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You Do Not Have to Have a Good Heart to Have a Good Soul!
If Adam could reenter the garden of Eden and not sin, then there would be no curse on humanity. However, if Adam had not sinned, you would not be here, would you then be happy? Salvation comes at a price, but without sin, there would never have been a need. Cognitive learning involves higher mental processes, such as understanding, knowing, or anticipating. Even in relatively simple learning situations, animals and people seem to form cognitive maps (internal representations of relationships). Reach out to those in need. Happiness increases helpfulness (those who feel good do good.) However, doing good also makes one feel good. Compassionate acts help one feel better about oneself. The New Testament’s four books on Jesus’ life all record His teachings that to find life, we must be willing to lose our lives. To find meaning, we must discover something bigger than ourselves, and serve it. Living beyond self is therefore a part of Catholic wisdom. Paradoxically, personal fulfillment means abandoning ourselves and putting others first. In the Catholic tradition, ultimate satisfaction is promised to those who give up their desire for self-satisfaction. This is part of the meaning of crucifixion. The cross leads to resurrection, to new life. When we let go of ourselves, our lives become filled with grace. The lives of St. Francis of Assisi, Pope John XXIII and Mother Teresa of Calcutta radiate a grace that people of all religious traditions admire. The thing one would notice about Mother Teresa and the hundreds of sisters who form her team is that they all look so happy. Mother Teresa said, “Nothing makes you happier than when you really reach out in mercy to someone who is badly hurt.” In latent learning, learning remains hidden or unseen until a reward or incentive for performance is offered. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
As if to test Mother Teresa’s idea, the psychologist Bernard Rimland id an experiment. He asked 216 students to list the initials of ten people they knew best, yielding a grand list of some two thousand people. He then asked them to indicate whether each person seemed happy or not. Finally, he asked them to go over each name again, indicating if the person seemed selfish (devoted mostly to one’s own welfare) or unselfish (willing to be inconvenienced for others). The striking result: 70 percent of those judged unselfish seemed happy; 95 percent of those judged selfish seemed unhappy. What a paradox, said the surprised Mr. Rimland: “Selfish people are, by definition, those whose activities are devoted to bringing themselves happiness. Yet, at least as judged by others, these selfish people are far less likely to be happy than those whose efforts are devoted to making them happy.” Happy people also often are in a zone called “flow”—absorbed in a task that challenges them without overwhelming them. The most expensive forms of leisure (such as sitting on a yacht or reading a book in the tower of a Victorian mansion) often provide less flow experience than gardening, socializing, or craft work. Much of human learning is achieved through observation, or modeling. Observational learning is influenced by the personal characteristics of the model and the success of failure of the model’s behaviour. Studies have shown that aggression is readily learned and released by modeling. The Christian Science practitioners apparently use their formulas, their statements of being, their treatments, in the form of uttered incantations. This is much like the use of mantrams in India. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
A comparative study of the history of mental healing shows how Universal and ancient are the origins of this treatment.; nor are its principles new. Mental Moral and Spirit Hygiene seeks to establish a proper way of living and thus prevent sickness. The healing art steps in where sickness already exists and a cure is sought. Another extremely fanatical attitude of which we must beware is the belief that mental healing displaces all other system and agencies for curing disease or keeping health; that its advocates may totally discard every branch of medicine and surgery, hygiene, and physical treatment. Sanity and balance call for the acceptance in its proper place of whatever Nature and man can contribute. With these preliminary warnings, we venture to predict that as the principles and practices of mental healing come to be better, namely more rationally understood, it will establish for itself a firm place in therapeutics which will have to be conceded—however grudgingly—by the most materialistic and most sceptical of medicos. We must remember that mental healing is only a single aspect of the art of healing. All the others must be brought in to make a balanced system. God as given us valuable herbs, for instance which possess remedial virtues. We should accept the gift. The error of Christian Science would appear to be that is confuses theory and wrongly applies practice. Its principles are half-right, half-wrong; its techniques are the same. The injunction to “cast thy burden on Me,” which it seems to apply, is misunderstood to advise neglecting practical means of healing troubles and leaving all to God. However, the correct way is not to neglect them but to do them while at the same time leaving results to God and being indifferent to them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Even if Christian Science and New Thought sects produce healings, they are still not truly “divine.” They use some lower force—some vital force, as the Indians say. For they are all attached to the ego, which is itself a consequence of their unconscious belief in its reality. The ego has cunningly inserted itself even into these highly spiritual teachings and is still the hidden source behind both their prophets and their followers. This explains the commercialism of humanity as well as the errors which are contained in the teachings of false prophets, which lead to so many people experiencing their own mental-physical breakdown and death. The Pleasures of this World may have whatever they want now, but will they have it forever? No, only “as long as smoke will last,” if I may replay with the Psalmist (37.20). That is the fate of every Midas since time began. Know there is no recordist of past joys, no lasting list of things that brough us pleasure. “As the smoke vanishes,” sang the Psalmist in another place (68.2). Even at the high point of their lives, the wealthy have never spent a night without bitterness, boredom, nor fear. The very things that brought them delight during the day haunted them throughout the night. However, what did they expect? They went out of their way to find bad companions. Take Delectation and Delight, for example. They seemed fanciful creatures at first, what with a myriad of murmurings and mummerings, but off with the masks, and there stood Bitterness and Consternation with scented breaths and missing teeth. Oh, how brief, false, wild, base these so-called pleasures are! You would think the Pleasurers would have understood this, but apparently they did not. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Their judgment was impaired, perhaps by boozing, perhaps by bamboozling. In this regard they were no better than the dumb animals, as the Apostle Judge might have put it (v.10); they grazed their way through life, eating what they should have and also what they should not have, till they brought on themselves an early death. Two Scriptures for you, My soulful friend. “Do not trail after your concupiscences,” as Jesus son of Sirach put it (18.30), “and swerve while you can from the headlong flight of your own will. “Delight in the Lord,” if I may sing with the Psalmist (37.4), “and He will grant you the petitions of your heart.” If you want to be entertained and consoled by Me, then you can. Merely hold in contempt all Worldly things and cut off all sickly delectations. Then My blessing will be yours, to be followed by copious consolation. Withdraw yourself, therefore, from every solace known to creatures, you will find in Me no sweeter, no stronger consolation. That will not happen right away in the spiritual life, as you, My friend, already know; at least not without some spiritual sadness and fatigue. The ingrained habits of a lifetime will stand in the way, as the Great Augustine acknowledged in his Confessions (8.11). They too can be overcome, but only by a better habit, which, alas for the New Devout, will be hard to do. The Flesh will murmur and demur at first, but the fervour of he Spirit will bridle it. The Ancient Serpent that Genesis spoke of in chapter 3 and the Great Dragon of Revelation in chapter 12 will chat you up, of course, but they will only make things worse. Prayer is useful in this regard. It will make them stop, stare, then slither away. To prevent their returning anytime soon, do keep yourself occupied. “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody,” reports 1 Thessalonians 4.11-12. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
