect upon him, bringing the blood back into his white face and steading his poor shaking limbs. He raised himself up upon his elbow, and looking round to see that we were alone, be beckoned me to come and sit beside him. “You are it, did you not?” he asked, still in the same subdued awesome tone so foreign to the nature of the man. “No, I saw nothing.” They have made up their minds that there is a curse upon the mansion, and nothing will ever persuade them to the contrary. The next night, there was a glorious sunset, which made the great fields look like a lake of blood. I have never seen a finer and at the same time more ghastly effect. Wind is veering round. There was a cry, sharp and shrill, upon the silent air of the night, beginning, as it seemed to me, at a note as such a prima donna never reached, and mounting from that ever higher and higher until it culminated in a long wail of agony, which might have been the last cry of a lost soul. The ghastly scream is still ringing in my ears. Grief, unutterable grief, seemed to be expressed in it and a great longing, and yet through it all there was an occasional wild not of exultation. It seemed to come from close beside me, and yet as I glared into the darkness, I could make out nothing. I waited some little time, but without hearing any repetition of the sound, so I came below, more shaken that I have ever been in my life before. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Odd things have happened here. Four kids in three years, from 1887-1890, vanished without a trace. Other people see things. No one will talk about. The butler was certain that something had come up through the “door to nowhere” five years ago, and was about to again. Some kind of hellspawn. The Devil may impudently impose his communion upon some that care not for his company. However, if the communion on the person’s part be proved, then the business be done. Specter evidence may be grounds for investigation, and may strength other presumptions, but it is not evidence on which to convict. The mansion could be a dangerous place, even at its best—a treacherous, dangerous place. The butler was staring at something. By the sudden intensity of his attitude, I felt that he saw some. I crept up behind him. He certainly was looking at something with an eager questioning gaze, at what seemed to be a wreath of smoke. It was a dim nebulous body devoid of shape, sometimes more, sometimes less apparent, as the light fell on it. The moon was dimmed in its brilliancy at the moment by a canopy of thinnest cloud, like the coating of an anemone. He held out his hand as if to clasp it, and so ran into the darkness with outstretched arms. That came from somewhere. Was it a demon? It took the shape of a man, and eventually of the man of whom we were in search of. He was lying face downwards upon the floor, frozen. Many little crystals of ice and feathers of snow had drifted on to him as he lay, and sparkled upon his dark seaman’s jacket. As we came up some wandering puff of wind caught these tiny flakes in its vortex, and they whirled up into the air, partially descended again, and then, caught once more in the current, sped rapidly away in the direction of the east wing. To my eyes it seemed but a snow-drift, but the butler averred that it started up in the shape of a woman, stooped over the corpse and kissed it, and then hurried away across the floor. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
It was the former cook Bill Thompson, who has gone missing in 1886. Sure he had met with no painful end, for there was a bright smile upon his blue pinched features, and his hands were still outstretched as though grasping at the strange visitor which had summoned him away into the dim World that lies beyond the grave. Surely this same apparition would also lead the butler into the eternal darkness. The smoke went into his mouth and he started to jerk, and speaking in tongues. That awful hellspawn had possessed him, and with his body dying and something inside of him, the butler staggered over to the sulfur stinking wall, sat down and died. Then he faded away and was gone. There he shall lie, with his secret and his sorrows and his mysteries all still buried in his breast, until that great day when the Winchester Mansion shall give up its dead, and Clarence Earl Gideon, known as “the butler,” come out from among the shadows with a smile upon his face, and his stiffened arms outstretched in greeting. I pray that his lot may be a happier one in that life than it has been in this. As for my son, I have not seen him in several years. In 1904, at the palace late at night, men who were pure of spirit, had thought they say a strange demoniac form taking the place of my son, John Wesley Thompson Faulkner. One man said that Mrs. Winchester suddenly rose from her throne and walked about, and immediately John’s head vanished, while the rest of hos body seemed to ebb and flow: whereat the beholder stood aghast and fearful, wondering if his eyes were deceiving him. However, he perceived the vanishing head filling out and joining the body again as strangely as it has left it. Another said he stood beside Mrs. Winchester as she sat, and all of the sudden the face changed into a shapeless mass of flesh, with neither eyebrows nor eyes in their proper places, nor any other distinguishing feature; and after a time the natural appearance of his countenance returned. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
I write these instances not as one who saw many of them myself, but heard them from people who were sure they had seen these strange occurrences at the time. They also say that the cook, Bill Thompson, very dear to God, at the instance of dinner time, went to beg forgiveness that some of the guess had been offended beyond endurance by a dish he made. And when he arrived at the dining room, he forthwith secured an audience with Mrs. Winchester; but just as he was about to enter his apartment, he stopped short as his feet were on the threshold, and suddenly stepped backward. Whereupon the maid who escorted him, and others who were present, importuned him to go ahead. However, he answered not a word; and like a man who has had a stroke staggered back to his lodging. And when some followed to ask why he acted thus, they say he distinctly declared he saw the King of the Devils sitting on the throne in the palace, and he did not care to meet or ask any favour of him. I shall not continue my journal. Our road home lies plain and clear before us, and the great Winchester palace will soon be but a remembrance of the past to me. It will be some time before I get over the shock produced by recent events. When I began this record of my visit, I little thought of how I should be compelled to finish it. I am writing these final words in the lonely chamber, still starting at times and fancying I hear the quick nervous step of the dead man upon the floor above me. I entered his chambers tonight as was my duty, to make a list of his effects in order that they might be entered in the official log. All was as it has been upon my previous visit, save that the picture which I have described as having hung at the end of his bed had been cut out of its frame, as with a knife, and was gone. With this last link in a strange chain of evidence I close my diary of the Winchester mansion. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Note by William Clark Falkner, Col. CSA: “I have read over the strange evens connected with the mystery, as narrated in the journal of my son. That everything occurred exactly as he describes it I have the fullest confidence, and, indeed, the most absolute certainty, for I know him to be a strong-nerved and unimaginative man, with the strictest regard for veracity. Still, the story is, on the face of it, so vague and so improbable, that I was long opposed to its publication. Within the last few days, however, I have had independent testimony upon the subject which throws a new light upon it. I had run down to Edinburgh to attend a meeting of the British Medical Association, when I came across Aleister Crowley, an old college chum of my son’s, now involved with the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where he was trained in ceremonial magic by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and Allan Bennet. Aleister told me that he had been contacted by a supernatural entity named Aiwass, who confirmed that that Witch Trials were started by people who wanted to break up convents and get their magic potions, spells, talismans, and secrets, while also getting the church in an uproar. Upon my telling him of this experience of my son’s, he declared to me that he was familiar with the man, and proceeded, to my no small surprise, to give me a description of him, which tallied remarkably well with that given in the journal, expect that he depicted him as a younger man. According to his account, the cook and butler and my son had all been in love with the same woman. However, the cook was engaged to the young lady of singular beauty residing upon Sierra. During their absence at the Winchester mansion, his betrothed had died under circumstances of peculiar horror. She became a Chenoo, a winter spirit with a heart of ice, created from a human, which wants to kill those it loves. In the period of transformation, the person who is becoming a Chenoo eats snow and refuses other food. One will be ill-tempered and angry. After the transformation, the Chenoo will attack and kill other members of the tribe.” There are many mysteries surrounding the Winchester Mansion. Have a visit and tell me a little story. Winchester Mystery House–a 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
In the 1800s, so many deer and cattle within the mansion’s proximity were found dead that staff members were accused of being werewolves. Today, staff and visitors have reported banging sounds, footprints, seeing white mists, and feeling someone breathe on them. They also report tormented ghosts wandering through the mansion at night. Even if you do not believe ghost stories, you might still get goosebumps passing by, do not chalk those taps on your shoulder and whispers in your ear as all up to imagination.
During mansion renovations in the early 1900s, workmen found a secret dungeon in the Bloody Tower with so many human skeletons, they filled three cartloads when hauled away. The basement was designed so that prisoners would fall through a trap door. These hallways won’t wander themselves 😳 Give you and your friends a fright this weekend on the Lost in The House Tour during All Hallows’ Eve at the Winchester Mystery House!
All Hallows’ Eve value night tickets are still available!
🎟️ Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com
A Word is a Sign for a Unique Experience!
