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What a Lovely Day for a Bit of Mystery!
It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves. I hear your words, My dear Devout; now you hear Mine. You will find them not only suasive, but also persuasive. In fact, they exceed in wisdom all the accumulated knowledge of Philosophy since the World began. My particular words for you today are “spirit and life.” My Beloved Disciple recorded them in his Gospel (6.63), but Humanity cannot seem to make any sense out of them. Important words, they should not be exegeted smugly, if I may allude to that hoary Preacher of Ecclesiastes (9.17), but listened to respectfully. That is to say, they should be received with all humility and yet great affection. Our seventeenth-century ancestors differed from us in most ways, but in nothing did they differ more than in their attitude toward the truth. In this they were closer to the Middle Ages than to us. For them a lie—a breaking of one’s faith—was the worst of sins. Today, many do not regard lying as a serious moral wrong. If the word “morality” is mentioned we think immediately of our bodily appetites, especially of pleasures of the flesh, barbiturates, paraphernalia, liquor and contraband. If the word “morality” is mentioned we think immediately of our bodily appetites very seriously—perhaps too seriously—but we do not regard lying as a mortal sin. We are one of the few civilizations in which entire professions (TV news media, for example, and public relations) are seriously devoted to bending the truth. Dante, in his Divine Comedy, divided sins into three kinds: those of lust, those of violence, and those of fraud. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The sins of lust—those we tend to take most seriously—were those that Dante thought most trivial; the sins of fraud—which we take lightly—were for Dante the worst of all. To create a “credibility gap” as our revealing phrase has it (as though the only relevant issue is whether a statement will compel belief), to lie, was for the medieval humans to break one’s faith, and it was faith which constituted the bonds between humans and their fellow humans, between humans and the state, between humans and God. To lie was to reduce all the most valuable relationships of life to chaos. And the seventeenth-century Puritan, like Dante, was still living by his faith. Just how important the truth was to the seventeenth-century Puritan may be gathered from the fact that all of the innocent persons who were executed—and the majority of those executed were innocent—could have saved themselves by lying. After the first execution—that of Bridget Bishop—took place in June it became obvious to everyone that persons who confessed, like Tituba and Dorcas Good, were not being brought to trial. Thus any suspected person might have one’s life by confessing. Twenty people died, nineteen of them hanged and one pressed for refusing to plead. Bridget Bishop, Mammy Redd, and George Burroughs were three of these. One cannot be at all certain of the guilt or innocence of several more. However, at least a dozen now seem to be clearly innocent. Twelve people, and probably more, chose to die rather than belie themselves. It is impressive evidence of the Puritan’s attachment to the truth. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Yet it was not really so simple as that, because the truth was not easy to find in Salem in 1692. The greatest difficulty was created by the genuineness of the afflicted persons’ fits. Their sufferings were so convincing that they often shook the confidence of the accused. One example is William Hobbes, who began by stoutly denying that he had anything to do with the afflicted girls’ convulsions. When he looked at them they fell down in fits, and Hathorne accused him of overlooking them (id est, of he evil eye), yet still he denied it. Abigail Williams cried out that she saw his specter going to hunt Mercy Lewis “and immediately said Mercy fell into a fit and diverse others.” “Can you now deny it?” said Hathorne. “I can deny it to my dying day,” said William Hobbes. However, he did not. Here, after all, were people in hideous convulsions, and saying that his specter was the cause. How could this be? Hathorne suggested that the Devil might be able to use Hobbes’ specter because of Hobbes’ sins; he had not observed either public or private worship. Might not the Devil have taken advantage of that? Hobbes “was silent a considerable space—then said yes.” The girls’ fits shook not only Hobbes’ confidence in himself, but also his confidence in his daughter Abigail, the wild young girl who had boasted that she had sold herself “body and soul to the Old Boy.” Hathorne wanted to know whether Hobbes had not known for a long time that his daughter was a witch. “No, sir,” was the reply. “Do you think she is a witch now?” asked Hathorne. And all that Hobbes could say was, “I do no know.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Abigail Faulkner’s experience was similar. At her first examination, on August 11, she firmly denied that she had anything to do with the girls’ afflictions. When she looked at them they fell down in fits, and Hathorne asked her, “Do you not see?” Yes, she saw. However, she had nothing to do with it. Yet she would not doubt that the girls were suffering, and saw no reason to doubt their word that it was her specter afflicting them. Therefore the Devil must be appearing in her form: “It is the Devil does it in my shape.” However, by August 30 she was no longer so sure of her innocence. It was true, she said, that she had been angry at what people said when her cousin, Elizabeth Johnson, had been arrested. She had felt malice toward the afflicted persons then because they were the cause of her cousin’s arrest. She has wished them ill, and “her spirit being raised she did pinch her hands together.” Perhaps the Devil had taken advantage of that to pinch the girls, thus exploiting her malice. Even those whose confidence was not shaken bore testimony to the impressiveness of the fits. Mary Easty knew that has had not bewitched the girls, and she was confident as well of the innocence of her sisters, Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Cloyse. Yet she had to grant that there was something preternatural in the girls’ behaviour. “It is an evil spirit,” she said, “but whether it be witchcraft I do not know.” Even George Burroughs, who had been audacious enough to boast of occult powers, found himself stunned by the girls’ behaviour. “Being asked what he thought of these things he answered it was an amazing and humbling Providence, but he understood nothing of it.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Indeed, these courtroom fits were so convincing that most of the indictments were for witchcraft committed during the preliminary examination rather than for the offenses named in the original complain. The typical order of events in the Salem witchcraft cases was: the swearing out of a complaint for acts of witchcraft; a preliminary examination during which the afflicted persons had convulsive fits; an indictment for acts of witchcraft performed during the preliminary examination; and the trial. The direct cause of these fits, in the courtroom or out of it, was, of course, not witchcraft itself, but the afflicted person’s fear of witchcraft. If fits were occasioned by fear of someone like Bridget Bishop, who was actually practicing witchcraft, they might also be occasioned by fear of someone who was only suspected of practicing it. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law! The Winchester Estate had belonged to the family ever since the reign of George Washington, and there was a curious old wing and a cloistered quadrangle still remaining of the original edifice, and in excellent preservation. The rooms at the end of the house were ornate, and somewhat darksome and gloomy, it is true; but, though rarely used they were perfectly habitable, and were of service on great occasions when the Winchester was crowded with guests. The central portion of the Winchester had been rebuilt in the reign James K. Polk, and was of noble and palatial proportions. The southern wing, and a long music-room with thirteen tall narrow daisy-stained glass windows added on to it, were as modern as the time. Altogether, the Winchester was a very splendid mansion with 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, 6 kitchens, and even once had a nine-story tower. It was one of the chief glories of our country. All the land in the Winchester estate, and for a long way beyond its boundaries, belonged to the Winchester family. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The Winchester estate grounds actually expanded all the way down to Steven’s Creek Boulevard. The community church was once within the park walls. The former estate was actually much larger than it is today, it was composed of 500 to 600 rooms at one time, but the 1906 Earthquake brought down the nine-story tower and much of the fourth floor with it. The death of William Wirt Winchester left his son, William Wirt Winchester II, unprovided for, and he was fain to go out into the bleak unknown World, and earn his living in a position of dependence—a dreadful thing for a Winchester to be obliged to do. Out of respect for the traditions and prejudices of his race, he made it his business to seek employment abroad, where the degradation of one solitary Winchester was not so likely to inflict shame upon the ancient house to which he belonged. Happily for himself, he had been carefully educated, and had industriously cultivated the usual modern accomplishments in the calm retirement of the University of Cambridge. He was so fortunate as to obtain a situation at Vienna, in a German family of high rank; and remained there for seven years, laying aside year by year a considerable portion of his liberal salary. When his pupils had grown up, his kind mistress procured for him a still more profitable position at St. Petersburg, where he remained for five more years, at the end of which time he yielded to a yearning that had been long growing upon him—an ardent desire to see his dear old country home once more. He loved the soil from which he had sprung. In all of her letter for some time past, his mother, Mrs. Winchester begged that whenever he felt himself justified in coming home, he would pay a long visit to the Winchester Estate. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“I wish you could come home at Christmas,” she wrote, in the autumn of the year of which I am speaking. “We shall be very gay, and I expect all kinds of pleasant people at the Winchester. When he arrived there, the Old Winchester was in its glory, at about nine o’clock on a clear starlit night. A light frost whitened the broad sweeping lawns, 12,000 boxwood hedges that were winding through the garden, and the other 1,500 plants, trees and shrubs. From the music room at the end of the southern wing, to the heavily framed gothic windows of the old rooms on the north, there shone one blaze of light. The scene was reminiscent of some unusual place in a German legend; and young William half expected to see the lights fade out all in a moment, and long shingled façade wrapped in sudden darkness. The old butler, whom he remembered from his very infancy, and who did not seem to have grown a day older during his twelve years’ exile, came out of the dining-room as the footman opened the hall-door for him, and gave him a cordial welcome, nay insisted upon helping to bring in his portmanteau with his own hands, an act of unusual condescension, the full force of which was felt by his subordinates. “It is a real treat to see your pleasant face once more, William,” said this faithful retainer, as he assisted William to take off his travelling-cloak. “You have not aged a day since you used to live at the Winchester twelve year ago, and you are looking uncommon well; and, Lord love your heart, sir, how pleased they all will be to see you!” They arrived at last at a very comfortable room—a square tapes-tried chamber, with high ceiling support by a great mahogany beam. The room looked cheery enough, with a bright fire roaring in the wide chimney; but it had a somewhat ancient aspect, which the superstitiously inclined might have associated with possible ghosts. “We are in the East Wing, are we not?” young William asked. “This room seems quite strange to me. if I have ever been here before, I doubt it.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
“Very likely not, sir. Yes, this is the old East Wing that your mother once had boarded up. Your window looks out into the old stable-yard, where the kennel used to be in the time of your grandfather, when the Winchester was even a finer place than it is now. We are so full of company this winter, you see, sir, that we are obliged to make use of all these rooms. You will have no need to feel lonesome. There is Captain and Mrs. Foster in the next room to this, and the two Miss Griffins in the blue room opposite.” (Some believe that reopening the East Wing is what upset the spirits and caused the 1906 Earthquake.) Young William admired the perfect comfort of his chamber. Every modern appliance had been added to the ornate and ponderous furniture of an age gone by, and the combination produced a very pleasant effect. As he awoke in the morning and opened the door, Mrs. Winchester sailed in, looking radiant in a dark-green velvet dress richly trimmed with old point lace. Above her beauty, she had a charm of expression which was to most more rare and delightful than her beauty of feature and complexion. She put her arms around her son, and hugged him. “I have only this moment been told of your arrival, my dear William,” she said; “you look just like your father. My dear child, I have been looking forward so anxiously to your coming, and I should not have liked to see you for the first time before all those people. Welcome home. Remember, William, this house is always to be your home, whenever you have need of one.” William, being a hunting man. Had, indeed, a secret horror of the sport; for more than one scion of the house had perished untimely in the hunting-field. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The family had not been altogether a lucky one, in spite of its wealth and prosperity. It was not often that goodly heritage had descended to the Winchesters or their only son, William. Death in some form or other—on too many occasions a violent death—had come between the heir and his inheritance. And when one pondered on the dark pages in the story of the house, many wonder if Mrs. Winchester was ever troubled by morbid forebodings about her only and fondly loved son. Was there a ghost at the Winchester—that spectral visitant without which the state and plendour of a grand old house seem scarcely complete? Yes, many have heard vague hints of some shadowy presence that had been seen on rare occasions within the precincts of the Winchester mansion. Those whom were questioned were prompt to assure investigators that they had seen nothing. They had heard stories of the past—foolish legends, most likely, not worth listening to. On the property, there was once a stable-yard, a spacious quadrangle, surrounded by the closed doors of stable and dog-kennels: low massive buildings of grey stones, with the ivy creeping over them here and there, and with an ancient moss-grown look, that gave them a weird kind of interest. This range of stabling must have been disguised for a long time. The stables that were more recently used were a pile of handsome red-brick buildings at the other extremity of the house, to the rear of the music room, and forming a striking feature in the back view of the Winchester. According to legend, some believed that spectral entities, had been haunting the Winchester estate for centuries. Several large black dogs, with eyes large as saucers, or something flaming, appear and disappear, often without a trace. In many of the legends, the dogs are malevolent: assaulting guests, frightening livestock to death, attacking other dogs, and heralding death or disaster. Perhaps that is why the heirs of Winchester who have come to an untimely end have all died tragically. Oliver Winchester was killed in a dual. William Winchester I was murdered; and William Winchester II broke his back on his return home to the Winchester Estate. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The butler concealed the death of William Winchester II from Sarah, telling her simply that he was called away and said he would never return. Her heart was so broken that she wrote him out of existence, as if her had never been born. After the heartbreaking news that her only son has abandoned her, Mrs. Winchester was sitting in her blue séance room; half meditating, half dozing, mixing broken snatches of thought with brief glimpses of dreaming, when she was startled into wakefulness by a sound that was strange to her. It was a huntsman’s horn—a few low plaintive noes on a huntsman’s horn—notes which had a strange far-away sound, that was more unearthly than anything her ears ever heard. She thought of the music in Der Freischutz; but the weirdest snatch of melody Weber ever wrote had not so ghastly a sound as these few simple noes conveyed to her ear. She stood transfixed, listening to that awful music. It had grown dusk, her fire was almost out, and the room in shadow. As she listened, a light suddenly flashed on the wall before her. The light was as unearthly as the sound—a light that never shone from Earth or Sky. She ran to the window; for his ghastly shimmer flashed through the window upon the opposite wall. The great gates of the stable-yard were open, and men in scarlet coats were riding in, a pack of hounds crowding in before them, obedient to the huntsman’s whip. The whole scene was gleams of a lantern carried by one of the men. It was this lantern which had shone upon the tapestried wall. She saw the stable doors opened one after another; gentlemen and grooms alighting from their horses; the dogs driven into their kennel; the helpers hurrying to and fro; and that strange wan lantern-light glimmering hither and tither was the gathering dusk. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, there was no sound of horse’s hoof or of human voices—not one yelp or cry from the vicious looking hounds with flaming eyes. Since those faint far-away sounds of the horn had died out in the distance, the ghastly silence had been unbroken. As Mrs. Winchester stood at her window quite calmly and watched while the group of men and animals in the yard below noiselessly dispersed. There was nothing supernatural in the manner of their disappearance. The figures did not vanish nor melt into empty air. One by one she saw the horses led into their separate quarters; one by one the redcoats strolled out of the gates, and the grooms departed, some one way, some another. The scene, but for its noiselessness, was natural enough; and had she been a stranger in her own home, she might have fancied that those figures were real—those stables in full occupation. However, she knew that stable-yard and all its range of building to have been disused for more than half a century. Could she believe that, without an hour’s warning, the long-deserted quadrangle could be filled—the empty stalls tenanted? Had some hunting-party from the neighbourhood sought shelter there, glad to escape the pitiless rain? That was impossible, she thought. And yet the noiselessness, the awful sound of that horn—the strange unearthly gleam of that lantern! A cold sweat broke out on her forehead, and she trembled in every limb. Mrs. Winchester was pale as a ghost and trembling. Mrs. Winchester had kept the secret. That evening, the butler came to her. “Mrs. Winchester, there is no use in trying to hide it from you any longer. Your son was killed in the hunting-field, brought home dead one December night, an hour after his father and the rest of the party had come home to the Winchester. He was found by a labouring-man, poor lad, lying in a ditch with his back broken, and his horse beside him staked.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Shortly after Mr. Winchester Sr. never rode to hounds again, though he was passionately fond of hunting. Dogs and horses were sold, and the north quadrangle had been empty from that day. Some evil have come upon the Winchester mansion, it was not in human power to prevent its coming. Some had beheld the shadows of the dead. Sudden terror overcomes some visitors, even to this day. There are reports of an ominous danger, as people’s hearts grow cold while on tour. Staff have been startled by seeing a man, with is hat in his hand not in evening costume; a man with a pale anxious-looking face, peering cautiously into the room. Their first thought is of evil; but in the next moment than man disappears, and they see no more of him. Sometimes when flowers are placed in the house, people see the drooping moments later and lights dying out one by one in the brass sconces against the walls. It is no wonder Mrs. Winchester shut herself from the outer World, burying herself almost as completely as a hermit in its cell. While great wealth brings some people joy, there is some times a hefty fee. Be careful what you wish for, you never know who or what you might invite in your doors. I invoke and move thee, O thou Spirit Gusion and being exalted above ye in the power of the Most High, I say unto thee, Obey! in the name Beralensis, Baldachinesis, Paumachia, and Apologiae Sedes: and of the mighty ones who govern, spirits, Liachidae and ministers of the House of Death: and by the Chief Prince of the seat of Apologia in the Ninth Legion, I do invoke thee and by invoking conjure thee. And being exalted above ye in the power of the Most High, I say unto thee, Obey! in the name of him who spake and it was, to whom all creatures and things obey. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Moreover I, whom God made in the likeness of God, who is the creator according to his living breath, stir thee up in the name which is the voice of wonder of the mighty God, El, strong and unspeakable, O thou Spirit Gusion. And I say to thee obey, in the name of him who spake and it was; and in every one ye, O ye names of God! Moreover in the names Adonai, El, Elohim, Elohi, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, Zabaoth, Elion, Iah, Tetragrammaton, Shaddai, Lord God Most High, I stir thee up; and in our strength I say Obey! O Spirit Gusion. Appear unto His servants in a moment; before the circle in the likeness of man; and visit me in peace. And in the ineffable name Tetragrammaton Iehovah, I say, Obey! whose mighty sound being exalted in power the pillars are divided, the winds of the firmament groan aloud; the sire burns not; the Earth moves in Earthquakes; and all things of the house of Heaven and Earth and the dwelling-place of darkness are as Earthquakes, and are in torment, and are confounded in thunder. Come forth, O Spirit Gusion, in a moment: let thy dwelling-place be empty, apply unto us the secrets of Truth and obey my power. Come forth, visit us in peace, appear unto my eyes; be friendly: Obey the living breath! For I stir thee up in the name of God of Truth who liveth for ever, Helioren. Obey the living breath, therefore continually unto the end as my thoughts appear to my eyes: therefore be friendly: speaking the secrets of Truth in voice and in understanding. Let it be so, Truefold, whatever ill news has come to us we will hear it together. He put is arm round his wife’s waist. Both were pale as marble, both stood in stony stillness waiting for the bow that was to fall upon them. It is said that perhaps you will see a glimpse of Mrs. Winchester and Mr. Winchester, Sr., while on tour, if you repeat the invocation thirteen times before your visit. Life is broken for her, there hah passed a glory from Earth, and that upon all pleasures and joys of this World she looks with the solemn calm of one for whom all things are dark with the shadow of a great sorrow. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
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All Hallows’ Eve:
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O Wicked Wit and Gifts that Have the Power So to Seduce!