There are so many mounting pressures towards telecommuting and they will intensify as cars are seen as status symbols (and people want to keep the milage low on them so they can hold their value better), intermittent gas shortages, odd-even days, long lines at the fuel pump, and perhaps rationing disrupt and delay normal commuting, further jacking up its cost in both social and economic terms. To this we can add even more pressures tending in the same direction. Corporate and government employers will discover that shifting work into the home—or into local neighbourhood work centers as a halfway measure—can sharply reduce the huge amounts now spent for real estate. The small the central offices and manufacturing facilities become, the smaller the real estate bill, and the smaller the costs of heating, cooling, lighting, policing, and maintaining them. However, identity theft and data breaches may become more of a problem because there is no one in the home to monitor employees, who they allow into their homes and what they are doing with client’s information. A friend or family member may steal or share someone’s personal information. Or someone may approach a work at home employee and buy private information from them, even though it is illegal. However, with moral values down the drain and law enforcement being swamped and unconcerned, at times, it could lead to a nightmare. Nonetheless, as land and commercial and industrial real estate, and the associated tax load all soar, the hope of reducing and/or externalizing these opportunity costs may favour the farming-out of work. Corporate America always finds a way to come out on top. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
The transfer of work and the reduction of commuting will also reduce pollution and therefore the tab for cleaning it up. The more successful environmentalists become at compelling companies to pay for their own pollution, the more incentive there will be to shift to low-polluting activities, and therefore from large-scale, centralized workplaces to smaller work centers or, better yet, into the home. Beyond this, as environmentalists and conservation-minded citizens groups battle against the destructive effects of the auto, and oppose road and highway construction, or succeed in banning cars from certain districts, they unwittingly support the transfer of work. The new effect of their efforts is to force up the already high cost and personal inconvenience of transport as against the low cost and convenience of communication. When environmentalists discover the ecological disparities between these two alternatives, and as the shift of work to the home begins to look like a real option, they will throw their weight behind this important decentralist move and help coax us into the civilization of the Third Wave. Social factors, too, support the move to the electronic cottage. The shorter the workday becomes, the longer the commuting time in relationship to it. The employee who hates to spend an hour getting to and from the job in order to spend eight hours working may very well refuse to invest the same commuting time if the hours spent on the job are cut. The higher the ratio of commuting time to working time, the more irrational frustrating, and absurd the process of shuttling back and forth. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
As resistance to commuting rises, employers will indirectly have to increase the premium paid to workers in the big, centralized work locations, as against those willing to take less pay for less travel time, inconvenience, and costs. Once again there will be greater incentive to transfer work. Finally, deep value changes are moving the same direction. Quite apart from the growth of privatism and the new allure of small-city and rural life, we are witnessing a basic shift in attitude toward the family unit. The nuclear family, the standard, socially approved family form throughout the Second Wave period is clearly in crisis. We shall explore the family of the future in much detail later. For now, we need only note the in the United States of America and Europe—wherever the transition out of the nuclear family is most advanced—there is a swelling demand for action to glue the family unit together again. And it is worth observing that one of the things that has bound families tightly together through history has been shared work. Even today one suspects that divorce rates are lower among couples who work together. The electronic cottage raises once more on a mass scale the possibility of husbands and wives, and perhaps even children, working together as a unit. And when campaigners for family life discover the possibilities inherent in the transfer of work to the home, we may discover he possibilities inherent in the transfer of work to the home we may see a rising demand for political measure to speed up the process—tax incentives, for example and new conceptions of workers’ rights. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Furthermore, with Social Security expected to be insolvent in 2033 and Medicare by 2026, working from home may be more appealing to people who do not want to work or have conditions that prohibit them from working. As more corporations allow people to work from home, this may increase the pool of people looking for jobs, and could help entitlement, insurance, and retirement programs recover some revenue. During the early days of the Second Wave era, the workers’ movement fought for a “Ten Hour Day,” a demand that would have been almost incomprehensible during the First Wave period. Soon we may see the rise of movements demanding that all work that can be done at home be done at home. Many workers will insist on that option as a right. And, to the degree that this relocation of work is seen as strengthening family life, their demand will receive strong support from people of many different political, religious, and cultural persuasions. The fight for the electronic cottage is part of the larger super-struggle between the Second Wave past and the Third Wave future, and it is likely to bring together not merely technologists and corporations eager to exploit the new technical possibilities but a wide range of other forces—environmentalists, labour reformers of a new style, and a broad coalition of organizations, from conservative churches to radical feminists and mainstream political groups—in support of what may well be seen as a new, more satisfactory future for the family. The electronic cottage may thus emerge as a key rallying point of the Third Wave forces of tomorrow. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Also, home economics bears a significant position in our education system. Not only do students need to learn how to sew, bake muffins and cakes, learn about nutritional value, and how to become conservative adults, home economics teaches students other life skills that help individuals succeed, independent of their chosen career path. Home economics helps students continually grow in the future as it emphasizes on personal development, intrapersonal skills, effective decision making and social-communicational skills deemed critical for occupational success. The various essential skills that home economics discusses includes financial planning, cooking and nutrition, safety, and overall life skills. It teaches students how to use a debit or credit card, how to open a checking and savings account, write a cheque. Students are also taught about their future, and how to effectively handle all their finances and how to avoid financial mistakes that could potentially bey very stressful in the near future. Home economics classes also educate student son interests rates, investment and takes, and how to choose good stock markets to invest money into or what would happen if you do not pay your taxes on time and so forth. It is extremely critical to be well versed in such matters to live in the World today. One of the most serious obstacles that families face today is how to eat healthily, but not spend all their savings on trying to purchase grocery items for the same. If such things are taught at an early age, there can be many problems avoided such as health defects, obesity, immorality and much more. Safety is something that seems obvious but is a very relevant topic that is taught in home economics. Students are taught about how to establish a safe environment around them. They learn about what to do in case of a fire, how to perform CPR, use a first aid kit, how to treat an open wound or prevent an injury from spreading. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Students are also taught critical, essential factors about working in the kitchen such as the most effective way of holding a knife, what material of clothing should not be worn in the kitchen, making sure the stove is always attended to and that pots should not have handles sticking outward, not to place lips on cooktop glass stoves (it cases them to shatter), what temperature the food should be cooked at and how it should be stored, how to clean up after you have finished cooking. When students are not educated about such things, there are so many possibilities of danger in and around us. God behaviour and manners are also valuable skills to learn about. Some teachers encourage students not to get tattoos nor piercings, not to grow facial hair, to be polite, speak clearly, and to respect all people. Not to hit, bite, scream, punch or kick. Students learn how to talk smart or how to give order and not sound discourteous while doing e same. They are taught to converse, sit and dress during a job interview. Many students also go on to go to college and end up sharing an apartment or a room with another person. Home economics teaches them how to adjust to living with someone else in such tight spaces. How to respect each other’s privacy and how to divine various tasks like cleaning, setting up the room and shopping. And to even leave a not if you hit someone’s car in the parking lot. Therefore, home economics teaches us basic life skills. Our World is so vast and developed todays that it is nice to receive instructions on how to go about it. For the half-century from 1920 to 1970, the popular magazine equated the suburban homes with attaining the American Dream, and that was the foundation of home economics. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
