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May the Father of Compassion Have Mercy Upon a People Who He Lovingly Tended!
As long as you are curious, you defeat age. Experience is what enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. Out everything into final perspective. You live and work in this century, but the judgment, Final Appraisal, of who you truly are will come at the end of time. Yes, you will stand before the Judge of Judges, as Paul promised the Romans (14.10), you and everyone else who has lived on the face of the Earth. Look smart. This judge cannot be hoodwinked—that is what Job found out (31.14). He cannot be softened up with a bribe. He knows a bad alibi when He hears one. All He has to do is render a just verdict, and He can do that in no time flat. O thrice miserable and thoroughly insipid sinner, just what do you think you are doing? What will you respond to the God who knows no tremble, but all of your evil? You will turn jelly, that is what you will do. Why now, you start to shiver and to shake when someone just makes a face at you! On the Day of Judgment, you will need to bring papers, proof of all the stuff you did. Why? Well, you will have to defend yourself; no defense counsel here. Each defendant will be presented with a detailed indictment. Examine it closely. Not an error on the list! All that is the indefinite future. Today your labour can bear fruit, plums and pomegranates. Your spiritual pain can bear fruit too, elephant tears, waterfalls of sorrows. Fortunately, they can be considered purgative and, happily, in an amount equal to your guilt. Purgatory is a lot like the life of a patient self-actualized person on Earth. One bears up under the terrible weight of injustice. One worries more about the human who hit one in the mush than the bloody nose one sustained. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
One prays for the contrarians who always seem to be buzzing about. One indulges the bad behaviour of others; and yet one is slow to seek indulgence for one’s own shortcomings. One is quicker o pardon a mugger than the mugger to pummel one. Such violence as one may engage in is directed only toward oneself as one vainly tries to whip one’s flesh into spiritual submission. Purge your sins, exercise your vices—that is the message of Purgatory. And better now than later, in the hairy hands of another. One more thing, and I wish it were not so, but in all of this there is just one continuing and complicating factor. It is that flaming love we have for the flesh! What else will that Fire of fires devour but your sins? As for now, you make a serious mistake when you spare yourself the spiritual rigors. Follow the flesh, an easier path now, but it is the harder one down the line. In fact, keep going as you are, and you will just be piling up the kindling for your own pyre. However, fire is not the only grief. Each sin has its own particular punishment. The Lazy will be pricked with pointy tips. The Gluttonous will be choked with the glutinous. The Lustful will burn like pitch and stink like sulfur. And for their own particular grief, the Envious will be set to how like rabid dogs at midnight. In Hell ever vice will have its own excruciating punishment. For example, the Prideful will be flustered with confusion. The Greedy will be bent over like famine victims. One hour in this hellhole will produce more pain than a hundred years of penitential practice. There, there is no rest for the Wicked, no consolation for the Condemned. At least here on Earth, there is some respite from the spiritual rigors—one does not have to fast forever—and some consolation from one’s spiritual friends. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
The Day of Judgment is approaching at a gallop. So now is the time to look to your life. Do daily sorrow for your sins, and the Blessed above will greet you at the terminus of time. As the Great Solomon said in his book of Wisdom, “The just will stand in great constancy against those who pinned them down” and oppressed them (5.1). At the Final Bar you who subject yourselves to the judgments of Humankind will be able to stand up and look the Final Judge in the eye. Then the Poor and the Humble will come into new boldness, and the Proud will face fear for the first time. In Heaven everything will be turned upside down. The one who gave up everything to follow Christ—a dreadful mistake in the eyes of the World, as Paul found out, to his own discomfort, and passed the word on in his First Letter to the Corinthians (4.10)—will be considered wise. The one who endured every trail and tribulation will be pleasantly surprised when one is called patient. As the Psalmist has sung, “Every iniquity will be nailed to the wall once and for all” (107.42). Every religious person will rejoice, and every irreligious person will recoil. The cheeks of those who have never shown cheek to others will have a Heavenly glow. Modest designs will become the rage, and designer raiment will be left on the rack. The pauper’s hovel will attract visitors while weeds will overrun the magnate’s manse. Patience will overpower Force. Obedience will outwit Cunning. In Heaven there will be many rewards. Clear conscience will rejoice over Learned Philosophy. Contempt of Riches will weigh in over Earthly Goods. Devout Prayer will be more consoling than Delicious Food. Guarded Silence will out-talk Excessive Conversation. Holy Works will have more value than Pretty Words. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Strict Life and Hard Penance will be more than a match for Silkness and Softness. School yourself in how to suffer a little now so that you will know how to suffer a lot later on. Practice now what you will have to put into practice then. If you can sustain so little pain in your regular spiritual regiment now, how will you be able to suffer eternal torments then? If just a handful of penitential practices gives you the hives now, what will Gehenna do? Face up to it. You just cannot have two joys. Either regale yourself in this World, or rule with Christ in the next. Pick one. Suppose you lived every day up to your hip, up to you lip even, in honors and pleasures. If you dropped dead this instant, what good would they do you? Not a whit! That is why I say, everything is vanity, except to love God and serve Him alone. However, what good do love and service do? Well, you who love God from your whole heart have nothing to fear, neither death nor punishment nor judgment nor Hell. That is why perfect love makes so much sense; that is to say, it makes access to God a sure thing. Summing it up, then, love alone should be enough to call you back from the brink of spiritual disaster; but if it is not, then fear of Gehenna should do the trick. What is the trick? To stay good for as long as you can. Sad to say, whoever postpones one’s commitment to God will not have the strength to stay god for very long. What then? No matter which way the traipses through the forest, or so Paul wrote in his First Letter to Timothy (6.9), one will not be able to outstep the Devi’s outlandish snares. The principle of agriculture was known long before its practice was established, and it is hardly possible that humans, constantly preoccupied with deriving their subsistence from trees and plants, did not rather quickly get the idea of the methods used by nature to grow plant life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
However, their industry probably did not turn in that direction until very late either because trees, which, along with hunting and fishing, provided their nourishment, had no need of their care; or for want of the means of preventing others from appropriating the fruits of their labor. Having become more industrious, it is believable that, with shape stones and pointed stick, they began by cultivating some vegetables or roots around their huts long before they knew how to prepare wheat and had the tools necessary for large-scale cultivation. Moreover, to devote oneself to that occupation and to sow the lands, one must be resolved to lose something at first in order to gain a great deal later: a precaution quite far removed from the mind of the savage human, who, as I had said, finds it quite difficult to give thought in the morning to what one will need at night. The invention of the other arts was therefore necessary to force the human race to apply itself to that of agriculture. Once humans were needed in order to smelt and forge the iron, other humans were needed in order to feed them. The more the number of workers increased, the fewer hands there were to obtain food for the common subsistence, without there being fewer mouths to consumer it; and since some needed foodstuffs in exchange for their iron, the others finally found the secret of using iron to multiply foodstuffs. From this there arouse farming and agriculture on the one hand, and the art of working metals and multiplying their uses, on the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
From the cultivation of land, there necessarily followed the division of land; and from property once recognized, the first rules of justice. For in order to render everyone what is ones, it is necessary that everyone can have something. Moreover, as humans began to look toward the future and as they say that they all had goods to lose, there was not one of them who did not have to fear reprisals against oneself for wrongs one might do to another. This origin is all the more natural as it is impossible to conceive of the idea of property arising from anything but manual labor, for it is not clear what humans can add, beyond their own labor, in order to appropriate things one has not made. It is labor alone that, in giving the cultivator a right to the product of the soil one has tilled, consequently gives one this right, at least until the harvest, and thus from year to year. With his right, at least until the harvest, and thus from year to year. With this possession continuing uninterrupted, it is easily transformed into property. When the ancients, says Grotius, gave Ceres the epithet of legislatrix, gave the name Thesmophories to a festival celebrated in her honour, they thereby made it apparent that the division of lands has produced a new kind of right: namely, the right of property, different from that which results from the natural law. If talents had been equal, and if the use of iron and consumption of foodstuffs had already been in precise balance, things in this state could have remained equal. However, this proportion, which was not maintained by anything, was soon broken. The strongest did the most work; the most adroit turned theirs to better advantage; the most ingenious found ways to shorten their labor. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
The farmer had a greater need for iron, or the blacksmith had a greater deal while the other barely had enough to live. Thus inequality occasioned by the socialization process. Thus it is that the differences among humans, developed by those of circumstances, make themselves more noticeable, more permanent in heir effects, and begin to influence the fate of private individuals in the same proportion. With things having reached this point, it is easy to imagine the rest. I will not stop to describe the successive invention of the arts, the progress of languages, the testing and use of talents, the inequality of fortunes, the use or abuse of wealth, nor all the details that follow these and that everyone can easily supply. I will limit myself exclusively to taking a look at the human race placed in this new order of things. Thus we find here all our faculties developed, memory and imagination in play, egocentrism looking out for its interests, reason rendered active, and the mind having nearly reached the limit of the perfection of which it is capable. We find here all the natural qualities put into action, the rank and fate of each human established not only on the basis of the quantity of goods and the power to serve or harm, but also on the basis of mind, beauty, strength or skill, on the basis of merit or talent. And since these qualities were the only ones that could attract consideration, one was soon forced to have or affect them. It was necessary, for one’s advantage, to show oneself to be something became two completely different things; and from this distinction there arose grand ostentation, deceptive cunning, and all the vices that follow in their wake. On the other hand, although humans had previously been free and independent, we find them, so to speak, subject, by virtue of multitude of fresh needs, to all of nature and particularly to one’s fellow humans, whose salve in a sense one becomes even in becoming their master; rich, one needs their service; poor, one needs their help; and being midway between wealth and poverty dose not put one in a position to get along without them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
It is therefore necessary for one to seek incessantly to interest them in one’s fate and to make them find their own profit, in fact or in appearance, in working for one’s. This makes one two-faced and crooked with some, imperious and harsh with others, and puts one in the position of having to abuse everyone one needs when one cannot make them fear them and does not find in it one’s interests to be of useful service to them. Finally, consuming ambition, the zeal of raising the relative level of one’s fortune, less out of real need than in order to put oneself above others, inspires in all humans a wicked tendency to hard one another, a secret jealousy all the more dangerous because, in order to strike its blow in greater safety, it often wears the mask of benevolence; in short, competition and rivalry on the one hand, opposition of interest[s] on the other, and always the hidden desire to profit at the expense of someone else. All these ills are the first effect of property and the inseparable offshoot of incipient inequality. Both secure and insecure people may be tormented, sad, full of doubt and anguish and uncertainties. This is not what distinguishes ontologically secure people from others. Being secure does not mean being happy, only being secure. There are three kinds of danger which characteristically beset the insecure. First the danger of engulfment—I may be taken over and swept away by someone of something. Second the danger of implosion—I may be invaded and impinged upon and totally filled with whatever they put into me when I am empty. In reaction to these dangers, I may withdraw, which leads to the third danger, which is the danger of depersonalization—I may feel that nothing and no one is real anymore: “This is not happening to the ‘me’ that matters.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
I may begin to thing of my “real” self as inviolable—no one can reach it. I may tell myself that whatever I am being forced to do, whatever roles they feel I must play, this is not happening to my real self. And indeed this is so—ontologically insecure people are not consenting to what they are saying or doing. Their true self is hidden away. Their behaviour and their bodies are being coerced, but somewhere is a “me” that is not involving itself. This is the “unembodied self.” It I as though the person said, “I must keep in mind that this is not happening to me, only to my body; it does not touch the real me.” Instead of being the core of his or her true self, the body is felt as the core of a false self which a detached, disembodies “inner,” “true” self looks on at with tenderness, amusement of hatred as the case may be. However, this divorce of role from self destroys the integrity of the personality. We shall suggest that it was on the basis of one’s exquisite vulnerability that the unreal human became so adept at self-concealment. One learnt to cry when one was amused, and to smile when one was sad. One frowned one’s approval, and applauded one’s displeasure. “All that you see is not me” one says to oneself. However, only in and through all that we do see can one be anyone (in reality). If these actions are not one’s real self, one is irreal: wholly symbolical and equivocal. One is a purely virtual, potential, imaginary person, a “mythical” human, nothing “really.” If, then, one stops pretending to be what one is not, and steps out as the person one has come to be, one emerges as Christ, or as a ghost, but not as a human: by existing with no body, one is no-body. “Here are people constantly reminding themselves “This is not happened to the essential me,” “This does not touch the real me,” “What they say and do to me does not really matter,” “This is a dream.” What is happening to that part of the person which the person does experience as “me”? What does “touch me”? The answer is, nothing from the senses touches “me”. That part of the person has retreated from the World of ideas. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
However, the sense of self started with body-imagery, which, if all goes well, is refined and structured and in various ways continually confirmed by messages from the sensory World. If, now, there is a constant inhibition of messages from the sense which would confirm that the World exists, then the body-image, the self-image, and they very self are inevitably weakened. The experience of being connected with the body will be weakened and confused. However, the body-imagery has been connected with the sense of well-being from the early days on, when all well-being was physical, and so the sense of well-being is dissipated. Moreover, even when good things are happening (regular breathing, good digestion, regular heartbreak, the soft touch of clothes, the good taste of food), the effect does not enhance well-being as it would do in a less divided self. As the science of medicine becomes more reverent, it will bring the spirit to the healing of the body in addition to its medicine. Life on Earth is so short, so beset by dangers of many kinds, so exposed to our own ignorance and Nature’s indifference, that we cannot afford to turn our eyes away as to the Christian Scientists from the discoveries and knowledge of humans who have devoted their years to patient sacrifice and research for the alleviation of human sickness. It is usually wise to consult a physician, wiser still to consult a specialist. Why reject the knowledge they have accumulated, the experience they have gained? However, blindly to follow their advice is quite another matter. Here a critical judgment is needed, for medicine is immensely far from being the perfect science that mathematic is. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
So long as orthodox medicine fails to recognize the mental or emotional origin of so many cases of sickness, so long will its cures be temporary and incomplete. Ever drawing us toward Itself, Its power to attract block by the layers of thoughts, emotions, desires, and passions which compose the personal self, much time and many lives are needed to unblock a passage to the soul. Follow the self’s track within, not slipping down into its muddy bogs but ascending up to its diviner sources. Is it possible to recapture these wonderful sensations? Long intervals of aridity may inspire a negative answer to this question, but adequate knowledge of the laws at work and the mental process involved inspire a beneficial one. Know Consciousness without its objects—and you are free! If one is willing to take the training of one’s mind seriously in hand one can, either during or at the end of one’s course, live again in such experiences. In that condition of passive emotions and paralysed thoughts, consciousness can receive That which otherwise shuts it out. When one retreats to one’s center, one has retreated to the point where the Glimpse of truth may be had. An event, a book or a person, a piece of music or a piece of landscape may bring the mind to brief spiritual consciousness. The evanescence of all these glimpses is saddening to most of us, but the causes once understood, the remedy is at hand. It is harder to find amid the din of city streets, and when found, easier to lose in the press of thronging crowds. Believe in the higher Self and look up to it. Sometimes one word may flash a light into one’s mind which goes far and wide. At other times a short phrase may do the same work for one. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
One realizes that one has had an important experience which will be followed at intervals by others, when one stands on the fringe of cosmic consciousness. Through proper metaphysical study, meditation practice, and philosophic action, it will not be difficult for one to come into the awareness of one’s own Overself to some extent, although it is difficult to acquire full consciousness in the present age, when the opposition of a materialistic society is so strong and intense. However, even to enjoy a fraction of this wider consciousness is to transform one’s life in every way. Look back into imagination upon those wonderful glimpses and try to recapture the feeling they produced. Just as the lotus flower opens its buds bit by bit, so should one open one’s mind to this great truth. It becoming conscious of the not-thinking hinterground of my personality, I attain true being. When its thinking faculty is put out of gear in the proper way, what peace fills the mind! What ever-remembered moments of illumination this happening produce! Eating food of a special kind or sitting in an isolated cave cannot of itself make anyone spiritually minded. However, it can lessen the number of obstacles in the way of anyone who seeks to become spiritually minded. The sensitive and humane person who does not pause to consider one’s guilt in life’s matters have let oneself take the easy conscience-drowning way, partly because it is the popular way and partly because one is duped by a science and religion which are blindly playing the ego’s game. The road to truth ought to be persuasive education, and not vehement propaganda. The cause for it ought to be presented temperately and prudently, not aggressively and fanatically. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Here we are, God—a planet at prayer. Please attuned our spirits that we may hear your harmonies and bow before your creative power, that we may face out violent discords and join with your Energy to make heard in every heart your hymn of peace. Here we are, God—a militarized planet. Transformed our fears that we may transform our war fields into wheatfields, arms into handshakes, missiles into messengers of peace. Here we are, God—a polluted planet. Please purify our vision that we may perceive ways to purify our beloved lands, cleanse our precious waters, de-smog our life-giving air. Here we are God—an exploited Planet. Please heal our hearts, that we may respect our resources, hold priceless our people, and provide for our starving children an abundance of daily bread. May the Father of compassion have mercy upon a people who He lovingly tended. May He remember the covenant with the patriarchs; may He deliver us from evil times, curb the evil inclinations in the people whom He has tenderly protected, and graciously grant us enduring deliverance. May He abundantly fulfill out desires and grant us salvation and mercy. May His Kingdom soon be revealed and made visible unto us, and may He be gracious unto our remnant and unto the remnant of His people, the house of America, granting them grace, kindness, mercy and favour; and let us say, Amen. Let us all ascribe greatness unto our God, and render honour to the Scriptures. Blessed be He who is His holiness gave the Scriptures to His people America. And you who cleave unto the Lord your God, are alive everyone of you this day. Bless the Lord who is to be praised. Praised be the Lord who is blessed for all eternity. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
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Plumas Lake, CA |
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Invite Him in and Ask Him What Took Him so Long—The Tea Has Been Getting Cold!
Even in the darkest glimmers of despair, there is what we call truth. But what if the glimmers of light is something to which the rest of the World is blind? Sooner than you think, Death will come to call. While you can, look over your shoulder to see how you have been doing. Terrible tigers one day, dust kittens the next! Do look at First Maccabees (2.63). Whenever a Devout is out of eyesight, one is out of mind-set. Oh, the blobbiness and blabbiness of the human heart! It meditates only on the present and makes no provision for the future! In everything you think and do, you ought to conduct yourself as though you were going to die tomorrow. If you have a god conscience, there is not much to fear. Hide, yes, but not from Death; it is your sins you should take cover from. However, what if there is no tomorrow and you are not ready today? And in the unlikely event that there is a tomorrow, what then? A long life is good to have, but how does it compare to a changed life? Let me put it another way. Is there really a connection between length of life and amount of change for the better? Often just the opposite is true. The longer you live, the more guilt you rack up. One day—just imagine one day—of your life devoted to spiritual change! If you could find just one such day in your life, you would be better off than the rest of Humankind. Many self-actualized reflect on the fact that year have passed since their conversion. However, I would contest that what they underwent so long ago was a real conversion. Why? The fruit of that change is barely visible to the unassisted eye today. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
A short life has its fears, but a long life has its dangers. Always keep before your eyes the hour of your own death, and daily prepare yourself for the moment of death. That would please Jesus son of Sirach (7.36). Do this, and happiness will be yours. Often you have been present when a self-actualized dies. Just drink that scene in, in the full knowledge that you will soon be making this very same journey. Jesus son of Sirach promised that (38.22), and, of course, he too has fulfilled his own promise. When morning comes, think to yourself that night will never come. When nigh falls, dare no to promise yourself another dawn. Hold yourself in readiness, as the Gospel of Luke urges (21.36), and do not miss a beat. Why? We all know people who have died before they said a prayer or changed their life. When Death knocks, surprise him. Invite him in and ask what took him so long—the tea has been getting cold. Physical death is the separation of the spirit from the mortal body. The Fall of Adam brought physical death into the World. “And he said unto them: Because that Adam fell, we are; and by his fall came death; and we are made partakers of misery and woe,” reports Moses 6.48. Yes, there will be a knock at the door. And yes, the Son of Man will come as surely as Death. Problem is, we still do not know when to put the kettle on. Death is an essential part of Heavenly Father’s plan of salvation. “For as death hath passed upon all men, to fulfill the merciful plan of the great Creator, there must needs be a power of resurrection, and the resurrection must needs come unto man by reason of the fall; and the fall came by reason of transgression; and because man became fallen, they were cut off from the presence of the Lord,” reports 2 Nephi 9.6. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
How happy and prudent is the person whose life is lived up to one’s eulogy! What steps did one take to attain such perfection? Complete contempt for the World and everything in it. Fervent desire to make spiritual progress. Love of discipline. Labour of penitence. Promptness of obedience. Abnegation of self. Bearing up under every adversity for the love of Christ. Having become expert in all these virtues, one can feel confident that one will die a good death. However, for many, the life of the sing Jewel may be floating around in their subconscious. “Who will save your souls? After all those lies that you told. Now, who will save your souls, if you don’t say your own?” (Who Will Save Your Soul, song by Jewel). When the physical body dies, the spirit continues to live. In the spirit World, the spirits of the righteous “are received into a state of happiness, which is called paradise, a state of rest, a state of peace, where they shall rest from all their troubles and from all care, and sorrow,” reports Alma 40.12. A place called spirit prison is reserved for “those who [have] died in their sins, without knowledge of the truth, or in transgression, having rejected the prophets,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 138.32. The Spirits in prison are “taught faith in God, repentance from sin, vicarious baptism for the remission of sins, the gift of the Holy Ghost by laying on of hands, and all other principles of the gospel that [are] necessary for them to know,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 138.33-34. If they accept the principles of the gospel, repent of their sins, and accept the ordinances performed in their behalf in temples, they will be welcomed into paradise. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
While you have your health, you can do many good things. However, once sickness comes, I do not know what you will be able to do. Few are able to turn sickness to their spiritual advantage. Or so I have been able to observe. As for those poor pilgrims who think that making the rounds of all the Martyr’s shrines will improve their own chances at death, they are just deluding themselves. Friends and neighbours are nice, but do not put your confidence in them for long, and certainly do not expect them to stand in for you at Final Bar. Why? Because they will forget you more quickly than you had guess. Now is the time for you to do something about it. Do provide for yourself, and do set aside a bit of the good for the future. Worry about yourself, yes, and do it now. Why? Who will worry about you in the future? The present moment is precious, as the Apostle Paul said in his Second Letter to the Corinthians. Now is “the day of salvation; now, the perfect time” (6.2). Oh, what an outrage it is! You live your life without a plan. You fill your day with indifferent acts. Do not you realize what is at stake? It is your eternal life. Just one day more, just one hour more, to change your life for the better—that is what you will petition the Almighty for sometime soon, someday soon. And what you want to know from me today is whether your request will be honoured. Well, I really do not know. Just the thought of death is paralyzing, dearest friend, and there is nothing your can do about it. All you can do is build up your strength, your spiritual strength—that is what you will need in the Final Hour. Then you will rejoice, not recoil, at the thought of death. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Now is the time, when you have got your physical strength, to stop living with the World and start living with Jesus Christ—that was Paul’s advice to the Romans (6.8), to condemn everything in the World and forge ahead for Christ. To face death with confidence, you must commit your creaking corpus to a grueling program of penance. Ahh, what a Dummkopf! You think you will live a long life when you do not know if you can survive till the end of the day! Lots of people have had the same thought, but now they are no longer with us, swept off the face of the Earth before they had a chance at a second thought. How many have died recently—is not that often the subject of casual conversation? This one has been stabbed; that one has been drowned. So-and-so has had a great fall and broke his thick neck. What’s-his-name has choked to death on his dinner. You-know-who began his game, but someone else had to finish it. Fire, war, plague robbery—killers all! So it may be said, and it is true in several senses, death is the end of all of us. Did we really need the Ancient Preacher in Ecclesiastes (7.20) to tell us this? What is after all? It is like a cloud formed by the wind into a Puff, sang the Psalmist (144.4), and yet by the very same wind wheezed away in all directions. Death will surely come, but who will remember you after death? And who will pray for you? Do it, dear soul; just do it now. You do not know when you will die. And when you do drop dead, you do not know what will happen right after. Once you have made the time, gather around you only immortal riches, or so the Gospel of Luke exhorted (12.33). Think of nothing else but your own salvation. Take care only for thing things of God. Also use the time you have left to make some new friends for yourself: the Saint of God. Venerate them and imitate their lives. Then, when it is time to leave your wretched hut, as Luke would say (16.9), “They will welcome you into their tents.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
While you are on this Earth, abandon your citizenship, but preserve your status as a wanderer who knows no home but a hostel. That is how the First Letter of the Apostle Peter summed it up (2.11). Pay no attention o the commerce of this World. Keep your affections unencumbered and always raised to God. Why? You know why. You do not have here a lasting dwelling place, warned the Letter to the Hebrews (13.14). To that Heavenly Domicile, then, direct your daily prayers and tearful practices. If you do not, what will happen to your spirit after death? One thing is sure. It will not deserve to pass happily through to the Lord. Amen. To say that God “is a particular Thing” does seem to obliterate the immeasurable difference not only between what He is and what all other things are but between the very mode of His existence and theirs. I must at once restore the balance by insisting that derivative things, from atoms to archangels, hardly attain to existence at all in comparison with their Creator. Their principle of existence is not in themselves. You can distinguish what they are from the fact that they are. The definition of them can be understood and a clear idea of them formed without even knowing whether they are. Existence is an “opaque” addition to the idea of them. However, with God it is no so: if we fully understood what God is we should see that there is no questions whether He is. It would always have been impossible that He should not exist. He is the opaque center of all existences, the thing that simply and entirely is, the fountain of facthood. And yet, now that He has created, there is a sense in which we must say that He is a particular Thing and even one Thing among others. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
To say this is not to lessen the immeasurable difference between Him and them. On the contrary, it is to recognize God an absolute perfection of being creative. He is so brim-full of existence that He can give existence away, can cause things to be, and to be really other than Himself, can make it untrue to say that He is everything. It is clear that there never was a time when nothing existed; otherwise nothing would exist now. However, to exist means to be an absolute Something, to have (metaphorically) a certain shape or structure, to be this and not that. The Thing which always existed, namely God, has therefore always had His own absolute character. Throughout all eternity certain statements about Him would have been true and others false. And from the mere fact of our own existence and Nature’s we already know to some extent which are witch. We know that He invents, acts, creates. After that there can be no ground for assuming in advance that He does not do miracles. Why, then, do mystic talk of Him as they do, and why are many people prepared in advance to maintain that, whatever else God may be, He is not the concrete, living, willing, and acting God of Christian theology? I think the reason is as follows. Let us suppose s mystical limpet, a self-actualized among limpets, who (rapt in vision) catches a glimpse of what Man is like. In reporting it to his disciples, who have some vision themselves (though less than he) he will have to use many negatives. He will have to tell them that Man has no shell, is not attached to a rock, is not surrounded by water. And his disciples, having a little vision of their own to help them, do get some idea of Man. However, then there come erudite limpets, limpets who write histories of philosophy and give lectures on comparative religion, and who have never had any vision of their own. What they get out of the prophetic limpet’s words is simply and solely the negatives. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
From these, uncorrected by any positive insight, they build up a picture of Man as a sort of amorphous jelly (he has no shell) existing nowhere in particular (he is not attached to a rock) and never taking nourishment (there is no water to drift it towards him). And having a traditional reverence for Man they conclude that to be a famished jelly in a dimensionless void is the supreme mode of existence, and reject as crude, materialistic superstition any doctrine which would attribute to Man a definite shape, a structure, and organs. Our own situation is much like that of the erudite limpets. Great prophets and saints have an intuition of God which is absolute and concrete in the highest degree. Because, just touching the fringes of His being, they have seen that He is plenitude of life and energy and joy, therefore (and for no other reason) they have to pronounce that He transcends those limitations which we call personality, passion, change, materiality, and the like. The absolute quality in Him which repels these limitations is their only ground for all the negatives. However, when we come limping after and try to construct an intellectual or “enlightened” religion, we take over these negatives (infinite, immaterial, impassible, immutable, et cetera) and use them unchecked by any absolute intuition. At each step we have to strip off from our idea of God some human attribute. However, the only real reason for stripping off the human attribute is to make room for putting in some absolute divine attribute. In St. Paul’s language, the purpose of all this unclothing is not that our idea of God should reach nakedness but that it should be re-clothed. However, unhappily we have no means of doing the re-clothing. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
When we have removed from our idea of God some puny human characteristic, we (as merely erudite or intelligent enquirers) have no resources from which to supply that blindingly real and concrete attribute of Deity which ought to replace it. Thus at each step in the process of refinement our idea of God contains less, and the fatal picture come in (an endless, silent sea, an empty sky beyond all stars, a dome of white radiance) and we reach at last mere zero and worship a nonentity. And the understanding, left to itself, can hardly help following this path. That is why the Christian statement that only He who does the will of the Father will ever know the true doctrine is philosophically accurate. Imagination may help a little: but in the moral life, and (still more) in the devotional life we touch something concrete which will at once begin to correct the growing emptiness of our idea of God. One moment even of feeble contrition or blurred thankfulness will, at least in some degree, head us off from the abyss of abstraction. It is Reason herself which teaches us not to rely on Reason only in this matter. For Reason knows that she cannot work without materials. When it becomes clear that you cannot find out by reasoning whether the cat is in the linen-cupboard, it is Reason herself who whispers, “Go and look.” This is not my job: it is a matter for the senses.” So here. The materials for correcting out abstract conception of God cannot be supplied by Reason: she will be the first to tell you to go and to try experience—“Oh, taste and see!” #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
For of course she will have already pointed out that your present position is absurd. As long as we remain Erudite Limpets we are forgetting that if no one had ever seen more of God than we, we should have no reason even to believe Him immaterial, immutable, impassible, and all the rest of it. Even that negative knowledge which seems to us so enlightened is only a relic left over from the absolute knowledge of better human—only the pattern which that Heavenly wave left on the sand when it retreated. The human understanding, from is peculiar nature easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds. People readily see correlations or cause-effect links where there are none. Thus they all too readily make sense out of nonsense, by believing that astrological predictions predict the future, that their favourite gambling strategies can defy the laws of chance, or that superstitious rituals bring good luck. So consistent is our human tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our judgments that some researchers refer to this phenomenon as “cognitive conceit.” For example, if people’s answers to a factual question—such as, “Which is longer, the Panama or the Suez Canal?”—as 60 percent of the time correct, they will typically feel 75 percent sure. Even when they feel 100 percent sure, they still err about 15 percent of the time on such questions. The available evidence indicates that they overconfidence phenomenon extents to scientists as they evaluate their own theories, to clinicians as they diagnose their psychology troubled client, and to theologians as they expound their doctrines. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Some humans become attached to particular sciences and contemplations, either from supposing themselves the authors and inventors of them, or from having bestowed the greatest pains upon such subjects, and thus become most habituated to them. Coal, rail, textile, steel, auto, rubber, machine tool manufacture—these were the classical industries of the Second Wave. Based on essential simple electromechanical principles, they used high energy inputs, spat out enormous waste and pollution, and were characterized by long production runs, low skill requirements, repetitive work, standardized goods, and heavily centralized controls. From the mid-1950’s it became increasingly apparent that these industries were backward and waning in the industrial nations. In the United States of America, for example, while the labour force grew by 21 percent between 1965 and 1974, textile employment rose by only 6 percent and employment in iron and steel actually dropped 10 percent. A similar pattern was evident in Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Japan, and other Second Wave nations. As these old-fashion industries began to be transferred to so-called “developing” countries, where labour was less expensive and technology no as advanced, their social influence also began to die out and a set of dynamic new industries shot up to take their place. These new industries differed markedly from their predecessors in several respects: they were no longer primarily electrotechnical and no longer based on the classic science of the Second Wave era. Instead, they rose from accelerating breakthroughs in a mix of scientific disciplines that were rudimentary or even nonexistent as recently as twenty-five years ago-quantum electronics, information theory, molecular biology, oceanics, nucleonics, ecology, and the space sciences. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