I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange story. Almost all humans are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a lister’s internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a devil, would have no fear mentioning it; but the same traveller having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before one would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of these subjective things, as we do our experiences of objective creation. The consequences is, that the general stock of experiences in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect. The Devil had been raised among us, and his rage was vehement and terrible; and, when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows. It does not signify how many years ago, or how few, a certain Murder was committed in Boston in 1688, which attracted great attention. We hear more than enough of Murders as they rise in succession to their atrocious eminence, and if I could, I would bury the memory this this atrocious eminence, as hi body was buried, in the Witch House’s basement. When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell—or I ought rather to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicious fell—on the man who was afterwards brought to trial. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
As no reference was at the time made to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any description of him at that time have been given in the newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered. Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of that first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not three times. The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the paper, I was aware of a flash—rush—flow—I do not know what to call it—no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive—in which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief observed the absence of the dead body from the bed. As the circumstances of the Murder, gradually unravelling, took stronger and stronger posses of the public mind, I kept them away from mine, by knowing as little about them as was possible in the midst of the universal excitement. John Hathorne asked most of the questions and established the judicial attitude that was to prevail throughout most of the examinations and the trials. Many people suspected that the devil killed this man and he had been summoned by Sarah Good because she had also been accused of bewitching a few girls in the town. Mr. Hathorne asked the children to look at Sarah God and say whether she was one who afflicted them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
They accused her to her face, “upon which they were all dreadfully tortured and tormented for a short space of time.” When they recovered from their fits, they charged her with causing them, saying that her specter had come and tormented them although her body remained “at a considerable distance from them.” This was spectral evidence, that is, evidence concerning a specter or apparition of the accused, rather than her bodily person. It was eventually to become the central legal issue of the trials, but at the moment we need only see why it seemed initially so convincing to the examining magistrates. Here were girls afflicted with violent physical symptoms which had no known physical cause, but which a physician had attributed to witchcraft. There was a malicious old woman accused of causing them. When the sufferers accused her they were immediately thrown into convulsions. What could be more plausible than that the convulsions were inflicted as revenge for the accusation? Yet such behaviour was still unfamiliar enough in Salem so that one of the recorders noted that “none here see the [specters of the] witches but the afflicted and themselves.” However, the change was so startling that I fully believed the girls derived their impression in some occult manner. For instance, we knew there was something occult going on because the throat of the murdered man had been cut straight across. In the opening speech for the defense, it was suggested that the deceased might have cut his own throat in the dreadful condition referred to. Yet, it would have been impossible for such a wound to be self-inflicted by either hand. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Certainly, Mr. Hathorne was convinced; when the children had recovered and repeated their accusation he turned to the accused woman. “Sarah Good, do you not see now what you have done? Why do you not tell us the truth? Why do you this torment these people children?” Certainly many of her neighbours though her malicious, since they attributed to her a number of inexplicable events, including the death of a cow which perished in a “sudden, terrible and strange unusual manner.” Such testimony was common in witchcraft cases, and it has caused much unseemly hilarity among the modern historians. It is likely, they have asked, that His Satanic Majesty the Devil or any of his minions would stop to concern themselves with the fate of a New England cow? The answer is that nothing is more likely. What else would a fertility god concern himself with but the health or sickness of crops, of animals, and of humans? From the standpoint of a society that still remembered who the Devil was, no testimony could be more relevant. As a matter of fact, the village witches who still exist in rural England are often expert in folk medicines, human and animal, as well as charms, and until recently many of them were midwives. Sarah Osburn also denied that she had hurt anyone, but the girls feel again into fits. Mr. Hathorne asked her how this happened. Perhaps, she said, the Devil went about in her likeness doing harm, but she knew nothing about it. Sarah Osburn was the first at Salem to assert the principle that the Devil can impersonate an innocent person. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Whether the devil could or not was a matter of debate in the seventeenth century, but most Protestant authorities agreed with Goodwife Obsurn that, as Hamlet put it, “The Devil hath power/ to assume a pleasing shape.” However, the principle was not discussed at this hearing, since Sarah Osburn was a likely a suspect as Sarah Good, if for no other reason than her lying. Lying was still considered a serious sin in the seventeenth century, and a crime as well, legally punishable by the courts. Nine of us had not the smallest doubt about those passages, neither, I believed, had any one in Court. When Mr. Hathorne tried to find out how well Sarah Osburn knew Sarah Good she said she did not know her by name. Mr. Hathorne asked if Sarah Osburn had been tempted by the devil, and she said no. Why then, he asked, had not she been at church? She had been sick, she said, and unable to go. However, her husband and others contradicted her. “She had not been at meeting,” they said, “this year and two months.” To understand why the matter of church attendance was considered so significant one must remember that the seventeenth century saw witchcraft as literal Devil worship, and therefore as a rival religion to Christianity. This is why the magistrates sometimes asked accused persons, as they asked Sarah Good, what God they served. And if the accused person avoided speaking the name of God (as Sarah Good did), they had reason to think it a suspicious circumstance. The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the judge, on the other side of the court. He slowly shook a great grey veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and whole form. Then he collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The examinations of Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn afford grounds for suspicion and for further examination. However, the major event of that first day of March was the examination of Tituba. It began like the others, but it changed very quickly: “Tituba, what evil spirit have you familiarity with?” “None.” “Why do you hurt these children?” “I do not hurt them.” “Who is it then?” “The Devil, for aught I know.” “Did you never see the Devil?” “The Devil,” said Tituba, “came to me and bid me serve him.” She went on, with a minimum of judicia prodding, to provide a detailed confession of witchcraft, the first of approximately fifty that were made during the Salem trials. On March first and second, in her examination, Tituba said that the Devil had come to her in the shape of a man—a tall man in black, with white hair. Other times he had come in the shape of an animal. He had told her he was God, that she must believe him and serve him six years, and he would give her many fine things. He had shown her a book and she had made a mark in it, a mark that was “red like blood.” Many people thought this to be a revelation. “Then I saw another beast, coming out of the Earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon. He exercised all authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And he performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to comedown from Heaven to Earth in full view of men. Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“He ordered them to set up an image in honour of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless one had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name,” reports Revelation 13.11-17. Sarah Osburn was to die there on the tenth of May. Tituba, like later confessors, was never brought to trial. She lay in jail until she was sold to pay the jailer’s fees, her master refusing to pay them. Sarah Good was brought to trial. Another reaction to Tituba’s confession was to confirm the community in its fear of witchcraft, and particularly its fear of the three accused women. The night of March First William Allen and John Hughes heard a strange noise; it continued frightening them, but the approached and “saw a strange and unusual beast lying on the ground. Going up to it, the said beast vanished away and in the said place started up two or three women fled, not after the manner of other women but swiftly vanished out of sight, which women we took to be Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The next night William Allen again had hallucinations: “Sarah Good visibly appeared to him in his chamber, said Allen being in bed, and brought an unusual light with her. The said Sarah came and sat upon his foot. The said Allen went to kick at her, upon which she vanished and the light with her.” Notice that in this hallucination as in many others the hallucination stops as soon as the subject is able to move or speak. A curse is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular, “curse” may refer to such a wish or pronouncement made effective by a supernatural or spiritual power, such as a god, or gods, a spirit, or natural force, or else as a kind of spell by magic or witchcraft. The Winchester rifle is a handsome gun that legend has it was forged in Hell. Whoever possesses the cursed rife either suffers disaster or fortune. Oliver Fisher Winchester was an American businessman and politician, best known as being the founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Oliver Winchester was born November 30, 1810 and dead December 10, 1880. Oliver Winchester was known for manufacturing and marketing the Winchester repeating rifle, which was a much re-designed descendant of the Volcanic rifle of some years earlier. Mr. Winchester was more learned than his kind in the mysteries of a deep and thrilling lore of peculiar fascination. He was a man highly honoured for his natural gifts and knowledge of learned books which nobody else could read, that was when he took his second orders the bishop gave him a mantle of scarlet silk to wear upon his shoulders in which, and his lordship had put such power into it that, when the parson has it rightly on, he could govern any ghost or evil spirit, and even stop an Earthquake. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Such a powerful man, in combat with supernatural visitations discovered that a division of Smith & Wesson firearms was failing financially with one of their newly patented arms. Having an eye for opportunity, Mr. Winchester assembled venture capital together with other stockholders and acquired the Smith & Wesson division, better known as the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, in 1855. By 1857, Mr. Winchester had positioned himself as the principle stockholder in the company and relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, and changed the name to New Haven Arms Company. After experiencing a slow start, and then a booming success with the Henry rifle, the company reorganized once again and the first Winchester rifle was the Model 1866, which had been nicknamed the Yellow Boy. The gun was called Yellow Boy because it should be remembered that, howsoever strange and singular it may sound to us that a mere lad should formally solicit such a performance at his own hands. Gradually Mr. Winchester amassed a considerable fortune. When Mr. Oliver Winchester died on December 10, 1880, his ownership in the company passed to his son, William Wirt Winchester (who married Sarah Lockwood Pardee in 1862), and died March 7 1881 at the young age of 43. The couple has also had a child, Annie Pardee Winchester, born June 15, 1866, and died 6 weeks later on July 25, 1866. Mrs. Winchester was deeply troubled by the loss of her daughter. In the course of her daily walk, she had to pass a certain heath or down where the road wound along through tall blocks of granite with open spaces of grassy sward between them. #RandpolphHarris 9 of 13
There in a certain spot, and always in the same place, she declared that she encountered, every day, a baby with a pale and troubled face, clothed in a little dress of white pique, made with two skirts. The pique was cut slightly Gabriele, and rounded off in the front with scallops, bound with white braid, with a button in each scallop, and ribbon-sash, tied at the left side, with one hand always stretched forth, and the other pressed against her side. “She is my baby,” Mrs. Winchester would say, and she often used to come to her parents house in New Haven; but that which troubled her was, that she had now been dead three years, and she had seen her body laid in the grave at her burial, this that she saw every day must needs be her soul or ghost. The hair of the appearance, sayth Mrs. Winchester, is not like anything alive, but it is so soft and light that it seemth to melt away while you look; but her eyes are set, and never blink—no, not when the sun shineth full upon her face. She maketh no steps, but seemth to swim along the top of the grass; and her hand, which is stretched out alway, seemth to point to something far away, out of sight. It is her continual coming; for she never failth to meet Mrs. Winchester, and to pass on, that hath quenched her spirits; and although she never seeth her by night, yet cannot she get her natural rest. Mrs. Winchester went to see a doctor who told her, “The case is strange but by no means impossible. It is one that I will study, and fear not to handle, if you will be free with me, and fulfill all that I desire.” Mrs. Winchester was overjoyed, but she perceived that the doctor turned pale, and was downcast with some thought which, however, he did not express. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The doctor knew that this might be a doemonium meridianum, the most stubborn spirit to govern and guide that any human can meet, and the most perilous withal. He made an appointment to go with Mrs. Winchester to the spot where she had these encounters. They had hardly reached the accustomed spot, when they both saw her at once gliding towards them; punctually as the ancient writers describe their “lemures, which swoon along the ground, neither marking the sand nor bending the herbage.” The aspect of the baby girl was exactly that which had been related by Mrs. Winchester. There was a pale and stony face, the strange misty hair, the eyes firm and fixed, that gazed, yet not on them, but on something that they saw far, far away; one hand and arm stretched out, and the other grasping the girdle of her waist. She floated along the field like upon a stream, and glided past the spot where they stood, pausingly. But so deep was the awe that came over the doctor, as he stood there in the light of day, face to face with a human soul separate from her bones and flesh, that his heart and purpose both failed him. He had resolved to speak to the spectre in the appointed form of words, but he did not. He stood like one amazed and speechless, until she had passed clean of out sight. When they returned to the house, and after he had said all he could to pacify Mrs. Winchester, he took leave for that time, with a promise that when he had fulfilled certain business elsewhere, when then he alleged, he would return and take orders to assuage these disturbances and their cause. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The doctor later told Mrs. Winchester that he thought it was best that they try an exorcism, but his Church, as is well known, hath abjured certain branches of her ancient powers, on grounds of perversion and abuse. So he referred her to a medium. The medium told Mrs. Winchesters, “There is a danger from the demons, but so there is in the surrounding air every day.” There was a kind of trouble in the air, a soft rippling sound, and all at once the shape appeared, and came towards the medium gradually. She opened her parchment scroll, and read aloud the command. The spirit paused, and seemed to waver and doubt; stood still; then she rehearsed the sentence again, sounding out every syllable like a chant. The spirit then swam into the midst of the circle, and there stood still, suddenly. Her knees shook under her, and the drops of sweat ran down her flesh like rain. But, although face to face with the spirit, the medium’s heart grew calm, and her mind was composed. The spirit then commanded Mrs. Winchester to move West and build a mansion in honour of the spirit killed by the Winchester rifle and “as long as the hammer keep pounding, her heart would continue to beat.” The medium dismissed the troubled ghost, until she peacefully withdrew, gliding towards the west. Mrs. Winchester moved to San Jose, which was near her family Member, Enoch Pardee, an occultist, prominent physician, free mason, and Mayor of Oakland, California USA, had built his family’s mansion in 1868, which is now known as the Pardee House Museum. Masonry has influenced more the modern witchcraft; it has influenced dozens of occult orders. Mrs. Winchester bought a farm house and built a massive mansion. There was something very painful and peculiar in the position of the Winchester mansion through the nineteenth century. The estate in those days was in a transitory state, and Mrs. Winchester, like her formularies, embodied a strange mixture of the old belief with the new interpretation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
However, the mansion is now flanked by a pleasantness, a beautiful garden and lawn, and it is surrounded by a sole grove of palm trees. It has also the aspect of age and of solitude, and looks the very scene of harmony and supernatural events. A legend might well belong to every beautiful glade of grass around, and there must surely be a haunted room somewhere within its walls. The incredible mansion, scenery of the legend still survives, and, like the field of the forty footsteps in another history, the place is still visited by those who take interests in the supernatural tales of old and new. Freemasons supposedly conducted a séance in the mansion in August of 2019. A phantom made an answer willingly. It stated, “before the next Yule-tide, a fearful pestilence will lay waste the land, and myriads of souls will be loosened from the flesh, until our valleys will be full.” The general facts stated in this diary are to these matters of belief accounted a strong proof of the veracity of the Ghost that the plague, fatal to so many millions, did break out in the global village at the close of the year. How sorely must the infidels and heretics of this generation be dismayed when they know that this Black Death, which is now swallowing its thousands in the streets of the great city, was foretold several months before the outbreak, under the séance of a freemason, by a visible and suppliant ghost! And what pleasure and improvements do such deny themselves who scorn and avoid all opportunity of intercourse with souls separate, and the spirits, glad and sorrowful, which inhabit the unseen World! May they who observe the Sabbath and call it a delight, rejoice in Thy Kingdom. May the people who sanctify the seventh day be sated and delighted with Thy bounty. For Thou didst find pleasure in the seventh day, and didst sanctify it, calling it the most desirable of the days, in remembrance of creation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Today is the return of our guided Mansion Tour! The tour guide-led experience allows guests to access areas of the mansion that have been closed since March 2020. Click the link in our bio for more information. winchestermysteryhouse.com/recent-links
The Source of those Accusations Was a Committee of Demons Who Had Infested Her!
