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Adversity is Part of Our Mortal Experience
Knowing that opposition and adversity are a common part of life, we can meet and overcome these challenges by remaining faithful to the Lord and trusting Him to help us. As we rise above adversity, our weaknesses are turned into strengths. “And if men come unto me, I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in men, then will I make weak things become strong unto them,” reports Ether 12.27. The neurotic process is a special form of human development, and—because of the waste of constructive energies which it involves—is a particularly unfortunate one. It is not only different in quality from healthy human growth but, to a greater extent than we have realized, antithetical to it in many ways. Under favourable conditions man’s energies are put into the realization of his own potentialities. Such a development is far from uniform. According to his particular temperament, faculties, propensities, and the conditions of his earlier and later life, he may become softer or harder, more cautious or more trusting, more or less self-reliant, more contemplative or more outgoing; and he may develop his special gifts. However, whenever his course takes him, it will be his given potentialities which he develops. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
Under inner stress, however, a person may become alienated from his real self. He will then shift the major part of his energies to the task of molding himself, by a rigid system of inner dictates, into a being of absolute perfection. For nothing short of godlike perfection can fulfill his idealized image of himself and satisfy his pride in the exalted attributes which (so he feels) he has, could have, or should have. This trend in neurotic development engages our attention over and beyond the clinical or theoretical interest in pathological phenomena. For it involves a fundamental problem of morality—that of man’s desire, drive, or religious obligation to attain perfection. No serious student concerned with man’s development will doubt the undesirability of pride or arrogance, or that of the drive for perfection when pride is the motivating force. However, there is a wide divergence of opinion about the desirability or necessity of a disciplinary inner control system for the sake of insuring moral conduct. Granted that these inner dictates have a cramping effect upon man’s spontaneity, should we not, in accordance with the Christian injunction (“Be ye perfect…”), strive for perfection? Would it not be hazardous, indeed ruinous, to man’s moral and social life to dispense with such dictates? #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
There are three major concepts of the goal of mortality which rests upon these different interpretations of essential human nature. Superimposed checks and controls cannot be relinquished by anyone who believes—in whatever terms—that man is by nature sinful or ridden by primitive instincts (Dr. Freud). The goal of morality must then be the taming or overcoming of the status naturae and not its development. The goal must be different for those who believe that there is inherent in human nature both something essentially “good” and something “bad,” sinful, or destructive. It will center upon the insurance of the eventual victory of the inherent good, as refined, directed, or reinforced by such elements as faith, reason, will, or grace—in accordance with the particular dominating religious or ethical concept. Here the emphasis is not exclusively upon combatting and suppressing evil, since there is also a beneficial program. Yet the beneficial program rests either upon supernatural assistance of some sort or upon a strenuous ideal of reason or will, which in itself suggests the use of prohibitive and checking inner dictates. The problem of morality is again different when we believe that inherent in man are evolutionary constructive forces, which urge him to realize his given potentialities. This belief does not mean that man is essentially good—which would presuppose a given knowledge of what is good or bad. It means that man, by his very nature and of his own accord, strives toward self-realization, and that his set of values evolves from such striving. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
Apparently, he cannot, for example, develop his full human potentialities unless he is truthful to himself; unless he is active and productive; unless he relates himself to others in the spirit of mutuality. If he indulges in a “dark idolatry of self” (Shelley) and consistently attributes all his own shortcomings to the deficiencies of others, apparently, he cannot grow. If he assumes responsibility for himself, he can grow, in the true sense. Many women have all sorts of residuals of the double standards, attitudes that some have gotten from their peers. Fantasizing is merely their way of breaking that down. However, all of us use fantasy, to a greater or lesser degree. It is a form of self-stimulation. It helps us move from where we are to where we want to be, when the occasion warrants. In that sense it is a bridge and can be very useful. If we apply it to what we have been discussing, we can see the guilt of the double standard. Some women’s fantasies help them advance from the old double standard thou-shalt-not morality to a single standard of permissibility. In this respect, some women symbolize what is happening in society at large, Social changes are unquestionably altering the traditional relationship of pleasures of the flesh between the male and female. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
The female is achieving greater equality, although I suspect at a much slower rate than most young people think. Traditions that evolve over centuries do not disappear overnight. However, if today’s changes are to continue and become culturally entrenched, it is up to young people to incorporate these changes in their own marriage patterns. As the woman seeks to become a more active partner, she must understand and accept the nature of response dealing with pleasures of the flesh. Any woman who demands the right to her climax involving intimate passions the way she demands equal job rights is simply unaware of the physiology of intimate passions. In achieving equality, she must preserve those aspects of herself as a female that the male has learned to value—because his physiological response is dependent on them. This does not mean that she has to pretend or tease or manipulate or submit or play any of the thousand and one roles written for her in the past. Instead of playing parts, she must be herself—the female self. Ans since pleasures of the flesh is not a matter of one person but of two, she has to be the kind of woman who appeals to the man who appeals to her. If together they are to get the pleasure from each other that they both seek, she has to give, as he has to give. What the man must understand is that he has everything to gain. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
Until now he has been playing a stereotyped part too-whether he felt like it or not, he was supposed to be tough, unemotional, giving orders and assuming all responsibility. Well, if you translate those terms into the relationships involving pleasures of the flesh, they may—and often do—work against him. To some extent they can deprive him of enjoyment. They diminish his chances of experiencing the kind of total body response that intercourse offers. If he has never experienced it, of course, he does not know what he is missing. However, once he does, he is jolly well likely to want it again. In the long run, the trend toward equality in pleasures of the flesh should mean a great deal for both male and female. As she assumes a share of the responsibility for making something happen between them, her self-esteem should rise, and with that should come an intensified capacity for pleasure. And as the male is relieved of some of the pressure his pleasure too should be increased—and, within physiological limits, his performance as well! Some people expect every encounter with pleasures of the flesh to be exciting and enjoyable and perfect, but sometimes people are just doing the best they can while dealing with all of the other responsibilities that they have. Pleasures of the flesh should not be categorized, should not be made into a “thing” that is reserved for a specific occasion or a specific use. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
Some people are always postponing pleasures of the flesh because there is too much work with the family, their job, and other responsibilities that need to be handled. In fact, it would amaze you to know how many husbands and wives become dysfunctional with intimate passions as a result of the so-called work ethic. There is nothing that can be done about it. However, a couple can have a medical consultation. They might say something along these lines: “We believe we are faced with a problem of sexual incompatibility. We would like to consult a physician about this matter. Are there any individual physicians in this area who have dealt with such problems in the past? If so, we would like a recommendation. If not, can you direct us to any other professional person who can be of assistance or who can put us in touch with a reliable authority?” You may be referred to a psychiatrist, an obstetrician, a gynecologist, generalist or urologist or to someone in some other field of medicine. However, the single greatest mistake any distressed couple can make is to discuss their problems with friends or neighbour. Also, no matter how difficult the search for help may be and despite the fact that even professional help is no guarantee that a couple problems with pleasures of the flesh can be resolved, the effort should be made. What are the other choices, after all? Either to love out the years in a miserable marriage or to get a divorce—or to solve the problem and enjoy the pleasure, in bed and out, that the couple expected to have when they got married. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
What we deal with in society has a huge impact of us. For instance, so far as advertising uses its powers of suggestion and repetition to increase the desires for food, clothes, and things which are basically harmful, it becomes a means of debasing or perverting people. Today, they are legalizing abortion in several countries and making it easier for the act to be committed than it ever was before. Nevertheless, it remains what it is. On its own level it is an act of murder, even though that level is an early one in the life of the human being in the foetus. There is, there must be, a bad karma connected with such an act. To abort a foetus is to destroy a child, to take its like. This is an act which must carry its own karmic penalty. And for a woman, whose very function in Nature is to bring a child into the World, such an act is doubly strange. How sad that, though ignorance of higher laws, such mistakes made in judgment and conduct have to be paid for—sometimes with many years of unhappiness or suffering, sometimes with recurring regrets over opportunity missed and gone. It is not enough to try to secure peace between the nations. We must also try to secure it between men by ceasing to slaughter them. To take advantage of the helplessness of so many people when confronted by man’s deadly weapons, cruel snares, or powerful contrivances is a sin. The karmic scales of life will read off an appropriate penalty for it. Ordinary human brutality to these creatures is bad enough but scientific brutality by vivisection is worse. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
The map of African reveals that the principle of neighbour-antagonism exists. What the political map does not show is the fact that within African countries, which were arbitrarily defined by European colonists, tribal enmities continue to rage on. African is a checkerboard of mammalian wardom. Ninety percent of African countries are ruled by assassins and military chiefs. Mafia capos. Look north to Europe. Until World War II, Europe was also a checkerboard of quarreling neighbours, each ruled by a feudal chief. The technological quantum leap taken in World War II forced a change in territoriality. Technology always increases the size of the gene pool territory. The Eastern Bloc nations were forced together into a monolithic entity confronting the union of West European states transferring border-tensions from between individual nations to the divine between East and West—the Iron Curtain. Interestingly, ninety percent of Western European countries are ruled, not by military dictators, but by elected representatives. Like brain hemispheres, the North-South bifurcation of the genetic highway has produced a fascinating left-right division which perfectly parallels the cerebral hemispheric split. Like those who are right-handed, the northern countries excel at logic, rationality, and manipulation of artifacts and symbols. The new technologies require larger networks of harmonious collaboration. The energies of thousands of people must be linked-up to maintain an automotive business or a Coca-Cola industry. Technology creates larger and more intelligent gene-colony units. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
Europe, the right-hand-continent developed the technology and carried the freedom-gene upward. By contrast, the left-hand continent, Africa, failed to produce mobility-freedom-gene pools. Africa developed slavery and Europe developed capitalist-democracy. The genetic highway veered north instead of south when it burst out of the Middle East—the midbrain. The northern Mediterranean centers lighted up in sequence—Greece, Rome, Venice, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, London. There must be a basic neuro-geographical principle that explains why African swarms with slavery and Paleolithic primitivism, while at the right-hand-northern lobe has provided the centers and pathways along which the species has evolved. We can only speculate as to why the freedom-genes clustered along the North Atlantic beaches and why the intelligence-technology breakout occurred from West Europe and not West Africa. Think of evolution as an ascent-literally a climb, a series of intelligence tests which activate velocity-altitude-freedom circuits. From the Mid-East-the midbrain—there are two pathways. The Southern route is the easiest. The Arabs took it and slid off along the low road. Insectoid armies oozing from the East, sending, not gene pools, but soldiers and military bureaucrats. By contrast, the highroad North was a ladder, a series of ledges to be scaled. Look at the map. First the Dardenelles to be crossed. Then the pricky mountains of Greece, the fingered peninsulas, the Balkan Mountains and the high Alps—rugged land, uninviting to Mid-Eastern sultans. Choked with geographic barters offering refuge to ascending gene pools. The story of evolution is the ascent of Celtic out-caste gene pools standing on the shoulders of the teeming Eastern autonomic-involuntary centers. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
What is interesting about humans, when some have tried to please everyone, not just the majority, but everyone with their work, there will still be discord amongst the group and it will render the person working hard to please them all to feel worthless. Not only that, but the individual will assume that because you do not like their work or their attempt to please you that you do not like him because so much of a person’s self goes into what they produce. And a person has to be liked. He has to live in society. If he makes nothing but enemies, he cannot do that. Most people do not want people hating them. Instead, they want to be loved by people. When someone’s work is not appreciated, the creator may choose to destroy it. There are certain people who quickly make it clear that they do not trust anybody. That is, they talk about life that way, but their behaviour is not entirely consistent with what they say, because actually they are continually “trusting” people, but it usually turns out badly. The concept of sweatshirts has an advantage over the more naïve approached of “character defense,” “attitude,” and “lifestyle” because they tend to take things at face value, while the transactional analyst is accustomed to look first of all for the con or paradox, and is gratified rather than surprised when he finds it. That is what he looks for when he finds a sweatshirt, and that is what gives him his therapeutic advantage. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
To put it another way, character analysts analyze the front of the sweatshirt very effectively, but fail to look at the back where the game slogan or “kicker” is written, or at least it takes them a long time to get around to it, while the game analyst looks there right at the beginning. The sweatshirt “You Cannot Trust Anybody” (or “You Cannot Trust Anybody Nowadays,” YOCTAN) is therefore not taken at face value. It does not mean that the wearer will avoid entanglement with people because he does not trust them. Quite the contrary. It means that he will seek entanglements for the express purpose of proving his slogan and reinforcing his position (I am Okay—They are not-Okay). Hence the YOCTAN player picks untrustworthy people, makes ambiguous contracts with them, and then gratefully, or even gleefully, collects brown stamps when something goes wrong, thus confirming his position that “You Cannot Trust Anybody.” In extreme cases he may feel entitled to a “free” homicide, justified by repeated betrayal at the hands of people carefully chosen for their untrustworthiness. Once having collected enough brown stamps for such a payoff, the YOCTAN player may pick as his victim someone he has never met, perhaps a public figure whose murder rates the label of “assassination.” Other YOCTAN players may seize upon such an event to prove that the “authorities,” such as the police who arrest the assassin, are untrustworthy. The police, of course, are paid for YOCTAN. It is part of their job not to be too trusting. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
Thus, a tournament is started in which amateur or semi-professional YOCTAN players are pitted against professionals. The battle cries of such a tournament, “frame-up,” “codes,” and “conspiracy,” may go on for years or even centuries, the object beings to prove such propositions as: “Homer was not really Homer, but another man of the same name,” “Raisuli loved Perdicaris,” and “Gavrilo Princip was not really Gavrilo Princip, but another man of the same name.” The YOCTAN sweatshirt gives the following information about the wearer. His favourite pastime is discussing double-crosses. His favourite feeling is triumph: “Now I Have Got You, You Male Chauvinistic Pig.” His nickname is Cagey, and the critical sphincter is his anus (“Keep a tight a** hole or you will get screwed.”) His hero is the man who proves that “the authorities” are untrustworthy. What he does in the front room comes on in a blandly righteous or ingenuous way, while in the back room he is scheming and untrustworthy (like the landlady who self-righteously said: “You cannot trust any of your tenants nowadays. Only the other day I was going through the desk of one of them, and you will never guess what I found!”) His mental World is a self-righteous one in which he is entitled to do all sorts of shady things, provided the aim is to uncover the untrustworthiness of others. His script calls for him to be done in by someone he trusts so that with his dying breath he can call out his slogan: “I knew it. You cannot trust anybody nowadays.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
Thus, the front of his sweatshirt, “You Cannot Trust Anybody Nowadays,” is a bland invitation to well-meaning people, such as unwary therapists, to prove that they are exceptions. If they do not take the trouble to look, ahead of time, it is only after the dust of battle settles down and the victorious player walks away, that they see what is written on the back: “Now Maybe You Will Believe Me.” If the therapist is alert, however, he still must be careful not to move too son, or the patient will say: “See, I cannot even trust you.” Then when he walks away, the kicker is still valid, so he wins either way. Some will wonder at the similarities of this region of normal experience and the hallucinations of schizophrenics. There are both consistent similarities and difference. Hallucinations reported by patents are much louder or more visible than the majority of hypnogogic experiences. A phrase said in the normal hypnogogic is as faint as a whispered notion, whereas most schizophrenic auditory hallucinations are as loud as a normal spoken voice. Things seen are often indistinguishable from reality. Hallucinations often have no fixed identity or slippery changing identity similar to the hypnogogic. The normal experiences are usually momentary whole hallucinations can keep up for years. Both states appear to be different from dreams, id est, a person tormented by a set of hallucinatory tormentors will usually have no sign of them in dreams. Hallucinations are unanticipated, often frame of reference, id est, the innermost subjective of the person. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
I have chosen patients who can distinguish between themselves and their hallucinations. I strike up a relationship with the patient and the hallucinated figures. Then it is possible to question the hallucinations directly, and the patient reveals their response. In this way it is possible to do a psychological examination of voices and the patient as separate entities. Curiously, hallucinations seem to be sicker than the patient on psychological tests! One patient’s hallucinations said they were from Washington D.C. near Virginia or were they at the seat of the government of the patient. They affirmed it was the latter. I have a good deal of evidence, too lengthy to cite, the hallucinations have this same inner subjective frame of reference. The patient is often fooled by subjective frame of reference. The patient is often fooled by it because it sounds as though the hallucinations felt they were his government. They commented for years how he was in their power. Hence, they are from his Washington, D.C. The man who exulted under torture, who hurled curses at God and at beauty, who hardened himself in the harsh atmosphere of crime, now only wants to marry someone “with a future.” The mage, the seer, the convict who lived perpetually in the shadow of the penal colony, the man-king on a godless Earth, always carried seventeen pounds of gold in a belt worn uncomfortably round his stomach, while he complained gave him dysentery. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
Is this mythical hero, worshipped by so many young men who, though they do not spit in the face of a belt? To maintain the myth, those decisive letters must be ignored. It is easy to see why they have been so little commented on. They are a sacrilege, as truth sometimes is. Sometimes persons who themselves are uncomfortable with genuine emotional expression, especially of pain, embarrassment, or sorrow, find it necessary to avoid dealing with such expressions in friends, relatives, children, or others. This makes for non-genuine interactions, since both are pretending to be or feel some way that is not authentic. Someone with a poker face in the midst of an expression of deep emotional feeling on the part of another leaves that person with a feeling of being drastically misunderstood. Concern for another’s feelings is characteristic of a “person-centered” society. We can assure communication of feeling through the reflection of feeling. This is a useful techniques in psychotherapy, as it is in all human relationships. One reflects back to the other the sensitive awareness of the other’s feelings: “I know you are upset with me” or “You feel very angry, extremely angry.” This technique of course requires that the “understander” be fully able to accept the feeling without shock or other negative, basic feelings. Because of the demonstrated difficult in determining the nature of an emotion from the facial communication only seem even more important to make use of the reflection as a check on one’s understanding of another person. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
The temper tantrums is perhaps the most manipulative of all emotions, and although it is often thought of as characteristic of the “spoiled” child, it can also be found in the spoiled adult. Someone who learns to het his or her way through exaggeration of emotion becomes an emotional tyrant who does damage to his or her own emotional life as well as to that of others. Philosophy is as opposed to violence and bloodshed as a method of ending conflicts as is pacifism but it stops where the latter walks obstinately on. It makes a clear distinction between aggression and self-defense, and justifies the use of force in the second instance. He will defend himself and others against evil aggression, but he will not retaliate against it. Justice often demands that force be used in order to implement is decisions. Philosophy sets up justice as one of the guiding principles of personal and national conduct. Therefore, philosophy has no use for pacificism or nonviolence. The resistance of evil is a social duty. Its strongest expression heretofore has been defensive war against a criminally aggressive offending nation. If resistance is itself an evil, war is the evilest form of that evil. The appearance of the atomic bomb is a sign that a new approach must be found today, that the old way of defensive war will not meet the new problems which have arisen. If man is to end war once and for all and find peace, he must do so both internally and externally. He cannot do the one by ending the rule of the animal aggressive emotions within himself such as greed, anger, revenge, and hatred, and he can do the other by abandoning the slaying of others. He may take whatever defensive preparations he pleases, but he must stop short at the point of killing other men. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
The Sacramento Fire Department puts the welfare of the nation, and the City of Sacramento before their own. As a firefighter, selfless service means doing what is right for the nation, the Sacramento Fire Department, and the citizens of Sacramento. While the needs of the City of Sacramento should come first, it does not imply neglect for firefighters nor their families, nor themselves. To the contrary, such neglect of these important elements weakens a firefighter and can cause the fire department more harm than good. A strong but harnessed ego, high self-esteem, and a healthy ambition can be compatible with self service, as long as a firefighter treats people fairly and gives team members credit when they deserve it. They Sacramento Fire Department cannot function except as a team. Fore a team to excel, everyone must give up self-interest for the good of the whole. Honor provides a moral compass for character and personal conduct in the Sacramento Fire Department. It means that they live by words and actions consistent with high ideals. Honor is the glue that holds the Sacramento Fire Department’s Values together. Honor requires that firefighters and EMTs always demonstrate an understanding of what is right. The Sacramento Fire Department and EMTs demonstrate an understanding of what is right and take pride in that reputation by living up to the fire department’s values. By living honorably, members of the Sacramento Fire Department set an example for others to follow. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
“I was married in 1996 to the high school gal I ran with all the time. Her family was one of the original settlers in this valley. She was a little hesitant about the fire department. You know how women are, maybe they’ve read of some big fire where somebody got hurt, and they go along with that part of it. Then I got involved putting in a lot of hours, and she got pushed out of shape, because she thought that the fire department was competing with our lives…which actually it was. We have two adult children, a daughter and a son. My son never cared about firefighting, and, of course, my daughter never did. My wife and I are into golfing. She’s an excellent golfer, and I’m not a hacker. We enjoy taking off for a few days and play different courses. And we still do quite a bit with our kids. They are not far away. We’ve helped them buy houses, do clean up work and build fences, things like that. My wife is a pretty fair artist, she does a lot of water colors, so she’s out in the wilds quite a bit taking pictures for her painting, and I go with her. I enjoy that. Basically, that’s about it. I’ve never had time to develop any hobbies, I was always seventy, eighty hours a week in my business. And since I’ve been chief here, I put in about nine, ten hours a day. I love it, you know?” The Sacramento Fire Department is older than the City of Sacramento. On 5 February 2025, the Sacramento Fire Department will be celebrating their 175th birthday. This is a very important milestone. Understanding the expectations and applying the attributes and competencies prepares the Sacramento Fire Department for situations they are likely to encounter. Fire fighters who gain expertise through operational assignments, institutional learning, and self-development will be versatile enough to adapt to most situations and grow into greater responsibilities. All members of the Sacramento Fire Department are loyal, dedicated to duty, respectful, selfless, honorable, possess a great deal of integrity and display personal courage in the face of danger and adversity. You can save lives by making a donation to the Sacramento Fire Department. As a reminder, parents, pleasure teach your children love America and be patriotic citizens and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
“You can measure the strength of a nation and the strength of its families, and you study the struggles of a nation and the struggles of its working people. And right now, our families and our working people in the country are struggling,” Senator Josh Hawley. In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. In an effort to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars. American made cars used to be the envy of the World and because American car brands are offering a wide range of options, from family SUVs to electric vehicles and luxury sedans, we are now seeing a resurging interest. American made cars are equal or superior to those made overseas. Having the Southern American boarder open and not having American farmland protected, not producing beef, poultry, fish, fruit, produce and dairy in America, not having country of origin labels on our meat, and without American goods and services being our number one manufactured and selling items, America has created a dangerous and significantly elevated risks to national security, national economic security, and national public health. Some people may believe that these claims are overstated, but by not routinely monitoring Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CEVs) or other security relevant alerts, such as end-of-life of machinery is how the Oroville Dam Crisis occurred in 2017. Other crises that have occurred due to neglect of critical infrastructure is the 2025 Palisades fires because Southern California ran out of water, when they are located next to an ocean and they could have simply created desalinating plants to help with the water shortage. The water is so plentiful that it is currently eroding land and causing homes to fall into the sea. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
American government should know all exploitable vulnerabilities and fix them prior to the situation becoming a crisis. Failure to take such mitigating actions is dangerous and significantly elevates risk to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. The American government must understand that significant time and resources must be invested in America. They must also encourage corporations to plan for both mitigating safety vulnerabilities in the short term and eliminating them in the long term. For instance, a company might begin by reaching out to the federal, state or local government and requesting tax incentives to provide security to dangerous communities, to help the government repair bridges and potholes. America needs an approach to eliminate safety vulnerabilities in American cities. There needs to be a road map by the end of 2025, outlining a prioritized approach to eliminate crisis situations in America. There is enough money to send aid to foreign nations, but the American government does not have enough money to care their infrastructure, provide adequate resources, nor end the affordable housing crisis. Nor is there enough money to fund other national critical functions (NCFs). These bad practices of putting America and Americans last is considered exceptionally risky, particularly to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. In an effort to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars. American made cars used to be the envy of the World and because American car brands are offering a wide range of options, from family SUVs to electric vehicles and luxury sedans, we are now seeing a resurging interest. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
American made cars are equal or superior to those made overseas. The Chevrolet Trax, for instance, is a well-designed, fuel efficient, and safe SUV. And as you know, there is no better car on Earth than 1950-1970s American Muscle Car. Americans make sure superior product, but we are buying things from other nations. American food imports have risen by 300 percent since 1999. American farmland declined by nearly 20 million acres between 2017 and 2022. As of 2022, there were 880.1 million acres of land dedicated to farming, compared to 900.1 million in 2017. The data shows there are now little more than 1.9 million farms in the country. Americans and American corporations spent $136 billion on food and beverages from other countries. It is a national security risk to lose American Farms and farmers. If there is a war, and most of our meat, produce, poultry, dairy, and fruit is coming from foreign counties, we stand the risk of starving. With war breaking out all over the World, in these uncertain times, it is very important to bring American farms back. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. As money flows, it influences further investment. Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever. And in the future, there may be food wars. Also, to ensure that we have farmland for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrant to America. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a populations that equally represents all races of people. If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in American, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in American which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the nation debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by send more money overseas. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
Buying American made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards in regard to pollution. American companies have to be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human minds to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. As a reminder, parents, pleasure teach your children love America and be patriotic citizens and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
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Be Careful with Your Words, Thoughts, and Actions
The brain is regarded as the most complex anatomical structure in the human body that executes various functions. The concept of wholeness or oneness refers to not only humans, but also all of creation. Similarly, consciousness may not wholly exist inside the human brain. One consciousness could permeate the whole Universe as limitless energy; thus, human consciousness can be regarded as limited or partial in character. According to the limited consciousness concept, humans perceive projected waves or wave-vortices as waveless item. Therefore, human limited consciousness collapses the wave function or energy of particles; accordingly, we are only able to perceive them as particles. With this limited concept, the wave-vortex or wave movement comes into review, which also seems to have a limited concept, id est, the limited projected wave concept. Notably, this wave-vortex seems to embrace photonic light, as well as electricity and anything between them, which gives a sense of dimension to our brain. These elements of limited projected wave-vortex and limitless energy (consciousness) may coexist inside our brain as electric (directional pilot wave) and quantum (diffused oneness of waves) brainwaves, respectively with both of them giving rise to one brain field. Abnormality in either the electrical or the quantum field or their fusion may lead to abnormal brain function. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
The electromagnetic brainwaves or energy with its discrete network is commonly thought of as the sole contributor to various brain functions. Our thoughts, even fleeting ones, can seem an insignificant part of our day. However, in reality, our thoughts eventually determine or character. “For as a man thinketh in his heart, so is her.” And, for those who are striving to be like the Saviour, being pure in heart and mind is a must. Your brain is comprised of a tight network of nerve cells, all interacting with one another and generating an overall electrical field. This electric field is detectable with standard medical equipment. Your brain waves are simply the superposition of the multitude of electrical states being formed by your nervous system. Anywhere there is a nerve cell, there is electricity. The light seen coming from a star and the energy in your mind are the same type. Your thoughts are formed in this electric field. The measurable perturbations and disturbances in the brain’s overall electric field are your actual thoughts racing through your mind. The thoughts you think and the words your mind processes are all electrical impulses that can be measured. Therefore, thoughts are energy. That means they are governed by all the same rules of quantum mechanics and Schrodinger’s wave of equations as well. All the fascinating things about quantum mechanics that describe how an electron or photon behave, apply to you and your thoughts as well. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
Like any other set of particles or source of energy, we are connected with everything we encounter, the environment around us and the rest of the Universe through the zero-point field. The difference between a human being and a photon is that human beings can think; they are conscious. As such, human beings can choose which of the possibilities before them to collapse their wave function into. However, because human beings are entangled with their environment, they can also affect the environment and influence the randomness, just as it can affect us. It is through the property of entanglement that human beings can affect change in their environment. Human minds are transceivers, and able to receive and send signals into the quantum sphere of the zero-point field by the way of the highly coherent frequencies of their thoughts. It is possible that some people have more powerful brain frequences than others and perhaps that is why people like Sarah L. Winchester could see ghosts and demons, and it is also perhaps why the Ancient Egyptian could use what is considered magic. They spent more time working with their brains and had less distractions, so their brains may have been more powerful. The higher the frequency of one’s thought and/or brain wave, the higher their consciousness. The level of a human being’s consciousness it what makes their reality what it is and what it will continue to be. That is why parents tell their children, “What you focus on you will attract.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
When behaviours or ideas are pushed to an incredible extreme, they are held up to ridicule either by mild humorous irony or by strong sarcasm. This brings a needed corrective to the exaggeration. Any good quality may be pushed to fanatical extremes, whereupon it may become a bad quality. It is hard to walk the pessimists and deny the will to live because birth is evil and deny the natural needs because desire is evil. A juster evaluation would find evil forms of living and evil desires, but the great current of Life itself is surely beyond such relativities as good and evil. A temperate self-discipline is certainly inculcated by philosophy bit it does not call for the extreme of rigorous asceticism. A reasoned austerity at certain times and a wise self-denial at other times fortify and purify a man. Ascetic disciplines take four channels: physical, mental, emotional, and vocal. This last one, the restraint of speech is threefold: First, Prayer. The Lord can help you overcome any problem, including unclean thoughts. Make sure you choose your surroundings carefully and that your activities inspire good thoughts. Surround yourself with good friends who uphold Church standards, and practice carefulness never to depart from truthfulness. The purpose of all balanced asceticism, whether physical or metaphysical, emotional or mental, is to pull the consciousness up from a lower outlook to a higher one. However, this is only to make it possible for the aspirant to get the loftier outlook. If he confuses asceticism with fanaticism, this cannot be done. It is properly a training of the body and thoughts to obey and work with his higher will. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
Some might consider all of this to be Women’s Lib. However, I would like to say that it seems unfortunate to lump everyone together under a single, catch-all label like “Women’s Lib,” when the fact is that there are different groups with different scientific views and philosophies and different goals. Some are doing important work while others, I am afraid, are just tilting at windmills. Nonetheless, let us not lose track of the issue. According to the familiar double standard, the man was active in intimate passions, the woman passive with in intimate passions. She served his needs. Today this master-servant kind of sexual exploitation is no longer acceptable, but the answer to the problem does not come from reversing roles. It is not either/or; it is neither/not. In most marriages today the goal of both partners is to be neither master nor servant. However, of course, it is more easily said than done, because the relationship with pleasures of the flesh is a subtle one, delicately constructed out of the needs and desires of two human beings who individually may not—probably do not—know fully what those needs and desires are. Their marriage is like a bridge from one to the other; somehow they can cross back and forth on it but they are not entirely sure just what is holding it up. Ans so if they arbitrarily decided to pull out one support and replace it with another, they may find the bridge in danger of collapsing. To more specific, let us suppose that the change they want to make to replace—concerns the pleasures of the flesh initiative. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
Traditionally this was the male’s privilege—to initiate or invite or suggest or request a physical response. This was his right because he was a man, and the exercise of that right proved he was a man. For the woman, naturally, it was the reverse. By exercising her right to respond or to refuse, she proved herself a woman. Today we are in transition, and we will assume that a young couple do not want to live in accord with that traditional standard. However, can they make progress toward equality in pleasures of the flesh without undermining the relationship of intimate passions itself? Suppose that a young woman has grown up, as so many still do, in a comparatively traditional climate. Her father, brother, boyfriends, teachers, in another way, her mother, older sisters, aunts, all have unwittingly conspired to make her see herself as being most female when she is most responsive or receptive to the male gender. In all her plans and dreams where boys are involved, she sees herself as being pursued, being desired, being enjoyed. You see, if we take a young lady with a basically traditional background, we can be almost certain that one of the things that turns her on is being pursued. The chase is delightful, and it has erotic value for her because being pursued intensifies her sense of herself as a female person. Both words count. She is happy with herself both as a female and as a person. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
Now, this does not mean that she cannot change and eventually be comfortable in a situation where she at least shares the initiative and where she participates more actively in a relationship with a man. She can learn and she can change. However, she needs time to allow her deepest feelings to adjust to these new values, to make them part of her pleasures of the flesh value system. She also needs to have the right man—or men—in her left at the time this is happening. After all, we are not talking about an intellectual abstraction. We are talking about flesh-and-blood human beings trying their best to work out their lives together as male and female. Here, by the way, the traditional female role helps the woman. Socially and culturally, it is perfectly acceptable for her to be the pupil. So, if the were teaching him to accept her as an equal, if she is fortunate enough to have the right man teaching her to take the initiative when the time and the circumstances and the mood seem favourable, she can be far more comfortable in the learning role than the man may be. From the male point of view, the problem is basically functional. If he is to perform at all, the situation must stimulate a spontaneous or voluntary physical response. This response is easily aborted, by fatigue, worries, fear, illness—you name it. If the male perceives the female is threatening him, even if in fact she intends the opposite, failure can be the result. She may, to further highlight this illustration, take off her nightgown before getting to bed, a gesture she intends to be stimulating and flattering, letting him know that she would be happy to join him. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
