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A Family Down the Block Has One and So do Several of Our Colleagues!
Take a moment to make a list of your closet friends. What do they have in common (other than the joy of knowing you)? It is likely that most are similar to you in age and the same gender and race as you. There will be exceptions, of course. However, similarity on these three dimensions is the general rule for friendships. Ninety percent of all people in Western society marry at some point. What, beyond attraction, determines how people pair up? The answer is that we tend to marry someone who is like us in almost every way, a pattern called homogamy. In case you are wondering, homogamy also applies to unmarried couples who are living together. Studies show that married and cohabiting couples are highly similar in age, education, race, religion, and ethnic background. In general, you are far more likely to choose someone similar to yourself as a mate than someone very different. This is probably a good thing. Personality traits tend to be closely matches in the most stable marriages. Conversely, this risk of divorce is highest among couples with sizable differences in age and education. Most dangerous of all are âfatal attractions,â in which qualities that originally made a partner appealing are later disliked. Fatal attractions are likely when an individual is drawn to someone who seems âdifferent,â âunique,â or âextreme.â When two people are similar, disenchantment is less likely to occur. Do people look for specific traits in a potential mate? Yes, in the United States of America, both men and women agree that the most important qualities are kindness and understanding, intelligence, exciting personality, good health, adaptability, and physical attractiveness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Love is a great thing, My monastic, monotheistic friend, altogether a great good. âIt makes every burden light,â as Matthew has recorded My saying in his Gospel (11.30), and manages to carry every load, no matter how slip-sliding it may be. What is more, it makes every tart and bitter thing taste sweet and juicy. My love is noble and provides the energy for doing great things; it encourages the desiring of even greater things. Love wants to rise, does not want to be tied down. Love wants to walk free, not to be told where to go. However, sadly, it loses its sense of direction. That is to say, it cannot sustain anything in time of consolation; it succumbs in time of desolation. There is nothing sweeter than Love; nothing stronger, higher, broader, happier, fuller, better in Heaven and on Earth. That is because Love is born of God, as the Beloved John has written in his First Letter (4.7), and cannot rest except in God, who is above all created things. Some wonderful effects of Love. First, one who knows how to love runs and rejoices; one is a free human and has no restraints. Second, one gives everything and in return receives everything; in a manner of speaking, one may be said to have everything. That is because one rests in the Great One, who has everything and from whom every good fountain flows. Third, one does not look for gifts for oneself, but love turns one into the giver of all goods. Fourth, Love is not measured out in small packets; more often than not, it spills all over. Fifth, Love is not seen as a load, does not have a reputation as a chore; it is more in the area of motivation than in the exercise of strength. Sixth, Love does not rise out of impossibility; that is because it comes out of possibility and permission. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
All things considered, whoever knows how to love has the strength for everything, fills to overflowing, causes every effect. The one who has not learned to love merely flops to the floor in heap. Some more effects of Love. Love stands the night watch, yet sleeps with one eye open. Exhausted, it nonetheless does not nod off. Shoved, it shoves back. Terrified, it does not pass the terror down the line, but like a flickering flame, a smoking torch, it flares up and burns brighter than before. If you know how to love, then you can make out the words of this riotous shout. It is a burning affection of the soul clamoring in the ears of the Lord, echoing the Song of Songs (2.16): âMine? You are all mine! Yours? I am all Yours!â Speech can accomplish more than an organizing function, in that it reminds us of imagery which we can hold on to at needâit keeps reverberations alive. The very action of saying things has consequences of a steadying kind. Speech enables people to reassess what has happened to them, to reconsider past events in the light of later experience and even, at a very deep level, to reorganize their understanding of themselves and of their World. It can even help to change the very structure of the personality. Talking puts experience into words. Sometimes talking allows us to connect experiences with words for the first time. This means that, sometimes for the first time ever, we are able to âgive an accountâ of those experiencesâwe are conscious of them for the first time. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Once the experiences are conscious, there are the experiences, and there is a narrator who is talking about them. Here we see a benign aspect of the process of depersonalizing and distancing. âIâ am for the first time consciously distanced from what happened to me. I can get some perspective: âI then did thisâ or âSuch and such happened to me next.â Moreover, the âIâ and the âmeâ in these accounts have a curious status. There is continuity and identity: these experiences were not someone elseâs but âmineâ (the speakerâs), they belong to my self-regions. However, at the same time, the âIâ who is doing the talking now is ten or twenty or more years older than âIâ in the account. There is a distance between the self-structures-from-then and the self-structures-of-now, a gap of time. This allows for a new perspective and a new meaning. Meaning depends on context. I am not in a different context from then. If myself-structures today are more mature, more complex, with better ego-functions and capacities for respect and recognition, they may be able to hold and integrate the self-structures for then. Talking, and being understood, changes the nature of the connections between âI thenâ and âI now,â weakening them in some respects (âBecause this happened to me twenty-four years ago, I need not be afraid of thunderstorms nowâ) and strengthening them in other respects (âI do not need to despise myself for having feared thunderstorms twenty-four years ago. I can stop despising myself and I can love myself.â) If I try to talk honestly to others about my past life, it comes up for review. The relation between my semantic self and my episodic self may also be challenged and changed when they confront one another. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Sympathetic listening, and the knowledge that what happened when I was little, weak, and ignorant cannot happen to me now, give me the strength to try and remember how it was with me then. Between us, we can hold âme then.â Held, I dare given an account of hitherto hidden parts of my self. I can integrate them. This is one reason why friends are so important for our well-being, and why people who for some reason have been unable to make friends or to keep them may find psychotherapeutic groups useful. Sometimes with professionals who help people suffer misfortune and it leads them into difficulties where friends cannot help. However, in more fortunate circumstances, our friends can do a god deal of our organizing and ego-functioning with and for us. They do so anyway in the normal course of life, as we pass the time of day with hem, gossip about others, or explore the meaning of the Universe. They let us talk and blow off steam. They are patient while we talk nonsense. They talk a load of rubbish themselves. They relax us when we get too desperately tense, and amuse us. However, more particularly, good friends strengthen and diversify our ego-functioning: they produce speculations, explanations, and suggestions of their own for us to consider, and much else. Thus the passage which follows may be read in terms of friends or in terms of ego-functioning or in terms of organizing processes. They help us toward increasing knowledge of our selves: they produce new ideas, and they surprise us by changing and developing and expecting us to welcome the changes. Though they may be tolerant they will not put up with our nonsense indefinitely without protest. They love us and accept us and warm us and make us feel worth while. They help us sand firm under pressure. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
In times of crisis friends are especially important, sustaining us while we encounter and explore new things, encouraging us to carry on, holding us when we temporarily lose our footing in the stress of reorganizing our concepts. They take care of us and step in when, in the course of the temporary disorganization which new developments may bring, we are about to do something permanently detrimental to our interests. Some people are able to give sense and direction to their lives by commitment to a cause or a task. There are many who can put something non-personal into the center of their lives. I may have got no foundation for self-love from the love of others, but by being part of something admirable, I can make my life worthwhile. Some people who take this second chance will come to have a deep and rich identity, in terms of which they organize their lives. However, others will not integrate in this organized way, and yet feel held by a sense of purpose and coherence because they know what they are doing and that it is worth while. Such people present quite a range. At one end are those who are contained within an ordered social system such as traditional societies are said to afford, or religious orders or other ideologically committed groups; these will be exercising individual judgment only in narrowly restricted areas. At the other extreme are people in the fragmented societies with which most readers will be familiar. Yet even here, those of us who have no solid sense of who we are, independent of what we do, may find significance in what we are doing and feel held by it. Many creative people belong in this category. As one creation is accomplished, hey suffer a kind of âpost-coital depression,â but this when the next project begins to define itself. At a less elevated level are many of us who can always cheer ourselves up by the accomplishment of small tasks well done: shoes shined, cakes baked, lawns mown, letters written. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
What gives a person the sense of being well and âtogetherâ? There are many indications that if I am to have a deep, east, and steady sense of well-being and identity, I must not have had any experiences so bad that they have cut me off from my bodily self. If they have, I must make a new beginning. Secondly, I must have been experienced as a whole person to unconscious matter, but it is not mystical. It is neurological. Neurologically the infant forms a set of conceptual structures which are either closely interconnected or nor, depending on whether those who relate to the infant regard it as a baby or as a set of tasks requiring to be done. The baby who is regarded as a loud yell at one end and a bad smell at the other will carry that knowledge through life. Experiencing myself as loveable strengthens the basis for a sense of well-being and self-esteem yet further. This lovability must depend on having been valued for being myself rather than for anything I do. The value of something we cherish or that nourishes us must lie exactly in not being exciting and not having to work or be worked for. A poorly cathected self is one which has experienced relatively little love, relatively little respect for its manifestations, relatively little empathy; lacking feelings of value and power, there are no deep roots for later self-esteem to develop from. The baby who is recognized as a person from the start is able to use this experience of recognition as a validation of itself, and can let the consequent imagery of itself perform holding functions. This in turn creates the right conditions for further integrating processes. The changes that a long-established habit of walking on two feet could have brough about in the conformation of humans, the relations that are still observed between oneâs arms and the forelegs of quadrupeds, and the induction drawn from their manner of walking, could have given rise to doubts about the manner that must have been the most natural to us. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
All children begin by walking on all fours, and need our example and our lessons to learn to stand upright. There are even savage nations, such as Hottentots, who, greatly neglecting their children, allow them to walk on their hands for so long that they then have a great deal of trouble getting them to straighten up. The children of the Caribs of the Antilles do the same thing. There are various examples of quadruped men, and I could cite among others that of the child who was found in 1344 near Hesse, where he had been raised by wolves, and who said afterward at the court of Prince Henry that, had the decision been left exclusively to him, he would have preferred to return to the wolves than to live among men. He had embraced to such an extent the habit of walking like those animals, that wooden boards had to be attached to him to force him to stand upright and maintain his balance on two feet. It was the same with the child who was found in 1694, in the forests of Lithuania, and who lived among bears. He did not give rise, says M. de Condillac, any sign of reason, walked on his hands and feet, had no language, and formed sounds that bore no resemblance whatever to those of a man. The little savage of Hanover, who was brought to the court of England several years ago, had all sorts of trouble getting himself to walk on two feet. And in 1719, two other savages, who were found in the Pyrenees, ran about the mountains in the manner of quadrupeds. As for the objection one might make that this deprives one of the use of oneâs hands from which we derive so many advantages, over and above the fact that the example of monkeys shows that the hand can be used quite well in both ways, this would prove only that man can give oneâs limbs a destination more congenial than that of nature, and not that nature has destined man to walk otherwise than it teaches one. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
However, there are, it seems to me, much better reasons to state in support of the claim that humans are bidped. First, if it were shown that they could have originally been formed otherwise than we see one and yet finally become what one is, this would not suffice to conclude that this is how it happened; for, after having shown the possibility of these changes, it would still be necessary, prior to granting them, t demonstrate at least their probability. Moreover, if humansâ arms seem as if they could have served as legs when needed, it is the sole observation favorable to that system, out of a great number of others which are contrary to it. The chief ones are that the manner in which humansâ head is attached to oneâs body, instead of directing oneâs view horizontally (as is the case for all other animals and for humans themselves when one walks upright), would have kept one, while walking on all fours, with oneâs eyes fixed directly on the ground, a situation hardly conducive to the preservation of the individual; that the tail one is lacking, and for which one has no use when walking on two feet, is useful to quadrupeds, and none of them is deprived of one; that the breast of a woman, very well located for a biped who holds her child in her arms, is so poorly located for a quadruped that none has it located in that way; that, since the hind part is of an excessive height in proportion to the forelegs (which causes us to crawl on our knees when walking on all fours), the whole would have made an animal that was poorly proportioned and that walked comfortably; that if one has places oneâs foot as well as oneâs hand down flat, one would have had one less articulation in the hind leg than do other animals, namely the one that joins canon to the tibia; and that by setting down only the tip of the foot, as doubtlessly one would have been forced to do, the tarsus (not to mention the plurality of bones that make it up) appears too large to take the place of the canon, and its articulations with the metatarsus and the tibia too close together to give the human leg in this situation the same flexibility as those of quadrupeds. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Since the example of children is taken from an age when natural forces are not yet developed nor the members strengthened, it proves nothing whatever. I might just as well say that dogs are not destined to walk because several weeks after their birth they merely crawl. Particular facts also have little force against the universal practice of all humans; even nations that have had no communication with others could not have imitated anything about them. A child abandoned in a forest before one is able to walk, and nourished by some beast, will have followed the example of oneâs nurse in training oneself to walk like the figure of dependence. Habit could have given one capabilities one did not have from nature and just as one-armed humans are successful, by dint of exercise, at doing with their feet whatever we do with our hands, one will finally have succeeded in using oneâs hands as feet. Psychology receives much criticism, but it can be used to complement Christian faith. In celebrating the complementary relationships that exist between psychology and religion we must not, however, delude ourselves into thinking that there are no conflicts. As when we build a tunnel between two territories, it sometimes happens that the two ends of the tunnel simply do not connect. The two tunnels of psychology and religion may fail to connect because the two disciplines start off guided by different underlying values. The two fields may also fail to connect because they approach a subject with two utterly different conceptions of it. A case in point is the idea of giftedness. Consider the concept of giftedness as found in an older educational psychology and then in the New Testament. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
A family down the block has one. So do several of our colleagues. One family we know has two of them. And each of these families knowns of other families who have one: a gifted child. All across America a great hunt is on to find more gifted children. A promotional letter from the Gifted Children Newsletter solicited subscriptions from parents who âhave the sneaking suspicion your child is special in some way.â And how many are special? Dorothy Sisk, former director of the U.S. Office of Gifted and Talented, estimate that âapproximately 3 to 5 percent of the school age-population could be considered gifted and talented.â The implication is that the other 95 percent are not gifted. And that explains why, despite the lobbying of the mostly European American, upper-middle-class parents of these children, most school districts find âthere generally are not enough gifted childrenâ in their town to justify special programs for their gifted children. Nevertheless, the psychology and education of a gifted few has become something approaching a social movement. Several national associations for the gifted have sprung up, as have journals and magazines. Nearly every state now as a coordinator of programs for the gifted. Virtually everyone agrees that the gifted-child movement will serve a valuable purpose if it pushes schools to treat children as individuals. Not every third-grader should be taking the same spelling test and working the same math problems. Better if we can find ways to individualize instructions so that no child is bored by work that is too easy or frustrated by tasks too hard. The challenge is to provide opportunities and rewards for individuals of every degree of ability so that students at every level will realize their full potentialities, perform at their best and harbor n resentment toward any other level. However, the problem with the gifted-child movement, says its critics, is that it does not affirm and stimulate individuals of every ability level and, worse, may provoke resentment or self-disparagement among those implicitly labeled ânot gifted or talented.â #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The gifted may get to visit computer centers, do special art and science projects, visit museums, and hear guest speakers, while the nongifted remain in their classrooms, wondering why they are excluded. Moreover, labels such as âgiftedâ and ânot giftedâ can be self-confirming. In experiments, teachers who are told that certain children fit such labels, or students who are led to feel competent or incompetent by receiving such labels, sometimes act in ways that make the label into a reality. In all the hoopla over giftedness, what most people miss is the arbitrariness of the concept. We forget that giftedness is only a concept, artificially defined by scores among the top 3 or 4 percent of some test of aptitude or intelligence. We begin to assume that giftedness really exists out there somewhere. We come to believe it is like a red hair: children either have it of they do not. Actually, giftedness is a decision made in the minds of those who use the word. Nothing is gifted until someone names it that. Nature has no clustered children into well-defined groups corresponding to our value-laden labels. We, not nature, decide what is a flower and what is a weed. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, a weed is but a flower that someone decides does not belong in the garden. The arbitrariness of designating what is and what is not gifted becomes apparent when we try to agree on a practical definition. To the Yanomamo Indians of South America, giftedness is possession of the skills of a great hunter and warrior. To Suzuki violin teachers, it is musical talent. In middle-class America, one finds almost as many definitions of the term as articles on gifted children. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
However, in order to pigeon-hold children as gifted or not gifted, we must somehow measure their giftedness. Thus we often reduce it to a score on a one-dimensional device that measures not artistic talent or leadership skill or physical prowess or any other gift that a particular child may have, but IQ score. Several other quite extraordinary advances are taking place in society and transforming the way we make things. As some industries move from mass to small batch production, others are already moving beyond that toward full customization on a continuous-flow basis. Instead of starting and stopping production at the beginning and end of each short run, they are advancing to the point at which the machines can continuously reset themselves, so that he units of outputâeach one different from the nextâstream from the machines in an unbroken flow. In a nutshell, we are racing toward the machine customization on a round-the-clock, continuous basis. Another significant change, as we shall shortly see, brings the customer more directly than ever before into the manufacturing process. In some industries we are only a step removed from a situation in which a customer-company pipes its specifications directly into the manufacturerâs computers, which will in turn control the production lines. As this practice becomes widespread, the customer will become so integrated into the production process that we will find it more and more difficult to tell just who is actually the consumer and who the producer. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Finally, while Second Wave manufacture was Cartesian in the sense that products were broken into pieces, then painstakingly reassembled, Third Wave manufacture is post-Cartesian or âwholistic.â This is illustrated by what has happened to common manufactured products like the wristwatch. Whereas watches once had hundreds of moving parts, we are now able to make solid-state watches that are more accurate and reliableâwith no moving parts at all. Similarly, todayâs Panasonic TV set is more of a computer than TV made just ten years ago. They are thinner, more stylish, have higher quality digital signage and a much more vibrant and enhanced picture. As tiny microprocessorsâthose tiny miracle chips againâturn up in more and more products making them more efficient, better quality, and more enthralling. These new electronics certainly are gifted. And of course with technology, not only is everything becoming more stylish, devices are also becoming more compact and reliable. Computers have made it where watches can be used as telephones, lightweight laptops have replaced bulk desktops, and cameras can function perfectly underwater or catch moving objects clearly (as long as that is what they are designed for). By intervening at the molecular level, by using computer-assisted design or other advanced manufacturing tools, we integrate more and more functions into fewer and fewer parts, substituting âwholesâ for many discrete components. What is occurring can be compared to the rise of computers in residential agriculture. Instead of simply setting a program or watering the yard by hand, new tools now allow your sprinkler system to analyze moisture content, types of vegetation, and the weather to decide how much water is needed and when. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
There are even small robots that can weed your garden for you on a constant basis so one never sees a weed sprouting. We are also beginning to see this âpresto effectâ in construction and manufacturing. The question is with things becoming more automated, more expensive, and more efficient, will the human population respond by decreasing because they will not be as needed as in the past, and it would not be wise to have a population of people, who cannot afford to live, overcrowding our communities and sitting idle. The pattern becomes clear, therefore. Vast changes in the techno-sphere and the info-sphere have converged to change the way we make goods. We are moving rapidly beyond traditional mass production to a sophisticated mix of mass and de-massified products. The ultimate goal of this effort is now apparent: completely customized goods, made with wholistic, continuous-flow processes, increasingly under the direct control of the consumer. In brief, we are revolutionizing the deep structure of production, sending currents of change through every layer of society. However, this transformation, which will affect the student planning a career, the business planning an investment, or the nation planning a development strategy, cannot und understood in isolation. It must be seen in direct relationship to yet another revolutionâthis one in the office. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Artificial intelligence will raise humanity to the heights of power and immortality many have envisioned. Throughout the World, hundred of people are making a difference in their neighborhoods, their communities, and their country. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
In the public service arena, God loving people are changing laws, shaping school curricula, working for peace, laboring against bad habits, and helping elect good men and women to public officeâor running for office themselves. The alternative to the succession model in the suburbs is the parallel growth model. What this suggests is that suburbs show both European American growth, as well as growth of other races and/or cultures. This appears to have been the more common pattern for recent decades, with comparatively less racial turnover when compared to the patten in central cities. Even thirty to four years ago, when non-dominate culture groups rates of suburbanization were already exceeding European American rates, there was no major pattern of succession of suburbs from European American to non-European America. However, we have seen European Americans move totally out of some areas, and that is mostly due to an increase in wealth. They can afford other neighborhoods usually because they have seen growth in equity in their homes, they are more established in their careers, and have been left an inheritance. This is also because America is a country that allows immigration, so as new people move in, they tend to inhabit costal communities, which can cause them to become more populated and increase prices. However, costal communities are also where more business hubs are because back in the days when things traveled by ships, that is where they docked and most commerce took place. Many suburbs are not turning over racially because European Americans make up 60.1 percent of the population. So rapid displacement of European Americans is not occurring everywhere, but is starting to happen as our nation diversifies. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
African Americans in the suburbs tend to have a higher income than those in central cities. In metropolitan areas with a population of at least a million, African American suburban families had an average income of $66.840.83. That is 55 percent higher than the average income of central-city African Americans in the same metropolitan areas. It is interesting, however, that not all non-Europeans are open to integration and diversity. In seeking that suburban dream, some middle-class non-European American families are deliberately forgoing the American dream of an integrated society. For instance, many Asian American moved to Greenhaven/Pocket in South Sacramento, which is an upper-middle class suburb. Serval African Americans moved to suburbs such as Rolling Oaks in the Miami area and Brook Glen and Wyndham Park outside Atlanta, which represents for many middle-class African Americas an affirmative decision to live in predominately African American suburbs. Race is still a core variable in American society, but class is more important than race in determining oneâs neighbors. For much of the middle class, race is increasingly being supplanted by the social-class variables of income, education, and occupations. As we are well into the new century, the variables of social class are affecting housing decisions. While middle-class neighbors of any race are becoming increasingly acceptable, lower-class neighbors are not. People tend to want peace and quiet in their neighborhoods. They want to feel safe. They want their kids to be able to play in their backyards and they do not want their property vandalized or stolen. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Believe it or not, there are still some communities in America where people live their doors unlocked and their keys in their cars. And it is not because they are forgetful, but because their communities are just that safe and peaceful. Overall the pattern of housing in America is one of optimism and some discouragement. The 1968 Fair Housing Act has displaced most government or illegal segregation in America. Many European Americas accept open housing principal. Neighborhood or suburban racial changeover is no longer triggered by the presence of non-European America residents, but European Americans and others still exhibit reluctance to move into predominantly non-European American areas. The old racial segregation is largely becoming history, and because many people are driven by money and sales, racial steering by real estate agents and discrimination against non-European Americans by banks and financial institutions is less common. There are even loans for people who have income, but cannot verify that income, called non-prime loans. These people can afford expensive houses, but may not be able to prove where their money is coming from, and the banks want to accommodate them because cash is king! Over the decades suburbs have taken much criticism as being the recipients of white flight and the last bastion of the lace front curtain, white shoe law firm community. However, as indicated, the data shows a much more complex racial mosaic. Suburbs are becoming more multiracial and multiethnic. Ironically, as we enter the new century, the suburbs have the opportunity to achieve what the cities largely have failed to accomplish: truly racially integrated communities. To live content with small means, to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion, to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich, to study hard, think quietly, talk gentle, act frankly, to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart, to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry neverâin a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. This is to by my symphony. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
I have come to terms with the future. From this day onward I will walk easy on the Earth. Plant trees. Kill no living things. Live in harmony with all creatures. I will restore the Earth where I am. Use no more of its resources than I need. And listen, listen to what it is telling me. Were the sky of parchment made, a quill each reed, each twig, and blade o, could we with ink the oceans fill, were every human a scribe of skill, the marvelous story of Godâs greatest glory would still remain untold; for He, Most High, the Earth and sky created alone of old. Without fatigue or weary hand, He spoke the word, He breathed command; the World and all that therein dwell, field and meadow, fen and fell, mount and sea, in six days He with life did then inspire; the work when ended, His glory ascended upon His throne of fire. Before Him myriads angels flash, to praise the Mighty One, Ancient of Days; six-winged hosts stand at their postsâthe flaming Seraphimâin hushed awe together draw to chant their morning hymn. The angels, together, without delay, call one to another in rapturous lay: âThrice holy He whose majesty fills Earth from end to end.â The Cherubim soar, like the oceanâs roar, on celestial spheres, ascend, to gaze upon the Light on high, which, like the bow in cloudy sky, is iris-colored, silver-lined; while hasting on their assigned, in every tongue they utter song and bless and praise the Lord, whose secret and source, whose light and force can never be explored. There is the peace which comes from having a well-filled stomach. There is the peace of the graveyard. However, a glimpse gives us the highest peace, the Shanti of Indian sages, that which passeth understanding of the New Testament. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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At His Preliminary Examination He Testified that He Has Been in the Snare of the Devil!