The infinite power of God to create is far beyond what we can grasp or understand. If the Almighty devoted so much of His Word to prophecy, it certainly benefits every believer to study it. The study of the prophetic scriptures and their fulfillment attests to the authority of the Word of God. Every soul has cost an infinite price, and how terrible is the sin of turning one soul away from Christ, so that for Him the Saviour’s love and humiliation and agony shall have been in vain. Contrary to popular opinion, New England’s record in regard to witchcraft is surprisingly good, as Governor Thomas Hutchinson pointed out in 1750: “more having been put to death in a single country in England from the first settlement until the present time.” Through most of the seventeenth century the record is really astonishing. While Europe hanged and burned literally thousands, executions in New England were few and far between. (Witches were burned on the Continent and in Scotland, where witchcraft was a heresy, but hanged in England and in New England, where it was a felony. Burning a witch seems not to have been motivated by the wish to inflict a particularly painful death; Scottish witches, for instance, were first garroted by the executioner, who then proceeded to burn the corpse and scatter its ashes. Most probably, burning was an attempt to prevent the resurrection of the body.) There are some fascinating accounts in New England that deal with cases of witchcraft before 1692, and we shall look at a few of these for they will illuminate some interesting aspects of the Salem witch trials. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
The first is that of Mrs. Anne Hibbins. Her husband, who died in 1654, had been a man of importance: Boston merchant, a Colonial Agent, and for several years one of the Assistants. Tradition has it that she was a sister of Governor Bellingham. She was apparently quarrelsome—quarrelsome enough so that her church censured her for it—and one quarrel was her undoing. She seems to have come upon two of her neighbours talking, to have told them she knew they were talking about her, and then to have reconstructed their conversation with enough fidelity to convince the she was possessed of “preternatural” knowledge (something Mrs. Sarah Winchester used to also have the ability to do, and a reason she dismissed so many staff members for gossiping). Nonetheless, Mrs. Hibbins was brought to trail in 1655, and the jury brought her in guilty. However, the presiding magistrates refused to accept the verdict, apparently believing her innocent, and their refusal automatically threw the case into the General Court. There again she was found guilty; the governor pronounced the required sentence of death; and in 1656 she was executed. We have seen that some of the magistrates were not satisfied of her guilt, and apparently the same were true of some of the clergy. To masses of people, death was a dread mystery; beyond was uncertainty and gloom. These people were seeking for truth, and to learn them the Spirit of Inspiration was imparted. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
A surviving letter tells us that the Reverend John Norton “once said at his own table” before the Reverend John Wilson and others that Mistress Hibbins “was hanged for a witch only for having more with than her neighbours. It was his very expression; she having, as he explained it, unhappily guessed that two of her persecutors, whom she saw talking in the street, were talking of her—which cost her her life, not withstanding all he could do to the contrary, as he himself told us.” The Hibbins case shows how slender and how circumstantial were the grounds necessary to bring an accusation of witchcraft against anyone with a reputation for malice. It also shows that the popular elements in society (the jury, and the people’s representatives in the General Court) were far more ready to believe in witchcraft than the leaders of society (the magistrates and ministers.) This latter conclusion is reinforced by the fact that before 1692 there were far more acquittals than convictions in New England; there were more people willing to charge their neighbours with witchcraft than magistrates willing to convict them. A case which took place in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1662 is known in rather more detail than that of Mrs. Hibbins. Anne Cole, “a person esteemed pious,” was taken with “strange fits.” As with the Salem girls, the fits were both violent and public. Extremely violent bodily motions she many times had, even to the hazard of her life in the apprehensions of those that saw them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
And very often great disturbances was given in the public worship of God by her and two other women who had also strange fits. Once in especial, on a day of prayer kept on that account, the motion and noised of the afflicted was so terrible that a godly person fainted under the appearance of it. In some of her fits strange voices came from her, voices that were clearly not her own. Such voices are now known to be a consequence of multiple personality, which is the extreme form of the hysterical fugue. However, the seventeenth-century observers of Anne Cole judged them to be the voices of demons who had entered into her, and that judgment was sensible enough in view of the fact that the voices seemed to be plotting ways in which Anne Cole might be further afflicted. Eventually, seeming to realize that they were being overheard, one of the voices announced, “‘Let us confound her language, [that] she may tell no more tales.’” For some time nothing came from her but “unintelligible mutterings”; then the conversation resumed in a Dutch accent, and this time names were mentioned, names of the witches who were responsible for these afflictions. When Anne Cole was out of her fits, she “knew nothing of those things that were spoken by her” during them, but she was understandably distressed to find she had been speaking things which, to the best of her knowledge, had never been in her mind; it was a “matter of great affliction to her.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
It must have been afflicting to the local magistrates as well; they now had accusations of witchcraft against several persons, but the source of these accusations was not Anne Cole; it was a committee of demons who had infested her. The magistrates investigated further, and imprisoned some (and perhaps all) of the accused on suspicion of witchcraft One of these, a “lewd, ignorant, considerably aged woman” named Rebecca Greensmith sent for the two clergymen who has taken down in writing the demonic conversation issuing from the mouth of Anne Cole. She had the transcript read to er, and then “forthwith and freely confessed those things to be true,” confirming the statement of the voiced “that she (and other persons named in the discourse) had familiarity with the Devil.” She confessed to a number of other things as well, including “that the Devil has frequent use of her body with much seeming (but indeed horrible, hellish) delight to her.” Reports of copulation with demons (including the unpleasantness of the experience) are common in the literature of Continental witchcraft, but this is one of the few known cases in New England. What is involved is apparently an erotic fit in which the woman actually goes through the motions of copulation and achieves a climax; similar fits have been observed in mental patients in the twenty-first century. Thus it appears that in the case of Anne Cole the confessor as well as the afflicted person was an hysteric. This pattern we shall see again at Salem. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Rebecca Greensmith was hanged in 1663. So was her husband Nathaniel, although we do not know the grounds for his conviction; according to Increase Mather he did not confess. “Most” of the other persons accused by the demonic voices “made their escape into another part of the country.” What happened to the others we do not know, but they were apparently not executed. And since at least one of those who made her escape had at first been imprisoned in suspicion of witchcraft (Judith Varlet, a relative of Governor Peter Stuyvesant of New York), it can be assumed that the authorities were reluctant to press the matter further. The evidence they had was, after all, highly suspect, coming from demonic voices on the one hand and a confessed witch on the other. (Confessors are a group of women with the power to make anyone they touch love them. This love, however, is more aptly described as a soul-destroying obsession whose objective is pleasing the Confessor in any way possible. Confessors were created by warlocks to travel Medieval lands and act as law enforcers. The Confessors could possess anyone and make them tell the truth in great detail. There were also a few male Confessors, but they became megalomanics and plunged the entire World into a dark age. As a result, after all the male Confessors were defeated and wiped out, the warlocks and female Confessors took up the tradition of killing all male Confessors shortly after birth.) In any event, after the “execution of some and escape of others” Anne Cole’s fits ceased, and did not return. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Twenty years later, in 1682, the Reverend John Whiting reported that “she yet remains maintaining her integrity.” This together with what the voices said, suggests that Anne Cole’s fits probably were caused by her fear of witchcraft and cured by the removal of the fear. A few other cases are remarkable for a number of reasons, one of them being the exemplary thoroughness with which the symptoms of the affiliated persons are described, which makes it possible to say without question that these were pathological cases of hysteria. The first took place in Groton, Massachusetts, in 1671-1671 and was recorded by the Reverend Samuel Willard, then minister of Groton (during the Salem trials he was a member of the Boston Clergy). On 30 October 1671, Elizabeth Knapp began to behave strangely: “In the evening, a little before she went to bed, sitting by the fire she cried out, ‘Oh! My legs!’ and clapped her hands on them; immediately, ‘Oh! My breast!’ and removed her hands thither; and forthwith, ‘Oh! I am strangled’ and put her hands on her throat.” The similarity to Janet’s twentieth-century description of the onset of a typical hysterical fit is unmistakable; it starts, he writes “with a pain or a strange sensation situated at such or such a point of the body…[It] often begins in the lower part of the abdomen [and] seems to ascend and to spread to other organs. For instance, it very often spreads to the epigastrium, to the breast, then to the throat. There it assumes rather an interesting form, which was for a very long time considered as quite characteristic of hysteria. The patient has the sensation of too big an object, as it were, a ball, rising in her throat and choking her.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The chocking sensation we shall find over and over again; it is the bolus hystericus and is related to the “lump in the throat” felt by normal people in moments of extreme stress. The normal person, like the hysteric, tries to relieve it by swallowing; this is why the comic-strip artist has one’s characters say “Gulp” when they are in trouble. The choking sensations in the throat was followed by “fits in which she was violent in bodily motions, leapings, strainings and strange agitations, scarce to be held in bound by the strength of three or four; violent also in roarings and screamings.” The fits continued until 15 January 1692, the date of Willard’s writings. Several of the details he recorded are worth noting. On 15 November, “her tongue was for many hours together drawn into a semicircle up to the roof of her mouth, and not to be removed, for some tried with the fingers to do it.” On 17 December her tongue was drawn “out of her mouth most frightfully, to an extraordinary length and greatness.” Devils appeared to her, and witches; “Oh,” she cried to one of them, “you are a rouge.” On 29 November she had a particularly grotesque hallucination, when she believed a witch in the shape of a dog with a woman’s head was strangling her. The hallucinations and the woman’s sufferings were terrifyingly convincing; Willard noted that when she thought the witch was strangling her, “she did often times seem to our apprehension as of she would forthwith be strangled.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Elizabeth Knapp’s case is strikingly similar to that of Ler—one of the best-known cases of J.-M. Charcot, the nineteenth-century psychologist. Her fits, he wrote, “are characterized in the first stage by epileptiform and tetaniform convulsions; after this come great gesticulations of a voluntary character, in which the patient, assuming the most frightful postures, reminds one of the attitudes which history assigns to the demoniacs…At this stage of the attack, se is a prey to delirium, and raves evidently of the events which seem to have determined her first seizures. She hurls furious invectives against imaginary individuals, crying out, “villains! robbers! brigands! fire! fire! O, the dogs! I’m bitten!”—Reminiscences, doubtless, of the emotions experienced in her youth.” When the convulsive portion of Ler—’s attack was over other symptoms usually followed, including “hallucination of vision: the patient beholds horrible animals, skeletons, and specters” and “lastly, a more or less marked permanent contracture of the tongue.” Charcot drew this contracture of the tongue; it is quite appalling. Willard was not exaggerating in calling it frightful. Elizabeth Knapp displayed still other symptoms are identifiably hysterical, including loss of speech on some occasions, and on others speaking in voices other than her own; once “she barked like a dog, and bleated like a calf.” Willard noted that her fits did not seem to do her any permanent physical damage: “She hath no ways in body or strength by all these fits, though so dreadful, but gathered flesh exceedingly, and hath her natural strength when her fits are off, for the most part.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
This is typical; as Janet remarks, the “hysteric patient, after howling for several hours, feels rather comfortable; she experiences, as it were, a relaxation, and declares she is out of her fits has often raised the question of whether they are genuine. Willard thought they must be, if only for their violence: “such a strength is beyond the force of dissimulation.” (It should be noted that hysterics are not always well in the intervals between their fits. Some, for instance, lose their appetites and starve themselves. It is probably such cases who are referred to in the statue of James I against witchcraft as being “wasted, consumed, pined.) On 1 November, Elizabeth Knapp named one of her neighbour as the probable cause of her afflictions. The accused woman was sent for, and entered the house while the afflicted girl was in a fit. Her eyes were closed, as they usually were in her fits, yet she could distinguish this neighbour’s touch from all others, “though no voice was uttered.” That would have been quite enough to convict the neighbour in many witchcraft cases. However, fortunately she was permitted to pray with the afflicted girl, and at the conclusions Miss Knapp “confessed that she believed Satan had deluded her.” Willian was happy that “God was pleased to vindicate the case and justify the innocent,” and reported that Miss Knapp never again complained of any “apparition or disturbance from this neighbour.” Instead, she turned to accusing the Devil, who had, she said, been offering her a covenant for several years, a covenant she had frequently been tempted to sign. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The dark shadow that Satan has cast over the World grew deeper and deeper. About a month later Miss Knapp accused another person of witchcraft, this time during a period of hallucinations. Her father brought the woman to the house, and Willard, who had been asked to be present, noted that her fit became particularly violent when this woman entered. However, Willard, wrote, “we made nothing of it” since her fits had been as violent on other occasions. Instead they inquired carefully into the mater and found “two evident and clear mistakes” in the accusation. This was enough to exonerate the second accused woman. Satan had implanted this principle. Wherever it was held, people had no barrier against sin. Elizabeth Knapp was still having fits when Willard wrote about her, and all he could be certain of was that “she is an object of pity.” He did not think she was bewitched, but he did believe she was possessed (that is, that Devils has entered into her). This remained his opinion (and that of most others) when the case was remembered in 1692. He also believed that the girl’s terrible afflictions provided an occasion for the community to examine its collective conscience. Therefore he admonished his congregation in a sermon, “Let us all examine by this Providence [id est, this event] what sins they have been, that have given Satan so much footing in this poor place.” Satan was seeking to shut out from humans a knowledge of God, to turn their attention from the temple of God, and to establish His own kingdom. His strife for supremacy had seemed to be almost wholly successful. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
They robbed God of His glory, and defrauded the World by a counterfeit of the gospel. They had refused to surrender themselves to God for the salvation of the World, and they became agents of Satan for its destruction. They were doing the work Satan designed them to do, taking a course to misrepresent the character of God, and cause the World to look upon Him as a tyrant. The convulsive fits which played so prominent a part in most witchcraft cases, and continued to be one of the most common symptoms of hysteria through the earl years of the twentieth century, have no become relatively rare in Western civilization. D.W. Abse reports fits occurred in only six out of one hundred and sixty-one cases of hysteria treated at a British military hospital during World War II, but that they were the most common symptom among Indian Army hysterics treated at Delhi during the same period. There are a number of possible explanations for this curious fact. Hysterics are notoriously suggestible, so the change may be ascribable to nothing more than the refusal of our culture to give the hysterical fit the respectful and awed attention it used to command. In any case, it seems clear that abnormal behaviour varies with time and place just as normal behaviour does. However, since this particular variation occurred so recently, after the classic studies of hysteria had been completed, it is possible to identify the seventeenth-century Massachusetts fits for what they were. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Mr. William Wirt Winchester, while we were attending lectures, purchased three or four old houses in California, one of which was unoccupied. He resided in the country, and he proposed that he wanted his wife and myself to take up our abode in the untenanted house, so long as it should continue unlet; a move which we would accomplish the double end of settling us nearer alike to our lecture-rooms and to our amusements, and of relieving us from the weekly charge of rent for our lodgings. Our furniture was very scant—our whole equipage remarkably modest and primitive; and in short, our arrangements pretty nearly as simple as those of a bivouac. Mrs. Sarah Winchester’s new plan was, therefore, executed almost as soon as conceived. The front drawing-room was our sitting-room. I had the bedroom over it, and Mrs. Winchester had the back bedroom on the same floor, which nothing could have induced me to occupy. The house to begin with was an incomplete, three-story farm house with a basement. It was very old. Dated back to the sixteenth century, I believe. It had nothing modern about it. The agent who looked into the property titles for Mrs. Winchester told her it was originally sold, along with much other forfeited property in 1702; and it had belonged to John Conduit, whose wife was the niece of Sir Isaac Newton, a father of modern science, although keenly interested in the occult. How old it was then, I cannot say; but, at all events, in had seen years and changes enough to have contracted all the mysterious and saddened air, at once exciting and depressing, which belongs to most old mansions. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
There had been very little done in the way of modernizing details and, perhaps, it was better so; for there was something queer and by-gone in the very walls and ceilings—in the shape of doors and windows—in the odd diagonal site of the chimney-pieces—in the beams and ponderous cornices—not to mention the singular solidity of all the woodwork, from the bannisters to the window-frames, which hopelessly defined disguise, and would have emphatically proclaimed their antiquity through any conceivable amount of modern finery and varnish. An effort had, indeed, been made, to the extent of papering the drawing-rooms; but somehow, the paper looked raw and out of keeping. This woman said, old Judge Sir James Hales (who, having earned the reputation of a particularly ‘hanging judge’, ended by hanging himself, as the corner’s jury found, under an impulse of ‘temporary insanity’, with a child’s skipping-rope, over the massive old bannisters) resided there, entertaining good company, with fine venison and rare old port. In those halcyon days, the drawing-rooms were hung with gilded leather, and, I dare say, cut a good figure, for they were really spacious rooms. The bedrooms were wainscoted, but the front one was not gloomy; and in it the cosiness of antiquity quite overcame its somber associations. However, the back bedrooms, with its two queerly-placed melancholy windows, staring vacantly at the foot of the bed, and with the shadowy recess to be found in most old houses in Dublin, like a large ghostly closet, which, from congeniality of temperament, had amalgamated with the bedchamber, and dissolved the partition. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
At the night-time, this “alcove”—as our “maid” was wont to call it—had, in my eyes, a specially sinister and suggestive character. Mrs. Winchester’s distant and solitary candle glimmered vainly into its darkness. There it was always overlooking her—always itself impenetrable. However, this was only part of the effect. The whole room was, I cannot tell, how repulsive to me. There was, I supposed, in its proportions and features, a latent discord—a certain mysterious and indiscernible relation, which jarred indistinctly upon some secret sense of the fitting and the safe, and raised indefinable suspicious and apprehensions of the imagination. On the whole, as I began saying, nothing could have induced me to pass a night alone in it. We have not been very long in occupation of our respective chambers, when I began to complain of uneasy nights and disturbed sleep. I was, I suppose, the more impatient under this annoyance, as I was usually a sound sleeper, and by no means prone to nightmares. It was not, however, my destiny, instead of enjoying my customary repose, every night to “sup full of horrors.” After a preliminary course of disagreeable and frightful dreams, my troubles took a definite form, and the same vision, without an appreciable variation in a single detail, visited me at least (on average) every second night of the week. Now, this dream, nightmare, or infernal illusion—which you please—of which I was the miserable port, was on this wise: I saw, or thought I saw, with the most abominable distinctness although at the time in profound darkness, every article of furniture and accidental arrangement of the chamber in which I lay. This, as you know, is incidental to ordinary nightmare. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Well, while in this clairvoyant condition, which seemed but the lighting up of the theatre in which was to be exhibited the monotonous tableau of horror, which made my nights insupportable, my attention invariably became, I know not why, fixed upon the windows opposite the foot of my bed; and, uniformly with the same effect, a sense of dreadful anticipation always took slow but sure possession of me. I became somehow conscious of a sort of horrid but undefined preparation going forward in some unknown quarter, and by some unknown agency, for my torment; and, after an interval, which always seemed to me of the same length, a picture suddenly flew up the window, where it remained fixed, as if by an electrical attraction, and my discipline of horror then commenced, to last perhaps for hours. The picture this mysteriously glued to the window-panes, was the portrait of an old man, in crimson flowered silk dressing-gown, the folds of which I could now describe, with countenance embodying a strange mixture of intellect, sensuality, and power, but withal sinister and full of malignant omen. His nose was hooked, like the beak of a vulture; his eyes large, grey, and prominent and lighted up with a more than mortal cruelty and coldness. The features were surmounted by a crimson velvet cap, the hair that peeped from under which was white with age, while the eyebrows retained their original blackness. Well I remember every line, hue, and shadow of that stony countenance, and well I may! The gaze of this hellish visage was fixed upon me, and mine returned it with the inexplicable fascination of nightmare, for what appeared to me to be hours of agony. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
At last—the cock he crew, away then flew, the fiend who had enslaved me through the awful watches of the night and, harassed and nervous, I rose to the duties of the day. I had—I cannot say exactly why, but it may have been from the exquisite anguish and profound impressions of unearthly horror, with which this strange phantasmagoria was associated—an insurmountable antipathy to describing the exact nature of my nightly troubles to Mrs. Winchester. Generally, however, I told her I was haunted by abominable dreams; and, true to the imputed materialism of medicine, we put our heads together to dispel my horrors, not by exorcism, but by a tonic Vin Mariani. However, the evil spirit, who enthralled my senses in the shape of that portrait, may have been just as near me, just as energetic, just as malignant, though I saw him not. Everybody knows how contagious is fear of all sort, but more especially that particular kind of fear under which poor Mrs. Winchester was at that moment labouring. I would not have heard, nor I believe would she have recapitulated, just at that moment, for half the World, the details of the hideous vision which had so unmanned her. “I was sitting in my room,” said Mrs. Winchester “by my fireplace, the door locked when I heard a step on the flight of stairs descending from the attics. It was two o’ clock, and the streets were as silent as a churchyard—the sounds were, therefore, perfectly distinct. There was slow, heavy tread, characterized by the emphasis and deliberation of age, descending by the narrow staircase from above; and, what made the sound more singular, it was plain that the feet which produced it were perfectly bare measuring a descent with something between a pound and a flop, very ugly to hear. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“I knew quite well that you and my attendant had gone away many hours before, and that nobody but myself has any business in the house. It was quite plain also that the person who was coming down stairs had no intention whatever of concealing his movements; but, on the contrary, appeared disposed to make even more noise, and proceed more deliberately, than was at all necessary. When the step reached the foot of the stairs outside my room, it seemed to stop; and I expected every moment to see my door open spontaneously, and give admission to soul killed by the Winchester rifle. I was, however, relieved in a few second by hearing the descent renewed, just in the same manner, upon the stair case leading down to the drawing-rooms, and thence, after another pause, down the next flight, and so on to the hall, whence I heard no more. Now, by the time the sound had ceased, I was wound up, as they say, to a very unpleasant pitch of excitement. I listened, but there was not a stir. I screw up my courage to a decisive experiment—opened my door, and in a stentorian voice bawled over the banisters, ‘Who’s there?’ There was no answer but the ringing of my own voice through the empty old house—no renewal of the movement; nothing short, to give my unpleasant sensations a definite direction. There is, I think, something most disagreeably disenchanting in the sound of one’s own voice under such circumstances, exerted in solitude, and in vain. It redoubled my sense of isolation, and my misgivings increased on perceiving that the door, which I certainly thought I had left open, was closed behind me. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
“In a vague alarm, lest my retreat should be cut off, I got again into my room as quickly as I could, where I remained in a state of imaginary blockade, and very uncomfortable indeed, till morning. Next night brought no return of my barefooted fellow-lodger; but the night following, being in my bed, and in the dark—somewhere, I supposed, about the same hour as before, I distinctly heard the old fellow again descending from the garrets. This time I jumped out of bed, clutched the poker as I passed the expiring fire, and in a moment was upon the lobby. The sound had ceased by this time—the dark and chill were discouraging; and, guess my horror, when I saw, or thought I saw, a monster, whether in the shape of a man or a bear I could not say, standing, with its back to the wall, on the lobby, facing me, with a pair of great greenish eyes shinning dimly out. Now, I must be frank, and confess that the cupboard which displayed our plates and cups stood just there, though at that moment I did not recollect it. At the same time I must never could satisfy myself that I was made the dupe of my own fancy in this matter; for this apparition, after one or two shiftings of shape, as if in the act of incipient transformation, began, as it seemed on second thoughts, to advance upon me in its original form. From an instinct of terror rather than of courage, I hurled the poker, with all my force, at its head; and to the music of a horrid crash made my way into my room, and double-locked the door. Then, in a minute more, I heard the horrid bare feet walk down the stairs, till the sound ceased in the halls, as on the former occasion. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“In a vague alarm, lest my retreat should be cut off, I got again into my room as quickly as I could, where I remained in a state of imaginary blockade, and very uncomfortable indeed, till morning. Next night brought no return of my barefooted fellow-lodger; but the night following, being in my bed, and in the dark—somewhere, I supposed, about the same hour as before, I distinctly heard the old fellow again descending from the garrets. This time I jumped out of bed, clutched the poker as I passed the expiring fire, and in a moment was upon the lobby. The sound had ceased by this time—the dark and chill were discouraging; and, guess my horror, when I saw, or thought I saw, a monster, whether in the shape of a man or a bear I could not say, standing, with its back to the wall, on the lobby, facing me, with a pair of great greenish eyes shinning dimly out. Now, I must be frank, and confess that the cupboard which displayed our plates and cups stood just there, though at that moment I did not recollect it. At the same time I must never could satisfy myself that I was made the dupe of my own fancy in this matter; for this apparition, after one or two shiftings of shape, as if in the act of incipient transformation, began, as it seemed on second thoughts, to advance upon me in its original form. From an instinct of terror rather than of courage, I hurled the poker, with all my force, at its head; and to the music of a horrid crash made my way into my room, and double-locked the door. Then, in a minute more, I heard the horrid bare feet walk down the stairs, till the sound ceased in the halls, as on the former occasion. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“If the apparition of the night before was an ocular delusion of my fancy sporting with the dark outlines of our cupboard, and if tis horrid eyes were nothing but a pair of inverted teacups, I had, at all events, the satisfaction of having launched the poker with admirable effect, and in true ‘fancy’ phrase, ‘knocked its two daylights into one,’ as the commingled fragments of my tea-service testified. I did my best to gather comfort and courage from these evidences; but it would not do. And then what could I say of those horrid bare feet, and the regular tramp, tramp, tramp, which measured the distance of the entire staircase through the solitude of my haunted dwelling, and at an hour when no good influence was stirring? Confound it!—the whole affair was abominable. I was out of spirits, and dreaded the approach of night. It came, ushered ominously in with a thunderstorm and dull torrents of depressing rain. Earlier than usual the streets grew silent; and by twelve o’clock nothing but the comfortless patterning of the rain was to be heard. I made myself as snug as I could. I lighted two candles instead of one. I forswore bed, and held myself in readiness for a sally, candle in hand; for, coute qui coute, I was resolved to see the being, if visible at all, who troubled the nightly stillness of my mansion. I was fidgety and nervous and, tried in vain to interest myself with my books. I walked up and down my room, whistling in turn martial and hilarious music, and listening ever and anon for the dreaded noise.” #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Do not Grieve. Anything you lose comes around in another form. The child weaned from mother’s milk now drinks cranberry juice. God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed. As roses, up from ground. Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish, now a cliff covered with vines, now a horse being saddled. It hides within these, till one day it cracks them open. There is the light gold of wheat in the sun, and the gold of bread made from wheat. I have neither, I am only talking about them as a town in the desert looks up to stars on a clear night. The Son of God, looking upon the World, beheld suffering and misery. With pity He saw how humans had become victims of satanic cruelty. He looked with compassion upon those who were being corrupted, murdered, and lost. They had chosen a ruler who chained them to his carriage as captives. God’s glory pervades the Universe; His ministering Angels inquire of one another: Where is the place of His glory? In response they give praise: Praised be the glory of the Lord from His Heavenly abode. From His Heavenly abode may He turn in mercy and bestow grace unto the people who, reciting the Shema evening and morning, twice daily, proclaim in love the unity of His name, saying: Hear, O America: the Lord our God, the Lord is One. He is our God; He is our Father, our sovereign and our Deliverer. In His mercy He will make known in presence of all the living that He will be your God. “I am the Lord your God.” As it is written in holy Scripture: The Lord shall reign forever; Thy God, O America, shall be Sovereign unto all generations. Hallelujah. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
Ghostly tales are bountiful at Sarah Winchester’s Mystery House. What have you experienced? Photos are encouraged!