However, if he sees this as taking the initiative with pleasures of the flesh, making demands on him, he may feel threatened. He may then be unable to perform and, inevitably seeking an excuse, he will be furious with her for having taken what he sees as an aggressive step. This is not an extreme example; it is a situation we encounter frequently in our clinical work. The man is taking a traditional double-standard attitude. A man with this philosophy is unlikely to take kindly to having his wife teach him other ways. In therapy, however, he can be introduced to new concepts. He may then perceive his wife’s action quite differently, and he may account for himself very well indeed. You see this mostly with mature people, but you see it with surprising frequency among younger couples too—particularly after marriage. Marriage apparently does seem to change one’s outlook. I do not say that it should, mind you—just that it does. When a man looks at a woman, that is one thing. When he looks at the same woman, who is now his wife, it is something else. If he is a latent double-standard man, you will know it, all right. To practice the necessary trainings and disciplines which any improvement of self calls for is to embrace the correct kind of asceticism, not to fall into unnecessary and unbalanced ways which turn it into fanaticism. We practice asceticism not because we hate the body but because it calms the passions. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
If we have to deny its most powerful manifestations, if we are taught to deny the body and ignore the senses, if we are to reject the national satisfactions and renounce the aesthetic ones, life makes no sense. To deny Nature in the name of some narrow ascetic doctrine, to judge men and art by its standards, is to introduce ugliness into life, prejudice into affairs, and imbalance into character. Not in ascetic despisal of the flesh nor in fascinated enslavement to it will peace be found. Two representative examples of those forms of asceticism which may be listed as unreasonable, extreme, or fanatical, and which are therefore taboo in philosophic practice are wearing hair shirts to cause irritation or itching of the skin, and deliberately inflicting pain by scourging or mutilating the body. An Asceticism which makes a moral distinction between the body and the Spirit is exaggerated or false. Ascetism is useful as training of the self but harmful as a shriveling of it. Ascetism serves a useful purpose, but the balanced man will not cling to it when the purpose has been achieved. He will let it go in order to reach the next step higher, where there is no room for one-sided things. Among the dangers of asceticism are its aptness to breed an intolerant mind, its proneness to harsh judgment on nonascetic human beings. As asceticism which rises from within, which is wholly spontaneous, natural, and unforced, which at the same time avoids fanaticism and imbalance, is not objectionable and may even be admirable. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
The ascetic who is ashamed to possess a body is as foolish as the one who hates it for the weakness, he thinks it produced in his feelings. The ascetic seeks for the impoverishment of life and the Worldling seeks for its enrichment. Both are right in their place. However, whereas the ascetic would impose his rule of life upon all others as constituting the highest one, the philosopher knows that it is but the mark of the beginner who has to disentangle himself from the dominion of desire and Worldliness. When we consider a person’s demeanor, the way he “comes on,” that is called his “sweatshirt.” The sweatshirt, in an exceedingly creative, artistic, and economical phrase or two, indicates to the experienced eye the person’s favourite pastime, game, and feeling, his nickname, what he does in the front room and the back room, what kind of a mental World he lives in, what kind of ending his script calls for, and sometimes the critical sphincter, his hero, and his totem. The sweatshirt is usually adopted in high school or early college years, the age when sweatshirts are popular. In later life it may be embroidered or the wording changed slightly, but the core of the meaning will remain unchanged. All competent clinicians, of whatever school, have one thing in common: they are good observers. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
Since they are all observing the same thing—human behaviour—there is bound to be some a similarity in what they see and how they sort our and account for their observations. Hence the psychoanalytic idea of “character defense” or “character armour,” the Jungian concept of “attitude,” the Adlerian notion of “life lie” or “life style,” and the transactional metaphour of “sweatshirt” all describer very similar phenomena. (Many psychoanalysts consider that “transactional games” is merely a synonym for character defenses. This is not so. The sweatshirt is the character defense. Games belong to the open system of social psychology, and not to the closed energy system described by Dr. Freud.) An actual sweatshirt (“Hell’s Angels,” “The Losers,” “Black Panthers,” “Harvard Track Team,” or even “Beethoven”) states which gang a person belongs to, and gives some indication of his philosophy and how he is likely to respond to certain stimuli; but it does not indicate exactly how he will go about conning someone and what payoff he expects. For example, it is clear that many members of the first three gangs mentioned above are riding on the “Forget You” streetcar, but without knowing each member of the gang intimately (in the clinical sense) it is not possible to predict which ones want to be killed in order to become martyrs, which ones want merely to be manhandled so that they can cry “Police brutality!” and which ones are straight. The sweatshirt indicates their collective attitude and the games they share in common, but each one is playing out his own script with its own individual payoff. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
A transactional or script sweatshirt is an attitude which is clearly advertised by the person’s demeanor, just as clearly as though he wore a sweatshirt with his script slogan printed on the front. Some common script sweatshirts are “Kick Me,” “Don’t Kick Me,” “I’m Proud I’m An Alcoholic,” “Look How Hard I’m Trying,” “Buzz Off,” “I Am Fragile,” and “Need a Fix?” Some sweatshirts have a message on the front and a “kicker” in the back: for example, a woman comes on like “I’m Looking For A Husband,” but when she turns her back it clearly says: “But You Don’t Qualify.” The man with “I’m Proud I’m An Alcoholic” on his forehead may have “But Remember It’s A Sickness” on the back. Homosexuals wear particularly flamboyant ones with the front slogan ‘Don’t You Think I’m Fascinating?” while on the back it says, “Isn’t That Enough?” Other sweatshirts give a picture of a more “clubbish” way of life. “Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen” (NOKTIS) is a fraternity with many branches, one of which is the Melancholy Litvak’s Club. The Melancholy Litvaks’ Club can be visualized by a Martain as little wooden building, sparsely furnished with run-down furniture. There are no pictures on the wall, only a framed motto reading, “Why Not Kill Yourself Today?” There is a small library consisting of statistical reports and books by pessimistic philosophers. The point of NOKTIS is not the total amount of trouble, but the fact that Nobody Knows. The NOKTIS makes sure that nobody ever finds out, either, because if anybody did know, then he could not say “Nobody knows,” and his sweatshirt would lose its point. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
The sweatshirt is usually derived from a favourtie slogan of the parents, such as “Nobody in the World will love you like your father and mother do.” This resigned, plod-ahead sweatshirt is disjunctive, and merely serves to separate the wearer from the people around him. By a simple twist it can be transformed into a conjunctive one which will attract other people instead of putting them off, and lead to appropriate “Ain’t It Awful” pastimes and games: “Nobody loves me like my father and mother do.” What attracts other people is the back of this sweatshirt, which reads: “How about you?” Rimbaud was the poet of rebellion. His life, far from justifying the myth it created, only illustrates (an objective perusal of the letters from Harrar suffices to prove this) the fact that he surrendered to the worst form of nihilism imaginable. As if his renunciation implied superhuman virtue, Rimbaud has been defied for renouncing his genius. It must be pointed out, however, despite the fact that by doing so we disqualify the alibis of our contemporaries, that genius alone—and not the renunciation of genius—implies virtue. Rimbaud’s greatness does not lie in the first poems of Charleville nor in his trading at Harrar. It shines forth at the moment when, in giving the most peculiarly appropriate expression to rebellion that it has ever received, he simultaneously proclaims his triumph and his agony, his conception of a life beyond the confines of this World and the inescapability of the World, the yearning for the unattainable and reality brutally determined on restraint, the rejection of morality and the irresistible compulsion of duty. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
At the moment when he carries in his breast both illumination and the darkness of hell, when he hails and insults beauty, and creates, from an insoluble conflict, the intricate counterpoint of an exquisite song, he is the poet of rebellion—the greatest of all. The order in which he wrote his two great works is of no importance. In any case there was very little time between the conception of the two books, and any artists knows, with the certainty born of experience, that Rimbaud simultaneously carried the seeds of the Season in Hell (Une Saison en Enfer) and the Illuminations within him. Though he wrote them one after the other, there is no doubt of them at the same time. This contradiction, which killed him, was the real source of his genius. In view of the fact that chronic suppression and repression of affect produce such unhealthy consequences, we shall inquire into some of the factors responsible for the adoption of these unhealthy patterns. Dependency upon Others. When persons must depend upon others for the solution of their problems and the satisfaction of their needs, they are thrust into situations that can promote unhealthy suppression and repression. So long as they are in the dependent role and need the other person’s good will, they must express nothing which will incur the displeasure of the other person. Thus, a child, an employee, or an inadequate person may have to withhold honest expression of feelings and express (or pretend to feel) only those that will improve his or her status in the eyes of the dominant one. Most of us have had the fantasy at one time or another of telling someone with whom we have been solely associated in a dependent role just how we really feel toward them. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
Some people, on achieving autonomy, wealth, or courage, come right out and express long-withheld feelings. Sometimes the dissolution of a dependency relationship will remove only the motives for suppression, so that persons vent feelings they have long been aware of. Sometimes, however, with the breakup of the dependency relationship, long-standing repression will be undone, and persons will themselves be shocked and surprised at the feelings that well up for expression. Excessively Strict Conscience and Self-denial. Persons may chronically suppress or repress certain emotions not only for external reasons, such as avoiding rejection or criticism, but also to conform with demands of conscience. Persons may have acquired values that make certain emotions not only for external reasons, such as avoiding rejection or criticism, but also to conform with demands of conscience. Persons may have acquired values that make their self-esteem contingent on the exclusion of certain feelings and emotions not only from behaviour, but even from consciousness. They can accept themselves only as kind, pure, and strong, and so they must repress all those feelings that would produce guilt if they were recognized. Rigid Role Definitions. Everyone learns a variety of social roles include those associated with age, pleasures of the flesh, occupation, and one’s family position. Each role has strong social norms governing the experience and expression of emotion. To further highlight this illustration, a physician is expected to appear calm in situations of illness and crisis, whereas a layperson or a patient can experience and express panic without social blame. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
Similarly, men in our culture are expected to appear stronger, more competent, and more in control of their emotions than are women (although these roles are changing through the influence of women’s liberation advocates). Thus, if they experience tenderness, weakness, and dependency, or the impulse to weep, men commonly feel ashamed. The necessity to appear before others in conformity with conventional role definitions thus fosters suppression and repression of emotion. If a person cannot find opportunities to be “out” of these roles, in order to experience and express the feelings engendered by life happenings, then that person’s roles are endangering his or her health. The moral precepts which philosophy imparts to its votaries are based not only on the familiar laws of goodness being coincident with happiness and of suffering being a reaction of evil, but also on the lesser-known facts of psychic sensibility. If you have renounced the World outwardly and wear a halo, you would be right in regarding ambition as a sin. However, if you still live in the World and have renounced it inwardly, it would not be wrong to work like those who are ambitious and so fill a more useful and more powerful role in society. Capital punishment is unethical because it commits a second murder to punish the first one, and not everyone on death row is guilty. Ideals are good and needed, but impracticable ones are not. Their failure tests and show them up for the mere theories that they are. The balanced, practical idealist does more for humanity than the hazy, muddling theorist. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
When you are a member of the Sacramento Fire Department, you must always work not just to meet the minimum standard, but to do your very best. Your duty is to commit to excellence in all aspects of your professional responsibility. Part of fulfilling duty is to exercise initiative—anticipating what needs to be done before someone tells you what to do. You must exercise initiative when you fulfill the purpose, not merely the letter, of the tasks assigned you and the orders you have received. The task is not complete until you achieve the intended outcome. Conscientiousness is the internalization of duty. Conscientiousness means having a high sense of responsibility for your personal contributions to the Sacramento Fire Department, demonstrated through dedicated effort, organization, thoroughness, reliability, and practicality. Your own conscientiousness consistently alerts you to do what is right—even when you are tried or demoralized. In rare cases, your sense of duty also has to detect and prevent an illegal order. Duty requires refusal to obey. The Sacramento Fire Department has no choice but to do what is ethically and legally right. Treat people as they should be treated. Respect for the individual is the basis for the rule of law—the very essence of what the nation stands for. Respect means you must treat others as they should be treated—with dignity and respect. Over the course of history, America has become more culturally diverse, requiring firefighters to deal with people from a wider range of ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds. You must prevent misunderstandings arising from cultural difference. Actively seek to learn about people whose culture is different. Be sensitive to other cultures. This will help you in mentoring, coaching, and counseling team members. See things from their perspective, and appreciate what is important to them. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
The Sacramento Fire Department consistently fosters a climate in which everyone is treated with dignity and respect, regardless of race, gender, creed, or religious belief. Fostering a balanced and dignified work climate begins with your personal example. How you live the Sacramento Fire Department values shows subordinates how they should behave. Teaching values is one of your most important responsibilities. It helps create a common understand of the Sacramento Fire Departments Values and standards. The discipline which makes the Sacramento Fire Department reliable is not gained by harsh or tyrannical treatment. On the contrary, such treatment is far more likely to destroy than to make a fire department. The Sacramento Fire Department imparts instruction and gives commands in such a manner and such a tone of voice to inspire in the firefighters and EMTs no feeling but an intense desire to obey, while the opposite manner and tone of voice cannot fail to excite strong resentment and a desire to disobey. The one mode or other of dealing with crew members springs from a corresponding split in the heart of the captain. He or she who feels the respect which is due to others cannot fail to inspire in them regard for himself or herself, while he or she who feels, and hence manifest, disrespect toward others, cannot fail to inspire hated against him or herself. “I got married within months of getting appointed to the department. My wife didn’t know much about the job, just that I wanted to get into the Sacramento Fire Department. I think it’s difficult for any wife to get used to the idea of her husband living with another family. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
“I realized immediately, even going to a slow company, that although firefighters are strangers at the outset, they become very close very quickly. It has a tremendous impact on your life, whether you want it to or not. Do I live here, or do I live there? But I live in both places, split equal time. It’s not like going to a factory and filling up a cardboard box with something, then putting tape on it and sending it out the shipping door, and you can’t wait to get out of there. This is totally the opposite. Going into the camaraderie of living with the other family in the firehouse is not that easy. I guess that wives, when they talk among themselves, feel that the husbands talk about things at the firehouse before they would discuss it at home, whatever the subject. I think a lot of families have trouble dealing with that. It’s not easy to say, ‘Wait a minute, I don’t care about the salary, the only reason I took this job was because I want to do it, I like it, and now that I’m doing it I like it even more. So don’t crowd my territory, please. If I like being in this family at the firehouse, let me be.’ But unless somebody loves there in the firehouse and goes through it, I don’t think they can see it. I think that wives sometimes mistakenly believe you’re trying to push them aside. We have four young children. I certainly wouldn’t tell them to take this job because their father loves it. I think they’re under more pressure than when we were their age. Television and movies have an unbelievable influence on them practically from the day they’re born. They’re still young. The oldest guy is interested right not in the sciences and astronomy and outer space and the whole NASA program. Like firefighting, it’s a challenge but of something else, where you’re taking your life in your hands and going out into the unknown. All I’d want to tell the kids is, do what you want, as long as you like what you’re doing. That’s the most I can do, not try to push them in one direction or another, in some kind of vicarious situation where I wish it was me.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
The proud members of the Sacramento Fire Department are committed to providing the highest quality and highest level of courteous and responsive services to the residents, businesses, and visitors of Sacramento. This is accomplished by implementing comprehensive strategies and training in fire prevention, fire suppression, emergency medical services, and all risk mitigation, including human-caused and natural disasters, emergency preparedness, emergency cervices and community-based fire services. The Sacramento Fire Department physical requirements for the firefighters and EMTs state that you must be medically and physically fit, and able to pass the Occupational Physical Assessment Test. Therefore, physical and mental toughness are just the basic requirements. You achieve excellence when you habitually show discipline and commitment to the department’s values. Individuals and organizations pursue excellence to improve. The Sacramento Fire Department cherishes leaders of character who are good role models, consistently set the example, and accomplish the mission while improving their skills. The values of the Sacramento Fire Department are never tested more strenuously than during times of crisis. Those who can keep a level head and act with character, particularly in the face of grave danger, testify to the importance of the values of the Sacramento Fire Department. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
Having the Southern American boarder open and not having American farmland protected, not producing beef, poultry, fish, fruit, produce and dairy in America, and without American goods and services being our number one manufactured and selling items, America has created a dangerous and significantly elevated risks to national security, national economic security, and national public health. Some people may believe that these claims are overstated, but by not routinely monitoring Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CEVs) or other security relevant alerts, such as end-of-life of machinery is how the Oroville Dam Crisis occurred in 2017. Other crises that have occurred due to neglect of critical infrastructure is the 2025 Palisades fires because Southern California ran out of water, when they are located next to an ocean and they could have simply created desalinating plants to help with the water shortage. The water is so plentiful that it is currently eroding land and causing homes to fall into the sea. American government should know all exploitable vulnerabilities and fix them prior to the situation becoming a crisis. Failure to take such mitigating actions is dangerous and significantly elevates risk to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. The American government must understand that significant time and resources must be invested in America. They must also encourage corporations to plan for both mitigating safety vulnerabilities in the short term and eliminating them in the long term. For instance, a company might begin by reaching out to the federal, state or local government and requesting tax incentives to provide security to dangerous communities, to help the government repair bridges and potholes. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
America needs an approach to eliminate safety vulnerabilities in American cities. There needs to be a road map by the end of 2025, outlining a prioritized approach to eliminate crisis situations in America. There is enough money to send aid to foreign nations, but the American government does not have enough money to care their infrastructure, provide adequate resources, nor end the affordable housing crisis. Nor is there enough money to fund other national critical functions (NCFs). These bad practices of putting America and Americans last is considered exceptionally risky, particularly to national security, national economic security, and national public healthy and safety. In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. In an effort to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars. American made cars used to be the envy of the World and because American car brands are offering a wide range of options, from family SUVs to electric vehicles and luxury sedans, we are now seeing a resurging interest. American made cars are equal or superior to those made overseas. The Chevrolet Trax, for instance, is a well-designed, fuel efficient, and safe SUV. And as you know, there is no better car on Earth than 1950-1970s American Muscle Car. Americans make sure superior product, but we are buying things from other nations. American food imports have risen by 300 percent since 1999. American farmland declined by nearly 20 million acres between 2017 and 2022. As of 2022, there were 880.1 million acres of land dedicated to farming, compared to 900.1 million in 2017. The data shows there are now little more than 1.9 million farms in the country. Americans and American corporations spent $136 billion on food and beverages from other countries. It is a national security risk to lose American Farms and farmers. If there is a war, and most of our meat, produce, poultry, dairy, and fruit is coming from foreign counties, we stand the risk of starving. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
With war breaking out all over the World, in these uncertain times, it is very important to bring American farms back. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. As money flows, it influences further investment. Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever. And in the future, there may be food wars. Also, to ensure that we have farmland for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrant to America. Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a populations that equally represents all races of people. If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in American, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in American which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the nation debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by send more money overseas. Buying American made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards in regard to pollution. American companies have to be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human minds to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. As a reminder, parents, pleasure teach your children love America and be patriotic citizens and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
Laguna Park, CA | From the Mid 500’s
Now Selling!
Welcome to the New Fabulous Forties! This intimate enclave of 37 homesites with available one- and two-story floorplans is the place to be in Sacramento. Waking up to a home you love sets just the right tone for what is ahead. Ventris Place offers beautifully designed homes. Danville, Residence 4, has 3 to 4 bedrooms and a loft across 1,846 square feet of living space.
Danville gives two levels, each one with its own defining purpose to create exactly what you need and want in the moment. Your home will flex with you, whether you need to invite work or play right into your comfort zone. There are also nooks that conjure up a visionary escape, welcoming you to lounge or create for the perfect work love balance. A main level with sweeping, open spaces and down to earth textures and tones, is designed with all the luxury details and faraway feels, much like the extended Laguna Park neighbourhood it occupies.
Organically designed to pull the outdoors and the indoors out, you can dine alfresco right of your gourmet kitchen or make the night bright, sitting on your side yard, for an entirely fresh perspective. A setting that is as cool as it is calm, elegant, and ready for the way you want to live. You will enjoy this home for generations to come. Just a few steps from your door and located in the Elk Grove School District, enjoy the features of the 22 acres North Laguna Creek Park, which includes paved paths, tennis courts, a basketball court, playgrounds, picnic areas, ball fields and 119-acre Wildlife Area and Interpretive Trail.
Your new home is within walking distance to Cosumnes River College and Regal RA Laguna Village and 24-Hour Fitness Laguna Sport Gym. Also, in close proximity to Kaiser Medical Centers, Winco Foods, Shell and Chevron gas stations, Walmart, and highway 99. This is the perfect community for those who are on the go, or just want to enjoy life at a slower place. The convenience is uniquely charming. https://nextgenerationcapital.us/new-homes-elk-grove-ventris-place/
Wishing you lots of love and happiness in your new home. #VentrisPlace
The Ultimate Driving Machine
BMW is a leader in automotive technology, constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in a car. From advanced infotainment systems to cutting-edge safety features, BMW cars are equipped with the latest technology to enhance the driving experience. The company’s commitment to innovation is also evident in its development of electric and hybrid vehicles, which offer the same performance and luxury as traditional models but with reduced environmental impact. https://bmw.niello.com/
Whatever He Did, He Did So People Would Love Him
Some people are so easily tempted to lie a little, to cheat a little, to steal a little, or to bear false witness—just a little. You cannot commit a little sin without being subject to the consequences. If you tolerate a little sin today, you tolerate a little more tomorrow, and before long, a cord of integrity is broken. In order to grasp the various formal characteristics of a lie, using a dictionary definition may be a good idea. A lie, according to Websters Ninth Collegiate Dictionary (1987) is “an untrue statement with intent to deceive.” Also included in the explanatory comments that follow the initial concise definition are the phrases, “an assertion something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue,” and the deliberate creation of a “false or misleading impression.” Gathering these statements with the notion of lying implicit in the in the well-known judicial instruction to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” leads one to the ideal that a lie can be told in many ways. Lying is a multifaceted sport with diverse moves available to the deft player. Some prominent forms of lying are: Not telling the truth. Remaining silent while being asked to respond to a question, the answer to which one actually knows, constitutes a lie. Replacing the facts one knows to be true by false and misleading information. Tell the truth but not the “whole truth” and, by such withholding of parts of relevant information, altering the inference to be drawn from one’s report. Telling the truth but embellishing it in a way that results in a caricature and thus puts its veracity in question. The mechanism of denial by exaggeration. #RandolphHarris 1 of 26
Flatly and forcefully questioning and even repudiating an established truth. The phenomenon of “gas lighting,” where one individual seeks to drive someone into a state of psychosis and/or neurosis by stirring up doubts about the latter’s perception is an example of this type of lying. Instances of “soul murder” where a child’s perception is ruthlessly erased by cruel and abusive parent, and the denial of slavery are other examples from individual and collective arenas, respectively, of this very type of lie. Acknowledging the truth about a certain matter but retrospectively imputing motives to it that were not in operation earlier. The ego operation of “sliding of meanings” seen in a narcissistic personalities is an example par excellence of such a strategy. What all this demonstrates is that a lie comes in many forms. From baldfaced assertions of falsehood to subtle distortions or reality, lies elude simplistic nosological traps. To discern them, one not only requires paying close attention to what is being said and why but also to what is not being said, what is being exaggerated, what is being minimized, and what is being painted with a revisionist brush. Every time we are dishonest, we are really guilty of two lies: the lie we tell others and the lie we tell ourselves to justify it. Failing to establish himself in the truth, he hides the weakness of his position under the abusiveness of his phraseology, and conceals his lack of rational arguments beneath the plenitude of his personal innuendoes. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26
If we simply compare the two attitudes, instead of arbitrarily opposing them, we shall find that they usefully counterbalance each other. Why should we deny our human needs and human nature because we claim our divine needs and seek our divine nature? All external austerities are helpful in training the will but only some of them have any other value in themselves. And when they become fanatical and extreme and merely external, they become perilous and illusory. He is not so foolish as to seek to impose the austere ethical standards of the higher philosophy upon those who are still unable to get beyond the level of the lower religion. The self-actualized Christians were never so unpractical as to offer a rule of life whose logical application could only be that all men should enter monasteries and all women enter convents. How often in history do we find men and movements whose purpose is admirable but whose execution of it is execrable! A bad means used to attain a good end, turns the end itself into a bad thing. The man who sits encased in his own virtue, may unwittingly become encased in spiritual pride. Both conservative followers of tradition and progressive rebels against it may have something to offer which is worthy welcoming. Why not admit the truth and scrutinize each offering justly? Why immediately react against or in favour of it, only by looking at the name of its source? If there is willingness to accommodate the other, to get the entire picture and then only make a decision, it is better for everyone. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26
In a marriage, there is no formula for success. No script can be provided for couples who want to use conflicts as a means of discovering new dimensions of themselves and their partners and thus enhance their physical relationship. Nor are there any shortcuts that will expedite the process of achieving genuine intimacy. However, if the principles of neutrality and mutuality are used guidelines in the negotiation of differences of intimate passions, there is every reason to be optimistic about the outcome. And this much is certain: all experience gained in resolving conflicts creates the facility for dealing constructively with future conflicts—which are inevitable. Conciliation is another word for marriage. We keep being told that in this “enlightened” age the double standard is disappearing. However, actually the truth is that time after time we find people saying one thing and doing something else. They believe what they are saying, all right, but they are not looking very carefully at what in fact they really do. Certainly you young people talk more freely; you communicate better. You accept the subject of functioning of pleasures of the flesh with much more aplomb. And yet there seems to be an awful lot of residual double standards in your generation, too. Many people wrestle with the idea that pleasures of the flesh are sinful, and I cannot really address that, but in the long-range, some psychiatrists believe this can be a harmful myth. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26
For many boy, growing up, the most sinful thing was not pleasures of the flesh. What many really felt guilty about was masturbation. However, many religions teach this is also sinful, but it can also be useful in preventing unwanted pregnancies and the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Most married men masturbate at times. They do not do so with the same frequency that prevailed during their teens or during the years that preceded the establishment of a more or less regular coital pattern, whether in marriage or not. However, there are circumstances when the male has a high incidence of return to masturbatory tendencies, even though he has a partner who theoretically is available. When she is not available, when husband and wife are physically separated, the function of masturbation seems clear enough. However, there are other circumstances in which it serves a similar need. It is not uncommon, for example, for masturbation to be utilized during the wife’s menstrual period, particularly if at this time either partner feels negatively predisposed to pleasures of the flesh. Masturbation may be utilized during illness or the last stages of pregnancy or the first month or two after childbirth. And then there are occasions during the normal course of marital life when suddenly it just seems like a great idea to the male—or the female, for that matter. Obviously, the same principles should apply to the woman as to the man. And I know of no harm at all in this, but your religion may be against it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26
There is one other consideration I can think of, and it involves the stabilization and preservation of a valued partnership. Here is a way of satisfying extraneous sexual need without making excessive demands on the relationship. It enables a woman to cope with her tensions at a time when, because of special concerns, she feels she cannot involve her husband, or she chooses not to. Once she comes to terms with the fact that this does not take anything away from her marriage, it may help to keep the relationship in balance. For a number of women, this is not an infrequent experience. Fundamentally, this kind of situation exists when a marital unit is not dysfunctional with pleasures of the flesh but the partners have different tension levels for intimate passions. This difference in levels is found in an incredible number of cases and is often balanced by masturbation, which permits the partner with the higher tension level to relieve that tension occasionally and ease up a bit. It may be the husband who needs relief; it may be the wife. However, keep in mind that we are talking about occasional incidents. If we find an established masturbatory pattern of some significance, we then look into the relationship itself. When we counsel husbands and wives who have serious problems, we introduce the concept of mutuality. This requires them to be sensitive to inevitable differences in their individual needs and to be willing to meet and satisfy those needs together. In the circumstances we have been describing, this means that the couple must accept the fact that their desire for pleasures of the flesh and capacities are not always going to perfectly match. #RandolphHarris 6 of 26
And the important question is how a couple handles that particular fact. If at a given moment one partner’s needs are on a slightly higher level, we would encourage him—or her—to task for the other’s cooperation so that together they can enjoy making it a mutual experience of pleasures of the flesh without putting performance pressure on the partner who is not quite so turned on. This can be a rather happy solution, because it uses the very differences that might otherwise have come between two people to bring them together. Just keep in mind that it is all right to play house when you are a kid, and it is not too bad to play doctor. However, if you are caught playing with yourself, good luck to you. Many marries men and women masturbate on occasion, for good reason and with no harm done. We discussed some of the circumstances—sickness, separation, impulse, what have you?—and I will add medical reason. If they are having dysmenorrhea—severe cramps–we know that many women will masturbate with the onset of their menstrual cycle. An “exciting” experience frequently will relieve the spasm of the uterus and the cramps will disappear. Many women learn this trick. Does it work for all? Of course not, but it helps some women and so they masturbate periodically, which seems sensible. Now, when we suggest to couples who have different levels of tension involving pleasures of the flesh that the partner with the lower level can—and should—help the partner with the higher level to achieve release, we are not discussing masturbation per se. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26
We are discussing stimulation involving pleasures of the flesh, the various modes by which one partner gives pleasure to the other. If either partner rejects the idea of providing or accepting release this way, we continue our in-depth interview until we find out, if possible, the basis of rejection. Then we try to negate that attitude. In attempting to overcome any sense of rejection by either partner, our usual approach is to make a major issue of the naturalness of pleasures of the flesh functioning. This includes stressing the fact that functioning of pleasures of the flesh is a total body response and that this response generally can be enhanced by any form of physical stimulation. We find that a significant percentage of individuals who object to a particular form of play with pleasures of the flesh do so on the basis of preconceived ideas. These individuals are frequently intrigued by the concept but are concerned with how it will be received by the partner, or they may even be concerned with what other people might think. If they are given an adequate explanation of the naturalness of any form of expression with pleasures of the flesh, by persons who they accept as authorities, they feel they have what we call “authoritative permission” to indulge in the particular activity. Very often we find that negative attitudes are based on myths or half-truths or irrational notions carried over from childhood. In a surprising number of cases, all it takes to change those attitudes is for a minister or doctor, for example, or for an older, well-regarded person to say to the individual, “My wife and I have enjoyed doing this all our married life.” And suddenly it becomes a perfectly acceptable practice, especially for young people. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26
Incidentally, often the woman feels that it is completely all right for her to release her husband but she does not feel the same about the reverse situation. There may be any number of different reasons for such an attitude, but one of the commonest is that she is afraid such a request might undermine her husband. It might make him feel that he is inadequate, that he is not capable of pleasing her. In fact, he himself may have communicated that idea to her. Here is another double-standard residual—a reflection of the traditional view of the woman’s role, with the culture assigning her the responsibility of meeting the man’s need. We must fly the kite of idealism, but we must also be able to jerk it back to Earth on a minute’s notice. The single-idea enthusiast, the fanatic persecutor, and the disproportioned extremist—these are all out of focus, out of harmony, and out of balance. The unbalanced fanatic merely makes a new attachment out of attempted detachment. The type to which a man belongs, the temperament which he possesses, will direct him to go along a certain way as being easiest for him. This limits his outlook, and leads to intolerance of other ways and imbalance of his own development. He should not fall into extremes and, in his care for self-protection, fall into an excessive prudence that risks nothing and consequently gains nothing. Sometimes one can address the process without disrupting too much. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26
One can watch words and sounds arise around feelings as though they take the form of feelings and image them in a most intimate way. Difficulties in relationships have several characteristics. They arise without anticipation. They are usually not understood immediately, just as though one is suddenly shown an image or told something by another person. Most, if not all, of it is symbolic. Most, if not all, appears to be a representation of the innermost thought or feelings. It occurs in a kind of timeless World which is now without past or future. It borders memory and usually requires some extra work to fix in memory. Most importantly its frame of reference is the innermost-subjective-now reality of the individual. It is as though, at our core is a process which cannot help but accurately represent itself. One many I met was in the unfortunate position of having too much of a good thing. He, like St. Augustine, was in love with loving, and he found how difficult life can be, stranded in that polarity. The story of his life was simple: Whatever he did, he did so people would love him. “From the minute he was born, you could not help but love him,” Arkie’s mother used to say. “He was so small, so sickly. Until the operation, when he was six weeks old, we did not think he would make it. But we felt so sorry for him and we loved him so much! Maybe all that love is what kept him alive.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 26