A weary and secretive darkness crept into her face, a distraction, as though her soul had traveled out of doors towards Heaven, and the she looked down sadly. When I came in sight of the house where John Procter live, there was a very hard blow struck on my breast which caused great pain in my stomach and amazement in my head. However, I did see no person near me, only my wife behind me on the same horse. And when I cam against said Mr. Procterâs house, according to my understanding, I did see John Procter and his wife at the said house. [They were, remember, in prison at this time.] Mr. Procter himself looked out of the window and his wife did stand just without the door. I told my wife of it, and she did look that way and could see nothing but a little maid at the door. I saw no maid there, but Mr. Procterâs wife according to my understanding did stand at the door. Afterwards, about half a mile from the aforesaid house, I was taken speechless for some short time. My wife did ask me several questions and desired me that if I could not speak I should hold up my hand, which I did. And immediately I could speak as well as ever. [Notice again that the fit was broken when the subject is able to move or speak.] And when we came to the way where Salem Road cometh into Ispwich Road, here I received another blow on my breast which caused much pain, so that I could not sit on my horse. And when I did alight off my horse, to my understanding I saw a woman coming towards us about sixteen or twenty pole from us, but did not know who it was. My wife could not see her. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
When I did get up on my horse again, to my understanding there stood a cow where I saw the woman. [Witches were thought capable of transforming their shapes.] After that we went to Boston without any further molestation, but after I came home again to Newbury I was pinched and nipped by something invisible for some time. However, now through Godâs goodness to me I am well again. That was testimony from Joseph Bailey of what he and his wife encountered. Testimony like this is careful and honest, and historians have been wrong in refusing to take it seriously. Mr. Baily was quite aware that he had been ill, and that the illness had created a difference between his perceptions and those of his wife. However, the fatal distinction between his understandings of the event and ours is that his culture led him to attribute his illness to witchcraft whereas ours permits us to attribute it to his fear of witchcraft. There are many similar instances of the specters of innocent people appearing to afflict the citizenry once they were suspected of witchcraft. One of the more interesting involves John Willard, who had at first been a deputy-constable employed in arresting persons who had been complained of. According to Robert Calef, an American author who wrote a book on the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-93, he became dissatisfied after being sent to arrest persons he believed innocent, and resigned his position. This immediately brought him under suspicion, and soon the afflicted girls were crying out against him. Shortly thereafter his grandfathers, Bray Wilkins, was ready for dinner when John Willard came into the house with my son Henry Wilkins, before I sat down, and said Mr. Willard to my apprehension looked after such a sort upon me as I never before discerned in any. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
That is, Mr. Wilkins thought Mr. Willard had âoverlookedâ himâgiven him the evil eye. I did but step into the next room and I was presently taken so that I could not dine nor eat anything. I cannot express the misery I was in, for my water was suddenly stopped and I had no benefit of nature, but was like a man in a rock. And I told my wife immediately that I was afraid that Mr. Willard had done me wrong. My pain continuing and finding no relief my jealousy [id es, suspicion] continued. Mr. Lawson and others there were all amazed and knew not what to do for me. There was a woman accounted skillful [who] came hoping to help me, and after she had used means she asked me whether none of those evil persons had done me damage. I said I could not say they had but I was sore afraid they had. She answered, she did fear so too. As near as I remember I lay in this case three or four days at Boston, and afterwards, with the jeopardy of my life (as I though), I cam home. And then some of my friends coming to see me (and at this time John Willard was run away) one of the afflicted persons, Mercy Lewis, came in with them, and they asked whether she saw anything. She said, âYes, they are looking for Jon Willard but here he is on his grandfatherâs belly.â (And at that time I was in grievous pain in the small of my belly.) I continued so in grievous pain and my water much stopped till said Mr. Willard was in chains. And then as near as I can guess I have considerable ease. However, on the other hand, in the room of a stoppage I was vexed with a flowing of water so that it was hard to keep myself dry. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
On the fifth [of] July last, talking with some friends about John Willard, some pleading his innocency and myself and some others arguing the contrary, within about one-quarter of an hour after that I was taken in the sorest distress and misery, my water being turned into real blood, or of a bloody color, and the old pain returned excessively as before, which continued for about twenty-four hours together. In this testimony, we come to understand the hysterical loss of appetite which was Mr. Wilkinsâ first symptom we have seen before and shall see again. The inability to urinate we have seen in Mrs. Simms as a result of Manny Reddâs curse. However, there was clearly something organic as well as psychosomatic wrong with Bray Wilkins. The blood in the urine coupled with the extreme pain of relatively short duration suggests that it may have been a kidney stone. However, whatever it was, both Mr. Wilkins and the community at large were by this time ready to attribute it to witchcraft. William Bakerâs confessions provide an excellent example that the Salem Witch Trials were carried in chiefly by the complaints and accusations of the afflicted and by the confessions of the accused, condemning themselves and others. Nothing is a first sight more surprising than the number of the confessors and the character of their confessions. There were about fifty of them, and the statements which they made far exceed in color and detail the simple statements of personal guilt that were necessary to save their lives. According to Mr. Baker, at his preliminary examination he testified that he has been in the snare of the Devil three years. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
That the Devil first appeared to him like a black man, and he perceived he had a cloven foot; that the Devil demanded of him to give up himself soul and body unto him, which he promised to do. [The Devil promised in return to pay Mr. Bakerâs debts and see that he lived comfortably. Mr. Baker signed the contract in blood.] Satanâs design was to set up his own worship, abolish all churches in the land (which some say politicians are currently doing), to fall next [id est, first] upon Salem and so go through the country. He saith the Devil promised that all his people should be equal, that there should be n day of resurrection or of judgment, and neither punishment nor shame for sin. That explains why people are trying to banish God and they church. They know they are bad people and believe they can avoid being held responsible for their crimes and sins by raising hell on Earth and raising the Devil. Mr. Baker said that the demonic âGrandessâ had told him there were about â307 witches in the countryâ and he volunteered his opinion that all the persons arrested and imprisoned to date (August 29, 1692) were guilty. However, an oral confession was not enough for him. Mr. Hale prints another âwhich he wore himself in prison, and sent to the magistrate to confirm his former confession.â However, an oral confession was not enough for him. Mr. Hale prints another âwhich he wrote himself in prison, and sent to the magistrates to confirm his former confession.â Here is his testimony: God having called me to confess my sins and apostasy in that fall in giving the Devil advantage over me, appearing to me like a Black, in the evening, to set my hand to his book, as I have owned to my shame. He told me that I should not want [in] so doing. At Salem Village, there being a little off the Meeting-House about an hundred five blades [id est, young bucks], some with rapiers by their sides, which was called (and might be more for ought I know) by Bishop and Burroughs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
And the trumpet sounded, and [there was] bread and beverage which they called Sacrament, but I had none, being carried over all on a stick, never being at any other meeting. I being at carting a Saturday last, all the day of hay and English corn, the Devil brought my shape to Salem and did afflict Martha Sprague and Rose Foster by clitching my hand. And a Sabbath day my shape afflicted Abigail Martin. Elizabeth Johnson and Abigail Faulkner have been my enticers to this great abomination, as one have owned and charged her to her sister with the same. And the design was to destroy Salem Village, and to begin at the ministerâs house, and to destroy the Church of God, and to set up Satanâs kingdom, and then all will be well. And now I hope God in some measure has made me something sensible of my sin and apostasy, begging pardon of God, and of the Honorable Magistrates and all Godâs People, hoping and promising by the help of God to set to my heart and hand to do what in me leith to destroy such wicked worship, humbly begging the prayers of all Godâs People for me [that] I may walk humbly under this great affliction and that I may procure to myself he sure mercies of David and the blessing of Abraham. Such testimony sheds light on the centuries long plot of some to remove God from America. Pray I must, my Lordly Friend, but what should I pray? Bless You, Heavenly Father, Father of my Lord Jesus Christ, for remembering me, pauper that I am? O Father of mercies and God of consolations, as Paul began his Second Letter to the Corinthians (1.3), I give You thanks, unworthy as I am of Your every consolation? #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
I bless You always, and I glorify You, with You Only Begotten Son and the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, for ever and ever? O Lord God, my Holy Loving Friend, when You come into my heart, You make my blood dance? âYou are my glory,â thrummed the Psalmist (3.3) and âthe exaltation of my heartâ (119.111)? You are my hope andâthrumming againââmy refuge in the day of my tribulationâ (59.16)? I ask again, O Lord, what should I pray? At this point in my life, I find myself not only a little long in the tooth, but also a little short in the hoof; that is to say, a little short of breath in the pursuit of Love and Virtue. I have no one to turn to. You are the only One who can help me. Do not be surprised, then, when I ask You to visit me more often. I need to know more about the holy disciplines. Will they free my body from the itch, cure my heart from the worm? Cleanse me on the inside, scrub me on the outside, and I will be ready enough to love, strong enough to suffer, stable enough to preserve. And you say that these blood drinkers are worshiped in the hills. It was the spring of 1880, I had lost my way, and could not tell how far I might be from my destination. I was very tired and had a heavy knapsack on my shoulders, packed with stones and relics from the ruins of the Old Pelasgic fortress which I had been exploring, besides a number of old coins and a lamp or two which I had purchased there. I could discern no signs of any human habitation, and the hills, covered with wood, seemed to shut me in on every side. I was beginning to think seriously of looking out for some sheltered spot under a thicket in which to pass the night. I was so excited to get back to the Winchester estate. The mansion was a large rambling place, and was tolerably comfortable within. My room was situated at the end of a long passage; there were two rooms on the right side of this passage, and a window on the left, which looked out upon the garden. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Having taken a survey of the outside of the house while getting some fresh air after dinner, when the moon was up, I remembered exactly the position of my chamberâthe end room of a long narrow wing, projecting at right angles from the main building, with which it was connected only by the passage and two side rooms already mentioned. Please to bear this description carefully in mind while I proceed. Before getting into bed, I drove into the floor close to the door a small gimlet which formed part of a complicated Winchester pocket-knife which I always carried with me, so that it would be impossible for any one to enter the room without my knowledge; there was a lock to the door, but the key would not turn in it; there was also a bolt, but it would not enter the hole intended for it, the door having sunk apparently from its proper level. I satisfied, myself, however, that the door was securely fastened by my gimlet, and soon fell asleep. How can I describe the strange and horrible sensation which oppressed me as I woke out of my slumber? I had been sleeping soundly, and before I quite recovered consciousness I had instinctively risen from my pillow, and was crouching forward, my knees drawn up, my hands clasped before my face, and my whole frame quivering with horror. I saw nothing, felt nothing; but a sound was ringing in my ears which seemed to make my blood run cold. I could not have supposed it possible that any mere sound, whatever might be its nature, could have produced such a revulsion of feeling or inspired such intense horror as I then experienced. It was not a cry of terror that I heardâthat would have roused me to actionânor the moaning of one in painâthat would have distressed me, and called forth sympathy rather than aversion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
True, it was like the groaning of one in anguish and despair, but not like any mortal voice: it seemed too dreadful, too intense, for human utterance. The sound had begun while I was fast asleepâclose to the head of my bedâclose to my very pillow; it continued after I was wide awakeâa long, hollow, protracted groan, making the midnight air reverberate, and then dying gradually away until it ceased entirely. It was some minutes before I could at all recover from the terrible impression which seemed to stop my breath and paralyse my limbs. At length I began to look about me, for the night was not entirely dark, and I could discern the outlines of the room and the several pieces of furniture in it. I then got out of bed, and called aloud, âWho is there? What is the matter? Is anyone ill?â I repeated these enquiries in Italian, German, and French, but there was none that answered. Fortunately I had some matches in my pocket and was able to light my candle. I then examined every part of the room carefully, and especially the wall at the head of my bed, sounding it with my knuckles; it was firm and solid there, as in all other places. I unfastened my door, and explored the passage and the two adjoining rooms, which were unoccupied and almost destitute of furniture; they had evidently not been used for some time. Search as I would, I could gain no clue to the mystery. Returning to my room I sat down upon the bed in great perplexity, and began to turn over in my mind whether it was possible I could have been deceivedâwhether the sounds which caused me such distress might be the offspring of some dream or nightmare; but to that conclusion I could not bring myself at all, much as I wished it, for the groaning had continued ringing in my ears long after I was wide away and conscious. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
While I was thus reflecting, having neglected to close the door which was opposite to the side of my bed where I was sitting, I heard a soft footstep at a distance, and presently a light appeared at the further end of the passage. Then I saw the shadow of a man cast upon the opposite wall; it moved very slowly, and presently stopped. I saw the hand raised, as if making a sign to someone, an I knew from the fact of the shadow being thrown in advance that there must be a second person in the rear by whom the light was carried. After a short pause they seemed to retrace their steps, without my having had a glimpse of either of them, but only of the shadow which had come before and which followed them as they withdrew. It was then a little after one oâclock, and I concluded they were retiring late to rest, and anxious to avoid disturbing me, though I have since thought that it was the light from my room which caused their retreat. I felt half inclined to call to them, but I shrank, without knowing why, from making known what had disturbed me, and while I hesitated they were gone; so I fastened my door again, and resolved to sit up and watch a little longer by myself. However, now my candle was beginning to burn low, and I found myself in this dilemma: either I must extinguish it at once, or I should be left without the means of procuring a light in case I should be again disturbed. I regretted that I had not called for another candle while there were people yet moving in the house, but I could not do so now without making explanations; so I grasped my box of matches, put out my light, and lay down, not without a shudder, in the bed. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
For an hour more I lay awake thinking over what had occurred, and by that time I had almost persuaded myself that I had nothing but my own morbid imagination to thank for the alarm which I had suffered. âIt is an outer wall,â I said to myself; âthey are all outer walls, and the house 9-inch-thick walls; it is impossible that sound could be heard through such a thickness. Besides, it seemed to be in my room, close to my ear. What an idiot I must be, to be excited an alarmed about nothing; I will think no more about it.â So I turned on my side, with a smile (rather a forced one) at my own foolishness, and composed myself to sleep. At that instant I heard, with more distinctness than I ever heard any other sound in my life, a gasp, a voiceless gasp, as if someone were in agony for breath, biting at the air, or trying with desperate efforts to cry out or speak. It was repeated a second and a third time; then there was a pause; then again that horrible gasping; and then a long-drawn breath, an audible drawing up of air into the throat, such as one would make in heaving a deep sigh. Such sounds as these could not possibly have been heard unless they had been close to my ear; they seemed to come from the wall at my heard, or to rise up out of my pillow. That fearful gasping, and that drawing in of the breath, in darkness and silence of the night, seemed to make every nerve in my body thrill with dreadful expectation. Unconsciously I shrank away from it, crouching down as before, with my face upon my knees. It ceased, and immediately a moaning sound began, which lengthened out into an awful, protracted groan waxing louder and louder, as if under an increasing agony, and then dying away slowly and gradually into silence; yet painfully and distinctly audible even to the last. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
As soon as I could rouse myself from the freezing horror which seemed to penetrate even to my joints and marrow, I crept away from the bed, and in the further corner of the room lighted with shaking hand of my candle, looking anxiously about me as I did so, expecting some dreadful revelation as the light flashed up. Yet, if you will believe me, I did not feel alarmed or frightened; but rather oppressed, and penetrated wit an unnatural, overpowering, sentiment of awe. I seemed to be in the presence of some great and horrible mystery, some bottomless depth of woe, or misery, or crime. I shrank from it with a sensation of intolerable loathing and suspense. It was a feeling akin to this which prevented me from calling Mrs. Winchester. I could not bring myself to speak to her of what had passed; not knowing how nearly she might be involved in the mystery. I was only anxious to escape as quietly as possible from the room and from the house. The candle was now beginning to flicker in its socket, but the stars were shining outside, and there was space and air to breathe there, which seemed to be wanting in my room; so I hastily opened my window, tied the bedclothes together for a rope, and lowered myself silently and safely to the ground. There was a light still burning in the lower part of the house; but I crept noiselessly along, feeling my way carefully among the trees, and in due time came upon a beaten track which led me to a road, the same which I had been travelling on the previous night. I walked on, scarcely knowing whither, anxious only to increase my distance from the accursed house, until day began to break, when almost the first object I could see distinctly was a small body of men approaching me. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The men asked me what was wrong? âI was disturbed in the night. I could not sleep. I made my escape from the Winchester mansion, and here I am I cannot tell you more.â âBut you must tell me more, dear sir; forgive me; you must tell me everything. I must know all that passed in that mansion. We have had in under our surveillance for a long time, and when I heard in what direction you had gone yesterday, and had not returned, I feared you had got into some mischief there, and we were even now upon our way to look for you. The mansion is so large that people seem to get lost inside and disappear.â I could not enter into particulars, but I told him I had heard strange sounds, and at his respect I went back with him to the mansion. He told me by the way that the mansion was haunted; that Mrs. Winchester e mansion, he placed his men about the premises and instituted a strict search, and Mrs. Winchester and the man who was found in the house being compelled to accompany him. The room in which I had slept was carefully examined; the wall was of plaster or cement, so that no sound could have passed through it; the walls were sound and solid, and there was nothing to be seen that could in any way account for the strange disturbance I had experienced. The room on the ground-floor underneath my bedroom was inspected; it contained a quantity of straw, hay, firewood, and lumber. It was paved with thick wooden slaps, and it was observed that the floors were uneven, as if they had been recently disturbed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
âPly the board loose,â said the officer, âwe shall find something hidden here, I reckon.â Mrs. Winchester was evidently much disturbed. âStop,â she cried. âI will tell you what lies there; come away out of doors, and you shall know all about it.â âDig, I say. We will find out for ourselves.â âLet the dead rest,â cried Mrs. Winchester, with a trembling voice. âFor the love of Heaven come away, and hear what I shall tell you. It is the body of my son, my only sonâlet him rest, if rest he can. He was wounded in a quarrel, and brought home to die. I thought he would recover, but there was neither doctor nor priest at hand, an in spite of all that would could do for him he died. Let him alone now, or let a priest first be sent for; he died unconfessed and unacknowledged. No one ever knew of his existence. I had hope to spare him of the Winchester cruse that Annie and his father had succumbed to. He was buried here because I did not want to make a stir about it. Nobody knew of his death nor his existence, and we laid him down quietly; once place I thought was as good as another when once the life was out of him. We could not bare a scandal. That gasping attempt to speak, and that awful groaningâwhence did they proceed? It was no living voice. Beyond that I will express no opinion on the subject. I will only say it was the means of saving my life, and at the same time putting an end to the series of bloody deeds which had been committed under my familyâs name. Every year, I go to the edge of my estate and drop a pound of silver in a grave, and my prayers go up to Heaven in all sincerity!â #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
I invoke thee, and move thee, and stir thee up O Spirit Berith appear unto my eyes before the circle in the likeness of a man in the names and by the name Iah and Vau, which Adam spake and in the name of God, Agla, which Lot spake: and it was as pleasant deliverers unto him and his house and in the name Ioth which Iacob spake in the voice of the Holy ones who cast one down, and it was also as pleasant deliverers in the anger of his brother and in the name Anaphaxeton, which Aaron spake and it was as the Secret Wisdom and in the name Asher Ehyeh Oriston, which Mosheh spake, and all waters were brining forth creatures who wax strong, which lifted up unto the houses, which destroyed all things and in the name of Elion which Mosheh spake, and it was as stones from the firmament of wrath, such as was not in the ages of Time the beginning of the Earth and in the name of Adni, which Mosheh spake and there appeared creatures of Earth who destroyed what the big stones did not: and in the name Schema Amathia, which Ioshua invoked, and the Sun remained over ye, O ye hills the seats of Gibeon, and in the names Alpha and Omega which Daniel spake, and destoyed Bel and the Dragon: and in the nae Emmanuel which the sons of God sang praises in the midst of the burning plain, and flourished in conquest: and in the name Hagios, and by the Throne of Adni, and in Ischyros, Athanatos, Paracletos: and in O Theos, Ictros, Athanatos. And in these names of the secret truth, Agla, On, Tetragrammaton, do I invoke and move thee. And in these names, and all things that are the names of the God of Secret Truth who liveth for ever, the All-Powerful. I invoke and stie thee up, Oâ spirit Berith. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Even by him who spake it was, to whom all creatures are obedient and in the Extreme Justice and Anger of God; and by the veil that is before the glory of God, mighty; and by the creatures of living breath before the Throne whose eyes are east and west; by the fire in the fire of just Glory of the Throne; by the Holy ones of Heaven; and by the secret wisdom of God, I, exalted in power, stir three up. Appear before this circle; obey in all things that I say; in the seal Basdathea Baldachia; and in this Name Primeumaton, which Mosheh spake and the Earth was divided, and Korah, Dathan, and Abiram fell in the depth. Therefore obey in all things, O Spirit Berith, obey thy creation. Come thou forth: appear into my eyes; visit us in peace, be friendly; come forth in the 24th of a moment; obey my power, speaking the secrets of Truth in voice and in understanding! I stir thee up, O Spirit Berith, in all things that are the names of glory and power of God the Great One who is greater than understanding, Adni Ihvh Tzabaoth, come forth in the 24th of a moment, let Thy dwelling-place be empty; apply thyself unto the secret truth and obey my power: appear unto my eyes, visit us in peace, speaking the secrets of truth in voice and understanding. I stir thee up and move thee, O spirit Berith, in all the names that I have said, and I add these one and sic names wherein Solomon, the lord of the secret wisdom, placed yourselves, spirits of wrath, in a vessel, Adonai, Preyai Tetragrammaton, Anaphaxeton Ineddenfatoal, Pathtomon and Itemon: appear before this circle; obey in all things my power. And as thou art he that obeys not and comes not I shall be in thy power, O God Most High that liveth for ever, who is the creator of all things n six days, Eie, Saraye, and in my power in the name Prieumaton that ruleth over the palaces of Heaven, Curse Thee, and destroy thy seat, joy, and power; and I bind thee in the depth of Abaddon, to remain until the day of judgment whose end cannot be. And I being thee in the fire of sulphur mingled with poison and the seas of fire and sulphur: come forth, therefore, obey my power and appear before this circle. Therefore come forth, therefore, obey my power and appear before this circle. Therefore come forth in the name of the Holy Ones Zabaoth, Adonia, Amioran. Come! For I am Adonai who stir thee up. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
The attic spaces can get quite dark, but the lights shine through those beautiful glass panes! Come see this and more on the Explore More Tour!
Explore More Tour:
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A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle đ»
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I am a Simple Doctor–All I Wanted to do Here Was to Found a Small Hospital!
Dear friend, you need to do two things. First, âWalk with Me,â as My Father in Heaven told the decrepit Abraham in Genesis, âand let Truth come with usâ (12.1). Second, âSeek Me always in the sincerity of your heart,â as the Wisdom of Solomon said right at the beginning (1.1). Do these two things, and you will be protected from the bandit horde. Punishment calls for âretributive suffering.â However, discipline is âtraining that corrects, molds, or perfects.â Punishment is directed at the child oneself. Discipline is directed more at the objectionable behavior of the child; it is something we do for our children, not to them. The common goal is to establish a home where harmony, respect, and love abound. However, as we attempt to teach our children to âwalk uprightly before the Lord,â Doctrine and Covenants 68.28, our methods will strongly influence our childrenâs behavior and self-imageâand these either encourage or impede the results we are seeking. The heart of child management is the relationship between parents and their children. There are four basic ingredients of positive parent-child interactions. First of all, mutual respect is very important. Effective parents try to avoid nagging, hitting, debating, and talking down to their children. They also avoid doing things for their children that children can do for themselves. (Constantly stripping children of opportunities to learn and take responsibility prevents them from becoming independent and developing self-esteem.) Second come shared enjoyment. Effective parents spend some time each day with their children, doing something that both the parent and child enjoy. Third comes love. This goes almost without saying, but many parents assume their children know that they are loved. It is important to show them you careâin words and by actions such as hugging. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The fourth tool in the child management program is encouragement. Children who get frequent encouragement come to believe in themselves. Effective parents do not just praise their children for success, winning, or good behavior. They also recognize a childâs progress and attempts to improve. Show you have faith in children by letting them try things on their own and by encouraging their efforts. Creative communication is another important ingredient of successful child management. Making a distinction between feelings and behavior is the key to clear communication. Since children (and parents, too) do not choose how they feel, it is important to allow free expression of feelings. The child who learns to regard some feelings as âbad,â or unacceptable, is being asked to deny a very real part of oneâs experience. Parents are encouraged to teach their children that all feelings are appropriate; it is only actions that are subject to disapproval. Many parents are unaware of just how often they block communication and the expression of feelings in their children. Consider this typical conversation:
Son: I am stupid, and I know it. Look at my grades in school.
Father: You just have to work harder.
Son: I already work harder and it does not help. I have no brains.
Father: You are smart, I know it.
Son: I am stupid, I know it.
Father: (loudly) You are not stupid!
Son: Yes, I am!
Father: You are not just good. You are the best!