And they made it possible for us t reach beyond the grosser features of time and space, with which Second Wave industry concerned itself, to manipulate, as Russian physicist B. G. Kunetsov has noted, “very small spatial regions (say, of the radius of an atomic nucleus, id est, 10^-13 centimeters) and temporal interval of the order of 10^-23 seconds.” It is from these new sciences and our radically enhanced manipulative abilities that the new industries arose—computers and data processing, aerospace, sophisticated petrochemicals, semiconductors, advanced communications, and scores of other. In the United States of America, where this shift from Second Wave to Third Wave technologies began earliest—sometimes in the mid-1950’s—old regions like Merrimack Valley in New England sank into that statues of depressed areas while places like Route 128 outside Boston of “Silicon Valley” in California zoomed into prominence, their suburban homes filled with specialists in solid-state physics, systems engineering, artificial intelligence, or polymer chemistry. Moreover, one could track the transfer of jobs and affluence as they followed the transfer of technology, so that the so-called “sun-belt” states, fed by heavy defense contracts, built an advanced technological base while the older industrial regions in the Northeast and around the Great Lakes plunged into lassitude and near-bankruptcy. The long running financial crisis of New York City was a clear reflection of this technological upheaval. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
So, too, was the stagnation of Lorraine, France’s center of steelmaking. And so, at yet another level, was the failure of British socialism. Thus, at the end of World War II the Labour government spoke of seizing the “commanding heights” of industry and did so. However, the commanding heights it nationalized turned out to be coal, rail, and steel—precisely those industries being by-passed by the technological revolution: yesterday’s commanding heights. Regions or sectors of the economy based on Third Wave industries boomed; those based on Second Wave industries languished. However, the changeover has hardly begun. Today many governments are consciously seeking to accelerate this structural shift while reducing the pains of transition. Japanese planners in MITI—the Ministry of International Trade and Industry—are studying new technologies to support the service industries of the future. German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and his advisers speak of strukturpolitik and look to the European Investment Bank to facilitate the move out of traditional mass production industries. Today, four clusters of related industries are poised for major growth and are likely to become the backbone industries of the Third Wave era, brining with them, once more, major shifts in economic power and in social and political alignments. Electronics and computers clearly form one such interrelated cluster. The electronics industry, a relative newcomer on the World scene, reached a value of nearly $1,097.7 billion, and now accounts for more than $1261165 million in sales per year, and is expected to grow by 6 percent, and will reach $1731053 million in 2025. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The largest industries in the World are Telecommunications, automobile manufacturing, oil and gas, food industry, and information technology. The speed with which computers have spread is so well known it hardly needs elaboration. Costs have dropped so sharply and capacity has risen so spectacularly that, according to Computerworld magazine, “If the auto industry had done what the computer industry has done in the last 30 years, a Rolls-Royce would cost $2.50 and get 2,000,000 miles to the gallon.” Today, inexpensive mini-computers are invading the American home. In recent years, media players for digital signage have gone from bulky devices to pieces of equipment that can fit into the palm of your hand. As technology has evolved, smaller devices are now incredibly capable and power-efficient. They can fit into compact spaces, mobile applications and offer comprehensive, reliable connectivity for remote management. Every home now has a computer and most people walk around with mini computers in their pockets or on their arms. Computers are as standard as toilets. Linked to banks, stores, government office, to neighbours’ homes, workplace, cars and human beings, such computers are reshaping not only business, from production to retailing, health and beauty, but the very nature of work and, indeed, even the structure of the family. Like the computer industry to which it is umbilically tied, the electronic industry has also been exploding, and consumers have been deluged with hand-held music players, mini computers, watch computers, and TV screen games. These, however, provide only the palest hint of what lies in store to take over: tiny, inexpensive climate and soil sensors in agriculture; infinitesimal medical devices built into ordinary clothing to monitor heartbeat or stress levels of the wearer—these and a multitude of other applications of electronics are just starting to lurk into the present. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The advance of Third Wave industries, moreover, is being radically accelerated by the energy crisis, inasmuch as many of them carry us toward processes and products that are miserly in their energy requirements. Second Wave telephone systems, for example, require virtual copper mines beneath the city streets—endless miles of snaking cable, conduit, relays, and switches. We have now converted to fiber optic systems that use hair-thin light carrying fibers to convey messages and wireless technology. The energy implications of this switchover have been staggering: it takes about one thousandth the energy to manufacture optical fiber that it took to dig, smelt, and process an equivalent length of copper wire. The same ton of coal required to produced 90 miles of copper wire can turn out 80,000 miles of fiber. At the height of his career, the pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla became obsessed with an idea. He theorized that electricity could be transmitted wirelessly through the air at long distances—either through a series of strategically positioned towers, or hopping across a system of suspended balloons. Things did not go to plan, and Tesla’s ambitions for a wireless global electricity supply were never realized. However, the theory itself was not disproved: it would have simply required an extraordinary amount of power, much of which would have been wasted. Now, research has suggested that the architects of the 5G network may have unwittingly built what Tesla did not manage to construct at the turn of the twentieth century: a “wireless power grid” that could be adapted to charge or power small devices embedded in cars, homes workplaces and factories. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Because 5G relies upon a dense network of masts and a powerful series of antenna, it is possible that the same infrastructure, with some adjustments, could beam power to small devices. However, the transmission will still suffer from the key drawback of Tesla’s towers: high energy wastage, which may be difficult to justify given the urgency of the climate crisis. The shift to solid-state physics in electronics moves in the same direction, each step forward producing component that require smaller and smaller inputs of energy. This characteristic of the electronic revolution suggests that one of the most powerful conservation strategies for energy-starved high-technology economies may well be the rapid substitution of low-energy Third Wave industries for energy-wasting Second Wave industries. More generally, the World’s economic activity has been substantially altered by the electronics explosion. Indeed, reality is outstripping fiction in the rate of introduction of new and often unexpected applications of electronics. The electronics explosion has only been one step in the direction of an entirely new techno-sphere. We all at times fall into the habit of speaking of suburbia as if it is a relatively homogeneous area. That is, a place of beautiful free-standing single family homes with emerald green lawns where everyone is a professional, middle-class or more affluent, and has children. We of course know better; we are aware that there are rich suburbs and poor suburbs, estate suburbs and garden apartment suburbs, residential suburbs and industrial park suburbs. Still we keep the standard image of a convenient shorthand and tend to forget that some suburbs vary widely from the norm. There is a remarkable range of types of suburbs. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
In terms of income, suburbs range from very rich, such as Kenilworth, Illinois, outside Chicago, where the income per capita (not family income, but per person income) is $104,301, with a median homes value of $1,000,000, and Bloomfield, Michigan, outside Detroit, the median income per capita in the township is $89,205, and the median house price is $533,635, to the poorest of suburbs, such as Ford Heights, Illinois, outside Chicago, where the per capita income is $12,217 and median home value is $80,200, or Cudahy, California, outside Los Angeles, where the per capita income is $14,385, but the median homes price is $532,834. In addition to the above income category, we can differentiate suburbs in a number of fashions. Suburbs can, in addition to socioeconomic status of income, education, and occupation, be differentiated by age, ethnicity, race, and function. In categorizing suburbs we can contrast older versus newer, growing versus stagnant, ethnic versus WASP, and incorporated versus unincorporated. The fact is, suburban settlements are so diverse that no single typology adequately encompasses all suburban types. One of the most used postwar typologies is between those suburbs that essentially serve as bedroom communities (residential suburbs) and those have primarily a manufacturing, trade, or business function (employment suburbs). Mixed-usage suburbs, combining the characteristics of the other two, can also be delineated. There are clear differences among these three categories of suburbs in terms of age of residents, ethnic composition, fertility rates, population growth, socioeconomic status, and housing characteristics. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Systematically there are difference in social and economic characteristics in each type of suburban community. Employment suburbs contain higher proportions of both foreign born and non-European American inhabitants than do residential suburbs, with mixed suburbs in the middle. Socioeconomic status, as measured by percentage having completed high school, percentage in white-collar occupations, and median income level, was highest in the residential suburbs. The mixed suburb was in the middle, and the employment suburbs were lowest. Residential suburbs as a group also had faster growth rate than employment suburbs. Other systems of categories have also been developed. Within the general category of residential suburbs, the pollster Louis Harris classified suburbs in for categories on the basis of income level and the rate of growth. The categories are: First, affluent bedroom: Affluent bedroom communities include such places as New Canaan, Connecticut; Leawood, Kansas; and Irving, California. They come closet to the traditional stereotype of a suburb. Such places rank at the top in terms of resident income levels, degree of home ownership, and proportion of residents employed as professionals and managers. Second, affluent settled: Affluent settled communities such as Oak Park, Illinois; Cherry Hill, New Jersey; and Fairfield, Connecticut are past their period of growth and may even be losing population. Since their land is developed, they are beyond the building-boom stage, and some may have considerable older housing. The housing stock is in good repair, and the neighbourhoods are comfortable. Affluent settled communities tend to have a wider range of economic activities and to be more self-sufficient and les purely residential than affluent bedrooms suburbs. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Third, low-income: Low-income, growing suburbs are often the home of upwardly mobile white-collar and blue-collar workers. These communities, such as El Monte, California; Sylvania, Ohio; and Millerica, Massachusetts are much less likely to fit the stereotype of suburbia. Forth, low-income stagnant: Low-income stagnant suburbs are places that are suburbs by definition but do not at all fit the suburban stereotype. Places such as East Orange, New Jersey; McKeesport, Pennsylvania; and Joliet, Illinois are essentially satellite cities rather than suburbs, and they have the full range of economic activities associated with central cities. In 2021, we would probably make some additions to the above list, such as the mixed, nonresidential and residential out-city suburbs that combine office parks, shopping malls, and residential neighbourhooods. However, whatever typology or categories are used, the important thing to note is that there are predictable patters of variations. Suburban growth is not as random or chaotic as it is often portrayed. Persistent and systematic differences exist. Suburban growth, in spite of its bas press, is not haphazard. Infinite Spirit, when I pray each day for shelter for those without homes, let me not ignore the pet without a home; as I ask protection for those in areas of turmoil and unrest, let me not forget endangered species of life; when I pray that the hungry be fed, please let me be mindful that all God’s creatures have need of sustenance; as I ask Divine assistance for those afflicted by fire, flood, earthquake, storm or drought, please let me remember that this included every living thing. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
In seeking miracle cures for human disease, may I also speak for the well-being of the planet itself. Please let the word of my mouth, the meditations of my heart and the actions of my life be as one, that I may live each day in harmony with Mother Earth. Amen. May God’s great name be blessed forever and ever. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises; hymns and blessings that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. If we want to hear the voice of the Overself, we have to create a quiet all around us and all within us and we have to listen and go on listening with patience. To enjoy a glimpse it is better to be alone, undisturbed, and undistracted, better to be with nature than with people, better to be among the woods and lakes and mountains than in the offices, the drawing rooms, and the factories of society. Some, like the poet Keats, find Truth through beauty while others, like the poet Dante, find it through suffering. That is a valuable meditation which, whether at odd moments or for fixed periods, return again and again to dwell on the nature of the Overself and disregards all lesser topics. Such frequent remembrances and such fixed meditations become indeed a kind of communion and are usually rewarded sooner or later by the glimpse. The contemplation in memory of those glimpses will help one to weaken the power of negative thoughts to weaken, however slightly, the very source of those thoughts, the ego. One must look ardently forward to, and eagerly await, each time when the Overself takes over more and more. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
The Lightening-flash may occur either after reason reaches the peak of its performance and has been exhausted, or by deliberately abandoning intellectual activity for the utmost faith and devotion. In both cases, one has to let go and sink back into the Nothing and stop furher efforts on one’s own. Sometimes, by destiny the Lightning-flash can occur unexpectedly when no effort is made. Accept my prayer, O Lord, and please answer me with Thy great mercy and with Thy great mercy and with Thy saving truth. Amen. And it came to pass that when the Ark moved forward, Moses said: Rise up, O Lord, and let Thine enemies be scattered; and let them that hate Thee flee before Thee. For out of Zion shall go forth the Torah, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. Blessed be He who, in His holiness, gave the Torah to His people of American. Extol the Lord with me, and together let us exalt His name. Thine, O Lord, is the greatness and the power, the glory, the victory and the majesty; for al that is in Heaven and on the Earth is Thine. Thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and Thou art exalted supreme above all. Exalt the Lord our God, and worship at His footstool; holy is He. Exalt the Lord our God, and worship at his holy mountain for the Lord our God is holy. If one can come to this belief in the reality of one’s own higher self, one can come into all the knowledge one needs, all the help one needs, by heeding its guidance (felt intuitively) and by applying its injunctions to one’s daily life. If the ego would be willing to abdicate its rule for a short period, the way to a glimpse would be opened. The paradox is perfect: when one is most empty of petty ends, the shinning glimpse reveals itself. The Universe is such a vast and mysterious labyrinth that those who choose to explore its depths may end up lost there forever. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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The same qualities that make most of us unique also prevent us from changing who we are, even if it might be a change for the better. It is sometimes said that to be more creative, one should try to see the World without preconceptions, as if through the eyes of a child. Any one-year-old child has no trouble turning a metal bowl and a wooden spoon into a rock star’s drum. However, as we get older, knowledge and experience increasingly displace imagination and our ability to see an object for anything other than its original purpose. This is called functional fixedness and while you may not need to build a drum set during your professional career, chances are you do suffer from it and it is impacting your work. Many of us suffer from Functional fixedness. When I was young, I used to sometimes watch the trendy situational comedy Friends. The show was based on young, successful, attractive singles, who were roommates, living in a hip and swinging apartment in New York City. So, it made me believe that is what life in the city would be like and made me think living in a mid-level rise or high-rise building in the city would be cool and I would meet young, attractive people. However, my experience has been anything but that. Living in an apartment house in the city has been a horrible experience. The people are old, unattractive, means, and down right evil. They also smell awful, so bad that it makes people sick. And it nothing like living in the city. It is more like living in a small town in the country side that is not deemed to be very sophisticated. The nearby stores are also expensive, and have a limited selection. So this experience makes me want to move to a beautiful community like Cresleigh Ranch. Where the people are friendly and attractive and care about their reputation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Functional fixedness is a well-known cognitive bias. Companies often struggle to develop breakthrough products because they are hobbled by Functional Fixedness. Technologists, engineers, and designers not only have their own expertise, they have their own way of applying their expertise. Ironically, the more success they have had with their approach to a solution, the harder it is to imagine a different one. If you suspect your Research and Development team will get upset at anything that challenges their abilities, consider setting up a Functional Fixedness SWAT team—a trained group of innovators who embrace the idea of collaborating with solution providers outside their industry specialty. This will allow the Research and Development team to become more creative and please and attract new clients and revenue, instead of being an unfriendly, impenetrable fortress of know-it-alls who are stagnate in their careers and cognitive functions. Functional fixedness is just one of the mental blocks that prevent insight. Here is an example of another: A $20 bill is placed on a table and a stack of objects is balanced precariously on top of the bill. How can the bill be removed without touching or moving the object? A good answer is to split the bill on one of its edges. Gently pulling from opposite ends will tear the bill in half and remove in without topping the objects. Many people fail to see this solution because they have learned not to destroy money. Notice again the impact of placing something in a category, in this case, “things of value” (which should not be destroyed). The list that follows identifies other common mental blocks and fixations that can hinder problem solving. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Emotional barriers: inhibition and fear of making a fool of oneself, fear of making a mistake, inability to tolerate ambiguity, excessive self-criticism. Example: An architect is afraid to try an unconventional design of adding a turret and a stained-glass window to the blue prints of a new house scheduled for development because he fears that other architects will think it is frivolous. However, many buyers are looking to get some aspects of Victorian culture in their homes, which is why farmhouse designs are becoming so popular. Cultural barriers: values that hold that fantasy is a waste of time; that playfulness is for children only; that reason, logic, and numbers are good; that feelings, intuitions, pleasure, and humour are bad or have no value in the serious business of problem solving. Example: A corporate manager wants to solve a business problem but becomes stern and angry when members of his marketing team joke playfully about possible solutions. Being too strict can stifle, but playing around and joking too much can be disruptive and waste a firm’s time and money. Learned barriers: conventions about uses (functional fixedness), meanings, possibilities, taboos. Example: A cook does not have any clean mixing bowls and fails to see that one could use a frying pan as a bowl. Being a cook, it is important to find solutions to problems on demand. The restaurant industry is a fast pace business and customers expect perfection for the high prices of the food they are paying for. Perception barriers: habits leading to a failure to identify important elements of a problem. Example: A beginning artist concentrates on drawing a vase of flowers without seeing the “empty” spaces around the vase are part of the composition, too. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Being an artist requires one to be visual and open to new interpretations. To pay attention to light, dark, textures, lines, and be creative. Much of what we know about thinking comes from direct studies of how people solve problems. Yet, surprisingly, much can also be learned from machines. Computerized problem solving provides a fascinating “laboratory” for testing ideas about how you and I think. Church sermons sometimes have surprisingly little impact. When the people from twelve churches were interviewed at home shortly before and after they heard sermons opposing racial bigotry and injustice, it was found that during the second interview, only ten percent recalled reading anything about racial prejudice or discrimination even though the material had been presented. When the remaining 90 percent were asked directly whether their minister “talked about prejudice or discrimination in the last couple of weeks,” more than 30 percent denied hearing such a sermon. So it is hardly surprising that the sermons had little impact on racial attitudes! However, there are certain requirements that have to be met for an effect sermon. For a sermon to be effect, one has to make sure the worshipper is paying attention. Then it must be clear that the worshipper comprehends the message, which is why audience participation is advised. Many teachers ask questions to the audience to get feedback. The questions are usually things others need clarity on as well. Also, it is important to make sure your audience believes your message, or you are jus wasting your time. They have already made their decision. If the audience believes your message, it is important they remember it. This is why many lecturers provide colourful examples so people are better able to relate to the stories and keep them in mind. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Furthermore, if instruction is to be useful, the worshippers have to follow through and amend their behaviour accordingly to be an example for others to follow and show you that they are practicing these doctrines. And of course, actions speak louder than words. For example, you should not have to verbally reassure someone you love them, your actions should make that clear. Love is no real definition of love, but you can behave in a way to show someone you deeply care about them. This is why many women love when their husbands buy them flowers, diamonds, cars, clothes or compliment them on their new hairstyle, dress or the cuisine they prepared. When you stop to think about it, the preacher has so many hurdles to surmount that it is no wonder preaching so often fails to affect our actions. The preacher must deliver a message that not only gets out attention but it is understandable, persuasive, memorable, and likely to compel action. After all, does it not make you suspicious when someone says, “I’m sorry,” or “I love you”? Because it means they did something wrong or are about to do something wrong. If a person is really sorry, they will repent from the upsetting or deviant behaviour and make a gesture to show remorse. Nonetheless, our concern here is neither theological content nor oratorical style, but with how to create and receive a memorable, persuasive message. What factors make for effective communication? How might ministers apply these factors in the construction of more potent messages? For that matter, how might any of us who teach, speak, or write do so with greatest effects? Finally, what can we ordinary people to receive an extraordinary benefit from what we hear and read? #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Well, vivid, concrete examples are more potent than abstract information. Human judgements and attitudes are often swayed by specific illustrations than by abstract assertions of general truth. Research studies show that a few good testimonials usually have more impact than statistically summarized data from dozens of people. A single vivid welfare case has more impact on opinions about welfare recipients than does factual information running contrary to the case. Another study finds that student impressions of potential teachers were influenced more by a few personal testimonies concerning the teacher than by a comprehensive statistical summary of many students’ evaluations. No experienced writer will be surprised by this principle. As William Strunk and E.B. White asserted in their classic, The Elements of Style, “If those who have studied the art of writing are in accord on any one point, it is on this: the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete. The greatest writers—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare—are effective largely because they deal in particulars.” Preachers and teachers should do the same, and so should we listeners, by conjuring up our own examples when the speaker begins to get abstract. However, a sermon is never just a string of unrelated examples; the preacher aims to communicate a basic point. We might say that theological truth is to a good sermon what the base of an iceberg is to its tip. Jesus’ vivid parables, for example, embodied basic truths in memorable pictures. And what pastor has not received compliments from adults for a simple but concrete children’s sermon? The children may not have grasped the analogy, but the adults understood and remembered it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
This illustrates the power of principle number one: vivid, concrete examples are more potent than abstract information. Messages that relate to what people already know or have experienced are more easily remembered. Public-speaking experts have long supposed this to be true. Aristotle urged speakers to adapt the message to their audiences. Experimental psychologists have confirmed the point: messages that are unrelated to people’s existing ideas or experience are difficult to comprehend and are quickly forgotten. The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different groups. Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. After the procedure is completed, one arranges the materials into different groups again. Then they can be put into their proper places. Eventually they will be used once more and the whole cycle will then have to be repeated. However, that is part of life. The statement above may not be what you think it is about. It is actually about laundry. If you knew it was about laundry, it might be easier to remember because it is something most people are familiar with. If you reread it, you will probably understand it better. A message that is hooked to some cue—something we will think about or experience again—is more likely to come to mind in the future. When the cue pops up, it may call to mind the message associated with it. For example, one memorable sermon likened American religion to waiting-room Muzak—bland and soothing. A year after this “sound of Muzak” sermon was preached, we found ourselves eating dinner in a room with music softly playing in the background. Someone noticed the music—and recalled the sermon. This illustrates principle number two: messages that relate to what people already know or have experienced are most easily remembered. Spaced repetition assists memory. If the repetitions are spaced over time rather than grouped together, as every student of human learning knows well, we remember information much better. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
The experimental psychologist Lynn Hasher found that repeated information is also more credible. When statements such as “The largest museum in the World is the Louvre in Paris” were repeatedly presented, people rated them as more likely to be turn when the statements had been presented infrequently. Social psychologists have uncovered a parallel phenomenon: repeated presentation of a neutral stimulus—whether a human face, a Chinese character, or a piece of unfamiliar music—generally increases people’s liking of it. Speakers can capitalize on this finding that repetition, especially spaced repetition, makes messages more memorable and appealing. When preparing a talk or sermon they might ask themselves, What do I most want people to remember from this? They can then repeat that one key idea many times. (We suspect that a little informal testing of parishioners’ recall would reveal that few people can recall the main points of the last three-point sermon they heard.) Given the limitations of human memory, a sermon should probably be the embodiment of only one vigorous idea. Perhaps this could even be taken a step further: that idea should be embodies in the whole worship service—the Scriptures, music, prayers, and closing charge to the congregation. A parishioners we should look for a unifying theme, or at least identify one idea in every service that is significant for us. Sometimes the key idea can be captured in a single statement or pithy saying that becomes the trunk of a talk or sermon, unifying the illustrative branches that grow from it. What listener can forget the refrain in Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” sermon? Principle number three therefore bears repeating: space repetition assists retention. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Active listening assists memory and facilitates attitude change. People remember information best when they have actively processed it—that is, when they have put it in their own words. Experiments reveal that when we read or hear something that prompts a thought of our own, we will often more readily remember our thought than the information that prompted it. Not only do we better remember information we produce ourselves but our attitudes are also more likely to be changed by that information. Social psychologists have found that passive exposure to information, through reading or listening, has less effect on people’s attitudes than information they get through active participation in a group discussion. Other research confirms that when we learn something passively our attitudes toward it usually do no change much. When we are stimulated into restating information in our own terms, we are much more likely to remember and be persuaded by it. Preachers, teachers, and even parents may fail to recognize that their spoken words are more prominent to them (as active speakers) than to their passive listeners. Parents are often amazed at their children’s capacity to ignore them. If instead of constant harping, the parent gently asks the child to restate the request (“Leo, what did I ask you to do?”), the child’s act of verbalizing the request will make the child more aware of it. Mr. Rogers, the television friend of preschoolers, applies this principle by asking a question and then saying nothing for a few moments, allowing children to answer themselves. Preachers would be well advised to do likewise, pausing after giving an instruction or raising a thought-provoking question. As listeners we can discipline ourselves to listen actively. Taking notes on a sermon, as any serious student does in class, forces us to repeat and restate its main points. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
So does discussing it with someone else. No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression—this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget. Therefore, anticipate that active listening assists memory and facilitates attitude change. Attitudes and beliefs are shaped by action. If social psychological research has established anything, it is, as we emphasize that our actions influence our attitudes. Every time we act, we amplify the idea lying behind what we have done, especially when we feel responsibility for having committed the act. It seems that we are as likely to believe in what we have stood up for as to stand up for what we believe Moreover, this principle is paralleled by the biblical idea that growth in faith is a consequence as well as a source of obedient action. The implication of his “attitudes follow actions” principle is clear: a message is most likely to stimulate faith if it calls forth a specific action. The effective talk or sermon will not leave people wondering what to do with it. It will suggest specific actions, or it will stimulate listeners to form their own place of actions. “How will ‘Love your neighbour’ affect you?” the speaker might ask. “Who are you going to phone or visit this week?” In the twenty-one months Joseph Smith had possessed the golden plates, no one expect Joseph Smith had seen them. They were kept wrapped in a cloth when not in use. When Joseph translated, he sat behind a curtain which prevented others from seeing them. God was not yet ready for others to see the precious book. This was a great responsibility for Joseph, because others had to believe the things he said and could not see for themselves. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
However, the Lord had promised Joseph that he was not to be the only one to see them, that three others should be shown the wonderful plates. Joseph was anxious to share his wonderful secret. Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris desired to be the three people who were to see the plates. They asked Joseph to pray to God about this. After Joseph prayed earnestly o God, a revelation came to these three men telling them that is they had faith they should see the golden plates, the breastplate, the Urim and Thummin, the sword of Laban, and the Liahona or compass. The Lord said: “After you have obtained faith, and have seen them with your eyes, you shall testify of them, by the power of God; and this you shall do…that I may bring about my righteous purposes unto the children of men, in this work. Ye shall testify that ye have seen them, even as my servant Joseph Smith, Jr., has seen them, for it is by my power that he has seen them, and it is because he had faith. And he has translated the book, even that part which I have commanded him, and as your Lord and your God liveth, it is true.” A few days after this revelation was received in June, 1829, Joseph, Oliver, David, and Martin were out in the woods discussing this revelation and praying that God would show them the plates. Joseph prayed first. Then each man turned and prayed; but there was only silence in the stillness of the forest. Joseph prayed again, followed by each of the other men. When God did not answer their prayers, Martin Harris blamed himself, think he was not good enough, and that he was keeping them from having their prayers answered. He went away to pray by himself. After Martin Harris left, Joseph and Oliver and David knelt and prayed again. While they were thus praying, a very bright light appeared in the air and rested upon them, extending all around them. It was not like the light of the sun, nor the light of fire, but was more glorious and beautiful. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
An Angel stood before them in this light, and there appeared a table on which were many plates as well as the golden plates from which Joseph had translated. Beside the plates were the Urim and Thummim, the breastplate, the sword of Laban, and Liahona, or compass. The Angel turned the pages of the golden book one by one so the three men could see the engravings. The men were allowed to handle the plates, to feel them as well as to see them, so they would know for sure they real. Then a voice came from out of the bright light above them, saying, “These plates have been revealed by the power of God, and they have been translated by the power of God. The translation of them which you have seen is correct, and I command you to bear record of wat you now see and hear.” When the Angel, the precious thing, and the bright light had disappeared, Joseph went to find Martin Harris to tell him of the wonderful vision they had seen. He found him in another part of the woods praying. Joseph knelt with him and together they prayed that Martin Harris might be the third witness to share the vision. As they were praying, the same bright light came to them as it has to Joseph, Oliver, and David. The Angel showed Martin Harris the golden plates and other precious things, just as he had shown them to others. The four men then went back to the Whitmer home and told the family what had happened. All rejoiced in their wonderful experience. They knew they must make a record of it so that all people might know. They carefully wrote their story. Briefly the words of the “Testimony of the Three Witnesses” are these: “Be it known to all nations and people to whom this work shall come, that we, through the power of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, have seen the plates which contain this record. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