Maybe it was. However, getting “all that love” became an obsession with Arkie as he grew up, and especially after his first Sunday school lessons. “God loves you,” the hard-faced, icy-voiced teacher said, “and He showers you with his grace—as long as you are good. But when you are bad little boys and girls, God turns away from you, takes his grace away and stops loving you. When God stops loving you, you spiritually die.” As a six-year-old, Arkie had no idea what it means to die “spiritually.” To him the message was, “if God stops loving you, you die.” The way to get love was by “being good,” which meant pleasing God—and in the mind of the little boy, it meant pleasing everyone else too. Oddly enough, for all his desire to be a “good boy,” Arkie was not very well behaved. There was a sassy, rebellious side to him, a side which surfaced just when he thought he was doing well. And when his rebellious side got him in trouble, he felt the guilt, the remorse, and the deathly fear that God had turned away from him—perhaps forever. At these times, he thought that he would surely die. Arkie hated the boredom and discipline of school, but to please his parents, he studied hard, made “A’s,” and graduated with honors. His father died when he was a teenager and Arkie, wanting more than ever to please his mother, went to college. She wanted him to be a teacher; he wanted to be a sculptor. “A sculptor?” she wailed when he told her of his dream. “Who ever heard of such a thing? Look in the want ads. In all of Sacramento, all of California, is anybody looking for sculptors? It’s teachers, teachers they’re crying for. The work is clean, it’s honest, it’s professional. Be a good boy, Arike. Be a teacher.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 26
He became a teacher, reasoning that he could study his art in college and teach it when he finished, pleasing himself and his mother at the same time. The plan might have worked, except for one thing: he hated teaching. He found school more boring as a teacher then he ever had as a student. They pay was poor and after a full day of dragging himself through the work he hated, Arike was left with little enthusiasm for pursuing his own art. Besides sculpture, Arkie had a talent for drawing, so he took a job as an illustrator in an advertising agency where the pay was good and the rewards for hard work were fast in coming. Soon, he was an art director, with his own office, secretary, and printed business cards. One Saturday he took his mother to his office to show her how well he was doing. She was impressed by the big desk and the carpeting, but said, “Anyway, it’s too bad you left teaching. There you were a professional.” Arkie soon grew frustrated at the advertising agency; frustrated with working on paper. He longed for the challenge and realness of three-dimensional creation. He longed to carve, to mold, to shape. However, the want ads still showed no jobs for sculptors. So he went back to college and took a degree in architecture. The field promised everything he wanted: a chance to work with shapes, structure and real materials; a chance to be in business for himself; and, most of all, the status of a “professional.” His mother would surely be proud. #RandolphHarris 12 of 26
In private practice, Arike was only marginally successful. With his easygoing, “anything-to-please” manner, he managed to get enough business, but he worked twice as hard as he needed to and charge half as much as he should have. After covering his overhead, there was little left for him to call profit. From time to time, his rebellious streak would surface. On one such occasion, he abruptly decided to close up shop and move. Three months later, he was sitting at a drawing board in a large architectural/engineering/construction firm in Orange County, trying to design office cubicles so that they would not all look identical. The work was not exactly exciting, but they pay was good and the position was “professional.” In Orange County, Arkie met and married Aerial, a pretty, energetic high-school speech teacher. She had a sweet voice, a sweet disposition and was passionately devoted to him. They got along well, did interesting things together, and fell more deeply in love every day. As Arkie was often told, he had everything a man could hope for: good job, lots of money, happy marriage, nice friends, bright future—everything. However, for Arkie, something was wrong. Drastically wrong. He was thirty-two years old and in good health, yet felt that his life was over. He had grown too fond of the wine which he drank in ever-larger amounts each evening. He found a certain amount of satisfaction in his work, but there was no joy in it, no life. #RandolphHarris 13 of 26
He began to feel that somewhere along the line, he had been cheated. “Please people,” he had been told, “and they will love you. When people love you, you will be happy.” Arkie went out of his way to please people. He did favours whenever someone asked. He lent people money; he helped them in business. He was a nice guy. “Live so as to please God,” he had been told, “and God will love you; you will be happy.” Arkie lived as closely as possible to what he had been told would please God. At the age of thirty-two, he was hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying—in short, a “good boy.” Yet for all his willingness to please, to love and be loved, Arkie was not entirely happy. And he felt it was not fair. For him, life was not working as he was told it would. Something was not right. I first met Arkie at a party. We had both gone to the buffet table for more hors d’oeuvres and Arkie, while chatting amiably, made a sweeping gesture and knocked over a full glass of punch, staining the white slacks and the Air Force Ones I was wearing. From the effusiveness of his apologies, I would have thought he had just done something horrendous. It struck me as curious that such an obviously bright, apparently self-assumed young man would go almost entirely to pieces over such a small incident. Hoping to draw him out a bit, I invited him to sit down and chat some more. Still reeling from the accident, he was only too ready to do anything I asked. I got the feeling that had I asked him to slash his wrists, he would have been happy to oblige. #RandolphHarris 14 of 26
Our conversation was the light, cocktail party variety, consisting mainly of describing what we each did for a living. Somehow we got on the subject of pet peeves and I mentioned that, as a psychotherapist, one of the things that bothers me is when people are not entirely honest and open in their communication about their feelings. I told him I felt it slowed the therapy process. Akie reacted as if he had been personally rebuked. “God, I don’t blame you, Ludolf,” he gushed. “It must be frustrating for you when people don’t open up. I admit I haven’t been entirely honest with you, even in this conversation. I, uh, I’m actually not as happy as I try to make it sound. I mean, I know I should be, but for some reason, I just feel, well…say, would it be all right if I came by your office?” He started therapy a few wees later. Persons are said to repress their emotions when they take active steps to avoid experiencing certain affects, and when confronted by stimuli adequate to induce an emotional response, they deny (and believe their own denial) that they are experiencing emotion. Repression in the first instance is achieved by regulating one’s life so that one will never encounter the objects known to induce feelings, and also by refusing to think about objects or events that might induce unwanted feelings. Repression in the second instance appears to be achieved by means of some form of self-deception or denial—as if the persons say to themselves, and believe, “I am not angry [afraid, sexy, amused].” #RandolphHarris 15 of 26
In order to rid their awareness of the unwanted emotional tensions, they may think about things and perform tasks that indue feelings incompatible with the unwanted emotional tension. Thus, a small child, confronted by a fear-inspiring dog, might say, “Nice puppy”—puppies evoke tender feelings, not fear in the child. The nervous and timid speaker at a banquet, who is afraid he or she will be ridiculed, may address the audience as “My friends.” If the speaker believes that they are friends, the fear will evaporate. Repression occurs automatically and unconsciously, because the emotional tension trigger off strong anxiety over the anticipated consequences of expressing them; too, the emotional tensions conflict strongly with persons’ conscience and self-ideals—if they admitted they had these feelings, they might have to change their concepts of themselves, with accompanying losses in self-esteem. In most, if not all, instances, professionals condemn repression of emotional tensions as unhealthy. The main reason for this condemnation lies in the fact that in spite of repression, the feelings exist—or at least the capacity to experience these feelings remains present and unchanged. When feelings have been provoked but are not recognized by the person, they produce both physical and psychological effects. In addition to psychological consequences, repressed affects produce the same effects on the body as do consciously suppressed feelings, except that the person is not aware that he or she has these feelings. #RandolphHarris 16 of 26
When feeling have been repressed more or less successfully, it is not only the individual who is unaware of their presence. Other persons as well will not know how the person really feels. Thus, a husband may irritate his wife for years by certain of his habits. She, however, may have repressed her annoyance and hostility. Then, at some future date, she leaves him or becomes overwhelmed with uncontrollable rage at some trivial annoyance. Naturally, the husband is surprised and shocked. If she had openly vented her feelings, he might have altered his behaviour easily and without complaint. One of the most important tasks in psychotherapy and in the treatment of so-called psychosomatic illnesses is adiding patients to recognize their own feelings—to “unrepress” them, to experience and express them fully. This uncovering process generally is met with strong resistance on the part of the patient, however, for the experience of these feelings is threatening to security and to self-esteem. Do not in enthusiastically winning new qualities and virtues ignore and neglect the one which must regulate them all—balance. The beginner who develops a self-conscious measured spirituality is dangerously near to the vice of spiritual pride. In trying to mold himself on a higher pattern, a new fault may insert itself—the tendency to become self-righteous. He is in a hard state who is unable to make compromises and untempted to make concessions. Like the rudder on a boat, or the governor on a spring, the very quality which he lacks is needed by a man to keep him from going astray into extremes, follies, quicksands, and disasters. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26
The proud members of the Sacramento Fire Department are committed to providing the highest quality and highest level of courteous and responsive services to the residents, businesses, and visitors of Sacramento. This is accomplished by implementing comprehensive strategies and training in fire prevention, fire suppression, emergency medical services, and all risk mitigation, including human-caused and natural disasters, emergency preparedness, emergency cervices and community-based fire services. The Sacramento Fire Department physical requirements for the firefighters and EMTs state that you must be medically and physically fit, and able to pass the Occupational Physical Assessment Test. Therefore, physical and mental toughness are just the basic requirements. You achieve excellence when you habitually show discipline and commitment to the department’s values. Individuals and organizations pursue excellence to improve. The Sacramento Fire Department cherishes leaders of character who are good role models, consistently set the example, and accomplish the mission while improving their skills. The values of the Sacramento Fire Department are never tested more strenuously than during times of crisis. Those who can keep a level head and act with character, particularly in the face of grave danger, testify to the importance of the values of the Sacramento Fire Department. #RandolphHarris 18 of 26
If you qualify, you join the Sacramento Fire Department with your personal values developed in childhood and nurtured over many years of person experience. By taking an oath to serve the nation and the institution, you also agree to live and act by a new set of values—Sacramento Fire Department values. Values consist of the principles, standards, and qualities considered essential for successful firefighters and EMTs. They are fundamental to helping you make the right decision in any situation. Sacramento Fire Department Values firmly bind all members into a fellowship dedicated to serving the nation and the City of Sacramento. They apply to everyone, in every situation, anywhere. The trust firefighters and EMTs have for each other, and the trust the American people have in them, all depends on how well the crew embodies the Sacramento Fire Department Values. The Sacramento Fire Department recognizes seven values that must be developed in all firefighters and EMTs: Loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity and personal courage. Sacramento firefighters and EMTs must bear the faith and allegiance to the US Constitution, the fire department, and their team members. All firefighters and EMTs swear a sacred oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America and their community. The Constitution establishes the legal basis for the existence of their organization. As a logical consequence, the Sacramento Fire Department has an obligation to be faithful to America and their community. #RandolphHarris 19 of 26
Loyalty is the big thing, the greatest battle asset of all. However, no man ever wins the loyalty of team members by preaching loyalty. It is given him by them as he proves his possession of the other virtues. Firefighters and EMTs who are loyal to their family (crew members) never let them be misused or abused. The Sacramento Fire Department stands with their family no matter how difficult the situation. “I married shortly before I got on the department. Being in the fire academy that early on in the marriage was probably a test of whether the marriage was going to work. My wife is my rock and my salvation. There were many nights when I came home with tons of homework and assignments, and she gave me a lot of moral support. I’ll be forever grateful to her for that. I don’t think she had any sense of what the job was about. She was pretty much caught up in the basis syndrome everybody else has—you work, you do yogi, have faith in God, and are dedicated to the commitment of marriage. She’s never expressed any fears about the job. A lot of firefighters’ wives can name every tool and specification of every fire truck, and can tell you all the things that firefighters do on the day-to-day basis. My wife has never gotten involved to that point. She’s just tremendously happy that I was able to have the career I wanted. She is a teacher. We have two young children. Our lives are different from others in the neighborhood in the hours we work, the situations we’re confronted with, the things we see on a daily basis. I spend a normal amount of time with the children, but I also have hobby interests and semibusiness ventures that I attend to. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26
“Free-lance photography, for one, generally in fire-related situations—for a magazine or a newspaper, a publication of some sorts. I suspect I’ll stay on the job for a minimum of twenty-five years. I can’t see myself retiring before that, not with the age of my kids. I’ve gotten fifteen years now, and if the next ten are as much fund as the last fifteen, I look forward to it. My mother and father are both college graduates and working in the professions. I think that now they’re real pleased that I’ve been so happy in the career that I chose. In addition to being a photographer, I’m a helicopter enthusiast. I spend some time at airports. Aviation has always been a part of my life. I’m not a pilot, but I have a number of buddies in the helicopter industry, who I ride with occasionally. They’re kind of another second family to me, in addition to the firefighter family and my own family. Unfortunately, the Sacramento Fire Department helicopters are out of the way to me. I flew with the guys a number of times, but I’m miles away from them now. In our off hours, my wife and I do whatever the kids want to do, or rather something that everybody wants to do. Not just to please Mom and Dad and not just to please the kids, but what the family wants to do. We go to amusement parks, the beach, depending on the time of the year. We go to the mountains. We took a trip to Hawaii. The kids are like their mother in regard to the department. You know, Dad’s a fireman, but we don’t really know a whole lot about what he does. They certainly could be firefighters, if they want, but I wouldn’t encourage them.” #RandolphHarris 21 of 26
The Sacramento Fire Department is older than the City of Sacramento. On 5 February 2025, the Sacramento Fire Department will be celebrating their 175th birthday. This is a very important milestone. Understanding the expectations and applying the attributes and competencies prepares the Sacramento Fire Department for situations they are likely to encounter. Fire fighters who gain expertise through operational assignments, institutional learning, and self-development will be versatile enough to adapt to most situations and grow into greater responsibilities. All members of the Sacramento Fire Department are loyal, dedicated to duty, respectful, selfless, honourable, possess a great deal of integrity and display personal courage in the face of danger and adversity. You can save lives by making a donation to the Sacramento Fire Department. As a reminder, parents, pleasure teach your children love America and be patriotic citizens and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. #RandolphHarris In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. In an effort to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars. American made cars used to be the envy of the World and because American car brands are offering a wide range of options, from family SUVs to electric vehicles and luxury sedans, we are now seeing a resurging interest. American made cars are equal or superior to those made overseas. #RandolphHarris 22 of 26
The Chevrolet Trax, for instance, is a well-designed, fuel efficient, and safe SUV. And as you know, there is no better car on Earth than 1950-1970s American Muscle Car. Americans make sure superior product, but we are buying things from other nations. American food imports have risen by 300 percent since 1999. American farmland declined by nearly 20 million acres between 2017 and 2022. As of 2022, there were 880.1 million acres of land dedicated to farming, compared to 900.1 million in 2017. The data shows there are now little more than 1.9 million farms in the country. Americans and American corporations spent $136 billion on food and beverages from other countries. It is a national security risk to lose American Farms and farmers. If there is a war, and most of our meat, produce, poultry, dairy, and fruit is coming from foreign counties, we stand the risk of starving. With war breaking out all over the World, in these uncertain times, it is very important to bring American farms back. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. As money flows, it influences further investment. Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever. Also, to ensure that we have farmland for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrant to America. Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a populations that equally represents all races of people. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26
If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in American, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in American which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the nation debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by send more money overseas. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26
Buying American made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards in regard to pollution. American companies have to be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human minds to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 26 of 26
Laguna Park, CA | From the Mid 500’s
Now Selling!
Welcome to the New Fabulous Forties! This intimate enclave of 37 homesites with available one- and two-story floorplans is the place to be in Sacramento. Waking up to a home you love sets just the right tone for what is ahead. Ventris Place offers beautifully designed homes. Danville, Residence 4, has 3 to 4 bedrooms and a loft across 1,846 square feet of living space.
Danville gives two levels, each one with its own defining purpose to create exactly what you need and want in the moment. Your home will flex with you, whether you need to invite work or play right into your comfort zone.
There are also nooks that conjure up a visionary escape, welcoming you to lounge or create for the perfect work love balance. A main level with sweeping, open spaces and down to earth textures and tones, is designed with all the luxury details and faraway feels, much like the extended Laguna Park neighbourhood it occupies.
Organically designed to pull the outdoors and the indoors out, you can dine alfresco right of your gourmet kitchen or make the night bright, sitting on your side yard, for an entirely fresh perspective. A setting that is as cool as it is calm, elegant, and ready for the way you want to live.
You will enjoy this home for generations to come. Just a few steps from your door and located in the Elk Grove School District, enjoy the features of the 22 acres North Laguna Creek Park, which includes paved paths, tennis courts, a basketball court, playgrounds, picnic areas, ball fields and 119-acre Wildlife Area and Interpretive Trail.
Your new home is within walking distance to Cosumnes River College and Regal RA Laguna Village and 24-Hour Fitness Laguna Sport Gym. Also, in close proximity to Kaiser Medical Centers, Winco Foods, Shell and Chevron gas stations, Walmart, and highway 99.
This is the perfect community for those who are on the go, or just want to enjoy life at a slower place. The convenience is uniquely charming. https://nextgenerationcapital.us/new-homes-elk-grove-ventris-place/
Wishing you lots of love and happiness in your new home. #VentrisPlace
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Set Goals and Work to Achieve them!
The purpose of this lesson here on Earth is to inspire of to set goals and work to achieve them. A goal is a standard, a skill, an ideal, or a destination that is to be achieved. When we decide to accomplish a particular thing, we set a goal. Some goals, such as cleaning the house or writing an essay, may take a short time to accomplish. Other goals, such as saving money to buy a new home or doing thing to improve the love and peace within the family, may take months or even years. Goal that will help us to become worthy to dwell eternally with our Heavenly Father may taken an entire lifetime. Some goals may not even be attained during a lifetime on Earth, but may require additional effort in the hereafter. It is one thing to set up such a goal in life; it is another to find the way to reach it. For the attempt to live in celibacy—unless wisely managed and informed with knowledge—provokes the animal in us to revolt. Some people often waste days, months, and even years of their lives going down paths that lead them to no worthwhile achievements. Other people set goals and progress steadily along paths that lead them to achieve much. When his involvement in the Quest has become a desperate affair to the point of morbid self-analysis endlessly repeated, it is time to restore his balance. How many misguided persons have condoned brining harm to a fellow human or animal creature by quoting a text or doctrine! #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Without discipline the passions and emotions may run wild. With excess discipline the heart may freeze, the man become fanatic and intolerant. In the scriptures Heavenly Father has stated His major goal concerning His work: “For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man,” reports Moses 1.39. One who follows the ways of the Lord will be neither slavish sycophant of modern sophistication nor an over-enthusiastic votary of ancient folly. To feel detachment from Earthly pleasures is one thing, but to feel distaste for them is another. He must not so clamp himself in the rigidity of any system as to turn it into a superstition. When criticism becomes so harsh that it becomes hysteria, the man has lost his balance. A mind surcharged with hysteria or neuroticism will not be able to appreciate, let alone find, the highest truth. A man must know his limitations, must know that there are certain desires he can never attain and certain people with whom he can never be at ease. Moreover, he must know other men’s limitations too, must realize that he can never make some understand, let alone sympathize with, his mystical outlook and that he can never bring the unevolved herd to give up their materialistic, racial, or personal prejudices. The simple life need not be a squalid one. The austere life need not be an ascetic one. There is room for aesthetic appreciation in the first and for reasonable comfort in the second. Both must respect the finer instincts and not decry them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
When it comes to marital life, a woman who was born with a mild drive for pleasures of the flesh and whose experiences while growing up did nothing to intensify that drive, for her, pleasures of the flesh in marriage is satisfying as long as it expresses warmth and tenderness and as long as she feels that her husband needs and values the love she is capable of giving him. And if, with good judgment and equally good luck, she has selected a man whose personality, attitudes and drive for pleasures of the flesh complement her own, she can have a genuinely happy marriage. Very few couples, however, start out perfectly matched. The question is whether a husband and wife can learn to respect and accommodate themselves to differences in the strength of their desires for pleasures of the flesh. Suppose, for example, that this young woman with limited drive for pleasures of the flesh marries a man whose enjoyment of pleasures of the flesh depends to some degree on the intensity of his partner’s enjoyment. In the beginning his pleasure inevitably will be somewhat tempered by his wife’s low-key responsiveness. If these two are to achieve a compatible relations with intimate passions, they must reach a mutual understanding of their individual natures. They must accept the fact that variations in drives for pleasures of the flesh do exist, that neither partner should apologize to the other for having more or less energy for pleasures of the flesh, that one is not “better” or “worse” than the other. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
The husband must make his wife feel that he accepts her nature for what it is and that any regret he may have about her inability to experience a more intense degree of pleasures of the flesh is genuine regret, not dissatisfaction. The wife in turn must make her husband feel that her muted response is not a reflection of his skill as a lover or in any way a personal rejection but her natural expression of fulfillment of pleasures of the flesh. Thus, instead of acting as two separate individuals with contrasting—or even conflicting—standards of behaviour involving pleasures of the flesh, they become a couple who honour the intimacy of their marriage. Limited responsiveness with pleasures of the flesh is, of course, often enough true of the male. The same principle applies—an acceptance of variations in natures of intimate passions. This means rejecting the idea that the husband is any less a man because his needs for pleasures of the flesh are less urgent than his wife expected, and it also means rejecting the idea that the wife is at fault because she fails to stimulate her husband to greater activity. The strength of the drive for pleasures of the flesh can change over a period of time. It is not fixed at a permanent level. A woman—and, of course, a man—may become more responsive; physical needs may surface more frequently and with greater intensity. If this happens, fine. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
However, it does not mean that there was anything wrong with that person before the change occurred. It simply indicated that the drives of pleasures of the flesh of this particular individual were stabilized at a lower level as a result of any number of factors, such as limited experience, personal problems, family demands and social pressures. As these things change, so does the behaviour of pleasures of the flesh. In trying to resolve their conflicts involving pleasures of the flesh by changing their ways of interacting, a man and woman can be easily discouraged. If their occasional and inevitable failures result in criticism or a loss of self-esteem, sooner or later the confidence that is needed to keep trying will evaporate and all efforts will stop. Continuation depends on encouragement, and the acceptance of failure as shared responsibility is encouraging. If only because it is preeminently realistic, the ability of both partners to share responsibility is additionally encouraging. Each is prepared to take into account the fact that both of them are not only fallible but temperamental, that they cannot and do not always act as they would like to, and that apologies are acceptable after something has gone wrong. This is an act of faith and it is crucial to the establishment of conciliation of intimate passions. To expect or want or need something of another person, and to let that person know this truth, is to be open to disappointment or denial. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
However, as long as the disappointment or denial is as long as it can be seen as a reflection of such things as forgetfulness, impatience, lethargy or unhappiness, the hurt can be accepted or at least put in perspective. And when forgiveness is later asked for—and given—sharing has taken place. Trust has been reaffirmed; openness to each other has been maintained; and the ongoing process of accommodation of pleasures of the flesh can continue. The “renunciate” who gloats over the miseries of life and points continually to its horrors is not necessarily wiser than the hedonist who sings over its joys and points continually to its beauties. Each has exaggerated his fact; each is too preoccupied with a single facet of existence. Wisdom lies in the impartial appraisal and the balanced view. We need all these virtues, yes, but we also need to practise them on the proper occasions—or they lose their values and do more harm than good. It is not the ordinary use and ingenious or aesthetic development of material things which corrupts man, but it is the excessive use of, and infatuated attachment to them which does so. The life of some unbalanced persons seems to be a periodic swing from one side of the pendulum to the other—that is, from extremes of emotional and physical sensuality to extremes of fanatic and wild asceticism. Their existence is filled with contradictions and discrepancies. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
The unseen source which suggests or encouraged fanatical austerities, extreme self-ordeals, or dramatically exaggerated sacrifices is suspect. When detachment is overdone it becomes a cold-bloodedness. The man then moves and acts like a marionette. There is a constant preaching of renunciation: abandon possessions, embrace poverty, chill off desires, and turn aside from luxuries. The high evaluation of poverty by holy men—in the preachments—is not seldom contradicted in their practice. If such ideas are not used to support harmful actions, why should he go out of his way to destroy religious ideas which others put their faith in. We must recognize that men are at different stages of response to the commands of Moses, the counsels of Jesus Christ. Consequently, it is vain to hope that they will accept or obey a universal rule of behaviour. Enthusiasm may degenerate into exaggeration. Note that ego consciousness needs to be stilled, and out of the way, for harmony to appear. It takes extra work to make a commitment last. Occasionally, an idea of what one is doing wrong in the relationship will break through clearly and be rememberable. Often why our relationships are not working out well tends out of reach because couples are not effectively communicating, which tends to create misunderstanding. It is possible to allow our experiences to grow strong and then deal with them without blocking them out. It is then more than likely that one will be able to address and deal with whatever images or voices appear. Sometimes they consist mainly of things said in a voice like one’s own thought. For others, images are more common than voices. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
What is said or imaged always rises unexpectedly and usually is not immediately understood. This is one difference from ego consciousness. When a man thinks of something, he has some anticipation for the next thought, and it appears familiar and understood. Conflict can be unanticipated, strange, surprising, and not even in one’s frame of reference. People often let experiences become frame of a single word or brief phrase said in an instant of time. The reaction for a lot of men is to grab onto the words, becoming too conscious and delaying the actual message. Autosymbolic refers to the mental process by which the mind easily forms representations of its own state. If one examines what was in consciousness at the moment the conflict arose, its meaning is clearer. If you are caught in a love polarity, you have an exaggerated desire to please and placate others, rather than express genuine caring. You have come to believe that relationships are best when you are kind to people, and so you “kill with kindness.” Part of your problem is that you have no real concept of your own self-worth, substituting it with the notion that you should “never be selfish” and care only for others. If instead you are a mater, you learn the beauty of self-expression. In other words, you become involved with what you like and thus you like being yourself. Not surprisingly, people then like you. You enjoy core-to-core contact with those you love. The contact need not be intimate passions, but an emotional kind of intimacy that can include tears, vulnerability, and trusting. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
On top of this, as a master, you enjoy the feeling of exhilaration in the natural swings between love and anger. When you can feel both of these things—without guilt, without apathy, and without fear—your life takes on a natural excitement. Your relationships are richer than before because you can recognize that people react according to their own feelings about things more so than according to anything you do. For many people, the script set can be so far removed from the reality of their life that there is no way to reconstruct it by mere observation or interpretation. The best way of getting a clear picture of what is going on with some people is through a dream. The “script-set dream” is recognizable because as soon as the person tells it, many things fall into place. Pictorially, it has no resemblance to the person’s actual way of life, but transactionally, it is an exact replica. A woman who was always “looking for a way out” dreamed that she was being chased, and found a tunnel that sloped downward. She crept into the tunnel and the people chasing her could not follow. They just stood guard hoping she would come out again. She discovered, however, that there was another gang of dangerous people waiting for her at the other end of the tunnel. Thus, she could go neither forward nor back; at the same time, if she relaxed, she would slide down into the arms of those who were waiting below. Therefore, she had to press with her hands against the side of the tunnel, and as long as she did that, she was safe. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
In script life, most of her life had been spent trapped in a tunnel in this cramped position, and it seemed clear from her attitudes and past history that the end of the script called for her to get tired of holding on and slide down into the arms of waiting death. She, too, had made considerable “progress” during her treatment up to that point. Translated, that progress meant “how to be more comfortable while holding on to the sides of a tunnel and waiting for death.” A script cure meant to get her out of the tunnel and into the real World, which again was a comfortable one for her. The tunnel was her script set. There are, of course, may other interpretations of this dream, as any freshman who has taken Psychology 1 can readily see. However, the script interpretation is important because it tells the therapist and the other group members, as well as the individual and her husband, what they are dealing with and what has to be done, and emphasizes that “progress” is not enough. The tunnel scene had probably remained unchanged since early childhood, as the patient had had this dream many times before. The concentration-camp scene is evidently a later adaptation of a child nightmare which the woman was able to recall. It was clearly based on early experiences modified by reading and adolescent fantasies. Adolescence, then, is the period when the fearsome tunnels of infancy are given a more realistic and contemporary form to build the operative script set for the individual’s life plan. This woman’s reluctance to probe into her husband’s “tricks” shows how tenaciously people cling to their script scenes while complaining about how disagreeable they are. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
The capacity to suppress emotional expression and to delay immediate responsiveness is valued by moralists and also by personality hygienists. However, the personality hygienist may differ from the moralist in that the hygienist affirms the value of the capacity to express emotional tensions just as much as the capacity to suppress them. The healthy personality displays neither immediate expression nor chronic suppression of emotion exclusively. Rather, the healthy personality displays a capacity to choose between the alternatives and suppression and expression. When it will not jeopardize important values, these people will express their feelings freely, laughing with gusto, crying without restraint, or expressing anger with vigour. If other values would be endangered by such emotionality, they are capable of suppressing their feelings and carrying on with whatever behaviour was in process at the time of emotional arousal. In the long run, however, this regime of selective suppression and release insures that the persons’ bodies and their ability to perform will not suffer the effects of prolonged emotion suppression and that they will not needlessly endanger their job, reputation, self-respect, and other important values by heedless emotional explosions. They can suppress when they choose, and they can let go when they choose—and it is they who do the choosing. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Emotion suppression becomes unhealthy when it is prolonged for any reason. When persons chronically suppress their emotions, they generally do so because they fear the consequences of emotional expression. Fear of emotional expression is often irrational, based on overgeneralization from unpleasant occurrences in the past. Perhaps someone was severely punished, or lost a job, because of an emotional outburst. From this one event, the person may have generalized that all emotional expression is dangerous or bad. Thus, the person comes to suppress feelings—though he or she is fully aware of them—without discrimination. The longer-range consequences of chronic suppression may be psychosomatic illness (provided other necessary and sufficient causes are present), such as elevated blood pressure, mucous colitis, asthma, peptic ulcers, chronic fatigue (it consumes energy to suppress hostility and other strong feelings), muscular aches and pains, migraine like headaches, impaired work and study efficiency, inability to concentrate, impaired reality contact, and impaired relationships with people who want their friends and loved ones to be able to express feelings. The chronic suppressor is often derogated as a “sick,” “stone-face,” or “iceberg”—someone who is “less than human.” Every beginner must remember that his own way to the truth is not the only way. However perfectly it suits his need and temperament, it may not suit another man’s. Each gains his understanding of it according to the level of his evolution. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
The terrestrial politics are rooted Newtonian-Euclidean reality. They are based upon territorial mammalian competitions between neighbouring hives who share the same neurotechnological level. Each quantum jump in neurotechnology increases the size of the political unit. Tribes are swallowed up by neighbours who have superior artifacts. Higher technology nations set up territorial boundary tensions of greater extension. In the latter 20th Century China and Russian confronted each other along a 3000-mile border with the same nervous, bluffing robot postures of four-foot mammals protecting turf. Ideological differences are, of course, irrelevant in mammalian terrestrial politics. The enmity is instinct-robotic. Neighbouring gene pools have to compete according to a relentless law of territorial—plus-minus—magnetism. To occupy an ecological niche is automatically to be “against” those who inhabit the neighbouring niche. To illustrate the limbic, primitive-brain nature of the Old World politics consult the map illustrating the state of terrestrial politics in the latter 20th Century. We see that Morocco received its arms from America and that its neighbour, Algeria, obtained weapons from Russia. The border between the two neighbours was tense. The next country, Tunisia, received its arms from America and quarreled with both its neighbours, leftist Algeria and leftist Libya. Poor confused Egypt caught between Black and White ambiguity switched from Russian to America. For example, Egypt managed to maintain hostile contact with both its neighbour—Libya and Israel—regardless of the ideological paradox! #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Continuing down our past, we note that Israel fought Syria. Syria growled at Israel above and Iraq below. Iraq fought Iran. Iran snarled at Afghanistan. Afghanistan frowned at Pakistan. Pakistan hated India. India tensed against China. China suspiciously rubbed up against Russia and the South East Asian states—all of which distrusted their neighbours, regardless of ideology. An examination of the politics of Southern Africa at that time reveals the same checkerboard sequence of neighborhood confrontations. South East Asia provided a similar confirmation of the theory that terrestrial politics produces an almost perfect unbroken sequence of robot mammalian-territorial confrontations. A magnetic ordering of plus-minus charges in neighbouring units develops. With robot regularity, and with an amazing disregard for common sense or political principles, each country opposes it neighbours. Even the renowned 20th Century political theorist Henry Kissinger failed to understand this neuro-political principle because he was so totally robotized—like iron filings held in a magnetic field—in confrontation with Russia. Mr. Kissinger believed in the Domino Theory—if South Vietnam fall, then all the South East Asian nations would topple shoulder-to-shoulder into monolithic Communism. This paranoia, for which 282,000 USA and allied military deaths occurred, completely disregarded the obvious. Once Saigon collapsed, then the nature took over! Cambodia attacked Vietnam. Vietnam raided Laos. Thailand snarled at Vietnam. And all Southeast Asian countries opposed their northern neighbour China. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Being a member of the Sacramento Fire Department means being a leader, a counselor, a strategist, and a motivator. While it is important for fire fighters to be able to articulate the seven Fire Fighter Values, it is even more imperative that they be able to demonstrate these values in their daily interactions with others. Values are the foundation of the Sacramento Fire Department. Personal development, values, ethics, officership, tactics, and techniques, are the fundamentals for setting direction, problem solving, and methods for building stronger relationships. When thinking of the Sacramento Fire Department, some will undoubtedly pick out only those traits which are shown in deeds of physical prowess, or in firefighting, discovery, exploration and the like. However, we also have to see and appreciate those gentler traits that are no less heroic. The fact that patience under ordinary difficulties, persistent industry in mastering the ordinary and hard things of life, the ability to forgive injuries and rise to superior to petty annoyances are just as heroic, and quite as hard to cultivate, as courage in the face of danger, or brave fighting when all the accompanying circumstances tend to arouse the best that is in one. Good health and a strong body play a part in making a member of the Sacramento Fire Department. Courage and the power to do hard things is largely dependent upon these. Hence the duty of proper care for their health and their physical powers. Also, keep the education and training in mind. Many of these characters accomplish many of their greatest deeds through their intellectual power. And the Sacramento Fire Department also has heart qualities, the power of goodness. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
