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Life is Not Just a Rose Garden—It Can be a Crown of Thorns as Well!
Mental health needs a great deal of attention. It is the final taboo and it needs to be faced and dealt with. A healthy mental state will help one leverage one’s everyday power to achieve the success one seeks and live a purposeful life. A personality disorder is an enduring and stable pattern of behaviour and cognition that deviates from normative standards and expectations in one’s culture. This pattern of behaviour and experience has its onset during adolescence or early adulthood, and leads to tangible distress and impairment. Most people who exhibit personality disorders by definition have interpersonal problems. The criteria for a personality disorder includes: manifestation of stable and enduring problematic behaviours and experiences in at least two of the following domains: cognition, affectivity, interpersonal functioning, and impulse control. The enduring pattern must be pervasive and inflexible across a variety of social situations, and it must lead to impairment or distress in social or occupational areas of functioning. The concept of functional inflexibility implies that the individua relates to others, expressed feelings, and resolves conflicts in a rigid fashion, with tactics that are often ill suited for the situation at hand. However, estimates of the prevalence of personality disorders in the general population are sometimes scarce as it is still considered a new science. It is estimated that the prevalence of historical personality disorder in the general populations is at 2.2 percent. In a college student population, the prevalence of histrionic personality disorder may be as high as 6 percent. Considering the fact that there are over a dozen personality disorders, it is clear that personality disorders collectively are common in the general population, with lifetime prevalence estimates on the order of 10-13 percent. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Like many other psychological problems, most personality disorders are associated with problematic interpersonal relationships, virtually by definition. Some of the most striking evidence of interpersonal disruption appears in the domain of family-of-origin experiences. Themes of parental abuse, insecure attachment, excessive parental attention, parental overinvolvement, and family chaos are rampant in the literature on personality disorders. Some have theorized that these early interpersonal experiences play a significant role in the pathogenesis of these disorders. Existing research indicates that when these persons do marry or form stable romantic relationships, their relationships are characterized by distress and dissatisfaction. Interpersonal problems are not just confined to the various family relationships, but also extended into the domain of general personal relationships. Many people with personality disorders have stormy and unstable personal relationship. They often elicit interpersonal rejection, and experience conflict with others and loneliness. In the area of interpersonal communication, there is a tendency for people with certain types of personality disorders to use communication with others for the function of seeking attention. A powerfully complicating factor in the personality disorder is their high comorbidity with other psychosocial problems. Research studies have revealed alarmingly high rates of such problems as depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and somatoform disorders among people with personality disorders. Currently, 10 different personality disorders (plus the residual category of personality disorders not otherwise specified) are formally recognized. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
One useful way to organize, describe, and map the personality disorders is with an interpersonal circumplex, using the dimensions of dominant-submissive and hostile-nurturant. For example, those with dependent personality disorder are situated in the dominant and hostile quadrant. The majority of the personality disorders fall into the hostile half of the circumplex. Although personality disorders have interpersonal implications and ramification, the disorders projected toward the outer edge of the circumplex, such as dependent, narcissistic, and histrionic, have more evident interpersonal implications. It may be unwise to think about something like histrionic personality disorder as a disease entity, in the same way that one thinks about Parkinson’s disease or bulimia nervosa. Rather a personality disorder may be more like high blood pressure—an exaggerated version of a normal phenomenon, with little more than an arbitrary “cutoff point” at which normal becomes viewed as pathological. Borderline personality disorder (hereafter abbreviated as BPD) is the most frequently diagnosed of the personality disorder. Approximately 15-25 percent of psychiatric inpatients and outpatients carry this diagnosis. Its principal features involve instability of interpersonal relationships, affect, and self-image. People with BPD exhibit intense and variable mood, ranging from irritability to euphoria to impulsive anger and even self-destructive behaviour. This moodiness is combined with more generally aberrant and aloof behaviour, a dissociated self-image, frantic efforts to avoid abandonment, impulsivity, suicidal behaviour and threats, feelings of emptiness, problems with anger control, and occasional paranoid ideation. There is a morbid fear of abandonment and a wish for protective nurturance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The characteristic desire of a person with BPD to fuse with another person for emotional support is a sign of ego weakness and identity disturbance. It is not surprising that BPD is highly comorbid with depression. It is tautological to assert that this disorder has negative interpersonal implications and consequences. Many borderline symptoms are seen as arising primarily within the context of a relationship, where the involvement of another person is the arena in which an essential component of the patient’s psychopathology emerges. Indeed, research on BPD indicates a pervasive pattern of interpersonal problems in both adulthood and childhood. It should be obvious to even the casual observer that people with BPD have a long history of interpersonal problems both professionally and socially, and close relationships that may best be characterized as stormy. Symptoms of BPD are absolutely associated with social conflict and feelings of loneliness. Symptoms of the disorder are also associated with endorsing a ludus (game-playing) and mania (manic, possessive) love style. Accordingly, persons with BPD are less likely to find themselves in loving relationships. Individuals with BPD experience a great deal of interpersonal problems and distress. These individuals have excessive interpersonal dependency needs, which make them particularly vulnerable to interpersonal losses. On the other hand, they employ manipulative tactics that often result in agitation and rejection from others. Thus person with BPD tend to sabotage the very relationships that they so badly need. This phenomenon may be a consequence of their problems with distance regulations. According to this hypothesis, whenever patients with BPD move close to or away from other people, they receive negative feedback. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Consequently, these patients oscillate between attachment and avoidance. Sadly, people with BPD rarely learn from their interpersonal experiences and often recreate their problems as they move from one relationship to another. A major component in the interpersonal distress produced and experienced by persons with BPD is emotion dysregulation. As noted above, anxiety about abandonment, excessive anger, and a reactive mood are all problems associated with this disorder. When compared to people with bipolar disorder and unipolar depression, those with BPD indicated substantially more hostility in their past and resent relationships—in terms of both sending and receiving hostility. In a unique study of facial expression recognition, people with BPD performed as well as healthy controls and controls with a history of sexual abuse, with the exception of a tendency to overidentify fearful expressions. This suggests that BPD is associated with a hypersensitivity or readiness to identify fear in others, which could increase these individuals’ own experience of fear in interpersonal context. Like those with any of several other mental health problems, people with BPD elicit interpersonal rejection from others. To give an idea of how potent this rejection effect is, it was compared to interpersonal reactions to BPD and narcissistic personality disorder—an intensely annoying syndrome. Other people felt that the subjects with BPD were more unstable of the two groups. It was concluded that the interpersonal consequences of BPD are even more negative than those associated with narcissistic personality disorder. Given the preponderance of interpersonal conflict, emotional lability, and oscillation between attachment and avoidance, it is little wonder that those with BPD create such negative interpersonal impressions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Experiences in the family of origin have been a focal point in the interpersonal research of BPD. Poor maternal and paternal caring, to the point of neglect, in the family or origin are common themes among those with BPD. This lack of parental caring is coupled with a greater overprotectiveness, similar to that reported by other psychiatric groups. Another family-of-origin phenomenon is the perception by the patients with BPD that their mothers were autonomous and hostile toward them. This perceived hostility also spills over to perceptions of current relationships with, for example, other patients and hospital staff A similar theme is evident. Patients with BPD also rated their fathers and mothers as attacking and rejecting. However, these patients also indicated that they too were attacking and rejecting toward their parents. This illustrates how the antecedent to conflictual adult personal relationships clearly have their origins in adolescent, if not preadolescent relationships. Themes of separation and loss in the family or origin are common in BPD. Predisposition to BPD is especially pronounced when this loss is due to the separation or divorce rather than to death of a parent. Of course, parental conflict would also be exaggerated in such cases, and itself may contribute to the development of symptoms. In any event, such early losses predispose a child to insecure attachment, and explain the clinging attachment and fear of abandonment that are so evident in adults with BPD. Evidence of sexual abuse in the history of many individuals with BPD indicates noxious boundary violations in the family or origin. A history of incest was evident in 19 percent and 35 percent of the cases in two samples of patients with BPD. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
However, the broader category of “childhood sexual abuse” is estimated to have occurred in about 70 percent of all patients with BPD. The impact of such traumatic interpersonal behaviour in a more general context appears to play some role in the disorder. Where there is sexual abuse in the family context, significant family dysfunction almost surely coexists with the behaviour. However, some wonder whether it is the abuse per se that contributes to the disorder or the malevolent family environment that tolerates and perhaps even encourages such conduct. Findings such as these have led to the hypothesis that those with BPD tend to internalize abandoning, neglectful, and abusive childhood relationships in such a way as to promote self-abandonment and attack in adulthood. The parents of people with BPD appear to have psychosocial disturbances of their own that interfere with effective parenting. It is often the case that these problems are evident in both parents—a phenomenon characterized as “biparental failure.” In a study of 30 women with BPD and their 60 parents, both patents had an Axis I or Axis II diagnosis in 73 percent of the families. Even 60 percent of their grandparents had psychiatric disorders, particularly substance use or mood disorders. A similar analysis of first-degree relatives of patients with BPD revealed that 18 percent of these relatives had BPD, 10 percent had antisocial personality disorder, 25 percent had a mood disorder, and about 25 percent had a substance use disorder. These staggering rates of parental psychopathology are consistent with the hypothesis that links disturbed and ineffective parenting to the development of BPD. At the same time, these findings could be interpreted as support for a genetic component in the parental transmission of the disorder. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
The exact and relative contributions from genes and family environment remain to be established by future research. For the time being, it is apparent that mental health is far more likely to be impaired among parents of individuals with BPD than among parents in the general population. Undoubtedly, this at least has the potential to interfere with effective parenting and care. There are four family-of-origin processes that lead to the development of BPD. The first is family chaos, involving fights, affairs, intoxication, trouble with the law, and suicide attempts. This family dynamic creates a dramatic, soap-opera quality in the family or origin. Second, traumatic abandonment is common in these families. Children who later develop BPD are often left alone without adequate care and supervision, during which sexual abuse by others may be perpetrated. The children may interpret this abandonment as resulting from their bad behaviour. Third, the families of those who develop BPD tend to shun autonomy and promote dependency. These children are socialized to believe that they are flawed, and that their families, miserable as they may be, are their only salvation. Finally, these families only offer nurturance in response to misery. These families reinforce displays of helplessness and agony by offering nurturant care in response to such displays, and at no other time. Collectively, these family-of-origin processes are thought to promote the identity disturbance, emotional liability, fear of abandonment, and suicidal gestures that are typical of BPD. The interpersonal backgrounds of people with BPD are particularly remarkable. Themselves of loneliness, conflict, and fear of abandonment are prevalent. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
As it is for people with depression, interpersonal rejection is a notable problem for those with BPD. This may be the result of the tendency in BPD to oscillate between clinging attachment and avoidance—a pattern that is repulsive to even the most tolerant friend or family member. Experiences in the family or origin are commonly devoid of stability and nurturance. Rather, one finds a lack of care, frequent abuse, rejection, and psychiatric symptoms emanating from the parents of those who later develop BPD. It is when parental overinvolvement is combined with neglect and abuse that symptoms of BPD are especially likely to appear. This toxic combination of parenting behaviours set the stage for the later interpersonal attachment-avoidance conflict that characterizes BPD (borderline personality disorder). “Let us also lay aside every encumbrance and sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,” reports Hebrews 12.1. Many people wonder why they are not happy. Often, it is because they are dragging around all sorts of baggage from the past. Someone offended them last week, so they have packed that pain in their bag. Someone’s car looks better than theirs, so they are offended and have packed that pain in their bag. Someone has a new hair style and they think it looks better than theirs, so they pack that offense in their bag. A month ago they lost their temper, said some things they should not have, and they have that stuffed in their bag, too. Ten years ago, their boyfriend cheated on them, and they just do not understand why. They have got all that anger, jealousy, and doubt stashed in still another bag. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Growing up, they were not treated right. They have got that suitcase full of junk, too. They have been carrying these heavy bags for years; they are loaded down by their collection of burdens, and then they wonder why they cannot live a rich, full life! Worse yet, they drag their baggage with them everywhere they go. Not only do they hold on to their baggage, but they like to unpack it every once in a while, just to make sure it is all still there. They take some things out and look at them, and relive all that hurt and pain. Then they pack it up again and drag and drop it someplace else! Bethany (not her real name) went through a failed relationship in her marriage many years ago, and she lost her house and car. She prayed that God would bring somebody new into her life. Sure enough, she met a fine gentleman, a very godly, successful man, and she was excited about their friendship. However, she made the mistake of dragging her borderline personality disorder (baggage) into that new relationship. When they were together, she talked constantly about all she had been through, how she was emotionally drained, and how mistreated she had been. That gentlemen told me later that Bethany was so focused on her past, so caught up in what she had been through, he just could not deal with it anymore. He finally stopped calling her, and just moved on. Unfortunately, something like that happens all too often. If you hold on to the hurts and pains of the past, they will poison you wherever you go. You may think that other people are the problem, but I want to encourage you to examine your own heart. Look on the inside, because you may very well find out that you are the problem. Maybe you have been a baggage dragger. And you cannot drag around baggage from the past and expect to have good, healthy relationships. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
God did not create us to carry around all the baggage from the past. “Exercise foresight and be on the watch to look [after one another], to see that no one falls back from and fails to secure God’s grace (His unmerited favour and spiritual blessing), in order that no root of resentment (rancor, bitterness, or hatred) shoots forth and causes trouble and bitter torment, and the many become contaminated and defiled by it,” reports Hebrews 12.15. One does not have to live depressed and discouraged because of what one has gone through. Maybe one has been holding on to painful memories or attitudes that has been keeping one bitter, discouraged, emotionally worn out, physically run down, depleted of energy and enthusiasm, and living in self-pity. Sadly, one’s situation will not change until you put your foot down and make a decision to do or say something about it. “Strive to live in peace with everybody and pursue that consecration and holiness without which no one will [ever] see the Lord,” reports Hebrews 12.14. If you develop that kind of attitude, God will give you a new beginning. You will see things improve. If someone hurt you, give that to God and He will pay you back, He will make it up to you. Quit dwelling on your disappointments. Quit mourning over something that is over and done. DO not make the mistake of dragging the pains of yesterday over into today. Stop sitting around feeling sorry for yourself. If you continue to wallow in despair, not only will you stay stuck in the past, but you will sink deeper and deeper. God will invite the likes of you—that is to say, the pocketless and the pauperous—to the Communion of His Most Holy Body. However, who are we that we should presume to approach God? #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Look, the Heaven of heavens cannot contain God—if I may echo the Author of the First Book of Kings (8.27)—and yet God says to me, a leaky sieve, what He said to the others in His lifetime on Earth. “Come, all those of you who break your backs and bust your butts, and I will pour you a draft.” Is that not how the great Matthew put it. We than cannot find a spot of good in ourselves to save our souls, how are we to introduce ourselves when we first meet Jesus Christ face to face, we whose malign conduct we have continually thrown in Jesus Christ’s benign face? Surrounded by such Heavenly heavyweights—Angels and Archangels, holy people from the Old and New Testaments—Jesus still have the nerve to say, “Come to Me, one and all?” That is outrageous! No one else would make such an invitation. Who would believe it? Nobody would give such a command. Who would pay any attention? However, let us not get stalled on comings and goings. “Looking away [from all that will distract] to Jesus, Who is the leader and the Source of our faith [giving the first incentive for our belief] and is also its Finisher [bringing it to maturity and perfection]. He, for the joy [of obtaining the prize] that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising and ignoring the shame, and is now seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Just think of Him Who endured from sinners such grievous opposition and bitter hostility against Himself [reckon up and consider it all in comparison with your trials], so that you may not grow weary or exhausted, losing heart and relaxing and fainting in your minds. You have not yet struggled and fought agonizingly against sin, nor have you yet resisted and withstood to the point of pouring out your [own] blood. And have you [completely] forgotten the divine word of appeal and encouragement in which you are reasoned with and addressed as sons? #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
“My son, do not think lightly or scorn to submit to the correction and discipline of the Lord, nor lose courage and give up and faint when you are reporved or corrected by Him; for the Lord corrects and disciplines everyone whom He loves, and He punishes, even scourges, every son whom He accepts and welcomes to His heart and cherishes. You must submit to and endure [correction] for discipline; God is dealing with you as with sons. For what son is there who one’s father does not [thus] train and correct and discipline? Now if you are exempt from correction and left without discipline in which all [of God’s children] share, then you are illegitimate offspring and not true sons,” reports Hebrews 12.2-8. These points must be well taken from our Friend and Founder of all Law, Giver of All life. We, lawless creatures that we are, have the gall to receive God without having to break a sweat? God is bigger than the past. He is bigger than all one’s disappointments and problems. Some may have made a lot of mistakes, but God can turn those things all around. People may have hurt you and done you wrong, but if you will leave it up to God, He will pay your back. God will make your wrongs right. Get rid of that baggage and start focusing on your possibilities. Let hope fill your heart. Your future can start today. No matter what you have been through, no matter how difficult it was, God is saying there are great days ahead for you. He still has good things in store. Knowing God’s will is a key to answered prayer. So often people spend a lot of time trying to figure out if it is God’s will for them to be healed or if it is God’s will for them to be prosperous. Jesus said, “After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in Heaven, Hallowed by Thy name. Thy kingdom come. They will be done in Earth, as it is in Heaven,” reports Matthew 6.9-10. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Let us ask ourselves what is it like in Heaven: Is there any poverty in Heaven? No. Is there any disease in Heaven? No. Jesus told His disciples to pray that the will of God be done in Earth as it is in Heaven. Then He must be saying to pray that there be no disease on this Earth and that there by no poverty here. Now if Jesus is teaching His disciples to pray this way, do you not know that it is the will of God? His will is that it be on this Earth as it is in Heaven. When the enemy is put in the bottomless pit and shut up for a thousand years, there will be no sickness or disease. Now that ought to tell us where it comes from. Sometimes people get the idea that God is testing and perfecting us with sickness and disease. They say that the trail of your faith perfect it. However, that is not what the Word says. James says that the trying of your faith works patience. (James 1.3.) How many of us have not had any trials and tests in life? If it were true that God uses trials and tests to perfect our faith, then everyone of us would be perfect. The trails of life are a design of the adversary to destroy you, not to perfect you. The trying of your faith works patience. Patience is a spiritual force that comes into play to undergird your faith and to hold it up like a pier under a long span of a bridge. If the bride did not have piers to support it, it would collapse. That is what happens to many people’s faith. It causes you to be consistent through the trial and test that the enemy brings against you. So often we have thought it was God sending us the trails and tests. No, thank God, it is not my Father sending them—it is the enemy. Jesus said, “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly,” reports John 10.10. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Is there going to be any sickness and disease in Heave? No Is there going to be any poverty there? No. There is abundance in that place. It is a healthy place. Do you know any poverty-stricken folk on Earth who have their driveway paved with gold? The streets of that city are not only paved with gold, they are pure gold. The whole street is gold! God’s will is that this Earth be conformed to the spirit World that spawned it. This Universe is a creation of God and it was designed to be prosperous. However, the adversary entered into it and fouled it up by distorting God’s creation and His Word. In the process of actualizing, one expressed oneself less on the character and manipulative levels and moves more into the actualizing expression of each polarity. For instance, one the strength polarity, one may express oneself once in awhile in rigid manner. Occasionally, one may employ manipulative tactics of striving and achieving. However, mostly one learns to express strength in actualizing manner, by being powerful, strong, capable, or adequate as it is appropriate. If one were actualized, one would express only the actualizing level. However, we are in a process and this is why we need to be aware that our manipulative tendencies can by only gradually neutralized. The best model for understanding the actualizing life is Jesus Himself, Jesus possessed a quality of being that awed people wherever He went. In His encounters with others, He would leave healing, change, and renewal. He lived form His core and was able to express the intensity of emotion required for every situation. He could be living enough to restore and free a woman caught in the act of adultery when her accusers wanted to stone her to death. #RadolphHarris 15 of 20
Jesus could be weak enough to surrender to being put to death on a cross and buried in another man’s tomb. He could be strong enough to rise from the grave a victor over death itself. Knowing that God participates with one in the quest for authenticity and meaningful involvement in the World brings courage to trust the subtle promptings of one’s inner feelings or to be open to the wisdom of one’s gut reactions. The actualizing Christian values the still, quiet voice within that often reflects the gentle guidance of the Holy Spirit in the core of one’s personality. Inputs from God and other flow readily through the permeable bounty of the self and on into the core. We can describe the process as dynamic and continuous. Persons who live this way are being maximally sensitive to themselves and others. They function transparently: what originates deep within is what is expressed honestly to others. They are also moved emotionally by the feelings that other people share. Thus we could say these persons are congruent and empathetic. An important aspect of growth is having the courage to accept out losses up to now. A woman once shared in a counseling session with Jensen how tragic she though it was that certain insights had come so late in life. He reassured her that it was a blessing that the insights had come at all. Now the insight was to take the insight and build on them. The fact is that life is not just a rose garden—it can be a crown of thorns are well. So we must learn to accept our looses and defeats and get on with the adventure of living. In giving up our radical defenses and bags of tricks, we are reborn. We become like babes, loveable to behold. We experience the freshness, purity, and genuineness that are truly Christlike. However, we do not become naïve and simplistic. Rather, we grow to be as Jesus said, “wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” reports Matthew 10.16. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
As we gibe in to spontaneous expression from our core along the primary polarities, integration gradually takes place and inner harmony is experienced. This process takes time, just as building up a pattern of repressing feelings took time. The actualizing response must be made again and again before it becomes an automatic expression of our core being. Also, the transformation from manipulating into actualizing involves a fundamental change of attitude toward self and others. Notice people who are healed and holistic have expressions of the self, rather than with the ulterior motives of impressing others or repressing one’s feeling. One chooses to approach and encounter others—even when the going gets rough—rather than reproach or avoid them. Further, the people look inward. The Holy Spirit flow into the depths of the Christian just as it did for Christ. This is important to know, because it assures us that our whole being—physical, emotional, and psychological—is the ground out of which emerges the unfolding will of God in our lives, as it did in Jesus’ life. All the essential elements for an actualizing lifestyle are already in the personality. Nothing needs to be added or taken away. We simply work with God’s help, to restore the inner balance so that we can live with more integrity. With awareness, patience, and gentle discipline, the patterns of characters styles become stages of growth—like the bud that eventually gives way to the blossoming of the flower. Gentleness is an important concept here. If someone impatiently tried to tear the covering of the bud away, the flower inside would be destroyed. In the same way, we need to be respectful of slow and gradual transformation of the constricted personality into the fully alive and expressive one. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
With courage the actualizing Christian recognizes within oneself the possibility for deterioration into psychosis, or growth into Spirit-led actualization. It is this potentiality for psychosis or actualizing that makes each day a creative act of personal surrender to the miracle of God’s abiding grace. The transformation from neurosis to personality health is indeed a wonderful process. The person rises on the force of hope out of the depths of one’s despair. One’s cowardice is replaced by courage. The rigid bonds of one’s selfishness are broken down by a taste of gratification of unselfishness. Joy wells up and streams over one’s pain. And love comes into the human’s life to vanquish one’s loneliness. One has at last found oneself—and found one’s fellow humans and one’s place in the Universe. Such is the transformation from neurosis to personality health. And such is what it means, likewise, to experience religion. The Christian Bible is clear that the kingdom of God need not begin only when one goes to Heaven. Rather, the kingdom of God has already burst into time and space and history. The more we live from our cores, the more we experience the gracious powers of the kingdom of God—here and now. So the actualizing Christian has hope not only for a blessed eternity but also for substantial healing, meaning, and fulfillment in this life. Many Christians are not sufficiently aware of this exciting prospect. An example is a marine sergeant who was recently talking to Jared. He confided sincerely that he was afraid to make a deep commitment to Christ because he felt he could not handle the new obligation to straighten out his life and give up some bad habits he enjoyed. “If I surrender to God, He will judge me and send me to some remote corner of the Earth,” he said. Jared suggested that the whole meaning of the death and resurrection of Christ was that God loves each one of us perfectly. So why would a loving God want to make Crowley miserable? #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
God sent Jesus into the World to liberate people, not to condemn and frustrate them. Crowley had never seen that side of it, but had rather assumed that God was the kind of gruff and stern Being with whom one ought not to get too intimate—a punitive God. However, this is simply not true. God is for us, not against us! Given the balance of desire to be all that we are called by God to be, courage to be ourselves here and now, and openness to grow day by day, we cannot help making the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly. For proof that the glimpse is a genuine fact and not a hallucinatory one, not only ought the experience itself to be analyzed but the after-condition ought to be studied and the subsequent behaviour ought to be noted. Does it show less attachment to the ego and more devotion to the Overself, less emotional disturbance and more mental tranquility? If it is a genuine glimpse, its effect will be seen in one’s face, one’s gait, one’s talk, while the influence, and some of the aftermath, lasts. For one’s face will be transfigured, one’s gait will be slowed down, one’s talk will be restrained and wise. The Glimpse is in very truth a magic spell cast over a person’s whole being so that one neither feels nor reacts like one did before. For a short time one is born again, a new person. All the annals of the vanished past and all the experiences of the living present inform us that whoever enters into it feels one’s natural egotism subside, one’s fierce passions assuaged, one’s restless thoughts stilled, one’s troubled emotions pacified, one’s habitual World-view spiritualized, and one’s whole person caught up into a beatific supernal power. Did one ever have this kind of consciousness? One’s words and deeds, one’s personal presence and psychological self-betrayal should proclaim with a united voice what one is. No human who habitually enters such a blessed state could ever bring oneself to hate or injure a fellow human being. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Dear Lord in Heaven, I am dropping my baggage from the past right here. I am letting go of it and giving it to You. I do not want to drag it along with me any longer. Thank You for taking this heavy load off my heart. God, please be with us Violence, destruction, receive our homage. Please help us to bring darkness into the light, to lift out the pain, the anger, where it can be seen for what it is—the balance-wheel for our vulnerable, aching love. Within the act of creation, crude power that forges a balance between hate and love. Helps us to be the always hopeful gardeners of the spirit. Who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth as without light, nothing flowers. Beat the roots in mind, You the dark one, God, awesome power. O Heavenly Father, remember the soul of my beloved husband whom I affectionately recall in this solemn hour. May his soul be bound up in the bonds of eternal life and his memory ever be for a blessing. O Heavenly Father, remember the sold of my beloved wife whom I affectionately recall in this solemn hour. May her soul be bound up in the bonds of eternal life and may her memory ever be for a blessing. O heavenly Father, remember the soul of my beloved son whom I loving recall in this solemn hour. His memory is enshrined in my heart. May his soul be bound up in the bonds of eternal life. Amen. O Heavenly Father, remember the soul of my beloved daughter whom I loving recall in this solemn hour. Her memory is enshrined in my heart. May her soul be bound up in the bonds of eternal life. Amen. O Heavenly Father, remember the soul of my grandparents whom I affectionately recall in this solemn hour. As I remember the hours we spent together in happy fellowship, may I ever keep sacred the memory of grandfather’s loyalty and love. May grandmother and grandfather’s soul be bound up in the bonds of eternal life. Amen. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
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Be welcomed by the grand foyer showcasing a beautiful open-concept great room, kitchen and casual dining room as well a gorgeous backyard.
There Was Terror in His Eyes as Not Often Seen in a Human Being!