Many people look at these beautiful homes, and want to one day live in a home just like that. However, their desires and reality do not always seem to match up. It may even see impossible to some that they will achieve the American Dream of home ownership. Therefore it is important to speak the words of faith and realize God did not bring this far to tour this model home, just to be let down. Keep on believing and know that with God, the impossible is possible. See yourself living in that enchanting home, even while you are living in your current situation. Through hard work, perseverance and determination and by having faith in God and continuing to reach for the stars, you will achieve your vision. God wants you time on this Earth to be the best time of your life. To receive the favour of God, one must draw closer to God. Start by studying the Ten Commandments in the Christian Bible and try to become a better person. Repent of your sins and practice forgiveness. Then you can expect more than the grace of God, you can expect His blessings. You must know in your heart and mind that whatever you want will come true, but you must follow the steps to make your dream a reality. Let go of old, defeated, negative, limiting thoughts. Have the courage to step out of your shell and become a new, more confident, and successful person. Do not think discrimination is going to hold you back. Know that you are the best in your field and God will place someone in your path to open the doors for you. You cannot be if your attitude is one of defeat and hatred and envy, America’s Next Top Model. God is ready for you to become more loving, for you to have harmony in your home, for your medical report to say you are in tip top shape. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
It pleases God to help you advance n live. The Lord wants to give you abundance. Father, I believe in You at this moment and forever. I know that you have my best interest at heart and are protecting me from things that I cannot see. However, Father, I am ready to enjoy this life and for things to come to me easily, without let down or hardship. I will walk by faith and not by sight, and please fill my heart with joy and gratitude as I try to become more like Jesus Christ. Take flight, my Soul, and circle creation until you find a perch. Not just any perch. Certainly not one with a view. A place for a rest is what I need. A perch with the Lord would be best. That is where the Saints are pillowed, or so I have been given to understand. To that end I have composed these little prayers with big faith. Please grant me, Sweet Jesus, Loving Friend, rest, not in the rest of creation, but in You. That is to say, not in beatitude or pulchritude, glory or honour, science or subtlety, richness or artistry, jig or dance, fame or praise, consecration or consolation, hope or promise, merit or desire, beneficence or munificence, joy or jubilation, Angels or Archangels or any other Heavenly Militia, or indeed any of the other Visibles or Invisibles. That is simply to say, please grant me rest only in Your company. I welcome you into my home and heart and into my family for eternity. Without God, other goods are nothing. I would rather have Jesus than silver and gold. No fame or fortune, no riches untold, I would rather have Jesus than silver and God. More than once over the eons, my Timeless if Timely Lord and God, You have been pronounced overall best of show. The tallest and strongest, the most beautiful of all. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Lord, You are the most self-sufficient and best equipped. The smoothest-cheeked and cheeriest of cheeks. The handsomest and friendliest. The noblest and brightest. All these have been true in the past and no doubt will continue to be true in the future. From these superlatives, however, there flows one horrific inexorable. Yet first, whatever You may give me by way of gift or revelation or promise, will, of course, always be welcomed. Now if that gift or revelation or promise has nothing of Yourself in it, it will always be regarded by me as one brick short of a load; that is to say, it is something less than perfection. All of which is another way of saying, I look forward to the time when I will see You in person and grasp Your Holy Hands. As the Great Augustine prayed in his Confessions (1.1), my heart can neither truly rest nor totally relax until it rests—no, not in all Your creatures or all Your creations—only in Your Yourself. When I told my friends that one day I would own a Cresleigh Home, they replied, “You’re crazy!” The word crazy is typical for defining that which is unthinkable. Most people call certain ideas “crazy” because “sane” is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought. Some people are not on your level. Their thoughts and expectations in life might be lower than the standards you hold yourself to. That which transcends the conventional is crazy in the view of the average person. The scientist can stand his uncertainty precisely because of one’s faith in human reason. What matters to one is not to arrive at a conclusion but to reduce the degree of illusion, to penetrate deeper to the roots. The scientist is not even afraid of being wrong; one knows that the history of science is a history of erroneous but productive, pregnant statements from which new insights are born that overcome the relative wrongness of the older statement and lead to new insights. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
If scientists were obsessed by the wish not to be wrong, they would never have arrived at the insights which are relatively right. Of course if the social scientist has only trivial questions and does not turn one’s attention to fundamental problems, one’s “scientific method” achieves results sufficient for the endless papers which one needs to write in order to promote one’s academic career. The combination or wide-ranging imagination and objectivity is seldom reached and this is probably the reason why great scientists, who would have to fulfill both conditions, are rare. High intelligence is necessary but is not by itself sufficient for becoming a creative scientist. In fact a condition of complete objectivity can hardly ever be fully achieved. In the first place the scientist, as we have discussed, always is influenced by the common sense of one’s time, and furthermore only extraordinary persons of great gift are immune from narcissism. Yet altogether the discipline of scientific thinking has produced a degree of objectivity and what one might call scientific conscience that is hardly matched in other areas of cultural life. Indeed the fact that the great scientists more than anybody else have seen the dangers threatening humankind today and warned of them is the expression of their capacity to be objective and unswayed by he clamour of misguided public opinion. The living person can be understood only as a whole and in one’s aliveness, in the constant process of change. Since every individual is different from any other, even the possibility of generalization and the formulation of laws is limited, through the scientific observer will always try to find some general principles and laws in the manifoldness of individuals. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
There is another difficulty in the scientific approach to the understand of the human. The data which we obtain from a person are unlike the data we obtain in other scientific endeavours. One has to understand a human in one’s full subjectivity to understand one at all. A word is not “a” word because a word is that which it means to a certain person who uses it. The dictionary meaning of the word is only an abstraction compared to the real meaning which a word has for the person who pronounces it. That of course is irrelevant for words for physical objects, although not entirely, but it is relevant for words referring to emotional or intellectual experiences. A four-page love letter from the beginning of the century sounds to us sentimental, contrived, and kind of silly. A four-page love letter from our tine which wanted to convey the same sentiments would have appeared to people living one hundred years ago as cold and feelingless. The words love, faith, courage, hate have an entirely subjective meaning for every individual and it is no exaggeration to say that it is never the same meaning for two people because there are no two people who are identical. It may not have even the same meaning for one person that it had ten years earlier because of the changes that one has undergone. The same holds true of course for dreams. Two dreams which are identical in their content may still have two very different meanings for two different dreamers. We should not take a word a person uttered for granted, but raise the question of what this particular word at this particular moment in this particular context meant for this particular person. This subjectivity in fact enhances the objectivity of one’s scientific method considerably. Any psychologist who is naïve enough to think “a word is a word is a word” will communicate with another person only on a highly abstract and fictitious level. A word is a sign for a unique experience. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
O Jesus Christ, Sweetest Friend of My Friendless Soul, how can You lord over the whole Universe and yet at the same time grant me license to fly anywhere in creation? And here I am reminded of the Psalmist’s dove who flew the cote and set sail for the wilderness where You reside. Please fill me with courage so that I can empty my soul. Flood my soul with Your love so that I can drain the soil of self-love. Just You, O Lord. No sensibilities. No methodologies. No intellectual monkey business of any kind. Just You alone and in a manner as yet unknown. However, that will be then, and this is now. At my Earthly unhappiness I frequently groan to myself, but at the same time I make a great show of my pain. It is to be expected, I suppose, what with the many evils that take place in this value of misery. However, in quick succession I become annoyed, morose, confused. More often than not, these evils impede, then distract, unfold, then fold up. Thought multifarious, the one purpose they have in common is to obstruct my access to You. I know the Blessed Spirits must be enjoying Your manly hugs, but somehow I am prevented from joining them in that jolly exercise. All of which is another way of saying, may my snortings and snottings about the many distractions and desolations I encounter on Earth move you to Help. The first suburban communities had a goal of making them accessible to public transportation, but also they were designed to emphasize the open public green areas and rural ambience of earlier romantic Victorian suburbs. In practice as well as philosophy, they were not outlying bucolic communities, but true suburbs. Physically and socially, they were more closely tied to the city. Roland Park, for example, reflected more urban than rural traditions. Roland Park was clearly oriented toward downtown Baltimore. Roland Park, Forrest Hills, and Shaker Heights each would come over time to represent the affluent inner-ring urban-oriented suburbs of the pre-World War II era. To many they would become the quintessential American suburbs. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
All three suburbs shared features such as strictly enforced building codes, including houses-setback regulations, but they different in the degree of developer control. Forrest Hills was designed by its backer, the Russell Sage Foundation, to be totally planned. This can be seen today in the community’s buildings, with their solid masonry construction and red tiled roofs. The Van Sweringens brothers, who founded Shaker Heights, compulsively oversaw the building of all the homes, mandating not only acceptable architectural plans but even what materials and colour schemes could be used. All homes in Shaker Heights had to be designed by an architect whose plans were approved by the brothers. They advertised their control over the community as one of its major advantages. The brothers sought “tasteful” designs and banned any too original designs as undermining the aesthetic, and financial, stability of Shaker Heights. In Roland Heights, on the contrary, house styles were not mandated. You could build your home in Dutch colonial, English Tudor, or any other style of your choice as long as you met the other community standards. Roland Park soon became incorporated into Baltimore, but it was never lost its reputation as a somewhat reclusive upper-middle class WASP enclave. Roland Park represented not just an area, but also a WASP way of life. The novelist Ann Rice and Ann Tylor, in the respective novels, Merrick (Rice)and The Accidental Tourist and Searching for Calib (Taylor) makes the Character of Roland Park itself an essential ingredient of the novels. While Mrs. Rice talks about the decadence of design, amongst other things. Mrs. Tylor portrays Roland Park residents as living very much self-satisfied and self-restricted lives; they have little interest in going out of the neighbourhood or matter beyond Roland Park. This view of the culturally restricted nature of the upper-middle-class suburban life may or may not be an accurate reflection of reality, but it has been the basis of many good novels. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Planned communities have a long, if not always successful, lineage in American urban life. They share with the romantic suburbs the belief that humans can be made over by proper surroundings. Many of he nineteenth-century new town examples, such as New Harmony, Indiana or Salt Lake City, were founded with an ideological-religious emphasis. Other new communities began as company towns—but company towns that also had a visionary or social component. Lowell, Massachusetts, began in the early nineteenth century as an idealistic community with a paternalistic interest in its workers, but by midcentury it was just another New England mill town. The classic American attempt to create a totally paternalist suburban community was Pullman, Illinois, which was at the southern extremity of Chicago urban area. Pullman, founded in the 1880s, was designed with solid urban planning to be a complete community with well-managed services. George Pullman, of Pullman car fame, was the founder and sole landlord. His goal was to provide a community of solid housing and few temptations (saloons were barred) so that workers would remain productive. He stated that, “With such surroundings and such human regard for the needs of the body as well as the soul the disturbing conditions of strikes and other troubles that periodically convulse the World of labour would no be found here.” He was a poor prophet, for Pullman is best known today for the famous biter and violent strike that occurred there in 1894. The strike was only crushed when National Guardsmen were brought in as strike breakers. Today pullman is part of Chicago. Nineteenth-century planned utopian communities, such as John Noyes’s Oneida, New York, with is system of group marriage, or political-philosophical communities such as New Harmony, Indiana, generally had difficulty maintaining themselves. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