No amount of physical strength or intellectual power will ever make a man a hero worthy of the name unless he be also a good man, loving his fellow men and willing to give his life for service. It is not only missing the aim of such a course of study to allow it to pass without the effort to grow more worthy of one’s best ideals; it is even dangerous to allow one’s ideals to be enlarged and one’s better impulses to be quickened without such effort. It is the hope and prayer of the author of fire programs that out of them there may come to firefighters and EMTs a higher ideal and nobler purpose for living, a gleam of the divine ideal for us all that shall strengthen them to “Follow the Christ, the King, live pure, speak true, right wrong…else, wherefore born?” “I go trout fishing in the spring and duck hinting in the fall and play basketball in the summer. I also play football and tennis. When I was voted into the fire department, even as an apprentice, my kids were very proud of me. It was exciting for them to have a father who was a firefighter. A lot of their friends would come over to see what I looked like. When I was going through training, I would have the kids come over and teach them about what it means to be a fire fighter. I feel that all the children on the block have a good sense of fire prevention and fire safety now. On several occasions in the wintertime, without me knowing, my wife would go out in her robe and boots and start my car up. She’d warm it up while I was getting my gear on. She does have fears. It scares her at times that I may never come back. She’s been my childhood sweetheart since we were fifteen years old, and I’ve been married to her for sixteen years, so we’ve shared a good twenty-some years. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
This Friday I’ll be doing fire prevention for the sixth graders over at X school. And by daughter is in the fifth grade. She can’t wait till I come so people can see her dad is a firefighter. And my other daughter, who is six, is in the first grade. I’m also going to the first grade, so she is real excited and keeps telling her teacher every day that I’m coming in. I went this week, on my own time, to my son’s class. He’s eight. We weren’t scheduled to see his class, but his teacher called and said they were learning about fire departments and asked me to come in. So I came in with all my gear and showed the kids what a firefighter wears, and explained what happens when they call and how important it is that they give good direction and an address when they call. It was a rewarding half hour. I got a wonderful thank-you note signed by all the kids. That’s the kind of thing I think children really need: they need someone who really wants to tech them. My oldest son—he’s twelve—goes to private school. He’s near genius, that’s why we put him in a different school. I want for my children whatever they want for themselves. I try to trach them that no matter who you are, you can be whatever you want to be. In my house, to survive, I teach the kids to know how to do all the chores, whether you are a man or a lady. That’s how I was raised, boys and girls have to know how to cook and mow the lawn. Every week we had a different job to do, so we were very well rounded by the time we left home. Yes, they could be President, if they want. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
“I did teach them, too, that it’s not easy. If you want something, you have to work your arse off for it. It didn’t come easy to me, and I know from now till the day I die I will have to work to keep up, with everything in the fire service changing so fat. My wife and I both work at a heating and colling company. She’s president, and I’m vice president. We started out with only three of us, and now there are seventeen workers and nine trucks. It’s an enjoyable business, and what’s amazing is that we can go to work and still be together. A lot of people might find that difficult, but I enjoy it. I sometimes do the office work, and she helps with the bidding and proposals and blueprints, estimating, things like that. I think I’ve done right, I have no regrets. Just like going into business, this was a dream my wife and I had, and I knew that if we never tried it, we’d never know if we could make it. So we tried it and made it. If we hadn’t, at least we could say, “Hey, we tried.” We helped build our own home. We had both lived in Colfax all out lives, and we came out here in 2020. It took us six months. My wife and I did all the heating, electrical, and plumbing. She was right by my side. We would just take up a bunch of Pampers and food for the weekend, come down here with the kids, and we’d work on the house. My most relaxing time is to dim the lights and listen to some music. To sit down and watch football. To be human together. I think that’s most important. A lot of times when I come back from a fire scene or a medical run, I can’t go to sleep. And it’s sort of neat, because what I do then is, I clean. I turn the music on low and just go around the house and clean. My wife thinks it’s great. She’ll get up, look around, and say, “Oh, it was a good run last night, huh?” #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
“We have a small fireplace, and a lot of times it’s very relaxing for me to sit in front of it and see a controlled situation, where fire can be beautiful, as opposed to being so deadly in nature. That’s a really nice feeling. We take the kids everywhere we go. We go up north to her parents’ cottage. We took them on an airplane for the first time this year. We flew to Florida. We went to Disney World and Epcot Center. It wasn’t really long enough, it was only three days, but we all needed to get away from business and the fire service, and just from home, I think. My wife goes to fire department functions with me. I would never go without her.” Understanding the expectations and applying the attributes and competencies prepares the Sacramento Fire Department for situations they are likely to encounter. Fire fighters who gain expertise through operational assignments, institutional learning, and self-development will be versatile enough to adapt to most situations and grow into greater responsibilities. All members of the Sacramento Fire Department are loyal, dedicated to duty, respectful, selfless, honourable, possess a great deal of integrity and display personal courage in the face of danger and adversity. You can save lives by making a donation to the Sacramento Fire Department. As a reminder, parents, pleasure teach your children love America and be patriotic citizens and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. In an effort to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars. American made cars used to be the envy of the World and because American car brands are offering a wide range of options, from family SUVs to electric vehicles and luxury sedans, we are now seeing a resurging interest. American made cars are equal or superior to those made overseas. The Chevrolet Trax, for instance, is a well-designed, fuel efficient, and safe SUV. And as you know, there is no better car on Earth than 1950-1970s American Muscle Car. Americans make sure superior product, but we are buying things from other nations. American food imports have risen by 300 percent since 1999. American farmland declined by nearly 20 million acres between 2017 and 2022. As of 2022, there were 880.1 million acres of land dedicated to farming, compared to 900.1 million in 2017. The data shows there are now little more than 1.9 million farms in the country. Americans and American corporations spent $136 billion on food and beverages from other countries. It is a national security risk to lose American Farms and farmers. If there is a war, and most of our meat, produce, poultry, dairy, and fruit is coming from foreign counties, we stand the risk of starving. With war breaking out all over the World, in these uncertain times, it is very important to bring American farms back. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. As money flows, it influences further investment. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever. Also, to ensure that we have farmland for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrant to America. Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a populations that equally represents all races of people. If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in American, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in American which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the nation debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by send more money overseas. Buying American made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards in regard to pollution. American companies have to be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human minds to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
The Winchester Mystery House
Experience an unforgettable journey back to the time of kings and queens with this entry ticket for The Winchester Mansion in Santa Clara, California which was the residence of Sarah L. Winchester. Take advantage of this fascinating experience. After tour, there will be time enjoy the mansion’s splendor at your own pace. You might even discover secret passages.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Movement is Unsafe at Any Speed
The Saviour will not tolerate abuse, and as His disciples, neither can we. However, tragically, there are some communities determined to abuse others. If a man becomes cold, pitiless, impenetrable, if he sets himself altogether apart from the life and feelings of other men, if he is dead to the claims of music and the beauties of art, be sure he is an intellectualist or a fanatical ascetic—not a philosopher. We need not become less human because we seek to make ourselves better men. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful will refine, and not destroy, out human qualities. When you find it impossible to attain yourself, why demand it in others? When they mock your own strivings and aspirations, why impose ideal standards on them? When virtue is too self-conscious, it becomes Vanity. The path from arrogance to madness is a short one. If we want to keep sane, it is safer to keep humble. When mysticism leads stolid apathy toward World-suffering, when it paralyses all sympathy for fellow creatures, it is time to call a halt. The holier-than-thou attitude which condemns the sins of other men implies its own sinlessness. This is not only to commit the sin of spiritual pride but also to fall into the pit of self-deception. Do not maintain a position which conscience, common sense, or intuition show you later to be wrong. Have the willingness to withdraw from it. He should shun the unphilosophic attitude which sees one side as all pessimistic and the other side as all optimistic, for he should understand that both have a contribution to make. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
Nothing is to be hated but everything is to be understood. Nobody is his enemy for everybody is his tutor, albeit usually an unconscious one and often only teaching us by his own ugly example what to avoid. It is in the nature of unbalanced and unphilosophic mentalities to see everything in extremes only and to confront others with the unnecessary dilemmas which they pose for themselves. A book that has not taken a laugh at life somewhere in its ramble, becomes a born. A man who has not found the fun in life at some time, has somehow failed. However, at the same time everyone cannot give years and years of intense thought and concentration to trying to solve the most difficult problems of life without becoming stamped with gravity, not only in mind but also in body. If he is well-balanced, however, he will appreciate the lighter side of life and enjoy it without losing his earnestness. No single factor is usually responsible for a particular evil and no single remedy can cure it. Reformers are usually one-eyed and take our attention away from important contributory causes in order that we may fasten it upon the one which they happened to have picked out. They are doubtlessly well-meaning, but are apt to be dangerously fanatical. When fears and wishes wholly control a man’s thinking, instead of reason and truth, we must guard ourselves against his statements, commands, doctrines, and ideas. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
The average American wants economic security because he wants to satisfy a higher standard of material living than exists anywhere else in the World. And the average American is right. Let him not degrade himself materially at the behest of others who wish to impose an ideal on others which was never intended for the World at large. Philosophical mysticism cannot appreciate, much less accept, the kind of nonattachment which runs to fanatic extremes or which makes too great outward fuss of itself. It cannot find any enthusiasm for politicians’ refusal to handle money properly because they regard it with an immature mind as they are not held responsible for their spending. More politicians need to develop the moral purity and sincerity and learn to deplore their mental unbalance. The cynic who despises and distrusts human nature is seeing only a fragment of it, and not the full circle. It is good in a World where there is so much evil, so any wrong-doers, to be cautious. However, carry this quality to excess and you breed timidity or fear, which are evils in themselves. He should beware lest in his recoil against trying to satisfy the demands of an unworthy sensuality, he falls into the opposite extreme of trying to satisfy the demands of an impossible renunciation. It is possible to show a faithful devotion to principles without becoming either fierce or fanatical about them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
These extremists tell us that such a reconciliation of the spiritual with the human is impossible, that the two aims are mutually discordant and utterly irreconcilable, that they contradict each other and if attained would destroy each other, and that either the first or the second will eventually and inevitably have to be abandoned. Sometimes it is better to be suspicious of such an oversimplification. It may lead us more quickly to truth, but it may also mislead us. And this is one of the times when such caution is called for. It is a common phrase in literature, instructions, and rules of totalitarian movements—especially political movements—to say that not the slightest deviation may be made from the line laid down by the authority. The ascetic demand that we renounce art, turn our backs on aesthetic feelings, and reject beauty may seem a necessary one. However, we have to beware here of falling into the danger which Angelique de Arnauld, Abbess de Port Royal, fell into. She said: “Love of poverty makes one whose what is ugliest, coarsest, and dirtiest.” She was the same Mother Superior who refused to allow any form of recreation to her nuns, so that some of them suffered from psychosis and/or neurosis. Those lovers of excessive asceticism who shiver at the sight of beauty, shrink from the thought of refinement, and brush off all suggestions of cleanliness as time-wasting, thereby proclaim the opposites by implication. That is to say, they proclaim dirt, squalor, and ugliness as being spiritual. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
This insistence on interfering with other people’s lives on behalf of some fanatical belief, this minding every business but one’s own is a great troublemaker. It is the cause of the World’s divisions into two fighting camps today. One of the signs of fanaticism is its conceited assurance; another its lunatic extremist attitude which denounces a moderate position as heretical. If he overdoes his remorse and stretches out his repentance too far; if his self-examination and self-criticism become unreasonably prolonged and unbearably overconcentrated, the actuating motive will then be not true humility but neurotic pity for himself. When active in the World, take the spiritual life seriously, but not too seriously to the extent of becoming a fool or a fanatic. The fanatic mutilates himself, deprives his kind of all the great accumulation of wide experience, original thought, and intuitive feeling which exists in the rest of the human race or in its records. He who has caught the spirit of philosophy cannot become a narrowminded fanatic or a conversational bore. He does not shut out the activities of human intelligence and human creativity from his interest, but lets them in. With fanatic hatred as his spirit and verbal violence as his expression, a man can never make a bad state of affairs better. By thinking such false thoughts, he can only make it worse. When views are so wide of the truth and so violent in expression, he cannot become a leader of people but only their misleader. He is an unfortunate sufferer in a psychopathic state and needs remedial treatment to restore his lost mental balance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
The spirit appropriate to certain forms of rebellion which consists in re-establishing reason at the end of an irrational adventure, of rediscovering order by means of disorder and of voluntarily loading oneself down with chains still heavier than those from which release is sought, must constantly make allowances for the possibility that his own attitudes are not the higher self’s. Despair, fed by the prejudice of hallucination, imperturbably leads to the mass abrogation of laws both social and divine, and to theoretical and practical wickedness. However, conformity can be passionate, and thereby a out of the ordinary. To console humanity, to treat it as a brother, to return to Jesus Christ, Socrates, moralists who wandered through villages, dying of hunger, are still the projects of despair. Thus, virtue and an ordered life have a nostalgic appeal in the midst of vice. However, when confronted with life and death, no mind is an impartial one. The taste of the absolute and the frenzy of annihilation can sterilize a man. Conformity is one of the nihilistic temptations of rebellion which dominate a large part of our intellectual history. If he forgets his origins, it demonstrates how the rebel who take to action is tempted to succumb to the most absolute conformity. Ands so it explains the twenty-first century. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
Of course, genius cannot be separated from banality. However, it is not a question of the banality of others—the banality that we vainly try to capture and which itself captures the creative person, where necessary, with the help of the censors. For the creative person it is a question of his own form of banality, which must be completely created. Every genius is at once extraordinary and banal. If he is only one or the other, he is nothing. It has its dandies and its menials, but it does not recognize its legitimate sons. When the caravans of futique gene-pools fleeing West hit the beached of the North Atlantic, an interesting thing happened. The Dark Ages (sic) occurred when this Westward wave of intelligent gene-pools crashed against the North Atlantic wall. Thousands of restless gene-pools had to wait in Western Europe until they got smart enough—technologically skillful enough—to move sperm-egg flotilla up the North Atlantic. The vanguard elite clustered in Ireland—as far West as possible. Darwinians did not understand. It is not survival of the fittest; it is the evolution of the fastest in the Human Race. Cocoon preparation for migration—here was the familiar test of nerve and intelligence. During the Dark Ages, the hive fear merchants said, “Stay put. The World is flat. If you sail across the North Atlantic, you will fall off the edge. You will be eaten by dragons, or busted by narcotic agents.” Or whatever they spooked people with back them. Recall here the etymology of the World locomotor. Fast movers throughout the history of evolution have always been considered “loco” or “crazy” by static hive-establishments. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
The Paleolithic conservatives warned the restless marine creatures away from the shoreline. Unicellular bureaucrats warned protozoic out-cast about hooking up in multiceullar linkages. The explosion did take place. The World is not flat, it is a spinning sphere. Eventually the DNA code reacting to the stimuli of pollution and overpopulation activated the mobility-agents. Celtic Rangers were the first to climb the Atlantic. Prince Henry, the Navigator, sent Vasco da Gama around the Hord; Queen Isabella pawned her jewels to fund the NASA explorations of Christopher Columbus. Queen Elizabeth got an appropriation from Parliament to fund the astronaut voyages of Sir Francis Drake. At this swarming moment of expansion and exploration, the great European powers reached the high points of their culture, drama, poetry, art, science and philosophy. That Dark Age was a pre-mutation period of growth-limitation, fear, bureaucratic hive-restriction, proto-Naderism which said: “Movement is unsafe at any speed.” To say that Old World natives inhabit primitive ecological niches, is not to be chauvinistic. I descend from German stock. Californians are as far removed from the Reformation Wars as Luther was from the Neanderthal. To say that Europeans are feudal-insectoid, that Africans are tribal-primates, that Japanese are techno-insectoid, is not to deny the ecological unity of all life on this planet. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
DNA wants the whales to survive, DNA want the crafty Middles-Easterners to continue to quarrel over borders. We can respect the ant-hill commitment of the Chinese to the super-insect Mao, and appreciate the technological skill of the web-spinning spidery-electronic Japanese. We can revere our midbrain and spinal links to the Old World and at the same time we must recognize our genetic ascendance beyond our primate, mammalian, insectoid roots. Arizona and California are states totally populated by migrants squeezed forward by Old World gene-pools. The smart Africans have left African and are in America. Futique Mexicans swarm the river. The superior Jews landed at Ellis Island along with the genetically selected Germans—all of our ancestors moving to the Sunset Strip in response to the genetic imperative. Nor are these remarks demeaning to the Old-World Old Brain residents. Migration still continues. This week, several thousand Africans, Asians, Europeans left the Old Brain Hemisphere and carried their ovaries and testicles Westward. If any Old Brain citizen is insulted by these remarks, we repeat the affectionate invitation—of you are genetically selected to advance neurogenic intelligence on this nursery plant, you will head for the Western Frontier tomorrow. If you are geared to create the future gene-pools, move West to join us. Come on up, you happy Arabs and you mellow Jews and you clever Africans and you alert Mexicans and you restless, freedom-loving Asians. We need your adventurous intelligence to join us in the next great migration. If you are geared to creature the future gene-pools, move West to join us. Westward High. Regardless of race, creed, colour, national origin. We need you up here with us on the frontal lobe of this primitive planet. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
Living the law of chastity helps us to recognize our shared divine potentials be more confident in our relationships. Sometimes married couples have issues that they need to work out, and the time to listen is when someone needs to be heard. Talking is certainly not the only ways of communicating about pleasures of the flesh and it is not necessarily the best way; words can mislead as well as illuminate, and there can be many a slip between implication and inference. Nevertheless for most people, most of the time, talking is an indispensable line of communication, and the fact that the line goes dead when pleasures of the flesh are the subject means that in marriage a considerable amount of important information remains shrouded in silence. Assuming, however, that each partner sees the situation through the other’s eyes, the next step is to improve matters—to negotiate the differences that threaten to deprive the couple of the gratification they both want. Negotiating differences, however, is not a matter of bargaining or setting terms. Negotiate, in these circumstances, reflects its definition as meaning “to move through, around or over in a satisfactory way, as in dancing.” And the purpose of negotiation is conciliation. (Conciliate is derived from the Latin conciliare, meaning “to bring together, unite,” a term that seems singularly appropriate.) Business negotiations end with a conditional contract which states, in effect, “If and when you do X, I will do Y.” Pleasures of the flesh negotiations end with a trusting commitment which states, in effect, “I will do my best to do X because I know you will do you best to do Y.” If such expressions of willingness to change are to be anything more than the empty promises characteristics of couples who are making up after a quarrel, they must be translated into reciprocal action. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
Generally speaking, it is not enough for just one person to make an effort. Under those circumstances, what may seem to be passive acceptance of chance on the other person’s part is actually disguised passive resistance. A husband and wife, for instance, can agree that she has been much more eager for pleasures of the flesh than he has and that, without intending to, she has made him more resistant than he would otherwise be. If she makes an effort to restrain her expression of desire, he says that he will take the initiative more frequently than he has in the past. Each understands the other’s feelings; both express a determination to change their habitual ways of interacting. Soon enough, however, it becomes evident that while the wife is holding to her promise, the husband’s response is something less than impressive. From the wife’s point of view, pleasures of the flesh occur with frustrating infrequency. Again they talk; again they resolve to do better; and once again the husband’s actions fail to match his intentions. Plainly his avowed wish to improve his relationship with pleasures of the flesh with his wife is not a truthful representation of his deepest feelings. For reasons which he himself may not understand, he is not actively committed to conciliation. He is, in reality, resisting it. The commitment requires each partner to try—and to keep on trying. It is the effort itself that means so much, even when success is not immediately achieved. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
If, in the previous instance, the husband tries to reach out to his wife, no matter how ineffectually or stumblingly, the effort will tell her, without a word, that he cares about pleasing her and values their bonding with pleasures of the flesh; at the very least he will spare her the feelings or rejection and anger that must otherwise turn her completely against him. In fact, the struggle to do what is obviously difficult is often more impressive evidence of emotional commitment than the actual achievement. The struggle is a measure of devotion; the achievement is not necessarily so. However, simple tenacity of purpose is not the entire answer, either. The process of negotiation of pleasures of the flesh hinges, to a considerable degree, on how failure is handled. What a mane and woman need of each other is the security that comes from knowing that occasional failures will not be used against them—they will not ridiculed, scolded or punished. On the contrary, the failures will not be his or hers but theirs. The couple can wander through their feelings. The language is images. From the perspective of this mood the scientific way of presenting human matters looks like the naked timbers of a house constrained to rise vertically, evenly spaced, rising just so far under command. One’s mood wanders like water over ground, down through dark soil, creeping around rocks deep into unseen places, wandering endlessly to the sea as if possessed. If the inner spirit wanders thus, why imitate it in any stiff, pale, reflected image? #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
One’s feelings come to a pause like water slowly collecting and spreading in a low place in the ground. It grows stiflingly and hot and feverish, but what is one’s concern? Hot blind concern not yet able to name itself—fearing it may end in useless emptiness like water that cannot bring anything to fruition. In the dark fingers of self lies nameless concern, its own creation of pressure. The feeling changes as though right has been done by naming it, permitting fidelity to itself. There open out fragments of images. Respect these too and see where they lead. One may see an incense burner in a church (tears at naming it), old hand-wrought metal, a fragrant woody odor that fills with its presence. There are fragments of Hebrew on parchment. The sense of lovingly carved wood and stolid images looking back at one. The sense of stillness, endlessness; the sense of the sacred and holy. Now the pen stops, for in this peace there are no queries and nothing to be done. It is its own doing. Standing back and evaluating as ego, would has to say that he has entered his feelings, first finding them random wans wandering, then gradually centering in concern, and finally coming to a peaceful states which is familiar and welcome. Are not the layers of self always in the same sequence? First stand forth straight-timbered ego consciousness which obeys the will of Worldly custom smiling to please the customers. Behind this the wayward wandering spirit which is at home in nameless feelings and intimations. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
Having entered this dark and uncertain passageway, in a moment there come forth images, memories, groups, of possibilities. If the ego consciousness smiling at customers, and obeying custom is him, then somewhere beyond feelings rises l’autre moi—the other man in a strange land of exotic markets and places where foreign tongues are intuited and nothing is strange. Like an intermediary, feeling lies between him and the other him. It is an intimation of the deeper self. He can hardly say his feelings are not him, yet they are so little of his direct fashioning and follow so little his customs that he cannot claim to be their master but rather their servant. They are the go-between, the mediator between him and the other him. The idea of l’autre moi, the other me, accords the full rights and even personhood to the inner. The other me (him) is what consciousness which named the other region (un-conscious) an un-like itself. Out of this prejudice has come the professional cult of undoing the unconscious that might rise to respectable egohood. Might it not be that consciousness can become less the storekeeper and more comfortable in its own home? Might it not be that the inner is the real master and the better master? A man whose physical motion during pleasures of the flesh are not to his wife satisfaction because he moves too rapidly and forcefully, in a rhythm and with movements that are not in harmony with her own, she finds her responsiveness impaired. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
Finally she tells him what is wrong, and he immediately wants her help in changing the way he uses his body. Although the first few times he blunders and reverts to old rhythms, she corrects him with her hands, and soon he improves. The intimate mood is never shattered. Navigating these tricky emotional currects requires that each partner be constantly aware of the other’s efforts. This can be seen more clearly by contrast with other kinds of responses that might have been made. The wife might have been condescendingly patient (“Well, dear, I will be glad to show you once more”) or annoyed (“Clumsy!”) or discouraged (“Oh, not again!). The husband might have been angry (Do not tell me what to do!”) or critical (“You do not know what you are talking about”) or deflated (I am sorry, but can we try again later?”). Or each might have remained silent, the wife with her hands motionless, and each could have assumed the worst—the husband, that nothing he could do would ever satisfy his wife; the wife, that her husband cared only about his own pleasure. Variations on the script are almost limitless, but the underlying point is that a successful approach is a creative act, and the credit belongs to both partners. Conversely, any failure would be a joint failure. Each would have failed to meet the other’s needs in the most painful of all circumstances: when each feels himself or herself to be alone, uncertain and exposed—and desperately in need of help and reassurance. (This may cast some light on the reason why an effective relationship involving pleasures of the flesh contributes so much strength to a marriage. It is not simply because of the physical pleasure the husband-and-wife experience, important though that is. It is because of the powerful sense of emotional well-being that comes when each partner knows that at times of greatest vulnerability, the other can be relied on to provide warmth, comfort and protection.) #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
What this means, in terms of the husband who was trying to harmonize his rhythms with those of his wife, is that on an occasion when his efforts would prove unsuccessful, she would understand that the failure was in part her own. She might not say so in words, but if she communicated an awareness of sharing the responsibility—of having failed to let him know when his movements started going wrong or of failing to make the effort to encourage him to move differently or of failing to cope with feelings of frustration and annoyance—she would at least have given him the confidence to try again. One cautionary note: Anu individual’s level of tension with pleasures of the flesh—the power of the drive for pleasures of the flesh—is not easily changed by conscious decision, and it is important for both partners to take this into account. To a large extent, the strength of the drive for pleasures of the flesh is influenced both by cultural values and by the individual’s unique experience growing up in that culture. However, apart from these influences, there seems to be an innate level of drive for pleasures of the flesh that varies from person to person. Why one person is born with a stronger drive than another, since has not yet determined. However, we do know that the inner World differs in critical ways from our ordinary consciousness. People apparently vary in their power to even note hypnogogic experiences. Under careful examination it soon becomes apparent that a delicate balance must be struck between ego consciousness and the autonomous appearance of l’autre moi. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
One can wander for months in a region where worries or concerns fill the mind and ego consciousness frets over its problems. Or one can still the mind by fixating on one thought or one sensation until it is relatively quiet. Then around the fringe of the conscious center spontaneous images appear. Whether words or images come first reflect personality difference (intuitive versus sensation types in Dr. Jung’s terms?). These fragile fringe phenomena are an unexpected, delicate penumbra surrounding the conscious center. Note that ego consciousness needs to be stilled, and out of the way, for the hypongogic to appear. Though it may not appear so at first, there is a choice involved in expressing your emotions as they come up. That choice is: (1) taking the risk of doing something that may have repercussions (like expressing irritation to the boss (2) or playing it safe. Playing it safe can take the form of venting your anger on someone who cannot fight back, like young children. It can take the form of stopping at the pub on the way home, having a few stiff ones and telling the bartender about it. Or it can take the form of just stuffing down anger and hoping it will go away—which it does not. One important reason that people play it safe and do not express their anger is that they do not trust the marvelous, miraculous mechanism they were born with. A mechanism which has its own natural restraining function. If allowed to feel what is feel and express what it needs to express, a mechanism which will take perfect care of you all your life. If you lose your temper, you need not fear what you may do—unless you have been holding your temper unnaturally. If you have been expressing your anger, then let go and do not worry about it. You will not kill anyone. You will not slug your boss in the mouth. You will not regret anything you say. Your natural restraining function takes care of you—by automatically balancing the centrifugal and centripetal force of anger and love. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
As a practical matter, however, we are all running around with many kinds of repressed anger, that is, anger which has been subconsciously pushed down, but not out. So as a practical matter, you cannot assume that every expression of anger will be harmless. Instead, when you get angry in a way that is out of proportion to the event at hand, another form of restraint comes into play. It is the set of external restraints imposed upon you since childhood: scolding, isolation, restriction of movement, all the things your parents once did. The things that bosses, policemen and various-other people do today. This system of outside restraints keeps you from acting in inappropriate ways. What’s inappropriate? Only you can answer that—on the basis of your background, experience, where you live, and whom you live with. Basically, you know what kind of behaviour people around you will put up with. You know what you can get arrested for in your town. The thing to develop is the habit if expressing yourself so that you do not have to rely on these outside restraints. The prospect of prison may keep you from shooting someone, but you want to avoid shooting someone even if there were no prisons. You want to reply on your natural, internal restraining function rather than the imposed, external system of restraints. The natural restraining function never fails. The other system is undependable. Expressing your feelings increases your confidence in the natural restraining function and decreases your reliance on outside restraints. It also helps you to live less like a manipulator and more like a master. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
Suppressed emotional excitement interferes with rational activity. Dr. Reich coined the term emotional plague to describe the far-reaching impairments of logical reasoning and accurate perception produced by prolonged suppression of sexual and emotional tension. A paranoid dread of communists or a chronic belief that one is going to be sexually assaulted illustrate forms of emotional plague. In addition to the effects on rational thinking, emotion suppression appears to interfere with the efficiency of skilled behaviour. One cannot play the piano, repair machinery, or knit with efficient speed and dispatch when one is full of unexpressed fear, hostility grief, or laughter. Finally, it may happen that the cumulative effects of suppression may eventuate in such powerful tension that control becomes impossible; the person then explodes with more violent expression than would have been the case had that person reacted much earlier. Many persons have committed acts of destruction when they could no longer suppress conscious hostility. Violently emotional exaggerated statements, reckless hysterical extremist screams should warn us that they come out of some sort of imbalance, that it is time for caution, prudence, reserve. He can be quietly enthusiastic about his cherished beliefs without indulging in propagandist shrieks. The discipline of passion, the checking of emotion, and the ruling of the flesh do not demand that we are to turn into inert wooden creatures. We may still keep the zest for life, the enthusiasm for worthwhile things, and the appreciation of art and beauty, but we shall keep these things in the proper place. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
On the shoulders of the Sacramento Fire Department rest this mission: Save lives, save property, prevent fire, and extinguish fires. The desire to accomplish that mission despite all the challenges makes the job of a firefighter different from all other professions. A firefighter must strive to become the very best leader: the people deserve nothing less. When they took their oath, when they agreed to be leaders, they entered into a pact with their crew and the nation. As a member of the Sacramento Fire Department, crews are capable of great patience and persistence and tremendous loyalty, as they show every day. They show up and do the work, no matter how frightening, no matter how boring, no matter how risky or bloody or exhausting. It is about living up to their ultimate responsibility. They have the capacity to assess situations or circumstances shrewdly and draw sound conclusions. When you are a firefighter what you do is every bit as important as the knowledge you possess. “I didn’t get married until just before I made lieutenant. I had been going with a girl for quite a while, from the time I came on the job. We had a talk before we decided to get married, and I told her that if she was against the fire department we might as well break up, because I couldn’t give it up and there was no sense going through life hating me over it. She certainly accepted the department, and we’ve never had a bit of a problem on that score. When I worked nights, she would do things that she wanted to do, like wash her hair or visit friend. It’s worked out fine. She accepted my idiosyncrasies and adjusted to them. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
“We don’t have any children. My brother has a boy and two girls. The son is not a fire buff. My brother wanted him to do his own thing. He was in the Air Force, and he married a girl. He has some interest in the firefighting job, but I wouldn’t call him a buff by any means. So there are no more relatives on the job. I’m the only Supple left on the SFD. My wife and I like to travel very much. We’ve tried to take some kind of trip every year, and every two or three years we make an exotic one. Last May, we went to Germany, which was her ambition. She’s a Germanic buff. I didn’t get to a firehouse in Germany because we were on tour. But I was on a street corner near a hotel when a rig came along. By the time I noticed that it was a fire engine, it was going past me. I said, ‘Aw, nuts.’ My wife said, ‘They’re going to get caught by the traffic light at the corner. ‘So I ran up to the corner, I had my camera out, and I was taking a picture. As I was doing that, I wondered if I was allowed to take pictures? I saw the officer looking at me with a sort of quizzical look, so, in sign language, I pointed to myself, I pointed to the rig, and he got a big smile on his face and gave me a big thumbs-up signal. As they went around the corner, he must has said something, because four heads turned and four hands came out with the thumbs-up signal. I thought that was great. Firemen are firemen, wherever you go.” #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
Understanding the expectations and applying the attributes and competencies prepares the Sacramento Fire Department for situations they are likely to encounter. Fire fighters who gain expertise through operational assignments, institutional learning, and self-development will be versatile enough to adapt to most situations and grow into greater responsibilities. All members of the Sacramento Fire Department are loyal, dedicated to duty, respectful, selfless, honourable, possess a great deal of integrity and display personal courage in the face of danger and adversity. You can save lives by making a donation to the Sacramento Fire Department. As a reminder, parents, pleasure teach your children love America and be patriotic citizens and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. In an effort to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars. American made cars used to be the envy of the World and because American car brands are offering a wide range of options, from family SUVs to electric vehicles and luxury sedans, we are now seeing a resurging interest. American made cars are equal or superior to those made overseas. The Chevrolet Trax, for instance, is a well-designed, fuel efficient, and safe SUV. And as you know, there is no better car on Earth than 1950-1970s American Muscle Car. Americans make sure superior product, but we are buying things from other nations. American food imports have risen by 300 percent since 1999. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
American farmland declined by nearly 20 million acres between 2017 and 2022. As of 2022, there were 880.1 million acres of land dedicated to farming, compared to 900.1 million in 2017. The data shows there are now little more than 1.9 million farms in the country. Americans and American corporations spent $136 billion on food and beverages from other countries. It is a national security risk to lose American Farms and farmers. If there is a war, and most of our meat, produce, poultry, dairy, and fruit is coming from foreign counties, we stand the risk of starving. With war breaking out all over the World, in these uncertain times, it is very important to bring American farms back. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. As money flows, it influences further investment. Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever. Also, to ensure that we have farmland for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrant to America. Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a populations that equally represents all races of people. If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in American, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in American which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the nation debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by send more money overseas. Buying American made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards in regard to pollution. American companies have to be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human minds to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
The Winchester Mystery House
The Winchester Mystery House is full of surprises. What was your favorite, “Oooh!” moment during your visit at the mansion? (And for those of you who still have to check it off your bucket list… we will hopefully see you soon.)