#RandolphHarris 2 of 19
By debating with the child, the father misses the point that his son feels stupid. It would be far more helpful for the father to encourage the boy to talk about his feelings. How could he do that? He might say, âYou really feel that you are not as smart as others, do you not? Do you feel this way often? Are you feeling bad at school?â In this way, the child is given a chance to express his emotions and to feel understood. The father might conclude by saying, âLook, son, in my eyes you area fine person. However, I understand how you feel. Everyone feels inadequate at times.â Again, it is valuable to remember that supportive parents encourage their children. In order for any organization to run effectively, it must establish a set of bylaws. A family also needs bylaws to prescribe boundaries for behavior. If parents do not have a specific, deliberate plan for discipline, they are likely to rely simply on instinct and react emotionally. At our weekly family council, we mutually agree upon rules which all must abide by. We also establish consequences for disobedience. In this way, everyone is aware of the rules and the consequences; there are no surprises. And the consequences are predicable and consistent. As a family, we have come to recognize that certain behaviors are âlove destroying actsâ and therefore cannot be tolerated. These include such things as sassing, teasing, and name-calling. âBehold, mine house is a house of order, saith the Lord God, and not a house of confusion,â reports Doctrine and Covenants 132.8. Order is an eternal principleâan important characteristic of the kingdom of God. We are instructed to follow the pattern and set our own houses in order. âAnd now a commandment I give unto youâif you will be delivered you shall set in order your own house,â Doctrine and Covenants 93.43. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
An orderly home depends upon well-defined and well-understood rules. One way the Lord maintains order in His kingdom is to bless those who obey certain laws. âThere is a law, irrevocably decreed in Heaven before the foundations of this World, upon which all blessings are predicatedâand when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated,â reports Doctrine and Covenants 130.20, 21. An orderly home also operates on this important principle. Family rules must be established and observed before the blessing of family harmony can be attained. Truth will free youâas I said to the Jewish people who believed in Me, and as the Beloved Disciple recorded in his Gospel (8.32)âfrom the seductions and detractions of those who hunt you down. Yes, Truth has freed you already; and when you are truly free, you do no care what epithets the vain World slings at you. âA light that shone from behind the sun; the sun was not so fierce as to pierce where that light could,â reports Charles Williams. The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this. Just as every natural event is the manifestation at a particular place and moment of Natureâs total character, so every particular Christian miracle manifests at a particular place and moment the character and significance of the Incarnation. There is no question in Christianity of arbitrary interferences just scattered about. It relates not a series of disconnected raids on Nature but the various steps of a strategically coherent invasionâan invasion which intends complete conquest and âoccupation.â #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
The fitness, and therefore credibility, of the particular miracles depends on their relation to the Grand Miracle; all discussion of then is isolated from it is futile. The fitness or credibility of the Grand Miracle itself cannot, obviously, be judged by the same standard. And let us admit at once that it is very difficult to find a standard by which it can be judged. If the thing happened, it was he central event in the history of the Earthâthe very thing that the whole story has been about. Since it happened only once, it is by Humeâs standards infinitely improbable. However, then the whole history of the Earth has also happened only once; is it therefore incredible? Hence the difficulty, which weighs upon Christian and atheist alike, of estimating the probability of the Incarnation. It is like asking whether the existence of Nature herself is intrinsically probable. That is why it is easier to argue, on historical grounds, that the Incarnation actually occurred than to show, on philosophical grounds, the probability of its occurrence. The historical difficulty of giving for the life, sayings and influence of Jesus any explanation that is not harder than the Christian explanation, is very great. The discrepancy between the depth and sanity and (let me add) shrewdness of His moral teaching and the rampant megalomania which must lie behind His theological teaching unless He is indeed God, has never been satisfactorily got over. Hence the non-Christian hypotheses succeed one another with the restless fertility of bewilderment. Today we are asked to regard all the theological elements as later accretions to the story of a âhistoricalâ and merely human Jesus: yesterday we were asked to believe that the whole thing began with vegetation myths and mystery religions and that the pseudo-historical Man was only fadged up at a later date. However, this historical inquiry is outside the scope of my book. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Since the Incarnation, if it is a fact, holds this central position, and since we are assuming that we do not yet know it to have happened on historical grounds, we are in a position which may be illustrated by the following analogy. Let us suppose we possess parts of a novel or a symphony. Someone now brings us a newly discovered piece of manuscript and says, âThis is the missing part of the work. This is the chapter on which the whole plot of the novel really turned. This is the main theme of the symphony.â Our business would be to see whether new passage, if admitted to the central place which the discoverer claimed for it, did actually illuminate all the parts we had already seen and âpull them together.â Nor should we be likely to go very far wrong. The new passage, if spurious, however, attractive it looked at the first glance, would become harder and harder to reconcile with the rest of the work the longer we considered the matter. However, if it were genuine, then at every fresh hearing of the music or every fresh reading of the book, we should find it settling down, making itself more at home, and eliciting significance from all sorts of details in the whole work which we had hitherto neglected. Even though the new central chapter or main theme contained great difficulties in itself, we should still think it genuine provided that it continually removed difficulties elsewhere. Something like this we must do with the doctrines of the Incarnation. Here, instead of a symphony or a novel, we have the whole mass of our knowledge. The credibility will depend on the extent to which the doctrine, if accepted, can illuminate and integrate that whole mass. It is much less important that the doctrine itself should be fully comprehensible. We believe that the sun is in the sky at midday in summer no because we can clearly see the sun (in fact, we cannot) but because we can see everything else. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The first difficulty that occurs to any critic of the doctrine lies in the very center of it. What can be meant by âGod becoming manâ? In what sense is it conceivable that eternal self-existent Spirit, basic Fact-hood, should be so combined with a natural human organism as to make one person? And this would be a fatal stumbling-block if we had not already discovered that in every human being a more than natural activity (the fact of reasoning) and therefore presumably a more than natural agent is thus united with a part of Nature: so united that the composite creature calls itself âIâ and âMe.â I am not, of course, suggesting that what happened when God became Man was simply another instance of this process. In other men a supernatural creature thus becomes, in union with the natural creature, one human being. In Jesus, it is held, the Supernatural Creator Himself did so. I do not think anything we can do will enable us to imagine the mode of consciousness of the incarnate God. That is where the doctrine is not fully comprehensible. However, the difficulty which we felt in the mere idea of the Supernatural descending into the Natural is apparently non-existent, or is at least overcome in the person of every human. If we did not know by experience what it feels like to be a rational terrestrial beingâhow all these natural facts, all this biochemistry and instinctive affection or repulsion and sensuous perception, can become the medium of rational thought and moral will which understand necessary relations and acknowledge mode of behavior as universally binding, we could not conceive, much less imagine, the thing happening. The discrepancy between a movement of atoms in an astronomerâs cortex and oneâs understanding that there must be s till unobserved planet beyond Uranus, is already so immense that the Incarnation of God Himself is, in one sense, scarcely more startling. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
We cannot conceive how the Divine Spirit dwelled within the created and human spirit of Jesus: but neither can we conceive how His human spirit, or that of any human, dwells within oneâs natural organism. What we can understand, if the Christian doctrine is true, is that our own composite existence is not sheer anomaly it might seem to be but a faint image of the Divine Incarnation itselfâthe same theme in a very minor key. We can understand that if God so descends into a human spirit, and human spirit so descends into Nature, and our thoughts into our senses and passions, and if adult minds (but only the best of them) can descend into sympathy with children, and men into sympathy with beasts, then everything hands together and the total reality, both Natural and Supernatural, in which we are living is more multifariously and subtly harmonious than we had suspected. We catch sight of a new key principleâthe power of the Higher, just in so far as it truly Higher, to come down, the power of the greater to include the less. Thus solid bodies exemplify many truths of plane geometry, but plane figures no truths of solid geometry: many inorganic propositions are true of organisms but no organic propositions are true of minerals; Montaigne became kittenish with his kitten but she never talked philosophy to him. Everywhere the great enters the littleâits power to do so is almost the test of its greatness. In the Christian story God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and sea-bed of the Nature He has created. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
However, He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined World up with Him. One has the picture of a strong man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great complicated burden. One must stoop in order to lift, one must almost disappear under the load before one incredibly straightens oneâs back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on oneâs shoulders. Or one may think of a diver, first reducing oneself to nakedness, then glancing in mid-air, then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the death-like region of ooze and slime and of decay; then up again, back to color and light, oneâs lungs almost bursting, till suddenly one breaks surface again, holding in oneâs hand the dripping, precious thing that one went down to recover. One and it are both colored now that they have come up into the light: down below, where it lay colorless in the dark, one lost oneâs color too. In this descent and re-ascent everyone will recognize a familiar pattern: a thing written all over the World. It is the pattern of all vegetable life. It must belittle itself into something hard, small and deathlike, it must fall into the ground: thence the new life re-ascends. It is the pattern of all animal generation too. There is descent from the full and perfect organisms into the spermatozoon and ovum, and in the dark womb a life at first inferior in kind to that of the species which is being reproduced: then the slow ascent to the perfect embryo, to the living, conscious baby, and finally to the adult. So it is also in our moral and emotional life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The first innocent and spontaneous desires have to submit to the deathlike process of control or total denial: but from that there is a re-ascent to fully formed character in which the strength of the original material all operates but in a new way. Death and Re-birthâgo down to go upâit is a key principle. Through this bottleneck, this belittlement, the highroad nearly always lies. The doctrine of the Incarnation, if accepted, puts this principle even more emphatically at the center. The pattern is there in Nature because it was first there in God. All the instances of which I have mentioned turn out to be but transpositions of the Divine theme into a minor key. I am not now referring simply to the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ. The total pattern, of which they are only the turning point, is the real Death and Re-birth: for certainly no seed ever fell from so fair a tree into so dark and cold a soil as would furnish more than a faint analogy to this huge descent and re-ascension in which God dredged the salt and oozy bottom Creation. From this point of view the Christian doctrine makes itself so quickly at home amid the deepest apprehension of reality which we have from other sources, that doubt may spring up in a new direction. Is it not fitting in too well? So well that it must have come into humansâ minds from seeing this pattern elsewhere, particularly in the annual death and resurrection of the corn? For there have, of course, been many religions in which that annual drama (so important for life of the tribe) was almost admittedly the central theme, and the deityâAdonis, Osiris, or anotherâalmost undisguisedly a personification of the corn, a âcorn-kingâ who died and rose again each year. Is not Christ simply another corn-king? #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
All words are pegs to hang ideas on. One of psychologyâs perennial chicken-and-egg questions is, Which comes first, thoughts or words? Do ideas arise first and await words to name them? Or are thoughts born of words and inconceivable without them? As usually happens with such either/or questions, the answer seems to be both: thinking shapes language, which shapes thought. Some thoughts precede the words used to express them. Consider: to tighten a screw, which direction do you turn it? Very likely, you first visualize the answer without words and only then expressed your thought in words such as âclockwise,â or âto the right.â Likewise, many artists, composers, poets, mathematicians, and scientists achieve creative insights as images. Peak religious moments, too, are sometimes experienced inarticulately; later the person struggles to express the mystical experience within the confines of language but finds it, as the apostle Paul reported, âinexpressible.â If words are sometimes the mere containers of ideas, they are nevertheless containers that shape the thoughts poured into them. Indeed, argued the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, âLanguage itself shapes a humanâs basic ideas.â As evidence of the power of language to shape thought Whorf pointed to the differing conceptions of reality in those who speak different languages. Because Eskimos have a variety of words that describe snow, he argued, they can more readily perceive differences in snow that often go unnoticed by English speakers. Because the Hopi Indian language has no past tense for verbs, the Hopi people cannot so readily think about the past. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Likewise, people who are bilingual will readily testify that certain concepts are available to them in one language but not the other. The language-thought relationship is why so much of education is devoted to enlarging studentsâ vocabularies. It pays to increase your word power. As Henry Ward Beecher realized, words are pegs to hang ideas on. When trained in sign language, even chimpanzees behave with an enlarged thinking power. Because our words influence how we think, we do well to choose our words carefully. Our labels for things affect our thoughts about them. Whether a space weapons program is termed âStar Warsâ or âThe Peace Shieldâ can subtly affect peopleâs thoughts and feelings about it. Liberation movements recognize this power of words to shape thought. When African American men were called âboysâ or âbuddyâ and when women were called âgirlsâ and âdollsâ it was easy to think of them as unequal to European American men. Recognizing that racist and sexist language undergirds racist and sexist thought, a liberation movement may choose as one of its first goals that of changing the way people talk. What is true in other realms of life is also true of religion. Our words influence our thoughts. For example, some words reflect and reinforce our tendency to think of reality as dualistic (divided into distinct categories) rather than as a unified whole. We dichotomize supernatural and natural forces, sacred and secular truths, mental and bodily realms, spiritual and material needs. Such dualisms, which as we noted in the past are more congenial with platonic than biblical assumptions, depend on certain religious words, such as soul. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Praying about anotherâs soul surely reflects a concern for the personâs ultimate welfare, which can only be applauded. However, concern for anotherâs soul can easily degenerate into concern for an imaginary person inside the person, while one ignores the needs of the very real person who is depressed, hurting, hungry, or lonely. If we were to expunge words such as soul from our vocabulary, it would become harder to think in dualistic terms. Similarly, we may talk of Christian life. The very words enable us to think of the Christian life as but one aspect of life, separate from oneâs school life, life involving pleasures of the flesh, vocational life, or family life. The result is a compartmentalized view of life that assigns a corner of religionâthat concerning prayer, worship, and the likeâas distinct from oneâs studies, oneâs dating and family relationships, or oneâs aspirations. To rid oneself of such dualistic thinking, a simple first step to avoid phrases such as Christian Life or spiritual life. Even in the struggle to find alternative words, one begins to view life more as a whole, no corner of which is irrelevant to being Christian. For the Christian, all vocations can be ministry, all learning is exploration of the Creatorâs World, all human relations are opportunities for embodying Godâs love. Or consider the adjectives that people are fond of piling up before the word Christian. It is not enough to be simply a Christian. One must be an evangelical Christian, a mainline Christian, a Bible-believing Christian, a born-again Christian, or even a really truly born-again Christian. One scores additional points, it seems, by piling the adjectives in top of one another. Thus we have Bible-believing, Bible-teaching Christians, and even a few really truly born-again, Bible-believing, Bible-teaching, evangelical Christians. Such words describe but also divine. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The tendency of Christians (or Muslims or any other religious groups) to focus on the differences rather than their kinship with others illustrates a powerful phenomenon: peopleâs self-concepts center on their distinctiveness. For example, William McGuire and his Yale University colleagues report that when children are asked to tell about themselves, they spontaneously mention how they differ from others. Children born in countries not native to the one they live in or are visiting are more likely than others to mention their birthplace; redheads are more likely than black- and brown-haired children to volunteer their hair color; below average weight and above average weight children are more likely to refer to their body weight; non-dominate culture children are the most likely to mention their race or culture/ The principle, says McGuire, is that âone is conscious of oneself insofar as, and in the ways that, one is different.â Thus: âIf I am an African American man in a group of European American men, I tend to think of myself as an African American; if I move to a group of African American women, my African Americaness loses salience and I become more conscious of being a man.â This insight helps us understand why Christians so often label themselves as distinct from other Christians, especially in predominately Christian cultures. In India, Christians are more likely to see themselves simply as âChristianâ (as distinct from Hindu or Muslim) and to feel a kindship with other Christians. In the United States of America, where a majority of the population claims to be Christian, oneâs distinctive identity is more likely to be a subcategory of Christian. The result is that one begins to see most fellow Christians and certainly most fellow humans as âtheyâ and only those within oneâs faction as âwe.â #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Social psychologists have also become intrigued by a subtle but reliable in–group bias phenomenon. Merely assigning people an arbitrary label that they share with certain others triggers a tendency to favor oneâs own group and to disparage those assigned a different label. In his novel Slapstick, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. illustrated the phenomenon: computers gave everyone a new middle name, whereupon all âDaffodil-11sâ felt kinship with one another and distance from âRaspberry-13s.â It is a point worth remembering: the labeling of who we areâour race, gender, religious denomination, and the likeâalso implies a definition of who we are not. The circle that defines âusâ excludes âthem.â Devotion to and pride in oneâs own ethic heritage or school or nationâor religious groupâoften creates a devaluation of other ethnic groups or schools or nations or religious groups. To label oneself as one of âPaulâs peopleâ or âApolloâs people,â or as fundamentalist, evangelical, mainline, or liberal, can be descriptive. However, it can also be divisive and a source of a spiritual pride that negates Jesusâ prayer âthat they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me, and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the World may believe that you have sent me.â Other words, and the images they carry, are more helpful. To say, as the apostle Paul did, that all Christians are members of one body acknowledges and accepts differences, yet encourages us to view other parts of the body as complementary to ourselves. Each part is unique and yet all work togetherâunity without uniformity. The moral: let us consider our words, for powerful ideas are hung upon them. There is an old proverb that sayâbe careful what you wish for, for you wish may come true. And if your wish is for immortality, it is something you will have to live with for a very long time. Did changes in the number of suburbanizing African Americans represent increasing housing integration, or merely the growth of all African American suburban areas? A related issue is whether the governmentâs goal should be racially integrated neighborhoods or freedom of choice for African Americans to live where they choose. Some non-dominant culture scholars suggest that the latter, rather than the former, has always been the African American priority. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Researchers refer to suburbs where one racial group replaces another as âdisplacementâ or âsuccessionâ suburbs. The northern version of succession typically involves African Americans overflowing in substantial numbers from the central city into older and les desirable inner-ring suburbs. European American residents then, in turn, depart for newer suburbs further out. This type of central-to-periphery racial movement fits the ecological invasion-succession model of urban change first proposed by Chicago School sociologists in the 1920s. African American suburbanization of this type does not indicate racial integration, but rather the expansion of high-risk neighborhoods across city lines. The period of integration this type of suburbanization encompasses is only the interval between the arrival of the first African Americans and the departure of the last European Americans. Research examining the period before the 1980s indicates that the pattern of African American spillover into older and less desirable inner-ring suburban housing has empirical validity. Areas that were most prone to turn over racially where those in close proximity to all African American areas thus, a HUD studying interviewing African Americans and European Americans confirmed that lite actual residential integration had occurred. European Americans continued to show reluctance to move into areas they viewed likely to be incorporated into high-risk neighborhoods. A real fear was that inner-ring suburbs into which African Americans disproportionately were flowing would undergo the same economic difficulties and population declines that plague central cities. The assumption was that African Americans would remain concentrated in the inner suburbs abutting central-city high-risk neighborhoods. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
The first holding which infants know about is an embrace which is physical. For the lucky ones this develops almost imperceptibly into understanding, respect, and validation, in the process of being taken care ofâa more psychological sort of embrace. Embrace turns into recognition. At first, someone else has to hold me. Gradually I am able to do my share in taking care of my self. Fortunate people can embrace themselves: they can understand and accept themselves, respect and love themselves, and see to it they get their share of good things. However, still someone else has had to do it for them first. The same is true for ego-functioningâthinking, understanding, making connections, planning ahead, thinking back, comparing, taking into consideration, giving an account of, making sense of life. Ego-functioning is only one aspect of holding, but it is an important part. And I must have had a mother or someone who was my self and did my ego-functioning for me, before I can have a self of my own and do my own ego-functioning. Some people have had the blessings of natural integration more or less from their beginnings, and hold together effortlessly. Others will always have to give some attention to staying integrated. In conditions of stress, their integration will also be under stress. They always have to devote at least some small amount of energy to keeping the connections between parts of themselves intact, lest they find themselves acting on the basis of only part of who they are or what they know or what they want. How may this more effortful integration be maintained? For this we need the rationality which comes from highly developed ego-functioning. I do not mean that this must be a cold and unfeeling reasonableness. I mean the ability to take care of things intelligently and to take enough factors into account so that we need not regret our impulsive actions afterwards. However, even cold unfeeling rationality has a lot to commend it, when we contrast it with hot emotional irrationality. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Ego-functioning, even when divested of attractive social values, can integrate and hold together what would otherwise be a jumble of impulses and responses ungoverned by any principle. We need only look at the lives of those whose ego-functioning is suppressed by disease, distress, or the misuse of drugs, to be persuaded of this. We should not belittle the uses of the intellect. Ego-functioning can strengthen the integrating process. It is ego-functioning which strengthens the bonds between a valued self-imagery and other aspects of living. There are times when we need to remind ourselves who we are and how we wish to be. It is ego-functioning that enables us to say: âAlthough these people treat me like dirt, I know who I am and I am not dirt.â A number of writers have noticed how many of those who survived in extreme conditions, as Japanese prisoners of war, in German concentration camps, or during natural disasters, said afterwards that they had had important values or ideas which they exerted themselves to hold on to. Those of us who have fortunately not had to survive in such extreme circumstances, also know how to hold on to ideas which in turn hold us: âI do not want to be embarrassed or ashamed, as I would be if I were untrue to myself and did not keep this promise, which turns out hard to keep, so I had better get on and do what I said I would do.â Learning social skills takes practice. There is nothing âinnateâ about knowing how to meet people or start a conversation. Social skills can be directly practiced in a variety of ways. It can be helpful, for instance, to get a tape reorder and listen to several of your conversations. You may be surprised by the way your pause, interrupt, miss cues, or seem disinterested. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Similarly, it can be useful to look at yourself in a mirror and exaggerate facial expressions of surprise, interest, dislike, pleasure, and so forth. By such methods, most people can learn to put more animation and skill into their self-presentation. Let the trees be consulted before you take any action, every time you breathe in, thank a tree. Let treeroots crack parking lots at the World bank headquarters, let loggers be druids, specially trained and rewarded to sacrifice trees at auspicious times let carpenters be master artisans. Let lumber be treasured like gold, let chainsaws be played like saxophones, and let soldiers on maneuvers plant trees. Give police and criminals a shovel and a thousand seedlings. Let businessmen carry pocketfuls of acorns. Let newlyweds honeymoon in the woods. Walk, do not drive, stop reading newspapers, stop writing poetry, squat under a tree and tell stories. The day the saved of God traversed the deep dryshod, then a new song sang Thy redeemed throng. Lo, sunken in deceit the Egyptian daughterâs feet, but lo, the Shulamite went shod in fair delight. Then a new song sang Thy redeemed thong. Thy banners Thou wilt set oâer those remaining yet, and gather those forlorn as gatherings ears of corn. Then a new song sang Thy redeemed throng. Those that have come to Thee under Thy seal to be, they from the birth are Thine bound by a holy sign. Then a new song sang Thy redeemed throng. Their token show to all whose eyes upon them fall: Lo, on their garmentsâ hem the fringe ordained for them! Then a new song sang Thy redeemed throng. For whom then are they sealed? Let truth be now revealed. Whose is the seal, and who shall claim the thread of blue? Then a new song sang Thy redeemed throng. Ah, take her as of yore, and cast her forth no more. Let sunlight crown her day and shadows flee away. Then a new song sang Thy redeemed throng. For Thy beloved throng still come to Thee with song, singing with one accord: âNow who is like Thee âmid the gods, O Lord?â Still Thy redeemed throng sing a new song. For the fathersâ sake Thou wilt save the children, yea, and bring redemption unto their childrenâs children. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who has redeemed America. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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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 âspirit and life.â 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 lieâa breaking of oneâs faithâwas the worst of sins. Today, many do not regard lying as a serious moral wrong. If the word âmoralityâ is mentioned we think immediately of our bodily appetites, especially of pleasures of the flesh, barbiturates, paraphernalia, liquor and contraband. If the word âmoralityâ is mentioned we think immediately of our bodily appetites very seriouslyâperhaps too seriouslyâbut 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 lustâthose we tend to take most seriouslyâwere those that Dante thought most trivial; the sins of fraudâwhich we take lightlyâwere for Dante the worst of all. To create a âcredibility gapâ 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 oneâs 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 executedâand the majority of those executed were innocentâcould have saved themselves by lying. After the first executionâthat of Bridget Bishopâtook 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 oneâs 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 Puritanâs 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 personsâ 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 girlsâ 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 âand immediately said Mercy fell into a fit and diverse others.â âCan you now deny it?â said Hathorne. âI can deny it to my dying day,â 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 Hobbesâ specter because of Hobbesâ sins; he had not observed either public or private worship. Might not the Devil have taken advantage of that? Hobbes âwas silent a considerable spaceâthen said yes.â The girlsâ fits shook not only Hobbesâ confidence in himself, but also his confidence in his daughter Abigail, the wild young girl who had boasted that she had sold herself âbody and soul to the Old Boy.â Hathorne wanted to know whether Hobbes had not known for a long time that his daughter was a witch. âNo, sir,â was the reply. âDo you think she is a witch now?â asked Hathorne. And all that Hobbes could say was, âI do no know.â #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Abigail Faulknerâs experience was similar. At her first examination, on August 11, she firmly denied that she had anything to do with the girlsâ afflictions. When she looked at them they fell down in fits, and Hathorne asked her, âDo you not see?â 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: âIt is the Devil does it in my shape.â 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 cousinâs arrest. She has wished them ill, and âher spirit being raised she did pinch her hands together.â 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 girlsâ behaviour. âIt is an evil spirit,â she said, âbut whether it be witchcraft I do not know.â Even George Burroughs, who had been audacious enough to boast of occult powers, found himself stunned by the girlsâ behaviour. âBeing asked what he thought of these things he answered it was an amazing and humbling Providence, but he understood nothing of it.â #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 personâs 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 Stevenâs 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 dependenceâa 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 himâan 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
âI wish you could come home at Christmas,â she wrote, in the autumn of the year of which I am speaking. âWe 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 oâclock 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 yearsâ 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. âIt is a real treat to see your pleasant face once more, William,â said this faithful retainer, as he assisted William to take off his travelling-cloak. âYou 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!â They arrived at last at a very comfortable roomâa 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. âWe are in the East Wing, are we not?â young William asked. âThis room seems quite strange to me. if I have ever been here before, I doubt it.â #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
âVery 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.â (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. âI have only this moment been told of your arrival, my dear William,â she said; âyou 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.â 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 otherâon too many occasions a violent deathâhad 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 Winchesterâthat 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 pastâfoolish 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 sĂ©ance 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 huntsmanâs hornâa few low plaintive noes on a huntsmanâs hornânotes 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 soundâa 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 huntsmanâs 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 horseâs hoof or of human voicesânot 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 realâthose 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 hourâs warning, the long-deserted quadrangle could be filledâthe 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 hornâthe 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. âMrs. 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.â #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 peopleâs 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 wifeâs 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 đ»
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All Hallows’ Eve:
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Without Your Inspiration Their Words Would Not Set My Heart on Fire!
Be careful what well you drink ofâbitter waters will contaminate you! You are surrounded by sights, sounds, odors, tastes, and touch sensations. Which are you aware of? The first stage of perception is attention. Selective attention refers to the fact that we give some messages priority and put others on hold. You might find it helpful to think of selective attention as a bottleneck, or narrowing in the information channel linking the senses to perception. When one message enters the bottleneck, it seems to prevent others from passing through. How should I pray, O Lord? There are so many ways. Like he Psalmist? âI am Your servantâ too, and I cry out. âGive me mind enough to know what You are talking about,â as the Psalmist sang (119.125). Or âDraw my heart closer so that I will hear Your words better,â as the Psalmist and (78.1). Like the Deuteronomist? âDo flutter your utterances as the dew droppeth,â sand Moses in prayer with the Israelites before they crossed the Jordan into Canaan (32.2). Like the Exodist? âDo speak to us, and we will listen!â exclaimed the sons of Israel to the Great Moses long, long ago. âDo not let the Lord talk to us, for fear that we will die at the sound of His voice,â (20.19). Like Samuel, the great prophet who ruled Israel so long ago? Yes, yes, O Lord, that is the way I want to pray. That is the way Samuel prayed when he was a young boy; that is to say, with all humility, and yet with some hilarity. âSpeak, O Lord, that Your servant may hear.â By the bye, my Distant if Divine Friend, it is not Moses I want to converse with, nor any of the other Prophets. No, Inspirer and Illuminator of all Prophets, it is You I want to talk with. You do not need their help to tell me what I need to know; they, on the other hand, cannot utter a word without Your help. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The Prophets can certainly mouth the words of prophecy, or so I have been given to understand, but they do not confer the spirit. Their pronunciation may be beautiful, remarkably so, like the sound silver tinkling, but without Your inspiration their words would not set my heart on fire. Their enunciation may be perfect, each letter receiving a single stress, but You, O Lord, stress the meaning. The Prophets give voice to the mysteries, but You make clear the meaning. They promulgate Your commands, but You help their observance. They show the way, but You walk with those on the way. They instruct crowds, but You tutor hearts. They provide the humidity; You, the fecundity; Paul wrote something similar in First Corinthians (3.7). To sum up then, the Prophets just shout the words, but the crowd gets the gist from You. I know You have a list of âwill nots,â my Willful Friend, but I have this list of âdo nots.â Do not send Moses to speak to me; it is You, O Lord God, Eternal Truth, that I want to hear, and it is You I want to listen to. Do not let me die before my tree is borne fruit! Do not let me hear the truth preached abroad and not put it into action within. Do not let me come before the Final Judge having heard the word and not done anything about it, having learned it but not loved it, even believed it but not observed it. And so I return to where I began, crying out with the boy Samuel. âSpeak, Lord, that Your servant may hearâ (3.10). Why? âYou have the words of eternal life,â as Peter pleaded with the Lord in the Gospel of John (6.68). Speak to me, console me, correct me, my Lord and Friend, and may glory galore be Yours for evermore! #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Many different peoples of the World believedâand some still doâthat behind the immediate physical reality of things lie spirits, that even seemingly dead objects, rocks, or Earth, have a living force within them: mana. The Sioux Indians called it wakan. The Algonkians, manitou. The Iroquois, orenda. For such people the entire environment is alive. Today, as we construct new info-sphere for a Third Wave civilization, we are imparting to the âdeadâ environment around us not life but intelligence. The key to this evolutionary advance is, of course, the computer. A combination of electronic memory with programs that tell the machine how to process the stored data, computers were still a scientific curiosity in the early 1950s. By the year 2022, we have reached the ultimate manifestation of machine age thinking. It is the crowning achievementâa large super-computer buried hundreds of feet beneath the center [in a] bombproof antiseptic environmentâŠmanned by a bunch of super-technocrats. So impressive are these centralized giants underground in in outer space that they have become a standard part of social mythology. Movie makers, cartoonists, and science fiction writers, using them to symbolize the future, routinely pictured the computer as an all-powerful brainâa massive concentration of superhuman intelligence. Computers control so much of everything we do. From managing our homes, cars, bodies, and environment. So many computers have appeared, in fact, that companies sometimes lose track of how many they have. âThe âbrainpowerâ of the computer is no longer concentrated at a single point; it is âdistributed.â #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
There are more than ten connected devices in the average household. People have access to more than two computers on average and more than two mobile phones in the evaluated period. We are also âsmarteningâ our work environment. Outside the confines of industry and government, moreover, a parallel process is under way based on that soon-to-be ubiquitous gadget: the home computer. Today, many American homes are controlled by computers, from computerized door locks, climate control, entertainment, surveillance, to pest control and agriculture. These cleaver machines are also being used for everything from doing the family taxes to monitoring energy use in the home, playing games, keeping a file of recipes, remaindering their owners of upcoming appointments, and serving as âsmart typewriters.â This, however, offers only a tiny glimpse of their full potential. Telecomputing Corporation of America offers a service called simply âThe Source,â which for minuscule costs provides the computer user with instant access to the United Press International news wire; a vast array of stock and commodity market data; educational programs to teach children arithmetic, spelling, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Latin, Greek Mandarin Chinese, Arabic or Italian; membership in a computerized discount shoppersâ club; instant hotel or travel reservations, and more. The Source also makes it possible for anyone with a computer terminal to communicate with anyone else in the system. Bridge, chess, football, baseball, basketball, tennis, target practice, or backgammon players who so desire can play games with someone a thousand miles distant. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