In addition to having ideological disputes, the communities were always undercapitalized. Alice Austin’s early-twentieth-century attempt to create the feminist planned “Socialist City” of Llano Del Rio in southern California suffered this fate. After struggling for many years, the community went bankrupt in 1917. As noted earlier, a unique feature of Llano del Rio was the building of homes without kitchens. Rather than having individual kitchens, the homes backed into a communal eating area. This was to save housewives from the drudgery of cooking. At the close of the nineteenth century, revulsion against the evils of the city and reaction to the isolation of the suburbs led to attempts to build entirely new communities in which the benefits of both types of living could be realized. The resulting communities thus grew out of a much different orientation then had led to the building of the earlier upper-status romantic suburbs. These communities had much more of a reformist and middle-or working-class orientation. Our suburbs of today are a melding of the two traditions. The turn of the century new towns were planned to be communities with fully developed commercial, residential, and industrial sectors. Much of the concern with new owns was because of the visionary efforts of Ebenezer Howard in England. His new towns, which were called “garden cities,” were to be self-contained communities of 30,000 residents. There were to be totally planned communities surrounded by a “green belt” of open land. Mr. Howard was going to solve the problem of the cities by abandoning them for a fresh environment of self-sufficient garden cities. Mr. Howard and his Garden City Association stared the first new town a Letchworth, some thirty miles by train from London, in 1902. After many financial troubles, Mr. Howard launched the second town, Welwyn Garden City, in 1920. Today it is a pleasant small city. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Following World II, in 1946, Britain passed the New Town Act, which made the building of new towns an official government policy in Great Britain. Since that time some fifty-six new towns have been constructed. During the 1920s some of the leading planners in the United States of America organized into the Regional Planning Association of America in order to promote comprehensive planning and new towns. The most famous new town which members were associated was Radburn, New Jersey, started in 1928 outside New York by City Housing Corporation. Radburn is often considered the first of the American new towns. Designed by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, the houses were arranged in superblocks that fronted on open parkland while automobiles were restricted to peripheral areas. The superblocks were to be free of traffic and congestion. Radburn was thus the first community specifically planned for controlling the problems of the “motor age.” An extensive pathway system, for example, was designed to separate pedestrians from automobiles. For financial reasons, it was not possible to build the external protecting green belt, and there was no provision for industry. Then English new town model of communal ownership and property leaseholds also was not followed, since it would not be accepted in the American environment. From the first, Radburn, the first homeowners moved into the community in May 1929, and the stock market collapsed half a year later. The community was begun stillborn. Now largely forgotten except by urbanists, three government-sponsored new towns were built over half a century ago by the United States of America’s government. They were built essentially as experimental or demonstration projects during the great Depression of the 1930s. The new towns were authorized with the three goals of demonstrating the advantages of community planning, providing good housing at reasonable rents, and giving jobs to thousands of unemployed workers. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
The three towns constructed were Greenbelt, Maryland, outside of Washington D.C.; Greendale, Wisconsin, southwest of Milwaukee; and Green Hills, Ohio, near Cincinnati. Although they lacked their own industries, all three were successful. However, Congress, responding to claims by the real estate industry that having government-built housing was socialists and a danger to the free-enterprise system, the surrounding green belt be sold. Since then, all new town developers have built their communities in the expectation of making money. They have not always achieved this expectation. Given this flowering of a multiplicity of family forms, it is too early to tell which will emerge as significant style in a Third Wave civilization. Will our children live alone for many years, perhaps decades? Will they go childless? Will we retire into old-age communes? What about more exotic possibilities? Families with several husbands and one wife? (If genetic tinkering lets us preselect the gender of our children, that could happen.) What about homosexual families raising children? The courts are already debating this issue. What about the potential impact of cloning? If each of us moves through a trajectory of family experiences in our lives, what will the phases be? A trial marriage, followed by a dual-career marriage with no children, then a homosexual marriage with children? The possible permutations are endless. Nor, despite the cries of outage, should any of these be regarded as unthinkable. As Jessie Bernard has put it, “There is literally nothing about marriage that anyone can imagine that has not in fact taken place…All these variations seemed quite natural to those who lived with them.” Which specific family forms vanished and which ones proliferate will depend less on pulpit-pounding about the “sanctity of the family” than on the decisions we make with respect to technology and work. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
While many forces influence family structure—communication patterns, values, demographic changes, religious movements, even ecological shifts—the linkage between family form and work arrangements is particularly strong. Thus, just as the nuclear family was promoted by the rise of the factory and office work, any shift away from the factory and office would also exert a heavy influence on the family. It is impossible, in the space of a single essay, to spell out all the ways in which the coming changes in the labour force and in the nature of work will alter the family life. However, one change is so potentially revolutionary, and so alien to our experience, it needs far more attention than it has received so far. This is, of course, the shift of work out of the office and factory and back to the home. Assume for a moment that twenty-five years from now 45 percent of the work force is employed part- or full-time in the home. How would working at home change the quality of our personal relationships or the meaning of love? What would life be like in the electronic cottage? Whether the work-at-home task is programming a computer, writing a pamphlet, monitoring distant manufacturing processes, designing a building, or typing electronic correspondence, one immediate change is clear. Relocating work into the home means that many spouses who now see each other only a limited number of hours each day would be thrown together more intimately. Some, no doubt, would find their marriages saved and their relationships much enriched through shared experience. Let us visit several electronic cottages to see how people might adapt to fundamental a change in society. Such a tour would no doubt reveal a wide diversity of living and working arrangements. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
In some houses, perhaps the majority, we might well find couples dividing things up more or less conventionally, with one person doing the “job-work” while the other keeps the house—he, perhaps, writing programs while she looks after the kids. They very presence of work in the home, however, would probably encourage a sharing of both job-work and housekeeping. We would find many homes, therefore, in which man and wife split a single full-time job. For example, we might find both husband and wife taking turns at monitoring a complex manufacturing process on the console screen in the den, four hours on, for hours off. Down the street, by contrast, we would likely discover a couple holding not one, but two quite different jobs, with each spouse working separately. A cellular physiologist and a CPA might each work at one’s craft. Even here, however, with the jobs differing sharply in character, there is still likely to be some sharing of problems, some learning of each other’s work vocabulary, some common concerns and conversation relating to work. It is almost impossible under such conditions for the work life of an individual to be strictly segregated from personal life. By the same token, it is next to impossible to freeze one’s mate out of a whole dimension of one’s existence. Right next door (continuing our survey) we could well come upon a couple holding two different jobs but sharing both, the husband working as a part-time insurance planner and part-time as an architect’s assistant, with the wife doing the same work on alternating shifts. This arrangement would provide more varied, and therefore more interesting, work for both. In such homes, whether one or several jobs are shared, each partner necessarily learns from the other, participate in the problem-solving, engages in complex give-and-take, all of which cannot but deepen intimacy. Forced proximity, it goes without saying, does no guarantee happiness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The extended family units of the First Wave era, which were also economic production units, were hardly models of interpersonal sensitivity and mutual psychological support. Such families had their own problems and stresses. However, there were few uncommitted or “cooled out” relationships. Working together assured, if nothing else, tight, complex, “hot” personal relationships—a committedness many people envy today. In short, the spread of work-at-home on a large scale could not only affect family structure but transform relationships within the family. It could, to put it simply, provide a common set of experiences and get marriage partners talking to one another again. It could shift their relationships along the spectrum from “cool” to “hot.” It could also redefine love itself and bring with it the concept of Love Plus. The Christian Bible does warn us against self-righteous pride—pride that alienates us from God and leads us to disdain one another. Such pride is at the heart of racism, sexism, agism, and all the other deadly sins that lead one group of people to see themselves as more moral, deserving, or able than another. The opposite side of being proud of our individual and group achievements, and of taking credit for them, is blaming the poor for their poverty and the oppressed for their oppression. Self-control is worth ten times as much as self-esteem. And so for centuries pride had been considered the fundamental sin, the original sin, the deadliest of the seven deadly sins. Vain self-love corrodes human community and erodes our sense of dependence on one another and on God. If we seem confident about the pervasiveness and potency of pride, it is not because we have invented a new idea, but rather because the new findings reaffirm a very old idea. There is indeed tremendous relief in confessing our limits and our pride and in being known as we truly are. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Having been forgiven and accepted, we gain release, a feeling of being given what formerly we were struggling to get: security, peace, love. Having cut the pretensions and encountered divine grace, we feel more—not less—value as persons, for our self-acceptance no longer depends exclusively upon our own virtue and achievement or upon others’ approval. The feelings one can have in this encounter with God are like those we enjoy in a relationship with someone who, even after knowing our inmost thoughts, accepts us unconditionally. This is the delicious experience we no longer feel the need to justify and explain ourselves to be on guard, in which we are free to be spontaneous without fear losing the other’s esteem. Such was the psalmist’s experience: “Lord, I have given up my pride and turned away from my arrogance…I am content and at peace.” And it was St. Paul’s experience: “By the grace of God I am what I am.” Beware, for fiends in triumph laugh over one who learns the truth by half! Beware; for God will not endure for humans to make their hope more pure than His good promise, or require another than the five-stringed lyre which He has vowed again to the hands Devout of one who understands to tune it justly here! In the earliest days of Christianity an “apostle” was first and foremost a human who claimed to be an eye-witness of the Resurrection. Only a few days after the Crucifixion when two candidates were nominated for the vacancy created by the treachery of Judas, their qualification was that they had known Jesus personally both before and after His death and could offer first-hand evidence of the Resurrection in addressing the outer World (Acts i. 22). A few days later St. Peter, preaching the first Christian sermon, makes the same claim—“God raised Jesus, of which we all (we Christians) are witness” (Acts ii. 32). In the first Letter to the Corinthians St. Paul bases his claim to apostleship on the same ground—“Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen the Lord Jesus?” (i.9). #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
As this qualification suggests, to preach Christianity meant primarily to preach the Resurrection. Thus people who had heard only fragments of St. Paul’s teaching at Athens got the impression that he was talking about two new gods, Jesus and Anastasis (id est Resurrection) (Acts xvii. 18). The Resurrection is the central theme in every Christian sermon reported in the Acts. The Resurrection, and its consequences, were the “gospel” or good news which the Christians brought: what we call the “gospels,” the narratives of Our Lord’s life and death, were composed later for the benefit of those who had already accepted the gospel. They were in no sense the basis of Christianity: they were written for those already concerted. The miracle of the Resurrection, and the theology of that miracle, comes first: the biography comes later as a comment on it. Nothing could be more unhistorical than to pick out selected sayings of Christ from the gospels and to regard those as the datum and the rest of the New Testament as construction upon it. The first in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection. They had died without making anyone else believe the “gospel” no gospel would ever have been written. Water. Lakes and rivers. Oceans and streams. Spring, pools, and gullies. Arroyos, creek, watersheds. Pacific. Atlantic. Mediterranean. Indian. Caribbean. China Sea. (Lying. Dreaming on shallow shores.) Arctic. Antarctic. Baltic. Mississippi. Amazon. Columbia. Nile. Thames. Sacramento. Snake. (Undulant woman river.) Seine. Rio Grande. Willamette. McKenzie. Ohio. Hudson. Po. Rhine. Rhone. Rain. After a lifetime of drought. That finally cleanses the air. The soot from our eyes. The dingy windows of our western home. The rooftops and branches. The wings of birds. The new light on a slant. Pouring. Making everything new. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Francis Schlatter replied to a query as to the secret of his successful healings: “I am nothing, but the Father is everything. Have in the Father and all will be well. The Father can grow a pair of lungs just as easily as He can cure a cold.” The secret exercising spiritual power is to turn toward the other and high being which is the soul. The price of exercising it is self-abandonment. This is as true of spiritual healing as it is of spiritual initiation. An hones healer can say only that one’s healing depends on two conditions being fulfilled: the faith of the patient and the permission of the higher powers. A self-actualized who attained great renown and reputation in Rumania for one’s selfless character, inspired preaching, and miraculous healing said that he asked all patients to make a confession privately to him of their wrong attitudes and wrong-doing before the work of healing could begin, as this opened the door. This healing quality in his highly developed being passes into others, although only into those who can absorb it through devotion or receive it through faith. It is risky for one to forget what one primarily still is—layperson, not medical person. One ought not attempt to occupy position which does not belong to one. O Lord and Redeemer, beside Thee there is none to save. Thou art mighty and redeemest. I was brought low, but Thou didst save me. O God of salvation who deliverest and savest, save Thy supplicants, save them that hope in Thee. Sustain Thy lambs; increase the Earth’s riches. Cause to flourish and save each shrub, and condemn not the Earth to infertility, but sweeten and save is fruit. Urge on the rain-mists that they discharge their showers, and hold not back the clouds. Thou who openest Thine hand to sustain Thy creatures, please satisfy the thirsty with water. Please save them that call on Thee, Thou who art mighty to save. Save them that seek Thee at morn, yes, do Thou save them. Please save Thy whole-hearted servants, yea save them, we beseech Thee. O Eternal, we beseech Thee, please save us now. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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It Appears that the Powers of Redeemed Man Will be Almost Unlimited!