Experience an unforgettable journey back to the time of kings and queens with this entry ticket for The Winchester Mansion in Santa Clara, California which was the residence of Sarah L. Winchester. Take advantage of this fascinating experience. After tour, there will be time enjoy the mansion’s splendor at your own pace. You might even discover secret passages.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Foreign Policy is Totally Foreign to the American Myth
Open debate is our strongest tool in standing up to extremism. The far more dangerous avenue is to force extremist ideas underground, where they can fester without competition. All extremists, whether in politics or theology, are found of propounding either false or artificial dilemmas. Either you are an X-ist or a Y-ist, they assert. That you need limit yourself to neither of these things alone does not enter the brains, any more than that you may often treat the competitives and alternatives of those false dilemmas as complementaries. It is not only wrong to take up such an extremist attitude, it is also dangerous to the quest of truth. Manifestly, both attitudes cannot be right at the same time. If we want the truth, we must accept neither and search with less fanaticism for it. And we shall then discover that it is not so alien as the extremists and partisans would have us believe. The choice before us is never really limited to two extremes. Philosophy refuses to confine itself so rigidly to them and points out that there is always a third alternative. However, philosophic minds are too partisan to perceive this. They operate mechanically on the dialectic pattern. It is as natural for the ordinary enquirer to be a partisan, to suppress what is good and proclaim what is bad in an opponent’s case, as it is natural for the philosophic student to bring both forward because he is genuinely a truth-seeker. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Consequently, most public discussion of any case presents a picture of it which varies entirely with the mentality and outlook of the discusser. Even if the philosopher finds it necessary to take one side in any controversy, this never prevents his perceiving, admitting, and accepting what is true in the opposite side. With this understanding of the relativity of all human knowledge and experience, he will understand that a multiplicity of possible standpoints is inevitable. Consequently, he will become more tolerant and less inclined to accept the hard, strict and rigid “either this ultimate or that one” attitude. Nevertheless, if philosophy affirms that different views of the same subject may be right from their respective standpoints, it does not affirm that they are equally right. It recognizes ascending levels of standpoint and consequently the progressive character of the resultant views. The illumined man will not condemn the unillumined one for not being better than he is, for not having developed a higher standard of thought, of feeling, and of conduct. He does not make the mistake of confusing the two levels of reference, of setting up his own criterion as being suitable for others. This must not be understood to mean, however, that because he gives them his intellectual sympathy, he also excuses them morally, for he does not. Even though its relativity may be recognized, a misdeed is still a misdeed. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
We are not in full agreement with those who attack all success as unspiritual or better living as materialistic. If he has done so honourably and if the purpose itself it worth or conducive to society’s well-being, whoever has realized his early purpose is a success. If he receives rewards for his accomplishments, there is nothing unspiritual in accepting them. And whoever appreciates attractive clothes, good quality food, modern conveniences to efficient comfortable living is—if he develops his self-control alongside this appreciation—taking better care of his physical instrument and making more of his physical environment. He is not necessarily materialistic. The meaning of the word “spiritual” should not be unjustly circumscribed. We believe that the battlefield of the quest is more within the mind than the flesh. Ascetics who gaze with disdain upon a useful life in the World have hitched their wagon to a cloud, not to a star. The unsuccessful, the sick, the disappointed, the unfortunate, the pleasure-satiated, the defeated, the neurotic, the bored, and the sad have not found happiness. In their discouragement, they turn either to Worldly escapes like drink or begin with what seems the next best thing—inner peace. They perceive that peace can be got but only at the price of partially or wholly renouncing bodily passions, Earthly desires, human prides, personal possessions, and social power. This sense of frustration drives many of them to religion, some of them to yoga, and a few of them to philosophy. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
All entrants into these portals are not similarly motivated, for others come through higher urges. It is a good start all the same because it marks an awakening to the need of higher satisfaction. However, it is only a start. For the ultimate goal of life cannot be merely the negative denial of life. It must be something more than that, grander than that. The ascetic ideal of liberation from desire is good but not enough. The philosophic ideal of illumination by truth both includes and complete it, bringing the beneficial qualities of joy, happiness, and contentment in its train. Even the sincere aspirant can become too anxious about the quest because he is too self-centered. He must learn to let go also. Let him remember the self-actualized Christian. He is satisfied to be anonymous. If disagreements involving pleasures of the flesh are habitually settled in favour of one partner’s wishes, at the expense of the other partner’s feelings of personal comfort, a man and a woman who interact as equals, a man and a woman who interact as equals must understand the ultimate penalty will be paid by both of them. Suppressed resentment or unhappiness tends to short-circuit feelings of intimate passions, and desire goes dead. This was described by a man who had come for therapy with his wife, after fifteen years of marriage. For more than thirteen of those years, the wife had never been “excited” but had tolerated perfunctory acts of pleasures of the flesh. Then she read a book that convinced her that she had a right to expect full satisfaction. She became increasingly unhappy, however, as her efforts to reach a climax proved unsuccessful. Her husband, too, became unhappy. He also began losing his ability to have “attention” or, if he achieved one, to maintain it for longer than a minute or two. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
“She should want to be ‘excited,’” he said, “and if she could have it, so much the better. But after a while, this one desire, what I call an obsession, dominated the act of pleasures of the flesh. My desires and everything else became subordinate to this one particular thing, so what was there in pleasures of the flesh for me to look forward to? In other words, pleasures of the flesh because pleasureless.” It would be simple to say that his wife had made him important. However, that would be just another instance of making one partner (in this case, the wife) responsible for the other partner’s inability to function during intimate passions (the husband’s impotence). Her real failure lay in not being responsive to her husband’s emotional state. His failure lay in not signaling his growing dismay. Their distress with pleasures of the flesh was the consequence of their failure to communicate, their failure to approach their undeniable problem in a neutral, non-fault-finding way, and their failure to be motivated by mutual concern. If they had managed otherwise, it would have been an impressive accomplishment. For this unhappy couple—and for so many like them—neutrality and mutuality were almost impossible. They had accumulated frustrations and hurt feelings over the years, piling them up like bricks to build a wall of anger until eventually they lost sight of each other. The wife blamed the husband for her failure to enjoy pleasures of the flesh, a blame he meekly accepted. And in their chamber, they silently argued their case, a plaintiff and a defendant without a judge or jury, wondering why they could not come to a satisfactory conclusion. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
To speculate about what they might have done is pointless. In reality, given their particular life histories, and especially in view of the wife’s severe emotional deprivation during childhood and adolescence, there was little they themselves could have done unassisted, and they were wise to choose therapy. However, supposed, in a comparable situation, neither partner had had a crippling childhood, and supposed, too, that they had been married only a few years. What might they have done to forestall a crisis of pleasures of the flesh? They would have talked. Communication does not just mean talking, it is true, and talking does not necessarily mean communicating. Nevertheless, as has already been pointed out, a husband and wife who find themselves troubled by frustrations that involve pleasures of the flesh are going to have to say so. Each must disclose his true feelings in first-person-singular—clear, candid statements that relieve one partner of having to guess, usually wrongly, what the other is experiencing. And on the opposite side of the coin, both husband and wife must resist the temptation to interpret each other: you thin, you feel, you want, you need, you are afraid—opinions which, no matter how accurate they may be, put the other person on the defensive and set the stage for conflict. Such honest communication is not a simple achievement. It is more than just a play on words to note that talking about pleasures of the flesh is, for many couples, easier said than done. Some reasons are obvious. Cultural inhibitions, internalized over the years, do not disappear overnight; they create an atmosphere in which self-consciousness blocks self-disclosure. In the same way that men and women conceal their bare bodies because they have been taught to do so—and, more important, because they are afraid that they may be physically unattractive—they also conceal their feelings about pleasures of the flesh because they are afraid those feelings may be emotionally unappealing to their partners. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In addition, they may be reticent because they lack a comfortable vocabulary. Clinical words can prove chilling and vulgar words can prove disruptive in the kind of talks that take place, not during encounters of pleasures of the flesh but in times of reflection and emotional communion, when a man and woman are struggling to be reflective and truthful. Some people, of course, are completely at ease with crude language, but for a considerable number of men and women, and particularly those who are accustomed to expressing themselves with discrimination, blunt terms are inadequate to convey the shades of meaning that matter a great deal in exchanging confidences. If a man becomes cold, pitiless, impenetrable, if he sets himself altogether apart from the life and feelings of other men, if he is dead to the claims of music and the beauties of art, be sure he is an intellectualist or a fanatical ascetic—not a philosopher. We need not become less human because we seek to make ourselves better men. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful will refine, and not destroy, our human qualities. We ought never to wish that any harm should come to anyone. If a man is behaving in a dastardly way, even then it would not be right to do so. In that case, we should wish that he should awaken to his wrong-doing. The simple uncluttered life is a sensible idea. However, if pushed by fanaticism, exaggeration, and extravagances to its ultimate goal, logical, and inevitable consequence, it would not only lead to the complete abandonment of all gadgets, appliances, and tools but—by steps—to life in a cave and clothes made of skin. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The desire to achieve unity in various sections of human life, belief, and activity—and in humanity itself—is only a dream. The differences are there, and will, in some altered form, still be there even under the surface of any cheerful pseudo-Utopia of unified World, or section of the World. There is no profit in denying them, only self-deception. The only real unity can come out of inner expansion, out of a great heart which excludes nothing and no one; but this will still not be uniformity. What we have to allow is that those who live only to satisfy the ego and its Earthly desires are not lost or sidetracked. They need and must gather in such experiences. It is a part of their necessary involvement. He should guard against those foolish tendencies of so many mystically minded people to hero-worship some man into a god, to over-idealize this man’s personal statement as infallible oracles, or to exaggerate some helpful idea he propounds into a universal panacea. With fanaticism, there comes unbeing rigidity and, in fact, unwillingness even to look at the evidence—which it finds of no interest. It is not enough to be eager for the truth; he must also be open to the truth. No bias, prejudice, fear, or dislike should stand in the way. If excessive pride in his attainments, virtue, knowledge, or devotion is an obstacle which hinders a man’s growth, excessive humility is also another. This may surprise those who have read again in spiritual manuals of the need to be humble. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Upon entrance into the inner World, it is appropriate that the language one uses broadens into imagery and a more freely literate style. To the scientific outer ego, it might be appropriate to say, “I perceive a flattened affect.” However, to day, “Everything seems flat and meaningless to me as though the World is an abandoned cemetery” is closer to an accurate representation of the inner. As will be seen, the inner things in terms of images. In the innermost, feelings, images, thoughts are all one living varying process. Here is an example which illustrates the central theme of the inner. I see (in the sense of conceive, which is a weak perception!) and image such as an area of light surrounding an eye-shaped area of darkness. This is inner rather than fabricated because it arises of itself. Its meaning or use is not now apparent. If I forget the image, its use can be permanently lost. Insofar as I invest in the image, I can gradually feel out its meaning. It comes slowly. Something about darkness seeing, but I do not understand it. Ego can react and reject the idea as illogical. Darkness cannot see—it is a foolish bit of imagination. However, in the inner World conceptual images grow slowly, like a seed, from almost nothing to more and more differentiated forms. The eye is black nothing outlined by light. It is seen as something in contrast with the light. It is seen. The associations run to a variety of scenes such as a person appearing dumb in the light of others’ wisdom. However, it is more than that. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Ignorance has a primal sense of itself out of contrast with what is not. Suddenly, the black eye has light in it. This reflects ignorance being aware of itself. I have a funny feeling of ignorance’s wisdom, and the eye winks at me. Then out of my ignorance, I see that I am ignorance aware of itself surrounded by light, paradoxically being light insofar as aware of my darkness. The image is not foolish imagination now. I can see it is an accurate representation of my state at that moment. I can see that I do not understand. Whenever I tell people my theories about expressing, rather than suppressing, their feelings, someone inevitably says, “That’s not entirely true. We can’t, for example, just let our anger out unchecked. We could hurt someone, or at the very least, in our rage, say something we’ll regret later. We have to control that emotion.” I have to disagree. Here is why. When you put an uncovered pot of water on the stove and turn on the heat, the water boils until it disappears. It is the nature of water so heated to boil and create steam which evaporates into thin air. However, when you cover the pot and seal it, you create a pressure cooker. If you try to control the steam, suppress it, not let it escape, it eventually blows up the pot and causes a mess all out of proportion to what the small amount of heart under the pot would warrant. The same thing happens with anger. When it comes, especially at first, it comes in little simmers. You can either express it or repress it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
When you express anger, it goes away. I call this natural form of expression a “hostilectomy.” Hostility comes up, say in the form of a sharp rebuke from your boss—an unwarranted rebuke at that. Chances are you were once taught to bite your tongue and not talk back to people in authority. So, you stuff down—or repress—the hurt and anger you are feeling. The trouble is, when you repress a feeling, it does not just go away. It begins building pressure. In your next experience of anger, you either express another simmer, or you put that one on top of the one you repressed before. Now, had you expressed your anger at the moment you felt it—on a “cash and carry” basis, so to speak—you would have dissipated it. You would have performed a mini-hostilectomy on yourself and the anger would have disappeared. Without those mini-hostilectomies, little irritations and little annoyances build into resentment and hatred—both of which are hard to control and can explode in harmful ways. At work, when you felt anger and hurt at your boss, had you taken a little risk and expressed yourself, you would not be going home and shouting at your children, for example. Or you would stack at something your boss says months later. Emotional control is made possible through gradually acquired ability of a person to choose responses to a situation (emotion-provoking or otherwise) that are compatible with the largest number of important values. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
This choosing in turn is predicated on the ability to postpone immediate responsiveness, to delay responding in order to allow time to reason, plan, or think. Young children cannot do this because they have yet learned how, and because their nervous systems have not yet matured to the point where it is physically possible for them to tolerate tensions and inhibit motor expression. When the nervous system has matured to the point where delay and purposeful planning are possible, then suppression of emotional behaviour becomes possible. There are no precise norms available for the age at which such control becomes possible or for the quantity of tension a person can be expected to tolerate without exploding into expressive behaviour; however, it can be expected that the ability increases from infancy to maturity and then probably declines with approaching senescence. When a person is provoked to emotional tension, widespread changes occur throughout the body in consequence of heightened autonomic nervous system activity. If expression is possible in the form of muscular activity, weeping, laughing, behaviour involving pleasures of the flesh, then the physiological processes will shortly be restored to normal. If no release is possible, if the person suppresses emotion for a long period of time, then the physical events that constitute part of the emotional response will be prolonged. If the prolongation is marked, it is possible that the functions and even the structure of inner organs may be permanently impaired. The field of psychosomatic medicine is devoted to study of the effects of emotionality on health. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
One woman was preoccupied with money troubles because her husband got into complex financial scrapes with various employers. However, when the other group members question some of his actions, Wanda would angrily defend him. She was also much preoccupied with the quality of her family’s diet. Actually, she had no reason to worry, since her parents were well off and she could always borrow money from them. For about two years, the therapist was unable to construct a coherent picture in his own mind of what was going on, until one night she had a “script dream.” She was “living in slave quarters which was run by some rich people who lived up on the hill.” The only way to get enough food was either to pleasure these rich people or trick them. This dream made her way of life easier to understand. Her husband was playing “Let us Pull a Fast One On Joey” with his employers, so that Wanda could play “Making Ends Meet.” If he ever made any money, he was always careful to lose it at the first opportunity so that the games could continue. When things got really bad, Wanda pitched in and helped him pull a fast one on her parents. In the long run, much to their chagrin, his employers and her parents always managed to end up in control of the situation. If she ever admitted it, the games would be broken up (which they eventually were), so she had to deny all this angrily in the group because it was so obviously unprofitable. Thus, she was actually living much the way she did in her dream, her parents and her husband’s employers being the rich people who lived up on the hill and ran her life, and whom they had to please or trick to survive. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Here the slave quarters were her World picture or script set. If she lived in the slave quarters of her dream, she lived in reality. In order to get well, she had to escape from slavery and into the real World, which for her was a comfortable one, or would be after the family affairs were in order. It is interesting to note how she and her husband selected each other on the basis of having complementary scripts. His script called for some rich people up on the hill to play tricks on, and a scared wife. Hers called for a trickers who would make her life easier in her enslavement. The time has come to learn how to read the Occidental Altimeter. When you move East, you crash-land in the past. Consider our liberal Potomac executives and congressional busybodies who continually ignore the wisdom of Washington’s farewell advice not to meddle in the affairs in the Old World. Poor President Biden sent to a senile envoy, Donald Trump to settle quarrel between Ukraine and Russia—forgetting that Mediterraneans have fighting each other about mammalian territorial borders for 5,000 years. Then comes Vice President J.D. Vance attempting to mediate border disputes between America and Mexico! And Biden tilted in favour of Mexico! And Kamala intervened in politics between demonstrators and police thus assuming the karma for two million dead and creating the ultimate insectoid state-postwar America. Domestic policy and foreign policy are the game of mad monsters playing chess blindfolded with mammalian-gene-pools as pawns. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Foreign policy is totally foreign to the American Myth. That is why accented Europeans like Trump and Biden are selected to be President. It is a European game several centuries old. Foreign policy is the game of man monsters playing chess blindfolded. Here is your American Ecological Foreign Policy. The folks of the Old World inhabit pre-civilized, barbarian gene-pools. European and Africans and Asians are our own terrestrial origins still obsessed with territorial conflict. This is not said in disinterest. By all means send food and veterinary medicine to the Old World. By all means send the old gene-pools invitations that freedom, change, mobility and intelligence increase await in the West. However, to meddle in European-African-Asian politics is an attempt to reconcile the ancient quarrel between rabbits and foxes. Shall free Americans take sides in back yard ants of South Africa, or the ferocious-fanatics of the Middle East? Terrorists wanting to destroy technology and Western ways to take us back to the Old World originated where? In the Middle East—where else? Interestingly enough, the national, tribal folk of Africa say they just want to be left alone and have no loyal commitments to Pentagon politicians. By all means, let them alone. Those who see themselves banished from the harmonious fatherland where justice and passion finally strike an even balance still prefer, to solitude, the barren kingdoms where words have no more meaning and where force and the instincts of blind creature reign. This challenge is, at the same time, a mortification. The battle with the angel, in Song II, ends in the defeat and putrefaction of the angel. Heaven and Earth are then brough back and intermingled in the liquid chasms of primordial life. Thus the man-shark of the Songs “only acquired the new change in the extremities of his arms and legs as an expiatory punishment for some unknow crime.” There is, in fact, a crime, or the illusion of a crime (is it homosexuality?) is Maldoror’s virtually unknow life. No reader of the Songs can avoid the idea that his essay is in need of a Stavrogin’s Confession. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The Sacramento Fire Department is made up of professionals committed to serving the Nation as an integral part of a team. They provide-mission essential capability, stability, and continue to support the community and their colleagues. They are committed to honourable service in the performance of their duty. Foundations of the Sacramento Fire Department include understanding oaths, dignity, and respect for all people. The Sacramento Fire Department values leadership, command, authority and they gain firmer understanding of the enduring requirements and add specialized knowledge as they move through levels. A person’s character affects how they lead. A leader’s characteristics consists of their true nature guided by their conscience, which affects their morals, attitudes, and actions. A firefighter’s personal reputation is what others view as character. Leaders who formally adhere to applicable laws, regulations and unit standards build credibility with their team and enhance trust of the Nation they serve. “I met my wife in front of the firehouse. She was going to nursing school at one of the Lois Rios Community Colleges, and she was walking past the firehouse with groceries, and she dropped them. Like the old handkerchief trick, I guess. One of the guys told me to go out and help her, and that’s how I met her. She was from Germany, and was living down town at the time. She’s German. So I put the groceries inside the firehouse, and I said, ‘When I get off, I’ll bring them over.’ #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
“So I went over, and we started to date, and we were married. Out of that marriage I have seven children, four boys and three girls, ages sixteen down to five. My wife, didn’t really know anything about me. She knew that I loved the Sacramento Fire Department, and we had battles because in my time off I would jump in my car and run down to firehouse. I wasn’t spending time with her. I thought I was going to lose my job, and went into a shell for about three or four months and made it unbearable for my wife. I would come home, and I was like a zombie, I didn’t want to be bothered with her. She went through a lot of pain and aggravation. She tried to help me. I just couldn’t accept the loss. I used to come home, maybe kiss her, talk to her for a while, then get in my car and go back to the firehouse. I was putting my family aside, and it was taking its toll on my family. Then I had come to the reality that if I wasn’t going to be a better husband and father, I had to quit and move. So we bought an old farmhouse twelve miles from downtown. I kept doing the things I was doing before. I got more involved with the people down there. My love for Sacramento was still there. What I want for my kids, I want them to be safe. I’d like to seem them drug-free. I’d like to see them get a good education. I would be happy if one of them followed in my footsteps. My oldest son is already talking about the Navy, talking about the Seal team. They’re all talented in their own little way. Some of them draw. One boy is a runner. One writes poetry, stories. He’s only ten years old, and his writing is great. I hope I can live to see what their future is going to be. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“In the last five years I lost my whole family, my mother, my father, my sister. I have nobody, just my wife and children. My father and sister died of cancer. My sister left four children. My mom died of a heart attack four months ago. Everything comes down. But I love what I’m doing. I made two good rescues that really made me feel good. That alone makes everything worth it.” Influences such as background, beliefs, education, and experiences all affect all firefighters and civilians. If it simply required checking and aligning personal values with the values of the Sacramento Fire Department, a firefighters’ role in developing character in others would be simple. Reality is much different. Becoming and remaining a leader of character is a process involving day-to-day experiences and internal fortitude. While education, self-development, counseling, coaching, and mentoring can refine outward signs of character, modifying deeply held values is the only way to build character. Firefighters are responsible for their own character and for encouraging, supporting, and assessing their teams’ efforts to embody character. All members of the Sacramento Fire Department are loyal, dedicated to duty, respectful, selfless, honourable, possess a great deal of integrity and display personal courage in the face of danger and adversity. You can save lives by making a donation to the Sacramento Fire Department. As a reminder, parents, pleasure teach your children love America and be patriotic citizens and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. In an effort to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars. American made cars used to be the envy of the World and because American car brands are offering a wide range of options, from family SUVs to electric vehicles and luxury sedans, we are now seeing a resurging interest. American made cars are equal or superior to those made overseas. The Chevrolet Trax, for instance, is a well-designed, fuel efficient, and safe SUV. And as you know, there is no better car on Earth than 1950-1970s American Muscle Car. Americans make sure superior product, but we are buying things from other nations. American food imports have risen by 300 percent since 1999. American farmland declined by nearly 20 million acres between 2017 and 2022. As of 2022, there were 880.1 million acres of land dedicated to farming, compared to 900.1 million in 2017. The data shows there are now little more than 1.9 million farms in the country. Americans and American corporations spent $136 billion on food and beverages from other countries. It is a national security risk to lose American Farms and farmers. If there is a war, and most of our meat, produce, poultry, dairy, and fruit is coming from foreign counties, we stand the risk of starving. With war breaking out all over the World, in these uncertain times, it is very important to bring American farms back. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. As money flows, it influences further investment. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever. Also, to ensure that we have farmland for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrant to America. Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a populations that equally represents all races of people. If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in American, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in American which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the nation debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by send more money overseas. Buying American made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards in regard to pollution. American companies have to be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human minds to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
The Winchester Mystery House
On 8 January 1894, Sarah Winchester’s beloved sister Estelle passed away within the Winchester mansion at age 45. Today, we honor Estelle’s memory and the bond the sisters shared. 🕊️✨
Its Weapon is Easily Recognized
Times have changed. Uninformed assumptions, illogical accusations, and outright lies are passed around as truth. Being blames in a hostile spirit is not the same as being criticized in a friendly constructive one. Yet over-sensitive egocentric persons usually act as if it were! What are we to do? As disciples who strive to “stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places” (Mosiah 18.9), we must do something. A close friend or a kindly spiritual guide will render him a better service by making him more aware of his frailties than by remaining silent. For it is these latter that are the seed of his future suffering, as well as the bars to his future progress. Every man whose orbit touches your own is unwittingly your teacher. He has something of value for you, however small it be. Let him perform his mission, then. Do not dim the lesson by covering it with clouds of negative emotion. Most neurotics cannot take any criticism—no matter how helpful, constructive or well-meant it be—but only exaggerated praise. Moral advice is not usually wanted, liked, or obeyed. The more it is pressed upon a person, the more it is likely to be resisted. He is content to stay as he is. Criticism of others should be benevolent, constructive, and suggestive, firm, yet sympathetic. He needs to learn that it is not necessary to be rude in order to be outspoken. It is a brutish sign to be unable to put vigour, emphasis, and feeling into criticism without using obscene four-letter words. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Even while you are criticizing and protecting against what is negative, keep an even balance and affirm what is beneficial in life. He can give others full understanding, but only by intellectually identifying himself with them. If it is not to be dangerous, this is an inner process which must be temporary, even momentary. To give others who hold different beliefs a mental sympathy—enough to understand what it is they hold and why—calls for a capacity to detach oneself temporarily from one’s own beliefs. This is not to be done, of course, by rejecting them in any way but by just letting them stand as they are while moving over and into the other person to get an understanding of his point of view. Such a capacity cannot be acquired without enough humility and selflessness to make it possible to entertain a distasteful viewpoint even for a single second. Even if he finds the opinions, beliefs, and actions of others repulsive and not to his taste, he would experiment at times in the development of tolerance and in the knowledge of human nature. This can be done by entering imaginatively into their history and into their experience until he understands why they think and act as they do. That need not result in the acceptance of their attitudes, but in the comprehension of them. He should be able to give an imaginative sympathy to those whose outlook is far from his own, lower than his own. He should be able to probe understandingly into the mind and heart of men with whose views he profoundly disagrees and whose actions he instinctively abhours. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
He should be able even to put himself without wincing into the shoes of a hardened criminal. However, he should do all this only momentarily, only just enough to glimpse what is this mystery that is his fellow man, and then return to being himself, broadened but untainted by the experience. When he deals with or speak to another person, his handling of an uncongenial person with whom he has to live or work will fail or succeed according to his practice of identifying himself with him. If the self-actualized Christian fails to do this, it means that he persists in identifying himself solely with his own little ego and its personal interests, activities, or desires—hence the irritability, bad temper, and negative reaction to the other’s deficiencies. However, if, on the contrary, he instantly tries to feel with him, to identify himself with him, to give him temporary intellectual sympathy—that is, to practise love—there will be forgiveness of the other’s failings and mistakes, good humoured acceptance of his deficiencies, and laughing patience with his shortcomings. Both persons will then make more progress more rapidly. If the self-actualized Christians tolerance, sympathy, and understanding are wide enough to enter every point of view, this does not mean that his judgment, balance, and discrimination are inactive. He is to see men and women not only as they are with their meanness and frailty, their wrong-doing and cruelty, but also as they are unwittingly struggling to become—perfectly expressive of the divine in them. And if the uglier one is to be the first impression, the lovelier one must follow quickly as the final impression. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
In doing this the self-actualized Christian makes truth out of life, instead of bringing falsity into it, as some rainbow-dreaming cults would have him do. More, he gives the best possible help to others in their struggle because he brings the kingdom of Heaven to their Earth in the only way it can be brought. Try to understand other persons not in order to blame them but in order to understand better the operations of mind itself, the human mind. If he catches himself criticizing his critics, being indignant with those who oppose him or despondent because others have denounced him, he ought to pull himself up sharply. Instead, let him enter into their shoes for a few moments to understand why the dislike or attack him as they do, and then to give their attitude his mental sympathy for these few moments. Their statement about him may be totally false or quite true, somewhat exaggerated or willfully distorted. Nevertheless, let him continue to step imaginatively into their shoes. This attempt will not be easy and an inner struggle will probably be unavoidable before he can bring himself to make it. He is not asked to endorse their attitude or approve the emptions which give rise to it, but only to practise this useful exercise for developing tolerance and diminishing egoism. Even if the others have tried to bolster up their own egos by deriding his, the activity may seem pleasant but will prove unprofitable. For not only does it break any harmonious relations with him, but it poisons their own psyches. Thus, they punish themselves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Why should he let resentment drag him into the same error? On the contrary, they offer a chance to deny his ego, to exalt his ethical outlook, and to shift his emotional center of gravity from the negative pole to the beneficial one. Let him regard them as his tutors, possibly his benefactors. Let him take these episodes as chances both to do needed work on himself and to refuse to identify himself with negative emotions. They are to be used for present instructions and future guidance. Thus, he lifts himself out of his personal ego, actually denying himself as Jesus Christ bid him do. Until it becomes perfectly natural and quite instinctive for him to react in this philosophic manner to every provocation, temptation, or irritation, he needs to continue the inner work upon himself. He needs to drill himself every day in those particular qualities in which he is deficient. If the foregoing is to be practiced, each problem in his relations with others must be accepted as a problem in his own development. However, after that has been done and not before, since it is an indispensable perquisite, he may dismiss the problem altogether and rise to the ultimate view, where infinite goodness and calm alone reign and where there are no problems at all. The self-actualized Christian’s sympathetic understand will include both those to whom religion is vital and those to whom it is suspect. Where sympathy is prolonged excessively, when this shift of personality from oneself to another is not limited to gaining understanding of that other’s need, and is not guarded by wisdom, there will be a denial one one’s own individual being. This can lead to harm on both planes—spiritual and physical. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Mental sympathy with others must go only as far as a certain point: if it begins to affect of negatively, we must refrain from proceeding farther. He need not stray either from the line which his thinking has been following nor the direction along which his conduct has been moving, even though he tries to give mental sympathy to different characters. Sometimes men act as the authority for their wives. Her concurrence does not alter the fact that he is using male standards and male attitudes as guidelines for female behaviour involving pleasures of the flesh, something no man should presume to do. Even if by chance he happens to guess right, what he is doing is wrong—because his wife then comes to conclusions on the basis of her husband’s reasons, not her own, and the damage to her self-confidence can be incalculable. For if he has in fact guessed right, and if she follows his suggestions and achieves greater responsivity than in the past, she must believe that he knows more about her feelings involving pleasures of the flesh than she does—and this is absolute nonsense. Exactly the same situation prevails when a wife tells a husband what he is thinking or feeling or should do. Where pleasures or the flesh is concerned, no partner can ever be the authority for the other. Each partner must accept the other as the final authority on his or her own feelings. In affirming that principle, a man and woman have taken the first step toward achieving harmony with pleasures of the flesh in marriage. They are telling each other without question the fact that they are individuals, separate but not separated, different but not dissimilar, and that their happiness must flow both from the delight they find in their differences and the security they derive from their similarities. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
This is not a conviction too easily attained, especially for young men and women. In growing up, the emphasis was never on what they shared or on an appreciation of the differences that distinguish them as male and female. On the contrary, considerable emotion was invested in sharpening the sense of difference and in using that difference as a way of defining selves with intimate passions. If girls like to talk, then a boy’s taciturnity is an assertion that he is a male. If boys like to compete, then a girl’s cooperativeness marks her as a female. Each gender defined itself by deliberately choosing not to think or feel or behave like the other. With such a heritage, it is no simple matter for a married couple to overcome the prejudice of the past and to understand that the differences between them are essentially no more and no less than the differences between any two individuals. As long as the old attitudes persist, however, as long as a man and woman use the differences between them as a way of separating themselves to prove that they are male and female, their marriage is likely to remain at best a working partnership. In those circumstances, conflicts are threatening and are consequently avoided or denied. To do otherwise would seem to put the partnership in jeopardy. However, for the man and woman who accept conflict as offering an opportunity for growth, much depends on whether they have developed an adequate system of communication. To say that disagreements can revitalize a relationship leaves open the question of how the disagreements are expressed. This is particularly true when gender is the issue. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
How indeed can a husband and wife adjust their discrepant physical needs and at the same time reinforce their marriage bond? They must find realization that a conflict involving pleasures of the flesh is not a problem in need of a solution. It is a situation that requires resolution. These are two entirely different approaches, promising radically different outcomes. Suppose a husband wishes pleasures of the flesh four times a week while he his welcomes it just twice. Arithmetic suggests a simple compromise of three times a week. However, the idea is, of course, ludicrous. The husband will still feel frustrated; the wife might feel imposed upon; and neither one would have learned anything about the other’s feelings. If that were not enough, there remains the final incongruity: the real difference between them has nothing to do with numbers. Frequently of pleasures of the flesh is almost never the true issues. Had this couple been able to communicate with each other, they could have explored the situation they were in. If possible, their goal would not have been to determine how many times to have pleasures of the flesh each weak but to discover their true feelings on the latter. Literally hundreds of alternative factors might have been operating for each partner. The husband might have felt that he was failing to excite his wife, that he was in need of more care and warmth than usual, or that he felt especially living and filled with energy. His wife might have felt oppressed by financial pressures, or unhappy because she had put on weight, or preoccupied by her new job. For this couple to ignore these matters and discuss instead the frequency of their pleasures of the flesh, would be to talk in an emotional vacuum. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Even if they fully unburdened their feelings, they would still have to deal with the fact that the husband’s needs for pleasures of the flesh were, at least for the present, greater than those of his wife. However, their basis for approaching each other would be entirely changed; the problem would not be one of taking or demanding versus not giving or submitting—it would be that of finding the best way to express care and concern for each other and to meet the needs of which ever partner was under the greater emotional strain. This kind of communication is not easy to accomplish, but it can be achieved by any couple willing to make the effort and to abide by two principles. The calls for neutrality; the second for mutuality. The neutrality principle requires both husband and wife to assume that past discord with pleasures of the flesh will not necessarily repeat itself in the future, because each partner is motivated to try to change. Each, in brief, credits the other with good intentions and the will to implement those intentions. Each accepts full responsibility for what he or she does—or fails to do—in making the effort to act differently. And each individual accepts responsibility for functioning with pleasures of the flesh, and does not hold the other accountable for the body’s responses. If a man and woman are to have a good physical relationship, each must strive to be responsive to the other, not responsible for the other. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Furthermore, the second principle, that of mutuality, requires all messages of pleasures of the flesh between two people, whether conveyed by words or actions, by tone of voice or touch of fingertips, to be exchanged in the spirit of having a common cause. Mutuality means two people united in an effort to discover what is best for both. In attempting to reconcile differences in their needs for pleasures of the flesh and desires, they must avoid what lawyers call “adversary proceedings,” in which each person tries to prove that he is right and his opponent is wrong. (It remains right vs. wrong even when other terms are used such as healthy vs. uptight, and everybody-does vs. nobody-I-know-does. By contrast, the principle of mutuality calls for both partners to accept the idea that is a sustained—and sustaining—physical relationship is desired, no conflict involving pleasures of the flesh can be resolved on an either/or basis. Often, of course, one partner may be in position to impose a decision on the other. Most frequently it is the husband, taking authority in matters of pleasures of the flesh as the traditional male prerogative or as simply another instance of the tune being called by whoever pays the piper. However, almost as frequently the decision is imposed by the less emotionally stable of the partners. Such is the tyranny of the neurotic over the normal that a person who suffers from persistent depression, chronic psychic exhaustion, free-floating anxieties, the need to be a martyr or another similar mental afflictions, generally succeeds in coercing a considerate partner to yield in pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Let us feel that we are trying to become good men of warm hearts, not good statues of cold marble. It would appear that ideals that seem too remote for realization and goals that seem too high for achievement are not worth the trouble of setting up. Yet to abandon them altogether would be to lose the sense of right direction. That would be a mistake. It is wiser to keep them as ultimate ideals and goals, drawing from them inspirational and directional value. It is here and for such a purpose that the dreaming idealists themselves have their place, not in the all-or-nothing revolutionary way that they themselves think they do. It is needful to make a compromise between the facts about human nature in its present state and the ideals which it can hope to realize only in some future state. It is not necessary to go all the way with the extremists, whether in art, mysticism, politics, or economics in order to realize that we can learn something from each of them. Let us take what is adaptable in their views, but let us reject what id decidedly extreme. There are not only sins against moral virtue; there are also sin against balance and proportion. What follows is more likely to be an experience of the opposite value. How often have you heard someone say, “I laughed until I cried,” or “After we have had a big fight, our pleasures of the flesh are always so intense,” or “Just when I had given up trying, I suddenly had new strength to start again.” This is not an unusual or unnatural phenomenon. In fact, it is perfectly natural and predictable. So not condemn yourself for loving somebody deeply one moment and being furious with him the next. In such instance, your natural restraining function is simply pulling you from flying off too far in one direction. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
When you start going too far on the other, it will pull you back again. So relax, and do not try to stifle or control it. The patterns in your life is basically circular. From a central core, our emotions, values and interests ray outward to a perimeter, or circumference. In physics, when an object is moving around a central core, there is one force which constantly trues to keep it moving toward that core; this is called center-seeking, or centripetal, force. At the same time, another force is trying to move it outward away from the core; this is called center-fleeing, or centrifugal, force. When centripetal force beings the object to the center, centrifugal force pulls it out to the perimeter where centripetal force draws it back in. Then the cycle starts all over again. The basic model for this phenomenon is the atom, which consists of a nucleus in the center and electrons flying around it. In atomic physics, the positive magnetic attraction of the nucleus keeps the negatively-charged electrons from flying off into space. The nucleus is a natural restraining mechanism. In your emotional make-up, your core (or center) performs a similar function. Trouble occurs when you refuse to “listen to” your core, refuse to stay in touch with it, thereby denying one value and intensifying the opposite one all out of proportion. This is the “overcontrol.” Some people exaggerate their anger, to the detriment of their other values, particularly love. If a person expresses their love, might be fearful of what may happen. Instead, this leads to an individual expressing a degree of anger all out of proportion to what would have been called for only by their loved one’s actions. Thus, an individual symbolically “kills” their loved one for disobeying them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