User can send private messages to one another or to large numbers of people all at once, and store all correspondence in electronic memory. The Source will even facilitate the creation of what might be called âelectronic communitiesââgroups of people with shared interests. A dozen photo buffs in a dozen cities, brought together electronically by The Source, can converse to their heartâs delight about camera, equipment, darkroom techniques, lighting, or colour film. Months later they can retrieve their comments from The Sourceâs electronic memory, by subject, date, or other category. The spread of machine intelligence has reached another level altogether with the microprocessors and microcomputers, those tiny chips of congealed intelligence have become part of nearly all the things we make and use. Apart from their applications in manufacturing processes and business generally, they re already embedded in everything from air-conditioners and automobiles to sewing machines and scales. They monitor and minimize the waste of energy in the home. They adjust them amount of detergent and the water temperature for each washing machine load. They fine-tune the carâs system and some cars by BMW can even make some repairs to themselves. These microchips flag us when something needs repair. They flick on the clock radio, lock the doors, adjust the lights, turn on the music, operate the toaster, the coffee maker, and the shower in the morning. They warm the garage and the car, and perform a vertiginous variety of other humble and not-so-humble tasks. Home computers can talk, interpret speech, and control appliances. And with a few sensors, their modest vocabular, the Internet and Bell Telephone system, and you house can now talk to anyone or anything in the World. Although many obstacles still lie ahead, the direction of change is clear. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Imagine you are at work, the phone rings. It is Donnie, your house. While monitoring police scanners and home surveillance and traffic cameras, Donnie picked up a story of recent burglaries and a weather bulletin warning of pending heavy rain. This jogged Donnieâs bubble memories to run a routine roof maintenance check. A potential leak was found. Before calling you, Donnie phoned Cresleighâs maintenance department for advice. Cresleighâs maintenance department evaluated the evidence from a virtual inspection. You have learned to trust Donnie’s judgment, as you have lived in this house for ninety years, and approve the repairs. The rest is rather straight forward, Cresleigh dispatches their maintenance team and within no time, everything is back to normal. That is the reality of the pending intelligent environment. We have intelligence and imagination we have not yet begun to use. What is inescapably clear, however, whatever we choose to believe, is that we are altering our info-sphere fundamentally. The Third Wave info-sphere make that of the Second Wave era-dominated by its mass media, traffic jams, and the telephoneâseem hopelessly primitive by contrast. The 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act was important for its implementation set for decades the attitudes and beliefs of citizens and policymakers regarding the feasibility of the federal government assisting the working and welfare poor to purchase their own housing. The assumption was that most of those assisted by the act would be less affluent non-European Americans, and this the act would foster integration. The Housing and Urban Development Act was designed to turn the economically marginal into responsible, tax-paying homeowners. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
It had a rehabilitation section that applied largely to the cities, and a new-housing section that had a more suburban application. The purpose of the act was not so much to open the suburbs to the African American middle class but to make home ownership open to all, regardless of income. The Housing and Urban Development Act was, in many respects, a response to the urban riots that racked American cities in the late 1960s. Following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, rioting broke out in some one hundred and twenty-five cities, and the period that followed came to be known as âthe long hot summer.â The Urban Development Act was rapidly passed, with the expectation that by providing the hope of home ownership it would relieve urban pressure. The emphasis was on immediate action, with less attention given to careful monitoring of the program. There was considerable political pressure from the Johnson White House to get the program going. It was thought that problems could be corrected later. The beneficial side of this fast start-up was that for the first time, the weight of government attention was focused on the housing needs of poor urban non-European Americans. Particular attention was directed at rapidly expanding the number of low-income marginalized population home purchasers. Integration per se received less attention than using federal subsidies to turn the urban poor into homeowners with a stake in the system. The downside of the fast start-up was that no one was monitoring the effects of the program and controlling the cash flow. In hindsight, what occurred was quite predictable. The program was exploited, often criminally, by those who knew how it could be manipulatedânot the poor, but the private-sector banking and real estate professionals, who saw the program as a money tree. As expressed by the director of HUDâs Chicago office: âEvery unethical, unscrupulous real estate broker and lender, many of them so slimy they crawled out from under a rock, looked at this program and said, âWhat a gold mine out thereâ.â As usual, the poor were the victims. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Basically, what occurred was criminal collusion between real estate speculators, banks, and FHA employees to sell supposedly rehabilitated properties at high prices to marginally qualified low-income non-Europeans and women purchasers, with the expectation that the buyers would default so the FHA would have to take back the loan and the unsalable property. The scheme worked as follows. A real estate speculator bought a run-down home at a low price and then put in a few cosmetic repairs such as a cheap paint job. A low-income buyer who marginally qualified for the program was then found, and the appraiser was paid to considerably overestimate the value of the property. The bank then authorized the loan; the FHA or VA insured the mortgage at the inflated price; and the speculator made a fast profit minus the bribe. The new homeowner soon found the property was unlivable and defaulted on the mortgage. The ideal purchaser from the speculatorâs and bankerâs viewpoint was someone so economically marginal that one was likely to default. (Until almost the final days of the program, even those with no income but welfare qualified as purchaser.) The bank then foreclosed and turned he property over to the FHA, who paid off the overpriced mortgage. Since the more properties sold, the greater the profits, federal monies were, in fact, used not to provide housing, but to provide real estate speculators and bans subsidies for destabilizing neighbourhoods. The majority of the supposedly rehabilitated 235 properties were eventually abandoned by their low-income purchasers, and thee deteriorating properties greatly added to the stock of abandoned city housing. As a consequence, the federal government found itself by the mid-1970s to be the nationâs largest holder of foreclosed and unsalable slum properties. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The federal government, in effect, found itself financing the creation of urban wastelands. Callous greed destroyed what was potentially a good program. The suburban version of the program involved not rehabilitation of existing properties, but the building of new-homes program had problems similar to the urban program. Homes were built at high cost to the taxpayers but with a quality of construction often below industry standards. There was little monitoring of the performance of developers. Since the new subsidized homes were of a clearly identifiable style and almost always of poorer construction than other homes in the neighbourhood, existing homeowners almost always saw the building of subsidized homes nearby as a threat to their property values. Unfortunately, they were correct in this belief. Shortsightedly, the program did not budget funds for garages or landscaping. More importantly, the low-income buyers were marginal purchasers with no financial cushion. To qualify for the program, the buyer had to have a very low income or be on public assistance. Such purchasers soon found themselves saddled with money pits requiring considerable expensive work. (A student of mine who purchased one of these homes in suburban Milwaukee County found, among other things, that his kitchen drainpipes had been installed with an upward tilt.) Non-European American buyers, low-income women, and the poor found that their new suburban homes were located in areas far from services or employment. Physical isolation compounded social isolation. The houses were distant from established African American neighbourhoods, African American churches, African American stores, and African American friends. Subdivisions in which the new housing was constructed invariably did not have public transportation and rarely had stores within walking distance. Low-income residents quickly discovered that car ownership was essential for their survival. Without at least one dependable auto, they were stranded miles from friends and services. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
As the physical problems with the homes became more evident, and the economic and social costs of living became clearer, the political support within the African American community for constructing additional suburban subsidized housing rapidly declined. A companion piece of legislation, the Title 236 program, provided rent subsidies for the poor so they could move out of public housing. The suburban effects of this program, were minimal, however, because of the scarcity of suburban rental housing for which low-income African Americans could qualify. By 1974, when President Nixon, with the connivance of Congress, terminated support for the subsidy programs, there were few voices raised in protest. Only the construction companies and a handful of die-hard supporters felt the program deserved to survive. The tragedy was that a well-meaning program to turn low-income renters into homeowners died, not because it was misused by the recipients, but because the program had become a bureaucratic disaster that exploited the poor to enrich banks, builders, and speculators. One consequence of the failure of these housing programs was that the African American community would become increasingly divided between the suburbanizing middle-class African Americans and central-city African Americans, who became more isolated in the old core neighbourhoods of economically weakening central cities. The 1970s ended the African American exodus from the south and initiated the middle-class African American exodus from the cities. As African American middle-class role models began to exit the city, the social fabric of central-city life began to deteriorate. Those leaving also took with them stable mainstream institutions and the informal job network. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
During the 1970s the South Bronx lost 37 percent of its population, and the once vibrant southside high risk neighbourhood (HRN) of Chicago lost 38 percent of its population. With the suburbanization of successful role models and jobs, the result was a growing economic and social marginalization of those left behind. William Julius Wilson argues that: âSocial isolation deprives residents of certain inner-city neighbourhoods not only of the resources and conventional role models, whose former presence buffered the effects of neighbourhood joblessness, but also of cultural learning from mainstream social networks that facilitate social and economic advancement in modern industrial society.â Thus, the central city has had to cope not just with shift from an industrial-based to an information-based economy, but also with the resultant loss of entry-level blue-collars jobs. The inner city also has lost its middle-class roe models and their important informal job networks. Whether a True or a False Self be he center from which a person acts, self-imagery operates gyroscopically once it is established. Once there are coherent self-representations on the map, feedback processes will ensure that people feel discomfort or pain when expectations arise which go against that imagery. The self can be regarded as a set of interlinking feedback systems. More central systems monitor the more peripheral ones, rather as, in hierarchical human organizations, managers higher up (nearer the center) delegate quite complex operations to others down the line, on whom they keep an eye in case things go wrong. Self-imagery controls the plans that are made at each level in somewhat the same way. Our image of ourselves, and our preferred self-imagery, influence what we do. âI am a person who gets up early.â âI am a person who runs towards trouble and not away from it. This is continually confirmed when I behave âlike myself.â The more I can do so, the more pleased I am to think of myself in particular ways. Whenever there is incongruity between what I am doing and the person I imagine myself to be (or prefer myself to be), I am under tension to reduce the incongruity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Self-imagery has a strong organization, function, keeping us coherent, consistent, and unfragmented, provided that we are able to call on it at need. Fortunate people have relatively strong self-images which reverberate easily and are therefore easily part of the working models of self-in-the-World, the models by which their actions are governed. Less fortunate people have more tenuous self-imagery, or are more tenuously in touch with it. Or they may lack the sense that their identity is rooted in solid experiences and memory-traces of experiencesâthey do not feel defined by a bodily self at the core. Something may have gone wrong at the mirroring stage. They do not retain an image of themselves for any length of time, let alone an image of themselves for any length of time, let alone an image of themselves as good and loveable, and worth living up to. They are often not in touch with how they feel or what suits them. They can be told by others, defined by them as it were, but the image easily disappears again because remembering what you have been told about yourself is different from actually remembering the experiences in which you have been involved and which made you what you are. Characteristically, though, if they are ever to have the strength to hold it for themselves, such peopleâs imagery of themselves needs to be held for a while by others. To the extent that people have a False Self, they have a false imagery of themselves. They may be quite normally self-aware and self-conscious and vernal about their thoughts and feelings, memories and plans, but they lack some of the strong roots which connect their life now to the beginning of their World. If so, they will at times feel a falsity or unreality in what they do. They sense that they are sometimes living up to an image of themselves which is not connected to the experiences which would make this image a basic neurological reality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Some people have practically no coherent self-imagery at all, true or false, to which they can refer at need to keep a check on themselves. Not surprisingly, they are liable to behave irrationally and impulsively; they lack some important monitoring or steering or organizing structure. They also have little help in putting up with frustration, even in order to gain a benefit they know they desire. They cannot postpose gratification now for the sake of a later good. Unable to go to the zoo because the rain, they cannot enjoy a visit to the Natural History Museum. It is ânot the same.â Substitutes will not gratify. The imagery which would hold these things together in the same frame is not there. The frame is not there. The various forms of government take their origin from the greater or lesser differences that were found among private individuals at the moment of institution. If the humans were eminent in power, virtue, wealth of prestige, one alone was elected magistrate, and the state became monarchial. If several humans, more or less equal among themselves, stood out over all the others, they were elected jointly, and there was an aristocracy. Those whose fortune or talents were less disproportionate, and who least departed from the state of nature, kept the supreme administration and formed a democracy Time made evident which of these forms was the most advantageous to humans. Some remained in subjection only to the laws; the others soon obeyed masters. Citizens wanted to keep their liberty; the subjects thought only of in taking it away from their neighbours, since they could not endure others enjoying a good they themselves no longer enjoyed. In a word, on the one hand were riches and conquests, and on the other were happiness and virtue. In these various forms of government all the magistratures were at first elective; and when wealth did not prevail, preference was given to merit, which gives a natural ascendancy, and to age, which gives experience in conducting business and cool-headedness in deliberation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The elders of the Hebrews, the gerontes of Sparta, the senate of Rome, and even the etymology of our word seigneur show how much age was respected in former times. The more elections fell upon humans advanced age, the more frequent elections became, and the more their difficulties were made to be felt. Intrigues were introduced; factions were formed; parties became embittered; civil wars flared up. Finally, the blood of citizens was sacrificed to the alleged happiness of the state, and people were on the verge of falling back into the anarchy of earlier times. The ambition of the leaders profited from these circumstances to perpetuate their offices within their families. The people, already accustomed to dependence, tranquility and the conveniences of life, and already incapable of breaking their chains, consented to let their servitude increase in order to secure their tranquility. Thus it was that the leaders, having become hereditary, grew accustomed to regard their magistratures as family property, to regard themselves as the proprietors of the state (of which at first they were but the officers), to call their fellow citizens their slaves, to count them like cattle in the number of things that belonged to them, and to call themselves equals of the gods and kings of kings. If we follow the progress of inequality in these various revolutions, we will find that the first stage was the establishment of the law and of the right of property, the second stage was the institution of the magistracy, and the third and final stage was the transformation of legitimate power into arbitrary power. Thus the class of the rich and poor was authorized by the first epoch, that of the strong and the weak by the second, and that of the master and slave by the third: the ultimate degree of inequality and the limit to which all other finally lead, until new revolutions completely dissolve the government or bring it nearer to its legitimate institution. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
To grasp the necessity of this progress, we must consider less the motives for the establishment of the body politic than the form it takes in its execution and the disadvantages that follow in its wake. For the vices that make social institutions necessary are the same ones that make their abuses inevitable. And with the sole exception of Sparta, where the law kept watch chiefly over the education of children, and where Lycurgus established mores that nearly dispensed with having to add laws to them, since laws are generally less strong than passions and restrain humans without changing them, it would be easy to prove that any government that always moved forward in conformity with the purpose for which it was founded without being corrupted or altered, would have been needlessly instituted, and that a country where no one eluded the laws and abused the magistrature would need neither magistracy nor laws. What will become of a World that outlaws all the tools it looked to for solutions? The Internet is being used to strip governments of their secrets and making them vulnerable to attack. âNo word shall be impossible with God,â reports Luke 1.37. All confess that God is omnipotent; but it seems difficult to explain in what His omnipotence precisely consists: for there may be doubt as to the precise meaning of the word âallâ when we say that God can do all things. If, however, we consider the matter aright, since power is said in reference to possible things, this phrase, âGod can do all things,â is rightly understood to mean that God can do all things that are possible; and for this reason He is said to be omnipotent. Now according to the Philosopher (Metaph. V, 17) a thing is said to be possible in two ways. First in relation to some power, thus whatever is subject to human power is said to be possible to humans. Secondly absolutely, on account of the relation in which the very terms stand to each other. Now God cannot be said to be omnipotent through being able to do all things that are possible to created nature; for the divine power extends father than that. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
If, however, we were to say that God is omnipotent because He can do all things that are possible to His power, there would be a vicious circle of explaining the nature of His power. For this would be saying nothing else but that God is called omnipotent because He can do all things that are possible absolutely; which is the second way of saying a thing is possible. For a thing is said to be possible or impossible absolutely, according to the relation in which the very terms stand to one another, possible if the predicate is not incompatible with the subject, as that Socrates sits; and absolutely impossible when the predicate is altogether incompatible with subject, as, for instance, that a human is a donkey. It must, however, be remembered that since every agent produces an effect like itself, to each active power there corresponds a thing possible as its proper object according to the nature of that act on which its active power is founded; for instance, the power of giving warmth is related as to its proper object to the being capable of being warmed. The divine existence, however, upon which the nature of power is God is founded, is infinite, and its not limited to any genus of being; but possesses within itself the perfection of all being. Whence, whatsoever has or can have the nature of being, is numbered among the absolutely possible things, in respect of which God is called omnipotent. Now nothing is opposed to the idea of being except non-being. Therefore, that which implies being and non-being at the same time is repugnant to the idea of an absolutely possible thing, within the scope of the divine omnipotence. For such cannot come under the divine omnipotence, not because of any defect in the power of God, but because it has not the nature of a feasible or possible thing. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Therefore, everything that does not imply a contradiction in terms, is numbered amongst those possible things, in respect of which God is called omnipotent: whereas whatever implies contradiction does not come within the scope of divine omnipotence, because it cannot have the aspect of possibility. Hence it is better to say that such things cannot be done, than that God cannot do them. Nor is this contrary to the word of the Angel, saying: âNo word shall be impossible with God.â For whatever implies a contradiction cannot be a word, because no intellect can possibly conceive such a thing. God is said to be omnipotent in respect to His active power, not to passive power, as was shown above. Whence the fact that He is immovable or impassible is not repugnant to His omnipotence. To sin is to fall short of a perfect action; hence to be able to sin is to be able to fall short in action, which is repugnant to omnipotence. Therefore it is that God cannot sin, because of His omnipotence. Nevertheless, Philosophers says (Topic. Iv, 3) that God can deliberately do what is evil. However, this must be understood either on a condition, the antecedent of which is impossibleâas, for instance, if we were to say that God can do evil things if He will. For there is no reason why a conditional proposition should not be true, though both the antecedent and consequent are impossible: as if one were to say: âIf a human is a donkey, one has four feet.â Or one may be understood to mean that God can do some things which now seem to be evil: which, however, if He did them, would then be god. Or he is, perhaps, speaking after the common manner of the heathen, who thought that men became gods, like Jupiter or Mercury. Godâs omnipotence is particularly show in a sparing and having mercy, because in this is it made manifest that God has supreme power, that He freely forgives sins. For it is not for one who is bound by laws of a superior to forgive sins of his own free will. Or, because by sparing and having mercy upon humans, He leads them on to the participation of an infinite good; which is the ultimate effect of divine power. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Or because, as was said above, the effect of the divine mercy is the foundation of all the divine works. For nothing is due to anyone, except on account of something already given him gratuitously by God. In this way the divine omnipotence is particularly made manifest, because it pertains the first foundation of all good things. The absolute possible is not so called in reference either to higher causes, or to inferior causes, but in reference to itself. However, the possible in reference to some power is named possible in reference to its proximate cause. Hence those things which it belongs to God alone to do immediatelyâas, for example, to create, to justify, and the likeâare said to be possible in reference to a higher cause. Those things, however, which are of such kind as to be done by inferior causes are said to be possible in reference to those inferior causes. For it is according to the condition of the proximate cause that the effect has contingency or necessity, as was shown above. Thus is it that the wisdom of the World is deemed foolish, because what is impossible to nature, it judged to be impossible to God. So it is clear that the omnipotence of Goes does not take away from things their impossibility and necessity. When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we do not know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taunt with power, we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down, we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper. Thy righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and Thy Law is truth. Thy righteousness, O God, is highly exalted; Thou who doest great things, O God, who is like unto Thee? They righteousness is like the eternal mountains; Thy judgments, fathomless depts; both man and beast dost Thou save, O Lord. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
CRESLEIGH HAVENWOOD
Lincoln, CA | Prices Coming Soon!
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Thou Hast Been Delivered from the Powers of Satan–He Was Declared âNot Guiltyâ and Set Free!
The Level is a symbol of fraternal equality recognizing the fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man. It is a tragic fact that there are many psychoneurotic individuals and others suffering from mental disorders, who are under malign psychic influence. Whatever treatment is given such individuals, including those who are now receiving institutional care, might be more successful by having the patients take up residence at an altitude of not less than five thousand feet. The electric shock and deep-freeze therapies used by several psychiatric institutions may achieve temporary success, but the price will be extracted later. Where a thought of fear constantly recurs and plunges one into anxiety or even despair against all the evidence of fact and reason, one is no longer normal but is the sufferer of a phobia. Sufferers from the manic phase of mental disorders are unstable in temperament and soon change their aims, policies, or goals, for none of these is clear enough. In our studies, the term âthe unconsciousâ is not used in the narrow meaning of certain arbitrarily selected innate trends, a meaning given it by the psychoanalysts, but in a broadly scientific sense, as containing in potential latency all the possibilities gained in the conscious life and all the deposits of former Earth lives, and not only the personal possibilities, but also the super-personal or cosmic ones. It may be that the patients who are advised by their analysts to take up painting pictures as a form of therapy benefit by the concentration involved in the work, as well as by the relaxation of transferring their thoughts for a while from their own self-affairs. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
There are different ways of escape for those who have problems. Some of them, such as inebriation, contraband, barbiturates and other paraphernalia, prophylactics and pleasures of the flesh, are frankly acknowledged to be so; others are less easily recognized as such and these include art and religion. Professor Stefan de Schill, psychoanalyst: A compulsion neurosis, of which there are several kinds, is caused by a person (technically called âa compulsiveâ) feeling guilty over unclean thoughts. Oneâs dry washing of hands is an outer symbol of oneâs attempt or wish to get rid of them. Or oneâs feet swinging, fingers tapping the table, and ear-pulling are nervous habits which betray tension. (2) Any good standard work on psychiatry deals with these habit patterns, these neuroses, which annoy or irritate others. In the catatonic state, the whole force of the person is turned inward and concentrated upon an idea or a picture or a happening which may be of a purely mental kind. They may or may not be aware of what is happening around them but they are unable to leave the condition at will; it must pass away of its own accord. What has the person who is obsessed, insane, paranoic, or hysterical really done? One has fixed oneâs attention on a particular thought, idea, belief, or mental picture and one will not let it go. If the thought contradicts reality, we call one insane. In changing thought for the better, one of the first activities is to cleanse it of undesirable attributes, to wash them away by beneficial energetic willed control, immediately reacting to their appearance with a very definite mental exclamation of âNo!â A mind filled with negative qualities cannot possibly be a healthy mind and is certainly unsuitable for high spiritual flights. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Neurotics talk about their quest but too often fail to apply its disciplinary principles, live in a perpetual muddle because they consider reasoning and planning to be anti-spiritual, and remain indecisive and unsettled because they are swaying from one emotion to another. They are easily excited, elated, or depressed. The fact is too often ignored that they have to go through a first stage in which they simply prepare themselves as grown-up human beings before trying higher flights. This is as much in their own interests as in societyâs, for they will then be better able to deal with others and help themselves. Surely it is more prudent to take up an ideal which is not too far off, which may be an intermediate one that seems reachable and realizable. However, the must recognize this situation for what it is, practice a humble patience, and not try to put the burden of duty elsewhere. They are really looking for someone to nurse them out of their neurotic condition which, of course, mean a passage from emotional adolescence to adult responsibility. Too often the emotionally sick are excessively possessive and will no let go of someone. The neurotic turns minor situations into great crises. Dr. Freud thought that giving emotional support to distressed persons would probably come through forms of hypnosis or self-hypnosis. Today more and more use is made of methods of relaxation, imaging, suggestion, meditation, optimistic thinking, and kindred ways of countering stress or improving healing. âLet me hear what the Lord God is saying in me!â That was the cry of the Psalmist (85.8). However, just as piercing are my own humble cries, My Holy Friend. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
As the boy Samuel found out to his joy, and as the author of First Samuel noted, blessed is the soul that hears the Lord jabbering and chartering within (1 Samuel 3.9). Let me see if I can recall the particulars. Let us continue out chatsworth, O Lord. That is to say, let us pick up our conversation where it left off, at Chatsworth, our secret rendezvous, the little room within my soul that can be reached only inside my cell. Blessed are the ears that pick up the Godly Whispering, if I may borrow an expression from 1 Kings (19.12), and at the same time block out the Worldly Whisperer! Blessed are the ears that listen, not to Untruth mouthing off out in the street, but to Truth instructing inside the monastery! Blessed are the eyes that blink in distress at the World outside, but stare unblinkingly at the World inside! Blessed are those who get beyond the entrance of the interior life and strive daily to grasp what is hidden in Deepest Heaven! Blessed are those who make time for God of the ages and at the same time cut themselves off from all the distractions of the age! O my soul, take note of these beatitudes and bar the gates before your sensuality charges in! Only then can you hear what your Lord God is saying in you. âI am your salvation!â That is what the psalmist wanted the Lord to say (35.3). And that is what I, your Beloved Lord, am saying to you, My dear friend. I am your peace, I am your life, and what is more, I have many things to say to you. First, be on your best behaviour when we have our chats, and you will soon learn to enjoy them. Second, let the eely Transitoriness slipâgrasp the eternal things only. Third, they are sweet, they are nice, all those petty yet pretty Temporalities, but they will drag you under the bushes every time. Fourth, all those creatures in the World, what help would they be if you were deserted by the Creator? #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
To sum up, dear friend of Mine, unclench your fists, and let everything you have fly out of your hands. Clean yourself up nicely and stay faithful to your Creator. Then you will begin to behold Beatitude. Godâs power is immeasurable. He is the living mighty one. Now everything that is immeasurable is infinite. Therefore the power of God is infinite. Active power exists in God according to the measure in which He is actual. Now His existence is infinite, inasmuch as it is not limited by anything that receives it, as is clear from what has been said, when we discussed the infinity of the divine essence. Wherefore, it is necessary that active power in God should be infinite. For in every agent is it found that the more perfectly an agent has the form by which it acts the greater its power to act. For instance, the hotter a thing is, the greater the power has it to give heat; and it would have infinite power to give heat, were its own heat infinite. Whence, since divine essence, through which God acts, is infinite, as was shown above, it follows that His power likewise is infinite. The Philosopher is here speaking of an infinity in regard to matter not limited by any form; and such infinite belongs to quantity. However, the divine essence is otherwise, as was shown above; and consequently so also His power. It does not follow, therefore, that it is imperfect. The power of a univocal agent is wholly manifested in its effect. The generative power of humans, for example, is not able to do more than beget humans. However, the power of a non-univocal agent does not wholly manifest itself in the production of its effect: as, for example, the power of the sun does not wholly manifest itself in the production of an animal generated from putrefaction. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Now it is clear that God is not a univocal agent. For nothing agrees with Him either in species or in genus, as was shown above. Whence it follows that His effect is always less than His power. It is not necessary, therefore, that the infinite power of God should be manifested so as to produce an infinite effect. Yet even if it were to produce no effect, the power of God would not be ineffectual; because a thing is ineffectual which is ordained towards an end to which it does not attain. However, the power of God is not ordered toward its effect as towards an end; rather, it is the end of the effect produced by it. The Philosopher (Phys. Viii, 79) proves that if a body had infinite power, it would cause a non-temporal movement. And one shows that the power of the mover of Heaven is infinite, because it can move in an infinite time. It remains, therefore, according to oneâs reckoning, that the infinite power of a body, if such existed, would move without time; not, however, the power of an incorporeal mover. The reason of this is that one body moving another is an unvocal agent; wherefore it follows that the whole power of the agent is made known in its motion. Since then the greater the power of a moving body, the more quickly does it move; the necessary conclusion is that if its power were infinite, it would move beyond comparison, fasters, and this is to move without time. An incorporeal mover, however, is not a univocal agent; whence it is not necessary that the whole of its power should be manifested in motion, so as to move without time; and especially since it moves in accordance with the disposition of its will. The Overself takes over oneâs identity not by obliterating it but by including it through its surrender. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
The glimpse state my come on in different ways. Sometimes it disinclines the human from moving. However, if one must attend to some matter which requires one to go across a room or out of the house, oneâs feet will seem to move of themselves, but very, very slowly. Before the glimpse can occur, the aspirant may have to pass through a major crisis of oneâs inner life, sometimes of oneâs outer life too. The mental pressure and emotional strain may leave one feeling utterly confused, perhaps even utterly forlorn. However, its sudden culmination in the glimpse will replace darkness by light, chaos by direction, and blindness by sight. It comes unexpectedly in relaxed moments, when enhanced physical or mental ease suspends the egoâs activity. Caught by the grace, and drawn into its stillness, one may find the physical body reproducing the same conditions by becoming quite immobile. If not of the heart, it may give one a catch of breath when the stillness is first felt if it comes unexpectedly and abruptly. The Divine Power is without shape, is pure Spirit; so the worshipper who accepts or creates any concept of it, or who sees it in spectral celestial vision, oneself furnishes a vehicle for it. In the cause of the concept, it arises from association of ideas: in the case of the vision, by expectancy or familiarity. In both cases, mind speaks whatever language, assumes whatever aspect appeals to the human thinking about God! The idea, ideal person, inspired prophet, or human redeemer whose image is best established in a personâs mind by custom and familiarity is in most cases the channel used by the Overself when bestowing the glimpse. Little by little the stress dissolves, the clamant duties to do this or that fall away as the recognition that this is a benedictory visitation comes closer. The glimpse may move so gently into awareness that the beginning is hardly noticed. Or it may move in with a rush that overwhelms one. With it, knowledge, understanding, meaning, nobility, and divinity fill the aura around one at the moment. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
It is the awareness of a Presence, a felt but hushed benignity, which signals this kind of entry, this glimpse; but there are other kinds, more forceful yet not more superior. If the glimpse comes unexpectedly in most cases, it comes unaccountedly in others. In the beginning of what one really wants to happen, this feeling of an inward-drawing presence. This awareness is a new experience so it flickers on and off, unadjusted. Who knows? It may come to you so quietly, so devoid of sounds and expectation, that so many smile at what begins to happen to you. However, then it may come like a cloudburst. The glimpse may come in the depth of meditation where expectancy places it. However, it may also come at unexpected moments. Either gently and slowly the ego is taken over or violently and quickly the âIâ is seized. This may happen during meditation or at any time when one is somewhat relaced, out of it. And then the long looked-for event will happen. A presence, nay a power, will suddenly make itself felt and control one out of oneself by an irresistible impetus moving like a tidal wave. It will come to one as quietly as the moon comes into the sky. The glimpses are not controllable. They come or go without consulting us. The glimpse may come only once or twice in a lifetime to one quester yet repeat itself twentyfold to another person. There are scattered moments of inner rapture underived from Earthly things, although they may be started off by Earthly things. The beauty of these glimpses is heightened by the delight of their unexpectedness. The coming of a glimpse is not predictable, although it may be encouraged by contact with Nature, appreciation of art, or practice of meditation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
It is less predictable than the clearing of haze which so often hovers over the nearby Swiss lake. âThe wind bloweth where it listeth,â said Jesus in this connection. There are moments when all oneâs acutest thought-movement is stilled and one finds oneself bereft of power, forced into utter submission to the divine Overself. If it starts with a faint awareness of being caught in a still moment, it ends in a full experience. The glimpse shows up something of oneâs higher identity. What is interesting also is that its advent is unpredictable, its form changeable: but it is always fascinating. I do not know the name of the ancient Chinese poet who write these lines but they refer to the glimpse: âFor about thirty years I wandered, searching for the real Tao everywhereâŠbut at this moment, seeing the peach blossoms, I am suddenly enlightened, and have no more doubts.â They come in their own mysterious seasons, stay with us in all their brief beauty, and depart as mysteriously and as elusively as they came. A man hears himself pronounced dead by his doctor. He begins to hear an uncomfortable noise, a loud ringing or buzzing, and at the same time feels oneself moving very rapidly through a long dark tunnel. After this, he suddenly finds himself outside of his own physical bodyâŠand sees his own body from a distance, as though he is a spectator. Soon other things begin to happen. Others come to meet and to help him. He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who have already died, and a loving, warm spirit of a kind he has never encountered beforeâa being of lightâappears before himâŠHe is overwhelmed by intense feelings of joy, love, and peace. Despite his attitude, though, he somehow reunited with his physical body and lives. This passage from Raymond Moodyâs best-selling book Life After Life is a composite near-death experience. Near-death experiences are more common than you might suspect. Several investigators each interviewed a hundred or more people who had come close to death through physical traumas such as cardiac arrest. In each study, 30 to 40 percent of such patients recalled a near-death experience. When George Gallup Jr. interviewed a national sample of Americans, 15 percent reported having experiences a close brush with death. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
