Home » Dreams (Page 21)
Category Archives: Dreams
The Paris Experience–Malls are a Ubiquitous Element of Modern American Life!
Long-term memory stores an immense amount of information in a lifetime. How it is possible to quickly find specific memories? Well, each person’s “memory index” is highly organized. Do you mean that information is arranged alphabetically, as in a dictionary? Not a change! If I asked you to name a black and white animal that lives on ice, is related to a chicken, and cannot fly, you do not have to go from aardvark to zebra to find the answer. You will probably one think of black and white birds living in the Antarctic. Which of these cannot fly? Voila, the answer is penguin. Now, if I ask you who is your Saviour, do you know the answer? One who saves. Jesus Christ, through His Atonement, offered redemption and salvation to all humankind. “Saviour” is the name and title of Jesus Christ. “I am the Lord; and beside me there is no Saviour,” reports Doctrine and Covenant 76.1. My dearest son, may this be your continual prayer. Lord, if You are pleased with what I pray for, please let it happen. Lord, if You are pleased to find some honour for Yourself in my prayer, please let it happen in Your Holy Name. Lord, if You are pleased to find some spiritual advantage in my prayer, please let it happen to Your honour. However, Lord, if what I pray for is harmful to me and not at all helpful to the salvation of my soul, please, please save me from my prayers. As I have already taught you, My friend and son, not every desire comes from the Holy Spirit, not even if it seems in general to be right and good for Humankind. Yes, it is difficult to judge for true whether the spirit that moves one to pray for this or that is a good one or a bad one or whether it just comes from one’s own self-centeredness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Alas, toward the end of their lives, many comes to see that all along they have been deceived by the Bad Spirit. Which is so sad! At the beginning of their spiritual lives, they seemed to have been motivated only by the Spirit of God. Therefore, whatever desirable comes into the mind must be longed for firs, then prayed for, but always with fear of God and humility of heart. Especially must you be resigned to whatever the outcome. That is to say, the prayer must be totally committed to Me and prayed this way. O Lord, You know what is good and bad, what is better and worse, what is best and worst—may my prayer be as You wish it to be. Please Give what You want, and how much You want, and when You want. Do with me as You know how. Pick what is more pleasing, more honouring. Please put me where You want, and deal freely with me in all things. My reins are in Your hand—put me through my paces, as the amatory Ovid might have put it. Mark You, I am Your full-time servant now, prepared for al exigencies. My life is not for me any longer; it is for You to do with it as You want, as the Psalmist has sung (119.125). Would not that be nice, O Lord, if I could ever really pull it off! Here is a prayer for making God happy. Please grant me Your grace, Kindest Jesus, that it may come with me, work with me, preserve with me until the end of the End. Please grant that I may desire and wish this one thing, what fits You more closely and pleases You more dearly. May Your will be mine always—may my will follow Yours in perfect harmony. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Two things I crave. Please enable me to will and to nill the way You do. Please limit me from willing and nilling the way You do not. Please grant that I may die in all things that have to do with the World. Please grant that I may grow accustomed to being despised and unknown in the age in which I live, as You did in Yours. Above all other desirables, please grant that I not take our friendship for granted; rather, as the Great Augustine suggested in his Confessions (1.1), to rest in I and quiet my heart in You. You are my heart’s True Peace. Without You all this is too hard, too harsh, if I may echo Augustine again (6.16). In this peace, which is Yourself, the One Great and Eternal Good, if I may bejumble the Psalmist’s verse (4.8), I sleep and take my rest. Amen. In life, there is a fundamental and unavoidable contradiction: on the one hand people have something new to say, something that has not thought or said before. However, in speaking of “newness” one places it only into a descriptive category which does not do justice to what is essential in the creative thought. The creative thought is always critical thought because it does away with certain illusion and gets closer to the awareness of reality. It enlarges the realm of humans’ awareness and strengthens the power of one’s reason. The critical and hence creative though always has a liberating function by its negation of illusory thought. One the other hand the thinker has to express one’s new thought in the spirit of one’s time. Different societies have different kinds of “common sense,” different categories of thinking, different systems of logic; every society has its own “social filter” through which only certain ideas and concepts and experiences can pass; those that need not necessarily remain unconscious can become conscious when by fundamental changes in the social structure the “social filer” changes accordingly. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Thoughts that cannot pass through the social filter of a certain society at a certain time are “unthinkable,” and of course also “unspeakable.” For the average person the thought patterns of one’s society appear to be simply logical. The thought patterns of fundamentally different societies are looked upon each by the others as illogical or plainly nonsensical. However, not only “logic” is determined by the “social filter,” and in the last analysis by the practice of life of any given society, but also certain thought contents. Take for instance the conventional notion that exploitation among human beings is a “normal,” natural and unavoidable phenomenon. For a member of the Neolithic society in which each human lived from one’s work, individually or in groups, such a proposition would have been unthinkable. Considering their whole social organization, exploitation of human beings by others would have been a “crazy” idea, because there was not yet a surplus to make it sensible to employ others. (If one person had forced another to work for one it would not have meant that amount of goods would have increased, only that the “employer” would have been forced to idleness and boredom.) Another example: the many societies that knew no private property in the modern sense but only “functional property,” like a tool, which “belonged” to a single person inasmuch as he used it but was readily shared with others when needed. What is unthinkable is also unspeakable and the language has no word for it. Many languages do not have a word for to have but must express the concept of possession in other words, for instance by the construction it is to me, which expressed the concept of functional but not of private property (“private” in e sense of the Latin privare, to deprive—that is to say, property the use of which everybody else is deprived of except the owner). #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Many languages started out without a word for to have but in the development and, one may assume, with the emergence of private property, they acquired a word for it (see Benveniste, 1966). Another example: in the tenth or eleventh century in Europe the concept of the World without reference to God was unthinkable and hence a word like atheism could no exist. Language itself is influenced by the social repression of certain experiences which do not fit into the structure of a given society; languages differ inasmuch as different experiences are repressed, and hence inexpressible. (I leave aside here quite a different problem, that of the possibility of expressing subtle and complex feelings experiences through language, which can be attempted only in poetry.) It follows that the creative thinker must think in the terms of the logic, the thought patterns, the expressible concepts of one’s culture. That means one has not yet the proper words to express the creative, the new, the liberating idea. One is forced to solve an insoluble problem: to express the new thoughts have been generally accepted.) The consequence is that the new though as one formulated it is a blend of what is truly new and the conventional thought which it transcends. The thinker, however, is not conscious of this contradiction. The conventional thoughts of one’s culture are unquestionably true for one and hence one oneself is little away of the difference between what is creative in one’s thought and what is purely conventional. Only in the historical process, when social changes are reflected in the changes of thought patterns, does it become evident what in the thought of a creative thinker was truly new to what extent one’s system is only a reflection of conventional thinking. It is up to one’s followers living in a different frame of ideas to interpret the “master” by distinguishing one’s “original” thoughts from one’s conventional thoughts, and by analyzing the contradictions between the new and the old, rather than by trying to harmonize the immanent contradictions of one’s system by all kinds of subterfuge. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The process of revision of an individual, which distinguishes the essential and new from the contingent, time-conditioned elements, is in itself also the product of a certain historical period that influences the interpretation. In this creative interpretation, again creative and valid elements are mixed with time-bound and accidental ones. The revision is not simply true as the original was not simply false. Some elements of the revision remain true, namely where it liberates the theory from the shackles of a previous conventional thinking. In the process of the critical elimination of previous theories we find an approximation to truth but we do not find the truth, and we cannot find the truth as long as social contradictions and force require ideological falsification, as humans’ reason is damaged by irrational passions which have their root in the disharmony and irrationality of social life. Only in a society in which there is no exploitation, hence which does not need irrational assumptions in order to cover up or justify exploitation, in a society in which the basic contradictions have been solved and in which social reality can be recognized without distortion, can humans make full use of one’s reason, and at that point one can recognize reality in an undistorted form—that is to say, the truth. To put it differently, the truth is historically conditioned: it is dependent on the degree of rationality and the absence of contradictions within the society. Humans can grasp truth only when one can regulate one’s social life in a human, dignified and rational way, without fear and hence without greed. To use a politico-religious expression, only in the Messianic Time can the truth be recognized insofar as it is recognizable. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
There is a general agreement that contemporary urban decentralization has developed beyond the traditional urban-suburban dichotomy. The old idea of the urban core surrounded by a ring of suburbs no longer neatly fits what we see when we travel to, or through, America’s metropolitan areas. Today’s multinucleated outer cities tear up the old definitions as to what is urban and what is suburban. The suburbs have become as to what is urban and what is suburban. The suburbs have become urban. Places that once were bedroom suburbs now attract commuters. The suburbs’ share of the employment pie had been dramatically increasing. Jobs as well as people have suburbanized. Moveover, most of those still working in the city do not live there. Seven in ten people who work in the District do not live there. The most common commuter trip today is not from suburb to city but within the suburbs. Commuting from a suburban home to a suburban job is more common than commuting from suburb to city. There is no longer a metropolitan area composed of a central city hub and its outlying residential areas spears along the spokes. The metropolitan area no longer has once core hub; it has become multinucleated. Among other things this means that road and rapid transit systems designed to move workers from the suburbs to the central city are becoming outdated. Population and job growth are occurring in areas where transportation facilities often are least developed. Although it stretches the language a bit, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the periphery is the new urban core. Places such as Irving, California; South Sacramento, California; Oceanside, California; Rancho Cordova, California; and Scottsdale, Arizona are no longer bedroom suburbs, but real cities in heir own right. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Such increasing economically and politically powerful outer cities can be found sandwiched between somewhat declining central cities and rural areas, both of which are losing their political and economic clout. Economically, the suburban economy is increasingly a service-based economy. Moreover, the marketplace patterns that dominate local economics are largely determined at the national or international rather then the local levels. Outer cities or suburban municipalities sometimes are difficult to define since they do not look like how we think cities should look; not do they behave as we expect cities to behave. They may not even appear on some maps. They are “cities” not subject to their own municipal legislation, codes, or regulations. Shopping malls, business parks, single-family subdivisions, and garden apartment complexes all are placed in a strategic order to make a harmonious community that is visually appealing. Not being legal municipalities, these outer cities also have another unusual characteristic for a city—they have no distinct elected government. Within these edge cities there thus seems to be no real civic order. They appear to be public places, but in reality, they are private. What really makes these new suburban communities break with the past is not only that hey are newer, shiner, or have more glass, and marble, but what really makes them different is that they are private domains rather than incorporated legally defined areas. The old city downtowns, whether planned or unplanned, were public spaces. City downtowns were open to all. The rules governing public dress and behaviour were the laws and ordinances passed by those public officials elected by citizens of the jurisdiction. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The outer-city malls, for all their open courtyards, fountains, benches, and play spaces, are fundamentally different. They are private property. They are not governed by elected representatives, but by executives appointed by corporate boards. They are governed not by public laws, but by corporate regulations. Fundamental questions, such as who can be in a mall and what they can or cannot do while they are there, are determined by corporate policy rather than ordinances passed by elected representatives. Thus, a mall can exclude those soliciting funds for cancer research, those proselytizing for a religious belief, those handing out literature for a political candidate, or those not meeting a required dress code (exempli gratia, those not wearing shoes or street people with foul odors or wearing dirty clothes). What applies to the malls of the outer cities or edge cities is even more the case for the business parks filled with state-of-the-art offices and facilities. The new outer cities are cities administered by decree. They are not controlled by citizens, not even nominally. Such may be safe, but they are not democratic. In many ways, the edge cities’ privatization of public spaces and activities represents a shift back to the medieval and Renaissance concept of a city as a collection of essentially privately managed places controlled by an oligarchy. The malls are, in effect, separate city-state controlled and administered by the decree of private boards. What is perhaps even more remarkable is that this shift from public to private control has occurred almost completely without public notice. It has certainly occurred without public discussion or debate. The once-public city has been privatized. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
If you had to pick one symbol that would represent contemporary suburban life, that symbol would very likely be the shopping mall. Malls have become a ubiquitous element of modern American life. You may love the malls or believe they are sterile and without a soul, but it is impossible to discuss suburbia today without noting the importance of the malls not only for retail purchasing but also for social life. As the old downtowns decline, the malls have become the primary site where people greet other citizens. Shopping centers dispense everything from lottery tickets, sports demonstrations, public relations programs to clothes, cars, housing, and even provide an off-campus site for college courses. Some shopping malls offer community activities such as bingo games once a week, periodic health services such as blood tests, and occasional entertainment such as Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving shows. The malls, with their shops selling mass-produced standardized goods, may also be the site for “Arts and Crafts” shows that sell expensive handmade one-of-a-kind heirloom-quality items. Malls also serve a social function, particularly for adolescents and the elderly. Being a teenage “mall socialite” is part of growing up in many parts of the country. Young ladies like to go to the mall with their parents’ credit cards, pretending like they are Paris Hilton, charge up a bunch of items, and walk out of the store smiling and carrying bags full of clothes and jewelry and perfumes and body washes and lotions. It is called “The Paris Experience.” The malls have also become the place where seniors go to ward off loneliness, a phenomenon that has produced a new variation (and spelling) of an old term, “malingering.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
However, enclosed malls with two to four anchor department stores, scores of specialty shops, fountains, food courts, and multiplex movie theaters have not always been synonymous with suburbia. Actually, they are a recent and relatively new innovation. The first modern shopping mall did not occur until Northgate, in 1950, on the edge of Seattle. It had an open pedestrian mall lined with shops and an anchor department store. Northgate, like malls to follow, was near a highway and had some 4,000 parking places. The first enclosed shopping mall was not opened until 1956—Southdale Center outside Minneapolis, designed by the architect Victor Gruen. Not until the early 1970s, did the Rouse Company introduce the idea of the now ubiquitous food courts. J.C. Nichols’s Country Club Plaza shopping centers, like his homes, was state of the art for the 1920s. It was the first mall designed specifically for the automobile, with off-street parking. Following the ideas of the British garden cities as earlier proposed by Ebenezer Howard, Country Club Plaza was to be the town center, not merely a collection of stores. Nichola set the pattern for the luxury malls of today by lavishingly landscaping Country Club Plaza and providing fountains, flowers, and walks with benches. The whole complex was done in elaborate Spanish-Moorish-Hollywood style using Spanish plaster and red tile roofs. The style was immensely popular during the 1920s. Nichols’s Country Club District tightly controlled what sort of businesses would be allowed into the plaza and where they would be placed. Most buildings were two-story, with the walking level occupied by shops and the second floor largely by the professional offices of dentist, doctors, and lawyers. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
From the first, Country Club Plaza was an economic and social success. It not only made a great deal of money, it also became an alternate to the downtown as a location for cultural as well as business activities. As such it was a harbinger of contemporary suburban malls. Country Club Plaza was designed from the first to provide an emotional, cultural, and socializing center for the community. It was to become the suburban version of the village center. Planners saw the separation of pedestrian from automotive and truck traffic as providing far more than convenience and efficiency. Landscaped grassy areas, winding walkways, and play areas for small children were all to contribute to better civic life. Shopping centers were also to encourage civic pride through physical design. Planners saw them contributing to the development of a more orderly, harmonious, and artistic environment—an environment that was being at least implicitly contrasted to the chaos, disorder, and confusion many planners saw in the central city. Planned shopping centers dovetailed with planned recreational facilities and planned neighbourhoods. Similarly, the advantage of the mall having its own free parking was recognized as providing mall retailers a significant edge. At the end of World War II, there were only eight shopping centers in all of North America. As of 2020, there are approximately 120 shopping malls spread across the United States of America. Back in 1970, here were only 30,000 shopping malls in the United States of America. Malls as great as they are, tend to put small locally owned stores out of business. In fact 87 percent of malls are strip malls. Economically, as a result, the mass market malls also are putting heavy pressure on the generally more expensive regional malls that have the overhead of higher levels of service and concern for ambience. Further squeezing the big malls are off-price shopping centers, discount warehouses, and online shopping. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Where earlier strip malls had followed the population, the new enclosed malls became magnets attracting people, housing, and commercial activity. The malls became a catalyst leading the development of a new suburban area. The fact of a comfortable middle-class suburb naming itself after a shopping mall is one of the small acts that signify a sea of change in attitudes toward suburbia. The defining characteristic of an area was a combination of the homes, the neighbourhood, and the size and quality of the shopping mall. Some malls like Huston’s Galleria, has an Olympic-sized skating rink, two hotels and nightclubs. In addition to its glitz and shopping, the mall has become a regional tourist attraction. It was the belief of philosophers of urban planning such as Victor Gruen that shopping centers would lead to the enhancement of social and civic life. Shopping malls were to be suburban agoras. They were to serve as new climate-controlled downtowns offering a full range of social, cultural, and even artistic activities. As expressed by Mr. Gruen, “By affording opportunities for social life and recreation in protected pedestrian environment, by incorporating civic and educational facilities, shopping centers can fill an existing void. The idea that the malls would bring vibrancy and vitality to suburban life is now widely accepted. Malls have promoted high culture, and even have provided a sense of community and a place for lively amusements. Not every downtown has the potential to attract tourist, or even residents. However, high class suburban shopping malls do just that. Meeting the need of less affluent or poor city residents is not the purpose for which they were created. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
It is a basic tenet of any successful mall that it must exude an image of security and safety. For a mall to be successful, it must give those within a feeling of comfort, and that means providing safety and security. This is provided by physically excluding activities or people that might prove disruptive or disturbing. The city downtown may be famous for producing a sense of surprise and excitement, of not knowing what is around the next corner. This is not the goal of the mall. Shopping malls studiously avoid and ban the unpredictable. What the downtown offers is excitement, what the mall seeks is clean family friendly fun and predictability. Mall publicity and advertisements may speak of excitement, but it is an excitement that is totally managed and predictable. All activities are controlled and programmed. The malls, for all their open courtyards, fountains, benches, and play spaces, are private property. As previously noted, they are governed not by public bodies, but by private boards. Malls are ruled by regulations rather than laws. Unpredictability in any form is banned from malls. If it might offend some shoppers, it will not be found at a regional mall. Walking through a mall one will not encounter flashers, loud music, threatening crows, or even a Jehovah’s Witness passing out The Watchtower. Malls are very Wonder Bread places—no politicians, no checking immigration status (all money is welcomed), no political parties, no street people, no dirt, no clutter, no art that in any way might disturb of offend, no live or recorded music that is not preapproved, no decorations that is not preapproved, and no charitable solicitations or sidewalk merchants of any sort that have no been preapproved. Volunteers cannot simply collect for cancer, heart, disease, or any relief. Most malls even ban the Salvation Army from ringing its bells and collecting food and clothing for the poor at Christmas time. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
All the restrictions are not so much out of any sense of mean-spiritedness, but because mall patrons have been taught to expect predictability and no hassles. State courts generally have supported the malls’ contention that they can control, limit, or exclude activities within their confines. The major exception is California; there the state constitution grants extensive public-access rights within malls. The 1972 Untied States of America Supreme Court ruling of Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner held that banning political leaflets did no interfere with First Amendment free-speech rights. Currently, the issue is in flux; but most mall managements tend to go with the most conservative interpretations. Generally, managements are not opposed to charity, community, or even political activities so long as these activities do not cost them shoppers or profits. What the malls seek to portray is an image of a secure environment into which the problems of the outside World do not intrude. Malls attempt to radiate an aura of safety. As private entities, malls can ban those activities and persons that are thought to be disruptive, distracting, or dangerous. Mall consciously promote the idea that they are safe places. To that end strangers are excluded. There are no street people or bag ladies in the malls because those loitering or improperly dressed are excluded. Similarly, teenagers or even senior citizens who are unduly loud or abusive may find themselves directed to the exits and told not to return. One can even be asked to leave for not being suitably dressed. This can be done because the mall is private rather than public space. No one has a right to walk unhindered back and forth through a mall simply because he or she feels like walking. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Enforcing these regulations are the mall police. In terms of uniform, badges, weapons, and demeanor, the mall police look and act like a police force. However, they rarely are they police officers. Rather, they are private security guards done up to look like police officers. Some malls have as many as fifty-two security officers who wear policelike uniforms and have authority to make arrests. This blurring of the distinction between police and security personnel is deliberate. Security guards in most states lack formal police powers. This means that in most states guards cannot stop and search purse snatchers or shoplifters. Often they cannot go into stores, but they merely patrol common areas. Their only arrest power in most states is that of a citizen’s arrest. Basically, the security guards notify the real police and try to hold the suspect until they arrive. So if a security guard is bothering you, it is best to leave before the situation escalates to a problem and you find yourself being detained and arrested. The major function of the security guards is public relations. They try to look like the police officer on the beat, help find lost children, and try to deter crime by looking official. However, you never know when they may actually be an off duty or undercover police officer or FBI agent. Therefore, it is best to be polite and respectful, you never know who you are dealing with, and do not want to be caught in the system over a misunderstanding. Seven out of ten mal crimes are shoplifting, while another 24 percent are auto break-ins and thefts. To increase safety, malls are designed to avoid dark corners, and elevators are invariably glass-sided (and even if you do not see them, almost all elevators have cameras). In terms of personal safety, by far the most dangerous area in a shopping mall is he parking area of deck. For this reason, parking areas are well lit. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Large malls have highly visible official-looking security vehicles with revolving flashing lights on the roof cruising the parking areas. This is to deter crime, but even more to reassure customers that the “police” are on patrol. While car theft is the most common problem to affect a shopper, robberies, assaults, rapes, and even murders and suicides do occur. Managements tend to do everything possible to keep problems with crimes of violence away from the public notice. Unless major public violence occurs, there is likely to be no comment on the evening news or in the local paper. Malls and their stores are major advertisers. When a series of robberies and rapes occurred at the major mall nearest someone’s expensive home, no notice of the crimes ever appeared in the local newspaper or on local news shows. Nor were warning posters placed on mall entrance doors. The image of safety and freedom from aggressive strangers is though essential for a successful mall. Crime is bad for business and is something that happens in central cities. To acknowledge publicly that malls have violent crimes would do damage to the illusion that both mall operators and patrons seek to maintain. Malls, however, have begun to indirectly deal with the subject by publicizing that they have security forces. Some regional megamalls have become major tourist attractions. South Coast Plaza, in Orange County, California, south Los Angeles, is the country’s third-largest tourist attraction. That achievement is put into perspective when it is noted that the first and second attractions are Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The West Edmonton Mall is a goliath of shopping mall. It is the size of 115 football fields, and have parking for 20,000 cars. This mall has 800 shops, 110 restaurants, 19 movie theaters, and a Caesar’s Palace Bingo Parlor. It also has the World’s largest indoor amusement park with 24 rides and two 13-story-high roller coasters. It boasts a 5-acre lagoon with the World’s largest wave machine, and 22 water slides. If you would prefer other amusements, there is an 18-hole miniature golf course, an NHL-size ice-skating rink, and the opportunity to cruise the bottom of the 2-foot-deep lake in one of 25-person submarines. Reston, Virginia, is one of American’s first planned new towns. Reston Town Center is not the typical suburban shopping center. Rather, it is trying to be a real downtown, with a grid street system, two 11-story office towers, streets with wide brick sidewalks, a 514-room hotel, some forty or so retail stores, eight restaurants, and a movie theater. Also, Reston’s downtown is not only new and clean, it is remarkable affluent. Reston was not designed for poor inner-city residents. Unlike real cities, there are no big stores or discount stores offering cheap goods. There are no panhandlers or street people. Reston is one of Virginia’s more affluent communities, and the Town Center reflects the interests and incomes of its residents; it has a clearly upscale image. Reston Town Center, in this respect, may have the combination of characteristics most Americans seeks in a city center. It has more real life and vitality than a mall, but more security, safety, and parking than the old downtowns. We do not yet know whether Reston Town Center will become a prototype for the new century or an interesting, but one-of-a-kind experiment. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Ancient sun, eternally young, giver of life and source of energy, in coal and oil, in plant and wind and tide, in spiritual light and human embrace, you kindle the Heavens, you shine within us (for we are suns with hearts afire—we light the World as you light the sky and find clouds within whose shadows are dark); we give thanks for your rays, and clouds your rays draw up, for the sky route your travel faithfully as we traverse this globe, for our journeys of Earth which draw us together, for our journeys od dream which sustain us when apar. Ancient of Days, you rule the nations, our birth and death: our journeys you have wrought. Loam we become for your fertile spirit. Your cosmic light penetrates our depths; in your majesty we are bound to one another. We gather this morning as did people of old with joys and woes, varied gifts and diverse needs. We offer you these in thanksgiving for life and share them through your generations on Earth. Save now this nation, once firm as a rampart and clear as the sun; she is exiled, a wandering one. Likened of yore to a palm-tree, today she is borne to the stake, today she is slain for Thy sake. Scattered amid her oppressors, she flyeth to Thee from their stroke, she bends to the love of Thy yoke. One to proclaim Thou art One, crushed by the far and the near, she awaits, she is learning Thy fear. Giving the cheek to the smiters, Thy burden of sorrow she bears, tossed in the storm of the years. Moses delivered her once;–the sanctified sheep of his fold were Jacob’s assembly of old, marked by Thy name:–O save! They are falling, they grasp thee, they crave. They are calling, beseeching Thee, “Save!” One loses one’s ego in the calm serenity of the Overself, yet at the same time it is, mysteriously, still with one. With this displacement of ego, one enters into the very presence of divinity. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Cresleigh Homes
The outside looks cozy, but the interior will exceed all your expectations! The thoughtful layout of this single story home allows maximum space with ultimate convenience. We know you’ll love our Residence 3 model as much as we do!
Residence Three is the largest of the single story homes offered in Cresleigh Havenwood. At 2,827 square feet you’ll be hard pressed to a contemporary floorplan that offers this much space. There are four bedrooms, two and one half bathrooms, and a three car garage. Utilize the den as your own private study or convert into an optional fifth bedroom if needed. The Dining Room and Kitchen are well situated to make entertaining a breeze.
The location of the Owner’s Suite makes it feel like a separate wing from the rest of the home allowing for maximum privacy and retreat. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/residence-three/
Egos are Breaking Like Eggshells Against the Walls!