However, rather than seeing the suburban bungalow as an ideal, feminists of the era saw the wife’s involvement in a self-contained home as a patriarch-designed regression. Thus, feminists were almost always antisuburban, ending to equate the suburban home not with more freedom, but with a patriarchal desire to confine women and children to an isolated home environment. The suburban ideal of domestic togetherness was viewed as a male device for keeping women in their domestic place. (However, as a contrast, today many women complain that men are not providers, unwilling to work and support their children and will not purchase the family a house or a car, sometimes they will not even buy food. It is like they expect the wife and the children to provide for the man, while he sits back, watches TV, drinks beer, hoots and howls while playing video games and inhales marijuana and eat pork rinds chicken wings with Crystal hot sauce, and Twinkies.) The suburban ideal of domestic togetherness was viewed by the feminists as a male device for keeping women in their domestic place. (Which some now wish would occur so the man can return to be a provider and having gainful employment.) However, to break traditional patterns and gender roles in the home, feminists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries often advocated making housework, laundry, and cooking communal responsibilities. This, they believed, would emancipate women from the daily drudgery that confined them to the house and its responsibilities. Utopian feminists’ communities, such as the early-twentieth-century Llano del Rio in southern California, often were designed without kitchens in homes. Rather, the houses backed on a communal kitchen and eating area. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Laundry, similarly, was done in communal rather than household facilities. The goal was to provide time for other activities. Somewhat ironically, this goal was accomplished for the middle-class women by having lower-class women do the heavy washing, cooking, and cleaning. In the day and age, it apparently never occurred to the proponents of Llano Del Rio that class discrimination was being substituted for gender discrimination. Contemporary feminist writings on ideal housing continue to stress the advantages of communal housing models. This is particularly the case with those favouring neo-Marxist models. Gender inequality is seen as an inevitable consequence of single-family suburban housing being built by men for men. Feminist writers generally view spatial structure as reinforcing gender inequalities, with the cities representing masculine centers of production and the suburbs feminine centers of reproduction. Suburban single-family home designs are part of a patriarchal family structure in which, “The dominance of the single-family detached dwelling, its separation from the workplace, and its decentralized urban location are as much the products of the patriarchal organization of household production as of the capitalistic organization of wage work. Important non-Marxist feminists such as Betty Friedan have also been justly critical of a model in which women were to remain tied to the house as homemakers while men commuted to the real World of work in the city. Only by entering the paid work force and establishing careers could women be liberated from the bondage of domestic servitude. Attempts to design more women—centered housing continues to be a major concern. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Ideally, such women-centered housing would be designed to prevent isolation from public life that is seen to be integral to contemporary suburbs. Feminist designs, harkening back to the earlier communal models, emphasize the importance of facilities. However, survey research indicates most women continue to prefer private over communal kitchens and other facilities. BMW took the women’s power move a little further. They very stylish and sporty BMW Z4 roadster with retractable hard-top roof was designed all by women. Designer Juliane Blasi—the first female to design the exterior of a BMW—created a stunning look with its elongated hood, short overhangs, powerful wheel arches, and flowing creases. Even the two roll-over bars in the ruthenium-look steel complement the exterior design. Another sophisticated woman, Nadya Arnaout, designed the interior, which is smart and sophisticated—a clean and modern look. The instruments are well-positioned and easy to find; large round HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) dials make it a cinch to adjust the temperature top up or down. A push-button start lets your fire up the engine without a key—the key fob can be hidden deep in your pocket; as long as it is nearby the car will start. It is easy to change the radio as well. A tiny electronic parking brake is located behind the gear shifter, which saves space, yet blends nicely into the décor. The car also comes very a very sophisticated price tag of approximately $63,000USD. Diversity is very important, and it is a notable characteristic of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which transcends every culture, rave, nationality, and language. Cultures and peoples throughout the World gather together by because the Saviour’s invitation that all God’s children come unto Him. The Heavenly Father loves each and everyone of his children equally. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
When the impeccable peace of the Overself inundates a human’s hear, one finds hat it is no negative thing. It must not be confused with sinister calm of a graveyard or with the mocking immobility of a paralytic. It is a strong, beneficial, and enduring quality which is definitely enjoyable. We actually get a momentary and much-diluted sample of it at such times as when a hated object is suddenly removed from our path, when a powerful ancient ambition is suddenly realized, or when we meet a greatly beloved person after long absence. Why? Because at such moments we are free from the infatuation with the hatred, the ambition, or the love simply because they have achieved their object and the desire-thoughts become still. The freedom passes almost in a flash, however, because some other infatuation replaces it in the heart within a few moments and thoughts begin their movement again. Whatever negative ideas and destructive feelings, whatever harassing doubts and muggy confusions one may have had before the Glimpse comes, disappear in its great joyous peace and vas buoyant certitude. It is not a merely abstract concept in the brain but a piercing experience in the heart. When these rare moments come quietly upon one, one feels oneself humbled and subdued. In these moments the air seems warm and pleasant, the Universe charged with friendliness. These moments of divine glorification exalt us like moments of hearing fine music. They come with the force of revelations for which we have been waiting. They hold us with the spell of enchantment made by a wizard’s hand. Their magical influence and mystical beauty pass all too soon, but the memory of them never does. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The ecstasy of that state is rare, the abundant happiness it yields is unforgettable. Those who have lifted themselves up at times into the higher Mind know the paradox of the air in which it dwells. For if beneficent gentle peace is there, so too is invigourating immeasurable strength. The Glimpse comes as a benediction and as a grace. The heart should be grateful, immensely grateful for its visitation. It possesses a beauty which is not of this World, which gives joy to the heart. “In The presence is fullness of joy,” reports Psalms 16.11. It is a feeling of unearthly and unlimited peace. The World stands still, the sense of time passing and events happening is suspended. Nothing exists but this Oneness. Some are ready to enter the light and when—through the mediumship of Nature or Art, a man or a book—that happens, the experience is as enjoyable as entering an orchard of ripened apricots. The joy comes upon one out of the unknown, gently, mysteriously, and sunnily. As this wonderful feeling steals over one, there is a clear and unmistakable sense that the Overself is displacing the ego. Hitherto one has obeyed the rule of the flesh and the brain and consequently has shared their pitiful limitations. Now one becomes acutely aware that a new sovereign is taking one’s place on the throne. One feels that one has reached the very edge of another self, another World of being. In its newly discovered presence, we are relieved of cares, immune to anxieties about the future, and liberated from regrets about the past. It is not the unspeech of morbid taciturnity but a mysterious hush which falls on the soul. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