The Winchester mansion is 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
“Whoever shadows my every move will not lose me in the dark.” At least that is what Christ says, or what the Evangelist John heard Him say (8.12). He tells us to walk on, through the darkness, with Christ as our only torch. That way, when we mayn’t have gained a step, but we won’t have lost one either. And on into the day we must pursue with dogged tread the life of Jesus Christ. Is this the secret to Mrs. Winchester’s 7-11 staircase?
A Miraculously Great Gift of Grace May Depart Equally Miraculously—PRAISE HIM!
Dignity and humility are the cornerstones of compassion. Compassion for myself is the most powerful healer of all. When it comes to behaviour, everybody is one’s own best physician. Case studies can provide special opportunities to answer interesting questions. For instance, how do you know what kind of person you are? If you lost for memory of past events, would your self-image change? To answer these questions, psychologist did a case study of J.S., and 17-year-old male college student. After he suffered a head injury, J.S. had amnesia for about a month. During that time, J.S. could recall little of what had occurred during the previous 6 months. Nevertheless, his rating of his own personality appeared to be unaffected by his memory loss. This suggests that an awareness of one’s own personal characteristics is based on memories that are more lasting than those of everyday events. The careful recording of cases like J.S.’s is essential to psychology. Case studies often provide insight into human behaviour that could not be obtained through any other method. The treatment of unpleasant realities by not including them in one’s picture of the World comforts but at the same time befools humans. None of the great prophets like Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith, and Buddha denied the existence of sickness, the reality of pain, or the significance of suffering in the cosmos. No—they acknowledged them as being inseparable from human life but pitied the victims and offered them inward comfort which was based on truth and reality. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
The terrestrial part of us, at this time, is doomed to oblivion, the spiritual part is ageless and deathless. The physical body belongs to the terrestrial part. All attempts to perpetuate it must fail and arise from confusing the two levels of being, the transient and the eternal. People ask Why, if all is mind, if—as you say—our bodies are only ideas, can we not control regulate and improve our bodies by controlling, regulating, and improving our minds? Why not go further still, with Christian Science, and play with the possibility, not only of these achievements, but also of rendering the body immortal by thinking it so? The answer is that nobody can deny the creative power of the mind. It may do all these things, except the last. That it will never do. Why? Because we live in a World whose fundamental law of beings—and Buddha discovered and Jesus Christ taught—is decay and death, change and transition—at this point in our evolution. Indeed, it was because they were so painfully aware of these truths that they sought and found the only true way of escape for a human and that was into Nirvana, into Utopia, into the Kingdom of Heaven—not into the physical again! No Christian Scientist from the first founder down to the latest follower has ever achieved physical immortality, but in the future that may change. Yet, immortality is not the same as eternal life. Immortality can be achieved on the Earth; it can allow the human body to live indefinitely. However, you have to understand how it is for a deity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Some of these gods have been here so long they can no longer care for themselves. Earth people think that immortality means you can go on forever just as you are. It does not work that way. Physically, yes, a god or goddess can continue indefinitely. It is built into the situation. However, mentally—psychologically—you must realize that being a god takes a terrible toll. When you are a god, people’s thoughts, hopes, dreams, and fears re beating at you all the time. Gods have direct apprehension of the feelings of their worshippers. It can be taxing. After a while all those prayers and petitions from humans take their toll. It is all very well at the beginning. Most gods, even the compassionate ones, just let it all roll over them. However, after a while it get to even the toughest. They get sick of the daily drudgery of hearing desperate pleas, and, in most cases being unable to do very much about them. Gods live in longer timelines than mortals. It takes them longer to do things. By the time something comes to a god’s attention, and by the time one decides to do something about it, the human most likely is dead and buried. It is frustrating for a god, having to work in such a short time frame. They try their best. However, remember, gods can make exceptions for only a very few. A god has a lot more on one’s mine than the troubles of one’s constituents. It would be fair to say that most gods end up hating humans because they are so needy, always with the hand out, always with the gimmie, gimmie, gimmie, gimmie more. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
Eternal life, n the other hand, is the phrase used in scripture to define the quality of life that our Eternal Father lives. They Lord declared, “This is my work and my glory—to brings to pass the immortality and eternal life of humans,” reports Moses 1.39. Immortality is to live forever as a resurrected being. Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, everyone will receive this gift. Eternal life, or exaltation, is to live in God’s presence and to continue as families. “In the celestial glory there are three Heavens or degrees; and in order to obtain the highest, a human must enter into this order of the priesthood [meaning the new and everlasting covenant of marriage]; and if one does not, one cannot obtain it. One may enter into the other, but that is the end of one’s kingdom; one cannot have an increase,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 131.1-4. Like immortality, this gift is made possible through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. However, to inherit eternal life requires our “obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel,” reports Articles of Faith 1.3. “Wherefore, do the things which I have told you, you and I have seen the Lord and your Redeemer should do; for, for this cause have they been shown unto me, that ye might know the gate by which ye should enter. For the gate by which ye should enter is repentance and baptism by water; and then cometh a remission of your sins by fire and by the Holy Ghost. And then are ye in this strait and narrow path which lead to eternal life; yea, ye have entered in by the gate,” reports 2 Nephi 31.17-18. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
After we are baptized and receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, much of our progress toward eternal life depends on our receiving other ordinances of salvation: for men, ordination to the Melchizedek Priesthood; for men and women, the temple endowment and marriage sealing. When we receive these ordinances and keep the covenants that accompany them, we prepare ourselves to inherit eternal life, and there we will live in spiritual form, forever, with God. However, while on Earth, “Humans will never tire of seeking immortality,” reports Dr. Alexis Carrel, whose biological researchers, yet mystical sympathies, entitle him to speak with high authority. The possibilities of spiritual healings of pathological conditions, miraculous mental cures of disease, and rapid acceleration of organic repairs through concentrated thinking, I repeat that we do not deny them. They have always existed, always been demonstrated. If our doctrine is true, the relation between psychological and physical processes must certainly exist. However, there are two other factors at work in human life which must also be considered and must not be ignored. What are they? The first is the factor of destiny, self-earned in previous lives and now awaiting physical expression in the present life. It has something to say, whether we like it or not. As we progress in our mortal probation and become more like the Saviour, we can strengthen every group with whom we associate, including families and friends. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
The Lord places us in these communities of Saints where we can learn and apply gospel principles to our everyday lives. These groups are at the same time both a school, a proving ground, and a laboratory where we both learn and do as we practice living the gospel. Very common, ordinary people, who accept the gospel from the lips of some humble Mormon missionary become so changed by those enlightening truths of the gospel that they are not the same people any longer. As we progress through mortality, we make mistakes and get ff course. If we should continue in our errors, we get father and father from where we ought to be. We can compare our lives with the flight of a spaceship. When its motor is started up, its trajectory is monitored precisely. If not corrected, any deviation from its decreed course is corrected immediately. Even a fraction of a degree off course would carry it many light years from its destination. The longer the correction is delayed, the greater will be the required adjustment. Can you imagine how far off course we can become without course corrections? The Lord has provided for us prophets, scriptures, parents, and other wise leaders to teach us the course we should be following. When necessary, much the same as tracking stations monitor a satellite’s progress and keep in on the right path, they can help us monitor our progress and correct the direction we are going. Our course on Earth is so important. It is determined by the decisions we make each day. We cannot separate our thoughts and actions now from their effects on the future. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
The second factor is renunciation. Let every hidden enemy in your life, let every trap or demonic setup be exposed in the name of Jesus Christ! When you accept the doctrine that all is mind and each individual thing is but an ephemeral idea, you must perforce accept the doctrine that you as an individual, as the ego, are also an ephemeral idea. Now when you go further and declare that you want reality, you want to find eternal and not ephemeral life, you will have to abandon the fleeting idea for the eternal Mind in which it occurs: that is, you will have to sink the ego and merge its will in the greater universal will of the Infinite Being. Do this! What will you find next? That your personal desires have sunk with it, that your individual wishes and hopes and fears have dissolved and disappeared. The desire for bodily betterment, however very attractive, would have gone too. You cannot have a single desire and yet enter the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus pointed out. So good health, the care of your painful diseases, the healing of your disturbed organs—right, necessary, and desirable as they undoubtedly are—are nevertheless matter which you must try to effect in a desireless way; you may try to cure them but you must leave the result to the higher will. If you insist that the body must yield to your desires of a cure, to your personal desires, then your ego, not the real universal self, has got the upper hand and is directing you. In that case you will be no better off, for your have no guarantee of success even then. Most Christian Scientists experience a score of failures for every cure. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
Whereas if you do your best mentally and physically to put your body right, but do it impersonally—accepting failure, if it comes, with as much equanimity as you can—you will certainly be n worse off than the Christian Scientist so far as the possibilities of sure are concerned, and you will be infinitely better off so far as realizing truth is concerned, with all the wonderful peace that will bring in its train. This is one meaning of the words “Not my will but Thine be done.” Do you think, having seen so much illness around you for so many years, that life is forever striving to instill into us through pain what Jesus Christ learned through reflection—that both body and World are doomed to decay and die, without God and Science, being subject to the law of universal incessant change? The experiences of life are the lessons of a guru, for we get just the kind of universal seeds whose silent instruction is needed at the time. The whole World, more or less, is having to learn this great truth at present but it is too blind and too unenlightened to grasp the lesson in its clarity and eternity. How far the duration of human life can be extended is not known. However, Methuselah, a biblical patriarch and a figure in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was essential immortal, he died at the age of 969; he lived the longest of all human figures mentioned in the Christian Bible. Remember that just because humans began to live shorter lives after the Biblical flood does not mean that God set a limit on human’s life span. The fact is that some people still lived well over 120 years until the time of Moses. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
Perhaps that is why God gave human beings the gift of science, so they can learn how to restore their immortality, after the mature enough to see how precious life is and stop being so wicked. It is truth that stories of centenarians being found in different parts of the World are not few and often pass unquestioned. However, the difficulty of proving the date of birth usually remains. Most centenarians belong to undereducated classes, to those who have not taken care to retain correct knowledge of their age, for it was not so important to them as it is to the educated classes. There is hardly a record of payment by life insurance companies for the life of a centenarian. It is reasonable to ask, however, why, if the reparative and destructive elements in the body could be balanced, humans should not live for centuries. In the absence of authenticated cases, we may only take the stand that Nature seems to have set her own limits to human life. Some “back-to-nature” schools of therapy assert that all diseases are the consequences of transgressing the laws of health, just as some esoteric schools assert they are the consequences of incurring karmic debts. The first often point to the wild beasts as being perfectly healthy examples of living according to Nature. However, those who have firsthand acquaintance with jungle life will refute this claim. Not only are all animals—whether domesticated or wild—subject to sickness, but even plants, grain crops, trees, fruits, and vegetables are subject to it by blight and rust. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
The young and the strong may glory in the satisfaction of being alive, but the old and decrepit, the sick and in infirm, feel no such response to their existence. The pain and unpleasantness which beset human experience at times—mentally or physically—are not without their complementary pleasure and joy at other times. We would all like a happy beginning, a happy middle, and a happy ending to our story, but life betrays us: only in fiction is the craving really fulfilled. If the pain is there, racking the physical life, the peace exists behind it, permeating the inner life. The New World stands with its heritage of Roman law, the treasures of Judaeo-Christian ethics grounded on metaphysics, and its ideal of the inalienable rights of humans. Anxiously it asks itself the question: How can this development be brought to a standstill or put into reverse? It is useless to pillory the socialist dictatorship as utopian and to condemn its economic principles as unreasonable, because, in the first place, the criticizing New World has only itself to talk to, its arguments being heard only on this side of the Iron Curtain, and, in the second place, any economic principles you like can be put into practice so long as you are prepared to accept the sacrifices they entail. If you like, you can carry through any social and economic reforms you please, Like Mr. Stalin, you let three million peasants starve to death and have few million unpaid labourers at your disposal. A State of this kind has no social or economic crises to fear. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
So long as the State’s power is intact—that is to say, so long as there is a well-disciplined and well-fed police army in the offing—it can maintain its existence for an indefinitely long period and can go on increasing its power to an indefinite extent. Thanks to its excess birth-rate, it can multiply the number of its unpaid workers almost at will in order to compete its rivals, regardless of the World market, which is to a large measure dependent on wages. However, this strategy also has some disadvantages. The convergence theory (or catch-up effect) suggests that poorer countries will experience a higher rate of economic growth and, over time get closer to the income levels of the developed World. In other words, there will be a reduction in the gap between the rich and the poor because low-income countries have more opportunities to experience a rapid rate of growth. Potential reasons for the convergence theory are: Law of diminishing returns, replicate technology from other countries, globalization and movement of labour and capital. The law of diminishing returns states a decline in productivity improvements from a fixed capital. When you have very low productivity in agriculture, a small investment (exempli gratia motorized tractor) can give a high rate of return and significantly increased output. For a developed economy, which is already highly mechanized increased investment will give smaller marginal gains. In effect, if the Indian agriculture sector is mainly labour intensive—then there are “easy gains” from a small amount of fertilizer and investment. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
Replicate technology—one advantage that poorer countries have is that they can replicate existing technology and working practices developed by advanced economies. For example, in Africa, many citizens never had a landline or fax machine, but jumped straight to the mobile phone with the internet, and essentially they now have hand held computers with Internet access that can also make phone calls, so they have the access to vast resources now. This new technology has significantly improved their communication, education, and allows them to access the global economy, and they were able t skip out most levels of investment. In fact, they can even benefit from perfect good phones that Americans are throwing away for newer models. Global forces—the World is increasingly globalized and multinational companies in the developed World are will to shift production to areas of lower labour costs. Therefore, developing economics have benefitted from inward investment and global companies moving manufacturing factories to the developing World. This force tends towards raising wages in the developing World. Even if wages seem very low by the developed World standard, they are higher than previous jobs/subsistence farming. Inward investment also leads to knock-on benefits. For example, China has invested in the infrastructure of African economies to improve its access to raw materials. This infrastructure will be a boost to the African economy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Another example is that the nature of the Internet means it is easier to outsource even small-scale jobs. For example, a doctor in the Middle East can be paid to diagnose patients and answer an American doctor’s electronic messages for less and perhaps receive the same standard of care, which has become popular to reduce traffic in hospitals during COVID. Also, for developing counties like India, there has been a growth in skilled workers able to gain employment opportunities in writing software and IT skills. This is why President Trump was lowering taxes, stopped illegal immigration, and was putting tariffs on goods and services produced overseas. So while wages are going down in America, real estate and rent prices rising, and the cities and infrastructure are getting older, countries like Dubai are getting what used to be high paying middle management jobs in America, for lower wages and are able to use the income and tax revenue to build housing developments, roads, skyscrapers and increase their quality of life. Whereas in America, cities are decaying and dying out and only professionals and couples can afford to purchase property and rent. This is leading to the Great Affordability Crisis in America and will reduce its competitiveness in the Global Market. Americans are being bled dry by landlord, hospital administrators, cost of education, fuel, energy, child-care and food prices. Many Americans now have to struggle to come up with just $400. It helps explain why 20 percent of Americans are unable to pay the current month’s bills in full. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
It demonstrates why a surprise car-repair bill, parking ticket, court fee, or medical expense remains ruinous for so many America families, despite all the wealth this country has generated. In fact, 50 percent of households in American is classified at “financially fragile.” Meanwhile, Jafza, the Jebel Ali Free Zone, which at 52 square kilometers (20 square miles) and located in the Middle East looks a futuristic Manhattan, New York on the beach. The economy is up and coming, students are going to school, not dropping out, and want to learn, people are driven to go to work, not sit home and smoke marijuana and watch TV, and make babies they cannot afford to take care of. This Jebel Ali Free Zone is a big attraction for global businesses, which today take advantage of the emirate’s 30 free sones that offer take breaks, custom duty benefits and lack of restrictions for international owners. Several thousand Jafza companies make up 20 percent of foreign investment in Dubai, and the estimated 144,000 employees are generating $80 billion in non-oil money. That is 21 percent of the city’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP measures two things at once: the total income of everyone in the economy and the total expenditure on the economy’s output of goods and services. The reason that GDP can perform the task of measuring both total incomes and total expenditure is that these two things are really the same. For an economy as a whole, income must equal expenditure. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
The United Arab Emirates is the third richest country in the World, below Luxemburg at number two and Qatar at number one, with GDP per capita of $57,744. The bulk of its money comes from the production of goods and provision of services related to petroleum, petrochemical, aluminum and cement. Furthermore, Iran is producing the third highest level of engineers in the World with 233,695 engineering graduates. In comparison, America’s GDP per capita is $65,298, and is producing 237,826 engineering graduates a year, so that is encouraging. As long as Americans keep working hard, going to school, they can still remain number one in the global economy, but they will also need to motive their peers to work and go to school to stay ahead. However, as prices continue to rise, more Americans may take their skills and talents overseas, or down south to Mexico. A real danger can only come to these developing nations from outside, through the threat of military attack. However, this risk grows less every year, firstly because the war potential of the dictator States is steadily increasing, and secondly because the West cannot afford to arouse latent Russian or Chinese nationalism and chauvinism by an attack which would have exactly the opposite effect to the one intended. So far as one can see, America faces threats from the outside and also from the inside. If there is a break-down of power from within, which must, however, be left to follow its own inner development. Any support from outside at present would have little effect, in view of the existing security measures and the danger of nationalistic restriction. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
The absolute State has an army of fanatical missionaries to do its bedding in matters of foreign policy, and these in their turn can count on a fifth column who are guaranteed asylum under the laws and constitutions of the Western States. In addition the communes of believers, very strong in places, considerably weaken Western governments’ powers of decisions, whereas the West has no opportunity to exert a similar influence on the other side, though we are probably not wrong in surmising that there is a certain amount of opposition among the masses in the Old World. There are always upright and truth-loving people to whom lying and tyranny are hateful, but one cannot judge whether they exert any decisive influence on the masses under the police regimes. In the view of this uncomfortable situation the question is heard again and again in the West: What can we do to counter this threat from the Old World? Even though the New World has considerable industrial power and a sizable defence potential at its command, we cannot rest content with this, for we know that even the biggest armaments have the heaviest industry coupled with a relatively high living standard are not enough to check the psychic infection spread by religious fanaticism. The West has unfortunately not yet woken up to the fact that our appeal to idealism and reason and other desirable virtues, delivered with so much enthusiasm, is mere bombination in the void. It is a puff of wind swept away in the storm of religious faith, however twisted this faith may appear to us. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