One-third of these people (representing some 8 million people by Gallupâs estimate) reported an accompanying mystical experience. Some claimed to recall things said while they lay unconscious and near death. (However, then, anesthetized surgical patients in a âcontrolled comaâ are sometimes not as out for the count as surgical teams might suppose. Occasionally, they can later recall operating-room conversation or obscure facts or words presented over headphones.) Mr. Moodyâs description of the âcompleteâ near-death experience sounds peculiarly like the psychiatric researcher Ronald Siegelâs description of the typical hallucinogenic experience. Both offer a replay of old memories, out-of-body sensations, and visions of tunnels or funnels and bright lights or beings of light. Patients who have experienced temporal-lobe seizures have also reported profound mystical experiences, as have solitary sailors and polar explorers while enduring monotony, isolation, and cold. Oxygen deprivation can produce such hallucinations. As oxygen deprivation turns off the brainâs inhibitory cells, neural activity increases in the visual cortex, notes Susan Blackmore. The result is a growing patch of light, which looks so much like what you would see while moving through a tunnel. Perhaps, then, the bored or stressed brain manufactures the near-death experience. The near-death experience, argued Siegel, is best understood as âhallucinatory activity of the brain.â It is like gazing out a window at dusk: we begin to see the reflected interior of the room as if it were outside, either because the light from outside is dimming (as in the near-death experience) or because the inside light is being amplified (as with barbiturates). #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Some near-death investigators object. They say that those who have experienced both hallucinations and near-death phenomenon typically deny their similarity. Moreover, a near-death experience may change people in way that a drug trip does not. Those who have been âembraced by the lightâ may become kinder, more spiritual, more believing in life after death. And even if the near-death experience is hallucinatory, might it not also be genuinely mystical, an authentic and rare opportunity for spiritual insight? Skeptics reply that these effects stem from the death-related context of the experience. When near death, people Worldwide sometimes report intuitions of another World, though their content varies with the culture. Under stress, the brain draws on what it knows. Prayer cannot guarantee against a return of any troubles which it succeeds in eliminating when their cause still remains uneliminated. Although prayer will unquestionably contribute to purification of feelings and liberation from passions, it is not usually enough by itself to give more than temporary success; moreover it is beset with psychic dangers. Not all persons can undergo it safely. Yet it is worth consideration. As the purificatory regime begins to show its effect, there will be clearly visible or strongly pronounced evidence of the stirring up discharges of unpleasant impurities from the body through skin, bowels, urine, and mouth. Prayer throughout its course and an unfired regime only in its early stages, eliminates so much waste toxins that it may be like taking a diuretic. The cleansing effects of prayer follow only after the disturbing effects. For when the waste matter and excess mucous is stirred up (so that they can be carried away and thrown away), there results unpleasant physical symptoms and unhappy mental ones. However, all this vanishes within two or three days in the case of long fasts, or certainly as soon as eating is resumed in the case of short ones. The purifying process of an unfired prayer works in the same way as that of medication sometimes. It does not make a single effort with a single result but rather a series of efforts with a series of results. Hence the distressing elimination symptoms are periodic and recurring, being successive and deepening stages of cleansing. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
The inner urge in its favour is needed to sanction prayer; the instructive incentive must be felt before embarking on it. Otherwise, it will merely be forced concentration. Everyone, except the persons whose physical constitution unfits them for it, should mark their entry upon the path of purification starting with a short prayer. If one has never prayed before, it may be modified prayer during which one abstains from all negative information, comments, and words but takes well comedies, uplifting music, pleasant environments, or a safe vacation Two to four days is sufficiently log for this purpose. Otherwise the best time to pray is at the opening of the seasons of spring and summer. Spring marks the beginning of the ancient new year, he real new year, around March 21. The more an aspirant purifies oneself by using this simple method of physical praying, the more will one be able to obtain a corresponding mental purification. After the first year or two, one will find it possible to go on to a fuller mode of praying, during which nothing be praise of the Lord and optimistic thoughts should be communicated. Oliver Cowdery preached the firs sermon delivered by an elder of the new church on Sunday, April 11, 1830. Large numbers of people came to hear him and several were baptized that day. Joseph then went to Colesville, New York, held meetings here, and others were baptized. Some who believed wanted to come to church without being baptized, saying other minsters had already baptized them. A revelation was given on this subject in which the Lord said: This is a new and everlasting covenant; even that which was from the beginning. Wherefore, although a human should be baptized an hundred times, it availeth one nothing; for you can not enter in at the strait gate by the Law of Moses, neither by your dead works. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
For it is because of your dead works, have caused this last covenant, and this church to be built up uno me; even as in days of old. Wherefore, enter ye in at the gate, as I have commanded. Oliver Cowdery, Hyrum and Samuel Smith, Joseph Knight, and Joseph Smith, Sr., were instructed as to their duties in the church and were warned to be faithful in their work in a revelation given through Joseph Smith, Jr., in April. Two gems of wisdom were included in this revelation. The Lord said: Beware of pride, lest thou shouldst enter into temptation. You must take up your cross, in which you must pray vocally before the World, as well as in secret, and in your family, and among your friends, and in all places. In June Joseph received a revelation from God about things which had happened many hundreds of years before when Moses lived on the Earth. God told Joseph many things that happened to Moses, records of which had been lost or left out of the Bible when it was compiled. These helped Joseph understand more about the World and Godâs purposes. The first conference of the church was held in June, 1830. The meeting was opened with prayer and singing, and the members partook of the sacrament of the Lordâs Supper. Those who had been baptized recently were confirmed, and other were ordained to the priesthood. Godâs Spirit was with these people in mighty power. Many saw wonderful visions and knew what God wanted them to do to help in the work. They were happy to know God needed them as he had the disciples who lived in Jesusâ day. The Lord blessed His people. Many of the sick were healed, and other miracles were performed. While they enjoyed these wonderful blessings, the new church began to have its troubles. Many people in the World did not believe the wonderful story told by Joseph and his friends. They did not believe the Lord would speak to people in that day or that Angels visited the Earth. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The unbelievers hated the men who taught these things and gathered together in groups, or mobs, to express their feelings. They did everything they could think of to break up the meetings and keep Godâs servants from preaching and baptizing. One Saturday the church people built a dam across a little stream of water in order that there might be water deep enough to baptize on the next day. The mob of unbelievers broke down the dam so there could be no baptism on Sunday. However, early Monday morning the men of the church rebuilt the dam and a number of the people were baptized before the mob realized what was happening. At a meeting that evening the new members were to be confirmed by the laying on of hands, but before the meeting began the mob had a constable arrest Joseph for preaching about the Book of Mormon. After talking with Joseph, the constable discovered that he was not the evil man the mob had said he was. The officer confided in Joseph that the mob planned to kill him, and suggested that Joseph go with him to escape trouble. When the mob saw that Joseph was escaping, they chased him and the constable. The horse was going as fast as it could when a wheel came off the wagon. Joseph was fearful lest the mob should catch up with them, but they hurriedly put the wheel back on the wagon and escaped. That night, while Joseph slept on a bed in the corner of the room where they found refuge, the constable slept on the floor with his feet against the door and a loaded gun at his side in order that one might protect his new friend. Joseph was brought into court the next day. Many false charges were made against him. His enemies brought people who swore that Joseph had done all sorts of evil things, but they were so hopelessly mixed up in their stories that the judge did not believe them. After several attempts to prove him guilty of somethingâjust anythingâhe was released. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
No sooner was he released than he was again arrested and taken to another country to appear before another court. Here he was badly mistreated. Men spat on him and abused him. They gave him nothing to eat except crusts of bread and water. Again he was brought before the court and his enemies tried to find some fault with him, but they could not. He was declared ânot guiltyâ and set free. Joseph regrated that the people he so much wanted to help had mistreated him. He prayed for strength. As he prayed he knew that no matter what men did to him he would have to go on preaching the wonderful message of Jesus. The Lord comforted Joseph by a revelation given in July, 1830, saying: Thou hast been delivered from all thine enemies, and thou hast been delivered from the power of Satan, and from darkness! Thou shalt continue in calling upon God in my name, and writing the things which shall be given thee by the Comforter, and expounding all scripters unto the church, and it shall be given thee, in the very moment, what thou shalt speak and write. Be patient in afflictions, for thou shalt have many; but endure them, for lo, I am with you, even unto the end of thy days. Perhaps Joseph thought how the apostles of Jesusâ day were persecuted. Perhaps he remembered that some of the men who made it possible for everyone to have the Bible gave their lives for the cause. Other humans who have tried to help God in ways that were new and different in all periods of the Worldâs history have suffered at the hands of those who did not want to see changes made. Joseph knew he had been called to help Jesus Christ restore His church again to Earth. He knew that even though he was to suffer as had other men before him, he would continue to serve the Lord in whatever work he was instructed to do. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Instructions were given Joseph in this same revelation. Jesus Christ, the Lord, continued, saying: Attend to thy calling and thou shalt have wherewith to magnify thine office, and to expound all Scriptures. Thou shalt take no purse, nor scrip, neither staves, neither two coats, for the church shall give unto thee in the very hour what thou needest for food, and for raiment, and for shoes, for money, and for scrip. Yea, and also, all those whom thou hast ordained. And they shall do even according to his pattern. Amen. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to le the soft soul of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mind. Meanwhile the World goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the World offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and excitingâover and over announcing your place in the family of things. May the words of my mouth and the mediation of my heart be acceptable unto Thee, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Thou who establishes peace in the Heaven, grant peace 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. As long as an enemy is judged solely by oneâs appearance, oneâs victory is assured. It the end, it may be our certainty that we are infallible, which may prove our downfall. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
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The Earth Remains Jagged and Broken Only to One Who Remains Jagged and Broken!
Faith is the bedrock of our religious foundation. However, what happens when it is shaken to its core? A thinker who suddenly solves a problem has usually experienced insight. Most insights are so rapid and clear that we wonder why we did not see the solution sooner. Insight is based on reorganizing a problem. This allows us to see problems in new ways and makes their solutions seem obvious. What, really, does it mean to have insight? Insight involves three abilities. The first is selective encoding, which refers to selecting information that is relevant to a problem, while ignoring distractions. Insight also relies on selective combination, or bringing together seemingly unrelated bits of useful information. A third source of insight is selective comparison. This is the ability to compare new problems with old information or with problems already solved. How do we avoid being swept along in the strong currents of the adversaryâs wind and waves? Let us be grateful for the beautiful Ancient Ship America, for without it we are cast adrift, alone, and powerless, swept along without rudder or oar, swirling with strong currents of the adversaryâs wind and waves. Hold tight, brothers and sisters, and sail on within the glorious ship, The Church of Jesus Christ, and we will reach our eternal destination. âHard saying, all this stuff about Jesus!â wrote the Evangelist John in his Gospel (6.61). âFor just once in your life forge yourself, lose yourself, leave yourself behind!â wrote Evangelist Matthew in his Gospel (16.24). âGo on, get on with it. Pick you that cross and follow Jesus.â #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Yes, har saying these, and harder still, they are not going to go away. Hardest of all will be the words of the Final Sentence, as it is recorded in Matthew (25.41). âYes, you ended up as moral felons, malefactors and maledictors, and yes, you will depart from this place of judgment for the Eternal Bonfire, where you will spend the rest of your supernatural life!â These words, if I may echo the Psalmist (112.7), will go unheard by those who already follow the word of the Cross, as Paul put it so felicitously to the First Corinthians (1.18). When the Lord comes to pass the Final Judgment, the finger of God will draw the sign of a cross across the Heavenly Vault. A the Endtime all who had planked themselves down on their own crosses during their own lifetimes, at least according to Romans (8.29), will be able to approach Christ the Judge with good humour and happy tread. New Devouts facing the Cross for the first time often toss their victuals right on the spot. They see only death and destruction, theirs and their friendsâ, and they tend to faint dead away. But why? The Way of the Cross, or so the Great Bernard has it in his Second Sermon for the Feast of St. Andrew, is the most direct route to the Kingdom of Heaven. However, apparently, for a queasy Devout, that is not much of a reason. So let me list, in no particular order, a few of the good things that may be found in the Cross. Life in this World and life in the next. Sanctuary from enemies, natural as well as supernatural. Health of mind, joy of spirit, sweetness of breath. Sanctity at its most attractive. Hope of eternal life and faith in salvation. Do any of these make a difference in your attitude toward the Cross? They should. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
And that is why I am going to say to you now, in the words of the Evangelist Matthew (16.24), âTake up the cross, your cross, and begin to follow Jesus.â The destinations? According to Matthew (25.46), the Heavenly City. It is not that hard, you know. Jesus has already cut the path with His own cross. Just follow His steps, one by one, one after the other, and you are on your way. The cross He carried, according to the Evangelist John (19.17), was the one He died on for you. He wants you to carry on and, eventually, to die on your own cross as He did on His. If you die as He did, at least according to Romans (6.8), so you will rise as He did and enjoy the fruits of the Long Haul. The moral? If you share His ghastly, if you share His ghostly pain, you will share His glorious gain. Behold everything is the Cross! That is to say, the Way of the Cross and the daily task of dying to self. Whether you like it or not, that is the secret of life and genuine peace of mind and soul. Read the map, ask for directions, but you will not find a more smoothly surfaced, bandit-free road than the Way of the Cross. Put your own welfare first, and you will still find you have to suffer in this World, whether you wan to or not. Which is another way of saying, no matter which way you turn, you will always confront the Cross. What is the moral? Inevitably, pain will come to your limbs, and your soul will be stretched to the breaking point, but in the end you will be able to bear up pretty well under the stress. When God stops bothering you, it is your neighbourâs turn, and one will torment you till one gives you the hives. And the latter is usually worse than the former. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Try what remedies or potions you want, but your skill will continue to weep. You will just have to bear up until God sends blessed relief. Why is this so? God wants you to learn to do without, to endure tribulation without consolation. No one feels the Passion of Christ so deeply in oneâs hear as the one who is committed oneself to the same holy path as oneâs Fair Lord. What is the moral? The Cross is always waiting. No matter which way you turn in the dark, it is there. Run where you will. Flee toward a safe street, search for a safe house, and the Cross will follow. Blithely, it will be there to greet you when you arrive. What is the moral? Change your ways, give yourself a fresh coat of paint, convert yourself. Do all this, and you will find the Cross before it finds you. Internal Peace and Perpetual Crownâthat is who you want to come, but when? They will come when they will come. In the meantime, as always, patience. Carry the Cross willingly, and it will carry you all the way to Sufferingsâ End. Soon? You ask. Not on this Earth, I reply. Some reasonable advice. Trudge and grudge the Cross in your heart, and you will just make it heavier for yourself. Shake the Cross off, and I know you will try, but you cannot get rid of it. If by some extraordinary circumstance you are able to get that Cross off your back, guess what? You will stumble onto anotherâand indeed a heavier oneâalmost immediately. The moral? Flee the Cross, and it only gets worse. Sometimes novices are cunning. They think they can evade the Cross and still remain in good odor. How addled can one get! No other mortal has been able to live without cross and stress. Jesus Christ Himself, our Fair Lord, never spent an hour on this Earth without feeling the pain of His Passion. Why? Luke had an explanation. âIt was necessary,â he said in his Gospel (24.46, 26), âthat Christ suffer so that He could rise from the dead and enter into His glory.â Seems plain enough to me. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
So why are you new novices, so swift of mind and yet so slow of spirit, spending so much time devising evasive actions? Why are you not out there now on the Way of the Cross with the jubilarians? Christ had to travel it. So did we. And so do you! If the life of Christ means anything at all, it means the cross of martyrs. Yet you New Devout novices seek out a life of quiet amusement in the monastery. What a mistake! If you seek anything but suffering tribulations, what a colossal mistake! Why? you ask for the hundredth time. Because, as Job moaned for the hundredth time (14.1), all of life on this planet Earth is full of misery and wretchedness. That is to say, everything bears the sign of the Cross. The moral? If your cross gets heavier as you go along, know that you are making a modicum of spiritual progress. However, if, after some hours, it weighs about the same, look down. Why? You are standing still. Sometimes there is a soul who enjoys oneâs multiple afflictions; that is to say, the more one suffers on oneâs own cross, the lighter oneâs load seems to become. Every ripple of pain he coverts to oneâs spiritual advantage. As much as oneâs flesh is torn with the thorn of affliction, oneâs spirit is stiffened with grace. I have seen it happenâalthough I have never encouraged itâthat an afflicted soul has received so much consolation from oneâs suffering that one never wants the suffering to end; if anything, one wants it increased because it is from and for God. When I see this happenâand thank God it happens rarelyâI realize that it is neither virtue nor virility that keeps one going; it is the grace of Christ. The moral? When you are repelled by the grubbiness of the Cross, you should swallow hard, then step up, grab hold with your bare hands, and embrace that holy piece of timber. Carrying the Crossâit is not the sort of thing a novice wants to get mixed up with. That, and some other unpleasantnesses. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Embracing the Cross. Castigating the flesh. Subjecting oneself to servitude. Fleeing honours. Enduring disgrace with a smile. Despising oneself, and desiring to be despised by others. Suffering the tortures of the Damned. Desiring nothing that smacks of prosperity on this side of the Final Veil. Soberly reflect on yourself as others as see youâthat should sober you up. You will quickly see that you are not a pretty sight. All these rigorous practices are beyond your natural powers. What should you do? Confide in the Lord, and He will send your reinforcements from Heaven. The result? You should be able to hold your ground against the assaults of the World and the Flesh. As for that Hound of Hell, that old war dog of a Devil, you really will not have to fear one as an enemy. Armed with the shield of faith and wearing the emblem of the Cross, you will still find one a threat, but no more so than a warm puppy shitting in your lap. Position yourself as a good and faithful servant of Jesus Christ. Wear the cross of your Lord proudly both for your own good and out of a love for the Crucifix as a symbol. Prepare yourself to withstand a whole range of adversities and inconveniences in this wretched campaign. Why all the fuss and bother? Because the miseries never end, at least in this life; you will find them wherever you lay your head. All these evils and pains you suffer for Christ there is really no Earthly remedy for. No matter how bitter the draft of the Lord tastes, down it without making a face, says Matthew (20.23); that is to say, if you want to be a friend of His and fight the good fight besides Him, says John (13.8). Accept what few consolations He has to offer under these battle conditions. What more do you have to do? It is enough to put yourself in harmâs way. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Hold your ground against the repeated onslaughts of adversity and consider each attack a great honour. Why? Because âthe present sufferings,â even if you were man enough to handle them without Christâs help, âcannot be compared with the future gloriesâ; at least that is what Paul said to the Romans (8.18). When you reach that point in the fray when you and Jesus are fighting as one, the bitter turns to sweet; victory is in the air; the Hellhound turns to a lap dog; it is Paradise right before your very eyes. However, when you lose sight of Jesus in the din and smoke of battle, then your wounds weigh heavily upon you, fear invades your vitals, and tribulation tracks you down. If you are where you are supposed to be on the battlefieldâthat is to say, where the suffering and the dying areâthen the tide begins to turn. That is to say, amid the scourge of war, you will find a ray of inner peace. Even if you were rapt all the way to Third HeavenâPaul described the phenomenon in the Second Letter to the Corinthians (12.2)âyou still would not be able o escape the wounds of war. âI have not told one yet,â Luke quoted Jesus as saying in Acts (9.16), âhow much he will have to bear for My nameâs sake.â Apparently, a great deal of suffering remains to be done. What is the moral? Sufferingâhat is what a soldier of Christ signs up for; that, and to love Jesus and serve Him forever. Do you have the stuff to do as Acts suggests (5.41), that is to say, suffer for the name of Jesus? I do not really think so. However, fortunately for you, He thinks so. And so do the Saints; they think such behaviour would magnify the Lord. And so do your neighbour on Earth; they might just follow your good example. Why do I raise the question? Everyone, it seems, wants to slow the spiritual life down. Few, sad to say, want to endure the grunt and the grind of the Cross. What is the moral? By rights, considering the Goals of goals, you deserve to suffer a little for Jesus, so why do you squawk at the prospect? Many of your peers in the World are already straining their groins to achieve grubbier goals. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
If I may paraphrase and condense a line from Romans (6.8), as you die to self, so you will live to Godâthat is for certain. No one really likes being stiffed for Christ, but once that happens, one can begin to make a habit of it. Joining Christ in His suffering has some value not only in the next World, but also in this one. Which would you rather choose, to suffer nasty desolations for Christ or just to mess about with recreational consolations? I hope you choose the former. You are a little like Christ, but a lot like the Saints; in either instance, you are living reproach to the laggard. It is not the levities you enjoy that inch your forward in the spiritual life; it is the gravities you suffer. Is there anything better than suffering for the salvation of Humankind? If there were, Christ would have shown us by word or example. For veterans as well as recruits, therefore, Jesus makes it perfectly clear that the Cross must be carried. âIf anyone wants to come after Me,â He was quoted as saying in the Gospels pf Matthew (16.24), Mark (8.34), and Luke (9.23), âlet one lean into the cross and follow Me.â Yes, on Earth for the sake of Christ you gave up your pleasure, and now the Kingdom of Heaven awaits your pleasure. Power is twofoldânamely, passive, which exists not at all in God; an active, which we must assign to Him in the highest degree. For it is manifest that everything, according as it is in act and is perfect, is the active principle of something: whereas everything is passive according as it is deficient and imperfect. God is pure act, simply and in all ways perfect, nor in Him does any imperfection find place. Whence it most fittingly belongs to Him to be an active principle, and in no way whatsoever to be passive. On the other hand, the notion of active principle is consistent with active power. For active power is the principle of acting upon something else; whereas passive power is the principle of being acted upon by something else. It remains, therefore, that in God there is active power in the highest degree. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Active power is not contrary to act, but is founded upon it, for everything acts according as it is actual: but passive power is contrary to act; for a thing is passive according as it is potential. Whence this potentiality is not in God, but only active power. Whenever act is distinct from power, act must be nobler than power. However, Godâs action is not distinct from His power, for both are His divine essence; neither is His existence distinct from His essence. Hence it does not follow that there should be anything in God nobler than His power. In creatures, power is the principle not only of action, but likewise of effect. Thus in God the idea of power is retained, inasmuch as it is the principle of an effect; not, however, as it is a principle of action, for this is the divine essence itself; except, perchance, after our manner of understanding, inasmuch as the divine essence, which pre-contains in itself all perfection that exists in created things, can be understood either under the notion of action, or under that of power; as also it is understood under the notion of âsuppositumâ possessing nature, and under that of nature. Accordingly the notion of power is retained in God in so far as it is the principle of an effect. Power is predicated of God not as something really distinct from His knowledge and will, but as differing from them logically; inasmuch as power implies a notion of a principle putting into execution what the will commands, and what knowledge directs, which three things in God are identified. Or we may say, that the knowledge or will of God, according as it is the effective principle, has the notion of power contained in it. Hence the consideration of the knowledge and will of God precedes the consideration of His power, as the cause precedes the operation and effect. The glimpse often comes unexpectedly and suddenly. If it comes while one is outdoors and walking a city street, one will automatically and consciously slow oneâs pace and sometimes even come to a complete standstill. They may come quite abruptly, those intensely lived moments of true vision, those spasmodic glimpses of a beauty and truth above the vest which Earthly life offers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The mind then rests and there is a gap in its usual activities, a Void out of which these Heavenly experiences come to life as they overcome our ordinary feelings. The neurotic, whose habitual reaction is entirely impulsive and quite unreasoned, may yet be intellectual or cultured or artistic. However, in this matter of reaction one is too dangerously close to the animal level of evolution, with its instinctive passional response to stimulus. The day of the all-powerful centralized network that controls image production is waning. Indeed, a former president of NBC, charging the three main U.S. television networks with strategic âstupidity,â has predicted their share of the primetime viewing public will drop to 50 percent by the end of the decade. For there is a spiritual enlightenment and Third Wave communications media are subverting the dominance of the Second Wave media lords on a broad front with digital streaming and Internet materials. Video games are a hot time. Millions of Americans have discovered a passion for gadgets that turn them into the orthodox political or social analyst. Many are learning to play with the television set, to talk back to it, and to interact with it. In the process they are changing from passive receivers to message senders as well. They are manipulating the set rather than merely letting the set manipulate them. This new generation feels a suppressed rage at the news media. As a result, insatiable readers of disposable paperbacks and special-interest magazines and blogs are gulping huge amounts of information from their preferred source in short takes. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
 Instead of merely receiving our mental model of reality, we are now compelled to invent it continually reinvent it. This places an enormous burden on us. However, it also leads toward greater individuality, a de-massification of personality as well as culture. Some of us crack under the new pressure or withdraw into apathy or anger. Others emerge as well formed, continually growing, competent individuals able to operate, as it were, on a higher level. (In either case, whether the strain proves too great or not, the result is a far cry from the uniform, standardized, easily regimented robots foreseen by so many sociologists and science fiction writers of the Second Wave era.) Above all this, the de-massification of the civilization, which the media both reflects and intensifies, brings with it an enormous jump in the amount of information we all exchange with one another. And it is this increase that explains why we are becoming an âinformation society.â For the more diverse the civilizationâthe more differentiated its technology, energy forms, and peopleâthe more information must flow between is constituent parts if the entirety is to hold together, particularly under the stress of high change. If it is to plan its own moves sensibly, an organization, for example, must be able to predict (more or less) how other organizations will respond to change. The more uniform we are, the less we need to know about each other in order to predict one anotherâs behaviour. As the people around us grow more individualized or de-massified, we need more informationâsignals and cuesâto predict, even roughly, how they are going to behave toward us. And unless we can make such forecasts we cannot work or even live together. As a result, people and organizations continually crave more information and the entire system begins to pulse with higher and higher flows of data. By forcing up the amount of information needed for the social system to cohere, and the speeds at which it must be exchanged, the Third Wave shatters the framework of the obsolete, overloaded Second Wave info-sphere and constructs a new one to take its place. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The 1950s and 1960 may have seen an emptying out of the cities, but this pattern was largely restricted to European American families. Numerous forms of institutional discrimination insured that racial segregation would persist. Real estate practices, lending policies of banks and savings and loan institutions, governmental policies, and the beliefs of individual homeowners all contributed to practices of legalized segregation in the south and de facto segregation in the south. As African Americans seeking employment moved to metropolitan areas, they were segregated within selected areas and neigbourhoods within the central cities. As European Americans departed the city, more previously European American neighbourhoods were opened to African American occupancy, but although the high-risk neighbourhoods expanded their borders, it remained a segregated area. Government policies also directly encouraged racially restrictive areas. In the suburbs the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) proposed racially restrictive protective covenants that stopped racial integration in order to prevent âdeclining property values.â The 1947 FHA manual stated that: If a mixture of user groups is founded to exist, it must be determined whether the mixture will render the neighbourhood less desirable to present and prospective occupants. Protective covenants are essential to sound development of proposed residential areas, since they regulate the use of the land and provide a basis for the development of harmonious, attractive neighbourhoods. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Blind faith can lead us toward the light or plunge us into eternal darkness. The elimination of these legal barriers made no difference to the lives of most African Americans. In 1948 the Supreme Court, in Shelley v. Kraemer, ruled that racially restrictive covenants were not unconstitutional, but that they were no longer enforceable through the courts. This had little practical impact, and until 1968 the FHA continued to accept written and unwritten restrictive covenants. The FHA and VA subsidization of mass suburbanization was almost exclusively for European Americans; there were only a handful of postwar suburban African American housing developments. Institutional housing discrimination remained. Realtors would not show suburban housing to African Americans, and homeowners would not sell to them. Additionally, even without explicit racially restrictive covenants, there were a host of exclusionary zoning practices. These included density controls on the number of units on a piece of land, minimum lot and housing sizes, housing codes, prohibitions of trailers, and other policies that were intended to exclude low-income populations in general and African Americans in particular. African Americans did not suburbanize during the 1950s and 1960s generally had as their destinations either long-standing working-class African American suburban communities or spillover communities that occurred when African American high-risk neighbourhoods expanded beyond city boundaries into aging inner-ring suburbs. Prior to the 1970s African American suburbanization occurred overwhelmingly within already African American communities. In effect, the United States of America had a dual housing market in which realtors and financial institutions steered African Americans into suburbs that were no longer desirable to European Americans. The dual housing market was used to contain and control African American suburbanization within less suitable areas. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Further, African Americans purchasing homes in African American suburbs paid a ârace taxâ that ranged from 10 percent to 25 percent. This was the additional amount African Americans had to pay for comparable housing over what European Americans would pay. Not surprisingly, under these disabilities embedded in the system, the rate of African American suburbanization increased only minimally in the immediate postwar period. As of 1960, census figures indicated that suburbs were 4.6 percent African American; for 1970s, the rate barely changed to 4.7 percent. Moreover, most African American suburbs were far from being the promised land. According to John R. Logan, âThe average African American suburb is poor, fiscally stressed, and crime-ridden, compared to other suburbs.â The postwar years were difficult ones for the civil rights movements Civil rights activists of 1940s and 1950s were still battling against lynchings and trying to get African American children access to equal education. The movement did not have the luxury of concerning itself with opening suburban housing. Metropolitan African Americans overwhelmingly worked and lived in the central city, and urban African Americans had more practical survival concerns than seeking to more to affluent, lace curtain, white shoe law firm suburbs. Moreover, with European Americans leaving the cities, more and better-quality urban housing was opened for African Americans. For the average urban African American worker who lived every day with racial discrimination, what happened in the suburbs was more of a theoretical than a practical matter. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
It is said the great conflicts are not settled by words, but iron and blood. But what is we could revisit those situations, would we still make the same decisions? The civil rights focus on obtaining equal access to education culminated with the landmark 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education ruling. A decade later followed the passage of these acts, the attention of the civil rights movements shifted from education and personal civil rights to a concern over housing discrimination. The 1968 Civil Rights Act, more commonly known as the Fair Housing Act, for the first time, threw the weight of the federal government behind equal housing access. While there is a general consensus that as a result of the act, the level of discrimination against women, poor European Americans, the disabled, and non-European Americans has declined, there is far less agreement that this had been accompanied by substantial reductions in racial segregation. The year 1968 also saw federal attempts to move poverty-level families into the private housing market. The Housing and Urban Development Act provided direct home ownership subsidies to low-income home buyers. Thus, as the 1970s dawned, the possibility of racial minorities achieving suburban home ownership for the first time became a real option. Before experience has shown or knowledge of the human heart had made humans foresee the inevitable abuses of such a constitution, it must have seemed all the better because those who were charged with watching over its preservation were themselves the ones who had the greatest interest in it. For since the magistracy and its rights were established exclusively on fundamental laws, were they to be destroyed, the magistracy would immediately cease to be legitimate; the people would no longer be bound to obey them. And since it was not the magistrate but the law that had constituted the essence of state, everyone would rightfully return to oneâs natural liberty. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