If one is fortunate there may come to the waiting seeker a sense of uplift, and exalted mood, a feeling of support from a vast mysterious source. There is a unique bliss in this new-found freedom of the second self, a sublime peace in this dissolution of old restraints. One feels something of that sacred presence within one and around one. Its effect upon the mind is to leave a glow of benign good will to all beings. It hovers on the edge of indefinable awareness. What is the mystery of that sate when the body sis, stands, or reclines without moving, when the thoughts come to rest and the feelings enter an exquisite calm? It has been given a variety of names, for it takes a human out of this familiar common world and puts one into a most mysterious one. The ego slides from off one’s shoulders like a heavy overcoat and one feels delightfully free. At the ordinary level one has the ordinary outlook, the habitual desires; but here are times when one finds oneself at another and higher level where one is unsympathetic to both. No theological difficulties can trouble this happy state, no religious doubts can enter into it. The glimpse is like a first airplane ride. Looking down at the Earth scene far below, with its patch-like landscape dotted with black specks called houses and autos, and thinking of those millions of living creatures who live in one and drive in the other, one is overcome with humility. It is the glorious moment when Adam re-enters Eden, even though he is only a visiting guest and not a permanent dweller therein. The Glimpse operates to cast an actual spell over one. One is enchanted not merely poetically but literally. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Hours that are so far from the common ones, so timeless in their quality, make one feel like an ageless Sphinx. Time itself is suspended, and with it go the fears and worries, the unhappiness, which beset living in this World at this hour of its history. It is a feeling of being right with the Universe, with Life itself. It is as if years spent living in a dark cellar are abruptly ended by moving to a bright sunny Cresleigh Home. In this beautiful mood one becomes possessed of perfect leisure. One has all the time now that one needs. There is no need ever for hurry, strain, anxiety. For a moment or a morning, a day or a week, the confusions of life vanish. Oxygen kisses each cell awake, atoms dancing in orderly metabolism, interpenetrating. That dance of the air cycle, breathing the Universe in and out again, is what you are, is what I am. Sons and daughters of the Earth, steep yourself in the sea of matter, bathe in its fiery waters, for it is the source of your life and your youthfulness. By living in a World of pure though, you become more divine, or at leas more angelic. As Thou didst save this people, leading them as a flock on their path, and at Marah by still waters, didst ordain a statute for them, do Thou save us. As Thou didst save Thy treasured sons in their camp in the wilderness of Sin, where they gathered a double measure of food on the sixth say, do Thou save us. As Thou didst save Thy children, who in setting the example of preparation of the Sabbath won the approval of their Shepherd who praised their deed, so save us now. As Thou didst save them who were sustained on the Sabbath by the prepare manna, the appearance of which altered not, and the fragrance thereof did not change, so save us now. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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One Feels the Presence within One of the Mysterious Entity which is One’s Soul!
How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most humans at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure. Emotional expressions, or outward signs of what a person is feeling, are another major element of emotion. For example, when you are intensely afraid, your hands tremble, your face contorts, and your posture becomes tense and defensive. Emotion is also revealed by marked shifts in voice tone or modulation. Such expressions are important because they communicate emotion from one person to another. Emotional feelings (a person’s private emotional experience) are a final major element of emotion. This is the part of emotion with which we are usually most familiar. Happiness—that delicious feeling of well-being and joy. What does it mean for our lives? How can we attain it? Have you noticed how your state of happiness or unhappiness colours everything else? Researchers have found that when we are in a happy mood, we see the World as friendly and nonthreatening. We make decisions easily. We recall the good times and forget the bad. Let our mood turn gloomy and soon enough we will find reasons for it: our relationships, our-self-image, and our prospects for the future suddenly seem depressing. What is more, happy people are helpful people. In experiments, those who have a mood-boosting experience become more generous and compassionate. If made to feel successful and intelligent, they are more likely to volunteer as a tutor. If they have just found some money in a phone booth, they are more likely to help someone pick up dropped papers. If they have just had a great day at work, they are more willing to loan someone money. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
So, being in a good mood triggers happy thoughts and memories and predisposes us to spread happiness to others. How, then, can we find happiness? Well, first of all, when faces with severe adversity or loss, being depressed is a normal and appropriate response. However, sometimes people react even to little problems by doubting and disparaging themselves. Their negative mood now triggers more negative thoughts: “I am no good,” “People do not like me,” “No one appreciates the work I do.” And the withdrawal and complaining that accompany such thoughts irritate others, which further worsens the unhappy person’s predicament. To break this vicious cycle of misery, psychologists often advise people to work at reversing their negative thinking. Keep a diary of daily successes, noting what you did to make them possible. Make negative self-talk more optimistic: not “I will never get this done,” but “One step at a time—I can handle it.” Or keep a gratitude journal. Those who pause each day to write down some optimistic aspects of their lives—perhaps their health, their friends, their family, their freedom, or even just their savouring the wonders of their senses—experience heightened well-being. Forcing ourselves also to act in more beneficial ways—offering a compliment, asserting ourselves—can help, too. When we act as if we are happy and confident, we may become more so. Silly as it may seem, even a smiling expression can sometimes break the cycle of misery. Try it. Make yourself smile. Can you feel the difference? The participants in dozens of recent experiments could feel the differences. When induced to make a frowning expression while electrodes were attached to their faces—“pull your brows together, please,” the researchers might instruct—the people reported feeling a little angry, and their heart rates and skin temperatures actually went up slightly (as if they really were “hot under the collar”). #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Those induced to smile felt happier and found cartoons more humorous. When we put on a happy face, our outlook seems to brighten. A famous author, on calculating the goods and evils of human life and comparing the two sums, has found that the latter greatly exceeded the former, and that, all things considered, life was a pretty poor present for humans. I am not surprised by his conclusion; he has drawn all of his arguments from the constitution of civil humans. Had he gone back as far as natural man, the judgement can be made that he would have found very different results, that he would have realized that man has scarcely any evils other than those he has given himself, and that nature would have been justified. It is not without trouble that we have managed to make ourselves so unhappy. When, on the one hand, one considers the immense labours of humans, so many sciences searched into, so many arts invented, and so many forces employed, abysses filled up, mountains razed, rocks broken, rivers made navigable, lands cleared, lakes dug, marshes drained, enormous buildings raised upon the Earth, the sea covered with ships and sailors; and when on the other hand, one searches with a little meditation for the true advantages that have resulted from all this for the happiness of the human species, one cannot help being struck by the astonishing disproportion that obtains between these things, and to deplore man’s blindness, which, to feed his foolish pride and who knows what vain sense of self-importance, makes one run ardently after all the miseries to which he is susceptible, and which beneficent nature has taken pains to keep from him. Men are wicked; a sad and continual experience dispenses us from having to prove it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Nevertheless, man is naturally good; I believe I have demonstrated it. What therefore can have depraved him to this degree, if not the changes that have befallen his constitution, the progress he has made, and the sorts of knowledge he has acquired? Let human society be admired as much as one wants; it will be no less true for it that necessarily brings humans to hate one another to the extent that their interests are at cross-purposes with one another, to render mutually to one another apparent services and in fact do every evil imaginable to one another. What is one to think of an interaction where the reason of each private individual dictates to one maxims directly contrary to those that public reason preaches to the body of society, and where each finds one’s profit in the misfortune of another? Perhaps there is not a wealth man whose death is not secretly hope for by greedy heirs and often by his own children; not a ship at sea whose wreck would not be good news for some merchant; not a firm that a debtor of bad faith would not wish to see burn with all the papers it contains; not a people that does not rejoice at the disasters of its neighbours. Thus it is that we find our advantage in the setbacks of our fellow-humans, and that one person’s loss almost always beings about another’s prosperity. However, what is even more dangerous is that public calamities are anticipated and hoped for by a multitude of private individuals. Sone want diseases, others death, others war, others famine. I have seen ghastly men weep with the sadness at the likely prospects of a fertile year. And the great and deadly fire of London, which cost the life or the goods of so many unfortunate people, made the fortunes of perhaps more than ten thousand people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