We all possess the God-given gift of moral agency—the right to make choices and the obligation to account for those choices. “That every human may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to the moral agency which I have given unto one, that every human may be accountable for one’s own sins in the day of judgement,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 101.78. However, there are times when punishment may be necessary to manage the behaviour of an animal, child, or even another adult. If you feel that you must punish, here are some tips to keep in mind. If you can discourage misbehaviour in other ways, do not use punishment. Make liberal use of positive reinforcement, especially praise, to encourage good behaviour. Also, try extinction first: See what happens if you ignore a problem behaviour; or shift attention to a desirable activity and then reinforce it with praise. Moral discipline is the consistent exercise of agency to choose the right because it is correct, even when it is hard. It rejects the self-absorbed life in favour of developing character worthy of respect and true greatness through Christlike service. Apply punishment during, or immediately after, misbehaviour. Of course, immediate punishment is not always possible. With older children and adults, you can bridge the delay by clearly stating what act you are punishing. If you cannot punish an animal immediately, wait for the next instance of misbehaviour. The root of the word discipline is shared by the word disciple, suggesting to the mind the fact that conformity to the example and teachings of Jesus Christ is the ideal discipline that, couple with His grace, forms a virtuous and morally excellent person. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Use the minimum punishment necessary to suppress misbehaviour. Often, a verbal rebuke or a scolding is enough. Avoid harsh physical punishment. (Never slap a child’s face, for instance.) Taking away privileges or other positive reinforcers (response cost) is usually best for older children and adults. Frequent punishment may lose its effectiveness, and harsh or excessive punishment has serious negative side effects. Jesus’s own moral discipline was rooted in His discipleship to the Father. To His disciples He explained, “My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me, and to finish His work,” reports John 4.34. By this same pattern, our moral discipline is rooted in loyalty and devotion to the Father and the Son. It is the gospel of Jesus Christ that provides the moral certainty upon which moral discipline rests. Be consistent. Be very clear about what you regard as misbehaviour. Punish every time the misbehaviour occurs. Do not punish for something one day and ignore it the next. If you are usually willing to give a child three chances, do not change the rule and explode without warning after a first offense. The societies in which many of us live have for more than a generation failed to foster moral discipline. They have taught that truth is relative and that everyone decides for oneself what is right. Concepts such as sin and wrong have been condemned as “value judgments.” As the Lord describes I, “Every human walketh in one’s own way, and after the image of one’s own good,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 1.16. As a consequence, self-discipline has eroded and societies are left to try to maintain order and civility by compulsion. #RandolphHarrs 2 of 19
The lack of internal control by individuals breeds external control by governments. In the World, we have been experiencing an extended and devastating economic recession. It was brought on by multiple causes, but one of the major causes was widespread dishonest and unethical conduct, particularly in the U.S. housing and financial markets. Reactions have focused on enacting more and stronger regulation. Perhaps that may dissuade some from unprincipled conduct, but others will simply get more creative in the circumvention. Therefore, expect anger from a punished person. Briefly acknowledge this anger, but be careful not to reinforce it. If you wrongfully punish someone or if you punished too severely, be willing to admit your mistake. There could never be enough rules so finely crafted as to anticipate and cover every situation, and even if there were, enforcement would be impossibly expensive and burdensome. This approach leads to diminished freedom for everyone. Punish with kindness and respect. Allow the punished person to retain self-respect. For instance, if possible, do not punish a person in front of others. A strong, trusting relationship tends to minimize behaviour problems. Ideally, others should want to behave well to get your praise, not because they fear punishment. In the end, it is only an internal moral compass in each individual that can effectively deal with the root causes as well as the symptoms of societal decay. Be sure to reinforce positive behaviours. Remember, it is much more effective to strengthen and encourage desirable behaviours than it is to punish unwanted behaviours. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Societies will struggle in vain to establish the common good until sin is denounced as sin and moral principle takes its place in the pantheon of civic virtues. Some torment themselves in order to acclimate the savages of various countries to their lifestyle, they have not yet been able to win over a single one of them, not even by means of Christianity; for our missionaries sometimes turn them into Christians, but never into civilized human beings. Nothing can overcome the invincible repugnance they have against appropriating our mores and living in our way. If these poor savages are as unhappy as is alleged, by what inconceivable depravity of judgment do they constantly refuse to civilize themselves in imitation of us, or learn to live happily among us. Some have frequently tried to cultivate savages; people have been eager to display our luxury, our wealth, and all our most useful and curious arts. None of this has ever excited in them anything but a stupid admiration, without the least stirring of covetousness. Economy or Oeconomy, (Moral and Political) is a word that means house and law and originally signified merely the wise and legitimate government of the household for the common good of the entire family. The meaning of this term was later extended to the government of the large family which is the state. To distinguish these two usages, in the latter case it is called general or political economy, and in the former case it is called domestic or private economy. Even if there were as much similarity between the state and the family as many authors would have us believe, it would not follow as a consequence that the rules of conduct proper to one of those societies would be suitable to the other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
The family and the government differ too much in size to be capable of being administered in the same fashion. Moreover, there will always be an extreme difference between domestic government, where the father can see everything for himself, and civil government, where the leader sees hardly anything unless through someone else’s eyes. For things to become equal in this regard, the talents, force and all the faculties of the father would have to increase in proportion to the size of his family, that of an ordinary man, what the size of his empire is to that of the private individual’s patrimony. However, how could the government of the state be similar to that of the family, whose basis is so different? Wit the father being physically stronger than his children, paternal power is reasonably said to be established by nature for as long as his help is needed by them. In the large family all of whose members are naturally equal, political authority, purely arbitrary as far as its establishment is conceived, can be founded only upon conventions, and the magistrate can command others only by virtue of the laws. The duties of the father are dictated to him by natural feelings, and in a manner that seldom allows him to be disobedient. Leaders have no such similar rule and are not really bound to the people except in regard to what they have promised to do for them and which the people can rightfully demand they carry out. Another even more important difference is that, since everything children have they receive from their father, it is obvious that all property rights belong to or emanate from him. It is quite the contrary in the case of the large family, where the general administration is established merely to assure private property, which is antecedent to it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The chief purpose of the entire household’s labours is to maintain and increase the father’s patrimony, so that he can someday disperse it among his children without reducing them to poverty. On the other hand, the wealth of the public treasure is merely a means—often very much misunderstood—of maintaining private individuals in peace and prosperity. In a word, the small family is destined to die off and to be dissolved someday into many other families; on the other hand, the large family was made to last forever in the same condition, whereas not only is it enough that that large family maintains itself, it is easily proved that any increase does it more harm than good. For several reasons derived from the nature of things, in the family it is the father who should command. First, the authority of the father and mother ought not be equal; on the contrary, there must be a single government and when there are differences of opinion there must be a single dominant voice which decides. Second, however slight we regard the limitations that are peculiar to a wife, since they always occasion a period of inactivity for her, this is a sufficient reason for excluding her from this primacy. For when the balance is perfectly equal, a straw is enough to tip the scales. Moreover, a husband should oversee his wife’s conduct, for it is important to him to be assured that the children he is forced to recognize and nurture belong to no one but himself. The wife, who has nothing like this to fear, does not have the same right over her husband. Third, children ought to obey their father—initially out of necessity, later out of gratitude. After having their needs met by him for half their lives, they ought to devote the other half to seeing his needs. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Fourth, as far as domestic servants are concerned, they too owe him their services in exchange for the livelihood he provides them, unless they cancel their arrangement once it ceases to be to their advantage. I say nothing here of slavery, since it is contrary to nature and no right can authorize it. None of this is to be found in political society. Far from the leader’s having a natural interest in the happiness of private individuals, it is not uncommon for him to seek his own happiness in the misery of others. If the magistracy is hereditary, often it is a child that is in command of humans. If it is elective, a thousand insolvencies make themselves to be felt in the elections. In either case one loses all the advantages of paternity. Were you to have but one leader, you are at the discretion of a master who has no reason to love you. Were you to have several, you must endure both their tyranny and their disagreements. In short, abuses are inevitable and their consequences devastating in every society where the public interest and the laws have no natural force, and are constantly attacked by the personal interest and passions of the ruler and the members. Although the functions of the father of a family and those of a chief magistrate ought to tend toward the same goal, their paths are so different, their duty and rights so unlike, that one cannot confound them without forming false ideas about the fundamental laws of society and without falling into errors that are fatal to the human race. In effect, though nature’s voice is the best advice a good father could listen to in the fulfillment of his duty, for the magistrate it is merely a false guide which works constantly to divert him from his duties and which sooner or later leads to his downfall or to that of the state, unless he is restrained by the most sublime virtue. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The only precaution necessary to the father of a family is that he protect himself from depravity and prevent his natural inclinations from becoming corrupt, whereas it is these very inclinations that corrupt the magistrate. To act properly, the former need only consult his heart; the latter becomes a traitor as soon as he listens to his. Even his own reason ought to be suspect to him, and the only rule he should follow is the public reason, which is the law. Thus nature has made a multitude of good fathers of families, but it doubtful that, since the beginning of the World, human wisdom has ever produced ten men capable of governing their peers. It follows from all I have just put forward that one has good reason to distinguish public from private economy and that, since the state has nothing in common with the family except the obligation their respective leaders bear to render each of the happy, the same rules of conduct could not be suitable to both. In discussing what is not occurring in the suburbs, it is necessary to occasionally take a glance back at the central city since comparisons between the two highlight the changes in later. As has been detailed previously, the downtowns of American urban areas came into their glory during the first half of the twentieth century as the retail trade and business locations of choice. Downtown was where all the major department stores were located. As of 1950, Chicago’s Loop contained not only the huge Marshal Field store but also, a block away, Carson, Pirie, Scott. In addition, there were other large department stores of Mandels, Sears, and The Fair. All of these department stores occupied multistoried buildings. Field alone occupied a fully city block, with an additional five-story Men’s Building annex across the street. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Additionally, the downtown was filled with scores of restaurants and coffee shops catering both to business people and housewives who dressed up to make an event out of shopping downtown. Certainly, if one were interested in serious shopping in Chicago—or New York, or Philadelphia, or Boston, or Washington, or Detroit, or Minneapolis, or Omaha, or Dallas, or Seattle, or San Francisco—one went downtown, usually by public transit. As we approach the turn of the century, the above description reads like something from another time and place. Across America, downtown and peripheral suburban areas have switched identities. The old pattern has been turned inside out. Concentrated and centralized cities have been supplanted by dispersed and polynucleated suburban malls and office parks. Downtowns that once were dominant in retail trade find themselves struggling not for dominance, but for survival. Numerous cities such as Baltimore, Detroit, Sacramento, and Omaha no longer even have a single downtown department store. The dispute as to the comparative economic strength of downtown or peripheral suburban locations as centers for the purchase of consumer goods is over. Downtowns lost the competition. Central business districts now account for less than half of all sales in personal and household items, and yearly this share decreases. Downtowns, with some exceptions, such as part of Manhattan and North Michigan Avenue in Chicago, are no longer prime locations for major new retailing activities. Some of us who love the old downtowns whish this were not so. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Along with downtown Chambers of Commerce, some would like to see new retailers occupy the buildings abandoned by the large department stores. Unfortunately, this is not going to occur. Central-city festival marketplaces provide wonderful urban vitality and a means of attracting tourists, but they are not where someone goes to buy shoes, a business suit, or a DVD player. For the foreseeable future, large-scale retailing ventures will have suburban post offices. New office space is also most likely to be suburban. Deconcentration is the cotemporary reality. However, as growth has gone from city to outside the city, there is a belief that the general quality of suburban life is decreasing. While applauding increases in employment and greater shopping alternatives, suburbanites feel frustration over traffic congestion, environmental degradation, crime, and crowded schools. Often these problems are attributed to a too-rapid pace of community growth. The question of limiting, or even halting, growth is one that is being debated in high-growth areas, such as the west coast. The concern first arose in high growth areas, such as Orange Country, in Southern California; now, as Californians out-migrate to Oregon, Washington state, Texas, Nevada, Atlanta, Arizona, or New Mexico, the concern about too-rapid growth has become a political issue in these localities. Local concerns over rapid growth fly in the face of the long-standing American creed that bigger is better. City boosters, as a matter of course, bragged that their community was better than their neighbour’s because it was growing faster. Not to grow was somehow un-American. Now that is changing and there are increasing calls for growth controls. At one time, the governor of Hawaii stirred up considerable controversy when he called for Hawaii to slow its exploding population by banning in-migration. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Research indicates that suburban residents have strong concerns about current and future growth. Studying the response of citizens in Orange County, California, it was found that over half of the residents surveyed cited environmental reasons such as traffic congestion and environmental deterioration as reasons for limiting growth. Economic reasons, such as maintaining property values and avoiding government spending and taxes, were listed by approximately a third of the respondents. While there is documented widespread support for slow-growth or growth-limit policies, there is little public support for no-growth policies, except for in Malibu, California which eventually lost their request. Suburban residents desire local officials and policy makers to put limits on population and economic expansion rather than to halt development. Both no growth and unrestricted growth are opposed by most suburbanites. However, desiring controlled growth and accomplishing it are not the same things. Research indicates that municipal zoning and other techniques to control growth have only a modest effect. Organizations favouring growth limits, such as the Sierra Club, generally argue that uncontrolled growth will continue to destroy what remains our physical and cultural environment. Thus, the indiscriminate gobbling up of land by developers and industries has to be controlled. Opponents of such control, such as the National Association of Homebuilders, say that those already in an area have no right to infringe on what they see as the constitutional right to settle where one chooses. Other opponents, such as the National Association of the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), are less concerned with the developers’ right to build and make profits than they are with a “pull-up-the-gangplank” mentality. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The NACCP fears that environmental policies such as setting minimum lot sizes and requiring municipal water and sewage hookups rather than allowing wells and septic systems will increase prices and thus exclude the less affluent. Zoning regulations allegedly have a history of being used for enforcing exclusion. The legal question of whether communities can impose growth controls was settled for the time being by the case of Petaluma, California. Located roughly 35 miles north of San Francisco and on a new freeway, the community was only 35,000 people at the time and felt it was being overwhelmed. Growth in Petaluma had reached 18 percent a year. Schools were in double session, water and sewage systems were at the maximum, and the community feared it was being swallowed by an unending number of new subdivisions. The city established a plan to limit building to 500 units a year, and developers and builder sued. By refusing to heart the case, the Supreme Court in 1976 rejected the builders’ argument that growth limits unconstitutionally restrict people’s right to live where they choose. The Supreme Court let stand the Court of Appeals ruling that the traditional local community responsibility for the public welfare was sufficiently broad to allow Petaluma to preserve its character and open spaces. Petaluma, California now has a population of 59,776. In practice the question of growth controls is moot for most suburban communities. Only a limited number of communities, almost all in environmentally attractive locations in the west and southwest, have tried to control growth. Many older suburban communities, with the exception of Old Land Park in Sacramento, California, are more likely to share the central-city problem of how to attract growth, rather than how to limit it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Much more common among suburbs than growth limits is the requiring of builders to offer “proffers.” These are fees to cover some of the cost to the municipality of providing local road, school, sewer, and water services. The argument is that new residences should be assessed some of the costs associated with servicing them, and that the cost of providing services for newcomers should not be borne solely by existing taxpayers. Furthermore, it is impossible to discuss suburban issues without some discussion of crime. Obviously, one of the more common explanations one hears for the movement to the suburbs or the unwillingness to move back to the city is crime. The built-in assumption is that suburbs are relatively free of crime while cities clearly are not. Neither of these assumptions is fully accurate. Some city neighbourhoods have low crime, while some suburbs do not. However, overall suburban crime rates are only 28 percent of city rates. The popular perception also is accurate insofar as central-city crimes rates are rising faster than suburban rates. Major U.S. Central Cities are seeing crime rate increase by 40 percent from the previous year. By companions, the suburban rate was a far lower, which was an increase of 1.2 percent. No one knows for sure why urban violent crime rates accelerated so rapidly. However, the pandemic, depressed economic conditions for the poor, and shrinking job opportunities likely play a factor. Still others have suggested the increasing use of drugs, more use of more lethal weapons, family breakdown, and racial discrimination as reasons for the increase. Whatever the reason, the popular belief that cities, or at least some parts of cities, are increasingly dangerous places is, unfortunately, accurate. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Suburban crime rates are substantially lower than in cities, and it much less likely to be violent crime. The most frequently reported suburban crime is bicycle theft. This is a problem if your new expensive Diamondback Sync’R 29 Carbon Mountain Bike Black, XL that is stolen, but it is not equivalent to being mugged at gunpoint. By comparison, the ten richest suburbs have burglary rates only 33 percent those of the ten poorest suburbs. Affluent residential suburbs are able to restrict unwanted activities and limit undesirable and unemployed populations. Higher crime rates are also found in those suburbs that have facilities that attract criminals. An ever-decreasing minority of suburbanites actually commutes into the central city for employment or other purposes. City dwellers are increasingly likely to commute to suburbs for employment, shopping, or entertainment. Representatives who suddenly find themselves answerable to suburban voters have a tendency to move politically from being urban liberals toward being more suburban law-and-order candidates. Some think this will benefit the Republicans, but Deromcrats seeking election in the new districts have shown an ability to adjust their rhetoric to their new constituencies. Downtowns have been changing their economic function and their future is uncertain because of the pandemic and the increase of electronic cottages and business parks. However, looking at the new skyline does not suggest the image of immediate economic decline. People still head downtown for employment, but one cannot deny the clerical jobs, finance, legal services, advertising, management, medical centers, educational institutions, and government services are relocating to the suburbs. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
During the Great Depression of the 1930’s millions of people were thrown out of work. As factory doors clanged shut against them, many plunged into extremes of despair and guilt, their egos shattered by the pink layoff slip. Eventually unemployment came to be seen in a more sensible light—not as the result of individual laziness or moral failure but of giant forces outside the individual’s control. The maldistribution of wealth, myopic investment, runaway speculation, stupid trade policies, inept government—these, not the personal weakness of laid-off workers, caused unemployment. Feelings of guilt were, in most cases, naively inappropriate. Today, once more, egos are breaking like eggshells against the walls. Now, however, the guilt is associated with the fracture of the family and the pandemic, rather than the economy. As millions of people clamber out of strewn wreckage of their marriages, break out of government-imposed house detainment they, too, suffer agonis of self-blame. And once more, much of the guilt is misplaced. When a tiny minority is involved, the crack-up of their families may reflect individual failures. However, when divorce, separation, pandemic, and other forms of familial disaster overtake millions at once in many countries, it is absurd to think the causes are purely personal. The fracture of the family today is, in fact, part of the general crisis of the age of information—the crack-up of all the institutions spawned by the Third Wave. It is part of the ground-clearing for the new socio-sphere. And it is this traumatic process, reflected in our induvial lives, that is altering the family system beyond recognition. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Today we are told repeatedly that “the family” is falling apar or that “the family” is our Number One Problem. It is clear that the national government should have a pro-family policy. There can be no more urgent priority. Substitute preachers, prime minister, and the pious rhetoric comes out very much the same. When they speak of “the family,” however, they typically do not mean the family in all is luxuriant variety of possible forms, but one particular type of family: the Second Wave family. What they usually have in mind is a husband-breadwinner, a wife-housekeeper, and a number of small children. While many other family types exist, it was this particular family form—he nuclear family—that Second Wave civilization idealized, made dominant, and spread around the World. This type of family became the standard, socially approved model because its structure perfectly fitted the needs of a mass-production society with widely shared values and life-styles, hierarchical, bureaucratic power, and a clear separation of home life from work life in the marketplace. Today, when the authorities urge us to “restore” the family it is this Second Wave nuclear family they usually have in mind. By thinking so narrowly they not only misdiagnose the entire problem, they reveal a childish naivete about what steps would actually be required to restore the nuclear family to its former importance. Thus the authorities frantically blame the family crisis on everything from “smut peddlers” to rock music. Some tells us that opposing abortion or wiping out sex education or resisting feminism will glue the family back together again. Or they urge courses in “family education.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
The chief United States government statistician on family matters wants “more effective training” to teach people how to marry more wisely, or else a “scientifically tested and appealing system for selecting a marriage partner.” What we need, say others, are more marriage counselors or even more public relations to give the family a better image! Blind to the ways in which historical waves of change influence us, they come up with well-intentioned, often inane proposals that utterly miss the target. Some persons have wonderful healing gifts, but they will need to keep the ego out of their use of these gifts if their quest is not to be obstructed. Those who are born with healing skills, probably brough over from former births, function on different levels. The commonest is that which radiates life-force and energizes the cells of the sick person. This kind of healer must first put oneself into a passive mood and then, when one feels the vibratory force of the life-force active within one, let it pass, with or without touching the patient, into the latter. The vibrations of the lifeforce are universal; they are not the healer’s own personal property. One simply possesses a skill in letting oneself be used as a channel, and it is usually concentrated in one’s hands. A healer like Saswitha, who says he is merely drawing the therapeutic power from his patient and redirecting it or returning in back to the patient, forgets that if this is so the patient oneself gets it from the cosmic forces. It is not one’s own personal property. Jesus healed the sick, cured the diseased. Why decry the feat (when others do the same) as “merely” using an occult power, and as a deviation from the highest path of attainment, becoming an obstacle to it? For this is criticism by Advaitic Vedantins. This criticism is unfair. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
If it is right to cure one by physical means—medicine, for example—then it is right to cure one by mental means, and drawing on still deeper powers is in the same line of progression. The Advaitins grant that a physician may attain the highest truth. Is a physician like Paracelsus, using both physical and mental remedies, plus one’s own spiritual power, and therefore capable of helping more people more effectively, to be denied this possibility? The professional in other lines can often give a reasonable assurance of the efficacy of one’s own work, but the genuine spiritual healer cannot. For not only is one’s own gift involved but also both the patient’s self-made destiny and one’s evolutionary need. Apollonius tells us that Pythagoras regarded healing as “the most divine art.” Why should anyone reject the views of the Greek sage, not to speak of Jesus’ own confirmation by His works? Why should the Indian sages regard healing as a merely occult art, hence as to practice to be avoided? Why should it be right for a spiritual master to minister to diseased minds but wrong to minister to diseased bodies? To label one as white magic and the others as black magic, or to neglect and ignore the flesh in the interest of the whole-time devotion to the spirit, is unfair. Too many Indian, and a few Western, gurus and cults reject the development and use of healing power. It is, they argue, an obstruction in the spiritual path because it keeps its practitioner captive to the ego, which may even become stronger through conceit. There is the historic case of Ramakrishma. He went to his prayer shrine in his temple three times to request a healing for the throat cancer which troubled him, but each time failed to utter words. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
The merit of argument based on increased egotism and vanity, the danger of being sicktracked from seeking the highest goal, is admitted. However, is this enough ground to ban spiritual healing completely and always? Must it be denied to all people at all times, universally, because some healers may be obstructed spiritually by its practice? The answer of common sense agreed with the example of Jesus. Blessed be the Wind! Without wind, most of the Earth would be uninhabitable. The tropics would grow so unbearably hot that nothing could live here, and the rest of the planet would freeze. Moisture, if any existed would be confined to the oceans, and all but the fringe of the great continents would be desert. There would be no erosion, no soil, and for any community that managed to evolve despite these rigors, no relief from suffocation by their own waste products. However, with the wind, Earth comes truly alive. Winds provide the circulatory and nervous systems of the planet, sharing out energy and information, distributing both warmth and awareness, making something out of nothing. All wind’s properties are borrowed. Our knowledge of it comes at secondhand, but it comes strongly. And this combination of a force that cannot be apprehended, but nevertheless has an undeniable existence, was our first experience of the spiritual. A crack in the cosmos that widened to let the tide of consciousness flow through. We are the fruits of the wind—and have been seeded, irrigated, and cultivated by its craft. Save us, we beseech Thee! For Thy sake, our God, do Thou save us. For Thy sake, our Creator, O save us. For Thy sake, our Redeemer, O save us. For Thy sake, O Thou who seekest us, save us, we beseech Thee. During these wonderful glimpses ordinary existence seems suspended. One finds a new joy deep within oneself, a new and higher meaning deep within life. If we are going to make in through this pandemic, we are going to need more than vaccine; we also need empathy. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Cresleigh Homes
That face you make when you picture all the possibilities for the gorgeous built-in in the primary suite! 😍😍😍😍
And just out of the frame, there’s that free-standing soaking tub! Wonders never cease at Mills Station Residence 4. 😇
Residence Four at Mills Station boasts 2,692 square feet in the largest home in the community. The open concept design includes four bedrooms, three and one half bathrooms and a two car garage plus workshop. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-4/
You Must Be As Rich As a Prince With a Fairy Godmother!