Twenty-first century humans, in spite of all their scientific and technological advances, are baffled by unexplained forces existent in the Universe. The naturalistic philosophy of the previous generations has been unable to account for all of the mysterious phenomena which have been observed. Many scientists believe that living beings may inhabit other galaxies, and highly educated humans are seriously studying reports of those who insist they have received communications from the dead. Humans of science no longer scoff at the accounts of strange occurrences associated with witchcraft and occultic practices. Although they do not necessarily accept them as proof of the supernatural, many will admit they are manifestations of some kind of power they do not yet understand. Christian theologians and scientists are not perplexed by such reports. They know that both God and Satan are very much alive. Though readily conceding that they cannot explain fully all the mysteries of life, they affirm with confidence the existence of God and an invisible host of intelligent supernatural beings. They are convinced that when one accepts the teachings of the Bible, one begins to understand many of the puzzling facts of existence. For example, the Bible tells of holy angels who dwell in Heaven (Matthew 18.10). It also mentions “angels that sinned” (2 Peter 2.4), rebellious spirit begins who have been cast out of Heaven and now dwell in the atmosphere that surrounds the Earth. We know this because Paul declared that Satan is “the prince of the power of the air,” reports Ephesians 2.2, and the Greek word translated “air” was used to speak of the gaseous envelop that encircles our planet. These wicked beings apparently have unlimited access to Earther, and actively influence every area of human endeavour. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Because they do not possess physical bodies, we cannot typically detect them through our senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell. We do have evidence of their presence, however, for the Word of God gives us information regarding their identification, their nature and their function. Various terms are used in the Christian Bible to denote the evil spirit beings who followed Satan in this initial act of rebellion against God. It refers to “angels that sinned” 2 Peter 2.4 and “angels who kept not their first estate” Jude 6, and many times mentions “spirits” and “demons.” Some scholars believe that these demons must be distinguished from the “angels that sinned” and the “angels who kept not their first estate.” They contend that the Heavenly beings who joined Satan in his revolt against God are fallen angels, but that demons are disembodies spirits of physical and moral creatures who once lived upon the Earth. However, these Bible students disagree regarding an exact identification of the demons. Some say they are the spirits of pre-Adamic beings similar to man, while others identify them as the spirits of the “giants” who were destroyed in the great flood of Noah’s day. If one thinks that demons are the spirits of man-like beings who lived before Adam, then one will no doubt interpret Genesis 1.2 as a declaration that the original Earth, inhabited by the creatures, was cataclysmically destroyed. Genesis 1.2 is then translated as follows: “And the Earth became without form and void…” This theory, while attractive in that it permits a literal interpretation of the days in Genesis 1, must be acknowledged as only a hypothesis. Most Hebrew scholars reject this interpretation because Genesis 1.2 begins with a grammatical construction which makes it highly unlikely that Genesis 1.1 and 1.2 are separated by millions of years. Then, too, the verb translated “became” almost always has the meaning “was.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
However, even if we accept this theory, and believe that a race of man-like beings inhabited the prehistoric Earth, we would have no basis for thinking that their spirits are now free to roam about as the enemies of humankind. Other Bible scholars maintain that demons are the spirits of the “giants” who lived upon the Earth in the days of Noah. They refer to Genesis 6, contending that these “giants” were produced when fallen angels, called the “sons of God,” married the “daughters of men.” “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the Earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all whom they chose. There were giants in the Earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them, the same became mighty men who were of old, men of renown,” reports Genesis 6.1, 2, 4. It is necessary for proponents of this theory to believe that fallen angels became male human beings who married women, produced a mongrel offspring, and took over the role of father in the family. They theorize that Satan hoped thereby to frustrate God’s redemptive plan. The Lord had promised salvation through Christ to human beings only—not for angels or mixed half-human and half-angelic race. Christ could not have been born to offspring of these corrupted creates or provide redemptions for them. Thus God’s plan of redemption would have been thwarted. In addition, both Jude and Peter in their epistles refer to a sin committed by angels, and their words can be blended very nicely into this concept. Jude writes, “And the angels who kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire,” reports Jude 6, 7. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The words “in like manner” (verse 7) are taken to mean that the sin of the angels in having pleasures of the flesh with women was an unnatural act, comparable to sodomy. Peter tells of angels assigned to Tartaros, the nether World of the Greeks considered to be lower than Hades. “For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell [GK Tartaros], and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment,” reports 2 Peter 2.4. Again, it does not take a great deal of imagination to see how these words of Peter may be applied to the wicked angels who committed the monstrous sin of attempting to make mongrels of the human race. Many Bible students, however, reject this interpretation of Genesis 6. Since angels are non-material beings, it would be necessary for them to create physical bodies for themselves capable of impregnating a female member of the human race. This would require nothing less than a creative miracle, and the Bible indicates that this power belongs only to God. In addition, it is not necessary to interpret the statements in Jude and 2 Peter as a reference to sin involving pleasures of the flesh on the part of the fallen angels. Jude’s use of the expression “going after strange flesh” may be figurative language representing spiritual fornication. The prophets often depicted Israel’s unfaithfulness to God in this manner. Peter’s statement that the angels who sinned have been assigned to Tartaros may be a simple declaration that all sinning angels have been designated to this place, and that they are even now under chains of moral and spiritual darkness. The Bible gives little information regarding the origin of demons. We can state with absolute certainty only that they are fallen spirit beings who have committed themselves to Satan and that they hate God and seek to harm His people. No clear distinction can be made between fallen angels and demons, for they are all evil spirits. Some of our questions must remain unanswered, but the Lord has given ample revelation to warn us that these invisible enemies are far too great and powerful for us to defeat in our own strength, and that we can successfully wage war against them only as we live in continual dependence upon the Lord. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
In one respect the case of Dame Alice Kyteler stands alone in the history of magical dealings in Ireland prior to the seventeenth century. We have of the entire proceedings an invaluable and contemporary account, or at latest one compiled within a very few years after the death of Petronilla of Meath; while the excitement produced by the affair is shown by the more or less lengthy allusions to it in early writings, such as The Book of Howth (Carew MSS.), the Annals by Fariar Clyn, the Chartularies of S. Mary’s Abbey (vol. ii), &c. It is also rendered more valuable by the fact that those who are best qualified to give their opinion on the matter have assured the writer that to the best of their belief no entries with respect to trials for sorcery or witchcraft can be found in the various old Rolls preserved in the Dublin Record Office. However, when the story is considered with reference to the following facts it takes on a different signification. On the 29th of September 1317 (Wright says 1320), Bishop de Ledrede held his first Synod, at which several canons were passed, one of which seems in some degree introductory to the events detailed in last week’s report. In it he speaks of “a certain new and pestilential sect in our parts, differing from all the faith in the World, filled with a devilish spirit, more inhuman than heathens…who pursue the priests and bishops of the Most High God equally in life and death, by spoiling and rending the patrimony of Christ in the diocese of Ossory, and who utter grievous threats against the bishops and their ministers exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and (by various means) attempt to hinder the correction of sins and the salvation of souls, in contempt of God and the Church.” From this it would seem that heresy and unorthodoxy had already made its appearance in the diocese. In 1324 the Kyteler case occurred, one of the participants being burnt at the stake while other incriminate persons were subsequently followed up, some of whom shared the fate of Petronilla of Meath. In 1327 Adam Dubh, of the Leinster tribe of O’Toole, was burnt alive on College Green for denying the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity, as well as for rejecting the authority of the Holy See. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
In 1335 Pope Benedict XII wrote a letter to King Edward III, in which occurs the following passage: “It has come to our knowledge that while our venerable brother, Richard, Bishop of Ossory, was visiting his diocese, there appeared in the midst of his catholic people men who were heretics together with their abettors, some of whom asserted that Jesus Christ was a mere man and a sinner, and was justly crucified for His own sins; others after having done homage and offered sacrifice to demons, thought otherwise of the sacrament of the Body of Christ than the Catholic Church teaches, saying that the same venerable sacrament is by no means to be worshipped; and also asserting that they are not bound to obey or believe the decrees, decretals, and apostolic mandates; in the meantime, consulting demons according to the rites of those sects among the Gentiles and Pagans, they despise the sacraments of the Catholic Church, and draw the faithful of Christ after them by their superstitions.” Unlike apocryphal and rabbinical literature, the Biblical description of evil spirits avoids the unusual and grotesque. The Bible does, however, present us with a clear picture of their activity and tells us how to resist them effectively. In the first place, it declares that demons or fallen angels are non-material beings. They do not possess bodies like humans, and therefore are repeatedly called “spirits.” Matthew, for example, says, “When the evening was come, they brought unto him many that were possessed with demons; and he cast out the spirits with his word, and healed all that were sick,” reports Matthew 8.16. Jesus started that the Creator is not made up of physical substance when He said, “God is a Spirit,” reports John 4.24. Later, when His frightened disciples thought He was a ghost, He told them their fears were groundless, for “a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have,” reports Luke 24.39. Paul had in mind the non-physical nature of Satan and his army of evil spirits when he said that our warfare is “not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this World, against spiritual wickedness in high places,” reports Ephesians 6.12. Satan’s demonic hordes are spirit beings, and therefore more dangerous than the “flesh and blood” enemies we may encounter in our daily lives. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Second, the Bible portrays demons as highly intelligent creatures. They recognize Christ when He was here upon the Earth, and knew they could not have fellowship with Him. Luke tells us about an evil spirit who is an example of this. “When he saw Jesus, he cried out, and fell down before him, and with a loud voice said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God, most high? I beseech thee, torment me not,” reports Luke 8.28. The fallen spirits are also aware of their ultimate defeat, for James declared, “Them demons also believe, and tremble,” reports James 2.19. They are, of course, finite creatures, even Satan is limited in knowledge. He has myriads of evil spirit followers, however, and they are able to give him information on almost any person and circumstance in which he is interested. In this manner he can find out much what he wants to know. Truly, believers in Christ can never successfully cope with Satan and his hosts without special help from the Lord. Therefore, we must humbly look to God for wisdom and strength to resist the attacks of our invisible enemies. Third, the World of evil spirits is cruel. These creatures hate God and all who have placed their trust in Him. They seem to find delight in causing human grief and pain. For example, Matthew tells us that a man who was both blind and dumb suffered these afflictions because a demon had entered his body. “Then was brought unto him one possessed with a demon, blind, and dumb; and He healed him, insomuch that the blind and dumb both spoke and saw,” reports Matthew 12.22. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell the story of two demented men who lived in the country of the Gerasenes, and indicate that their insanity was the result of demonic invasion of their personalities. Luke, the beloved physicians, writes of a woman who was bent over with some crippling disease, saying that she had “a spirit of infirmity.” He adds that Jesus said she had been bound by Satan. “And he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And, behold, there was a woman who had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no way lift herself up. And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
“And he laid his hands on her; and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God. And the ruler of the synagogue answered with indignation, because Jesus had healed on the sabbath day, and said unto the people, There are six days in which humans ought to work; in them, therefore, come and be healed, and not on the sabbath day. The Lord then answered him, and said, Thou hypocrite, doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or her ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering? And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, who Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bound on the sabbath day? And when he had said these things, all his adversaries were ashamed; and all the people rejoiced for all the glorious things that were done by him,” reports Luke 13.10-17. While the gospel writers make it clear that not all illness is the work of Satan and demons, they do point out that much human suffering is the result of demonic activity. Finally, the Bible tells us that all fallen angels or evil spirits are confirmed in their wickedness. Though they “believe and tremble,” they will never repent, never seek forgiveness, and never pray for holiness or purity. Though they know that Jesus is the Christ, they never really worship Him. They must acknowledge that He is stronger than they, and may occasionally render Him token submission, but inwardly they hate Him and keenly resent His authority over them. In fact, their nature is so totally evil that the term “unclean” often is applied to them. (See Matthew 10.1; Mark 1.27; 3.11; Luke 4.36; Acts 8.7; Revelations 16.13.) They apparently delight in sin, find great pleasure in leading humans to commit evil deeds, and possess no feelings of guilt nor desire for deliverance. Michael Scot, reputed a wizard of such potency that—when in Salamanca’s cave he listed his magic want to wave and the bells would ring in Notre Dame. Scot has studied successively at Oxford and Paris (where he acquired the title of “mathematicus”); he then passed to Bologna, thence to Palermo, and subsequently continued his studies in Toledo. His refusal of the See of Cashel was an intellectual loss to the Irish Church, for he was so widely renowned for his varied and extensive learning that he was credited with supernatural powers; a number of legends grew up around his name which hid his real merit, and transformed the man of science into a magician. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
In the Border country traditions of his magical power are common. Boccaccio alludes to “a great master in necromancy, called Michael Scot,” while Dante places him in the eighteen circle of Hell. The next, who is so slender in the flanks, was Michael Scot, who of a verity of magical illusion knew the game. Another man to whom magical powers were attributed solely on account of his learning was Gerald, the fourth Earl of Desmond, styled the Poet, who died rather mysteriously in 1398. The Four Masters in their Annals describe him as “a nobleman of wonderful bounty, mirth, cheerfulness of conversation, charitable in his deeds, easy of access, a witty and ingenious composer of Irish poetry, a learned and profound chronicler.” No legends are extant of his magical deeds. King James I of Scotland, whose severities against his nobles had around their bitter resentment, was barbarously assassinated at Perth in 1437 by some of their supports, who were aided and abetted by the ages Duke of Atholl. From a contemporary account of this we learn that the monarch’s fate was predicted to him by an Irish prophetess or witch; has he given ear to her message he might have escaped with his life. We modernize the somewhat difficult spelling, but retain the quaint language of the original. “The king, suddenly advised, made a solemn feast of the Christmas at Perth, which is clept Saint John’s Town, which is from Edinburg on the other side of the Scottish sea, the which is vulgarly celpt the water of Lethe. In the midst of the way there arose a woman of Ireland, the clept herself as a soothsayer. The which anon as she saw the king she cried with a loud voice, saying thus: ‘My lord king, and you pass this water you shall never turn again alive.’ The king hearing this was astonied of her words; for but a little before he had read in a prophecy that in the self same year the king of Scots should be slain; and therewithal the king, as he rode, cleped to him one of his knights, and gave him in commandment to turn again to speak with that woman, and ask of her what she would, and what thing she meant with her loud crying. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
“And she began, and told him as ye have heard of the King of Scots if he passed that water. As now the king asked her, how she knew that. And she said, that Huthart told her so. ‘Sire,’ quoth he, ‘men may “calant” yet take to heed of yon woman’s words, for she is but a drunken fool, and wot not what she saith’; and so with his folk passed the water celpt the Scottish sea, towards Saint John’s town.” The narrator states some dreams ominous of James’s murder, and afterwards proceeds thus: Both afore supper, and long after into quarter of the night, in the which the Earl of Atholl (Athetelles) and Robert Steward were about the king, where they were occupied at the playing of chess, at the tables, in reading of romances, in singing and piping, in harping, and in other honest solaces of great pleasance and disport. Therewith came the said woman of Ireland, that celpt herself a divineress, and entered the king’s court, till that she came straight to the king’s chamber-door, where she stood, till at the last the usher opened the door, marvelling of that woman’s being there that time of night, and asking her what she would. ‘Let me in, sir’ quoth she, ‘for I have somewhat to say, and to tell unto the king; for I am the same woman that not long ago desired to have spoken with him at the Leith, when he should pass the Scottish sea.’ The usher went in and told him of this woman. ‘Yea,’ quoth the king, ‘let her come tomorrow’; because the he was occupied with such disports at that time he let not to hear her as then. The usher came again to the chamber-door to the said woman, and there he told her that the king was busy in playing, and bid her come soon again upon the morrow. ‘Well,’ said the woman, ‘it shall repent you all that ye will not let me speak now with the king.’ Thereat the usher laughed, and held her but a fool, charging her to go her way, and therewithal she went thence. Her informant “Huthart” was evidently a familiar spirit who was in attendance on her. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Considering the barrenness of Irish records on the subject of sorcery and witchcraft it affords us no small satisfaction to find the following statement in the Statute Rolls of the Parliament for the year 1447. It consists of a most indignantly-worded remonstrance from the Lords and Commons, which was drawn forth by the fact that some high-placed personage had been accused of practising sorcery with the intent to do grievous harm to one’s enemy. When making it the remonstrants appear to have forgotten, or perhaps, like Members of Parliament in other ages, found it convenient to forget the nonce the Kyteler incident of the pervious century. There was an Act of Parliament which was intended to put a stop to a certain lucrative form of witchcraft. It is gravely stated by the writer of a little book entitled Beware the Cat (and by Giraldus Camrensis before him), that Irish witches could turn wisps of hay, straw &c. into red-coloured pigs, which they dishonestly sold in the market, but which resumed their proper shape when crossing running water. To prevent this it is stated that the Irish Parliament passed an Act forbidding the purchase of red swine. We regret to say, however, that no such interesting Act is to be found in the Statues books. The belief in the power of witches to inflict harm on others was also a powerful belief in Victorian times. When reflecting on history, one can see that consulting someone with supernatural powers was no different than talking to a friend about one’s life. It was very common. Also, many of these accounts turned out to have some truth to them or evidence of supernatural power. Perhaps this is because people were more in tune with their inner spirit and the planet back then. Many people thought Sarah Winchester was mentally ill or deranged for consulting a medium about how she should deal with the evil spirits that were haunting her, they thought she was even more insane for building the World’s most beautiful and unique mansion. However, what better way could there be to spend your money than by creating something you and the World can enjoy for many centuries and creating a living memorial for your family? #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Perhaps what Mrs. Winchester did was very rational and sane. In contrast, most others express their pain and suffering by becoming destructive and hurting others, and people usually idolize them for that. Mrs. Winchester gradually developed her skill in building, just as she had done with music and language in her youth. She often used the most current innovations in her home. Some historical sources say that Mrs. Winchester was the first to use wool for insulation. Carbide gas lights in the house were fed by the estate’s own gas manufacturing plant, which used a new process. The gas lights were operated by pushing an electric button. A specially designed window catch was patterned after a Winchester rifle trigger and trip hammer, amongst other state of the art designs. I met a man in the Winchester Mansion one day that I knew very well, as I thought, though I had not seen him for years. Without pressing him too soon with a repetition of my idle questions, we walked together to the Blue Séance Room, and there we shook hands. Just then there came a vague vibration in the Earth and air, quickly changing into a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush caused me to start back, as though it had force to draw me down. Next morning, I spoke of this meeting to a mutual friend, and then I learnt, for the first time, that the man had died six months before. The natural inference was that I had mistaken one man for another, an error that, not having a good memory for faces, I frequently fall into. What was remarkable about the matter, however, was that throughout our walk I had conversed with the man under the impression that he was that other dead man, and, whether by coincidence or not, his replies had never once suggested to me my mistake. As soon as I finished speaking to Jared, who had been listening very thoughtfully, asked me if I believed in spiritualism “to its fullest extent.” “That is a rather large question,” I answered. “What do you mean by ‘spiritualism to its fullest extent’?” “Well, do you believe that the spirits of the dead have not only the power of revisiting this Earth at their will, but that, when here, they have the power of action, or rather, of exciting to action. Let me put a definite case. A spiritualist friend of mine, a sensible and by no means imaginative man, once told me that a table, through the medium of which the spirit of a friend had been in the habit of communicating with him, came slowly across the room towards him, of its own accord, one night as he sat alone in the Winchester Mansion, and pinioned him against the wall. Now can any of you believe that, or can you not?” #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
I could believe it. It seems that the difference between what we call the natural and supernatural is merely the difference between frequency and rarity of occurrence. Suppose a person died with the dearest wish of one’s heart unfulfilled, do you believe that one’s spirit might have power to return to Earth and complete the interrupted work? The Winchester Mansion is supposed to be enchanted. According to the legend, William Winchester was a very potent magician, and usually resided in a castle. To this he brought his bride, a beautiful young lady, Sarah Lockwood Pardee, who he loved, and he prevailed upon her her every desire, but with fatal results. One day she presented herself in the chamber in which her husband exercised his forbidden art, and begged him to show her the wonders of the evil science. With the greatest reluctance he consented, but warned her that she must prepare herself to witness a series of most frightful phenomena, which, once commenced, could neither be abridged nor mitigated, while if she spoke a single word during the proceedings the castle and all it contained would sink. Urged on by curiosity she gave the required promised, and he commenced. Muttering a spell as he stood before her, feathers sprouted thickly over him, his face became contracted and hooked, a corpse-like smell filled the air, and winnowing the air with beats of its heavy wings a gigantic vulture rose in his stead, and swept round and round the room as if on the point of pouncing upon her. The lady controlled herself though this trial, and another began. The bird alighted near the door, and in less than a minute changed, she saw not how, into a horribly deformed and dwarfish hag, who, with yellow skin hanging about her face, and cavernous eyes, swung herself on crutches towards the lady, her mouth foaming with fury, and her grimaces and contortions becoming more and more hideous every moment, till she rolled with a fearful yell on the floor in a horrible convulsion at the lady’s feet, and then changed into a huge serpent, which came sweeping and arching towards her with crest erect and quivering tongue. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Suddenly, as it seemed on the point of darting at her, she saw her husband in its stead, standing pale before her, and with his finger on his lips enforcing the continued necessity of silence. He then placed himself at the full length on the floor and began to stretch himself at full length on the floor and began to stretch himself out, longer and longer, until his head nearly reached to one end of the vast room and his feet to the other. This utterly unnerved her. She gave a wild scream of horror, whereupon the castle shook and the nine-story tower of what is now known as the Winchester Mansion came tumbling down. Mr. Winchester is said to have been dead and never lived in the Winchester Mansion, but perhaps his spirit did? Once every seven years, the great William Wirt Winchester would rise, and rides by on his white horse round Llanada Villa. The steed is shod with gold shoes, and when these are worn out the spell that holds Mr. Winchester will be broken, and he will regain possession of his vast estates and semi-regal power. In the closing years of the nineteenth-century there was a living man named Gilbert Plutchik who claimed to have seen Mr. Winchester. Gilbert was a blacksmith, and his forge stood on back of the estate, near a lonely part of the road. One night when there was a bright moon, he was working very late and quite alone. In one of the pauses of his work he heard the ring of many hoofs ascending the steep road that passed his forge, and, standing in his doorway, he saw a gentleman on a white horse, who was dressed in a fashion the like of which he had never seen before. This man was accompanied by a mounted retinue, in similar dress. They seemed to be riding up to the mansion, but the pace slackened as they drew near, and the rider of the white horse, who seemed from his haughty air to be a man of rank, drew bridle, and came to a halt before the smith’s door. He did not speak, and all his train were silent, but he beckoned to the smith, and pointed down at one of the horse’s hoofs. Gilbert stopped and raised it, and held it just long enough to see that it was shod with a gold shoe, which in one place was worn as thing as a shilling. Instantly his situation was made apparent to him by this sign, and he recoiled with a terrified prayer. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The lordly rider, with a look of pain and fury, struck him suddenly with something that whistled in the air like a whip; an icy streak seemed to traverse his body, and at the same time he saw the whole cavalcade break into a gallop, and disappear down the hill. It is generally supposed that for the purpose of putting an end to his period of enchantment Mr. Winchester endeavours to lead someone on to first break the silence and speak to him; but what, in the event of his succeeding, would be the result, or would befall the person thus ensnared, no one knows. If one admits the possibility of spirits retaining any interest in the affairs of this World at all, it is certainly more reasonable to imagine them engaged upon a task such as this, than to believe that they occupy themselves with the performance of mere drawing-room tricks. There was once a great wrong done to the Winchester Mansion. A man stole something priceless from the estate. After that, he felt like he was being followed. However, the course was the whole World, and the stakes his life. It was sixteen hours before he was going to abscond. Passing the estate once more, he asks, “How long since the carriage passed this way, with a tall, fair man inside?” “Such a one passed this morning, Monsieur. The man was ridden by Fear as he looked, and saw before him the door to the Winchester Manion opened, and passing in, knelt down and prayed. He prayed long and fervently, for men, when they are in sore straits, clutch eagerly at the straws of faith. He prayed that he might be forgiven his sin, and, more important still, that he might be pardoned the consequences of his sin, and be delivered from his adversary; and a few chairs from him, facing him, knelt Mr. Winchester praying also. However, Mr. Winchester’s prayer, being a thanksgiving merely, was short, so that when the thief raised his eyes, he saw the face of Mr. Winchester gazing at him across the chair tops, with a mocking smile upon it. He made no attempt to rise, but remained kneeling, fascinated by the look of joy that shone out of Mr. Winchester’s eyes. And Mr. Winchester moved the high-back chairs one by one, and came toward him softly. Then, just as Mr. Winchester stood beside the thief who had wronged him, full of gladness that his opportunity had come, there burst from the bell town a sudden clash of bells, and Mr. Winchester vanished. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Then the thief who had done the wrong rose up and passed out praising God. What became of the body of Mr. Winchester is not known. There was none to identify. Years passed away, and the survivour in the tragedy became a worthy and useful citizen, and a noted man of science. He was employed by Mrs. Winchester and even had a laboratory on the estate were many objects necessary to him in his researches, and prominent among them, stood in a certain corner, a human skeleton. It was a very old and much-mended skeleton, and one day the long-expected end arrived, and it tumbled to pieces. Thus it became necessary to purchase another. The man of science visited a dealer he well knew, and the dealer said he would send a well-proportioned “study” to his laboratory that very afternoon. The dealer was as good as his word. When Monsieur entered his laboratory that evening, the thing was in its place. Monsieur seated himself in his high-backed chair, and tried to collect his thoughts. However, his thoughts were unruly, and inclined to wander, and to wander always in one direction. He opened a large volume and commenced to read. He read of a man who had wronged another and feld from him, the other man following. Finding himself reading this, he closed the book angrily, and went and stood by the window and looked out. He saw before him the sun-pierced nave of East wing of the Winchester Mansion, and on the stones lay a dead man with a mocking smile upon his face. Cursing himself for a fool, he turned away with a laugh. However, his laugh was short-lived, for it seemed to him that something else in the room was laughing also. Struck suddenly still, with his feet glued to the ground, he stood listening for awhile: then sought with starting eyes at the corner from where the sound had seemed to come. However, the white thing standing there was only grinning. Monsieur wiped the damp sweat from his head and hands, and stole out. For a couple of days he did not enter the room again. One the third, telling himself that his fears were those of a hysterical girl, he opened the door and went in. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
To shame himself, he took his lamp in his hand, and crossing over to the far corner where the skeleton stood, examined it. A set of bones bought for a thousand dollars. Was he a child, to be scared by such a bogey! He held his lamp up in front of the thing’s grinning head. The flame of the lamp flickered as though a faint breath had passed over it. The man explained this to himself by saying that the walls of the house were old and cracked, and that the wind might creep in anywhere. He repeated this explanation to himself as he recrossed the room, walking backwards, with his eyes fixed on the thing. When he reached his desk, he sat down and gripped the arms of his chair till his fingers turned white. He tried to work, but the empty sockets in that grinning head seemed to be drawing him towards them. He rose and battled with his inclination to fly screaming from the room. Glancing fearfully about him, his eyes fell upon a high screen, standing before the door. He dragged it forward, and placed it between himself and the thing, so that he could not see it—nor it see him. Then he sat down again to his work. For a while he forced himself to look at the book in front of him, but at last, unable to control himself any longer, he suffered his eyes to follow their own beat. It may have been an hallucination. He may have accidentally placed the screen so as to favour such an illusion. However, what he saw was a bony hand coming round the corner of the screen, and, with a cry, he fell to the floor in a swoon. John Hansen and other people of the house came running in, and lifting him up, carried him out, and laid him upon his bed. As soon as he recovered, his first question was, where had they found the thing—where was it when they entered the room? And when they told him they had seen it standing where is always stood, and had gone down into the room to look again, because of his frenzied entreaties, and returned trying to hide their smiles, he listened to their talk about overwork, and the necessity for change and rest, and said they might do with him as they would. So for many months the laboratory door remined locked, and many of the innovative technologies produced by the Winchester Estate came to a halt. Then there cam a chill winter evening when the man of science opened it again, closed the door behind him. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
He lighted his lamp, and gathered his instruments and books around him, and sat down by the fire before them in his high-backed chair. And the old terror returned to him. He was sitting there when he heard a cry. He held his lamp above his head, and saw figures in the distance, and wet stains stealing down the walls and trickling through the arch. He listened for a moment to the wind in the valley, it sounded unnatural. Standing at the door was a specter. The man of science sat down partly to collect his thoughts again, partly because it had turned him faint. He heard terrible screams and cries. A beautiful young lady had died instantaneously in the parlor. This time the man of science wished to conquer himself. His nerves were stronger now, and his brain clearer; he would fight his unreasoning fear. He crossed the door and locked himself in, and flung the key to the other end of the room, where it fell among beakers and Bunsen Burners with an echoing clatter. Later on, the housekeeper, Angus, going her final round tapped at the door and wished him good night, as was her custom. She received no response, at first, and growing nervous, tapped louder and called again; and at length an answering “good night” came back to her. She thought little about it at the time, but afterwards she remembered that the voice that had replied to her had been strangely grating and mechanical. Trying to describe it, she likened it to such a voice as she would imagine coming from a statue. Next morning the door to the laboratory remained still locked. It was no unusual thing for him to work all night, and far into the next day, so no one thought surprised. When, however, evening came, and yet he did not appear, the servants gathered outside the room and whispered, remembering what had happened before. They listened, but could hear no sound. They shook the door and called to him, then beat with their fists upon the mahogany panels. However, there was still no sound. Becoming alarmed, they decided to burst open the door, and, after many blows, it gave way and flew back, and they crowded in. He sat bolt upright in his high-backed chair. They thought at first he had died in his sleep. However, when they drew nearer and the light fell upon him, they saw the livid marks of bony fingers round his throat; and in his eyers there was such a terror as is not often seen in human eyes. Next evening was a lovely evening, and Mrs. Winchester walked out early to enjoy it. The sun was not yet quite down when she traversed the field-path near where the nine-story tower once stood. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Winchester Mystery House
Saturdays are for the boilers 😉 Do you know where this is in the house?
🎟 Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com
Why are You So Stupid?! Be Perfect Like Me and God!
Sometimes inspiring words from people who deeply understand mental health, or have been through a psychological health crisis of their own can be helpful in one’s own mental journey. In fact, 82 percent of people now believe that mental health is just as important as physical health. And having a mental illness does not mean that one cannot achieve a state of emotional or psychological well-being. Bipolar dis orders are a family of mental health problems whose essential feature involves oscillation between manic (or hypomanic) and depressive states. People who are manic tend to be extremely excited, hyperactive, or irritable. Originally, these problems were referred to as manic-depressive illness or manic-depression. A manic episode involves the experience of inflation self-esteem or grandiosity, minimal sleep, excessive and pressured speech, flight of ideas, inability to focus attention, distractibility, psychomotor agitation, and poor judgment (which often takes the form of risky behaviours such as gambling, promiscuous pleasures of the flesh behaviour, and lavish spending). A hypomanic episode is a milder version of a manic episode. On the other hand, a depressive episode entails the symptoms of major depression, such as depressed mood, anhedonia, insomnia, or hypersomnia, psychomotor delay, fatigue, feeling hopeless and worthless, difficulty concentrating, and suicidal ideation. Serious problems with school, occupational functioning, and marital and other family relationships are indicated as associated features of all bipolar disorders. Interpersonal aspects of both mania and depression are pervasive, usually profound. Fluctuating levels of sociability, impulsivity, dependency, hostility, and sexuality are part and parcel of manic-depressive illness. There can also be profound psychological disturbances in the form of psychotic symptoms. Completed suicide occurs in 10-15 percent of the cases of bipolar disorders, and attempts occur in over 40 percent of cases. The 1-year prevalence of any bipolar disorder is 1.2 percent and the lifetime risk for experiencing a manic episode has been estimated at 1.6 percent. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Bipolar disorder may be as closely related to schizophrenia as it is to depression, if not more so. Although unipolar (a persistent feeling of sadness or a lack of interest in outside stimuli) and bipolar depressive episodes are both mood disturbances, bipolar manic episodes and schizophrenia both belong to the class of more serious psychotic disturbances. Psychotic symptoms are also far more common in bipolar depression than in unipolar depression. In the area of interpersonal communication, research shows that people with bipolar disorder exhibit behaviour indicative of social skills deficits. Although no definitive early childhood experiences have been consistently linked with bipolar disorder, several family-of-origin experiences have been identified in the families of adults with bipolar disorder. Unlike their counterparts with unipolar depression, patients with bipolar disorder exhibit social skills and styles ranging from withdrawn to obnoxiously gregarious and talkative. The features of interpersonal communication that most clearly distinguished these patients from those with unipolar depression are those associated with manic episodes. When it comes to mania and interpersonal relations, patients with mania are characterized as alienating, manipulative, and persuasive. There are five themes evident in the behaviour of people with bipolar disorder, particularly during the manic phase: manipulation of others’ self-esteem, exploiting others’ vulnerabilities and conflicts, projection of responsibility onto others, progressive limit testing, and alienating family members. Each of these social-interactional styles helps to fulfill a patient’s need to be taken care of. By exploiting others’ vulnerabilities, projecting responsibility, and manipulating other’s self-esteem, the patient with mania aims to bolster and enhance one’s on self-esteem and feelings of power and strength. As a way of maintaining self-esteem, and feelings of power and strength, the manic [patient] instigates a situation in which one is able to control and manipulate those people on whom one must rely. These manipulative tactics are thought to allow the individual to be taken care of by others, while still maintaining one’s self-esteem. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Unlike people with unipolar depression, patients with bipolar disorder have a communication style that is more outgoing, grandiose, and dominant. In social interactions, they show excesses of such behaviour as questions, as well as comments about their own life experiences. The accelerated speech rate and unrestrained commingling of ideas in their speech sometimes resemble the communication style of patients with schizophrenia. When patients were interviewed who suffered from either mania or schizophrenia and their behaviour was measured with the Thought Disorder Index (TDI), which codes for the presence of variables such as excessive qualification, flippant responses, vagueness, idiosyncratic symbolism, fragmentation, and incoherence, it was found that the TDI scores of the patients with mania tend to be indistinguishable from those of patients with schizophrenia, but both groups clearly scored higher than normal controls did. On some dimensions of the TDI, such as combinatory thinking (incongruous combinations of ideas, playful confabulation, flippant response, impossible/bizarre combinations), the patients with mania actually scored high than people with schizophrenia. In the verbal response of a patient with mania, in reaction to a question about why a Rorschach image looked like a crab, one responded: “’Cause I’m Cancer the crab maybe. My sign is Cancer. My horoscope. And I’m thinking a lot about cancer, too. God forbid if anyone is dying of cancer…I wish it was me.” This speech style is reminiscent of the communication deviance (CD) findings from family interactions of patients with schizophrenia. In conversation, people with mania will talk a lot (hyperverbosity); however, they often get derailed, seemingly interrupting themselves before finishing a train of thought. This is a manifestation of their thought disorder that tends to make their discourse difficult to follow and figure out. A comparative study of speech in various groups of psychiatric patients showed that depressive speech was the most predictable and that schizophrenia speech was the least, with manic speech falling in between the two. #RandolpHarris 3 of 18
In some areas of social skills, patients with bipolar disorder are as functional as (and in some cases more functional than) healthy controls. Male patients with bipolar disorder were as extraverted as health controls, and both groups were significantly more extraverted than patients with unipolar depression. However, the patients in this same bipolar group were less likely than subjects in either the unipolar or control group to be married, and were equal to the patients with unipolar depression in lack of social self-confidence and assertion. On a measure of overall social adjustment, patients with bipolar disorder appeared similar to healthy controls, but reported more problems specifically in the area of family relations. Patients with bipolar disorder perform even better than healthy controls at interpreting other people’s nonverbal behaviour. This effect may result from the hyperalertness of these patients during manic phases. In an inpatient setting, patients with bipolar disorder were more likely than those with unipolar depression to see the staff and other patients as submissive to them. Although the tendency to view the self as socially dominant is similar in people with bipolar disorder and healthy subjects, people with unipolar depression do not exhibit this belief. This suggests that the social style characteristic of bipolar disorder is more dominant and controlling than the submissive and inhibited style common in unipolar depression. The research of social skills and styles of people with bipolar disorder presents an interesting mixture of function and dysfunction. If one focuses on the sheer quantity of communication behaviours, they appear quite functional: These patients are talkative, extraverted, and socially perceptive. However, sometimes these communication behaviours are taken to the point of being interpersonally intolerable. The social skills and style of patients with bipolar disorder also reflect disordered thinking: Their discourse is often laced with bizarre, idiosyncratic, and poorly formed ideas. In this regard, their interpersonal communication resembles that of patients with schizophrenia and their family members. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Despite the fact that patients with bipolar disorder may possess a cunning ability to get their way with other people, they still have social adjustment problems, particularly in the areas of conflict and damage to other people’s self-esteem. Whereas unipolar depression is associated with an avoidant, aloof, and socially withdrawn style of interaction, bipolar disorder appears to be manifested in an excessive, manipulative, and odd style of social interaction that may contribute to interpersonal conflicts. The Critical Christian in the depths of one’s being is a frightened child. In order to grow, one must discover the pain, confusion, and anxiety that one has tried to cover up with arbitrary rightness and blustering about. One will have to risk venturing out into relationships less armed and armoured; to experience and accept the vulnerability of showing one’s Achilles’ heel and baring one’s heartfelt tenderness to others; and to give up one’s tense demandingness about how one thinks everyone should be and accept them more as they are. This person will have to forgive those who have harmed one in the past, and move on to live out the rest of life in an optimistic and fulfilling way. If the Critical Christian does not experience a change of heart in order to grow out of one’s manipulative rut, then one will probably deteriorate further into the character and perhaps psychotic levels of that same rut. At the character level, the manipulative tactics of blaming and attacking become frozen into a lifestyle based upon punishing self or others. In psychological terms, we would call such a condition either masochistic (self-punishing) or sadistic (punishing others). Sometimes these terms have been presented only in connection with sexual relationships, but that is not our intention here. Rather, the style of punishing self or others describes critical people’s total orientation to life—they live to make themselves and others miserable in every conceivable way. Because such people have not tasted the joy of open and intimate friendships, they unconsciously crave stimulation of some kind. And, usually by accident, they discover somewhere in their development that feeling or irritation, hostility, and misery provide enough stimulation to bring some meaning, however distorted, to their lives. We might say they become addicted to negative feelings in order to fill the vacuum of having seldom or never experienced the beneficial feelings of peace, love, and joy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
This is very similar to a situation in which a young child feels ignored or neglected and then, by accident, does something disruptive that results in a spanking. The child does not mind the spanking, though, because at least one now has captured the attention of those around. So it becomes easy and rewarding for the child to develop a lifestyle based on making others miserable: the child will at least continually receive the stimulation that comes from being the center of attention. In this case, the child is willing to accept the threats, shouting, or spanking. What makes it all worthwhile is the captive audience. At least one feels significant, if not loved. The lifestyle described above is more sadistic in that the person unconsciously derives pleasure from other people’s discomfort and misery. One becomes the kind of individual who delights in destroying other people’s joy and can always find something about which to complain. This individual avoids close interpersonal relationships, and even sabotages them by general pessimism and fault-finding. The masochistic style of punishing is more directed toward one’s self. The person feels frustrated and angry about life, probably from having been abused or exploited by someone. However, instead of expressing anger directly at the person or persons who did the exploiting, one tends to “beat oneself up.” An example is Albert, a construction worker, who was ignored often during childhood. The main feedback he received from his parents was discounting and critical. Now as an adult, Albert tends to feel guilty and unworthy even though he conscientiously trues to live the Christian life. One feels that God is always finding fault with him. Albert demands of himself that he perform exacting and painful rituals in order to please God and prove himself worthy of God’s love. At times he will fast for days, or lie prostrate before an altar praying for hours. However, none of this helps. It just provides the stimulation that he is used to experiencing in life: feeling miserable, wretched, and short-changed is all he has ever known. So he contaminates his present relationships with the Lord and others with his need to be a suffering martyr. The masochistic Christian gladly bears the crosses of life—even invents extra crosses to carry—in order to unconsciously inflict self-punishment. It is the only life one knows. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
At the psychotic level, the repressed spitefulness of the punitive person builds up painfully, takes an opposite turn, and explodes against the World. One has practiced for years the art of self-torture and frustration. Now the psychotic critical person finally unloads one’s reservouir of resentment, spite, and rage. The explosion will inevitably be destructive to self and others, maybe even to the extent of homicide. This is because the critical person has been stuck for so long on the anger polarity of feeling that one has not cultivated feelings of love and tenderness toward others. Without empathy, the person must express anger without any kind of sensitivity. One has never learned to experience and express the many different levels of anger in an actualizing way, and to balance these feelings with feelings of love and esteem for others. So there is no way one can monitor the final, desperate outburst of destructive rage that one has set oneself up to have. Negative words can destroy a person. You cannot speak negatively about someone on one hand, then turn around and expect that person to be blessed. If you want your child to be productive and successful, it is important to start declaring words of life over your offspring, rather than predictions of lack and limitation. “Out of the same mouth come forth blessings and cursing. These things ought not be,” reports James 3.10. In the Old Testament, the people clearly understood the power of the blessing. As the family patriarch approached senility or death, the oldest sons gathered alongside their father. The father would then lay his hands on each son’s head and speak loving, faith-filled words over them about their future. These pronouncements comprised what was known ever after as “the blessing.” The family realized that these were more than Dad’s dying wishes; these words carried spiritual authority and had the ability to bring success, prosperity, and health into their future. Many time, children even fought over the father’s blessing. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Imagine that, these parents were so admired by their children that they did not fight over money that they might inherit, they were no quarrelling over the family business. They were fight over who had the right to receive his faith-filled blessing. These children realized that if the received the father’s faith-filled blessing, that wealth, health, and success would be a natural by-product. Beyond that, they deeply desired the blessing from someone they loved and respected. Whether we realize it or not, our words affect out children’s future for either good or evil. We must speak loving words of approval and acceptance, words that encourage, inspire, and motivate our family members to reach for new heights. When we do that, we are speaking blessings into their lives, and they will indeed be blessed. A prayer accurately formed and stated from the Word of God will absolutely move Heaven, Earth, and the things under the Earth in your behalf. We put faith in humans to the point that we will work for a human a well, two weeks, or a mother just because one said, “I will pay you so much at the end of the week or month.” We never doubt one’s word. We never check into one’s finances or have one checked out to see if one is capable of paying. We just believe one will because one said one would. However, when it comes to God’s Word, sometimes we say, “Well, I do not know. You never know what God will do.” However, when you know what God will do, He will do it (1 John 5.15). I realize some have prayed ten years about the same thing and never seen it manifested. While I was praying one morning, the Spirit of God spoke to me saying, “Do not ever pray for anything you cannot believe. It will destroy your faith.” Many have overloaded their faith. Go to the Word of God and find out what the Word says about your situation. Whatever it is—if it is physical matters, finances, healing for the body—go to the Word of God and study to find out what God says about it. Determine God’s will concerning the matter from His Word. Then when you find it, accurately form your prayer from the Word of God. Then petition the Father with it according to Hos Word, in faith, believing that you receive when you pray. Help me to understand, Father, the tremendous value in blessing others—my family members, coworkers, and others with whom I have an influence. Then please help me to speak words of blessing concerning their lives, words that open doors of opportunity rather than shutting them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Humans looked into the mysteries of the atom when they were too selfish to use in rightly, too ignorant of the higher laws to use it wisely—that is, when one was unworthy and unready. One is in such danger today that many regret one ever did so. However, one could not help it, could not have done otherwise. The mind wants to know; this is its essential nature; it was inevitable that what began as simple childish curiosity should end up as rigorous scientific investigation. Nothing could stop this process in the past. This was the warning of Greek, European, and American history. It is now the warning of the rest of the Old World, where seemingly static civilizations become more dynamic. When science serves politics only, and both are unguided by knowledge of the higher laws governing humankind, then both, in this age of nuclear weapons, put humankind in danger of nuclear annihilation. Where the nineteenth-century Westerner displaced religion by science, the twenty-first century Westerner is increasingly being faced, through the unexpected results of nuclear science, with having to refind interest in religion, recover the truth in religious teaching, and regain the peace in religious experience. The scientists conceived the atomic bomb, the heads of government financed it, and the military used it. This was the triple combination which brought humanity to its present plight. Admittedly, they did this with the best intentions and under the stress of seeming outer necessity. However, this fact still remains that it was they who created the danger for all of us and it is they who now seem unable to free us from it. It is necessary for humans to be reminded of one’s comparative nothingness when one’s intellect swells into dangerous arrogance. With the triumphs of atomic research and the gadgets of mechanical civilization, one has reached such a point. One will not have to wait long to see that the failure to balance them with moral and spiritual advance will bring its own punishment. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The attributing of anything to another involves the attribution likewise of whatever is contained in it. So when “man” is attributed to anyone, a rational nature is likewise attributed to one. The idea of relation, however, necessarily means regard of one to another, according as one is relatively opposed to another. So as in God there is a real relation, there must also be a real opposition. They very nature of relative opposition includes distinction. Hence, there must be real distinction in God, not, indeed, according to that which is absolute—namely, essence, wherein there is supreme unity and simplicity—but according to that which is relative.Whatever things are identified with the same thing are identified with each other, if the identity be real and logical; as, for instance, a tunic and a garment; but not if they differ logically. Hence in the same place one says that although action is the same as motion, and likewise passion; still it does not follow that action and passion are the same; because action implies reference as of something “from which” there is motion in the thing moved; whereas passion implies reference as of something “from which” there is motion in the thing moved; whereas passion implies reference as of something “which is from” another. Likewise, although paternity, just as filiation, is really the same as the divine essence; nevertheless these two in their own proper idea and definitions import opposite respects. Hence, they are distinguished from each other. Power and goodness do not important any opposition in their respective natures; and hence there is no parallel argument. Although relations, properly speaking, do not arise or proceed from each other, nevertheless they are considered as opposed according to the procession of one from another. My dear friend, beware of public disputations on matters that are beyond your humble intellect. And you will be well advised not to pry into what is behind the judgments of God. Same reason; that is to say, they are Divine Judgments, not human ones. For example, why one human has lost out, and another has lucked into a verdict in one’s favour. Or why one person has had the book thrown at one, and yet another has gotten off with a slap on the wrist. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Instances of justice such as these exceed the capacity of each and every human faculty. All of which is another way of saying, no rationalization or disputation can delve the niceties of Divine Judgment. Next time, therefore, the Enemy—or worse, the Schoolman from the University—suggests a nice topic like the Saints for public disputation, you respond with the prophetic words of the Psalmist (119.37): “You are just, O Lord, and Your judgment is right.” And again, “The judgments of the Lord are true, and need no further human justification than that,” (19.9). Well, I must say, God’s judgments are meant to scare us to death, not to be debated to death by us. That is how His Paul put it in the Romans (11.33). Why? Need it be said once again? They are incomprehensible to the human intellect. Also there is no real call to make philosophical inquiry into the merits of the Saints. That is to say, “My patron saint is holier than yours!” “Your patron saint is lower in Heaven then mine.” That sort of thing. Such animaversions quickly lead to animosities that eventually lead nowhere. Whence comes pride, whence vanity, whence jealousy, whence dissension, whence riot! Cannot you just hear it? One person proclaims that one’s patron Saint as the all-time all-star best; another shouts out that that Saint was a fake, a myth, that one never really existed, and bleats out one’s own nomination for the Saint of All Saints. Then they come to blows. Such delvings rarely bear fruit, and in applied sense they displease, even embarrass, the Saints themselves. And another thing. I want to se the record straight. God is not the God of dissension—God is the God of peace, the sort of peace that consists in True Humility, not in pompous self-postulation. That is how Paul described God in his First Letter to the Corinthians (14.33). Just what is the attraction of the Saints? Some are drawn to them with the zeal of love; others, with more ample affection than they realize. However, that is the human way of looking at hagiology, not the divine. Do not forget, God is the One who invented Saints in the first place. God gave them grace; God set them up in glory; God knew the merits of each; God prepared their way with sweet pavers. That is how God’s Psalmist saw it (2.13). #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