I know that Montaigne bales the Athenian Demades for having had a worker punished, who, by selling coffins at a high price, made a great deal from the death of the citizens. However, since the reason Montaigne proposes is that everyone would have to be punished, it is evident that it confirms my own. Let us therefore penetrate, through our frivolous demonstration of good will, to what happens at the bottom of our hearts; and let us reflect on what the state of things must be where all humans are forced to caress and destroy one another, and where they are born enemies by duty and crooks by interest. If someone answers me by claiming that society is constituted in such a manner that each human gains by serving others, I will reply that this would be very well and good, provided one did not gain still more by harming them. There is no profit, however legitimate, that is not surpassed by one that can be made illegitimately, and wrong done to a neighbour is always more lucrative than services. It is therefore no longer a question of anything but finding the means of being assured of impunity. And this is what the powerful spend all their forces on, and the weak all their ruses. Savage man, when he has eaten, is at peace with all nature, and the friend of all his fellow-men. Is it sometimes a question of one’s disputing over one’s mean? One never comes to blows without having first compared the difficulty of winning with that of finding one’s sustenance elsewhere. And since pride is not involved in the fight, it is ended by a few swings of the first. The victor eats; the vanquished is on one’s way to seek one’s fortune, and everything is pacified. However, for humans in society, these are quite different affairs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
It is first of all a question of providing for the necessary and then for the superfluous; next come delights, and then immense riches, and then subjects, and then slaves. One has not a moment’s respite. What is more singular is that the less natural and pressing the needs, the more the passions increase and, what is worse, the power to satisfy them; so that after long periods of prosperity, after having swallowed up many treasures and ruined many humans, my hero will end by butchering everything until he is the sole master of the Universe. Such in brief is the moral portrait, if not of human life, then at least of the secret pretensions of the heart of every civilized human. Compare, without prejudices, that state of civilized humans with that of savage humans and seek, if you can, how many new doors to suffering and death (other than their wickedness, their needs and their miseries) the former has opened. If you consider the emotional turmoil that consumes us, the violent passions that exhaust and desolate us, the excessive cause the former to die of their needs, and the latter of their excesses; if you call to mind the monstrous combinations of food, their pernicious seasonings, the corrupted foodstuffs, tainted drugs, the knavery of those who sell them, the errors of those who administer them, the poison of the vessels in which they are prepared; if you pay attention to the epidemic diseases engendered by the bad air among the multitudes of humans gathered together, to the illnesses occasioned by the effeminacy of our lifestyle, by the coming and going from the inside of our houses to the open air, the use of garments put on or taken off with too little precaution, and all the cares that our excessive sensuality has turned into necessary habit, the neglect or privation of which then costs us our life or health. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Furthermore, if you take into account fires and earthquakes, which, in consuming or turning upside down whole cities, cause their inhabitants to die by the thousands; in a word, if you unite the dangers that all these causes continually gather over our heads, you will realize how dearly nature makes us pay for the scorn we have down for the scorn we have down for its lessons. I will not repeat here what I have said elsewhere about war, but I wish that informed humans would, for once, want or dare to give the public the detail of the horrors that are committed in armies by provisions and hospital suppliers. One would see that their not too secret maneuvers, on account of which the most brilliant armies by provisions and hospital suppliers. One would see that their not too secret maneuvers, on account of which the most brilliant armies dissolve into less than nothing, cause more soldiers to perish than are cut down by enemy swords. Moreover, no less surprising is the calculation of the number of humans swallowed up by the sea every years, either by hunger, or scurvy, or pirates, or fire, or shipwrecks. It is clear that we must also put to the account of established property, and consequently to that of society, the assassinations, the poisonings, the highway robberies, and even the puishments of these crimes, punishments necessary to prevent greater ills, but which, costing the lives of two or more for the murder of one man, do not fail really to double the loss to the human species. How many are the shameful ways to prevent the birth of humans or to fool nature: either by those brutal and depraved tastes which insult its most charming work, tastes that neither savages nor animals ever knew, and that have arisen in civilized counties only as the result of a corrpt imagination. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Or by those secret abortions, worthy fruits of debauchery and vicious honour; or by the exposure or the murder of a multitude of infants, victims of the misery of their parents or of the barbarous shame of their mothers; or, finally by the mutilation of those unfortunates, part of whose existence and all of the brutal jealousy of a few humans: a mutilation which, in that last case, doubly outrages nature, both by the treatment received by those who suffer it and by the use to which they are destined. [But are there not a thousand more frequent and even more dangerous cases where paternal rights overtly offend humanity? How many talents are buried and inclinations are forced by the imprudent constraint of fathers! How many men would have distinguished themselves in a suitable station who die unhappy and dishonoured in another station for which they have no taste! How many happy but unequal marriages have been broken or disturbed, and how many chaste wives dishonoured by the order of conditions always in contradiction with that of nature! How many other bizarre unions formed by interests and disavowed by love and by reason! How many even honest and virtuous couples cause themselves torment because they were ill-matched! How many young and unhappy victims of their parent’s greed plunge into vice or pass their sorrowful days in tears, and moan in indissoluble chains which the heart rejects and which gold alone has formed! Happy sometimes are those who courage and even virtue them for life before a barbarous violence force them into crime or despair. For give me, father and mother for deplorable. I regrettably worsen your sorrows; but may they serve as an eternal and terrible example to whoever dares, in the name of nature, to violate the most scared of its rights! #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
If I have spoken only of those ill-formed relationships that are the result of our civil order, is one to think that those where love and sympathy have presided are themselves exempt from drawbacks?] What would happen if I were to undertake to show the human species attacked in its very source, and even in the most holy of all bounds, where one no longer dares to listen to nature until after having consulted fortune, and where, with civil disorder confounding virtues and vices, continence becomes a criminal precaution, and the refusal to give life to one’s fellow-human an act of humanity? However, without tearing away the veil that overs so many horrors, let us content ourselves with point out the evil, for which others must supply the remedy. Let us add to all this that quantity of unwholesome trades which shorten lives or destroy one’s health, such as work in mines, various jobs involving the processing of metals, minerals, and especially lead, copper, mercury, cobalt, arsenic, realgar; those other perilous trades which everyday cost the lives of a number of workers, some of them roofers, others carpenters, others masons, other working in quarries; let us bring all of these objects together, I say, and we will be able to see in the establishment and the perfection of societies the reasons for the diminution of the species, observed by more than one philosopher. Luxury, impossible to prevent among humans who are greedy for their own conveniences and for the esteem of others, soon completes the evil that societies have begun; and on the pretext of keeping the poor alive (which it was not necessary to do), luxury impoverishes everyone else, and sooner or later depopulates the state. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Luxury is a remedy far worse than the evil it means to cure; or rather it is itself the worst of all evils in any state, however, large or small it may be, and which, in order to feed the hordes of lackeys and wretches it has produced, crushes, and ruins the labourer and the citizen—like those scorching south winds that, by covering grass and greenery with devouring insects, take sustenance away from useful animals, and bring scarcity and death to all the places where they make themselves felt. From society and the luxury it engenders, arise the liberal and mechanical arts, commerce, letters, and all those useless things that make industry flourish, enriching and running states. The reason for this decay is quite simple. It is easy to see that agriculture, by its nature, must be the least lucrative of all the arts, because, with its product being of the most indispensable use to all humans, its price must be proportion to their usefulness, and that the most necessary must finally become the most neglected. From this it is clear what must be thought of the true advantages of industry and of the real effect that results from its progress. Such are the discernible causes of all the miseries into which opulence finally brings down the most admired nations. To the degree that industry and the arts expand and flourish, the scorned farmer, burdened with taxes necessary to maintain luxury and condemned to spend one’s life between toil and hunger, abandons one’s fields to go to the cities in search of the bread one ought to be carrying there. The more the capital cities strike the stupid eyes of the people as wonderful, the more it will be necessary to groan at the sight of countrysides abandoned, fields fallow, and main roads jammed with unhappy citizens who have become beggars or thieves, destined to end their misery one day on the rack or on a dung-heap. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Thus it is that the state, enriching itself on the one hand, weakens and depopulates itself on the other; and that the most powerful monarchies, after much labour to become opulent and deserted, end by becoming the prey of poor nations which succumb to the deadly temptation to invade them, and which enrich and enfeeble themselves in their turn, until they are themselves invaded and destroyed by others. Let someone deign to explain to us for once what could have produced those hordes of barbarians which for so many centuries have overrun Europe, Asia, and Africa. Was it to the industry of their arts, the wisdom of their laws, the excellence of their civil order that they owed that prodigious population? Would our learned one be so kind as to tell us why, far from multiplying to that degree, those ferocious and brutal humans, without enlightenment, without restraint, without education, did not all kill one another at every moment to argue with one another over food or game? Let them explain to us how these wretches even had the gall to look right in the eye such capable people as we were, with such fine military discipline, such fine codes, and such wise laws, and why, finally, after society was perfected in the countries of the north, and so many pains were taken there to teach humans their mutual duties and the air of living together agreeably and peaceably, nothing more is seen to come from them like those multitudes of humans it produced formerly. I am very much afraid that something, namely the arts, sciences, and laws, have been very wisely invented by humans as a salutary plague to prevent the excessive multiplication of the species, out of fear that this World, which is destined for us, might finally become too small for its inhabitants. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
What then! Must we destroy societies, annihilate thine and mine, and return to live in the forests with bears?—a conclusion in the style of my adversaries, which I prefer to anticipate, rather than leave to them the shame of drawing it. Oh you, to whom the Heavenly voice has not made itself heard, and who recognize for your species no other destination except to end this brief life in peace; you who can leave in the midst of the cities your deadly acquisitions, your troubled minds, your corrupt hearts and your unbridled desires. Since it depends on you, retake your ancient and first innocence; go into the woods to lose sight and memory of the crimes of your contemporaries, and have no fear of cheapening your species in renouncing its enlightenment in order to renounce its vices. As for men like me, whose passions have forever destroyed their original simplicity, who can no longer feed on grasses and acorn[s], nor get by without laws and chiefs; those who were honoured in their first father with supernatural lessons; those who will see, in the intention of giving human actions from the beginning a morality they would not have acquired for a long time, the reason for a precept indifferent in itself and inexplicable in any other system; those, in a word, whoa re convinced that the divine voice called the entire human race to the enlightenment and the happiness of the celestial intelligences; all those latter ones will attempt, through the exercise of virtues they oblige themselves to practice while learning to know them, to merit the eternal reward that they ought to expect for them. They will respect the sacred bonds of the societies of which they are members; they will love their fellow-men and will serve them with all their power; they will scrupulously obey the laws and the men who are their authors and their ministers. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
They will honour above all the good and wise princes who will know how to prevent, cure or palliate that pack of abuses and evils always ready to overpower us; they will animate the zeal of these worthy chiefs by showing them without fear or flattery the greatness of their task and the rigour of their duty. However, they will despise no less for it a constitution that can be maintained only with the help of so many respectable people, who are desired more often than they are obtained, and from which, despite all their care, always arise more real calamities than apparent advantages. Nevertheless, powerful forces are converging to promote the electronic cottage. The most immediately apparent is the economic trade-off between transportation and telecommunication. Most high-technology nations are now experiencing a transportation crisis, with mass transit systems strained to the breaking point, roads and highways clogged, parking spaces rare, pollution a serious problem, strikes and breakdowns almost routine, and costs skyrocketing. The escalating costs of commuting are borne by the individual workers. However, they are, of course, indirectly passed on to the employer in the form of higher wage costs, and to the consumer in higher prices. Jack Nilles and a team sponsored by the National Science Foundation have worked out both dollar and the energy savings that would flow from any substantial shift of white-collar jobs out of centralized offices. Instead of assuming the jobs would go into the homes of employees, the Nilles group used what might be termed a halfway-house model, assuming only that jobs would be dispersed into neighbourhood work centers closer to employee homes. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The implications of their findings are startling. On average, Americans travel an average of 32 miles a day to and from work. The higher up the managerial scale, the longer the commute, with top executives averaging 44 miles. All told, these workers drove 12.4 million miles each year to get to work, using up nearly a half-century’s worth of hours to do so. At 2021 prices, this costs about sixty cents per mile, or a total of $15,117,610.34—an amount borne indirectly by the company and its customers. Indeed, it was found that the company was paying its downtown workers $2,879.54 a year more than the going rate in the dispersed locations—in effect, a subsidy of transportation costs. It was also providing parking spaces and other costly services made necessary by the centralized location. If we now assume a secretary was earning in the neighbourhood of $55,375.86 a year, the elimination of commuting costs could have permitted the company to hire nearly 300 additional employees or, alternatively, to add a substantial amount of profits. The key question is: When will the cos of installing and operating telecommunications equipment fall below the present cost of commuting? While gasoline and other transport costs (including the costs of mass-transit alternatives to the auto) are soaring everywhere, the price of telecommunications is shrining spectacularly. Satellites slash the cost of long-distance transmission, bringing it so near the zero mark per signal that engineers now speak of “distance-independent” communications. Computer power has multiplied exponentially and prices have dropped so dramatically that engineers and investors alike are left gasping. With fiber optics and other new breakthrough technologies in the wings, it is clear that still further cost reductions lie ahead—per unit of memory, per processing step, and per signal transmitted. At some point the curves must cross. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
However, these are not the only forces subtly moving us toward the geographical dispersal of production and, ultimately, the electronic cottage of the future. The Nilles team found that the average American urban commuter uses the gasoline equivalent of 64.6 kilowatts of energy to get back and forth to work each day. (The Los Angeles insurance employees burned 37.4 million kilowatts a year in commuting.) By contrast, it takes far less energy to move information. A typical computer terminal uses only 100 to 125 watts or less when it is in operation, and a phone line consumes only one watt or less while it is in use. Making certain assumptions about how much communications equipment would be needed, and how long it would operate, Nilles calculated that “the relative energy consumption advantage of telecommuting over commuting (id est, the ratio of commuting energy consumption to telecommuting consumption) is at least 29.1 when the private automobile is used; 11.1 when normally loaded mass transit is used; and 2.1 for 100 percent utilized mass transit systems.” Carried to their conclusion, these calculations showed that, even if as little as 12 o 14 percent of urban commuting is replaced by telecommuting, the United States of America would save approximately 75 million barrels of gasoline—and would thereby greatly reduce the need to import as much gasoline from abroad. The implications of that one fac for the U.S. balance of payments for Middle East politics might also be more than trivial. As gasoline prices and energy costs in general rise in the decades immediately ahead, both the dollar cost and energy cost of operating “smart” typewriters, telecopiers, the Internet, video calls, email, audio and video links, and computer desks will plummet, still further increasing the relative advantage of moving at least some production out of the large central workshop that dominated the Second Wave. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