Social conditions of the World are not what we would like them to be; the real crux of the problem lies in what should be done about it. By now, you have probably heard a phone-in radio psychologist. On typical program, callers describe social problems from child abuse, loneliness, love affairs, phobia to financial hardships, depression, educational and more. The radio psychologist then offers reassurance, advice, or suggestions for getting help. Talk-radio psychology may seem harmless, but it raises some important questions. For instance, is it reasonable to give advice without knowing anything about a person’s background? Could the advice do harm? What good can a psychologist do in 3 minutes? In defense of themselves, radio psychologists point out that listeners may learn solutions to their problems by hearing others talk. Many of us are concerned with these same problems. However, several radio psychologists also stress that their work is educational, not therapeutic. As you can see, psychological services that rely on electronic communication may serve some useful purposes. Still the very best advice given by media psychologist, telephone counselors, or cybertherapists may be, “You should consider discussing this problem with a psychologist or counselor in your own community.” The social problems of our day are not unique. Jesus Christ was born into a World beset with serious social problems. There existed in Palestine a wide gulf between the rich and the poor. Beggars were found in all of the cities and villages. Disease was rampant. The natives of Palestine were held in bondage to the Roman overlords. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Thievery and brigandage were everywhere. The story of the Good Samarian, involving a brutal attack on a lone traveler, could have taken from numerous real happenings. The unarmed dared not venture abroad at night. Even the apostles of our Lord sometimes went about armed, as evidence in the account of Gethsemane. However, Jesus has the power to alleviate hunger. He had just fed the five thousand who seemed to desire his word and who had followed him around the Sea of Galilee to be near him. Yet the answer lay no in bread, nor in clothing, nor in houses. The answer lay deep in the hearts of humans. One who was most touched by man’s inhumanity to man, one who had time for the lowliest of the low, knew that man can rise no higher than his thought, than his philosophy of life, his understanding of its purpose, and his relationship to the Almighty. These are the things that determine the stature of man. Hence, Jesus devoted Himself to the teaching of gospel truths, to the establishment of a church with apostles and seventies to teach and to baptize. He knew that change in the individual brought about change in society, that change in the individual was brought about by a change in his spirit, and that the change in his spirit came from the acceptance of God and His commandments. “The son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do,” reports John v.19. If we open such books as Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Ovid’s Metamorphoses or the Italian epics, we find ourselves in a World of miracles so diverse that they can hardly be classified. Beasts turn into men and men into beasts or trees, trees talk, ships become goddesses, and a magic ring can cause tables richly spread with food to appear in solitary places. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Some people cannot stand this kind of story, others find it fun. However, the least suspicion that it was true would turn the fun into a nightmare. If such things really happened they would, I suppose, show that Nature was being invaded. However, they would show that she was being invaded by alien power. The fitness of the Christian miracles, and their difference from these mythological miracles, lies in the fact that they show invasion by a Power which is not alien. They are what might be expected to happen when she is invaded not simply by a god, but by the God of Nature: by a Power which is outside her jurisdiction not as a foreigner but as a sovereign. They proclaim that He who has come is not merely a king, but the King, her King and ours. It is this which, to my mind, ours. It is this which, to my mind, puts the Christian miracles in a different class from most other miracles. I do not think that it is the duty of a Christian apologist (as many sceptics suppose) to disapprove all stories of the miraculous which fall outside the Christian records, nor of a Christian man to disbelieve them. I am in no way committed to the assertion that God has never worked miracles through and for Pagans or never permitted created supernatural beings to do so. If, so Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dion Cassius relate, Vespasian performed two cures, and if modern doctors tell me that they could not have been performed without miracle, I have no objection. However, I claim that the Christian miracles have a much greater intrinsic probability in virtue of their organic connection with one another and with the whole structure of the religion they exhibit. If it can be shown that one particular Roman emperor—and, let us admit, a fairly good emperor as emperors go—once was empowered to do a miracle, we must of course put up with fact. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
However, it would remain a quite isolated and anomalous fact. Nothing comes of it, nothing leads up to it, it establishes no body of doctrine, explains nothing, is connected with nothing. And this, after all, is an unusually favourable instance of a non-Christian miracle. The immoral, and sometimes almost idiotic interferences attributed to gods in Pagan stories, even if they had a trace of historical evidence, could be accepted a wholly meaningless Universe. What raises infinite difficulties and solves none will be believed by a rational man only under absolute compulsion. Sometimes the credibility of the miracles is in an inverse ratio to the credibility of the religion. Thus miracles are (in late documents, I believe) recorded of the Buddha. However, what could be more absurd than the he who came to teach us that Nature is an illusion from which we must escape should occupy himself in producing effects on the Natural level—that he who comes to wake us from a nightmare should add to the nightmare? The more we respect his teaching, the less we could accept his miracles. However, in Christianity, the more we understand what God it is who is said to be present and the purpose for which He is said to have appeared, the more credible the miracles denied except by those who have abandoned some part of the Christian doctrine. The mind which asks for a non-miraculous Christianity is a mind in process of relapsing from Christianity into mere “religion.” A consideration of the Old Testament miracles is beyond the scope of this essay and would require many kinds of knowledge which I do not possess. My present view—which is tentative and liable to any amount of correction-would be that just as, on the factual side, a long preparation culminates in God’s becoming incarnate as Man, so, on the documentary side, the truth first appears in mythical form and then by a long process of condensing or focusing finally becomes incarnate as History. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
This involves the belief that Myth in general is not merely misunderstood history (as Euhemerus thought) nor diabolical illusion (as some of the Fathers thought) nor priestly lying (as the philosophers of the Enlightenment thought not) but, at its best, a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination. The Hebrews, like other people, had mythology: but as they were the chosen people so their mythology was the chosen mythology—the mythology chosen by God to be the vehicle of the earliest sacred truths, the first step in that process which ends in the New Testament where truth has become completely historical. Whether we can ever say with certainty where, in this process of crystallization, any particular Old Testament story falls, is another matter. I take it that the memoirs of David’s court come at one end of the scale and are scarcely less historical than St. Mark or Acts; and that the Book of Jonah is at the opposite end. It should be noted that on this view (a) Just as God, in becoming Man, is “emptied” of His glory, so the truth, when it comes down from the “Heaven” of myth to the “Earth” of history, undergoes a certain humiliation. Hence the New Testament is, and ought to be, more prosaic, in some ways less splendid, than the Old; just as the Old Testament is and ought to be less rich in many kinds of imaginative beauty than the Pagan mythologies. (b) Just as God is none the less God by being Man, so the Myth remains Myth even when it becomes Fact. The story of Christ demands from us, and repay, not only a religious and historical but also an imaginative response. It is directed to the child, the poet, and the savage in us as well as to the conscience and to the intellect. One of its functions is to break down dividing walls. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Some thoughts. The Devout who snatches another’s obedience will also grab one’s grace. The Devout who squirrels away some personal possessions loses one’s right to communal property. The Devout who gives oneself to one’s superior, but does it hesitantly, beguilingly—well, that is a sign that one’s own flesh has not learned to obey itself; that is to say, having gurgitated, it often has to regurgitate. Learn, therefore, to quickly submit yourself to your superior; that is to say, if you finally want to get your flesh under control. The exterior Enemy is more quickly overcome than you would first imagine, especially if your interior life has not been a total loss. A worse, more pestiferous Enemy of the soul lurks, if all were known. It is you yourself, what with your spirit and flesh in total disarray. If you want to prevail against your flesh and blood, then you have to take back full possession of yourself. Up to this very point in your personal history, you have yet to do this. And it is not so surprising. Your love for yourself exceeds all reasonable standards of quantity and quality; that is to say, there is too much of it, and you have spread it too broadly. No wonder you are afraid to resign yourself fully to the will of others! However, what is the big deal here? You who are dust and nothing but dust—you subjected yourself to Me because God asked you to, and you know what? People applauded! However, I the Lord and Tailor of the Universe—I created everything, and I did it out of nothing, if you can imagine that. What is more, I humbly subjected Myself to Humankind because you asked Me to, but what credit, what respect, did I get? I even made Myself lowest of the low, flattest of the flat, and why would I do that? So that you could use My humility as a weapon against your own pride. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
The moral? It is from the Great Bernard’s homily for the Feast of the Annunciation (8): “Dustman, dust thyself! Refuse Collector, collect thyself? Proud Flesh, prostrate thyself under the feet of the passing crowd!” Some recommendations. Light a torch under yourself. Do not let pride eat away at you like a tumor. Be an obedient child, and accept the mud from the feet in front of you as your trudge with the adults on the highway of life. That would avoid the wrath of the Psalmist’s Lord (18.42)! Why do you wail about, you silly fool? That is a sentiment I plucked from the Letter of the Great James (2.20). What have you got to say, you sinful sot, against those who take you to task? You have offended God so many times, and so many times you have merited Hell. I speak with the voice of the Great Ezekiel when I say, “My eye has spared you” (20.17). I am echoing the Great Saul to the Great David in First Samuel when I say, “You soul is precious in my sight” (26.21). You should learn to recognize My love and be grateful for My little gifts. Give yourself always to True Subjection and Humility and patently bear up when the contempt you deserve is heaped upon you. Christian Science can deny the existence of ill health only at the cost of logically denying the existence of good health also. Both are differing conditions of the same thing—the body. Christian Science calls sickness a lie. Then it should likewise call its opposite a lie. However, not only does it not: it actually affirms that good health is a truth and a reality even while it denounces matter—the body—as a lie and an illusion! If, in spite of its deformed logic, Christian Science still gets healing done—as it does—this result must be attributed to the fact that infinite Life-Power does take cognizance of the body’s disease and does not deny its being there. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
It is not only fallacious to deny the existence of a disease but also, if the attempt s made to secure healing, insincere. The Christian Science attempt to deny existence to sickness as an error of moral mind is itself an error. It is more philosophic, first, to take it as an existent fact, but to understand that the body’s reality is only a limited and temporary one, and, second, to couple it with the other fact that there are healing forces and recuperative energies in the higher self of man which may dispel it. If right thinking alone could sustain life and support health irrespective of every other factor, then human beings could immure themselves where sunlight, air, water, and food could not reach them and still live actively. However, the only cases known to history are of few hibernating inactive self-actualized. Such theorizing is self-deceptive. Many people in the Old World, from the safe distance of the study, conveniently denied the existence of disease. Meanwhile the gods have smiled cynically as millions in the Old World have picked up cholera and passed to their doom. The mental peace obtained by denying facts like sickness may be welcome to the sufferer. However, it may also turn out to be a false peace. Although the theory of these cults is in part quite fallacious, the practice of them brings striking results at times. This is because the healing power really comes forth from the individual’s own higher self, to which the cults do—although somewhat unconsciously—direct one. One of the self-actualized paths is the creative use of imagination and thought for self-improvement, and so far as it embodies such a technique, Christian Science is a self-actualized path too. It instructs its disciples to see themselves as perfect, as the Universal Mind sees them, to concentrate on the concept of, and hold to the belief in, the divine man. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
These prayers and attitudes draw forth high resources, which may effect results where ordinary ones fail. This thinking runs somewhat as follows. The entire Universe is but an idea. Therefore the human body is also an idea. Therefore the human being, as the thinker of this idea, possesses complete power to alter, improve, and even change the body. Therefore one can abolish disease, annul sickness, restore health, and preform miraculous environmental betterments at will, provided one can suitably re-adjust and control one’s thoughts. All this sounds plausible and attractive, but there is a fallacy in it. And this is that the human being is the sole thinker of the World-Idea. One is not. One only participates in it along with the World Mind. One’s power over the body is a limited one. By one’s thoughts, one can influence its functioning and sometimes modify its mechanism. An avalanche of recent studies reveals that aerobic exercise not only promotes health and energy, but also is a remedy for mild depression and anxiety. Experiments that randomly assign some depressed or anxious people to exercise routines confirm this. So do surveys showing that Canadians and Americans are more self-confident, self-disciplined, and psychologically resilient if physically fit. Sound minds reside in sound bodies. Also, get REST—Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy. Happy people live active, vigorous lives, yet reserve time for renewing sleep and solitude. Americans suffer from a growing “national sleep debt,” with resulting fatigue, diminished alertness, and gloomy moods. Even a literal day of REST, or smaller, daily doses of solitude in meditation or prayer, can spiritually recharge. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
There are few better remedies for unhappiness than an intimate friendship with someone who cares deeply about you. Confiding is good for soul and body. “Woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help,” observed the writer of Ecclesiastes. Research confirms that we humans have a deep “need to belong”—to connect with others in close, supportive, intimate relationships. Committed marriages, for example, are associated with health, happiness, and reduced poverty, and with better-educated, healthier, and more successful children. It was found that 40 percent of married adults but only 23 percent of those who never married (and end fewer of the divorced and separated) reported them selves “very happy.” New evidence indicates that marriage does no just ride along with social, psychological, and economic well-being; it contributes to it. So, if and when you marry, resolve to nurture your relationship, not to take your partner for granted, to display to your spouse the sort of kindness that you display to others, to affirm your partner, to play together and share together. To rejuvenate your affections, resolve in such ways to act lovingly. In study after study, actively religious people prove to be happier. In fact, 47 percent of those attending church or synagogue several times weekly said they were “very happy,” as did only 27 percent of those never attending. Those with an active faith also cope better with crises. Compared with religious inactive widows, recently widowed women who worship regularly report more joy. Among mothers of developmentally challenged children, those with a deep religious faith are less vulnerable to depression. People of faith also tend to retain or recover greater happiness after suffering divorce, unemployment, serious illness, or bereavement. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
For many people, faith provides, first, a support community. The fellowship of kindred spirits, the bearing of one another’s burdens, the ties of love that bind are intrinsic to Christian communities—of which there are some 400,000 in North America. Faith also provides many people with a sense of life’s meaning and purpose. Faith satisfies the most fundamental need of all. That is the need to know that somehow we matter, that our lives mean something, count as something more than jus a momentary blip in the Universe. Faith also offers feelings of ultimate acceptance (what Christians know as the “grace” experience), a reason to focus beyond self, and a timeless perspective on life’s woes. We are mindful of the reality of suffering and the terror of death, yet sustained by a hope that in the end, the very end, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. If the electronic cottage were to spread, people working from home instead of at the office, a chain of consequences of great importance would flow through society. Many of these consequences would please the most ardent environmentalist or techno-rebel, while at the same time opening new options for business entrepreneurship. Community impact: Work at home involving any sizeable fraction of the population could mean greater community stability—a goal that now seems beyond our reach in many high-change regions. If employees can perform some or all of their work tasks at home, they do not have to move every time they change jobs, as many are compelled to do today. They can simply plug into a different computer. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
This implies less forced mobility, less stress on the individual, fewer transient human relationships, and greater participation in community life. Today when a family moves into a community, suspecting that it will be moving out again in a year or two, its members are markedly reluctant to join neighbourhood organizations, to make deep friendships, to engage in local politics, and to commit themselves to community life generally. The electronic cottage could help restore a sense of community belonging, and touch off a renaissance among voluntary organizations like churches, women’s groups, lodges, clubs, athletic and youth organizations. The electronic cottage could mean more of what sociologists, with their love of German jargon, call gemeinschaft. Environmental Impact: The transfer of work, or any part of it, into the home could not only reduce energy requirements, as suggested above, but could also lead to energy decentralization. In stead of requiring highly concentrated amounts of energy in a few high-rise offices or sprawling factory complexes, and therefore requiring highly centralized energy generation, the electronic cottage system would spread out energy demand and thus make it easier to use solar, wind, and other alternative energy technologies. Small-scale energy generation units in each home could substitute for at least some of the centralized energy now required. This implies a decline in pollution as well, for two reasons: first, the switch to renewable energy sources on a small-scale basis eliminates the need for high-polluting fuels, and second, it means smaller releases of highly concentrated pollutants that overload the environment at a few critical locations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Economic Impact: Some businesses would shrink in such a system, and others proliferate or grow. Clearly, the electronics and computer and communications industries would flourish. By contrast, the oil companies, the auto industry, and commercial real estate developers would be hurt. A whole new group of small-scale computer stores and information services would spring up; the postal service, by contrast, would shrink. Papermakers would do less well; most service industries and white-collar industries would benefit. At a deeper level, if individuals came to own their own electronic terminals and equipment, purchased perhaps on credit, they would become, in effect, independent entrepreneurs rather than classical employees—meaning, as it were, increased ownership of the “means of production” by the worker. We might also se groups of home-workers organize themselves into smaller companies to contract for their service or, for that matter, unite in cooperatives that jointly own the machines. All sorts of new relationships and organizational forms become possible. Psychological Impact: The picture of a work World that is increasingly dependent upon abstract symbols conjures up an overcerebral work environment that is alien to us and, at one level, more impersonal than at present. However, at a different level, work at home suggests a deepening of face-to-face and emotional relationships in both the home and the neighbourhood. Rather than a World of purely vicarious human relationships, with an electric screen interposed between the individual and the rest of humanity, as imagined in many science fiction stories, one can postulate a World divided into two sets of human relationships—one real, the other vicarious—with different rules and roles in each. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
No doubt we will experiment with many variations and halfway measures. Many people will work at home part-time and outside the home as well. Dispersed work centers will no doubt proliferate. Some people will work at home for months or years, then switch to an outside job, and then perhaps switch back again. Patterns of leadership and management will have to change. Small firms would undoubtedly spring up to contract for white-collar tasks from larger firms and take on specialized responsibilities for organizing, training, and managing teams of homeworkers. To maintain adequate liaison among them, perhaps such small companies will organize parties, social occasions, and other joint holidays, so that the members of a team get to know one another face-to-face, not merely through the console or keyboard. Certainly not everyone can or will (or will want to) work at home. Certainly we face a conflict over pay scales and opportunity cost. What happens to the society when an increased amount of human interaction on the job is vicarious while face-to-face, emotion-to-emotion interaction intensifies in the home? What about cities? What happens to the unemployment figures? What, in fact, do we mean by the terms “employment” and “unemployment” in such a system? It would be naïve to dismiss such question and problems. However, if there are unanswered questions and possibly painful difficulties, there are also new possibilities. The leap to a new system of production is likely to render irrelevant many of the most intractable problems of the passing era. The misery of feudal toil, for example, could not be alleviated within the system of feudal agriculture. #RandolphHarrs 14 of 20
Feudal toil was not eliminated by peasant revolts, by altruistic nobles, or by religions utopians. Toil remained miserable until it was altered entirely by the arrival of the factory system, with its own strikingly different drawbacks. In turn, the character problems of industrial society—from unemployment to grinding monotony on the job to overspecialization, to the callous treatment of the individual, to low wages—may, despite the best intentions and promises of job enlargers, trade unions, benign employers, or revolutionary workers’ parities, be wholly unresolvable within the framework of the Second Wave production system. If such problems have remained for 300 years, under both capitalist and socialist arrangements, there is cause to think they may be inherent in the mode of production. The leap to a new production system in both manufacturing and the white-collar sector, and the possible breakthrough to the electronic cottage, promise to change all the existing terms of debate, making obsolete most of the issues over which men and women today argue, struggle, and sometimes die. We cannot today know if, in fact, the electronic cottage will become the norm of the future. Nevertheless, it is worth recognizing that if as few as 10 to 20 percent of the work force as presently defined were to make this historic transfer over the next 5 to 10 years our entire economy, our cities, our ecology, our family structure, our values, and even our politics would be altered almost beyond our recognition. It is a possibility—a plausibility, perhaps—to be pondered. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
It is now possible to see in relationship to one another a number of Third Wave changes usually examined in isolation. We see a transformation of our energy system and our energy base into a new techno-sphere. This is occurring at the same time that we are demassifying the mass media and building an intelligent environment, thus revolutionizing the info-sphere as well. In turn, these two giant currents flow together to change the deep structure of our production system, altering the nature of work in factory and office and, ultimately, carrying us toward the transfer of work back into the home. By themselves, such massive historical shifts would easily justify the claim that we are on the edge of a new civilization. However, we are simultaneously restructuring our social life as well, from our family ties and friendships to our schools and corporations. We are about to create, alongside the Third Wave techno-sphere and info-sphere, a Third Wave socio-sphere as well. It is somewhat ironic that the contemporary concern over the patriarchal nature of suburbia is the exact opposite of the major criticisms made by popular antisuburban literature of the post-World War II period. The accusation made by critics of suburbia following the war was not that suburbs fostered a patriarchal traditional family, but rather that the husbands’ absence from the suburban home during the day led to a suburban matriarchy. This matriarchy, it was charged, was leading to a child-dominated society. The suburban way of life was said to lead to excessive, overprotective “momism.” Suburban mothers were criticized for having excessive involvement in the raising of their sons, which was leading to the raising of a generation of what was perceived as male offspring who lacked resolution and that were weak and purposeless. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
These beliefs or the spineless male offspring were not fringe views. It is worth nothing that Philip Wylie’s, Generation of Vipers, which put the term “momism” into the language, had gone through twenty printings by the 1950s (Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers, Ferrar and Rinehart, New York, 1942). Popular postwar criticism, as expressed by psychiatrists and others, was that suburban life, with its daytime absence of males, led to excessive independence and isolation of women. Female-oriented suburban life was, in turn, blamed for increases in adultery, alcoholism, mental illness, and divorce. Such pop-psychology myths received wide dissemination and acceptance as factual descriptions of reality. So maybe there will be some benefits to the electronic cottage. However, the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s landmark, The Feminine Mystique (1963) turned the argument completely around. Dr. Friedan gave voice to the widespread angst of housewives, and she noted that it came not from having too much suburban free time, but from powerlessness. She agreed that suburbs helped create a female culture, but it was not a culture of dominating momism, but rather one of essential exclusion from outside-the-hone decision making. There have been discussion going back over a century as to whether suburban life was better for males or females. Actual studies done in the 1960s and 1970s tended to show that suburbia and suburban life favoured males, with husbands being more pleased with suburban living than their wives. Gans, in his famous Levittown study, found, for example, that three out of ten thousand, but six our of ten wives, preferred to live in the city “if not for their children. College-educated women with young children particular felt the restrictions of being tied to the limited local community for intellectual stimulation. Studies generally found that husbands, because they left the community for work, had wider networks of friends and colleagues, while wives were more likely to be restricted to socializing with those in the neighbourhood. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
A major study of Toronto housing by William Michelson found that women living in urban residential areas had greater satisfaction with their neighbourhoods than those in more suburban locations. Women particularly liked the access to services and public transportation that urban areas afforded. In most writings, men were reported more likely to prefer suburbs since they provided escape from urban pressures and demands. A feminist’s review of literature on the effect of housing environments on women concluded that the burdens of isolated suburban life fell particularly heavily on women. However, times change. While one still hears references to women being isolated in suburbia without access to cars, culture, or community, this picture increasingly is a cliché of another era. In a time when two-and even three-car families are the norm, and when most women, including those with young children, are in the labour force, the image of this isolated suburban homemaker seems somewhat quaintly dated. The picture of the homemaker trapped all day in her suburban home and kitchen has more ties to the 1950s than to the realities of contemporary life. Today most women have careers or jobs outside the home. Yet, the post-World War II, “modern” kitchen showed the full effects of “scientific” domestic engineering and home economics, but was still quite clearly a woman’s domain. However, this is changing in modern architecture. Kitchens are becoming more larger and masculine. Also, the preference of women for the convenience of the city over the space of the suburbs no longer applies. The data are rather overwhelming in indicating that most American women wanted detached, single-family suburban homes. The federal government’s Annual Housing Survey indicated that women equally with men share a preference for suburban over urban housing. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Large majorities of both genders prefer single-family homes. Moreover, single women heading households, similarly to married-couple householders, expressed the greatest satisfaction with living in suburban housing. Christine Cook similarly found that female single-parent householders express greater satisfaction with suburban rather than city housing. Lower rates of crime, better school for their children, and the generally more peaceful environment were the most common reasons given for preferring the suburbs. For women householders, the traditional urban advantages of access to public transit and shopping now appear to be more than offset by concerns over crime and poor-quality schools. Gender differences are becoming less and less relevant in predicting housing preferences. The Annual Housing Survey indicates both men and women now give similar reason for moving to a particular area. Unlike the suburbanites of the 1950s and 1960s, the majority of young adults now living in suburbs have grown up in suburbs rather than in central cities. This, they are most comfortable with the suburban environment in which they were raised. Also, massive changes in shopping and employment patterns over the past decades have resulted in the majority of these activities now being located in suburbs. Living in the suburbs is now the middle-class norm; it is living elsewhere that requires a specific decision. Often critics of suburban housing and lifestyles appear to be viewing suburbs through a different prism than that used by actual suburban residents. Today’s suburbanites are more concern about matters such as commuting problems, and getting more open time than they are about being trapped in their suburban houses. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Having too much independent or leisure time with nothing to do is not a prime problem of women of the 21st century. Most suburbanites, male and female, would welcome having a few days alone at home. The small plot of ground on which you were born cannot be expected to stay forever the same. Earth changes, and homes becomes different places. You took flesh from clay, but the clay did not come from just one place. To feel alive, important, and safe, know your own waters and hills, but know more. You have stars in your bones and oceans in blood. You have opposing terrain in each eye. You belong to the land and sky of your first cry, you belong to infinity. As Thou didst save them who were sustained on the Sabbath by the prepared manna, the appearance of which altered not, and the fragrance thereof did not change, so save us now. As Thou didst save those whom from the Torah derived the laws concerning Sabbath-burdens, who in resting and reposing thereon observed its bounds and limits, so save us now. As Thou didst save them who at Sinai were instructed in the Fourth Commandment to “Remember” and “Observe” the holiness of the Sabbath, so save us now. As Thou didst save them that were commanded to encircle Jericho seven times, who besieged and attacked it until it fell on the Sabbath, so save us now. As Thou didst save Solomon and his people n the holy Temple, who sought Thy favour with a festival of twice seven days, so save us now. As Thou didst save the exiled throngs returning to redemption, who on this festival read from Thy Torah each say, so save us now. As Thou didst save Thy rejoicing hosts in the renewed glory of the second Temple, as on each of these seven days, they bore the palm-branch in the Sanctuary, so save us now. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
The IDEAL home is the one that fits your REAL life. The Brighton Station Residence 4 is equipped with the option of multi-generational living, 😮 thanks to the first floor bedroom + bathroom. https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-4/
There are so many possibilities when your home is thoughtfully designed and beautifully executed!
Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
You Do Not Have to Have a Good Heart to Have a Good Soul!
If Adam could reenter the garden of Eden and not sin, then there would be no curse on humanity. However, if Adam had not sinned, you would not be here, would you then be happy? Salvation comes at a price, but without sin, there would never have been a need. Cognitive learning involves higher mental processes, such as understanding, knowing, or anticipating. Even in relatively simple learning situations, animals and people seem to form cognitive maps (internal representations of relationships). Reach out to those in need. Happiness increases helpfulness (those who feel good do good.) However, doing good also makes one feel good. Compassionate acts help one feel better about oneself. The New Testament’s four books on Jesus’ life all record His teachings that to find life, we must be willing to lose our lives. To find meaning, we must discover something bigger than ourselves, and serve it. Living beyond self is therefore a part of Catholic wisdom. Paradoxically, personal fulfillment means abandoning ourselves and putting others first. In the Catholic tradition, ultimate satisfaction is promised to those who give up their desire for self-satisfaction. This is part of the meaning of crucifixion. The cross leads to resurrection, to new life. When we let go of ourselves, our lives become filled with grace. The lives of St. Francis of Assisi, Pope John XXIII and Mother Teresa of Calcutta radiate a grace that people of all religious traditions admire. The thing one would notice about Mother Teresa and the hundreds of sisters who form her team is that they all look so happy. Mother Teresa said, “Nothing makes you happier than when you really reach out in mercy to someone who is badly hurt.” In latent learning, learning remains hidden or unseen until a reward or incentive for performance is offered. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
As if to test Mother Teresa’s idea, the psychologist Bernard Rimland id an experiment. He asked 216 students to list the initials of ten people they knew best, yielding a grand list of some two thousand people. He then asked them to indicate whether each person seemed happy or not. Finally, he asked them to go over each name again, indicating if the person seemed selfish (devoted mostly to one’s own welfare) or unselfish (willing to be inconvenienced for others). The striking result: 70 percent of those judged unselfish seemed happy; 95 percent of those judged selfish seemed unhappy. What a paradox, said the surprised Mr. Rimland: “Selfish people are, by definition, those whose activities are devoted to bringing themselves happiness. Yet, at least as judged by others, these selfish people are far less likely to be happy than those whose efforts are devoted to making them happy.” Happy people also often are in a zone called “flow”—absorbed in a task that challenges them without overwhelming them. The most expensive forms of leisure (such as sitting on a yacht or reading a book in the tower of a Victorian mansion) often provide less flow experience than gardening, socializing, or craft work. Much of human learning is achieved through observation, or modeling. Observational learning is influenced by the personal characteristics of the model and the success of failure of the model’s behaviour. Studies have shown that aggression is readily learned and released by modeling. The Christian Science practitioners apparently use their formulas, their statements of being, their treatments, in the form of uttered incantations. This is much like the use of mantrams in India. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
A comparative study of the history of mental healing shows how Universal and ancient are the origins of this treatment.; nor are its principles new. Mental Moral and Spirit Hygiene seeks to establish a proper way of living and thus prevent sickness. The healing art steps in where sickness already exists and a cure is sought. Another extremely fanatical attitude of which we must beware is the belief that mental healing displaces all other system and agencies for curing disease or keeping health; that its advocates may totally discard every branch of medicine and surgery, hygiene, and physical treatment. Sanity and balance call for the acceptance in its proper place of whatever Nature and man can contribute. With these preliminary warnings, we venture to predict that as the principles and practices of mental healing come to be better, namely more rationally understood, it will establish for itself a firm place in therapeutics which will have to be conceded—however grudgingly—by the most materialistic and most sceptical of medicos. We must remember that mental healing is only a single aspect of the art of healing. All the others must be brought in to make a balanced system. God as given us valuable herbs, for instance which possess remedial virtues. We should accept the gift. The error of Christian Science would appear to be that is confuses theory and wrongly applies practice. Its principles are half-right, half-wrong; its techniques are the same. The injunction to “cast thy burden on Me,” which it seems to apply, is misunderstood to advise neglecting practical means of healing troubles and leaving all to God. However, the correct way is not to neglect them but to do them while at the same time leaving results to God and being indifferent to them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Even if Christian Science and New Thought sects produce healings, they are still not truly “divine.” They use some lower force—some vital force, as the Indians say. For they are all attached to the ego, which is itself a consequence of their unconscious belief in its reality. The ego has cunningly inserted itself even into these highly spiritual teachings and is still the hidden source behind both their prophets and their followers. This explains the commercialism of humanity as well as the errors which are contained in the teachings of false prophets, which lead to so many people experiencing their own mental-physical breakdown and death. The Pleasures of this World may have whatever they want now, but will they have it forever? No, only “as long as smoke will last,” if I may replay with the Psalmist (37.20). That is the fate of every Midas since time began. Know there is no recordist of past joys, no lasting list of things that brough us pleasure. “As the smoke vanishes,” sang the Psalmist in another place (68.2). Even at the high point of their lives, the wealthy have never spent a night without bitterness, boredom, nor fear. The very things that brought them delight during the day haunted them throughout the night. However, what did they expect? They went out of their way to find bad companions. Take Delectation and Delight, for example. They seemed fanciful creatures at first, what with a myriad of murmurings and mummerings, but off with the masks, and there stood Bitterness and Consternation with scented breaths and missing teeth. Oh, how brief, false, wild, base these so-called pleasures are! You would think the Pleasurers would have understood this, but apparently they did not. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Their judgment was impaired, perhaps by boozing, perhaps by bamboozling. In this regard they were no better than the dumb animals, as the Apostle Judge might have put it (v.10); they grazed their way through life, eating what they should have and also what they should not have, till they brought on themselves an early death. Two Scriptures for you, My soulful friend. “Do not trail after your concupiscences,” as Jesus son of Sirach put it (18.30), “and swerve while you can from the headlong flight of your own will. “Delight in the Lord,” if I may sing with the Psalmist (37.4), “and He will grant you the petitions of your heart.” If you want to be entertained and consoled by Me, then you can. Merely hold in contempt all Worldly things and cut off all sickly delectations. Then My blessing will be yours, to be followed by copious consolation. Withdraw yourself, therefore, from every solace known to creatures, you will find in Me no sweeter, no stronger consolation. That will not happen right away in the spiritual life, as you, My friend, already know; at least not without some spiritual sadness and fatigue. The ingrained habits of a lifetime will stand in the way, as the Great Augustine acknowledged in his Confessions (8.11). They too can be overcome, but only by a better habit, which, alas for the New Devout, will be hard to do. The Flesh will murmur and demur at first, but the fervour of he Spirit will bridle it. The Ancient Serpent that Genesis spoke of in chapter 3 and the Great Dragon of Revelation in chapter 12 will chat you up, of course, but they will only make things worse. Prayer is useful in this regard. It will make them stop, stare, then slither away. To prevent their returning anytime soon, do keep yourself occupied. “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody,” reports 1 Thessalonians 4.11-12. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
There are so many mounting pressures towards telecommuting and they will intensify as cars are seen as status symbols (and people want to keep the milage low on them so they can hold their value better), intermittent gas shortages, odd-even days, long lines at the fuel pump, and perhaps rationing disrupt and delay normal commuting, further jacking up its cost in both social and economic terms. To this we can add even more pressures tending in the same direction. Corporate and government employers will discover that shifting work into the home—or into local neighbourhood work centers as a halfway measure—can sharply reduce the huge amounts now spent for real estate. The small the central offices and manufacturing facilities become, the smaller the real estate bill, and the smaller the costs of heating, cooling, lighting, policing, and maintaining them. However, identity theft and data breaches may become more of a problem because there is no one in the home to monitor employees, who they allow into their homes and what they are doing with client’s information. A friend or family member may steal or share someone’s personal information. Or someone may approach a work at home employee and buy private information from them, even though it is illegal. However, with moral values down the drain and law enforcement being swamped and unconcerned, at times, it could lead to a nightmare. Nonetheless, as land and commercial and industrial real estate, and the associated tax load all soar, the hope of reducing and/or externalizing these opportunity costs may favour the farming-out of work. Corporate America always finds a way to come out on top. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
The transfer of work and the reduction of commuting will also reduce pollution and therefore the tab for cleaning it up. The more successful environmentalists become at compelling companies to pay for their own pollution, the more incentive there will be to shift to low-polluting activities, and therefore from large-scale, centralized workplaces to smaller work centers or, better yet, into the home. Beyond this, as environmentalists and conservation-minded citizens groups battle against the destructive effects of the auto, and oppose road and highway construction, or succeed in banning cars from certain districts, they unwittingly support the transfer of work. The new effect of their efforts is to force up the already high cost and personal inconvenience of transport as against the low cost and convenience of communication. When environmentalists discover the ecological disparities between these two alternatives, and as the shift of work to the home begins to look like a real option, they will throw their weight behind this important decentralist move and help coax us into the civilization of the Third Wave. Social factors, too, support the move to the electronic cottage. The shorter the workday becomes, the longer the commuting time in relationship to it. The employee who hates to spend an hour getting to and from the job in order to spend eight hours working may very well refuse to invest the same commuting time if the hours spent on the job are cut. The higher the ratio of commuting time to working time, the more irrational frustrating, and absurd the process of shuttling back and forth. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