In a century where people take pride in fine sorts of knowledge, there are no to be found two closely united Humans—rich, one in money, the other in genius, both loving glory and aspiring for immortality—one of whom sacrifices twenty thousand crowns of his goods and the other ten years of one’s life for a famous voyage around the World, in order to study, not always rocks and plants, but, for once, men and more, and who, after so many centuries used to measure and examine the house, would finally be of a mind to know its inhabitants. Spankings, reprimands, fines, jail sentences, firings, failing grades, and the like are commonly used to control behaviour. Clearly, the story of learning is unfinished without a return to the topic of punishment. Recall that punishment lowers the probability that a response will occur again. To be most effective, punishment must be given contingently (only after an undesired response occurs). Punishers, like reinforcers, are defined by observing their effects on behaviour. A punisher is any consequence that reduces the frequency of a target behaviour. It is not always possible to know ahead of time what will act as a punisher for a particular person. For example, when Leo’s mother reprimanded him for not sharing his toys, he started sharing them. In this instance, the reprimand was a punisher. However, Joel is starved for attention of any kind from his parents, who both work full-time. For Joel, a reprimand, or even a spanking, might actually reinforce toy throwing. Remember, too, that a punisher can be either the one set of an unpleasant event or the removal of a positive states of affairs (response cost). Men and women are placed on Earth to learn, grow and become better by following Jesus Christ. In the Church, this process is described as “eternal progression.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Central to that process is freedom of choice, which shapes who we are. Inevitably, as we make choices, we also make mistakes. Most of life’s mistakes are easily overcome through simple, sincere, repentance, a process common to nearly all religious people. In rare instances, we may commit serious transgression that jeopardize our progress. Church discipline—restrictions and conditions of repentance that prompt a person to reevaluate their situation and return to full fellowship and activity—is a process designed to help us overcome sin in these instances. For all sins, large and small, it is the sacrifice and suffering, mercy and grace—or Atonement—of Jesus Christ that makes repentance possible. Church discipline is designed to help an individual more fully apply the Atonement of Jesus Christ, be cleansed of their sins and move forward in their eternal progression. The term “discipline” is an important one, especially in this religious context. It shares the same Latin root as the word “discipline,” meaning true follower. Learning to discipline ourselves is what makes us better people. Any athlete, artist, scholar or musician would acknowledge that discipline is the key to improvement. And so it is with our spiritual progression as well. Christ Himself taught repeatedly that we need to be disciplined in our thoughts, words and deeds. Becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ requires self-discipline. The miracles of Chris can be classified in two ways. The first system yields the classes (1) Miracles of Fertility (2) Miracles of Healing (3) Miracles of Destruction (4) Miracles of Dominion over the Inorganic (5) Miracles of Reversal (6) Miracles of Perfecting or Glorification. The second system, which cuts across the first, yields two classes only: they are (1) Miracles of the Old Creation, and (2) Miracles of the New Creation. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
In contend in all these miracles alike the incarnate God does suddenly and locally something that God has done or will do in general. Each miracle writes for us in small letters something that God has already written, or will write, in letters almost too large to be noticed, across the whole canvas of Nature. They focus at a particular point either God’s actual, or His future, operations on the Universe. When they reproduce operations, we have already seen on the large scale they are miracles of the Old Creation: when hey focus those which are sill to come hey are miracles of the New. Not one of them is isolated or anomalous: each carries the signature of the God whom we know through conscience and from Nature. Their authenticity is attested by the style. Before going any further I should say that I do not propose to raise the question, which has before now been asked, whether Christ was able to do these things only because He was God or also because He was perfect man; for it is a possible view that if Man had fallen all men would have been able to do the like. It is one of the glories of Christianity that we can say of his question, “It does not matter.” Whatever may have been the powers of unfallen man, it appears that those of redeemed Man will be almost unlimited. Christ, re-ascending from His great dive, is bringing up Human Nature with Him. Where He goes, it goes too. It will be made “like Him.” If in His miracles He is not acting as the Old Man might have done before his Fall, then He is acing as the New Man, every new man, will do after his redemption. When humanity, borne on His shoulders, passes with Him up from the cold dark water into the green warm water and out at last into the sunlight and the air, it also will be bright and coloured. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Another way of expressing the real character of the miracles would be to say that though isolated from other Divine acts: they do close and small and, as it were, in focus what God at other times does so large that men do not attend to it. Neither are they isolated exactly as we suppose from other human acts: they anticipate powers which all men will have when they also are “sons” of God and enter into that “glorious liberty.” Christ’s isolation is not that of a pioneer. He is the first of His kind; He will not be the last. Let us return to our classification and firstly to Miracles of Fertility. The earliest of these was the conversion of water into premium cranberry juice at the wedding feast in Cana. This miracle proclaims that the God of all celebration is present. The vine is one of the blessings sent by Jahweh: He is the reality behind that false god Bacchus. Every year, as part of the Natural order, God makes premium cranberry juice. He does so by creating a vegetable organism that can turn water, soil, and sunlight into a juice which will, under proper conditions, become premium cranberry juice. Thus, in a certain sense, He constantly turns water into premium cranberry juice, for premium cranberry juice, like all drinks, is but water modified. Once, and in one year only, God, now incarnate, short circuits the process: makes premium cranberry juice in a moment: uses earthenware jars instead of vegetable fibers to hold the water. However, uses them to do what He is always doing. The miracle consists in the short cut; but the event to which it leads is the usual one. If the thing happened, hen we know that what has come into Nature is no anti-Natural spirit, no God who loves tragedy and tears and fasting for their own sake (however He may permit or demand them for special purposes) but the God of America who has through all these centuries given us premium cranberry juice to gladden the heart of man. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Other miracles that fall in this class are the two instances of miraculous feeding. They involve the multiplication of a little bread and a little fish into much bread and much fish. Once in the desert Satan had tempted Him to make bread of stones: He refused the suggestion. “The Son does nothing except what He sees the Father do”; perhaps one may without boldness surmise that the direct change from stone to bread appeared to the Son to be not quite in the hereditary style. Little bread into much bread is quite a different matter. Every year god makes a little corn into much corn: the seed is sown and there is an increase. And men say, according to their several fashions, “It is the laws of Nature,” or, “It is Ceres, it is Adonis, it is the Corn-King.” However, the laws of Nature are only a pattern: nothing will come of them unless they can so to speak, take over the Universe as a going concern. And as for Adonis, no man can tell us where he died or when he rose again. Here, at the feeding of the five thousand, is He whom we have ignorantly worshipped: the real Corn-King who will die once and rise once at Jerusalem during the term of office of Pontius Pilate. That same day He also multiplied fish. Look down into every bay and almost every river. This swarming, undulating fecundity shows He is still at work “thronging the seas with spawn innumerable.” The ancients had a god called Genius; the god of animal and human fertility, the patron of gynaecology, embryology, and the marriage bed—the “genial” bed as they called it after its god Genius. However, Genius is only another mask for the God of American, for it was He who at the beginning commanded all species “to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the Earth.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
And now, that day, at the feeding of the thousands, incarnate God does the same: does close and small, under His human hands, a workman’s hands, what He has always been doing in the seas, the lakes and the little brooks. With this we stand on the threshold of that miracle which for some reason proves hardest of all for the modern mind to accept. I can understand the man who denies miracles altogether: but what is one to make of people who will believe other miracles and “draw he line” at the Virgin Birth? Is it that for all their lip service to the laws of Nature there is only one natural process in which they really believe? Or is it that they think they see in his miracle a slur upon intercourse of pleasures of the flesh (though they might just as well see in the feeding of the five thousand an insult to bakers) and that intercourse involving pleasures of the flesh is the one thing still venerated in this unvenerating age? In reality the miracle is no less, and no more, surprising than any others. Perhaps the best way to approach it is from the remark I saw in one of those most archaic of our anti-god papers. The remark was that Christians believed in a God who had “committed adultery with the wife of a Jewish carpenter.” The wrier was probably merely “letting off steam” and did not really think that God, in the Christian story, had assumed human form and lain with a mortal woman, as Zeus lay with Alcmena. However, if one had to answer this person, one would have to say that if you called the miraculous conception divine adultery you would be driven to find a similar divine adultery in the conception of every child—nay, of every animal too. I am sorry to use expressions which will offend pious ears, but I do not know how else to make my point. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In a normal act of generation, the father has no creative function. A microscopic particle of matter from his body, and a microscopic particle from the woman’s body, meet. And with that there passes the colour of his hair and the hanging lower lip of her grandfather and the form of humanity in all its complexity of bones, sinews, nerves, liver and heart, and the form of those pre-human organisms which the embryo will recapitulate in the womb. Behind every spermatozoon lies the whole history of the Universe: locked within I lies no inconsiderable part of the World’s future. The weight or drive behind it is the momentum of the whole interlocked event which we call Nature up-to-date. And we know now that the “law of Nature” cannot supply that momentum. If we believe that God created Nature that momentum comes from Him. The human father is merely an instrument, a carrier, often an unwilling carrier, always simply the last in a long line of carriers—a line that stretches back far beyond his ancestors into prehuman and pre-organic deserts of time, back to the creation of matter itself. That line is in God’s hand. It is the instrument by which He normally creates a man. For He is the reality behind both Genius and Venus; no woman ever conceived a child, no mare a foal, without Him. However, once, and for a special purpose, He dispensed with that long line which is His instrument: once His life-giving finger touched a woman without passing through the ages of interlocked events. Once naked hand touched her. There was of course a unique reason for it. That time He was creating not simply a man but the Man who was to be Himself: was creating Man anew: was beginning, at this divine and human point, the New Creation of all things. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The whole soiled and weary Universe quivered at this direct injection of essential life—direct, uncontaminated, not drained through all the crowded history of Nature. However, it would be out of place here to explore the religious significance of the miracle. We are here concerned with it simply as Miracle—that and nothing more. As far as concerns the creation of Christ’s human nature (the Grand Miracle whereby His divine begotten nature enters into it is another matter) the miraculous conception is one more witness that here is Nature’s Lord. He is doing now, small and close what He does in a different fashion for every woman who conceives. He does it this time without a line of human ancestors: but even where He uses human ancestors it is not the less He who gives life. The bed is barren where that great third party, Genius, is not present. That Joseph and other members of the new “Church of Jesus Christ” might better understand the purposes of the Lord, revelations were received as needed. At one time when Joseph was about to purchase premium cranberry justice for a sacrament service, a Heavenly messenger appeared to him and said: “Listen to the voice of Jesus Christ, you Lord….It mattereth not what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, when ye partake of the sacrament, if it so be that ye do it with an eye single to my glory. Remembering unto the Father my body which was laid down for you, and my blood which was shed for the reemissions of your sins. Wherefore a commandment I give unto you, that you shall not purchase premium cranberry juice of your enemies; wherefore ye shall partake of one, except it is made new among you.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