“We know they have been translated by the gift and power of God, for his voice has told us so. Wherefore, we know for sure that this work is true. We also testify that we have seen the engravings which are on the plates. They were shown to us by the power of God and not of man. We declare that an Angel of the Lord came down from Heaven and brought and laid them before our eyes, and we saw the plates and the engravings on them. We know that it is by the power of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, that we saw and we make a record that these things are true. It is marvelous to us, and to be obedient to the commandments of God, we bear testimony of these things. We know that is we are faithful in Christ, we shall dwell with him forever in the Heavens, and the honour be to the Father, and to the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.” Then Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris signed their names to the document. Never in all their lives, even in times of great trouble, did they every deny their testimony. At the time of their deaths, when they were old men, they still told all who would listen the wonderful story of how the Angel visited them and showed them the golden plates. These three men were not the only witnesses who were to see the golden plates. The Lord told Joseph Smith that others were to be permitted to see them. A few days later when several men were meeting together, Joseph showed them the golden plates. They saw them as Joseph turned the pages, leaf by leaf, showing them the writings in the strange language. They were permitted to touch and handle them. There were eight men in this group. They did not see the Angel nor the other things which had been shown to the first three witnesses, but they knew they must bear record of the things they saw. They carefully wrote their story, and the “Testimony of the Eight Witnesses” briefly is this: “Be it known unto all nations and people unto whom this work, has shown to us the plates, which have the appearance of gold. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
“As many of the pages as he translated we did handle with our hands and saw the engravings thereon. We bear record that we have seen and lifted and know for sure that Joseph Smith has the plates of which we have spoken. We give our names to witness unto the World that we have seen, and we lie not, God bearing witness of it.” These eight men then signed their names to the document: four Whitmer brothers, Peter, Christian, Jacob, John; two brother of Joseph Smith, Hyrum and Samuel; Joseph’s father, Joseph Smith, Sr..; an a man named Hyrum Page. The book printed from the translation was called the “Book of Mormon” because Mormon was the man who had prepared the plates many hundreds of years before. The complete testimonies of the “three witnesses” and the “eight witnesses” have been printed in every copy of the Bool of Mormon that has ever been printed. Nearly every man over the age of twenty years who had anything to do with helping in the Lord’s work of translating the golden plates saw and handled the plates. Throughout their lives they testified to the truth of the work. Not one of these men every denied that he had seen the golden plates. Several of these men had not yet been baptized. This had been a wonderful experience as they worked closely with God, and those who had not yet made their promise to God in the waters of baptism did so within the next few months. At every point Christianity has to correct the natural expectations of the Pantheist and offer something more difficult, just as Schrodinger has to correct Democritus. At every moment he has to multiply distinctions and rule out false analogies. One has to substitute the mapping of something that has a beneficial, concrete, and highly articulated character for the formless generalities in which Pantheism is at home. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Indeed, after the discussion has been going on for some tie, the Pantheists is apt to change one’s ground and where one before accused us childish naivety now to blame us for the pedantic complexity of our “cold Christs and tangled Trinities.” And we may well sympathise with him. Christianity, faced with popular “religion” is continuously troublesome. To the large well-meant statements of “religion” it finds itself forced to replay again and again, “Well, not quite like that,” or “I should hardly put it that way.” Thus troublesomeness does not of course prove it to be true; but if it were true it would be bound to have this troublesomeness. The real musician is simply troublesome to person who wishes to indulge in untaught “musical appreciation”; the real historian is similarly a nuisance when we want to romance about “the old days” or “the ancient Greeks and Romans.” The ascertained nature of any real thing is always at first a nuisance to our natural fantasies—a wretched, pedantic, logic-chopping intruder upon a conversation which was getting on famously without it. But “religion” also claims to base itself on experience. The experiences of mystics (that ill-defined but popular class) are held to indicate that God is the God of “religion” rather than of Christianity; that He—or It—is not a concrete Bing but “being in general” about which nothing can be truly asserted. To everything which we try to say about Him, the mystics tend to reply, “Not thus.” What all these negatives of the mystics really mean I shall consider in a moment: but I must first point out why it seems to be impossible that they should be true in the sense popularly understood. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
It will be agreed that, however they come there, concrete, individual, determinate things do now exist: things like flamingoes, German generals, lovers, sandwiches, pineapples, comets and kangaroos. These are not ere principles or generalities or theorems, but things—facts—real, resistant existences. One might even say opaque existences, in the sense that each contains something which our intelligence cannot completely digest. In so far as they illustrate general laws it can digest them: but then they are never mere illustrations. Above and beyond that there is in each of them the “opaque” brute fact of existence, the fact that it is actually there and is itself. Now this opaque fact, this concreteness, is not in the least accounted for by the laws of Nature or even by the laws of thought. Every law can be reduced to the form “If A, then B.” Laws give us only a Universe of “Ifs and Ands”: not this Universe which actually exists. What we know through laws and general principles is a series of connections must be given something to connect; a torrent of opaque actualities must be fed into the pattern. If God created the World, then He is precisely the source of this torrent, and it alone gives our truest principles anything to be true about. However, if God is the ultimate source of all concrete, individual things in the highest degree. Unless the origin of all others thing were itself concrete and individual, nothing else could be so; for there is no conceivable means whereby what is abstract or general could itself produce concrete reality. Book-keeping needs something else (namely, real money put into the account) and metre need something else (real words, fed into it by a poet) before any income or any poem can exit. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
If anything is to exist at all, then the Original Thing must be, not a principle nor a generality, much less an “ideal” or a “value,” but an utterly concrete fact. Probably no thinking person would, in so many words, deny that God is concrete and individual. However, not all thinking people, and certainly not all who believe in “religion,” keep this truth steadily before their mind. We must beware of paying God ill-judged “metaphysical compliment.” We say that God is “infinite.” In the sense that His knowledge and power extend no to some things but to all, this is true. However, if by using the word “infinite” we encourage ourselves to think of Him as a formless “everything” about whom nothing in particular and everything in general is true, then it would be better to drop that word altogether. Let us dare to say that God is a particular Thing. Once He was the only Thing: but He is creative, He made other things to be. He is not those other things. He is not “universal being”: if He were there would be no creatures, for a generality can make nothing. He is “absolute being”—or rather the Absolute Being—in the sense that He alone exists in His own right. However, there are things which God is not. In that sense He has determinate character. Thus He is righteous, not a-moral; creative, not inert. The Hebrew writings here observe an admirable balance. Once God says simple I AM, proclaiming the mystery of self-existence. However, times without number He says, “I am the Lord”—I, the ultimate Fact, have this determinate character, and not that. And humans are exhorted to “know the Lord,” to discover and experience this particular character. The error which I am here trying to correct is one of the most sincere and respectable errors in the World; I have sympathy enough with it to feel shocked at the language I have been drive to use in say the opposite view, which I believe to be the true one. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
In countless writings the prophets of the Lord have been trying to teach us that throughout time and all eternity the most important organization is the family. A loving Father in Heaven organized His church here on the Earth as a means of teaching families how to be eternally happy. We know that none of us can receive the fulfillment of true happiness except at a member of an eternal family. We also know, or should know, that the success we experience in our homes as families, is going to have a most significant effect on the eternal happiness of each of us. Happiness in the life hereafter is geared to our learning and living celestial laws while we are here on the Earth. This being so, then our great need is to establish in our homes an atmosphere that will encourage the learning and living of the teachings of the Saviour. Satan knows that He can cause unhappiness in our homes if he can bring about disunity, discontent, disharmony, and a host of other spiritual illness. By this insidious process He has gained no small measure of success in His plan to lead astray the children of our Father in Heaven. For instance, He knows that if He can cause parents to quarrel with each other, their children may well follow the example. He knows that if parents show little respect for each other, so will their children. He knows that children mirror the actions of their parents. One of Satan’s most effective tools is at work among us today—it is a destroyer of happiness, peace, contentment, family solidarity. Families are stumbling and falling because of is hobbling and crippling effect. This tool of Satan is called the contention. The word contention means: to argue, to bring discord or strife, to dispute, to quarrel. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Now, sone will say, “This is our way of life—everybody is doing it.” Lest we think these acts are not serious and are just our way of life, to be accepted and lived with, let us hear the word of the Lord as expressed by an ancient prophet. “And according as I have commanded you thus hall ye baptize. And there shall be no disputations among you, as there have hitherto been; neither shall there by disputations among you concerning the points of my doctrine, as there have hitherto been. For verily, verily I say uno you, one that hath the spirit of contention is not of me, but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, and He stirreth up the hearts of humans to content with anger, one with another. Behold, his is not my doctrine, to stir up the hearts of humans with anger, one against another,” reports 3 Nephi 11.28-30. It does not take great faith to believe in something that never fails. God has never failed. Lack of understanding of many confused people is due to our own unconscious unwillingness to understand them (and ourselves), and they are confused due to the divided self because we need them (and us) confused. People have identities. However, they may also change quite remarkably as they become different others to others. It is arbitrary to regard any of these functions or “alter” actions as basic and the others as variations. Not only may people behave quite differently in their different alterations, but they may experience themselves in different ways. They are liable to remember different things, express different attitudes, even quite discordant ones, imagine and phantasize in different ways, and so on. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
This a theory of natural splits. It maintains that people will feel they have integrity and identity, provided first that they are not under pressure to be wildly different in different role-relationships, and second that each role-relation is fairly consistent from day to day. Overall, both city dwellers and suburbanites tend to overemphasize the differences between them. Actually, when one controls for income and other social-status variables, there is little difference between the city and country cousins. There is little that makes suburbanites stand out from other similar-status persons. When one looks at similar populations in city and suburb, their ways of life are remarkably alike…The crucial difference between cities and suburbs, then, is that they are often home for different kinds of people. If one is to understand their behaviour, these differences are much more important than whether they reside inside or outside the city limits…if populations and residential areas were described by age and class characteristics, and by racial, ethnic, and religious ones, our understanding of human settlements would be much improved. The truth is that those living in the suburbs are not all that different from city dwellers with similar backgrounds. In many respects suburbs have been maligned by being portrayed as a monochromatic landscape of beautiful boxes holding look-alike middle-class and upper-middle class families. Suburbs now house nearly 60 percent of the American population, and this population is remarkably complex in terms of age, family status, income, ethnicity, and race. Individual suburbs, as is true with urban neighbourhoods, are often homogenous, but suburbia as a whole is diverse. There is a mosaic of all ages, lifestyles, races, cultures, educational and political backgrounds. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
In discussing suburbs and suburbanites, it is important to remember their complexity as well as their commonalities. Not everyone would agree with the portrait of suburbs presented in the statement above. More negative view of suburban life, and especially suburban family life by critics such as M.P. Baumgartner. In a social-anthropological examination of an upper-middle-class commuter suburb of 16,000 outside New York, she describes a community that appears to it Riseman’s, and others’, criticism of suburbia. Baumgartner argues that the pattern she found in the community can be generalized to suburbia elsewhere (or at least upper-middle-class suburbia). She describes suburbia as a place of a “culture of weak ties” and “moral minimalism.” The surface tranquility of suburban life covers an unwillingness to address real conflicts and tensions. Weak bonding to family and neighbours leads not to discussing and resolving conflicts, but to conflict avoidance and suppression as major characteristics of suburbia. As put by Guest in his review work, “Since ties are weak and unimportant, sub urbanities have allegedly little reason to resolve differences. Thus, almost paradoxically, the apparent harmony of suburbia stems from a lack of communal feeling. Suburbia is too diverse to be simply and uniformly categorized. In general, one can say that suburbs have characteristics that tend to fall between those of cities and those of small towns. When one compares suburbs with small towns suburbs have less neighbouring, less community participation, and less localism. Suburbs also are more private and anonymous, possibly because they are not “whole” communities but only the residential piece. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
The suburbs lack the overlapping social networks found in small towns where people work and shop as well as live together. In most suburbs residents must commute outside the proximate community for work or shopping. Suburbs, while having more neighbouring than cities, have less than small towns Suburbs similarly lack the strong informal social control mechanisms of small towns, which leads to suburbs having greater freedom, more anonymity, and more peace and quiet, and less crimes because people are busy working and demand a peaceful environment while they are at home. Socially as well as physically, suburbs are a middle landscape. Wherever you are, whatever you turn to, you are in a wretched state, unless you turn to God. So you do not succeed in everything you do? What is the big fuss? What self-actualized gets everything one wants? Not I, not you, not anyone else on the face of this Earth. No even a king, pope, or Paris Hilton. All Worldlings must wade through the gutters or tribulation and anguish. If anyone fares better, then one is in a good position to suffer rather more for God’s sake. “Look, there goes a man who has got a good life!” That is what the general public says. “He has got a lot of money, a big Cresleigh Home, a 2007 high performance luxury sports car BMW Concept CS, friends in high places!” However, there is another way. Look to the Celestial, and you will see that the Temporal does not amount to a great deal. Possessions are here one day, gone the next. If you are overly possessive, then your mind plays a trick. Everyone you meet is plotting to swipe them. Ten of everything? Having ten BMWs will not make your bottom ten times happier. One of everything will do. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
Misery, if you want the true definition of the word, is just living on this Earth. The more your attention to the sweetness of spiritual things, the more you realize how bitter the experience is. That is because you feel more dearly and see more clearly the defects of human corruption. To eat, drink, watch, sleep, relax, labour, and be subject to all the bodily functions, to have to do all these things, that is the truly great misery. That is the great affliction, one has o conclude. Free from sin, and free for Heaven—that is the freedom to pray for. The bag of bones we have to lug around this World is a rackety load. The Psalmist knew (27.17). Hence, his heart-rendering cry, “Grasp my body with one hand, O Lord, and with the other rip my heart from it!” Imagine a place with out air, noise, and water pollution. Imagine a place where there was peace and quiet and happiness. Imagine a land of long white vistas, ice cold saviours, gleaming glaciers, breaking into the sea. Imagine the Earth so awesome, so vast, so pure, we can hardly breathe its air. Imagine the Earth alive with morning, shimmer white nights, no end of sky, no end of sea. Lord God of our fathers, God of American, please keep this forever in the inward thoughts of the heart of Thy people, and direct their heart unto Thee, for Thou, being merciful, full of compassion, forgiveth iniquity and destroyeth not; yea, many a time Thou turnest anger away. For Thou, O Lord, art good, and ready to forgive, and abounding in mercy unto all who call upon Thee. They righteousness is everlasting, and Thy Law is truth. Thou wilt show faithfulness to Jacob and mercy to Abraham, as Thou hast promised unto our fathers from the days of blessed. Blessed is the Lord who day by day bears our burden. It is said that our relations deepen the secrets hidden from the truth. It may be said, however, there are some stones better left unturned. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
Cresleigh Homes
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No One Lives on this Earth without Tribulation–Life is Lived Forwards, but Understood Backwards!
Are lives are defined by our choices. Paths taken and worlds explored. But once we commit, we can never go back, or can we? Bondage of the will is an essential foundation for the doctrine of grace. By ourselves, we are unable to act righteously, to have faith, or to contribute to our own salvation. All credit belongs to God. What then is left to free will? “Nothing! In truth!” insisted Marlin Luther. John Calvin was just as forceful: because the term free will “cannot be retained without great peril, it will…be a great boon for the church if it is abolished.” The divine determinism assumed by the doctrines of God’s foreknowledge, sovereignty, and grace is not identical to naturalistic cause-effect determinism. Yet biblical faith assumes that God works through the created order. Thomas Aquinas argued (in the words of Michael Novak) that “grace operates (except in the rarest cases) through the ordinary contingencies and processes of nature…The whole environment, the whole ‘schedule of contingencies’ that constitutes history is graced.” Believing in God opens one to the possibility of miracles; yet if we accept that all nature is from moment to moment sustained, ordered, and upheld by God, then we no longer need miracles in order to “make room for God.” Whatever their differences, the concepts of absolute determinism and absolute divine sovereignty converge in affirming our dependence on forces beyond our conscious knowledge. Thus they share the problem of how to accommodate ultimate more responsibility. If a superhypnotist were to plant an irresistible suggestion that you should commit a crime, which you then did with a sense of having chosen to do it, surely no one who knew the hidden cases of your behaviour would hold you responsible. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Likewise, if we understand the conditions that triggered someone’s acting desirably, we tend to credit the conditions rather than the person. It is only when we are surprised by a person’s heroism—when we do not expect people to behave o nobly under such circumstances—that we give special credit and honour to the hero. In a deterministic World we can judge any behaviour as worthy of praise or blame, but it becomes more difficult to hold the person as ultimately responsible. One is therefore tempted to create a gap in the schemes of natural and divine determination—to open the door to just a dash of ultimate free will, however much is needed to restore our accountability before God and before our human judicial system. God’s sovereignty, we may tell ourselves, does not extend all the way down to the little things, such as what I ate for breakfast this morning. God is concerned only with big events, the ultimate ends. However, as Jonathan Edwards and the other theological masterminds recognized, this assumption of agent causation creates as many problems as it solves. A God who is detached from what you ate for breakfast (or whether you ate breakfast) is not a God who is continuously involved with all events of the creation. And consider: How are the big ends in life achieved apart from the little means? Looking back on our lives, we see our path winding through countless little event and chance encounters, from our initial conception right up to the present. At any decision point we feel free, but looking back, we see causation. “What I so proudly call ‘myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never stared and which I cannot stop,” suggested C.S. Lewis. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Or as Soren Kierkegaard noted, “Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.” Thus the apostle Paul could sense, “I yet not I, but the grace of God.” So both the absolute determinist and the one who believes in God’s utter sovereignty (perhaps the same person) are left baffled. To limit natural and divine powers makes little sense and only opens that door for pride in self and a judgmental attitude toward others. Yet somehow human accountability must be affirmed. Faced with this paradox of faith, we can take comfort in remembering that we cannot expect to comprehend fully this wisdom and justice of a being whose cognitive stage is infinitely beyond our own. Our situation is like that of someone stranded in a deep well with two ropes dangling down. If we grab either one alone, we sink still deeper into the well. Only when we hold both ropes at once can we climb out, because at the top, beyond where we can see, they come together around a pulley. Grabbing only the rope of determinism or the rope of human responsibility plunges us to the bottom of a well. So instead we grab both ropes, without yet understanding how they come together. In doing so, we may also be comforted that in science as in religion, a confused acceptance of irreconcilable principles is sometimes more hones than a tidy oversimplified theory that ignores evidence. (Remember that advocates of agent causation have no trouble explaining our responsibility, but do face a different mystery—how God could accomplish divine purposes while granting us freedom to do as we choose.) #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
We also do well to remember both ropes in our everyday attitudes—by viewing ourselves as free and responsible agents and others as influenced by their biology, their past experience, and their current situation. Such a view has the effect of cultivating within us the practical fruits of self-discipline and self-initiative, while being more understanding of the forces that constrain others. Scripture, too, tends to adopt the perspective of self as free and other as caused. When the Bible addresses us directly, it emphasizes our responsibility for our failings. When talking to us about others, especially the poor and disadvantaged, it frequently advocates the complementary perspective: do not judge; act with compassion toward the oppressed; take the beam out of your own eye before worrying about the motes in others; let judgment begin with the house of the Lord. Are we determined or free? Christian psychologists who assume absolute determinism struggle to rationalize human responsibility; those who assume self-causation have solved the problem of human responsibility butt struggle to accommodate natural causation and divine sovereignty in human affairs. Nevertheless, on this much both camps agree: in the fabric of contemporary psychology and Christian doctrine, natural order and human responsibility are the interwoven threads. The new enlightenment which resulted from this development increased human superiority over others terrestrial beings by making them aware that they are from a divine being and created in His image. “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground,’” reports Genesis 1.26. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
And because humans learned they were superior to animals, they trained themselves to set traps for them; they tricked them in a thousand different ways. And although several surpassed them or hurt them, humans became the master of the former and the scourge of the latter. Thus the first glance they directed upon themselves produced within them the first string of pride; thus, as yet hardly knowing how to distinguish the ranks, and contemplating themselves in the first rank by virtue of their species, they prepared themselves from afar to lay claim to it in virtue of their individuality. Although their fellow humans were not for one what they are for us, and although they had hardly anything more to do with them than with other animals, they were not forgotten in their observations. The conformities that tie could make one perceive among the, their female, and oneself, made the human beings judge of those they did not perceive. And seeing that they all acted as one would have done under similar circumstances, one concluded that their way of thinking and feeling was in complete conformity with their own. And this important truth, well established in their mind, made them follow, by a presentiment as sure as dialectic and more prompt, the best rules of conduct that it was appropriate to observe toward them for their advantage and safety. Taught by experience that love of well-being is the sole motive of human actions, one found oneself in a position to distinguish the rare occasions when common interest should make one count on the assistance of their fellow humans, and those even rarer occasions when competition ought to make one distrust them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
In the first case, humans untied with them in a herd, or at most in some sort of free association, that obligated no one and that lasted only as long as the passing need that hard formed it. In the second case, if one believed that one could, everyone sought to obtain one’s own advantage, either by overt force. Of it one felt oneself to be weaker, one sought to obtain advantage by cleverness and cunning. This is how humans could imperceptibly acquire some crude idea of mutual commitments and of the advantages to be had in fulfilling them, but only insofar as present and perceptible interests could require it, since foresight meant nothing to them, and far from concerning themselves about a distant future, they did not even give a thought to the next day. Were it a matter of catching a deer, everyone was quite aware that one must faithfully keep to one’s post in order to achieve this purpose; but if a hare happened to pass within reach of one of them, no doubt one would have pursued it without giving it a second thought, and that, having obtained one’s prey, one cared very little about causing one’s companions to miss theirs. It is easy to understand that such intercourse did not require a language much more refined than that of crows or monkeys, which flock together in practically the same way. Inarticulate cries, many gestures, and some imitative noises must for a long time have made up the universal language. By joining to this in each country a few articulate and conventional sounds, whose institution, as I have already said, is not too easy to explain, there were individual languages, but crude and imperfect ones, quite similar to those still spoken by carious savage nations today. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
Constrained by the passing of time, the abundance of things I have to say, and the practically imperceptible progress of the beginnings, I am flying like an arrow over the multitudes of centuries. For the slower events were in succeeding one another, the quicker they can be described. These first advantages enabled humans to make more rapid ones. The more the mind was enlightened, the more industry was perfected. Soon they ceased to fall asleep under the first tree or to retreat into caves, and found various types of hatches made of hard, sharp stones, which served to cut wood, dig up the soil, and make huts from branches they later found it useful to cover with clay and mud. This was the period of a first revolution which formed the establishment of the distinction among families and which introduced a kind of property, whence perhaps there already arose many quarrels and fights. However, since the strongest were probably the first to make themselves lodgings they felt capable of defending, presumably the weak found it quicker and safer to imitate them than to try to dislodge them; and as for those who already had huts, each of them must have rarely sought to appropriate that of one’s neighbour, less because it did not belong to one than because it was of no use to one, and because one could not seize it without exposing oneself to a fierce battle with the family that occupied it. The first development of the heart were the effect of a new situation that united the husbands and wives, fathers and children in one common habitation. The habit of living together gave rise to the sweetest sentiments known to humans: conjugal love and parental love. “God blessed them and said to them ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the Earth and subdue it,’” reports Genesis 1.28. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
Each family became a little society all the better united because mutual attachment and liberty were its only bonds; and it was then that the first difference was established in the lifestyle of the two genders, which until then had had only one. Women because more sedentary and grew accustomed to watch over the hut and the children, while the man went to seek their common subsistence. With their slightly softer life the two genders also began to lose something of their ferocity and vigour. However, while each one separately became less suited combat savage beasts, on the other hand it was easier to assemble in order to jointly to resist them. In this new state, with simple and solitary life, very limited needs, and the tools they had invented to provide for them, since humans enjoyed a great deal of leisure time, they used it to procure for themselves many types of conveniences unknown their fathers; and that was the first yoke they imposed on themselves without realizing it, and the first source of evils they prepared for their descendants. For in addition to their continuing thus to soften body and mind (those conveniences having through habit lost almost all their pleasures, and being at the same time degenerated into true needs), being deprived of them because much more cruel than possessing hem was sweet; and they were unhappy about losing them without being happy about possessing them. At this point we can see a little better how the use of speech was established or imperceptibly perfected itself in the bosom of each family; and one can further conjecture how various particular causes could have extended the language and accelerated its progress by making it more necessary. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
Great floods or earthquakes surrounded the inhabited areas with water or precipices. Upheavals of the globe detached parts of the mainland and broke them up into islands. Clearly among humans thus brought together and forced to live together, a common idiom must have been formed sooner than among those who wandered freely about the forests of the mainland. Thus it is quite possible that after their first attempts at navigation, the islanders brought the use of speech to us; and it is at least quite probable that society and languages came into being on islands and were perfected there before they were known on the mainland. Everything begins to take on a new appearance. Having previously wandered about the forest and having assumed a more fixed situation, humans slowly came together and united into different bands, eventually forming in each country a particular nation, united by mores and characteristic features, not by regulations and laws, but by the same kind of life and foods and by the common influence of the climate. Eventually a permanent proximity cannot fail to engender some intercourse among different families. Young people of difference genders live in neighbouring huts; the passing intercourse demanded by nature soon leads to another, through frequent contact with one another, no less sweet and more permanent. People became accustomed to consider different objects and to make comparison. Imperceptibly they acquire the ideas of merit and beauty which produce feelings of preference. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer get along without seeing one another again. A sweet and tender feeling insinuates itself into the soul and at the least opposition becomes an impetuous fury. Jealousy awakens with love’ discord triumphs, and the sweetest passion receives sacrificed of human blood. In proportion as ideas and sentiments succeed one another and as the mind and heart are trained, the human race continues to be tamed, relationships spread and bonds are tightened. People grew accustomed to gather in front of their huts or around a large tree; song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation of idle humans who had flocked together. Each one began to look at the others and to wan to be looked at oneself, and public esteem had a value. The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit or the most eloquent became the most highly regarded. And this was the first step toward inequality and, at the same time, toward vice. From these first preferences were born vanity and contempt on the one hand, and shame and envy on the other. And the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence. On 8 August 1960, a West Virginia-born chemical engineer named Monroe Rathbone, sitting in his office high over Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, New York United States of America, made a decision that future historians might someday choose to symbolize the end of the Second Wave era. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
Few paid any attention when Mr. Rathbone, chief executive of the giant Exxon Corporation, took steps to cut back on the taxes Exxon paid to the oil-producing countries. His decision, though ignored by the Western press, struck like a thunderbolt at the governments of these countries, since virtually all their revenues derived from oil company payments. Within a few days the other major oil companies had followed Exxon’s lead. And one month later, on 9 September, in the fabled city of Baghdad, delegates of the hardest-hit countries met in emergency council. Backed to the wall, they formed themselves into a committee of oil-exporting governments. For fully thirteen years the activities of this committee, and even its name, were ignored outside the pages of a few petroleum industry journals. Until 1973, that is, when the Yom Kippur War broke out and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) suddenly stepped out of the shadows. Chocking off the World’s supply of crude oil, it sent the entire Second Wave economy into a shuddering down-spin. What OPEC did, apart from quadrupling its oil revenues, was to accelerate a revolution that was already brewing in the Second Wave techno-sphere. In the earsplitting clamour over the energy crisis that has since followed, so many plans, proposals, arguments, and counterarguments have been hurled at us that it is difficult to make sensible choices. Governments are just as confused as the proverbial human in the streets. One way to cut through the murk is to look beyond the individual technologies and policies to the principles underlying them. Once we do, we find that certain proposals are designed to maintain or extend the Second Wave energy base as we have known it, while others rest on new principles. The result is a radical clarification of the entire energy issue. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
The Second Wave energy base, we saw earlier, was premised on non-renewability; it drew from highly concentrated, exhaustible deposits; it relied on expansive, heavily centralized technologies; and it was nondiversified, resting on a relatively few sources and methods. These were the main features of the energy base in all Second Wave nations throughout the industrial era. Bearing these in mind, if we now look at the various plans and proposals generated by the oil crisis we can quickly tell which ones are mere extensions of the old and which are forerunners of something fundamentally new. And the basic question becomes not whether oil should sell at forty dollars (2021 inflation adjusted $363.78) per barrel or whether a nuclear reactor should rise at Seabrook or Grohnde. The larger question is whether any energy base deigned for industrial society and premised on these Second Wave principles can survive. Once asked in this form, the answer is inescapable. Through the past half-century, fully two thirds of the entire World’s energy supply has come from oil and gas. Most observers today, from the most fanatic conservationists to the deposed Shah of Iran, from solar freaks and Saudi sheikhs to the button-down, brief-case-carrying experts of many governments, agree that this dependency on fossil fuel cannot continue indefinitely, no matter how many new oil fields are discovered. Statistic vary. Disputes rage over how long World has before the ultimate crunch. The forecasting complexities are enormous and many past predications now look silly. Yet one thing is clear: no one is pumping gas oil back to replenish the supply. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Whether the end comes in some climatic gurgle or, more likely, in a succession of dizzyingly destabilizing shortages, temporary gluts, and deeper shortages, the oil epoch is ending. Iranians know this. Kuwaitis and Nigerians and Venezuelans know it. Saudi Arabians know it—which is why they are racing to build an economy based on something other than oil revenues. And although we are having issues supplying electricity to major cities in America, and an element used to create batteries in electric cars is expected to run out in the near future, this is why leaders are pushing to increase the demand of electric cars. Petroleum companies know it—which is why they are scrambling to diversify out of oil. (One president of a petroleum company told me at a dinner in Tokyo not long ago that, in his opinion, the oil giants would become industrial dinosaurs, as the railroads have. His time frame for this was breathtakingly short—years, not decades. Perhaps in the next ten years.) However, the debate over physical depletion is almost beside the point. For in today’s World it is price, not physical supply, that has the most immediate and significant impact. And here, if anything, the facts point even more strongly to the same conclusion. The suburban ideology fits somewhat uncomfortably into the urban dichotomy. Suburbs are neither one nor the other. Proponents of suburban living historically have resolved this by emphasizing how suburbs ideally combine the best features of urban and rural living. Opponents stress that they contain the worse of both Worlds. The argument that suburbs have best of both is not new. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