As resistance to commuting rises, employers will indirectly have to increase the premium paid to workers in the big, centralized work locations, as against those willing to take less pay for less travel time, inconvenience, and costs. Once again there will be greater incentive to transfer work. Finally, deep value changes are moving the same direction. Quite apart from the growth of privatism and the new allure of small-city and rural life, we are witnessing a basic shift in attitude toward the family unit. The nuclear family, the standard, socially approved family form throughout the Second Wave period is clearly in crisis. We shall explore the family of the future in much detail later. For now, we need only note the in the United States of America and Europe—wherever the transition out of the nuclear family is most advanced—there is a swelling demand for action to glue the family unit together again. And it is worth observing that one of the things that has bound families tightly together through history has been shared work. Even today one suspects that divorce rates are lower among couples who work together. The electronic cottage raises once more on a mass scale the possibility of husbands and wives, and perhaps even children, working together as a unit. And when campaigners for family life discover the possibilities inherent in the transfer of work to the home, we may discover he possibilities inherent in the transfer of work to the home we may see a rising demand for political measure to speed up the process—tax incentives, for example and new conceptions of workers’ rights. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Furthermore, with Social Security expected to be insolvent in 2033 and Medicare by 2026, working from home may be more appealing to people who do not want to work or have conditions that prohibit them from working. As more corporations allow people to work from home, this may increase the pool of people looking for jobs, and could help entitlement, insurance, and retirement programs recover some revenue. During the early days of the Second Wave era, the workers’ movement fought for a “Ten Hour Day,” a demand that would have been almost incomprehensible during the First Wave period. Soon we may see the rise of movements demanding that all work that can be done at home be done at home. Many workers will insist on that option as a right. And, to the degree that this relocation of work is seen as strengthening family life, their demand will receive strong support from people of many different political, religious, and cultural persuasions. The fight for the electronic cottage is part of the larger super-struggle between the Second Wave past and the Third Wave future, and it is likely to bring together not merely technologists and corporations eager to exploit the new technical possibilities but a wide range of other forces—environmentalists, labour reformers of a new style, and a broad coalition of organizations, from conservative churches to radical feminists and mainstream political groups—in support of what may well be seen as a new, more satisfactory future for the family. The electronic cottage may thus emerge as a key rallying point of the Third Wave forces of tomorrow. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Also, home economics bears a significant position in our education system. Not only do students need to learn how to sew, bake muffins and cakes, learn about nutritional value, and how to become conservative adults, home economics teaches students other life skills that help individuals succeed, independent of their chosen career path. Home economics helps students continually grow in the future as it emphasizes on personal development, intrapersonal skills, effective decision making and social-communicational skills deemed critical for occupational success. The various essential skills that home economics discusses includes financial planning, cooking and nutrition, safety, and overall life skills. It teaches students how to use a debit or credit card, how to open a checking and savings account, write a cheque. Students are also taught about their future, and how to effectively handle all their finances and how to avoid financial mistakes that could potentially bey very stressful in the near future. Home economics classes also educate student son interests rates, investment and takes, and how to choose good stock markets to invest money into or what would happen if you do not pay your taxes on time and so forth. It is extremely critical to be well versed in such matters to live in the World today. One of the most serious obstacles that families face today is how to eat healthily, but not spend all their savings on trying to purchase grocery items for the same. If such things are taught at an early age, there can be many problems avoided such as health defects, obesity, immorality and much more. Safety is something that seems obvious but is a very relevant topic that is taught in home economics. Students are taught about how to establish a safe environment around them. They learn about what to do in case of a fire, how to perform CPR, use a first aid kit, how to treat an open wound or prevent an injury from spreading. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Students are also taught critical, essential factors about working in the kitchen such as the most effective way of holding a knife, what material of clothing should not be worn in the kitchen, making sure the stove is always attended to and that pots should not have handles sticking outward, not to place lips on cooktop glass stoves (it cases them to shatter), what temperature the food should be cooked at and how it should be stored, how to clean up after you have finished cooking. When students are not educated about such things, there are so many possibilities of danger in and around us. God behaviour and manners are also valuable skills to learn about. Some teachers encourage students not to get tattoos nor piercings, not to grow facial hair, to be polite, speak clearly, and to respect all people. Not to hit, bite, scream, punch or kick. Students learn how to talk smart or how to give order and not sound discourteous while doing e same. They are taught to converse, sit and dress during a job interview. Many students also go on to go to college and end up sharing an apartment or a room with another person. Home economics teaches them how to adjust to living with someone else in such tight spaces. How to respect each other’s privacy and how to divine various tasks like cleaning, setting up the room and shopping. And to even leave a not if you hit someone’s car in the parking lot. Therefore, home economics teaches us basic life skills. Our World is so vast and developed todays that it is nice to receive instructions on how to go about it. For the half-century from 1920 to 1970, the popular magazine equated the suburban homes with attaining the American Dream, and that was the foundation of home economics. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
However, rather than seeing the suburban bungalow as an ideal, feminists of the era saw the wife’s involvement in a self-contained home as a patriarch-designed regression. Thus, feminists were almost always antisuburban, ending to equate the suburban home not with more freedom, but with a patriarchal desire to confine women and children to an isolated home environment. The suburban ideal of domestic togetherness was viewed as a male device for keeping women in their domestic place. (However, as a contrast, today many women complain that men are not providers, unwilling to work and support their children and will not purchase the family a house or a car, sometimes they will not even buy food. It is like they expect the wife and the children to provide for the man, while he sits back, watches TV, drinks beer, hoots and howls while playing video games and inhales marijuana and eat pork rinds chicken wings with Crystal hot sauce, and Twinkies.) The suburban ideal of domestic togetherness was viewed by the feminists as a male device for keeping women in their domestic place. (Which some now wish would occur so the man can return to be a provider and having gainful employment.) However, to break traditional patterns and gender roles in the home, feminists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries often advocated making housework, laundry, and cooking communal responsibilities. This, they believed, would emancipate women from the daily drudgery that confined them to the house and its responsibilities. Utopian feminists’ communities, such as the early-twentieth-century Llano del Rio in southern California, often were designed without kitchens in homes. Rather, the houses backed on a communal kitchen and eating area. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Laundry, similarly, was done in communal rather than household facilities. The goal was to provide time for other activities. Somewhat ironically, this goal was accomplished for the middle-class women by having lower-class women do the heavy washing, cooking, and cleaning. In the day and age, it apparently never occurred to the proponents of Llano Del Rio that class discrimination was being substituted for gender discrimination. Contemporary feminist writings on ideal housing continue to stress the advantages of communal housing models. This is particularly the case with those favouring neo-Marxist models. Gender inequality is seen as an inevitable consequence of single-family suburban housing being built by men for men. Feminist writers generally view spatial structure as reinforcing gender inequalities, with the cities representing masculine centers of production and the suburbs feminine centers of reproduction. Suburban single-family home designs are part of a patriarchal family structure in which, “The dominance of the single-family detached dwelling, its separation from the workplace, and its decentralized urban location are as much the products of the patriarchal organization of household production as of the capitalistic organization of wage work. Important non-Marxist feminists such as Betty Friedan have also been justly critical of a model in which women were to remain tied to the house as homemakers while men commuted to the real World of work in the city. Only by entering the paid work force and establishing careers could women be liberated from the bondage of domestic servitude. Attempts to design more women—centered housing continues to be a major concern. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Ideally, such women-centered housing would be designed to prevent isolation from public life that is seen to be integral to contemporary suburbs. Feminist designs, harkening back to the earlier communal models, emphasize the importance of facilities. However, survey research indicates most women continue to prefer private over communal kitchens and other facilities. BMW took the women’s power move a little further. They very stylish and sporty BMW Z4 roadster with retractable hard-top roof was designed all by women. Designer Juliane Blasi—the first female to design the exterior of a BMW—created a stunning look with its elongated hood, short overhangs, powerful wheel arches, and flowing creases. Even the two roll-over bars in the ruthenium-look steel complement the exterior design. Another sophisticated woman, Nadya Arnaout, designed the interior, which is smart and sophisticated—a clean and modern look. The instruments are well-positioned and easy to find; large round HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) dials make it a cinch to adjust the temperature top up or down. A push-button start lets your fire up the engine without a key—the key fob can be hidden deep in your pocket; as long as it is nearby the car will start. It is easy to change the radio as well. A tiny electronic parking brake is located behind the gear shifter, which saves space, yet blends nicely into the décor. The car also comes very a very sophisticated price tag of approximately $63,000USD. Diversity is very important, and it is a notable characteristic of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which transcends every culture, rave, nationality, and language. Cultures and peoples throughout the World gather together by because the Saviour’s invitation that all God’s children come unto Him. The Heavenly Father loves each and everyone of his children equally. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
When the impeccable peace of the Overself inundates a human’s hear, one finds hat it is no negative thing. It must not be confused with sinister calm of a graveyard or with the mocking immobility of a paralytic. It is a strong, beneficial, and enduring quality which is definitely enjoyable. We actually get a momentary and much-diluted sample of it at such times as when a hated object is suddenly removed from our path, when a powerful ancient ambition is suddenly realized, or when we meet a greatly beloved person after long absence. Why? Because at such moments we are free from the infatuation with the hatred, the ambition, or the love simply because they have achieved their object and the desire-thoughts become still. The freedom passes almost in a flash, however, because some other infatuation replaces it in the heart within a few moments and thoughts begin their movement again. Whatever negative ideas and destructive feelings, whatever harassing doubts and muggy confusions one may have had before the Glimpse comes, disappear in its great joyous peace and vas buoyant certitude. It is not a merely abstract concept in the brain but a piercing experience in the heart. When these rare moments come quietly upon one, one feels oneself humbled and subdued. In these moments the air seems warm and pleasant, the Universe charged with friendliness. These moments of divine glorification exalt us like moments of hearing fine music. They come with the force of revelations for which we have been waiting. They hold us with the spell of enchantment made by a wizard’s hand. Their magical influence and mystical beauty pass all too soon, but the memory of them never does. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The ecstasy of that state is rare, the abundant happiness it yields is unforgettable. Those who have lifted themselves up at times into the higher Mind know the paradox of the air in which it dwells. For if beneficent gentle peace is there, so too is invigourating immeasurable strength. The Glimpse comes as a benediction and as a grace. The heart should be grateful, immensely grateful for its visitation. It possesses a beauty which is not of this World, which gives joy to the heart. “In The presence is fullness of joy,” reports Psalms 16.11. It is a feeling of unearthly and unlimited peace. The World stands still, the sense of time passing and events happening is suspended. Nothing exists but this Oneness. Some are ready to enter the light and when—through the mediumship of Nature or Art, a man or a book—that happens, the experience is as enjoyable as entering an orchard of ripened apricots. The joy comes upon one out of the unknown, gently, mysteriously, and sunnily. As this wonderful feeling steals over one, there is a clear and unmistakable sense that the Overself is displacing the ego. Hitherto one has obeyed the rule of the flesh and the brain and consequently has shared their pitiful limitations. Now one becomes acutely aware that a new sovereign is taking one’s place on the throne. One feels that one has reached the very edge of another self, another World of being. In its newly discovered presence, we are relieved of cares, immune to anxieties about the future, and liberated from regrets about the past. It is not the unspeech of morbid taciturnity but a mysterious hush which falls on the soul. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
If one is fortunate there may come to the waiting seeker a sense of uplift, and exalted mood, a feeling of support from a vast mysterious source. There is a unique bliss in this new-found freedom of the second self, a sublime peace in this dissolution of old restraints. One feels something of that sacred presence within one and around one. Its effect upon the mind is to leave a glow of benign good will to all beings. It hovers on the edge of indefinable awareness. What is the mystery of that sate when the body sis, stands, or reclines without moving, when the thoughts come to rest and the feelings enter an exquisite calm? It has been given a variety of names, for it takes a human out of this familiar common world and puts one into a most mysterious one. The ego slides from off one’s shoulders like a heavy overcoat and one feels delightfully free. At the ordinary level one has the ordinary outlook, the habitual desires; but here are times when one finds oneself at another and higher level where one is unsympathetic to both. No theological difficulties can trouble this happy state, no religious doubts can enter into it. The glimpse is like a first airplane ride. Looking down at the Earth scene far below, with its patch-like landscape dotted with black specks called houses and autos, and thinking of those millions of living creatures who live in one and drive in the other, one is overcome with humility. It is the glorious moment when Adam re-enters Eden, even though he is only a visiting guest and not a permanent dweller therein. The Glimpse operates to cast an actual spell over one. One is enchanted not merely poetically but literally. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Hours that are so far from the common ones, so timeless in their quality, make one feel like an ageless Sphinx. Time itself is suspended, and with it go the fears and worries, the unhappiness, which beset living in this World at this hour of its history. It is a feeling of being right with the Universe, with Life itself. It is as if years spent living in a dark cellar are abruptly ended by moving to a bright sunny Cresleigh Home. In this beautiful mood one becomes possessed of perfect leisure. One has all the time now that one needs. There is no need ever for hurry, strain, anxiety. For a moment or a morning, a day or a week, the confusions of life vanish. Oxygen kisses each cell awake, atoms dancing in orderly metabolism, interpenetrating. That dance of the air cycle, breathing the Universe in and out again, is what you are, is what I am. Sons and daughters of the Earth, steep yourself in the sea of matter, bathe in its fiery waters, for it is the source of your life and your youthfulness. By living in a World of pure though, you become more divine, or at leas more angelic. As Thou didst save this people, leading them as a flock on their path, and at Marah by still waters, didst ordain a statute for them, do Thou save us. As Thou didst save Thy treasured sons in their camp in the wilderness of Sin, where they gathered a double measure of food on the sixth say, do Thou save us. As Thou didst save Thy children, who in setting the example of preparation of the Sabbath won the approval of their Shepherd who praised their deed, so save us now. As Thou didst save them who were sustained on the Sabbath by the prepare manna, the appearance of which altered not, and the fragrance thereof did not change, so save us now. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cesleigh Homes
Are you a trendsetter? You’ll fit right in at our new Cresleigh community at Havenwood! The Residence 2 is a jewel, with three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a three car garage. We’re partial to that mid-century modern garage door!
Residence Two a spacious single story home with over 2,600 square feet of home thoughtfully designed to maximize every available foot of space. Three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a three car garage all come included in this home. The layout if an entertainer’s dream with large kitchen and working island, dining room connected through the butler’s pantry, and a large great room overlooking the ample rear yard. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/residence-two/
I Suspect that Angels See Nothing Funny About Being Angels!
It is probably fair to say that the social World and the psychological World interact on an equal footing to produce human behaviour. For this reason, cultural factors can influence the expression of psychological disorders. Different values, support networks, stress levels, behaviour patterns, family ties, and cultural beliefs can have a big impact on overall mental health. The psychologist Abraham Maslow once noted that to appreciate your blessings “all you have to do is to go to a hospital and hear all the simple blessings that people never before realized were blessings—being able to urinate, to sleep on your side, to swallow, to scratch an itch.” In one experiment, students viewed depictions of poverty or were asked to imagine tragedies such as being burned and disfigured. Afterward, these students expressed greater satisfaction with their own lives. Comparing with those who have more may breed envy, but comparing with those who have less breeds contentment. So count your blessings; name them one by one. There is an old Chinese story about a dog who discovers that happiness lies in his tail: “When I chase my tail, I never catch it. But when I go about my business, it follows me.” The moral is that to achieve happiness we must abandon our striving for a happiness that lies yet ahead of us. To be happy is to take pleasure in the moment. “The streams of small pleasures fill the lake of happiness,” observed Benjamin Franklin. Sipping a cup of tea while reading a good book, taking joy in a problem solved, delighting in a child’s excitement, being gratified by the affirming smile and touch of a loved one—these are moments of happiness for those not too busy to catch them as they fly by. “Martha, Marta, you were worried and distracted by many things,” said Jesus. Learn from Mary; she chose to relax and savour the moment. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
It ought to be noticed at this stage that the Christian doctrine, if accepted, involves a particular view of Death. There are two attitudes towards Death which the human mind naturally adopts. One is the lofty view, which reached its greatest intensity among the Stoics, that Death “does not matter,” that it is “kind nature’s signal for retreat,” and that we ought to regard it with indifference. The other is the “natural” point of view, implicit in nearly all private conversations on the subject, and in much modern thought about the survival of the human species, that Death is the greatest of all evils; Hobbes is perhaps the only philosopher who erected a system on this basis. The first idea simply negates, the second simply affirms, our instinct for self-preservation; neither throws any new light on Nature, and Christianity countenances neither. Its doctrine is subtler. On the one hand Death is the triumph of Satan, the punishment of the Fall, and the last enemy. Christ shed tears at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane: the Life of Lives that was in Him detested this penal obscenity not less than we do, but more. On the other hand, only one who loses one’s life will save it. We are baptized into the death of Christ, and it is the remedy for the Fall. Death is, in fact, what some modern people called “ambivalent.” It is Satan’s great weapon and also God’s great weapon: it is holy and unholy; our supreme disgrace and our only hope; the thing Christ came to conquer and the means by which He conquered. To penetrate the whole of this mystery is, of course, far beyond our power. If the pattern of Descent and Re-ascent is (as looks not unlikely) the very formula of reality, then is the mystery of Death the secret of secrets lies hid. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
However, something must be said in order to put the Grand Miracle in its proper light. We need not discuss Death on the highest level of all: the mystical slaying of the Lamb “before the foundation of the World” is above our speculations. Nor need we consider Death on the lowest level. The death of organisms which are nothing more than organisms, which have developed no personality, does not concern us. Of it we may truly say, as some spiritually minded people would have us say of human Death, that it “does not matter.” However, the startling Christian doctrine of human Death cannot be passed over. Human Death, according to the Christians, is a result of human sin; Man, as originally created, was immune from it: Man, when redeemed, and recalled to a new life (which will, in some undefined sense, be a bodily life) in the midst of a more organic and more fully obedient Nature, will be immune from it again. This doctrine is of course simply nonsense if a man is nothing but a Natural organism. However, if he were, then, as we have seen, all thoughts would be equally nonsensical, for all would have irrational causes. Man mist therefore be a composite being—a natural organism tenanted by, or in a state of symbiosis with, a supernatural spirit. The Christian doctrine, startling as it must seem to those who have not fully cleared their minds of Naturalism, states that he relations which we now observe between that spirit and that organism, are abnormal or pathological ones. At present spirit can retain its foothold against the incessant counterattacks of Nature (both physiological and psychological) only by perpetual vigilance, and physiological Nature always defeats it in the end. Sooner or later it becomes unable to resist the disintegrating processes at work in the body and death ensures. A littler later the Natural organism (for it does not long enjoy its triumph) is similarly conquered by merely physical Nature and returns to the inorganic. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, on the Christian view, this was not always so. The spirit was once not a garrison, maintaining its post with difficulty in a hostile Nature, but was fully “at home” with its organism, like a king in his own country or a rider on his own horse—or better still, as the human par of a Centaur was “at home” with the equine part. Where spirit’s power over the organism was complete and unresisted, death would never occur. No doubt, spirit’s permanent triumph over natural forces which, if left to themselves, would kill the organism, would involve a continued miracle: but only the same sort of miracle which occurs every day—for whenever we think rationally we are, by direct spiritual power, forcing certain atoms in our brain and certain psychological tendencies in our natural soul to do what they would never have done if left to Nature. The Christian doctrine would be fantastic only f the present frontier-situation between spirit and Nature in each human being were so intelligible and self-explanatory that we just “saw” it to be the only one that could have existed. However, is it? In reality the frontier situation is so odd that nothing but custom could make it seem natural, and nothing but the Christian doctrine can make it fully intelligible. There is certainly a state of war. However, not a war of mutual destruction. Nature by dominating spirit wrecks all spiritual activities: spirit by dominating Nature confirms and improves natural activities. The brain does not become less a brain by being used for rational thought. The emotions do not become weak or jaded by being organized in the service of a moral will—indeed they grow richer and stronger as a beard is strengthened by being shaved or a river is deepened by being banked. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
The body of the reasonable and virtuous man, other things being equal, is a better body than that of the fool or the debauchee, and one’s sensuous pleasures: for the slaves of the senses, after the first bait, are starved by their masters. Everything happens as if what we saw was not war, but rebellion: that rebellion of the lower against the higher and itself. And if the present situation is one of rebellion, then reason cannot reject but will rather demand the belief that there was a time before the rebellion broke out and may be a time after it has been settled. And if we thus see grounds for believing that the supernatural spirit and the natural organism in Man have quarrelled, we shall immediately find it confirmed from two quite unexpected quarters. Almost the whole of Christian theology could perhaps be deduced from the two facts (a) That men make coarse jokes, and (b) That they feel the dead to be uncanny. The coarse joke proclaims that we have here an animal which finds its own animality either objectionable of funny. Unless there had been a quarrel between the spirit and the organism I do not see how this could be: it is the very mark of the two no being “at home” together. However, it is very difficult to imagine such a state of affairs as original—to suppose a creature which from the very first was half shocked and half tickled to death at the mere fact of being the creature it is. I do not perceive that dogs see anything funny about being dogs: I suspect that Angels see nothing funny about being Angels. Our feeling about the dead is equally odd. It is idle to say that we dislike corpses because we are afraid of ghosts. You might say with equal truth that we fear ghost because we dislike corpses—for the ghost owes much of its horror to the associated ideas of parllour decay, coffins, shrouds, and worms. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
In reality we hate the division which makes possible the conception of either corpse or ghost. Because the thing ought not to be divided, each of the halves into which it falls by division is detestable. The explanations which Naturalism gives both of bodily shame and of our feeling about the dead are not satisfactory. It refers us to primitive taboos and superstitions—as if these themselves were not obviously results of the thing to be explained. However, once accept that the doctrine was devised to explain our enjoyment of a chapter in Rabelais, a good ghost story, or the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. It does so none the less. I ought, perhaps, to point out that the argument is not in the least affected by the value-judgments we make about ghost stories or coarse humour. You may hold that both are bad. You may hold that both, though they result (like clothes) from the Fall, are (like clothes) the proper way to deal with the Fall once it has occurred: that while perfected and recreated Man will no longer experience that kind of laughter or that kind of shudder, yet here and now not to feel the horror and not to see the joke is to be less than human. However, either way, the facts bear witness to our present maladjustment. So much for the sense in which human Death is the result of sin and the triumph of Satan. However, it is also the means of redemption from sin, God’s medicine for Man and His weapon against Satan. In a general way I is not difficult to understand how the same thing can be a masterstroke on the part of one combatant and also the very means whereby the superior combatant defeats him. Every good general, every good chess-player, takes what is precisely the strong point of one’s opponent’s plan and makes it the pivot of one’s own plan. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
If you insist, take that castle of mine. It was not my original intention that you should—indeed, I thought you would have had more sense. However, take it by all means. For now I move thus…and thus…and it is mate in three moves. Something like this must be supposed to have happened about Death. Do not say that such metaphours are too trivial to illustrate so high a mater: the unnoticed mechanical and mineral metaphours which, in this age, will dominate our whole minds (without being recognized as metaphours at all) the moment we relax our vigilance against them, must be incomparably less adequate. And one can see how it might have happened. The Enemy persuades Man to rebel against God: Man, by doing so, loses power to control that other rebellion which the Enemy now raises in Man’s organism (both physical and psychical) against Man’s spirit: just as that organism, in its turn, loses power to maintain itself against the rebellion of the inorganic. In that way, Satan produced human Death. However, when God created Man he gave him such a constitution that, if the highest part of it rebelled against Himself, it would be bound to lose control over the lower parts: id est in the long run to suffer Death. This provision may be regarded equally as a punitive sentence (“In the day ye eat of that Fruit ye shall die”), as a mercy, and as a safety device. It is punishment because Death—that Death of which Martha says to Christ, “But…Sir…It will smell”—is horror and ignominy. (“I am not so much afraid of death as ashamed of it” sad Sir Thomas Browne.) It is mercy because by willing and humble surrender to it Man undoes his act of rebellion and makes even this depraved and monstrous mode of Death an instance of that higher and mystical Death which is eternally good and a necessary ingredient in the highest life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
“The readiness is all”—not, of course, the merely heroic readiness but that of humility and self-renunciation. Our enemy, so welcomed, becomes our servant: bodily Death, the monster, becomes blessed spiritual Death to self, if the spirit so wills—or rather if it allows the Spirit of the willingly dying God so to will in it. It is a safety-device because, one Man has fallen, natural immortality would be the one utterly hopeless destiny for him. Assisted to the surrender that one must make by no external necessity of Death, free (if you call it freedom) to rivet faster and faster about oneself through unending centuries the chains of one’s own pride and lust and of the nightmare civilizations which these build up in ever-increasing power and complication, one would progress from being merely a fallen man to being a fiend, possibly beyond all modes of redemption. This danger was averted. The sentence that those who ate the forbidden fruit would be driven away from the Tree of Life was implicit in the composite nature with which Man was created. However, to convert this penal death into the means of eternal life—to add to its negative and preventive function an absolute and saving function—it was further necessary that death should be accepted. Humanity must embrace death freely, submit to it with total humility, drink it to the dregs, and so concert it into that mystical death which is the secret of life. However, only a Man who did not need to have been a Man at all unless He had chosen, only one who served in our sad regiment as a volunteer, yet also only one who was perfectly a Man, could perform this perfecting dying; and thus (which way you put it is unimportant) either defeat death or redeem it. He tasted death on behalf of all others. He is the representative “Die-er” of the Universe: and for that very reason the Resurrection and the Life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Or conversely, because He truly lives, He truly dies, for that is the very pattern of reality. Because the higher can descend into the lower He who from all eternity has been incessantly plunging Himself in the blessed death of self-surrender to the Father can also most fully descend into the horrible and (for us) involuntary death of the body. Because Vicariousness is the very idiom of the reality He has created, His death can become ours. The whole Miracle, far from denying what we already know the reality He has created, His death can become ours. The whole Miracle, far from denying what we already know of reality, writes the comment which makes that crabbed text plain; or rather, proves itself to be the text on which Nature was only the commentary. In science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself. With this our sketch of the Grand Miracle may end. Its credibility does no lie in Obviousness. Pessimism, Optimism, Pantheism, Materialism, all have this “obvious” attraction. Each is confirmed at the first glance by multitudes of facts: later on, each meets insuperable obstacles. The doctrine of Incarnation works into our minds quite differently. It digs beneath the surface, works through the rest of our knowledge by unexpected channels, harmonises best with out deepest apprehensions and our “second thoughts,” and in union with these undermines our superficial opinions. It has little to say to the man who is still certain that everything is going to the dogs, or that everything is getting better and better, or that everything is God, or that everything is electricity. Its hours comes when these wholesale creeds have begun to fail us. Whether the thing really happened is a historical question. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
However, when you turn to history, you will not demand for it that kind and degree of evidence which you would rightly demand for something intrinsically improbable; only that kind and degree which you demand for something which, if accepted, illuminates and orders all other phenomena, explains both our laugher and our logic, our fear of the dead and our knowledge that it is somehow good to die, and which at one stroke covers what multitudes of separate theories will hardly cover for us if this is rejected. The beatitude of an intellectual nature consists in an act of the intellect. In this we may consider two things, namely, the object of the act, which is the thing understood; and the act itself which is to understand. If, then, beatitude be considered on the side of the object, God is the only beatitude; for everyone is blessed from this sole fact, that one understands God, in accordance with the sayings of Augustine (Confess. V, 4): “Blessed is one who knoweth Thee, though one know nought else.” However, as regards the act of understanding, beatitude is a created thing in beatified creatures; but in God, even in this way, it is an uncreated thing. Beatitude, as regards its object, is the supreme good absolutely, but as regards its act, in beatified creatures it is their supreme good, not absolutely, but in that kind of goods which a creature can participate. End is twofold, namely, “objective” and “subjective,” as the Philosopher says (Greater Ethics I, 3), namely, the “thing itself” and “its use.” Thus to a miser the end is money, and its acquisition. Accordingly God is indeed the las end of a rational creature, as the thing itself; but created beatitude is the end, as the use, or rather fruition, of the thing. Beatitude is a certain perfection. However, the divine perfection embraces all other perfection. Therefore the divine beatitude embraces all other beatitudes. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Whatever is desirable in whatsoever beatitude, whether true or dales, pre-exists wholly and in a more eminent degree in the divine beatitude. As to contemplative happiness, God possesses a continual and most certain contemplation of Himself and of all things else; and as to that which is active, He has the governance of the whole Universe. As to Earthly happiness, which consists in delight, riches, power, dignity, and fame, according to Boethius (De Consol. iii, 10), He possesses joy in Himself and all things else for His delight; instead of riches He has that complete self-sufficiency, which is promised by riches; in place of power, He has omnipotence; for dignities, the government of all things; and in place of frame, He possesses the admiration of all creatures. A particular kind of beatitude is false according as it falls short of the idea of true beatitude; and thus it is not in God. However, whatever semblance it has, howsoever slight, of beatitude, the whole of it pre-exists in the divine beatitude. The good that exists in things corporeal in a corporeal manner, is also in God, but in a spiritual manner. We have now spoken enough concerning what pertains to the unity of the divine essence. Those mysterious divine moments are as the sudden arisal of a bridge flung from time into eternity. One feels the presence within one of the mysterious entity which is one’s soul. This wonderful experience bathes one in wonder, penetrates one with deliciousness, and swings one out into infinity. In those moods one will journey far from bodily conditions and environmental influences, far from human sins and social strife, to a place of sanctuary, peace, blessing, and love. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
One touches the Permanent, feels that one’s true self s part of eternity and this self is a foolish thing he is glad to be rid of. It is an ecstasy which takes complete possession of one for the time; even after it leaves one, there is a kind of twilight glow. There is a presence at such times which lovingly holds the heart and serenely rests the mind. In human relations its effect is towards harmony with others, and in moral relations towards selflessness. If one will only respond to it, even bad humans will feel its goodness and be good accordingly while the spell lasts. There are several causes of this joyful feeling, but the primary one is that the prodigal son has returned to his father. Each is exceedingly happy to see the other again. Something of the quiet joy with which one greets the first faint swelling of green buds on bare trees, comes into the hear with these moods. There is something in a human which does not belong to this World, something mysterious, holy, and serene. It is this that touches and hold one at certain unforgettable moments. The inner glow is unique, the emotional transport sublime, the intellectual enlightenment exceptional. Such exalted moments give a human the feeling of one’s ever-latent greatness. There is no experience in ordinary life equal to it, no joy so perfect. Such are the sweeter moments which comes as the “herald of a higher Beauty which is advancing upon man!” A full glimpse gives a self-free experience and a stilled mind. Such is the overpowering effect of its beauty that, when we are admitted to its presence, every egoistic thought is dropped—even the search for truth, since that too is self-centered. The sense of ever-continuing being into which one has been drawn and with which one is now identified overwhelms one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The glimpse is an experience in fascination. The person’s mind is allured, one’s attention firmly fastened, one’s feelings captivated. The glimpse puts one for a while—a moment or a day—beyond melancholy, misery, fear, and the other negative emotions. There are certain intervals when the mind drifts into a kind of half-reverie, its attention diverted to some high theme, its most delicate feeling gently engaged in it. The common World is then far away. An ethereal rarefied atmosphere. Life is halted, time is stopped, mind is stilled, imagination is caught and held. Time is absolutely still. Mind is absolutely at peace. One feels in the midst of a miracle, one which embraces the whole World. The discovery of timelessness, of its reality and factuality, is both a thing to wonder at and a joyful experience. To call it an eternal moment may loosely describe it, but to call it timeless does so more accurately. It is these moments when the glimpse happens that we find new strength, new inspiration, and are able to put our weaknesses, for the moment, at least as a distance. The glimpse gives a person, for the short period while it exists, a different way of thought, a different attitude towards others, and a different measure for what the World cherishes or despises. As one’s inner self is illumined, one feels the nearness of God, experiences a loving relationship with God, knows the deathlessness of one’s own being, and accepts the rightness of all that is throughout the Universe. One feels gathered into the silence, enfolded by it and then, hidden within it, intuits the mysterious inexplicable invisible and higher power which must remain forever nameless. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Its coming is an emotional, intuitive, non-physical, intellectual, and spiritual event. It happens, this experience of a transcendental Presence, here, in the place that Jesus mentioned—the Heart. It is an experience of complete security—so rarely found among people in the World today. As one sinks inside oneself, one’s inner being seems to open out into ever-receding depths. Lord God, what You are telling me is that if I cannot have peace, then I have to make do, like Author of the Letter to the Hebrew (10.36), that is to say, have patience. If for no other reason than that so many things go wrong in life. I know; I keep whistling in the dark like the Psalmist (31.10). However, try though I do to keep the peace in my own life, war and the panic of war blow it to Hell. Yet, that is the way. However, I understand God still wants one o seek peace. Question is, what kind of peace? Peace without pain, without temptation, without catastrophe? That is not the peace He is talking about. Many of us have been able to find some measure of peace and tranquility amid a variety of tribulations. Just by being patient in each one, we have shown our spiritual mettle. If one has little capacity for suffering, how then will one sustain the fire of Purgatory? When comes to two evils, always choose the lesser. In the case of Purgatory, either you can endure the fiery punishments after death or you can tolerate the burning evils that beset you now. If the latter, then do it right; that is to say, do it for God’s sake and without blowing one’s top. Do you think the people of this age escape all suffering? Poll the most refined of Pleasurers, and one will find that they too howl when skulled or skunked. Still, they have so many pleasurable distractions, and they lose themselves in so many whimsical mazes, that when confronted with distress, they hardly notice. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Unbiased investigation shows that there are disproportionately more cases of failure than of success by mental and religious healers. It is unfortunate for the claims made and misleading to the uncritical following that while the successes are highly advertised, the failures are buried in silence. Moreover, even among the alleged healings, not all are actual or durable ones. Thus the subject easily lends itself to deception, sometimes to imposture. The therapy of spiritual healing yields results similar to those of other therapies. It has been known to cure one human of a chronic complaint, yet fail to even help another human suffering from the same complaint. If the published testimony to the cures by the methods of the best known of these cults is carefully and cautiously examined in the scientific manner, I will be obvious that in the first place some of the sufferers never had the particular ailment they name, but only some minor one. The religious revivals which are carried on during intense excitement, with much dancing and jumping, and at which dramatic healing of the sick occurs, are too often more displays of emotionalism. The Spirit-fire current rushes upward temporarily but soon falls down and with its return to quiescence there is the usual bodily reaction. Religious fervour abates and the cure vanishes. The proportion of failures to healings is never known, and so long as the religious approach continues and a religious organization’s power, wealth, and prestige are at stake, will never be known. When Christian Science states profound mentalist truths it becomes elevating, but when it mixes them up with refutable conjectures, it becomes misleading. In the first case it is supported by the facts of life, whereas in the second it conflicts with them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
My attitude towards Christian Science—Aurobindo theory of physical immortality: continue to deny that abolition of death is possible, but admit that prolongation of physical life may well be possible. In the case of good individuals admit also its desirability. If any exercise has unpleasant effect such as discomfort or pain, its practice should be discarded for time. The cause should be sought for and, if found, remedied. There may be a mistake in the manner in which the exercise is done. It is not necessary to practise vigorous exercise that quickly tire one, nor to put forth strenuous exertions that make one perspire. There are mild, simple, and slow movements which can bring about the desired results without them. The customer of working earnestly at self-improvement through a series of exercises done every day, exercises which involve the body as well as the mind, is somewhat frightening to lazy people, somewhat impracticable to busy people, and somewhat superhuman to average ones. This is why so many of those who start any regime of regular exercises fail to continue and finish the course. The longer the daily period required, the sooner their enthusiasm wanes. Only those succeed who have exceptional determination and unusual persistence. The fact is, we are not easily amenable to rigorous discipline. However, if the period of daily work were limited to essential for a few minutes only, many more people would remain faithful to it. The idea of doing exercise for a space of time daily carries a suggestion of monotony and boredom with it. The value of stretching and bending exercises is twofold. First, there is the local and beneficial effect on the particular part of the body’s muscles and organs. Second, there is the general good effect which comes from the deep breathing they induce. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
The greatest benefit is got by bending the entire trunk, which means bending forwards, backward, and sideways. When a muscle is regularly compelled to undergo a series of stretches and contractions, not only is it kept flexible but it is also kept strong. Prayers and poems are supposed to remind us of our roots. We are made of the planet’s elemental energies: Water—washing and nourishing through endless riverways of gut and vein and capillary; Earth—pouring through us, replacing each cell in the body every seven years; Air—its oxygen kissing each cell awake; Fire—from our Sun that fuels all life. Yet as basic as these elemental energies are to our own lives, it is easy in the modern World to dissociate ourselves from them. Our search for comfort and security and our fear of Nature’s forces has led us to use our technology to create a barrier between ourselves and the natural World. We tend to forget that when the wind blows coolly on our face we are feeling the generosity of the Universe or that sunlight on our arms is the touch of the great cosmic flame. It is easy to lose our place in Earth’s story. It is time to regain our mythic respect for these cosmic dynamics and to open our lives to the blessings of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. These are the elemental cycles that underlie all evolution. Our future and that of our children lies not in overcoming them but in aligning ourselves with their energies. Ancient Sun, eternally young, giver of life and source of energy, in coal and oil, in plant and wind and tide, in spiritual light and human embrace, you kindle the Heavens, you shine within us (for we are Suns with hearts afire—we light the World as you light the sky and find clouds within whose shadows are dark); we give thanks for your rays. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Please save the people whom Thou guardest as one guards the apple of his eye, Thy sons who understand Thy Torah, the solace of the soul; who learn the precepts of the Sabbath, deriving the laws concerning the carrying of burdens and the regulations concerning the limitations of Sabbath-day journey; who restrain their foot from profaning the Sabbath, fulfilling Thy behest to “remember” and to “keep” the Sabbath. They hasten to welcome its advent, and from the labour of six days, provide for the Sabbath. They rest and wait until the Sabbath is concluded, calling it a glory and a delight. They don new garments for the Sabbath and prepare special food for its coming, and delectable dishes in honour. They arrange three meals for the Sabbath and pronounce the blessing over two loaves of bread. They teach the delineated areas of activity on the Sabbath. They obey Thy command to kindle the Sabbath lamp and pronounce the sanctification of the holy day. They offer on the Sabbath a service of seven-fold exaltation and called seven people to read the Scroll. Do Thou grant them to inherit life eternal that shall be wholly a Sabbath; yea, do Thou save, we beseech Thee. O Eternal, do Thou save us. As Thou didst save and shield the first man, created by Thee, granting Him redemption and grace on the holy Sabbath, do Thou save us. As Thou didst save the distinguished people who longed for freedom and with unity of purpose chose the Sabbath day for rest, do Thou save us. As Thou didst save this people, leading them as a flock on their path, and at Marah by still waters, didst ordain a statute for them, do Thou save us. As Thou didst save Thy treasured sons in their camp in the wilderness of Sin, where they gathered a double measure of food on the sixth day, do Thou save us. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes
With the included garage + workshop, you just might make a whole patio full of furniture to enjoy the outdoor living space!