The dawning of the twentieth century saw a major social attack on the formality and excesses of the Victorian era. In architecture, this was reflected in the supplanting of the elaborate Victorian dwelling with the simpler rustic bungalow. The bungalow style stressed efficiency and simplicity. In spite of its name, the bungalow characteristically had a second floor housing a bathroom and all the bedrooms, and a full concrete-floored basement. Compared to the suburban homes of earlier decades, bungalows were generally smaller and constructed without formal features such as entrance halls or parlours. What they did have, however, was a high degree of comfort and convenience. Not unimportant for newlyweds, the bungalow was also a less expensive first home and thus had a particular appeal to young couples. From the standpoint of the housewife, suburban bungalows took far less time and energy to care for than the larger, but far less modern, homes of their mothers. The bungalows had all the technological advances of the day and included luxuries only available to the well-to-do a generation earlier. The homes were built with modern indoor, bathrooms, electric connections, gas connections for kitchen stoves, and central heating. For latter, you could have steam, hot-air, or hot-water systems. Individual wood- or coal-burning room heaters or stoves were no longer seen; they have been superseded by coal-fire central-heating systems. In some cases the furnaces were even automatic oil-fired units. The “fireplaces” in the 1920s bungalow living room was likely to be a faux fireplace with gas-fed logs. (During the 1990s gas-fired fireplaces again returned to favour.) New “scientific” labour-saving devices such as electric laundry machines, electric irons, electric vacuum cleaners, and even electric toasters all made middle-class women’s lives easier. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
No longer did you have to daily strain yourself to feed wood or coal into the kitchen stove or room heaters. No longer did you have to have a washerwoman—or yourself—do the backbreaking work of heating water on the stove and then washing the clothes by hand in huge vats. For hot water you turned on the faucet; to wash the clothes you turned on the washing machine, which was now located in the bungalow’s concrete-floored, electric-lighted, and centrally heated basement. It is all but impossible for us today to imagine jus how much time and heavy physical labour was an everyday part of housekeeping prior o the modern era. The new labour-saving electric appliances and more efficient kitchen designs of the smaller bungalow-style suburban homes of the 1920s did more than reduce heavy labour around the home. They also contributed to the ongoing social revolution in women’s equality by providing middle-class women much more free time. The comparative efficiency of the new electric appliances removed some of the time-consuming drudgery from housekeeping and promoted the possibility of leisure time. Woman’s magazines of the day noted how many modern young women living in such suburban homes now had the “free time” to devote to social activities, charity work, or others activities. They might even have a career. The idea that it was possible to have both a home and a career first came into vogue for the middle-class at this time. Having a job outside the home was not the norm, but it now, theoretically, became an option. Middle-class ideology began to change so that a suburban woman’s working at a career or job was not automatically assumed to be the consequence of the early death of the male breadwinner. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
“Modern” married middle-class women, even those with children, could have a career without automatically being considered negligent wives and mothers. This is not to suggest that the technology of the new housing determined family social and work patterns. Rather, it is to suggest that technological advances, by changing the nature of housework, made it easier for patterns of greater social equality between spouses to develop. A more recent development has been the assumption by adult family members of home repair and improvement activities that were previously done by hired male painters, plumbers, and carpenters. A “do-it-yourself” generation has grown up with the assumption that everything from kitchen cabinets to decks to new bathroom fixtures can be self-installed. TV ads show couples putting in a new ceiling fan or installing new countertops after viewing the hardware warehouse video on how to do it. On the beneficial side, there is a decreasing division between what appropriate men’s work and women’s work. On the negative side, home improvement activities decrease true leisure time. Nonetheless, labour costs all but necessitates that suburban couples who wish to upgrade their homes will do much of their own work. It is taken for granted that they themselves will do much of the work in building a rec room or adding a bedroom. In this respect, the contemporary family unit has a commonalty with early American families, who were expected to physically contribute to the construction and maintenance of their dwellings. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
One thing you should concentrate on is desire, in fact, your alarming number of desires. You should make them conform to My pleasure. That is to say, you should not prefer your own will to Mine, as the Great Matthew recorded in the Lord’s Prayer in his Gospel (6.10); you should fall all over yourself to put My will first in your life. Why? Desires, I have noticed, often rouse you to act before you think. That is nice, but I think you should consider whether you are acting for our mutually agreed upon alliance or just for your own dalliance. If, however, I am the over cause, you will be happy enough, no matter how much I bang you about. However, if you have some covert initiative, something you do not want to reveal to Me, watch your step. It will trip you up and weigh you down. A few things to beware of. First, do not lean too much on these subcutaneous, subterranean desires of yours. Consult Me first. If you do not, it will make you suffer a lot later. One hint. A desire may please you at first, but it does not satisfy for long. It can only lead you to another, seemingly better supposedly greater desire, which itself is just another one in an endless chain of self-devouring desires that can only lead you to spiritual ruin. Second, not every Friendly Affection has to be seized immediately. There can be an interval. Examine it closely. Use restraint. You do not want to distract your mind from your goodly and indeed Godly studies simply because a Friendly Affection suddenly presents itself. Third, not every Unfriendly Affection must be fled from right away. Again, let there be an interval. Instantaneous and negative reaction may result more in Vitus than Virtue. The last thing you want to do is engender scandal in those who look up to you. Worse, you will arouse those who look down upon you; they will whirl you about until your finally fly apart. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Fourth, sometimes you have to use strength, that is to say, to mount an assault against the Sensitive Appetite. The Flesh will make demands. Counter them; demand unconditional surrender—that was the way the pugnacious Paul handled the problem, or so he said in his First Letter to the Corinthians (9.27). Trouble erupts when the Flesh is unwilling to respond to the wishes of the Spirit. Alas, the Flesh has to be broken and bridled until it is willing to do everything that is required of it. That is to say, until it learns to be content with few things, delight in simple things, and overlook annoying things. My words are tied in one with the great mountains, with the great rocks, with the great trees, in one with my body and my heart. O Eternal, we beseech Thee, please save us now. Save Thy people, and bless Thine inheritance; nourish and sustain them forever. And may my words of supplication before the Lord be nigh unto the Lord our God, day and night, that He maintain the cause of His servant and the cause of His people America, as every day shall require; that all people of the Earth may know that the Lord is God; there is none else. Save us, we beseech Thee! For Thy sake, our God, do Thou save us. For Thy sake, our Creator, O save us. For Thy sake, our Redeemer, O save us. For Thy sake, O Thou who seekest us, save us, we beseech Thee. It is not merely feeing to which we give ourselves up, but being into which we settle. The conception alone of a peace which is out of this World is simply daring: its realization is utterly gorgeous in beauty and joyous in remembrance. Mostly as a result of prayer, but sometimes during an unexpected glimpse, a mystical experience of an unusual kind may develop. One feels transparent to the Overself; it light passes into and through one. One then finds that one’s ordinary condition was as if a thick wall surrounded one, devoid of windows and topped by a thick roof, a condition of imprisonment in limitation and ordinariness. However, now the walls turn to glass, their density is miraculously gone, one is not only open to the light streaming in but lets it pass on, irradiating the World around it. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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In a Nightmare of Supernatural Terror—Afraid to Move Hand or Foot II!