An 1873 promotional tract pushing development of the North Shore of Chicago proclaims, “The controversy which is sometimes brought, as to which offers the greater advantage, the country of the city, finds a happy answer in the suburban ideal which says both—the combination of the two—the city brought to the country. This is a practical and valuable reply. The city has its advantages and conveniences, the country its charm and health; the union of the two (a modern result of the railway), gives to humans all they could ask in this respect.” As the earlier section on romantic suburbs indicates, the suburb was to allow the nineteenth-century city man of business to have it both ways. One would make one’s fortune during the day in the dynamic and vita industrial city and then retire by commuter railroad to the health and domestic tranquility of the picturesque suburb. Although homes in turn-of-the-century streetcar suburbs were far less grand and often occupied minimal size lots, the imagery of suburbs being at least surrounded by country persisted. Sometimes the open spaces lasted only until all the planned housing was constructed. Automobile suburbs built prior to the second World War, if anything, accentuated and sharpened the image of suburbs as being distinct from the city. Real estate developers and realtors found it was good for business to foster the image of both spatial and social distance from the central city. The mass suburbanization during the postwar years may have changed the reality, not the ideology, of suburban exclusivity. Builders and developers continued to advertise based upon the image of suburbia as an exclusive enclave where one’s fellow suburbanites would all be upwardly mobile and community involved. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Advertisements spoke less about square footage than about “moving up” and the “quality of life.” Nonetheless, the reality was that suburbia was now open to virtually all. Exclusively had come down to the basics of being employed and European American. Some of the postwar criticisms by cultural elites of the new suburbs were, in fact, a recognition of his change. Literary and cultural criticisms of standardized subdivision housing as an aesthetic wasteland, and the attacks on the middle-brow values of those inhabiting such housing, were in part an elitist response to rapid social change. This “there goes the neighbourhood” response, combined with a glorification of the past, was clearly evident in the comments of influential intellectuals such as Lewis Mumford. One can feel the disdain when he described postwar suburbia as “a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at unform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group…conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold.” To many of the urban critics of the 1950s and 1960s, the major crime of the new suburbs was that they were common. Unlike the affluent and exclusive suburbs of earlier decades, the new suburbs, and suburbanites, were seen as lacking the true urbanite’s sense of good taste. Underlying the criticisms is the assumption that the new suburbanites went to the wrong schools, read the wrong books, and even bought the wrong furniture. It was as if former workers and service help had aspired to rise above their true station in life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
There is a World of other people and things—the point of individuation. At this point, there may be either a more home-loving or a more space-loving orientation, but either way, if all goes well, a person will emerge with an integrated personality. However, all may not go well. A person may be struck by a trauma, after which development will be fundamentally influenced by the method which that person invented to cope with the trauma. The Basic Fault is at the point at which people begin to have to “cope.” Use of the English “coping” refers to ego-function! It gives recognition to our ability to survive and to deal with people and things in order to survive, not necessarily with much regard to the moral dimension. “Coping” has two independent and equally relevant root, according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: A. Form the Old French coper, Modern French couper, to strike (a blow), to cut. From this root we get our meanings (1) to strike; to come to blows; encounter; engage; (2) to be or prove oneself a match for, content successfully with; (3) to have to do with; (4) to meet, to come in contact (hostile and friendly) with; (5) to match a thing with another equivalent. B. From Middle English Kopen – to buy (cf. cheap). From this root we get (1) to buy; (2) to exchange, barter; (3) to make an exchange, bargain. There is even a third root, from cope meaning cape: to cover with a cope, to hang over like a coping. All very appropriate. To return to our theme after this linguistic digression, trauma is not necessarily a single even. Trauma is more likely to be caused by a long-standing situation in which there was some painful misunderstanding—a lack of fit—between the child and the adults around it. #RandolphHarrs 16 of 25
True, despite the general lack of fit, in some cases some adult may be on the child’s side, but much more often, immature and weak individuals have to cope on their own with traumatic situations: either no help is available, or the only help is of a kind that is hardly more than a continuation of the misunderstand, and thus useless. For lack of the right support, the individual is forced to find its own method of coping, a method hit upon a time of despair or thrown at it by some un-understanding adult who may be a well-wisher, or just indifferent, or negligent, or even careless or hostile. This method will be incorporated in the individual’s personality, and thereafter anything beyond or contrary to this method will strike the person as a frightening and more or less impossible proposition. The individual’s further development will then be prescribed or at least limited by this method which, although helpful in some respects, is often costly, and above all, alien. Most patients cannot tell us what causes their resentment, lifelessness, dependence, what the fault or the defect in them is…some can express it by phantasies about perfect partners, perfect harmony, untroubled contentment….Over and over they repeat that they feel let down, that nothing in the World can ever be worth while unless something hey were deprived of is restored to them. Sophisticated patients may express this something irretrievably lost or gone wrong as the male organ or the breast, usually felt to have magical qualities, and speak of male organ or breast, or castration fear. However, in nearly all cases this is coupled with an unquenchable and incontestable feeling that if the loss cannot be made good, the patient oneself will remain no go. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
It is always a dry season until you give way to the sorrowing of the heart. Only then will the drops of devotion come. Heart-felt sorrow opens many a door. Deep-down compulsion slams the door in your face every time. We may stumble onto happiness, but, remember, we are exiles and the World is alive with peril. You laugh at the defects of the World, but your own spiritual defects you shrug off. Yet hey bedevil your soul, and what do you do about it? You laugh. Nobody laughs in public these days, expect you. You laugh uproariously, but the joke is on you. It is the other way around. Your peccadillos are laughing at you when you should be weeping uncontrollably where no one can see. What is missing is the fear of God and a working conscious. If we do not feel the pain of reformation in our souls, Joy or Liberty cannot be true and good. Happy the self-actualized who can scatter one’s distractions and collect oneself into holy sorrowing of the heart! Happy is the self-actualized who can shield one’s snow-white conscience from bilious gray pigeons! That is to say, from the dropping of one’s own inordinate affections. Face it! When it comes to power, it takes a good habit to whip a bad habit. If you do not care a fig for the World, the World will not care a farthing for you. Do not inundate yourself with the affairs of the low and unlovely, and do not insinuate yourself into the affairs of the high and mighty. Remember, you are a member of a holy company dedicated to spiritual progress. Hence, keep a steely eye on yourself. When necessary, unbraid yourself. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
If you cast a knowing wink at the World and the World does not return the wink, do not tear up, do not waste a single tear of your own. Give serious thought to this possibility. You may not have the right stuff to be a servant of God and live the devout life. After all, we do not have many consolations in this sort of life; at least as Flesh counts them. That is what our experience tells us. And rarer still, at least as the Soul counts them, are the Divine Consolations. There has go to be a reason, and it is sin. We just do not seek the sorrowing of the heart hard enough. The least we could is throw our vanities to the wind. Are you worth Divine Consolation? Face it, all you are worth is a bundle of snakes! When you are contrite to the point of perfection, the face your present to the World is never cheerful, always chary. The good person has more than enough to be sorrowful for, to weep for. No matter how you look at it—and your neighbour will confirm it—no one lives on this Earth without tribulation. The more you eye the condition of your own soul, the more openly you weep. The causes of just sorrow and internal contrition are our sins and the vice that lead to our sins. And is it not true that we spend so much time on Earthly grapplings that we have almost no time to give to celestial contemplations? Death is approaching more quickly than life is unfolding. Think about that now, and put more shoulder into your reformation of life. We are on the near side of death now, but on the far side await he pains of Hell or Purgatory. Weigh that in your heart, and maybe now you will be willing to undertake the laborious program of reform, readying yourself for the Final Rigour. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
Why is it that considerations like these do no hit the target? Why are we as blind to the blandishments banded about us? Are we as lazy and loutish as that? What spirit is left in that wretched body of yours? A whistle? A whimper? A whisper? Pray, therefore, humbly to the Lord that He give your spirit of contrition. Say as the Psalmist said (80.5), “With the bread of tears satisfy my hunger, Lord, and with a measure of tears satisfy my thirst.” The number of the predestined is certain, and can neither be increased nor diminished. The number of predestine is certain. Some have said that it was formally, but not materially certain; as if we were to say that it was certain that a hundred or a thousand would be saved; not however these or those individuals. However, this destroys the certainty of predestination; of which we spoke of above. Therefore we must say that to God the number of predestined is certain, not only formally, but also materially. It must, however, be observed that the number of the predestined is said to be certain to God, not by reason of His knowledge, because, that is to say, He knows how many will be saved (for in this way the number drops of rain and the sands of the sea are certain to God); but by reason of His deliberate choice and determination. For the further evidence of which we must remember that every agent intends to make something finite, as is clear from what has been said above when we treated of the infinite. Now whosoever intends some definite measure in one’s effect thinks out some definite number in the essential parts, which are by their very nature required for the perfection of the whole. For of those things which are required not principally, but only account of something else, one does not select any definite number “per se”; but one accepts and uses the in such numbers as are necessary on account of that other thing. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
For instance, a builder thinks out the definite measurements of a house, and also the definite number of rooms which one wishes to make in the house; and definite measurements of the walls and roof; one does not, however, select a definite number of stones, but accepts and uses just so many as are sufficient for the required measurements of the wall. So also must we consider concerning God in regard to the whole Universe, which is His effect. For He pre-ordained the measurements of the whole of the Universe, and what number would befit the essential parts of that Universe—that is to say, which have in some way been ordained in perpetuity; how many spheres, how many stars, how many elements, and how many species. Individuals, however, which undergo corruption, are no ordained as I were chiefly for the good of the Universe, but in a secondary way, inasmuch as the good of the species is preserved through them. Whence, although God knows the total number of individuals, the number of oxen, flies and such like, is not pre-ordained by God “per se”; but divine providence produces just so many as are sufficient for the preservation of the species. Now of all creatures the rational creature is chiefly ordained for the good of the Universe, being as much incorruptible; more especially those who attain to eternal happiness, since they more immediately reach the ultimate end. Whence the number of the predestination is certain to God; not only by way of knowledge, but also by way of a principal pre-ordination. It is not exactly the same thing in the cause of the number of the reprobate, who would seem o be pre-ordained by God for the good of the elect, in whose regard “all things work unto good” Romans 8.28. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Concerning the number of all the predestined, some say that so many human will be saved as Angels fell; some so many as there were Angels left; others, as many as the number of Angels created by God. It is, however, better to say that, “to God alone is known the number for whom is reserved eternal happiness [From the ‘secret’ prayer of the missal, “pro vivis et defunctis.’]” These words of Deuteronomy must be taken as applied to those who are marked out by God beforehand in respect to present righteousness. For there is increased and diminished, but not the number of the predestined. The reason of the quantity of any one part must be judged from the proportion of that part of the whole. Thus in God the reason why He has made so many stars, or so many species of things, or predestined so many, according to the proportion of the principal parts to the good of the whole Universe. The good that is proportionate to the common state of nature is to be found in the majority, and is wanting in the majority. Thus is clear that is the majority of humans have a sufficient knowledge for the guidance of life; and those who have not this knowledge are sad to be half-witted or foolish; but they who attain to a profound knowledge of things intelligible are a very small minority in respect to the rest. Since their eternal happiness, consisting in the vision of God, exceeds the common state of nature, and especially in so far as this is deprived of grace through the corruption of original sin, those who are saved are in the minority. In this especially, however, appears the mercy of God, that He has chosen some for that salvation, from which very many in accordance with the common course and tendency of nature fall short. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
All thinking keeps one’s awareness out of the Overself. That is why even thinking about the Overself merely produced another thought. Only in the case of the self-actualized, who has established oneself in the Overself, is thinking no barrier at all. In this case, thinking may coexist with the larger awareness. So it is not enough to be a good thinker; one also has to learn how to be a good non-thinker. Of course, the way to do this is through the practice of deep and meaningful prayer. Appetite has really become an artificial and abnormal thing, having taken the place of true hunger, which alone is natural. The one is a sign of bondage but the other, of freedom. It may be considered folly by common opinion but this refusal to destroy life uncecessarily, this reverence for it, must become a deeply implanted part of one’s ethical standard. If the body is intolerant of particular treatments and allergic to particular foods, it should not be forced to accept them. When either faith healing or naturopathic treatment is too passive, when it refrains from timely co-operation with nature by the use of positive means, by they nontoxic medicines or essential operations, it becomes guilty of sacrificing the patient to its own narrowness. No healer’s treatment is always successful nor is the cure always permanent. Failures are many and relapses are common. Those who shout and splutter from evangelistic public platforms exhibit the ego’s arrogance, not the Overself’s quiet humility. They hold the view which conforms with their presuppositions, their inborn tendencies and governing prejudices, in short, with their little ego, not their impersonal higher Self. This is why there are so many contesting theories, why the body’s ill health may cause the mind to be governed by negative thoughts, why this conflict of authorities shows their worthlessness. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
All these cults and groups which acknowledge the power of mind over body but which leave out the acknowledgment of the body’s power over the mind, are out of balance and so out of truth to that extent. This statement may be a matter of arguable theory partisan adherents of either side, but it is a mater of tested fact with creative leaders who consciously exercise both powers. If mental and spiritual healing agents are also joined in, the physical cure will surely be accelerated and the physical therapy will surely be helped. In this way the individual limitations of the method of treatment being used will be overcome and each healing agent will contribute to bringing about a complete and successful result. It is foolish to believe that there is any particular healing method which has only to be applied for it to be universally and equally successful or that there is any particular human healer who has only to be visited for one to be cure. If we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed, something will have gone out of us as people; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the World, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural World and competent to belong in it. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
And a redeemer shall come to America and to those in Jacob who turn from transgression, saith the Lord. And as for Me, this is My covenant with them, saith the Lord: My spirit that is upon you, and My words which I have put in your mouth shall not depart out of your mouth, nor out of the mouth of your children nor your children’s children henceforth and forever. Thou art holy, O Thou that art enthroned upon the praises of America. And one called to another and said: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole Earth is full of His glory. [And they receive sanction one from the other, and say: Holy upon Earth, the works of His mighty power; Holy forever and to all eternity is the Lord of hosts; the whole Earth is full of the radiance of His glory.] And a wind lifted me up, and I heard behind me a mighty chorus proclaiming: Blessed be the glory of the Lord everywhere. [Then a wind lifted me up, and I heard behind me the mighty moving sound of those who uttered praises and said: Blessed be the glory of the Lord from the place of His abode.] The Lord shall reign for ever and ever. [Then Kingdom of the Lord is established forever and to all eternity.] The time has come to arouse the conscience of all those who sincerely the Good and the Right to their duty in the matter of harming innocent terrestrial beings and the environment and vehicles, a conscience which, if it could speak unperverted by racial habits, would emphatically repeat the Mosaic commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” These are cruelties practiced on objects to gain wealth and pleasures for others, sometimes clothes, entertainment and medicinal drugs. The human claim of necessity as a justification is a mistake one. Whether forged of metal or born of flesh, every form of life has one unquenchable thirst, the urge for freedom. Christianity is not something to be endured, but something to be treasured. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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Here Rests in Honoured Glory an American Soldier Known but to God!
Wars can be won or lost, but the battlefields waged inside a human’s soul, only love can heal those wounds. Without the right people in our life, we will never fulfill God’s purpose. Succeeding at any endeavour is dependent on the nature and quality of your relationships. The scriptures tells us the Lord “established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 101.80. The land was “redeemed” indeed by thousands killed and wounded along the way at Germantown, at Bemis Heights and Charleston, and so many other places in the American Revolution. The singers of the Declaration of Independence and the framers of the Constitution were inspired from on high to do that work. An objective study of the delegates involved—their fears, their limitations, vested interests, and the like—makes it clear that they were not the sort of men we usually think of as prophets. Nonetheless they were inspired, and the Constitution they provided can be designated accurately as a divine document. However, even a divine constitution required something further; it demands a kind of people who will, by their very natures, receive and respect such a constitution and function well within the conditions it establishes. Where indeed shall we find such people today? I recall one. It was in a concentration camp I helped liberate during the American revolution in the 18th century. There were thousands of American prisoners held by the British during the war. Of all the prisoners held in captivity, 80 percent of them died. New York City was the main city were prisoners were held. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
As we blew the lock off the door and tried to assist the miserable and the painful inside, I was interrupted by a tap on my boot and found, wallowing in the mud, a Protestant minister. One of his first request was, “Soldier, do you have a flag?” Later when we retrieved one from the saddle on one of the horses, I gave it to him on a stretcher and with tears in his eyes he said, “Thank God, you came.” Again the Lord said, “Wherefore, this land is consecrated unto him who he shall bring. And if it so be that they shall serve him according to the commandments which he hath given, it shall be a land of liberty unto them,” reports 2 Nephi 1.7. As Christian’s then, we know why some people came to America and others did not. We have done as well as could be expected, and are richly blessed despite our shortcoming because the Lord has thus far held us in His hands and worked His purposes, His ultimate purposes, through us. During the war, as many of 8,000 soldiers were killed, approximately 20,000 died from illness or starvation. An estimated 25,000 were wounded. Nearly 30 percent of the army was killed, wounded or captured. Can you understand, this is what America is all about? Standing up for your freedom and honor and being willing to risk your life. You and I know, and you and I alone really know, the reason for this blessed and beautiful land. In a World where men have given up on this most vital question, we know the purpose of America. Can you understand the way God has worked?? And if you do, will you join me in this day to committing yourself to preach the message of the Lord’s glorious achievement in America? #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
This is a time when you and I can afford to be patriotic, in the best sense of that term. There is a reason to be proud that we live in an established land that has been conditioned by the Lord so that His gospel could be restored. The purpose of American was to provide a setting wherein that was possible. All else takes its power from that one great, central purpose. Anti-God is Anti-American. By striving to make our citizenry the righteous people the Lord required of us. And by telling the story of what the Lord has done for us is how we make a great church. “Oh beautiful for patriot dreams, that seed beyond the years. Thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears. America! America! God shed His grace on thee. And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.” (Katherine Bates, “Oh Beautiful for Spacious Skies,” Hymns, no. 126.) May that be the song of our heart and prayer for fulfillment, I humbly pray as I bear witness to these truths and add my testimony that God lives, that Jesus is the Christ, and that here sits his prophet, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Unless a civilization has some explanation for why things happen—even if its explanation is nine parts mystery to one part analysis—it cannot program lives effectively. People, in carrying out the imperatives of their culture, need some reassurance that their behaviour will produce results. And this implies some answer to the perennial why. Second Wave civilization came up with a theory so powerful it seemed sufficient to explain everything. A sock smashes into the surface of a pond. Ripples swiftly radiate out across the water. Why? What causes this event? Chances are that children of industrialism would say, “because someone threw it.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
An educated European gentleman of the twelfth or thirteenth century, in attempting to answer this question, would have had ideas remarkably different from our own. He probably would have relied on Aristotle and searched for a material cause, a formal cause, an efficient cause, and a final cause, no one of which would, by itself, have been sufficient to explain anything. A medieval Chinese sage might have spoken about the yin and yang, and the force-field of influences in which all phenomena were believed to occur. Second Wave civilization found its answer to the mysteries of causation in Newton’s spectacular discovery of the universal law of gravitation. For Newton, causes were “the forces impressed upon the bodies to generate motion.” The conventional example of Newtonian cause and effect is the billiard balls that strike one another and move in response to one another. This notion of change, which focused exclusively outside forces that are measurable and readily identifiable, was extremely powerful because it dovetailed perfectly with the new indust-real notions of linear space and time. Indeed, Newtonian or mechanistic causation, which came to be adopted as the industrial revolution spread over Europe, pulled indust-reality together into a hermetically sealed package. If the World consisted of separate particles—miniature billiard balls—then all causes arose from the interaction of these balls. One particle or atom struck another. The first was the cause of the movement of the next. That movement was the effect of the movement of the first. There was no action without motion in space, and no atom could be in more than one place at one time. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Suddenly a Universe that had seemed complex, cluttered, unpredictable, richly crowded, mysterious, and messy, began to look neat and tidy. Every phenomenon from the atom inside a human cell to the coldest star in the distant night sky could be understood as matter in motion, each particle activating the next, forcing it to move in an endless dance of existence. For the atheist this view provided an explanation of life in which, as Pierre-Simon Laplace later put it, the hypothesis of God was unnecessary. For the religious, however, it still left room for God, since He could be regarded as the Prime mover who used the cue stick to set the billiard balls in motion, then perhaps retired from the game. This metaphor for reality came like a shot of intellectual adrenalin into the emerging indust-real culture. Of the French Revolution, the Baron d’Holbach, exulted, “The Universe, that vast assemblage of everything that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation nothing but in immense, an uninterrupted succession of causes and effects.” It is all there—all implied in that one short, triumphant statement: the Universe is an assembled reality, made of discrete parts put together into an “assemblage.” Matter can only be understood in terms of motion—id est, movement through space. Events occur in a [linear] succession, a parade of event moving down the line of time. Human passions like hatred, selfishness, or love, d’Holbach went on, could be compared to physical forces like repulsion, inertia, or traction, and a wise political state could manipulate them for the public good just as science could manipulate the physical World for the common good. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
It is precisely from this indust-real image of the Universe, from the assumptions buried within it, that some of the most potent of our personal, social, and political behaviour patterns have come. Buried within them was the implication that not only the cosmos and nature but society and people behaved according to certain fixed and predictable laws. Indeed, the greatest thinkers of the Second Wave were precisely those who most logically and forcefully argued the lawfulness of the Universe. Newton seemed to have discovered the laws that programmed the Heavens. Darwin had identified the laws that programmed social evolution. And Freud supposedly laid bare the laws that programmed the psyche. Others—scientists, engineers, social scientists, psychologist—pressed the search for still more, of different, laws. Second Wave civilization now has at its command a theory of causality that seemed miraculous in is power and wide applicability. Much that hitherto had seemed complex could be reduced to simple explanatory formulae. Nor were these laws or rules to be accepted simply because Newton or Marx or someone laid them down. They were subject to experiment and empirical test. They could be validated. Using them, we could build bridges, send radio waves into the sky, predict and retrodict biological change; we could manipulate the economy, organize political movements or machines, and even—so they claimed—foresee and shape the behaviour of the ultimate individual. All that was needed was to find the critical variable to explain any phenomenon. If and only if we could find the appropriate “billiard ball” and hit it from the best angle, we could accomplish anything. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
This new causality, combined with the new images of time, space, and matter, liberated much of the human race from the tyranny of ancient mumbo jumbo. It made possible triumphant achievements in science and technology, miracles of conceptualization and practical accomplishment. It challenged authoritarianism and liberated the mind from millennia of imprisonment. However, indust-reality also created its own new prison, an industrial mentality that derogated or ignored what it could not quantify, that frequently praised critical rigor and punished imagination, that reduced people to oversimplified protoplasmic units, that ultimately sought an engineering solution for any problem. Nor was indust-reality as morally neutral as it pretended to be. It was, as we have seen, the militant super-ideology of Second Wave civilization, the self-justifying source from which all the characteristic left-wing and right-wing ideologies of the industrial age sprang. Like any culture, Second Wave civilization produced distorting filters through which its people came to see themselves and the Universe. This package of ideas, images, assumptions—and the analogies that flowed from them—formed the most powerful cultural system in history. Indust-reality, the cultural face of industrialism, fitted the society it helped to construct. It helped create the society of big organizations, big cities, centralized bureaucracies, and the all-pervasive marketplace, whether capitalist or socialist. It dovetailed perfectly with new energy systems, family systems, technological systems, economic systems, political and value systems that together formed the civilization of the Second Wave. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
It is that entire civilization taken together, along with its institutions, technologies, and its culture, that is now disintegrating under an avalanche of change as the Third Wave, in its turn, surges across the planet. We live in the final, irretrievable crisis of industrialism. And as the industrial age passes into history, a new age is born. The myth of suburbia, like all myths, contained elements of fact. That the new suburbs were architecturally similar was beyond dispute. However, the claim commonly made that this conformity also included all cultural tastes, child-rearing practices, levels of social activity, and patterns of neighbouring carried the argument to caricature. While the image of compulsive conformity and socialization was caricature, it is true that people in the suburbs were more socially homogeneous and more likely to engage in social interaction. There was general agreement that there were some differences, but their consequences were minimal. Nor was there any consensus on why, in suburbs, there was greater involvement with neighbours. Part of the difference, doubtlessly, can be explained by the presence of young children and higher family incomes, but even with these variables taken into account, differences remain. The more localized in nature of suburban friendship networks might simply reflect the relative isolation of the suburb and the greater difficulty of maintaining ties with those more distant. It also was suggested that suburbanites self-select for personality traits favouring sociability. In this view those who opt for the suburbs have chosen a lifestyle emphasizes “familism” over alternatives such as “careerism” and “consumership.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
However, the data do not appear to support this explanation. Research does suggest that the suburban neighbourhood does foster somewhat greater political participation. Suburbanites as a group tend to be somewhat more affluent than city dwellers and desire a more familistic lifestyle. It appears that those living in suburbs have some minor differences in tastes from city dwellers, for example, preferring gardening and rating cultural affairs lower. However, there is no evidence that suburban living changes tastes. Rather, those who value nature tend to gravitate toward suburbs, just as those who prefer easy access to a full cultural life tend to prefer the city. There is no evidence that suburbanites make less use of museums, concert, and art galleries than do otherwise equivalent city dwellers. Expressways allow suburbanites to get to many events as fast as those living in outer-city neighbourhoods. In recent years popular culture, such as first-run movies or sports events, have occurred outside the central city. For example, the Detroit Pistons’ basketball stadium is outside Detroit, and the New York Giants play their football in New Jersey. Needless to say, postwar suburbanites did not view themselves as living lives devoid of culture or as being excessively conforming, hyperactive joiners. They already knew what researcher such as Bennett Berger and Herbert Gans would confirm. That is, the new suburbanites had not given up their individuality, political affiliation, ethnic identity, or religious heritage as they moved houses. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
For good or ill, studies from the era of the 1950s achieved widespread popular as well as professional attention. The Organization Man was a widely read and discussed best-seller. It and its ilk helped set out contemporary view of suburbia suffered from sone serious limitations. One of the most obvious problems was rooted in the authors having preset expectations. Additionally, questions can be asked about how and why the various study sites were chosen. Rather than being “typical” suburbs, it is clear today that the sites were chosen precisely because hey were “interesting.” That is, they were selected because they were in some respects atypical, not because they were just like everyplace else. This approach to selection of a community may lead to more interesting reading, but it by definition limits generalization. The suburbs written about, for example, were almost invariably new, large-scale developments sprouting at the urban periphery. Little or no attention was paid to other types of suburbs, such as industrial suburbs, working-class suburbs, or even old established WASP suburbs. The focus of the studies was on the new middle-class subdivisions built to house young ex-GIs, their wives, and their children. Although it was not scientifically, or even logically, valid to generalize from these new suburbs to all suburbs, this was commonly done. Additionally, many of the studies fell into the so-called ecological fallacy of trying to generalize from the characteristics of an area to the characteristics of all individuals who live in that area. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Furthermore, their observations of supposedly typical suburban lifestyles were based on a single look at a new suburb immediately following the first wave of settlement. We know that a mature community viewed ten or twenty years later shows a different pattern. For example, the supposed social ability of postwar suburbia can be attributed in good part to that fact that because of the limited housing type in each subdevelopment, most of the new inmovers were approximately the same age, had the same aged children, and had the common experience of all moving into similar new houses at the same time. Most of the men also shared common experience of military service. If there was not a high degree of social interaction under such circumstances, it would be unusual. However, when most of life is frightening, and I usually feel inadequate, I may decide that being an onlooker is safer than being a doer: it is less obtrusive and hence less likely to attract hostile notice in my direction. When watching “I” is out of touch with emotions, feelings, and impulses, I develop something like Fairbairn’s Central Ego, one of whose functions is to keep me out of situations so painful that I cannot cope. Being wounded and terrified, people may withdraw into themselves in order to avoid further hurt. The danger is that they will withdraw so far that they will be left totally bereft, and get so far out of touch with their needs and feelings that they get no signals from them: it appears to such people that they have no needs—they do not feel anything. Paradoxically that may be a terrible feeling! #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The memory of having had feelings once, the capacity for which seems now lost, can fill a person with distress and longing. And in the present, I may want to keep in touch with the signals which come to me, yet be afraid of being overwhelmed by them if I do not attend to them. I may oscillate in and out of my feelings because I do not have the energy or strength to contain them at a practical level. There are other examples of the kind of people, people to whom messages from the World of others come only in very shadowy form, people not much in touch with what happens in the World of living-rooms, streets, or media. At first sight, this may not be obvious. However, slowly we realize that we are listening to someone who is not talking about people as we know them, in the round, but about “them.” We are listening to someone who can perceive only a few highly selected aspects of the World of people and things. “They,” the others, are not realistically perceived, but are experienced only in terms of their imagined capacity to assist, threaten, or frustrate. Sometimes, “they” are selectively perceived in such a way that the speaker can be both in touch with feelings, and yet able to keep them remote. “Do not be silly” or “Do not be so depressing” are examples of people speaking repressively to another person, while perhaps at the same time also disowning their own unacceptable notions. “He is out for what he can get” or “She sets her sights too high” may be said principally to enable the speaker to keep his or her own ideas isolated and disowned. Such people sometimes give us the impression that we and others are no experienced as independent people who existed before they walked into the room and who will continue to exist after they are out of sight; we are known only as experiences which must be controlled and kept away from contact with the self-image. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
“Patient: I am very depressed. I had just been sitting and could not get out of the chair. There seems no purpose anywhere: the future is blank. I am very bored and want to change but I feel stuck…
Therapist: Your solution is to damp everything down, do not feel anything, give up all real relationships to people at an emotional level and just ‘do things’ in a meaningless way, like a robot.
Patient: Yes, I felt I did not care, did not register anything. Then I felt alarmed, this was dangerous. If I had not made myself do something, I would just have sat, not bothered, not interested.
Therapist: That is your reaction in analysis to me. Do not be influenced, do not be moved, do not be lured into reacting to me.
Patient: If I were moved at all, I would feel very annoyed with you. I hate and detest you for making me feel like this. The more I am inclined to be drawn to you, the more I feel a fool, undermined.”