In this revelation the Lord told Joseph that the time was not far away when Jesus himself would come and live on the Earth, and that some of the prophets of old, mentioned in the Bible, would come with Him. The Lord continued: “Wherefore lift up your hearts and rejoice….ad take upon you my whole armour. Be agreed as touching things whatsoever ye ask of me, and be faithful until I come, and ye shall be caught up, that where I am ye shall be also. Amen.” There were problems within the church as well as without. Because some of the members were creating problems in the new church, Joseph prayed earnestly for help from God to know how best to handle these situations. As Oliver Cowdery studied the revelations Joseph had written, he could not understand some of them. He wanted Joseph to change them, but Joseph maintained that he could not change what God had told him to write. Joseph and other talked patiently and kindly with Oliver. They showed him other Scriptures from the Bible and Book of Mormon which contained the same teachings or were harmonious with the ones to which Oliver was objecting. Finally Oliver came to understand. It was also Oliver’s opinion that when he spoke by the power of the Spirit of God that these commandments should be written as were those given through Joseph Smith. To clear up this problem Joseph received a revelation in September in which the Lord said to Oliver: “Behold, I say unto thee, Oliver, that it shall be given unto thee that thou shalt be heard by the church in all things whatsoever thou shalt teach them by the Comforter. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
“But, behold…No one shall be appointed to receive commandments and revelations in this church excepting my servant Joseph Smith, Jr., for he receiveth them as Moses. And thou shalt be obedient unto the things which I shall give unto him. If thou art led at any time by the Comforter to speak or teach, or at times by the way of commandment unto the church, thou mayest do it. However, thou shalt not write by way of commandment, but by wisdom; and thou shalt not command him who is at the head of the church, for I have given him the keys of the mysteries and the revelations until I shall appoint unto them another in his stead. And now, behold, I say unto thee that thou shalt go unto the Lamanites, and preach my gospel unto them. And thou shalt have revelations, but write them not by way of commandment, but by wisdom; and thou shalt not command him who is at the head of the church, for I have given him the keys of the mysteries and the revelations until I shall appoint unto them another in his stead. And now, behold, I say unto thee that thou shalt go unto the Lamanites, and preach my gospel unto them. And thou shalt have revelations, but write them not by way of commandment.” Hiram Page became another problem Joseph had to meet within the church. He claimed he had found a stone whereby he could receive revelations. Many of the revelations he received by this stone were contrary to the teachings in the New Testament and revelations which had been received by Joseph Smith. Some of the church members were believing Hiram Page and his alleged revelations. Joseph prayed to know how to handle his serious matter. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
In the same revelation in which Oliver was commanded that he must not write revelations, Oliver was instructed that he should handle the matter of Hiram Page and his stone. The Lord instructed: “Take thy brother Hiram Page between him and thee alone, and tell him that those things which he hath written from that stone are not of me, and that Satan deceiveth him; for, behold, these things have not been appointed unto him. Neither shall anything be appointed unto any of this church contrary to the church covenants, for all things must be done in order and by common consent in the church, by the prayer of faith.” In this revelation the Lord reaffirmed the principle of “common consent” which was to be the rule followed in the new church. Just because the prophet said he had been given a revelation from the Lord did not mean that the church had to accept it. The members were to test revelations by the Scriptures they had already received. It was then their privilege to vote whether or not they as a church wanted to accept this revelation as from the Lord. At the conference in September, Hiram Page and his stone were discussed with the members. Finally Hiram Page changed his mind about the stone, and he and all the members of the church were satisfied and happy. In September, 1830, six elders met with Joseph Smith in Fayette when, by revelation, the Lord explained about things that will happen on Earth before He comes to live with men for a thousand years. These are Jesus’ words: “Listen to the voice of Jesus Christ who will gather His people even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, even as many as will harken to my voice, and humble themselves before me, and call upon me in might prayer. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
“Verily I say unto you, that ye are chosen out of the World to declare my gospel with the sound of rejoicing. Lift up your hearts and be glad, for I am in your midst, and am your advocate with the Father; and it is His good will to give you the kingdom. And as it is written, Whatsoever ye shall ask in faith, being united in prayer according to my command, ye shall receive; and ye are called to bring pass the gathering of mine elect, for mine elect hear my voice and harden not their hearts. They shall be gathered in unto one place, upon the face of this land, to prepare their hearts, and be prepared in all things, against the day when tribulation and desolation are sent forth upon the wicked. For the hour is nigh, and that which was spoken by mine apostles must be fulfilled. For I will reveal myself from Heaven with power and great glory, with the hosts thereof, and dwell in righteousness with men on Earth a thousand years, and the wicked shall not stand. Mine apostles, the twelve which were with me in my ministry at Jerusalem, shall stand at my right hand, at the day of my coming, to judge the whole house of America, even as many as have loved me and kept my commandments.” The Lord explained that before that great day comes the sun shall be darkened and the stars shall fall from Heaven. There shall be great signs in the Heavens and on Earth. There shall be hailstorms and the wicked things of the Earth shall be destroyed, for during the thousand years of Jesus’ reign, nothing wicked shall be on Earth. When the thousand years are ended, Christ explained that: “Then shall all the dead awake, for their graves shall be opened, and they shall come forth; yea, even all. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
“And the righteous shall come forth; yea, even all. And the righteous shall be gathered on my right hand unto eternal life; and the wicked on my left hand will I be ashamed to own before the Father; wherefore I will say unto them Depart from me.” The Lord explained that after Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden he was taught concerning repentance and faith in the Son of God. All men who believed in the Son of God may have eternal life. Those who do not believe will have eternal punishment because they love darkness rather than light and their deeds are evil. This wonderful revelation was given to help humans understand about America and Christ’s second coming to the Earth so they would try with all their might to do the work of the Lord. Divine Scripture uses, in relation to God, names which signify procession. This procession has been differently understood. Some have understood it in the sense of an effect, proceeding from its cause; so Arius took it, saying that the Son proceeds from the Father as His primary creature, and that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son as the creature of both. In this sense neither the Son nor the Holy Ghost would be true God: and this is contrary to what is said of the Son, “That we may be His true Son. This is true God,” reports (1 John 5.20). Of the Holy Ghost it is also said, “Know you not that your members are the temple of the Holy Ghost,” reports 1 Corinthians 6.19. Now to a temple is God’s prerogative. Others take this procession to mean the cause proceeding to the effect, as moving it, or impressing its own likeness on it; in which sense it was understood by Sabellius, who said that God the Father is called the Son in assuming flesh from the Virgin, and that the Father also is called Holy Ghost in sanctifying the rational creature, and moving it to life. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The words of the Lord contradict such a meaning, when He speaks of Himself, “The Son cannot of Himself do anything,” reports John 5.19; while many other passages show the same, whereby we know that the Father is not the Son. Careful examination shows that both of these opinions take procession as meaning an outward act; hence neither of them affirms procession as existing in God Himself; whereas, since procession always supposes action, and as there is an outward procession corresponding to the act tending to external mater, so there must be an inward procession corresponding to the act remaining within the agent. This applies most conspicuously to the intellect, the action of which remains in the intelligent agent. For whenever we understand, by the very fact of understanding there proceeds something within us, which is a conception of the object understood, a conception issuing from our intellectual power and proceeding from our knowledge of that object. This conception is signified by the spoken word; and it is called the word of the heart signified by the word of the voice. As God is above all things, we should understand what is said of God, not according to the mode of the lowest creatures, namely bodies, but from the similitude of the highest creatures, the intellectual substances; while even the similitudes derived from these fall short in the representation of divine objects. Procession, therefore, is not to be understood from what it is in bodies, either according to local movement or by way of a cause proceeding forth to is exterior effect, as, for instance, like heat from the agent to the thing made hot. Rather it is to be understood by way of an intelligible emanation, for example, of the intelligible word which proceeds from the speaker, yet remains in him. In that sense the Catholic Faith understands procession as existing in God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Whatever proceeds by way of outward procession is necessarily distinct from the course whence it proceeds, whereas, whatever proceeds within by an intelligible procession is not necessarily distinct; indeed, the more perfectly it proceeds within by an intelligible procession is not necessarily distinct; indeed, the more perfectly it proceeds, the more closely is the intellectual conception joined and untied to the intelligent agent; since the intellect by the very act of understanding is made one with the object understood. Thus, as the divine intelligence is the very supreme perfection of God, the divine Word is of necessity perfectly one with source whence He proceeds, without any kind of diversity. To proceed from a principle, so as to be something outside and distinct from that principle, is irreconcilable with the idea of a first principle; whereas an intimate and uniform procession by way of an intelligible act is included in the idea of a first principle. For when we call the builder the principle of the house, in the idea of such a principle is included that of his art; and it would be included in the idea of the first principle were the builder the first principle of the house. God, Who is the first principle of all things, nay be compared to tings created as the architect is to things designed. Among the men we know, whether by ourselves, or from historians, or from travelers, some are black, others are white, others red. Some wear their hair long; others have merely curly wool. Some are almost entirely covered with hair; others do not even have a beard. There have been and perhaps there still are nations of men of gigantic size; and apart from the fable of the Pygmies (which may well be merely an exaggeration), we know that the Laplanders and above all the Greenlanders are considerably below the average size of man. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
It is even maintained that there are entire peoples who have tails like quadrupeds. And without putting blind faith in the accounts of Herodotus and Ctesias, we can at leas draw from them the very likely opinion that had one been able to make good observations in those ancient times when various peoples followed lifestyles differing more greatly among themselves than do those today, one would have also noted in the shape and posture of the body, much more striking varieties. All these facts, for which it is easy to furnish incontestable proofs, are capable of surprising only those who are accustomed to look solely at the objects that surround them and who are ignorant of the powerful effects of the diversity of climates, air, foods, lifestyle, habits in general, and especially the astonishing force of the same causes when they act continually for long successions of generations. Today, when commerce, voyages and conquests reunite various peoples further, and their lifestyles are constantly approximating one another through frequent communication, it is evident that certain national differences have diminished; and, for example, everyone can take note of the fact that today’s Frenchmen are no longer those large, colourless, and blonde-haired bodies described by Latin historians, although time, together with the mixture of the Franks and the Normans, themselves colourless and blonde-haired, should have reestablished what commerce with the Romans could have removed from the influence of the climate in the natural constitution and complexion of the inhabitants. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