When people are unable to feel an intense amount of love, it may be a good idea to push their emotional teeter-totter to the level of intense anger. Doing this in an atmosphere which is not judgmental or “right-wrong” oriented, the individual will then be free to let the teeter-totter swing the other way, as it naturally is inclined to do. The result is a natural outpouring of the love one holds so bottled up all of one’s life. One will finally be able to express love for someone who, in the past, had been one’s enemy. If a man remains detached, he is akin to a fundamentalist minister trying to capture the depth of an African tribal celebration in fundamentalist terms. They very language and the frame of reference of the innermost is quite different from our ordinary way of thinking. I would have no quarrel with anyone who asserted the language of the novelist, poet, or musician is closer to the quality of human experience than the language of psychologists. One can distinguish what is outermost in man as that which is more or less perceived by and available to himself, from an innermost that extends from this to aspects of himself which are quite unlike the public self. Each of these areas can be roughly ordered. The real outermost is the World which we more or less agree upon and assumes exists regardless of ourselves. One can experience trees, sky, people and all “others” as though they are a World superordinate to us. It exists. Less outermost are perceptions which are relative to the perceiver. For instance, I see this room, my study, as relative to me. An empty study divorced from my presence and use of it would be something else, strange to contemplate. At about this level might he included the reaction of one person to another in which there is awareness of both as present, id est, “Your words surprise me.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
At the inner border of the outermost, I would include sensation of one’s own body. It can be like a thing possessed and used. For instance, I notice a little stiffness here and there and need to change position. It is almost as though I tolerate my body as a necessary other. In this outer region, I would also include states of mind in which I think of what to say to others, so to speak—adjustments of my mask. The inner me (or to borrow the French ‘lautre moi, the other me) begins at this border and extends to puzzling and even unknown aspects of myself. Near the border of the outer, l’autre moi includes spontaneous associations of thought which arise unbidden when in a social context or alone. Inside that are vaguely felt sensations, feelings, images in something of an apparently hodge-podge order. There are states in which one can awaken the inner life to stand forth of its own. There are, in rough order toward the innermost, drifting-fantasy, auto-hypnotic inner perception, the hypnogogic state (the territory near sleep or relaxation) and dreaming while asleep. There are also so-called abnormal states such as hallucinations, altered perceptions of the body and outer World, visions, et cetera. The whole of this inner me, this inner territory, is marked by one distinct difference from the outer me. The life of the inner arises spontaneously, showing surprising twists and turns. The outer me is guided by circumstances or what I choose to do and think. The border of the inner is reached when spontaneous thought, feelings, or images arise, perhaps related to the outer situation at hand, but still autonomously surprising in their nature. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
The surprise may be a little one, where one can see the associative link. Or it may be like a dream where the message of the inner is not really understandable. To the conscious outer self the inner, or l’autre moi, is marked by this spontaneous unaccountability. There are lovely images in literature where the relationship of the inner and outer are portrayed. For instance, in the Christian Bible there are references to the relationship of the servant to the master of the house. It may come as a surprise to ego, but in this imagery, ego is servant and the inner is the master. The master provides and the servant makes do with what is provided, id est, the inner springs provide resources and the outer is judged by what is made of them. Some creative people make good use of the inner and are judged favourably by themselves and the World. At this point mankind is no longer even defended. On the contrary, “to attack that wild beast, man, with every possible weapon, and to attack the creator…” that is the intention. Overwhelmed at the thought of having God as an enemy, intoxicated with the solitude experienced by great criminals (“I alone against humanity”), M. Maldoror goes to war against creation and its author. The romantics maintained with the greatest care the fatal opposition between human solitude and divine indifference—the literary expression of this solitude being the isolated castle and the dandy. However, Mr. Latreamont’s work deals with a more profound drama. It is quite apparent that he found this solitude insupportable and that, ranged against creation, he wished to destroy its limits. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Far from wanting to fortify the reign of humanity with crenelated towers, he wishes to merge it with all other reigns. He brought back creation to the shores of the primeval seas where morality, as well as every other problem, loses all meaning—including the problem, which he considers so terrifying, of the immortality of the soul. He had no desire to create a spectacular image of the rebel, or of the dandy, opposed to creation, but to mingle mankind and the World together in the same general destruction. He attacked the very frontier that separates mankind from the universe. Total freedom, the freedom of crime in particular, supposes the destruction of human frontiers. It is not enough to condemn oneself and all mankind to execration. The reign of mankind must still be brought back to the level of the reign of the instinct. We find in Mr. Lautreamont this refusal to recognize rational consciousness, this return to the elementary which is one of the marks of a civilization in revolt against itself. It is no longer a question or recognizing appearances, but of no longer existing at all on the conscious level. The child has a picture of the World which is quite different from the way it appears to his parents. It is a fairy-tale World, full of monsters and magic, and it persists all through his life and forms the archaic background for his script. A simple example is the night fear or night terror, where Jeder calls out that there is a bear in his room. His parents come in and turn on the lights and show him that there are no bears there, or else become angry and tell him to hush up and go to sleep. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Either way, his Children knows that there is, or was, a bear in the room nevertheless. Like Galileo, he cries: “Eppur se muove.” The difference in the two ways of handling it does not change the fact of the bear. The reasoning approach means that when there is a bear, you parents will come and protect you and the bear will go into hiding; the angry approach means that when there is a bear, you are on your own. However, the bear stays, either way. By the time he grows up, Jeder’s World image or script set has become much more elaborate and also much better hidden, unless it reappears with its original distortions in the form of delusions. Usually, however, there is no inkling of it until it appears in a dream, and then suddenly much of the patient’s behaviour becomes coherent and understandable. What do person do what they have been provoked to emotional arousal? The alternative reactions of a person to emotional arousal are immediate uncontrolled expression and release, suppression or emotional behaviour, and repression of the emotional quality experience. Immediate expression is the characteristic pattern among young children when they experience emotional tension. They laugh, cry, strike out, jump up and down, throw tantrums—in short, they appear to be almost out of control. It is as if their cerebral cortex has been dethroned from rational control over behaviour and their entire organism is directed by “explosions” of subcortical brain structures, such as the hypothalamus. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
On the beneficial ide, immediate expression of emotional tension in this uncontrolled manner is effective in getting rid of the tension. Once it is given expression, the person is able to proceed in a more controlled and less tense way. On the negative side, immediate expression is undesirable, especially in an adult, because: Society condemns uncontrolled expression of emotion in adults on a purely normative and moral basis. Adults who throw tantrums or who cannot control their emotions are viewed as immature, as person who cannot be trusted with important responsibilities. While expressing uncontrol emotions, the person is out of touch with external reality. Persons out of touch with reality do not perceive the World with accuracy—indeed, they are not interested in the external World during the tantrum. Further, they do not protect other important values while in those throes of an “affective storm.” They may break things that they value; they may say or do things that cost them their job, marriage, reputation. It is so very important that you do not let praise and adulation go to your head. Adulation is poison. You better never lose sight of the fact that the Lord put you where you are according to His design, which you do not understand. Acknowledge the Lord for whatever good you can accomplish and give Him the credit and the glory and do not worry about that coming to yourself. If you can do that, you will go forward with love for the people and a great respect for them and you will try to accomplish what your office demands of you. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Direction is telling others what to do. Providing effective direction requires that leaders communicate the desires end state for the direction they provide. To accomplish a mission, leaders prioritize tasks, assign responsibility, supervise, and ensure subordinates perform to standard. They ensure subordinates clearly understand their guidance, while allowing subordinates the opportunity to demonstrate initiative withing the overall commander’s intent. Providing clear direction allows subordinates initiative to adopt their tasks withing the commander’s intent when circumstances change. The Sacramento Fire Department requires leaders who provide direction and firefighters who can execute without the need for continuous guidance. Motivation is the will and initiative to do what is necessary to accomplish a mission. While motivation comes from within, others’ words and actions affect it. The Sacramento Fire Department understands others’ needs and desires, and aligns and elevates individuals desires into team goals. Even if it means risking their lives, the inspire others to accomplish those larger goals. At other times, such as constrained or dangerous situations, the leader gets the fire fighters to do things quickly and explains the reasons later. Indirect approaches to motivation can be as effective as direct approaches. Setting a personal example can sustain the drive in others. Then becomes apparent when crews share hardships and risks with each other. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
“Social life? I’ve been going with a lady, and it’s getting serous, so I have to be thinking about marriage. She hasn’t been put through the wringer yet, so she doesn’t really know what fire service is like. It’s happened with some of my other women, where I don’t show up at all because I’m at a fire. Or we’re out someplace and a fire call comes in, and I have to stop the date and go to the fire, because I’m needed. But our first date was kind of funny. We went out with some friends and their wives, and were sitting around the house toward the end of the evening, and a fire came in. I said, ‘Well, no time like the present to break into the fire service, huh?’ And off I went. I went on the fire call, and she was taken home by some of the other wives. I don’t think any woman likes to be left at home in those situation. But the fire department is my first love and always will be my first love. And when duty calls, I have to go.” Understanding the expectations and applying the attributes and competencies prepares the Sacramento Fire Department for situations they are likely to encounter. Fire fighters who gain expertise through operational assignments, institutional learning, and self-development will be versatile enough to adapt to most situations and grow into greater responsibilities. All members of the Sacramento Fire Department are loyal, dedicated to duty, respectful, selfless, honourable, possess a great deal of integrity and display personal courage in the face of danger and adversity. You can save lives by making a donation to the Sacramento Fire Department. As a reminder, parents, pleasure teach your children love America and be patriotic citizens and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. In an effort to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars. American made cars used to be the envy of the World and because American car brands are offering a wide range of options, from family SUVs to electric vehicles and luxury sedans, we are now seeing a resurging interest. American made cars are equal or superior to those made overseas. The Chevrolet Trax, for instance, is a well-designed, fuel efficient, and safe SUV. And as you know, there is no better car on Earth than 1950-1970s American Muscle Car. Americans make sure superior product, but we are buying things from other nations. American food imports have risen by 300 percent since 1999. American farmland declined by nearly 20 million acres between 2017 and 2022. As of 2022, there were 880.1 million acres of land dedicated to farming, compared to 900.1 million in 2017. The data shows there are now little more than 1.9 million farms in the country. Americans and American corporations spent $136 billion on food and beverages from other countries. It is a national security risk to lose American Farms and farmers. If there is a war, and most of our meat, produce, poultry, dairy, and fruit is coming from foreign counties, we stand the risk of starving. With war breaking out all over the World, in these uncertain times, it is very important to bring American farms back. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. As money flows, it influences further investment. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever. Also, to ensure that we have farmland for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrant to America. Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a populations that equally represents all races of people. If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in American, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in American which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the nation debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by send more money overseas. Buying American made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards in regard to pollution. American companies have to be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human minds to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
Laguna Park, CA | From the Mid 500’s
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The Evil You Have Done Me is Too Great
The true American Christian harbours only goodwill towards one who chooses to be his enemy, together with good wishes for the other’s well-being, and for his coming closer to the higher self, hence closer to the truth. To serve humanity is in the end to serve yourself. This follows from the working of God’s law. To forgive those who, in ignorance, sin against you, is for the same reason to forgive yourself. In the end, the heartlessly cruel punish themselves, though whether here in this life, in purgatory after death, or in some future re-embodiment is another matter. Where other persons are good but mistaken, the uttered criticism of them should be gentle; where they are well-meaning but weak, it should be cautious. For in such cases the character has what is admirable and what is blameworthy mixed up in it. The first step in dealing with one who is difficult to live with, who is irritable, impulsive, quick to take offense, explosively bad-tempered, condemnatory, and sulky is to control in yourself what you wish him to control in himself—to set an example through self-discipline, to stimulate his higher will, and to give out love. When correcting his mistakes or shortcomings, remember it is not so much what you say as how that matters. If done calmly, gently, kindly, and unemotionally, it will be effective. If not, it will arouse his ego into antagonism or resentment and fail of effect. #RandolphHarris 1 of 26
Every time he speaks to you, do not answer at once. Instead, pause collect yourself to the dangers of the situation and answer slowly, taking special pains to be more polite than circumstances call for. If you do not do this, his fault may be aroused in him immediately and you may pick it up sensitively, too; then both will display it. Remember that negative fault-finding acts as an irritant to him and as a poison to your inner relationship. Correct him by optimistic, affirmative suggestions of what to do rather than harass him with criticisms of what not to do. In short, be polite outwardly and surrender the ego inwardly. Only by first conquering the weakness inside yourself can you rightly hope that he will ever even begin to struggle against the same weakness inside himself. If he is the unfortunate victim of temperament, that is, of his ego, remember that he is a younger soul, that you are older, and check yourself. Iamblichus tells us that Pythagoreans did not punish a servant nor admonish a man during anger, but waited until they had recovered their serenity. They used a special word to signify such “self-controlled rebukes,” effecting this calmness by silence and quiet. Pythagoras himself advised that the scares and ulcers which advice sometimes cases should be minimized as much as possible: “The corrections and admonitions of the elder towards the younger should be made with much suavity of manners and great caution; also, with much solitude and tact, which makes the reproof all the more graceful and useful.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 26
If you want to improve a man, it took me along time to learn that I should not reprove him. Leave that to life itself However, then it will do so in harsher, more inconsiderate terms than those you are likely to use. Criticisms should always be balanced ones, should avoid the tendency to go to extreme or to be one-sided when revealing defects. He should not waste thought or harm others by destructively criticizing them. Instead, if his life-path forces him to deal with them and therefore to understand them exactly as they are, he will calmly and constructively, gently and impersonally, analyze them. He will see their weakness without involving himself in egotistically emotional reactions to it—unless they are compassionate recognitions of the sorrowful results it must inevitably bring. If he is to be helped, it is sometimes necessary when a man is acting stupidly, unwisely, or unethically, to speak out straightforwardly, rather than remain silent. If he has aspiration, if he is seeking self-improvement, his faults can be corrected. However, if they are concealed from him and no one tells him about their existence, they will live longer and he will suffer more for them. The fear of hurting his feelings is, in such a case, a foolish consideration. For it condones present error instead of correcting it. Yielding to this fear keeps the man imprisoned in a wrong view, where rejecting the fear might be the first step towards his liberation from it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26
If sometimes a criticism is called for, if harsher experience is to be avoided, then let it be given by a constructive suggestion of the opposite beneficial quality only, not mentioning the actual negative one. However, if that is unlikely to be accepted and a plain warning seems the only way, then it should be uttered humbly and tactfully. In its most paralyzing form, fear expresses itself by the denial that any problem exists, or by a refusal to face the problem even after it has become apparent. Just as there are none so blind as those who will not see, so there are none so frightened as those who will not concede their fear. If it were volunteered, they cannot be helped because they do not seek help, nor would they accept it. In one case, for example, a couple came for treatment because the wife had never experienced “excitement.” It soon became evident from their personal histories that the husband had problems of his own. He was often impotent. However, that was not how he saw himself—his self-image was of a virile male, who because of fatigue or having had too much to drink, would on rare occasions be uninterested in pleasures of the flesh. It was his wife, he insisted, who could not function during pleasures of the flesh; he himself did very well, thank you. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26
His wife confirmed his description of the situation. Although this would seem to fly in the face of logic—surely, she must have been aware of his failures—the truth is that she saw his impotence as her fault and she therefore agreed with him that the problem was hers and hers alone. No effort was made to persuade the husband or wife that they both might be deceiving themselves. Instead, the husband was told during one counseling session that when he and his wife had pleasures of the flesh that night, he was to permit his wife to assume the superior position. He was given those instructions with full awareness that this variation, which ran contrary to his picture of himself as the dominant male, would put him under considerable tension and this make it unlikely that he could perform satisfactorily. The following day he reported that he had in fact failed to have any “excitement,” and he quickly explained that this happened because he had eaten to much dinner. He was reassured that this did not demean him as a man nor prove that he was incompetent with pleasures of the flesh. It did, however, demonstrate two things: that under stress he reacted as a human being, and that he was subject to occasional impotence. Once his fear of being something less than a man could be recognized for what it was—an adolescent image of the male as a athlete of pleasures of the flesh—he was relieved of the need to deny the existence of his very real problem. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26
When it occurred, he could acknowledge failure and, seeing it in perspective, he could concentrate on learning to cope with his emotional tensions. The calmer and more confident he became, the more certainly his body asserted itself—and the more readily his wife responded. She had been as much a victim of his tensions as he was. Once she was set free of that fear that she was the cause of their unhappiness with pleasures of the flesh, she was free to let a sense of physical pleasure rise to the surface of awareness and culminate naturally in “excitement.” Some couples make no attempt to deny the existence of a conflict involving pleasures of the flesh—on the contrary, they may fight openly about it—but they proceed to handle matters in ways that are just as self-defeating as total denial would be. One wife, for example, endured almost total frustration for years, furious with her husband because, as she saw it, “he didn’t know how to do ‘it’ right.” Nevertheless, she continued to engage in pleasures of the flesh whenever he made a request. “I feel used,” she admitted, “but I also feel that I’m doing my duty. He supports me and the children, and if this is what he wants, that’s what I do.” Like many women, she thought she was solving her marital problem by doing whatever could be expected of her as a wife, accepting a conventional, subservient role. However, the solution solved nothing; instead, it made a bad situation worse. #RandolphHarris 6 of 26
Over the years, her anger intensified, and her husband, who genuinely regretted his inability to be more effective with pleasures of the flesh, became increasingly impotent. Once in a while, however, he got back at his wife without being fully aware of what he was doing. When it was transparently clear that she did not want to have pleasures of the flesh but grimly agreed to it anyway, on occasions, he found himself able to prolong his performance almost indefinitely. A simpler, but no less negative, approach to pleasures of the flesh conflicts it taken by couples who use stereotypes to explain away all their difficulties. If a husband and wife cannot agree on how often to have pleasures of the flesh, for instance, empty generalizations make it easier for them to accept their differences. The wife can reassure herself that it is all her husband’s fault because, as everyone knows, “the more you give a man, the more he wants.” And her husband remains confident that his wife’s lack of enthusiasm is no reflection on him because, as everyone knows, “most women really do not have much interest in pleasures of the flesh.” Such stereotypes, incidentally, are remarkably versatile. They can be used to support opposite decisions. If most men have pleasures of the flesh on their minds almost all the time, a woman can either justify refusing her husband when she chooses to because it will make him more eager the next time—or justify obliging him as an act of kindness since he cannot help being in a state of her perpetual desire. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26
Her husband, on the other hand, can either accept her refusal as evidence of her female nature—or else if there is to be any chance of a response, he can refuse to take no for an answer since that same female nature requires a man to assert himself. False though they are, such sentiments are relied on by countless couples to suppress anxiety and to avoid having to search for the underlying source of their discontent. With this kind of sedation, some marriages can struggle along for years. Others cannot—and it is difficult to say for certain which outcome is the more unfortunate. One other ill-advised approach should be mentioned. A couple may openly acknowledge to each other that their relationship involving pleasures of the flesh is far from perfect and both agree that they want to do whatever they can to increase their pleasure. Their unity of purpose starts them in the right direction—but they immediately take a wrong turn. They pull pleasures of the flesh out of context; that is, they consider the physical act of intercourse as something in and of itself, a skill to be practiced and improved. The usual analogies are with dancing or tennis—but such comparisons are misleading. Pleasures of the flesh is not just a skill to be mastered, an activity to exercise the body, or a game to be played. At certain times and under certain circumstances, anu of these elements may dominate the total experience. However, to reduce pleasures of the flesh to a physical exchange is to strip it of richness and subtlety and, even more important, ultimately means robbing it of all emotional value. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26
Less pleasure, rather than more, is the almost certain outcome for a man and woman who make the mistake of compartmentalizing pleasures of the flesh as a physical act. As hypothetical example, and one that is not as farfetched as it might sound, consider the husband who decides that his wife’s inability to have more than one “exciting” experience is an indication that in some way she still is not totally free in the acceptance of the pleasures of her body. Since she is both a curious and suggestible person, she thinks it is a good idea when he suggests that she use something stimulating as a means of going into training, as it were, for more frequent “excitement.” As if making a helpful suggestion and not as if making an attack, to offer someone constructive criticism and to avoid its being taken as a reproof, one should phrase the sentence carefully. Criticism based on passion, anger, prejudiced bias, hatred, or ignorance is of little worth. If it is to be constructive and healthy, it must be based on fact ascertain in the way in which the scientist ascertains facts. If men are to judged at all, then they should be judged not by the understanding which others possess but by their own. The aspirant who resents being told that there is room to improve himself in a particular way, is unfit to be a disciple. If he takes a constructive helpfully meant criticism in such a way, what is the use of saying that he wants to life himself to a higher plane? A fair appraisal of anything or person should leaven appreciation with criticism. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26
One way to view yourself, you “organism,” is as a dynamic, ever-changing unit, bi-polar in its potential for expression. The picture that comes to mind is that of a teeter-totter, the child’s playground toy made up of a long board held up by a fulcrum in the middle. If you label one end “liberal,” to describe the open, uninhibited, expressive side of you and the other end “conservative” to describe the cautious, traditional, controlled side, the teeter-totter has one side that is touching the ground and the other side totally in the air. As any child knows, when the two side of the teeter-totter are balanced, it gently swings up and down, up and down, with one side counteracting the movement of the other. In the same way, when you are in balance, your teeter-totter is moving continually in dynamic interplay between your liberal and conservative potentials. One side of the teeter-totter goes up and that side comes into awareness; the needs of that side of your nature predominate. Circumstances change, and the other wide of the teeter-totter goes up. As long as you continue to live by the law of expression—expressing what you feel in your words, your behaviour, your fantasies—then you will continue to move in organismic balance. Neither the liberal nor the conservative tendencies will predominate or become fixated. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26
There are a number of ways to upset this balance. On the playground, a child can ask a friend to sit on his side of the board, this making it heavier. When that happens, the side with two children on it slams to the ground heavily and stays there. Another way is for one of the children to move closer to the middle; the change in weight causes the other side to go down and the child who moved closer stays up in the air. Note that in both cases, the result is a stoppage, a breakdown, no movement, no action, no “life.” Whether you upset the balance with external control, as with taking more weight on your side, or self-control, as with changing your position, the disruption is up to you. You must take responsibility for the situation, whether it is a situation of balance or imbalance. Responsibility in this sense means accepting that you are the cause of your own natural rhythmic balance, not depending on anyone else to establish controls for your behaviour. Thus, to say, “I will not physically hurt another because there are laws against it,” is an abdication of the responsibility. On the other hand, it is an acceptance of responsibility to say, “I am so angry, I want to hurt somebody, but I know that doing it will not make me feel less angry; besides, it is not productive and it just makes matters worse.” (Wanting to hurt someone is consider a medical or psychiatric emergency.) #RandolphHarris 11 of 26
Here the “liberal” side got an opportunity to express itself, but the “conservative” side was able to temper the expression with logic and restraint. We all have liberal and conservative sides; each side must accept the existence and role of the other. In the open acceptance and expression of both sides of your nature, you have a natural means by which to live your life with the greatest ease. This still afford you an abundance of challenges with a minimum of artificial controls imposed from without. External morality systems are artificial control devices which some of us believe are required to keep “immature” people from behaving “unwisely.” As parents and spouses, we feel the need to impose such systems on our children and mates because, deep down, we do not trust our own organismic balance and therefore cannot trust the balance of those we love. Prior to the work of scientific psychology, there is a need to find the human experience the science is to deal with. This corresponds to geologists picking up stones and paleontologist finding bones. Usually humans experience is bypassed, or squeezed into a data processable form by getting the responses of people to a protocol (id est, “answers to these questions are a measure of introversion”). The protocol may involve responses to a fixed array of lights or other equipment. The person is translated into a fixed pre-determined protocol which is then data-processable to arrive at some general statement of people. The protocol is fashioned to note certain given aspects, although many protocols do not even do this reliably or validly. #RandolphHarris 12 of 26
The individual’s life, spread though time, and different under different circumstances, is the original complete protocol. In this form it can be barely read, let alone statistically processed. Moreover, it is a protocol in its own unique language having a unique frame of reference. It is important to recognize at the outset that the phenomenology of an individual life is not scientific and only with some work can be processed into the mode of science. A human’s life I see as pre-scientific, although it may provide data for science as stones do to a geologist. I once set out to describe the World of a schizophrenic man. Much of my description consisted of quotes from the mane himself, for in some lucid moments he captured better than anyone what was happening to him. I deliberately avoided the categories of the usual case history. What was important to him went into it. For instance, the meaning of the things in his pockets was important to him. To check on the validity of this description of his World, I could but ask the subject of this schizophrenic World himself. He found it accurate except that his World fell in pieces and my description was coherent. He lacked the continuity of meaning we take for granted. There were deadly places of lostness in which he was not sure who he was, where he was, or what it all meant. To more accurately described his World, I would have to had to use a poetic form of language with horrible blank spaces—something in the mode of Joyce’s Ulysses. Validity in science is what can be commonly agreed upon. Validity in humanism is finally the subject himself. Science finds the common in varied. Phenomenology finds the varied in the common. #RandolphHarris 13 of 26
The man who offers himself to defend mankind at the same time writes: “Show me the one man who is good.” This perpetual vacillation is part of a nihilist rebellion. We rebel against the injustice done to ourselves and to mankind. However, in the moment of lucidity, when we simultaneously perceive the legitimacy of this rebellion and its futility, the frenzy of negation is extended to the very thing that we claimed to be defending. Not being able to atone for injustice by the elevation of justice, we choose to submerge it in an even greater injustice, which is finally confounded with annihilation. “The evil you have done me is too great, too great the evil I have done you, for it to be involuntary.” In order not to be overcome with self-hatred, one’s innocence must be proclaimed, an impossibly bold step for one man alone, for self-knowledge will prevent him. However, at least one can declare that everyone is innocent, though they may be treated as guilty. God is then the criminal. From the romantics to Mr. Lautreamont, there is, therefore, no real progress, except in style. Lautreamont resuscitates, once again, with a few improvements, the figure of the God of Abraham and the image of the Luciferian rebel. He places God “on a throne built of excrement, human and golden,” on which sits, “with imbecile pride, his body covered with a shroud made of unwashed sheets, he who styles himself the Creator.” “The horrible Eternal One with the features of a viper,” “the crafty bandit” who can be seem “stoking the fires in which young and old perish,” rolls drunkenly in the gutter, or seek base pleasures in the brothel. God is not dead, He has fallen. #RandolphHarris 14 of 26
Face to face with the fallen deity, Mr. Maldoror appears as a conventional cavalier in a black cloak. He is the Accursed. “Every must not witness the hideous aspect which the Supreme Being, with a smile of intense hatred, has granted me.” He has forsworn everything—“father, more, Providence, love, ideals—so as to think no longer of anything else but himself.” Racked with pride, this hero has all the illusions of the metaphysical dandy: “A face that is more than human, sad with the sadness of the Universe, beautiful as an act of suicide.” Like the romantic rebel, Mr. Maldoror, despairing of divine injustice, will take the side of evil. To cause suffering and, in causing it, to suffer, that is his lot. The Songs are veritable litanies of evil. Adolescence is the period when Jeder oscillates, or agonizes, between his script and his antiscript. He tries to follow his parents’ precepts, then rebels against them, only to find himself following their script programing. He sees the futility of that and falls back on the precepts again. By the end of his adolescence, when he graduates from college, for example, or gets out of the army, he has made some sort of decision; he either settles down and follows the precepts, or breaks away and slides downhill toward his script payoff. He is likely to continue on this chosen course until he reaches forty, when he goes through his second agony. If he has followed his parents’ precepts, he then tries to break out: he gets a divorce, quits his job, absconds with the profits, or at least dyes his hair and buys a guitar. If he has gone down with the script, he tries to reform by joining AA or going to a psychiatrist. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26
However, adolescence is the period when he first feels that he can make an autonomous choice: unfortunately, this feeling of autonomy may be part of the illusion. What he often does is merely alternate more or less violently between the precepts of the Parent in his parents, and the provocations of the Child they put forth. Teenage drug users are not necessarily rebelling against parental authority. They are rebelling against Parental slogans, but in so doing, they may simply be following the demonic come-ones, the “crazy Child,” of the very same parents. “I do not want my son drinking,” says mother as she takes a drink. If he does not drink, he is a good boy, a mama’s boy. If he does drink, he is a bad boy, but he is still a mama’s boy. “Don not let anybody up your skirt,” says father to his daughter, looking at the waitress’s skirt. Whichever way she plays it, she is still daddy’s girl. She can either shack up in high school and then reform, or remain a virgin until she is married and then have affairs later. However, somewhere in between, perhaps both the boy and the girl can make up their own minds and free themselves from their scripts and live life their own ways. Especially if they have permission to make up their own minds, and not “permission to make up your own mind (as long as you make it up my way).” Genetic intelligence is measured by the ability to move gene pools upward, angling always westward, pushing against, always being shaped by, reformed by, activated by, mutated by spin-pressure from The Future. #RandolphHarris 16 of 26
When we move down and back East across the Atlantic Ocean, the truth of the Occidental Ascendance becomes comically clear. The Greenwich time zones are in centuries. If Boston is two hundred years before Los Angeles—no accident that the current Neurological Capital of the planet has been given the high-altitude title “City of the Angels,” then surely, we see that London is four hundred years back and down. What, in truth, can we expect from England? Elizabethan Style? Repetitious tradition? Culture? Only in the sense of a class structure which penalizes new genetic intelligence’ in favour of inherited privilege. Parent-child inheritance of bureaucratic advantages always drives the superior—fatigue genes into migration. This is not a political complaint, but a neurogenetic I.Q. test. The genetically active, whether descended form the sperm-ova of prince or pauper—every gene-pool contains its princes and paupers, always migrate West. Those who rely on power remain in the Eastern capital. If England is a comic opera, what can he say about France? Paris is a museum of dusty Louis XIV grandeur. And what, in relevant charity for the past, can be said about the lessons that an intelligent terrestrial primate can learn today in Lisbon? Madrid? Rome? Athens? Cairo? Beirut? Jerusalem? There is this to be said for NATO nations. They are the most Western—the freest and smartest gene-pools of the Old Continent. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26
Examine a map of the European land mass. Colour in blue those countries which are democratic, which respect human rights, which outlaw torture, which allow any cultural or individual experimentation. You will see that the blue countries cluster nervously at the Western borders of the huge, European hemisphere. Notice as you go East, you find more government restrictions, ore centralization, more contempt for the individual, ore commitment to tradition and familial-dictatorship. To live east of Denver is to fail the intelligence test. One winter I traveled from San Diego to Buffalo and told the shivering natives, “Buffalo is an intelligence test you have failed. So you have to stay here and repeat Buffalo IA.” Can there possibly be one intelligent person left in North Ireland? Uganda? Any Ugandan with more than eight billion neurons surely has swum a river or climbed a mountain to flee from that jungle of primitive barbarism. Buffalo is an intelligence test you have failed. A sociologist or anthropologist observes that most members of a given social class or society share many emotional habits. These emotional responses differ, however, from typical emotional responses of people in other classes or societies. For example, the exposure of woman’s bosom typically arouses no erotic interest in some African tribesman, whereas it may exist a middle-class American man. #RandolphHarris 18 of 26
Part of the total socialization process—the efforts of parents, teachers, and others to mold and shape the typical personality for that society—is devoted to ensuring that the growing children acquire the appropriate emotional habits. It is desired by the society that most members of a group perceive and interpret aspects of the World in a uniform way, and react with similar emotional responses. This uniformity is achieved in part through formal education—children know that pain and fear are associated with danger, and so their elders and instructors teach them to interpret many things as dangerous. It may also be achieved less formally through experience within the family that have the effect of training most members of the society to react in a uniform way to certain classes of stimuli. He who spares the bad hurts the good. Yet the critic, who is at the same time philosophically minded, will always seek to be constructive and will only show up the bad where he can also show us the good. It is his business as a student of philosophy to be constructive. If he prepares the way for it with an offering or praise, he will make it easier to make a needful criticism. When it comes from outside criticism is rarely acceptable for it is then supposed to have a hostile motivation. Neither the spirit of genuine truth-seeking nor that of friendly constructive helpfulness will be correctly understood; they will only be misunderstood. If they are superiors or at least equals, and if they have the courage to criticize shortcomings, help in growth come also from friends. #RandolphHarris 19 of 26
For the Sacramento Fire Department, being a firefighter is an inherently human endeavor, which requires perseverance, sacrifice, and tenacity. They have to face life threatening situations daily and maintain the motivation requires to endure the physical and mental hardships and danger. The Sacramento Fire Department has a historical ethic, are loyal, possess integrity, believe that duty comes first, and provides self-less service. With a great patriotic love for American, they bear true faithful allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America, their family, their crew, and all other beings. “We have one daughter. She is fifteen months old. If I hadn’t been injured, she wouldn’t be here. You see, the night we figure she was conceived, I looked at my work schedule and I would have been at work, and it never would have happened. This was elven months after I was injured, near the end of my leave. So, in a sense, I was glad to have been injured and to have been home that night. When I met my wife, she was working as a part-time secretary at a law firm and she was moonlighting at nice as a waitress. I stopped in at the diner on my way home, and this young lady, who was a friend of mind said, “do you want to go somewhere else to eat?” I said, “No. I like the food here. I don’t want to leave.” She said, “Ah, come on, I know this new café nearby. The food is great.” We drove over to this fancy café, and my future wife was working there, and I started talking to her. I asked her to go out to breakfast. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26
“The next morning, before going to the law firm, I picked her up and took her to my favorite diner. She was very sky and barely ate a thing. After that, I dropped her off at work. We started dating. I’d pick her up after work and we’d go to breakfast, or she’d come to the firehouse and bring me a sandwich or whatever. We dated a little over a year, then we got engaged and lived together for over eight months, and then we were married. I was already a captain at the rescue company. I don’t think she understood how dangerous it was. I wouldn’t talk about it. If I came home and had a close call, I wouldn’t say anything. I didn’t want her to know what could happen. She thought being a police officer was dangerous and that firefighting may be dangerous, but it wasn’t going to happen to her husband. I explained what a recuse company did, but she really had no idea what the fire department was about. Now she’s a real fan, she cuts pictures out of the paper, and she mounted different awards for me on the wall. She’ll listen to a scanner once in a while. Yet even today, if I mention a truck company, she’ll say, ‘Is that the one with the hose or the one with the ladders?’ She’s not working now, she’s staying home with the baby. My little baby is fascinated by my uniform. The kids in the neighborhood say, ‘Hey, Mr. X, did you go to any fires?’ I feel good about that. My mother is really proud about me being a captain. My father didn’t have a chance to see it. He died before I made lieutenant. I was listening to the home watch, and I heard an ambulance go there for a heart attack. By the time I got to the hospital, he was dead. He would have been proud. I feel good making the promotions that I have. #RandolphHarris 21 of 26
“I wouldn’t take a medical disability pension. As soon as I was injured, the guys were saying, ‘Hey, you’ve got it made. Get the heck out.’ I was like, ‘For what? What the heck am I going to do?’ I don’t want to go home and sit on my duff for the rest of my life. Why would I leave this job and go work at another job? I like this job. It’s been my life, it’s been good to me. I enjoy it, and I always look forward to doing it. I’ll keep doing it, if it doesn’t kill me. And if it does, I know that my family will be well taken care of. If I were out selling insurance and got killed in a car accident, that company is not going to look out for my family the way the city fire department does. I’ve made too many friends in here to leave. My whole life has been screwed up working the graveyard shifts. I’m having a hard time now, working a five-day week in fire prevention, because for sixteen years I hadn’t been doing it. You get used to never being off on a holiday, and it’s kind of weird now. I mean, I can tell friends and family that I’ll be there Christmas, rathe than, ‘I’m sorry, I gotta work,’ or ‘I’ve gotta leave early, I have to work tonight.’ I just enjoy the job too much to leave. When I first went to Rescue, they had a trust fund, set up by some guy years ago, supposedly to give money to victims of fire, also to children and poor people in the area. Well, I talked it over with the lawyer, and because Rescue goes citywide, we could pick anybody in the city. We would go around to different schools and pick children out, talk it over with the teachers, and have a big Christmas party for them. We would bring them over and buy a whole set of clothes, and give them toys and all. We would have a Santa Claus there. A couple of the kids kept stealing coins from our soda machine, and we’d have to smack their hands, but that was okay. #RandolphHarris 22 of 26
“The year I went and delivered the checks, and I looked around, and hell, they were doing better than I was. You could tell the mother was going to spend the money on herself. She had a Neo QLED 8K color TV, but the kids looked like ragpickers. I decided that from then on, we’d get stuff for the kids. We went to the schools, and the teachers know which kids aren’t dressed properly and who need more than others. We got the sizes from the parents, and we went out and did the shopping. Clothes were the big things. Our wives would wrap the stuff up, we got turkeys and then a hotel in our district would cook them for us, and the wives would come in and help. They would dress up as elves, and we had a guy come down from the water tower like Santa Claus. The whole firehouse did this, still do it, the decorations and everything. It made me feel good, knowing that it was the kids’ Christmas. I mean, if the kids weren’t going to get this, they weren’t going to get much.” All members of the Sacramento Fire Department are loyal, dedicated to duty, respectful, selfless, honourable, possess a great deal of integrity and display personal courage in the face of danger and adversity. You can save lives by making a donation to the Sacramento Fire Department. As a reminder, parents, pleasure teach your children love America and be patriotic citizens and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26
In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. In an effort to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars. American made cars used to be the envy of the World and because American car brands are offering a wide range of options, from family SUVs to electric vehicles and luxury sedans, we are now seeing a resurging interest. American made cars are equal or superior to those made overseas. The Chevrolet Trax, for instance, is a well-designed, fuel efficient, and safe SUV. And as you know, there is no better car on Earth than 1950-1970s American Muscle Car. Americans make sure superior product, but we are buying things from other nations. American food imports have risen by 300 percent since 1999. American farmland declined by nearly 20 million acres between 2017 and 2022. As of 2022, there were 880.1 million acres of land dedicated to farming, compared to 900.1 million in 2017. The data shows there are now little more than 1.9 million farms in the country. Americans and American corporations spent $136 billion on food and beverages from other countries. It is a national security risk to lose American Farms and farmers. If there is a war, and most of our meat, produce, poultry, dairy, and fruit is coming from foreign counties, we stand the risk of starving. With war breaking out all over the World, in these uncertain times, it is very important to bring American farms back. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. As money flows, it influences further investment. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26
Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever. Also, to ensure that we have farmland for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrant to America. Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a populations that equally represents all races of people. If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in American, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in American which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. #RandolphHarris 25 of 26
When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the nation debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by send more money overseas. Buying American made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards in regard to pollution. American companies have to be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human minds to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 26 of 26
The Winchester Mystery House
Experience an unforgettable journey back to the time of kings and queens with this entry ticket for The Winchester Mansion in Santa Clara, California which was the residence of Sarah L. Winchester. Take advantage of this fascinating experience. After tour, there will be time enjoy the mansion’s splendor at your own pace. You might even discover secret passages.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
BMW’s slogan, “The Ultimate Driving Machine,” isn’t just a marketing phrase—it’s a promise. BMW cars are designed with the driver in mind, offering features like rear-wheel drive, near-perfect weight distribution, and precise steering. These elements combine to create a driving experience that is both engaging and satisfying.