Keep in mind that God is restoring to you the years the enemy devoured. And it may not be good to act like a robot, to not have feeling. It could cause you to have an accident. I was doing that one day, while ironing a pillow case and burned it because I was not in touch with what I was doing. It is always import to feel. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
How long with humankind have to go before they realize the only solution to self-annihilation is trust? Cut off from the external World and living in my own phantasy, I cannot feel others, for they are not real to me. My therapist and the other people around me are more than stick figures or balloons which enable me to act according to the phantasies in my head which do seem real to me, regardless of if they open their doors. I can imagine some of them to be so powerful that I must keep an eye on them and manipulate the to keep things smooth for myself, even if they are not knocking on my doors. Or I may act compliant and behave nicely to them because I imagine that is what they want, and I imagine that I must do what they say because they are always right and may feel threatened otherwise. Or I may imagine them as needing my consideration and concern so they will not take their insecurities out of my vehicle, causing me pain and costing me thousands upon thousands of dollars. What I fear to do is to know them as they are, to “discover” them so they do not try to poison me. So I am left with the choice of either feeling well but unreal, or feeling real but terrible and wondering if they are trying to set me up in a clandestine manner. I may veer between these two in an attempt to get some relief from each in turn. Bad relationships may be better than none. Even though they may wish you harm and frustrate, and have no regard for your life, it is hard to do without other people altogether, but it may be a way to say alive. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Yet, I may cling compulsively (and to others eyes tiresomely) to a loved person or valued idea, in order to keep unconscious my feelings about some of their more hateful aspects. Worse, I may cling to a relationship with an unloving or hating or unloved person, in order to keep at bay the sense of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and futility which would result from giving them up and being without anyone at all. Some people may be able to keep anxieties at bay by relating mainly to causes and ideas, and interacting with other people mainly through these. “If I stop believing in what holds me together and gives meaning to my life, only constant and unremitting self-monitoring will keep me from falling apart. I shall believe in psycho-analysis or monetarism or Adam and the Ants—they make life work living.” Somewhat better off are those people who can relate to others more directly, provided everyone’s duties and roles are carefully and minutely defined. They relate to others mainly in the meticulous execution of tasks, not risking more unpredictable and spontaneous contacts. Then there are people who prefer some kind of in/out compromise. However weakened they may be by the continual advance and retreat, it is better than nothing. Yet others may be able to make relationships, albeit tainted by fear and suspicion because they cannot help feeling that people are dangerous and easily cruel or mean. It is hard to do without people and relationships. When I fear and avoid them, something happens to myself, the self which needs to be attached to and in touch with others. Void and emptiness threaten me. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
My very identity feels as though it is disintegrating—it lacks boundaries where I should be in touch with others. I mobilize a host of defences. I look depressed, I feel depressed. However, this depression may be what I hold on to as a defence against feeling overwhelmingly anxious. And indeed, the anxieties which a person is willing to know about may be a cover to conceal anxieties about falling apart or ceasing to be a person at all. The defences against falling apart may be strong enough to be called False Selves; they may be the only parts of the personality that a terrified person dare show. One of the attractive things about this insistence on a person’s defences, is we do not speak of the False Self in condemnatory terms; we see it as a necessary defensive organization, a survival kit, a caretake self, the means by which a threatened person has managed to survive. It is worth reminding oneself, when exasperated by someone who acts flighty, irresponsible, dishonest, evasive, or snooty, that these are all defensive plays. A frightened person may make a show of anger as a way of hiding weak, scared feelings. It is easy for others to see such a person as an angry person (and to attempt a therapy on the basis of the hidden anger and the guilt which goes with it—after all, hidden anger and guilt form par of the psychoneurotic personality which was the first to be analysed and restored to relative well-being by Dr. Freud nearly a hundred years ago). However, anger and hidden guilt are not at the root of all distress, and it is possible to use the appearance of hidden anger as a defence against even ore unacceptable feelings. Our culture has a preference for these “strong” feelings. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In a word, the core of psychological distress is not guilt but fear. Guilt is itself a form of fear, but it arises at he stage when the child is becoming socialized and capable of realizing the effect of actions on other person, and the nature of their reactions of anger and condemnation. The individual feels ashamed, sad and frightened to find that one has hurt those one loves and needs. There are much more primitive fears than that, fears not the effect of our strong and dangerous needs and impulses, but of our infantile weakness, littleness, and helplessness in the face of an environment which either fails to give the support we needed as infants or else was positively threatening. Human beings all prefer to be bad and strong rather than weak. The diagnosis of guilt allows us to feel that the course of our troubles with ourselves and others is possession of mighty and powerful instinctive forces in our make-up, which take a great deal of controlling and civilizing. The philosophies of Nietzsche and Machiavelli, and the “power politics” of the present age, all make it plain that human beings feel at least a secret and often openly admitted admiration for the ruthless strong human, however bad one’s ideas and actions may be. In our competitive New World culture (including communism which is every bit as competitive as capitalism) contempt is felt for weakness. We have always known that sympathetic care for the weak and suffering, fostered by Christianity, had to fight its way forwards, and survive on the basis of much compromise; s in the often cited cases of Victorian capitalist who made fortunes by the most ruthless business methods on the one hand, and endowed churched, charities and hospitals on the other. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The main stream of the World’s active life has been carried on in the tradition of the struggle for power in which the weakest go to the wall. The superman is the criminal who has the courage to fight and does not mind hurting other people. The Christian with one’s slave-morality of self-sacrifice to save others is weak and gets crucified. A diagnosis which traced psychological troubles to our innate strength supports our self-respect and is what is called today an ego-booster. A diagnosis which traces our troubles to deep-seated fears and feelings of weakness in the face of life has always been unacceptable. To protect against occurrences like these, we have to take some positive steps. If we do not, they will continue to trip us up. Scrutinize our Externals and Internals, that is what we have to do, and make whatever realignments are necessary. Why? Because properly pave, both speed the journey toward perfection. You cannot keep yourself in a continuous state of recollection in the monastic life. You know that already, but know also that recollect you must. When? Not les than once a day. Morning or evening? In the morning make a plan; in the evening, check how you did, that is to say, what and how you did in word, deed, and thought. Why? More often than you would like to thin, you have offended God and neighbour in one manner or another. No droopy drawers here! Cinch up that cinture! Be a self-actualized being and face the diabolical onslaught head on! That is what St. Paul exhorted the Ephesians to d (6.11-17). Rein in your gluttony, and you will find it easier to bridle every others inclination of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Never drop your guard. Read or write or pray or meditate, but whatever you do, busy yourself at all time with some form of labour for the community. When it comes to corporal austerities, forget what everybody else does. Use your head. Sting, do not wound. No more. No less. Personal prayers inside the walls should not be paraded around outside the walls. The reason for that is simple. When you pray by yourself, you can hurt only yourself; that is to say, no damage is done to others. As for your own spiritual life, do not become a pig about it, too lazy to come to chapel, yet strong enough to wallow through your own peculiosities. The community’s regular spiritual exercise, participate in them wholeheartedly and single-mindedly. Beyond that—and God forbid there is any time left over!—you can pray yourselves silly. Let devotion be your guide. All spiritual exercise are suitable for all self-actualized. Sadly, not all these exercises are equally profitable to each self-actualized. Happily, no two self-actualized have the same taste. As the year passes, the many varietals of spiritual exercise are always welcomed by a monastic community. Some are good on feasts; others, no ferials. Temptation requires one sort; peace and quiet, quite another. And so on, from the times of spiritual sadness, when the dry tears sting, to the sweet weepiness of True Spiritual Joy. Any say is a hard day to renew our spiritual exercises, but when the principal feast days roll around, it all seems so easy. And, only if the are asked, the Saints, they are waiting to help; they only pretend to be hard of hearing. From one feast day to the next, we ought o make resolutions as if they will be our last. However, how can we do this? We could imagine we are about to take wing from this World to a perch in the next. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
And so we should make these times devout times, preparing ourselves carefully, passing our time prayerfully, and guarding our every observance of the Holy Rule more strictly. What is the rush? In no time we will be brough before the Final Bar, attempting to cash in on our life of spiritual labour. If we mistook the time of departure, let us put the blame on ourselves. From our point of view, we were not all that well enough prepared; from God’s point of view, we are not yet ready for glory. St. Paul described that state in his Letter to the Romans (8.18). As for the next date of departure, who knows? Whenever it is, let us strive to prepare better for the trip out there. “Blessed is the servant,” wrote the Evangelist Luke (12.37, 42), “who, when his Lord came, was found awake. Amen I say to you, all God’s goods will be put under his servant’s watchful eye.” Llanda Villa, Beautiful Victorian. Perfect Grand Queen Anne Victorian Manion by the last Bay in the World. None more beautiful. Today we kneel at Thy feet and cruse the humans who have misused you. Dear Lord in the Shining Heaven, please bless us with insight in this hour of grief, that from the depths of suffering may come a deepened sympathy for all who are bereaved, that we may feel the heart-break of our fellow humans and spirits and find our strength in helping them. Heartened by this hymn of praise to Thee, we bear our sorrow with trustful hearts, and knowing Thou art near, shall not despair. With faith in Thine eternal wisdom, we who mourn, rise to sanctify Thy name. A wise system of healing would coordinate physical and psychological, artificial and natural, dietary and spiritual treatments, using some or all of them as a means to the end—cure. However, as the spiritual is the supreme therapeutic agent—if it can be touched—it will always be the one last resort for the desperate and chronic sufferers when all other agents have had to accept defeat. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
Essential California – an outdoor living area + a mudroom for any washing up. We just love the thoughtful layout of the Brighton Station Res 3 model. 🏘
The Brighton Stations floorplans will make anybody a homebody. This awesome space offers approximately 2,800 square feet; there are four bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms, and a three car garage!
Although the living room and dining room and kitchen are open concept, this plan is set up in a way that both rooms anchor the kitchen, but still allow for some visual separation, making this home the perfect place for special occasions. And tons of available outdoor space will make your weekends feel like a vacation. https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-3/
Here is All the Invisible World, Caught, Defined, and Calculated!
Here is all the invisible World, caught, defined, and calculated. Some come to do the Devil’s work, but life is God’s most precious gift. No principle, no matter how glorious it may be, may justify the taking of it. Even if great stone may lay upon their chest, Reverend Lawson, like Cotton Mather, thought prayer a more certain cure for the witchcraft that the children of Salem were afflicted by during the Salem Witch trials. They did not believe the magistrates might do any good with their methods, partly because it was so difficult to catch a witch. Martha Corey, who had been accused of witchcraft in 1692, would not sign her pact with Satan on Main Street in broad daylight, nor practice her black arts there. Witchcraft was by its nature secret, and hard to be found out. Yet witches had been caught, and many examples were a matter of record, as were many theories on catching them. There were, to begin with, commonly recognized grounds for investigation. If an apparition was appearing to the citizenry and afflicting them, one would surely want to investigate the person represented in that apparition. One would also look for evidence of malice, since witchcraft was an expression of ultimate malice, the diametrical opposite to Christian charity. And one could hope that an investigation would produce credible confessions. Confessions were often easy to obtain, particularly if one used the technique of “cross and swift questions” recommended by virtually all authorities from Malleus Maleficarum to Cotton Mather, but it was not always easy to judge whether they were credible. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Satan was the Prince of Lies and witches were his servants; the word of confessed witches was therefore suspect in the accusations both of others and themselves. Furthermore, it was known that desperate persons had sometimes confessed to witchcraft as a bizarre means of committing suicide. And the mentally disturbed had also been known to imagine themselves witches and confess. In spite of all these difficulties, however, confession was often the best evidence one could hope for. More concrete evidence was occasionally to be had. A diligent search, for example, might turn up some of the tools of the witch’s trade: images with pins in them, ointments and potions, books of instruction in the magical arts. And one could search the body of the accused for the so-called Devil’s Mark. It was believed that when a pact was made, the Devil placed upon the witch’s body a piece of flesh from which He, in His own person or that of a familiar, might such the blood of the witch. (The blood has traditionally been thought to be the carrier of the spirit; in sucking blood the Devil was feeding on the witch’s soul.) since this “witch’s tit” was created by the Devil, rather than by God, it lacked the warmth of normal flesh (hence the still-current expression about being cold as a witch’s tit). It also lacked sensation, and one could rest for it by running a pin through it to see whether it was a genuinely preternatural excrescence or only a wart or a hemorrhoid. Yet pricking for the Devil’s Mark was most haphazard and uncertain. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
It was common for examiners, physicians included, to disagree over whether an excrescence was natural or preternatural. And it was not unheard of for them to find what they thought to be a Devil’s Mark on one occasion, only to discover that there was nothing left of it but a piece of dried skin on a second examination. The common people believed in a number of tests for witches. The best known was the water-ordeal, in which the suspect was bound and “swum”: thrown into or dragged by a rope thought the nearest body of water. If she floated, she was a witch; the water was rejecting her as she had rejected Christian baptism. If she sank, she was innocent; the mod would try to drag her out before she drowned. If they failed, they professed to be sorry. Guilty until proven innocent, which would often result in the death of innocent people. (It was generally mod-action when a witch was swum; the courts seldom countenanced it, even when the accused requested it as a means of proving her innocence.) Another such test was asking the accused to repeat the Lord’s Prayer. It was believed that a witch could not say it correctly, even after prompting, since she regularly said it backwards at her witches’ Sabbaths. It was also believed that a witch could not weep. Because she had rejected Christian charity in favour of demonic malice, she would remain dry-eyed at the most heart-rending spectacles. Many of the learned, including Increase Mather and Deodat Lawson, rejected such tests outright as superstitions as white magic or both. Others like Cotton Mather, were wiling to countenance experiments with them but refused to accept them as certain evidence. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Rebecca Nurse was accused of witchcraft. Girls who had been afflicted testified that not only was the apparition of Rebecca Nurse tormenting them; they said they had seen it leave her body and return to it. However, Rebecca denied this allegation, and it was at that point that Judge John Hathorne, for the second time prayed that she be cleared if innocent; and if guilty, that be discovered. If he could not doubt that the girls’ afflictions were genuine, neither could he doubt that Rebecca Nurse was telling the truth, at least so far as she knew it. Perhaps, he thought, the Devil had made her a witch without her knowledge. Therefore he said to her “Possibly you may apprehend you are no witch, but have you not been led aside by temptations that way?” “I have not,” she answered, and Judge Hathorne could reply only be reflecting on “what a said thing” it was to see church members accused of such a crime. “What, he asked, did she make of the girls’ behaviour? “hey accuse you of hurting them, and if you think it is not unwillingly, but by design, you must look upon them as murderers.” “I cannot tell what I think of it.” Nothing testifies more to the genuineness of the fits than the fact that Rebecca Nurse, like majority of the accused persons, could not tell what to think of them. Later, when Judge Hathorne asked whether she thought the afflicted persons bewitched, she answered yes, “I do think they are.” So he appealed to her again. “When this witchcraft came upon the stage there was no suspicion of Tituba….She professed much love to that child, Betty Parris, but it was her apparition that did the mischief. And why should not you also be guilty, for your apparition doth hurt also.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
“Would you have belie myself?” said Rebecca Nurse. To repeated testimony that her apparition was tormenting people she replied “I cannot help it. The Devil may appear in my shape.” In the end the magistrates committed her for further examination. Rebecca Nurse’s arrest and examination did more than raise temporary doubts in the mind of John Hathorne; it evoked the first open expression of opposition to the witchcraft proceedings. Mary Warren, one of the afflicted girls, was the servant of a farmer named John Procter. On the morning after Rebecca Nurse’s examination, he came to Salem Village “to fetch home his jade,” as he put it. He expressed his opinion of the afflicted persons’ testimony in no uncertain terms. “If they were let alone,” he said, “we should all be devils and witches quickly. They should rather be had to the whipping post. However, he would fetch his jade home and thrash the Devil out of her. And more to the like purpose, crying ‘Hang them! Hang them!’” He added that when Mary Warren “was first taken with fits he kept her close to the wheel and threatened to thrash her, and then she had no more fits till the next day [when] he was gone forth. And then she must have her fits again, forsooth.” Historians have taken John Procter’s statement as evidence that Mary Warren’s fits were false, and in this they have been quite wrong. The seventeenth-century community took hem as evidence of Procter’s malice and brutality, and they were partly right. However, only partly. Because no matter how brutal it may be to beat the hysterical out of their fits, the fact remains that such treatment often works. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
A fit of uncontrolled laughter can often be stopped with a judiciously timed slap in the face. And we should remember that in the eighteenth century one of the commonest treatments for many forms of insanity was beating the patient. Such treatment was probably motivated in part by the “normal” person’s exasperation with the insane for so conspicuously losing their rationality. However, surely it was also motivated by the fact that it frequently worked. And for that matter, it should be recognized that we are still beating the insane. Even in modern times, people who work in lunatic asylums, on rare occasions, beat the patients because no one will believe them because they have no credibility due to the fact that they have been accused of being “crazy.” Imagine that. Calling someone “crazy” in modern times is just a new form of witch hunting, which allows one to do whatever one wants to a person. Most people no longer administer the blows themselves; it is done through technology, and with more precision than our ancestors. However, this should not disguise the fact that electric shock is just as brutal for the patient as the thrashing John Procter proposed for Mary Warren. Perhaps he did thrash her, and perhaps it did in part work, because Mary Warren was the only person who even temporarily recovered from her affliction. As we moved into the 19th century, more people moved from hunting witch to hunting animals for food and fur. Sarah Winchester inherited a fortune, as she was heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms company, but unfortunately, and it really may have been unfortunate, she could not take all her wealth with her. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
At the time of Mrs. Winchester’s death in 1922, there were rooms full of ornate treasures still waiting to find a niche in the massive home. And there still may be treasures untold hidden away in the Winchester mansion, even though it took six trucks, working day and night, for six weeks to loot the mansion after her death. However, for some reason, they still left behind enough materials to continue construction on the mansion for another 38 years. At one time Mrs. Winchester enjoyed the finest vintage wines and liqueurs. However, one evening wen she went to the wine cellar to locate a special bottle, she same across a black handprint on the wall. It was most likely a dirt smudge left by a workman, yet she took it as an omen and ordered the cellar boarded up. To this day the wine cellar has not been rediscovered, which means that there might still be spirits in the Winchester Mystery House—if only the intoxicating kind! The late Mrs. Winchester had been a great reader of Shakespeare, at a time when this pursuit implied more freedom of thought than at the present day, and in a community where it required much courage to patronize the drama even in the closet. Mrs. Winchester also had an inordinate love of dress, and the very best tastes in the World. Often she would sit alone, combing out her long hair. When it would get too dark to see, she would light two candles in their sockets, on the frame of her mirror, and then go to the window to draw her curtains. It was a grey September evening; the landscape was bare and bleak, and the sky heavy with cumulonimbus clouds. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Her bedroom door stood ajar, as she could vaguely see in the gathering darkness, and moved slowly to and fro, as if someone were swaying it. She was about to drop her curtain, when she stumbled and fell on her bed. Later Mrs. Winchester would be found dead. She died peacefully in her sleep at the age of 83. Although people in the town gossiped about her, many dreamed of getting their hands on her riches. Mrs. Winchester also had many finery and jewels. Before he passed away, Mr. Winchester had liberality covered her hands with rings, and she had the finest night dresses trimmed with lace ruffles. People coveted Mrs. Winchester’s rings and her laces more than they coveted her home sometimes. Before her untimely death, Mrs. Winchester wanted to leave her rings and laces and silks to Annie. It was a great wardrobe—there was not such another in all of California; it would have been a great inheritance for her daughter, if she had ever grown up into a young woman. There were things that a man never buys twice, and if they are lost you will never again see the like. So she watched the well. It was such a providence that Annie would have been Mrs. Winchester’s colour; and she could wear her gowns; and she had her mother’s eyes. For the same fashion usually come back every twenty years. Annie would have been able to wear Mrs. Winchester’s gowns as they were. They would lie there quietly waiting till Annie grew into them—wrapped in camphor and rose-leaves, and keeping their colours in the sweet-scented darkness. Even though Annie passed six weeks after her birth, Mrs. Winchester still had the gowns in several great chests in the attic of the Winchester mansion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
After Mrs. Winchester passed away, the house was locked up. Dozens of women waited at the auctions in San Francisco to bid on Mrs. Winchester’s copious wardrobe, but it still lay languishing in thankless gloom in the dusty attic. It was a revolting thought that such exquisite fabrics should be awaiting no one. Was it not a pity that so much finery should be lost?—for lost it would be, what with colours fading, and moth eating it up, and the change of fashion. After the mansion was sold Lewis Dupont and his wife Bianca spent months combing through the items left behind in the mansion. They could not figure out why the mover left so many beautiful and rare items. When they stumbled upon the attic with Mrs. Winchester’s wardrobe, Bianca asked if she could wear them. Her husband told her that he did not want to disturb any ghost and to leave them be. Nine moths went by, however, and brought with them new needs and new visions. Bianca’s thoughts hovered loving about Mrs. Winchester’s relics. She went up and looked at the chests in the attic in which they lay imprisoned. There was a sullen defiance in its three great padlocks and its iron bands which only quickened her cupidity. There was something exasperating in its incorruptible immobility. It was like a grim and grizzled old household servant, who locks his jaws over a family secret. And then there was a look of capacity in its vast extent, and a sound as of dense fullness, when Bianca knocked one chest’s sides with the toe of her little shoe, which caused her to flush with baffled longing. “It’s absurd,” she cried; “it’s improper, it’s wicked”; and she forthwith resolved upon another attack upon her husband. On the following day, after dinner, when he had had his wine, she boldly began it. But he cut her short with great sternness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
“Once for all, Bianca,” said he, “it’s out of the question. If you return to this matter, I shall be gravely displeased.” “Very good,” said Bianca. “I am glad to learn the esteem in which I am held. Gracious Heaven,” she cried, “I am a very happy woman! It’s an agreeable thing to feel one’s self sacrificed to a caprice!” And her eyes filled with tears of anger and disappointment. Lewis had a good-natured man’s horror of a woman’s sobs, and he attempted—I may say he condescended to explain. “It’s not a caprice, dear, it’s a promise,” he said—“an oath.” “An oath? It’s a pretty matter for oaths! and to whom, pray?” “To Mrs. Winchester,” said the young man, “Everyone knows the clothes were meant for her late baby girl! That’s probably why the movers left them behind. Mrs. Winchester—ah, Mrs. Winchester!” and Bianca’s tears broke forth. Her bosom heaved with stormy sobs—sobs which were the long-deferred sequel of the violent fit of weeping in which she had indulged herself on the night she had discovered Mrs. Winchester’s betrothal. She had hoped, in her better moments, that she had done with her jealousy; but her temper, on that occasion, has take an ineffaceable hold. “And pray, what right had Mrs. Winchester to dispose of my future?” she cried. “What right had she to bind you to meanness and cruelty? Ah, I occupy a dignified place, and I make a very fine figure! I am welcome to what Mrs. Winchester has left! And what has she left? I never knew till now how great it was!” Lewis put his arm around his wife’s waist and tried to kiss her, but she shook him off with magnificent scorn. Poor fellow! he has coveted a “devilish fine woman,” and he had got one. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Bianca’s scorn was intolerable. He walked away with his ear tinging—irresolute, distracted. Before him was his secretary, and in it the scared key which with his own hand he had turned in the triple lock. He marched up and opened it, and tool the key from a secret drawer, wrapped in a little packet which he had sealed with his own honest bit of glazonry. Fe garde, said the motto—“I keep.” However, he was ashamed to put it back. He flung it upon the table beside his wife. “Put it back!” she cried. “I want it not. I hate it!” “I wash my hands of it,” cried her husband. “God forgive me!” Mrs. Dupont hastily took possession of the key. At the habitual supper-hour Lewis Dupont came back from his counting-room. It was the month June, and supper was served by daylight. The meal was placed on the table, but Mrs. Dupont failed to make her appearance. The servant who his master sent to call her came back with the assurance that her room was empty, and that the woman informed him that she had not been seen since dinner. They had, in truth, observed her to have been in tears, and supposing her to be shut up in her chamber, had not disturbed her. Her husband called her name in various parts of the house, but without response. At last it occurred to him that he might find her by taking the way to the attic. The thought gave him a strange feeling of discomfort, and he bade his servants remain behind, wishing no witness in his quest. He reached the foot of the stair case leading to the topmost flat, and stood with his hands on the banisters, pronouncing his wife’s name. His voice trembled. He called again louder and more firmly. The only sound which disturbed the absolute silence was a faint echo of his own tones, repeating his question under the great eaves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
He nevertheless felt irresistibly move to ascend the staircase. It opened upon a wide hall, westward, and admitted the last rays of run. Before the window stood the great chests of clothes. Before one of the chests, on her knees, the young man saw with amazement and horror the figure of his wife. In an instant he crossed the interval between them, bereft of utterance. The lid of one of the chests stood open, exposing, amid their perfumed napkins, its treasure of stuffs and jewels. Bianca had fallen backward from a kneeling poser, with one hand supporting her on the floor and the other pressed to her heart. On her limbs was the stiffness of death, and on her face, in the fading light of sun, the terror of something more than death. Her lips were parted in entreaty, in dismay, in agony; and on her blanched brow and cheeks there glowed the marks of thirteen hideous wounds from a vengeful ghost. Legend has it that Mr. and Mrs. Dupont were never heard from again and the ghost sealed off this portion of the attic, creating the stairs to the ceiling. Astaroth is a Mighty, Strong Duke, and appears in the form of an hurtful Angel riding on an Infernal Beast like a Dragon, and carrying in his right hand a Viper. Thou must in no wise let him approach too near unto thee, lest he do thee damage by his Noisome Breath. Wherefore the Magician must hold the Magical Ring near his face, and that will defend him. He giveth true answers of things Past, Present, and to Come, and can discover all Secrets. He will declare wittingly how the Spirits fell, if desires, and the reason of his own fall. He can make humans wonderfully knowing in all Liberal Sciences and is said to guard the Winchester. He rules 40 Legions of Spirits. His Seal is this, which wear thou as a Lamen before thee, or else he will not appear not yet obey thee. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Some of the architectural oddities of the Winchester mansion may have practical explanations, others may have supernatural origins. The miles of twisting hallways are made even more intriguing by secret passageways in the walls. Mrs. Winchester traveled through her house in a roundabout fashion, supposedly to confuse any mischievous ghosts that might be following her. This wild and fanciful description of Mrs. Winchester’s nightly stroll to the Séance Room appeared in The American Weekly in 1928, six years after her death. “When Mrs. Winchester set out for her Séance Room, it might well have discouraged the ghost of the Indian or even the bloodhound, to follow her. After traversing an interminable labyrinth of rooms and hallways, suddenly she would push a button, a panel would fly back and she would step quickly from one apartment into another, and unless the pursuing ghost was watchful and quick, he would lose her. Then she opened a window in that apartment and climbed out, not into the open air, but onto the top of a flight of steps that took her down one story only to meet another flight that brought her right back to the same level again, all inside the house. This was supposed to be very discomforting to evil spirits who are said to be naturally suspicious of traps.” We who prayed and wept for liberty from kinds and the yoke of liberty accept the tyranny of things we do not need. In plenitude too free, we have become adept beneath the yoke of greed. Those who will not learn in plenty to keep their place must learn it by their need when they have had their ways and the fields spurn their seed. We have failed Thy grace. Lord, I flinch and pray, please send Thy necessity. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Oh deer, the weekend is here! What a better way to spend time than strolling through the gardens of the Winchester Mystery House.
🎟️ Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com/recent-links
The Myth of Suburbia–Because My Heart is Broken, I Feel Very Cheerful!