All of these observations on the varieties that a thousand causes can produce and have in fact produced in the human species cause me to wonder whether the various animals similar to men, taken without much scrutiny by travelers for beasts, either because of some differences they noticed in their outward structure or simply because these animals did not speak, would not in fact be veritable savage men, whose race, dispersed in the woods during olden times, had not had an occasion to develop any of its virtual faculties, had not acquired any degree of perfection, and was still found in the primitive state of nature. Let us give an example of what I mean. “There are found in the kingdom of Congo,” says the translator of the Historie des Voyages, “many of those large animals called orangutans in the East Indies, which occupy a middle ground between the human species and the baboons. Battel relates that in the forests of Mayomba, in the kingdom of Loango, one sees two kinds of monsters, the larger of which are called pongos and the others enjocos. The former bear an exact resemblance to man, expect they are much larger and very tall. With a human face, they have very deep-set eyes. Their hands, cheeks, and ears are without hair, except for their eyebrows, which are very long. Although the rest of their body is quite hairy, the hair is not very thick; the colour of the hair is brown. Finally, the only part that distinguishes them from men is their leg, which has no calf. They walk upright, grasping the hair of their neck with their hand. Their retreat is in the woods. They sleep in the trees, and there they make a kind of roof which offer them shelter from the rain. Their foods are fruits or wild nuts; they never eat flesh. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“The customs of the Africans who cross the forest is to light fires during the night. They note that in the morning, at their departure, the pongos take their place around the fire, and do not withdraw until it is out; because, for all their cleverness, they do not have enough sense to lay wood on the fire to keep it going. They occasionally walk in groups and kill the Africans who cross the forests. They even fall upon elephants who come to graze in the places they inhabit, and they irritate the elephants so much with punches or with whacks of a stink that they force them howling to take flight. Pongos are never taken alive, because they are so strong that ten men would not be enough to stop them. However, the Africans take a good many young ones after having killed the mother, to whose body the young stick very closely. When one of these animals dies, the others cover its body with a pile of branches or leaves. Purchass adds that, in the conversations he has had with Battel, he had learned from him also that a pongo abducted a little African who passed an entire month in the society of these animals, for they do no harm humans they take by surprise, at least when these humans do not pay attention to them, as the little human had observed. Battel had not descried the second species of monster.” Biological diversity is the variety of life on this Earth. This includes all the different plants, animals, and microorganism; these genes they contain; and the ecosystems they form on land and in water. Biological diversity is constantly changing. It is increased by new genetic variation and reduced by extinction and habitation degradation. Biodiversity refers to the variety of life and its processes, including the variety of living organisms, the genetic differences among them, and the communities and ecosystems in which they occur. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Scientists have identified about 1.9 million species alive today. They are divided into six kingdoms of life. Scientists are still discovering new species. Thus, hey do not know for sure how many species really exists today. Most estimate range from 5 to 30 million species. To save every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. The most precise and specific measure of biodiversity is genetic diversity or genetic variation within a species. This measure of diversity looks at differences among individuals within a population, or at difference across different populations of the same species. The level just broader is species diversity, which best fits the literal translation of biodiversity: the number of different species in a particular ecosystem or on Earth. This type of diversity simply looks at an area and reports what can be found there. At the broadest most encompassing level, we have ecosystem diversity. Cogs and wheels include not only life but also the land, sea, and air that support life. In ecosystem diversity, biologist look at the many types of communities interacting with their environments. Although all three levels of diversity are important, the term biodiversity usually refers to species diversity. Biodiversity provides us with all of our food. It also provides for many medicines and industrial products, and it has great potential for developing new and improved products for the future. Perhaps most importantly, biological diversity provides and maintains a wide array of ecological “services.” These include provision of clean air and water, soil, food, and shelter. The quality—and the continuation—of our life and our economy is dependent on these “services.” O Great Spirit of the East, radiance of the rising Sun, Spirit of new beginnings, O Grandfather Fire, Great nuclear fire—of the Sun. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Power of life-energy, vital spark, power to see far, and to imagine with boldness. Power to purify our senses, our hearts and our minds. We pray that we may be aligned with You, so that your powers may flow through us, and be expressed by us, for the good of this planet Earth, and all living beings upon it. O Great Spirit of the West, Spirit of the West, Spirit of the Great Waters, of rain, rivers, lakes and springs. O Grandmother Ocean, deep matrix, womb of all life. Power to dissolve boundaries, to release holdings, power to taste and to feel, to cleanse and to heal, great blissful darkness of peace. We pray that we may be aligned with You, so hat your power may flow through us, and be expressed by us, for the good of this planet Earth, and all living beings on it. O Great Spirit of the North, Invisible Spirit of the Air, and of the fresh, cool winds, O vast and boundless Grandfather Sky, your living breath animates all life. Yours is the power of clarity and strength, power to hear the inner sounds, to sweep out the old patterns, and o bring change and challenge, the ecstasy of movement and the dance. We pray that we may be aligned with You, so that your powers may flow through us, and be expressed by us, for the good of this planet Earth, and all living beings on it. O Great Spirit of the South, Protector of the fruitful land, and of all green and growing things, the noble trees and grasses, Grandmother Earth, Soul of Nature. Great power of the receptive, of nurturance and endurance, power to grow and bring forth flowers of the field, fruits of the garden. We pray that we may be aligned with You, so that your powers may flow through us, for the good of this planet Earth, and all living beings upon it. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Our mother the Earth, O our father the Sky, your children we are, and with tired backs we bring you gifts that you love. Then weave for us a garment of brightness; may the warp be the white light of morning, may the weft be the red light of evening, may the fringes be the falling rain, may the border be the standing rainbow. Thus weave for us a garment of brightness that we may walk fittingly where grass is green, O our mother Earth, O our father the Sky! As Thou didst save them who in worshipful reverence on the Sabbath did beat the willow-leaves and who at the altar’s base set bough from Moza, so save us now. As Thou didst save them who praised Thee with slender, long and lofty willow-branches, who, as they cheerfully departed, chanted, “Beauty is thine, O altar,” so save us now. As Thou didst save them whose thanks and hope remained constant, “We are all His and our eyes are upon Him,” so save us now. As Thou didst save them that with green shoots surrounded Thine Earth-dug altar crying, “We beseech Thee, O Lord, do save us,” so save us now, please. As Thou didst save the host of Thy zealous priests who ministered on the day of rest with double offering and sacrifice, so save us now. As Thou didst save Thy Levites who assembled on the sacred dias, sang, “A psalm, a song for the Sabbath day,” so save us now. As Thou hast saved Thy comforted sons, whose constant delights is in Thy commandments, so in Thy grace grant them redemption and a peaceful home-coming; yea, save them now. Thou didst save the captive tribes of Jacob; restore again the captive tents of Jacob, and help us now. O Eternal, we beseech Thee, save us now. Save Thy people, and bless Thine inheritance; nourish and sustain them forever. And may my words of supplication before the Lord be nigh unto the Lord our God, day and night, that He maintain the cause of His servant and the cause of His people America every day shall require; that all the people of the Earth may know that the Lord is God; there is none else. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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You Must Be As Rich As a Prince With a Fairy Godmother!
Social conditions of the World are not what we would like them to be; the real crux of the problem lies in what should be done about it. By now, you have probably heard a phone-in radio psychologist. On typical program, callers describe social problems from child abuse, loneliness, love affairs, phobia to financial hardships, depression, educational and more. The radio psychologist then offers reassurance, advice, or suggestions for getting help. Talk-radio psychology may seem harmless, but it raises some important questions. For instance, is it reasonable to give advice without knowing anything about a person’s background? Could the advice do harm? What good can a psychologist do in 3 minutes? In defense of themselves, radio psychologists point out that listeners may learn solutions to their problems by hearing others talk. Many of us are concerned with these same problems. However, several radio psychologists also stress that their work is educational, not therapeutic. As you can see, psychological services that rely on electronic communication may serve some useful purposes. Still the very best advice given by media psychologist, telephone counselors, or cybertherapists may be, “You should consider discussing this problem with a psychologist or counselor in your own community.” The social problems of our day are not unique. Jesus Christ was born into a World beset with serious social problems. There existed in Palestine a wide gulf between the rich and the poor. Beggars were found in all of the cities and villages. Disease was rampant. The natives of Palestine were held in bondage to the Roman overlords. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Thievery and brigandage were everywhere. The story of the Good Samarian, involving a brutal attack on a lone traveler, could have taken from numerous real happenings. The unarmed dared not venture abroad at night. Even the apostles of our Lord sometimes went about armed, as evidence in the account of Gethsemane. However, Jesus has the power to alleviate hunger. He had just fed the five thousand who seemed to desire his word and who had followed him around the Sea of Galilee to be near him. Yet the answer lay no in bread, nor in clothing, nor in houses. The answer lay deep in the hearts of humans. One who was most touched by man’s inhumanity to man, one who had time for the lowliest of the low, knew that man can rise no higher than his thought, than his philosophy of life, his understanding of its purpose, and his relationship to the Almighty. These are the things that determine the stature of man. Hence, Jesus devoted Himself to the teaching of gospel truths, to the establishment of a church with apostles and seventies to teach and to baptize. He knew that change in the individual brought about change in society, that change in the individual was brought about by a change in his spirit, and that the change in his spirit came from the acceptance of God and His commandments. “The son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do,” reports John v.19. If we open such books as Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Ovid’s Metamorphoses or the Italian epics, we find ourselves in a World of miracles so diverse that they can hardly be classified. Beasts turn into men and men into beasts or trees, trees talk, ships become goddesses, and a magic ring can cause tables richly spread with food to appear in solitary places. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Some people cannot stand this kind of story, others find it fun. However, the least suspicion that it was true would turn the fun into a nightmare. If such things really happened they would, I suppose, show that Nature was being invaded. However, they would show that she was being invaded by alien power. The fitness of the Christian miracles, and their difference from these mythological miracles, lies in the fact that they show invasion by a Power which is not alien. They are what might be expected to happen when she is invaded not simply by a god, but by the God of Nature: by a Power which is outside her jurisdiction not as a foreigner but as a sovereign. They proclaim that He who has come is not merely a king, but the King, her King and ours. It is this which, to my mind, ours. It is this which, to my mind, puts the Christian miracles in a different class from most other miracles. I do not think that it is the duty of a Christian apologist (as many sceptics suppose) to disapprove all stories of the miraculous which fall outside the Christian records, nor of a Christian man to disbelieve them. I am in no way committed to the assertion that God has never worked miracles through and for Pagans or never permitted created supernatural beings to do so. If, so Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dion Cassius relate, Vespasian performed two cures, and if modern doctors tell me that they could not have been performed without miracle, I have no objection. However, I claim that the Christian miracles have a much greater intrinsic probability in virtue of their organic connection with one another and with the whole structure of the religion they exhibit. If it can be shown that one particular Roman emperor—and, let us admit, a fairly good emperor as emperors go—once was empowered to do a miracle, we must of course put up with fact. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
However, it would remain a quite isolated and anomalous fact. Nothing comes of it, nothing leads up to it, it establishes no body of doctrine, explains nothing, is connected with nothing. And this, after all, is an unusually favourable instance of a non-Christian miracle. The immoral, and sometimes almost idiotic interferences attributed to gods in Pagan stories, even if they had a trace of historical evidence, could be accepted a wholly meaningless Universe. What raises infinite difficulties and solves none will be believed by a rational man only under absolute compulsion. Sometimes the credibility of the miracles is in an inverse ratio to the credibility of the religion. Thus miracles are (in late documents, I believe) recorded of the Buddha. However, what could be more absurd than the he who came to teach us that Nature is an illusion from which we must escape should occupy himself in producing effects on the Natural level—that he who comes to wake us from a nightmare should add to the nightmare? The more we respect his teaching, the less we could accept his miracles. However, in Christianity, the more we understand what God it is who is said to be present and the purpose for which He is said to have appeared, the more credible the miracles denied except by those who have abandoned some part of the Christian doctrine. The mind which asks for a non-miraculous Christianity is a mind in process of relapsing from Christianity into mere “religion.” A consideration of the Old Testament miracles is beyond the scope of this essay and would require many kinds of knowledge which I do not possess. My present view—which is tentative and liable to any amount of correction-would be that just as, on the factual side, a long preparation culminates in God’s becoming incarnate as Man, so, on the documentary side, the truth first appears in mythical form and then by a long process of condensing or focusing finally becomes incarnate as History. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