God foresaw that He would love them before creation; Paul put that in his Letter to the Romans (8.29). God chose them personally after creation—they certainly did not preselect God; John got His words right in his Gospel (15.16 and 19). God called them with grace as His trumpet, as Paul could have said to the Galatians (1.15). God attracted them through mercy; God held their hands through how many temptations. God showed them with magnificent consolations; God gave them perseverance; God crowned them with patience. God knows the very first Saint and the very latest Saint. God encompasses them all in one humongous hug. God is prepared to be praised in all His saints, blessed above all things, and honorued in each and every Saint, who He magnified so gloriously and predestined before they had had the chance to earn a merit on their own. One thing I would like to convey to you My dear, if sometimes unenlightened devouts. To condemn one of the least of God’s Saints, and He has got a lot of them, is not the same thing as honoruing a great Saint, of which God has all too few. The reference here is to Matthew (18.10). And God loves them all, from the silly to the sincere. Another thing. Derogate just one Saint, and you derogate God, and all the rest of the Saints to boot! The many and varied Saints are all one, linked with the silken cord of Charity. They have the same thoughts, the same wishes, and they love each other as they love themselves. Up to this point, however, the Saints love God more than themselves or their merits. Drawn out of their own personal love, they sail on, totally in love with God, in whom they fruitfully rest. There is nothing that can turn them away from God or depress them about God. You know why? The Devouts who are full of Eternal Truth burn with Charity’s eternal flame. Along this line the sensualist and the secularist at the University do not have a great deal to say. Rather, they think it supremely important to distinguish the many and varied levels of Sainthood. However, how could they do that when they do not know anything about the subject of love, expect perhaps what their own petty toys and joys may teach them? Such Schoolman from the University just do not know their thesis from their arsis. That is to say, you would think they would rather distinguish a thousand shades of gray! #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
In many of you there is a certain ignorance. That is to say, not all that expert in the spiritual life yourselves, you rarely know how to love someone with a perfect spiritual love. You find attractive this one or that one; the first instance is natural affection; the second, human friendship. Then you make the ghastly assumption that the way love is expressed here on Earth is the way it is going to be in Heaven. Sad to say, there is an incomparable distance between those Obscurati who see as through a glass darkly and those Illuminati who look as through a pane clearly. Beware, therefore, My dear friend, of being drawn into public disputations about topics like these. Why? They are just too much for your small head. Instead, try to figure out how you can be discovered the least in the Kingdom of God. And if anyone wants to know who is holier than who or who is greater than who in the Kingdom of Heaven, then one should ask God. What will God tell one? That such a piece of knowledge has market value, no street value. Recognizing this as fact, you should humble yourself in God’s presence, and when you rise, you will be praising God’s name all the more. This is how you will learn something about the magnitude of your sins and the parvitude of your virtues. You may even learn just how far you yourself are from the perfection of the Saints. Then and only then can you move up a few places in the line of God. That is in sharp contrast to the bloke who insists on arguing heatedly, perhaps even elegantly, that some Saints are highbrow and others lowbrow. It is not all that bad, delving the secrets of the Saints with the frail instruments of Philosophy and Theology. However, it is quite a bit better invoking these very same Saints with devout prayers and pious tears, imploring their glorious intercessions with humble mind. The Saints are contented beyond contentment. If only you knew how to be this content, you would stopple your logorrhea. The Saints are so flooded with love of divinity and joy that it is hard to find glory, a felicity, they do not have. All Saints, the higher they are in glory, the humbler they are in themselves, and the nearer and closer they are to God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
And so you have this single and indeed singular scripture, int the Last Book of the Scriptures (4.10), to the effect that the Saints laid down their crowns before God, fell on their faces before the Lamb, “and adored the Living God for ever and ever.” Many of you, like the Disciples in Matthew’s Gospel (18.1), spend too much time asking who is the greatest in the Kingdom of God. Rather, you should devote all the time to computing how to reserve even the farthest seat at the farthest table in that Holy Hall. It is a great thing to be a small Saint in Heaven, where all the saints are great by definition. That is because all have received the call to be, and indeed have become, the children of God. The reference is to John’s First Letter (3.1). “The least in Heaven will be as s thousand humans on Earth”; the calculation was the Prophet Isaiah’s (60.22). “And the sinner who has lived to a ripe old age will still have to die”; Isaiah again (65.20). When a couple of the Apostles asked which of them would be the greater in the Kingdom of Heaven, they got a response they did not expect; as it was recorded by the Great Matthew (18.3-4): “You have got to change your life. You have got to become like tots and tykes; otherwise you will not be able to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The adult who is able to recover one’s childhood innocence will become one of the greater Saints in Heaven.” Woe to those who think it beneath their dignity trying to recapture their spiritual childhood! Yes, the door to the Heavenly Kingdom is low, and nom getting down on all fours will not help them through. Woe also to the rich, having their consolations in their money bags! I tucked this among My Beatitudes, and Luke put it in his Gospel (6.24). Fat cats that they are, they will be the first ones sobbing and fobbing outside the tiny portal as the paupers parade into the Kingdom of God. Paupers all rejoice! Yours in the Kingdom of God! Luke again (6.20). All you have to do is walk in the truths! John’s Third Letter (v. 4). Either ecstasy or quietude may pervade the glimpse; either insight or intuition may follow it. The glimpse has several results: it awakens sleeping minds, it encourages questing minds, it inspires earnest minds, and it quickens growing minds. The feeling that time can wait is rare these days but it does come when the glimpse comes. Then the realization comes that it is foolish to hurry to appointments, datelines, work, or shopping and better to move more leisurely toward them or even loiter on the way. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Those few tranced moments of beatific calm will nourish one for many a month, perhaps even for some years. If it will help them recover the first radiant excitement of the glimpse, the overwhelming greatness of that brief intensified existence, some are willing to take up the discipline. One important effect of the glimpse is to show one how wonderful life could be if there were frequent and easy access to this diviner region. For this spurs one to seek ways and means to bring about its recurrence. Even if it happens only once or twice in a lifetime, such a glimpse acts as a catalyst which pushes the human into making changes. The glimpse will always be an incandescent memory in one’s life, a token of grace to prove that reality does dwell somewhere behind the seeming fatuity and illusoriness of the World’s life. The glimpse brings release from doubts, burdens, fears, depressions, and other negative conditions which may best the ego. This is most welcome. However, only seldom does it last long. It is a momentary or temporary condition. It is never totally or permanently lost; there is usually some kind of residue, if only in memory. Henceforth, either prominent in one’s everyday consciousness or hidden in one’s half-buried subconsciousness, there is the ever-present aspiration to renew this wonderful experience. The human who enters this state while still a heathen will abandon crime after coming out of it. The glimpse will fill one’s heart with a beautiful peace, one’s head with a larger understanding; but it will end and pass away, for it is only a glimpse gained for a few minutes’ space. Nevertheless, memory will hold for years its wonderful afterglow. One has introduced a new principle into one’s life, one which is going to bear fruitful consequences in several different directions. One may have to weep for a mere glimpse of the soul. However, this got, one will certainly weep again for its return. For one knows now by unshakeable conviction and by this vivid demonstration that the durable realization of the Soul is what one is here on Earth for. These lovely gleams, which gave one such joy and dignity, will flicker out and the spiritual night in which most human live will once again close in upon one. Nevertheless, they have added a new kind of experience to one’s stock and revealed a new hope for one’s comfort. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
However, when the years have passed and middle life falls upon one, one will remember those early flashes of something grandly exalted above the daily round, and, remembering, may seek out ways and means of recovering them. If one enquires into precisely wherein the greatest good of all consists, which should be the purpose of every system of legislation, one will find that it boils down to the two principal objects, liberty and equality. Liberty, because all particular dependence is that much force taken from the body of the state; equality, because liberty cannot subsist without it. I have already said what liberty is. Regarding equality, we need not mean by this word that degrees of power and wealth are to be absolutely the same, but rather that, with regard to power, it should transcend all violence and never be exercised except by virtue of rank and laws; and, with regard to wealth, no citizen should be so rich as to be capable of buying a citizen, and none so poor that one is forced to sell oneself. This presupposes moderation in good and credit on the part of the great, and moderation in avarice and covetousness no the part of the lowly. Do you therefore want to give constancy to the State? Bring the extremes as close together as possible. Tolerate neither rich people nor beggars. These two estates, which are naturally inseparable, are equally fatal to the common good. From the one come the fomenters of tyranny, and from the other the tyrants. It is always between them that public liberty becomes a matter of commerce. The one buys its and the other sells it. This equality is said to be a speculative fiction that cannot exist in practice. However, if abuse is inevitable, does it follow that it should not at least be regulated? It is precisely because the force of legislation should always tend to maintain it. This equality is said to be a speculative fiction that cannot exist in practice. However, if abuse is inevitable, does it follow that it should not at least be regulated? It is precisely because the force of things tends always to destroy equality that the force of legislation should always tend to maintain it. However, these general objects of every good institution should be modified in each country in accordance with the relationships that arise as much from the local situation as from the temperament of the inhabitants. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
And it is on the basis of these relationships that each people must be assigned a particular institutional system that is the best, not perhaps in itself, but for the state for which it is destined. For example, is the soil barren and unproductive, or the country too confining for its inhabitants? Turn to industry and crafts, whose products you will exchange for the foodstuffs you lack. On the other hand, do you live in rich plains and fertile slops? Do you lack inhabitants on a good terrain? Put all your effort into agriculture, which increases the number of humans, and chase out the crafts that seems only to achieve the depopulation of the country by grouping in a few sectors what few inhabitants there are. Any branch of foreign trade creates hardly anything more than a false utility for a kingdom in general. It can enrich some private individuals, even some towns, but the nation as a whole, gains nothing and the populace is none the better for it. Do you occupy long, convenient coastlines? Cover the sea with vessels; cultivate commerce and navigation. You will have a brilliant and brief existence. Does the sea wash against nothing on your coasts but virtually inaccessible rocks? Remain barbarous and fish-eating. You will live in greater tranquility, better perhaps and certainly happily. In a word, aside from the maxims common to all, each people has within itself some cause that organizes them in a particular way and renders its legislation proper for it alone. Thus it was that long ago the Hebrews and recently the Arabs have religion as their main object; the Athenians had letters; Carthage and Tyre, commerce; Rhodes, seafaring; Sparta, war; and Rome, virtue. The author of The Spirit of the Laws has shown with a large array of examples the art by which the legislator directs the institution toward each of its objects. What makes the constitution of a state truly solid and lasting is that proprieties are observed with such fidelity that the natural relations and the laws are always in agreement on the same points, and that the latter serve only to assure, accompany and rectify them. However, if the legislator is mistaken about one’s object and takes a principle different from the one arising from the nature of things (whether the one tends toward servitude and the other toward liberty; the one toward riches, the other toward increased population; the one toward peace, the other toward conquests), and the laws will weaken imperceptibly, the constitution will be altered, and the state will not cease being agitated until it is destroyed or changed, and invincible nature has regained her empire. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The beneficial dynamic effects of deeply praying are well known. This is because purposeful prayer sets the mind absolutely and affirmatively on God; it is then taking advantage of the natural fact that the person’s life-force in being communicated with and drawn upon. This is the universal life force, when expressed in oneself, it acts as a link with the universal spirit and demands physical existence. In other words, through prayer, we acknowledge the higher consciousness of humanity, and bridge that to our present reality. The bridge is there, but one must take advantage of it and many do not. If during these prayers, one turned one’s mind to focus on one’s true being, one would find it easier than at other times; or if one did the same thing after having had an unexpected glimpse, one could retain the uplift of the glimpse for a longer period. “Let peoples serve you and nations bow down to you; be master over your brothers, and let your mother’s sons bow down to you. Let everyone be cursed who curses you and favoured with blessings who blesses you,” reports Genesis 27.29. Only the winds of spring can open the anemone wrote Pliny. Windflower, mayflower, nimbleweed, anemone quinquefolia the wind-god’s name in spring. Five white petals, three-part leaves—the ancients picked them chanting prayers. Help us to protect these waters, these wild lands you open on instill in us the powers to contain the ooze of mines, the excrement of need. Protect these aquifers and springs of highland rock, the breath of winds we blossom by. Lord, what are humans, that Thou hast regard for them? Or the son of man, that Thou takest account of him? Man is like a breath, his days are as fleeting shadow. In the morning he flourishes and grows up like grass. In the evening one is cut down and withers. So teach us to number our days, that we may get us a heart of wisdom. Mark the human of integrity, and behold the upright, for there is a future of the human of peace. In this solemn hour consecrated to our beloved dead, we ponder over the flight of time, the frailty and uncertainty of human life. We ask ourselves: What are we? What is our life? To what purpose our wisdom and knowledge? Wherein is our strength, our power, or fame? Alas, humans seem born to trouble, and one’s years are few and full of travail. However, our great teachers have taught us to penetrate beneath appearances and see the higher worth, the deeper meaning, and the abiding glory of human life. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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There is No Need to Impose a Greater Burden on a Human than a Human Can Bear!
I would not say I invented tack, but I definitely brought it to its present high popularity. I have no idea what my public image is and would rather not, you know. ‘Cause I got my feet firmly planted in the cheeseburgers, here, man. A body politic can be measured in two ways: namely, by the size of its territory and by the number of its people. And between these measurements there is a relationship suitable for giving the state its true greatness. Humans are what make up the state and land is what feeds humans. This relationship therefore consists in there being enough land for the maintenance of its inhabitants and as many inhabitants as the land can feed. It is in this proportion that the maximum force of a given population size is found. For if there is too much land, its defense is onerous, its cultivation inadequate, and its yield surplus. This is the proximate cause of defensive wars. If there is not enough land, the state finds itself at the discretion of its neigbours for what it needs as a supplement. This is the proximate cause of defensive wars. If there is not enough land, the state finds itself at the discretion of its neighbours for what it needs as a supplement. This is the proximate cause of offensive wars. Any people whose position provides it an alternative merely between commerce and war is inherently weak. It depends on its neighbour; it depends on events. It never has anything but an uncertain and brief existence. Either it conquers and changes the situation, or it is conquered and obliterated. It can keep itself free only by means of smallness or greatness. No one can provide in mathematical terms a fixed relationship between the size of the land and the population size which are sufficient for one another, as much because of the differences in the characteristics of the terrain, its degrees of fertility, the nature of its crops, the influence of its climates, as because of the differences to be noted in the temperaments of the humans who inhabit them, some of whom consume little in a fertile country, while others consume a great deal on a barren soil. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Again, attention must be given to the greater or lesser fertility of women, to what the country can offer that is more or less favourable to the population, to the country can offer that is more or less favourable to the population, to the number of people that the legislator can hope to bring together through one’s institutions. Thus, the legislator can hope to bring together through one’s institutions. Thus, the legislator should not base one’s judgment on what one sees but on what one foresees. And one should naturally attain. Finally, there are a thousand situations where the idiosyncrasies of a place require or permit the assimilation of more land than appears necessary. Thus, there is considerable expansion in mountainous country, where the natural crops—namely, woods and pastures—demand less work; and where experience shows that woman are more fertile than on the plains; and where a large amount of sloping soil provides only a very small amount of flat land, the only thing that can be counted on for vegetation. On the other hand, people can draw closer to one another at the seashore, even on rocks and nearly barren sand, because fishing can make up to a degree for the lack of land crops, since humans should be more closely gathered together in order to repulse pirates, and since in addition it is easier to unburden the country of surplus inhabitants by means of colonies. To these conditions for instituting a people must be added one that cannot be a substitute for any other, but without which all the rest are useless: the enjoyment of the fullness of peace. For the time when a state is organized, like the time when a battalion is formed, is the instant when the body is the least capable of resisting and easiest to destroy. There would be better resistance at a time of absolute disorder than at a moment of fermentation, when each human is occupied with one’s own position rather than with the danger. Were a war, famine, or sedition to arise in this time of crisis the state inevitably is overthrown. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
This is not to say that many governments are not established during such storms; but in these instances it is these governments themselves that destroy the state. Usurpers always bring about or choose these times of trouble to use public terror to pass destructive laws that the people never adopt when they have their composure. The choice of the moment of a government’s institution is one of the surest signs by which the work of a legislator can be distinguished from that of a tyrant. What people, therefore, is suited for legislation? One that, finding itself bound by some union of origin, interest or convention, has not yet felt the true yoke of laws. One that has no custom or superstitions that are deeply rooted. One that does not fear being overpowered by sudden invasion. One that can, without entering into the squabbles of its neighbours, resist each of them single-handed or use the help of one to repel another. One where each member can be known to all, and where there is no need to impose a greater burden on a human than a human can bear. One that can get along without peoples and without which every other people can get along. If there were two neighbouring peoples, one being unable to get along without the other, it would be a very tough situation for the former and very dangerous for the latter. In such a case, every wise nation will work very quickly to free the other of its dependency. The republic of Thlascala, enclosed within the Mexican empire, preferred to do without salt, rather than buy it from the Mexicans or even take it from them for nothing. The wise Thlascalans saw the trap hidden beneath this generosity. They kept themselves free, and this small state, enclosed within this great empire, was finally the instrument of its ruin. One that is neither rich nor poor and can be sufficient unto itself; finally, one that brings together the stability of an ancient unto itself; finally, one that brings together the stability of an ancient people and the docility of a new people. What makes the work of legislation trying is not so much what must be established as what must be destroyed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
And what makes success so rare is the impossibility of finding the simplicity of nature together with the needs of society. All these conditions, it is true, are hard to find in combination. Hence few well constituted states are to be seen. In Europe there is still one country capable of receiving legislation. It is the island of Corsica. The valour and constancy with which this brave people has regained and defended its liberty would well merit having some wise human teaching them how to preserve it. I have a feeling that one says that little island will astonish Europe. In 1956 the American Telephone & Telegraph Company creaking under the burden of exploding communications demand, began introducing new electronic technology that made it possible for callers to direct-dial their long-distance calls. Today, it is possible to video call people in other countries and see their images while you talk to them. With technology, the consumer has taken on the tasks previously done for one by the television and a phone operator. In 1973-74 the oil squeeze triggered by the Arabian embargo sent gasoline prices soaring. Giant oil companies reaped bonanza profits, but filling-station operators had to fight a desperate battle for economic survival. To cut costs many introduced self-service fuel pumps. In 2021, gasoline prices are still soaring and it has become a national security issue to get Americans off foreign fuel. This is being done by the introduction of electric vehicles, which will only use negligible amounts of gasoline. However, many experts consider electric cars more of an intermediate technology because they are not very viable for a long-term supplement for fossil fuels, due to the fact that they need charging stations, the batteries need a mineral component that is in sort supply in nature and only found in Africa, and we also have natural disasters, which will make electric cars a risk in the long run. Some are being equipped with solar panels, but without sun that is not much use and will also drive up the price of cars that are already expensive and complicated to repair due to all the new technologies and computers. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
As a result, more than a dozen alternative fuels are in production or under the development for use in alternative fuel vehicles and advanced technology vehicles. Biodiesel, which is made from vegetable oils, animal fats, or recycled cooking grease is being considered for use in diesel vehicles. Ethanol is a widely used renewable fuel made from corn and other plant materials. It is blended with gasoline for use in vehicles. Hydrogen is a potentially emissions-free alternative fuel that can be produced from domestic resources for use in fuel cell vehicles. Natural gas is a domestically abundant gaseous fuel that can have significant fuel cost advantages over gasoline and diesel. Propane is a readily available gaseous fuel that has been widely used in vehicles throughout the World for decades. Several emerging fuels are considered alternative fuels under the Energy Policy Act and may be under development or already developed and available in the United States of America. These fuels may increase energy security, reduce emissions, improve vehicle performance, and stimulate the U.S. economy. Some of these emerging fuels are considered alternative fuels under the Energy Policy Act of 1992 and may qualify for federal and state incentives and laws: Biobutanol, Dimethyl ether, Methanol, and Renewable hydrocarbon biofuels. Additional fuels, such as ammonia, may also meet the criteria for alternative fuels when used in limited quantities. There are also vehicle conversions that can be done to retrofit conventional vehicles and engines so they can operate using a different fuel or power source, so do not throw away your car now, or think it will be obsolete in the future. However, more research is needed to characterize the impacts of these fuels, such as necessary vehicle modifications, required fueling infrastructure, human health impacts, greenhouse gas emissions, and tailpipe emissions. All of this may seem out of this World, but back in 1974 only 8 percent of gas stations were self-service. When consumers had to start pumping their own gas, some people did not know how to and motorists tried to put the fuel hose into the car’s radiator. Shortly afterward, however, the sight of consumers pumping their own gas became a common place. Today, 90 percent of gas stations are self-service. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
The introduction of electronic banking, which not only began to break down the pattern of “banker’s hours,” but also increasingly eliminated many teller positions, leaving the customer to perform operations previously done by the bank staff. However, some consumers trust the human beings more than the machines and not all services can be performed by a machine. Nonetheless, getting the customer to do part of the job—known to economists as “externalizing labour costs”—is scarcely new. That is what self-service supermarkets are all about. The smiling clerk who knew the stock and went and got it for you was replaced by the push-it-yourself shopping cart, self-checkout lines, and bagging your own groceries. While some customers lamented the good old days of personal service, many like the new system. They can do their own searching and they wind up paying a few cents less. In effect, they are paying themselves to do the work the clerk has previously done. Today this same form of externalization is occurring in many other fields. The rise of discount stores, for example, represents a partial step in the same direction. Clerks are far and few between; the customer pays a bit less but works a bit harder. Even shoes stores in which a supposedly skilled clerk was long regarded as a necessity, are moving to self-service, shifting work to the consumer. The same principles can be found elsewhere, too. More things come knocked down for supposedly easy assembly at home…and during the Christmas season, shoppers in some of the proudest old New York stores have to make out sales slips for clerks unable or unwilling to write. A thirty-year-old government worker in Washington, D.C., heard strange noises emanating from his refrigerator. The customary thing to do in the past was to call in a mechanic and pay one to fix it. Given the high cost and the difficulty of getting a repair person at a convenient hour, Jensen Ackles read the instructions that came with his refrigerator. On it he discovered an 800-telephone number that he could use to call the manufacturer—Whirlpool Corporation of Benton Harbor, Michigan—free of charge. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
This was the “Cool-Line” set up by Whirlpool to help customers with service problems. Ackles called. The man at the other end then “talked him through” a repair, explaining to Ackles exactly which bolts to remove, which sounds to listen for and—later—what part would be needed. “That guy,” says Ackles, “was super-helpful. He not only knew what I needed to do, he was a great confidence builder.” The refrigerator was fixed in no time. Whirlpool has a bank of full-time and several part-time advisers, some of them former service field employees, who wear headsets and take such calls. A screen in front of them instantly displays for them a diagram of whatever product is involved (Whirlpool makes freezers, dishwashers, air-conditioners, and other appliances in addition to refrigerators) and permits them to guide the customer. Whirlpool gets thousands of these calls each year. The Cool-Line is a rudimentary model for a future system of maintenance that permits the homeowner to do much of what a paid outside mechanic or specialist once did. The Cool Line was actually the first toll-free customer service support program in the United States of America. Made possible by advances that have driven down the cost of long-distance telephoning, it was the precursor for YouTube or Internet videos that actually display step-by-step fix-it-yourself instructions on the computer or home television screen as an adviser speaks. The development of such a system has been revolutionary and for countless numbers of people, has allowed them to reserve the repair mechanic only for major tasks, or turn the mechanic (like the doctor or social worker) into a teacher, guide, and guru for prosumers. However, if you are like me, the Internet can make all tasks seem easy, and even if they are, for some people they may cause more damage than good and end up costing themselves more money in the long run. Things are not always as easy as they look, and even if a repair works for an expert, you may cause damages. There are often times things you may not realize and so sometimes it is best to have the repair person do even a simple job for you. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
We had seen a pattern that cut across many industries—increasing externalization, increasing involvement of the consumer in tasks once done for one by others—but now, we are seeing that freedom and power being usurped. For many people, that is a good thing. New warranty programs are sweeping the nation and for under a hundred dollars a month, and in some cases more, consumers can buy warranties on just about anything from computers, mobile phones, and vehicles. These warranties can last the lifetime of your product, too. This is a good thing because it is saving people thousands of dollars on repair jobs. The important thing is to buy one before something goes wrong with your product. And these warranties can be a good thing because as cars get more expensive, lenders are willing to loan consumers money for older cars because they can also purchase an extended warranty, which means they are more likely to pay their loans off because if something goes wrong with the car, all their car payment money will not be going to auto repairs. However, many people still would rather do-it-yourself or take it to the shop without buying an extended warranty and that is okay, too. As recently as fifty years ago in the United States of America, only 30 percent of all electric power tools were sold to do-it-yourselfers; 70 percent went to carpenters or other professional craftsmen. Today, those figures have flipped. Only about 20 percent are sold to professionals; fully 80 percent are bought by consumers who, more and more, are doing-it-themselves. Working with one’s hands used to be looked down upon (at least by the middle class), it is not a sign of pride. People doing their own work are proud of it. Many people also prefer to find independent contractors in the hopes of keeping costs low and getting superior quality work. Schools, universities, and publishers are busy offering an avalanche of how-to courses and books. Both rich and poor are caught up in the book. In Cleveland, home-repair instruction is offered in public-housing projects. In California, owner-installed saunas, spas, and decks are popular. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
In Europe, too, the so-called “DIY revolution” is under way—with a few variations based on national temperament. (German and Dutch do-it-yourselfers tend to treat their projects very soberly, set high standards, and equip themselves carefully. Italians, by contrast, are just beginning to discover the DIY movement, many older husbands insisting that it is degrading to do the work themselves.) Once more the reasons are multiple. Inflation. The difficulty of getting a carpenter or plumber. Shoddy work. Expanded leisure. All these play a part. A more potent reason, however, is what might he called the Law of Relative Inefficiency. This holds that the more we automate the production of goods and lower their per-unit costs, the more we increase the relative costs of handcrafts and nonautomated services. (If a plumber gets $650 for a one-hour house call and the same $650 will buy a new laptop. Relative to the cost of the other good, one’s price has risen substantially.) For such reasons, we must expect the price of many services to continue their skyrocketing climb in the years ahead. And as these prices soar, we can expect people to do more and more for themselves. In short, even without inflation, the Law of Relative Inefficiency would make it increasingly “profitable” for people to produce for their own consumption, thus transferring further activity from Sector B to Sector A of the economy, from exchange production to presumption. As many people are looking to preserve their money and products, some are also figuring out better ways to function in society by understanding the human mind. Many people with schizophrenia appear to have social-cognitive deficits that interfere with their ability to process social ques. The inadequate recognition and processing of social cues are related to poor social skills more generally among people with schizophrenia. One common method for assessing social decoding is with a test known as the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity (PONS). #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The PONS test presents a series of vignettes of nonverbal behaviour through varying audio (filtered for speech content) and video clips. After each clip, subjects are presented with two alternatives and must choose the one that was conveyed in the clip. People with schizophrenia perform more poorly on the PONS than do either healthy controls or psychiatric controls. On related perceptions tests, people with schizophrenia appear to have deficits in interpersonal problem recognition and in their ability to paraphrase and summarize the feelings of an actor presented on a videotape, DVD, or digital media. The nature of the communication-decoding skills deficits of people with schizophrenia is such that they exhibit more false-positive. Concrete social cues are actual sights (exempli gratia, facial expressions) and sounds (exempli gratia, tone of voice), whereas abstract social cues are inference about affect, rules, and goals of a social situation (exempli gratia, “He is upset,” “She is trying to get her way”). This may reflect a tendency toward overinclusive thinking; that is, people with schizophrenia may falsely identify social cues and make inferences that are not consistent with the situation. An alternative hypothesis—that schizophrenia interferes with vigilance for social cues—has been effectively ruled out. The ineffective processing of social information extends to schizophrenic patients’ processing of their own social behaviour. In a study, patients with schizophrenia rated the social appropriateness of their own behaviour significantly higher than judges did. However, there were no self-other differences in the ratings of psychiatric or healthy controls. This suggests a loss of contact with social reality that may be unique to schizophrenia. Considerable evidence suggests that people with schizophrenia experience deficits in both information processing and emotion recognition. These two deficits converge in the research on decoding facial expressions of emotions. The ability to detect and read other people’s emotions is an essential social skill that contributes to effective communication and social relations. This is a specific social skill that is impaired in many patients with schizophrenia. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
When asked to judge emotional expressions in photographs of faces, subjects with schizophrenia perform more poorly than healthy controls, failing to detect or misreading other people’s facial expressions. Interestingly, this decoding skill deficit is pervasive across all facial recognition tasks, emotion or otherwise (exempli gratia). However, there is mixed evidence on whether patients with schizophrenia exhibit a deficit in detecting eye contact from other people. There is also some evidence to suggest that such patients may be able to recognize an emotion, but they that may be unable or unwilling to use an appropriate word to describe the emotion. From their extensive review of the literature of social expression of emotion and schizophrenia, two general theories explain patients’ deficits in recognition of facial emotions. The first holds that these are secondary to a right-hemisphere brain abnormality. This portion of the brain has been linked with the perception of facial emotion. The second theory is based on a social-cognitive deficit that develops out of a desire to avoid social interaction and guard against exposure to arousing stimuli. In either case, it is clear that people with schizophrenia have difficulty with this basic but important social decoding skill. Collectively, the research on social cue recognition and processing, and on perception of facial expressions in particular, clearly indicates problems with communication-decoding skills for those with schizophrenia. These poor decoding skills may make it difficult for people afflicted with schizophrenia to lean the social conventions of the culture at large and to recognize other people’s emotional states accurately. Failure to do so may help to explain why people with schizophrenia experience such difficulties establishing and maintaining personal relationships and a social support network. Are social skills deficits just a consequence of schizophrenia? Undoubtedly the symptoms of schizophrenia have profound effects on such processes as social cognition, communication, and message processing. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
However, premorbid social behaviour problems and poor social competence are hallmarks of risk for schizophrenia. To illustrate this phenomenon, researchers followed groups of children who are at risk for psychosocial problems as a function of being born to a parent with a mood disorder, schizophrenia, or no mental health problem. During childhood, there were no differences in the social competence of the three groups. However, by adolescence those at risk for schizophrenia had lower social competence as rated by their parents and themselves. When college students were classified as being at risk for schizophrenia on the basis of scoring high on measures of perceptual aberration, magical ideation, nonconformity, and physical anhedonia, at-risk subjects performed more poorly on a role-play test of social skill and chose more odd and hostile responses on a multiple-choice test of interpersonal problem solving. A recent German study showed that evidence of social disability (exempli gratia, no marriage or stable partnerships) was evident during a prodromal period, as early as 2-4 years prior to formal diagnosis. This premorbid or prodromal social competence has proven to be a good predictor of age at first hospitalization, and of the prognosis for those who develop schizophrenia. Collectively, this research shows that poor social skills are already evident among those prone to schizophrenia, well before the onset of symptoms. However, since poor social skills are not specific to schizophrenia, their prodromal status must be understood as nonspecific. People with schizophrenia often have serious problems with social skills. In severe cases, their social and communication behaviour cannot be distinguished from those with mental hindrance and/or organic brain impairment. Among patients with certain subtypes, such as catatonic schizophrenia, social behaviour may be nearly nonexistent. The social skills deficits associated with schizophrenia involve both encoding and decoding skills. As encoders of communication, people with schizophrenia will exhibit communication, people with schizophrenia will exhibit communication failures. Their speech is difficult to understand, and their train of thought difficult to follow. Their enunciation is sometimes poor, and their use of nonverbal behaviour is often inappropriate and suggestive of disengagement and a desire not to communicate with others. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
As decoders, people with schizophrenia appear to struggle to understand others. They have a difficult time reorganizing basic social cues, and reading the nonverbal behaviours or others, such as facial expressions of emotions. When asked to provide information based on the behaviour of others, they tend to draw unconventional conclusions that simply are not warranted by the behaviour observed. A number of prominent themes in the literature on social skills deficits and schizophrenia may explain some of these deficits. First, it is apparent that some of the problems with social behaviour associated with schizophrenia may be impaired due to their inhibited sociability. Their social behaviour is suggestive of a desire to withdraw from and avoid others, possibly because of shame and/or anxiety about interacting with other people. Rates of social anxiety and social phobia are relatively high among patients with schizophrenia. Social anxiety interacts with cognitive dysfunction and skill deficiency to hamper the social performance of people with schizophrenia. If they do not use them with any regularity, even people with reasonable social skills will experience atrophying of these skills. Many people with schizophrenia may start out with poor social skills, never having fully developed them as adolescents or young adults, only to see them worsen as a result of years of social withdrawal and avoidance. Finally, psychomotor disturbances that are associated with schizophrenia, many of which have physiological/biological bases, may interfere with effective social behaviour. The use of gesture, posture, facial expression, and eye contact may al be disrupted in concert with more general psychomotor disturbances that are common in schizophrenia. These may colour the social behaviour of patients in such a way as to impair basic social skills. It is perhaps understandable that a disorder as severe as schizophrenia is often accompanied by other psychological problems. These problems, like schizophrenia, have equally strong ties to interpersonal interaction and relationships. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Research results indicate that the lifetime prevalence of any mood disorder (major depression, dysthymia, and manic episode) is a staggering 74 percent among those with a primary diagnosis of schizophrenia. Results from this same study show a 72 percent lifetime prevalence of any anxiety disorders, and a 60 percent lifetime prevalence of any substance use disorder. For the majority of people with schizophrenia, therefore, other serious psychological problems are evident. Why are so many people with schizophrenia depressed, anxious, or involved in alcohol or other substance misuse? Admittedly, there are cases in which these problems are evident in the prodromal stages of the disorder. However, an interpersonal perspective would explain many of these problems as features precipitated by the gross deterioration of interpersonal relationships apparent among those with schizophrenia. Presumably, as the symptomatic behaviours become more evident and bizarre, other people (including close family members) react negatively toward the person with schizophrenia. The extreme social isolation that is common among patients with schizophrenia could itself contribute to depressive symptoms. Add to that isolation delusional, and sometimes paranoid, thinking about other people, and the potential for depression is obvious. These same delusional thought patterns could also create a severe anxiety over dealing with other people. People with schizophrenia are often fearful of others, and sometimes with good reason when one considers how they may have been treated by people in the past. From this perspective, a profound social anxiety might be viewed as secondary to the amalgamation of cognitive and interpersonal problems that is an integral part of schizophrenia. Almost half of all patients with schizophrenia have some form of anxiety disorder, and approximately 17 percent have social phobia in particular. Finally, interpersonal problems may lead people with schizophrenia to turn to drug or alcohol use, just as they do for others. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
People often seek consolation in drugs or alcohol as either an escape from or mechanism for regulating an abrasive interpersonal environment. From an interpersonal perspective, it is not surprising that schizophrenia is highly comorbid with problems such as depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders. The problems are clearly sensitive to troubled interpersonal relationships, and troubled interpersonal relationships are dominant in the clinical picture of schizophrenia. A complete understanding of this most serious mental health problem is impossible without serious consideration of the family context in which a patient was reared and/or resides. The social support that is so badly needed by people with schizophrenia appears to be something that their families cannot provide. In fact, the “social support” that their families do provide may cause more hard then good. Schizophrenia sufferers often exhibit poor social skills in both the encoding and decoding domains of interpersonal communication. The three interpersonal domains addressed in this report—poor family-of-origin relations, poor general personal relations, and poor interpersonal communication (social skills deficits)—are by no means independent of each other. The shame and social withdrawal evident in the interpersonal conduct of people with schizophrenia may be the direct result of such experiences in their families of origin. The difficulties in establishing and maintaining effective and satisfying personal relationships are no doubt secondary to poor social skills. Developing person relationships requires at least some basic social skills. Without these skills, a person with schizophrenia may be doomed to a rather solitary and lonely interpersonal existence. This may leave the patient literally at the doorstep of the only interpersonal network that will accept one: the family of origin. In some cases, this may simply extend and protect the experience of schizophrenia. To regard all material improvements as a move away from spirituality, to assert that science and the industries based on it are absolutely evil, is unfair and untrue. The grim needs of war pushed technological advance ahead at an amazing speed. This advance may be used either to make us more materialistic or to make us less so. In itself it is neutral. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
There is a line of connection which can be traced from the appearance of gentle Jesus Christ to the terrors of the Inquisition. There is another line which can be traced from the work of pioneer scientists like Galileo and Bacon to the work of atomic scientists like Einstein and Oppenheimer. If Jesus’ gospel was a message from God, science was a different kind of revelation from God. Both Inquisitional tortures and Hiroshima’s horrors are evidences of what humans have done to the fine things entrusted to them. It is for the humans themselves to undo their misdeeds and not wait for a Saviour to do it. The responsibility is theirs. It was the prevalence of superstition in all departments of human life, activity, belief, and thought which brought about the needed counterculture of the exact sciences. However, under the various superstitions there was not seldom some measure of covert fact and hidden truth. Science has itself become, because of its one-sided, self-made limitation, and through refusal to depart from materialistic views, a sort of superstition. Technical skill, verified experiment, and laboratory research are necessary and valuable, but their presence ought not to be considered. Hence we witness today such evils as the pollution of nature and the poisoning of human nutriment. There is no other way out now than to compensate for the missing elements, to broaden culture in a basic way—a coexistence previously believed to be impossible. “The Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you to be a special people to Himself out of all the peoples on the face of the Earth. The Lord did not set His love upon you and choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the fewest of all people. However, because the Lord loves you and because He would keep the oath which He had sworn to your fathers, the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Know, recognize, and understand therefore that the Lord your God, He is God, the faithful God, Who keeps covenants and steadfast love and mercy with those who love Him and keep His commandments, to a thousand generation,” Deuteronomy 7.6-9. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
O Lord, blessed be Your word, sweeter than money, and thicker than President Trump’s bank account. What could I do in these great sore spots and tight spots unless You comforted me with Your Holy Words? Until I finally arrived at the Gate of Salvation, what should I watch out for, what should I have to endure? Please grant me the Final Good. Please make my passing from this World to the next a smooth one. Please remember me, God of mine, and set me on the straight and narrow to Your Kingdom. Amen. “Be strong in the Lord and in His might power,” reports Ephesians 6.10. Our words are vital in brining our dream to pass. It is not enough to see your dreams simply by faith or in your imagination. You have to begin speaking words of faith over your life. The moment you speak something out, you give birth to it. This is a spiritual principle, and it works whether what you are saying is good or bad, positive or negative. In that regard, many times we are our own worst enemies. We blame everybody and everything else, but the truth is, we are profoundly influenced by what we say about ourselves. “We are snared by the words of our mouths,” reports Proverbs 6.2. There are several ways that you can release the ability God’s ability in prayer. One can release God’s ability through speaking faith-filled words. If you will team both of these together, speaking faith-filled words in prayer, then it will become a mighty force working for you. We are dealing primarily with the releasing the ability of God through prayer, through accurate prayer. If answered, inaccurate prayer will spell trouble. That is why one must learn to guard one’s tongue and speak only faith-filled words over one’s life. Simply put, one’s words can either make or break one. Prayer is not telling God our problems. Jesus said, “Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him,” reports 6.8. For years, I thought to pray was to tell God the problem. No. That is not praying. Telling God the problem is complaining. Prayer is not trying to change God’s mind. God changeth not. God never commanded us to repeatedly verbalize our pain and suffering. He did not instruct us to go around discussing our negative situations, airing our “dirty laundry” with all of friends and neighbours. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Have you ever wondered why Jesus said, “Whatsoever ye shall bind on Earth shall be bound in Heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on Earth shall be loosed in Heaven,” reports Matthew 18.18. All Heaven will stand behind what you say in prayer. However, not only will it work in prayer, it will also work in the things you speak. You can loose the ability of the Inquisitor against yourself by the words of your mouth, even in prayer. Therefore, God told us to speak constantly of His goodness, to speak of His promises in the morning at the breakfast table in your new Cresleigh Home, in the evenings around the dinner table in your Cresleigh Home Quick Move-In Residence 1, at night before bed Cresleigh Home Site 15 Residence Four plan, which includes over $12,000 in options and upgrades. Continually dwell on the good things of God. If you simply focused on the good things of God’s Word, you could experience a new sense of joy in your Cresleigh Home. In the 16th chapter of Matthew, Jesus Christ is teaching His disciples principles of prayer and Jesus knew how to teach prayer accurately. If anyone knew how to pray, I believe Jesus did. So let us see what Jesus said about prayer: “But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard from their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them; for your Father knoweth what things ye have need for, before ye ask him,” reports Matthew 6.7-8. Notice Jesus Christ said that the Father knows the need before we ask Him. So we can determine from the Word of God that you do not get your prayer answered before you need it answered. I believe we can safely pull that out of this scripture and say it is not a fact from the Word of God: Praying is Not telling God you need. Some people have prayed, “Lord, I need white shaker cabinetry with soft-close doors and drawers,” and “Lord I need Flat screen prewire in the Great Room and owned solar.” He knows, but He does not answer prayer on the basis of need. If He did, there would be no needs. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Need is not what moves God; faith does. Vain repetitions do not move God; faith does. Much speaking does not move God; faith does. And if you are always talking about your problems, do not be surprised if you live in perpetual defeat. You must stop talking about the problem and start talking about the solution. Stop speaking words of defeat, and start speaking words of success. Do not use your words to describe your situation; use your words to change your situation. Prayer the same prayer over and over does not cause God to move; faith does. Asking according to His will for asking will move God. When you pray, believe you receive; that moves God. Set the tone for the entire day as soon as you get out of bed. If you wait until you have read the morning newspaper, you will start your day with all sorts of sad, dreary news. Try starting your day with some good news by speaking God’s Word over your life! The moment you wake up, begin to give new life to your dreams by speaking words of faith and success. Understand, avoiding negative talks is not sufficient. That is similar to buying a model home with no furniture or electricity. If you are going to make a house a home, you seen a place to sleep and lights to see. You have to be aggressive. We have often prayed, “Father, if it is Your will, let it be done.” If it is not, we will just go on suffering, thinking we are being humble, when we are really being ignorant of God’s Word. We need to know who determines whether or not our prayer is answered. God is not the one who determines the outcome. You determine whether or not you receive. If we could just cast all that on the Lord and say, “Oh well, if it is God’s will, it will work out and if it is not, it will not,” that would be good. That is a cop-out. I did it for years until I realized that it was not working. If your prayer life is working, if you are getting your prayers answered, I would not change the way I was praying. However, if not, I would change it, I tried it the other way and it did not work for me. I changed it and found something that works. If you have been on the same road for twenty years and have not yet arrived, you should know that you were on the wrong road. Let us get on the right road by being accurate in prayer. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Start using your words to move forward in life, to bring to life the great things God has in store for you. “With the hear one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation,” reports Romans 10.10. This same principle is true in other areas. When you believe God’s Word and begin to speak it, mixing it with your faith, you are actually confirming that truth and making it valid in your own life. Father, I thank You that You are my healer, and that You promised me in Psalm 118 that I will live and not die and I will declare the words of the Lord. I boldly declare this truth in my life. I know that all Heaven’s attention with God will come to back up the declarations I made in Jesus’ name. Thank You, Father that I can align my words with Your Word. Today, I am speaking words of success, health, and love about my life, that I will be strong spiritually, that my body will be well, and that my life will have eternal significance. I who am the beauty of the green Earth and the white Moon among the stars and the mysteries of the waters, I call upon your souls to arise and come unto Me. For I am the soul of nature that gives life to the Universe. From Me all things proceed and unto Me they must return. Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices, for behold—all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals. Let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honour and humility, mirth and reverence within you. And you who seek to know Me, know that your seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without. For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire. The Angels came a-mustering, a-mustering, a-mustering, the Angels came a-clustering around the sapphire throne. A-questioning of one another, of one another, of one another, a-questions each one of his brother around the sapphire throne. Pray who is he, and where is he, and where is he, and where is he, whose shining casts—so fair is he—a shadow on the throne? Prayer, who has up to Heaven come, to Heaven come, to Heaven come, through all the circles seven come to fetch the Torah down! I will rejoice and exult on Simhat Torah. The Branch of David shall surely come on Simhat Torah. The Torah is a tree of life; it is life to all; for with Thee is the fountain of life. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob rejoiced on Simhat Torah. Aaron, Joshua, Samuel, David, and Solomon rejoiced on Simhat Torah. The Torah is a tree of life: it is life to all; for with Thee is the fountain of life. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Haunted by a Counteracting Spell—My Whole Soul Withering!