Some things, some things just were not meant to be. There is a balance of nature. You cannot not just turn back the clock just because you wish you can. We are often told that primitive man could not conceive pure spirit; but then neither could they conceive mere matter. A throne and a local habitation are attributed to God only at that stage when it is still impossible to regard the throne, or palace even of an Earthly king as merely physical objects. In Earthly thrones and palace it was the spiritual significance—as we should say, the “atmosphere”—that mattered to the ancient mind. As soon as the contrast of “spiritual” and “material” was before their minds, they knew God to be “spiritual” and realized that their religion had implied this all along. However, at an earlier stage that contrast was not there. To regard that earlier stage as unspiritual because we find there no clear assertion of unembodied spirit, is a real misunderstanding. You might just as well call it spiritual because it contained no clear consciousness of mere matter. As regards to the history of language, word did not start by referring merely to physical objects and then get extended by metaphor to refer to emotions, mental states and the like. On the contrary, what we now call the “literal and metaphorical” meanings have both been disengaged by analysis from an ancient unity of meanings which was neither or both. In the same way it was quite erroneous to think that humans started with a “material” God of “Heaven” and gradually spiritualized them. Humans could not have started with something “material” for the “material,” as we understand it, comes to be realized only by contrast to the “immaterial,” and these two sides of the contrast to the “immaterial,” and the two sides of the contrast grow at the same speed. Humans started with something which was neither and both. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
As long as we are trying to read back into that ancient unity either the one or the other of the two opposites which we ourselves still from time-to-time experience. The point is crucial not only for the present discussion but for any sound literary criticism or philosophy. The Christian doctrines, and even the Jewish doctrines which preceded them, have always been statements about spiritual reality, not specimens of primitive physical science. Whatever is beneficial in the conception of the spiritual has always been contained in them; it is only its negative aspect (immateriality) which has had to wait for recognition until abstract thought was fully developed. The material imagery has never been taken literally by anyone who had reached the stage when one could understand what “taking it literally” meant. And now we come to the differences between “explaining” and “explaining away.” It shows itself in two way. First, some people when they say that a thing is meant “metaphorically” conclude from this that it is hardly meant at all. When Christ told us to carry the cross, they rightly think that Chris spoke metaphorically. However, they wrongly conclude that carrying the cross means nothing more than leading a respectable life and subscribing moderately to charities. They reasonably think that hell “fire” is a metaphor—and unwisely conclude that it means nothing more serious than remorse. They say that the story of the Fall in Genesis is not literal; and then go on to say (I have heard them myself) that it was really a fall upwards—which is like saying that because “My heart is broken” contains a metaphor, it therefore means “I feel very cheerful.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
This mode of interpretation I regard, frankly, as nonsense. For me the Christian doctrines which are “metaphorical”—or which have become metaphorical with the increase of abstract thought—mean something which is just as “supernatural” or shocking after we have removed the ancient imagery as it was before. They mean that in addition to the physical or psycho-physical Universe known to the sciences, there exists an uncreated and unconditioned reality which causes the Universe to be; that this reality has a beneficial structure or constitution which is usefully, though doubtless not complete, described in the doctrine of the Trinity; and that this reality, at a definite point in time, entered the Universe we know by becoming one of its own creatures and there produced effects on the historical level which the normal workings of the natural Universe do not produce; and that this has brough about a change in our relations to be unconditioned reality. It will be noticed that our colourless “entered the Universe” is not a white less metaphorical then the more picturesque “came down from Heaven.” We have only substituted a picture of horizontal or unspecified movement for one of vertical movement. And every attempt to improve the ancient language will have the same result. These things not only cannot be asserted—they cannot even be presented for discussion—without metaphor. We can make our speech duller; we cannot make it more literal. Secondly, these statements concern two things—the supernatural, unconditioned reality, and those events on the historical level which its irruption into the natural Universe is held to have produced. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The first thing is indescribable in “literal” speech, and therefore we rightly interpret all that is said about it metaphorically. However, the second thing is in a wholly different position. Events on the historical level are the sort of things we can talk about literally. If they occurred, they were perceived by the sense of humans. Legitimate “explanation” degenerates into muddled or dishonest “explaining away” as soon as we start applying to these evens the metaphorical interpretation which we rightly apply to the statements about God. The assertion that God has a Son was never intended to mean that He is a being propagating His kind by intercourse involving pleasures of the flesh: and so we do not alter Christianity by rendering explicit the fact that “sonship” is not used of Christ in exactly the same sense in which it is used of men. However, the assertion that Jesus turned water into wine was meant perfectly literally, for this refers to something which, if it happened, was well within the reach of our senses and our language. When I say, “My heart is broken,” you known perfectly well that I do not mean anything you could verify at a post–mortem. However, when I say, “My boot-lace is broken,” then, if your own observation shows it to be intact, I am either lying or mistaken. The accounts of the “miracles” in first-century Palestine are either lies, or legends, or history. And if all, of the most important, of them are lies or legends then the claim which Christianity has been making for the last two thousand years is simply false. No doubt it might even so contain noble sentiments and moral truths. So does Greek mythology; so does Norse. However, that is quite a different affair. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Nothing we have discussed helps us to a decision about the probability or improbability of the Christian claim. We have merely removed a misunderstanding in order to secure for that question a fair hearing. Long before the dawn of First Wave civilization, when our most distant ancestors relied on hunting and herding, fishing, or foraging for survival, they kept constantly on the move. Driven by hunger, cold, or ecological mishaps, pursuing weather or game, they were the original “high-mobiles”—traveling light, avoiding the accumulation of cumbersome goods or property, and ranging widely over the landscape. A band of fifty men, women, and children might need a land area six times the size of Manhattan Island to feed them, or they might trace a migratory path over literally hundreds of miles each year as conditions demanded. They led what today’s geographers call a “spatially expensive” existence. First Wave civilization, by contrast, bred a race of “spacemisers.” As nomadism was replaced by agriculture migratory trails gave way to cultivated fields and permanent settlements. Rather than romancing restlessly over an extensive area, the farmer and his family stayed put, intensively working their tiny patch within the larger sea of space—a sea so large as to dwarf the individual. By the period immediately preceding the birth of industrial civilization, vast open fields surrounded each huddle of peasant huts. Apart from a handful of merchants, scholars, and soldiers, most individuals lived their lives at the end of a very short tether. They walked to the fields at sunrise, then back again at nightfall. They traced a path to church. On rare occasions they trekked to the next village six or seven miles away. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Conditions varied with climate and terrain, of course, but according to historian J.R. Hale, “We should probably not be far wrong if we took the average longest journey made by most people in their lifetimes as fifteen miles.” Agriculture produced a “spatially restricted” civilization. The industrial storm that broke over Europe in the eighteenth century created once again a “spatially extended” culture—but now on a nearly planetary scale. Goods, people, and ideas were transported thousands of miles and vast populations migrated in search of jobs. Instead of production being widely dispersed in the fields, it was now concentrated in cities. Huge, teeming populations were compressed into a few tightly packed nodes. Old villages shriveled and died; booming industrial centers sprang up, rimmed with smokestacks and furnace fire. This dramatic reworking of the landscape required much more complex coordination between city and country. Thus food, energy, people, and raw materials had to follow into the urban nodes, while manufactured goods, fashions, ideas, and financial decisions flowed out. The two flows were carefully integrated and coordinated in time and space. Within the cities themselves, moreover, a much wider variety of spatial shapes was needed. In the old agricultural system the basic physical structures were a church, a nobleman’s palace, some wretched huts, an occasional tavern or monastery. Second Wave civilization, because of its much more elaborate division of labour, demanded many more specialized types of space. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Architects, for this reason, soon found themselves creating offices, banks, police stations, factories, railroad terminals, department store, prisons, fire houses, asylums, and theaters. These many different types of space had to be fitted together in logically functional ways. The locations of factories, the pathways that led from home to shop, the relationships of railroad sidings to docks or truck yards, the placement of schools and hospitals, of water pipes, power stations, conduits, gas lines, telephone exchanges—all had to be spatially coordinated. Space had to be as carefully organized as a Bach fugue. This remarkable coordination of specialized spaces—necessary to get the right people to the right places at the right moment—was the exact spatial analogue of temporal synchronization. It was, in effect, synchronization in pace. For, if industrial societies were to function, both time and space had to be more carefully structured. Just as people had to be provided with more exact and standardized units of space. Prior to the industrial revolution, when time was still being sliced up into crude units like pater noster wyles, spatial measures, too, were a mishmash. In medieval England, for example, a “rood” might be as little as sixteen and a half feet or as much as twenty-four feet. In the sixteenth century the best advice on how to arrive at a measured rood was to select sixteen men at random as they walked out of church, to stand them in a line “their left feet one behind the other,” and to measure off the resulting distance. Even vaguer terms were used, such as “a day’s ride,” “an hour’s walk,” or “half and hour’s canter.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Such looseness could no longer be tolerated once the Second Wave began to change work patterns, and the invisible wedge created an ever-expanding marketplace. Precise navigation, for example, became more and more important as trade increased, and governments offered huge prizes to anyone who could devise better methods of keeping merchant ships on course. On land, too, more and more refined measurements and more precise units were introduced. The confusing, contradictory, chaotic variety of local customs, laws, and trade practices that prevailed during First Wave civilization had to be cleaned up, rationalized. Lack of precision and standard measurement were a daily aggravation to manufacturers and the rising merchant class. This explains the enthusiasm with which the French revolutionaries, at the dawn of the industrial era, applied themselves to the standardization of distance through the metric system as well as time through a new calendar. So important did they deem these problems that they were among the very first items taken up when the National Convention first me to declare a republic. The Second Wave of changes also brought with it a multiplication and sharpening of spatial boundaries. Until the eighteenth century the boundaries of empires were often imprecise. Because vast areas were unpopulated, precision was unnecessary. As population rose, trade increased, and the first factories began to spring up around Europe, many governments began systematically to map their frontiers. Customs zones were more clearly delineated. Local and even private properties came to be more carefully defined, marked, fenced, and recorded. Maps became more detailed, inclusive, and standardized. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
A new image of space arouse that corresponded exactly to the new image of time. As punctuality and scheduling set more limits and deadlines in time, more and more boundaries cropped up to set limits in space. Even the linearization of time had its spatial counterpart. In preindustrial societies straight-line travel, whether by land or sea, was an anomaly. The peasant’s path, the cowpath or Indian trail, all meandered according to the lay of the land. Many walls curved, bulged, or went off at irregular angles. The streets of medieval cities folded in on one another, curved, twisted, convoluted. Second Wave societies not only put ships on exact straight-line courses, they also built railroads whose shining tracks stretched in parallel straight lines as far as the eye could see. As the American planning official Grady Clay has noted, these rail lines (the term itself is a giveaway) became the axis off which new cities, built on grid patterns, took shape. The grid or gridiron pattern, combining straight lines with ninety-degree angles, lent a characteristic machine regularity and linearity to the landscape. Even now in looking at a city one can see a jumbled of streets, squares, circles, and complicated intersections in the older districts. These frequently give way to neat gridirons in those parts of the city built in later, more industrialized periods. The same is true for whole regions and countries. Even farm land began, with mechanization, to show linear patterns. Preindustrial farmers, plowing behind oxen, created curvy, irregular furrows. Once the Ox had started, the farmer did not want to stop him and the beast curved wide at the end of the furrow, forming a kind of S-curve. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Today anyone looking out the window of an airplane sees squared off fields with ruler-straight plow marks. The combination of straight lines and ninety-degree angles was reflected not merely on the land and in the streets but in the intimate spaces experienced by most men and women—the rooms they lived in. Curved walls and non-right angles are seldom found in industrial age architecture. Neat rectangular cubicles came to replace irregularly shaped rooms and high-rise buildings carried the straight line vertically toward the sky as well, with windows forming linear or grid patterns on the great walls facing the now straight streets. Thus our conception of an experience of space went through a process of linearization that paralleled the linearization of time. In all industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, Eastern or Western, the specialization of architectural spaces, the detailed map, the use of uniform, precise units of measurement and, above all, the line, became a cultural constant—basic to the new indust-reality. The Model 1866 Winchester rifle came to because although only about 13,000 Henrys were made, the name became so popular that for a year the firm was called the Henry Repeating Rifle Company. However, in 1866-67, since O.F. Winchester had majority control, the name was changed to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and the company absorbed all the assets of previous firms in which Winchester had invested substantial sums. And with the Henry’s successor, the Model 1866, his investments began to pay off handsomely. Knows popularly as the “Yellow Boy” in reference to its bright brass frame, the 1866 was the first of hundreds of models to bear the name Winchester. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
One of the most popular of all Winchester arms, the 1866 was widely used in opening the West and, in company with the Model 1873, is the most deserving of Winchesters to claim the legend “The Gun That Won the West.” It was also with this model that the factory engravers first created elaborate and exquisite masterpieces, some for exhibitions and a few for special presentations. The engraving dynasty of the Ulrich family, active primarily at Winchester for over eighty years, was effectively launched with the Model 1866. Model 1866 production would reach a total in excess of 170,000, with its serial numbering continuing that of the Henry rifle. The run continued until 1898, despite the appearance of several newer, more modern lever-actions with its production span. All 1866s were in .44 rimfire caliber, and all frames were brass. Most steel parts were blued, though some barrels were browned, and the levers and hammers were standard case-hardened. Despite the model designation of 1866, production quantities did not reach the market until 1866. The board had voted to authorize 5,000 rifles and carbines in a resolution of early March 1867, and another 10,000 were voted in mid-February 1868. The first Model 1866s were commonly known in the arms trade as “improved Henrys.” References to the 1866 in newspapers and in journals were generous and not infrequent. The Scientific American of October 14, 1868, noted: “We have lately examined the Winchester repeating rifle…which was submitted to a series of trials by the Federal Military Commission of Switzerland…The riled is elegant in appearance, compact, strong, and of excellent workmanship. On examination we find its working parts very simple, and not apparently liable to derangement.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Discoveries of surviving guns by collectors and dealers, and the Model 1866s in museums around the World, testify to this model’s being the first Winchester to spread the name internationally. The Army Museum in Constantinople displays some of the most exquisite of engraved Model 1866w, and Turkey was also a major client. The deluxe arms likely served as presentations to whet the appetite of Turkish generals and colonels. If so, the results were well worth the expense on Winchester’s part: 5,000 carbines and 45,000 muskets were ordered by the Turks in 1870 and 1871. The fortunes of Oliver Winchester and his rapidly growing firearms company surged during the banner years of 1873 and 1876. People are so fascinated with the story of the Winchester, it was The Golden Age of Gun making and the Winchester 1 of 1000. That means some of these guns were labeled like paintings because they are works of art and collectors’ items. People are looking for them because they are rare and valuable. These special rifles helped capture for Winchester an image of prestige, quality, and performance, an image he brand name has kept into modern times. However, only 133 Model of 1873 One of One Thousand were made, and only eight One of One Hundred. Of the Model 1868, only fifty-one One of One Thousand were built, and seven One of One Hundred. It was the One of One Thousand which inspired the only Hollywood Western movie ever named for a specific model of Winchester: Winchester ’73, starring James Stewart. As a part of the nationwide promotion of the film (which was released in 1950 and still shown on television), Universal Pictures and Winchester launched a nation search for One of One Thousand rifles. Owners of the first twenty guns discovered were given a Model 94 carbine. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
To locate the riled, 150,000 “Wanted” posters were printed and sent to Winchester dealers (there were then some 50,000 of them) and to “20,000 chiefs of police, daily and weekly newspapers, radio stations…and rifle club[s]…and…approximately 7,000 motion picture theaters.” The campaign was instrumental in adding to the ranks of firearms collectors, as well as locating over two dozen One of One Thousand 1873s. The Winchester Repeating Arms Company, in 1876, did approximately $1,812,500 ($45,599,620.33 in 2021 dollars) in net sales, made a profit of approximately $444,500 ($11,182,913.97 in 2021 dollars), and paid dividends to stockholders of $50,000 ($1,257,920.56 in 2021 dollars). The company had about 690 workmen. With guns being a necessity to keep one and one’s home safe, one can see why beautiful suburban neighbourhoods would become attractive. Not only did people like their looks, but the safety they provided. While the studies done about suburbs and suburbanization do no always fall into neat categories, it is possible, with a bit of shoving, to see suburbs and suburbanization since World War II as falling into four social and chronological eras. Each of these eras or phases has had a somewhat different emphasis. The first place of study of suburbs was simply the discovery of suburbia as an area and a topic worthy of scholarly and popular attention. By the early 1950s suburbia had been discovered by the popular press and magazines, but there was a dearth of actual research. Magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post began to focus on the homogeneity of suburbs’ physical appearance and how this was reflected in the social similarity of new suburbanites. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
While popular portrayals of the ranch houses, neat lawns, station wagons, and car pools had an element of humour, many of the novels, such as The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, The Crack in the Picture Window, Bullet Park, and No Down Payment, painted a darker picture. While outwardly benign, suburbia’s underside was portrayed as one of alcoholism, adultery, and quiet despair. (By contrast, if blander, the new medium of television painted a far bright picture. Shows such as “Ozzie and Harriet” in the 1950s, “Leave it to Beaver” in the 1960, “Happy Days” in the 1970s, and “The Wonder Years” in the late 1980s, and early 1990s presented an essentially warm and benign image of suburban life.) During the late 1940s and the 1950, scholars also discovered the suburbs, and what they found was that living in the suburbs produced a unique way of life. This came to be called “the myth of suburbia.” The myth of suburbia may also be the American Dream many people are seeking, and some have found. Starting the process, although the book really was not about suburbs per se, was David Riseman’s 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd, which, with its emphasis on the “other directed” personality type, emphasizing social conformity, set the stage for what was to follow (David Riseman, The Lonely Crowd, Yale University Press, New Haven Connecticut, 1950). As portrayed by Mr. Riseman, postwar suburban housing developments were conformist and coercive. The indictment was that such areas produced look-alike, other directed personality types who were governed by group norms rather than an inner moral compass. Commonly acknowledged as the best sociological analysis of the new suburbs was William H. Whyte’s best-selling book, The Organization Man (William H. Whyte, The Organization Man, Doubleday Anchor, Garden City, N.Y., 1956). Mr. Whyte, not a sociologist but the editor of Fortune, was impressed by the demographic composition of the postwar suburbs burgeoning on the urban periphery. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Not only was the housing relentlessly similar, but the young corporate businessmen and their wives living in these suburbs seemed to be developing a way of life or “social ethic” strongly emphasizing group interaction. To test these ideas, Mr. Whyte studied a “typical” suburb, Park Forest, Illinois, some thirty miles south of Chicago on the train line. Park Forest was not just a subdivision, but a fully planned community having its own shopping center and community facilities. Mr. Whyte suggested that Park Forest, and other like suburbs, the corporate ethic, with its emphasis on teamwork and on the downplaying of the solo individualist, was creating a new social way of life. The new suburbs, with their interchangeable houses and families having shallow community root, were simply reflections of the corporation ethic. Both corporations and suburbs were being populated by bland managers stressing the importance of getting along. In the suburbs, belongingness and frenetic socialization took place of the individuality of an earlier age. Group conformity and not rocking the boat were supposedly the suburban goals. Mr. Whyte’s The Organization Man, in its portrayal of the burgeoning post-World War II suburbs as centers of conformity and “togetherness,” set the suburban stereotype. Supposedly, the ethic of the organization, with its emphasis on mass-produced uniformity, produced newly constructed suburbs of considerable compulsive sociability and group activity but little originality. For example, in this era before most middle-class women worked, the wives living in Park Forest were expected to leave doors open to neighbour’s and engage in daily coffee klatching while their husbands were at work. Those who did not participate were ostracized; belongingness was a way of life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Moving to the suburbs also was portrayed as more or less automatically producing a number of personality and behavioural changes. These ranged from turning city introverts into suburban joiners to the converting of urban Democrats into suburban Republicans. According to a 1957 Newsweek article, “When a city dweller packs up and moves his family to the suburbs, he usually acquires a mortgage, a power lawn mower, and a backward grill. Often although a lifelong Democrat, he also starts voting Republican” (Newsweek, April 1, 1957, p.42). The stereotype was that new suburbanites who previously were Democrats automatically abandoned their long-standing voting patterns to become instant Republicans. The suburban Eisenhower landslides of 1952 and 1956 were interpreted as being a sign of a permanent voter shift. Such analysis often downplayed the degree to which the vote was for the immensely popular Eisenhower rather than for the party. Such statements as that in Newsweek also did not give sufficient attention to the fact that similar Eisenhower landslides also occurred in many supposedly Democratic city wars. The real voting pattern was more complex. In 1960 the old, established WASP suburbs voted solidly for Richard Nixon, while newer suburbs, particularly those with substantial Catholic populations, voted for John Kennedy. There also are rare cases of suburbs voting overwhelmingly Democratic. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign witnessed Goldwater losing every single suburban county in the northeast from Baltimore to Boston, illustrating that the suburbs were far from being bastions of Republicanism. However, the political myth persists, and it is commonly believed that Democrats cannot win in middle-class suburbs. As the myth was expressed in a 1992 Atlantic article, “Presidential politics these days is a race between Democratic cities and Republican suburbs to see who can producer bigger margins. The suburbs are winning. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
It is true that Republicans seeking a middle-class constituency are generally more comfortable in suburbs than those Democrats still trying to revive the inner-city, ethnic-racial-economic coalition of New Deal. It is also true that politically suburbia tends to be more conservative than the central cities. Between 1960 and 1988 city voters became more Democratic and suburban voters more Republican. The suburban proportion of the electorate grew from 33 percent in 1960 to 48 percent in 1988, while the urban proportion shrank from 33 to 29 percent. However, the suburban vote is not monolithic. Bill Clinton ran well in the suburbs in 1992. Congressional Democratic party candidates ran even better. Ideologically, most suburbanites generally see themselves as being in the center rather than to the right or life. The supposed right-wing proclivities of Orange County, south of Los Angeles, may be fascinating to journalists, but such right-wing voting is not typical of suburbia nationally. Nonetheless, the myth that the growth of suburbs sounds the death knell of the Democratic party is a half-century-old myth that keep being revived every national election. The problem about being dependent on others is that people need others whether these are adequate or not. For many reasons, realistic and unrealistic, many individuals (in us all) may construct a concept of being trapped in a relationship with a bad disobliging other, the witch of many fairy tales. The basic neurotic conflict is between dependence and independence; when the person one turn to is the person one must get away from. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
How are we to rely on others without feeling cut off? Again we are reminded of Balint’s philobats and ocnophils, who represent the fear of being committed versus the fear of belonging nowhere and having no attachment-figure. The origins of schizoid traits lay in some failure of the early environment to provide combinations of support and freedom in an acceptable form, a form which would foster both relationship and individuality, and which would make it possible to feel comfortable both with “I + You = Us’ and with ‘You and I disagree.’ When we are weak, we are vulnerable and need protection and so we are necessarily dependent on whoever will protect us and look after our needs. Suppose now that the people on whom we are dependent resent our dependence. Then we will feel we are rejected because of our dependence, about which we are helpless to do anything. Our very situation makes us contemptible. Some people are constantly afraid for this reason. Their experience of vulnerability and dependence has made them so: afraid of being dependent on people who dislike their dependence on them, afraid of appearing weak, afraid of looking a fool in other people’s eyes. People committed to this internalized object-relation are in the more dire a plight because they regard themselves with the same hostile gaze which they experience from others. They feel shamed and disgraced by their own dependence and weakness and terror, believing that other people despise them for it. When people make the slightest mistake, and start yelling things at themselves like, “You stupid thing! Why don’t you think! You ought to have known better!” and so on, are using words that their parents typically use against the in their daily nagging. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
We see in these individuals in an unmistakable way the anti-libidinal ego as an identification with the angry parent in a vicious attack on the libidinal ego which is denied comfort, understanding and support, treated as a bad selfish child, and even more deeply feared and hated as a weak child. In this frame of mind, people feel that the whole World is against them and waiting to humiliate them, yet they feel too weak to do without these hostile people. They are trapped. “I need them but they do not want me; even my being here with them annoys them.” They may then make an effort not to feel those needs which make them dependent on the people who resent their dependence. In these circumstances, a person’s sense of inadequacy does not come from doing this or that imperfectly; it is an “unremitting state” of feeling in the wrong and in the way. To keep anxiety at bay, some people then develop a marked interest in competence and self-sufficiency, rather as the spacebats do. They may try to run their life so that their need for others is minimized. This is how the premature ego-functions of “doing” rather than “being” develop, with emphasis on adequacy and skills. However, in the depths there is still terror, and the memory of being unable to cope, of being unable to keep “them” friendly and concerned, and of the passionate overwhelming need for the forbidden dependence. However, if you have enough confidence to trust in the teaching, and to move in the direction toward which it guides you, sooner or later the future will be lighted by small fugitive glimpses. What, it has been asked, if I get no glimpses? What can I do to break this barren, monotonous, dreary, and sterile spiritual desert of my existence? #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
If you cannot pray successfully, go to nature, where she is quiet or beautiful; go to art where it is majestic, exalting; go to hear some great soul speak, whether in private talk or public aggress; go to literature, find a great inspired book written by someone who has had glimpses. The fact that we know our bodies is a guarantee that we can know our souls. For the knowing principle in us is derived from the soul itself. We have only to search our own minds deeply enough and ardently enough to discover it. When you begin to seek the Knower, who is within you, and to sever yourself from the seen, which is both without and within you, you begin to pass from illusion to reality. The mind’s chief distinguishing power is to know—whether the object known is the World around or the ideas within. When this is turned in still deeper upon itself, subject and object are one, the thought-making activity comes to rest, and the “I” mystery is solved. Humans discover their real self, or being—one’s soul. They have lost it, lost it, and their children will never even wish for it—and I am afraid that the whole tribe is in trouble, the whole tribe is lost—because the Sun keeps rising and these days nobody sings. The high, he low, all of creation, God gives to humankind to use. If this privilege is misused, God’s Justice permits creation to punish humanity. Because of the voices of the Spirit of the imperishable in humans, because it refuses to acknowledge death as triumphant, because it permits the withered blossom, fallen from the tree of humankind, to follower and develop again in the human heart, it possesses sanctifying power. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
To know that when you die there will remain those who, wherever they may be on this wide Earth, whether they be poor or rich, will send this prayer after you, to know hat they will cherish your memory as their dearest inheritance—what more satisfying or sanctifying knowledge can you ever hope for? And such is the knowledge bequeathed to us all by God. God is just, through we do not always comprehend His ways. When death seems to overwhelm us, negating life the Holy Ghost renews our faith in the worthwhileness of life. Through the Holy Ghost, we publicly manifest our desire and intention to assume the relation to the American community which our parents had in their life-time. Continuing the chain of tradition that binds generation to generation, we express our undying faith in God’s love and justice, and pray that He will speed the day when His Kingdom shall finally be established and His peace pervade the World. O Lord and King Who are full of compassion, in whose hand is the soul of every living thing and the breath of all flesh, to Thine all-wise care do we commit the souls of our dear ones who have departed from this Earth. Teach all who mourn to accept the judgment of Thine inscrutable will and cause them to know the sweetness of Thy consolation. Quicken by Thy holy word those bowed in sorrow, that like all the faithful in American who have gone before, they too may be faithful to Thy Word and thus advance the reign of Thy Kingdom upon Earth. In solemn testimony to that unbroken faith which links the generations one to another, please let those who mourn now rise to magnify and sanctify Thy holy name. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
Just looking at that island in the kitchen at the Meadows Residence 1 makes us hungry for some roast chicken, mashed potatoes, string beans, and chocolate cake. Effortless, classic luxury deserves foods that match!
Imagine that the beautiful life you’ve always wanted can be yours. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/residence-1/
The Earth Dries Up and Withers, the World Languishes and Withers!
They say what you send around, comes around. Perhaps that is true, even if it takes a thousand years. Everyone is born. Everyone will die. This is the short summary of life. Although it is accurate, the story certainly leaves out a lot, does it not? How might we develop a fuller picture of what happens during a lifetime? Perhaps we can begin by studying interesting lives. We are all affected by the same universal principles that guide human development. Each of us will face problems on the path to healthy development. Some obstacles, such as learning to walk of finding a personal identity, are universal. Others are unusual or specialized. The challenges of development extend far beyond childhood and into old age. There really is no such thing as a “typical person” or a “typical life.” Nevertheless, broad similarities can be found in the life stages of infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle adulthood, and old age. Each stage confronts a person with new developmental tasks that must be mastered for optimal development. The spread of industrialism was dependent upon the synchronization of human behaviour with the rhythms of the machines. Synchronization was one of the guiding principles of Second Wave civilization, and everywhere the people of industrialism appeared to outsiders to be time-obsessed, always glancing nervously as their watches. To bring about this time-consciousness and achieve synchronization, however, people’s basic assumptions about time—their mental images of time—had to be transformed. A new “software of time” was needed. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Agricultural populations, needing to know when to plant and when to harvest, developed remarkable precision in the measurement of long spans of time. However, because they did not require close synchronization of human labour, peasant peoples seldom developed precise units for measuring short spans. They typically divided time not into fixed units, like hours or minutes, but into loose, imprecise chunks representing the length of time needed to perform some homely task. A farmer might refer to an interval as “a cow milking time.” In Madagascar, an accepted unit of time was called “a rice cooking”; a moment was known as “the frying of a locust.” Englishmen spoke of a “pater noster wyle”—the time needed for a prayer—or, more earthily, of a “pissing while.” Similarly, because there was little exchange between one community or village and the next, and because work did not require it, the units in which time was mentally packaged varied from place to place and season to season. In medieval northern Europe, for example, daylight was divided into equal hours. However, since the interval between dawn and sunset varied from day to day, an “hour” in December was shorter than an “hour” in March or June. Instead of vague intervals like a pater noster wyle, industrial societies needed extremely precise units like hour, minute, or second. And these units had to be standardized, interchangeable from one season or community to the next. Today the entire World is neatly divided into time zones. We speak of “standard” time. Pilots all over the globe refer back to “Zulu” time—id est, Greenwich Mean Time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
By international convention Greenwich, England, became the point from which all time differences would be measured. Periodically, in unison, as though motivated by a single will, millions of people set their clocks back or forward an hour, and whatever our inner, subjective sense of things may tell us when time is dragging, or conversely when it seems to be whizzing by, and hour is now a single interchangeable, standardized hour. Second Wave civilization did more than cut time up into more precise and standard chunks. It also placed these chunks in a straight line that extended indefinitely back into the past and forward into the future. It made time linear. Indeed, the assumption that time is linelike is so deeply embedded in our thoughts that it is hard for those of us raised in Second Wave societies to conceive of any alternative. Yet many preindustrial societies, and some First Wave societies even today, see time as a circle, not a straight line. From the Mayas to the Buddhists and the Hindus, time was circular and repetitive, history repeating itself endlessly, lives perhaps reliving themselves through reincarnation. The idea that time was like a great circle is fond in the Hindu concept of recurrent kalpas, each one four thousand million years long, each representing but a single Brahma day beginning with re-creation, ending in dissolution, and beginning again. The notion of circular time is found in Plato and Aristotle, one of whose students, Eudemus, pictured himself living through the same moment again and again as the cycle repeated itself. It was taught by Pythagoras. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
In Time and Eastern Man, Joseph Needham tells us that “For the Indo-Hellenic…time is cyclical and eternal.” Moreover, while in China the idea of linear time dominated, according to Needham, “Cyclical time was certainly prominent among the early Taoist speculative philosophers.” In Europe, too, in the centuries preceding industrialization, these alternative views of time coexisted. “Throughout the whole medieval period,” writes mathematician G. J. Whitrow, “the cyclic and linear concepts of time were in conflict. The linear concept was fostered by the mercantile class and the rise of a money economy. For as long as power was concentrated in the ownership of land, time was felt to be plentiful and was associated with the unchanging cycle of soil.” As the Second Wave gathered force this ago-old conflict was settled: liner time triumphed. Linear time became the dominant view in every industrial society, East or West. Time came to be seen as a highway unrolling from a distant past through the present toward the future, and this conception of time, alien to billions of humans who lived before industrial civilization, became the basis of all economic suit of IBM, the Japanese Economic Planning Agency, or the Soviet Academy. It is worth noting, however, that linear time was a precondition for indust-real views of evolution and progress. Liner time made evolution and progress plausible. For if time were circular instead of linelike, if events doubled back on themselves instead of moving in a single direction, it would mean that history repeated itself and the evolution and progress were no more than illusions—shadows on the wall of time. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
Synchronization Standardization. Linearization. They affected the root assumption of civilization and they brought massive changes in the way ordinary people handled time in their loves. However, if time itself was transformed, space, too, had to be repackaged to fit into the new indust-reality. Then suddenly in the 1950s, urban-based intellectual discovered the suburbs. And what they discovered, to their horror, was an aesthetic and social dreamland filled with beautiful, new tract housing with big emerald green lawns, trees, bushes, and flowers, station wagons, sports cars and sedans, and organization men, housewives, and children. However, attention was riveted almost exclusively on the supposed negative consequences of city-oriented intellectuals, particularly those living in New York City, was that the postwar suburbs were an unmitigated aesthetic and social disaster. Suburbia was equated with the emergence of a popular mass culture dominated by the mass media. The neatness and repetitiveness of popular taste was blamed on the suburbs. They became a scapegoat for all that the cosmopolitan critics disliked about modern life. Often, this was accompanied with glorification of the past. In The City History Lewis Mumford bemoaned the growth of middle-class suburbs: “While the suburbs served only a favored minority, it neither spoiled the countryside nor threatened the city. But now that the drift to the outer ring has become a mass movement, it tends to destroy both environments without producing anything but a dreary substitute, devoid of form and even more devoid of the original suburban values.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