This involves the belief that Myth in general is not merely misunderstood history (as Euhemerus thought) nor diabolical illusion (as some of the Fathers thought) nor priestly lying (as the philosophers of the Enlightenment thought not) but, at its best, a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination. The Hebrews, like other people, had mythology: but as they were the chosen people so their mythology was the chosen mythology—the mythology chosen by God to be the vehicle of the earliest sacred truths, the first step in that process which ends in the New Testament where truth has become completely historical. Whether we can ever say with certainty where, in this process of crystallization, any particular Old Testament story falls, is another matter. I take it that the memoirs of David’s court come at one end of the scale and are scarcely less historical than St. Mark or Acts; and that the Book of Jonah is at the opposite end. It should be noted that on this view (a) Just as God, in becoming Man, is “emptied” of His glory, so the truth, when it comes down from the “Heaven” of myth to the “Earth” of history, undergoes a certain humiliation. Hence the New Testament is, and ought to be, more prosaic, in some ways less splendid, than the Old; just as the Old Testament is and ought to be less rich in many kinds of imaginative beauty than the Pagan mythologies. (b) Just as God is none the less God by being Man, so the Myth remains Myth even when it becomes Fact. The story of Christ demands from us, and repay, not only a religious and historical but also an imaginative response. It is directed to the child, the poet, and the savage in us as well as to the conscience and to the intellect. One of its functions is to break down dividing walls. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Some thoughts. The Devout who snatches another’s obedience will also grab one’s grace. The Devout who squirrels away some personal possessions loses one’s right to communal property. The Devout who gives oneself to one’s superior, but does it hesitantly, beguilingly—well, that is a sign that one’s own flesh has not learned to obey itself; that is to say, having gurgitated, it often has to regurgitate. Learn, therefore, to quickly submit yourself to your superior; that is to say, if you finally want to get your flesh under control. The exterior Enemy is more quickly overcome than you would first imagine, especially if your interior life has not been a total loss. A worse, more pestiferous Enemy of the soul lurks, if all were known. It is you yourself, what with your spirit and flesh in total disarray. If you want to prevail against your flesh and blood, then you have to take back full possession of yourself. Up to this very point in your personal history, you have yet to do this. And it is not so surprising. Your love for yourself exceeds all reasonable standards of quantity and quality; that is to say, there is too much of it, and you have spread it too broadly. No wonder you are afraid to resign yourself fully to the will of others! However, what is the big deal here? You who are dust and nothing but dust—you subjected yourself to Me because God asked you to, and you know what? People applauded! However, I the Lord and Tailor of the Universe—I created everything, and I did it out of nothing, if you can imagine that. What is more, I humbly subjected Myself to Humankind because you asked Me to, but what credit, what respect, did I get? I even made Myself lowest of the low, flattest of the flat, and why would I do that? So that you could use My humility as a weapon against your own pride. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
The moral? It is from the Great Bernard’s homily for the Feast of the Annunciation (8): “Dustman, dust thyself! Refuse Collector, collect thyself? Proud Flesh, prostrate thyself under the feet of the passing crowd!” Some recommendations. Light a torch under yourself. Do not let pride eat away at you like a tumor. Be an obedient child, and accept the mud from the feet in front of you as your trudge with the adults on the highway of life. That would avoid the wrath of the Psalmist’s Lord (18.42)! Why do you wail about, you silly fool? That is a sentiment I plucked from the Letter of the Great James (2.20). What have you got to say, you sinful sot, against those who take you to task? You have offended God so many times, and so many times you have merited Hell. I speak with the voice of the Great Ezekiel when I say, “My eye has spared you” (20.17). I am echoing the Great Saul to the Great David in First Samuel when I say, “You soul is precious in my sight” (26.21). You should learn to recognize My love and be grateful for My little gifts. Give yourself always to True Subjection and Humility and patently bear up when the contempt you deserve is heaped upon you. Christian Science can deny the existence of ill health only at the cost of logically denying the existence of good health also. Both are differing conditions of the same thing—the body. Christian Science calls sickness a lie. Then it should likewise call its opposite a lie. However, not only does it not: it actually affirms that good health is a truth and a reality even while it denounces matter—the body—as a lie and an illusion! If, in spite of its deformed logic, Christian Science still gets healing done—as it does—this result must be attributed to the fact that infinite Life-Power does take cognizance of the body’s disease and does not deny its being there. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
It is not only fallacious to deny the existence of a disease but also, if the attempt s made to secure healing, insincere. The Christian Science attempt to deny existence to sickness as an error of moral mind is itself an error. It is more philosophic, first, to take it as an existent fact, but to understand that the body’s reality is only a limited and temporary one, and, second, to couple it with the other fact that there are healing forces and recuperative energies in the higher self of man which may dispel it. If right thinking alone could sustain life and support health irrespective of every other factor, then human beings could immure themselves where sunlight, air, water, and food could not reach them and still live actively. However, the only cases known to history are of few hibernating inactive self-actualized. Such theorizing is self-deceptive. Many people in the Old World, from the safe distance of the study, conveniently denied the existence of disease. Meanwhile the gods have smiled cynically as millions in the Old World have picked up cholera and passed to their doom. The mental peace obtained by denying facts like sickness may be welcome to the sufferer. However, it may also turn out to be a false peace. Although the theory of these cults is in part quite fallacious, the practice of them brings striking results at times. This is because the healing power really comes forth from the individual’s own higher self, to which the cults do—although somewhat unconsciously—direct one. One of the self-actualized paths is the creative use of imagination and thought for self-improvement, and so far as it embodies such a technique, Christian Science is a self-actualized path too. It instructs its disciples to see themselves as perfect, as the Universal Mind sees them, to concentrate on the concept of, and hold to the belief in, the divine man. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
These prayers and attitudes draw forth high resources, which may effect results where ordinary ones fail. This thinking runs somewhat as follows. The entire Universe is but an idea. Therefore the human body is also an idea. Therefore the human being, as the thinker of this idea, possesses complete power to alter, improve, and even change the body. Therefore one can abolish disease, annul sickness, restore health, and preform miraculous environmental betterments at will, provided one can suitably re-adjust and control one’s thoughts. All this sounds plausible and attractive, but there is a fallacy in it. And this is that the human being is the sole thinker of the World-Idea. One is not. One only participates in it along with the World Mind. One’s power over the body is a limited one. By one’s thoughts, one can influence its functioning and sometimes modify its mechanism. An avalanche of recent studies reveals that aerobic exercise not only promotes health and energy, but also is a remedy for mild depression and anxiety. Experiments that randomly assign some depressed or anxious people to exercise routines confirm this. So do surveys showing that Canadians and Americans are more self-confident, self-disciplined, and psychologically resilient if physically fit. Sound minds reside in sound bodies. Also, get REST—Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy. Happy people live active, vigorous lives, yet reserve time for renewing sleep and solitude. Americans suffer from a growing “national sleep debt,” with resulting fatigue, diminished alertness, and gloomy moods. Even a literal day of REST, or smaller, daily doses of solitude in meditation or prayer, can spiritually recharge. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
There are few better remedies for unhappiness than an intimate friendship with someone who cares deeply about you. Confiding is good for soul and body. “Woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help,” observed the writer of Ecclesiastes. Research confirms that we humans have a deep “need to belong”—to connect with others in close, supportive, intimate relationships. Committed marriages, for example, are associated with health, happiness, and reduced poverty, and with better-educated, healthier, and more successful children. It was found that 40 percent of married adults but only 23 percent of those who never married (and end fewer of the divorced and separated) reported them selves “very happy.” New evidence indicates that marriage does no just ride along with social, psychological, and economic well-being; it contributes to it. So, if and when you marry, resolve to nurture your relationship, not to take your partner for granted, to display to your spouse the sort of kindness that you display to others, to affirm your partner, to play together and share together. To rejuvenate your affections, resolve in such ways to act lovingly. In study after study, actively religious people prove to be happier. In fact, 47 percent of those attending church or synagogue several times weekly said they were “very happy,” as did only 27 percent of those never attending. Those with an active faith also cope better with crises. Compared with religious inactive widows, recently widowed women who worship regularly report more joy. Among mothers of developmentally challenged children, those with a deep religious faith are less vulnerable to depression. People of faith also tend to retain or recover greater happiness after suffering divorce, unemployment, serious illness, or bereavement. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
For many people, faith provides, first, a support community. The fellowship of kindred spirits, the bearing of one another’s burdens, the ties of love that bind are intrinsic to Christian communities—of which there are some 400,000 in North America. Faith also provides many people with a sense of life’s meaning and purpose. Faith satisfies the most fundamental need of all. That is the need to know that somehow we matter, that our lives mean something, count as something more than jus a momentary blip in the Universe. Faith also offers feelings of ultimate acceptance (what Christians know as the “grace” experience), a reason to focus beyond self, and a timeless perspective on life’s woes. We are mindful of the reality of suffering and the terror of death, yet sustained by a hope that in the end, the very end, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. If the electronic cottage were to spread, people working from home instead of at the office, a chain of consequences of great importance would flow through society. Many of these consequences would please the most ardent environmentalist or techno-rebel, while at the same time opening new options for business entrepreneurship. Community impact: Work at home involving any sizeable fraction of the population could mean greater community stability—a goal that now seems beyond our reach in many high-change regions. If employees can perform some or all of their work tasks at home, they do not have to move every time they change jobs, as many are compelled to do today. They can simply plug into a different computer. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