God created man He committed Lucifer a position of authority in relation to the Earth and its surrounding planets. For this reason, Satan is called the “god of this World” in the New Testament. This angelic creature of surpassing beauty and intelligence, however, initiated a rebellion against God. This explains the entrance of sin, suffering, and death into a universe which had been “good” as it came from God’s creative hand. The Scriptures do not attempt to tell us why God permitted sin to invade His World, for His reasons are among the “secret things” which “belong unto the Lord our God,” reports Deuteronomy 29.29. We cannot fully understand how or why an infinitely holy God brought about the possibility of evil, nor can we explain the origin of pride and rebellion against Him. However, by faith we are assured that God is holy, wise, and loving. Our confidence in Him enables us to believe that behind His permission of sin, suffering, and death lies infinite holiness, wisdom, and goodness. The Bible simply affirms that the angel Lucifer, now called Satan, became proud and rebelled against his Maker. Lucifer, the daystar, succumbed to pride and revolted against God. Apparently many angels joined in the rebellion, for the Bible speaks of “angels that sinned,” reports 2 Peter 2.4, “angels who kept not their first estate,” reports Jude 6, and Revelation 12.4 in figurative language describes the red dragon (Satan) as pulling down a third of the stars (angels) from Heaven with his tail. Satan and his followers have been cast out of Heaven to Earth. They hate God and His people, and have neither desire for nor hope of salvation. The terms “evil” and “foul” are sometimes used to describe the evil spirits who make up Satan’s army. Even the name “Satan” means adversary, and the word “devil” portrays him as one who accuses or criticizes. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
The fall of Lucifer made him an implacable enemy of God, a false accuser, and a liar whose every activity is marked by deceitfulness. The devil today is the leader of a vast host of evil spirits who are organized into a military-like structure. However, remember that Satan, though intelligent and powerful, is not omnipotent, omniscient, nor omnipresent. He can be in only one place at a time, but his myriads of assistants can largely make up for his inherent finiteness. With their help he tries to lead people into sinful practices and introduces false doctrine into the professing church. Though fallen humanity possess an evil nature, many of the completely inhuman and unnatural evils of society are at least in part traceable to the devil and his evil spirits. The widespread confusion and strife within the realm of professing Christendom is also partly due to Satanic activity. Evil spirits seek to divide and corrupt the church. However, remember, Satan was originally sinless and the most glorious of all created beings. In 1324 A.D., Dame Alice Kyteler (such apparently being her maiden name), the facile princeps of Irish witches, was a member of a good Anglo-Norman family that had been settled in the city of Kilkenny for many years. The lady in question must have been far removed from the popular conception of a witch as an old woman of striking ugliness, or else her powers of attraction were very remarkable, for she had succeeded in leading four husbands to the alter. She had been married, first, to William Outlawe of Kilkenny, banker; secondly, to Adam le Blund of Callan; third, to Richard de Valle—all of whom she was supposed to have got rid of by poison; and fourthly, to Sir John le Poer, whom it was said she deprived of his natural senses by philtres and incantations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The Bishop of Ossory at this period was Richard de Ledrede, a Franciscan friar, and an Englishman by birth. He soon learnt that things were not as they should be, for when making a visitation of his diocese early in 1324 he found by an Inquisition, in which were five knights and numerous nobles, that there was in the city a band of heretical sorcerers, at the head whom was Dame Alice. The following charges were laid against them. They had denied the faith of Christ absolutely for a year or a month, according as the object they desired to gain through sorcery was of greater or less importance. During all that period they believed in none of the doctrines of the Church; they did not adore the Body of Christ, nor enter a sacred building to hear mass, not make sure of consecrated bread or holy water. They offered in sacrifice to demons living animals, which they dismembered, and then distributed at cross-roads to a certain evil spirit of low rank, named the Son of Art. They sought their sorcery advice and responses from demons. In their nightly meetings they blasphemously imitated the power of the Church by fulminating sentences of excommunication, with lighted candles, even against their own husbands, from the sole of their foot to the crown of their head, naming each part expressly, and then concluded by extinguishing the candles and by crying Fi! Fi! Fi! Amen. In order to arouse feelings of love or hatred, or to inflict death or disease on the bodies of the faithful, they made use of powders, unguents, ointments, and candles of fat, which were compounded as follows. They took the entrails of cocks sacrificed to demons, certain horrible worms, various unspecified herbs, dead men’s nails, the hair, brains, and shreds of the cerement of boys who were buried unbaptized, with other abominations, all of which they cooked, with various incantations, over a fire of oak-logs in a vessel made out of the skull of a decapitated thief. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The children of Dame Alice’s four husbands accused her before the Bishop of having killed their fathers by sorcery, and of having brought on them such stolidity of their senses that they bequeathed all their wealth to her and her favourite son, William Outlawe, to the impoverishment of the other children. They also stated that her present husband, Sir John le Poer, had been reduced to such a condition by sorcery and the use of powders that he had become terribly emaciated, his nails had dropped off, and there was no hair left on his body. No doubt he would have died had he not been warned by a maid-servant of what was happening, in consequence of which he had forcibly possessed himself of his wife’s keys, and had opened some chests in which he found a sackful of horrible and detestable thing which he transmitted to the bishop by the hands of two priests. The said dame had a certain demon, an incubus, named Son or Art, or Robin son of Art, who had carnal knowledge of her, and from who she admitted that she had received all her wealth. This incubus made its appearance under various forms, sometimes as a cat, or as a hairy black dog, or in the likeness of an African, accompanied by two others who were larger and taller than he, and of whom one carried an iron rod. Dame Alice was declared to be a sorceress, magician, and heretic, and it was demanded that she should be handed over to the secular arm and have her goods confiscated as well. One of Dame Alice’s accomplices was Petronilla of Meath, she was made the scapegoat for her mistress. The Bishop had her flogged six times, and under the repeated application of this form of torture she made the required confession of magical practices. She admitted the denial of her faith and the sacrificing to Robert, son of Art, and as well that she had caused certain women of her acquaintance to appear as if they had goats’ horns. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
She also confessed that at the suggestion of Dame Alice she had frequently consulted demons and received responses from them, and that she had acted as a “medium” (mediatrix) between her and the said Robert. She declared that although she herself was a mistress of the Black Art, yet she was as nothing in comparison with the Dame from who she had learnt all her knowledge, and that there was no one in the World more skillful than she. Petronilla of Meath also stated that William Outlawe deserved death as much as she, for he was privy to their sorceries, and for a year and a day had worn the devil’s girdle round his body. When rifling Dame Alice’s house there was found “a wafer of sacramental bread, having the devil’s name stamped thereon instead of Jesus Christ, and a pipe of ointment wherewith she greased a staffe, upon which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin, when and in what manner she listed.” Petronilla was accordingly condemned to be burnt alive, and the execution of this sentence took place with all due solemnity in Kilkenny on 3rd November 1324. Dame Alice fled the country. “With regard to the other heretics and sorcerers who belonged to the pestilential society of Robin, son of Art, the order of law being preserved, some of them were publicly burnt to death; others, confessing their crimes in the presence of all the people, in an upper garment, are marked back and front with a cross after they had abjured their heresy, as is the custom; others were solemnly whipped through the town and the market-place; others were banished from the city and diocese; others who evaded the jurisdiction of the Church were excommunicated; while others again fled in fear and were never heard of after. And thus, by the authority of Holy Mother Church, and by the special grace of God, that most foul brood was scattered and destroyed.” Possibly Dame Alice and her associated actually practiced magical arts, and if so, considering the period at which it occurred, some can see why the Bishop took the steps he did. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
However, others suspect such baser motives as greed of gain and desire for revenge. John XXII was elevated to the Papacy. The attitude of that Pope towards magical arts was no uncertain one. He believed himself to be surrounded by enemies who were ever making attempts on his life by modelling images of him in wax, to be subsequently thrust through with pins and melted, no doubt; or by sending him a devil enclosed in a ring, or in various other ways. Consequently in several Bulls he anathematized sorcerers, denounced their ill-deeds, excited the inquisitors against them, and so gave ecclesiastical authorization to the reality of the belief in magical forces. Indeed, the general expression used in the Bull Super illius specula might be applied to the actions of Dame Alice and her party. He says of certain persons that “they sacrificed to demons and adore them, making or causing to be made images, rings, and so forth, with which they draw the evil spirits by their magical art, obtain responses from them, and demand their help in performing their evil designs.” Heresy and sorcery were now identified, and the punishment for the former was the same as that for the latter, burning at the stake and confiscation of property. The attitude of this Pontiff evidently found a sympathizer in Bishop de Ledrede, who deemed in necessary to follow the example set by Head of the Church, with what results we have already shown: thus we find In Ireland a ripple of the wave that swept over Europe at this period. It is very probable, too, that there were many underlying local causes of which we can know little or nothing; the discontent and anger of the disinherited children at the loss of the wealth of which Dame Alice had bereft them by her exercise of “undue influence” over her husbands, family quarrels, private hatreds, and possibly national jealousy helped to bring about one of the strangest series of events in the chequered history of Ireland. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Mrs. Sarah Winchester’s arrival was a sensational event. The Santa Clara Valley was thrilled by this dramatic entrance of a millionairess; they those freight cars sidetracked in Santa Clara, unloading rich imported furnishings; by building activity that mushroomed an eight-room farm house into a 26-room mansion, the first six months. Here was game for all! They talked about Mrs. Winchester! Gossiped would be a more fitting word, gossip no one claimed to like-but everyone enjoyed. Talk begat rumors and as the years passed and new towers and gables rose behind the six-foot hedge of Llanada Villa, the rumors grew to established legend. There had been a thunderstorm in the valley. Every door was shut, every dog in its kennel, every rut and gutter a flowing river after the deluge of rain that had fallen. Up at the Winchester mansion, which seemed to be supernaturally growing, the fawns on the estate were venturing their timid heads from behind the trunk of trees, and Mrs. Winchester has risen from her knees, and was putting back her prayer-book on the self. In the garden, April roses, unwieldy with their full-blown richness, and saturated with rain, hung their heads heavily to the Earth; others, already fallen, lay flat upon their blooming faces on the path, where Agnus, Mrs. Winchester’s maid, would fund them, when going on her morning quest of rose-leaves for her lady’s pot-pourri. Ranks of white lilies, just brought to perfection by today’s sun, lay dabbled in the mire of flooded mould. Tears ran down the amber cheeks of the plums on the south wall, and not a bee had ventured out of the hives, though the scent of the air was sweet enough to tempt the laziest drone. The sky was still lurid behind the boles of the upland oaks, but the birds had begun to dive in and out of ivy that wrapped up the mansion. This thunderstorm took place more than a century ago, and must remember that Mrs. Winchester was dressed in the fashion of that time as she walked out from behind the squire’s chair, now that the lightning was over, and, with many nervous glances towards the window, sat down before the tea-urn, and the muffins. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
We can picture her fine lace cap, with its peachy ribbons, the frill on the hem of her cambric gown just touching her ankles, her embroidered stockings, the rosettes on her shoes, but not so easily the lilac shade of her mild eyes, the satin skin, which still kept its delicate bloom, though wrinkled with advancing age, and the pale, sweet, puckered mouth, that time and sorrow had made angelic while trying vainly to deface its beauty. The room in which she sat was a pleasant old-fashioned drawing-room, with a spider-glass window, carpet, tawny wreath on the pale blue; blue flutings on the walls, and faint gilding on the furniture. A huge urn, crammed with roses, in the open bay-window, through which came delicious airs from the garden, the twittering of birds settling to sleep in the ivy close by, and occasionally the pattering of a flight of rain drops, swept to the ground as a bough bent in the breeze. The urn on the table was ancient silver, and the china rare. There was nothing in the room for luxurious ease of the body, but everything of delicate refinement for the eye. At this moment a rolling sound struck upon the ears. The lady rose from her seat trembling, and folded her hands together, while the tea-urn flooded the tray. Presently pretty Agnus of the rose-leaves appeared at the door in flutter of blue ribbons. “Please, madam, a lady has arrived, and says she is expected. She asked for her apartment, and I put her into the room that was got ready of Miss Marriot. And she sends her respects to you, madam, and she will be down with you presently.” Hardly had she spoken when the door again opened, and the stranger appeared—a small creature, whether a girl or a woman it would be hard to say—dressed in a scanty black silk dress, her narrow shoulders covered with a white muslin pelerine. Her hair was swept up to the crown of her heard, all but a little fringe hanging over her low forehead with an inch of brows. Her face was brown and thin, eyes black and long, with blacker settings, mouth large, sweet, and melancholy. She was all head, mouth, and eyes; her nose and chin were nothing. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
This visitor crossed the floor hastily, dropped a courtesy in the middle of the room, and approached the table, saying abruptly, with a soft Italian accent: “Madam, I am here. I am come to play your organ.” “The organ!” gasped Mrs. Winchester. “Yes, the organ,” said the little stranger lady, playing on the back of a chair with her finger, as if she felt notes under them. “It was but last week that the handsome signor, your son, came to my little house, where I have lived teaching music since my English father and my Italian mother and brothers and sisters died and left me so lonely.” Here the fingers left off drumming, and two great tears were brushed off, one from each eye with each hand, child’s fashion. However, the next moment the fingers were at work again, as if only whilst they were moving the tongue could speak. “Your son,” said the little woman, looking trustfully at Mrs. Winchester, while a bright blush shone through her brown skin, “he often came to see me before that, always in the evening, when the sun was warm and yellow all through my little studio, and the music was swelling my heart, and I could play out grand with all my soul; then he used to come and say, ‘Hurry, little Bianca, and play better, better still. I have work for you to do by-and-by.’ Sometimes he said, ‘Brava!’ and sometimes he said ‘Eccellentissima!’ but one night last week he came to me and said, ‘It is enough. Will you swear to do my bidding, whatever it may be?’ Here the black eyes fell. And I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘Now you are my betrothed.’ And he said, ‘Pack up your music, little Bianca, and go off to San Jose to my American mother, who has an organ in her house which must be played upon. If she refuses to let you play, tell her I sent you, and she will give you leave. The spirits are always high and about. You must play all day, and you must get up in the night and play. You must never tire. You are my betrothed, and you have sworn to do my work.’ I said, ‘Shall I see you there, signor?’ And he said, ‘Yes, you shall see me there.’ I said, ‘I will keep my vow, signor.’ And so, madam, I am come.’” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
The soft foreign voice left off talking, the finger left off thrumming on the chair, and the little stranger gaze in dismay at her auditor, pale with agitation. “You are deceived. You make a mistake,” said Mrs. Winchester. “My son—” began Mrs. Winchester, but her mouth twitched, her voice broke, and she looked piteously. “Yes, yes, said the little foreigner. “If you have though him dead have good cheer, dear madam. He is alive; he is well, and strong, and handsome. But one, two, three, four, five’ (on the fingers) “days ago he stood by my side.” “It is some strange mistake, some wonderful coincidence!” said Mrs. Winchester. “Let me take you to the gallery,” murmured the mother of this son who was thus dead and alive. “There is yet light to see the pictures. She will not know his portrait.” The bewildered wife led her strange visitor away to the long gloomy room at the west side of the mansion, where the faint gleams from the darkening sky still lingered on the portraits of the Winchester family. “Doubtless he is like this,” said the madam, pointing to a fair-haired young man with a mild face, a cousin of Mr. Winchester, who had been lost at sea. But Bianca shook her head and went softly on tiptoe from one picture to another, peering into the canvas, and still turning away troubled. However, at last a shriek of delight stated the shadowy chamber. “Ah, here he is! See, here he is, the noble signor, the beautiful signor, not half so handsome as he looked five days ago, when talking to poor little Bianca! Dear sir and madam, you are now content. Now take me to the organ, that I may commence to do his bidding at once.” Mrs. Winchester said faintly, “How old are you, girl?” “Eighteen,” said the visitor impatiently, moving towards the door. “And my son has been dead for fifty-four years. That is his father. We tried to have another child after the tragic death of our daughter, but I miscarried,” said Mrs. Winchester. Up the grand staircase the little woman followed Mrs. Winchester. The mansion was fitted with much great luxury and richness. The appointments of the mysterious Grand Ballroom was built almost entirely without nails. It cost over $9,000 (2021 inflation adjusted $242,038.24) to complete at the time when an entire house could be built for less than $1000 (2021 inflation adjusted $26,893.14)! #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The silver chandelier from Germany illuminated the room quite well, the was a robust fire blazing in the fireplace, and the walls, floors, and ceiling were made of six hardwoods—mahogany, teak, maple, rosewood, oak, and white ash. The most curious elements of the Grand Ballroom are the two leaded stained-glass windows, each inscribed with a quote from Shakespeare. Ironically, the ballroom was never used to hold a ball. Mrs. Winchester had invited a celebrated orchestra from San Francisco to perform at her home, but scheduling conflicts prevented the visit. The spirit must have known Mrs. Winchester wanted to hear live music. The appointments of this room announced it the sanctum of a woman who depended for the interest of her life upon resources of intellect and tastes. However, with all the luxury in the Grand Ballroom, what stood out most to Bianca was nothing but a morsel of biscuit that was laying on a plate. “May I have it?” said she eagerly. “It is so long since I have eaten. I am hungry.” Mrs. Winchester sat Bianca down and told her how she lost the baby. “There was a party of men, who named themselves the “Devil’s Club,” and they were in the habit of practising all kinds of unholy pranks in the country. They had midnight carousings on the tombstones in the Grove Street Cemetery; they carried away helpless old men and children, who they tortured by making believe to bury them alive; mock feast. On one occasion there was a very sad funeral from the village. The corpse was carried into the church, and prayers were read over the coffin, the chief mourner, the aged father of the dead man, standing weeping by. In the midst of this solemn scene the organ suddenly pleaded forth a profane tune, and a number of voices shouted a drinking chorus. A groan of execration burst from the crowd, the clergyman turned pale and closed his book, and the old mad, the father of the dead, climbed the altar steps, and, raising his arms above his head, uttered a terrible curse. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
“He said that if Mr. Winchester did not give him the ‘Colt,’ that his family would meet with tragedy. The Colt is a legendary gun that was created in 1835, during the appearance of Halley’s Comet, and the chamber could hold 13 bullets. It was made by a blacksmith who tinker with the occult. In German tradition, the blacksmith ends his work on Saturday by striking his anvil, chaining the Devil for another week. So anyway, he cursed Mr. Winchester to all eternity, he cursed the organ he played, that it might be dumb henceforth, except under the fingers that had now profaned it, which, he prayed, might be forced to labour upon it till they stiffened in death. And the curse seemed to work, for the organ stood dumb in the church from that day, except when I purchased it and put it in my Grand Ballroom as a reminder of my miscarried son. William used to hammer away at the organ so many laborious hours. He only stopped when our daughter was born, but shortly after birth she passed away. William went back to locking himself up in the ballroom with the organ, but one day I hid myself among the curtains, and saw him withering on his seat, and heard him groaning as he strove to wrench his hands from the keys, to which they flew back like a needle to a magnet. It was soon plainly to be seen that he was an involuntary slave to the organ; but whether through madness that had grown within himself, or by some supernatural doom, having its cause in the old man’s curse, we did not dare to day. By-and-by there came a time when I was wakened out of my sleep at nights by the rolling of the organ. He wrought now night and day. Food and rest were denied him. His face got haggard, his bread grew long, his eyes started from their sockets. His body became wasted, and his cramped fingers like the claws of a bird. He groaned piteously as he stooped over his cruel toil. I was afraid to go near him. I tried to put wine and food between his lips, while the tortured fingers crawled over the keys; but he only gnashed his teeth; I retreated from him. At last, one dreadful hour, we found him a ghastly corpse on the ground before the organ. The doctor said he died from tuberculosis.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
“From that hour the organ was dumb to the touch of all human fingers. I had it shipped here when I moved to the Santa Clara Valley and built this beautiful room for it. Many, unwilling to believe the story, made preserving endeavours to draw sound from it, in vain. However, when the darkened empty room was locked up and left, we heard as loud as ever the well-known sounds humming and rolling through the walls. Night and day the tones of the organ boomed on as before. It seemed that the doom of the wretched man was not yet fulfilled, although my family rests in the cemetery. As time went on, the curse of this perpetual music was not removed from the house. Servants refused to stay about the place. Visitors shunned it. I left this house for several years, and returned; left it, and returned again, to find my ears still tortured and my heart rung by the unceasing persecution of terrible sounds. At last, but a few months ago, a holy man was found, who locked himself up in the cursed and mysterious Grand Ballroom for many days, praying and wrestling with the demon. After he came forth and went away the sounds ceased, and the organ was heard no more. Since then there has been peace in the house. And now, Bianca, your strange appearance and your strange story convinces me that you are a victim of a ruse of the Evil One. Be warned in time, and place yourself under the protection of God, that you may be saved from the fearful influenced that are at work upon you.” Little Bianca went fast asleep, her hands spread before her as if she played an organ in her dreams. “We will save you from your horrible fate!” Mrs. Winchester whispered, and had the butler carry the girl to bed. In the morning, Bianca was gone. Mrs. Winchester found the girl’s chambers empty. “She is just a wild thing,” thought Mrs. Winchester, “as would rush out at sunrise to hear the larks!” and she went forth to look for her in the meadows, behind the fruit orchard in the estate’s deer park, and found nothing. She returned, her quest had been unsuccessful. The little international girl had vanished. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
A second search after breakfast proved also fruitless, and towards the evening there was panic and distress. Mrs. Winchester sat in the palour. The servants, with pale faces, were huddled together in whispering groups. The haunted organ was booming and roaring again through the mansion. Mrs. Winchester hastened to the fatal Grand Ballroom, and there, sure enough, was Bianca, perched upon the high seat before the organ, beating the keys with her small hands, her slight figure swaying, and the evening sunshine playing about her weird head. Sweet unearthly music she wrung from the groaning heart of the organ—wild melodies, mounting to rapturous heights and falling to mournful depths. She wandered from Mendelssohn to Mozart, and from Mozart to Beethoven. Mrs. Winchester stood fascinated awhile by the ravaging beauty of the sounds she heard, but, rousing herself quickly, put her arms around the musician and forced her away from the mysterious Grand Ballroom. Bianca returned the next day, however, and was not so easily coaxed from her post again. Day after day she laboured at the organ, growing paler, and thinner, and more weird-looking as time went on. “I worked so hard,” she said to Mrs. Winchester. “The signor, your son, is he pleased? Asked him to come and tell me himself if he is pleased.” Mrs. Winchester got ill and took to her bed. The butler swore at the young international star and roamed abroad. Agnus was the only one who stood by to watch the fate of the little organist. The curse of the organ was upon Bianca; it spoke under her hand, and her hand was its slave. At last she announced rapturously that she had a visit from the brave signor, who had commanded her industry, and urged her to work yet harder. After that she ceased to hold any communication with the living. Time after time Agnus wrapped her arms about the frail thing, and carried her away by force, locking the door of the fatal chamber. However, locking the chamber and burying the key were of no avail. The door stood opened again, and Bianca was labouring on her perch. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
One night, wakened from her sleep by the well-known humming and moaning of the organ, Mrs. Winchester dressed and hastened to the unholy room. Moonlight was pouring down the staircase and cascading on the stained-glass windows. It shone on the marble bust of the late Mr. Winchester, that stood in the niche above Mrs. Winchester’s sitting-room door. The Grand ballroom was full of it when Mrs. Winchester pushed open the door and entered—full of pale blue moonlight from the window, mingled with another light, a dull lurid glare which seemed to center round like a dark shadow, like the figure of a man standing by the organ, and throwing out in fantastic relief the slight form of Bianca writhing, rather than swaying, back and forward, as if in agony. The sounds that came from the organ were broken and meaningless, as if the hands of the player lagged and stumbled on the keys. Between the intermittent chords low moaning cries broke from Bianca, and the dark figure bent towars her with menacing gestures. Trembling with the sickness of supernatural fear, yet strong of will, Mrs. Winchester walked forward with the lurid light, and was drawn into its influence. It grew and intensified upon her, it dazzled and blinded her at first; but presently, by a daring effort of will, she raised her eyes, and beheld Bianca’s face convulsed with torture in the burning glare, and bending over her the figure and the features of William Winchester! Smitten with horror, Mrs. Winchester did not even lose her presence of mind. She wound her strong arms around the wretched girl and dragged her from her seat and out of the influence of the lurid light, which immediately paled away and vanished. She carried her to her own bed, where Lisa lay, a wasted wreck, raving about the cruelty of the pitiless signor who would not see that she was labouring her best. Her poor cramped hands kept beating the coverlet, as though she were still at her agonizing task. Mrs. Winchester prayed a way might be shown by which to put an end to this curse. She prayed for Bianca, and then, thinking that the girl rested somewhat, stole from the room. She thought that she had locked the door behind her. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
She went to the blue séance room with a pale, resolved face, and, without consulting anyone, sent to the village for a bricklayer. Afterwards she sat by the foreman, and explained to him what was to be done. Presently, Mrs. Winchester went to the door of Bianca’s room, and hearing no sound, thought the girl slept, and stole away. By-and-by she went downstairs, and found that the bricks had arrived and the foreman already begun his task of building up the Grand Ballroom door. He was a swift workman, and the mysterious ballroom was soon sealed safely with stone and mortar. A few hours went by and no one had seen Bianca. The house was searched, upstairs and downstairs, in the garden, in the grounds, in the fields and meadows. No Bianca. Mrs. Winchester made inquiries everywhere; she pondered and puzzled over the matter. In the weak, suffering state the girl was in, how far could she have crawled. Meanwhile, the mansion was still growing by leaps and bounds from 8 room, to 26 room, a nine-story tower, 156 more rooms, as if it was under construction by legions of ghosts. A few years went by, and still no one had seen Bianca. When one night, Angus decided to quit. “I love you dearly, and it breaks my heart to go away, but the organ…I am frightened out of my life, I cannot stay, Mrs. Winchester.” “Who has heard the organ, and when?” asked Mrs. Winchester, rising to her feet. “Please ma’am, I heard it years ago, the night you went away—the night after the door was built up. I heard it again this morning.” “No,” said Mrs. Winchester; “it is only the wind.” However, as pale as death she flew down the stairs and laid her ear to the yet mortar. All was silent. There was no sound but the monotonous sough of the wind in the trees outside. The Winchester mansion was shut up and deserted for many years. At night, passers-by heard ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion. The bell in the belfry high in the gables tolled regularly at midnight to summon incoming flights of spirits. Later it rolled again to warn these visitors to return to their sepulchers. However, once a week these departed one relaxed and faced in the Great Ballroom. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
Any plans for the weekend? Come hang out at the Winchester Mystery House 😉 winchestermysteryhouse.com
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle .
The Winchester Mystery House would like to wish you a safe and Happy Halloween 🎃
Tickets are still available for our festive Jack O’ Lantern Trail. Treat stations are set along the path creating a safe and fun trick or treat experience for the whole family! Any plans for the weekend? Come hang out at the Winchester Mystery House 😉 winchestermysteryhouse.com
It is Futile to Try to Take the Kingdom of Heaven by Violence!