Further this mass exodus to suburbia was resulting in: “a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, in uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated food, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold manufacture in the central metropolis (Mumford, 1961, p. 486). Mr. Mumford, like other cosmopolitan critics, seemed particularly offended that suburbia was developing not as planned communities for those of taste, but as mass suburbanization for the common man. Often, as in the above quotation, the characteristics of the housing and the characteristics of the suburban residents were directly linked. And both were clearly found wanting. The critics embraced an extreme form of environmental determinism in which the characteristics of the area determined the character of the inhabitants. According to a 1964 New York Times Magazine article by elitist Ada Louise Huxtable, the long-time New York Times architecture critic, “It is a shocking fact that more than 90 percent of builders’ homes are not designed by architects…and the consequent damage “is social, cultural, psychological, and emotional, as well as aesthetic” (Ada Louise Huxtable, “Clusters Instead of Slurbs,” New York Times Magazine, February 9, 1964, pp. 37-44). #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
Suburbia was thought by some to be a dismal place where mediocrity ruled and about which no intellectual could say anything favourable—even if they lived in one. The same biased criticism of popular tastes and cultural uniformity was delivered with far more humour in Malvina Reynolds’s folksong “Little Boxes.” Sung for decades by Pete Seeger to the point where it has become an American classic, the opening lines to the lyrics are: “Little Boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky, little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same. There’s a green one and pink one and a blue one and a yellow one and they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.” This point that the little boxes and the people who lived in them are all the same was a core belief of the city-based intellectual critics of suburbs. It was a given that suburbs bred conformity. Ironically, the children born in the little boxes would spawn the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. It was the children of the suburbs who celebrated at Woodstock and Coachella. It should also be noted that this pattern of urban cities detailing the ills of suburbia is not a phenomenon common only to earlier decades. Even in 1993, in The New York Times, one could find a feature article bemoaning the isolation and lack of intellectual and cultural activities in suburbia, As stated in the article, “escapees from Manhattan have found that along with the gains have come unexpected nuisances, even deep feelings of loss. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
“And what is more, the unpleasant surprises are often the flip side of precisely the attractions that drew them to the suburbs in the first place. The emigres discover they can walk virtually anywhere at night without fear. But where to walk? So few places worth walking are open after dark…Some discover that at times their snug home on its separate lot, without a doorman downstairs or neighbor above and below, makes them feel lonely and more vulnerable, not more secure. And when pipes leak and the heat shuts off, they learn that the joys of the suburbs do not include supers” (Joseph Berger, “Emigres in Suburbs Find Life’s Flip Side,” New York Times, January 24, 1993, Metro p.30). Sounds a lot like satire. Nonetheless, there are significant differences between contemporary articles, such as that quoted above, and the typical piece written during earlier decades. While both might decry the absences of all-night take-out, current articles acknowledge that in addition to the opera, the city also has serious problems, such as old buildings with pest, noise, foul smells, a high density of unfriendly people packed into one place, lack of privacy and family values, political tensions are more visible, there are issues with parking and traffic, poor air quality, the menace of muggers and aggressive panhandlers. Contemporary laments are also less likely to be angry diatribes and more likely to be done tongue-in-cheek, with humour. Finally, the authors of contemporary suburban criticisms are more likely to be themselves suburbanites. They miss the city, but they, like most Americans having the choice, have chosen to live elsewhere. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
The writer of the New York Times piece, for example, had moved to Westchester from the West Side of Manhattan some twenty months earlier. Envy impedes our spiritual growth and harms our relationship with others. Yet with hard work and the Lord’s help, it can be overcome. Most of us will experience envy at one time or another. The danger comes when we remain unaware of our envy or do not handle it appropriately; then it has the potential to harm us and may cause us to think or act badly toward others. “For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work,” reports James 3.16. However, by eliminating envy, we can improve our relationships with others and our view of ourselves. When we realize we are not competing with others, we can then rejoice in their accomplishments. The practice of comparing ourselves to others is usually at the root of envy. It causes us to feel that we are not good enough and that in order to be acceptable we have to achieve more, acquire more, or in other ways appear to be “better” than others. It occurs when we do not value ourselves sufficiently as children of God and consequently feel we have to prove our worth by “doing” or “having.” Envy is a form of pride. Pride can create enmity, or hatred, which separates us from our fellow humans. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone. Part of the reason envy can be so difficult to recognize in ourselves is that it often disguises itself in other feelings and behaviours. One disguise envy wears is the tendency to criticize. Another is the desire to act in a way that will provoke envy in others. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
The good news is, once we unmask envy and begin to eliminate it, we can begin to feel much better about ourselves and others around us. Like layers of accumulated paint, envy covers our true worth, making it difficult to see ourselves accurately and change our beliefs so that we can feel better about ourselves. There are at least five reason why we need to be concerned about envy in ourselves: it blocks us from growing spiritually, it keeps us from having pure motives, it creates an “us against them” mentality, it can make us feel negative toward others, and a desire to be envied can cause others to feel negative toward us. When we grow up feeling that we are not loved for who we are and instead are criticized or are valued for how we compare to others, we can develop the habit of looking outside ourselves to feel good. People who try to pump up their self-worth by gaining the admiration of others for their thought or knowledge in reality may be suffering from a lack of understanding of their worth, and their true relation to God. However, as children of our Heavenly Father, each of us has inherent worth and has been endowed with divine potential. “We are the children of God,” the Apostle Paul declared, “and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ,” reports Romans 8.16-17. Many of us have inner standards of excellence and perfection that are hard or even impossible to meet, often causing emotional pain. We may have a hard time admitting mistake and living with imperfections. If not careful, we can end up envious of those who seem to achieve more or seem more comfortable being imperfect. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
It was once written “To oneself be true.” But who do we know who we are? One must learn to focus one’s assertive aggressive and hostile feelings, so that these do no suffuse too many inappropriate parts of oneself or one’s World. Learn to become less hostile and become more approachable so that better contact can be obtained from those you know and work with. This will allow anxiety to diminish. Self-acceptance is also useful in attacking the inner voices which persecuted oneself at times, denying one right to life and happiness. Having established the right to live, and a channel through which love and care can reach one, one will began to take an interest in the wide and varied World of other people and things. Having established the rudiment of self, mental illness can come to an end and one can be engaged in intellectual activity, accomplishing good work with success and ease. One may not only remain cured, without any recurrences of pathology, but one’s personality may continue to develop and may gain in strength. The basic anxiety-producing conflicts in human beings are no over the “gratification of desires” but over the frightening struggle to maintain themselves in existence at all as genuine individual persons. Of course guilt is a real experience and must be accepted, and there is no therapeutic result unless feelings of guilt are cleared up, but guilt is no at the core of psychological distress. Pathological guilt is a struggle to maintain object-relations, a defence against disintegration, and is a state of mind that is preferred to being undermined by irresistible fears. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
The core of psychological distress is simply elementary fear, however much it gets transformed into guilt: fear carrying with it the feeling of weakness and inability to cope with life, fear possessing the psyche to such an extent that “ego-experience” cannot get started. People are dependent on the opportunities which the environment offers; one’s potentialities flourish best in an environment that understands, supports, and encourages individual growth. If the environment is unsatisfactory, development may be distorted or arrested. The True Self is as yet only potential; it will not be realized in unfavourable circumstances. Vulnerability to separation-anxiety exists when the human being is not ego-related. Ego-relatedness allows the individual to be protected by the presence of others without being impinged on by them. Given this, the vulnerable individual is able to develop in one’s individual way, without fear either of devastating loneliness or of devastating damage. People can begin to experience separateness from others, without losing one’s sense of security. The sense of belonging, of being securely in touch, as it grows in an individual by virtue of having relationships that are reliable, becomes an established property of one’s own psyche. When people feel totally secure and invulnerable, they gain proof that their trust is justified by finding they have experienced stable relationships in life. People who have not had enough of this good experience are excessively vulnerable to even the slightest loss of support. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Their chronic overdependence is a genuine compulsion which they cannot evade by effort, will-power, or intellectual understanding. Their only hope is to find someone who can understand them and help them grow out of it. That is what psychotherapy is. The need is for a relationship in which people can experience being securely held while they venture to be in touch with thoughts, feelings, or parts of the self from which fear has long kept them estranged. “Love made angry” is what happens when you want love from a person who is not giving it—you become angry with them in an attempt to force the to give what you want. This is called “coercive anger.” Obviously, at some point this anger must lead to worry hat your anger will drive away the very person you need, and for some this will lead on to guilt at having hurt the feelings of someone they care about. Not getting what you want, worrying about losing a loved person, having to live without love and mutual concern, makes you depressed as well as angry. One the bright side, however, you may in your anger turn to another person in the hope that they will love you better and so you have another chance. “Love made hungry” describes the view of the schizoid position. When you cannot get what you want from the person you love and need, it may be that instead of getting angry you simply feel more and more needy, with an ever stronger craving to get total possession of the loved person, to ensure that you will never be left wanting. However, then you may be visited by the terrible fear that your love has become so overwhelming and devouring that it will destroy your loved one, and that then there will be nothing left of them. And indeed, this can happen. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
The depression which comes from this craving brings aloofness with it: you withdraw from loving because loving destroys those you love. In this case, there is no second chance, because if that is what you believe to be the nature of love and this is what you do, you dare not love anyone for fear that it will lead to the destruction either of them or of you. The love-made-angry depressed person looks on one’s loved one as a hateful denier (a Rejecting Object), while the love-made-hungry schizoid person sees one’s beloved as a desirable deserter (an Exciting Frustrating Object) never to be fully possessed. When people reaching out and finding nothing there, the individual’s excitement about life meets with no response in the World of other people and things, so that one must turn back on oneself and be satisfied with one’s phantasies of what one wants, ceasing to look for satisfaction in a World devoid of interest. (In psycho-analytic language, cathexis is withdrawn from the object-World.) This sense of emptiness and void may be experienced where there would normally be connection with people and things, so that the individual feels one has nothing to hang on to and lacks any sense of secure attachment. In this case, one experiences their loved one’s as void and emptiness. At other times, void and emptiness may be experienced as coming from the self, as a frequent experience of hunger, for instance—the individual experiencing oneself as hungry-empty-needy-urgent-demanding-greedy-tearing-emptying in relation to their loved ones. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Every human must confront the monster within oneself, if one is ever to find peace without. There is always a two-endednes of relationships. This is not the case when one end of the relationship is experienced as not there: the experience that “the World is empty and des not hold anything for me” may be equivalent to “I am empty and cannot hold anything or anyone securely. Similarly “I am empty and will destroy, swallow, overwhelm the World” may be experienced as indistinguishable from “The World is empty and will overwhelm, destroy, swallow me.” People may experience all these possibilities, either simultaneously or in mood-swings up and down consecutively, however mutually contradictory they may seem to common sense (or rather to the “Central Ego”). Some people dread entering personal relationships which demand deep and genuine feeling on both sides. Such people may have felt compelled to withdraw heir consciousness into a relatively small area because, although their need for love is as great as anyone’s, it operates at the emotional level of absolute infantile dependence filled with need and greed and the terror of abandonment. At that level, dimly aware of their enormous need, they feel faced with risk of total loss and destruction, both of themselves and of those they love. It is the form their own love has taken and they have little knowledge of any other. Loving, therefore, seems to present them with a terrifying choice, in which both alternatives lead to loss and destruction for someone. If they let themselves be loved, that means they must let themselves be swallowed up and taken over: they must be totally compliant and cease to be an individual. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
If they let themselves love other people, this means that they themselves will inevitably take them over, insisting on their total compliance and swallowing them whole. Then the loved ones will disappear as real people. In this plight, some people try to comprise. This is called the in/out programme. Driven by their need to love and be with others, they go into a relationship but at once feel driven out again by their fear of exhausting the person they love with the demands they want to make on them, or by their fear of losing themselves through overdependence and compliance. Others escape this painful oscillation by withdrawing from feelings and relationships altogether. They then feel a dreadful meaningless emptiness. Their consciousness is confirmed to the unfeeling Central Ego, which relates only to idealized perfectly good and perfectly bad “inner objects.” Such uncomplicated phantasy-figures are all that they (selectively) perceive of all that the varied World of people and things has to offer. Libidinal relationships are quite disowned, though anti-libidinal ones may be used to keep libidinal strivings down. We can imagine spouses who feel like this being emotionless and unresponsive when their loved one’s tries to relate to them. We can imagine the dependent loved one’ greed for love and their fear of needing it. We can imagine the dependent loved one summoning up all their strength, in turn, to avoid evidence of feeling, and maturing, and becoming independent or single or having to be more of a provider in life. Out of experience in the World, from infancy onward, we form schema—ways of organizing and interpreting reality. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
Lacking a schema to interpret ambiguous aspects of life, one probably does not form rational ideas about things they do not understand. As one continues to focus on reality, their mind struggles to make sense out of the apparent chaos. With patience one eventually imposes order, by seeing a reality that makes sense to them. Note, that once your mind forms a social construction of reality it controls your perception—so much so that it becomes virtually impossible not to perceive the many things that we take for granted and believe are objective reality are actually socially constructed, and thus, can change as society changes. The theory of social constructionism states that meaning and knowledge are socially created, and our assumptions and expectations may give us a perceptual set—a predisposition to interpret an ambiguous stimulus one way rather than another. Social constructionist believe that things are generally viewed as natural or normal in society, such as understandings of gender, race, class, and disability, are socially constructed, and consequently are not an accurate reflection of reality. Once preliminary hunches are formed based on a certain construction of reality, even if it is badly distorted, they interfere with accurate perceptions. Having formed a wrong idea about reality, people have more difficulty seeing the truth. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we being to the experience. Social constructs are often created within specific institutions and cultures and come to prominence in certain historical periods. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
Our expectations influence how we see things. To see is to believe, but social constructs’ dependence of historical, political, and economic conditions can lead them to evolve and change. For all these reasons, religious perceptions depend on the state of the perceiver as well as on external reality. Depending on one’s perceptual set, a thought that pops into the mind while meditating may be perceived as a random cognition or as the still small voice of God. Moses perceived his burning bush and mountaintop experiences through the eyes of faith and thus assigned them a profound religious significance that would have been meaningless to someone lacking one’s perceptual sets. Imagine yourself looking with a friend at a clear night sky. Your friend points overhead and says, “Do you see the Little Bear?” Looking at the very same stars, you cannot perceive what your friend so clearly sees. Why? Because your friend, having taken the trouble to study star patterns, has eyes to see what you are not ready to notice. Similarly, people may see the Heavens, which declare the glory of God, yet not see that the Heavens, which declare the glory of God, yet not see that the Heavens are declaring God’s glory. Only the heart that already has faith will see the Heavens in the way. The point has been recognized even by religious skeptics, such as the philosopher Paul Kurtz: “I have wondered at times: Is it I who lacks religious sense, and is this due to a defeat of character? The tone-deaf are unable to fully appreciate the intensity of music, and the color-blind live in the World denuded of brightness and hue.” #RandolphHarrs 18 of 25
To have a religious experience is thus to assign sensory experience spiritual significance. It is to interpret phenomena with an awareness of the presence of God. Those who have a schema for interpreting life through the eyes of faith are like those who have a schema for perceiving the dalmatian: they have difficulty viewing things another way, yet sometimes find I hard to get others to see reality as they do. To refer simply to “religious experiences” as if we all knew exactly what we meant by them and had an agreed-upon definition would be naïve. In different religious traditions and in different historical epochs religious experience has referred to many different things. In the last few decades there has been, within the Christian tradition, a wide resurgence of interest in unusual religious experience. What are we to make of them? In the 1950s, Aldous Huxley invited his readers to take advantage of mind-altering drugs to give them new spiritual experiences. In the 1970s, Timothy Leary was a great advocate of altering consciousness with hallucinogenic drugs. Sadly, today, we are living with the tragic consequences to many of those who followed Leary’s advice and who now suffer. Even so, many of the drug takers longed for better spiritual awareness. However, if religious experience can be induced through drugs, what are we to make of what we believe are normal religious experiences? How can we properly understand them and derive the greatest benefit from them? Furthermore, how do we answer those who set aside all religious experiences on the grounds that we can give them an explanation in terms of psychology or physiology? The great philosopher Bertrand Russell, for example, asked, “What is the difference between a person who drinks alcohol and sees green snakes, and a person who half starves himself to death and sees God?” #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
We know from the use of hallucinogenic drugs, as well as from the agonizing experiences of some mentally ill people, that religious experiences can be a sign of psychopathology. The hardheaded and previously skeptical philosopher Simone Weil did not regard her spontaneous mystical experiences as proof of reality of God or of the truth of Christian doctrines. Rather, she saw the as drawing attention to, or helping to focus upon, a spiritual understanding of the things of this World: “If I light an electric torch at night, I don’t judge its power by looking at the bulb, but by seeing how many objects it lights up. The brightness of a source of light is appreciated by the illumination it projects upon non-luminous. The value of a religious or, more generally, a spiritual way of life is appreciated by the amount of illumination thrown up the things of this World.” It is not the experience that matters but the effects of that experience. The evidences for the reality of a spiritual experience should be seen in the subsequent life of the experiencer. The changed life of apostle Paul is the classic example of this. Spiritual experiences matter, but feelings are not the ultimate criterion for judging spirituality. Rather, “you will know them by their fruits.” With the schema of faith, a whole set of perceptions forcefully takes hold of one’s consciousness. Jesus Christ is perceived not as a psychotic but an incarnation of God. The Universe is seen not as a meaningless material reality, but as God’s creative handiwork—the ultimate miracle that makes little sense without a Creator. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
Life itself takes on purpose in a World where humans are viewed as called to recognize their limits and their value to their Creator, to assume their responsibility for the Earth and for each other’s welfare, and to serve and enjoy God forever. Lord, please open our eyes that we may see. Keep vivid in your memory the many splendid exploits of the Holy Fathers of the desert. In their lives true religious perfection has shone out like a flaming beacon on a hill. Sad to say, what we have been able to accomplish in our own modest lives adds up to a guttering candle. As Saints and friends of Christ, they served the Lord in famine and drought, coldness and nakedness, labour and fatigue, vigils and fasts, holy prayers and meditations, persecutions and derisions. Oh, how they suffered, the Apostles, the Martyrs, the Confessors, the Virgins, and all the rest who followed close upon the footsteps of Christ! They did the evangelical thing, at least as described by John (12.25), dispossessing their souls in this World that they might possess them in the next. Oh, how isolated and dedicated was the life of the Holy Fathers led in the desert! Their temptations were long and lurid, but they managed to endure. The Enemy harassed them suddenly and frequently. Just as sudden and frequent were the prayers they shot to Heaven. Their abstinences were rugged, but they managed to swallow their hunger. Crazed was their desire for spiritual progress! Feverish was their battle against what seemed the overwhelming supremacy of their vices! #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Through it all they held fast to God. Through the day they worked hard and prayed quietly to survive their harsh life; through the night they prayed, even in their sleep, their snores rising like incense to the Lord. Every hour of work seemed too long; every hour of prayer, too short. Making time to eat was impossible. The sweetness of contemplation was irresistible. All wealth, title, and honour, every friend and relative, they renounced. Nothing that smacked of all the World did they want to have. The necessities of life they scarcely touched. The pangs in their stomachs they begrudgingly satisfied. And so poor were they in the things of this World, but rich, so very rich, in graces and virtues! They were ravaged on the outside, but on the inside they were refreshed with Grace and Divine Consolation. The Fathers of the desert were aliens in their own World, but close family friends with God. In their own eyes self-esteem had no value, and hence they dressed like castaways. However, in the eyes of God they were precious, chosen ones, and further haberdashery was far from their minds. They stood in True Humility; they lived in Simple Obedience; they walked in Charity and Patience. And so daily they progressed in spirit and obtained great grace in God’s presence. They have been given as examples to all Religious and ought to rouse us to more spiritual progress. Standing in opposition to them are the Tepids, milling around every which way, affirming and denying, mummering and murmuring, whispering the rest of the World to a spiritual standstill. Religious orders, when they were founded, were quite remarkable gardens. Hotbeds of fervour they were. Their prayers were awash with devotion. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
Their virtue was pruned and precise. Discipline, sometimes harsh and heavy-handed, took root. Under the rule of their Founder, and indeed under the inspiration of the Founder of Founders, Reverence and Obedience walked hand-in-hand down the garden path. These truly holy and perfect men poured out their lives in the strenuous fight against the World. The footprints they left behind are visible to this day. Odd thing, though. Today’s self-actualized, who is anything but exceptional when compared to the self-actualized of old, seems to be the exception to the rule; that is to say, one is thought to be observant and does no rock the boat, but there is not a great deal else that one does. Ah, the laziness and sloppiness of the religious life today! What Worldly winds could have cooled he fervour of our white-hot forge! Whatever happened to Motivation and Enthusiasm? They are nowhere to be seen! Is it any wonder, then, that the desire to live the religious life has decreased? Once so awake during the nocturnal watch, now you are found snoring on the battlement. Is this any way to live the religious life? And you of all people! You have had the privilege of meeting many of the devout Religious in your own community in the generation just passed. In Earth Prayers, the pain of the Earth is expressed. Knowing that the World is an intricate balance of parts we see that if one of the parts is sick or wounded, its plight and suffering affects us all. Here we humble ourselves before all creation and allow the outcries of despair from around the globe to touch our hearts, opened by the realization of an ecological self. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
Today the ability of the Earth to support life is being deeply eroded. The evidence is everywhere. We are mindlessly destroying the very web of life; millions of people are dying each year as a result of direct ecological collapse. Within the animal and plant kingdoms we are witnessing the greatest holocaust in history. Millions of species are on the verge of extinction. The old forests are being felled, the top soil washed away, and the groundwater contaminated. The air is polluted and the ran is acid. So the litany goes on, as every aspect of life on the planet is profoundly altered by the way our culture has organized the business of its existence. They have lost it, lost it, and their children will never even wish for it—and I am afraid…because the sun keeps rising and these days nobody sings. While many of us are aware of the destruction taking place on our planet, it is difficult to integrate this knowledge into our daily life. What do we do when it is not war that is killing us, but progress? When the problem is not the actions of an evil “other,” but ourselves? We fear the despair such information provokes. We do not want to feel the grief over all that is lost, nor our own complicity in the damage. This denial of feeling takes a heavy toll on us, impoverishing our sensory and emotional life. Ultimately, it puts us out of touch with reality. There is a historical tradition of prayer that foresees the ruination of the World because of human transgression. We find in the Old Testament, we find it again in the prayers of Native Americas as they witness the destruction of their way of life by conquerors. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
We are hearing it again now, as citizens from around the World express their fears and their grief at what is happening to the Earth. We have forgotten who are are. We have sought only our own security, we have exploited simply for our own ends, we have distorted our knowledge, we have abused our power. “The Earth dries up and withers, the World languishes and withers, the Heavens languish together with the Earth. The Earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed laws, violated the statues, broken the everlasting covenant,” reports Isaiah 24.4-5. We therefore hope in Thee, O Lord our God, that we may soon behold the glory of Thy might, when Thou wilt remove the abominations from the Earth and when all idolatry will be abolished. We hope for the day when the World will be perfected under the Kingdom of the Almighty, and all humankind will call upon Thy name; when Thou wilt turn unto Thyself all the wicked of the Earth. May all the inhabitants of the World perceive and know that unto Thee every knee must bend, every tongue vow loyalty. Before Thee, O Lord our God, may they bow in worship, giving honour unto Thy glorious name. May they all accept the yoke of Thy Kingdom and do Thou rule over them speedily and forevermore. For the Kingdom is Thine and to tall eternity Thou wilt reign in glory; as it is written in Thy Holy Bible: The Lord shall reign for ever and ever. And it has been foretold: The Lord shall be King over all the Earth; on that day the Lord shall be One, and His name One. After some weeks on a healthy diet, the intellectual type of person will find, as I found, that there is greater mental clarity and greater mental drive. In fact, there may even be a tendency to overwork intellectually in reading and writing. A century ago, John Linton, of England, reported the result of a long period on a healthy diet in these words: “I was able to write with an ease and perspicacity and satisfaction which I had never before known, or had any idea of.” #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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Ten Minutes on the Clock, but a Thousand Centuries in My Heart!
The Greek philosopher Aristotle had a recipe for handling relationships smoothly. You must be able, he said, “to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way.” Psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer call such self-control “emotional intelligence.” Emotional intelligence refers to a combination of skills, such as empathy, self-control, and self-awareness. People who excel in life tend to be emotionally intelligent. Indeed, the costs of poor emotional skills can be high They range from problems in marriage and parenting to poor physical health. A lack of emotional intelligence can ruin careers and sabotage achievement. Perhaps the greatest toll falls on people who are still developing or marginalized members of the community. For them, having poor emotional skills and being subjected to dealing with those who have substandard emotional skills, makes them become victims of depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, unwanted lifestyle choices, aggression, and violent crimes, or they can also become violent criminals. The Devil has a sure foothold in Massachusetts during the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 because many people seemed to be lacking emotional intelligence. People who were skeptical of witchcraft were thought to must undoubtedly be a witch. For instance, that Martha Corey’s skepticism was held against her is clear evidence that by this time the magistrates’ attitudes had hardened into those of the witch hunter. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
It was at Martha Corey’s examination that one typical kind of behaviour first appeared. She bit her lip, and several of the afflicted children complained that they were bitten She was charged with biting her lip, and she quite naturally asked what harm was there in it. The Reverend Mr. Nicolas Noyes of Salem Town explained: “I believe it is apparent she practiseth witchcraft in the congregation; there is no need of images.” That is, instead of tormenting images she was using her own body as an image, biting the children by biting her own lips, and later pinching them by clenching her fingers together. From Martha Corey’s examination on, any motion on the part of the accused was apt to produce a corresponding effect in the afflicted children. It must have been a most convincing spectacle, as though black magic were being worked before the very eyes of the beholders. And as the effects produced on the children were obviously painful, they were that much more convincing. In some cases there were seen to be marks of bites or pinches on the children’s flesh; on other occasions there were pins literally stuck in their flesh. There are at least three explanations for this behaviour. In the first place, hysterics are extremely suggestible, and for hysterics familiar with the idea of image magic, it would be easy to assume that an accused person biting her lip was trying to bit them. A similar phenomenon is the “arctic hysteria” of North American Indians, in which the group imitates the motions of the shaman. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Secondly, hysteric will often try to injure themselves; they will beat their heads on the floor, or run into fire or water. (But they seldom succeed in injuring themselves seriously because they are most apt to make these attempts when other people are present, an able to stop them.) Surely this is the explanation for the pins in their flesh; the afflicted stuck them there themselves. However, this is not to say there was conscious fraud; people in fits are after all not responsible for their actions. Some of the bites and pinches, too, were probably self-inflicted, but it is also probable that some were not. Skin lesions are among the commonest of psychosomatic symptoms, and surely some of these bites and pinches were psychosomatic. Hathorne and Corwin, of course, thought the cause was witchcraft, and they committed Martha Corey to jail for further examination and eventually trial. And with her commitment to jail, Salem had very nearly committed itself to a witch hunt. Yet there would be moments during the succeeding month when the course of events would seem to hesitate and waver; moments wen the slightest change of circumstances might have averted the final catastrophe. On Saturday, March 19, two days before the examination of Martha Corey, the Reverend Deodat Lawson arrived in Salem Village. He has been its minister from 1684 to 1688 and had now returned as a visiting preacher and for personal reasons as well; the afflicted girls were saying that his wife and daughter, whom he had buried there, had been killed by witchcraft. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Reverend Deodat Lawson tells us that there were at that time ten afflicted persons—three girls from nine to twelve years old: Elizabeth Parris, Abagail Williams, and Ann Putnam; three adolescent girls: Mary Walcott, Mercy Lewis, and Elizabeth Hubbard; and for married women: Goodwives Putnam, Pope, Bibber, and Goodall. He conducted both the morning and the afternoon services on Sunday, but without incident. Several of the afflicted persons were present. This was not Lawson’s first introduction to the behavior of the afflicted. He had lodged the night before at Ingersoll’s Tavern, and there had seen Mary Walcott, who, “as she stood by the door was bitten, so that she cried out of her wrist, and looked on it with a candle we saw apparently the marks of teeth, both upper and lower set, on each side of her wrist.” He had also visited the parsonage, where Abigail Williams “had a grievous fit.” He would see more on Monday, at Martha Corey’s examination, and on Wednesday, when he went to Thomas Putnam’s to see his wife, Ann Putnam, Senior. “I found her lying on the bed, having had a sore fit a little before. She spake to me and said she was glad to see me. Her husband and she both desired me to pray with her while she was sensible, which I did, though the apparition said [id est, to Ann Putnam, Senior] I should not go to prayer. At first beginning she attended but after a little time was taken with a fit, yet continued silent and seemed to be sleep. When prayer was done, her husband going to her found her in a fit. He took her off the bed to set her on his knees, but at first she was so stiff she could not be bended. But she afterwards set down, but quickly began to strive violently with her arms and legs.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Shortly afterward she began to argue with an apparition, and she thought that telling it a passage from the Christian Bible would make it vanish. She said, “I am sure you cannot stand before that text!” Then she was sorely afflicted, her mouth drawn on one side and her body strained for about a minute, and then said “I will tell, I will tell; it is, it is, it is!” three or four times, and then was afflicted to hinder her telling. At last she broke forth and said “It is the third chapter of the Revelations.” I did something scruple the reading it. [Reverend Lawson was reluctant because in this case reading the Bible might be construed as using it as a charm.] However, thought not versed she opened her eyes and was well. This fit [had] continued near half an hour. Her husband and the spectators told me she had often been so relieved by reading texts that she named, something pertinent to her case. The next day was Lecture Day at Salem Village and Reverend Lawson preached the sermon, which he published shortly thereafter under the title Christ’s Fidelity the Only Shield Against Satan’s Malignity. Historians have consistently represented it as an attempt to sir up the emotions of the community, but in fact it was nothing of the sort. To be sure, Reverend Lawson did reaffirm that the girl’s afflictions were the “effects of Diabolical malice and operations, and that it cannot rationally be imagined to proceed from any other cause whatsoever.” Reverend Lawson was far from depending on the magistrates to cure the country of its troubles. In fact he warned the community that there was ultimately no legitimate secular defense against witchcraft. There was, for example, no legitimate means of testing to see whether an accused person was a witch: “we find no means instituted of God to make trial of witches.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Nor could one rightly defend oneself against witchcraft with white magic, such as boiling one’s urine or nailing a horseshoe over the door, because such charms were in themselves, “a kind of witchcraft,” and might well give a more secure foothold to the Devil. Careless accusations of suspected persons might also backfire, Reverend Lawson warned. “Rash censuring of others, without sufficient grounds, or false accusing any willingly…is indeed to be like the Devil, who is a calumniator, of false accuser.” Most important, he warned his listeners that the Devil might appear in the shape of an innocent person. Indeed, he suspected this was precisely what had happened when church members saw the apparitions of other church members afflicting them. The Devil had taken “some visible subjects of our Lord Jesus and [used] at least their shapes and appearances…to afflict and torture other visible subjects of that same Kingdom. Surely his design is that Christ’s Kingdom may be divided against itself.” Given all these difficulties the only sure protection against witchcraft, the “Only Shield Against Satan’s Malignity,” was faith in Christ, and the application of that faith in prayer. And such prayer would be answered, particularly if it came from a people bound to the worship of God, like those of New England, by their church covenants: “whensoever God hath declared a person or people to be in covenant with Him, as the objects of His special mercy and favour, He will assuredly and shortly suppress the malice of Satan, however violently engaged against them.” In the late 19th century, it seemed that San Jose, California had come under a spell. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Mrs. Sarah Winchester moved to San Jose, California after the tragic loss of her baby daughter and husband and began to construct one of the most unique and elaborate Queen Anne Victorian mansions the World had ever witnessed. According to legend, Mrs. Winchester enacted a nightly séance to help with her building plans and for protection from “bad” spirits. While she sometimes drew up simple sketches of the building ideas, there were never any blueprints! In the morning, she would meet with Mr. John Hansen, her dutiful foreman, and go over new changes and additions. During the early years of construction, this resulted in some unusual and impractical concepts such as columns being installed upside down—though some suggest this was done deliberately to confuse the evil spirits. However, this is how the Winchester Mystery House became known as “the house built by the spirits.” Mr. John Hansen stayed with Mrs. Winchester for many years, redoing scores of rooms, remodeling the in one week and tearing them apart the next. It is doubtful whether Mr. Hansen ever questioned his boss. Mrs. Winchester may have been trying to confuse evil spirits, or simply unsure if she was pleased with aspects of traditional designs, but there was so budget ceilings or deadlines to meet. This resulted in many features being dismantled, built around, or sealed over. Some rooms were remolded many times. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