When you live in your dream home, anything is possible! The Meadows Residence 1 model wouldn’t be complete without the patio!
Residence One at Cresleigh Meadows holds 2,054 square feet of single story living. The open concept design includes three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a two car garage plus workshop. Through the charming front porch enter into the foyer, where two secondary bedrooms lead off to a Jack and Jill bathroom. The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters. The great room is spacious and full of natural light. The Owner’s suite is nestled in the rear of the home separate from the secondary bedrooms, providing maximum privacy. Enjoy a spa like experience in the Owner’s bathroom with a large walk in shower and large soaking tub.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together! https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/
In a Nightmare of Supernatural Terror—Afraid to Move Hand or Foot II!
Immediately after I sat down…and did see a black thing jump into the window. And it came and stood just before my face. The body of it looked like a monkey, only the feet were like a cock’s feet with claws, and the face somewhat more like a man’s than a monkey’s. And I being greatly affrighted, not being able to speak or help myself by reason of fear, I suppose, so the thing spoke to me and said, “I am a messenger sent to you. For I understand you are troubled in mind, and if you will be ruled by me you shall want for nothing in this World.” I would have cried out—would have shrieked, if every never had not been paralyzed. I could not doubt the evidence of my sense—if I could have done so the cold, unearthy horror which sicked my very soul would have borne its undeniable testimony that I had behold the impersonation of the hidden curse that rested on this dwelling. I stood there rigid and immovable, as if that blighting Medusa-glance had indeed changed me into stone. It may have been but a very few minutes—it seemed to me a cycle of painful ages, when the light of a brightly burning lamp shone before me, and I heard the cheerful sounds of the new nurse’s voice in my ears: “Come along, cook. Bless your heart, my dear! you need not be nervous; there is no occasion. Mrs. Winchester, ma’am, are you not well, ma’am? “No,” I said faintly, staggering to the woman’s outstretched hands. “Not down there—upstairs to the children.” She turned as I bade her, and supported me up the stairs and into the nursery, the cook following close at my skirts, muttering fervent prayers and chants. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The sight of the peacefully sleeping little ones did far more to restore me than all the essences and chafing and unlacing which the two women busily administered. I had got suddenly ill when coming upstairs was the explanation I gave, which the cook, plainly perceived, most thoroughly doubted, at least without the cause she suspected being assigned, which, even in the midst of my terror-stricken condition, I refrained from giving, I did not speak to the nurse either of what had happened, but I felt that she knew as well as if she had been by my ide all the time. However, when William returned I told him. Distressed and alarmed on my account though he was, yet he did not, as before, refuse credence to my story. “We must leave the house, William. I should die here very soon,” I said. “Yes, Sarah; of course we must leave if you have anything to distress or terrify you in his manner, though it does seem absurd to be driven out of one’s house and home by a thing of this kind. Someone’s practical joke, or a trick prompted by malice against the owner of the property in order to lessen its value. I have heard of such things often.” “William, it is nothing of the kind,” I said earnestly; “you know it is not.” “No, I do not,” said William shortly and grimly, as he opened his case of revolvers, “and I wish I did.” The night passed away quietly, to our ears at least; but next morning when William had concluded the usual morning prayers, instead of the usual move of the servants, they remained clustered at the door, Jansen with an exceedingly elongated visage standing slightly in advance of the group as a spokesman. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
“Please, sir and ma’am, we cannot tell you what to do.” “Why, go and do your work,” retorted William, with a nervous tug at his moustache and an uneasy glance at me. Jansen shook his head slowly. “It cannot be done, sir—cannot be done, ma’am. Why, no living Christian, not to speak of humble, but respectable servants,” said Jansen with a flourish, quite unconscious of the nice distinction he had made, “could stand it any longer.” “What is the matter, pray?” said my husband. “Ghosts, sir—spirits—unclean spirits,” said Charles, in an awestruck whisper which was re-echoed in the cook’s “Lor” “a” mercy!” as she dodged back from the doorway with the housemaid holding fast to one of her ample sleeves, and the lady’s maid holding fast to the other. The New nurse, quietly dandling the baby in her arms, was alone unmoved. “What stories have you been listening to now?” said their master, what a slight laugh and a frown. “No stories, sir; but what we have seen with our eyes and understanded with our ears, and—and—comprehended with our hearts,” said Jansen, with an unsuccessful attempt at quoting Scripture. “What was it as walked the floors last night between one and two, sir? What was it as talked and shrieked and run and raced? What was it as frightened the mistress on the stairs last evening?” And the whole posse of them turned to me, triumphantly awaiting my testimony. I was feeling very ill, and looking so, I daresay, having struggled downstairs in order to prevent the servants having any additional confirmation of their surmises. “That is no affair of yours,” said William gravely; “your mistress is in delicate health, and was feeling unwell all day.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
“Will you allow me to speak, please, sir?” said the nurse, and, as her maser nodded assent, she turned to the frightened group with a pleasant smile. “You have no cause to be afraid, cook, or Mr. Jensen, or any of you,” said she, addressing the most important functionary first—“not in the least. I am only a servant like the rest, and here a shorter time than any one; but I think you are very foolish to unsettle yourself in a good situation and frighten yourselves. You need not think they will harm you. Fear God and do your duty, and you need not mind wandering, poor, lonely souls—-” “Lor” “a” mercy! ‘ow you talk, Mrs. Lewis!” said the coo indignantly. “I have seen them more times than one—many and many a time, Mrs. Cook; and they never harmed a hair of my head,” said the nurse, “nor they will ever harm your.” “Well, then,” said the cook, packing into the hall, followed by her satellites, “not to be made Cleopatra, nor the Virgin Mary neither, would I stay to be frighted out of my seven senses, and made into a lunatic creature like poor Linda was!” “Please to make better omelettes for luncheon, cook, than you did yesterday,” said William calmly, though he looked pale and angry enough, “and leave me to deal with the ghost—I will settle accounts with them!” The nurse turned quickly and looked earnestly at him: “I would not say that, sir—God forbid,” said she in an undertone, and the next moment was singing softly and blithely as she carried the children away to their morning bath. William and I looked at each other in silence. “I wish we have never come into this house, dear,” I said. “I wish from my heart that we never had, Sarah,” he responded; “but we must manage to stay the season out, at all events. It would be too absurd to run away like frightened hares, not to speak of the expense and trouble we have gone through expanding the mansion to four floors with a nine-story tower.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
“We can may get it taken off our hands with a substantial loss, perhaps,” I suggested. “See the house-agent, William.” “I have seen him, but we have one of the largest, and most expansive estates in the country. No one can afford it,” he replied. “He deeply regretted that we should have any occasion to find fault, especially after our huge investment in expanding the estate, and it is not even completed yet. The agent also said he was happy to do anything in the way of clearing up this little mystery, et cetera. Of course he was laughing at me in his sleeve.” Again, as after our previous alarms, says passed on and lengthened into weeks in undisturbed quietude. William had a good many business matters to arrange; the children looked as rosy and healthy as in their country home, from their constant walking and playing in the airy, pleasant parks. My own health was not every good; and Dr. Winchester, William’s cousin, was kindest and wisest of grave, gentlemanly doctors; so, all thing considered, we stay at the Winchester mansion we have build into a 600 room Queen Anne Victorian mansion from an 18-room farmhouse. Only on my husband’s account, I wished for any change. Something seemed to affect his health strangely, although he never complained of anything beyond the usual lassitude and want of a tone which a gay Santa Clara season might be expected to bequeath him. He was sleepless, frequently depressed, nervous, and irritable; and still he vehemently declared he was quite well, and seemed almost annoyed when I urged him to put his business aside for the present and leave town. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
He had been induced to enter into a large “Highly Finished Arms” promotion and sales of deluxe Winchesters, and had, besides, some heavy money matters to arrange, connected with his sister’s marriage settlements, which he expected would be required about Christmas. So, all things considered, he had some cause for feeling as haggard as he did. “It will be as well for William to leave Santa Clara, Mrs. Winchester, as soon as he can, said his cousin Dr. Winchester at the close of one of his pleasant “run-in” visits. “His nerves are shaky. We men get nervous nearly as often as the ladies, though we do not confess to the fact quite so openly. A little unstrung, you know—nothing more. A few weeks in sea or mountain air will quite brace him up again.” And as I dressed for dinner that evening, I determined that if wifely entreaties, and arguments, and authority, should not fail for the first time in our wedded life, William should have the sea or mountain air without another week’s delay; and, of course I determined, likewise, to back up entreaties, arguments, and authority with the prettiest dress I could put on. I cannot tell why wives, and young wives too, will neglect their personal appearance when “only one’s husband” is present. It is unpolitic, unbecoming, and unloving; and men and husbands do not like neglect—direct or implied, be sure of that, ladies—young, middle-aged, or old. “Your brown silk, ma’am?—it is rather cold this evening for that cream-coloured grenadine,” said Agnus, rustling at my wardrobe. “No, Agnus, I will not have that brown, I am tired of it,” I replied. If so happened that it was this dress which I had worn on the three occasions when I had been terrified by the strange occurrences in this house; and I had acquired a superstition aversion for this particular robe. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
So Agnus arrayed me in a particularly charming demi-toilette of pale yellow silk grenadine and white lace; and I felt myself to be a most amiable and affectionate little wife, as I went downstairs to await William’s return for dinner. I never sat in my pretty dressing-room alone. Truth to tell, I disliked the apartment secretly and intensely, and only for fear of troubling and displeasing George I would have shut it up from the first evening I spent in it. He was late for dinner, and I was quite shocked to see how thin and ill he looked by the gas-light; and, as soon as it was concluded, and that by the assistance of excellent coffee and a vast amount of petting, I had coaxed him into his usual smiles and good-humour, I began my petition—that he would leave town for his own sake. He listened to me in silence, and then said, “Very well, Sarah, we will go as soon as we can board up the east wing; I suppose you may come back here. “Oh! yes, I think so,” I replied, “maybe someone attracted these bad spirits and we need to let things cool off again. We shall spend Winter in New Haven, in our dear old house, William.” “Very well,” he said wearily, “though you must know, Sarah, I am not going on account of this one thing. I would hardly quit my house, indeed, because of ghostly or bodily sights or sounds.” He started up from the couch on which he was lying, flushed and excited as he always was when the subject was mentioned, his eyes gleaming as brightly as the flashing scabbard which hung on the wall before him. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
“Certainly not, dearest,” I said soothingly. “I wish I could solve the mystery,” he pursued, more excitedly; “I would make somebody suffer for it! One’s peace destroyed, and people terrified, and servants driven away, as if one was living in the dark ages, with some cursed necromancer next door!” “Oh! well, it is some time ago now, and the servants have got over their fright. Pray, do not distress yourself about it, dear William.” “Ah, well—you do not—never mind,” he muttered; “but I mean to have tangible evidence before ever I leave this house—I have sworn it!” He was not easily roused, and I felt both surprise and alar to see him so now, and for so inadequate a cause. I had almost fancied he had forgotten the matter, as we, by tacit consent, never alluded to it. “Do not you allow yourself to be alarmed, Sarah, that is all I care about,” he went on, pacing the floor. “I have been half mad with anxiety on your account, for fear those idiotic servants should manage to startle you to death some dark evening-cowards, every one of them; but I mean to have someone to stay here and sit up—-” He paused suddenly, and listened, then stepped noiselessly to the door, and opening it, listened again intently. “William,” I whispered. He took no heed of me; but rapidly unlocking a cabinet drawer, he drew out a thirty-shooter, loaded and capped, and with his finger on the trigger stole softly to the door and into the hall, whither I followed him. Everything was silent, and the hall and stairs lamps were burning clear and high. I could hear the throbbing of my own heart as I stood there watching. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Suddenly we both heard heavy rapid footsteps, seemingly overhead; and then confused noises, as of struggling, and quarrelling, and sobbing, mingled in a swelling clamour which sounded now near, deafeningly near, and then far, far away; now overhead, now beside us, now beneath, undistinguishable, indescribable, and unearthly. Then the rushing footsteps came nearer and nearer. And, clenching his teeth, while his face grew rigid and white in desperate resolve, William sprang up the staircase with a bound like a tiger. It has all passed in less than half the time I have taken to relate it, and while I yet stood breathless and with straining eyes, William had nearly reached the last step when I saw him stagger backwards, the thirty-shooter raised in his hand. There was a struggle, a rushing, swooping sound, two shots fired in rapid succession, a floating cloud of white smoke, through which I saw the streaming yellow hair and steel-blue eyes flash downward, and then a shriek rang out—the dreadful cry of a man in mortal terror—a crashing fall, beneath which the house trembled to its foundations, and I saw my husband’s body stretched before the conservatory door, whither he had toppled backwards—whether dead or dying I knew not. I remember dimly hearing my own voice in agonized screams, and the terror-stricken servants hurrying from the kitchens below. I remember the kind of face of my new nurse as she bravely rushed down and dispatched someone for the doctor, and made others help her to carry the senseless figure, with blood slowly dripping from the parted lips and staining the snowy linen shirt-front in great gouts and splashes, up to the chamber, where they laid him on his bed, and I, a wretched frenzied woman, knelt beside him with the sole, ceaseless prayer that brain or lips could form—“God help me!” #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
I remember the physician’s arrival, and the grave face and low clear voice of Dr. Winchester, as he made his enquiries; and then another physician summoned, and the low frightened voices, and peering frightened faces, and the lighted candles guttering away in currents of air form opening and shutting doors, and the long hours of night, and the cold grey dawning, the heart-rendering suspense, and speechless, tearless, wordless agony, and the sun rose, gloriously cloudless, smiling in radiance, as if there was not the shadow of death over the weary World beneath his rays, and I hear the verdict—“there was scarcely a hope.” However, God was merciful to me and to him, and my darling did not die. With a fevered brain and a shattered limb he lay there for weeks—lay there with the dark portals half opened to receive him; lay there, when I could no longer watch beside him, but lay prostrate and suffering in another apartment, tended by kind relatives and friends; but at length, when the mellow sunshine, and the crisp clear air of the soft shadowy October days stole into the sick room. William was able to be dressed and sit up for an hour or two amongst the pillows of his easy-chair by the window. And there he was, longing to be gone away from London. “Sarah, darling, weak or strong I must go,” he said in his trembling uncertain voice, and with a restless longing in his faded eyes, “I shall never get better in this house.” And so a few days afterwards, accompanied by the doctor and two nurses, we went down in a pleasant swift railroad journey to our dear, beautiful, peaceful home in New Haven. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
William never spoke of that night of horror but once, when Dr. Winchester told of the story connected with the original 18-room farmhouse we purchased, which morphed into a labyrinth of endless room, twisting and winding tunnels, and catacombs. Thirty years before we bought the farmhouse, the man who was both proprietor and tenant of the estate died, leaving his two daughters all he possessed. He had been a bad man, led a bad wild life, and died in a fit brough on by drunkenness; and these two daughters, grown to womanhood, inherited with his ill-gotten fold his evil nature. They were only half-sisters, and were believed to have been illegitimate also. The elder, a tall, masculine, strongly built woman, with masses of coarse fair hair, and bright, glitter blue eyes; and the younger, a plump, dark-haired rather pretty girl, but as treacherous, vain, and bold, as her elder sister was fierce, passionate, and cruel. They lived in this house, with only their servants, for several years after their father’s death, a life of quarrelling and bickering, jealousy, witchcraft, and heart-burnings, on various accounts. The elder strobe to tyrannize over the younger, who repaid it by deceit and crafty selfishness and black magic. At length a lover came, who the elder sister favoured; whom she loved as fiercely and rashly as such wild untamed natures do; and by fiercely and rashly as such wild untamed natures do; and by falsehood and deep-laid treachery the younger sister cast a love spell on the man and won his fickle fancy from the great, harsh-featured, haughty, passionate elder one. The elder woman soon perceived it, and there were dreadful scenes between the two sisters, when the younger taunted the elder, and the elder cursed the younger. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, as fate would have it, one night and at length—there had been a fiercer encounter of words than usual, and the dark-haired girl maddened her sister by insults, and the sudden information that she intended leaving the house in the morning, to stay with a relative until her marriage, which was to take place in one week from that time—the wronged woman, demon-possessed from that moment, waited in her dressing-room, until her sister entered, and then she sprang on her and screaming and struggling, they both wrested until they reached the staircase, where the younger sister, escaping for an instant, rushed wildly down, followed by her murderess, who overpowered her in spite of her frantic struggles, and with her strong, cruel, bony hands deliberately strangled her, until she lay a disfigured palpitating corpse at her feet. She had several scars that seemed as if they had been long there, and they were done by witchcraft. The officers of justice arrested the murderess a few hours afterwards. The jailers put irons on her legs (having received such a command). [It was the curious theory that chaining the prisoner would prevent her specter from afflicting anyone.] The weight of them was about eight pounds. These irons and her other afflictions soon brought her into convulsion fits so they thought she would die that night. She died by poison self-administered on the second day of her imprisonment. What is now known as the Winchester Mansion had been shut up and silent for many a year afterwards, and when, at length, and when, at length, an enterprising landlord put it in habitable order, and found tenants for it again, he only found them to lose them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Year after year passes away, its evil fame darkening with its massive masonry, for none could be found to sanctify with the sacred name and pleasures of home that dwelling blighted by an abiding curse. “I never told you, Sarah,” William said, “although I told my cousin Dr. Winchester, that from the first evening I led a haunted life in that beautiful house, and the more I struggled to disbelieve the evidence of my senses, and to keep the knowledge from you, the more unbearable it became, until I felt myself going mad. I knew I was haunted, but will that last night I had never witnessed what I dreaded day and night to see. And then, Sarah, when I fired, and I saw the devilish murderess face, with its demon eyes blazing on me, and the tall unearthly figure hurrying down to meet me, dragging the other struggling, writhing figure, with her long sinewy fingers seemingly pressed around the convulsed face, then I knew it was all over with me. If there had been a flaming furnace beside me I think I should have leaped into it to escape that awful sight.” That was over a century ago. Sarah eventually returned to the Winchester all along and made several changes to it over 38 years. It is now a 4 story, 160-room mansion, with over 25,500 square feet, sitting on four acres. It was once up to 600 rooms, likely 95,625 square with as many as 737 acres. The strange thing about witchcraft and legends is many of them are based in truth, and sometimes there are unexplainable continuity errors. Take for example An hysterical fit, from J.M. Charcot, Lectures on the Disease of the Nervous System (London, 1877). Look at the extruded tongue, reported during the seventeenth century in witchcraft cases at Gordon, Boston, Salem, and elsewhere. Notice also the legs crossed in spasm; at one time Mary Warren’s legs could not be uncrossed without breaking them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Happy mansion Monday from one of the most beautiful and bizarre mansions around!
Let’s have a mysterious Monday together! We’re open 10:00am-5:00pm
🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
In a Nightmare of Supernatural Terror–Afraid to Move Hand or Foot!