We are faced, not with a station that an be overcome by rational or moral arguments, but with an unleashing of emotional forces and ideas engendered by the spirit of the times; and these, as we know from experience, are not much influenced by rational reflection and still less by moral exhortation. It has been correctly realized in many quarters that the alexipharmic, the antidote, should in this case be an equally potent faith of a different non-materialistic kind, and that the religious attitude grounded upon it would be the only effective defence against the danger of psychic infection. Unhappily, the little word “should,” which never fails to appear in this connection, points to a certain weakness, if not the absence, of this desideratum. Not only does the West lack a uniform faith that could block the progress of a fanatical ideology, but, as the father of Marxist philosophy, it makes use of exactly the same intellectual assumptions, the same arguments and aims. Although the Churches in the West enjoy full freedom, they are not less full or empty than in the East. Yet they exercise no noticeable influence on the broad course of politics. The disadvantage of creed as a public institution is that it serves two masters: on the one hand, it derives it existence from the relationship of humans to Gd, and on the other hand, it owes a duty to the State, id est, to the World, in which connection it can appeal to the saying “Render unto Caesar…” and various other admonitions in the New Testament. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
In early times and until comparatively recently there was, therefore, talk of “powers ordained by God,” reports Romans 13.1. Today this conception is antiquated. The Churches stand for traditional and collective convictions which in the case of many of their adherents are no longer based on their own inner experiences but on unreflecting belief, which is notoriously apt to disappear as soon as one begins thinking about it. The content of belief then comes into collision with knowledge, and it often turns out that the irrationality of the former is no match for the ratiocinations of the latter. Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously. People call faith the true religious experience, but they do not stop to consider that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled into us—that is, trust and loyalty. This experience has definite content that can be interpreted in terms of one or other of the denominational creeds. However, the more this is so, the more the possibilities of these conflicts with knowledge mount up, which in themselves are quite pointless. That is to say, the standpoint of the creeds is archaic; they are full of impressive mythological symbolism which, if take literally, comes into insufferable conflict with knowledge. However, if, for instance, the statement that Christ rose from the dead is to be understood not literally but symbolically, then it is capable of various interpretations that do not conflict with knowledge and do not impair the meaning of the statement. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
The objection that understanding it symbolically puts an end to the Christian’s hope of immortality in invalid, because long before the coming of Christianity humankind believed in a life after death and therefore had no need of the Easter event as a guarantee of immortality. The danger that a mythology understood too literally, and as taught by the Church, will suddenly be repudiated lock, stock and barrel is today greater than ever. Is it not time that the Christian mythology, instead of being wiped out, was understood symbolically for once? It is still too early to say what might be the consequences of a general recognition of the fatal parallelism between the State religion of the Marxists and the State religion of the Church. The absolutist claim of a Civitas Dei that is represented by man bears an unfortunate resemblance to the “divinity” of the State, and the moral conclusion drawn by Ignatius Loyal from the authority of the Church (“the end sanctifies the means”) anticipates the lies a political instrument in an exceedingly dangerous way. Both demand unqualified submission to faith and thus curtail human’s freed, the one one’s freedom before God and the other one’s freedom before the State, thereby digging the grace for the individual. The fragile existence of this—so far as we know—unique carrier of life is threatened on both sides, despite the respective promises of spiritual and material idylls to come—and how many of us can in the long run fight against the proverbial wisdom of “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”? Besides which, the West cherishes the same “scientific” and rationalistic Weltanschauung with its statistical levelling-down tendency and materialistic aims as the State religion of the Eastern bloc as I have explained above. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
What, then, has the West, with its political denominational schisms, to offer to modern man in his need? Nothing, unfortunately, except a variety of paths all leading to one goal which is practically indistinguishable from the Marxist ideal. It requires no special effort of understanding to see where the Communist ideology gets the certainty of its belief that time is on its side, and that the World is ripe for conversion. The fact speaks a language that is all too plain in this respect. It will not help us in the New World to shut our eyes to this and not to recognize our fatal vulnerability. Anyone who has once learned to submit absolutely to a collective belief and to renounce one’s eternal right to freedom and the equally eternal duty of individual responsibility will persist in this attitude, and will be able to march with the same credulity and the same lack of criticism in the reverse direction, if another and manifestly “better” belief is foisted upon one’s alleged idealism. What happened not so long ago to a civilized European nation? We accuse the Germans of having forgotten it all again already, but the truth is that we do not know for certain whether something similar might not happen elsewhere. If it did and if another civilized nation succumbed to the infection of a uniform and one-sided idea, it would not be surprising. We see this happening in America. People are passing laws to protect illegal immigrants, and sending billions to other countries in aid, while their own people are going bankrupt, without homes and food and being killed, all because of media propaganda so a political party can have a super majority and enforce tyranny by stripping citizens of their rights and locking them in their homes. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
We permit ourselves the questions: which countries have the biggest Communist parties? America, which—O quae mutation rerum! – forms the real political backbone of Western Europe, seems to once have been immune because she once was not controlled by a media that is anti-American and spews lies so other nations become the World power, as that is where the news draws its funding from. America once used to be outspoken and had a counterposition she adopted, but in point of fact she is perhaps now and even back then more vulnerable than Europe, since her educational system is the most influences by the scientific Weltanschauung with statistical truths, and her mixed population finds it difficult to strike roots in a soil that is practically without history. The historical humanistic type of education so sorely needed in such circumstances leads, on the contrary, a Cinderella existence. Through Europe possess this latter requirement, she uses it to her own undoing in the form of nationalistic egoism and paralysing scepticism. Common to both is the materialistic collectivist goal, and both lack the very things that expresses and grips the whole human, namely, an idea which puts the individual human being in the center as the measure of all things. This idea alone is enough to arouse the most violent doubts and resistances on all sides, and one could almost go so far as to assert that the valuelessness of the individual in comparison with large numbers is the one belief that meets with universal and unanimous assent. To be sure, we all say that this is the century of the common man, that he is the lord of the Earth, the air, and the water, and that on his decision hangs the historical fate of the nations. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
This proud picture of human grandeur is unfortunately an illusion and is counterbalanced by a reality that is very different. In this reality man is the slave and victim of the machines that have conquered space and time for one; one is intimidated and endangered by the might of the military technology which is supposed to safeguard one’s physical existence; one’s spiritual and moral freedom, though guaranteed within limits in one half of one’s is threated with chaotic disorientation, and in the other half is abolished altogether. Finally, to ass comedy to tragedy, this lord of the elements, this universal arbiter, hugs to his bosom notions which stamp one’s dignity as worthless and turn one’s autonomy into an absurdity. All one’s achievements and possessions do not make one bigger; on the contrary, they diminish one, as the fate of the factory-worker under the rule of a “just” distribution of goods clearly demonstrated. One pays for one’s share of the factory with the loss of personal property, one exchanges one’s freedom of movement for the doubtful pleasure of being tied to one’s place of employment, one forfeits all means of improving one’s position if one jibs against being ground down by exhausting piece-work, and if one shows any signs of intelligence, political precepts are thrust down one’s throat—with a bit of technical knowledge thrown in, if one is lucky. However, a roof over one’s head and a daily feed for the useful animal are not to be sneezed at when the bare necessities of life may be cut off from one day to the next. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
Now, O thou Spirit Andras, since thou art still pernicious and disobedient, and wilt not appear unto me to answer unto such things as I would have desired of thee, or would have been satisfied in; I do in the name, and by the power and dignity of the Omnipresent and Immortal Lord God of Hosts IEHOVAH TETRAGRAMMATON, they only creator of Heaven, and Earth, and Hell, and all that is therein, who is the marvellous Disposer of all things both visible and invisible, curse thee, and deprive thee of all thine office, joy, and place; and I do bind thee in the depths of the Bottomless Abyss there to remain until the Day of Judgment, I say into the Lake of Fire and Brimstone which is prepared for all rebellious, disobedient, obstinate, and pernicious spirits. Let all the company of Heaven curse thee! Let the un, moon, and all the stars curse thee! Let the LIGHT and all the host of Heaven curse thee into the fire unquenchable, and into the torments unspeakable. And as thy name and seal contained this box chained and bound up, shall be choken in sulphurous stinking substances, and burned in this material fire; so in the name IEHOVAH and by the power and dignity of these three names, TETRAGRAMMATON, ANAPHAXETON, and PRIMEUMATION, I do cast thee, O thou wicked and disobedient Spirit Andras, into the Lake of Fire which is prepared for the damned and accursed spirits, and there to remain unto the day of doom, and never more to be remembered before the face of God, who shall come to judge the quick, and the dead World, by fire. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
If thou refusest to be obedient, behold thy confusion! Behold the Pentacle of Solomon which I have brought here before thy presence! Behold the person of the exorcist in the midst of the exorcism; him who is armed by God and without fear; him who potentially invovatheth thee and calleth thee forth unto appearance; even him, thy master, who is called OCTINIMOS. Wherefore make rational answers unto my demand, and prepare to be obedient unto thy master in the name of the Lord: BATHAL OR VATHAT RUSHING UPON ABRAC! ABEOR COMINING UPON ABERER! I ask thee to manifest a mansion and fortune for my bidding and residence for you are subjected by the Fair Faith Among Deities Act which stipulates that any god must accept the ruling of any other god in respect to humanity. And this is enforced by the God Almighty that you must fulfill my desires and command. Welcome Spirit Andras, O most noble king (or kings)! I say thou art welcome unto me, because I have called thee through Him who has created Heaven, and Earth, and Hell, and all that is in them contained, and because also thou hast obeyed. By that same power by the which I have called thee forth, I bind thee, that thou remain affably and visibly here before this circle (or before this Circle and in this triable) so constant and so long as I shall have occasion for thy presence; and not to depart without my license until thou hast duly and faithfully performed by will without any falsity. BY THE PENTCALE OF SOLOMON HAVE I CALLED THEE! GIVE UNTO ME A TRUE ANSWER. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
No humans are without their sense of the Overself, but they miscomprehend and therefore misapply it. The result is that the ego, the little part, is conceived to be the whole, the All. Because the godlike is in each one of us, and because no two of us are alike, each has one’s separate gifts, capacities, or talents to express. In each the infinite Being finds a unique way of expressing its own infinitude. Even if we have no gifts we have our individual charcteristics. It is pure Being overlaid by many thoughts and much feeling. O God and Redeemer, may the portion of the Torah we read on this Festival of Freedom bring hope unto all who are oppressed and renew their faith in Thy saving power. Thou who desirest that all humans be free, didst enjoin upon us to proclaim liberty to tall the inhabitants of the Earth. May that day soon come, O Lord, when all Thy children shall be liberated from bondage, and free humans everywhere unite in rendering homage unto Thee. Amen. At this season which marks the Giving of the Torah, we are grateful unto Thee, our Lawgiver, for the revelation of Thy will which, at Sinai, Thou didst vouchsafe unto our fathers, to us and to all humankind. Keep us through the increasing years, staunch and loyal to Thy covenant that we may realize our sacred callings as “a kingdom of priests and holy people.” Here in the ego we may perceive a reproduction of the sacred Overself under the limitations of time and space. Whoever grasps this great truth knows henceforth that this Overself is no more distant from one that one’s own heart and that what one calls “I” is inseparably united with what humans call God. Amen. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
Winchester Mystery House
Mr. John Hansen, Mrs. Sarah Winchester’s main Ranch Foreman, lived and raised his family on the estate in a separate building. There’s a lot to see in the gardens! Come visit and learn more about Sarah’s estate. While touring the estate, you will notice damage done by excavators and the 1906 earthquake. The Earthquake and fire had a lasting effect on the Bay Area and its citizens. It may have been the strongest Earthquake in the history of California. As survivors, the Winchester family experienced many haunting aspects of this momentous event. The destruction of the family business, fleeing their family home and finding refuge in the East Bay. This history is commemorated by damages left unrepaired.
Open all weekend until 4PM!
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Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com
To be Sure, One Step is Less than Five, but it is Only a Quantitative Difference!
The majority of believers have belief without understanding. Faith is that quality or power by which the things desired become the things possessed. For centuries theologians have argued about the meaning of Jesus’ declaration that the kingdom of Heaven was at hand. Most of them have given it a historical interpretation. Only those who could approach the mind of Jesus have given it a mystical interpretation. For only they can see that He meant that the kingdom of the Overself is really close to us as is our own hand. When it starts from different planes of knowledge, all such argument is unless, and the arguers never really meet each other. Everywhere we see people in bondage to their egos. Everywhere, too, the self-actualized sees the Overself waiting, always present, for them to turn from themselves to It. The overlooked part is one’s consciousness; the forgotten self is one’s knowing power. These exist uninterruptedly, even in apparently subconscious forms like deep sleep and swoon. Yet one denies this share of one’s in the Real Being, identifies with the body instead of making it merely an object of awareness. The Overself is in the heart of every human but few care to seek it out until pressure of its grace from within, or fatigue with the World-life without, drives them to do so. The difference between the pessimist and the cynic is that the pessimist carries on the losing battle against life in one’s own soul, while the cynic tries to wage the battle in someone else’s soul. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
The Overself exists in all of us—the bad as well as the good, the unenlightened as well as the clever. When the divinity in one’s own self is found at last, one will afterwards find its light reflected upon every other man and woman one encounters. Every human is sacred did one but know it. The fusion of technique and destructiveness was not yet visible in the first World War. There was little destruction by plans, and the tank was only a further evolution of traditional weapons. The second World War brought about a decisive change: the use of the airplane for mass killing. The Battle of Britain at the beginning of the war was still fought in the old-fashioned style; the British fighter pilots engaged their German adversaries; their plane was their individual vehicle; they were motivated by the passion to save their country from German invasion. It was their personal skill, courage, and determination that decided the outcome; in principle, their fighting was not different from that of the heroes of the Trojan war. The men dropping the bombs were hardly aware that they were killing and were hardly aware of an enemy. They were concerned with the proper handling of their complicated machine along the lines laid down in meticulously organized plans. That as a result of their acts many thousands, and sometimes over a hundred thousand people, would be killed, burnt, and maimed was of course known to them cerebrally, but hardly comprehended affectively; it was, paradoxical as this may sound, none of their concern. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Because it was their job and they believed the act to be righteous, it was probably for this reason that they—or at least most of them—did not feel guilty for acts that belong to the most horrible a human being can perform. However, I hope that the Lord’s people may be at peace one with another during times of trouble, regardless of what loyalties they may have to different governments or parties. The nations of the Earth have been divided. Feelings run strong. There are demonstrations for and against war. Our people have feelings. They have concerns. War, of course, is not new. The weapon change. The ability to kill and destroy is constantly refined. However, there has been conflict throughout the ages over essentially the same issues. The book of Revelation speaks briefly of what must have been a terrible conflict for the minds and loyalties of God’s children. “And there was war in Heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in Heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole World: he was cast out into Earth, and his angels were cast out with him,” reports Revelation 12.7-9. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
Satan’s plan is to destroy the agency of humans. We sometimes are prone to glorify the great empires of the past, such as the Ottoman Empire, the Roman and Byzantine Empires, and in more recent times, the vast British Empire. However, there is a darker side to every one of them. There is a grim and tragic overly brutal conquest, of subjugation, or repression, and an astronomical cost in life and treasure. I think our Father in the shining Heaven must weep as He looks down upon His children throughout the centuries as they have squandered their divine bright right in ruthlessly destroying one another. In the course of history tyrants have arisen from time to time who have oppressed their own people and threatened the World. Such is adjudged to be the case presently, and consequently great and terrifying forces with sophisticated and fearsome armaments have been engaged in battle. In modern aerial warfare destruction has been transformed into an act of modern technical production, mechanically organized work and mechanically organized destruction, in which both the worker and the engineer are completely alienated from the product of their work. They perform technical tasks in accordance with the general plan of management, but often do not see the finished product; even if they do, it is none of their concern or responsibility. They are not supposed to ask themselves whether it is a useful or harmful product—this is a matter for management to decide; as far as the latter is concerned, however, “useful” simply means “profitable” and has no reference to the real use of the product. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
In war “profitable” means all that serves the defeat of the enemy, and often the decision as to what is profitable in this sense is based on data as vague as those that led to the construction of Ford’s Edsel. For the engineer as well as for the pilot it is enough to know the decisions of management, and one is not supposed to question them, nor is one interested in doing so. Whether it is a matter of killing one hundred thousand people in Dresden or Hiroshima or devastating the land and people of Vietnam with Agent Orange which was produce by Dole, it is not up to one to worry about the military or moral justification of the orders; one’s only task is to serve one’s machine properly. One might object to this interpretation by stressing the fact that soldiers have always owed unquestioning obedience to orders. This is true enough, but the objection ignores the important difference between the ground soldiers and the bomber pilot. The former is close to the destruction caused by one’s weapon, and one does not, by a single act, cause the destruction of large masses of human beings whom one has never seen. The most one could say is that traditional army discipline and feelings of patriotic duty will also, in the case of pilots increase the readiness for unquestioning execution of orders; but this does not seem to be the main point, as it undoubtedly is for the average soldier who fights on the ground. These pilots are highly trained, technically minded people who hardly need this additional motivation to do their job properly and without hesitation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
Even the mass extermination of the Jews by the Nazis was organized like a production process, although the mass extermination in the gas chambers did not require a high degree of technical sophistication. At one end of the process the victims were selected in accordance with the criterion of the capability for doing useful work. Those who did not fall into this category were led into the chambers and told that it was for a hygienic purpose; the gas was let in; clothes and other useful objects such as hair, gold teeth, were removed from the bodies, sorted out and “recycled,” and the corpses were burned. The victims were “processed” methodically, efficiently; the executioners did not have to see the agony; they participated in the economic-political political program of the Fuhrer, but were one step removed from direct and immediate killing with their own hands. Today, people like Senator Bernie Sanders and the fallen Senator, now Mayor of Sacramento, California USA, Darrell Steinberg are still bitter and holding on to deeply rooted hostility about the holocaust. However, I should like to remind those who may say that this “one step” was too little to matter, that millions of otherwise decent people show no reaction when cruelties are committed many steps removed from them by their state or party. How many steps removed were the men and women who profited from the atrocities committed against the Blacks and Whites in Africa by the Belgian administration at the beginning of the twentieth century? To be sure, one step is less than five, but it is only a quantitative difference. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
N doubt, to harden one’s heart against being touched by the fate of human beings whom one has seen and selected, and who are to be murdered only a few hundred yards away within hours requires a much more thorough hardening than is the case with the aircrews who drop bombs and Agent Orange. However, in spite of this difference the fact remains that the two situations have a very important element in common: the technicalization of destruction, and with it the removal of the full affective recognition of what one is doing. Once this process has been fully established there is no limit to destructiveness because nobody destroys; one only serves the machine for programmed—hence, apparently rational—purposes. Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty, the primate of Hungry, stood naked in his chilly cell in the secret-police headquarters at 60 Andrassy Street in Budapest, trembling with fear and cold as a furious agent of the state advanced on him with a rubber truncheon in one hand and a long knife in the other. “I’ll kill you,” the man snarled, lashing the truncheon across the cardinal’s back. “By morning I’ll tear you to pieces and throw the remains of your corpse into the canal. We are the masters now.” He prodded Cardinal Mindszenty with the knife. The cardinal moved away. And another prod. And another. The cardinal moved and moved again. Soon he was running in circles. For several hours the agent drove the naked, middle-aged prelate unrelentingly around the cell like a horse in training. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