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The Poet Chooses the Apocalypse and Destruction
One of the most cunning aspects of the adversary’s efforts to thwart our Father in Heaven’s plan of happiness is his deceitful teaching that there s no evil influence or devil and this attempt to redefine evil as good and good as evil, darkness as light and light as darkness, and bitter as sweet and sweet as bitter. “And behold, others he flattereth away, and telleth them there is no hell; and he saith unto them: I am no devil, for there is none—and thus he whispereth in their ears, until he grasps them with his awful chains, from whence there is no deliverance,” reports 2 Nephi 28.22. Let those who wish complain of evils or criticize: that is their affair. However, to take such adverse attitudes is not a laudable way of life. They, men or women, could find enough material to occupy wholes days at a time. We are all vulnerable. Denouncing negatives is unhealthier than announcing benefits. “Wo unto them that call evil good, and good evil, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” reports 2 Nephi 15.20. He is too psychologically perceptive not to understand the character of others but too generous to judge and condemn them. The student should not go about criticizing or abusing others. He should not do so because it is mentally unhealthy and hinders his own progress, because it will one day bring down criticism or abuse upon his own head, because he has to foster a compassionate outlook, and because he ought to understand that everybody on Earth is indeed here owing to his own imperfection so that the labour of showing up faults would be an endless one. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
The wise student should emulate the masters when encountering a man who insists on controversial argument but who has no desire to learn the truth, no humility to accept it from those who, from broader experience, know more about the matter or who, from superior intelligence, judge it better than himself. The student should lapse into silence, smile, and take the earliest opportunity to get away! He should not waste time and breath or fall into friction and disharmony by letting himself be drawn into further talk. For the truculent and bull-headed man who argues against every standpoint he takes, who disputes each explanation he gives, will be impervious to whatever truth is given him. It is better meekly to acknowledge what he asserts, without criticizing it or correcting its errors. Since its change is not possible, it is better to let the man remain in the smugness of his mistaken views and let the situation be accepted. Such people do not come to hear the truth about themselves or to learn the truth about life. They come for confirmation of their own ideas, flattery about their own character, and endorsement of their own conduct. This is why they will vehemently reject all criticism or correction. It is stupid to bring conversation with others’ beliefs which they are certain to scoff at but which one cherishes as holy. The philosopher would not waste his time in hair-splitting arguments or bickerings about trivial, unimportant details when discussing a metaphysical or mystical theme with the unconvinced. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
It is useless trying to explain his loyalty to the philosophic ideal to those who can see no use and no truth in philosophy itself. Those who are unready for the higher truth will also be ungrateful to anyone who foolishly brings it to them. Few couples would have any trouble understanding exactly what a cynic means when he says that marriage, as a part of life, is like a dual being fought in the midst of a battle. To a considerable extent, it can hardly be otherwise. Even as individuals, we are often at cross-purposes with ourselves, waging inner battles as we struggled to resolve confused or contradictory intentions and desires. With marriage, the problem is inevitably compounded. No matter how obliging by nature a husband and wife may individually be, they must expect to engage in a certain amount of disagreement as they try to reconcile their personal wishes so that together they can pursue the goals they share. What is more, culturally conditioned attitudes toward pleasures of the flesh and sexual identity could hardly have been designed to insure conflict between man and woman. However, for those men and women who basically accept and respect one another as independent and equal human beings, differences can be a stimulus for growth rather than a threat to happiness. A sharp point of disagreement can prod them into testing their feelings and thoughts and beliefs, thus possibly brining them to a deeper level of understanding. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
These feelings, thoughts and beliefs reflect values that the individual, from childhood on, is continually crystallizing out of the totality of his or her personal experiences. Originally, the experiences have no direct association with the act of pleasures of the flesh. They are simply memories attached to happy or unhappy feelings. They may be linked to a parent’s actions, for example, or to a favourite teacher’s counsel, a passage from a novel, a scene from a movie or the derisive laughter triggered by an unsavory joke. Through the drift of emotions imperceptible ways over a period of time, these memories become charged by pleasures of the flesh. They acquire the power to define for the individual the circumstances which make pleasures of the flesh something to be actively enjoyed or simply endured or even dreaded, and to be remembered with good feelings or bad feelings—or indifference. Thus, if satisfying feelings of intimate passions are to result, every individual evolves a unique set of needs that have to be met. In a sense these needs, these factors, might be considered prerequisites to pleasure; our term for them is the value system of pleasures of the flesh. At baseline, it includes all the considerations—the time, the place, the mood, the words used, the gestures made, the thousand and one little signals that a man and woman send to each other with or without language—that the individual requires in order to respond emotionally, to let feelings come to the surface. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
It also includes—and this is very important—those elements that permit the individual to be comfortable with those feelings. For example, if he is to be stimulated for pleasures of the flesh, a man might have a desperate need to be held, to be touched and stroked, and this is a requirement that he, as an individual, must have fulfilled. However, if it happens, will he then accept the touch with pleasure? Or might his response be blocked by guilt or embarrassment? Or plain discomfort? After all, if the pure physical fact of being touched was an automatic turn-on, there would be daily orgies, instead of murders, on the subways! Another example would be the woman who is with the man of her choice, when the time and the mood are both right, and she wishes he would do X—whatever her particular X might be—but she cannot tell him to do it or signal him to do it because, in her system of values, that would be “unromantic.” And if she forced herself to tell him and he then did what she asked, she might be completely unresponsive, turned off by any of a dozen ideas: he did not really want to, a woman should not tell a man what to do, a real man would not obey a woman that way, and so on. All these considerations are part of what makes up her pleasures of the flesh value system. For a man and woman who want to satisfy each other’s needs without sacrificing their own, a delicate process of accommodation is required. Even in an exemplary marriage, differences in temperament and spontaneous feelings make it certain that at all times a husband and a wife will find themselves emotionally at odds. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
With or without words, one partner may signal a wish to make love, for example, and the other partner either ignores the signal or counters it, saying, in effect: “I am not in the mood.” Often the refusal is tempered—not now, not here, not that way. Ans there is the “yes” that means “no,” communicated in a veiled message that means: “If you insist, all right.” No matter how the response is phrased, whether it expresses outright refusal or conditional acceptance, it puts an emotional discrepancy in sharp focus. The feelings of the husband and wide are in conflict. Perhaps the disagreement arises because one of the two likes to use four-letter word during pleasures of the flesh while the other partner finds them discordant and abrasive, or perhaps one of them wants to have pleasures of the flesh occasionally on the spur of the moment, in unlikely places, while the other cannot relax except in the security of their chamber. However, no matter what the specific argument may be about, the problem is more than just a difference in preference. The real issue is not having pleasures of the flesh; it is feeling loved. Although the wife may never say the words, she is thinking: “If he loved me, he would not insist.” Or else: “If he loved me, he would be understanding enough not to ask.” And the husband thinks: “If she loved me, she would not refuse.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
The emotional stakes are higher than is generally realized, a fact that is underscored by the bitterness and hurt feelings that quarrels over gender differences often generate. However, these differences can also be successfully negotiated. The negation will be simpler, however, and the outcome more certain, in cases where husband and wife share the same fundamental convictions about pleasures of the flesh. Particularly if one partner holds conventional views and the other takes an unconventional approach, success becomes more problematical for the couple with a basic disagreement in philosophy. Major differences divide the latter couple. Should the wife accommodate her husband and accept the traditional female role, for instance, or is she equally free to express desire and initiate pleasures of the flesh? Must pleasures of the flesh be reserved for a customary time and place—in bed enjoyed whenever and wherever the mood dictates? Should the physical embrace be restricted to the familiar position and practices—with the woman supine, the man prone above her, and foreplay intended to facilitate pleasures of the flesh—or should the exchange of intimate passions be adventurous and experimental, utilizing every imaginable method of stimulation and every available orifice? Obviously, if a man and wife hold diametrically opposing view on such questions, they will have difficulty compromising their relationship with dealing with pleasures of the flesh and it will be a trial for one or both of them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
It is unlikely, however, that any substantial number of marriages fit this pattern. It represents the extreme. However, in countless marriages, including those where husbands and wives are essentially of the same mind about pleasures of the flesh, whether conventionally or unconventionally so, conflicting feelings about pleasures of the flesh on any given occasion are the rule, rather than the exception, and rarely are they easily resolved. How such conflicts are handled is one of the crucial factors in establishing the prevailing atmosphere of a marriage. A negative approach to this vital problem creates defensiveness and resentment on the part of one or both partners, undermining their relationship. A positive approach leads to the openness and trust that strength the bond. The difficulty, of course, lies in understanding the difference between the two approaches and, what is even more difficult, implementing that understanding. Negative approached to conflicts involving pleasures of the flesh are characterized by fear, hopelessness or ignorance. Fear, for instance, impels some couples to minimize their dissatisfactions and to tell them that if they are patient enough, the problem will go away. (A young wife, whose husband rarely has pleasures of the flesh with her and who even on those occasions is unable to bring her any measure of enjoyment, may console herself for years with the belief that “nature” would soon assert itself.) Other couples may acknowledge the problem but become defensive about it, each partner seeking personal reassurance in the belief that “it is not my fault”—an attitudes that produces nothing but anger and endless recrimination. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
The necessity of forgiving others for what they have done to us is paramount. Nay, it is a duty to be constantly and unbrokenly practiced, no matter what provocation to disobey it we may receive. Our contact with others, or our relation to them, must bring them only good! never bad. To the degree you keep ego out of your reaction to an enemy, to that degree you will be protected from him. His antagonism must be met not only with calmness, indifference, but also with beneficial forgiveness and active love. These alone are fitting to a high present stage of understanding. Be sure that if you do so, good will ultimately emerge from it. Even if this good were only the unfoldment of latent power to master negative emotion which you show by such an attitude, it would be enough reward. However, it will be more. Noble indignation and just resentment are on immensely higher level than grossly selfish indignation and greedy resentment. However, in the case of the disciple, for whom the scale of moral values extends farther than for the “good” man, even they must be abandoned for unruffled serenity and universal goodwill. To the definitely wicked and the evilly obsessed, he need no give his love. However, he must give them and all others who wrong his his forgiveness, for his own sake as well as theirs. Every thought of resentment at another’s action against him, every mood of bitterness at the other’s refusal to do something he wishes him to do, is a crude manifestation of egoism in which, as disciple, he cannot indulge without harming his own self and hindering a favourable change in the other person’s attitude toward him. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
The man who burns with hate against an enemy is, by the fuel of his own thoughts, keeping the fire of the other man’s mutual hate alive. Let him remember instead those glorious moments when the higher self touched his heart. In these moments all that was noble in him overflowed. Enemies were forgiven, grievances let go and the human scene viewed through the spectacle of tenderness and generosity. Only by such a psychological about-turn towards goodwill and forgiveness will he open the first door to abatement of his enemy’s feeling. Mr. Lautreamont demonstrates that the rebel dissimulates the desire to accept appearance behind the desire for banality. In either case, whether he abases or vaunts himself, the rebel wants to be other than he is, even when he is prepared to be recognized for what he really is. The blasphemies and the conformity of Mr. Lautreamont illustrate this unfortunate contradiction, which is resolved in his case in the desire to be nothing at all. Far from being a recantation, as is generally supposed, the same passion for annihilation explains Mr. Maldoror’s invocation of the primeval night and the laborious banalities of the Poesies. Mr. Lautreamont makes us understand that rebellion is adolescent. Out most effective terrorists, whether they are armed with bombs or with poetry, hardly escape infancy. The Songs of Maldoror are the works of a highly talented schoolboy; their pathos lies precisely in the contradictions of a child’s mind ranged against creation and against itself. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
Like the Rimbaud of the illuminations, beating against the confines of the World, the poet chooses the apocalypse and destruction rather than accept the impossible principles that make him what he is in a World such as it is. “I offer myself to defend mankind,” says Mr. Lautreamont, without wishing to be ingenuous. Is Mr. Maldoror, then, the angel of pity? In a certain sense he is, in that he pities himself. Why? That remains to be seen. However, pity deceived, outraged, inadmissible, and unadmitted will lead him to strange extremities. Mr. Maldoror, in his own words, received life like a wound and forbade suicide to heal the scar. Like Mr. Rimbaud, he is the one who suffers and who rebelled; each, being strangely reluctant to say that he is rebelling against what he is, gives the rebel’s eternal alibi: love of mankind. Ordinarily, it is not easy, not natural, to forgive anyone who has wrong us. The capacity to do so will come to us as understanding grows large enough or as a meditation penetrates deep enough or as grace blesses us. For Darrell, nothing flowed. He was angry about something all the time, and the tool it took on his well-being was tremendous. He was born Jewish—and sixty years, thought that was the problem. In the San Francisco community where he was raised, his was the only Jewish family. His father and mother ran a successful dry goods store, took part in local politics and had many good friends. On the surface, they were respected, valued members of the community. However, Darrell’s father was never allowed to join the country club, even though he could easily afford it. Darrell’s mother was not invited to play bridge with the wives of other prominent businessmen. And when Darrell was in high school, many of his classmate were asked to rush the unofficial “fraternities” to which all the affluent boys belonged. Darrell was as affluent as they were, yet he was not asked to rush. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
Darrell’s parents were resigned to the subtle, unspoken prejudice. The boy was infuriated by it. He was, in fact, infuriated by just about everything. School infuriated him. As a result, he was bored, surly, disobedient, a troublemaker. The other children infuriated him. The boy talked only about sports and girls. The girls talked only about make-up and clothes, and boys. None of them were the slightest bit interested in anything he talked about or anything he wanted to do. Korea infuriated him. By the time he was ready for college, he could not wait to leave the little town—and its little-minded people—for good. His parents were not surprised that during his time at school in Davis, he visited home just once a year. Yet they were surprised that after he finished law school, he moved to Sacramento. They were surprised again when he told them he had eloped with a large-framed, unremarkably Jewish girl. When Darrell’s mother asked him why the couple had not announced their plans and has a proper ceremony, he simply replied, “I didn’t want to put up with all that Jewish wedding crap.” At his law firm, he was called the “wild man,” because he had clients who were guilty and as a result, he would argue down every fact. He relished the role. He was untamed in the way he practiced law. He ignored professional courtesy, even scoffed at it. He scrapped and bullied and muscled his way through each case until the opposition sundered when they saw him name at the bottom of a pleading. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Darrell and his wife had a son and daughter, both of whom infuriated him from the time they were able to talk. They were bright: they had problems in school much the same as he had. They were strong-willed and refused to do as they were told. Most infuriating of all, both children began to experiment with drugs when they were in their early teens. Darrelle tried to impose the strict Jewish discipline his father had used with him. It did not work. His children would simply run away from home and stay with friends rather than take the punishment. Darrell despised their friends, whom he considered “hippies,” lazy and unambitious, with minds destroyed by drugs. One of the ironies of Darrell’s life was that, while he was fiercely proud of the traditions and accomplishments of the Jewish people, he despised the fact that he was Jewish himself. Being Jewish had only caused him difficulty and pain. Never had it helped make his life easier. He despised the Jewish stereotype and went out of his way to give people the impression he was gentle. Darrell would get mad at his friends for going against his orders. He wanted to punish them, thrash them, strangle them. However, many of them stayed out of the reach of every kind of punishment. Darrell had heard about an obscure Jewish practice, a carryover from the “old country,” in which a family would declare one of its members dead. In earlier times, this was sone when someone committed, in the eyes of the parent, an unpardonable violation of Jewish law or tradition, rendering that person unfit to be among the living. He decided the actions of some of his friends were unpardonable, that they were such persons. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
Darrelle forced his wife to go through the procedure with him, even to the extent of “sitting shiva,” the mourning ritual of Jewish family. Their daughter was horrified, refused to participate and left home without saying good-bye. The family was in shambles. Shortly after, Darrell got an exciting opportunity. He was offered the position of chief counsel in an aggressive merger-minded California company that was on its way toward becoming a conglomerate. The offer included a huge salary, moving expenses, a new home and stock. He and his wife moved willingly, ecstatically. There was little to keep them in Sacramento. Three months after taking the job, Darrelle was fired. The official reason for the dismissal was that Darrell’s approach to legal problems was “inconsistent with established company policy.” Privately, one of the junior attorneys told him that the company brass found him to be “too heavy-handed, too loud, too pushy.” Darrell had his own translation: “too Jewish.” Darrell was so devastated by the firing, he could not bring himself to look for another job. He began to have feelings he could not explain and could not deal with: deep depression, moroseness, impotence with pleasures of the flesh. He had no friends to consult, so he went to a rabbi. The rabbi sent him to therapy. In the group, Darrell was a terror. He even intimated the therapist, challenging everything that was said about him, losing his temper when his arguments failed. His spats with other clients became so butter than he and others threated to leave the group. He was known for telling anybody off at anything—and making their ears burn. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Other men in the group would tell Darrell to keep his mouth shut so he could learn something. One man in particular moved Darrell to the level of resentment. What really upset Darrell is when someone said to him, “Oh, I don’t have the privilege of being right? You’ve got a monopoly on it? You guys have a monopoly on being right like you have a monopoly on the banks and everything else?” That did it. Darrell’s face went red. He stood up and growled at this other man, “You mealy-mouth bigoted son of a b*tch. When you say ‘you guys,’ what you really mean is ‘you Jews,’ don’t you? And you don’t know anything about Jews, or what it’s like to be one! All you know is counting those stupid rows of numbers and overcharging people for it. God, I hate you! I ought to break your bigoted Nazi neck. And get a medal for doing it!” So far for Darrell, he was merely acting out levels of anger, something he had been doing all his life: irritation, annoyance, resentment, hatred. Darrell has a fear and unrestrained emotions have no limit, unchecked, he will fly off into hysteria, blind rage, bottomless depression. The unwillingness to experience and express one or more emotions leads to manipulation and other forms of unnatural behaviour. However, what happens when we do allow ourselves full expression? So we turn into raving lunatics? Fo we go on endless crying jags? Do we become monsters? No. Because within each of us, there is a natural restraining function. Cars have many controls besides the brakes. When you let go of the accelerator (which is a speed control mechanism) the natural friction within the engine begins to slow it down. Other natural forces, such as wind resistance and the friction of the tires on the road, also contribute to the slow-down. Thus, to stop a car, you do not have to slam on the brakes immediately, just as you do not have to push the accelerator to the floor every time you want to make it go. Downhill to can take advantage of natural forces and make the car go without the accelerator at all. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
Similarly, we have a restraining function which is entirely internal, natural and automatic. It works every time, yet we have little or no faith in it. Sometimes parents’ show a perfect side of themselves in the “front room,” but show another side of themselves in the “back room,” which is often times a full 180-degree difference. This can have an impact on their child’s behaviour and cause the child to act out in ways no one understands because they come from this picture-perfect family, live in a good community and go to a good school. People will suspect that there is something wrong with the child, but not that their parents have a dark side that they hide behind closed doors. Children become aware very early in life that their parents have several sides to their character, but they do not know how to evaluate that until they are adolescents. If they live in homes where there is “front room” behaviour and “back room” behaviour, they may resent this as part of the World’s hypocrisy. A woman took her eighteen-year-old son to dinner when he came home from college for the holidays. She ordered a Martini for herself, but told him he could not have one, although she knew he liked liquor, and indeed, dark excessively. The group members had spent hours listening to her complaints about her son’s drinking. Now, if she had either not ordered a drink, they agreed that it would have been better, or else allowed him to have one with her, but that they way she did it she was setting him up for an alcoholic script. In script language, the front room represents the antiscirpt, where the parental precepts hold sway, while the back room represents the script, where the real action is. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
The schools of psychology are sectarian variants. They translate the unique World of an individual into an agreed upon frame of reference. For instance, the classical Freudians would discover pleasures of the flesh and aggression in any person and explain present behaviour by reference to psychosexual development. Like, churches, these sects communicate well to their own brethren but look askasnce upon those of other creeds. Schoolism is psychology is quite common, and to anyone who has dealt with church groups it looks to be a remarkably similar phenomenon. It seems to me the schools are saying largely the same things in different languages from different viewpoints—sort of a modern Babel. There are taboos between the scientific and humanistic camps. It is a serious violation for the humanist to pretend his observations or opinions of man have any relationship to science. This can lead to modern civilized forms of the cat-o-nine-tails to be laid on. It is less of a taboo violation for the scientist to pretend he is a humanist. Invasions from this direction are common. There is an immutable law of Neuro-Geography which governs terrestrial politics—the evolution of intelligence moves East to West. When you go back East—note the retrograde terminology—you are going back in time, down in intelligence and lower in evolution. Let me restate it simply: Westerners are significantly smarter, freer, more creative, more future-oriented than Easterners. Easterners operate at lower forms of evolution. Easterners, it is true, are more specialized—but, as we have learned from dinosaurs, specialization means Terminal Adulthood. Civilizations are, by definition, adult, id est, passe. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
Western gene-pools are always freer, more adolescent, more mobile than Eastern gene-pools. In the Genetic Breeding Book, mobility is nobility. The most intelligent and the freest people on the planet have been propelled by their gene pools to the Western belt of this continent- Arizona, Texas, California, Oregon, Washington—the ecological niche of the future. Each Westerner is the hopeful adolescent blossom of the old Eastern roots. When you move back East from the Pacific—be on guard. You are moving down into primitive, inflexible, cynical terrain. Chicago is a tough, mammalian jungle compared to San Diego. New England is a monument to the statis past. Easterners, in their neolithic shrewdness are skillful, political mammals. They are adepts in Newtonian competitions. Do not try to hustle Easterners on their own turf. New York is the center of money power, Washington is the center of barnyard political force, and Boston the capital of antiquated Puritan culture—but there is no freedom, no spirit of growth and development, no enthusiasm for change in the Adult Eastern Hive. These remarks are in no way chauvinistic. All Westerners are migrated Easterners! I was born at West Point, New York and teenaged in Massachusetts. I honour my damp roots and respect their venerable, unchanging traditions. I thank the New England educational system for activating my migration button. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
It is no accident that all the laws which restrict youthful freedom come from grim, prudish Eastern hives. We must be aware of the natural tendency of Eastern hive leaders to frighten stay-put yokels with stories of Western instability. Sure, Californians and Arizonians and Texans are diverse, flamboyant, juvenile and easy to deride. It is always that way. Frontier regions encourage the formation of new gene-pools, wide-open territories that allow cultural experimentation and future fabrication are always easy to ridicule from the docile, adult, traditional bunkers of the East. The age-old Chinese think that all Occidentals are crazy kids because we believe in individual reality and personal change. To the old Soviets individualism is hooliganism! We grant that an Easterner, in the secure cocoon of adult conformity and centralized dogmatic repetition, is shocked by the insane insistence of Westerns to “be themselves.” We grant that the individual or small cult is kooky-vulnerable in contrast to the monolithic stability of specialized gene-pools which repeat what their parents did and cling to the myths of their grandparents. The independent Western pioneer is easily ridiculed. However, the fact remains—freedom to experiment, courage to change, energy to recreated is always a Westward high. The moral purification involved in casting out all hatred and granting complete forgiveness opens a door to the Overself’s light. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
Anyone can observe similarities in emotional habits within a family or between two close friends or spouses. A father and his sons may all display similar emotional responses to politicians, salespeople, women, and animals. A woman, before she became married, may have responded emotionally after the fashion of her mother and siblings; after several years of marriage, her parents and siblings notice she no longer feels about things the way she used to—she has changed. She has come to share some of the emotional habits of her husband, and he in turn has acquired many of hers, so that his former bachelor friends notice striking differences in him. He is no longer amused by the same things, angered or afraid of the same things, we when he was “one of the boys.” The mechanism responsible for the acquisition of emotional responses that resemble those of someone else is identification. Identification is a learning process by means of which one person models himself, herself after another. It may be a deliberate attempt to imitate the other person, or it may be an unconsciously purposeful emulation, It is not known whether emotional habits are acquired through direct identification or whether the similarity in emotional habits between two person derives from identification with each other’s values, expectancies, and attitudes. Nevertheless, it can be asserted that, either directly or indirectly, persons acquire certain of their emotional habits by means of identification. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
Sacramento Fire and Rescue is an I.S.O. Class One fire department. The department provides all fire suppression, prevention and education programs in the city as well as paramedic emergency medical services to the residents and visitors of the Sacramento community. The department also has a Bomb Squad, Hazardous Materials Team and Technical Rescue Team that provides services for the city and the rest of Sacramento County. “There are some things that simply come with the territory, and if you’re a firefighter you might as well learn early that there is no point in fighting them. The first thing is that just about everyone wants Christmas and Easter off. It’s an American culture state of being, but you’re going to have to go to work. Not only because arsonists don’t follow the Gregorian calendar, but because the fire department never closes shop. I remember working Christmas or Christmas Eve for six years straight. But at least I had a job to go to, and a steady income, unlike to many others in America who haven’t been able to put order and progress in their lives. Certainly, my children were often out of sync with their classmates, but I think they understood that their father worked a job that was different than most. They never complained, and I don’t think they ever realized the inconveniences. After all, if I wasn’t home Christmas Eve, I would always be home on Christmas morning. Unless, of course, there was an especially terrible fire in Sacramento. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Another thing is that in your twenty- or thirty-year career, you vacation period might actually occur in the summer months about half the time. The other half might be spent writing postcards to the wife and kids who will be travelling around in the BMW X5 visiting relatives, or packed away in the summer rental up at the lake. Still, my family always loved being a part of a firefighter’s family. There were all those company picnics and ball games, those three-day camping trips, times that etch in the memory like shells on a tree trunk, organic interlockings that grow more solid each passing year. The best times, perhaps, were spent playing baseball. It has always been a great crew. It never mattered what we did, or where we were, though, the idea and the reality of service and courage were always with us. Someone in the hose was always doing a great thing.” If an enemy who is guilty of doing wrong toward him comes to him, whether out of personal need or by the accident of social life, there will be no hard feelings, no bitter thought, no angry word. For the other man, he sees, acted out of what was truth for him, what was valid by his own understanding. Even if his enemy had sought to gain something through injury to himself, then it must have seemed right to the greed in his enemy’s ego, which could not then have acted otherwise. In this attitude there is an immense tolerance, and an immeasurable forgiveness. If it is proper to forgive a man’s crime, it is not proper, through emotionalism and sentimentality pushing forgiveness to the extreme, to condone his crime. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. In an effort to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars. American made cars used to be the envy of the World and because American car brands are offering a wide range of options, from family SUVs to electric vehicles and luxury sedans, we are now seeing a resurging interest. American made cars are equal or superior to those made overseas. The Chevrolet Trax, for instance, is a well-designed, fuel efficient, and safe SUV. And as you know, there is no better car on Earth than 1950-1970s American Muscle Car. Americans make sure superior product, but we are buying things from other nations. American food imports have risen by 300 percent since 1999. American farmland declined by nearly 20 million acres between 2017 and 2022. As of 2022, there were 880.1 million acres of land dedicated to farming, compared to 900.1 million in 2017. The data shows there are now little more than 1.9 million farms in the country. Americans and American corporations spent $136 billion on food and beverages from other countries. It is a national security risk to lose American Farms and farmers. If there is a war, and most of our meat, produce, poultry, dairy, and fruit is coming from foreign counties, we stand the risk of starving. With war breaking out all over the World, in these uncertain times, it is very important to bring American farms back. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. As money flows, it influences further investment. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever. Also, to ensure that we have farmland for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrant to America. Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a populations that equally represents all races of people. If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in American, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in American which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the nation debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by send more money overseas. Buying American made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards in regard to pollution. American companies have to be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human minds to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
The Winchester Mystery House
Experience an unforgettable journey back to the time of kings and queens with this entry ticket for The Winchester Mansion in Santa Clara, California which was the residence of Sarah L. Winchester. Take advantage of this fascinating experience. After tour, there will be time enjoy the mansion’s splendor at your own pace. You might even discover secret passages.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
The Largest Activity in the World is Criticism
So many are so quick to think ill of others, to spread calumny and give out malicious gossip, that the man who reverses this debased trend minds his own business is coming closer to spirituality than he perhaps knows himself. What historian has complete and true information on any past event or obscure personage when he does not even have it on any present event or celebrated personage? Unless business or duty brings the responsibility into our hands, it is fairer to refrain from sitting in judgment. The man who respects himself will not degrade others. He will have eyes open enough to see the sordid evil in men yet a World-view large enough not to become cynical about them. What is the use of reproaching a fly for not being a bird or for its inability to travel as far or look as beautiful? Yet this is what they do who deplore others’ bad behaviour and spiritual ignorance. By blaming other persons, one’s own ego is served by its implied superiority. Ignorance and immaturity in others should call forth, not his irritability, but his patience. The largest activity in the World is criticism, the smallest creation. We aspirants ought not to waste our time or sully our minds to criticize the weakness of others. There are countless people in this World who expend their energies in this useless task. It brings them no gain. It keeps them tied to the lower nature. It attracts Worldly troubles to them. We are to be as constructive and optimistic as they are destructive and negative. This will lessen the disharmony in our surroundings and increase the harmony in our hearts. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