The warning came too late to change that course of event. There has been time when many admitted some doubt of the validity of spectral evidence. This story I will tell to you now, as I have promised to do so, and yet I can hardly make you believe in the reluctance with which I even allow my thoughts go back to the times which I spent in my house—my first town residence after I was married. I loved so much my lovely mansion, I suppose. The wide emerald green lawns and quiet, glassy ponds and streams, bordered by luscious, blooming rhododendrons; of silent, mossy avenues, glorious with the flickering light that stole through pale green beech leaves; of rose gardens with grassy paths, jewel-sprinkled with shell-like petals of white, crimson, pink, and cream-like hues; of old-fashioned rooms with narrow, mullioned windows embowered in scarlet japonica and fragrant, starry jessamine. I supposed I possessed a deep love of them all. This was the first house we were sown in the Santa Clara, California. It was certainly a very fine house, both as o exterior and interior appearances. Large, massively built, agreeably darkened in woodwork and masonry by Time’s shading brush, in excellent repair, and the locality all that could be desire. Wide, lofty apartments, staircases, and landings; a handsome dining-room panelled in velvety dark-green “flock” and gold; a handsome drawing-room panelled in pale cream-colour and gold; airy bed-chambers and dressing-rooms—one, in particular, attached to what seemed the principal bedroom, with a vast mirror occupying the whole side of the apartment which was opposite to the door leading into the bed-chamber. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
“What a nice dressing-room! This house is perfect and expansion will be a joy.” I exclaimed, having a weakness, I confess, for large, handsome mirrors in the rooms I inhabit—William says impertinent things about my “wishing to see as much of myself as I can.” I know I am not all, in fact, rather what he should call petite, if he wished to be polite—but that is not my reason for liking a large mirror. As I spoke the words I looked about mechanically for the house—agent’s clerk who had been sent with us—a nervous-looking little man, with a pasty complexion, and orange-colored hair meekly plastered down at each side of his face. He had been untiringly trotting up and down stairs, unlocking doors, answering questions, and keeping up a harmless soliloquy of chatter about the beauties and excellencies of the “mansiond,” as he called it, ever since he entered its doors, but now he was nowhere to be seen. “What door have you open?” I said, speaking aloud to him, for suddenly a cold blast of air swept up the wide staircase and into the dressing-room door, but not entering. His face looked wither than before, and in his accents there was an almost terrified earnestness that puzzled me. The shadows of the afternoon seemed to deepen. The aspect of the suites of rooms and long silent corridors, with their doors ajar, as if unseen inhabitants were stealthily crouching behind them, drearily impressed me with a sense of dull desolation; and it was with a sudden sensation of childish fear and loneliness that I rushed after my husband, and took his arm as he hastily descended the stairs. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
“A spacious, handsome staircase, William” I remarked. “Yes; and a spacious, handsome price, you may be sure,” William responded. However, in this particular, he was exceedingly, and I agreeably, astonished. To our surprise, the house was rather affordable. William figured there must be a screw loose somewhere. He mentioned his opinion to the clerk in a more business-like expression, to the effect that the price seemed low, and that he trusted there was no—peculiar—eh? “Drains, gas, water, all right, sir—right as—a—a trivet, sir. However, the 18-room farmhouse is incomplete,” sad the clerk, looking over his shoulder oddly, as he spoke. “But chimneys, ventilators, roof, tiles—everything in the perfect repair and order, sir!” However, wonderful or not, the house seemed all that we could desire; the lowness of the price made it a decided bargain. I planned to expand the house, and make it even more lofty, and handsome; and in three weeks, huge furniture vanes, and a clever upholstered, had carpeted, curtained, and furnished our town mansion from garret to basement, and William and I, our two babies, a nurse, two maids, a cook, and a butler, were installed in what would become the Winchester Mansion. Dear William had been very generous—nay, almost extravagant—in his provisions for the comfort and pleasure of his wife and children; and my dressing-room and their nursery were fitted up so luxuriously and tastefully, that my feeling at the first inspection of them was that of self-gratulation on being such a fortunate woman, in having such a home, such babies, and such a husband. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
I arrayed myself for dinner that evening quite gleefully; standing before my splendid mirror amid the bule drapery, cushions, and couches of my charming dressing-room. I put on William’s favourite dress—a bronze-brown lustrous silk, with sparkling gold ornaments: he invariably kissed me when he saw it on, stroked my brown curls and face, and called me “Mrs. Winchester”—and was still standing before the glass smiling at myself, like the happy, foolish little woman I was, when I perceived to my discomfiture that William was standing in the doorway watching my doings, and grinning very visibly under his moustache. “Do not mind me, my dear, I beg! do not me the least. However, when you have done admiring Mrs. Winchester, perhaps you will be kind enough to let me know”—then, suddenly changing his tone, he exclaimed, “Have you the window open, Sarah, this chilly evening?” “No William,” I replied, glancing at it to make sure of the fact. “Change in the weather, then,” my husband said. “Come, Sarah, there is no use in making yourself any prettier!” He had just uttered the last words when I saw him spring aside suddenly, and look around. “What is the matter?” I said—“William, dear, what is the matter?” For his face had grown quite white, and with his back against the wall, he was staring about him wildly. “I do not know—Sarah—something”—he explained in a low tone; then recovering himself, with a laugh, he cried—“I struck myself against the door, I suppose! I declare one would think I was composed of old china, or wax, or sugar candy, I hurt and stunned me so! Come, dearest.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
He had not struck himself, for I had been watching him going out on the lobby, and I felt an uneasy conviction that he knew he had not done so, and only spoke as he did in order to deceive or satisfy me. why? Why did I think so? As I live I cannot tell why I thought so then—I know now. We had the “babies”—as William always called them—in the dessert, after the time-honoured fashion of making olives as well as olive branches of them; and then, when the lite ones had gone to bed, we sat side by side in he summer twilight, I lazily fanning myself, William bending over me the lover-husband he was. Then came the lamps, and I played for him, and we sang duet and spent as happy an evening in our new home as a married pair could wish to spend. I cannot tell why I felt so disinclined to go upstairs that night, tired as I was, too—for we had had a long journey up from the country. However as eleven struck, I routed William out of the easy chair where he had been indulging in a preliminary doze, and, ringing for my maid went up to my dressing-room. I like gas in my dressing-room, though not in my bedroom, and the globes at either side the great mirror were a blaze of light. As I entered I caught the reflection of a woman’s figure in the depths of the glass, no my maid’s. The glimpse I had was of a tall woman, strongly built, and broad-shouldered, a quantity of light hair hanging in a disordered manner on her neck, and the profile of a white, hard, masculine face, with the keen glittering eye turned watchfully towards the door. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
This may seem an elaborately detailed description for the momentary glance I obtained, but it is well known with what lightning rapidity the organs of vision will, in moments of terror and amazement, convey impressions to the startled brain, impression accurate and indelible. I had taken but one step on entering, the next step the figure had vanished, and the mirror reflected by my own terrified face, and the homely, cheerful one of my maid Agnus, as she stooped over the dressing-table opening a jewel case. I dropped down on the nearest chair, and, in answer to the girl’s alarmed questions, replied that I did not feel very well. I was sick and shuddering from head to foot. Suddenly it flashed across me that it was from a similar cause I had seen my husband’s face grow ghastly, and that strange, terrified look come into his eyes,–he, who had been a soldier and unflinchingly had fought amidst the dead and dying on bloody Indian battlefields, almost boy as he was then! What was it? What had he seen? Nonsense! was I going to believe I had seen a ghost? Nonsense, a thousand times over! I heard my husband’s cheery voice as he ascended the stairs, and, quite angry with myself for giving way to such folly, I threw on my dressing gown, and, snatching up the brush from Agnus, I pulled my hair down and brushed it quite savagely, until my head ached well—for punishment. If the bright morning light disperses sweet illusions formed overnight, as people say it does, it disperses gloomy ones as well. With the warmth and brightness of the unclouded summer’s sun streaming in through softly coloured blinds, brining out the velvety green of soft new carpets and lounges, the rainbow tints of glittering chandeliers, vases, and ornaments, the gilding on bright fresh wallpaper and the spotless folds of snowy window drapery, it was impossible for an instant to connect anything dark or dismal with the Winchester House. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Why, my dressing-room even where I had been so silly last evening, was like a woodland bower, with its deep purple-blue hangings and rose painted china flower-vases filled with bouquets from our country home. Clustering fragrant honeysuckle half-opened moss roses, drooping emerald-green fern, and masses of delicious jessamine dropping its over-blown blossoms on the white toilet cover, lace-flounced and tied with blue ribbons, as Agnus delighted to have it. “I think this such a charming room and such a charming house altogether, William!” I said; “and you have been such a dear, thoughtful old darling!” For I had perceived that the dear fellow had had his own half-length portrait hung over my writing-table. Quite a pleasant surprise for me, for I thought he intended it to be hung in the dining-room, and I delighted in having the dear pleasant brown eyes looking for a me when I was busy writing or sewing. “I am so glad you like everything, Sarah,” said he. “Why, William, do you not?” However, William had walked off whistling, and presently I heard uproarious baby-laughter, and baby-chatter, and thumping, trotting of small fat feet, as William put the tiny nursery into dire confusion by his morning game of romps with his son and heir, and red-cheeked baby-daughter. And it did seem as if I must have been dreaming or delirious, when this day and many a succeeding one passed away swiftly and pleasantly, without the slightest recurring event to remind me of my strange alarm on the night of our arrival. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
We had been in the Winchester House about a fortnight, when one morning I received a visit from Mrs. Ellen Kenna. A very pretty, lady-like person she was, and as we had some common acquaintances we chattered away very freely and pleasantly for half-an-hour or so. As she rose to go she asked suddenly if we like the house. I replied in the affirmative rather warmly. She was opposite the light, and I saw an involuntary elevation of her eye-brows and compression of her lips that puzzled me. I fancied it was because I had spoken so enthusiastically. Yet her own manner was anything but languidly fashionable, being very cordial and decided. “Yes; it is a very nice house, roomy and well-built,” she said, after a moment’s pause; “I am so glad you like it—I live down the road in Oakland.” We took the carriage to have dinner at Bertha Hass’s mansion that for the following evening, and when we returned about three days later, in spite of a yawning remonstrate from William, I tipped off softly to have a peep at my darlings, before I went to bed. The nursey was a large, pleasant room at the end of the long corridor leading from our own apartments, and, gently turning the handle and gathering my rustling silk dress around me, I opened the door and went in. There was a night-lamp burning clearly, shining softly on the tiny cribs with the sweet flushed infant faces, the long golden-brown lashes lying in dimpled apple-bloom cheeks, the waxen hands and little rounded arms thrown above the tossed golden curls, and the Heavenly calm of the little sleeping forms and pure, peaceful breathing. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
I wondered would any mother, no matter how cold and careless, have neglected doing what I did, as I bent over my treasures, and prayed God that His angels might keep watch over each cherub head on its little, soft, white pillow? I had looed at and kissed them, and turned to go, when I glanced toward the nurse’s bed. “Are you not well, Linda? What is the matter?” I said in an anxious whisper. She was a very respectable and trustworthy servant, as well as being, a kind, gentle creature with the little ones, and consequently highly valued by me, but her health was never very good, and she was subject to severe attacks of nervous headache and sleeplessness. She was sitting up in bed, her hands grasping the bedclothes, her face and lips ashy white, and her as big as saucers and staring wildly, as if they would start from their sockets. “Linda! Good Heavens! what is the matter?” I gasped. “Ma’am! Oh, ma’am—oh, mistress, I am dying!” We summoned a doctor and administered restoratives, and chafed the half-senseless girl’s damp, cold hands. I could imagine no cause for her sudden illness, and the others servants were very voluble in exclamations and laments. However, when the physician—a pale, kindly, grave-looking man arrived—after a moment’s examination, he demanded if she had been frightened? I replied in the negative, and was proceeding to describe to him the state in which I had found her, when I heard the housemaid and Agnus whispering energetically together. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
The doctor was paying tribute to the dramatic affliction of the girl, when he said, “This strikes hard upon me, that you are at this very present charged with unfamiliar spirits. This is your bodily person they speak to. They say now they see these unfamiliar sprits some to your bodily person. Now what do you say to that?” Agnus said that she saw a specter leaving Linda’s body, as she was going into hideous convulsions. The fit was far too violent to be acting. This was terribly “real” and convincing. “What is it? Speak out at once my god girl!” said the doctor sternly to the housemaid; “you know something of this.” Both servants looked apprehensively at me and at William. “Speak up at once, Bethany; the girl’s life may depend on it! Tell the truth, my girl, and do not be afraid,” said her master kindly, but firmly. “I do not know nothing, sir—indeed, no ma’am, said Angus confusedly; “but—I think, ma’am—she seen the ghost, sir!” “That what!” cried William angrily. “She have, sir!” persisted Agnus eagerly, now that her confession was made. “We are all afraid, sir; but she has been worser nor the rest of us. And she says to me only this morning, ‘Agnus,’ she says, ‘if I see it, I will die!’” “What ghost, you fool?” cried William more angrily. “A pretty set you are!—great, grown men and women, afraid of some bogie story you have heard when you were gossiping with the servants on the balcony, I suppose!” “No, indeed, sir,” said Agnus; “I was not gossippin’, sir; but the parlour-maid over the way, sir Mrs. Kenna’s parlour-maid, ma’am—she told me that there was the Devil–” #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
“I thought so!” interrupted William. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves not to have an ounce of brains among you.” “But, sir! Agnus burst out again, unheeding her master’s rather uncomplimentary phrenological verdict, “we did not mind, sir, though we was a bit frightened, until we see it, sir! The butler see it, and he ran, and cook ran.” “And you ran after them?” said William, with an indignant laugh. “I did, sir, for I saw it too—a big woman with fair hair all over her shoulders,” said Agnus, in an awestruck whisper to Harriet, who nodded her head. The doctor looked up, gravely and without a smile. The servants clustered together near the door, and muttered in undertones. William looked at me with a forced smile, which died away in an instant: “You are not so foolish as to credit any of this nonsense, Sarah?” he said. The servants all turned eagerly to hear their mistress’s opinion. I am afraid it was written in my pallid face. Was it true? Was it what I had seen? Could there be any reality in this, that here, in our pleasant, happy home, beneath the roof with out helpless little one, was a dreadful, unblessed presence—a shadowy horror; that that thing with the watchful, cruel eyes had not been a mere vision of imagination, the mere offspring of an active brain, and the unstrung nerves of an overtired frame? Is there conclusive proof that the person represented had been trafficking with the Devil? “Oh! they imagined something from the stories they heard, I dare say,” I faltered. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
The butler shook his head solemnly: “I could swear to it, ma’am.” “And so could I ma’am!” chorused the cook and housemaid. “Hush!” said the doctor, as the nurse, roused, at length, from her stupor, lay quietly, with closed eyes, from which the tears streamed down her face. “Some one must sit up with her now,” said the doctor, looking around. “I will, sir, if my mistress allows me, said Bethany. Certainly, Bethany,” she said at once. He communicated his instructions to her and took his leave, promising to call in the morning. “Did you ever hear anything like this folly, doctor,” said William, as he shook hands with him at the head of the stairs. “Oh! yes, sir, I often hear such stories,” said the doctor quietly, as he bade us both goodnight.” William! what has frightened the girl? What has she seen?” I whispered, clasping my husband’s arm. “Sarah, go to bed, and do not be a goose,” was William’s reply. “William—I saw that thing—that woman, in my dressing-room,” I said, trembling, “and oh! think if the children were to see I and be frightened like poor Mary!” “Well, Sarah,” said my husband sharply, “if you are going to listen to ignorant servants’ superstitions and run out of your house, just as we are comfortably settled in it, on account of a foolish sickly woman fainting from hearing a ghost story—I say—it is a pity you ever came into it.” He spoke very decidedly and sternly, and yet I felt in my inmost heart that the uttered what he wished me to believe, not what he believed himself. I said no more, but went to my bedroom—not into the dreaded dressing-room—and lay awake listening and fevered with nervous anxiety until the next morning dawned. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The nurse was better and able to speak the next day, though extremely weak and unnerved yet. The doctor forbade much questioning, and all that could be got from her at intervals was that something had come up the staircase and ran through the corridor, that she heard struggling and scuffling outside, and then the nursey door opened and she saw a woman’s face peering in, the eyes gleaming wickedly at her, and it had the yellow hair that “belong to the ghost.” “The woman has had a bad fit of nightmare—that is all, Sarah,” said William, rattling his paper unconcernedly, when I repeated to him the story I had just heard from poor Linda’s trembling lips. It might be so; but why were they all agreed as to what they had seen? Why did they all speak of the tangled fair hair, and the wicked gleaming eyes? Was our house haunted? Was this the mysterious cause of the exceedingly moderate price of the house and land and the house-agent’s profuse civility? The nurse did not recover strength, and being worse than useless in her present weak, hysterical condition, I sent her down to her country home for change of air, and hired another temporarily in her place. The newcomer was a stout, small, cheerful woman of about forty. I liked her face the moment I saw her; for, besides its smiling, honest expression, there was a good deal of decided character in the large firm features. “You appear to be a sensible person,” I said, when giving her her first instructions in the nursey, “and I think I can rely on you. You know my nurse is leaving because of illness, and that illness was caused by her being frightened by—a ghost-story.” I paused; but the woman remained unmoved, listening to me in respectful silence. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
“The servants downstairs have got some nonsense of the kind into their head,” I went on; “they will try to frighten you, too, and tell you they have seen—-” I could not go on. For my life I could not calmly giver her the description of that shadowy image of fear. “They cannot frighten me, ma’am, said my new nurse quietly. “I am not afraid of spirits.” I thought she spoke in jest, and smiled. “I am not indeed, ma’am,” she repeated. “I have lived where there were such things seen but they never harmed me.” “You do not mean to say you believe such nonsense?” said I, hypocritically trying to speak carelessly. “Oh yes, ma’am, I do! I could not disbelieve it,” said the nurse, opening her eyes with earnestness, “I know the story of this house, ma’am.” What story” I cried. The woman coloured and looked confused. “I beg your pardon, ma’am—I mean what people say is seen here.” “What do they say? Do not frighten me,” I said, and my voice quivered in spite of me; “I have heard nothing but what the servant said.” The nurse looked deeply concerned. “I am very stupid, ma’am; I beg your pardon for repeating such stores to you—I daresay it is only idle people’s gossip.” She went about her duties, and I went—not into my dressing-room—but down into the drawing-room, where I say by the window looking out until my husband returned. Two or three weeks more passed away. I lay down on my pet chintz-covered couch, near the window, to look at the sky and the starts. Dead silence—and the “ting, ting” of the French clock on the mantelpiece marked the half-hour after eight. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Dear me, how dark it was growing! this brooding storm I supposed, which had been making me feel so languid and restless. I wish it would come down and cool the air—not tonight, though. Dear me, how lonely it is. I wish William were home. Those women are talking very loudly—I wonder nurse would—here I got drowsy, and my eyes ached looking for the stars that had not come. In a few minutes I roused again, my maternal anxiety changing into indignation as I heard the women’s voices growing louder and shriller, and some doors opened and shut violently. What can nurse be thinking of? They will wake the children most certainly, and William was so long in falling asleep—quite fevers my own boy! I shall really reprover her very plainly. I never needed to do so before. What could she be thinking of? Dead silence again. Well, this was lonely; I was inclined to ring for lights, and turn on all the burners in the chandeliers by way of company. Then I remembered there were some wax matches in one of the drawers of a writing-tray just at hand, and thought I would light the gas myself instead of brining the servants down—yes—but I wanted company. It was so dark and dreary, and—and—I was afraid. Afraid to stir—afraid to look at the door! a numbing, chilling tide of icy fear ebbing through every vein—afraid to draw a breath—afraid to move hand or foot, in a nightmare of supernatural terror. At last, by a violent effort, I sprang at the bell-handle, and pulled it frantically, and as soon as I had done so, with a sudden revulsion of feeling, I felt thoroughly ashamed of my childish cowardice, although I could not have helped it, and it had overcome me as suddenly as unexpectedly. How William would have laughed at me! #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
There were those servants talking again, tramping about and banging the doors as before. Really, this was unbearable; cook must be in one of her fits of temper, and certainly had forgotten herself strangely. And, as the quarrelsome tones grew louder and louder—evidently in bitter recrimination, although I could not catch a word—my own anger rose proportionately, and, forgetting loneliness and darkness in my indignant anxiety lest my children should be waked by this most unseemly behaviour of the servants, I ran hastily out of the room and up the wide staircase. The dime light from the clouded evening sky, still further subdued by the gold and purple-stained glass of the conservatory door, streamed faintly down the steps from the first landing, and by it, just as I had ascended half way, I discovered the short, thick-sett figure of the nurse rushing down—of course, in answer to my ring, I supposed. Involuntarily I stepped aside to avoid coming in violent contact with her as she feld past. No, it was not the nurse; and the woman following her in headlong haste, sweeping by me so that the current of air from their floating dresses struck icily cold on my brow where the clammy dew of perspiration had started in great drops, was—was—-Merciful Heavens! What was that tall figure, with the coarse, disordered, yellow hair, the white face, and glittering, steel-blue eyes, that glinted fiendishly on me for one dreadful instant, and then vanished? Vanished as the pursed and pursuing figures had disappeared in the shadows of the wide, lofty hall, without sound of voice or footstep? #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
If you had a chance to explore areas never before seen within Sarah’s house, would you take it?
Explore More Tour: winchestermysteryhouse.com/recent-links
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day!
When looking at top concert pianists, Olympic swimmers, sculptors, tennis players, mathematicians, and research neurologists, it was discovered that drive and determination, not great natural talent, led to exceptional success. The first steps toward high achievement began when parent expose their children to music, swimming, scientific ideas, and so forth, “just for fun.” At first, many of the children had very ordinary skills. One Olympic swimmer, for instance, remembers repeatedly losing rases to a 10-year-old. At some point, however, the children began to actively cultivate their abilities. Before long, parents noticed the child’s rapid progress and found an expert instructor or coach. After more successes, the youngsters began “living” for their talent and practiced many hours daily. This continued for many years before they reached truly outstanding heights of achievement. Talent is nurtured by dedication and hard work. It is most likely to blossom when parents actively support a child’s special interest and emphasize doing one’s best at all times. Studies of child prodigies and eminent adults also show that intensive practice and expert coaching are common ingredients of high achievement. Elite performance in music, sports, chess, the arts, and many other pursuits requires at least 10 years of dedicated practice. The old belief that “talent will surface” on its own is largely a myth. This is especially true for talented women, who face a wide variety of social obstacles to exceptional achievement. “If ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true,” reports Alma 32.21. #RandolohHarris 1 of 23
Faith is needed to reach any goal. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Faith is a principle of action and power. Whenever you work toward a worthy goal, you exercise faith. You show your hope for something that you cannot yet see. In order for your faith to lead you to salvation, it must be centered in the Lord Jesus Christ. “We believe that the first principles and ordinances of the Gospel are: first, Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; second, Repentance; third, Baptism by immersion for the remission of sins; fourth, Laying on of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost,” Articles of Faith 1.4. Achieving elite performance may be reserved for the dedicated few. Nevertheless, you may be able to improve everyday motivation by increasing your self-confidence. People with self-confidence believe they can successfully carry out an activity or reach a goal. To enhance self-confidence, it is wise to do the following: Have faith in Jesus Christ. That means relying on Jesus Christ completely. Trust in His infinite power, intelligence, and love. Set goals that are specific and challenging, but attainable. Visualize the steps you need to take to reach your goal. Advance in small steps. When you first acquire a skill, your goal should be to make progress in learning. Later, you can concentrate on improving your performance, compared with other people. This means believing that even though you do not understand all things, Jesus Christ does. Remember that because He as experienced all your pains, afflictions, and infirmities, He knows how to help you rise above your daily difficulties. He has overcome the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Get expert instruction that helps your master the skill. “And he shall go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind; and this that the word might be fulfilled which saith He will take upon Him the pains and the sickness of His people. And He will take upon Him death, that He may loose the bands of death which bind His people; and He will take upon Him their infirmities, that His bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that He may know according to the flesh how to succor His people according to their infirmities,” reports Alma 7.11-12. Jesus Christ has prepared a way for you to receive eternal life. He is always ready to help you as you remember His plea: “Look unto e in every thought; doubt, not fear,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 6.36. Find a skilled model (someone good at the skill) to emulate. Get support and encouragement from an observer. Faith is much more than a passive belief. You express your faith through actions—by the way you live. If you fail, regard it as a sign that you need to try harder, not that you lack ability. The Saviour promised, “If ye will have faith in me, ye shall have power to do whatsoever thing is expedient in me,” Moroni 7.33. Faith in Jesus Christ can motivate you to follow His perfect example. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, one that believeth on me, the works that I do shall one do also; and greater works than these shall one do; because I go unto my Father,” reports John 14.12. Self-confidence affects motivation by influencing the challenges you will undertake, the effort you will make, and how long you will persist when things do not go well. You can be confident that self-confidence is worth cultivating. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Your faith can lead you to do good works, obey the commandments and repent of your sins. Your faith can help you overcome temptation. “Teach them to withstand every temptation of the devil, with their faith on the Lord Jesus Christ,” reports Alma 37.33. The Lord will work mighty miracles in your life according to your faith. “And that one manifesteth oneself unto all those who believe in Him, by the power of the Holy Ghost; yea, unto every nation, kindred, tongue, and people, working mighty miracles, signs, and wonders, among the children of men according to their faith,” reports 2 Nephi 26.13. Faith in Jesus Christ helps you receive spiritual and physical healing through His Atonement. When times of trial comes, faith can give you strength to press forward and face your hardships with courage. Even when the future seems uncertain, your faith in the Saviour can give your peace. “Peace, peace be unto you, because of your faith in my Well Beloved, who was from the foundation of the World,” Helaman 5.47. Faith is a gift from God, but you must nurture your faith to keep it strong. Faith is like the muscle of your arm. If you exercise it, it grows strong. If you put it in a sling and leave it there, it becomes weak. You can nurture the gift of faith by praying to Heavenly Father in the name of Jesus Christ. As you express your gratitude to your Father and as you plead with Him for blessings that you and others need, you will draw near to Him. You will draw near to the Saviour, whose Atonement makes it possible for you to plead for mercy. “And thou didst hear me because of mine afflictions and my sincerity; and it is because of Thy Son that Thou hast been thus merciful unto me, therefore I will cry unto Thee in all mine afflictions, for in Thee is my joy; for Thou hast turned Thy judgments away from me, because of Thy Son,” reports Alma 33.11. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
You will also be receptive to the quiet guidance of the Holy Ghost by exercising faith. Another question that arises is this. If the redemption of Man is the beginning of Nature’s redemption as a whole, must we then conclude after all that Man is the most important thing in Nature? If I had to answer “Yes” to this question I should not be embarrassed. Supposing Man to be the only rational animal in the Universe, then (as has been shown) his small size and the small size of the globe he inhabits would not make it ridiculous to regard him as the hero of the cosmic drama: Jack after all is the smallest character in Jack the Giant–Killer. Nor do I think it in the least improbable that Man is in fact the only rational creature in this spatiotemporal Nature. That is just the sort of lonely pre-eminence—just the disproportion between picture and frame—which all that I know of Nature’s “selectiveness” would lead me to anticipate. However, I do not need to assume that it actually exists. Let Man be only one among a myriad of rational species, and let him be the only one that has fallen. Because he has fallen, for him God does the great deed; just as in the parable it is the one lost sheep for whom the shepherd hunts. Let Man’s pre-eminence or solitude be one not of superiority but of misery and evil: then, all the more, Man will be the very species into which Mercy will descend. For his prodigal the fatted calf, or, to speak more suitably, the eternal Lamb, is killed. However, once the Son of God, drawn hither not by our merits but by our unworthiness, has put on human nature, then our species (whatever it may have been before) does become in one sense the central fact in all Nature: our species, rising after its long descent, will drag all Nature up with it because in our species the Lord of Nature is now included. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
And it would be all of a piece with what we already know if ninety and nine righteous races inhabiting distant planets that circle distant suns, and needing no redemption on their own account, were re-made and glorified by the glory which had descended into our race. For God is not merely mending, not simply restoring a status quo. Redeemed humanity is to be something more glorious than unfallen humanity would have been, more glorious than any unfallen race now is (if at this moment the night sky conceals any such). The greater the sin, the greater the mercy: the deeper the death the brighter the re-birth. And this super-added glory will, with true vicariousness, exalt all creatures and those who have never fallen will thus Adam’s fall. I write so far on the assumption that the Incarnation was occasioned only by the Fall. Another view has, of course, been sometimes held by Christians. According to it the descent of God into Nature was not in itself occasioned by sin. It would have occurred for Glorification and Perfection even if it had not been required for Redemption. Its attendant circumstances would have been very different: the divine humility would not have been a divine humiliation, the sorrows, the gall and vinegar, the crown of thorns and the cross, would have been absent. If this view is taken, then clearly the Incarnation, wherever and however it occurred, would always have been the beginning of Nature’s re-birth. The fact that it has occurred in the human species, summoned tither by that strong incantation of misery and abjection which Love has made Himself unable to resist, would not deprive it of its universal significance. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
This doctrine of a universal redemption spreading outwards from the redemption of Man, mythological as it will seem to modern minds, is in reality far more philosophical than any theory which holds that God, having once entered Nature, should leave her, and leave her substantially unchanged, or that the glorification of one creature could be realized without the glorification of the whole system. God never undoes anything but evil, never does good to unto it again. The union between God and Nature in the Person of Christ admits no divorce. He will not go out of Nature again and she must be glorified in all ways which this miraculous union demands. When spring comes it “leaves no corner of the land untouched”; even a pebble dropped in a pond sends circles to the margin. The question we want to ask about Man’s “central” position in this drama is really on a level with the disciples’ question, “Which of them was the greatest?” It is the sort of question which God does not answer. If from Man’s point of view the re-creation of non-human and even inanimate Nature appears a mere byproduct of one’s own redemption, then equally from some remote, non-human point of view Man’s redemption may seem merely the preliminary to this more widely diffused springtime, and the very permission of Man’s fall may be supposed to have had that larger end in view. If they will consent to drop the words mere and merely, both attitudes will be right. Where a God who is totally purposive and totally foreseeing acts upon a Nature which is totally interlocked, there can be no accidents or loose ends, nothing whatever of which we can safely use the word merely. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Nothing is “merely a by-product” of anything else. All results are intended from the first. What is subservient from one point of view is the main purpose from another. No thing or event is first or highest in a sense which forbids it to be also last and lowest. The partner who bows to Man in one movement of the dance receives Man’s reverences in another. To be high or central means to abdicate continually: to be low means to be raised: all good masters are servants: God washes the feet of men. The concepts we usually bring to the consideration of such matters are miserably political and prosaic. We think of flat repetitive equality and arbitrary privileges as the only two alternatives—thus missing all the overtones, the counterpoint, the vibrant sensitiveness, the inter-inanimations of reality. For this reason, I do not think it at all likely that there have been (as Alice Meynell suggested in an interesting poem) many Incarnations to redeem many different kinds of creature. One’s sense of style—of the divine idiom—rejects it. The suggestion of mass-production and of waiting queues comes from a level of thought which is here hopelessly inadequate. If other natural creatures than Man have sinned we must believe that they are redeemed: but God’s Incarnation as Man will be one unique act in the drama of total redemption and other species will have witnessed wholly different acts, each equally unique, equally necessary and differently necessary to the whole process, and each (from a certain point of view) justifiably regarded as “the great scene” of play. To those who live in Act II, Act III looks like an epilogue: to those who live in Act III, Act II looks like a prologue. And both are right until they add the fatal word merely, or else try to avoid it by the dullard’s supposition that both acts are the same. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
All the kinds of knowledge that demand reflection, all those acquired only by the concatenation of ideas and perfected only successively, appear to be utterly beyond grasp of savage man, owing to the lack of communication with one’s fellow-men, that is to say, owing to the lack of the instrument which is used for that communication, and to the lack of the needs that make it necessary. His understanding and his industry are limited to jumping, running, fighting, throwing a stone, climbing a tree. However, if he knows only those things, in return he knows them much better than we, who do not have the same need for them as he. And since they depend exclusively on bodily exercise and are not capable of any communication or progress from one individual to another, the firs man could have been just as adept at them as his last descendants. The reports of travelers are full of examples of the force and vigor of men of barbarous savage nations. They praise scarcely less their adroitness and nimbleness. And since eyes alone are needed to observe these things, nothing hinders us from giving credence to what eyewitnesses certify on the matter. I draw some random examples from the first books that fall into my hands. “The Hottentots,” says Kolben, “understand fishing better than the Europeans at the Cape. Their skill is equal when it comes to the net, the hook and the spear, in coves as well as in rivers. They catch fish by hand no less skillfully. They are incomparably good at swimming. Their style of swimming has something surprising about it, something entirely unique to them. They swim with their body upright and their hands stretched out of the water, so that they appear to be walking on land. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