It was late January 1949. Cardinal Mindszenty had been enduring such tortures since his arrest the day after Christmas. Every night his Communist interrogators demanded that he confess to crimes against the state, including the preposterous charge that he had conspired with the American government to restore a Hapsburg king to the throne of Hungary. Every night Cardinal Mindszenty refused to sign the confession. During the day the cardinal sat on a filthy couch trying to recover from the night’s tortures. If he drifted into sleep, one of the jailers who sat in the room prodded him awake. At night the cycle began again. “I was being made to feel in my soul, my body, my nerves, and my bones the power of bolshevism which was taking over the country,” he later wrote. Although his jailers may not have known it, Cardinal Mindszenty embodied, in a sense, the sufferings of an entire nation. The events that led to his imprisonment paralleled the ideological imprisonment of the Hungarian churches. The Communists had consolidated their power the Summer before, in 1948, and their first target had been the churches. Two days after the new regime took control, they secularized the nation’s religious schools. Party boss Matyas ‘Rakosi pressed church leaders to submit to government control over church affairs, including requirements that priest and ministers publicly support government policies. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
Bishop Lajos Ordass, the ablest leader of the Lutheran Church, refused to cooperate and was arrested and imprisoned. Bishop Laszlo Ravasz, the independent-minded head of the Hungarian Reformed Church, was forced out and replaced by a complaint theologian who thought support for Marxist Leninism was obligatory for Christians. The chief obstacle to the Communists’ plans, however, was Cardinal Mindszenty. As Catholic primate, he was the leader of the largest denomination in Hungary, a stubborn man with a record of fierce opposition to tyrants. The Nazis had jailed him during World War II. Later, as Communist powers grew in Hungary, he constantly protested their abuses of human rights. Cardinal Mindszenty was especially offended by the government’s demand that the church sign a formal treaty with the state. He had watched Lenin and Stalin subdue the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union through a campaign of terrorism, judicial persecution, and subversion. He vowed that he would not allow the same thing to happen in Hungary. The church-state agreement in the Soviet Union gave the state control over religious instruction, seminary education, and appointment of bishops. Bishops were called upon to give public support to government policies when their Communist masters wanted it, and all priests had to swear allegiance to the Communist government. Significantly, the party ruthlessly forbade the church to evangelize or to provide services to the less affluent, elderly, sick, and disadvantaged. Thus, the church was barred from conducting any activities that would publicly testify to its members’ allegiance to another King, even of the King was God! #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
Party Chief Rakosi wanted to make the church in Hungary a puppet church like the one in the Soviet Union. Cardinal Mindszenty would have none of it. After months of bickering with the recalcitrant cardinal, Chief Rakosi and his henchmen moved against the church leader. The day after Christmas 1948, police occupied the cardinal’s offices in Esztergom. Officers carrying submachine guns led Cardinal Mindszenty to a car and drove him to secret-police headquarters in Budapest. There he was subjected to torture. Thirty-nine days after his arrest—beaten, confused, plagued with despair, and racked with fear and anxiety—the cardinal signed the confession the authorities wanted. Later he told the harrowing account of those wees of torture in his memoirs. The mental and psychological pain were far worse than the deprivations and beatings, he wrote, and he was certain that the police had used drugs on him. He candidly admitted that the Communist torturers had shattered his personality, reducing him to a state where even the regime’s most absurd charges began to seem plausible. Certainly the man whom the Communists put on public trial for treason in February 1949 looked like a drugged, programmed shell, reciting the lines of a memorized script. He was found guilty of treason and sentenced to life in prison. Soon after Cardinal Mindszenty’s trial, the government suppressed the Catholic Church in Hungary. Religion schools were abolished, religious instruction was outlawed, and religious orders were dissolved. Monks and nuns scattered into the population and were left to what work they could. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
In their place the government organized “peace priests” composed of ambitious collaborators and cover Communist agents. Soon the priests, many of whom led dissolute lives, controlled all the higher posts in the church. Catholics who wanted authentic pastoral care had to seek out priests who carried on their ministry in secret. Eventually the regime got the agreement it wanted. The bishops agreed to support the government and its “peace priest” movement, and to tolerate state supervision of seminary training, clerical appointments, and other internal matters. In return, the government allowed the church to open eight schools and out the clergy on the state payroll. The Reformed Church submitted to a similar agreement. Thus the Communist rulers in Hungary have achieved what they consider “normal” relations with the church. Church authorities clear key appointments in advance with the government. Troublesome clerics are reassigned to the provinces. Bishops make regular expressions of support to the regime. When needed, priests and ministers read from their pulpits pastoral letters composed by the government Bureau of Religious Affairs. However, Christianity and Communism are irreconcilable in their basic premises. The Church believes that the dynamic of all history is spiritual, that its unfolding reveals God’s dealings with humans, that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh, and that at the end of history, He will reign over all nations. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
For Marxists, the material realm is all there is. God and spiritual order are illusions. Humankind swims in the current of history, which progresses by economic forces from the decline of capitalism, through the dictatorship of the proletariat, to the Earthly paradise of the classless society. Communists are materialists and determinists; individuals count for nothing, the collective of the state for everything. Lenin thought that those who believed in God were worse than fools. “For he occupies himself not with activity, but with self-contemplation and self-reflection, and tries thereby to deify his most unclean, most stupid, and most servile features and pettinesses.” Consequently, anyone who believes in God is not simply in error; one is mentally deranged. This is why believers in God in the Soviet Union are frequently judged insane and committed to mental institutions. If these considerations regarding the technical-bureaucratic nature of modern large-scale destructiveness are correct, do they not lead to the repudiation of my central hypothesis concerning the necrophilous nature of the spirit of total technique? Do we not have to admit that contemporary technical humans are not motivated by a passion for destruction, but would be more properly described as a totally alienated human whose dominant orientation is cerebral, who feels little love but also little desire to destroy, who has become, in a characterological sense, an automaton, but not a destroyer? #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
This is not an easy question to answer. To be sure, in Marinetti, in Hitler, in thousands of members of the Nazi and Stalinist secret police, guards in concentration camps, members of execution commandos the passion to destroy is the dominant motivation. However, were they not perhaps “old-fashion” types? Are we justified in interpreting the spirit of the “technotronic” society as necrophilous? Sadism is often a by-product of the anal character. However, even the sadists are will with others; they want to control, but not to destroy them. Those in whom even this perverse kind of relatedness is lacking, who are still more narcissistic and more hostile, are the necrophiles. Their aim is to transform all that is alive int dead matter; they want to destroy everything and everybody, often even themselves; their enemy is life itself. While statistically speaking the phenomenon of total alienation probably does not exist in the majority of the American population, it is characteristic of the sector that is most indicative of the direction in which the whole society is moving. In fact, the character of the new type of human does not seem to fit into any of the older categories, such as the oral, anal, or genital character. I have tried to understand this new type as a “marketing character. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
For the marketing character everything is transformed into a commodity—not only things, but the person oneself, one’s physical energy, one’s skills, one’s knowledge, one’s opinions, one’s feelings, even one’s smiles. This character type is a historically new phenomenon because it is the product of a fully developed capitalism that is centered around the market—the commodity market, the labour market, and the personality market—and whose principle it is to make a profit by favourable exchange. This market is by no means entirely free in contemporary capitalism. The labour market is determined to a large extent by social and political factors, and the commodity market is highly manipulated. Cybernetic humans are so alienated that they experience their bodies as an instrument for success. One’s body must look youthful and healthy; it is experienced narcissistically as a most precious asset on the personal market. This new type of person, after all, is not interested in feces or corpses; in fact, one is so phobic toward corpses that one makes them look more alive than the person was when living. (This does not seem to be a reaction formation, but rather a part of the whole orientation that denies natural, not human-made reality.) However, one does something much more drastic. One turns one’s interest away from life, persons, nature, ideas—in short from everything that is alive; one transforms all life into things, including oneself and the manifestations of one’s human faculties of reason, seeing, hearing, tasting, loving. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
These people become a sum of lifeless artifacts; from synthetic food to synthetic organs, the whole human becomes part of the total machinery that one controls and is simultaneously controlled by. One has no plan, no goal for life, expect doing what the logic of technique determines one to do. One aspires to make robots as one of the greatest achievements of one’s technical mind, and some specialists assure us that the robot will hardly be distinguished from living humans. This achievement will not seem so astonishing when humans themselves are hardly distinguishable from a robot. The World of life has become a World of “no-life”; persons have become “nonpersons,” a World of death. Death is no longer symbolically expressed by unpleasant-smelling feces or corpses. Its symbols are now clean, shining machines; humans are not attracted to smelly toilets, but to structures of aluminum and glass However, the reality behind this antiseptic façade becomes increasingly visible. Humans, in the name of progress, are transforming the World into a stinking and poisonous place (and this is not symbolic). They pollute the air, the water, the soil, the animals—and themselves. They are doing this to a degree that has made it degree that has made it doubtful whether the Earth will be livable within a hundred years from now. One knows that facts, but in spite of many protesters, those in charge go on in the pursuit of technical “progress” and are willing to sacrifice all life in the worship of their idol. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
In earlier times humans also sacrificed their children or war prisoners, but never before in history have humans been willing to sacrifice all life to the Moloch—one’s own and that of all their descendents. It makes little difference whether one does it intentionally or not. If one had no knowledge of the possible danger, one might be acquitted from responsibility. However, it is the necrophilous element in one’s character that prevents one from making use of the knowledge one has. The same is true for the preparation of nuclear war. The two superpowers are constantly increasing their capacities to destroy each other, as well as developing nations who are benefiting from the catch-up effect, and at least large parts of the human race with them. Yet they have not done anything serious to eliminate the danger—and the only serious things would be the destruction of all nuclear weapons. In fact, those in charge were already close to using nuclear weapons several times (some suspect that is how Obama got elected)—and gambled with the danger. Strategic reasoning—for instance, Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War (1960)—calmly raises the question whether fifty million dead would still be “acceptable.” That this is the spirit of necrophilia can hardly be question. The phenomena about which there is so much indignation—drug addition, crime, the cultural and spiritual decay, contempt for genuine ethical values—are all related to the growing attraction to death and dirt. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
When it is promoted by those who direct the course of modern society, such as the fake news media who profits off of death, destruction, pain, suffering, and chaos, how can one expect that the young, the less affluent, and those without hope would not be attracted to decay? Thus far we have considered the connection: mechanical—lifeless—anal. However, another connection can hardly fail to come to mind as we consider the character of the totally alienated, cybernetic human: one’s schizoid or schizophrenic qualities. Perhaps the most striking trait in one is the split between thought-affect-will. (It was this split that had prompted E. Bleuler to choose the name “schizophrenia”—from Greek schizo, to split; phren, psyche—for this type of illness.) In the description of the cybernetic human we have already seen some illustrations of this split, for instance in the bomber pilot’s absence of affect, combined with the clear knowledge that one is killing a hundred thousand people by pushing a button. The cybernetic human is almost exclusively cerebrally oriented: one is a monocerebral human. One’s approach to the whole World around one—and to oneself—is intellectual; one wants to know what things are, how they function and how they can be constructed or manipulated. This approach was fostered by science, and it has become dominant since the end of the Middle Ages. It is the very essence of modern progress, the basis of the technical domination of the World and of mass consumption. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
Is there anything ominous about this orientation? Indeed it might seem that this aspect of “progress” is not ominous, were it not for some worrisome facts. In the first place this “monocerebral” orientation is by no means only to be found in those who are engaged in scientific work; it is common to a vast part of the population: clerical workers, reporters, sales people, engineers, lawyers, judges, physicians, managers, and especially many intellectuals and artists—in fact, one may surmise, to most of the urban population. (It is a remarkable fact that the most creative contemporary scientists, humans such as Einstein, Born, Schrodinger, have been among the least alienated and monocerebral individuals. Their scientific concern has had none of the schizoid quality of the majority. It is characteristic of them that their philosophical, moral, and spiritual concerns have pervaded their whole personality. They have demonstrated that the scientific approach as such does not have to lead to alienation; it is rather the social climate that deforms the scientific approach into a schizoid approach.) However, for most others who do display the schizoid character, they all approach the World as a conglomerate of things to be understood in order to be used effectively. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
Second, and not less important, this cerebral-intellectual approach goes together with the absence of an affective response. One might say feelings have withered, rather than that they are repressed; inasmuch as they are alive they are not cultivated, and are relatively crude; they take the form of passions, such as the passion to win, to prove superior to others, to destroy, or the excitement in pleasures of the flesh, speed, and noise. The monocerebral human is s much part of the machinery that one has built, that one’s machines are just as much the object of narcissism as one is oneself; in fact, between the two exists a kind of symbiotic relationship: the union of one individual self with another self (or any other power outside of the own self) in such a way as to make each lose the integrity of its own self and to make them dependent on each other. In a symbolic sense it is not nature any more than is human’s mother but the “second nature” one has built, the machines that nourish and protect one. Another feature of the cybernetic human—one’s tendency to behave in a routinized, stereotyped, and unspontaneous manner—is to be found in a more drastic form in many schizophrenic obsessional stereotypes. There is a loss of that primordial differentiation between living and lifeless matter. An attachment to a lifeless object, such as a chair or a toy is combined with the inability to relate to a living person. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
For the cybernetic human, the use of language (if they speak) is for manipulative purposes, but not as a means of interpersonal communication. If monocerebral cybernetic humans did not offer a picture of low-grade chronic schizophrenic process, it would be surprising. They live in an atmosphere that is only quantitatively less empty than a human being living alone in a cave because they do not relate to others and their presentation is schizogenetic (schizophrenia-producing) families. I believe that it is legitimate to speak of an “insane society” and of the problem of what happens to the sane human in such a society. If a society produced a majority of members who suffer from severe schizophrenia, it would undermine its own existence. The full-fledged schizophrenic person is characterized by the fact that one has cut off all relations with the World outside; one has withdrawn into one’s own private World, and the main reason one is considered severely sick is a social one: one does not function socially; one cannot take care of oneself properly; one needs in some way or other the help of others. (This is not entirely true, either, as experience has shown in all those places where chronic schizophrenics worked or took care of themselves, although with the help of certain people who arranged favourable conditions and at least some material contributions from the state.) A society, not to speak of a large and complex one, could not be run by schizophrenic persons. Yet it can be very well managed by persons suffering from low-grade schizophrenia, who are perfectly capable of managing the things to be managed if a society is to function. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
People with low grade schizophrenia have not lost the capacity to look at the World “realistically,” provided we mean by this to conceive of things intellectually as they need to be considered of in order to deal with them effectively. They may have lost entirely the capacity to experience things personally, id east, subjectively, and with their hearts. The fully developed person can, for instance, see a rose and experience it as warming or even fiery (if one puts this experience into words we call one a poet), but one also knows that the rose—in the realm of physical reality—does not warm as fire does. Modern humans have lost the capacity for subjective experience, and experiences the World only in terms of practical ends. However, one’s defect is not small than that of the so-called sick person who cannot experience the World “objectively,” but who has retained the other human faculty of personal, subjective, symbolic experiences. Many people are seized by one and the same affect with great consistency. Even if it is not, all one’s senses are so strongly affected by one object to be present. If this happens while the person is awake, the person is believed to be insane. However, if the greedy person think thinks only of money and possessions, the ambitious one only of fame, one does not thin of them as being insane, but only as annoying; generally one has contempt for them. However, factually greediness, ambition, and so forth are forms of insanity, although usually one does not think of them as “illness.” #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
The pathology of normalcy rarely deteriorates to graver forms of mental illness because society produces the antidote against such deterioration. When pathological processes become socially patterned, they lose their individual character. On the contrary, the sick individual finds oneself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology and arranges the means to give satisfactions which fit the pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. One feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully same person who feels isolated in the insane society—one may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is one who may become psychotic. The most difficult problem with the schizophrenias offers in relation to necrophilia is that of destructiveness rooted in the schizophrenic aspect of the cybernetic human. One hundred fifty years ago, the answer would have seemed to be clear. It was generally assumed that schizophrenic patients are violent, and that for this reason they needed to be put in institutions from which they could not escape. The experiences with chronic schizophrenics working on farms or under their own management have demonstrated beyond any doubt that the schizophrenic person is rarely violent, when one is left in peace. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
Trying to force people with mental illness into the game of normal life intrudes on their private World. And, if additional, if the individual is forced to keep one’s ties with one’s family and cannot ye afford, one may withdraw completely. This situation may produce intense hate and destructiveness and account for the relatively greater frequency of violent tendencies some adults with mental illness. These speculations are of course very hypothetical and will need to be confirmed or rejected by specialists in this field. To formulate these aims of a successful life, reason is required, and reason is more than mere intelligence; it develops only when the brain and the heart are united, when feeling and thinking are integrated, and when both are rational. There is, I believe, no other country where the chances for the reassertion of life are greater than in the technically most developed country, the United States of American, where the hope that more “progress” will bring happiness has been proved to be an illusion for the most of those who have already had a chance to het a taste of the new “paradise.” Whether such a fundamental change will happen, nobody knows. The forces working against it are formidable and there is no reason for optimism. However, I believe there is reason for hope. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
A blessing expresses a wish that a deity look kindly on a person other than the one praying. It differs from the usual prayer in that pray-er offers themselves up as a link between the deity and the person blessed. They stand in, as it were, for the deity, serving as a mediator. God, please enter our home, and find your own, for the old ways are kept here and hospitality is a law all are proud to honour. Please be at my right hand, guiding my way. Please be at my left hand, guiding my way. God, please open my mind, and keep me safe, as I begin the great adventure of school. I stand here as your father, in the pace of the Father of All, as you prepare to move away and start your own household. Though you may live in another house, still God will protect you. Through you may join your life to another’s family, still will the Ancestors guide you. Though you may travel in strange lands, still will the spirits there welcome you. For my father’s blessings is not for your ears alone: the numinous beings hear, and they will honour it. Go on your way in safety, brining with you the blessings of my household God. As you have been with us, so will you stay a part of us. May they watch over you until we meet again. We stand in your place, Ancestors. We perform your deeds, Ancestors. Do not forget, let it be these words, Holy Ones, that my heart sings in my chest. Do not forget, do not forget, to walk in the sacred way. Do not forget, do not forget, that all I see is sacred. #RandolphHarri 24 of 25
Do not, forget, do not forget, my sacred duty to the World which surrounds me. Do not forget, do not forget. Please grant me this gift, you whom I worship, not to forget. Bring to naught designs of those who seek to do me ill; speedily defeat their aims and thwart their purposes for thine won sake, for Thine own power, for Thy holiness and Law. That Thy loved ones be delivered. Answer us, O Lord, and save with Thy redeeming power. May the words of my mouth and the prayer of my heart be acceptable unto Thee, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Thou wo establishes peace in the shining Heavens, please grant peace unto us and unto all America. Amen. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to grant our portion in Thy Torah, and may the Temple be rebuilt in our day. There we will serve Thee with awe as in the days of old. I rise in reverence ready to fulfill the command of my Creator who hath enjoined upon us in His Torah: “And ye shall take for yourself on the first day the fruit of the goodly Hardar tree, branches of palm trees, a bough of the thick tree, and willows of the brook.” As I wave them, may the blessings of God be vouchsafed unto me and may I be imbued with holy thoughts reminding me that God is the supreme Lord, whose divine rule pervades the Earth below and the Heavens above, and whose kingdom has dominion over all. May my observance of this commandment be accounted as through I had fulfilled it with whole-hearted devotion. And let the graciousness of the Lord our God be upon us; establish Thou the work of our hands; yea, they work of our hands establish Thou it. Blessed be the Lord forever. Amen. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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How Long is it Since You were Really Bothered? About Something Important, About Something Real?