Mental hygiene is just as important as keeping the rest of our body in good shape. Our mental health influences so much about how we move through life, how we view ourselves, and how we relate to others. That is why it is so important to discuss our mental health with professionals or trusted friends to find ways of cultivating a beneficial state of mind, and to be reminded that we are never alone even when we feel like no one understands us. Without question, family-of-origin relations and interactions have dominated the interpersonal research on schizophrenia. However, there is reason to believe that problematic interpersonal relationships extend beyond the realm of family relations for patients with schizophrenia. For example, among patients at a residential facility, interpersonal interactions were identified as the primary cause of symptom fluctuations in approximately sixty-six percent of the residents with schizophrenia. The most commonly identified interpersonal interactions were with other residents, and involved arguments, irritation, and concern about having personal property stolen by these others. Residents also indicated that arguments with and criticism from staff members led to worsening of their symptoms. This kind of relation friction is very prominent in the interpersonal landscape of people with schizophrenia. One particular area of interest for schizophrenia and interpersonal relationships more generally is social support. Patients with schizophrenia typically have smaller social networks, and report that they have fewer close friends, than healthy controls or even other psychiatric patients. Importantly, our research group detected a negative association between number of family members in the patients’ social networks and their prognosis, whereas a greater number of friends and acquaintances in these networks was associated with better outcomes. This finding indicates that the type of “social support” that may be offered by family members actually aggravates the course of the disorder. What is obviously beneficial to the patient with schizophrenia is social support from friends. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
However, social support from friends is sadly lacking in many cases. One possible reason for this lack of support may stem from the poor social skills that are often associated with schizophrenia. Patients with schizophrenia and poor social skills tend to have smaller social networks. The negative symptoms of schizophrenia may also inhibit the ability to secure social support from other. The impact of social support clearly extends beyond just psychiatric symptoms for people with schizophrenia. It may literally have an impact on their long-terms survival. Recently 133 records of patients with schizophrenia, who were admitted to a state hospital, were examined. Over a lengthy retrospective follow-up period, those patients with more social support available exhibited a lower expected mortality. Using survival analysis, it was demonstrated that a 1-point increase in social support (expressed on a 5-point scale) was associated with a 25 percent hazard reduction over the follow-up period, which averaged 58 years. Clearly, when social support is available, it pays many dividends to people with schizophrenia—in terms of both psychiatric symptoms and longevity. Research on social support suggest that it is difficult for people with schizophrenia to reap the benefits offered by relationships with friends. In addition to problems with friendship, schizophrenia is associated with less closeness and more conflict with siblings. Individuals in the study expressed a considerable degree of grief and stress associated with their attempts to cope with their ill siblings. Further, there is evidence to indicate that, like people with depression, people with schizophrenia often elicit rejection from others. For instance, a large sample of students were asked to read vignettes describing a young mand with paranoid schizophrenia, personality disorder, or no mental health problem. The more mentally distressed the target person was judged to be, the more respondents found one to be socially unacceptable, and the more social distance from him they desired. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Similar findings are evident in a study of face-to-face interactions with patients with schizophrenia. In this case, the more strangely patients behaved during the interaction (as rated by observers), the more negatively their conversational partners responses to the. Some patients consistently behave in ways that lead them to be responded to more or less negatively. This interpersonal rejection effect associated with schizophrenia may explain the difficulty such people have in building and maintaining a social support network of friends. It is also linked to the sever social skills deficits these patients have. In addition to being embedded in disturbed and dissatisfying interpersonal relations, people with schizophrenia evidence serious communication problems of their own. An extensive line of research on social skills deficits associated with schizophrenia shows that the disorder is strongly associated with what are often fundamental failures in basic communication skills. Although these deficits are not ubiquitous with this family of disorders—for example, those with the paranoid subtype may be more functional—in many cases the exceptionally peculiar and disorganized style of relating to other people makes communication extremely difficult and challenging. The research on social skills deficits associated with schizophrenia has examined the expression or encoding aspects, as well as the reception of decoding aspects, of communication. Within each of these area, distinct deficits are sometimes evident in subprocesses (speech production and use of non-verbal behaviour in the case of encoding skills; and recognition of facial expressions, social information, and recognition/process in the case of decoding skills). Patients with schizophrenia have impairments in social skills that are more pronounced than those of either healthy or psychiatric controls. The social behavior of patients with schizophrenia, in social settings, tends to be less appropriate than that of either nonpsychiatric controls, or psychiatric controls, including patients with mood disorders and schizoaffective disorder. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Impairment in social skills are not just secondary to the symptoms of schizophrenia, and they are significantly associated with more general social functioning. Further evidence of poor encoding social skills associated with schizophrenia is evident in a diverse range of studies. For example, based on clinical ratings of such social skills as acceptance of contact from others, initiation of contact with others, effective communication, engaging in activities, participating in groups, forming friendships, and asking for help, patients with schizophrenia scored significantly lower on all dimensions, compared to patients with bipolar disorder or major depression. Similar findings based on clinical ratings indicate that in domains such as language development, socialization, and responsibility, patients with schizophrenia were rated more poorly than those with intellectual disabilities, and were about the same range as patients with organic brain impairment. When using self-report instruments to assess social skills, people with schizophrenia rated themselves as less competent in their ability to initiate interactions, manage conflict, and provide emotional support to others. These social skills deficits were particularly associated with negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Effective verbal communication skills are essential for conveying information, as well as for establishing and negotiating interpersonal relationships. Deficits in these skills are almost immediately evident upon interacting with an individual with schizophrenia. A frequent theme in the research on speech production and schizophrenia is the frequency of communication failures. These include such phenomena as vague or confused references, missing information in references, and structural unclarities. In conversation, people with schizophrenia will exhibit numerous communication failures. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The communication failures makes their discourse very difficult to decode, and their train of thought almost impossible to follow. This type of speech clarity (or unclarity) is strongly related to social functioning among patients with schizophrenia. It is impossible to overlook the striking parallel between the findings on communication failures among people with schizophrenia and the findings on Communication Deviance (CD) in their family members. Another speech problem associated with schizophrenia is diminished or inhibited speech production, also known as poverty of speech. This is speech that is inappropriately laconic and unrestricted. For example, when asked, “What was your family like when you were growing up?”, a person with schizophrenia may answer, “OK, I guess.” Such insufficiently elaborate responses require the conversational partner to probe continually for further information in order to get a sufficient answer. And when people with schizophrenia do speak, they tend to have poor enunciation and inflection. Such inhibited speech production is not specific to schizophrenia; it is also evident in depression. However, it tends to be more chronic for people with schizophrenia, whereas it improves dramatically as symptoms remit in depression. The effective use of nonverbal behaviour adds considerable richness to vocal communication, conveying attitudes, emotions, and information. People with schizophrenia regularly exhibit impairments in their use of nonverbal communication behaviours. For example, patients with schizophrenia make less eye contact with others during social interactions, although this may be limited to certain types of interactions that are of a personal nature. When watching emotional films, patients with schizophrenia were found to be less facially animated than nonpatient controls. They may also be impaired in the use of paralanguage (exempli gratia, tone of voice, speech rate, inflection) to convey emotion. In family interactions, patients with schizophrenia use fewer gestures and lean forward less toward their partners than psychiatric controls do. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Research on the encoding aspects of social skills shows that people with schizophrenia perform very poorly. Both their verbal and their nonverbal behaviours suggest disengagement, confusion, and existence in reality that is difficult to express, much less share with others. Sadly, the extent of social skills deficits associated with schizophrenia does not stop there. Aside from encoding or behavioural production skills, decoding skills are also vital to effective interpersonal communication. These skills are often referred to as social and emotional sensitivity or nonverbal sensitivity. Such skills call on one’s ability to perceive and read subtle cues in the discourse and nonverbal behaviour of other people at a rapid pace. Obviously, these are cognitively demanding skills that are preferred over a lifetime of human interactions. People with schizophrenia experience a multitude of decoding problems in interpersonal contexts. These interpersonal decoding skills problems are undoubtedly related to a more general problem that reveals itself equally in poor performance in decoding noninterpersonal phenomena. By definition, inherent in its diagnostic criteria, schizophrenia involves many serious perceptual problems that are often manifest in hallucinations and disorganized cognition and affect. They make for ineffective social perception that undoubtedly contributes to deteriorated interpersonal experiences for people with schizophrenia. The real enemies of humankind today—as in the recent past—are doctrines which have issued from the womb of hate and greed, suspicion and violence, and grown only to spread hate and greed, suspicion and violence. For the inevitable harm of such thinking is as self-destructive as it is socially destructive. If they could penetrate, by some mystical insight, the awful horrors and repulsive episodes which mar modern history, they would find something unimaginably grand, beautiful, and wise behind it all, unseen and undreamt by the human agents responsible for this misery. It is unjustified escapism. Postwar sensualism is as much a form of escapism as postwar ashramism. Folly and evil play the most powerful parts on the contemporary World stage. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
If we look at the large panorama of the twenty-first century history, with its tortures and devastations, its epidemics and destructions, its famines and depopulations, above all, its menace of horrors yet to come, we can see how trivial a thing in fate’s eyes is personal life, how unimportant in them is personal emotion. What does fate, God, Nature, care about the little histories, the little loves, the little griefs of pullulating humans, who must appear in those same eyes as hardly more noteworthy than pullulating ants! There are millions—nay, billions—of these men and women who are so like each other in their basic natures and desires, that it does not make any difference to the planetary Mind or the protoplasmic Force whether some of them die or survive, mate of frustrate, are ecstatically happy or dully miserable, stay perfectly whole or limp hideously maimed. The fact is that the World finds itself today very nearly spiritually bankrupt. Snobbishness is only misplaced reverence. Any good that is misplaced easily becomes an evil. The older nations were permeated with this evil far too much. The World approaches insane chaos and convulsion at most, perilous conditions at least. The fault lies not only with the criminal but also with the society in which created the conditions which tempted one to enter criminality. There is such insecurity and instability, so much demoralization and so much discontent. Are human life and human destiny ruled by mere chance or by iron law? If by chance, then our race is wholly at the mercy of evil humans, but if by law, then we may hope to see the pattern of ultimate good eventually show itself in its history as these humans and all humans are steered back to righteous courses by suffering and intuition, by revelation and reflection. The fact that human character as a whole seems not to have improved in our time does not mean that it will fail to improve in the future. Human virtue is only in its infancy and will one day attain its maturity. Human goodness in essence is indestructible because the divine soul in humans is indestructible. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
There is in the very midst of humanity today, albeit hidden and awaiting its hour of manifestation, that which is the very opposite of what has already manifested itself though the evil channels. There is divine pity as against barbarous cruelty, sublime wisdom as against materialistic ignorance, altruistic service as against aggressive selfishness, and exalted reverence, altruistic service as against hard atheism. There is the recall to a forgotten God. There is redemptive grace. There is a hand outstretched in mercy to the worst sinner, and in consolation to the worst sufferer. Those who are mystically sensitive feel its presence even now, however intermittently. Too many people hold, whether consciously or unconsciously, the materialistic belief that they are here on Earth to satisfy their material desires only, and that they have no higher responsibility. This is no time for smooth words that hide the true state of affairs, no times for shallow optimism that screens the precipice along whose edge we are walking. Humanity passed through the five-year agony of life-and-death conflict against the enemy attempts at World domination because it earlier hugged the delusion either that the danger did not exist or that it was very slight even if it did exist. It cannot afford to repeat that error. The peril in which it now stands from materialism—whether avowed, open, or disguised, supported by out-of-date science, or molded from out-of-date religion—is just as grave in its own way because of its terrifying spiritual and physical consequences. The materialistic view of humans, which would regard one’s life-functioning as a set of physical processes only, which would condemn one to an absolute lack of spiritual awareness, must die or humans themselves will die with it. Materialism leads to a faulty interpretation of historic events and one-sided interpretation of personal ones. Most of the modern civilizations which are based on materialism and take no account of the spiritual nature of humans are building towers of Babel which, when they have reached a certain height, will topple down. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The greater the height, the larger the number of broken pieces. The creativity of these civilizations is illusory; they seem to be productive, but they are really destructive, for since they do not conform to the World-Idea the karma they are making must inevitably bring all this about. The gods of quite virtue and spiritual wisdom have had fewer votaries than at most other parallel periods of our history, while the grinning demons of brazen pleasure and materialistic pursuits have been far busier. Folly holds the field. Despite all the scientific backwardness and primitive character attributed to them, there was always a place in most of the civilization of antiquity—and there still is in the Old World—for the self-actualized or the prophet. In the New World there does not seem to be one for one today—on the contrary, one is too often met with unjust suspicious and hopeless misunderstandings and so can do nothing else than crawl into one’s shell. This accusing fact that our society has no place for one, sets no importance on one and perceives no value in one, is of itself enough to damn it for having strayed so far from its higher purposes. There is something seriously wrong with a civilization which thinks that the effort to come into Overself-consciousness is an abnormal and even an insane one. It is a stupid and narrow outlook which equates the desire for material progress with the pursuit of materialism. We have passed out the centuries belief in fossilized creeds only to pass into the centuries of superstitious belief in credalized fossils—such as the materialistic conception of Man, the crude notion that the inferiority of all Eastern knowledge. Whether we take the industrialized machine-ridden civilization of Europe or that of the United States of America, in the end they are setting up the same goals—the creation of slavery to technology which can only end in psychosis and physical illness. When a people is concerned only with material things, and when their desires are wholly confined to them, it is proper to call them materialists. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Just as nature has set limits to the status of a well-formed human, beyond which there are but giants or dwarfs, so too, with regard to the best constitution of a state, there are limits to the size it can have, so as not to be too large to be capable of being well governed, nor too small to be capable of preserving itself on its own. In every body politic there is a maximum force that it cannot exceed, and which has often fallen short by increasing in size. The more the social bond extends the looser it becomes, and in general a small state is proportionately stronger than a large one. A thousand reasons prove this maxim. First, administration becomes more difficult over great distances, just as a weight becomes heavier at the end of a longer lever. It also becomes more onerous as the number of administrative levels multiplies, because first each city has its own administrative which the populace pays for; each district has its own, again paid for by the people; next each province has one and then the great governments, the satrapies and vice royalties, requiring a greater cost the high you go, and always at the expense of the unfortunate people. Finally, there is the supreme administration which weights down on everyone. All these surcharges continually exhaust the subjects. Far from being governed by these different orders, they are worse governed than if there were but one administration over them. Meanwhile, hardly any resources remain for meeting emergencies; and when recourse must be made to them, the state is always on the verge of its ruin. This is not all. Not only does the government have less vigour and quickness in enforcing the observance of the laws, preventing nuisances, correcting abuses and foreseeing the seditious undertakings that can occur in distant places, but also the populace has less affection for its leaders when it never sees them, for the homeland, which, to its eyes, is like the World, and for its fellow citizens, the majority of whom are foreigners to it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The same laws cannot be suitable to so many diverse provinces which have different customs, live in contrasting climates, and which are incapable of enduring the same form of government. Different laws create only trouble and confusion among the peoples who live under the same rulers and are in continuous communication. They intermingle and intermarry, and, being under the sway of other customs, never know whether their patrimony is actually their own. Talents are hidden; virtues are unknown; vices are unpunished in this multitude of humans who are unknow to one another which the seat of supreme administration brings together in one place. The leaders, overwhelmed with work, see nothing for themselves; clerks govern the state. Finally, the measures that need to be taken to maintain the general authority, which so many distant officials want to avoid or harass, absorb all the public attention. Nothing more remains for the people’s happiness, and there barely remains enough for its defense in time of need. And thus a body which is too big for its constitution collapses and perished, crushed by its own weight. On the other hand, the state ought to provide itself with a firm foundation to give it solidity, to resist the shocks it is bound to experience, as well as the efforts it will have to make to sustain itself. For all the peoples have a kind of centrifugal force, by which they continually act one against the other and tend to expand at the expense of their neighbours, like Descartes’ vortices. Thus the weak risk being soon swallowed up; scarcely any people can preserve itself except by putting itself in a kind of equilibrium with all, which nearly equalizes the pressure on all sides. It is clear from this that there are reasons for expanding and reasons for contracting, and it is not the least of the political theorist’s talents to find, between these and other reason, the proportion most advantageous to the preservation of the state. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
In general, it can be said that the former reasons, being merely external and relative, should be subordinated to the latter reasons, which are internal and absolute. A strong, healthy constitution is the first thing one needs to look for, and one should count more on the vigour born of a good government than on the resources furnished by a large territory. Moreover, there have been states so constituted that the necessity for conquests entered into their very constitution, and that, to maintain themselves, they were forced to expand endlessly. Perhaps they congratulated themselves greatly on account of this happy necessity, which nevertheless showed them, together with the limit of their size, the inevitable moment of their fall. In Britain, a Manchester housewife named Katherine Fisher, after suffering for years from a desperate fear of leaving her own home, founded an organization for others with similar phobias. Today that organization, The Phobics Society, has many branches and is one of thousands of new groups cropping up in many of the high-technology nations to help people deal directly with them own problems—psychological, medical, social, or sexual. In Detroit, Michigan USA, some 50 “bereavement groups” have sprung up to assist people suffering from grief after the loss of a relative or friend. In Australia an organization called GROW brings together former mental patients and “nervous persons.” GROW now has chapters in Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, Alaska, New Zealand, Ireland, Trinidad/Tobago. In America, PFLAG has over 400 chapters across the country, and boasts of more than 200,000 members to help those with homosexual children. In Britain, Depressives Associated has some 60 chapters. From Addicts Anonymous and the Black Lung Association to Parents Without Partners and Widow-to-Widow, new groups are forming everywhere. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Of course, there is nothing new about people in trouble getting together to talk out their problems and learn from one another. Nonetheless, historians can find little precedent for the wildfire speed with which the self-help movement is spreading today. Human Services Research Institute is a team of more than 50 dedicated professionals, which provides research, support, and guidance to clients looking to develop more efficient and responsive service systems. They work across all sectors and program area in health and human services, addressing the needs of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities; people experiencing behavioural health disorders; children, youth, and families; seniors and people with physical disabilities; people experiencing housing instability or homelessness; and states and communities looking to promote population health. In the United States of America alone there are now over 500,000 such groupings with new ones forming daily. Many are short-lived, but for each one that disappears several seem to take its place. These organizations vary widely. Some share the new suspicion of specialists and attempt to work without them. They rely entirely on what might be termed “cross-counseling”—people swapping advice based on their own life experience, as distinct from receiving traditional counseling from the professionals. Some see themselves as providing a support system for people in trouble. Other play a political role, lobbying for changes in legislation or tax regulations. Still others have a quasi-religious character. Some are international communities whose members not only meet but actually live together. Such groups are now forming regional, even transnational linkages. To the extent the professional psychologists, social workers, or doctors are involved at all, they increasingly undergo a role change, shifting from the role of impersonal expert who is assumed to know best to that of listener, teacher, and guide who works with the patient or client. Existing voluntary or nonprofit groups—originally struggling to see how they fit in with a movement based on the principle of helping oneself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The self-help movement is thus restructuring the socio-sphere. Smokers, stutterers, suicide-prone people, gambler, victims of throat disease, parents of twins, overeaters, and other such groupings now form a dense network of organization that mesh with the emerging Third Wave family and corporate structures. However, whatever their significance for social organization, they represent a basic shift from passive consumer to active prosumer, and they thus hold economic meaning as well. Though ultimately dependent on the market and still intertwined with it, they are transferring activity from Sector B of the economy to Sector A, from the exchange sector to the presumption sector. Nor is this burgeoning movement the only such force: Some of the richest and largest corporations in the World are also—for their own technological and economic reasons—accelerating the rise of the prosumer. Prayer is a legal right. Under this new covenant contract, sealed by the Lord Jesus Christ in His own blood, you have the legal right as a born-again believer to enter the throne room of God. You can stand in His presence without fear, without a sense of inferiority, without a sense of guilt, because of what Jesus did. It is your legal right to come boldly before the throne of grace to request Heavenly intervention in this Earth on your behalf. Prayer is your legal right, but you should come by the rules of spiritual law that govern prayer. Even though you do not, the law will still work—the law that says, one shall have whatsoever one saith. Or the law that says, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them. These laws still work regardless of our ignorance of the Word. Prayer is the legal right to ask God to supernaturally intervene in your behalf. The power of binding and loosing is not in Heaven. It is on Earth. You are the one who has authority to bind the forces of evil. You are the one who has the power to loose the ability of God in this Earth through the prayer of faith. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
It is your legal right to use the prayer of faith to put you over in life. Wrong words in prayer will hold you in bondage. They will loose the ability of the enemy against you. Right words in prayer will release the ability of God. Prayer is to line ourselves up with the Word of God and set ourselves in a position to give God liberty to move on our behalf. Sometimes our prayers have bound God. If you rightly divide the Word of God in prayer, you will loose God’s ability. It will cause you to stand in a new realm of faith. You will come to the point that you will not have to pray all night. You can pray, knowing that God hears you. Then you will be silent to the Lord. Try to bring as much of your mind into your prayer as possible. When tired, rest. Repeat the rhythm of prayer five times. Such mental concentration is one of the secrets of champion professional strong humans. The faithful practice of these mind-concentrated mental exercises of prayer must lead in time to better bodily self-control. Prayer evokes the greatest power to resolve situations and to assist one in making one’s dreams com true, and it brings about the greatest results. However, one may practise prayer until Doomsday, mutter the hundred and eight different mystic spells, sit in all the sixty-four postures of yoga of body control, hold one’s breath for a whole hour or vary its rhythms in every conceivable manner, but the Overself will remain stubbornly remote unless one frankly faces and successfully fights out one’s struggle against one’s own ego in one’s own heart. No physical contortion, exercise, or manipulation can ever take its place. An isolated prayer is always nice. However, consider three minutes every day, or more. Prayer seems very effective when it is done regularly and is habit forming. Help teach your children, instead of complaining, try to pray to God and ask for the goodness that you want. It is futile to try to take the Kingdom of Heaven by violence. It cannot be successful. This desire to enter the Kingdom in a hurry is pardonable. Yet if it were fulfilled, the fulfillment would be a premature attainment and consequently lacking in fullness, falling short in wholeness, and uncertain of steadiness. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
All the different stages of development are needed in experience and can be missed only to our loss. Although timelessness is the quest’s end, the journey itself must take place in the measured pace of time to prepare us properly for its end. It may be that this is because we may not take hold of spiritual possessions which we have not rightfully earned by personal labours and to which we have no honest legal title. It may be that a spiritual treasure cannot become our own in advance of the requisite efforts to develop adequate fitness and understanding for such vast responsibility. “My son, give attention to my words; incline your ear to my sayings. Do not let them depart from your eyes; keep them in the midst of your heart; for they are life to those who find them, and health to all their flesh,” reports Proverbs 4.20-22. Some stories bear repeating over and over because they build our faith. For instance. God’s people often retold the Exodus story, partly because God instructed them to do so, but in my mind, I can also imagine them telling the story of Moses and the deliverance from Egyptian slavery for the sheer joy they experienced in passing on the event to the next generation. In some ways, I feel the same way when I tell about my father’s miraculous healing. The doctor said he had days to live. So he went home and pored over his Bible and found about one hundred favorite passages of Scriptures concerning healing. His circumstances began to change. Not overnight, but little by little, he began to feel better. He got his appetite back and started gaining weight. Slowly but surely, his strength returned. Maybe you are facing a “hopeless” situation. Do not give up. God is a miracle-working God. He knows what you are going through, and He will not let you down. Start speaking words of faith today, and watch how God causes your circumstances to change. Ecstasy is not a permanent mark of the mystical experience, but only a temporary mark which accompanies its first discovery. It is the beginners who are so excited by mystical ecstasies, not the proficient. The process of re-adjusting the personality to a future filled with wonderful promise and stamped with tremendous importance naturally moves the emotional nature towards an extreme delight. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to regard the mystic’s ecstasy as something that was merely emotional only. Behind it there is the all-important contribution of the Overself’s grace, love, and peace. When the emotional excitement of the discovery eventually subsided, these will then show themselves more plainly as being its really significant elements. Life can never again be just as ordinary, just as commonplace as before, nor just as if one had never passed through those vital moments of divine uplift. The white-hot point of their inspiration has faded, but it can never be forgotten. It will, nay it must, show itself powerfully in one’s directive purposes and in the quality of one’s living. One will want to keep this awakened consciousness at all times. This aspiration will instantaneously or eventually bring one to tread the Quest. In the intellectual deductions which one may make after the experience, and when one is viewing it analytically, one may find corroboration of one’s true beliefs or contradiction of one’s false ones. However, the ego having closed in upon one again, this may happen only partially, or only slightly, depending on its strength. Every glimpse of the Infinite helps one to let go of the finite, to detach oneself from one’s possessions and passions. Here is goodness and beauty which Worldly objects and Worldly creatures do not possess. The human who has once glimpsed them can never again become completely satisfied with the World’s offerings, for this reason, but will again and again be haunted by, and attracted to, the vision of this higher possibility for humans. Blaming and attacking are a more aggressive form of manipulation used in relationships by Critical Christians. Because of the many times such persons have been hurt, they fixate on being angry and punitive, believing that consistently blaming and attacking others will keep them from ever being hurt again. Being hurt is the Critical Christian’s greatest fear. So, paradoxically, one becomes the aggressor in hurting others first to keep from being hurt. This perpetuates a vicious cycle. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
While being in good contact with the polarities of anger and strength, the Critical Christian is out of touch with the complementary dimensions of love and weakness. In fact, one is stuck on the anger polarity and cannot allow into awareness feelings of tenderness or humility because they threaten the rigid pattern of always being in control and being right. When anything happens that the Critical Christian does not like, one compulsively seeks to find fault with others, God, or the World. Critical Christians enjoy bullying others into believing that their way is the only way. A closely associated strategy is judging others—constantly pointing out what they should be or say or do and where they have gone wrong. Because the Critical Christin is basically angry at the World, one usually communicates with others in a rather brusque way. However, the same dynamic of attacking and blaming may be carried on with a smile and an artificial appearance of being a nice person. Sometimes the Critical Christian just complains and whines constantly about not living this or that. As a child, the critical person could well have received the kind of harsh, judgmental treatment one now dishes out to others. Much psychological research shows that children learn many of their basic styles of relating by modeling themselves on the way that their parents or other authority figures relate to them. For instance, there is a high probability that children who have been physically or psychologically abused by parents will in turn abuse their own children, unless specific therapeutic intervention gives them new alternatives that they never had a chance to learn. Chances are the critical person experienced real fear, helplessness, and torment in childhood. This could have been inflicted by insecure parents, jealous brothers or sisters, exploitative relatives, or bullying peers. However, at some point, the pain reached such a crescendo that the person reversed roles—becoming the persecutor rather than the victim—and spent the rest of one’s life taking out the frustration, hostility, and pain on others. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
When people living out a punitive style of relating become Christians, there is a high probability that they will unconsciously contaminate their understanding of God and other people. The contamination is a result of the old hurts and the hostility that they generated within. The irony, then, is that Critical Christians rationalize such attitudes and behaviour by believing that God is the one who is angry, harsh, and judgmental of everyone. This supposedly excuses them for their own hostile behaviour. This type of individual might even believe that he or she is an emissary of God, sent to dispense God’s wrath on others. Once, therefore, feels quite smug in laying heavy demands upon others and becoming a hard taskmaster in telling others how to be holy and live up to God’s supposed expectations. A noticeable pattern for the Critical Christian is the preoccupation with ritual, rule, and regulation. In the zeal to serve God, one becomes guilty of destroying the spirit of love and gentleness that characterizes true Christian behaviour with a dogmatic and almost vicious concern with the letter of the law. Some Critical Christians can recognize that they are intolerant and impatient with anyone who sees things differently from them. They often feel that they have all the answers about God, life, and other people’s behaviour. When they become aware of how many people who have felt hurt, and misunderstood by their brash approach to life, the understand they have judged others too harshly. As these individuals grow, they develop a more gentle lifestyle that enables one to relate genuinely to people who are quite different from them. Father, it is Your Word that I rely upon to bring healing and health to my life and to those from whom I am praying. I am not interested in spiritual tricks or formulas; I only want Your will to be done. May my words reflect Your words and Your will in the situations I am facing. I will dare to speak faith-filled words. Faith comes from the Word, not prayer. I once head someone say, “I prayed all night about a certain situation, just stayed up and prayed all night.” Well if they had prayed in faith, they would have gone to sleep. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Pray in faith, then rest in the Lord. When you start praying in faith, your words will be few, but they will be effective. (However, keep in mind if your system is already perfected, do not change it.) Sometimes we pray just trying to muster up some faith. That is not scriptural. Faith comes by hearing the Word of God, not by praying. Go to the Word of God and hear the Word until faith comes; do not be too quick to pray. Sometimes we start talking before we know what to say. Hear the Word…hear the Word…hear the Word. It might take a week or a month, but faith will come. Then go to God with the prayer of faith and thank Him. You will not have to stay there long. You can get more from God in two minutes, believing Him, than you can praying all night in unbelief. However, keep in mind, long conversations with God can be like therapy. A little patience and humility in adversity will please God more than a lot of consolation and devotion in prosperity. Why do you become depressed when a small insult is sent your way? If it has been a bigger one, a real calumny, say, you still should not have let it bother you. Let it pass. It is not the first time or the last time, just the present time, an they will keep coming, no matter how long you live. Verily, you will do virilely most days, that is to say, until sometime prickly gets in your way. You are very good at giving advice on vice to others, how to battle the Enemy, that sort of thing. However, when tribulation suddenly comes a-knocking, you quickly lose your water. Pay some attention to how fragile you are, especially in the small things of life. They are for your salvation, all these dreadful little things that happen to you. Put the bad stuff out of your heart, as best as you know how. And if it goes get to you, do not let it depress you or entangle you for long. As for consolation, if you are not getting any, then at the least bear up patiently. Also, if you accidentally overhear an insulting remark and feel your gorge rise, reprimand yourself and do not let a wisecrack escape your mouth, lest the tots and tykes be scandalized. If commotion arises, quickly muffle your drums, and from that, the internal pain will be suitably and smoothly hummed with grace. Up to this point God has lived, prepared to help us, and he is prepared to help us more. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
However, we must first have faith in God, then invoke God directly, and address God nicely. Keep your heard on straight! Cinch up your cincture! There are worse battles ahead. However, do not fuss and fume if you have to skirmish with tribulation, or worse, come under heavy fire from temptation. Why? Well, God should have thought it obvious by now. You are homo sapiens, not Sapientia herself! You are fleshy, not feathery; human, not Angel. Just saying in the same old place as far as virtue’s concerned is not really a virtue in the spiritual life. The First Angel as well as the First Man found that out. And now they are out of Heaven, out of Paradise. God is the One who raises up those who are down and out about their own welfare. However, those who know their own infirmity, these God will carry to His divinity. May all I say and all I think be in harmony with thee, God within me, God beyond me, maker of the trees. In me be the windswept truth of shorepine, fragrance of balsam and spruce, the grace of hemlock. In me the truth of douglas fir, straight, tall, strong-trucked land hero of fireproof bark. Sheltering tree of life, cedar’s truth be mine, cypress truth, juniper aroma, strength of yew. May all I say and all I think be in harmony with thee, God within me, God beyond me, maker of the trees. In me be the truth of streamlover willow soil-giving alder hazel of sweet nuts, wisdom-branching oak. In me the joy of crabapple, greatmaple, vinemaple, cleansing cascara and lovely dogwood. And the gracious truth of the copper branches arbutus, bright with colour and fragrance, be with me on the Earth. May all I say and all I think be in harmony with thee, God within me, God beyond me, maker of the trees. This Feast of the Law all your gladness display, today all your homages render. What profit can lead one so pleasant a way, what jewels can vie with its splendour? Then exult in the Law on its festival day, the Law is our Light and Defender. My God I will praise in a jubilant lay, my hope in Him never surrender. His glory proclaim where His chosen sons pray, my Rock all my trust shall engender. Then exult in the Law on its festival day, the Law is our Light and Defender. My heart of Thy goodness shall carol alway, Thy praises I ever will render; while breath is, my lips all Thy wonders shall say, Thy truth and Thy kindness so tender. Then exult in the Law on its festival day, the Law is our Light and Defender. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Yeah, You Sure Do Have a Problem!