“I have been told by other women that immediately after the birth of a baby, your desire for pleasures of the flesh wanes—probably because you do not want another child in nine months!—but then the desire comes back even stronger. That’s how it was for me. When we were trying to have a child, we were trying so hard it was pretty terrible, but once I was pregnant, it was great. Then after we had her—we have a daughter—it waned, but now it’s even better than ever. So I wonder whether his isn’t one reason why woman have stronger drives for pleasures of the flesh when they get older?” The question is too complex to answer in detail today, because it involves both psychological and physiological elements. So permit me to put aside the issue of whether desire for pleasures of the flesh occurs at a later age for the female and I will concentrate on the physiological aspects of female responsiveness after childbirth. Many women in a relatively happy marriage are not fully responsive with pleasures of the flesh until after the birth of a first baby, and there is a physical reason for this. Responsiveness in regard to pleasures of the flesh for a woman, just as for a man, is inevitably accompanied by a concentration of blood in the pelvis. The amount of blood supplied to the pelvis changes through pregnancy and childbirth, and this affects responsivity—especially a woman’s awareness of feelings for pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
From about the third to the sixth month of pregnancy, there is usually a high level of demand for pleasures of the flesh. You seem to have noticed that, and it was a happy contrast to the period when you were first trying to become pregnant, when you forced yourself to make the effort. However, you mentioned a waning of desire after childbirth—and this reflects, among other things, the fact that your ovaries were not functioning yet. The ovaries stop functioning at about the second or third month of pregnancy, and they do not start again until anywhere from six weeks to three months after you have given birth. If you nurse your baby, it may take an extra month or six weeks. What does all this add up to? Well, it means that demand for pleasures of the flesh can be expected to return a couple of months after childbirth, and when it does, it may well be stronger than before because now you have a greatly increased vascular supply to the pelvis, much greater than you ever had before. “My wife and I have been talking about having a baby, and she keeps telling me that she isn’t sure she wants to start a family. But it seems to me she’s kidding herself and she really wants me to decide that we will have one.” I certainly do not want to find myself stepping into the middle of a battle. However, somewhere along the line, Mother Nature talks to every female. There is, I am convinced, an innate female demand to reproduce. Some women, of course, make a deliberate commitment, for their own valued reasons, to certain goals in life that preclude motherhood. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
However, the demand to reproduce is real; it is a tremendous instinct. It may not be too much of a factor for many women when they are twenty-three, twenty-four—but when thirty-three or thirty-four rolls around without pregnancy, the gal looks in the mirror and says, “Well, how much time do I have, oh Lord?” “When a man says that at thirty-three or thirty-four, he has something entirely different in mind!” It is popular, I know, to point out the difference between men and women, but I have to tell you that from the beginning of our work, what has impressed us most have been the similarities, not the differences, between the genders. Not only physically but emotionally—and we are talking specifically about functioning involving pleasures of the flesh. Men and women are incredibly and constantly similar. Oh, there are a few basic—basic and happy biological difference that we all enjoy. And there are a couple of other differences that are far less obvious. For instance, there is no question that the human female is infinitely more effective as a sexual entity than the male ever dreamed of being. Her potential capacity to respond to effective stimulation of intimate passions is almost unlimited. Nature simply built her that way. This is her natural facility. If the male capacity to produce the “vital lifeforce” is compared to the female capacity to produce eggs, on the other hand, it is plain that the male is infinitely more fertile than the female ever dreamed of being. By comparison she is an astonishingly sterile create! #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
The other difference that I want to mention is just an interesting sidelight. Recently, as you may know, there has been a good deal of research on sleep patterns. In our laboratory, we have observed husbands and wives to see whether they move differently in their sleep, depending on whether they have or have not had a climax release. Observers discovered that in the first hour after sleep, the post-climaxed female usually moves nearer the male. If he is removed from the bed, the sleeping female still reaches for him, and in one out of every two cases she will settle in his place. Would anyone care to guess about the behaviour of the male? “He moves into another bed.” Not quite. The man stays put. Of course, we are talking in terms of percentages. This differential response was not universal. However, the dictations seem reasonably clear and quite fascinating—that the female, the postorgasmic female has a subconscious need to relate, to remain in touch with her partner. The male does not need to relate physically to the degree that the female evidences. There may be a physiological factor operating here. As we mentioned a moment ago, the woman’s natural capacity for repetitive response of pleasures of the flesh is far greater than that of the man. The fact that she reaches out for him in her sleep while he tends to stay where he is may be a reflection of a difference in their capacities for pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
Even in sleep, she may seek to continue interactions of pleasures of the flesh while he is satiated and seeks nothing more. On the other hand, her sleep behaviour may reflect her acceptance of the traditional female role of being receptive for pleasures of the flesh rather than indicating any active desire. However, I am afraid that this discussion, as interesting as it is, is based on speculation and has taken us away from the more immediate and very real concerns that young couples are encountering in marriage. “I was just wondering…does a marriage work out best over the years if the husband and wife place more emphasis on the emotional than the physical side? Because after you’ve been married for a while, making love just isn’t the same sensational thing it used to be when you were dating. So you have to deal with it differently. You learn to appreciate it for what it is—an act of communication. It’s part of what keep two people together. But you don’t expect it to be the way it was in the beginning.” Nothing feels the same way it did in the beginning—and some things become better than they were then! Of course, the first flush of excitement, the first taste of the unknown, this is always memorable and can never be duplicated—and I am not talking about pleasures of the flesh alone. The first dance, the first kiss—the first time is unlike any other that follows. And yet, because a later experience often unfolds out of an earlier one, it can prove to be more mysterious or more wonderful than the one before. It is a cliché that we become older and wiser, but clichés are often true. And “wiser” simply means that we can do more things, do them better—and appreciate them more. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
It is no different with marriage. I do not want to sound like Wally Cleaver—or like Ozzie Nelson, either!—but let me assure you that marriages can become deeper and richer and more intense over a period of time as your commitment to each other becomes reinforced by all the experiences, good and bad, that you share. This is not true for all marriages, of course, it may not even be true for most marriages. However, it has proved true for some marriages—and since that is the case, why should it not be possible for yours? All I am trying to say—and saying it poorly, I am afraid—is that marriages may grow, or fail to grow, depending on whether the husband and wife develop greater trust in each other, more confidence in themselves and increased pleasures in their relationship—their emotional and their physical relationship—because they are really two sides of the same coin. The existence of pleasure with intimate passions testifies to the quality of that man-woman relationship. It adds a dimension to your marriage and makes life itself more rewarding. If you and your husband are vital, growing individuals, different today from what you were yesterday, and if you can communicate this growth not only emotionally and philosophically but also with pleasures of the flesh, your marriage, over the years, will remain vital and creative. However, there are times, occasions, situations, and responsibilities which may make fair criticism a moral duty. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
Yet, no aspirant can fall into the all-too-common habit of criticizing for its own sake, much less for malice’s sake, without thwarting his spiritual progress. Condemning others for their real or supposed sins is even worse. From the time that he perceives that he does not and can not know all the circumstances, he ceases to condemn others. It is not for him to judge others, for this would imply finding fault with the divine World-Idea, of which they are a part. He knows well that, in their own proper time, they will unfold their better characteristics. Since every man is guided in his mind by, or is in the end-result of, his own experience of life, it is conceit to act as a judge and criticize his actions. If he were perfect, he would not be born at all. Of what use, then, is blaming him? Since every man is—by the mere fact of his reincarnation here on Earth—admittedly imperfect, no other man has the right to upbraid him for this and yet become indignant when his own imperfections are pointed out and condemned. There is a certain quality missing from their psychological makeup which Saint Paul called “charity” and which is the outcome of broad views and generous feelings, of spiritual insight and mental serenity. It is this lack which accounts for the harsh, unfair, prejudiced, and even spiteful treatment which they afford me. Nevertheless, it is not my duty as a student of philosophy to blame them for not possessing a quality which, after all, is not a part of their goal, but to display it towards them myself. And in the last reckoning it does not matter how people—even reputedly spiritual people—behave to me, but it does matter how ai behave to them. He may register what others are by the measure of his own sensitivity, but he must not set up to judge, criticize, and condemn them. If you are to love men, you must expect little of them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
For a long while it has seemed to me that there is a natural depth in man’s experience that is little known to the outer social man. I will wander in this depth to show something of its unique ways, language, and outlook on the outer World. Client-centered therapy is one means of letting come forth some of the personal meanings from this depth. The subtle air of reflecting everything back to the client will usually annoy them because it is an artificial game by which the therapist remains free of even meeting the client. There is a growing confluence of people in psychology and kindred disciplines who move in the direction of humanism while respectful of science. The confluence can be as large as the humanities themselves. Science and humanism have different aims, though they can be productive brethren. Humanism can supply root questions and root speculations of man together with raw data of human experience—phenomenological descriptions. The science of psychology can be considerably enriched by this data; yet the aim of science is toward the communal, common, consensually validated—what is general or lawful and can be measured and shown consistently by publicly agreed upon methods. On the negative side, science can see humanism as vague in method, inconsistent, and unsure in results. Humanism, on the other hand, can well see in science a great monster that eats up the test protocols of 1,000 people to spew out one or two generalities. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
Science digests uniqueness and turns it to the generally valid. Humanism can gain from science methods which would increase the validity and reliability of observation, while science can get from humanism the varied, proactive and question-awakening richness of individual experience. These should be two side of the same coin. It always requires a technical breakthrough to move sperm-egg colonies to a higher altitude—a higher velocity. A gene pool is a species-unit capable of protecting its young over several generations. Marauding bands of astronauts, like Francis Drake and Johny Wanye, are beginning probe. However, nothing happens until the family-units move together. You see, the King-Emperor does not want to migrate. He does not want to leave the seat of Imperial power and luxury. The feudal society cannot migrate, which is likely why Catholic countries could not pull it off. The Holders of the Land have to stay on the land. Feudal Catholic-Monarchies are flashy in the first stage of opening-up of a new ecological niche. The second-born sons, the Dukes’ younger brothers, sail off with crack-troops to establish secure footholds. It was generic folly for Spaniards to make with Paleolithic natives. Nonetheless, permanent military settlements have to breed with the natives and the mestizo result is uniformly disastrous because the second-string, invasive male-warriors mate down with intellectually unrealized conquered females. A gene pool is a species-unit capable of protecting its young over several generations. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
Under all this stress and change, and the need to keep cool in order to get what he wants, good or bad, the male adolescent becomes more aware of his bodily reactions. His mother and father can no longer surround him with love and protection, or on the other hand, he is no longer inclined simply to cower before their range, drunkenness, whining, or brawls. Whatever the situation at home, he is on his own outside. He must rise before his fellows and recite, and walk down long and often lonely corridors under the critical gaze of other boys and girls, many of whom already know his weaknesses. So sometimes he sweats aromatically, his hands shake, his heart pounds; girls blush, their clothes become moist, and their stomachs gurgle. In both genders, there is an assorted loosening and tightening up of various internal and external sphincters, and this reorganization in the long run may determine which “psychosomatic” illnesses will play a major role in their scripts. Jeder becomes sphincterized. Now, what can you do about anger? There is no denying that it comes up. And when it does, the result is almost never pleasant. You cannot ignore it, yet you are not likely to cherish it either. Getting very angry can cause you to hurt other people. Refusing to get angry can cause a great deal of internal damage to you. So what can you do? “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun do down upon your wrath,” reports Ephesians 4.26. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
If you are a manipulator who is stuck on the anger polarity, you hold on to it. It accumulates within you and, in time, explodes like a pressure cooker. By the time this happens, you are so relieved to be expressing the anger that you get a certain perverse pleasure from showing people your hostility. Result: your relationships suffer. When they are around you, people feel the need to proceed very cautiously so they avoid being around you. Ironically, this isolation does little more than reinforce your anger. If you are a master, you have learned to express your anger on a “cash and carry” basis, expressing it whenever it comes up from within, so that you do not build up an “anger debt” which explodes when it is overdue. As a master, you understand that hostility from others is a projection of their own repressed or unexpressed anger from the past, and that you are not really the target. You also know that you have a natural restraining function within yourself that prevents you from too much expression of anger. Functioning as a master, you recognize your need to express your intense anger occasionally, perhaps by hitting a couch or bed, chopping wood, or in some way releasing your repressed tension. After such a session, you are even able to reach a level of hurt, feeling your vulnerability, and perhaps cry. Eventually, this leads to a feeling or personal well-being. When you are able to express your minor irritations to another on a regular basis, you then become aware of your opposite values of love and caring for that person. This makes your relationship much more pleasant and exciting. Your relationships flow naturally from negative to beneficial feelings and back. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Well-loved children feel and express affection for parents, siblings, friends, and animals. As they grow and become socialized to their gender roles, and ultimately their occupational and community roles, they can lose the capacity to feel affection and tender concern for others. Men of our culture especially appear to be subject to a “tenderness taboo.” Their relationship with other men frequently are limited to reserved expressions of friendship or competition in work or in games. The male role, as socially defined, impels many men to regard affection and tender solicitude between men as evidence of homosexuality or effeminacy. Women are encouraged, by contrast, to be more open in experiencing and expressing their affection. There is evidence that such rigid differentiation between the genders is breaking down in America and other Western countries, so that men can be softer, less aggressive, and more affectionate in their relationships with others, regardless of age or gender. From the perspective of healthy personality, such liberation from rigid gender roles is good for men, women, and children alike, and may even add years to the typical male life expectancy. Affection is life-giving, both for the object of the affection and the one who is feeling and bestowing it. “Yea, and cry unto God for all thy support; yea, let all thy doings be unto the Lord, and whithersoever thou goest let it be in the Lord; yea, let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord; yea, let the affections of thy heart be placed upon the Lord forever,” reports Alma 37.36. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
If metaphysical rebellion refuses to assent and restricts itself to absolute negation, it condemns itself to passive acceptance. If it prostrates itself in adoration of what exists and renounces its right to dispute any part of reality, it is sooner or later compelled to act. Ivan Karamazov—who represents non-interference, but in a dolorous aspect—stands halfway between the two positions. Rebel poetry, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, constantly oscillated between these two extremes: between literature and the will to power, between the irrational and the rational, the desperate dream and ruthless action. The rebel poets—above all, the surrealists—light the way that leads from passive acceptance to action, along a spectacular short-cut. Mr. Hawthrone was able to say of Mr. Melville that, as an unbeliever, he was extremely uneasy in his unbelief. It can equally well be said of the poets who rushed to assault the Heavens, with the intent of turning everything upside down, that by so doing they affirmed their desperate nostalgia for order. As an ultimate contradiction, they wanted to extract reason from unreason and to systematize the irrational. These heirs of romanticism claimed to make poetry exemplary and to find, in its most harrowing aspects, the real way of life. They define blasphemy and transformed poetry into experience and into a means of action. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Until their time, those who claimed to make poetry exemplary and to find, its most harrowing aspects, the real way of life. They defined blasphemy and transformed poetry into experience and into a means of action. Until their time those who claimed to influence men and events, at least in the Occident, did so in the name of rational rules. On the contrary, surrealism, after Mr. Rimbaud, wanted to find constructive rules in insanity and destruction. Mr. Rimbaud, through his work and only through his work, pointed out the path, but with the blinding, momentary illumination of a flash of lightning. Surrealism excavated this path and codified its discoveries. By its excesses as well as by its retreats, it gave the last and most magnificent expression to a practical theory of irrational rebellion at the very same time when, on another path, rebellious thought was founding the cult of absolute reason. Mr. Lautreamont and Mr. Rimbaud—its sources of inspiration—demonstrate by what stages the irrational desire to accept appearances can lead the rebel to adopt courses of action completely destructive to freedom. The most important thing to consider in the twenty-first century is that the youth of this nation who, thanks to the criminal corruption of our parliamentary do-nothings, have received to real training on how to be patriotic Americas and have been handed over to the enemy as defenseless kids, sacked with debt. Should American be a confederation of states or one national central government? To end divisions and slavery, we need the honest will and intent of our leaders almost without exception to an honourable, upright, and proper outcome. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
The Sacramento Fire Department is considered an “All Hazards” Fire Department. In addition to fire response, Sacramento Firefighters respond to Medical Emergencies, Hazardous Materials Incidents, Technical Rescue and Maritime Emergencies. The Sacramento Fire Department also provides Fire Investigation and Prevention, as well as Community Education. The Sacramento Fire Department is the primary provider for Emergency Medical Services within the City of Sacramento. All Frontline Companies are equipped to provide “Advanced Life Support. “X and I were putting gear away on the truck after a high-rise fire of no great consequence, when we heard a report on the radio of a helicopter crash in the river. It was an afternoon in April. They were sending a full assignment of three engines and two trucks over there. I told Lieutenant Y of the report and asked, ‘Do you want us to take it in?’ He said, ‘Tell them we’re going. We’ll put the scuba equipment on en route.’ It was only a five-minute ride away. When we got there, there were many police officers and the firemen from Rescue Z. Some of the men were in the water with cold water survival suits, some just in their uniforms, helping the people who were on the surface of water. A and I went down to the pier to where the helicopter was in the water. It was upside down, and the tail rotor was just visible on the surface. The fuselage dipped downward at a severe angle into the river and was bobbing up and down, with a small rope tied to it to keep it from being swept away. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
“In the confusion there, I found out that, unlike commercial airliners, shuttle helicopters don’t a passenger list. So they weren’t sure of exactly how many people were in there. It was right near a floating dock, so it was relatively easy getting into the water when the lieutenant have me the go-ahead. I worked my way underwater to the front of the helicopter and went in. It was laid out like a van-type school bus, with rows of seats four across. I had to twist around to get fully into the helicopter. The were personal items floating around, some seat cushions and other obstructions. I was about ten feet below the surface of the water, wondering if the chopper would sink. I went row by row and didn’t find anything. When I reached the back of the helicopter, I remember thinking, ‘There probably isn’t anybody here.” Then I came across a man who was strapped upside down in the seat farthest away from me. He was a fairly heavy man, about 225 pounds. I couldn’t lift him enough to release the buckle, so I had to take my knife and cut the seat belt. I brought him to the surface, and they started resuscitating him right away. They did get a heartbeat, and they took him to the hospital, but he died two hours later from heart failure. He was a German businessman. We did everything we could. We did get him going again, and we felt good about that, but it was a little too traumatic for him. He had a heart attack. I suppose that’s why he couldn’t get himself out of the seat belt in the first place. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
“I made another dive down to check the helicopter again, then to the bottom of the river to see if there was anybody else. They took me out and got me to the hospital of ingestion of polluted water and hypothermia from the cold water. It was one of the initial successes in scuba rescue, if you could term it a success. It proved that the scuba team concept in the fire department was an effective one. There were some people against spending any money to equip us. I was recently involved in two rescues within twenty-six days of each other. Both turned out to be pretty dramatic for me. The first was in a partially demolished hotel. We arrived with the first engine and the fire truck. I had been to the building before, so I was familiar with the layout. I knew that the fire escapes were partially destroyed and unusable. I knew that large portions of the top of the building had been removed in illegal demolition. On this particular job, there were two or three floors of heavy fire in the rear building. I was helping B Engine stretch a line up the stairs when we got a handie-talkie message that there was a victim on the fire floor, which was the fourth. The fire was coming down the hall from the back apartments and starting to vent into the staircase. I told the nozzle man I was going to go up. He advised against it because there was a malfunction in the pumps, and there wasn’t going to be any water until the second pumper came through. Knowing there was a victim trapped on the roof, and knowing the layout of the building, I felt fairly secure, and I continued up the staircase. I was being chased, though, by some pretty hot some, real hot, and I just burst out on the roof. A few minutes later there was a fire rushing through the doorway I had come through. On the roof I saw Lieutenant C, who had done virtually the same thing I did after hearing the report. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
“We came across twin brothers, twenty-two years old, who were huddled in a corner. They were kind of young bums—homeless people would be a better way to put it. They were living in this partially demolished vacant building. Now there was no way down the interior or down the fire escape in the rear, and the aerial ladder wouldn’t reach from the side. We have to bring them to the front, where an aerial was being places in position. But much of the roof had been removed, leaving only a bare steel I-beam, which was about eight inches wide and about fifteen feet long, sticking out into nothing seven stories into the air. We saw that we had to walk across the beam to get to the ladder; it was the only way, and we knew it. Conditions were rapidly deteriorating. We now had fire on the roof and in the rear, and smoke was coming up through the demolished lower portions of the top floors in front of us. The smoke was starting to obscure the beam and the ladder, so we had to get there quickly. I tied a rope to one of the victims, the lieutenant took the other end, went across the beam, and tied it to the aerial ladder. We guided the first guy across the bean to the ladder. I then had to get the second civilian across, but conditions were now so severe there was no time to tie him. I forced him out onto the beam. He did not want to go. I asked him if he could fly. I don’t think he got it, because he just gave me a blank look. He was scared. I cussed at him a little bit, urged him, and finally got his butt in gear. Well, I got him across the beam anyway. When he got to the end of the beam, he grabbed the lieutenant and just froze. He wouldn’t do anything we told him. I realized we were in a tight situation, like being on the edge of a diving board seventy feet above the ground. So I had to swing myself around to the aerial ladder, around the lieutenant, who was like a stabilizer, and the victim. Then we hoisted him bodily onto the ladder, for he was like a stiff, and moved him down to the street. All in a day’s work. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
Well, just twenty-six days later we’re in quarters, and a report comes in that a helicopter, another helicopter, has crashed in the river. We started off immediately, getting into our scuba gear en route. At the scene there was some confusion, a lot of people trying to give us a lot of information quickly. The biggest obstacle at this point was the vertical drop about eighteen feet from the dock down to the water. The area was another berth for large ships, and was pretty deep. I was lowered by Captain D on a rope, and I swam out to where E was on one of the rotor blades underwater. The helicopter had settled at an angle on the bottom, in twenty-odd feet of water. I dove down and swam until I got to the front of the helicopter and found a door, where a part of the canopy had broken apart from the impact. I pulled the door open, and right there was the pilot of the helicopter. I vividly remember him wearing a white shirt. I shook him, and he did not respond. If he had, I would have given him the octopus to let him breathe air underwater. I discounted that possibility as a waste of time. I got his seat belt off him and removed him to the surface as quickly as possible. I turned him over to the four divers and firemen who were there. I immediately went back down and followed the same route into the helicopter. I was surprised to see that the other seat was empty. But I figured that there had to be somebody in there, because I remembered hearing that there were two people in the copter when it crashed. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
“It was a two-passenger helicopter, a lot smaller than the other one. I swam completely into the helicopter, and in the back I found the passenger, a woman floating but wedged in with some seating equipment and pieces of broken canopy. I grabbed her, worked her out of the spot, and immediately brought her to the surface and handed her over. I tilted her head back to see if we could clear her airway. I looked across the water to the eighteen-foot-high pier. They were tying a rope around the first victim, the pilot, and giving him mouth-to-mouth while they were still in the water. They swam the woman over. I had been hyperventilating a little bit, so I took a thirty-second break. I went back down to search the bottom to make sure there was nobody else, because there were conflicting reports that somebody may have jumped in to help these people. I did that and found nothing. I did a secondary search of the helicopter and found the pilot’s headset with his name on it. Not knowing whose helicopter this was at that point, I took the headset to the surface, figuring it might help to identify the helicopter and the people involved. I got up on the dock and saw the firemen and the EMS personnel frantically working on the two victims, with a crowd of police, reporters and cameramen hovering around. It was a strange scene. I remember seeing the polit, G, take his first breath on his own, and it felt like a great weight was lifted off me. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
“I think firemen work somehow on a feeling of guilt. I don’t know how to describe it, really. You do have limited capabilities when you get to these emergency situations. You have your training, you have your tools. But then things go wrong. Things weren’t going right for these people. The helicopter not only crashed, it crashed into the water, so besides injuries, now you have to contend with drowning. And somehow we managed to revive G, and I felt better as soon as I saw him breathe. I then started to get a bit emotional. I withdrew from the crowd and for a minute or two just stood by myself and regained my composure. Then I started the round-robin of television interviews. H, may she rest in peace, despite all efforts to revive her, was pronounced dead a few hours later in the hospital. And I mean, they worked on her, but it was not to be. But G has had a tremendous recovery. He must have been in the water eight or nine minutes with no air. He did get some severe shoulder injuries, a lot of broken bones, a broken jaw. He has pretty much recovered. I stay in touch with his family, and they give me progress reports on how he is doing. Again the scuba had come through and showed how successful it is. One of the firemen got a boy out of the river after nearly an hour and he survived. It’s things like some of these crashes that give meaning to all the hard work and all the drilling. We can actually save people’s lives with scuba. It’s not a matter of body recovery anymore, it’s an actual rescue operation, and that’s how we approach it.” #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. In a afford to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars. American made cars used to be the envy of the World and because American car brands are offering a wide range of options, from family SUVs to electric vehicles and luxury sedans, we are now seeing a resurging interest. American made cars are equal or superior to those made overseas. The Chevrolet Trax, for instance, is a well-designed, fuel efficient, and safe SUV. American food imports have risen by 300 percent since 1999. American farmland declined by nearly 20 million acres between 2017 and 2022. As of 2022, there were 880.1 million acres of land dedicated to farming, compared to 900.1 million in 2017. The data shows there are now little more than 1.9 million farms in the country. Americans and American corporations spent $136 billion on food and beverages from other countries. It is a national security risk to lose American Farms and farmers. If there is a war, and most of our meat, produce, poultry, dairy, and fruit is coming from foreign counties, we stand the risk of starving. With war breaking out all over the World, in these uncertain times, it is very important to bring American farms back. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. As money flows, it influences further investment. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever. Also, to ensure that we have farmland for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrant to America. Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a populations that equally represents all races of people. If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in American, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in American which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the nation debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by send more money overseas. Buying American made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards in regard to pollution. American companies have to be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human minds to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
Laguna Park, CA | From the Mid 500’s
Now Selling!
Welcome to the New Fabulous Forties! This intimate enclave of 37 homesites with available one- and two-story floorplans is the place to be in Sacramento. Waking up to a home you love sets just the right tone for what is ahead. Ventris Place offers beautifully designed homes. Danville, Residence 4, has 3 to 4 bedrooms and a loft across 1,846 square feet of living space.
Danville gives two levels, each one with its own defining purpose to create exactly what you need and want in the moment. Your home will flex with you, whether you need to invite work or play right into your comfort zone.
There are also nooks that conjure up a visionary escape, welcoming you to lounge or create for the perfect work love balance. A main level with sweeping, open spaces and down to earth textures and tones, is designed with all the luxury details and faraway feels, much like the extended Laguna Park neighbourhood it occupies.
Organically designed to pull the outdoors and the indoors out, you can dine alfresco right of your gourmet kitchen or make the night bright, sitting on your side yard, for an entirely fresh perspective. A setting that is as cool as it is calm, elegant, and ready for the way you want to live.
You will enjoy this home for generations to come. Just a few steps from your door and located in the Elk Grove School District, enjoy the features of the 22 acres North Laguna Creek Park, which includes paved paths, tennis courts, a basketball court, playgrounds, picnic areas, ball fields and 119-acre Wildlife Area and Interpretive Trail.
Your new home is within walking distance to Cosumnes River College and Regal RA Laguna Village and 24-Hour Fitness Laguna Sport Gym. Also, in close proximity to Kaiser Medical Centers, Winco Foods, Shell and Chevron gas stations and highway 99.
This is the perfect community for those who are on the go, or just want to enjoy life at a slower place. The convenience is uniquely charming. https://nextgenerationcapital.us/new-homes-elk-grove-ventris-place/
How often have Ι lain beneath rain under a strange roof thinking of home. Welcome to Ventris Place, a home for generations.
Throughout its history, BMW has been at the forefront of automotive innovation. In the 1960s, BMW introduced the “Neue Klasse” (New Class) series, which featured advanced engineering and design that would define the brand for decades. These cars were not only fast but also handled exceptionally well, earning BMW a loyal following among driving enthusiasts. https://bmw.niello.com/new-inventory/index.htm?search=&model=740i&year=2025&gvBodyStyle=Sedan
Randolph Harris II International 