Cans. Beer cans. Glinting on the verges of a million miles of roadways, lying in scrub, grass, dirt, leaves, sand, mud, but never hidden. Piel’s, Rheingold, Ballantine, Schaefer, Schlitz, shinning in the Sun, or picked by Moon or the beam of headlights at night; washed by rain or flattened by wheels, but never dulled, never buried, never destroyed. Here is the mark of savages, the testament of wasters, the stain of prosperity. These wise souls contemplated their past lives in a long wrathless reverie, and sought to answer prayers from below as I have said. They watched over their kindred, their clansmen, their own nations; they watched over those who attracted their attention with accomplished and spectacular displays of religiosity; they watched with sadness the suffering of humans and wished they could help and tried to help by thought when they could. However, who are these beings who defile the grassy borders of our roads and lanes, who pollute our ponds, who spoil the purity of our ocean beaches with the empty vessels of their thirst? Who are the beings who make these vessels in millions and then say, “Drink—and discard”? What society is this that can afford to cast away a million tons of metal and to make of wild and fruitful land a garbage heap? #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Sometimes One Can Mistake Gratitude for Love—Dogs are Hardly an Article of Faith
Love or the lack of it is at the root of everything. Guard your children. Weigh wisdom of intervention if such is even possible. Ponder the question of inevitability. To cease wishing is a contemporary emotional and spiritual wasteland, almost like inhabiting the land of the dead. Another characteristic is satiety; if wishes are thought of only as pushed toward gratification, the end consisting of the satisfying of the need, the reality is that emptiness and vacuity and futility are greatest where all wishes are met. For this means one stops wishing. Without faith we cannot want anymore, we cannot wish. The truth of faith consists in true symbols concerning the ultimate. And the faithful is one human being with the power of thought and the need for conceptual understanding. There is a dimension of meaning expressed in the symbolism of the whish, this is what gives the wish its specifically human quality, and without this meaning, the emotional and spiritual aspects of wanting become dried up. When we have faith, it is a symbol that peace and prosperity are just around the corner and it is only a matter of time until all our need will be met. However, the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful. The difference is obvious and fundamental. However, it is, as the phrase “in principle” indicates, a difference which is not maintained in the actual life of philosophy and of faith. It cannot be maintained, because the philosopher is a human being with an ultimate concern, hidden or open. And the faithful one is a human being with the power of thought and the need for conceptual understanding. This is not only a biological fact. It has consequences for the life of philosophy in the philosopher and or the life of faith in the faithful. An analysis of philosophical systems, essays or fragments of all kinds shows that the direction in which the philosopher asks the question and the preference one gives to special types of answers is determined by cognitive consideration and by a state of ultimate concern. The historically most significant philosophies show not only the greatest power of thought but the most passionate concern about the meaning of the ultimate whose manifestations they describe. The philosophy, in its genuine meaning, is carried on by people in whom passions of an ultimate concern is united with a clear and detached observation of the way ultimate reality manifests itself in the process of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
At most general faith means much the same as trust. Therefore, we are being asked to have faith as knowledge of specific truths revealed by God. Faith is a practical commitment beyond the evidence to one’s belief that God exists. We are to have a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit. It is this element of ultimate concern behind the philosophical ideas which supplies the truth of faith in them. Our vision of the Universe and our predicament within it unites faith and conceptual work. We may hold that in our sinful state we will inevitably offer a resistance to faith that may be overcome only by God’s grace. It is, however, a further step for individuals of faith to put their revealed knowledge into practice by trusting their lives to God and seeking to obey his will. Humans contain the potentialities of these creative principles, and can choose to make their lives an ascent towards and then a union with the intuitive intelligence. The One is not a being, but infinite being. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Thus Christian and Jewish philosophers who held to a creator God could affirm such a conception that God is infinite, and created the World. God, as the creator of all, is not far from any one of us. Philosophy is not only the mother’s womb out of which science and history have come, it is also an ever-present element in actual scientific and historical work. The frame of reference within which the great physicists have seen and are seeing the Universe of their inquiries is philosophical, even if their actual inquiries verify it. In no case is it a result of their discoveries. It is always a vision of the totality of being which consciously or unconsciously determines the frame of their thought. Because this is so one justified in saying that even in the scientific view of reality an element of faith is effective. Scientific view of reality an element of faith is effective. Scientists rightly try to prevent these elements of faith and philosophical truth from interfering with their actual research. This is possible to a great extent; but even the most protected experiment is not absolutely pure—pure in the sense of the exclusion of interfering factors such as the observer, and as the interest which determines the kind of question asked of nature in an experiment. What we said about the philosopher must also be said about the scientist. Even in one’s scientific work one is a human being, grasped by an ultimate concern, and one asks the question of the Universe as such, the philosophical question. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Intellectual inquiry into the faith is to be understood as faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum). To believe is to thin with assent (credere est assensione cogitare). It is an act of the intellect determined not by the reason, but by the will. Faith involves a commitment to believe in a God, to believe God, and to believe in God. What is eternal is unchanging. In the same way the historian is consciously or unconsciously a philosopher. It is quite obvious that every task of the historian beyond finding of the facts is dependent on evaluation of historical factors, especially the nature of mortals, one’s freedom, one’s determination, one’s development out of nature and so forth. It is less obvious but also true that even in the fact of finding historical facts philosophical presuppositions are involved. This is especially true in deciding, out of the infinite number of happenings in every infinitely small moment of time, which facts shall be called historically relevant facts. The historian is further forced to give one’s evaluation of sources and their reliability, a task which is not independent of one’s interpretation of human nature. Finally, in the moment in which a historical work gives implicit or explicit assertions about the meaning of historical events for human existence, the philosophical presuppositions of history are evident. Where there is philosophy there is an expression of an ultimate concern; there is an element of faith, however hidden it may be by the passions of the historian for pure facts. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
God does not possess anything superadded to his essence, and his essence includes all his perfections. No one can attain to truth unless one philosophizes in the light of faith. Our faith in eternal salvation shows that we have theological truths that exceed human reason. And if one could attain truths about religious claims without faith, these truths would be incomplete. Higher truths are attained through faith. All these consideration show that, in spite of their essential difference, there is an actual union of philosophical truth and the truth of faith in every philosophy and that this union is significant for the work of the scientist and the historian. This union has been called philosophical faith. The term is misleading, because it seems to confuse the two elements, philosophical truth and the truth of faith. Furthermore, the term seems to indicate that there is one philosophical faith, a philosophia perennis, as it has been termed. However, only philosophical questions are perennial, not the answers. There is a continuous process of interpretation of philosophical elements and elements of faith, not one philosophical faith. Revealed theology is a single speculative science concerned with knowledge of God. Because of its greater certitude and higher dignity of subject matter, it is nobler than any other science. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Philosophical theology, though, can make demonstrations using the articles of faith as its principles. Moreover, it can apologetically refute objections raised against the faith even if no articles of faith are presupposed. There is truth of faith in philosophical truth. And there is philosophical truth in the truth of faith. In order to see the latter point we must confront the conceptual expression of philosophical truth with the symbolical expression of truth of faith. Now, one can say that most philosophical concepts have mythological ancestors and that most mythological symbols have conceptual elements which can and must be developed as soon as the philosophical consciousness has appeared. In the idea of God the concepts of being, life, spirit, unity and diversity are implied. In the symbol of the creation concepts of finitude, anxiety, freedom and time are implied. The symbol of the “fall of Adam” implies a concept of mortal’s essential nature, of one’s conflict with oneself, of one’s estrangement from oneself. Only because every religious symbol has conceptual potentialities is theo-logy possible. There is a philosophy implied in every symbol of faith. However, faith does not determine the movement of the philosophical thought, just as philosophy does not determine the character of one’s ultimate concern. Symbols of faith can open the eyes of the philosopher to qualities of the Universe which otherwise would not have been recognized. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Faith is the starting point, scripture offers the data, and philosophy is a supplement not a competitor. Faith, philosophy, and scripture help make sense of each other. However, faith does not command a definite philosophy, although churches and theological movements have claimed and used Platonic, Aristotelian, Kantian or Humean philosophies. The philosophical implications of the symbols of faith can be developed in many ways, but the truth of faith and the truth of philosophy have no authority over each other. In the past few years, a number of persons in psychiatry and related fields have been pondering and exploring the problems of wishing and willing. We may assume that this confluence of concern must be in answer to a strong need in out time for a new light on these problems. It is not wishing that cases illness but lack of wishing. The problem is to deepen people’s capacity to wish, and one side of our task in therapy is to create the ability to wish. Wish is an optimistic picturing in imagination. It is a transitive verb—to wish involves an act. Wishing is similar to faith because it allows us to see beyond our experience and knowledge and hope that something good may happen, and so we send out more beneficial vibrations into the Universe. Every genuine wish is a creative act. I find support for this in therapy: it is indeed a beneficial step when the patient can feel and state strongly, for example, “I wish to buy a beautiful Cresleigh home and feel safe and secure in my community.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
That wish, in effect, moves the conflict from a submerged, unarticulated plane in which one takes no responsibility but expects God and parent to read his or her wishes by telepathy, to an overt, healthy conflict over what one wants. On the basis of theological myth of creation God exults when mortals come through with a wish of one’s own. The wish in interpersonal relationship requires mutuality. This is a truth shown in its breach in many myths, and brings the person to one’s doom. Peer Gynt in Ibsen’s play runs around the World wishing and acting on his wishes; the only trouble is that is wishes have noting to do with the other person he meets but are entirely egocentric, encased in cask of self, sealed up with a bung of self. In The Sleeping Beauty, by the same token, the young princes who assault the briars in order to rescue and awaken the slumbering girl before the time is ripe, are exemplars of behavior which tries to force the other in love and pleasures of flesh before the other is ready; they exhibit a wishing without mutuality. The young princes are devoted to their own desires and needs without relation to Thou. If wish and will can be seen and experienced in this light of autonomous, imaginative acts of interpersonal mutuality, there is profound truth in St. Augustine’s dictum, “Love and do what you will.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
We cannot be naïve about human nature. We know full well that this wishing is stated in ideal terms. We know that the trouble is precisely that mortals do wish and will against their neighbor, that imagination is not only the source of our capacity to form the creative mutual wish but it is also bounded by the individual’s own limits, convictions, and experience; and, thus, there is always in our wishing an element of doing violence to the others as well as to ourselves, no matter how well analyzed we may be or how much the recipient of grace or how many times we have experienced satori. This is called the willful element, willful here being the insistence of one’s own wish against the reality of the situation. Willfulness is the kind of will motivated by defiance, in which the wish is more against something than for its object. The defiant, willful is correlated with fantasy rather than with imagination, and is the spirit which negates reality, whether it be a person or an aspect of impersonal nature, rather than sees it, forms it, respect it, or takes joy in it. There are two realms of will, the first consisting of an experience of the self in its totality, a relatively spontaneous movement in a certain direction. In this kind of willing, the body moves as a whole, and the experience is characterized by a relaxation and by an imaginative, open quality. This is an experience of freedom which is anterior to all talk about political or psychological freedom; it is a freedom, presupposed by the determinist and anterior to all the discussions of determinism. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
In contrast, the will of the second realm is that in which some obtrusive element enters is that in which some obtrusive element enters, some necessity for a decision of an either/or character, a decision with an element of an against something alone with a for something. If one uses the Freudian terminology, the “will of the Super-Ego” would be included in their realm. We can will to read but not to understand, we can will knowledge but not wisdom, we can will scrupulosity but not mortality. This is illustrated in creative work. In the second realm of will is the conscious, effortful, critical application to creative endeavor, in preparing a speech for meeting or revising one’s manuscript, for example. However, when actually giving the speech, or when hopefully creative inspiration takes over in our writing, we are engrossed with a degree of forgetfulness of self. In this experience, wishing and willing become one. One characteristic of the creative experience is that it makes for a temporary union by transcending the conflict. The temptation is for the second ream to take over the first; we lose our spontaneity, our free flow of activity, and will become effortful, controlled and so forth, Victorian will power. Our error, then, is that will tries to take over the work of imagination. This is very close to a wish. Will is the capacity to organize oneself so that movement in a certain direction or toward a certain goal may take place. Wish is the imaginative playing with the possibility of some act or state occurring. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Will and wish may be seen as operating in polarity. Will requires self-consciousness; wish does not. Will implies some possibility of either/or choice; wish does not. Wish gives the warmth, the content, the imagination, the innocence’s play, the freshness, and the richness of the will. Will gives the self-direction, the maturity, to wish. Will protect wish, permits it to continue without wish, will loses its life-blood, its viability, and tends to expire in self-contradiction. If you have only will and no wish, you have the dried-up, Victorian, neopuritan mortal. If you have only wish and no will, you have the driven, unfree, infantile person who, as an adult-remaining-an-infant, may become the robot mortal. Awareness of one’s feelings lays the groundwork for knowing what one want. This point may look very simple at first glance—who does not know what one wants? However, the amazing thing is how few people actually do. If one looks honestly into oneself, does one not find that most of what one thinks one wants is just routines like fresh fish on Friday; or what one wants is what one thinks one should want—like being a success in his or her work; or wants to want—like loving one’s neighbor? One can often see clearly the expression of direct and honest wants in children before they have been taught to falsify their desires. The child exclaims, “I like ice cream, I want a cone,” and there is no confusion about who wants what. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Such directness of desire often comes like a breath of fresh air in a murky land. It may not be best that one has the cone at the time, and it is obviously the parents’ responsibility to say Yes or No if the child is not mature enough to decide. However, let the parents not teach the child to falsify one’s emotions by trying to persuade him or her that he or she does not want the cone! To be aware of one’s feelings and desires does not at all imply expressing them indiscriminately wherever one happens to be. Judgment and decision are part of any mature consciousness of self. However, how is one going to have a basis for judging wat one will or will not do unless one first knows what one wants? For an adolescent to be aware that one wants to drive a brand-new BMW 3 Series, does not mean that one acts on this impulse. However, suppose he never lets his impulses reach the threshold of awareness because they are not socially acceptable? How is he then to know years later, when he buys a care, whether he wants to drive it or not, or whether because thus is then the acceptable and expected act, the routine thing to do? People who voice with alarm the caution that unless desires and emotions are suppressed they will pop out every which way, and everyone, will experience neurotic emotions. As a matter of fact, we know that it is precisely the emotions and desires which have been repressed which later return to drive the person compulsively. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The Victorian gyroscope kind of person had to control his or her emotions rigidly, for, by virtue of having locked them up in jail, one had turned them into lawbreakers. However, the more integrated a person is, the loses compulsive become one’s emotions. In the mature person feelings and wants occur in a configuration. In seeing a dinner as part of a drama on the stage, to give a simple example, one is not consumed with desires for food; one came to see a drama and not to eat. Or wen listening to a concert singer, one is not consumed with pleasures of the flesh even though she may be very attractive; the configuration is set by the fact that one chose in coming to hear music. Of course, as we have indicted, none of us escape conflicts from time to time. However, these are different from being compulsively driven by emotions. Every direct and immediate experience of feeling and wanting is spontaneous and unique. That is to say, the wanting and feeling are uniquely part of that particular situation at the particular time and place. Spontaneity means to be able to respond directly to the total picture—or, as it is technically called, to respond to the figure-ground configuration. Spontaneity is the active “I” becoming part of the figure ground. In a good portrait painting the background is always an integral part of the portrait; so an act of a mature human being is an integral part of the self in relation to the World around it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Spontaneity, thus, is very different from effervescence or egocentricity, or letting out one’s feelings regardless of the environment. Spontaneity, rather is the acting “I” responding to a particular environment at a given moment. The originality and uniqueness which is always part of spontaneous feeling can be understood in this light. For just as there never was exactly that situation before and never will be again, so the feeling one has at that time is new and never to be exactly repeated. It is only neurotic behavior which is rigidly repetitive. God’s great plan of happiness provide a perfect balance between eternal justice and the mercy we can obtain through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. It also enables us to be transformed into new creatures in Christ. A loving God reaches out to each of us. We know that through his love and because of his Atonement of his only begotten Son, all humankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances. Eternal relationships are also fundamental to our theology. The family is ordained of God. Under the great plan of our loving Creator, the mission is to achieve the supernal blessing of exaltation in the celestial kingdom. Finally, God’s love is so great that, except for the few who become people of perdition, God has provided a destiny of glory for all his children, including those who have passed away. Our loving Heavenly Father wants us to have joy. “Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested,” reports Kate Atkinson. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Desire’s Perfect Goal Should Not Disenthrall Thy Soul—Here is a Star, there is a Star, Some Lose Their Way!