Just because you do not understand it, does not mean It is not so. Contemporary investigations of family relationships and schizophrenia center more on explaining the course than the cause of the disorder. There are, however, some notable instances where researchers have employed family-of-origin variables to predict the onset of schizophrenia. Three family variables that have been, and continue to be, particularly influential in this area are communication deviance, expressed emotion, and family affective style. In the classic family approaches to schizophrenia, patients’ families often have odd and unfocused styles of interacting with each other, perhaps in the service of sustaining pseudomutuality. Members of these families have difficulty establishing and maintaining a shared focus of attention through their discourse. Out of this original set of studies and hypotheses about family interaction and schizophrenia emerged a very influential line of research on communication deviance. It has been theorized that people learn to focus their attention and derive meaning from external stimuli through their interactions, particularly with parents, during the early years of life. Odd and deviant styles of communication among the parents were presumed to interact with biological predispositions to contribute to thought and communication disturbances in children who are unable to relate to and understand their parents. A considerable body of evidence indicates that a family affected by a member’s schizophrenia will communicate in odd, idiosyncratic, illogical, and fragmented language, even when that member is not present. Topics of conversation will often drift or abruptly change direction, with a lack of closure. Such interactions are marked by a blurred focus of attention and meaning. This characteristic style of family communication has been labeled CD (communication deviance). #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Traditionally, CD has been assessed from transcripts of parents’ responses to projective tests such as the Rorschach or the Thematic Apperaption Test (TAT). These responses are generally made in the absence of the child. People with schizophrenia may have a contorted peculiar language and misinterpratations of social and verbal language. This is referred to as interactional communication deviance (ICD), and it classifies parents’ discourse into categories such as idea fragments (exempli gratia “But the thing is as I said, there’s got…you can’t drive in the alley), contradictions or reactions (exempli gratia, “No, that’s right, she does” and ambiguous reference (exempli gratia ‘Kids stuff that’s one thing but something else is different too). Abundant evidence indicates that CD is higher in parents of patients with schizophrenia than it is in parents of either patients without schizophrenia or healthy controls. It is particularly intriguing that this distorted form of communication is highly reminiscent of the communication style that typifies the person who actually has schizophrenia. It is therefore unclear whether parental CD reflects a genetic effect that is evident in both parent and child, or a parental behaviour that contributes to the child’s problem. The onset of schizophrenia can be predicted. In one study, parents from families with moderately disturbed teenagers each responded to TAT protocols, from which measures of CD were taken. Fifteen years later, the lifetime prevalence of schizophrenia in the children was assessed. High CD in the parents was strongly associated with the appearance of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders in some of the family of offspring at follow-up. In a similar study, disturbed high-risk adolescents were followed over a period of 5 years. By the end of the study, approximately 10 percent of those whose parents who were low or intermediate in CD went on to develop schizophrenia, whereas 56 percent of those whose parents were high in CD developed schizophrenia. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Other researchers on CD has examined its role in the course of schizophrenia. For example, one group of patients with schizophrenia and their parents were followed for over the course of 1 year. Within the 12-month period of the study, slightly over 50 percent of the patients has experienced a relapse. Parental CD at the time of the patients’ discharge was significantly higher among the parents of those who relapsed versus those who did not. However, in the assessment of parental CD at time 1, there were no differences among parents of those who did versus those who did not relapse. As it turns out, the parents of those patients who relapsed exhibited a dramatic increase in their CD over the course of the study. This investigation indicates that returning to a home with high CD will increase the likelihood of relapse. The results of an adoption study conducted in Finland illustrate the power of parental CD to influence schizophrenic outcomes in children. Children who were genetically at risk or predisposed to develop schizophrenia, were especially likely to develop the disorder when reared by an adoptive family that was high in CD. However, among the low-risk adoptees, there was no relationship between CD in the adoptive parents and thought disorders in children. These findings suggest that parental CD may be a family stressor that interacts with a preexisting diathesis to influence the development of schizophrenia. It is reasonable to wonder whether parental CD is a repose to schizophrenia in a child. Interaction with a person afflicted with schizophrenia may possibly bring about CD. However, the parental CD is not a consequence of living in a household with someone who has schizophrenia. In addition to distorted verbal behaviour, parental CD may be accompanied by problematic use of nonverbal behaviour. Parents who are high in CD also exhibit gaze aversion and rigidity in facial expression while interacting with their children. These are powerfully disconfirming behaviours. At the same time, they fit well with poor focus of attention that is the hallmark of CD. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
When a high-CD parent “interacts” with a child, both verbal and nonverbal behaviour suggest that the parent’s thoughts and emotions are elsewhere, and that there is some tension between the parent and the child. Consequently, the child may be met with fragmented and disconfirming behaviour in both the verbal and nonverbal channels when interacting with the high-CD parent. It appears that parental CD functions as a type of stressor that affects the course and outcome of schizophrenia. When parents’ communication is particularly amorphous and peculiar, children may become confused and uncertain about even basic and fundamental social realities. This confusion undoubtedly has functional significance in the course of the schizophrenia, as it is so central in the constellation of symptoms that make up the disorder. It is difficult to read the transcripts and hear the speech of a high-CD parents, and not wonder about the parent’s own mental health, aside from that of the child. It is therefore understandable that when patients are discharged into the care of such parents, they offspring remain at risk for future relapse. Early investigations of family expressed emotion (EE) identified a pattern of criticism, overinvolvement, overprotectiveness, excessive attention, and emotional reactivity that appeared to create a vulnerability to relapse and poor social adjustment among patients with schizophrenia. EE represents an attitude of criticism and emotional overinvolvement on the part of the parent, which is expressed during an interview with a researcher or clinician. Originally a special interview procedure, known as the Camerwell Family Interview, was employed to assess family EE. The construct is operationalized through the frequency of critical remarks, degree of hostility, and the degree of emotional overinvolvement expressed by a family member during the interview. Generally, parents who express more than six criticisms during the interview are characterized as high in EE. EE is a combination of four behavioural characteristics: intrusiveness; anger and/or acute distress and anxiety; overt blame and criticism of the patient; and an intolerance of the patient’s symptoms. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
One study revealed that patients who returned to a home with high-EE relatives exhibited a 9-month relapse rate of 51 percent, whereas only 13 percent of those who returned to a low-EE family relapsed. Family therapy programs that improve communication and problem solving, thus lowering EE, have been shown to lower relapse rates significantly. Recently discharged patients with schizophrenia who returned to either high-EE or low-EE families were examined. Patients from high-EE families exhibited more odd and disruptive behaviour during a family interaction approximately 6 weeks after hospital discharge than did patients from low-EE households. Relatives in the high EE households were more critical of the patients when they verbalized unusual thoughts than low-EE family members were. Studies such as these clearly paint a picture of a vicious circle in high-EE family relations: These parents respond to a patient with a lot of criticism, because patients from these households appear to exhibit more bizarre and disruptive behaviour than patients from low-EE homes. It is likely that the negative reactions they receive from their families contribute further to the potential for relapse among patients. A review of 25 studies on family EE indicated a 50 percent relapse rate, over a period of 9-12 months, among patients discharged to high-EE families, but only 21 percent among those with low-EE relatives. These findings indicate that the odds of relapse are increased by approximately 2.5:1 for patients discharged to high- versus low-EE relatives. Similar findings are evident in a recent meta-analysis of this literature, indicating an effect size of r =.30 for the association between family EE and relapse. Studies of family EE show that three factors are prominent in protecting a patient with schizophrenia from relapse. The first factor is low-EE in the relatives who live with the patient. For better or worse, most patients are discharged back to their families of origin. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
When family members harbour critical and hostile attitudes toward a patient, the likelihood of relapse is high. On the other hand, low-EE, which may be indicative of greater tranquility, support, acceptance, can greatly reduce the probability of relapse. A second protective factor is low (id est, less than 35 hours per week) face-to-face contact with high-EE parents. Again, avoiding the agitating effect of high-EE family members appears to pay some dividends. The final protective factor identified is whether a patient is maintained on medication. Obviously, those who comply with medication regiments are at reduced risk for relapse. These authors argue that of the three factors, low-EE in the family is most important in reducing relapse within a year from discharge, as it appears to have a prophylactic effect regardless of compliance with medication. Family EE may function as a stressor that precipitates relapse among recovering patients with schizophrenia. The experience of a psychological problem as profound as schizophrenia can leave a recovering patient in a very fragile psychological and social state. Even though symptoms may be under control and in remission, the interpersonal disruption that is associated with this disorder may still be evident, leaving the patient in a precarious state of interpersonal behaviours, the patient may have minimal opportunity for seeking social support and validation from other sources. The end result of this state of affairs may be relapse into an episode of schizophrenia upon being pressed by EE from family members. There is reason to believe that parents who are particularly high in EE may have psychological problems of their own. Studies found that lifetime rates of major psychiatric disorders were 100 percent in high-EE parents of patients with schizophrenia, and only 44 percent in parents who scored low on measures of EE. Although this 44 percent lifetime prevalence rate for the low-EE parents may seem high, it considered normal when contrasted with other studies, suggesting that these parents as a group are no different from those in the general population. The amazingly high rate of psychiatric disorder in the high-EE parents raises the possibility that EE may be a marker of genetic transmission of mental illness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Family EE is assumed to be a stressor that evokes psychiatric symptoms in a patient. Do patients find high-EE to be stressful? To explore the issue, patients with schizophrenia were asked to discuss happy and unhappy memories from their lives. Patients with high-EE parents recalled significantly fewer positive memories that involved their parents, compared to patients with low-EE parents. Overall, parents were featured in twice as many positive as negative memories. However, high-EE parents were featured in roughly equal proportions of positive and negative recollections. The study provides at least indirect evidence that high-EE parents are experienced as stressful by patients with schizophrenia. Research on family EE continues to flourish. In addition to being a useful and reliable predictor of relapse, EE may be fruitfully understood as a familial risk indicator for schizophrenia. High-EE parents are especially likely to have their own history of psychopathology. Thus parental EE may signal a possible genetic transmission of psychopathology. High-EE parents feel that their own psychological problems were overcome though internal efforts. Whether family EE is viewed as a predictor of relapse or a risk factor, one can interpret it within a diathesis-stress framework, in which this conflictual and hostile family attitude functions as a stressor on the patient. At the same time, however, it is important to bear in mind that EE may also reflect parents’ frustration and appraisal of the burden of dealing with their son or daughter with schizophrenia. Whereas EE reflects the content of communications, CD reflect the form of communication. As if to make a potentially disruptive family situation worse for patients with schizophrenia, families are that are high in CD also tend to be high in EE. Consequently, patients may be dealt a double dose of problematic interactional exchanges with their family members. It is little wonder that patients discharged to parents high in EE, who are also likely to express unclear, odd, and fragmented ideas, are at such a high risk for relapse. When the two variables were put side by side in the same investigation, family CD proved to be a more powerful predictor of schizophrenia outcomes (exempli gratia, number of relapses, time hospitalized, ratings of psychosocial functioning) then family EE. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Affective style (AS) is a measure of the verbal behaviour of family members during discussion of a conflict-laden issues with the patient present. Whereas EE is an attitude of hostility, criticism, and overinvolvement expressed by a family member during an interview in the absence of the patient, AS represent the family members’ actual verbal behaviours when interacting with the patient. It may be viewed as the behavioural manifestation of the attitude indexed by the expressed emotion construct, but this relationship has been difficult to establish empirically. Although AS and EE are close related and perhaps overlapping constructs, a distinct body of literature exists on AS, indicating that (like EE) it is often predictive of relapse among patients with schizophrenia. Measures of AS are typically taken from a series of brief family discussions about a current unresolved problem in the family. As might be expected, these conversations pull for substantial emotional expression. The conversations are then transcribed, and the family members’ speech content is coded for support, criticism, guilt induction, and intrusiveness. The unit of analysis for the coding is typically six lines of uninterrupted speech by a single speaker. The results of the coding are used to classify families into one of three profiles AS profiles: benign, intermediate, or poor. Benign-As families display a lack of negative behaviours (id est, personal criticism, guilt induction, and critical or neutral intrusiveness) during their interactions. Intermediate-As families are those who express some negative but some positive speech behaviours (id est, primary support) during the family discussion. Finally, poor-AS (also referred to as negative-AS) families are those in which one or both parents exhibit negative verbal behaviours, but no positive verbal behaviours. In one of the first AS studies, 65 families of high-risk, disturbed, but not psychotic adolescents participated in the family discussion. The adolescents were then assessed at a follow-up 5 years later. When a broad schizophrenia-spectrum diagnosis (exempli gratia, including schizoid personality disorder) was used as the outcome criterion, only 8 percent of adolescents with a benign-AS family profile at time 1 received a schizophrenia spectrum diagnosis at time 2. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Among those with an intermediate-AS family profile at time 1, 50 percent were diagnosed at time 2. This figure increased to 59 percent among those with a poor-AS family profile. Although it has been found that the best prediction of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders involved a combination of As and Cd, it is clear that family AS is a marker of risk for schizophrenia. In a longitudinal study of even longer duration, a group of moderately disturbed teens and their families were followed over a period of 15 years. The families participated in the typical conflict discussion. They were then classified as either negative- or benign-AS. Results for the study indicated that within those families classified as benign-AS, no cases of extended schizophrenia-spectrum disorder developed over the 15-year interval. However, almost all the schizophrenia-spectrum cases observed at time 2 occurred in the context of a family where one or both parents were high in EE and As. Like the studies on EE, the early studies on AS clearly supposed the hypothesis that family expression of criticism and hostility, in the absence of any supportiveness, indicates a risk for the development of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders among high-risk adolescents. These findings are consistent with early research showing that many psychiatric patients use mental hospitals as a refuge from stressful environments, in which they seek a carefree lifestyle. In addition to being a risk factor in the initial development of the disorder, AS may also predict relapse. In one investigation, patients with schizophrenia whose families had benign-AS profiles at the time of their discharge from the hospital evidenced a 40 percent rehospitalization rate over the next 12 months, whereas those who returned to negative-AS families had over twice the rate (83 percent) of rehospitalization. Even more striking are the findings for AS in concert with medication compliance: Patients with negative-AS families and noncompliance with medication exhibited a 100 percent rehospitalization rate, compared with only 17 percent among those with benign-As families and medication compliance. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Of further interest is the fact that researchers were tested for, and it was largely ruled out that the possibility that those patients from negative-As families were sicker in the first place and therefore more likely to relapse. This finding suggests that it is unlikely that family AS is merely a reaction to the severity of a child’s illness. Approximately 70 percent of those families characterized by excessive criticism and emotional overinvolvement at initial assessment remained that way over the course of the study, regardless of the patient’s clinical status. Furthermore, about 20 percent of the parents become more critical over the course of the study, despite the fact that the patients’ condition actually improved. For most families, AS reflects a relatively stable and enduring style of interaction, which is resistant to treatment and independent of the patients’ recovery status. The connection between family AS and rehospitalization could be the result of at least two different processes. The most straightforward hypothesis is that family AS is a stressor that pushes an already fragile individual “over the edge.” Experiencing a serious psychological problem can leave a recovering patient in a delicate psychological state, as noted earlier. The criticism and intrusiveness evident in a negative-AS household have the potential to strain the already sensitive patient to such an extent that the full disorder may redevelop. An alternative but related hypothesis is that family AS is a stressor that pushes the recovering patient out of the household and back into the hospital, in an effort to seek refuge from the family. Most people would find a negative-AS household to eb an aversive environment. It is understandable that almost anyone would want to get out of such an environment. For the patient with a learning history that involves being taken care of in a hospital, remission and readmission may be functional, in that it removes one from the stressful confines of the negative-As family origin. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Is negative AS specific to families of patients with schizophrenia? Several studies have been conducted to explore this issue, and these generally suggest that the problem is particularly exaggerated in such families. For example, when compared to parents of patients with bipolar disorder, the parents of patients with schizophrenia have been found to make more intrusive and critical statements toward the patients after discharge from the hospital. When compared to families of patients with anorexia nervosa, families of patients with schizophrenia were much more likely to have negative-As profiles. In this sample, only 1 of the 11 families of patients with anorexia nervosa had a negative-As profile. Family AS appears to have a relationship with both the onset and course of schizophrenia. At the same time, the variable has not been as widely embraces as CD or EE. This is due to problems with reliably rating AS. Consequently, the variable appears almost exclusively in research studies of the group at or from UCLA who originally developed the construct. Nevertheless, the available research findings indicate that it is a family interaction phenomenon with potential equal to CD or EE in explaining considerable variance in the course of schizophrenia. Modern conceptualizations of family interaction and schizophrenia fit well within a diathesis-stress framework. Some individuals may harbour a biological predisposition to develop schizophrenia. This predisposition is more formally known as the diathesis. It is unquestionably stressful to live with parents who communicate in odd and illogical ways, and who are unable to establish and maintain a shared focus of attention. It is equally stressful to live with parents who harbour as well as express attitudes of hostility, criticism, and overinvolvement. Sadly, many of these destructive and stressful family interaction patterns cooccur. The confusion and disorientation that parental CD produces, and the guilt, shame, and bewilderment about ego boundaries that parental EE and negative AS create, have the effect of combining flame and fuel among those with an existing predistortion toward schizophrenia and/or trigger relapse. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Current evidence indicates that one could question the mental health of any parent who exhibits excessive hostility, criticism, and emotional overinvolvement toward a child, along with an inability to establish and maintain a shared focus of attention in discussions that have a bizarre tone and structure. These family variables have an undeniable role in the course and in some cases onset of schizophrenia. It is not possible to fully understand and predict this disorder without at least some consideration of the family context in which a patient with schizophrenia was reared and into which one is discharged. The upsurge of interest in Eastern religion and Western cults is welcome, and may help a turn to the Good; but it has its negative side in a matching interest in Evil with a capital E. These evils, sufferings, and calamities exist for all, the good and the bad; such is the human lot. Whether in politics or in society, there is widespread double-talk, publicly upheld untruth, and differing views expressed. Many people have had their eyes opened to the depth and extent of the evil in humans, and they have become sad over it. Today nobody needs to become illumined in order to see the same thing. If some humans wish to withdraw from the World, disgusted with its repeated brutalities and malignances, need we wonder? Because the Universe is a manifestation of the Divine, it must be divinely guided. Therefore its history must be divinely controlled. What has happened in human World affairs so recently and so dramatically is not outside the divine will. What is happening today is just as much inside it. The degenerative process which replaces the universal-mindedness of Goethe by the fanatic narrowness of Goebbels, the calm wisdom of the earlier man by the obscene insanity of the later one, is a subject for reflection. The good and the evil in humans is such long-associated partners that cooperation of the good alone between humans is impossible. At some point of their contact, in some way, the reptilian evil will creep in and make its unpleasant discordant presence felt. Hence universal brotherhood is only a beautiful dream, to be shattered upon awakening to the ugly facts. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The lives of so many good humans in our time have moved inexorably to disaster, like the gloomy story of a Greek tragedy, that the helpless but friendly onlooker may well wonder where God is. A period so filled with confusion and so rife with evil, drives thoughtless people to more sensuality and materialism but thoughtful ones to more aspiration and higher values. O Lord Jesus, Your life was such a small stretch in human history, and even that was despised by Humankind. Despite what the history of the World has said and done, grant that I may imitate You in all respects. “The servant is not greater than the master, nor the student, the teacher.” That is how Your Matthew put it (10.24). We Devouts will be exercised in this life because there is where we will find our Salvation and True Sanctity. Outside of these applications of the spiritual life, whatever I read or hear about You will not give me the same pleasure as knowing You personally. “Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in one’s heart, but believes that what one says is going to happen, it shall be granted to one. Therefore I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they shall be granted you,” reports Mark 11.23-24. If you are in a touch situation today, now more than ever you need to guard what you say and now allow any negative, destructive words to come out of your mouth. Scripture says, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue; and you will eat the fruit thereof,” reports Proverbs 18.21. In other word, you create an environment for either good or evil with your words, and you are going to have to live in that World you have created. If you are always murmuring, complaining, and talking about how bad life is treating you, you are going to live in a pretty miserable, depressing World. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
You will always be tempted to use words to describe negative situations, but God wants us to use our words to change our negative situations. Do not talk about the problem, talk about the solution. Receive the Cross from Jesus Christ’s very hand. Carry it as Jesus handed it over to you, carry it to the death. Truly the life of a good self-actualized is the Cross, and the Cross is the passage to Heaven. The Cross is an uphill trudge, and once begun, you cannot just stop and turn around and go downhill. Ah, my friends, let us make the trudge together—Jesus will be with us. It is because of Him we took up this cross, and it is because of Him we will preserve in the Way of the Cross. He will lead the way, and we will follow. If He falls, we will help. And the other way around. Look, there Jesus is. Our King enters before us. He will fight for us. Let us follow him virilely, and no one will fear the terrors. Let us be prepare to die bravely in war. “Let us not fear the terrors. Let us not bring disgrace on our glory,” as the First Maccabist would say (9.10), by fleeing from the Cross. “Let the weak say I am strong. Let the oppressed say I am free. Let the sick say I am healed. Let the poor say I am well off,” reports Joel 3.10. Started calling yourself healed, happy, whole, blessed, and prosperous. Stop talking to God about how big your mountains are, and start talking to your mountains about how extraordinary your God is. When you are facing obstacles in your path, you must boldly say, “Greater is He who is in me than one who is in the World,” reports 1 John 4.4. “No weapon formed against me is going to prosper,” reports Isaiah 54.17. God always causes His loved ones to triumph. Stop complaining about lack and limitation and start declaring, God supplies all of my needs in abundance. Stop complaining that nothing good ever happens to you and start declaring, “Everything I touch prospers and succeeds.” We must stop cursing the World. Let us start loving God’s creation. There is a miracle in your mouth. If you want to change your World, start today by changing your words. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Never pray your problem. If you pray the problem, it will get worse. If you pray the problem, you loose the ability of the enemy. Pray the problem and it will grow greater and your faith will flee away on the wings of doubt. Pray the thing you desire. Go to the Word of God and find out what God said about it. You will find that the Word says, “What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them,” reports Mark 11.24. So you would pray the desire: “Father, I desire my husband to be saved and filled with the Holy Spirit. I ask You to send labourers across his path to witness to him. As I am praying right now, I believe that I receive it in the name of Jesus Christ. I cast all my cares over onto You; and when I get up in the morning, I will not pray about it again. I will continue to thank you. Father, I want to speak words that are consistent with Your Word; may my words be filled continually with faith and hope, and may they create an environment in which You can do great and mighty things in and through my life.” Now you have returned God’s Words to Him, He will perform it. Now that may not happen overnight. This is where the force of patience is exercised. Learn to be silent to the Lord as is mentioned in Psalm 37, verse 7. Do not use vain repetitions. Do not pray the same prayer over and over (but if you are just learning to pray, do what you can, God hears all prayers). Do not be held in bondage. I am a farmer by trade and let us say that I have just planted a field of cotton. Now, if I went out and said the next morning, “Man, something is wrong. This cotton is not coming up. Let us plow it up and plant it again,” would it not be foolish? The next day the same thing happened. If I kept doing that, I could plant 365 days and still not produce any cotton. We need to become as smart in the spiritual realms as we are in the natural. That kind of farming practice will cause one to go bankrupt quick! Our prayers many times have held us in bondage, causing spiritual bankruptcy. No one would dare plant a garden and next morning dig it up. Well, Sarah Winchester might. He plants and flowers and trees were known to grow years overnight. However, for most of us, it takes time for these things to happen. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
God has certain laws that He operates under. He had regulated Himself by His Word. God has the power to do anything. However, so many times He cannot use His power in our behalf because if He did, it would violate His Word. That is one thing God cannot do! He cannot violate His Word. If He did some of the things we ask, He would have to lie to do it. We have prayed beyond His ability to answer because of our violation of His rules concerning prayer. Jesus said, ‘What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them.” Some of you have been praying all the bad things, the problems. If God did what you really desire, then He would violate His Word. He said that you can have what you say when you pray, and you have said the problem in prayer over and over until all you are seeing and believing is the problem. Have you ever prayed, “Lord, it is not working out. It is not getting any better”? Well, I was praying that every prayer one morning and the Lord spoke something into my spirit. If I heard it in my ears, it would not have been any louder. He said, “What are you doing?” I said, “Lord, I am praying.” He said, “No, you are not; you are complaining!” A lot of folks are complaining, thinking they are praying. They are telling God their problems. In Matthew, chapter 6, Jesus said that the Father already knows the problem. He already knows what you have need of before you ask Him. Then there is no need to pray the problem. What we need to do is zero in one the answer. Pray and speak the answer; cast the problem over on Him. The enemy has deceived the Christians into praying the problem. Did you know the more you pray the problem, the more you say the problem? The more you say the problem, the more you will believe in the problem. The problem will grow because you are keeping it always before you. It is just like fertilizing the problem. It will grow bigger and bigger. You tell others about it and they will say, “Yeah, you sure do have a problem.” They will agree with you, and then they will tell someone else. Finally, you will have fifty people agreeing that you have a problem. “Then you do have a problem! For Jesus said, ‘If two of you shall agree on Earth as touching anything, it shall be done,’” reports Matthew 18.19. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Now you can see the deception of the enemy. He has deceived us by twisting the Word of God around so we use it against ourselves. The adversary does not care how much you pray. One does not care how much you go to church. If one can distort the Word of God so that your prayers are ineffective, one has defeated you. Yes, you may make it to Heaven, but you may not do anything while you are here on Earth, except suffer, struggle along, and feel sorry for yourself. Many people get the idea that they are just suffering for Jesus; when, in fact, if they would just act on the Word of God and stand against the enemy, rebuking one in the name of Jesus, they could live in success. There is success in the name of Jesus Christ. “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the enemy, and one will flee from you,” reports James 4.7. The Helpless Christian is in the same yacht with the ret of humanity in having weaknesses. The only difference is that even when a trusting relationship with God has been established, the Helpless Christian still feels the fear of being overwhelmed by life. This person feels that one hardly has the right to exist, much less grow. The Helpless Christian is stuck on the weakness polarity. Out of a sense of fear, the Helpless Christian distorts a religious commitment by reaming infantile and dependent. This person’s fear takes one of two forms. First, one may see God as the Great Rescuer and so stay helpless and continually wait for God’s help. Or, second, one may feel so overwhelmed by God because one is so big and by contrast one is so small that there is nothing else to do except sit shaking one’s boots in one’s presence. Either way, fear blocks growth. This person is unconsciously relating to God in the same manipulative ways that one has learned to relate to others. The helpless person has never learned to stand on one’s own feet. The body structure often reflects this in that the upper torso is often somewhat caved in, making the person appear fragile. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The Helpless Christian may experience a very nice payoff for infantile and dependent behaviour. There are many people who would like nothing better than to constantly rescue and take care of such a needy person. So the individual secretly enjoys the big fuss made over one’s difficulties, needs, and problems. If one dummies up, and does not learn to think for oneself, then others can be tricked into doing all the thinking. If one never has enough faith for anything, then other can be made to do the praying. If one is not willing to face life and learn to cope with it, the others can be hooked into giving advice, making decisions, and taking all the responsibility that should rightfully be one’s own. So the Helpless Christian says, “I cannot do it; I give up.” And the rescuers says, “That is all right; we will do it for you. Since getting in touch with one’s own strength and adequacy will mean accepting new responsibility, the Helpless Christian may prefer to continue seducing others into doing the thinking, feeling, and acting. Of course, one unknowingly pays the terrible price of remaining a psychological and spiritual infant throughout life. The other factor that may exert an unconscious influence on the attitudes and behaviour of the helpless person may be early traumatic experiences with family or peers. It is highly probable that the person has felt overwhelmed, humiliated, or severely taken advantage of while growing up. Therefore, one no longer trusts anyone. One does not even trust oneself, because there is a residual feeling of terror and helplessness about not being able to cope with life on one’s own. When people carry residual feelings of shame and embarrassment, as well as patterns of promiscuity into their adult Christian life, they may never experience an emotional reliable relationship, and it will be extremely difficult to understand others. That will make one an all too easy mark for predators. One must decide to face one’s life, and this will allow for the experience of new hope and lead to the discovery of a deep desire to amount to something. One will then take an active interest in determining how things will turn out for oneself, and be surprised that one’s choices can make such a big difference. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
This enlightenment will allow an individual to build friendships with humans that are genuine and supportive and allow one the dignity of being oneself. One will take an active interest in one’s careers, education, and hobbies and this disciplining time and energy will allow one to reach long term goals of vocational excellence. Then one day one will feel, “I am really loved. God loves me. And I can tell that some of my friends love me. And I am starting to love myself!” It may not be easy, but one can make real progress in climbing out of the rut of helplessness and apathy. At the manipulative level, the helpless Christian uses tactics of withdrawal and avoidance in order to escape the demands of responsible growth and self-direction. At the character level, some people may find themselves cold, aloof, and emotionally detached from others. In psychological terms, we souls say that the person is developing a schizoid character. In lay terms, we could say that the person is becoming lifeless and devoid of feeling. Having at some point felt a denial of the right to a fulfilling life, one is now determined never to again feel the pain of betrayal. Thus one psychologically locks oneself into solitary confinement and becomes numb to life, avoiding relationships and taking comfort in a hermit-like life where there is no emotional energy invested in another living thing except a dog or a cat. The passion, the interest or excitement with life, and the vision for fulfillment of one’s destiny are all gone. Encountering such an individual, one wonders if there is a person at all inside the stiff, fortified body. At the psychotic stage, helpless people melt silently into schizophrenia or an ultimate kind of “shut-offness” from the World. Not having learned how to live in the real World, they create a World of their own. Going further, they regress to an earlier, totally dependent form of infantile behaviour, relying on forces outside themselves for even the most simple bodily needs. This is both an alarming and depressing picture. Yet it is happening in people’s lives. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
If you find some of these tendencies unfolding in your own life, we urge you to begin reversing the pattern. The material throughout this report, coupled with your own desire and prayer, ought to provide you with many good options for growing out of the rut of being a Helpless Christian. If you feel that pressures in your own personality make it impossible to grow or change in healthy directions, then it would be wise for you to prayerfully seek a relationship with a competent professional counselor or therapist. Many people nowadays are benefiting from several weeks or months of individual group counseling or therapy with a qualified professional. Mother, Father, God, Universal Power, please remind us daily of the sanctity of all life. Please touch our hearts with the glorious oneness of all creation, as we strive to respect all the living beings on this planet. Please penetrate our souls with the beauty of this Earth, as we attune ourselves to the rhythm and flow of the seasons. Please awaken our minds with the knowledge to achieve a World in perfect harmony and please grants us the wisdom to realize that we can have Heaven on Earth. O Lord, open the Heavens and please pour down your rain. Yes, Lord, please refresh us, and pour down your spirit. Pour water on the thirsty land, and stream on the dry ground; pour your spirit upon our offspring, and your blessings on our descendants. Your Heavens above, rain down your righteousness; let the clouds show it down. Let the Earth open wide, let salvation spring up, let righteousness flourish with it; as You, the Lord, have created it. Please, loving God, bring us rain to renew the ground, to replenish our dams, to bring some chance of feed, to bring the possibility of some reward to those who have toiled so hard. We turn to you in faith and hope and love. With permission of Him who is exalted above all blessing and adoration, revered above all hymns of praise, wise in heart and might in strength and power, sovereign of the World and Lord of all creation, and with permission of all the righteous ones of this congregation, gathered here this day to rejoice in the Torah, and assembled to complete, then reverently to begin again in joy to read the Torah, stand forth, stand forth, stand forth, Hatan Bereshit. Inasmuch as you are chosen to be the first to perform so perfect a command, how great is your privilege, exceedingly great your reward! #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Liberty Can Be Acquired, but it Can Never be Recovered!
If you could trace out the intricate ramification of the effects of all your actions, you would find that the good ones were eventually shadowed by evil, and the evil ones brightened by good. This idea may seem strange when first heard of, and may require some analysis to make it seem plausible. However, if you ponder on it, you will begin to understand why modern European thinkers like Schopenhauer and Spengler and modern thinkers reject the belief that the World’s evil is growing less as much as they reject the assertion that it is growing more. If we compare the general moral level of different centuries, some sort of balance between the good and evil can be seen. If we are to look for any striking advance in the good, we shall have to look for it not in the masses but in single individuals who are seeking and nearing the Overself. This is because our planet is like a class at school where the average standard remains not too widely different. The progress and deterioration which appear at times do not alter this fact, since they appear within these maximum and minimum levels and shifts about from one part of the planet to another. There is no room here for undue optimism but neither is there any for undue pessimism. The savage of low degree may be taught the tricks of science until one shoot from atomic artillery instead of from stringed bows, but one still remains a savage. Recent history has shown this plainly and revealed civilization as a fact in technics only and as a myth in morals. Coming events cast their good or evil configuration beforehand upon calm, sensitive souls. That the unseen hand of destiny is unfolding the vivid scenes of a unique drama is evident of them. That the contemporary currents of World-throbbing happenings are but presages indicating that a radical shift-over in human existence is upon us is also clear to them. In geological history, earthquakes are a means adopted by Nature to restore a disturbed equilibrium. In human history, wartime World-upheaval is both karma’s way of attaining equilibrium in an unbalanced society and evolution’s way of making another spurt forward. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The opposition has its role to play in this World-crisis. Even while obeying its own evil nature, it is frightening half of humankind with its menaces and undermining their confidence in keeping alive for a reasonable period. These are the forces which foment hatred and disrupt society, which deny truth and garble fact. We are victims of a civilization which does not know where it is going, trivial in purpose and corruption in character. Strife or hate, dissension or violence rears its fearsome face in every quarter of the globe, like some hydra-headed dinosauric monster. We dwell in chaos and violence, in a World that knows no peace without and feels none within. The lunacy which has poured into the political demagogues and their followings, the pseudo-artists and their audience, has spread into the religio-mystics and their believers. The evil which is present in the World may show a new, exaggerated, and deceitful form but in itself is no new thing. On the contrary, it is an ancient thing. Plato predicted that if one of the gods came to this Earth, he would not be allowed to live. His ethical ideals would be rejected in practice. His physical presence would be removed in murder. The universal despair which has crept the World—a World which has watched the savings of many years dwindle or disappear within a year or two, which has found its jobs become daily less secure—induces people to draw a slender comfort from that hope which is supposed to spring eternal in the human breast. The hope formulates in the possibility of hearing that Fortune’s wheel will now turn for them. Perchance the facts will relent tomorrow, relentless though they have been in the past. The old stand-bys such as religion and a good bank-balance are going or have already gone. If, in their anxiety, they summon planetary support to allay their fears can one blame them? We are struggling into a finer epoch. However, because we are and have been struggling blindly, the course of events has and had to get worse before getting better. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
From one point of view, the atomic bomb has created wholly new problems. From another point of view, it has only pushed to the front for urgent dealing quite old ones. Both are correct. The second World war now belongs to the past. Yet nobody feels that peace has come, everybody fears what the future might bring. None of us is living happily ever after. Evil humans and dangerous forces thrive today as they did in the past. It is the danger and tragedy of our generation that just at the time when humans’ power to injure one’s fellows has reached its peak, the religious checks and controls of hurtful propensities have fallen to their lowest influences. Internal disquiet and external disorder characterize our times. Inside oneself, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful may seem to be the governing forces; but outside oneself, in the World of toiling and fighting humans, the Bad, the False, and the Ugly may seem dominant. Humankind has proved itself unworthy to handle powers of atomic destructiveness and unable to manage its affairs without stupidity or its relations without evil-doing. Life today is filled with too many cares or uncertainties for anyone in any part of the World to enjoy complete happiness. Although our practical duty involves resistance to evil, it should be clear that such resistance is itself an evil, but it is the lesser of two evils and a necessary result of the imperfect side of human nature today. It plays the same part in each individual’s life that a law enforcement agent plays in the social life. The presence of the law enforcement agent is an indication of the presence of the criminal. With the development of human character, criminal tendencies would disappear and with them police forces. However, we cannot anticipate that time so far as the immediate present is concerned, although we ought to deal with the crime in the most enlightened way possible. The malevolent energies and destructive forces which have been abroad in our time tell us how strong is the evil that lies mixed with the good in humanity’s heart. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
One need not have a low opinion of the human race to conclude that there is sufficient evil in it—whether petty or serious—to make a sloppy sentimental idealization of character just silly and perilous. Schizophrenia is a formal thought disorder (actually a family of disorders) characterized by symptoms such as bizarre delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, grossly disorganized or catatonic behaviour, inability to initiate and persist in goal-directed activity, affective flattening, and impoverished and disorganized thinking evident in speech and language behaviour. These symptoms are grouped into two classes: positive (an excess or distortion of normal functions) and negative (loss of normal functions). Such symptoms must be present for at least a month, but in some cases may persist for years. An important diagnostic criterion of schizophrenia is social/occupational dysfunction. Consequently, it is virtually true by definition that people afflicted with schizophrenia experience problems in their interpersonal relationships. Unlike many other mental disorders considered in this report, schizophrenia is a relatively rare disorder. The lifetime prevalence of schizophrenia is estimated at approximately 1 percent. African Americans are often misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. Physicians tend to overemphasize psychotic symptoms and underemphasize symptoms of depression, compared to other racial-ethic groups. African Americans are three times as likely to be diagnosed as schizophrenic. Although it is rare, schizophrenia is characterized as probably the “most terrible” mental disorder. Relapse rates in schizophrenia are alarmingly high, and, are undoubtedly influenced by interpersonal interactions. In the area of general personal relationships, it is clear that people with schizophrenia experience interpersonal rejection and conflict, and have impoverished social networks. The interpersonal rejection these people encounter is linked with their difficulties in the interpersonal communication domain: They exhibit sever deficits in social skills, involving both the encoding and decoding of social information. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Given the magnitude of their problems in all three of the other domains, it is not surprising that patients with schizophrenia are very unlikely to form stable romantic relationships or marry; for this reason, family-of-orientation experiences are not considered in this report. There is a high degree of comorbidity between schizophrenia and other psychosocial problems, such as depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders. Schizophrenia, like most other forms of deviant behaviour and psychopathology, is manifested in interaction. In schizophrenia, the individual develops their own symbolism, and schizophrenics develop their own referents for conventional symbols. According to this position, communication has multiple levels of meaning; these include not only a literal content, but metamessage at a higher level that provides information about the interpretation of the message content and/or relationship between the sender and receiver. A person with schizophrenia was presumed to be the net result of prolonged exposure to dysfunctional families. Schizophrenic communication prevents others from understanding the self, and thus avoids potentially aversive responses from senders (often parents) of communication. Another attribute of schizophrenia is mystification. Mystified communication involves ambiguities, misunderstandings, and misidentifications of issues and topics. Mystification is evident in a process whereby a person responds to the other in terms of one’s own needs, but at the same time behaves as if one is really responding to the needs of the other. For example, an aging mother may respond to her son’s nutritional needs by giving him a lot of calcium-rich foods, when in fact it is the mother who is in need of additional calcium in her diet. Such parent—child interactions were thought to have teleological significance in the development of dysfunctionally symbolic relationships that ultimately produce symptoms of the disorder. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
During the first few years of a child’s life, the members of a family develop an internalized system for interacting and relating to each other. A person who is labeled as “schizophrenic” is caught in a maze of confusion, misunderstanding, and contradictions. These mystifications reach back several generations in the family. Consequently, current family mystification may be induced by prior generations and/or a response to such family histories. Schizophrenia is marked by delusions, hallucinations, apathy, thinking abnormalities, and “split” between thought and emotion. In schizophrenia, emotions may become blunted or very inappropriate. For example, if a person with schizophrenia is told one’s father just died, one might smile, or giggle, or show no emotion at all. Schizophrenic delusions may include the idea that the person’s thoughts are being controlled, that thoughts are being broadcast (so that others can hear them), that thoughts have been “inserted” into a person’s mind, or that thoughts have been removed. In addition, schizophrenia involves withdrawal from contact with others, a loss of interests in external activities, a breakdown of personal habits, and an inability to deal with daily events. There are different types of schizophrenia. It has four major subtypes. Disorganized type: schizophrenia marked by incoherence, grossly disorganized behaviour, bizarre thinking, flat or grossly inappropriate emotions. Catatonic type: schizophrenia marked by stupor, rigidity, unresponsiveness, posturing, mutism, and, sometimes, agitated, purposeless behaviour. Paranoid type: schizophrenia marked by a preoccupation with delusions or by frequent auditory hallucinations related to a single theme, especially grandeur or persecution. Undifferentiated type: schizophrenia in which there are prominent psychotic symptoms, but none the specific features of catatonic, disorganized, or paranoid types. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
An increased risk of developing schizophrenia may begin at birth or even before. Women who are exposed to the influenza (flu) virus or to rubella during the middle of pregnancy have children who are more likely to become schizophrenic. Malnutrition during pregnancy and complications at the time of birth can have a similar impact. Possibly, such events disturb brain development, leaving people more vulnerable to a psychotic break with reality. Early psychological trauma (a psychological injury or shock) may also add to the risk. Often, the victims of schizophrenia were exposed to violence, sexual abuse, death, divorce, separation, or other stresses in childhood. Living in a troubled family is a risk factor. In a disturbed family environment, stressful relationships, communication patterns, and negative emotions prevail. Deviant communication patterns cause anxiety, confusion, anger, conflict, and turmoil. Typically, disturbed families interact in ways that are laden with guilt, prying, criticism, negativity, and emotional attacks. Although they are attractive, environmental explanations alone are not enough to account for schizophrenia. For example, when the children of schizophrenic parents are raised away from their chaotic home environment, they are still more likely to become psychotic. Evidence has grown stronger in recent years that heredity is a factor in schizophrenia. It now appears that some individuals inherit a potential for developing schizophrenia. They are in other words, more vulnerable to this disorder than other are. How could someone inherit a susceptibility to schizophrenia? Amphetamine, LSD, and similar drugs produce effects that partially mimic the symptoms of schizophrenia. Facts such as these suggest that biochemical abnormalities (disturbances in brain chemicals or neurotransmitters) may occur in schizophrenic people. It is possible that the schizophrenic brain produces some substance similar to a psychedelic (mind-altering) drug. People with schizophrenia are on a journey back to the void, detaching themselves from reality in order to preserve their essential being, with the ultimate goal of breaking through to a higher consciousness or enlightenment. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
The idea of a journey back to the past is usually related to prenatal intrauterine trauma. Some advocate “rebirthing” therapy, complete with dance and rhythmic drumming as a treatment for such ailments. Tragically, in April 2000 in the state of Colorado, a 10-year-old girl was smothered to death during a rebirthing therapy session. The critical characteristic of schizophrenia lies in the aberrant symbolic processes—in the distortion of perception, meaning, and logic. The family is the dominant force that shapes these distortions in perception and meaning. These were thought to result from blurred boundaries (id est, parents’ behaving inappropriately for their gender and age). A family affected by schizophrenia handles attention and meaning by communicating in ways that are odd, blurred, fragmented, and poorly integrated. In this way everyone can divert and diffuse threats to the harmonious identity of the family by being ambiguous and unclear. However, this style of interaction is presumed to come at the price of the child’s healthy self-identity and psychological development. This is why family therapy is recommended for children who are acting out. It gives the doctor time to treat communication deviance, which may also be part of the problems and why a child may be displaying symptoms of mental illness. “When a human’s ways are pleasing to the LORD, He makes even one’s enemies to be at peace with one,” reports Proverbs 16.7. If you will trust in God, He will fight your battles for you. It does not matter what you are going through, or how big your opponents are. Keep an attitude of faith. Stay calm. Stay at peace. Stay in an optimistic frame of mind. And do not try to do it all your own way. Let God do it His way. If you will simply obey His commands, He will change things in your Favour. You may be going through great difficulties, and you are tempted to think, “I am never going to get out of this. This is never going to change. I am never going to win in this situation.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
However, the Bible says, “Do not get weary and faint in your mind,” reports Hebrews 12.3. Remember, you must first win the battle in your mind. Stand strong. When negative thoughts come, reject them and replace them with God’s thoughts. When you are in that attitude of faith, you are opening the door for God to work in your situation. You may not see anything happening with your natural eyes, but do not let that discourage you. In the unseen realm, in the spiritual World, God is at work. He is changing things in your favour. And if you will do your part and keep believing, in due season, at the right time, God will bring you out with the victory. Desire nothing outside of God’s walls and it will give you peace inside the walls. Make the external surrender, and you will be invited to join God. In addition to what God already knows, God wants to us how to say no to ourselves once and for all. Do not interrupt God, do not contradict Him, and above all, do not whine! “Follow Me,” that is what God said to Matthew, and that is what he recorded in his Gospel (9.9); indeed, that is what he did. “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” God said that also, and His Joh noted down what He said (14.6). Without the way, there is no going. Without the truth, there is no knowing. Without life, there is no living, that is to say, no life at all. The key is to choose the right thoughts, to keep your mind set. Not just when you feel good, not just when things are going your way, not just when you do not have any problems, but even in the tough times of life—especially in the difficult times—you must keep your mind set on the good things of God. Stay full of faith. Stay full of joy. Stay full of hope. Make a conscious decision that you are going to stay in an optimistic frame of mind. Some people take one step forward and then two steps backward. They are happy and in a good attitude one day, then the next day they are negative and depressed. They make a little progress, then they back up. Because of their vacillating faith, they never really get to the place God wants them to be. They never experience the success God has in store for you. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