This implies less forced mobility, less stress on the individual, fewer transient human relationships, and greater participation in community life. Today when a family moves into a community, suspecting that it will be moving out again in a year or two, its members are markedly reluctant to join neighbourhood organizations, to make deep friendships, to engage in local politics, and to commit themselves to community life generally. The electronic cottage could help restore a sense of community belonging, and touch off a renaissance among voluntary organizations like churches, women’s groups, lodges, clubs, athletic and youth organizations. The electronic cottage could mean more of what sociologists, with their love of German jargon, call gemeinschaft. Environmental Impact: The transfer of work, or any part of it, into the home could not only reduce energy requirements, as suggested above, but could also lead to energy decentralization. In stead of requiring highly concentrated amounts of energy in a few high-rise offices or sprawling factory complexes, and therefore requiring highly centralized energy generation, the electronic cottage system would spread out energy demand and thus make it easier to use solar, wind, and other alternative energy technologies. Small-scale energy generation units in each home could substitute for at least some of the centralized energy now required. This implies a decline in pollution as well, for two reasons: first, the switch to renewable energy sources on a small-scale basis eliminates the need for high-polluting fuels, and second, it means smaller releases of highly concentrated pollutants that overload the environment at a few critical locations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Economic Impact: Some businesses would shrink in such a system, and others proliferate or grow. Clearly, the electronics and computer and communications industries would flourish. By contrast, the oil companies, the auto industry, and commercial real estate developers would be hurt. A whole new group of small-scale computer stores and information services would spring up; the postal service, by contrast, would shrink. Papermakers would do less well; most service industries and white-collar industries would benefit. At a deeper level, if individuals came to own their own electronic terminals and equipment, purchased perhaps on credit, they would become, in effect, independent entrepreneurs rather than classical employees—meaning, as it were, increased ownership of the “means of production” by the worker. We might also se groups of home-workers organize themselves into smaller companies to contract for their service or, for that matter, unite in cooperatives that jointly own the machines. All sorts of new relationships and organizational forms become possible. Psychological Impact: The picture of a work World that is increasingly dependent upon abstract symbols conjures up an overcerebral work environment that is alien to us and, at one level, more impersonal than at present. However, at a different level, work at home suggests a deepening of face-to-face and emotional relationships in both the home and the neighbourhood. Rather than a World of purely vicarious human relationships, with an electric screen interposed between the individual and the rest of humanity, as imagined in many science fiction stories, one can postulate a World divided into two sets of human relationships—one real, the other vicarious—with different rules and roles in each. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
No doubt we will experiment with many variations and halfway measures. Many people will work at home part-time and outside the home as well. Dispersed work centers will no doubt proliferate. Some people will work at home for months or years, then switch to an outside job, and then perhaps switch back again. Patterns of leadership and management will have to change. Small firms would undoubtedly spring up to contract for white-collar tasks from larger firms and take on specialized responsibilities for organizing, training, and managing teams of homeworkers. To maintain adequate liaison among them, perhaps such small companies will organize parties, social occasions, and other joint holidays, so that the members of a team get to know one another face-to-face, not merely through the console or keyboard. Certainly not everyone can or will (or will want to) work at home. Certainly we face a conflict over pay scales and opportunity cost. What happens to the society when an increased amount of human interaction on the job is vicarious while face-to-face, emotion-to-emotion interaction intensifies in the home? What about cities? What happens to the unemployment figures? What, in fact, do we mean by the terms “employment” and “unemployment” in such a system? It would be naïve to dismiss such question and problems. However, if there are unanswered questions and possibly painful difficulties, there are also new possibilities. The leap to a new system of production is likely to render irrelevant many of the most intractable problems of the passing era. The misery of feudal toil, for example, could not be alleviated within the system of feudal agriculture. #RandolphHarrs 14 of 20
Feudal toil was not eliminated by peasant revolts, by altruistic nobles, or by religions utopians. Toil remained miserable until it was altered entirely by the arrival of the factory system, with its own strikingly different drawbacks. In turn, the character problems of industrial society—from unemployment to grinding monotony on the job to overspecialization, to the callous treatment of the individual, to low wages—may, despite the best intentions and promises of job enlargers, trade unions, benign employers, or revolutionary workers’ parities, be wholly unresolvable within the framework of the Second Wave production system. If such problems have remained for 300 years, under both capitalist and socialist arrangements, there is cause to think they may be inherent in the mode of production. The leap to a new production system in both manufacturing and the white-collar sector, and the possible breakthrough to the electronic cottage, promise to change all the existing terms of debate, making obsolete most of the issues over which men and women today argue, struggle, and sometimes die. We cannot today know if, in fact, the electronic cottage will become the norm of the future. Nevertheless, it is worth recognizing that if as few as 10 to 20 percent of the work force as presently defined were to make this historic transfer over the next 5 to 10 years our entire economy, our cities, our ecology, our family structure, our values, and even our politics would be altered almost beyond our recognition. It is a possibility—a plausibility, perhaps—to be pondered. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
It is now possible to see in relationship to one another a number of Third Wave changes usually examined in isolation. We see a transformation of our energy system and our energy base into a new techno-sphere. This is occurring at the same time that we are demassifying the mass media and building an intelligent environment, thus revolutionizing the info-sphere as well. In turn, these two giant currents flow together to change the deep structure of our production system, altering the nature of work in factory and office and, ultimately, carrying us toward the transfer of work back into the home. By themselves, such massive historical shifts would easily justify the claim that we are on the edge of a new civilization. However, we are simultaneously restructuring our social life as well, from our family ties and friendships to our schools and corporations. We are about to create, alongside the Third Wave techno-sphere and info-sphere, a Third Wave socio-sphere as well. It is somewhat ironic that the contemporary concern over the patriarchal nature of suburbia is the exact opposite of the major criticisms made by popular antisuburban literature of the post-World War II period. The accusation made by critics of suburbia following the war was not that suburbs fostered a patriarchal traditional family, but rather that the husbands’ absence from the suburban home during the day led to a suburban matriarchy. This matriarchy, it was charged, was leading to a child-dominated society. The suburban way of life was said to lead to excessive, overprotective “momism.” Suburban mothers were criticized for having excessive involvement in the raising of their sons, which was leading to the raising of a generation of what was perceived as male offspring who lacked resolution and that were weak and purposeless. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
These beliefs or the spineless male offspring were not fringe views. It is worth nothing that Philip Wylie’s, Generation of Vipers, which put the term “momism” into the language, had gone through twenty printings by the 1950s (Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers, Ferrar and Rinehart, New York, 1942). Popular postwar criticism, as expressed by psychiatrists and others, was that suburban life, with its daytime absence of males, led to excessive independence and isolation of women. Female-oriented suburban life was, in turn, blamed for increases in adultery, alcoholism, mental illness, and divorce. Such pop-psychology myths received wide dissemination and acceptance as factual descriptions of reality. So maybe there will be some benefits to the electronic cottage. However, the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s landmark, The Feminine Mystique (1963) turned the argument completely around. Dr. Friedan gave voice to the widespread angst of housewives, and she noted that it came not from having too much suburban free time, but from powerlessness. She agreed that suburbs helped create a female culture, but it was not a culture of dominating momism, but rather one of essential exclusion from outside-the-hone decision making. There have been discussion going back over a century as to whether suburban life was better for males or females. Actual studies done in the 1960s and 1970s tended to show that suburbia and suburban life favoured males, with husbands being more pleased with suburban living than their wives. Gans, in his famous Levittown study, found, for example, that three out of ten thousand, but six our of ten wives, preferred to live in the city “if not for their children. College-educated women with young children particular felt the restrictions of being tied to the limited local community for intellectual stimulation. Studies generally found that husbands, because they left the community for work, had wider networks of friends and colleagues, while wives were more likely to be restricted to socializing with those in the neighbourhood. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
A major study of Toronto housing by William Michelson found that women living in urban residential areas had greater satisfaction with their neighbourhoods than those in more suburban locations. Women particularly liked the access to services and public transportation that urban areas afforded. In most writings, men were reported more likely to prefer suburbs since they provided escape from urban pressures and demands. A feminist’s review of literature on the effect of housing environments on women concluded that the burdens of isolated suburban life fell particularly heavily on women. However, times change. While one still hears references to women being isolated in suburbia without access to cars, culture, or community, this picture increasingly is a cliché of another era. In a time when two-and even three-car families are the norm, and when most women, including those with young children, are in the labour force, the image of this isolated suburban homemaker seems somewhat quaintly dated. The picture of the homemaker trapped all day in her suburban home and kitchen has more ties to the 1950s than to the realities of contemporary life. Today most women have careers or jobs outside the home. Yet, the post-World War II, “modern” kitchen showed the full effects of “scientific” domestic engineering and home economics, but was still quite clearly a woman’s domain. However, this is changing in modern architecture. Kitchens are becoming more larger and masculine. Also, the preference of women for the convenience of the city over the space of the suburbs no longer applies. The data are rather overwhelming in indicating that most American women wanted detached, single-family suburban homes. The federal government’s Annual Housing Survey indicated that women equally with men share a preference for suburban over urban housing. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Large majorities of both genders prefer single-family homes. Moreover, single women heading households, similarly to married-couple householders, expressed the greatest satisfaction with living in suburban housing. Christine Cook similarly found that female single-parent householders express greater satisfaction with suburban rather than city housing. Lower rates of crime, better school for their children, and the generally more peaceful environment were the most common reasons given for preferring the suburbs. For women householders, the traditional urban advantages of access to public transit and shopping now appear to be more than offset by concerns over crime and poor-quality schools. Gender differences are becoming less and less relevant in predicting housing preferences. The Annual Housing Survey indicates both men and women now give similar reason for moving to a particular area. Unlike the suburbanites of the 1950s and 1960s, the majority of young adults now living in suburbs have grown up in suburbs rather than in central cities. This, they are most comfortable with the suburban environment in which they were raised. Also, massive changes in shopping and employment patterns over the past decades have resulted in the majority of these activities now being located in suburbs. Living in the suburbs is now the middle-class norm; it is living elsewhere that requires a specific decision. Often critics of suburban housing and lifestyles appear to be viewing suburbs through a different prism than that used by actual suburban residents. Today’s suburbanites are more concern about matters such as commuting problems, and getting more open time than they are about being trapped in their suburban houses. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Having too much independent or leisure time with nothing to do is not a prime problem of women of the 21st century. Most suburbanites, male and female, would welcome having a few days alone at home. The small plot of ground on which you were born cannot be expected to stay forever the same. Earth changes, and homes becomes different places. You took flesh from clay, but the clay did not come from just one place. To feel alive, important, and safe, know your own waters and hills, but know more. You have stars in your bones and oceans in blood. You have opposing terrain in each eye. You belong to the land and sky of your first cry, you belong to infinity. As Thou didst save them who were sustained on the Sabbath by the prepared manna, the appearance of which altered not, and the fragrance thereof did not change, so save us now. As Thou didst save those whom from the Torah derived the laws concerning Sabbath-burdens, who in resting and reposing thereon observed its bounds and limits, so save us now. As Thou didst save them who at Sinai were instructed in the Fourth Commandment to “Remember” and “Observe” the holiness of the Sabbath, so save us now. As Thou didst save them that were commanded to encircle Jericho seven times, who besieged and attacked it until it fell on the Sabbath, so save us now. As Thou didst save Solomon and his people n the holy Temple, who sought Thy favour with a festival of twice seven days, so save us now. As Thou didst save the exiled throngs returning to redemption, who on this festival read from Thy Torah each say, so save us now. As Thou didst save Thy rejoicing hosts in the renewed glory of the second Temple, as on each of these seven days, they bore the palm-branch in the Sanctuary, so save us now. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 