In the greatest agitation of the sea, when the waves form so many mountains, they somehow dance on op of the waves, rising and falling like a piece of cork. “The Hottentots,” say the same author further, “are surprisingly good at hunting, and the nimbleness of their running surpasses the imagination.” He is amazed that they did not put their agility to ill use more often, which however, sometimes happens, as can be judged from the example he gives. “A Dutch sailor,” he says, “on disembarking at the Cape, charged a Hottentot to follow him to the city with a roll of tobacco that weighed about twenty pounds. When they were both some distance from the crew, the Hottentot asked the sailor if he knew how to run. Run! answered the Dutchman; yes, very well. Let us see, answered the African. And feeling with the tobacco, he disappeared almost immediately. The sailor, confounded by such marvelous quickness, did not think of following him, and he never again saw either his tobacco or his porter. “They have such quick sight and such a sure hand that Europeans cannot go near them. At a hundred paces they will hit with a stone a mark the size of a halfpenny. And what is more amazing, instead of fixing their eyes on the target as we do, they make continuous movements and contortions. It appears that their stone is carried by an invisible hand.” Father du Tertre says about the savages of the Antilles nearly the same things that have just been read about the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope. He praises, above all, their accuracy in shooting with their arrows birds in flight and swimming fish, which they then catch by diving for them. The savages of North America are no less famous for their strength and adroitness, and here is an example that will lead us form a judgment about these qualities in the Indians of South America. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
In the year 1746, an Indian from Buenos Aires, having been condemned to the galleys of Cadiz, proposed to the governor that he buy back his liberty by risking his life at a public festival. He promised that by himself he would attack the fiercest bull with no other weapon in his hand but a rope; that he would bring him to the ground, seize him with his rope by whatever part they would indicate, saddle him, bridle him, mount him, and so mounted he would fight two other of the fiercest bulls to be released from the Torillo, and that he would put all of them to death, one after the other, the moment they would command him to do so, and without anyone’s help. This was granted him. The Indian kept his word and succeeded in everything he had promised. On the way in which he did it and on the details of the fight, one can consult M. Gautier, Observations sur l’ Histoire Naturelle, Vol. I (in-12), p. 262, whence this fact is taken. What is the nature of the analytic work which is performed at the “vertical” barriers? What are the activities of the analyst? It is to bring the central sector of the personality to an acknowledgement of the simultaneous existence (1) of unaltered conscious and preconscious narcissistic and/or perverse aims, and (2) of the realistic goal structures and the moral and aesthetic standards which reside in the central sector. This is not as cold or complex a process as the language implies. It is amazing how close to “kissing it better” the whole business sometimes is. Or is it amazing that psychotherapists are only now finding a place for such processes in their theories? #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
How does a person become strong, in the sense of having good self-esteem, a good ability to understand situation and cope with them, a good personality organization which allows feeling and needs to find expression in actions and gratifications which in turn fee self-esteem? Bluntly, we do not know for sure. We may make some guesses based on what good parents and good therapists are thought by some to have in common. Let us think of a simple, everyday pain: a child has hurt a finger. The finger gives pain. The pain must be recognized and accepted. Parents know this who put large plasters on tiny grazes. They give recognition to the fact that the child has had a shock. The pain was a shock. The child’s illusions of omnipotence or safety may have shattered. It has certainly been reminded that it does not have perfect control over what happens to it. The suddenness of the shock may have been experienced as an impingement—this needs healing as much as the graze does, so that the boundaries of the self may feel secure again. Consolation is needed. So mourning with the child, as in depression about other losses: mouring the fact that the World is not a better place, and mouring our limited power to be safe and keep our good things safe. In mouring there is a kind of recognition and acceptance which is consoling. The process takes a while, and during that time we just have to sit about, being not doing. London April 2003: I am sitting in my armchair reading. Leo walks in, stifling his sobs, clambers on my lap, positions himself upright, facing away, tilts his head fully back, and bursts into howls and howls and howls. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
I make a move to cuddle him but he elbows my arms away, and when I tentatively touch the tips of his fingers, by way of some gesture of consolation, he snatches them away, and his howls threaten to turn into shrikes, or even skreeks. As his howls continue, I have just time to check my impulse to ask him what is the matter to hug him, stroke his hair, to offer him words of comfort, before he is lowering his head and turning to look at me for the first time, his last howl fades. In one smile he says hello, bye-bye, perhaps thanks daddy. With a sigh of completion, he gets down from my lap, and without a word between us since he came in and without looking back, he ambles out the door, ready for his next adventure with Nacho. This is why bed-rest is sometimes a good treatment (to accompany other help) in the case of psychologically wounded people. It would be great if hospitals could provide this. However alas, financial shortages, the wrong medical model of psychological troubles, and demoralized management structure which cannot support and educate its nursing staff, militate against this as things are at present—as does the professional’s passion to be doing or at least talking. Jus as the good-enough parent accepts the small child as it is, giving recognition and acceptance by “mirroring” in an atmosphere which implies that what is seen in the mirror is good, so will therapists, accepting people who are hoping for a new beginning, find themselves impelled to mirror. Mirroring is not quite interpreting, though in some ways near it. The best simple example comes from Virginia Axline’s account of her work with Dibs, the very anxious and confused little boy of four who had been very much overwhelmed by parents obsessed with doing at the expense of being. Dibs remembered his therapy as “Everything I did, you did. Everything I said, you said.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Good parents give the small child permission to be just whatever it happens to be at the time. And they not only give it room to be, but also recognize that it is a person in its own right, even before it is so, and praise it for what it is not yet. They also validate its needs and requirements. They also provide the conditions for ego-relatedness, allowing the child to feel safe and protected and yet not obligated by their presence. So the child feels safe enough to begin to discover something about itself in the World. In much the same way, friends and therapists can provide an opportunity for people to discover that it is safe just to be, to be arglos, undefended, in a safe ego-related us-related state. In this state of mind people can let their thoughts drift in a free-association kind of way. It may be that, contentedly in touch with a person who matters to them and whom they have come to trust they are unconsciously getting close to sharing something which cannot (yet) be put into words. They may be getting ready to be a person they have not yet dared to be, or to reveal a split-off par of self which had hitherto been disowned. Words are no very suitable for conveying your essential being. The new (organization of the) self is therefore sometimes acted out somehow, the person half-hoping that the right response from the first or psychotherapist will do something that will somehow make something good happen. This is a route by which people can sometimes get back to a state of being when something was so unbearable that they had to stay split. At such times there may be a lot of anger, or other behaviour it is as hard to put up with as it would be in a three-person regions of relationships. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
However, this can be a cover-up. In these regressions, anguish is much more common, and may be the norm. Can this be conveyed in words, except by a poet? “I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree, bitter would have me taste: my taste was me; bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse. Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough scours. I see the lost are like this, and their sciurage o be as I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.” (Gerard Manely Hopkins, I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.) Therapists, parents, or friends, faced with these feelings, may find themselves in conflict. This person who has come for help seems so clearly to need comfort and reassurance, is so obviously in agony, ashamed, or frightened; the feelings are so hard to bear. How to react for the best? On the one hand, here is a person in pain. On the other hand, the pain could be very largely due to some very distorted ideas about how others would react if they really knew them. Those ideas need to be changed. Putting them right by reassurance or sensible arguments has not worked in the past and does not seem worth trying again. The old pain, the shame-making situation, the hidden person, have first to come into view and be seen and acknowledged and recognized and shared. After that it may become possible to repair the damage which had previously prevented the bad experienced from being fully integrated into the personality at the obvious moment, the moment when they first aroused. However, integration can be achieved only if they are now allowed to come into consciousness, now, while the sufferer is in a relationship with someone willing to have them come to light. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
The process must therefore not be impeded by too many expressions or reassurance and comfort, however, well meant, least the sufferer get the idea that we cannot bear (contain, accept, integrate) these feelings either. That might cause such an increase in anxiety that the splits would be deepened rather than mended. The whole point of reviving all that pain is to have someone there who is able to survive it, contain it, and integrate it. Recognition is basic need. To be recognized is part of the healing process, whether it be recognition of good or of bad things. What is recognized is that here is someone who has lived thus and has felt thus and not otherwise. Just the experience of going to pieces, of being lost, furious, disgusting, terrified, ignored, yet safe and known and accepted, may be what a person is after, just the experience of being so in someone else’s presence and not having to do anything about it. When does a person need the kind of recognition that goes with support and with praise for achievement, and when do people need us to stand back and let them be a little while longer? It is clear that it is not supportive to prevent people from telling us their bad feelings when they are urgent to do so, and there is time, and we are ready to hear them. And it is not supportive to behave like blocks of stone while we are listening. Or to just say, “Okay,” which is the same as saying “I do not care. Why are you bothering me with your petty concerns? I have better things to do.” However, how far to go? #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
It has been interesting to see the newer therapies which are less firmly attached to psycho-analytic roots and which have recently gained in popularity—Transactional Analysis, Gestalt, Bio-energetics, Psychosynthesis, and so on—also grappling with this question. These newer techniques are much more empathic about the need to provide safety, recognize “being,” and communicate acceptance. This emphasis derives from many sources; among others, there is the fact that they evolved in an era when people in fear of disintegration were seeking non-religious, non-medical, non-psycho-analytic help for their condition (and were often rightly avoided by more orthodox psychotherapies because they were considered unsuitable for psycho-analysis). Disintegrating people need holding, and the newer techniques are freer in encouraging comfort, praise, and warmth. Thus they help people to bear both the pain of their everyday lives and the pain of therapy, where painful new discoveries are made and painful old feelings revived: people get a supply of strength while they seek new ways of being. Groups are ideal for this purpose, different members offering different gifts of themselves, and support coming from many quarters at once. The more orthodox psycho-analytically based therapies on the whole refrain from giving gratifying support of this kind, and this can be hard both on patient and on therapist—the many warnings against it prove how strong the temptation is. They impose restraint on the grounds that people must eventually find those gratifications for themselves in themselves and in others: the wrong kind of dependence may be created when a therapist gives realistic gratifications. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Abstinence from support, praise, warmth, or reassurance can serve another purpose also: it can serve to give recognition to our strivings to be strong, able, competent. Having given rom for ocnophilic dependency-needs, room has equally to be made for the philobat’s independence-strivings. So while many of the newer therapies at first made much of physically holding people, surrounding them with cuddling words and gestures, many are now also quite explicit on the importance of waiting for people to stop sobbing or shouting, letting then gain control over themselves, and allowing them to find within themselves the strength needed for self-control and self-esteem. Older and newer agree on the importance of people finding out for themselves who they are and what they can do and what they like doing. However, their methods of achieving this vary, particularly here, in the timing and indeed the nature of helpful interventions. There seem at present no hard and fast rules which make things right for everyone. We will, for a while longer, just have to guess what each particular person needs at a particular moment, to help one with become strong enough to bear reality after having denied it for son long or after having distorted it and secretly held on to all kinds of cherished delusions which must now be given up. We have been considering why and how parents and others might create an atmosphere in which it feels safe for people to let themselves go, in which they can be defenceless and even go to pieces, and yet know that someone is looking after them. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
A more realistic phase is now starting. Conversations are becoming possible. From he very early days, of people’s life and of their therapy, there will have been phantasies about the World, about living, about parents and/or therapists, sometimes of a quite frightening kind. What is to happen to these phantasies? The time has come for them to be established as either true or untrue. In the early days, the parent/therapist’s role was concentrated on providing an atmosphere which conveyed that it was all right to have phantasies, not wrong to have thoughts about anything. In therapy this often comes as a surprise, and the discovery has therapeutic effects. However, when conversations become possible, further gains can be achieved. Words can now be provided, for use when thinking, or talking about hazardous things—words in which the at-first blurry phantasies can be talked about, words like “muscle” words like “hate,” words like “disagree” and “conflict.” The parent/therapist can now convey new things to the child (part of us) knowing that we are ready for it. The parent/therapist teaches, making meaning for us, or helping us to find meaning, still often ego-functioning for us as a form of support. Verbal labels help us look for and remember things—symbolic thought become possible, reasoning. Explanations can now be made in words; there is less need to reply on direct experience to make the connections. “If you put your fingers into those little holes, you might get a nasty shock from the electric current.” “It may be that you are feeling disgruntled because you missed a session last week, and now you feel somehow sold short.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Facts will be changing accordingly. The parent/therapist can say, or allow the discover to be made, that a particular phantasy is true (or false, as the case may be): “Yes, fathers and mothers go on dates.” “No, your mother is not a child.” The child learns language. The child learns road safety, and crocheting, and other skills. Some of these are learned because someone sets out to teach them. I think there is an observable difference between those whose parents took trouble over such things, and those who were left too entirely to their own devices. In somewhat the same way there is a difference between people whose therapists’ techniques differed in this respect. Words, skills, and the ability to look after yourself are related. At this time in development, the child part of us is now no longer so confined to creating its own realities as in the ego-related state. We become interested in our new opportunities—and discover new limitations. We being to be interested in doing things for ourselves; now we need to be allowed freer opportunities to discover both the World and our place in it. At this time we need recognition that we can safely be strong enough to do things for ourselves. We need to be allowed to discover what we can do, with fairly wide limits, and not be inhibited too much in our play and our trial-and-error explorations, which necessarily involve a good deal of error, failure, and frustration. Yet good parents are very much there: they are no uninvolved, or let the child discover things for itself in a laissez-faire sort of way. They give praise in recognition of the fact that it is strong and can do things. However, they protect the child’s growing self-confidence by keeping away problems which might prove too overwhelmingly difficult, which would necessarily defeat it and sap its growing self-esteem. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
The child needs protection against what it cannot yet handle. Support is needed for instance when we have to give up our omnipotent or endlessly greedy phantasies. Part of this support consists of help in recognizing limits: “No, you cannot have the moon, but you can have my love, and a hug, and a game with Tommy next door.” Support is needed, too, while learning to accept the reality of other people “Yes, you can play with Tommy but no, you must not kick him. He does not like it any more than you would.” We need to have boundaries pointed out to us and maintained, if necessary against our wishes at the time. In psychotherapy, the therapist’s willingness to do this new kind of holding may be tried and tested over and over. At this time, a laid-back psychotherapist, laissez-faire because anxious not to intrude, may fail to provide a feeling of safety. At this stage, when there is much frustration and disillusionment at what is not possible as well as much pleasure at what can be now done, the need for reliable, comforting, sharing-the-mourning kind of holding is as crucial as ever. It is what gives us the strength and vitality to keep on trying. These periods of being-at-rest and being-at-one allow the new things to be securely integrated and valued. They bring us back to our central strength. For we can be sure that we have the seeds of the goodness and strength we need hidden and repressed or split-off though they may be. Locked in our memory are traces of the experiences which enabled us to survive. We know that this is so because we have in fact survived. We did not die. At least the minimum goodness was there, and just enough strength, at least. We are already posses of what we need, if we can but get to it. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
With the discover of this higher self, there comes a conviction of truth gained, a sense of perfect assurance, and a feeling of happy calmness. “Oh joy! that in our embers is something that doth live, that nature yet remembers what was so fugitive! The thought of our past years in me doth breed perpetual benediction: not indeed for that which is most worthy to be blest—delight and liberty, the simple creed of children, whether busy or at rest, with new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:–not for these I raise the song of thanks and praise…but for those first affections, those shadowy recollections, which, be they what they may, are yet the fountain-light of all our day, are yet a master-light of all our seeing; uphold us, cherish, and have power to make our noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal Silence: truth that wake, to perish never: which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, now Man nor Boy, nor all that is at enmity with joy, can utterly abolish or destroy! Hence in a season of calm weather though inland far we be, our souls have sigh of that immortal sea which brough us hither, can in a moment travel thither, and see the children sport upon the shore, and hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. Then sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song!” (William Wordsworth, Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.) Hear, O Humankind, the prayer of my heart for are we not one, have we not one desire, to heal our Mother Earth and bind her wounds to hear again from dark forests and flashing rivers the varied ever-changing Song of Creation? O humankind, are we not all brothers and sisters, are we not the grandchildren of the Great Mystery? Do we not all want o love and be loved, to work and to play, to sing and dance together? However, we live with fear. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
Fear that is hate, fear that is mistrust, envy, greed, vanity, fear that is ambition, competition, aggression, fear that is loneliness, anger, bitterness, cruelty…and yet, fear is only twisted love, turned back on itself, love that was denied, love that was rejected…and love. Love is life—creation, seed, and lead, and blossom, and fruit, and seed, love is growth and search and reach and touch and dance. Love is nurture and succor and feed and pleasure, love is pleasuring ourselves pleasuring each other, love is life believing in itself. And life…life is the Sacred Mystery singing to itself, dancing to its drum, telling tales, improvising, playing and we are all that Spirit, our stories all but one cosmic story that we are love indeed, that perfect love in me seeks the love in your, and if our eyes could ever meet without fear we would recognize each other and rejoice, for love is life believing in itself. The glimpse will affect each individual in a different way, although the feeling of stepping out of darkness into light will be common to all. Within and around the Earth, within and around the hills, within and around the mountains, your authority returns to you. Help Thine establish dwelling, the tranquil habitation, the tabernacle of America, the goal of the tribe’s pilgrimage, the precious corner-stone, even America, the excellent, the Holy of Holies, the object of your affection, the home of Thy glory. O save America, yea, save the hill to which the World turns. O Eternal, we beseech Thee, do Thou save us. Saviour of might ones that swelt with Thee in Lud, the land whence Thou didst set them free; so save Thou us! As Thou didst save together God and nation, the people singled out for God’s salvation; so save Thou us! The house of Thy redeemed, with manifold Angelic hosts were saved by Thee of Old. So save us Thou us! #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
Cresleigh Homes
When it comes to your dream home, every detail matters. The Meadows Residence 2 is designed for maximum impact; the butler’s pantry allows easy access from the kitchen to the dining room. What a thoughtful addition! https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/
This attractive one-story plan has an ideal layout with 2,372 square feet, of thoughtfully designed living space, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a three car garage.
Some People Feel they May Be Flying Apart–We Do Not Forgive Because it Benefits Us!
My turn at last, my Loquacious if Lofty Friend. “How multitudinous are Your sweetness, O Lord, which You have hoarded for those who fear you!” That was the shout of the Psalmist (31.19), and it is my shout too. However, what are You to those who love? And to those who serve You with their whole heart? You are the sweetness of contemplation—who can describe it?—that You bestow generously on those who love You. To this point, in the most generous way possible, You have shown me the sweetness of Your charity. How do I know? You have made me into something better than I was, what I am not, and when I have strayed far afield, You found me and led me back. Hence it is that I serve You now. What is more? You have laid down the one condition, that I should love You. No big deal! I do that already. Although not very well, as You are so fond of pointing out. O Fountain of Perpetual Love! What may I say about You? How can I forget You after You kept me on Your list of friends, even after I pined away and died the spiritual death. Your response to Your servant at that unhappy time was extravagant, an act of friendship, making my every hope a mercy, and my every merit a grace. “What can I give You in return for that grace?” I ask with the Psalmist (116.12). Not everyone has received it. Not everyone has been called to leave everything behind, renounce the World, enter the monastic life. At this point—and, before You say it, O Lord, I do have a point—may I ask a stupid question? What is so great about serving You? We are already under all obligation to serve You; yes, the whole of Humankind. So pardon me if I do not think it is such a great new idea. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
What is really great, though—and this is an argument You seemed to have missed—is that You picked a pauper and a pooper like me for You monastery and put me in the company of Your beloved self-actualized. Now that is astounding! That is astonishing! Look at all this Earthly clutter of mine! It is Yours too, as the First Book of Chronicles has it (29.14), at least according to the terms of our present agreement, and I use bits and bobs of it to serve You. However, that is the wrong end to approach it from. You serve me more than I serve You. Just take a look at Heaven and Earth. You created them for the use of Humankind. They are right here in front of our eyes, and every day they do just what You have ordered them to do. And this is just the beginning. “You have ordered the Angels to minister to Humankind,” as the Psalmist has it (91.11). Transcending all of this transcendence is Your deigning to serve Humanity and promising to give Yourself to us. All those thousands of gifts You have given me, what can I give in return? I know. I will serve You all the days of my life! Better, I will serve You just one day of my life, but I will make it a day of perfect service! Ah, my Lord and Gracious Friend, “You are worth the perfect service, and all the honour and eternal praise that go with it,” as the twenty-four elders in Revelations sang to the Spirit on the throne (4.11). As for me, poor servant that I am, I have vowed to serve You with every fiber of my being, to praise You without ever stinting. That is my wish. That is my desire. And you know what I like best? Whenever I come undone, You kindly see to my mending. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Great honor? To serve You! Great glory? To condemn everything else because of You. Like me, those who on the spur of the moment enlisted in Your Most Holy Service have a great grace. That is to say, we who ditched every carnal delight now discover the most delightful consolation of the Holy Spirit. We who ignored the World’s broad highways and followed Your pointy sign down the narrow dirt road, as Matthew quoted You (7.14), are having a fairly pleasant journey. How sweet is the service of the Lord! Yes, my Lordly if sometimes Leery Friend, we like to think the monastery a great and happy place, and we hope You think the same. And yes, religious service has a lot to recommend it. As You say, it does indeed promote Freedom and Holiness. And it does render Humankind equal to Angels, satisfactory to God, unwelcome to Demons, and commendable to all faithful! It is a life one can learn to love and embrace for a lifetime. A service promising the Summum Bonum. With the Gaudium Perenne to boot! In the Church, we are frequently reminded about the importance forgiving one another. We are told that we are “required to forgive all humans,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 64.10. Forgiveness is our responsibility. However, when we teach our children the principle of repentance, more is involved than saying “I am sorry.” Repentance required that we change our lives and, if possible, make amends for our mistakes. This is where the principle of restitution comes in. Restitution has always been a part of the gospel plan. We read in the law of Moses that when one has sinned against another, “one shall even restore it in the principal, and shall add the fifth part more hereto,” reports Leviticus 6.5. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
When we make a restitution for our sins, we show our Father in Heaven that we are willing to change our lives. As parents, we can d much to instill this important principle in our family. Restitution should be made for mistakes. If we run into the back of someone else’s car, it is called an “accident.” However, the law still expects us to pay for having the other car repaired. Restitution is just one part of repentance. Repentance really involves changing our hearts and our lives and accepting the atonement of Christ. Everyone needs to know that God loved them so much that “He gave his only begotten Son,” reports John 3.16. God did that so people could repent. He paid the wages for your sins. The wages of sin is death. It is also important to understand that restitution would be of little worth without the great sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ. We are so tied to the foolish idea which regards body and mind as two wholly separate and different entities, that all too many regard it as undignified to practice physical exercises in order to influence the mind. The discoveries of mentalism show how foolish is such an attitude, how much we miss in outer helps to inner attainment. Whether or not someone else provides restitution to us when we have been hurt, we should still forgive. Two types of studies inform what we know about forgiveness and mental health: studies of people with forgiving personalities, and studies that teach people how to forgive. Some research examines the mental health of people who already have unforgiving or forgiving personalities. Some people seem to harbor grudges, and some practice forgiveness across a range of hurtful experiences. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Unforgiving people—whether college students in research studies or clients in therapy—feel more anxious, depressed, and inferior than forgiving people. But why? Does a forgiving personality result in better mental health? Does better mental health make it easier to forgive across situations and over time? Or does adherence to faith—or even the support of family and friends—promote both a forgiving personality style and better mental health? Although we do not yet know the answers to these questions, we do know something about the effects of forgiving in response to specific hurts. In separate universities, both Robert Enright and Everett Worthington Jr. have studied the effects of teaching forgiveness. Can people learn to forgive? It seems so—for adolescents and the elderly, men and women, survivors of incest and people with everyday hurts, and people in individual and group therapy. What are the mental-health benefits? Generally, forgiveness therapies increase clients’ willingness and ability to forgive. When clients complete forgiveness therapies, they feel less grief, depression, anxiety, and anger. They also feel more self-esteem, more hope, more-optimistic attitudes toward family members and other offenders, and more desire for reconciliation. Forgiveness therapies work better than control conditions without treatment. However, forgiveness therapies do not always surpass supportive discussion therapies (both treatments can benefit mental health). Even so, people who forgive more—regardless of the type of therapy—have lower depression and anxiety, and high self-esteem. If clients feel wounded by or vengeful toward an offender—forgives therapy can both help them forgive and improve their mental health. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Most physical health studies have focused primarily on the health consequences of being unforgiving. In type A personalities—highly competitive, ambitious, rushed, easily angered, and hostile—hostility is the dangerous part, ratcheting up the risk of dying early from heart disease. Why? For one, hostile people are more physically reactive when they perceive interpersonal offenses (and they might even be more likely to perceive offenses in the first place). When angered, hostile people experience an exaggerated release of stress hormones, a large cholesterol dump into the blood stream, and a suppressed immune response, to name a few. On top of that, hostile people typically smoke more, overeat, and drink more alcohol—all risky for heart health. As if that were not enough, hostile people often lack social support—they are not as much fun to be around!—placing them at risk for both mental and physical problems. If hostility—an unforgiving personality style—is physically dangerous, then reducing hostility should reduce coronary problems. Indeed, type A’s who learned to manage their anger and become more forgiving also improved their cardiac health. What are some other consequences of being unforgiving or forgiving? College students in one study remembered someone from real life who had hurt them. At different points in the experiment, they focused on four different reactions to his offender: they mentally rehashed the hurt and nursed a grudge (two unforgiving responses), and they focused on the humanity of the offender and tried to genuinely forgive him or her (two forgiving responses). #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
When the students focused on unforgiving responses, their blood pressure rates, heart rates, sweat levels, brow muscle tension, and negative feelings: all were significantly higher than when the students were forgiving. By contrast, forgiving responses induced calmer feelings and physical responses. It appears that harboring unforgiveness comes at an emotional and physiological cost. By contrast, cultivating forgiveness may cut these costs and even bring some benefits, at least in the short term. The jury is out on the long-terms health effects of forgiveness. Perhaps future research will trac people over time and document long-term health outcomes. Will forgiving and unforgiving responses have long term effects on health if they are sufficiently frequent, intense, and enduring? When physiological systems stay highly aroused, they can eventually lead to physical breakdown. If forgiveness clams that arousal, it could buffer health. The challenge we now face is to help people learn not only how to forgive in the short term, but how to make forgiving a way of life. When we consistently practice the virtue of forgiving, we may see the greatest mental and physical health benefits. As Christians, we care about forgiveness and might readily embrace the beneficial messages about forgiveness and health. However, does this promising research have any potential pitfalls? Let us look at three examples. Can research prove Christian claims? Scientific research on forgiveness—and other virtues—holds value for addressing some questions (such as who is more likely to forgive, and what effects forgiveness has on feelings and physiology). #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
However, the scientific method in incapable of testing the ultimate truth claims of Christianity. Although science can illuminate the relationships among forgiveness-related thoughts, feelings, and physiology, science cannot tell us whether we ought to forgive. And whereas science can assess whether certain people judge forgiveness to be a virtue (and whether this is related to their behaviour), science cannot determine whether forgiving is virtuous. Is good behavior always good for us? It seems reasonable that something that we believe is good would also be good for us. However, this is not necessarily so. Being faithful and doing what is good does not inevitably secure good mental and physical health. People may alienate us because our beliefs are countercultural. We may suffer scorn for our faithful labours. We may feel depressed as we work with the sick and sorrowing. Sometimes discipleship has a cost. Why forgive? Some Christians have come to think that the reason they should forgive and should not hold grudges is because forgiveness is healthier. The because in that sentence is problematic. As valuable as research data are, they simply cannot serve as our ultimate motivation. Scientific data describe the way things are and help us predict what will happen in the future. However, these predictions do not always hold up. What would happen if—in future research—we discovered that forgiveness was so difficult for some people that it caused stress, negative emotion, and physical problems? Would that mean that we should stop forgiving? What would Christians do? In the best case, Christians’ motivation to forgive would be unshaken. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
We do not forgive because it benefits us. Those benefits may be a welcome by-product. However, our motivation to forgive is rooted in God’s call to forgive, our gratitude for God’s forgiveness of us, and our desire to imitate Christ—the one who perfectly modeled forgiveness and even now perfects our efforts to practice forgiveness. Many therapists believe that some people need to go to pieces, to become totally disorganized, in order to have a chance at better organization. I think this may be true as things stand at present. Our understanding of psychotherapy is not sufficiently developed for therapists to be able to help people disintegrate just in the right area and to the right extent, and in fifty-minute packages! Nor is enough known as yet about the circumstances in which the natural healing process (vis medicatrix naturae) will work best, and how we may encourage it. There is still much to learn. What is clear, however, is that some people feel that they may be falling apart, or even flying apart. An absolutely terrifying state of mind, an unbearable agony; yet this may have already happened in infancy: the unbearable has already happened. Yet is maybe that this is a thing that may need to happen to them again before they can get to an integrated personality-structure which feels better at a fundamental level. It is also clear that they need to be held somehow during that falling-apart time. It is surely almost obvious that being held by a hospital organization or a bed or drug. In practice, however, there is still a lot that psychotherapists need to learn. A little more is known about more controlled therapeutic regressions and relaxations of integration. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
At certain times in therapy, we may be in touch with a baby part of ourselves, and its terrible experiences, while at an adult level, too, all is confusion, disintegration, lack of connectedness, lack of context or meaning. This horrible experience is nothing new. What is new is the experience of feeling like this in the presence of someone who can take all this without losing one’s hold. At first, the adult part of us cannot hold on, never having been able to since babyhood. However, the therapist holds it, is not swallowed up by it, does not deny it but continues to be in touch both with the disintegrated adult and the disintegrated baby parts. In due course, if things go well, the adult part of us co-operates with the therapist in holding the baby and, further along in time, the therapist’s help is no longer needed. Then, the adult is able to feel the baby’s disintegration without feeling overwhelmed by it—the disintegration is integrated as part of the personality: it is not the whole. It is this that helps people get better. The facilitating environment is there to enable the maturational processes to proceed: safety, recognition, opportune reality-presentation. What else? A facilitating environment is in the end not enough. People are needed. Persons. Personal relationships between two whole persons, because one of them is still a tenuous patchwork of disintegrated and suffering adult and baby bits, even then it is important that there is a person in the relationship who is adult and whole, and that is the therapist. Like a good parent, like a good friend, the therapist is there to maintain the consoling knowledge that there are still good things, and most basically, that the good relationship has survived. “You are still you, I am still I, we are still together and sharing.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