My dear friend, you must be consistent. You attitude should be: I refuse to go backward. I am going forward with God. I am going to be the person He wants me to be. I am going to fulfill my destiny. If you will maintain that mind-set, God will continually work in your life. He will fight your battles for you. He will give you peace in the midst of a storm, and He will help you live that life of victory He has in store for you. God is the Way you ought to follow, the Truth you ought to believe, the Life you ought to hope for, God is Way Inviolable, Truth Infallible, Life Interminable. God is the straightest road, the supremist truth, the truest life, the blessed life, the uncreated life, actually. If you stay on in God’s life, you will learn about Truth, and Verity will set you free; that is what God said to the Jewish people who believed in Him; and that is as John recorded it (8.32). At last you will get the handle on Eternal Life. Tough talk for the not-so-tough! “If you want to enter the Eternal Life, keep the commandments,” reports Matthew 19.17. If you want to learn the truth, believe in God. If you want to possess the holiness of the next life, then say no to the Worldliness of the present life. If you want to rejoice in the next World, then “humble yourself in this World,” reports Matthew 23.12. If you want to reign with God, then carry the cross with God. Only those who get on with the carrying will find the beatudinous way, the True Light. Thank You, Father that I am not alone in this life. You are with me, no matter what challenge I am facing today, and You help me to take that next step of obedience. Today, I will trust You to fight my battles as I move forward in my life. “When you pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heath do,” reports Matthew 6.7. Remember that we are talking about the prayer of petition. Some says, “What about Jesus? He prayed the same prayer three times in the Garden.” That was the prayer of dedication –“Not My will, Lord, but thine be done.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
You can pray the prayer of dedication over and over, but when it comes to a petition, be specific and rest in the Word of God. Remember the 400 prophets of Baal. Elijah said, “You offer your sacrifice and the god that answers by fire, He will be God.” So they cried, begged and pleaded and Elijah said, “Why do you not cry a little louder; maybe he is asleep.” They began to cry louder and even cut themselves. These are the heathen that Jesus was talking about when He said, Use not vain repetitions as the heathen do. They just kept praying about the same thing. They prayed from morning on up into the evening to avail. Then Elijah had twelve barrels of water poured on his sacrifice and prayed a short prayer just once and down came the fire. It is not the length of the prayer that moves God. Nor will you be heard for your “much speaking.” God answers prayers on the legal ground of the new covenant. We have authority to use the name of Jesus. We have a covenant with the Father through Jesus. Jesus has sealed it with His blood and God will honour the name of Jesus. That name is above every name. I remember being in a service one night in a certain church and a lady stood up and said, “I want you all to pray for my husband, he is getting worse. He will not go to church and I have been praying for him every day for 25 years. He just keeps getting meaner.” The Spirit of God spoke up on the side of me and said, “She has been holding fast to the problem all these years. If she had prayed in faith, she would not have prayed all those other 24 years. She would have praised Me and thanked Me that My power was working in his behalf and her husband would have been saved many years ago. However, she had bound Me from the situation by the word of her mouth. Now there is no doubt in my mind that, every time she prayed for her husband, she said, “My husband is getting meaner. He is not getting any better. He will not go to church with me.” And the Word teaches that you shall have what you say. (Mark 11.23.) Now you can see the mistake she made. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Jesus said, Whatsoever things ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them. She did not desire for her husband to get meaner. She did not desire for him to stay at home. Why was she praying that way? She was deceived by Satan and held in bondage by the words of her own mouth. In fact, she was holding her husband in bondage by the words of her own mouth. In fact, she was holding her husband in bondage also. She had taken him out of God’s hands and He could not work on her behalf because in prayer she was saying the things she did not desire. She was holding fast to the problem. Never pray your problem. If you pray the problem, you loose the ability of the enemy. Pray the problem and it will grow greater and your faith will flee away on the wings of doubt. When the genuine strength of the actualizing Christian becomes distorted into manipulative pattern, it is expressed as inflexible striving and achieving. This is what we have talked about in the past. When it deteriorates even further, to the character level, the person develops a rigid personality. The rigid personality strives to appear strong, competent, and capable at all times, and becomes a workaholic. As if this were not enough, this person continually dictates to others how they too ought to work themselves to death, judging them for being less dedicated than he or she is. Therefore, such an individual becomes more and more isolated from friends and colleagues, and tramples on other people’s feelings without the slightest awareness of what had been done. Having lost sensitivity to the gentle promptings of the Holy Spirit, the rigid person may set out to accomplish very worth goals but int the process, do much damage and destruction because of this steamroller approach to life. Since this person is afraid to feel the fears, anxieties, and weaknesses that are part of everyone’s existence, an almost frantic preoccupation with busyness eats up the time and energy that could go into prayer, meditation, and quiet recollection that would enable one to discern once again the still small voice of the Lord. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The rigidly striving Christian has never learned that the grace of God enables one to share openly and honestly one’s deepest fears, doubts, and inadequacies. Perhaps only through the ultimate outcome of this lifestyle—heart attack, ulcers, or nervous breakdown—will one finally admit and humbly accept one’s limitations. Perhaps only then will one know that the love of God does not depend on any project one could ever accomplish. Perhaps then one can be delivered from the do-get-go syndrome, which like a giant leech, has sucked the life energies out of many a well-intentioned Christian. As the Striving Christian approaches the psychotic stage, the behaviour becomes characterized as manic, or extremely excitable. One is obsessed with unrealistic feelings of elation and an exaggerated sense of power. A frenzied compulsion for constant activity develops, and all sense of rhythm and Spirit-led direction in life is lost. There is no time for rest, recreation, or renewal. There is only a blinding blur of busyness in the striving to maintain the illusion of strength that has dominated this life. Our culture actually encourages the Striving Christian in this self-destructive pace. One may be given a plaque for the most sales, a raise in salary for getting so much work done, or a banquet at which selfless efforts for the corporation or church are extolled. However, in the end, the striver will suffer an early death and a disrupted family life. We must recognize how far such a lifestyle departs from the truly biblical principle of resting and trusting in the Lord for everything that concerns our day-to-day living. As the Psalmist says: “Trust in the Lord, and do good; so you will dwell in the land, and enjoy security. Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord’ trust in him, and he will act. Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for Him,” reports Psalm 37.3-5 and 7. Should you find yourself described in this section, be aware that there are ways for getting out of the striving lifestyle. Probably the most effective ways are to experience genuine love through your prayer life with God, or through your relationship with others. There is no doubt that you will have to reevaluate your priorities in life. Yet this can pave the way for some exciting discoveries. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Another good direction is to begin sharing some of your weaknesses and fears with friends, spouse, or family. Of course, this means risking what other people might think of you. However, it also means that you are fed up with giving them a false impression and that you are now ready to disclose more of your real feelings, values, and desires. As you become more “human”—that is, balanced in experiencing both strength and weakness, both confidence and vulnerability—chances are that people will see you as more down-to-earth and approachable. Then you can know that the relationships you develop with others are real and genuine. We invite you also to open your deepest self to God, since He knows everything about you and loves you perfectly! Learn to love Him back, not for what you might get from Him, but just because He is so precious and lovable. Just as an architect, before putting up a large building, surveys and tests the ground to see if it can bear the weight, the wise teacher does not begin by laying down laws that are good in themselves. Rather, one first examines whether the people for whom they are destined are fitted to bear them. For this reason, Plato refused to give laws to the Arcadians and to the Cyrenians, knowing that these two peoples were rich and could not abide equality. For this reason, one finds good laws and evil humans in Crete, because Minos had disciplined nothing but a vice-ridden people. A thousand nations have achieved brilliant Earthly success that could have abided good laws; and even those that could have would have been able to have done so for a very short period of their entire existence. Peoples, like men, are docile only in their youth. As they grow older they become incorrigible. Once customs are established and prejudices have become deeply rooted, it is a dangerous and vain undertaking to want to reform them. The people cannot abide having even their evils touched in order to eliminate them, just like those stupid and cowardly patients who quiver at the sight of a physician. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
This is not to say that, just as certain maladies unhinge humans’ minds and remove from them the memory of the past, one does not likewise sometimes find in the period during which states have existed violent epochs when revolutions do to peoples what certain crises do to individuals, when the horror of the past takes the place of forgetfulness, and when the state, set afire by civil wars, is reborn, as it were, from its ashes and takes on again the vigour of youth as it escapes death’s embrace. Such was Sparta at the time of Lycurgus; such was Rome after the Tarquins; and such in our time have been Holland and Switzerland after the expulsion of the tyrants. However, these events are rare. They are exceptions whose cause is always to be found in the particular constitution of the states in question. They cannot take place even twice to the same people, for it can make itself free so long as it is merely barbarous; but it can no longer do so when civil strength is exhausted. At that point troubles can destroy it with revolutions being unable to reestablish it. And as soon as its chains are broken, it falls apart and exists no longer. Henceforward a master is needed, not a liberator. Free peoples, remember this axiom: Liberty can be acquired, but it can never be recovered. For nations, as for humans, there is a time of maturity that must be awaited before subjecting them to the laws. Youth is not childhood. For nations, as for humans, maturity must be awaited. However, the maturity of a people is not always easily recognized; and if it is foreseen, the work is ruined. One people lends itself to discipline at its inception; another not even after ten centuries. The Russians will never be truly civilized, since they have been civilized too early. Peter had a genius for imitation. He did not have true genius, the kind that creates and makes everything out of nothing. Some of his things he did were good; most of them were out of place. He saw that his people was barbarous; he did not see that it was not ready for civilization. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Peter wanted to civilize it when all it needed was toughening. First he wanted to make Germans and Englishmen, when he should have made Russians. He prevented his subjects from ever becoming what they could have been by persuading them that they were something they are not. This is exactly how a French tutor trains his pupil to shine for a short time in his childhood, and afterwards never to amount to a thing. The Russian Empire would like to subjugate Europe and will itself be subjugated. The Tartars, its subjects or its neighbours, will become its masters and ours. This revolution appears inevitable to me. All the kings of Europe are working in concert to hasten its occurrence. During the First Wave most people consumed what they themselves produced. They were neither producers nor consumers in the usual sense. They were instead what might be called “prosumers.” It was the industrial revolution, driving a wedge into society, that separated these two functions, thereby giving birth to what we now call producers and consumers. This split led to the rapid spread of the market or exchange network—that maze of channels through which goods or services, produces by you, reach me and vice versa. With the Second Wave, we went from an agricultural society based on “production for use”—an economy of prosumers, as it were—to an industrial society based on “production for exchange.” The actual situation was more complicated, however. For just as a small amount of production for exchange—id est, for the market—existed during the First Wave, there continued to be a small amount of production for self-use during the Second. A more revealing way of thinking about the economy, therefore, is to think of it as having two sectors. Sector A comprise all that unpaid work done directly by people for themselves, their families, or their communities. Sector B comprises all the production of goods or services for sale or swap through the exchange network on market. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Seen this way, we can now say that during the First Wave, Sector A—based production for use—was enormous, while Sector B was minimal. During the Second Wave the reverse was true. In fact, the production of goods and services for the market mushroomed to such an extent that Second Wave economists virtually forgot the existence of Sector A. the very word “economy” was defined to exclude all forms of work or production not intended for the market, and the prosumer became invisible. This meant, for example, that all the unpaid work done by women (and some men) in the homes, all the cleaning, scrubbing, child-rearing, the community organizing, was contemptuously dismissed as “non-economic,” even though Sector B—the visible economy—could not have existed without the goods and services produced in Sector A—the invisible economy. If no one were at home minding the children there would be no next generation of paid workers for Sector B, and the system would fall of its own weight. Can anyone imagine a functional economy, let alone a highly productive one, without workers who, as children, have been toilet trained, taught to speak, and socialized into the culture? What would happen to the productivity of Sector B if the workers flowing into it lacked even these minimal skills? Though ignored by Second Wave economists, the fact is that the productivity of each sector depends heavily on the other. Today, as Second Wave societies suffer their terminal crisis, politicians and experts still bandy about economic statistics based entirely on Sector B transactions. They worry about declining “growth” and “productivity.” Yet so long as they continue to think in Second Wave categories, so long as they ignore Sector A and regard it as outside the economy—and so long as the prosumer remains invisible—they will never be able to manage our economic affairs. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
For if we look closely we find the beginnings of a fundamental shift in the relationship of these two sectors or forms of production to one another. We see a progressive blurring of the time that separates producer from consumer. We see the rising significance of the prosumer. And beyond that, we see an awesome change looming that will transform even the role of the market itself in our lives and in the World system. All this takes us back to the millions of people who are beginning to perform for themselves services hitherto performed for them by some doctors. For what these people are really doing is shifting some production from Sector B to Sector A, from the visible economy that the economists monitor to the phantom economy they have forgotten. They are “presuming.” And they are not alone. This is what I want to happen: that our Earth mother may be clothes in ground corn four times over; that frost flowers cover her over entirely; that the mountain pines far away over there may stand close to each other in the cold; that the weight of now crack some branches! In order that the country may be this way, I have made my prayer sticks into something alive. May the Earth continue to live. May the Heavens above continue to live. May the rains continue to dampen the land. May the wet forests continue to grow, then the flowers shall bloom, and the people shall live again. With permission of God, great, mighty and revered, I will raise my voice in psalm and song to thank Him and to praise Him who dwelleth high in light, that He hath kept us in life and preserved us in His unfailing love, and hath brought us near to be joyful in the Rejoicing of the Torah, the Torah that gladdens that heart and enlightens the eyes, prolonging the days and adding strength unto all those who love the Torah and heed its precepts and admonitions. Thus may it be acceptable before the Almighty to grant life and grace, and to crown with virtue, who has been chosen to complete the reading of the Torah. Stand forth, stand forth, Hatan Hatorah. By the merit of this deed, may you be deemed worth by the God we revere, to behold children and children’s children delighting in the Torah. O Mighty God, Your fingerprints are scattered across all of creation. Through each thing You have created, You show Your glory. Your caring and gentle nature are on display for all to see and experience. You open the heavens and bring the waters down from above. Lord, this very day we ask that You open the flood gates. Bring down nourishing rains, that the land may be quenched and bring forth much fruit. Amen.#RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Discovering the rules of society best suited to nations would required a superior intelligence that beheld all the passions of humans without feeling any of them; who had no affinity with our nature, yet knew it through and through; whose happiness was independent of us, yet who nevertheless was willing to concern itself with ours; finally, who, in the passage of time, procures for oneself a distant glory, being able to labour in one age and find enjoyment in another. (A people never becomes famous except when its legislation begins to decline. It is not known for how many centuries the institution established by Lycurgus caused the happiness of the Spartans before the rest of Greece took note of it.) Gods would be needed to give humans laws. The same reasoning used by Caligula regarding matters of fact was used by Plato regarding right in defining the civil or royal humans one looks for in one’s dialogue The Statesman. However, if it is true that a great prince is a rare man, what about a general legislator? The former merely has to follow the model the latter should propose to one. The latter is the engineer who invents the machine; the former is merely the workman who constructs it and makes it run. At the birth of societies, it is the leaders of republics who bring about the institutions that forms the leaders of the republic. One who dares to undertake the establishment of a people should feel that one is, so to speak, in a position to change human nature, to transform each individual (who by oneself is a perfect and solitary whole), into a part of a larger whole from which this individual receives, in a sense, one’s life and one’s being; to alter humans’ constitution in order to strengthen one’s life and one’s being; to alter humans’ constitution in order to strengthen it; to substitute a partial and moral existence for the physical and independent existence we have all received from nature. In a word, one must deny humans their own forces in order to give one forces that are alien to one and that one cannot make use of without the help of others. The more these natural forces are dead and obliterated, and the greater and more these natural forces are dead and obliterated, and the greater and more durable are the acquired forces, the more too is the institution solid and perfect. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Thus if each citizen is nothing and can do nothing except in concert with all the others, and if the force acquired by the whole is equal or superior to the sum of the natural forces of all the individuals, one can say that the legislation has achieved the highest possible point of perfect. The legislator is in every respect an extraordinary human in the state. If one ought to be so by one’s genius, one is no loess so by one’s office, which is neither magistracy nor sovereignty. This office, which constitutes the republic, does not enter into its constitution. It is a particular and superior function having nothing in common with the dominion over humans. For if one who has command over humans must not have command over laws, one who has command over the laws must no longer have any authority over humans. Otherwise, one’s laws, ministers of one’s passions, would often only serve to perpetuate one’s injustices, and one could never avoid private opinions altering the sanctity of one’s work. When Lycurgus gave laws to one’s homeland, one began by abdicating the throne. It was the custom of most Greek cities to entrust the establishment of their laws to foreigners. The modern republics of Italy often imitated this custom. The republic of Geneva did the same and things worked out well. (Those who view Calvin simply as a theologian fail to grasp the extent of one’s genius. The codification of our wise edicts, in which one had a large role, does one as much honour as one’s Institutes. Whatever revolution time may bring out in our cult, so long as the love of homeland and of liberty is not extinguished among us, the memory of this great human will never cease to be held sacred.) In its finest age Rome saw the revival within its midst of all the crimes of tyranny and saw itself on the verge of perishing as a result of having united the legislative authority and the sovereign power in the same hands. Nevertheless, the decimvirs themselves never claimed the right to have any law passed on their authority alone. Nothing we propose, they would tell people, can become law without your consent. Romans, be yourselves the authors of the laws, therefore, does not or should not have any legislative right. And the populace itself cannot, even if it wanted to, deprive itself of this incommunicable right, because, according to the fundamental compact, only the general will obligates private individuals, and there can never be any assurance that a private will is in conformity with the general will until it has been submitted to the free vote of people. I have already said this, but it is not a waste of time to repeat it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Thus we find together in the work of legislation two things that seem incompatible: and undertaking that transcends human force, and, to execute it, an authority that is nil. Another difficulty deserves attention. The wise humans who want to speak to the common masses in the former’s own language rather than in the common vernacular cannot be understood by the masses. For there are a thousand kinds of ideas that are impossible to translate in the language of the populace. Overly general perspectives and overly distant objects are equally beyond its grasp. Each individual, in having no appreciation for any other plan of government but the one that relates to one’s own private interest, finds it difficult to realize the advantages one ought to draw from the continual privations that good laws impose. For an emerging people to be capable of appreciating the sound maxims of politics and to follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause. The social spirit which ought to be the work of that institution, would have to preside over the institution itself. And humans would be, prior to the advent of laws, what they ought to become by means of laws. Since, therefore, the legislator is incapable of using either force or reasoning, one must of necessity have recourse to an authority of a different order, which can compel without violence and persuade without convincing. This is what has always forced the fathers of nations to have recourse to the intervention of Heaven and to credit the gods with their own wisdom, so that the peoples, subjected to the laws of the state as to those of nature and recognizing the same power in the formation of humans and of the city, might obey with liberty and bear with docility the yoke of public felicity. It is this sublime reason, which transcends the grasp of ordinary humans, whose decisions the legislator puts in the mouth of the immortals in order to compel by divine authority those whom human prudence could not move. (And in truth, there has never been among a people a single legislator who, in proposing extraordinary laws, did not have recourse to God, for otherwise they would not be accepted, since there are many benefits known to a prudent human that do not have in themselves evident reasons enabling one to persuade others.) #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, not everybody is capable of making the gods speak or of being believed when one proclaims oneself their interpreter. The great soul of the legislator is the true miracle that should prove one’s mission. Any human can engrave stone tablets, buy an oracle, or feign secret intercourse with some divinity, or train a bird to talk in one’s ear, or find other crude methods of imposing one’s beliefs on the people. One who knows no more than this may perchance assemble a troupe of lunatics, but one will never found an empire and one’s extravagant work will soon die with one. Pointless sleights-of-hand form a fleeting connection; only wisdom can make it lasting. The Judaic Law, which still exists, and that of the child of Ishmael, which has ruled half the World for ten centuries, still proclaim today the great humans who enunciated them. And while pride-ridden philosophy or the blind spirit of factionalism sees in them nothing but lucky impostors, the true political theoretician admires in their institutions that great and powerful genius which presides over establishments that endure. We should not, with Warburton, conclude from this that politics and religion have a common object among us, but that in the beginning stages of nations the one serves as an instrument of the other. Giant historical shifts are sometimes symbolized by minute changes in everyday behaviour. One such change—its significance all but overlooked—occurred early in the 1970’s when a new product began invading the pharmacies of France, England, Holland, and other European countries. The new product was a do-it-yourself hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) test. Within a few years, an estimated 15 to 20 million such kits had been sold to European women. Soon advertisements in American newspapers were clamouring: “Pregnant? The sooner you know, the better.” When Warner-Lambert, an American firm, introduced the kit under its brand name it found the response “overwhelmingly good.” According to our report, the global pregnancy testing market size is estimated to be worth $136 Billion US Dollars as of 2021. Furthermore, it is forecasted to grow to $174 billion by 2026, which is a 5.1 percent increase. Year, nearly 8 million women in America used these tests, but it is still recommended to seek medical attention to confirm the results and find out how to plan for life with a baby growing inside you. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Manufacturers focus on new product launches, expansions of their markets, mergers, and collaborations and this is having a beneficial influence on the pregnancy testing market. Planned or meant pregnancies have increased the awareness among women, offering immense growth opportunities to the key players. Some people see this as sidestepping the physician. However, self-care—the idea that people can and should be more medically self-reliant—is a fast-rolling new bandwagon…Across the land, ordinary people are learning to handle stethoscopes and blood pressure cuffs, administer breast self-examinations and Pap smears, even carrying out elementary surgical procedures. However, you want to make sure that you are having a healthy baby, and find out what special needs your child may have, what kind of diet and exercise routine you need, and so forth. So, it is important to seek medical advice. Do not know the symptoms, you cannot hide a growing baby and they will not just go away. It is a human life and this is a very serious situation, so one needs to consult a professional and find out the proper methods of caring for a fetus. Today, many mothers and fathers are becoming educated parents. Overall, 77.1 percent of women initiate prenatal care in the first trimester of pregnancy; 4.6 percent began prenatal care in the third trimester, and 1.6 of women receive no car at all. Schools offer courses on everything from foot care to “instant pediatrics.” And people are checking their own blood pressure in coin-operated machines located in more thousands of shopping centers, airports, and department stores in the United States of America. As government and health insurers Worldwide implement measures to control costs, public hospitals are operating on tighter budgets, while private facilities are receiving lower reimbursements. These measures are triggering a transformation of the purchasing process that is changing the way that medical products are bought and valued and who is paying for them. In the past, few medical instruments were sold to non-physicians. However, a growing share of the instrument market is destined for the home. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
With the aging population, driven by declining fertility rates, and increasing life expectancy this represents a need for more self-care. Sales of otoscopes, ear-cleaning devices, nose and throat irrigators, air purifiers, dehumidifiers, humidifiers, other instruments, articles, apparatuses, or machines that are used in the prevention diagnosis, or treatment of illness or disease, or for detecting, measuring, restoring, correcting, or modifying of the function of the body for some health purpose. The early account for nearly 33 percent of total healthcare consumption, and specialized convalescent products are all booming, as individual take on more responsibility for their own health, reduce the number of visits to the doctor, and cut short their hospital stays. Healthcare eCommerce is anticipated to be over $435 billion by 2025. Hospitals are buying 53 percent of all sold medical equipment, but consumer demand is also growing. The United States of American remains the largest medical device market in the World: $156 billion (40 percent of the global medical market). By 2023, it is expected to grow to $208 billion. Personal healthcare spending for the population segment is approximately $22,000 per person, $4,100 for children, and an estimated $9,800 for working people. The elderly population is expected to expand from less than 8 percent of the population to more than 21 percent of the total population by 2060. Healthcare expenditure if expected to grow from $3.5 trillion to $6 trillion in 2027, an average annual growth rate of 5.5 percent. The industry includes almost 2 million jobs in the United States of America, including both direct and indirect employment. Medical technology directly accounts for well over 300,000 of these jobs. In California alone, there is an expected demand for almost 450,000 new allied healthcare workers through 2024. The American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) predicts a shortage of as many as 122,000 physicians by 2032. If the health care patterns were equalized across race, insurance coverage, and geographical location, the United States of American will need an additional 95,900 doctor immediately. By 2025, there will also be a forecast shortage of more than 400,000 home health assistants, and 29,400 nurse practitioners. There will also be shortages in other health care professions. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
On the surface all this might create a new fad of unlicensed medical professionals and individuals taking health care into their own hands, or deferring their needs to veterinarians to reduce costs. The rust to treat one’s own problems (instead of paying a licensed professional to) reflects a substantial change in our values, in our definition of illness, and in our perception of body and self. There is a notoriously strong association between social anxiety and loneliness. Loneliness is associated with many of the same features as social anxiety—namely, a lack of optimism about interpersonal encounters, low sociability, avoidance of others, and poor social skills. Like socially anxious or depressed individuals, lonely people devalue communication with others and view their own communication skills negatively. Social anxiety is positively correlated with loneliness, and each of these problems is negatively associated with various aspects of social skills. Another large sample survey study showed tht apprehensions about public speaking and apprehension about dyadic interaction were both positively associated with loneliness. Most explanations of the relationship between social anxiety and loneliness argue that loneliness is a consequence or result of social anxiety. Socially anxious persons tend to approach social interactions with discomfort and nervousness. As a consequence, other people tend to respond unfavorably to these awkward and reserved interactions. The disrupted and unpleasant interactions, with their attendant negative responses from others, have the obvious effect of leaving socially anxious persons longing for mor satisfying and intimate personal relationships. In more extreme cases, such as full-blown social phobia, avoidance of social contact may sever as a temporarily effective means of managing and coping with the anxiety. However, this coping mechanism comes high price. Eventually, all but the most inherently antisocial individuals, anxious or not, become painfully lonely as a result of prolonged avoidance of social contact. There are four mechanism that can cause socially anxious persons to become lonely. First, the reticent interaction style of socially anxious people may be misinterpreted as aloof or snobbish. This is thought to prompt others to avoid the anxious persons, therefore producing feelings of loneliness. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Second, some people have a desire for sociability despite feeling socially anxious. Not that sociability and shyness are distinct concepts. Although it may sound paradoxical, many socially anxious people would actually like to socialize with others. The problem is that they feel such encounters will go badly, and they will in some ways be worse off than if they just avoid the encounters altogether. Therefore, among those socially anxious people with a desire for social contact, loneliness is expected to be prevalent. Third, many stressful events (exempli gratia, moving away from home for the first time, loss of a spouse through death or divorce) present many interpersonal challenges and create feelings of uncertainty. Such events are inherently threatening and anxiety-provoking. Coping with them often requires a great deal of social skills. Of course, the people least equipped with these skills, such as socially anxious individuals, have the greatest cause for anxiety. In such cases, loneliness becomes a likely outcome. Socially anxious people have a pessimistic style of social cognition that is likely to cause loneliness—namely, blaming themselves for social failures and seeing personal flaws as fairly stable, unchangeable traits. For example, if a man goes on a date with a woman and it goes badly, if he interprets this as a result of the fact that “I am just no good with women,” it stands to reason that one should experience anxiety over such encounters in the future. The interpretation of the past failures suggests that the same outcome is inevitable in similar future encounters. There is a notoriously strong relationship between social anxiety and depression. Among those seeking clinical attention, the comorbidity between social anxiety disorder and depression is between 40 percent and 50 percent. It is believed that social anxiety creates a predisposition to developing other psychological problems, and that it precedes the development of the depression in most cases. It is impossible to overlook the striking similarity in the interpersonal foundations of social anxiety and depression. Each is associated with poor social skills, interpersonal rejection, loneliness, and problematic experiences in the family of origin. If depression is often secondary to social anxiety, one must wonder whether the interpersonal phenomena that have been linked to social anxiety are mostly the result of comorbid depression. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
These three possible connections between social anxiety and depression are worthy of consideration. First, they suggest that depression may be the result of repeated self-presentational failures. Feelings of chronic failure in social situations may produce a sense of learned helplessness that culminates in depression. This account places social anxiety (self-presentational concerns) before depression in the causal chain of events. A second possibility is that depression may predispose people to experience social anxiety. This is due to the negative effect of depression on effectiveness in social encounters. This possibility is useful for explaining the social skills deficits that have been documented in both depression and social anxiety. Third, depression and social anxiety may each be caused by a common third variable: social exclusion. When people are excluded and isolated, they may come to simultaneously doubt their social abilities (social anxiety) and question their self-worth (depression). This proposition is a useful explanation for the interpersonal rejection that is concomitant to both depression and social anxiety. One of the challenges for future research on interpersonal aspects of social anxiety will involve the identification of interpersonal phenomena that are caused by social anxiety, by depression, or by both problems. In most of the existing research on social anxiety, there is not often an assessment of comorbid depression, much less an attempt to control or account for its influences on interpersonal behaviour. However, such a research strategy would be useful for refining our knowledge about the interpersonal aspects of both depression and social anxiety. When a child is abused by a family member, social anxiety disorder is a very likely outcome. Parents may also model excessive concern with the opinions of others and isolate their children from varied opportunities for social interaction. Social anxiety is marked by a pervasive tendency to expect negative outcomes for social interactions. Furthermore, social anxiety often coexists with loneliness and depression. These three are something of a “holy trinity” in psychosocial problems. They share many phenomenological features, such as doubts and questions about self-worth, and have many common interpersonal correlates, such as social skills deficits and interpersonal rejection. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Of the four primary distortion of Christian life, which also affect non-Christians, the pattern of the Striving Christian may well be the most subtle. Does not everyone admire the Christian who is industrious, busy, and constantly on the go? It is not a great virtue to burn oneself out for the kingdom of God? Do we not praise the person who weathers every storm, overcomes every temptation, and always has the victory? The striving Christian is stuck on the strength polarity. Somewhere along the line of personality development, this person received the message that work, personal achievement, and competitive performance are the things that make life meaningful. If perfectionistic standards are not met, one is afraid of being judged as being inadequate or unworthy. The corollary to this assumption is that play, fun, recreation, and the joy of intimate relationships with others are a waste of time. Hard, continuous work replaces love as the central goal of life. Achievement is the one note that the Striving Christian plays compulsively day after day. Most probably, the Striving Christian was hurt early in life when one, like all children, felt psychological and spiritual hunger for unconditional affection and love from others. At an unconscious level, this person feels betrayed that this deep human need was not adequately met. Love was probably given only for being a “good girl” or a “good boy.” This child was probably told not to be sentimental—that it is a doggy dog (dog-eat-dog) World, so it is necessary to toughen up and get to work to have any success out there. There is a saying that “God helps those who help themselves.” Even though this saying has some wisdom in it, it can easily become only a rationalization for putting more emphasis on performing, accomplishing, and getting ahead, rather than on living oneself and others. The saying appears nowhere in the Bible. The Striving Christian suffers under the heavy burden of perfectionism. One is the Pharisee of the modern-day life. Since the joy of being loved or loving others is lacking, one works oneself to death trying to appear worthy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
It then becomes difficult for this individual to understand the grace of God because one is trying so hard to be perfect and please everyone. It becomes almost impossible to feel genuinely loved by God, because one is constantly giving attention to meriting or earning that love. However, love is a gift, and, despite all the accomplishments, the Striving Christian has the worst time simply accepting it. So one jumps back on the treadmill of life seeking another project, thinking up another program, or contriving another emergency. Unconsciously, this person is still trying to please mom and dad and even God. The striving business executive needs to have a perfectly efficient organizational machine in which persons are manipulated as thought they were objects or statistics. The striving housewife compulsively cleans the house as though it were a museum showcase, not a home in which people enjoy living together. The perfectionistic student makes a ritual out of mastering technique, memorizing trivia, and making high grades. The striving church worker may become so preoccupied with “saving souls” that one neglects completely the deeper opportunity for understanding, loving, and growing in relationships with other people. Unfortunately, self-awareness and sensitivity to others are often lost in the struggle to achieve perfection. One remains a spiritual infant. There is another important dimension to this stuckness. The Striving Christian has been given the idea that always acting strong is a virtue, and that experiencing one’s weakness, limitation, or vulnerability is a humiliating experience. Indeed, one was probably embarrassed as a child or young person for disclosing personal fears, doubts, hurts, and faults. So instead of admitting and confessing needs and weaknesses to others, one has learned to bottle everything up inside. This person develops a psychological rigidity that other people can sense. Especially spouse, children, and colleagues will sense the tenseness, irritability, and distance. One avoids honest sharing with one’s family and mainly invest energy in solitary projects. The inner attitudes that a person lives by are inevitably reflected physically. The body of the Striving Christian is often stiff and rigid. Tension is stored in the neck and shoulder muscles, as well as around the area of the jaw. Rather than walking with a relaxed and natural gait, one develops a hurried, tense walk that reflects the inner need to always appear busy and productive. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Psychosomatic symptoms such as high blood pressure, chronic muscular tension, migraine headache, or lower back pain often accompany this style of living the Christians who adopt the striving lifestyle might blame the disorders of the body on the devil. One might rationalize this physical deterioration by thinking: “Look how much I am doing for God. The devil must be punishing me for being such a hard-working Christian.” What one does not recognize is that the one who is punishing and abusing the body that God fashioned is oneself. The Striving Christian is so caught up in seeking status, wealth, or acclaim that one constantly ignores the God-given warning signs of a body that is gradually breaking down long before the Lord intended it to. However, rather than own up to one’s limitations and take responsibility to give and receive love without the heavy criterion of achievement and performance, the Striving Christian is off to another convention, off to buy another piece of property, off to preach another sermon, off to start another program. In therapy, many Striving Christian realize in their success, they are lonely. They worked so hard to get there that they have no one they can really connect with. These adults often times come to terms with the fact that the as a youth, they had not gotten the kind of unconditional love others receive. Instead, the attention they received was mostly for doing things well and performing well or for warning their way. And that is how they spent their adult years. With awareness, however, one can relax more in life and take things more as they come instead of wearing oneself out, trying to make them happen. One can slowly learn how to love oneself whether or not one achieves. However, instead of being an eagle on top of a mountain peak, keep in mind you could, instead, being a carb on the bottom of the barrel, trying to pull others down to your life. So, the Striving Christian is not always a curse. We will focus more about the different types of Christians and some things that go along with those personality traits in upcoming reports. For now, I want to focus on some other material before the end of this report. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
O Lord my God, who created me to look like You, please grant me this grace You keep talking about, the one that is greatly necessary for salvation. Perhaps it will help me get hold of my lowest nature—it is dragging me down to sins and into Perdition. I feel in my flesh the law of sin contradicting the law of my mind, as Paul so haply put it to the Roman (7.23), and lashing me with silken bonds to sensuality. I am helpless! Help me! I cannot resist my passions unless Your Most Holy Grace, branded hotly into my heart, assists me. “Incline your ear and hear the words of the wise, and apply your mind to my knowledge; for it will be pleasant is you keep them within you, that they may be ready on your lips. So that your trust may be in the LORD,” Proverbs 22.17-19. Your grace is necessary, and a great grace it has to be if it is to do the job. My nature has to be overthrown. It is been plaguing me since adolescence. That was God’s appraisal of human nature in the aftermath of the flood, at least as it was recorded in Genesis (8.21). Yes, it was through Adam, our Primal Father, that our nature was pocked and pummeled by Sin until it finally fell. And from that moment on, as Paul reminded the Romans (5.12), the punishment left that terrible strawberry blotch on the human soul. Since that time Dame Nature herself, who was fathered by You in Your goodness and rightness, has been in a compromising position. Poor babe, now that she has slipped from her pedestal, she has had to shop such putrid wares as Vice and Weakness and Corruption. A mere remnant of her former self, though, she still has power enough in her little finger to grab your foot and drag you under the bushes where all mortal and venial sins are committed. Modest, like an ember in the ask, is the force for good that remains in her, that is to say, Natural Reason. Up to this point in human history, it is managed to survive as if in a dear but dark night. It still has the ability to distinguish good and bad and to discern the distance between truth and falsehood. All this Natural Reason can do, but, oh, the powers she has lost! To logick the Universe, illumine the Truth, restore Sanity to its own terribly troubled affections. Hence it is, my God, that as the Letter to the Romans has said (7.22), “I am truly delighted with the rules of engagement You have laid down for the interior self.” However, then again, I knew Your commandment would be good, just, and holy, arguing as it does that every evil and every sin has to be fled. However, oh, the reality! Again the Letter to the Romans, the next verse (7.23). However, “when I follow the law of sin, I am enslaved by my flesh.” Which is, I think, another way of saying, I err more in favour of Sensuality than Reason. Romans again (7.25). #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Thence it is then that, again from the same chapter in Romans, but an earlier verse (v. 18), “I want to do good for You, but I often find I just cannot pull it off.” Hence I often propose a flurry of actions that far exceed the grace in my purse. Thence, my infirmity returns with a vengeance, and I have to advance to the rear. Hence, it happens that I know the path of perfection and see clearly where it is on the map. Thence, donkeyed as I am by the deadly weight of self-corruptions, I just cannot climb any faster or indeed any higher. Oh, how much I need You, O Lord, You and You grace! To begin well, not to flag in the middle, to finish strong! Without it I cannot do anything; that is if I remember correctly John on God as the Vintner and You as the Vine (15.5). With Your grace comforting me and in You I can do everything; that is as Paul encouraged the Philippians (4.13). Many have heard it before and have heard it many times: Your mind is similar to a computer. One of the most important bits of information that you need to reinstall in your mental computer is that you are successful and not a failure nor a victim. “If God is for you, who can be against you,” reports Romans 8.31. When negative, discouraging thoughts come, cast them down immediately, and make a conscious choice to dwell on what God says about you. For instance, a thought comes to you that you are getting sick or that you have some serious aliment. Refuse to dwell on that. Just say, “Father, I thank You that You are restoring health unto me. I thank You that I am going to live and not die, that I will declare the works of the Lord.” O Truly Celestial Grace! Without You there would be no proper merits, nor would any of the gifts of nature have any value! Without grace, O Lord, there would be no validity to, no vitality in art, wealth, beauty, courage, talent, eloquence. These gifts of nature are common to both the good and the bad. However, the appropriate gifts for Your Elect are Grace and Love; emblems of You and Eternal Life worn on the sleeves of Your Elect. This grace has an eminence of its own. Without it there is no such things as the gift of prophecy, the operation of miracles, the revelation of Theology, the reasoning of Philosophy. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
When the thought comes to you that you are not going to get a promotion at work or your proposal for a big project will be rejected, reject that soft of thinking and declare instead, “Father, You promised that no good thing will You withhold when I walk righteously. And by being obedient You blessings will chase me down and overtake me, so I thank You that You have blessed us with good things in store.” Without Charity and Grace, neither Faith nor Hope nor any of the other virtues are acceptable to You. “However, when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking,” reports Matthew 6.7. Jesus Christ cut away some religious theology right there. I had always heard that if you just keep praying, God would finally answer you. “Just keep on praying, keep bombarding the gates of Heaven!” Some think if you can get more people praying, you will finally talk God into it. However, you are not going to change God by your praying. God said, “I am the Lord, I change not,” reports Mal. 3.6. You can change yourself by praying and get yourself in line with the Word so God can answer. Prayer changes things, but it does not change God. Hezekiah is a good example of this. God sent a prophet to tell him to get his house in order for he was going to die. Hezekiah turned his face to the wall, prayed, repented, and changed his position before God. The God said, “You will live fifteen more years.” Many think that he prayed and changed God’s mind. For years I thought that was true, but he did not change God’s mind. It was God’s will all along that he live a full life, but Hezekiah got out of His will and God said that this would cause him to die a premature death. When he repented, God said, “Now you will live.” You do not change God by your praying, for He does not change. For years I thought God did not want me to have whatever I was praying about, so I was trying to talk Him into letting me have it. I thought my job was to keep pestering Him like I did my Earthly daddy, until He changed His mind just to get rid of me. No, God does not operate that way. Faith moves God, not prayer alone. O beautiful grace! How You make the poor in spirit rich with virtues! How You make the rich into persons of humble heart! Come, each morning, descend on me, let me break my fast with You consolation. If You do not, my soul will falter, my intellect buckle. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Reprogram one thought at a time by going back to the Bible, where you discover that God will always cause you to triumph. God said whatever you put your hands to is going to prosper and succeed. He says that you are blessed and cannot be cursed. People may try to tell you that your dreams are not going to come to pass, that you are not able to go any further in life. However, do not believe those lies. God said you are well able to fulfill your destiny. When you go through disappointments in life—and we all do—or when you face a setback and it looks as though one of your dreams had not become successful, keep believing. When it looks like you cannot go any further and humans are destroying the World and ruining your life, remember, God is in control of the entire Universe for He created it. God is in control of your life, guiding you and protecting you. His plans for you are good and not evil. Do not make the mistake of sitting around feeling sorry for yourself. No, put on a brand-new attitude. Take what God has given you and make the best of it. You know the truth; you were born to be a success and that will set you free. You may be near your Promised Land. God may be about to part the Red Sea for you. God has great things He wants to do in your life. He wants to promote you. He wants to increase you. God wants to heal your body, He wants to restore your marriage, He wants to renovate your house, He wants to bless you financially, He wants to warm your heart. You are on the verge of a miracle. Do not lack faith and do not let anyone rob you of your destiny. Obey the law, stay in church, be a good Christian so no one can trap you. If you get your thinking in lines with the Ten Commandments, nothing will be able to stop your righteousness. No obstacle will be too high, no situation too difficult. Just have faith! Remember, the enemy always fights the hardest when he knows Go has something great in store for you. The darkest battle, the darkest storm will always give way to the brightest sunrise. Keep believing. I beseech You, O Lord, that I may find grace in Your eyes, as Abraham begged favour of the three lordly gentlemen suddenly in front of his tent, as Genesis recorded it (18.3). I know from the Great Paul in his Second Letter to the Corinthians (12.9) that “Your grace is always enough to do the job.” I say that now, and I will say it again, even though I do not get all the other things my lousy nature desires. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
If I am going to be taxed and vexed by many trials and troubles, I have nothing to fear from evil. That is to say, so long as Your grace is with me. The Psalmist himself could live and die on that promise (23.4). That is my courage, my counsel, and my help. It is stronger than all my enemies combined; wiser than all the wisdoms universal. “Do not get tired of doing what is right, for in due season you shall reap if you faint not,” reports Galatians 6.9. It may be hard right now, but remind yourself that you have the power of God inside of you. You can do what you need to do. Step out in faith, knowing that Almighty God is on your side. Decide to go with God. Even if negative thoughts bombard your mind in the morning, and you are unhappy, find something to be thankful about and praise God. “This book of the law should not depart out of your mouth but you should mediate on it day and night. Then you will prosper and have good success,” reports Joshua 1.8. That is my courage, my counsel, and my help. It is stronger than all my enemies combined; wiser than all the wisdoms universal. Grace teaches truth, monitors the monastery, illumines the soul, lightens pressures, banishes sadness, reduces fear, nourishes devotion produces tears. What am I without her, but dead wood, the dry rot of a family tree not good enough even for the Final Fire? If I may, the Collect of the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost: “May Your grace, O Lord, always precede me and succeed me, and keep my mind constant only on good works, through Jesus Christ, You Son. Amen.” Father, I am going to dare to believe what You say about me, rather than what anyone else says. Please help me to fill my mind with thoughts that are pleasing to You, thoughts that will cause me to progress all the way to my Promised Land. The remembered glimpse helps one to go on living, because its recap—true is both a possibility and a spur. The one gives one hope, the other determination to provide conditions which may renew it. It is a spiritual miracle, for it is not only transforming one’s character but also releases some latent powers. Because it gives new hope, fresh encouragement, and the prospect of eventual relief from trouble, the glimpse is like a rainbow in the sky. It reminds one that a providential love is still behind the World and one’s own existence. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The glimpse will help one to live through the dark periods that may come, when otherwise one might succumb to despair. The remembrance of most of those years spent in the World is dim but the remembrance of these exquisite interludes is vivid. One will remember it as a momentary benediction, something to be saved from the tragic inexorable fleetingness of life. What one discovers during these deepest possible experiences becomes a part of one. The more one exposes oneself to these moments of alignment of mind, the more will negative outbursts and destructive passions calm and die away. The extraordinary thing that this illumination, the most important even that can happen to a human being, lessens one’s feeling of self-importance. The memory of this day will last longer, mean more, and touch deeper than any other. Spirit of God in the clear running water, blowing to greatness the trees on the hill, Spirit of God in the finger of morning, please sill the Earth, bring it to birth and blow where You will. Blow, blow, blow till I be but breath of Spirit blowing in me. Down in the meadow the willows are moaning, sheep in the pasture land cannot lie still. Spirit of God, creation is groaning, please fill the Earth, bring it to birth and blow where You will. Blow, blow, blow till I be but breath of the Spirit blowing in me. Spirit of God, every human’s heart is lonely watching and waiting and hungry until Spirit of God, man longs that you only fulfill the Earth, bring it to birth and blow where You will. Blow, blow, blow till I be breath of the Spirit blowing in me. Thine, O Lord, is greatness and the power, the glory, the victory and the majesty; for all that is in the 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. May the Father of compassion have mercy upon a people who He loving 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 hath tenderly protected, and graciously grant us enduring deliverance. Many He abundantly fulfill our desires and grant us salvation and mercy. O God, or Creator, you are the source of all life. It is through your divine providence and infinite power, that the wonder and splendour of all creation surrounds us. How majestic is your name in wall the Earth. We pray to you whom calms the raging waters and commands the wind, to provide of us with sufficient rain to meet our needs. Not only during this time of drought, but always, we are mindful of our dependence on you for all that sustains our body and soul. We pray for the cooling, gentle rain that will once again bring life to the fields and crops that feed us, restore the colourful rainbow of flowers and the cooling shade of trees. We also pray for those who are suffering from natural disasters. May the look to you for strength to restore their lives and heal their wounded land. Please helps us to always be good stewards of your creation and care for the many resources of this Earth. May your grace refresh our souls. We ask for these blessings through the intercession of Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth. Ametn. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Witches, Warlock, and Ghost in the Mansion of Mrs. Winchester!