It is estimated that the Winchester mansion once contained 500 to 600 rooms, but because so many were redone, only 160 remains (110 open for touring). This naturally resulted in some peculiar effects, such as stairs that lead to the ceiling, door that go nowhere and that open onto walls, and chimneys that stop just short of the roof! Once a room was completed, and most importantly, not targeted for further alterations, it was adored with some of the best furnishings money could buy. Mrs. Winchester appreciated beauty, and she was a woman with exquisite taste. Freight cars loaded with gold- and silver-plated chandeliers, imported Tiffany art glass windows then valued at up to $1,500 ($39,587.50 in 2021 dollars), German silver and bronze inlaid doors at twice that amount, Swiss molded bathtubs, rare precious woods like mahogany and rosewood, and countless other items were docked onto a side track at San Jose. Everything was then transported to the house, where much of the material was never even installed. However, the employees often times seem to be bewitched by the Devil. “Oh, how I wish I were out of this dreadful, dreadful house!” said Stella the maid. “Please do not think me very ungrateful for saying this, after taking such pains to provide us with a Heaven upon Earth, as you thought, Mrs. Winchester.” What happened could, of course, have been neither foretold, nor guarded against, by any human being. Stella, Mrs. Winchester’s maid came to her with a very long face, and said, “If you please, Mistress, did you know that this house was haunted? #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Mrs. Winchester was so startled. She replied, “Good Heavens! No! is it?” Stella then explained, “Well, Mistress, I’m pretty nigh sure it is,” and the expression of her countenance was about as lively as an undertaker’s; and then she told Mrs. Winchester that cook had been that morning to order in groceries from a shop in the neighbourhood, and on her giving the man the direction where to send the things to, he had said, with a very peculiar smile, “The Winchester mansion–, eh? H’m! I wonder how long you’ll stand it; last cook held out just a fortnight.” He looked so odd that she asked him what be meant, but he only said, “Oh! nothing; only that help never did long at the Winchester mansion. He had known staff go in one day, and out the next, and during the last four years he had never known any remain over a month.” Feeling a good deal alarmed by this information, the cook naturally enquired the reason; but he declined to give it, saying that if se had not found out herself, she had much better leave it alone, as it would only frighten her out of her wits; and on her insisting and urging him, she could only extract from him, that the house has such a mysterious history. “You know, Mrs. Winchester, how firmly I believe in apparitions, and what an unutterable fear I have of them; anything material, tangible, that I can lay hold of—anything of the same fibre, blood, and bone as myself, I could, I think, confront bravely enough; but the mere thought of being brought face to face with the ‘bodiless dead,’ makes my brain unsteady.” Mrs. Winchester had the prettiest mansion in California. She told Setlla, “Most good things that had ever been in the World had had a bad name in their day; and moreover, the grocer probably a motive for taking away the house’s character.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Mrs. Winchester derided Stella’s “babyish fears,” to such an extent that she felt half ashamed, and yet not quite comfortable, either and then came the usual rush of the mansion’s engagements, during which one has no time to think of anything but how to speak, and act, and look for the moment then present. Marriam Marriot, Mrs. Winchester’s niece was to arrive the previous day and, in the morning, the weekly hamper of flowers, fruit, and vegetables arrived. Stella always dressed the flower-vase, while other servants ate so tasteless; and as she was arranging them, it occurred to her—you know Stella’s passion for flowers—to carry up one particular cornucopia of roses and mignonette and set it on Marriam’s toilet-table, as a pleasant surprise for her. As Stella came downstairs, she had seen Ashely, another maid. Ashely was a fresh round-faced country girl—she went into the room, which was being prepared for Mrs. Marriot, with a pair of sheets that she had been airing over her arm. Stella went upstairs very slowly, as her cornucopia was full of water, and she was afraid of spilling some. She turned the handle of the bedroom-door and entered, keeping her eyes fixed on her flowers, to see how they bore the transit, and whether any of them had fallen out. Suddenly a sort of shiver passed over her; and feeling frighten—she did not know why—she looked up quickly. The girl was standing by the bed, leaning forward a little with her hands clenched in each other, rigid, every nerve tense; her eyes, wide open, starting out of her head and a look of unutterable stony horror in them; her cheeks and mouth not pale, but livid as those of one that died awhile ago in mortal pain. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
As Stella looked at her, her lips moved a little, and an awful hoarse voice, not like hers in the least said, “Oh! my God, have see it!” and then she fell down suddenly, like a log, with a heavy noise. Using Mrs. Winchester’s call system, she alerted Mr. Hansen to what area in the mansion they were in. The message was loudly audible and Mr. Hansen came running in, and between the two of them they managed to lift Ashely on to the bed, and tried to bring her to herself by running her feet and hands, and holding strong salts to her nostrils. And all the while they kept glancing over their shoulders, in a vague cold terror of seeing some awful, shapeless apparition. Two long hours she lay in a state of utter unconsciousness. Meanwhile Mr. Hansen, who had been down to his guest house, returned. At the end of the two hours they succeeded in bringing Ashely back to sensation and life, but only to make the awful discovery that she was raving mad. She became so violent that it required all the combined strength of Mr. Hansen and Walley (the butler) to hold her down in the bed. Of course, the sent off instantly for a doctor, who, on her growing a little calmer towards evening, removed her in a carriage to his own house. The doctor had come later to tell Mrs. Winchester that Ashley was pretty quiet, not from any return to sanity, but from sheer exhaustion. Stella, Mrs. Winchester, Mr. Hansen and Walley were, of course, utterly in the dark as to what she saw, and her ravings were far to disconnected and unintelligible to afford them the slightest clue. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Everyone was so completely shattered and upset by the awful occurrence. No one was allowed to occupy that room again. Mrs. Winchester would shudder and run by quickly as she passed the door. Eventually Mr. Hansen boarded it up. Legend has it this room is one of the 50 not opened to guests on tours. Mrs. Winchester was still unconvinced as to the house being at fault. You know, she felt like the mansion was a godmother, a protector to her, and was responsible for its good behaviour. She thought the girl simply had a fit. Why not? She knew of a man who was subject to seizures of that kind, and immediately on being attacked his whole body became rigid, his eyes glassy and staring, his complexion livid, exactly as in that case. Or it was also possible that, if no a fit, that perhaps the girl was subject to madness? The doctor had to ascertain where there was not insanity in her family. Even allowing the possibility, nay, the actual unquestioned existence of ghost in the abstract, is it likely that there should be anything to be seen so horribly fear-inspiring, as to send a perfectly sane person in one instant raving mad, which, after many years of residence in the house that Mrs. Winchester had never caught a glimpse of? According to this hypothesis, everyone in the mansion should have, by that time, been stark raving mad and in a lunatic asylum. Stella told Mrs. Winchester that she was leaving that “terrible, hateful, fatal house. I wish I had escaped from it sooner! Oh, my dear Mrs. Winchester, I shall never be the same woman again if I live to be a hundred.” After Stella left, Ashley was removed to the lunatic asylum, Agnews State Hospital, where she remained in the same state. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Ashely had several lucid intervals, she was closely, pressingly questioned as to what it was she saw; but she maintained an absolute, hopeless, silence, and only shuddered, moaned, and would hide her face in her hands when the subject was broached. Stella went to see her, and on her retuned was sitting resting in the drawing-room, before going to dress for dinner, talking to Mrs. Winchester about her visit, when Theophilus Riesinger walked in, he had always been waling in the last ten days, and Mrs. Winchester always flushed up and looked happy, whenever he made his appearance. He looked very handsome, dear fellow, just came in from the park in a coat that fitted like a second skin, black gloves, and a top hat. He seemed in tremendous spirits, and was as sceptical as Mrs. Winchester to the ghostly origins of Ashley’s seizure. “Let me come here tonight and sleep in that room; Mrs. Winchester,” he said, looking very eager and excited, “with the gas lit and a poker, I’ll engage to exorcize every demon that shows his ugly nose; even if I should find seven white ghostisses, sitting on seven white postisses.” “You don’t mean really?” asked Stella, incredulously. “Don’t I? that’s all,” he answered, emphatically. “I should like nothing better. Well, is it a bargain?” Mrs. Winchester turned quite pale. “Oh, don’t,” she said, hurriedly, “Please, don’t; why should you run such a risk, besides the room has been boarded up? How do you know that you might not be sent mad too?” He laughed very heartily, and coloured a little with pleasure at seeing the interest she took in his safety. “Never fear,” he said, “it would take more than a whole squadron of departed ones, with the gentleman at their head, to send me crazy.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
He was so eager, so persistent, so thoroughly in earnest, that Mrs. Winchester yielded at last, though with a certain strong reluctance to his entreaties. Her eyes filled with tears, she had the room opened up and walked away hastily to the conservatory. Nonetheless, Father Riesinger got his wish; it was so difficult to refuse him anything. Mrs. Winchester gave up her engagements for the evening. And at about 10.00pm, she went to bed. Then he went, jumping up the stairs three steps at a time and humming a tune. The human victims of this tragedy should never be forgotten. With a magnitude registering 7.9, high intensity shaking was felt at 5.13am on April 18, 1906. It felt like the most powerful Earthquake on Earth. All of the sudden the whole Earth started shaking like crazy, and the shaking got worse and worse. Devastating fires soon broke out in the San Francisco Bay Area and lasted for several days. More than 3,000 people died and over 80 percent of San Francisco was destroyed. The position of the people in Agnews was critical; a number of insane persons escaped from the demolished asylum, and were running at random about the country. 117 patients and staff were killed and buried in mass graves on the site. The main building and some others were irreparably damaged. The ground just opened up. Back at her mansion, Mrs. Winchester was in her Daisy Bed Room, when she was awakened by the jolt, “Every time I took a step,” she said, “I fell. I heard an awful sound. The seven-story town went flying up and crashed down onto the house, trappimg me in my bedroom and destroying most of the fourth floor along with it.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
People were running, but the valley just opened up and swallowed them. Dozens of people sank into the Earth. “The house seemed to shake forever and ever. I felt a lump in my throat, a gasping for breath—ten minutes on the clock, but a thousand centuries in my heart. Then again, loud, sudden, a violent banging on the door! I made a simultaneous rush to the door. My servants came and saved me. They said I had been trapped in my room for days. As we walked down the hall, there was Father Riesinger, standing in the middle of the floor of the room we had boarded up, rigid, petrified, with that same look—that look that is burnt into my heart in letters of fire—of awful, unspeakable, stony fear on his brave young face. For one instant he stood thus; then stretching out his arms stiffly before him, he groaned in a terrible husky voice, ‘Oh, my God, I have seen it!’ and fell down dead. Yes, dead. Not in a swoon or in a fit, but dead. Vainly we tried to bring back the life to that strong young heart; it will never come back again till that day when the Earth and the sea give up the dead are therein. I cannot see for the tears that are blinging me; he was such a dear fellow.” Then an omnipresent, malevolent voice, said, “Can you feel that? Drowning deep in my sea of loathing, broken your servant I kneel. Will you give it to me? There is no turning back now. You’ve woken up the demon in me.” This is a true story. The Winchester mansion is a 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester rifle. The study of theology also tells us that a distinction between spirit and soul has remained obtuse till present day. As a result, the learned theologians of the most advanced organized religions take one for the other, keeping the identities and so interrelationship between the two hazy. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
This obtuse relationship has been trickling down for the millenniums, from when humans lived in caves in the Mesolithic era, around 14,000 years BC. Sorcery is also visible in burial rites and construction of monuments. Belief in a deity or an afterlife could be an evolutionarily advantageous by-product of people’s ability to reason about the minds of others. The Victorian period was an era of deep and sustained religious belief in the supernatural. People have a bias for believing in the supernatural. Yet people think there is a dark force behind many of the tragic events that are happening today. A force that has a significant impact on Society. Repeatedly we see cases involving law-breaking, or violence on the rise, and in many cases people believe it proceeds from an unknown dark force. Perhaps the Victorian belief in the spiritual and occult was not too farfetched. And God say everything He had made, and found it very good. And He said: This is a beautiful World that I have given you. Take good care of it; do not ruin it. It is said: Before the World was created, the Holy One kept creating Worlds and destroying them. Finally He created this one, and was satisfied. He said to Adam: This is the last World I shall make. I place it in your hands: hold it in trust. May His great name be blessed for ever and ever. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises, hymns and blessings that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. May the prayers and supplications of the House of America be acceptable unto their Father in Heaven; and say ye, Amen. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
The most expensive window was built on the north side of the house with a room built over it. Ever wonder why? Come learn about this beautiful story at the Winchester Mystery House.
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Its Inhabitants Live with More Ease, Decency, and Peace than You Can Imagine!
Benefits of expanding trade were not evenly shared. They flowed mainly from the First Wave World to the Second. To facilitate this flow, the industrial powers worked hard to expand and integrate the World market. As trade passed beyond national boundaries each national market became part of a larger set of interconnected regional or continental markets and, finally, part of a single, unified exchange system envisioned by the integrational elites who ran Second Wave civilization. A single web of money was woven around the World. Treating the rest of the World as its gas pump, garden, mine, quarry, and cheap labour supply, the Second Wave World wrought deep changes in the social life of the Earth’s non-industrial populations. Cultures that had subsisted for thousands of years in a self-sufficient manner, producing their own food supplies, were sucked willy-nilly into the World trade system and compelled to trade or perish. Suddenly the living standards of Bolivians or Malayans were tied to the requirements of industrial economies half a planet away, as tin mines and rubber plantations sprang up to feed the voracious industrial maw. The innocent household product margarine provides a dramatic case in point. Margarine was originally manufactured in Europe out of local material. It grew so popular, however, that these materials proved insufficient. In 1907 researchers discovered that margarine could be made out of coconut and palm-kernel oil. The result of this European discovery was an upheaval in the lifestyle of West Africans. “In the main areas of West Africa,” writes Magnus Pyke, former president of the British Institute of Food Science and Technology, “where palm oil was traditionally produced, the land was owned by the community as a whole.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Complex local customs and rules governed the use of the palm trees. Sometimes a man who had planted a tree was entitled to its product for the rest of his life. In some places, women had special rights. According to Pyke, the Western businessmen who organized “the large-scale production of palm oil for the manufacture of margarine as a ‘convenience’ food for the industrial citizens of Europe and America destroyed the fragile and complex social system of the non-industrial Africans.” Huge plantations were set up in the Belgian Congo, in Nigeria, the Cameroons, and the Gold Coasts. The West got its margarine. And Africans became semi-slaves on huge plantations. Rubber offers another example. After the turn of the century when automobile production in the United States of America created a sudden heavy demand for rubber tires and inner tubes, traders, in collusion with local authorities, enslaved Amazonian Indians to product it. Roger Casement, the British consul in Rio de Janeiro, reported that the production of four thousand tons of Putumayo runner between 1900 and 1911 resulted in the death of thirty thousand Indians. It can be argued that these were “excesses” and were not typical of Grand Imperialism. Certainly the colonial powers were not unrelievedly cruel of evil. In places they did build schools and rudimentary health facilities for their subject populations. They improved sanitation and water supplies. They no doubt raised the living standard for some. Nor would it be fair to romanticize precolonial societies or to blame the poverty of today’s non-industrial populations exclusively on imperialism. Climate, local corruption and tyranny, ignorance, and xenophobia all contributed. There was plenty of misery and oppression to go around long before the Europeans ever arrived. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Nevertheless, once torn out of self-sufficiency and compelled to product for money and exchange, once encouraged or forced to reorganize their social structure around mining, for example, or plantation farming, First Wave populations were plunged into economic dependence on a marketplace they could scarcely influence. Often their leaders were bribed, their cultures ridiculed, their languages suppressed. Moreover, the colonial powers hammered a deep sense of psychological inferiority into the conquered people that stands even today as an obstacle to economic and social development. In the Second Wave World, however, Grand Imperialism paid off handsomely. As the economic historian William Woodruff put it: “It was the exploitation of these territories and the growing trade done with them that obtained for the European family wealth on a scale never seen before.” Built deep into the very structure of the Second Wave economy, feeding its ravenous need for resources, imperialism marched across the planet. In 1492 when Columbus first set foot in the New World, Europeans controlled only 9 percent of the globe. By 1801 they ruled a third. By 1880, two thirds. And by 1935 Europeans politically controlled 85 percent of the land surface on Earth and 70 percent of its population. Like Second Wave society itself, the World was divided into integrators and integrates. Not all integrators were equal, however. The Second Wave nations waged an increasingly bloody battle among themselves for control of the emerging World economic system. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
English and French dominance was challenged in World War I by rising German industrial might. The war’s destruction, the devastating cycle of inflation and depression that followed it, the revolution in Russia, all shook the industrial World market. These upheavals brought on a drastic slowdown in the rate of growth of World trade, and, even though more countries were sucked into the trading system, the actual volume of good traded internationally declined. World War II further slowed extension of the integrated World market. By the end of World War II, Western Europe lay in smoking ruins. Germany had been reduced to a lunar landscape. The Soviet Union has suffered indescribable physical and human damage. Japan’s industry was shattered. Of the major industrial powers only the United States of America found itself unharmed economically. By 1946-950 the global economy stood in such disarray that foreign trade was at its lowest level since 1913. Moreover, the very weakness of the war-stricken European dependence. Gandhi, Ho Chi Minh, Jomo Kenyatta, and other anti-colonialists stepped up their campaigns to oust the colonizers. Even before the wartime guns stopped firing, therefore, it was apparent that the entire World industrial economy would have to be reconstituted on a new basis after the war. Two nations took upon themselves the task of reorganizing and reintegrating the Second Wave system: the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The United States of America until then played a limited part in the Grand Imperial campaign. In opening its own frontier it had decimated the Native Americans and cordoned them off in reservations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
In Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, Americans imitated the imperial tactics of the British the French, or the Germans. In Latin America throughout the early decades of this century U.S. “dollar diplomacy” helped United Fruit and other corporations guarantee low prices for sugar, bananas, coffee, copper, and other goods. Nevertheless, compared with the Europeans, the United States of America was a junior partner in the Grand Imperial crusade. After World War II, by contrast, the United States of American stood as the chief creditor nation in the World. It had he most advanced technology, the most stable political structure—and an irresistible opportunity to move into the power vacuum left behind by its shattered competitors as they were forced to withdraw from the colonies. As early as 1941 U.S. financial strategists had begun to plan for a postwar reintegration of the World economy along lines more favourable to the United States. At the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, held under U.S. leadership, forty-four nations agreed to set up two key integrative structures—in International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The IMF thus fixed the basic relationship of the major World currencies. The World Bank, meanwhile, at first established to provide postwar reconstruction funds to European nations, gradually began providing loans to the non-industrial countries, too. These were often for the purpose of building roads, harbours, ports, and other “infrastructure items” to facilitate the movement of raw materials and agricultural exports to the Second Wave nations. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Soon a third component was added to the system: The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade—GATT for short. This agreement, again promoted originally by the United States of America, set out to liberalize trade, which had the effect of making it difficult for the poorer, less technologically advanced countries to protect their tiny fledgling industries. The three structures were wired together by a rule that prohibited the World Bank from making loans to any country that refused to join the IMF or to abide by the GATT. This system made it difficult for debtors of the United States to reduce their obligations through currency or tariff manipulation. It strengthened the competitiveness of U.S. industry in World markets. And it gave the industrial powers, and especially the United States of American, a strong influence on economic planning in many First Wave countries, even after they had attained political independence. These three interconnected agencies formed a single integrative structure for the World trade. And from 1944 to the early 1970’s, the United States of America basically dominated this system. Among nations, it integrated the integrators. As a direct result, the American suburb became more than a geographical location. Suburbs also became more than various collections of certain types of residences. Nor are suburbs simply the abodes of certain types of people. American suburbs are all the above and far more—for suburbia is not just a place, it is an idea. This suburban ideal is called, in one urban scholar’s felicitous term, a “bourgeois utopia.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
The suburbs that best met this idealized goal were the nineteenth-century suburbs of privilege. These well-to-do suburbs represented not only a place, but also a romanticized and idealized image of nature and of the role of the family in such an idyllic setting. The suburb was the humane alternative to the dehumanizing aspects of the city. To popular writer of the time, the suburb represents an escape from the filth, noise, and debauchery of the nineteenth-century industrial city. Suburban life was portrayed in a highly idealized light that stressed numerous advantages, and all but ignored inconveniences and liabilities. Suburbs were to allow families to achieve the benefits of the Jeffersonian rural ideal without having to forgo the comforts and convenience of the city. The suburb was said to be the perfect merger of the energy of the city and the charm and openness of the country. Here proud parents could raise healthy children in the safety and openness of the country. Early country small towns copied the compact pattern of the city. This mean crowding existing structures together and building right up to property and street lines. Such small towns saw themselves as nascent cities, and as such they copied city patterns. The goal of the designed romantic suburb we will presently discuss was quite different. Rather than ape the city, the suburb consciously sought to return its residents to nature. Winding roads and large lots with trees, foliage, and ample emerald green lawns all were designed to suggest the virtues of a comfortable home nestled in benign nature. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
The goal of the idealized romantic suburbs was an improved-upon naturalism. For housewives, living in such planned naturalism—the fresh air, wide vistas, and comfortable cottages—was to allow them to develop their spiritual, sentimental, and intellectual capacities. For the male, the home was to be a refuge from the crowded, dirty, noisy, and dense city. The romantic suburb was designed o counteract the unnatural aspects of urban confusion with the balm of peaceful nature. The American romantic suburb had both American and English roots. It can be seen as an artifact of both Jeffersonian ideals and nineteenth-century British romantic era sensibilities in arts and philosophy. The Englishman J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, writing in 1782, stated that the new American humans lived in a village, “where far removed from the accursed neighbourhood of Europeans, its inhabitants live with more ease, decency, and peace than you can imagine; where, though governed by no laws, yet find in uncontaminated simple manners all that laws can afford. The image of the self-sufficient American was pure Jeffersonian, and it was one of the more enduring symbols of the romantic era. To nineteenth-century writers such as Emerson and Hawthorne, the rural landscape was far preferable to that of the squalid city Creations of nature were preferable to artificial creations of humans. In the view of Emerson, urbanization was a potential danger to the nation in that it was fostering false and artificial tastes. This superficiality was undermining the rural simplicity that was the bedrock of the national greatness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
As expressed by Emerson, “We pave the Earth for miles with stones and forbid the grass. We build streets all round the horizon and shut out the sky and wind.” If such calamities were to continue, not only the artistic sensibilities would suffer; there also would be a sharp undermining of the people’s natural rural virtue. Onto these essentially Jeffersonian beliefs, writers of the nineteenth century then grafted the artistic works of the poets, painters, and writers of the romantic era. Examining the poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson, or even that of Byron or Shelley, is to see a World of picturesque villages and cottages in a bucolic landscape. In American art of the time, the paintings of the Hudson Valley School similarly present a view of nature that is highly idealized and almost mystical. Nature is pure, it is virtuous, and it is basically benign. There is no suggestion that nature can be capricious, evil, violent, or dangerous. It is the nature of Rousseau rather than that of Hobbes. The romantic garden suburb was a pragmatic American response, insofar as it was an attempt to practically prepackage the rural virtues of the affluent suburbanite. The romantic suburb was to provide the jaded urbanite a healthful, restorative return to nature. Thus, moving one’s family from the crowded, sinful city to the pure and open country was not just a practical decision; it was a moral choice. Moving one’s family to a suburban villa, or a large country “cottage,” signified one’s moral rectitude. It was a sign that the home owner was not only well-off, but stable and dependable. In simplest terms, one was a family person. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
By moving to the suburbs, it showed that one was putting down solid rots. One cared for one’s family. One might have to spend one’s days in the hellish city, but one’s spouse and children would be spared. They would abide among flowers and greenery in rural-like domesticity. The line between the home itself and the idealization of the family was blurred. Having the right home became a moral as well as a practical choice. Even before the Civil War, the image of the larger welcoming house with a front porch, a garden, and a spacious tree-shaded lawn was on its way to becoming an American icon. It is generally accepted that architectural and social-morality writers were particularly influential in spreading the gospel of the morality of the suburban villa set in a gracious tree-lined lawn. The most influential of the latter was Catherine Beecher, the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote the immensely popular antislavery potboiler Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Catherine Beecher was the combination Miss Manners, Dr. Spock, and Ann Landers of her day. Her Treatise on Domestic Economy, first published in 1841, became the authority on everything domestic. The book is still a marvel, including everything from how to exercise, to proper manners, to the proper way to eat healthfully, to methods of best caring for infants, to how to raise plants, to skills needed to decorate a parlour, to how to deign a more efficient kitchen. Over a quarter of a century later, in 1869, Catherine and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a new version of Treatise on Domestic Economy titled The American Woman’s Home, which expanded on the idea that not only the home, but also the surrounding community, should provide a tranquil escape from the city. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Also, as the sisters became increasingly doubtful as to weather the city could be reformed and redeemed, the location of the home gradually became as crucial as the home itself. It is one of those interesting side notes of history tht Catherine Beecher, the expert on everything domestic and the advocate of suburban homes, never married or had a home of her own in the suburbs or anywhere else. Nonetheless, for several decades her works publicized the moral as well as practical advantages of living in a suburban country environment outside the city. In her view, women were morally superior to men, and the proper feminine sphere was providing husband and children an elevated home environment. While she never directly advocated leaving the city, it was clear that suburbia, in her view, best provided an environment as free as possible from the corruption of the male-dominated city life. She also stressed the practical and healthful aspects of living a quiet, countrylike life. While relatively few families could afford the ideal suburban villas she championed, Catherine Beecher was very influential with women in setting the image of the suburban home as the physical and moral ideal. The second wrier of great influence was the landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing. Mr. Downing has considerable popularity. He even designed the largely undeveloped Mall in Washington, D.C., into a parklike area having winding carriage drives and a naturalistic setting of trees. (Only at the turn of the century, under the general guidance of the architect Daniel Burnham, did the Mall adopt the classical architecture and proportions with which we now are all so familiar.) #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
However, Mr. Downing and his disciples, such as Calvert Vaux, were primarily concerned with domestic architecture and were great popularizers of the picturesque suburban villa or cottage. Mr. Downing’s popular book Cottage Residences provided models of Italianate, Gothic, rustic, and Victorian-style comfortable middle-class housing, as did his later The Architecture of Country Houses and Victorian Cottage Residences. Mr. Downing saw domestic cottage architecture as providing a sense of balance and tranquility to counter the unsettling negative energy of the city. However, although Mr. Downing borrowed heavily from the ideas of the English landscape architect John Claudius Loudon, he had innovative deigns and used new building techniques. For example, Mr. Downing used the new balloon frame made out of two-by-fours spaces 18 inches apart rather than the older, and more expensive, post-and-beam method of construction. Balloon-frame homes did not require skilled craftsmen and could rapidly be constructed by two or three humans having basic carpentering skills. Housing reformers such as Mr. Downing preferred to refer to the more elaborate homes as “villas,” which suggested a Roman estate for one of the patrician class rather than the more humble designation “cottage.” The home, in Mr. Downing’s view, was o be republican, but not egalitarian. Suburbia was to be a place for those of taste, not for the urban masses. Similarly to Catherine Beecher, Mr. Downing and Vaux stressed the moral value of the suburban home as a refuge from the hectic businesses and moral vices of the city. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Suburban homes in their design, size, and furnishings were to express the moral superiority of their inhabitants. Domestic architecture was not only to reflect taste and beauty, but also the spiritual ideals and moral development of the inhabitants. As noted by Clark, he architectural reformers of the mid-nineteenth century believed, for example, that Gothic-revival style, with its emphasis on verticality, not only harmonized well with nature but also symbolized an eminently Christian type of dwelling. Dwellings were not simply functional, they also possessed a moral element. Thus, whether the American suburb was a unique American phenomenon, as Kenneth Jackson suggests, or a virtual clone of earlier English models, as Robert Fishman argues, American suburbs soon developed into something quite American. Compared to early English estates, the American suburban vision of the ideal home was considerably reduced in scale. The American suburban home also carried in its designer’s eyes an explicit tie to the agrarian Jeffersonian republican ideal. In Mr. Downing’s words, the homes had to be, “built and loved upon the new World, and not old World, ideas and principles; a home in which humanity and republicanism are stronger than family pride and aristocratic feeling.” The American suburban home was more than a place, it was an ideology. The homeowner would not only be a better citizen, one would be a better person because of the more “natural” character of suburban life. Some things you are not strong enough to change either in yourself or others. What you can do but patiently endure until God’s orders otherwise? Yes, this is a trial, and it is meant to prove your virtue under fire. Without experience in long-suffering, such merits as you have will not amount to a hill of beans. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
What you might want to do is ask God for more annoyance rather than less. Perhaps then He will think it worth His while to come to your assistance. In the meantime bear up and benign. Once someone has been admonished a couple of times, one becomes anxious. Do not mess with one. Instead, commit yourself totally to God. Pray to God that His will and honour will appear in Him and all His servants. However, how can He do this? Well, God has converted bad cranberry juice into premium cranberry juice on at least one festive occasion! Strive to be patient by putting up with the defects of others. Why? Because you have saddled onto others the infirmities that are dragging you down. If you cannot express approval of others, how can you possibly expect them to return approval to you? We are quick to want others to appear polished, but why is it that we are so slow to hammer out our own dents? We want others to be held to the letter of the law. Ourselves? We want to swan around barely observing the spirit of the law. Worse, the uncontrollable behaviour of others has spread through the populace like a plague. Better, our own errant behaviour has swept over the lowlands like a flood. Clearly the latter is to be preferred to the former. We want those others to be surrounded with strictures. We want out own behaviour to know no boundaries. Rare it is that we put ourselves on par with our neighbour, allowing one the same amount of slack as we have come to expect ourselves. If all the World and all the Worldlings were perfect, what glory could we give to God! After all, the source of our spiritual progress is all those neighbours who are annoying us to death. God has ordained it, and St. Paul has written to the Galatians (6.2). We should learn “to carry the burdens of another.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
No one’s without a defect, no one is wise enough to represent oneself. Pauline wisdom to the Galatians (6.2) and Second Corinthians (3.5)! We should carry each other, console each other, help, instruct, admonish each other. That is the sort of wisdom found in Proverbs (3.7), Colossian (3.13), and First Thessalonians (5.11). The more virtue you have, the more adversity you will encounter. Confrontation result. They shake a human up, but at the same time they reveal jus what kind of human one is. When they are in high school, today’s youth should have a general idea of what field they would like to work in. It is not necessary for them to have decided that they are going to be engineers, or secretaries, or doctors, but they need to have started to funnel their skills and interests in a direction. The person who does not aim in a given direction, may wander and drift without ever arriving anywhere, while the person who plans ahead will have a better chance of arriving at one’s destination and will know where one is once one has arrived. Even if you aim someplace and find out it is not what you had in mind, at least you have eliminated one alternative. When youths establish goals, they do not wander aimlessly; instead, they exchange them for other goals. There is a strong relationship between home environment and career development. Parents have more influence on their children’s career choices than do their teachers, friends, or counselors. Not only do they pay the bills in many cases, but they also help form attitudes and feelings about various jobs and the training needed to get them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The purpose is to show people how the “Golden Light” is there for everyone to see. However, do you not think that when people do not get struck by that light and do not hear the thunderous voice they feel cheated? However, it can happen to them, too. Through prayer we can all experience this spiritual ecstasy and God will give us direction in life. When the spirit leaves the body, it is not the end. We are here to realize Oneness with God and will come back until we achieve this. The little voice we gain from prayer will make us give up bad habits. Life is your journey. This will remind you of God’s beauty. As you continue your journey you cannot keep asking to see the Grand Canyon again if you are traveling from Los Angeles to New York. God has many faces. What should a human do to live a perfect life in God’s eyes? Simply reaffirm the oneness of your soul with the Infinite Soul. Prayer means to know that you are one with God. God is omnipresent, and the activity of God is here and now. God’s energy can be perceived by the senses, and that is this “Light.” Dark nights of the soul will give us a great humility, which will smash any pride the glimpse might have engendered. The first thing God gave the created World was physical light. The first communication God makes to the human who has attained His presence is the vision of supernatural Light. During this rare experience the human feels that one is free from Earthly attachments and Worldly desires, that the intense peace one enjoys is the true happiness, that God’s reality is the overwhelming fact of existence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
This vision is a gift, a grace, so it may come suddenly, unexpectedly, but more often it comes to someone who has prepared oneself for it by purification and contemplation. Beneficial changes appear in one’s character and one’s outlook. The lower nature is weakened, the baser attributes are thinned down. Spiritual truths are confirmed for one, and certain false beliefs are cancelled. Yet, if the vision of Light brought union with God, intimacy with God, it did not and could not enable one to know God as God knows Himself. One could not penetrate His inmost nature and substance. Seeing the Light in front of one is one state; being merged into it is another, and superior. To describe the wonders and benefits, the delights and beauties of these glimpse will whet the appetite of people without satisfying it. Hence they will then be led to ask how such a glimpse is to be obtained. Wherever you are is home and the Earth is paradise. Wherever you set your feet is holy land. You do not live off it like a parasite. You live in it, and it in you, or you do not survive. And that is he only worship of God there is. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable unto Thee, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Thou who establishes peace in the Heavens, please grant peace unto us and unto all America. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to grant our portion in Thy Holy Bible and may the Temple be rebuilt in our day. There we will serve Thee with awe as in the days of old. Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the World which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His Kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all the house of America, speedily, yea, soon; and say ye, Amen. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
CRESLEIGH RIVERSIDE AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA |
Now Selling!
Cresleigh Riverside Model Home is OPEN! Nestled at the southern end of Plumas Lake, bordering an orchard to the west, Cresleigh Riverside is home to the largest home sites in the three Plumas Ranch communities.
Its executive-style residences feature space and amenities that are well beyond the norm – many on country lots that back up to the Ranch’s adjacent fruit orchards. With four floor plans available, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.
Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Additional game rooms, bedroom space and three-car garages provide other custom possibilities.
Gain the freedom of large home sites and the extra space and flexibility with Cresleigh Riverside. Homeowners will love the convenient commuter access to nearly Sacramento and Yuba City.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Go! https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/
Randolph Harris II International Institute 