The slightest attentive reflection on this point would confirm this by new reasons, and by the nature of the contract it would be seen that it could not be irrevocable. For were there no superior power that could guarantee the fidelity of the contacting parties or force them to fulfill their reciprocal commitments, the parties would remain sole judges in their own case, and each of them would always have the right to renounce the contract as soon as one should find that the other party violated the conditions of the contract, or as soon as the conditions should cease to suit one. It is on this principle that it appears the right to abdicate can be founded. Now to consider, as we are doing, only what is of human institution, if the magistrate, who has all the power in oneâs hands and who appropriates to oneself all the advantages of the contract, nevertheless had the right to renounce the authority, a fortiori the populace, which pays for all the faults of the leaders, should have the right to renounce their dependence. However, the horrible dissensions, the infinite disorders that this dangerous power would necessarily bring it its wake, demonstrate more than anything else how much need human governments had for a basis more solid than reason alone, and how necessary it was for public tranquility that the divine will intervened to give to sovereign authority a sacred and inviolable character which took from the subjects the fatal right to dispose of it. If religion had brought about this for good humans, it would be enough to oblige them to cherish and adopt it, even with its abuses, since it spares even more blood than fanaticism causes to be shed. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Psychic intuition examines some of the spiritual intuitions, including claims of communicating with immortal loved ones now living on the other side. Other claims also lend themselves to empirical scrutiny. One set of studies used hypnosis in efforts to âregressâ people into intuitions of past lives. These experiments are akin to the âage regressionâ experiments that invite hypnotized adults to relive their childhood. Alas, age-regressed people act as they believe children would, but they typically miss the mark by outperforming real children of the specified age. How believable are claims of hypnotic regression to past lives? Can the 25 percent of Americans who believe in reincarnation find support in such reports? Were 36 percent of university students correct to agree, in a survey by Scott Brown and others, that certain people can be age-regressed to recall past lives? The late Nicholas Spanos reported that, when hypnotized, fantasy-proned people who believe in reincarnation will offer vivid details of âpast lives.â However, they nearly always report being their same raceâunless the researcher had informed them that different races are common. They often report being someone famous rather than one of the more numerous ânobodies.â Some contradict one another by claiming to have been the same person, such as King Henry VIII. Moreover, they typically do not know things that any person of that time would have known. One subject would âregressedâ to a âprevious lifeâ as a Japanese fighter pilot in 1940 could not name the emperor of Japan and did not know that Japan was already at war. The bottom line: intuitions of reincarnation have collided against reality. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The mother is the childâs first skin. In general, the mother is also the first person to participate in processing and organizing and integrating the childâs experiences, deeply influencing the meaning which events have for the child. At first, she does this by facilitating the selfobject state, in which the childâs needs and wishes are taken care of in such a way that the child has an experience of what it feels like to take care of yourself and be an organized person doing things for yourself. Good parenting is the foundation and center of this experience. The motherâs capacity to identity with her baby allows her to fulfil the function of life. Holding is the basis for what gradually becomes a self-experiencing being. The conscious ego is the ego of separation, of doing, of acting, and being acted uponâŠit must derive its strength from the deepest unconscious core of the self that has never lost the feeling of being-at-one-with the maternal source of its life. The establishment of a strong personality-structure depends in the first place on the extent of which there has been called âindwellingâ: the close integration of the most primitive bodily self-regions (the homunculi) and later psychic developments. This integration forms a central core which is potentially dynamic since the biological drives are incorporated there, as are other needs with a bodily base. If a childâs needs are met when it expresses them, then the connections between need and consciousness of need and expression of need and need-satisfaction will be strengthened thereby. Self-imagery will then also be rooted in this central core, and the True Self will be involved in the earliest homunculus-based self-representations. From this point on, the self-image and the True Self can become influential in how later experiences shall be met and organized. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The best chance of maintaining a personality capable of happiness, altruism, and energy comes from having a central core which has not had to split off unacceptable experiences, and which can therefore integrate distress without too much distortion or denial. Such personalities will be able to integrate later distresses without inevitably involving them in the distortions and denials which earlier splits would impose on experience. Lucky peopleâfor them, later experiences connect straightforwardly with earlier ones, right back to the days when the very earliest body-imagery was being established. There is the central core, the center of True Self. People lucky in these respects must not be assumed to be lucky in every other way. We may imagine a range of people, all able to draw on the strength of a True-Self central core which organizes their experiences. At one extreme are those who had quite simple straightforward relations between their needs and their satisfactions. At the other extreme are those with much more stressful experiences, whose needs got satisfied only after long delays, or only in part, or after great distress. There is quite a range, from bliss to pain, of what people can bear without major distortion, or denial, or splitting. Of course, if there are many painful associations to this early core, quite a lot of good things would also have to happen if a person is to preserve some sense of inner goodness and not be overwhelmed by a sense of misery and worthlessness. It is also possible for a False Self to act as a core. A child may have been disappointed when its expression of what it wanted was not followed by fulfilment. Yet its needs were eventually me. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The question is, to what extent were its needs met on its terms and to what extent was it subject to other peopleâs? On this criterion depend differences in the extent to which a personâs core hold True and False components. When the mother cannot adapt well enough, the infant gets seduced into a compliance, and a complaint False Self reacts to environmental demands and the infant seems to accept them. Through this False Self, the infant builds up a false set of relationships, and by means of introjections evens attains a show of being real so that the child may grow up to be just like mother, aunt, brother or whoever at the time dominates the scene. I swear the Earth surely be complete to one who shall be complete, the Earth remains jagged and broken only to one who remains broken and jagged. I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those of the Earth, there can be no theory of any account unless it corroborate the theory of the Earth, no politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account, unless it compare with the amplitude of Earth, unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude of the Earth. O Lord, please guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile, and to those who slander me, please let me give no heed. May my soul be humble and forgiving unto all. Open Thou my heart, O Lord unto Thy sacred Law, that Thy statues I may know and all Thy truths pursue. Please bring to naught designs of those who seek to do me ill; speedily defeat their aims and thwart their purposes for Thine own sake, for Thine own power, for Thy holiness and Law. That Thy loved ones be delivered, please answer us, O Lord, and save with Thy redeeming power. Despite everything we do, we may never free ourselves from the bonds of fate. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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The Most Beautiful Adventures are Not those We Go to Seek!
Powerful ideas do not die with those who gave them birth, as long as those seeds are planted in their followers. At this point in history, Jesus is surrounded with flocks wherever He is, but all is not well. Sometimes one will feel that one is being led into an experience, a mood, or an idea. At other times one may feel oneself being drawn inward quite deeply as if the very roots of oneâs egoic being were penetrated; more rarely as if one has been drawn beyond the ego itself. When this consciousness takes hold of a human, it takes one by surprise. Infinity is so utterly different from what one was experiencing a few minutes earlier that its wonder, its truth, its beauty, its love fills one abruptly, as if in descent from the skies. The element of surprise and the delight of novelty are present and give the Glimpse its rapturous turn. The glimpse may come to one with a suddenness which makes the surrounding circumstances quite incongruous. The glimpse takes you unawares. When the humor of a particular situation or scene, happening or idea strikes a person one may burst out into sudden laughter. It is not long-forming but explosive, not built-up like a wall brick-by-brick but flashed across the darkness like lighting. Oneâs mind has this possibility of an abrupt move, and unexpected leap. Just so does it still possess this same possibility with regard to the discovery of truth. Enlightenment is always âsuddenâ in the sense that during meditation or reverie or relaxation the preliminary thought-concentrating gustatory period usually moves through consciousness quite slowly until, at some unexpected moment, there is an abrupt deepening, followed by a slipping into another dimension, a finding oneself alive in a new atmosphere. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
A passing sign of progress in arousing latent forces and a physical indication that one is on the eve of noteworthy mystical experience may be a sudden unexpected vibratory movement in the region of the abdomen, in the solar plexus. It usually comes when one has been relaxed for a short time from the daily cares, or after retiring to bed for the night. The diaphragmatic muscle will appear to tremble violently and something will seem to surge to and fro like a snake behind the solar plexus. This bodily agitation will soon subside and be followed by a pleasant calm and out of this calm there will presently arise a sense of unusual power, of heightened control over the terrestrial nature and human self. With this there may also come a clear intuition about some truth needed at the time and a revelatory expansion of consciousness into supersensual reality. These moods descend without invitation and depart without permission. This is the crucial point when ordinary compulsive mental activity fades away and stillness supervenes, perhaps very briefly, perhaps for some minutes. For some time, one is tense with the feeling of being about to receive a new revelation. Many are happy to make the trip to the Heavenly Kingdom, but few there are who will cart and haul that cross of Jesusâs. Many enjoy the sweet sentiments He utters, but few, that tart words He sometimes has to say. Many will wolf down the food with the Famous Man, as Jesus son of Sirach put it in his Book of Wisdom (6.10), but few will join Him in the fasts. They are all there in the good times, but few will take on the tough tasks He inevitably asks. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Yes, many like to be seen breaking bread with Jesus but, as Matthew has described (20.22), they are nowhere to be found when the passion cup is passed. Many are wowed by His miracles; few are wooed by His cross. Many just love chatting with Jesus so long as He is not rude about their not embracing His rood. What is the moral? Many praise Jesus Christ and bless Him as long as the good times roll. However, when He absents Himself for a few moments or just goes off for a while to pray, they become bellicose, then lachrymose, then comatose. We should love Jesus for His own sweet sake, and not because of any magic He will do in our behalf. And so when the bad times rock, we will bless Him as though the good times had never left. Even if He will never want to give us consolation again, we will still praise Him and thank Him for what He once did. Here are some questions for us. How can the love of Jesus, pure as it is, have no particular price tag, not terrestrial taint? Can those who spend all their time hunting down consolations not be called mercenaries? Are not those who think of nothing but their own comfort and profit hoarders of stuff rather than lovers of Christ? Can anyone be found who wants to serve God without counting the cost? Some considerations. Rare is the person who is so spiritual that one is denuded oneself of every material thing! Is there anyone who is truly poor in spirit and bereft of every creaturely thing? Can any of us be discovered whose interior life is like the Proverbial âgift of great price from a foreign landâ (31.10)? If a Devout gave all oneâs substance, that is good, but it is not everything. If oneâs penitential practices were punishing and public, that is good too, but one still has a long way to go. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
If one understands all knowledge, that is fine, but there is so much more to know. âIf I speak in the tongues of humans and of angles, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or clanging cymbal,â reports 1 Corinthians 13.1. Even if one has great virtue and indeed flaming devotion, it is still a long way to Purgatory. Why? For one has one step farther to go and according to Luke 10.41-42, âyou are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed.â It is the most important step of all. What is that? That one leave behind not only all created things, but also oneself. That is to say, dump oneâs selfish pride by the side of the road. Empty out oneâs petty pockets. And when one has done all this, which one knows has yet to be done, then and only then will one come to the realization that of oneself one is nothing. One day we ay come to think we are rather skilled in the service of the Lord. Some of our peers may even encourage us to think we are slick. However, even if there is some truth to it, we should still describe ourselves as just another clumsy oaf. âWhen you have done everything that is required of you, repeat after me,â Revealed Truth has spoken in the Gospel of Luke, âwe are truly the bumbling and stumbling servants,â (17.10). We have to be truly poor in body and spirit before we can say with the Psalmist, âYes, I am a leper, and a pauper tooâ (25.16). Nevertheless, no one is richer or stronger than the person who knows how to leave oneâs material self and all oneâs trash behind and place oneself on the rutted, deeply rutted, road to Humbletown. Each glimpse is not just a repeat performance, it is a fresh new experience. Each time the glimpse comes, it is as if it had never come before, so fresh, so sparkling is its never-failing wonder. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The higher awareness comes on imperceptibly and little by little. However, as it silently gathers itself, like a cloud, it also breaks like a renovating cloudâvehement, sparkling, and splashing. The belief, which prevails in Japan, China, and other lands, in a sudden abrupt enlightenment when one thinks quietly or says aloud, âAh! so this is IT,â has a factual basis. This satori, as the Japanese call it, may be either a temporary or a permanent glimpse. The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to see. Such is the coming of a glimpseâat the moment of arrival, unsought. Although such glimpses come mostly when a human is alone, come in quiet solitude, they need not do so. They have sometimes come to one in a crowded street or on a well-filled ship. The signs of this visitation are not always the same. It may delicately brush one with the feeling of its presence or forcefully stimulate one with the strength of its being. The beginner usually has to go through an emotional experience in order to receive a mystical experience, but the proficient is under no necessity to do so. It comes into the orb of oneâs awareness as an unstruggled and unsensational happening, so easily, so smoothly, that there is no dramatic emotion. The sensitive informed and experienced person may get intimations, may feel the glimpse coming even before the actual joyous event. In tat moment one feels on the very verge of eternity, about to lose oneself in its impersonal depths. When the opportunity to gain a glimpse of oneâs Overself draws near, it will be foreshadowed by certain happenings, either of an inward or an outward nature, or both. The book of life may be understood in two senses. In one sense as the inscription of those who are chosen to life; thus we now speak of the book of life. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
In another sense the inscription of those things which lead us to life ay be called the book of life; and this also is twofold, either as of things to be done; and thus the Old and New Testament are called a book of life; or of things already done, and thus that divine energy by which it happens that to each one oneâs deeds will be recalled to memory, is spoken of as the book of life. Thus that also may be called the book of war, whether it contains the names inscribed of those chosen for military service; or treats of the art of warfare, or relates the deeds of soldiers. It is the custom to inscribe, not those who are rejected, but those who are chosen. Whence there is no book of death corresponding to reprobation; as the book of life to predestination. Predestination and the book of life are different aspects of the same thing. For this latter implies the knowledge of predestination. The book of life implies a conscription or a knowledge of those chosen to life. Now a human is chosen for something which does not belong to one by nature; and again that to which a human is chosen has the aspect of an end. For a soldier is not chosen or inscribed merely to put on armor, but to fight; since this is the proper duty to which military service is directed. However, the life of glory is an end exceeding human nature. Wherefore, strictly speaking, the book of life regards the life of glory. The divine life, even considered as a life of glory, is natural to God; whence in His regard there is no election, and in consequence no book of life; for we do not say that anyone is chosen to possess the power of sense, or any of those things that are consequent on nature. For there is no election, nor a book of life, as regard the life of nature. The life of grace has the aspect, no of an end, but of something directed towards an end. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Hence nobody is said to be chosen to the life of grace, except so far as the life of grace is directed to glory. For this reason those who, possessing grace, fail to obtain glory, are not said to be chosen simply, but relatively. Likewise they are not said to be written in the book of life simply, but relatively; that is to say, hat it is in the ordination and knowledge of God that they are to have some relation to eternal life, according to their participation in grace. âLet them be blotted out from the book of living,â reports Psalms 68.29. Some have said that none could be blotted out of the book of life as a matter of fact, but only in the opinion of humans. For it is customary in the Scriptures to say that something is done when it becomes known. Thus some are said to be written in the book of life, inasmuch as humans think they are written therein, on account of the present righteousness they see in them; but when it becomes evident, either in this World or in he next, that they have fallen from that state of righteousness, they are then said to be blotted out. And thus a gloss explains the passage: âLet them be blotted out of the book of the living.â However, because not to be blotted out of the book of life is placed among the rewards of the just according to the text, âOne that shall overcome, shall thus be clothed in white garments, and I will not blot oneâs name out of the book of life,â reports Apocalypse 3.5. And what is promised to holy humans, is not merely something in the opinion of humans, it can therefore be said that to be blotted out, and not blotted out, of the book of life is not only to be referred to the opinion of humans, but to the reality of the fact. For the book of life is not only to be referred to the opinion of humans, but to the reality of the fact. For the book of life is the inscription of those ordained to eternal life, to which one is directed from two sources; namely, from predestination, which direction never fails, and from grace; for whoever has grace, by this very fact becomes fitted for eternal life. This direction fails sometimes; because some are directed by possessing grace, to obtain eternal life, yet they fail to obtain it through moral sin. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Therefore those who are ordained to possess eternal life through divine predestination are written down in the book of life simply, because they are written therein to have eternal life in reality; such are never blotted out from the book of life. Those, however, who are ordained to eternal life, not through divine predestination, but through grace, are said to be written in the book of life not simply, but relatively, for they are written therein not to have eternal life in itself, but in its cause only. Yet though these latter can be said to be blotted out of the book of life, this blotting out must not be referred to God, as if God foreknew a thing, and afterwards knew it not; but to the thing known, namely, because God knows one is first ordained to eternal life, and afterwards not ordained when one falls from grace. The act of blotting out does not refer to the book of life as regards Godâs foreknowledge, as if in God there were any change; but as regards things foreknown, which can change. Although things are immutably in God, yet in themselves they are subject to change. To this it is that the blotting out of the book of life refers. The way in which one is said to be blotted out of the book of life is that in which one is said to be written therein anew; either in the opinion of human, or because one begins again to have relation towards eternal life through grace; which also is included in the knowledge of God, although not anew. Probability is founded on the presumption of a resemblance between those objects of which we have had experience and those of which we have had none; and therefore it is impossible that this presumption can arise from probability. The argument up to date shows that miracles are possible and that there is nothing antecedently ridiculous in the stories which say that God has sometimes performed them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
This does not mean, of course, hat we are committed to believing all stories of miracles. Most stories about miraculous events are probably false: if it comes to that, most stories about natural events are false. Lies, exaggerations, misunderstandings and hearsay make up perhaps more than half of all that is said and written in the World. We must therefore find a criterion whereby to judge any particular story of the miraculous. In one sense, of course, our criterion is plain. Those stories are to be accepted for which the historical evidence is sufficiently good. However, then, as we saw at the outset, the answer to the question, âHow much evidence should we require for this story,â depends on our answer to the question, âHow far is this story intrinsically probable?â We must therefore find a criterion of probability. The ordinary procedure of the modern historian, even if one admits the possibility of miracle, is to admit no particular instance of it until every possibility of ânaturalâ explanation has been tried and failed. That is, one will accept the most improbable ânaturalâ explanations rather than say that a miracle occurred. Collective hallucinations, hypnotism of unconsenting spectators, widespread instantaneous conspiracy in lying by persons not otherwise known to be liars and not likely to gain by the lieâall these are known to be very improbably events: so improbably that, except for the special purpose of excluding a miracle, they are never suggested. However, they are preferred to be the admission of a miracle. Such a procedure is, from the purely historical point of view, sheer midsummer madness unless we start by knowing that any Miracles whatever is more improbable than the most improbable natural event. Do we know this? We must distinguish the different kinds of improbability. Since miracles are, by definition, rarer than other events, it is obviously improbable beforehand that one will occur at any given place and time. In that sense every miracle is improbable. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
It is immensely improbable beforehand that a pebble dropped from the stratosphere over London will hit any given spot, or that any one particular person will win a large lottery. However, the report that the pebble has landed outside such and such a shop or that Mr. So-and-So has won the lottery is not at all incredible. When you consider the immense number of meetings and fertile union between ancestors which were necessary in order that you should be born, you perceive that it was once immensely improbable that such a person as you should come to exist: but one you are here, the report of your existence is not in the least incredible. With probability of this kindâantecedent probability of chancesâwe are not there concerned. Our business is with historical probability. Ever since Humeâs famous Essay it has been believed that historical statements about miracles are the most intrinsically improbable of all historical statements. According to Hume, probability rests on what may be called the majority vote of our past experiences. The more often a thing has been known to happen, the more probable it is that it should happen again; and the less often the less probable. Now the regularity of Natureâs course, says Hume, is supported by something better than the majority vote of past experiences: it is supported by their unanimous vote, or, as Hume says, by âfirm and unalterable experience.â There is, in fact, âuniform experienceâ against Miracle; otherwise, says Hume, it would not be a Miracle. A miracle is therefore the most improbable of all events. It is always more probable that the witnesses were lying or mistaken than that a miracle occurred. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Now of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely âuniform experienceâ against miracles, if in other words they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle. There is also an objection to Hume which leads us deeper into our problem. The whole idea of Probability (as Hume understands it) depends on the principle of the Uniformity of Nature. Unless Nature always goes on in the same way, the fact that a thing had happened ten million times would not make it a whit more probable that it would happen again. And how do we know the Uniformity of Nature? A momentâs thought shows that we do not know it by experience. We observe many regularities in Nature. However, of course all the observations that humans have made or will make while the race lasts cover only a minute fraction of the events that actually go on. Our observations would therefore be of no use unless we felt sure that Nature when we are no watching her behaves in the same way as when we are: in other words, unless we believed in the Uniformity of Nature. Experience therefore cannot prove uniformity, because uniformity has to be assumed before experience proves anything. And mere length of experience does not help matters. It is no good saying, âEach fresh experience confirms our belief in uniformity and therefore we reasonably expect that it will always be confirmedâ; for that argument works only on the assumption of Uniformity under a new name. Can we say that Uniformity is at any rate very probable? Unfortunately not. We have just seen that all probabilities depend on it. Unless Nature is uniform, nothing is either probable or improbable. And clearly the assumption which you have to make before there is any such thing as probability cannot itself be probable. The odd thing is that no human knew this better than Hume. His Essay on Miracles is quite inconsistent with the more radical, and honourable, scepticism of his main work. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Throughout the Second Wave era the mass media grew more and more powerful. Today a startling change is taking place. As the Third Wave thunders in, the mass media, far from expanding their influence, are suddenly being forced to share it. They are being beaten back on many fronts at once by what I call the âde-massified media.â Newspapers provide the first example. The oldest of the Second Wave mass media, newspapers are losing their readers and staff. The estimated total U.S. daily newspaper circulation (print and digital combined) in 2020 was 24.3 million for weekday and 25.8 million for Sunday, each down by 6 percent from the previous year. Nor were such losses due merely to the rise of television. Each of todayâs mass-circulation dailies now faces increasing competition from burgeoning flock of mini-circulation weeklies, biweeklies, and so-called âshoppersâ that serve not the metropolitan mass market but specific neighbourhoods and communities within it, providing far more localized advertising and news. Having reached saturation, the big-city mass-circulation daily is in deep trouble. De-massified media are snapping at its heels. The United States of America has experienced and explosion of electronic journals and mini-magazinesâthousands of them aimed at small, special-interest, regional, global, or even local markets. And it is not all bad news. Their programs focus on things their producers like. They are not really targeting an audience, but producing and sharing things they are interested and that they believe will help others, so their content is not the same as the doom and gloom of the mass media, which people find appealing because no one wants made to feel sad, fearful or anxious. Â #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
For instance, pilots and aviation buffs today can chose among literally scores of periodicals edited just foe them. Teenagers, scuba divers, retired people, women athletes, collectors of antique camera, tennis enthusiasts, skiers, and skateboarders each have their own press. Every organization, community group, political or religious cult and cultlet today can afford to produce is own publication. Even smaller groups churn out periodicals on the Internet that have become ubiquitous in American and International offices, homes, and classrooms. The news media and magazines have lost their powerful influence in national life, especially with people trying to safe trees and also the fact people now know news is not necessarily true nor honest work. It is entertainment which is trying to compete with fictional television shows. Many people, however, have the intentions to maintain the peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to one, and prefers on every occasion the public utility to oneâs own interest. Between the 1920s and the end of the second World War, the very limited amount of African American suburbanization generally took one of two forms. The first was the all-African American suburb. Almost all of these suburbs were poor, and the majority were unincorporated. In the south, it was common for non-European Americas to live in small hamlets and less-developed areas on the cityâs periphery. These low-income shantytown neighbourhoods often even lacked community water and sewage and were suburban in name only. While such small communities were technically in the suburbs, socially and economically they were not of the suburbs. An example of this type of suburb was the African American suburb of Kinloch, 6 miles outside the city limits of St. Louis. Kinloch, surrounded by more affluent European America suburbs, did not become incorporated until 1948. It was typical of early African American suburbs insofar as because of a limited tax base, it had poor school, potholed roads, and minimal government services. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The roads from Ferguson, the suburb east of Kinloch, actually stopped short of Kinloch at an overgrown easement only to start up again on the Kinloch side of the border. As late as 1970 some of these African American âsuburbanâ neighbourhoods could be seen south of Washington, D.C., across the district line. During the interwar period, some solid working class-African American suburbs also existed, such as Robbins, southwest of Chicago. At this time the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) directly supported segregated housing by refusing to make loans in other than all-one-race areas. Until 1950 FHA regulations specially prohibited making loans that would permit racial integration. The Federal Housing Administrationâs official manuals cautioned against infiltration of inharmonious racial and national groups, a lower class of inhabitants, or the presence of incompatible racial elements, in the new neighbourhood. Thus, federal policies prohibited loans that would encourage the integration of neighbourhoods. During World War II, the FHA consistently refused to insure war-housing projects for African American workers. The formal regulations were not changed until the Kennedy years of the early 1960s, and the policies really did not change until the Open Housing Act of 1968 barred housing discrimination. However, the outlawing of discriminatory policies did not eliminate informal practices of racial steering, where African Americans were shown housing only in areas already having African American residents. The second form of African American suburbanization prior to World War II included small communities of African Americans found in the most elite suburbs. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
African Americans living in such suburbs were not equal-status homeowners. Some of them did not have professional jobs. The 1930s census showed, for example, that along Chicagoâs prestigious North Shore, 5 percent of Glencoeâs and 4.3 percent of Kenilworthâs residents were African American. Overtime some of the African Americans without professional jobs purchased or built small homes in the less desirable sections of the community. Such African American populations contained the seeds of social change. For example, Evanston, on Chicagoâs North Shore, as of 1930 listed 7.8 percent of is population as African American. Evanston as of that date already had a separate aspiring middle-class African American neighbourhood for those working on the North Shore. Overtime this nucleus would grow to be a substantial portion of the Evanston community. One reason for the new interest in human spirituality is that its source in intuition is radically different from the rational, densely factual nature of science and therefore generates feelings. New Age Spiritualityâalternative and usually individualistic forms of spiritual consciousness illustrated by New Age bookstore sectionsâfeeds off both waning of communal religion and the advance of science. In an age where many religionsâand ever moreâcoexist, religious dogma may seem less credible. Yet science fails to answer our ultimate questions: Why are we here? How should be live? What is our ultimate destiny? If the old faith seems unbelievable and the new science seems to demystify life, then people will find mystery and meaning in new places. It has been said that when some people cease believing in Gog, they do not believe nothing, they believe anything. Nature abhors a spiritual vacuum. The quest for meaning is fundamental to our being. The human mind has a genuine desire to plumb the depths of the unspoken, to find deeper significance and truth, to reach out to another realm of existence. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
New Age âsoft spiritualityâ is essentially irreligious. âI am not religious,â one hears, âbut I am very spiritual.â This is the privatized spirituality of radical individualism, the solo spirituality of pop cultural. This is the spirituality of religion, minus the things one does not like about religion, such as the authoritative status of sacred texts and communally shared beliefs. New Age spirituality differs from biblical spirituality not only in its individualism but also in its understanding of human nature. Biblical spirituality places its most basic distinction between all of creation (both people and animals) and God who is creator. In the Old Testament book of Isaiah God declares, âI am God; there is none like me.â The Holy Spirit is given to provide us with a deeper knowledge of both God and a wisdom that goes beyond rational and scientific forms of knowing. However, biblical spirituality still maintains the distinction between God and mortal, finite humans. New Age spirituality replies that we are emanations of God: The divine is within you. You are immortal. You are a soul who inhabits your body, and thus able to travel out of body, read othersâ minds, and glimpse the future. Your spirit or soul may also have inhabited another being, and may again be reincarnated in someone to come. You are undying and capable of communicating with those who, also undying, have passed to the other side, the spirit World. You do not need God to give you hope of life beyond death, because there is no death. You are already an eternal spirit. At your bodyâs death, you will meet a gentle being of light (which already had been experienced by those near-death survivours whose spirits temporarily vacated their bodies). #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
New Age spirituality offers other comforting messages. Angels protect us. There are no fortunate random coincidences, but rather angelic or divine interventions. Evil is not real (though some are spiritually impoverished). Fear, loneliness, and pain can be dismissed. Given positive attitudes, optimum health, serene bliss, and joy of pleasures of the flesh awaits us. And then there is the New Age elevation of intuition. IF you feel it, it is true. Truth is much less a matter of logic and verification than of personal experience and testimony. Neale Donald Walsch illustrates this radical individualism in his disdain for history and community and in his elevation of the individua self. Walsch has had âconversations with Godâ (so reads the title of the book he has written), and here is what God says: The wisdom of faith traditions is ânot authoritative.â So âlisten to your feelings. Listen to your Highest Thoughts. Listen to your experience. Whenever any one of these differ from what you have been told by your teachers, or read in your book, forget the words.â We are being held together by some kind of bonding or gluing, or held together by some central unifying force that rules the other parts and holds them together as the force of gravity does or the focus around which perspectives organize themselvesâsuch a power, central and hierarchically organized, is postulated by Plato and has been the most generally accepted metaphor in Western thought from its beginnings. No doubt there are minds almost entirely held together in one or other of these ways. As a rule, however, which metaphor is most useful at any time depends on a number of factors: the kind of person under discussion, the kind of structures which are falling apart, and so on. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
When we think of neural connections, and when we think of the association of ideas, we tend to think of structures held together by connecting bonds. Neural connections exemplify this kind of cohesion. Sense-impressions build up into perceptions, which integrate into concepts and ever more complex structures. Variations in integration and coherence are seen to determine structure so that the very nature of structure could be defined in terms of bondsâthere are more neural associations within a structure than between structures. Regions of the personality are bonded together more or less strongly depending on the number of associations between them. The number of associations determines the extent of integration. A relative absence of associations defines a gap or fissureâthe fewer the associations, the wider the split. As anyone knows who has glued things, the things to be stuck together need to be held firmly in a kind of frame until the glue holds. Then the frame is no longer needed. The concepts of boundary and space are boundaries and frames of this kind. Frames provide restrictions or limitations which can be used to further the integration within. A picture must be painted on a certain canvas; a poem must be written in sonnet form. Within the frame there is space for a creative live. When there is a frame that gives space and protection, all the resonances and echoes and reverberation of an individualâs experiences have time to work themselves out. They do not get lost; they are not cut off prematurely. Ego-relatedness normally provides a frame. It provides the safety within which various experiences may come to be connected and associated, although they occurred at different times in different contexts. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Good parenting provides the frame within which psychological associations can ramify and become strong. In this way, good parenting leads to personalities which have strong and well-integrated structures. With less ego-relatedness, the individual has less space and time to get this inter-connecting process going, and so it retains more dissociated experiences. When people experience themselves as lacking a containment, something is rushing through themâa noise, a sensation, an impressionâwhich they cannot hold on to. This sense, of something rushing through, may be how we experience unintegrated sensory streams of unprocessed uncontained stimulation. It is what falling apart sometimes feels like: what is going on does not make sense to us. Not making sense is the same as not being organized into a meaningful pattern. Or we may be unable to find a framework of meaning into which to organize what is happening. Boundaries seems to facilitate organization; insecure boundaries seem often to hinder it. There is an interesting connection between uncontained state and the autistic individualâs desperate clutching of hard objects. In some states of mind, holding one to something with firm contour might feel much like being something with firm contours. The common element would be there is something firm for holding something formless. Firm contours seem to be needed, whether they belong to the infant (in us) or they belong to whatever the individual feels held and contained by. Whether the something firm is my skin or yours seems less important than the fact that it prevents me feeling a rushing shapeless flowing away. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The function of the boundary frame are reminiscent of Pribramâs âbag of skin,â and Winnicottâs âmembrane.â Our skins provide a compelling metaphor for such holding functions, more flexible and organic than the idea of a frame. The skin protects. The vulnerable skinless self and its care, means that especially when an infant, something or someone is needed to give one space and protect against impingement from without, and also from withinâfrom loneliness, pain, rage. Failure in the holding environment, perhaps because of illness in the mother (or caregiver), can mean that the individualâs line of life is interrupted and its development hindered by the need for defence against primitive anxiety. However, it can also be seen that failure of the father to protect the mother in the crucial weeks after oneâs birth can contribute to this state of affairs. If the circle made by the father, or by some person fulfilling the fatherâs function is broken, the mother cannot abandon herself without anxiety to her infantâs needs. The parents, who are normally the childâs holding environment, may at times be fiercely tested, especially at times when feelings are strong. Once again, we have reached a set of ideas where parallels can be perceived between what good parents do and what psychotherapists do. The reader has probably practiced at recognizing these passages by now. It is important that whoever hold the infant (of the older child or the adolescent or the adult) is strong enough to hold on to, either to prevent explosion and fragmentation, or to form the framework for such disintegration and for subsequent integration. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
The survival of the mother who does not retaliate, together with the father who comes to represent the indestructible environment, allows for freedom of the instinctual lifeâthe source of spontaneityâwithin the family circle. In the earliest days, it is the caring adult whose insightful and coping skills protect, as with a shielding skin, the helpless and defenceless infant. In favourable circumstances, however, these functions will gradually be taken over by the competent developing infant. Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden, suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood. Please teach us to care and not to care. Please teach us to sit still, even among these rocks. Our peace in oneâs will and even among these rocks, sister, mother, and spirit of the river, spirit of the sea. Please suffer me not to be separated and please let my cry come unto Thee. O inscribe all the children of Thy covenant for a happy life. May all the living do homage unto Thee forever and praise Thy name in truth, O God, who are our salvation and our help. Blessed be Thou, O Lord, Beneficent One, unto whom our thanks are due. Grant lasting peace unto America Thy people, for Thou art the Sovereign Lord of peace; and may it be good in Thy sight to bless Thy people America at all times with Thy peace. In this book of life, blessing, peace and ample sustenance, may we, together with all Thy people, the house of America, be remembered and inscribed before Thee for a happy life and for peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who establisest peace. In every system throughout antiquity there is an ascetic preliminary side which purifies the mind and the body and then only does meditation start. Without such purification, that is, asceticism, all the dangers of meditationâhallucination, misuse of occult powers, egotistic fancies, mediumship, and so onâare free to raise, but with it there is better protection against them. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Almost a Free Citizen–The âGod Factorâ is Not a Mere 5 Percent but 100 Percent!