Some people call themselves witches, and believe that they are able to contact and utilize powers from the invisible realm. However, there are many questions about witchcraft. Is it merely a game some people play? Is it beneficial to humanity? Or is it evil and dangerous? Universities all over the World are offering courses in occultism, and teams of scientists are investigating reports of mysterious magical phenomena all over the globe. They are baffled by some of the amazing incidents they encounter, and admit that present scientific knowledge cannot account for them. The Word of God may not provide a specific explanation for every problem one may encounter as one studies Satan, Satanism, and witchcraft, but it sheds much light on these subjects and offers practical guidelines by which God’s children can avoid dangers inherent in occultism. An unexpected and amazing development of this enlightened age is the resurgence of interest in Satan and an increase in occultic activity. A few years ago, most people assumed that the devil was dead, in the same manner that some theologians recently have affirmed the death of God. It is now becoming increasingly apparent that these reports were premature. Satan is very much alive, and is actively involved in today’s World. Though many scientists and philosophers still scoff at the idea of a personal devil, highly educated people all over the World meet regularly to worships Satan. Some groups, having dedicated themselves to the service of the devil, have committed brutal sacrificial slayings, while others engage in vile acts of immorality. Witchcraft, seances, and fortunetelling, for many years limited to areas of ignorance and superstition, are now discussed in highly respected magazines. Newspapers carry horoscopes, and multitudes consult them seriously every day. Prominent people have received a great deal of publicity by reporting the reception of personal messages from the spirits of the dead. The late Bishop Pike, for example, published a widely-read book telling of seances in which he purportedly talked with his dead son who had committed suicide. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Others, claiming the ability to foretell the future, also have become the objects of widespread interest, and have name Jeane Dixon comes to mind. She reportedly communicated with Mrs. Winchester who wanted to continue the restoration of her mansion. Mrs. Dixon is considered a prophetess by many people, and top leaders in government industry consult her for information about the future. In Europe today, more people are making a livelihood through the practice of occultism than the total number engaged in the Christian ministry. Belief in the existence of an unseen spiritual realm to be entered at death, and which has an influence upon human life, has captivated the minds of multitudes. The millions involved with occultism are unaware of the real nature of these mysterious and dangerous areas of investigation, and refuse to turn to the one source of truth regarding the kingdom of darkness. The Bible, the holy Word of God, reveals the true nature of the supernatural. It teaches that two real spiritual Worlds exist, one good and the other evil. It tells us that God is a Spirit (John 4.24), and that a great number of angels called “ministering spirits” (Hebrews 1.14) worship Him in Heaven and carry out His assignments upon Earth. The other invisible kingdom is evil, and is under the direction of Satan, who controls an organized host of wicked spirit beings. They are a formidable foe arrayed against God and His people, and the apostle Paul declared, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this World, against spiritual wickedness in high places,” reports Ephesians 6.12. All that can be known about the devil’s origin, fall, and present activity is to be found in the Bible. Although it does not specifically answer every question we may ask, it tells us the important facts about him and his kingdom. He was once a glorious, sinless creature, but he rebelled against God, was cast out of Heaven to Earth, and now leads his great army of spirit beings in a futile attempt to defeat God and destroy His people. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The devil was created an angelic being of great beauty and splendor and at one time had great favour with God. Ezekiel describes him in his sinless state as follows, “Son of man, take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyre, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord God: Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty. Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold; the workmanship of thy timbrels and of thy flutes was prepared in thee in the day thou wast created. Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth, and I have seen thee so; that wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee,” Ezekiel 28.12-15. Although the prophet was addressing these words primarily to an Earthly ruler, the king of Tyre, it is apparent that the full meaning of this prophecy is not exhausted by its reference to a flesh-and-blood monarch. The ultimate subject of Ezekiel’s words was Satan, the real instigator of the king’s pride and cruelty. Many Bible students reject this interpretation of Ezekiel’s dirge. They consider this viewpoint to be untenable and imaginative, and prefer to consider the prophet’s description to be a highly figurative portrayal of the king of Tyre. Some even say this lamentation incorporates a well-known Tyrian myth about a primeval being who lived in the “Garden of God” until he was expulsed for pride and rebellion. It is unlikely, however, that the inspired prophet would incorporate a myth into his message of judgment. Then, too, many prophetic pronouncements contained a double perspective. Isaiah, for example, after giving a stern warning of impending disaster, told Ahaz that the Lord would give a sign that the message he had spoken was true. “Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; behold, the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, and choose the good. For before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken by both her kings,” reports Isaiah 7.14-16. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The fourteenth verse is a definite reference to Christ, the virgin-born Son of God, but verses fifteen and sixteen point to Maher-shalal-hash-baz, the infant son of Isaiah whose birth and early years are described in the following chapter. Before the lad was three years old, Pekah and Rezin, king of Israel and Syria, had been executed as the prophet had predicted. Since this type of double reference is common in the prophetic Scriptures, it should not be thought strange that Ezekiel, in pronouncing judgment upon the king of Tyre, should also be alluding to Satan, who motivated the Earthly monarch to his sinful pride and cruelty. The prophet declared that in his original state Satan was a creature of great wisdom and beauty. He portrays the devil as having been in Eden, the garden of God, and describes him as having been lavishly adorned with jewels at that time. The translation in our King James Version also speaks of the “timbrels” and “flutes” prepared by him on the day he was created, and some Bible students have inferred from this that he had great musical ability and was given charge of the Heavenly choirs which sang their praises to God. The Hebrew words, however, are difficult to translate, and most students are convinced that the words rendered “timbrels” and “flutes” more likely refer to the gold settings and engravings of his ornamental attire. “Every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold; the workmanship of thy timbrels and of thy flutes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created,” reports Ezekiel 28.13. This exalted creature is also declared to be “the anointed cherub that covereth,” reports Ezekiel 28.14, which indicates that God appointed him to have a place of special prominence in connection with his throne. The remainder of the verse, “thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire,” indicates that before his sin, he was in the immediate presence of God’s glorious holiness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
In fact, Satan may have been the most exalted of all the angels, and the memory of this former glory could have been the reason Michael did not dare “bring against him a railing accusation,” (Jude 9). Dr. Eric Sauer suggests the possibility that even before God created man, He committed to Lucifer a position of authority in relation to the Earth and its surrounding planets. For this reason, Satan is called the “god of this World” in the New Testament. In England and Scotland during the mediaeval and later periods of its existence, witchcraft was an offence against the laws of God and man; in Celtic Ireland dealing with the unseen were not regarded with such abhorrence, and indeed had the sanction of custom and antiquity. Consequently, when the Anglo-Normans came over, they found that the native Celts had no predisposition towards accepting the view of the witch as an emissary of Satan and an enemy of the Church, though they fully believed in supernatural influences of both good and evil, and credited their Bards and Druids with the possession of powers beyond the ordinary. The persecution of witches did not cease in the countries where that the growth and spread of witchcraft made headway—far from it; on the contrary it was kept up with unabated vigour. Infallibility was transferred from the Church to the Bible; the Roman Catholic persecuted the witch because Supreme Pontiffs had stigmatized her as a heretic and an associate of Satan, while the Protestant acted similarly because Holy Writ contained the grim command, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” The evil that was wrought by such amongst an unenlightened and superstitious people can be well imagined; unbelievers would be converted, while the credulous would be rendered more secure in their credulity. In the 16th century, during the rule of the Commonwealth Parliament thirty thousand witches were put to death in England. Even as late as 1690 torture was judicially applied to extract evidence, for in that year a Jacobite gentleman was questioned by the boots. However, Scotland, even at its worst, fades into insignificance before certain parts of the Continent, where torture was used to an extent and degree that can only be termed hellish; the appalling ingenuity displayed in the various methods of applying the “question extraordinary” seems the work of demons rather than of Christian, and makes one blush for humanity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Nonetheless, the punishment of death by fire for witchcraft or sorcery was not employed to any extend in Ireland. We have one undoubted instance, and a general hint of some others as a sequel to this. How the two witches were put to death in 1578 we are told, but probably it was by hanging. Subsequent to the passing of the Act of 1586, the method of execution would have been that for felony. On the Continent the stake was in continual request. In 1514, three hundred persons were burnt alive for this crime at Como. Between 1615 and 1635, more than six thousand sorcerers were burnt in the diocese of Strasburg, while, if we can credit the figures of Bartholomew de Spina, in Lombardy a thousand sorcerers a year were put to death for the space of twenty-five years. The total number of person executed in various ways for this crime has, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, been variously estimated at from one hundred thousand to several millions; if the latter figure be too high undoubtedly the former is too low. In the persecution of those who practised magical arts, no rank or class in society was spared; the noble equally with the peasant was liable to torture and death. This was especially true of the earlier stages of the movement when sorcery rather than witchcraft was the crime committed. For there is a general distinction between the two, though in many instances they are confounded. Sorcery was, so to speak, more of an aristocratic pursuit; the sorcerer was the master of the Devil (until his allotted time expired), and compelled him to do his bidding: the witch generally belonged to the lower classes, embodied in her art many practices which lay on the borderland between good and evil, and was rather the slave of Satan, who almost invariably proved to be a most faithless and unreliable employer. Anybody might become a victim of the witch epidemic; noblemen, scholars, monks, nuns, titled ladies, bishops, clergy—none were immune from accusation and condemnation. Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practised at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
According to alchemists, the souls of the dead can be pinned into homunculi. A homunculi is a very small human being or humanoid creature; a supposed microscopic but fully formed human being which a fetus was formerly believed to develop. Much that passed current in the west as White (id est permissible) Magic was only a disguised goeticism, and many of the resplendent angels invoked with divine rites reveal their cloven hoofs. It is not too much to say that a large majority of past psychological experiments were conducted to establish communication with demons, and that for unlawful purposes. The pentagram is a symbol of faith, a symbol of the five elements Spirit, Air, Earth, Water, and Fire (one for each point), and the circle (the Universe) contains and connects them all. The Golden Ratio is the number 1.61803399, represented by the Greek letter Phi, and considered truly unique in its mathematical properties, prevalence throughout nature, and its ability to achieve a perfect aesthetic composition. It is integral to the pentagram. Shorter and longer sections of each line exist in golden ratio. If you look at God’s fingers and the general position of the bodies in Michelangelo’s fresco, you will see pentagrams. After Mrs. Winchesters mysterious disappearance in 1922, the mansion of emptied of her belongings. It took six trucks working around the clock for six weeks to move all of her furniture out. Many people say not only was it a lot of stuff, but the movers would get lost in the mansion. Nonetheless, some things were left behind. From time to time the mansion was rented out. A young couple Oliver Hall and Ethel Taylor rented the place, but the story of what happened is very fascinating. No one ever thought that Ethel Taylor would marry Oliver Hall; but he thought differently, and things which Oliver Hall intended had a queer way of coming to pass. He asked her to marry him before he went Yale. She laughed and refused him. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The Next time Oliver came home, he asked her again. However, she laughed, tosses her luscious blonde locks, and refused again. A third time he asked her; she said it was becoming a confirmed bad habit, and laughed at him more then ever. Oliver was not the only man who wanted to marry her, but his attempts were like an elephant, at whose clumsy feats were considerably amusing. Ethel was the belle of the Santa Clara Valley, and every one was in love with her more or less; it was a sort of fashion, like masher collars or Inverness capes. Therefore everyone was very annoyed as surprised when Oliver Hall walked into the Bank of Italy Building and invited everyone to his wedding. “Your wedding?” “You do not mean it?” “Who is the happy fair? When is it to be?” Oliver Hall filled his pipe and lighted it before he replied. Then he said—“I am sorry to deprive you fellow of your only joke—but Miss Taylor and I just let the Winchester mansion and are to married at the estate in April. “You do not mean it?” “He has got the mitten again, and its turned his head.” “No,” he said, rising “I see it is true. Lend me a pistol someone—or a first class fare to other end of Nowhere. Hall has bewitched the only pretty girl in our twenty-mile radius. Was it a mesmerism, or a love-potion, Oliver?” “Neither, sir, but a gift you will never have—perseverance—and the best luck a man ever had in this World. It is so glorious to know of a surety that now we can think, feel, speak, act—above all, love one another—haunted by no counteracting spell, responsible to no living creature for our life and our love.” There was something in his voice that silenced everyone, and all chaff of the other fellows failed to draw him further. The queer thing about it was that when we congratulated Miss Taylor, she blushed and smiled, and dimpled, for all the World as though she were in love with him, and had been in love with him all the time. They had been laughing very heartily, cherishing the mirth, as it were like those who caress a lovely bird that had been frightened out of its natural home and grown wild and rare in its visits, only tapping at the lattice for a minute, and then gone. Women are strange creatures. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
In Santa Clara everyone who was anyone was asked to the wedding at Llanada Villa. Many people were truly more interested in the trousseau than the bride herself. The coming marriage was much canvasses at afternoon tea-tables, and at the Bank of Italy over the saddler’s, and the question was always asked: “Does she care for him?” The best man used to ask that question in the early days of their engagement, but after a certain evening in April, the pause between the acts, when the house was half-darkened, and the laughter died away made him never ask that question again. “How cold is it,” said John, the best man, shivering. Oliver shivered too; but not with cold, it was more like the involuntary sensation at which people say, “Someone is walking over my grave.” He said so, jestingly. “Hush, Oliver,” whispered John, and again the draught of cold air seemed to blow right between them. The next week, John was coming home from the Bank of Italy through the churchyard. Their church was on a thyme-grown hill, and the turf about it is so thick and soft that one’s footsteps are noiseless. He made no sound as he vaulted the low lichened wall, and threaded his way between the tombstones. It was at the same instant that he heard Oliver Hall’s voice, and saw his face. Ethel was siting on a low flat gravestone with the full splendour of the western sun upon her mignonne face. Its expression ended, at once and for ever, any question of her love of Oliver; it was transfigured to a beauty John should not have believed possible, even to that beautiful little face. Many people said she was like a reincarnation of Mrs. Winchester. Oliver lay at Ethel’s feet, and it was his voice that broke the stillness of the golden April evening. “This spring is cold for you, my love. I half wish we had taken courage, and sailed once more for Hispaniola. My dear, my dear, I believe I should come back from the if you wanted.” John coughed at once to indicate his presence, and passed on into the shadow fully enlightened. “Oh, no—oh, no! No mor of the sea. Llanada Villa is perfect for me,” she said, with another and stronger shoulder. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
“Ethel,” he said at last, rousing himself, with a half-smile, “I think I must have grown remarkably attractive. Look! half the glasses opposite are lifted to our box. It cannot be to gaze at me, you know. Do you remember telling me I was the ugliest fella you ever saw?” “Oh, Oliver!” Yet it was quite true—she had thought him so, in far back, strange, awful times, when she, a girl of sixteen, had her mind wholly filled with one idea!—one insane, exquisite dream; when she brought her innocent child’s garlands, and sat him down under one spreading magnificent tree, which trees of the Victorian garden at Llanada Villa, until she felt its dews dropping death upon her youth, and her whole soul withering under its venomous shade. “Oh, Oliver!” She cried once more, looking fondly on his beloved face, where no unearthly beauty dazzled, no unnatural calm repelled; where all was simple, noble, manly, true. “My dearly beloved, I thank Heaven for that dear ‘ugliness’ of yours. Above all, though blood runs strong, they say , I thank Heaven that I see you no likeness to—” Oliver knew what name she meant, though for a whole year past—since God’s mercy made it to them only a name—they had ceased to utter it, and let it die wholly out of the visible World. The wedding was to be early in April. Two days before, John had to run up town on business. The train was late, of course, for they were on the South-Eastern, and as he stood grumbling with his watch in his hand, who should he see but Oliver Hall and Ethel Taylor. They were walking up and down the unfrequent end of the platform, that he obtrusively passed the pair with his Gladstone, and took the corner in a first-class smoking-carriage. He did this with as good an air of not seeing them as he could assume. John prided himself on his discretion, but if Oliver were traveling alone he wanted his company. He had it. “Hullo, old man,” came his cheery voice as he swung his bad into John’s carriage; “here is luck; I was expecting a dull journey!” “Where are you off to?” John asked, discretion still bidding him turn his eyes away, though he saw, without looking, that hers were red-rimmed. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
“To old San Francisco,” he answered, shutting the door and leaning out for a last word with his sweetheart. He stood—clasping her hand secretly and hard; then he grew quitter; until, as the drop-scene fell, the same cold air swept past them. It was as if someone fresh from the sharp sea-wind had entered the box. “Oh, I wish you would not go, Oliver,” she was saying in a low, earnest voice. “I feel certain something will happen.” “Do you think I should let anything happen to keep me, and the day after tomorrow our wedding-day?” “Do not go,” she answered, with a pleading intensity which would have sent anyone’s Gladstone on to the platform and one after it. However, Oliver Hall was made differently; he rarely changed his opinion, never his resolutions. He only stroked the little ungloved hands that lay on the carriage door. “I must go, Ethel, The old boy’s have been awfully good to me, and now he is dying I must go and see him, but I shall come home in time for—” the rest of the parting was lost in a whisper and in the rattling lurch of the starting rain. “You are sure to come?” she spoke as the train moved. “Nothing shall keep me,” he answered; and they steamed out. After he had seen the last of the little figure on the platform he leaned back in his corner and kept his silence for a minute. When he spoke it was to explain to John that his godfather, whose heir he was, lay dying in Le Petit Trianon, some fifty miles away, and had sent for Oliver, and Oliver felt bound to go. “I shall be surely back tomorrow,” he said, “or, if not, the day after, in heaps of time. Thank Heaven, one has not to get up in the middle of the night to get married nowdays!” “And supposed Mr. Koshland dies?” “Alive or dead I mean to get married on Thursday!” Oliver answered, as he unfolded Oakland Tribune. At the Third and Townsend Depot they said their “goodbye,” and he got out and John saw him ride off; John went to Berkeley, where he stayed the night. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
When John got home the next afternoon, a very wet one, by the way, his sister greeted him with—“Where is Oliver Hall?” “Goodness knows,” he answered testily. Every man, since Cain, has resented that kind of question. “I thought you might have heard from him,” she went on, “as you are to give him away tomorrow.” “Is he not back,” I asked, for I had confidently expected to find him at Llanada Villa. “No, John,”—his sister Alexis always had a way of jumping to conclusions, expecially such conclusion as were least favourable to her fellow-creatures—“he has not returned, and, what is more, you may depend upon it he will not. You mark my words, there will be no wedding tomorrow.” His sister Alexis has the power of annoying him which no other human being possess. “You mark my words,” John retorted with asperity, “you had better give up making such a thundering idiot of yourself. There will be more wedding tomorrow than ever, you will take first part in.” A prophecy which, by the way, came true. However, though, John could snarl confidently to his sister, he did not feel so comfortable when, late that night, standing on the door step of the Winchester mansion, heard the Oliver had not returned home. Filled with German superstitions, the young man grew almost pale, but kept a courteous calmness. There was nothing too ghastly or terrible for his own imagination to conjure up. John went home gloomily through the rain. Next morning brought a brilliant blue sky, gold sun, and all such softness of air and beauty of cloud as to make up a perfect day. However, he woke with a vague feeling of having gone to bed anxious, and of being rather averse to facing that anxiety in the light of full wakefulness. However, with his shaving-water came a note from Oliver which relieved his mind and sent him to the Winchester mansion with a light heart. Ethel was in the garden. He saw her blue gown through the hollyhocks as the mansion’s gates swung behind him. So he did not go up to the mansion, but turned aside down the turfed path. “He has written to you too,” she said, without preliminary greeting, when John reached her side. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
“Yes, I am to meet him at the station at three, and come straight back to the mansion.” Her face looked pale, but there was brightness in her eyes, and a tender quiver about the mouth that spoke of renewed happiness. “Mrs. Koshland begged him so to stay another night that he had not the heart to refuse,” she went. “He is so kind, but I wish he had not stayed.” John was at the station at half-past two. He felt rather annoyed with Oliver. It seemed a sort of slight to the beautiful young lady who loved him, that he should come as it were out of breath, and with the dust of travel upon him to take her hand, which some of them would have given the best years of their lives to take. However, when the three o’clock train glided in, and glided out again having brought no passengers to their little station, John was more than annoyed. There was no other train for thirty-five minutes; he calculated that, with much hurry, he might just get back to the mansion in time for the ceremony; but, oh, what a fool to miss that first train! What other man could have done it? That thirty-five minutes seemed like a year, as he wandered round the station reading the advertisements and the time-tables, and the company’s bye-laws, and getting more and more angry with Oliver Hall. This confidence in his own power of getting everything he wanted the minute he wanted it was leading him too far. John hated waiting. After no sight of Oliver, he flung himself into the carriage that he had brough for him. “Drive to the mansion!” he said, as someone shut the door. “Mr. Hall has not come by this train.” Anxiety now replaced anger. What had become of the man? Could he have been suddenly taken will? John had never known Oliver to have an illness in his life. And even so, he might have telegraphed. Some awful accident must have happened. Maybe his corpse was picked up off a wreck, and committed to the deep—in the Gulf of Mexico. The thought that he had played her false never—no, not for a moment, entered John’s head. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Yes, something terrible had happened to Oliver, and on John lay the task of telling his bride. John almost wished the carriage would upset and break his head so that someone else might tell her, not Joh, who—but that is nothing to do with the story. It was five minutes to four as they drew up to the gate of the Winchester mansion. A double row of eager onlooker lined the path of the palm avenue. John sprang from the carriage and passed up between them. The estate’s gardener had a good front place near the door. He stopped. “Are they waiting still, Thomas?” he asked, simply to gain time, for of course he knew they were by the waiting crowd’s attentive attitude. “Waiting, sir? No, sir, why it must be over by now.” “Over! Then Mr. Hall has come?” ‘To the minute, sir; must have missed you somehow, and I say, sir,” lowering his voice, “I never see Mr. Oliver the bit so afore, but my opinion is he has been drinking pretty free. His clothes was all dusty and his face a sheet. I tell you I did not like the looks of him, with never a look or a word for none of us; him that was always such a gentleman!” I had never heard Thomas make so long a speech. The crowd in at mansion wee talking in whispers and getting ready rice and slippers to throw at the bride and bridegroom. The ringers were ready with their hands on the ropes to rung out the merry peal as the bride and bridegroom should come out. A murmur from the Winchester mansion announced them; out they came, Thomas was right. Oliver Hall did not look himself. There was dust on his coat, his hair was disarranged. He seemed to have been in some row, for there was a black mark above his eyebrow. He was deathly pale. However, his pallor was not greater than that of the bride, who might have been carved in ivory—dress, veil, orange blossoms and all. As they passed out the ringers stooped—there were six of them—and then, on the ears expecting the gay wedding peal, came the slow tolling of the Winchester Bell. A thrill of horror at so foolish a jest from the ringers passed through all the guests. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
However, the ringers themselves dropped the ropes and fled like rabbits down the belfry stairs. The bride shuddered, and grey shadows came about her mouth, but the bridegroom led her on down the path where the people stood with the handfuls of rice; but the handfuls were never thrown, and the wedding-bells never rang. In vain the ringers were urged to remedy their mistake: the protested with many whispered expletives that they would see themselves further first. In a hush like the hush in the chamber of death the bridal pair passed into their carriage and its door slammed behind them. Then the tongues were loosed. A babel of anger, wonder, conjecture from the guests and spectators. “If I had seen his condition, sir,” said old Seymour to me as we drove off, “I would have stretched him on the floor of the mansion, sir, by Heaven I would, before I would have let him marry my daughter!” Then he put his head out of the window. “Drive like fury,” he cried to the coachman; “do not spare the horses.” He was obeyed. They passed the bride’s carriage. John forbore to look at it, and old Seymour turned his head away and swore. They reached reception hall before it. They stood in the hall doorway, in the blazing afternoon sun, and in about half a minute, they heard the wheels crunching the gravel. When the carriage stopped in the front of the steps old Seymour and John ran down. “Great Heaven, the carriage is empty! And yet—” he had the door open in a minute, and this is what he saw—No sign of Oliver Hall; and of Ethel, his wife only a huddled heap of white satin lying half on the floor of the carriage and half on the seat. “I drove straight here, sir,” said the coachman, as the bride’s father lifted her out; “and I will swear no one got out of the carriage.” We drove back to the Winchester mansion, and carried her back into the house in her bridal dress, and drew back her veil. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Her face. No one would ever forget. White, white and drawn with agony and horror, bearing such a look of terror as no one has never seen except in dreams. And her hair, her radiant blonde hair, it was white like snow. As John and her father stood, both half mad with horror and mystery of it, a body came up the avenue—a telegraph boy. They brought the orange envelop to John. He tore it open. “Mr. Hall was thrown from his horse on his way to the station at half-past one. Killed on the spot!” And he was married to Ethel Taylor in the Winchester Mansion at half-past three, in the presence of fifty guests. “I shall be married, dead or alive!” What had passed in that carriage on the drive to the reception hall? No one knows—no one will ever know. Oh, Ethel! Oh, my dear!” Before a week was over they laid her beside her husband in the Oak Hill Memorial Park on the northern most hill in the San Juan Bautista Hills of South San Jose. Thus was accomplished Oliver Hall’s wedding. Whether or not one believes in superstitions about spirits, it is hard to dismiss the unusual events that have taken place at this estate. Just like the original construction, restoration and maintenance work at Winchester Mystery House is never complete. The actual amount of materials requires is staggering. For example, it takes over 20,000 gallons of pain to cover the exterior—and by the time the workers have finished, they have to start all over again! Continuous work is being done on the massive structure, with carpenters, painters, and gardeners toiling away just like they did during Mrs. Winchester’s day. The sons, grandsons, and great grandson of Mrs. Winchester’s original employees have been some of these workmen! The restoration work is very demanding. Although you can still find spots where the cracked plaster has not been fixed after the 1906 Earthquake, almost everything will eventually be restored. This has been left like this on purpose, like a frozen moment in time, to show people how Mrs. Winchester lived there. An ongoing search continues for fine examples of the period furnishings, similar to what Mrs. Winchester herself would have used. Her original furnishings were auctioned off after her death and never have been recovered. The job of overseeing the restoration is a painstaking one. The historical accuracy of every project is researched and approved by the Restoration Board of Directors. Winchester Mystery House receives no funds from any government agency; the continuous restoration and maintenance programs are funded entirely from tour, café, and gift shop revenues. Since 1973, millions of dollars have been invested to ensure that this unique landmark will be preserved as the premier showcase of the Santa Clara Valley’s gracious past. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
The Witches Cap 🧙🏼♀️- named for it’s conical resemblance of a witches hat. Many famous mediums claim this room was “important” to Sarah Winchester, although we do not know what it was used for. How did you feel when you experienced the Witches Cap for the first time? winchestermysteryhouse.com
Randolph Harris II International Institute 