“You and I are both at risk of natural disaster but the relationship is surviving.” “You may be (I may be) more confused, more lost, more inept, more of a coward, more sadistic or dirtier than you wanted to believe, but we both know it now and the relationship is still there.” “Your parent(s) may have been more confused, lost, inept, cowardly, sadistic, or dirty than you wanted to believe, but we both know it now, and the relationship is still intact.” That is what holding is. It is not easy to achieve. If analysts concentrate on either the grandiose or the wretched part of the psyche, they waste their time. Both must be accepted, both held: when they are, then parts of the personality which were previously disowned will contribute strength and solidity to the whole. Less than two centuries ago most humans were working on the land, the sea, and the forests and mines. In the cities they worked in hand-operated workshops and the cities themselves were no so large; the countryside was close at hand. They worked hard and long, using the muscles of their bodies, and so did their wives. This involuntary exercise of the muscular system, this exposure to sunshine and fresh air, this limitation to fresh and unpreserved foods, kept most of them healthy and strong even if the lack of better housing and sanitation kept short the lives of some of them. Then came the industrial revolution, when the machine and the civilization it created changed their habits of living. Now they crowd into cities, enter sedentary occupations, sit in chairs for long hours, or stand at mechanical assembly lines. Their bodies become soft, flabby, and undeveloped. Their organs of digestion function imperfectly. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Yet such is their hypnotized condition that these people do not realize the harm which modern ways have done them; indeed, they usually pity their ancestors! However, those who do realize it and feel uneasy in their conscience about it, need to make a constructive effort to eliminate the deterioration and the atrophy which are the price paid for straying away from Nature. There is no better way to bring the body under control than the way used to bring the mind under control—to put in under a daily routine of exercise and to have a fixed time for their repeated practice. The best time naturally to do exercise is on rising from bed, but it may not be the most convenient time. If the body is a battery and needs regular recharging (through relaxation practices), it is also a structure and needs reconditioning (through indicated exercises). Cicero’s prescription to follow the daily period of exercise with a period of rest is an excellent one. It is possible with only twelve months of regular, daily work to build up a perfect physical control. The ordinary bodily exercises can soon become tiring to middle-aged people. Moreover they take twice or treble the time needed for the simple culture of the spine, which is the most concentrated form of exercise possible. It stretches the body to the limit. It may be too much to ask students who have reached middle or old age to try all these exercises in physical betterment or follow all these instructions in physical condition. However, what they may find impossible to perform or what they may be disinclined to practice, they can still make advantageous use in the following way. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Let them bring such teaching to the notice of younger persons, to children in their teens and those just beyond the threshold of adulthood—for it is far easier for these younger persons to do than for older ones. The effort required is much less, the habits not so much encrusted. The body is deliberately made to exercise itself in certain attitudes and gestures. Any gesture become an attitude when it is arrested. Care of the physical organism will require attention to physical exercise as well as physical relaxation and to deep and abdominal breathing. The disuse of some muscles and the misuse of others can only lead to bodily faults. Restore he first to use, correct the second. As the new 20th century opened, antiquated Victorian social patterns were further substantially modified by a Progressive Era emphasis on the housewife as a “domestic engineer.” This was consciously advocated by Progressives and middle-road feminists to elevate household activities to the realm of skilled domestic engineering in order to provide housewives both higher status and greater personal freedom. No longer could a middle-class woman know only how to manage servants; now she was a manager responsible for the “scientific management” of the home. This meant she had to know budgeting, sanitation, and the characteristics of foods (balanced meals); she had to be an informed consumer. This emphasis on domestic science was reflected in schools and colleges, which established departments of Home Economics. The land grant colleges which had first brought professional programs such as dentistry and engineering onto campuses, were also in the forefront in establishing programs of home economics for the application of domestic science. (Following World War II, the idea of scientific management was further extended by universities into the realm of personal relations with the proliferation of courses on Marriage and Family.) #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
All the concern with domestic management was designed to increase women’s freedom by making the home role more professional and less restrictive. Mary Pattison made this explicit in her influential Principles of Domestic Engineering, where she sought to make the home more efficient by standardizing household tasks into science (May Pattison, Principles of Domestic Engineering: or What, Why, and How of a Home, Trow Press, New York, 1915). Through the use of stopwatch and charts plus several thousand questionnaires that had been distributed to Ne Jersey housewives, the efficient ways to cook clean, and sew were detailed. The titles of some of the chapters give a sense of the scope of the work. Titles of chapters include, “An Auto-Operative House,” “The Business of Purchasing,” “The Regeneration of the Kitchen,” “Personal Freedom,” “Organization of the Family,” “The Cultural Value of Housework,” “The Organization of the Consumer,” and “Housework and Democracy.” The scientific management of the home was tied to progressive idealism. According to the book’s final paragraph, “the truly progressive home is akin to democracy’s method…Domestic engineering would encourage cooperation between men and women leading to personal freedom and personal independence.” The new progressive idealism shows Democracy as a Religion, where men and women guided by God, united, shall work for its issues. “He is in glory, Who whilst He rejoices in Himself, needs not further praise,” reports Moral xxxii, 7. To be in glory, however, is the same as to be blessed. Therefore, since we enjoy God in respect to our intellect, because “vision is the whole of reward,” as Augustine says (De Civ. Dei. xxii), it would seem that beatitude is said to be in God in respect of His intellect. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Beatitude is perfect good of an intellect operation, by which in some sense it grasps everything. When the beatitude of every intellectual nature consists in understanding. Now in God, to be and to understand are one and the same thing; differing only in the manner of our understanding them. Beatitude must therefore be assigned to God in respect of God in respect of His intellect; as also to the blessed, who are called blessed [beati] by reason of the assimilation to His beatitude. This argument proves that beatitude belongs to God; not that beatitude pertains essentially to Him under the aspect of His essence; but rather under the aspect of His intellect. Since beatitude is good, it is the object of the will; now the object is understood as prior to the act of power. Whence in our manner of understanding, divine beatitude precedes the act of will at rest in it. This cannot be other than the act of the intellect; and thus beatitude is to be found in an act of the intellect. With both the brief Glimpse and the lasting Fulfilment comes a strong feeling of release. This refers to release from all the various kinds of limitation and restriction which have hemmed and oppressed one heretofore. Like a prisoner emerging from a gloomy cell after many years of an invalid liberated from long confinement in a hospital bed, one will feel an overwhelming sense of relief as the glimpse deepens and all cares, all burdens, fade away. There is an air of effectiveness in the experience which accompanies the glimpse, a feeling that here is real power ready for use and easy to use, in the way that the Overself directs, of course. It is like the feeling of returning to a well-beloved home after long absence, a joy whose arisal is spontaneous and unavoidable. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
When the glimpse is at its most, one hears within one the harmony of things like a joyous song. The stillness made one feel as religious and reverential as could be, yet one remained unpraying, even unthinking. The base, the mean, the unworthy, and the low seem alien and far from one: the noble, the high, the true, and the ideal seem to become one’s own very nature. From this rare contact one draws an unspeakable peace, a divine upliftment. Too many lives have a hard grey colour about them. The glimpse changes this, for an hour or a day, and puts a delicate pastel beauty in its place. All that is negative in one’s character fades away for the time of this glimpse, as if it had never existed. For one feels that there is pure harmony at the heart of things, within the Universe’s Mind, and that one has momentarily touched it. In these enchanted moments, all life takes on the shadowlike quality of a dream. The gulf between the impersonal calm of one’s present state and the egotistical emotion of one’s earlier one, is immense. The sudden Olympian elation which the glimpse gives, the unfamiliar feeling that it is like looking through a window on an entirely different and wholly glorious World of being, the inner knowing that this is reality—these things make it a benediction. When one is in that consciousness, there is nothing either in place or time which one wants for. For one’s mind is at peace. It is a strange paradox that in this experience although a human becomes infinitely humbler—for one has to be passive to surrender, if it is to happen at all—one finds at the same time an immense dignity within oneself. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
In these glorious moments the awareness of evil in the World faces out; by contrast the continuity of original goodness stays unbroken. The sense of well-being which comes with a glimpse spreads into the body, lights up the mind, glows in the emotions. In its enfolding peace, one will lose one’s Earthly burdens for a time; by its brooding wisdom, one will comprehend the necessity of renunciation; through its mysterious spell, one will confer grace on suffering humans. As its beauty seeps into one and affects one’s entire feeling-nature, all one’s grievances against other humans, against life itself, dissolve. All regrets for the past, complaints about the present, and grumbles over the future, pass away. Even more, all contempt or hatred for other humans passes too. The glimpse brings a feeling of enchantment. It is the opening of a secret door. The effect is a magical release from burdens and a flooding by hope. So, friends, every day do something that will not compute. Love the Lord. Love the World. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be humble. Love someone who does not deserve it (from afar). Denounce corruption and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Praise ignorance, for what humans have not encountered one has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant redwoods. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion—put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Expect the end of the World. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. So long as the honourable do not go cheap for power, please honourable people more than others. Ask yourself: Will his satisfy an honourable person satisfied to a bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth? Go with your love to the fields. Let easy in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the general and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trial, the way you did not go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection. For the sake of Thy truth, Thy covenant, Thy greatness and glory; for the sake of Thy Torah, They majesty, Thy troth and Thy fame; for the sake of Thy mercy, Thy goodness, Thy unity, Thine honour, and Thy wisdom; for the sake of Thy sovereignty, Thine eternity, Thy mystic bond with us, Thy strength and Thy splendor; for the sake of Thy righteousness, Thy holiness, Thine abundant mercies, and Thy divine presence, do Thou save us; for the sake of Thy praise, do Thou save us, we beseech Thee. O Eternal, do Thou save us. Save Thou the World’s foundation-stone, the Temple, the house of Thy choice, the threshing-floor of Ornan, the Jebusite, from whom David bought the site of the Temple, the sacred shrine, even Mount Moriah, hill of revelation and abode of Thy majesty, where once David dwelt, godliest of Lebanon, lovely height, the joy of the whole Earth, perfection of beauty, lodging-place of righteousness. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes
Cooking is a team sport when your kitchen island is this spacious! 👨🍳👩🍳 The stainless steel appliances and quartz countertops just might have you feeling like a contestant on Chopped! 🍗🧀🥖
Welcome to the enchanting ranch you have been dreaming about. This home offers the perfect layout with space in all the right places, including an open kitchen, dining and great room. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/
When You Can Stop Thinking of Yourself as Omnipotent, the World is a Safer Place!
Dearest son and friend of Mine, do Me a favour. Put some finality into your life. That is to say, make Me your supreme and ultimate end, and you will mingle with the Blessed. In the past, you have not always done that. More often that I like to say, your affection has centered on yourself and other creatures. So your affection will have to be cauterized. Why? Seek yourself in something, and immediately you collapse and give up. Therefore, you should refer everything to Me. I am the One who gave everything. Individual graces—consider them as drips from the Divine Tap, drops from the Heavenly Basin, and give Me full credit for them; that is to say, in the Divine Plan all things have to be recirculated to their origin. The tintinnabulous and the timid, the rich and the poor, all drink the Living Water from Me. Those who serve Me as though they were slaves—that is to say, spontaneously and freely—will, according to John, “receive grace after grace,” (1.16). Whoever wants to make hay without Me or delight in some good not known to Me will not be rooted in True Joy, nor will one’s heart expand. Rather, one’s spiritual progress will be obstructed and restricted in a multiplicity of ways. How do you get out of this mess, My poor friend? First, ascribe nothing good to yourself. Then do not attribute virtue to any other human being. Last, give God everything, without whom Humankind has nothing. So what is so hard about this? After all, I gave everything I had; I want you to do that same. And I insist—nay, I require—that you thank Me for it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
When Virtue strides into the room, Vainglory vanishes. When Heavenly Grace and True Charity sweep into the room, Virid Envy turns up her nose, High Anxiety has a fit, Particular Friendship is beside himself. We all know why. Grace and Charity have this way of clearing the floor of cranks and releasing all the warmths of the soul. If you get My drift, you will rejoice in Me alone, hope in Me alone. “No one is good,” Luke has quoted Me as saying, “except God alone,” (18.19). God must be praised above all things and blessed in all things. Agency is an eternal principle and is implicit in the test of life. We must constantly choose between opposites: good and evil. Satan sought to destroy the free agency of man, and here on Earth he is working to entangle man in sin. “Wherefore, because that Satan rebelled against me, and sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him, and also, that I should give unto him mine own power; by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be cast down; and he became Satan, yea, even the devil, the father of all lies, to deceive an to blind men (and women), and lead them captive at his will, even as many as would no hearken unto my voice,” reports Moses 4.3-4. To use our agency wisely, we need information to act upon. We need a knowledge of the laws of life, with their accompanying blessings and protective punishments. When we know the gospel, the elements of the “thou shalts” and the “thou shalt nots,” we will make better choices. I would give If only we could forget a past that we cannot change, it would give us some comfort. If we could only choose to forget the cruelest moments, we could, as time goes on, free ourselves from pain. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, the wrong sticks like a nettle in our memory. The only way to remove he nettle is with a surgical procedure called forgiveness. Christians have long believed that forgiveness lies at the heart of faith. Psychologists have recently found that forgiveness may also lie at the heart of emotional and physical well-being. For Christians, forgiveness is a familiar concept. We find God is called to “bear with each other and forgive” and see it modeled throughout Scripture—in the narrative of the prodigal son, in Jesus’ command to forgive seventy times seven, and in the parable of the unmerciful servant. Forgiveness is central to the gospel message of Christ’s death and resurrection. We encounter texts and symbols of forgiveness almost everywhere we look—in the Lord’s Prayer, in confession and the assurance of pardon, in baptism, and in the Lord’s Supper. Even though we know a lot about forgiveness and often want to forgive, we do not always know how. The Bible offers no recipe for forgiving. We can get stuck. When someone hurts us, those angry, hurt, and bitter feelings come easily. Maneuvering through the mire of hard feelings takes moral muscle. How do we do it? First, what forgiving does not mean: despite the familiar cliché “forgive and forget,” most of us find forgetting nearly impossible. Forgiveness—at least for significant offenses—does not involve a literal forgetting. We are made to remember hurts. As children need to remember the pain from a hot burner, we need to remember the hurts from people who burn us, so that we can prevent future harm. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Instead of forgetting, forgiveness involves remembering graciously. The forgiver remembers the true (though painful) parts, but without the embellishment of angry adjectives and adverbs that stir up contempt. Forgiveness also differs from ignoring, excusing, minimizing, tolerating, condoning, legally pardoning, liking, and reconciling. At times, the church has done a disservice to survivors of neglect or abuse, suggesting that they must reconcile or must reenter a hurtful relationship with their offenders. Sometimes reconciliation is inappropriate. It is wise to stay away from people who have proven themselves abusive or untrustworthy. Yet we still can forgive—a move that paradoxically frees us from the shackles of resentment and rage. Moreover, we need not wait to forgive until we receive an apology. We cannot always count on our offenders to apologize. Sometimes, we simply see the situation differently. The offender sees a minor slight, when the victim feels a major slam. If we refuse to forgive until we receive an apology, we give the key that can unlock the prison of our pain to the very person who betrayed us in the first place. Scripture does not say that we need to forgive only if the offender apologizes. Yet when we are the transgressors, Scripture is clear: we must confess our sins and repent, turning away from sin. Second, what forgiving does mean: when we forgive, we start by honestly acknowledging the hurt. Forgiving is a lot like grieving. We have lost something—a relationship, trust, or a reputation. Hurt and anger are normal. We acknowledge them. However, then we let go of grudges, bitterness, and vengeance against the person we blame for hurting us. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
As Christians, we can focus on the truth that our offender is a person, someone who bears God’s image as much as we do. We can see the hurt they caused us as evidence that they are sinful and as proof that they need grace, just as we do. And we being to see ourselves as agents who can show grace toward them. To make grace concrete, we can find even small ways to genuinely wish them well. Or we may pray for their restoration and redemption in a more ultimate sense. When we do these things—even when we do not explicitly tell the offender—we are forgiving. Our gift of forgiveness is real. And when painful memories and anger bubble up, we roll up our sleeves and flex our moral muscles again. Forgiveness takes effortful practice, and God’s redeeming grace makes our practice perfect. As I have defined them, psychotherapists are professionals who allow people to relate to them in terms of earlier dreaded or desires experiences. They may be treated as selfobjects satisfactory or unsatisfactory, as a compliant or stubborn other, as a tyrant, a terror, a feeder, attacker, protector, omniscient, omnipotent, powerless, always getting it wrong, and so on—just like a parent. Therapists let themselves be used, first as “inner objects,” and later, as the patient improves, as objects in shared reality. That is why psychotherapists deserve their pay (within limits), and why friends and family may in the long run not be the best people to help someone integrate who have gone to pieces. It is not right that they should try to put up with being the object of unrealistic phantasies for more than a little while. If they do, they deprive the sufferer of an important realistic relationship while themselves being no more than inexperienced, untrained psychotherapists. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Professional psychotherapists are needed to be the climbing-frames of the consulting-room adventure-playground, where people can discover what they are made of and what the World of the other is made of. At such time, the therapist us used in the sense of an object. It is not an easy position to occupy! The expected control over the narcissistically-cathected object and its function is closer to the concept which grownups have of the control they expect to have over their own body and mind, than of their experience of others and of their control over them. The object of such affections will feel pretty oppressed! Yet accepting that a person may need to behave in this way is the only way we know of at present, to provide enough safety to let people relax their defences and reach the sore regions. When a baby has to give up one’s imagined omnipotence and live in the World of shared reality, it can be a fortunate circumstance. The rage has the effect of establishing this World as a safe place. The subject says to the object “I destroyed you,” and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says “Hullo object! I destroyed you. I love you. You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.” The subject can now use the object that has survived. From the point of view of psychotherapy, for people to discover that the imagined effects of even the most destructive rage, and even the most chaotic confusion, in fact destroys neither them nor the therapist, may be the major repair to be done. There is no better way to bring the body under control than the way used to bring he mind under control—to put it under a daily routine of exercises and to have a fixed time for their repeated practice. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
With a vengeful World retaliating, when you can stop thinking of yourself as omnipotent, the World is a safer place. The (m)other may not have survived in a person’s phantasy—the therapist does: “C’est son metier.” How does this help? It heals splits. Once another person’s reality is safely established as independent of my confusion or rage, I become more capable of realistic acceptance of myself and others, and of ambivalence. I become saner. I can allow my model of myself-in-situation, and my map of myself-in-the-World, to carry contradictory images. I can accept that I am sometimes honest and sometimes not, and that you are sometimes kind to me and sometimes not. By contrast, when I was unsure of your independent reality, I tried to carry only one coherent internally consistent model at any time: the right one. In shared reality, I have to put up with the fact that others are to some extent exactly as I want them to be and to some extent remain stubbornly their own inconvenient selves. Very interestingly, babies whose mothers can tolerate their times of rage, soon show themselves as more sure of themselves than other babies. This must have a bearing, too on gender differences, considering our culture’s encouragement for boy to prove their assertiveness, and for girls to prove their good nature even to the point of submissiveness—even, sometimes, to the point of allowing themselves to be victimized. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Babies that have been seen through this phase well are likely to be more aggressive clinically than the ones who have not been seen through the phase well, and for whom aggression is something that cannot be encompassed, or something that can be retained only in the form of a liability to be an object of attack. It is easy to imagine that allowing a person to rage and make chaos is in itself therapeutic. In some circumstances this is so. However, in the circumstances now under consideration, it is the (m)other’s or the therapist’s ability to “survive” that is being tested and established. A person may need to get back to the bad feelings of the very early days, yes, but in my view the therapeutic experience is not just that of expressing the hurt or angry or terrified feelings. These have to be expressed in order that further healing may take place. The real healing comes also in part from being listened to and understood and recognized as a person while having these feelings. The real healing comes from being held while all this is going on, at first by another person, and later by one’s own functioning personality. In this process it may also happen that a person gets in touch with some totally unexpected good and quiet times of being. This is what must sometimes be the aim of regression and relaxation, re-integrating the good and quiet times when someone else is looking after us. In therapy, people can discover another person, the therapist who is affected by the baby (part of them) but whose fate is not under that baby’s control. Symmetrically, that baby can discover that it is part of a whole person. This starts the process of growing up, of becoming an adult who can become angry but who is not swallowed up by anger. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
The anger is integrated as a part of the whole personality, but it is not like the whole. The anger can become depersonalized. We can come distance and detach our selves from other feelings, and cease to be overwhelmed by misery, fear, or futility. The great achievement is to be able to say, “I feel terrible, but I am more than a terrible feeling.” Meaning depends on context. The context holds things together Without a context there is no meaning, only unintegrated bits. For instance, when building a house, a stud is a bit without a context. When the stud is combined with other studs and used to make a frame, it begins to make sense in the context of the cube of which it has become a part. After a good deal more work, it has become part of a house to live in. The fallacy in Christian Science theory is the pretense that problems and pains, diseases and malfunctions, cancer and crime do not exist among us here in this physical World. If we turn only to pure Spirit and leave out the World in time and space and form, then, undeniably, they do not exist. However, we may not leave them out of practical reckoning while we have to live in this body, much as some of us would like to. If the theory floats in mists of fatuous optimism, the art of Christian Science healing does in some cases bring very successful results. Why? It is never the truly spiritual healer who temporarily feels the pain or shows the symptoms of one’s patient’s disease, but only the physical-magnetic healer. Uncritical believers in so-called metaphysical healing and in faith-cure theories are sooner or later subjected to the discipline of facts. The intensity of their pains and the gravity of their ills are intended to, and do, bring them to a truer view of actualities. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Instead of blaming themselves for failure to demonstrate good health, they ought to blame these theories for having mislead them. Such failure is a change to revise imperfect beliefs, to cast out errors and start again. This surely is to the good and something to be satisfied about. The problem of bodily healing is a complicated one and often depends on more than a single factor. Those who are likely to decry this proviso are always those who tell us only of the successes of mental or “spiritual” healing, but not of its failures. The comparative figures of the two sets of results are tremendously disproportionate. To open one’s eyes to the flaunted success of this system and to shut them to its aching failures is, not the way to understand it aright. To exaggerate what it has achieved and to minimize or deny what it has been unable to achieve—as is done by its ardent partisans—represents a falling away from intellectual integrity. To take a typical example, consider the famous healing sanctuary at Lourdes, France. It was established in 1860. During recent years the attendance of sick and crippled patents has been no less than six hundred thousand annually. Yet during the first seventy years of the sanctuary’s existence, a total of only five thousand cures was reported. This should represent, on a conservative estimate, about one percent of successful treatments. The number of those pilgrim-patients who failed to benefit must therefore run into millions! We dwell on this example not to decry Lourdes, which is doing a blessed and benign work which everyone should respect, and certainly not to derogate its religious aspect, but to point out that the failures in every school of healing, whether materialists, mental, or religious, must exist. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
That the inspiration which brought Lourdes into being was truly divine and that the most amazing cures have been achieved there in a manner only to be described as miraculous, we fully accept. However, there are limitations and disappointments inherently present in this kind of healing must also be accepted. Do they not remind us of those medieval alchemists who talked glibly of transmuting brass into gold, the while their tattered sleeves and torn garments betrayed their shame-faced poverty! Facts are stern and cannot be laughed off. Exaggerated expectations are inevitably disappointing. These failures are not held against such systems. No healing system, no healer, certainly not even the most orthodox, could have a record consisting only of triumphs. However, no movement which boasts of its successes and ignores its failures has the right to call itself scientific. For only by studying its failures could it ever learn not only that there are errors mixed up with its truths, but also exactly what errors they are. There mere giving of an auto-suggestions, such as “I am perfect health,” which is belied by facts and made untrue by the body’s condition, cannot bring about a cure. Such a fictious statement can only bring about a fictitious result. To deny an illness’ existence while refraining from denying the body’s existence, is illogical. The break with long-held bad personal habits, coupled with the brining to birth of entirely new goods ones, is a difficult experience. However, this is also an immensely rewarding one. Pray for guidance in self-improvement and for help in self-purification. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Reality is always a mess. However, it is clear that we are rapidly on our way, and the transition to the electronic office has triggered an eruption of social, psychological, and economic consequences. The current wordquake is more than the result of new machines. It has restructured all the human relationships and roles in the office as well. People now send messages instantly, to places all over the World. They make video calls and correspond with their doctor over the Internet. For the most part, the functions of the secretary have been eliminated. As speech-recognition technology has grown more popular, typing, in many cases, has become obsolete. Dictation equipment is turned to the distinctive accents of each individual user and converts the sounds into written words, thus entirely by-passing the typing operation. When I delivered a speech at the International Word Processing convention, for example, I was asked if my secretary uses the machine for me. When I said I typed my own drafts and that in fact, my secretary could hardly get near my computer, cheers rang through the room. They dreamed of a day when the classified section in the newspaper may include ads like this: Wanted: Group Vice President Responsibilities include coordinating finance, marketing, product line development in several divisions. Must have demonstrated ability to apply sound management control. Report to Exec. VP, multi-line international company. TYPING REQUIRED. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Executives, by contrast, are likely to resist sullying their fingertips, just as they resist fetching their own mugs of coffee, dry-cleaning, lunch and children from daycare. And knowing that speech-recognition equipment is here, and they can dictate and have the machine do all the typing, they will resist learning how to handle a keyboard all the more. The secretary is likely to become a nanny for professional adults, which will be seen as a necessity for many corporations because it will save the executive time and allow one to deal with more pressing matters which will earn the company more revenue. Imagine all the business deals that can be closed on the golf course now. However, the unevadable fact remains that Third Wave production in the office, as it has collided with the old Second Wave systems, has produced anxiety and conflict as well as reorganization, restructuring, and—for some—rebirth into new careers and opportunities. The new system has changed all the old executive turfs, the hierarchies, the gender role divisions, the departmental barriers of the past. Al of this has raised many fears. Opinion divides sharply between those who insist that millions of jobs have vanished (and that today’s secretaries are mainly being reduced to mechanical slaves) and a more sanguine view widely held about secretaries. Secretaries are far from being reduced to mindless, repetitive processors. However, they are becoming “para-principals,” sharing in some of the professional work and decision-making from which they had once been largely excluded until now. What we are seeing is a sharp division between those white-collar workers who move up to more responsible positions and those who move down—and eventually out. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
When automation first began arriving on the scene, economist and trade unionists in many countries forecasted massive unemployment. Instead, employment in the high-technology nations expanded. As the manufacturing sector shrank, the white-collar and service sectors expanded, taking up the slack. However, if manufacturing continues to shrink, and if the office employment is to be out through wringer at the same time, where will the jobs of tomorrow come from? Nobody knows. Despite endless studies and vehement claims, the forecast and the evidence are contradictory. Attempts to relate investment in mechanization and automation to levels of manufacturing employment show what the Financial Times of London calls an “almost complete lack of correlation.” Japan once had the highest rate of investment in new technology, as a percentage of value added, of any country in a seven-nation study. It also had the highest growth in employment. Britain, whose investment in machinery was the lowest, showed the greatest loss of jobs. The American experience roughly paralleled that of Japan—technology and new jobs both increasing—while Sweden, France, Germany, and Italy all showed markedly individual patterns. It is clear that the level of employment is not merely a reflection of technological advance. It does not simply rise and fall as we automate or fail to do so. Employment is the net result of many converging policies. Pressures on the job market may well increase dramatically in the years ahead. However, it is naïve to single out the computer as their source. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
What is certain is that both the office and the factory are destined to be revolutionized in the decades ahead. The twin revolutions in the white-collar sector and in manufacture add up to nothing less than a wholly new mode of production for society—a gain step for the human race. This step carries with it indescribably complex implications. It will affect not only such things as the level of employment and the structure of industry but also the distribution of political and economic power, the size of our work units, the international division of labour, the role of women in the economy, the nature of work, and the divorce of producer from consumer; it will even later so seemingly simple a fact as the “where” of work. Hidden inside our advance to a new production system is a potential for social change so breathtaking in scope that few among us have been willing to face its meaning. For we are revolutionizing our homes as well. Apar from encouraging smaller work units, apart from permitting a decentralization and de-urbanization of production, apart from altering the actual character of work, the new production system is shifting literally millions of jobs out of offices and back into factories and homes. As more commerce is done online, less people are shopping at physical stores, so we are seeing the need for more factories to house all the products. Also, with pandemic forcing people to work at home, millions have decided they like the change and can get more done and have more time for their family because they are not spending hours communing. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Every institution we know, from the family to school and the corporation is being transformed. Watching masses of people scything a field three hundred and sixty years ago, only a madman would have dreamed that the time would soon come when the fields would be depopulated, when people would crowd into urban factories to earn their daily bread. And only a madman would have been right. Today it takes an act of courage to suggest that our biggest factories and office tower may, within our lifetimes, permanently stand half empty, reduced to use as ghostly warehouses or converted into living spaces. Yet his is precisely what we are seeing with the new mode of production—a return to cottage industry on a new higher, electronic basis, and with it a new emphasis on the home as the center of society. To suggest that millions of us will spend our time at home, or in a factory, instead of going out to an office, has unleashed an immediate shower of enlightenment. Once people used to say things like, “People do not want to work at home, even if they could. Look at all the women struggling to get out of the home and into a job!” “How can you get any work done with kids running around?” “People will not be motivated unless there is a boss watching them.” “People need face-to-face contact with each other to develop the trust and confidence necessary to work together.” “The architecture of the average home is not set up for it.” “What do you mean work at home—a small blast furnace in every basement?” “What about zoning restriction and landlords who object?” “The unions will kill the idea.” “How about the tax collector? The tax people are getting tougher on deductions clamed for working at home?” And the ultimate stopper: “What, and stay home all day with my wife (or husband)?” #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Yet there are equally, if not more compelling reasons three hundred and sixty years ago to believe people would never move out of the home field to work in factories. After all, they had laboured in their own cottages and the nearby land for 10,000 years, not a mere 360. The entire structure of family life, the process of child-rearing and personality formation, the whole system of property and power, the culture, the daily struggle for existence were all bound to the hearth and the soil by a thousand invisible chains. Yet these chains were slashed in short order as soon as a new system of production appeared. Today that is happening again, and a whole group of social and economic forces are converging to transfer the locus of work. Life is changing, so we must also change. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow not to kill. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not take what is not given. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not engage in abusive relationships. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not speak falsely or deceptively. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not harm self or others through poisonous thought or substance. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not dwell on past errors. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow not to speak of self separate from others. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not harbour ill will toward any planet, animal, or human being. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not abuse the great truth of the Three Treasures. For Thy sake, our God, do Thou save us. For Thy sake, our Creator, O save us. For Thy sake, our Redeemer, O save us. For Thy sake, O Thou who seekest us, save us, we beseech Thee. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Cresleigh Homes
What you see: the spacious laundry room
What you don’t see: the walk in pantry and large eat-in island!
Mill Station Residence is all about the space! The floorplan is expertly designed for maximum flow, particularly when you’re entertaining! https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-2/
Randolph Harris II International Institute 