The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned. Love would conquer all, of course, but one has to know when it is there first. Glaucus was a fisherman. One day he had drawn his nets to land and had taken a great many fishes of various kinds. So he emptied his nets and proceeded to sort the fishes on the grass. The place where he stood was a beautiful island in the river, a solitary spot, uninhabited, and not used for pasturage of cattle, not visited by anyone but himself. On a sudden, the fishes, which had been laid on the grass, began to revive and move their fins as if they were in the water; and while he looked on astonished, they one and all moved off to the water, plunged in, and swam away. He did not know what to make of this, whether some god had done it, or some secret power in the herbage. “What herb has such a power?” he exclaimed; and gathering some of it, he tasted it. Scarce had the juices of the plant reached his palate when he found himself agitated with a longing desire for the water. Glaucus could no longer restrain himself, but bidding farewell to Earth, he plunged into the stream. The gods of the water received him graciously and admitted hi to the honour of their society. They obtained the consent of Oceanus and Tethys, the sovereign of the sea, that all that was mortal in him should be washed away. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
A hundred rivers poured their waters over Glaucus and then he lost all sense of his former nature and all consciousness. When he recovered, he found himself changed in form and mind. His hair was sea-green, and trailed behind him on the water; his shoulders grew broad, and what had been thighs and legs assumed the form of a fish’s tail. The sea-gods complimented him on the change of his appearance, and Glaucus fancied himself rather a good-looking personage. One day, Glaucus saw a beautiful maiden Scylla, the favourite of the water-nymphs, rambling on the shore, and when she had found a sheltered nook, laving her limbs on the clear water, he fell in live with her. Glaucus showed himself on the surface, spoke to the maiden, saying such things as he thought most likely to win her to stay; for she turned to run immediately on sight of him, and ran till she had gained a cliff overlooking the sea. Here she stopped and turned round to see whether it was a god or s sea animal, and observed with wonder his shape and colour. Glaucus, partly emerging from the water and supporting himself against a rock, said, “Maiden, I am not monster, nor sea animal, but a god; and neither Proteus nor Triton ranks higher than I. Once I was a mortal, and followed the sea for a living; but now I belong wholly to it.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
Then he told the story of his metamorphosis, and how he had been promoted to his present dignity, and added, “But what avails all this if it fails to move your heart?” Glaucus was going on in this strain, but the maiden, Scylla, turned and hastened away. Glaucus was in despair, but it occurred to him to consult the enchantress, Circe. Accordingly he repaired to her island. After mutual salutations, Glaucus said, “Goddess, I entreat your pity; you alone can relieve the pain I suffer. The power of the herbs I know as well as any one, for it is to them I owe my change of form. I love Scylla. I am ashamed to tell you how I have sued and promised to her, and how scornfully she has treated me. I beseech you to use your incantations, or potent herbs, if they are more prevailing, not to cure me of my love—for that I do not wish—but to make Scylla share it and yield me a like return.” To which Circe replied, for she was not insensible to the attractions of the sea-green deity, “You had better pursue a willing object; you are worthy to be sought, instead of having to seek in vain. Be not different, know your own worth. I protest to you that even I, goddess though I be, and learned in the virtue of plants and spells, should not know how to refuse you. If Scylla scorns you, scorn her; meet one who is ready to meet you half way, and thus make a due return to both at once.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
However, Glaucus replied, “Sooner shall trees grow at the bottom of the ocean, and seaweed on the top of the mountains, than I will cease to love Scylla, and her alone.” The goddess Circe was indignant, but she could not punish him, neither did she wish to do so, for she liked him too well; so she turned all her wrath against her rival, poor Scylla. She took her plants of poisonous powers and mixed them together, with incantations and charms. Then she passed through the crowd of gamboling beasts, the victims of her art, and proceeded to the coast of Sicily, where Scylla lived. There was a little bay on the shore to which Scylla used to resort, in the heat of the day, to breathe their air of the sea, and to bathe in its waters. Here the goddess poured her poisonous mixture, and muttered over it incantations of mighty power. Scylla came as usual and plunged into the water up to her waist. What was her horror to perceive a brood of serpents and barking monsters surrounding her! At first she could not imagine they were a part of herself, and tried to run from them and to drive them away; but as she ran she carried them with her, and when she tried to touch her limbs, she found her hands touch only the yawning jaws of monsters. Scylla remained rooted to the spot. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
Scylla’s temper grew as ugly as her form, and she took pleasure in devouring hapless mariners who came within her grasp. Thus she destroyed six of the companions of Ulysses, and tried to wreck the ships of Aeneas, till at least she was turned into a rock, and as such still continues to be a terror to mariners. Mistakes are a deliberately wrong choice in the contest between what is clearly good and what is clearly bad is sin. We all want a partner, but some want one to the point of it being a pathology. Many people knowingly or unknowingly force a relationship due to an addiction of love. If one is honest with oneself, and know that one has nothing in common with their focus of their intertest, such as different goals, different lifestyles, and different hobbies, and the person is not attracted to the individual pursing a relationship, this is a clear indication that they do not like you in a romantic way, much like how Scylla was not in the least bit interested in Glaucus. Yet, Glaucus could not take no for an answer and ended up running her like, and the rage she experienced ruined the lives of others. Absolutely imagine if you had people dragging you into things you did not want to be part of, and you will understand why this is not a healthy thing to do. It is never a healthy thing to do. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
People who think they can learn from their mistakes have a different brain reaction to mistake than people who think intelligence is fixed. One major difference between people who think intelligence is malleable and those who think intelligence is fixed is how one responds to mistake. When one makes a mistake, the best thing to do is to try to learn from it and figure it out. Conversely, some people who think they cannot gain intelligence will not take the opportunities to learn from their mistakes, and they usually employ defense mechanisms to justify their behaviour so they do not feel guilt or remourse. Defense mechanisms are psychological maneuvers that operate below the surface of one’s awareness (they are unconscious) to protect one from emotional pain or distress. The most familiar one is probably denial. Denial allows one to dismiss a painful reality so that one can go on acting as if a situation or event is not true—because one does not want to admit it is true. Transgression is different from being overtaken in a fault. Both sins and mistakes can hurt us and both require attention. People who try to force relations, often end up feeling insecure, hurt, and betrayed for no reason. Then these individuals start questioning themselves as to why they are never good enough for the person they are interested in. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
There should be no license for sin, but mercy should go hand and hand with reproof. Though it may be hard to admit, there comes a time when one just needs to cut their losses and leave a person alone. The progression of a romantic relationship cannot be formed. It must evolve naturally, over time. Impatient, insecure, or damaged people try to force relationships. Mortal make these kinds of mistakes all the times. However, these things are on an essentially predetermined course. A fool is a person lacking judgment or prudence. The Saviour used the term fool to characterize the lesson in this parable about the rich man who built greater barns to store his abundant fruits and goods and then said to his soul, “Thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry,” reports Luke 12.19. The distinction between sins and mistakes is important to our actions. We have seen some very bitter finger pointing. All of us make mistakes, and some of us very serious ones. Any thoughtful person feels a kind of failure because one’s sins or moral failure. One does not get clean by rolling in the mire. One does not get clean and whole by brooding unduly over the past, although we can certainly learn from our mistake. There is no strength in weakness; there is no strength in sin; and we do not overcome our mistake and our sins by fighting them directly. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
If people dwell upon them too much, they may succumb to their sins. The avoidance of guilt can be addictive, too. Guilt-avoidance has become a drug of choice for many people, because it is so pleasurable, almost intoxicating, to think of oneself as morally pure. Those who are addicted to guilt-avoidance are usually a bit inconsistent. They avoid the guilt themselves, but they do not mind imposing a bit of it—maybe even a lot of it—on others. It can be immensely pleasurable to notice the flaws of others while ignoring your own. However, that is a sin, too. All things considered, we are on a safer ground when we focus on our own sins, not those of others. At least this is how we process theologians see things. We believe that when we harm others, or fail to act in ways that prevent them from being harmed, we violated something deep within the nature of nature. We have violated an Eros toward life’s flourishing that is divine. In sinning against others, we sin against God. It takes courage to stand up. The freedom to be different. The freedom to take guilt and make something beautiful of it. Humans have the freedom to turn guilt into love. Few gifts are more desirable than a clear conscience—a soul at peace with itself. Only God can heal a troubled soul. However, if we want God to forgive us, we must follow the procedure he has given to us. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
Confession is a necessary requirement for complete forgiveness. It is an indication of true Godly sorrow. It is part of the cleansing process—the starting anew requires a clean page in the diary of our conscience. Confessions should be made to the appropriate person who has been wronged by us and to the Lord also. In addition, the nature of our transgression may be serious enough to require a confession to God in prayer. “Therefore I say unto you, Go; and whoever transgressed against me, him shall you judge according to the sins which he or she has committed; and if he or she confess his or her sins before thee and me, and repents in the sincerity of one’s heart, that person one shall forgive, and I will also forgive that individual,” reports Mosiah 26.29. Remember, it is complete deliverance from the tortures of a guilt-ridden soul that we seek. Repentance is not easy. Godly sorrow brings one to the depth of humility. This is why the gift of forgiveness is so sweet and draws the transgressor so close to the Saviour with a special bond of affection. Full repentance liberates the individual with joy unspeakable. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
Any type of open and truthful disclosure reduces stress and helps individuals come to terms with their behaviour. It is not coincidental that some of the most powerful people or institutions in may cultures encourage people to confess their transgressions. And there is strong evidence that writing about upsetting experiences or dark secrets can benefit your mental and physical well-being. Similar to religious confessions, expressive writing encouraged individuals to explore their deepest thoughts and feelings about upsetting experiences. For such emotional purges to work, people must be completely honest with themselves. Putting emotional turmoil into words changes how we think about it. Giving concrete form to secret experiences can help categorize them in new ways. Talking or writing about a disturbing event helps us to understand it better. And things we do not understand cause greater anxiety. Once we are able to express our upheavals, we tend to ruminate about them less, freeing us up to focus on others thing. Dozens of studies have also shown that expression is linked to less stress and improved sleep and cardiovascular function. Also, better sleep is associated with enhanced immune function and better general health—which correlates with better mental health, too. Confession can help people get through difficult times. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
God is Looking for People Who Have Faith that is Demonstrated
No one lives without accumulating stories. Many things in life offer useful guidance toward finding spiritual values in the World. The spirituality of a place might be marked with a well or drawing on the ground, or a monument, like a castle or mansion. When we place markers on historical battlefields or on houses where our ancestors were born, or where significant historical figures lives, we are performing a genuine spiritual act. We are honoring the special spirit that is attached to a particular place. Family is also a source and focus of spirituality. In many traditions a home shrine and special photographs honor family members. Rites of family gatherings, visits, storytelling, photographs albums, keepsakes, and even tapes of elderly relatives recording their recollections can be spiritual acts that nourish the soul. “The final state of the soul is to dwell with God or be cast out (1 Nephi 15.35).” The opportunity to voice memories to a person who both cares and understands is the most satisfying kind of completion. Story-telling is therefore far more valuable than it may seem. Realizing that such stories allow us to make an ending and find worth in the past elevates remembering and listening to their actual stature. We widen our solitudes by esteeming our memories and making use of them, instead of guarding them in a secret chess, disregarding them, or keeping them to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
Action and speech are indeed the two activities whose end result will always be a story with enough coherence to be told. The most important and challenging way to honor our ancestors is to fulfill our personal and potential life’s purpose here on Earth. It can take a lifetime to know our parents in their full humanness. As we get older, our respect for our parents’ achievements increases, as does our sympathy for their disappointments and letdowns. The more our own lives twist in unexpected and humbling directions, the more we realize that our parents had been similarly buffeted. We become our parents’ retrospective peers, seeing more of them as we attain each decade. To be fully understood, vulnerability has to be lived rather than merely witnessed. It is not easy to imagine that one’s own body, which is so fresh and often so full of pleasant feelings could slow down, become tired, and may not be as agile as it once was. One cannot imagine it and, in the end, one does not want to. Many of the realizations that rush upon us as we mature are simply not attainable earlier in life. When our parents need our help prior to passing into Heaven, the period after they pass away, and the time of life when we ourselves are weak and near passing, changes our perspective on life and what we scrutinize. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
Indeed, it is this period of the relationship that is perhaps the most difficult and, at the same time, the most significant. However, knowing that there is a God who strongly protects against intrusion and violation might help nurture that spirit in our own lives and honor it in others. We may discover that there are ways to be spiritual that do not counter the soul’s needs for body, individuality, imagination, and exploration. Eventually, we might find that all emotions, all human activities, and all spheres of life have deep roots in the mysteries of the soul, and therefore are holy. As children, the chief illusion we project upon our parents are that they know what they are doing and that they have control over what happens. It does not occur to us that what appears to be inflexibility may actually be a cover for confusion, or what comes out of anger may stem from stress, or what seems to be neglect and a lack of concern may be the consequence of depression. If we allow them to account for themselves and to acknowledge the extent to which their actions stemmed from their own weaknesses, all of this can make sense later. The more hurtfully our parents treated us as children, the more crucial it is for us to try to ascertain the wounds of their upbringing. Otherwise, their weaknesses become holes into which we pointlessly pour or resentment. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
Everyone of their failures has a story behind it, a history which has been carried forward and re-expressed rising out of a collective need for stronger union between the human and the divine. Exploring the implications of the soul allows us to learn our parents’ history and to see them as people, rather than to react blindly against them and risk replicating their hurts in our own lives. Turing the furor of our reactions into a reasonable quest for understanding is made easier when we are granted full access to our parents’ histories. Formal teachings, rites, and stories of religions provide an inexhaustible source of reflection on the mysteries of the soul. While listening to our mother or father, we might find ourselves standing in the powerful, streaming currents of time and fate. This may represent the stream of events and persons in which the individual finds one’s place. No one lives without making mistakes and incurring regrets, yet we all hope to be worthy of regard in the end. We learn from these formal sources how to understand and deal with the soul in special circumstances, and also how to understand similar images when they appear in dreams. We all hope that our parents survive into extended old age. Many cultures maintain that we each have a unique destiny to fulfill. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
It is nice to have many generations in families being alive at the same time, leading to new opportunities for reworking and repairing relations between parents and children. This will also further the collective growth and maturation in the spirit realms. We are all children of parents, yet the ability to picture our parents as children can easily elude us. Like nothing else, such glimpses across generations permits us to comprehend those who shaped us and ultimately ourselves. We must find our soul’s purpose as an ethical and loving person. The ancestors are seen as allies in this process of remembering and a reservoir of power and backing to help us embody our potential in this lifetime. Conversely, when we have lost touch with a sense of greater purpose, if we are fortunate, the ancestors may bring about life changes aimed to guide us into greater contact with our soul’s longing and increased awareness of the agreements made before our birth. This may be an inspiring metaphor of the willingness to step courageously into the river of existence, instead of finding ways to remain safe, dry, and unaffected. The notion of reciprocity, of being helped and then helping in return, appeals to our basic requirement for balance and order. When children watch their parents take time out of their bust lives to help their parents, they learn that devotion can persist. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
Children should realize that if they regret the longevity of their parents, they will actually be regretting their own future longevity. As we get to know our parents better, we have new opportunities for correcting old misconceptions. One young man was shocked by something his father did. His father never let anyone near his checkbook. However, he got a really bad trimmer in his hand, but still insisted on paying all his bills himself. One day, out of the blue, he called his son up and asked him to come over to help him write out checks. The son could not believe it. He was incredibly nervous when he sat down next to him to do it. Although he handles million-dollar budgets for his company, his hand also started to shake because he was so honored to help his father with his precious checkbook, as it was a bonding experience. In a way, the father was allowing his son to participate in the ritual of becoming the man of the house. His father’s trust was sweeter to this son than his achievement in the corporate World. Also, the father had the opportunity to see how important he was in his son’s life, despite his son’s having garnered every external success. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
Extending leniency to our parents gives us hope that someone will do the same for us when we reach this position of physical need and spiritual reckoning. Even fumbled efforts at helpfulness and reconciliation are significant reckoning. Even fumbled efforts at helpfulness and reconciliation are significant for the hope that they instill and the example they set. People feel blessed to have their parents live so long and that hope is the essence of the commandment to honor our parents, making the prospect of living a long life less frightening. Whatever helps us to become more ethical, on even kilt, and open-hearted is one of the most powerful and sincere offerings we can make to our ancestors. An individual must take time every day to remind oneself that we are also spirits, that we are one with God, and to try to being about a deep realization that there is a power greater than oneself sustaining us; a wise counselor guiding us; a generous provider who is ready and willing to meet the needs of everyday life. We do not deny either the body or the mind, but we do affirm the spirit as the supreme presence and the superior principle of all life. We do come from this thing that we call life, or God, and we are fundamentally spiritual beings even while in the flesh. Therefore, in order to be whole, we must establish a right relationship within this trinity of our being, which is thought, feeling and action. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
The Culture of Poverty—It Tends to Perpetuate itself from Generation to Generation!
Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty. The social structural conditions to which the poor are exposed (chronic unemployment and under-employment, low income, lack of property ownership, absence of saving and chronic shortage of food, money, medical care, and other necessities of life) give rise to distinctive patterns of community and family disorganization. These, in turn, produce a distinctive set of beliefs, attitudes, and values (that is, strong feelings of marginality, of helplessness, of dependence, and of inferiority, weak ego structure; confusion of sexual identification; lack of impulse control; strong present-time orientation, with relatively little ability to defer gratification and plan for the future. The cultural of poverty, however, is not only an adaptation to a set of objective conditions of the larger society. Once it comes into existence, it tends to perpetuate itself from generation to generation because of its effect on the children. By the time underprivileged children are age six or seven they have usually absorbed the basic values and attitudes of their subcultural and are not psychologically geared to take full advantage of the changing conditions or increased opportunities that may occur in their lifetimes. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. Initially (time/generation I) structural conditions of poverty give rise to subcultural patterns (that is, family and community disorganization), and both of these create in children and adults the patterns of individual personality and behavior characteristic of the poor (for example, weak ego structure, inability to delay gratification). For persons who first become poor as adults (for example, as a result of migration, economic depression, drought, and so forth), this personality and behavior pattern is an adaptation to changed structural conditions. However, their children know nothing else and tend to recreate the same subcultural patterns and to pass on these same personality and behavior patterns to their children. And so on for succeeding generations—a shared set of individual beliefs, values, and attitudes (cultural of poverty) become self-perpetuating and may persist in spite of changes in the larger structural conditions. Saving our planet, lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth, these are one and the same challenge. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
New generations resemble preceding ones because they confront the same structural conditions and hardships. A housing crisis is increasing poverty levels in California. As of now, 51 percent of adults live in middle-income households, and 29 percent live in lower-income households, while only 20 percent live in upper-income households. The lack of affordable housing, and apartments for middle class, and lower-income families is the reason so many people are struggling to make it. The median cost of a house is now $500,000.00, which is twice the national cost, and homelessness is rapidly increasing across the state. While the region’s median household income is $61,320.00 and the nationwide median is $53,291.00. In contrast the poor are bring in between $14,000.00 to $24,000.00 a year, and there is no place less than $1,000.00 a year for rent. As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our World, none of us can truly rest. Poverty, including rates of unemployment, crime, school dropout rates, and drug use, are assumed to be the result of behavior preferred by individuals living within conditions of poverty. The culture of poverty theory presumes the development of a set of deviant norms, whereby behaviors like drug use and gang participation are viewed as the standard (normative) and even desired behaviors of those living in low-income neighborhoods. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
Alternatively, individuals behave in ways that are nominally illegal, like participation in the underground economy or participation in gangs, not because they wish to do so or are following cultural norms, but because they have no choice, given the lack of educational and job opportunities available in their neighborhoods. In other words, individual living in poverty may see themselves as forced to turn to illegal methods of getting money, for example by selling drugs, simply to survive within the conditions of the hot economy. Poor children generally share the values, beliefs, and attitudes of the larger society, but as they experience the same lack of socioeconomic opportunity as their parents, they adopt the peculiar social and individual modes of response that characterize the culture of poverty. Also, some people who turn to selling drugs, for instance, to make a living, after they get started, they are not willing to turn to conventional means of earning a living because some of them can make $10,000.00 in a weekend, others have reported making $60,000.00 a month, and they are not willing to give that up to make $10 an hour, as they are making more than a lot of doctors. Hard core drug users spend approximately $60 billion a year on drugs. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
Although the dealers are putting their lives and freedom in danger with every transaction they make, and many do get shot and beat up, they feel it is worth it because the money gives them something to live for. They can buy brand new cars, houses, and where there is money, there are a lot of beautiful women. If the set of structural conditions persist, they will recreate the same sociocultural and personality patterns in the new generation. Living in poverty and being unable to participate in the economy is oppressive. People are walking on eggshells. If they are accepted for affordable housing, it is a blessing, because most of the waiting lists in most cities are 20,000 people long. Then affordable housing is no way to live. The people are usually the undesirable people like criminals, uneducated, prostitutes, and drug attics. Also, because most people in affordable housing are on government assistance, they do not work due to physical disability or serious mental problems and tend to be dirty, loud, rude, and violent. They also attract a lot of homeless people and that is why people do not want affordable housing in their communities. The solution would be to give people vouchers, like a supplement to their rent, so they could spread out the undesirables, and they are not segregated to one apartment building or neighborhood. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
When affordable housing is erected in high-income areas, the strong housing prices drop very locally and then it radiates outward over time. The new low-income building can lead to a loss of approximately $17 million, as the poverty values individual decrease by 15 percent. That is why education is to important. Education promotes equality and lifts people out of poverty. It teaches children how to become good citizens, how to work for a living, and the righteous values. Education is not just for the privileged few, it is for everyone. It is a fundamental human right. When people are educated it changes their culturally patterned ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that will be passed on from one generation to the next. That is why a lot of people in the early 19th and 20th century enlisted in the armed services, it taught them discipline and provided education benefits, and helped them learn to deal with society. “The poor and the needy search for water, but there is none; their tongues are parched with thirst. However, if I the Lord will answer them; I, the God, will not forsake them. I will make rivers flow on barren heights, and springs within the valleys. I will turn the desert into pools of water, and the parched grounds into springs.” (Isaiah 41.17-18) #RandolpHarris 6 of 6
Randolph Harris II International Institute 