Please bless us with a moral and spiritual restoration in the land. We give you thanks Thy sovereignty Thou has permitted us to have a momentous history. Why do you demand beauty restâanother echo from the Book of Job (5.7)âwhen you were born for hard labour? Set yourself up more for long-suffering than short-suffering, more for toting the cross than admiring it. If one could have them on demand, character from the secular World would not gladly accept consolations? After all, they exceed in delectation and duration all the delicacies of the World and all the pleasures of the Flesh. The former taste out of this World, but only for a while; then they begin to cloy. As for the later, trying to prolong a pleasure of the Flesh. The former taste out of this World, but only for a while; then they begin to cloy. As for the latter, trying to prolong a pleasureâis that not just about the most pitiful of human exercises? What is the moral? Truly, spiritual desserts alone are the real thing, whipped up from virtues into frosted layers of pure thoughts. But however mouth watering they are, no one can enjoy them for long. Why? Because the time for temptation is never far off. If we did not put up so many roadblocks, consolation would visit us more often. Two bumptious examples: Braggart Spirituality and Bogus Confidence. God does well by giving the grace of consolation. We do ill when we attribute the whole gracious phenomenon to our own efforts. In a situation like this, the graces cannot flow; our pipes are clogged. That is because we are ungrateful to the Fountained of All Grace, from whom we receive all these Heavenly Gifts and to whom we should return to all thanks. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
What is the moral? Grace is always available for the asking. Trouble is, not everyone asks. Sometimes, to feed the humble pigeon, God robs the proud puffin. Yes, consolationâs a good thing, but not all consolations are good. We are succored by some, but suckered by others. I do not want the sort that takes contrition away from me. And the same could be said of contemplation. I do not want the kind that leads me to pride. Is there a snare here? Of course there is. Not everything that is high is holy; nor every sweet, good; nor every desire, pure; nor every dear thing, something that tickles Godâs fancy. How then can we tell the good from the good? The grace that makes me more humble, more careful, that is the True Grace, the grace that truly helps me leave my worldliness behind. Having gone to the School of Grace, then, and severed all times to worldliness, we will not have the audacity to beat on our chests like drums and trumpet our goodness abroad. Rather, we will mouth our maximas culpas and bare our poor souls at home. What is the moral? Give to God what belongs to Him, Matthew has advised (22.21), and take note of what is yours. Give thanks to God for grace. However, your faults and the punishment that is due them you will have to bear yourself. Keep placing yourself on the lowest rungâif I may be pardoned a little laddering in the Lordâand the highest rung will soon be yours. Why? Because the highest stands on the shoulders of the lowest. âWhen you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, one will say to you, âFriend, move up to a better place.â Then you will be honoured in the presence of all the other guests,â reports Luke 14.10. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
The Saints who stand high in Godâs esteem are the same blokes who lie low in their own esteem. If I may put it crudely, the more they grovel, the more they will revel. Founded and grounded in God, they cannot be proud. Full of Truth and Heavenly Glory, they lose their tastes for Earthly glory. They ascribe totally to God whatever good comes their way. They seek gloryânot the kind that is from human beings, but the kind of glory that is from God alone. âHow can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?â reports John 5.44. The moral? Devouts desire God to be praised in Himself and all His Saints above all else, and they direct all their efforts toward that very goal. We should be grateful for the small gifts, and soon we will be found worthy of larger ones. A word of advise. Unwrap the tiniest one with the same sense of glee as the humongous one. And if a truly disgusting thing is found inside, count it a special gift. Always consider the dignity of the donor, and no gift will ever seem too small, too cheap. Need I say it? It is not the largeness of the gift; it is the largesse of the giver. If God should give pain and suffering, count them as gifts too. Why? It seems to me I hear you ask. Because what He gives and what He allows are for your own salvation. Anyone who wants to keep the blessings of God coming should be grateful for the grace just given and patient for the grace yet to come. In the latter instance, you should pray that the grace may return. If you do not prostrate yourself before the Divine Tribunal toward that end, I cannot help adding, it may not return. As always, you should be open and humble. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The prayer experiments can stimulate us to clarify our understanding of prayer. To believe in and wholeheartedly engage in petitionary prayer, we must agree that prayer disturbs natureâs events in statistically verifiable ways. Jobâs experience reminds us that God does not play favourites; the rain falls both on those who plead with God and on those who do not. Still, would we be wrong to presume that, other things being equal, praying parents will have 5 percent fewer stillborn or disabled babies than nonpraying parents? To suppose so is to fall victim to the natural/supernatural dichotomy. In the biblical view, the âGod factorâ is not a mere 5 percent but 100 percent. One does not need a manipulative conception of prayer to induce Godâs involvement in the World; God is everywhere and at all times already involved. Thus when the Pharisees pressed Jesus for some criteria by which they could validate the Kingdom of God, Jesus answered, âYou cannot tell by observation when the Kingdom of God comes. There will be no one saying, âLook, here it is!â or âThere it is!â for in fact the Kingdom of God is among you.â What, then, is the Christianâs proper prayer? First of all, it is a declaration of praise and thanksgiving for Godâs infinite goodness and an acknowledgement of sin and the need for forgiveness. Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven. Please give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Christâs prayer, the model prayer for Christians, contains no attempt to manipulate God. It does not attempt to cajole a miserly god into doing what he would not have the goodwill and good sense to do anyway. It has the quality of a confessional statement, affirming Godâs nature and human dependence upon Godâs grace. It therefore prepares one to receive that which God by his nature is already providing. The petitions that Godâs will be done and that forgiveness be given for debts seek what is intrinsic to Godâs nature. The petition for daily bread serves to reinforce the sense of God as gracious Father, of humanity as dependent and anticipating children, and of our lives as daily saturated by Godâs providence. The prayer of a Christian is not an attempt to force Godâs hand, but a humble acknowledgment of helplessness and dependence. Prayers is not magic, but it is mystical. In quiet meditation and prayer, we sense he reality of the living God. Good speaks to us and we to God. As we do so we are changed. Sinking to our knees or bowing our heads reminds us of our humble dependence. Prayers for others makes us more aware of their needs. There is nothing that makes us love a human so much as praying for one. Prayer may also be viewed as a response, as an effect rather than a cause, as a time not of asking: âWhat are we to eat? What are we to drink? What shall we wear?â All these are things for the heathen to run after, no for you, because your Heavenly Father knows that you need them all. Set your mind on Godâs Kingdom and His justice before everything else, and all the rest will come to you as well. Grace is divine help and strength that we receive through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Through grace, we are saved from sin and death. In addition, grace is an enabling power that strengthens us from day to day and helps us endure to the end. Effort is required on our part to receive the fulness of the Lordâs grace. âFor we labour diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do,â reports 2 Nephi 25.23. The Lord is near; have no anxiety, but in everything make your requests known to God in prayer and petition with Thanksgiving. Then the peace of God, which is beyond our utmost understanding, will keep guard over your hearts and your thoughts in Jesus Christ. St. Paul urges us to petition God, and we are promised an answer: not that of scientifically provable effects, but the peace of God that satisfies the deeper cravings of our being. Jesus Christ Himself prayed that, if it be Godâs will, the cup might pass. It did not, but His strength was made equal to the burden. In confessing His private longings and communing with the Father, Jesus found the grace to endure. If our Creator loves us as an all-loving parent would love a child, then we, like children, can communicate with God without ceasing. We can share even the little concerns of daily existenceâanything that is worth worrying aboutâmuch as a child would do with its parents or as two intimate friends do with one another. We can surrender every corner of our lives in prayer, not with a superstitious intent of manipulating magical solutions to lifeâs problems, but in the confidence that petitionary prayer is a means of grace whereby we will grow and be sensitized to the presence of God. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
To ask âWhat is the use of petitionary prayer?â is like asking what is the use of making music, skiing, or sharing a meal with a friend; such activities, like prayer, are inherently worthwhile quite apart from any further purposes they serve. And le us not forget prayerâs multiple purposes. Through prayer we thank and praise God, we humbly confess our sin and acknowledge our dependence upon Godâs grace, we express our concerns, and we seek inward peace and the strength to live as Godâs people. An information bomb is exploding in our midst, showering us with a shrapnel of images and drastically changing the way each of us perceives and acts upon our private World. In shifting from Second Wave to a Third Wave info-sphere, we are transforming our own psyches. Each of us creates in oneâs skull a mind-model or realityâa warehouse of images. Some of these are visual, others are auditory, even tactile. Some are only âperceptsââtraces of information about our environment, like a glimpse of blue sky seen from the corner of the eye. Others are âlinkagesâ that define relationships, like the two words âmotherâ and âchild.â Some are simple, others complex and conceptual, like the idea that âinflation is caused by rising wages.â Together such images add up to our picture of the Worldâlocating us in time, space, and the network of personal relationships around us. These images do not spring from nowhere. They are formed, in ways we do not understand, out of the signals or information reaching us from the environment. And as our environment convulses with changeâas our jobs, homes, churches, schools, and political arrangements feel that impact of the Third Waveâthe sea of information around us also changes. Before the advent of mass media, a First Wave child growing up in a slowly changing village built oneâs model of reality out of images received from a tiny handful of sourcesâthe teacher, the priest, the chief or official and, above all, the family. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
As psychologist-futurist Herbert Gerjuoy has noted: âThere was no television or radio in the home to give the child a chance to meet many different kinds of strangers from many different walks of life and even from different countriesâŠVery few people ever saw an international cityâŠ.The result [was that] people had only a small number of different people to imitate or model themselves after. âTheir choices were even more limited by the fact that the people they could model themselves after were themselves all of limited experience with other people.â The images of the World built up by the village child, therefore, were extremely narrow in range. The messages one received, moreover, were highly redundant in at least two senses: they came, usually, in the form of casual speech, which is normally filled with pauses and repetitions, and they came in the form of connected âstringsâ of ideas reinforced by various information givers. The child heard the same âthou shalt notsâ in church and in school. Both reinforced the messages sent out by the family and the state. Consensus in the community, and strong pressures for conformity, acted on the child from birth to narrow still further the range of acceptable imagery and behaviour. The Second Wave multiplied the number of channels from which the individual drew oneâs picture of reality. The child no longer received imagery from nature or people alone but from newspapers, mass magazines, radio and, later on, from television. For the most part, church, states, home, and school continued to speak in unison, reinforcing one another. However, not the mass media themselves became a giant loudspeaker. And their power was used across regional, ethic, tribal, and linguistic lines to standardize the images flowing in societyâs mind-stream. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Certain visual images, for example, were so widely mass-distributed and were implanted in so many millions of private memories that they were transformed, in effect, into icons. The image of Xi Jinping, jaw thrust out in triumph under a swirling red flag, thus became as iconic for millions of people as the image of Jesus on the cross. The image of Aaliayh in the Queen of the Damned billboard, or Beyonce raging at Super Bowl XLVII Halftime Show, the images of fans in the bleachers stacked like waves in the ocean during a full moon, or Paris Hilton making the illuminati hand gesture, while driving her custom BMW i8 in Malibu, or Britney Spears drinking a Pepsi, of Marilyn Monroeâs skirt blown by the wind, of hundreds of media stars and thousands of different, universally recognizable commercial productsâthe bar of Ivory soap in the Unite States of America, the Morinaga chocolate and Wagyu beef in Japan, the bottle of Perrier in France (which Meghan, Duchess of Sussex is said to bathe in and wash her face with)âall became standard parts of a universal image-file. This centrally produced imagery, injected into the âmass mindâ by the mass media, helped produce the standardization of behaviour required by the industrial production system. Today the Third Wave is drastically altering all this. As change accelerates in society, it forces a parallel acceleration within us. New information reaches us and we are forced to revise our image-file continuously at a faster and faster rate. Older images based on past reality must be replaced, for, unless we update them, our actions become divorced from reality and we become progressively less competent. We find it impossible to cope. This speed up of image processing inside us means that images grow more and more temporary. Throwaway art, one-shot sitcoms, Polaroid snapshots, Xerox copies, compact disc, Blockbuster Video Stores, Bonkerâs candy, pay phones, and disposable graphics pop up and vanish. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Idea, beliefs, and attitudes skyrocket into consciousness, are challenged, defined, and suddenly fade into nowhere-ness. Scientific and psychological theories are overthrown and superseded daily. Ideologies crack. Celebrities pirouette fleetingly across our awareness. Contradictory political and moral slogans assail us. It is difficult to make sense of this swirling phantasmagoria, to understand exactly how the image-manufacturing process is changing. For the Third Wave does more than simply accelerate our information flows; it transforms the deep structure of information on which our daily actions depend. Until the twentieth century, the African American population in the United States of America was overwhelmingly rural and southern. On the even of the Civil War, the south was rural, as of 1860, only 8.6 percent of the total population living in cities. Slavery was essentially a rural institution founded on a plantation economy, and plantation owners vigorously opposed the use of people as slaves in urban manufacturing. Laws were passed in the attempt to restrict the number of enslaved people in cities, and, as a consequence, the urban African American population actually declined in most southern cities prior to the Civil War. Slaveholders feared that slavesâ relative freedom of life in the cities would undermine the southâs âpeculiar institution.â In this fear they were quite justified. In urban areas the system of enslaved people being hired out or even hiring themselves out and sharing their income with their nominal owners led to a modification of the system. In effect, through such contractual agreements, the enslaved persons âpurchasedâ some degree of freedom. According to Mr. Frederick Douglas, the major African American figure of the Civil War period, such an urban slave was âalmost a free citizen.â #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Prior to the Civil War not all African Americans were slaves. As of 1860, roughly one of every eight Africans Americans was a âfree person of colour.â The great bulk of those free persons of colour were urban, and most lived in border states. It is usually not known that when the war began, Richmond, Virginia, the Capitol of the Confederacy, counted one-fifth of its African American population as âfree persons of colour.â Moreover, one-quarter of the cityâs African American population, including some enslaved African Americas, owned their own modest homes. By comparison, at the outbreak of the war, the northern states had only limited populations of freed African Americans. In the north, as in the south, the only African American suburbanites were usually those living in the poor shantytowns on the cityâs fringe. The initial expectation after the Civil War was that African Americans would flood out of the rural south. It did not happen. Even the extensive political and social changes wrought by Reconstruction did not change the overwhelmingly rural and southern pattern of African American residence. Social relations remained castelike, with African Americans not in competition with European Americas for jobs or status. Thus, there was no need to segregate the races in terms of housing. A common southern pattern was for European Americans to occupy the big house on the street while African Americans lived in the south, and three-quarters of all African Americas were rural. What did change African American residence patterns was the first World War. The outbreak of war in 1914 cut off the supply of European immigrant labour just as the times factories were being flooded with war orders. Humanity distinguishes itself by the ability to think and feel. But what happens when a machine has the same abilities? #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
New labour sources had to be found to replace the loss labour source. One method was increasing the use of woman workers. The second was to recruit labour from the rural south. Northern factories sent recruiters south offering one-way train ticket to those, African American as well as European American, who would sign up for factory jobs. In the early years of the twentieth century, life had been getting harder for rural African Americans with the mechanization of agriculture, the spreading destruction of cotton crops by the boll weevil, and new Jim Crow laws that brought increasing segregation and racial repression. These factors provided a strong push that, when combined with the pull for northern jobs, initiated a mass migration of rural African Americas to the urban north. The World War I decade (1910-1920) saw the five states of the deep âblack beltââSouthern Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisianaâlose over 400,000 African Americans to out-migration. The migration continued during the 1920s, with high African American growth rates for major norther cities. New York (114 percent), Chicago (113 percent), Detroit (194 percent), and Philadelphia (64 percent) showed the heaviest growth. Harlem, which was already crowded in 1920, added fives times more residents during the decade. The Depression years of the 1930s saw migration slow and then shoot up dramatically during the World War II years because of the needs of war industries and the implementation by President Roosevelt of an executive order mandating fair employment policies. The aftermath of the war saw the urban relocation of African Americas continue. By the time the migration to northern cities had substantially run is course in the late 1960s, over 5 million African Americans had left the south for norther cities. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Chicago now housed more African American than all of Mississippi, and the New York metropolitan area had more African Americans than any state of the old south. This movement to urban places provided the population for consequent African American suburbanization. Everyone is striving to be happy but the number who truly achieve that goal is limited. Who are the happy people today? Not those who forsake the Lord and devote themselves entirely to the pleasures of life and the physical things of the World. The truly happy people are those who have faith in the Lord and keep the laws of the gospel, those who forget self in their desire and effort to bless others. Our Heavenly Father loves His children. He wants us to be happy, and He has shown us the way. Many of us are fathersâfathers of mortal bodies of our children. The greatest treasures we have are our children. When they are happy and successful, we are happy. When they depart from the straight and narrow path, the hearts of the parents are saddened. Our Lord has told us by revelation through the Prophet Joseph Smith regarding the worth of souls: âRemember the worth of souls is great in the sight of God. For, behold, the Lord your Redeemer suffered death in the flesh; wherefore He suffered the pain of all humans, that all humans might repent and come unto Him. And He hath risen again from the dead, that He might bring all humans unto Him, on conditions of repentance. And how great is His joy in the soul that repenteth,â reports Doctrine and Covenants 18.10-13. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
What are the forces which prevent people from âfalling apartâ? âFalling apartâ and âdisintegratingââceasing to be integratedâare appropriate metaphors, suggesting that different regions of the personality lose contact with one another. Great anxiety, as well as high fevers and toxic states, can have this effect. We do not know where we are. We are âat a lossâ. Many different kinds of regions and organizations makes up the personality, and people can disintegrate in different ways. We have seen that basic faults may split regions along a variety of lines, different writers tending to be interested in different lines. âFalling apartâ may refer to the dissociation of simple organizations of memoriesâtraces as they lose touch with one another and we forget what we read in a book, or auntieâs birthday, or what we had for dinner last Wednesday. It can also refer to the progressive isolation of mere complex organizations such as particular self-images or particular relationships with other people and things. Or even more central processes may cease to function. Our ego-functions may desert us. Then there is the kind of isolation of different regions of the personality for which Kohut coined the phrase âvertical splitââwe do not feel we are ourselves. âI do not know what made me do it,â âIt is not like me,â âIt is the drink talking,â âI did not mean it.â And there is the âschizoidâ feeling of disembodiment when constant attention seems to be needed to keep the too loosely organized structures from flying apart. If we choose to give birth to a thinking machine, we must prepare for the day when our progeny with demand independence. Prayer gives the body and mind a chance to regain its lost chemical balance. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
With prayer, energy is set free to cleanse the mind and body concerned. Sometimes prayer and the regime take almost instantaneous effect, but more often some time must elapse for the results to show themselves. This need to purify our thoughts and connect with God is to make our minds better and obey the spirit. The benefits are not only physical and moral but also psychological, since it enjoins patience and perseverance. The seeker may take this calmly and without anxiety. This is the way in which the subconscious forces prompted by the Overself concentrate their work of purification and renovation upon the body and feeling alone for a time, to gain the most effective result in the shortest time. Thus, those forces which would otherwise be used up in creating the desire to meditateâthe atrophy of willpower and the deprivation of energy in this direction need not be fought but should be accepted as a passing and necessary phenomenon. All though the Winter months while the Book of Mormon was being printed, Joseph and Oliver were concerned about their part in the marvelous work the Lord had promised to do through them. They spent much time praying and studying both the Bible and the new Book of Mormon. God caused their minds to be enlightened so they understood the things they read. From time to time during these Winter months, the Lord gave instructions about the Church of Jesus Christ which was to be restored to the Earth. These have been grouped together as Section 17 of the Doctrine and Covenants. Some of these instructions were: The church was to be organized according to the laws of the land on April 6, 1830, with Joseph Smith as the first elder and Oliver Cowdery as the Second elder. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The duties of the officers of the church were explained. The elder is to baptize, confirm by the laying on of hands for the gift of the Holy Spirit, ordain others, serve the bread and beverages, teach, preach, and take the lead in all meetings as led by the Holy Spirit. The priest is to teach, preach, and baptize. He is to serve the bread and beverages, visit in the homes of members and teach them o pray, ordain other priests, teachers, or deacons, and assist the elders. If no elder is present, the priest should lead the meeting. The teacher is to watch over he church members, strengthening them, and see that there is no trouble or quarreling among them. He is to teach and preach, and if no elders or priests are present, he should lead the meetings. The deacon is to assist other members of the priesthood, but the teacher and deacon may not baptize, serve the Sacrament, nor lay on hands. Those who have repented and are willing to serve Jesus all their lives are to be baptized in water. Specific instructions as to the manner of baptism were given, as follows: The person who is called of God and has authority from Jesus Christ to baptize, shall go down into the water with the person who has presented oneself for baptism, and shallsay, calling one by name. Having been commissioned of Jesus Christ, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen. Then shall he immerse one in the water, and come forth again out of the water. To become members of the church, those who have been baptized are to be confirmed by the laying on of hands of the elders. Every member of the church of Chris having children, is to bring them unto the elders before the church, who are to lay their hands upon them in the name of Jesus Christ, and bless them in His name. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
No one can be received into the church of Christ unless one has arrived unto the years of accountability before God, and is capable of repentance. And the members shall manifest by a Godly walk and conversation that they are worthy of it, that there may be works and faith agreeable to the Holy Scriptures, walking in holiness before the Lord. The method of administering the sacrament of the Lordâs Supper was explained and the exact prayers to be offered over he bread and beverage were given. The necessity of keeping a regular list of all the names of the memberships of the whole church was stressed. The various branches of the church were instructed to keep a record of all who untied with the church and to send this record to the conference. When a member moved from one place to another, the Lord instructed that they were to take a letter certifying they were a member of the church in good standing. In a revelation given through Joseph Smith, Jr., in March, 1830, for Martin Harris, the Lord said: Learn of me, and listen to my words; walk in meekness of my Spirit and you shall have peace in me. I am Jesus Christ; I came by the will of the Father, and I do His will. I command Thee that thou shalt pray vocally as well as in thy heart; yea, before the World as well as in secret; in public as well as in private. And thou shalt declare glad tidingsâŠamong every people that thou shalt be permitted to see. And thou shalt do it with all humility, trusting in me. Pray always and I will pour out my Spirit upon you, and great shall be your blessings; yea even more than if you should obtain treasure of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
According to instructions given them, on April 6, 1830, six men who had been baptized met together at the Whitmer home in Fayette, New York, and organized the church. These six men were Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, Hyrum Smith, Samuel Smith, and Peter Whitmer. It was not until after this organization meeting that Martin Harris and Josephâs parents were baptized. The meeting was opened with solemn prayer. Joseph then asked the men if they would accept him and Oliver as their leaders. They all voted that they would. At this time another revelation was received. The new church was structed to keep a record of all the things they did. The members were command to listen to the words and commandments of Joseph Smith, Jr., their leaders. The Lord said: âWherefore, meaning the church, thou shalt give heed unto all his words, and commandments, which he shall give unto you, as he recieveth them, walking in all holiness before me; for oneâs word ye shall receive, as if from mine own mouth, in all patience and faith. For thus saith the Lord God, him have I inspired to move the cause of Zion in mighty power for good; and his diligence I know, and his prayers I have heard. For, behold, I will bless all those who labour in my vineyard, with a might blessing, and they shall believe on his words, which are given him through me, by the Comforter.â Joseph ordained Oliver an elder in the church, and Oliver ordained Joseph to the same office. These two newly ordained men them served the first sacrament of the Lordâs Supper in the church. They took bread, blessed it, broke it, and ate it with the others. Then Joseph and Oliver laid their hands on each member of the church that each might receive the gift of the Holy Spirit and be confirmed members of the Church of Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit was felt by them and all praised the Lord and rejoiced. As Godâs spirit rested upon them, Joseph called and ordained some of the men to various priesthood. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
All wanted to serve God in His church which had been oranganzied according to the commandments and revelations given by Christ in the latter days. This was a restoration of the same church Jesus established as told of in the New Testament when he said, âI will build my church.â No idea is so strong that it should not be tested by doubt, and no man so powerful that he is infallible. When humans become so completely occupied with their own affairs that thought or feeling for others is entirely absent and the point of extreme obsession with self is reached, they are liable to go mad. It is certain that many of this type find their way into lunatic asylums or mental hospitals. The unconscious mind retreats in the end from every effort at self-expression, because the suffering and pains of consciousness causes it to return to its own primal and peaceful state. In any madhouse one may see patients sitting for hours and staring into space, a vacuous expression on their faces. Outwardly they not only have these resemblances to the self-actualized but they to live in a kind of sequestered retreat, they too have in their peculiar way renounced the World and its affairs. Most negative traits belong to the feelings of adolescence, most positive ones to those of real maturity. It is when the negative ones appear in adults that they become neurotic and must be treated as psychic sickness. Through ignorance of the World-Idea or through disobedience to their revelators and teachers, neurotics get worse and become psychotics. They are to be found in both campsâthe religious or cultist believers and the sceptical materialists. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Too many of these neurotics are too full of unstable egoism to have their emotional complexes soluble by any other psychological treatment than a robust and direct attack upon these complexes. A mushy sentimentality will merely prolong the life of such a complex. Neurotics are moody, sometimes very attractive with their day and brilliant charm, but sometimes repulsive with their black despairs and criticizing tantrums. When anyone attaches immensely more important to something than it really has, there is the first sign of neuroticism. Some people become neurotic through too much strained activity, but others become neurotic through too little. All the predestined are chosen by God to possess eternal life. This conscription, therefore, of the predestined is called the book of life. A thing is said metaphorically to be written upon the mind of anyone when it is firmly held in the memory, according to Proverbs 3.3. âForget not My Law, and let thy heart keep my commandments,â and furthers on, âWrite then in the table of thy heart.â For things are written down in material books to help the memory. Whence, the knowledge of God, by which He firmly remembers that He has predestined some to eternal life, is called the book of life. For as the writing in a book is the sign of things to be done, so the knowledge of God is a sign in Him of those who are to be brought to eternal life, according to 2 Timothy 11.19: âThe sure foundation of God standeth firm, having this deal; the Lord knoweth who are His.â My help is in the mountain where I take myself to heal the Earthly wounds that people give to me. I find a rock with sun on it and a stream where the waters runs gentle and the trees which one by one give me company. So I must stay for a long time until I have grown from the rock and the stream is running through me and I cannot tell myself from one tall tree. Then I know that nothing touches me nor makes me run away. My help is in the mountain that I take away with me. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Earth please cure me. Earth please receive my woe. Rock please strength me. Rock receive my weakness. Rain wash my sadness away. Rain receive my doubt. Sun make sweet my song. Sun receive the anger from my heart. We thankfully acknowledge that Thou art the Lord our God and God of our fathers, the God of all that lives, our Creator and Creator of the Universe. We offer blessings and thanksgiving to Thy great and holy name because Thou hast kept us in life and sustained us; so mayest Thou continue to keep us in life and sustain us. O gather our exiles into the courts of Thy holy sanctuary to observe Thy statutes, to do Thy will, and to serve Thee with a perfect heart. We give thanks unto Thee. Blessed be God to whom we are ever grateful. We thank Thee also for the miraculous and mighty deeds of liberation wrought by Thee, and for Thy victories in the battles our forefathers fought in days of old, at this season of the year. In the days of High Priest Mattathias, son of Johanan, of the Hasmonean family, a tyrannical power rose up against Thy people Israel to compel them to forsake Thy Torah, and to force them to transgress Thy commandments. In Thine abundant mercy Thou didst stand by them in time of distress. Thou didst rise to their defense and didst vindicate their cause. Thou didst bring retribution upon the evil doers, delivering the strong into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few, the wicked into the hands of the just, and the arrogant into the hands of those devoted to Thy Torah. Thou didst thus make Thy greatness and holiness known in Thy World, and didst bring great deliverance to America. Then Thy children came into Thy swelling place, cleansed the Temple, purified the Sanctuary, kindled lights in Thy sacred courts, and they designated these days for giving thanks and praise unto Thy great name. For all this, Thy name, O king, shall be blessed and exalted for ever and ever. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
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A Thousand things May Happen to Bring Your Marriage to Mr. Winchester to an End!
Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven. He went wining through the darkness of the cosmos. He flew fast and hard, not stopping to fool around with the stars and planets scattered in his path like grains of diamond dust. He passed the Milk Way without even going in for a dip, passing it up for the sake of his mission. Satan had come to persuade poor creatures to give their souls to the Devil, but he will bewitch many people to death, and their faces will turn towards God as their blood cries for vengeance against him, begging to be clothed in white robes in Heaven when Satan is cast into Hell. The time of the old cults is returning. There are people who can repeat conversation to others and make them believe that they know it not from eavesdropping but from occult powers. Reverend George Burroughs, who had been minister of Salem Village from 1680 to 1682 bewitched many people to death, including his own first two wives. The fist he smothered and the second he strangled, and nobody seemed to notice that their specters differed about the means by which the supposed murders were done. Reverend Burroughs often would tell people, âMy God makes known your thoughts unto me,â both he and his hearers understood his god to be the Devil; the Christian God does not deal in the occult, particularly at the level of family gossip, but the Devil does. When people are in the clutch of malignant demons, they are bound to die. Dr. Harold M. Johnson, a Hawaiian physician, reported both severe skin lesion and death among victims of Kahuna sorcerers. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
However, he had succeeded in curing bewitched patients by giving them methylene blue tablets, which turned their urine blue and persuades them that a powerful countercharm has been worked on their behalf. Witchcraft deaths have been reported for a very long time, yet it is only recently that they have received serious medical attention. Most of the physical effects of witchcraft are attributable to hysteria, but not death. However, people do not die from hysteria, but death. Like the hysterical symptoms of bewitchment, begins with the victimâs fear of the witchâs power. Dr. Walter B. Cannon of Harvard Medical School published an article entitled âVoodoo Death,â in which he began by acknowledging that âthe phenomenon is so extraordinary and so foreign to the experience of civilized people that it seems incredible.â In all cases, death comes inexorably and in a relatively short time. As one observer put it, âthe victims dieâŠas though their strength ran out as water.â The only know cure was a countercharm, and when this was successfully employed, recovery was so rapid and complete that Western observers found it remarkable. Dr. Cannon suggested that witchcraft death might well be a genuine phenomenon, and also put forward a hypothetical explanation. âIt may be explained,â he thought, âas due to shocking emotional stressâto obvious or repressed terror.â It would occur, he felt, chiefly in primitive cultures, âamong human beings to primitive, so superstitious, so ignorant that they are bewildered strangers in a hostile World. Instead of knowledge they have a fertile and unrestricted imagination which fills their environment with all manner of evil spirits capable of affecting their lives disastrously.â #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
It was believed that these humans may be dying of psychogenic deaths as were the victims of witchcraft. However, Dr. Cannon had suggested that fear might be the emotional cause, with consequent overstimulation of the sympathicoadrenal system, accelerated of the heartbeat, and death with the heart contracted in in systole. However, Dr. Curt P. Richter found that while acceleration of the heartbeat was the initial reaction, it was shortly followed by a steady, gradual decrease in rate, with the heart eventually stopping in diastole, like a run-down clock. This meant that the emotional cause of death was not fear but hopelessness, produced by oneâs conviction that there was no possible means of escape, with consequent overstimulation of the parasympathetic rather than the sympathic-coadrenal system. However, when people are removed from fearful situation in hasty fashion, they know their situation is not hopeless. So, they will not die psychogenic deaths. If individuals about to die a psychogenic death were removed from the situation they recovered rapidly, like human victims who have been reprieved by a countercharm. In short, Dr. Richter found that the first response in such cases was fear but that the emotional cause of death was hopelessness that succeeded fear, and that death could be prevented either by restoring hope or by training the subject to be hopeful in a particular situation. Therefore, prayer may very well save countless lives by removing fear and giving people who. This is probably also why stress has been noted to kill people and cause disease, it stresses the body and causes it to attack itself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Stress and fear may prolong and make medical conditions worse and could very well facilitate in killing a person if it is ongoing and not resolved, and a person cannot find help. Dr. R. S. Fisher, corner of the City of Baltimore, who had found that âa number of individuals die each year after taking small, definitely sublethal doses of poison, or after inflicting small, nonlethal wounds on themselves; apparently they die as a result of the belief in their doom.â Dr. Richterâs findings throw much new light on the history of Massachusetts witchcraft. They should enable us at long last to take as seriously as it deserves Cotton Matherâs detailed account of his treatment of the Goodwin girl. When he gave her religious sustenance by spelling the crucial words she was unable to hear spoken, he may have been saving his patient from much more than convulsive fits. By giving her continued hope he may literally have been keeping her alive. Dr. Richterâs findings also explain the frequent reports of death in both European and American witchcraft cases. There are about a dozen such reports in the documents of Salem witchcraft, but in most instances one cannot be at all certain of the actual cause of death. Even when death does appear to be psychogenic it is usually impossible to say whether the victimâs hopelessness was simply a result of private fears or whether those fears had their origin in a specific magical act. And if the testimony concerning Roger Toothaker and his daughter may be taken at face valueâand there is reason to believe it mayâwe have one case of murder by witchcraftâone case in which occult means were used to take a human life away. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Some people have become blasĂ© to strange manifestations. When you consort with the occult, out-of-body experiences are like your daily bread and butter. We have special preparation for those who want their loved oneâs memories restored. However, many do not use it, because they often find their beloved more charming without memories, and therefore without a clue as to what to scold about, at least for a while. Though Mrs. Sarah Winchester had a comfortable home, a home of a god as vast and resounding as the sea, and loving hearts around her, she wore a grave, melancholy look on her face. A disappointment! Yes, the old story of a lost love and new born baby is the reason for Mrs. Winchesterâs looks. She had good offers often; but since she lost the love of her heart, she had never indulged in the happy dream of loving and being loved. The grave look, which was habitual with her, was a rare thing in her young and happy days, and passed over her face sometimes when she thought no one was looking. Before his death, Mr. Winchester had been persuaded to sit for his portrait. It was a fair likeness, but a very modern work of art. The background was so very dark, and Mr. Winchesterâs naval costume was so deep in colour, that the face came out too white and staring. It was a three-quarter picture; but only one hand showed in it, gripping indisputably one of the most spectacular and historic of all Winchesters, number 14327. As George said, he looked much more like the commander of a Venetian galley than a modern mate. However, the picture pleased Mrs. Winchester. So the picture was duly framedâin a tremendously heavy frame, of Mr. Winchesterâs orderingâand hung up in the dining-room. Mr. Winchesterâs Father, Oliver, was a gunmaker, politician, clothing maker, and sailor by profession. He sailed the great and mysterious sea, and had been especially known as a good Arctic sailor, having share more than one expedition in search of the North Pole and the North-West Passage. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
It was no surprise when William Winchester wanted to go out for a voyage in search of his cousin Robert and his missing expedition. And now the time for Williamâs departure was growing nearer. The USS Jeannette was nearly ready to sail, and her crew only waited orders. The officers grew acquainted with each other before sailing, which was an advantage. Mr. Winchester took up very warmly with the commander, George W. De Long, and, with permission, brough him to dinner once or twice. Poor chap, he had no friends nearer than New York, and it is precious lonely work. So George came to dinner at the Winchester Estate in New Haven, Connecticut. However, Mrs. Winchester was not favourably impressed by him, and almost wished she had no consented to his invite. He was a tall, pale, fair young man, with a hard New York face and a cold, grey eye. There was something in his expression, too, that was unpleasantâsomething cruel or crafty, or both. It was in very bad taste for him to pay such marked attention to Mrs. Winchester, coming, as he did, as a friend of her husband. George kept by her constantly and anticipated Mr. Winchester in all the little attentions which a husband delights to pay. Mr. Winchester was a little put out about it, though he said nothing, attributing his friendâs offence to lack of breeding. Mrs. Winchester did not like it at all. She knew that she was not to have Mr. Winchester with her much longer, and she was anxious to have him to herself as much as possible. But as George was her husbandâs friend, she bore the infliction with the best possible patience. The commander did not seem to perceive in the least that he was interfering where he had no business. He was quite self-possessed and happy, with one exception. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
The portrait of Mr. Winchester seemed to annoy George. He had uttered a little impatient exclamation when he first saw it which drew Mrs. Winchesterâs attention to hi; and she noticed that he tried to avoid looking at it. At last, when dinner came, he was told to sit exactly facing the picture. He hesitated for an instant and then sat down, but almost immediately rose again. âItâs very childish and that sort of thing,â he stammered, âbut I cannot sit opposite that picture. I know nothing about art, but it is one of those unpleasant pictures whose eyes follow you about the room. I have inherited horror of such pictures. My mother married against her fatherâs will, and when I was born she was so ill she was hardly expected to live. When she was sufficiently recovered to speak without delirious rambling she implored them to remove a picture of my grandfather that hung in the room, and which she vowed made threatening faces at her. Itâs superstitious, but constitutionalâI have a horror of such paintings!â I believe Mr. Winchester thought this a ruse of his friendâs to get a seat next to Mrs. Winchester; but it sure was not, for that was a real alarmed expression of his face. Before the ship departed, George has started visiting the Winchesterâs more and more each day. He even went as far as to tell Mrs. Winchester that he loved her. He told her that a man could no more help falling in love than he could help taking a fever. Mrs. Winchester stood upon her dignity and rebuked him as if he was Satan; but he told her he could see no harm in telling her of his passion, though he knew it was a hopeless one. âA thousand things may happen,â he said at last, âto bring your marriage to Mr. Winchester to an end. Then perhaps you will not forget that another love you!â The butler was very angry, and was forthwith going to give him his opinion on his conduct, when Mrs. Winchester told him he was gone, that she had bade him go and had forbidden him the house. She had only told the butler in order to protect herself, for she did not intend to say anything to Mr. Winchester, for fear it should lead to a duel or some other violence. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
That was the last Mrs. Winchester saw of George De Long before the Jeannette expedition. Mr. Winchester came the same evening, and was home until daybreak, when he had to tear himself away and join his ship. After shaking hugging Mrs. Winchester at the door, in the cold, grey, drizzly dawn, Mrs. Winchester went inside and started sobbing on the sofa. She could not help starting when she looked at Mr. Winchesterâs portrait. The strange light of daybreak could hardly account for the extraordinary pallor of the face. The picture was covered with moisture, and he looked so pale. The Jeannette sailed. Mrs. Winchester received two letters from Mr. Winchester, which he had taken the opportunity of sending by homeward-bound whalers. In the second he said it was hardly likely he should have an opportunity of sending another, as they were sailing into high latitudesâinto the solitary sea, to which none but expedition ships ever penetrated. They were all in high spirits, he said, for they had encountered very little ice and hoped to find clear water further north than usual. Moreover, he added, George had held a sinecure so far, for there had not been a single case of illness on board. Then came a long silence, and a year crept away very slowly for poor Mrs. Winchester. Once she heard of the expedition from the papers. They were reported as pushing on and progressing favourably by a wandering tribe of Esquimaux with whom the captain of a Russian vessel fell in. They had laid the ship up for the winter, and were taking the boats on sledges, and believed they had met with traces of the lost crews that seemed to show they were on the right track. The winter passed again, and spring came. It was a balmy, bright spring such as they got occasionally, even in the changeable and uncertain climate of theirs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
One evening Mrs. Winchester was sitting in the dining-room with the window open, for, although she had long given up fires, the room was so oppressively warm that she was glad of the breath of the cool evening breeze. Mrs. Winchester was working. Though she never murmured, she was evidently pining at Mr. Winchesterâs long absence. The butler was leaning out of the window, studying the evening effect on the fruit blossom, which was wonderfully early and plentiful, the season was so mild. Mrs. Winchester was sitting at the table, near the lamp, reading the paper. Suddenly there swept into the room a chill. It was not a gust of cold wind, for the curtain by the window did not swerve in the least. However, the deathly cold pervaded the roomâcame, and was gone in an instant. Mrs. Winchester shuddered with an intense icy feeling. She looked up, âHow curiously cold it has got all in a minute,â she said. âWe are having a taste of poor Williamâs Polar weather,â she said with a smile. At that moment, she instinctively glanced towards his portrait. When she saw struck her dumb. A rush of blood, at fever heart, dispelled the numbing influence of the chill breath that she seemed to freeze her. The lamp was lighted; but it was only that she might read with comfort, for the violet twilight was still so full of sunset that the room was not dark. However, as she looked at the picture, she saw it had undergone a strange change. She saw it as plainly as possible. It was no delusion, coined for the eye by the brain. In the place of Mr. Winchesterâs head, a grinning skull! She started at it hard; but it was no tick of fancy. She could see the hollow orbits, the gleaming teeth, the fleshless cheekbonesâit was the head of death! Without saying a word, she rose from her chair and walked straight up to the painting. As she drew nearer a sort of mist seemed to pass before it; and as she stood close to it, she saw only the face of Mr. Winchester. The spectral skull had vanished. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
âPoor William!â she said unconsciously. The butler Robert looked up. The tone of her voice had alarmed him, the expression on her face did not reassure him. âWhat do you mean? Have you heard anything, Mrs. Winchester? She came over to him, laying her hands on his arm, and looked into his face sadly. âNo, my dear; how should I hear? Only I could not help thinking of the privation and discomfort he must have gone through. I was remaindered of it by the cold. âCold!â said Robert, who had left the window by this time. âCold! what on Earth are you talking about? Cold, such an evening as this! You must have had a touch of ague, I should think.â Mrs. Winchester felt it bitterly cold for a minute or two. âDid you not feel it, Robert?â âNot for a bit; and I was three parts out of the window I ought to have felt it if anyone did.â It was curious, but that strange chill ad been felt only in the room. It was not the night wind, but some supernatural breath connected with the dread apparition she has seen. It was, indeed, the chill of polar winterâthe icy shadow of the frozen North. It was a hot evening and Mrs. Winchester seemed to have caught a violent cold, for she was shivering very much. Mrs. Winchester, felling unwell, had gone to bed. The next day Mrs. Winchester was well again, and did not mentioned the events of the preceding night. However, from that day on she was ever inwardly dreading the arrival of bad news. And at last, it came as expected. The newspaper said there had been a âFatal Accident to one of the Officers of the USS Jeannette.â It stated that news had been received at Admiralty stating that the expedition had failed to find the missing crew, but had come upon some traces of them. Want of stores and necessaries had compelled them to turn back without following those traces up; but the commander was anxious, as soon as the ship could be refitted, to go out and take up the trail where he left it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
An unfortunate accident had deprived him of one of his most promising officers, Lieutenant Winchester, who was precipitated from an iceberg and killed while out shooting with the commander. He was beloved by all, and his death had flung a gloom over the gallant little troop of explorers. There stood Mrs. Winchester, with her face as pale as death, with her lips apart, and with a blind look about her eyes. The doctor was sent for, and restorative were promptly administered. Mrs. Winchester came to herself again, but lay dangerously ill for some weeks from the shock. It was about a month after she was well enough to come downstairs again. One afternoon shortly after, there came a loud knock at the front door. As Mrs. Winchester looked up at Mr. Winchesterâs portrait, puzzling who could it be at the door, she would not figure out if she was dreaming or awake? One hand on the picture used to be resting on a shotgun, but now the forefinger was raised, as if in warning. She looked hard at the picture, to assure herself it was no fancy, and then she perceived, standing out bright and distinct on the pale face, two large drops, as if of blood. She walked up to it, expecting the appearance to vanish, as the skull had done. It did not vanish. It was surely blood. When the butler opened the door, George came in. He was greatly altered. He was thinner and paler than ever; hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked. He had acquired a strange stoop, too, and his eyes had lost the crafty look for a look of terror, like that of a haunted beast. He kept glancing sideways every instant, as if unconsciously. It looked as if he heard someone behind him. Mrs. Winchester never had liked that man. She told him of course she was glad to see him back, but that she could not ask him to continue to visit her. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
Mrs. Winchester was glad to hear the particulars of poor Williamâs death. He related with reluctance, how they had gone out to shoot a white bear which they had seen on an iceberg stranded along the shore. The top of the berg was ridged like the roof of a house, sloping down on one side to the edge of a tremendous overhanging precipice. They had scrambled along the ridge in order to get nearer the game when Mr. Winchester incautiously ventured on the sloping side. The surface was as smooth and slippery as glass with oil on it. He tried to turn back, but slipped and fell. And then began a horrible scene. But his fate was sealed; and he could only tell George to bring his last farewell to his wife! He clung to the edge of the precipice instinctively for one second, and was gone. However, there was something always at Georgeâs side, which none could see, but which cast a shadow. As they were talking, Mr. Winchesters portrait had fallen, and the corner of the heavy frame had struck him on the head, cutting it open, and rendering him insensible. The staff had carried him upstairs, by the direction of the doctor. He was laid down in the guest room. George was delirious. The doctor said it was a queer case; for, though the blow was a sever one, it was hardly enough to account for the symptoms of brain-fever. When he learnt that George had just retuned in the Jeannette from the North, he said it was possible that the privation and hardship had told on his constitution and sown the seeds of the malady. They sent for a nurse, who was to sit up with him, by the doctorâs directions. In the middle of the night, Mrs. Winchester was roused by a loud scream. She slipped on her slippers and bed coat, and rushed out to find the nurse, who explained the mystery to her. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
It appears that about midnight, George sat up in bed, and began to talk. And he said such terrible things that the nurse became alarmed. Nor was she much reassured when she became aware that the light of her single candle flung what seemed to be two shadows of the sick man on the wall. Terrified beyond measure, she saw George siting up in bed, gazing at the unseen figure to which the shadow belonged. Â Mrs. Winchester was now in the nurseâs company. In a voice that trembled with emotion, George begged the haunting spirit to leave him, and prayed for its forgiveness. âYou know the crime was no premeditated. It was a sudden temptation of the devil that make me shoot you twice. It was the devil tempting me with the recollection of her exquisite faceâof the tender love that might have been mine, but for you. Bu she will not listen to me. See, she turned away from me, as if she knew I was your murderer, William Winchester!â Mrs. Winchester was horrified to hear this awful confession. However, George had risen in his delirious terror, opened the window, and leaped out. Two days later his body was found in the river. In 1884, Mrs. Winchester left New Haven, Connecticut, and the graves of her husband and only child, moved to San Jose, California, and began the obsession that was to las for the rest of her life. She purchased an eighteen-room farmhouse outside the small agricultural town, and for the next 38 years, the sound of construction on Mrs. Winchesterâs house never stopped. Mrs. Winchester hired carpenters to work around the clock building and rebuilding room after room, as the spiritsâor her moodâdirected. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
Some say the construction had actually started much earlier and went on for centuries, in fact. It is the cobwebs that finally tip some off; and the ancient dust on the cobwebs. Stretched out in this mansion is an entityâit is impossible to tell at a glance whether it is a man or a god, or perhaps something else. The entity seems to be of the masculine persuasion, is of medium height and has medium brown hair flecked with gray. The being sometimes sits on the couch in the parlor, opens his eyes, blinks rapidly several times, then vanishes. The Winchester house was furnished with the finest materials and was a showcase of Victorian elegance and taste. The homes of the gods are bigger, more beautiful, more awe-inspiring. However, no one can say with this is so, since any god can build a house of any size and get any interior decorator one wants. Some says the real architect was William Writ Winchester, reaching out from beyond the grave and building a wedding present for his wife. It just seems to be a quality of the major gods to have an air that is godlier than the less godly air of the minor gods. The house represents the spirit of something entirely new, a new principle, a new life, a new set of values. It gave Mrs. Winchester a feeling of gratitude for the unbending nature of things, which does not demand that we obsess constantly over what is to happen next, but merely put one foot in front of the other until something numinous takes place. Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor: Lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor. Atte ye induynge of ye holy vestures. In the mystery of these vestures of the Holy Ones, I gird up my power in the girdles of righteousness and truth in the power of the Most High: Ancor: Amacor: Amides: Theodonias: Anitor: let be mighty power my power: let it endure for ever: in the power of Adonai, to whom the praise and the glory shall be; whose end cannot be. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Winchester Mystery House
Winchester Mystery House presents 30 Nights of All Hallows’ Eve – our all new Halloween event for Fall 2021! Tickets for All Hallows’ Eve offer multiple estate wide activities including the Lost in the House Tour – a paranormal investigation adventure and the family-friendly Jack O’ Lantern Trail. All Hallowsâ Eve offers something for everyone on select nights starting September 10th.
đ» Frightening Lost in the House Tour
đ Family Friendly Lighted Displays on the Jack O’ Lantern Trail
đż Fall themed food & drinks
đ Lost in the House Projection Show using the front of the mansion as a canvas!
and more! https://www.instagram.com/p/CR6y_fFN78M/
For more information and for tickets:
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle đ»
đ winchestermysteryhouse.com
Randolph Harris II International Institute 