Immediately after I sat down…and did see a black thing jump into the window. And it came and stood just before my face. The body of it looked like a monkey, only the feet were like a cock’s feet with claws, and the face somewhat more like a man’s than a monkey’s. And I being greatly affrighted, not being able to speak or help myself by reason of fear, I suppose, so the thing spoke to me and said, “I am a messenger sent to you. For I understand you are troubled in mind, and if you will be ruled by me you shall want for nothing in this World.” I would have cried out—would have shrieked, if every never had not been paralyzed. I could not doubt the evidence of my sense—if I could have done so the cold, unearthy horror which sicked my very soul would have borne its undeniable testimony that I had behold the impersonation of the hidden curse that rested on this dwelling. I stood there rigid and immovable, as if that blighting Medusa-glance had indeed changed me into stone. It may have been but a very few minutes—it seemed to me a cycle of painful ages, when the light of a brightly burning lamp shone before me, and I heard the cheerful sounds of the new nurse’s voice in my ears: “Come along, cook. Bless your heart, my dear! you need not be nervous; there is no occasion. Mrs. Winchester, ma’am, are you not well, ma’am? “No,” I said faintly, staggering to the woman’s outstretched hands. “Not down there—upstairs to the children.” She turned as I bade her, and supported me up the stairs and into the nursery, the cook following close at my skirts, muttering fervent prayers and chants. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The sight of the peacefully sleeping little ones did far more to restore me than all the essences and chafing and unlacing which the two women busily administered. I had got suddenly ill when coming upstairs was the explanation I gave, which the cook, plainly perceived, most thoroughly doubted, at least without the cause she suspected being assigned, which, even in the midst of my terror-stricken condition, I refrained from giving, I did not speak to the nurse either of what had happened, but I felt that she knew as well as if she had been by my ide all the time. However, when William returned I told him. Distressed and alarmed on my account though he was, yet he did not, as before, refuse credence to my story. “We must leave the house, William. I should die here very soon,” I said. “Yes, Sarah; of course we must leave if you have anything to distress or terrify you in his manner, though it does seem absurd to be driven out of one’s house and home by a thing of this kind. Someone’s practical joke, or a trick prompted by malice against the owner of the property in order to lessen its value. I have heard of such things often.” “William, it is nothing of the kind,” I said earnestly; “you know it is not.” “No, I do not,” said William shortly and grimly, as he opened his case of revolvers, “and I wish I did.” The night passed away quietly, to our ears at least; but next morning when William had concluded the usual morning prayers, instead of the usual move of the servants, they remained clustered at the door, Jansen with an exceedingly elongated visage standing slightly in advance of the group as a spokesman. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
“Please, sir and ma’am, we cannot tell you what to do.” “Why, go and do your work,” retorted William, with a nervous tug at his moustache and an uneasy glance at me. Jansen shook his head slowly. “It cannot be done, sir—cannot be done, ma’am. Why, no living Christian, not to speak of humble, but respectable servants,” said Jansen with a flourish, quite unconscious of the nice distinction he had made, “could stand it any longer.” “What is the matter, pray?” said my husband. “Ghosts, sir—spirits—unclean spirits,” said Charles, in an awestruck whisper which was re-echoed in the cook’s “Lor” “a” mercy!” as she dodged back from the doorway with the housemaid holding fast to one of her ample sleeves, and the lady’s maid holding fast to the other. The New nurse, quietly dandling the baby in her arms, was alone unmoved. “What stories have you been listening to now?” said their master, what a slight laugh and a frown. “No stories, sir; but what we have seen with our eyes and understanded with our ears, and—and—comprehended with our hearts,” said Jansen, with an unsuccessful attempt at quoting Scripture. “What was it as walked the floors last night between one and two, sir? What was it as talked and shrieked and run and raced? What was it as frightened the mistress on the stairs last evening?” And the whole posse of them turned to me, triumphantly awaiting my testimony. I was feeling very ill, and looking so, I daresay, having struggled downstairs in order to prevent the servants having any additional confirmation of their surmises. “That is no affair of yours,” said William gravely; “your mistress is in delicate health, and was feeling unwell all day.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
“Will you allow me to speak, please, sir?” said the nurse, and, as her maser nodded assent, she turned to the frightened group with a pleasant smile. “You have no cause to be afraid, cook, or Mr. Jensen, or any of you,” said she, addressing the most important functionary first—“not in the least. I am only a servant like the rest, and here a shorter time than any one; but I think you are very foolish to unsettle yourself in a good situation and frighten yourselves. You need not think they will harm you. Fear God and do your duty, and you need not mind wandering, poor, lonely souls—-” “Lor” “a” mercy! ‘ow you talk, Mrs. Lewis!” said the coo indignantly. “I have seen them more times than one—many and many a time, Mrs. Cook; and they never harmed a hair of my head,” said the nurse, “nor they will ever harm your.” “Well, then,” said the cook, packing into the hall, followed by her satellites, “not to be made Cleopatra, nor the Virgin Mary neither, would I stay to be frighted out of my seven senses, and made into a lunatic creature like poor Linda was!” “Please to make better omelettes for luncheon, cook, than you did yesterday,” said William calmly, though he looked pale and angry enough, “and leave me to deal with the ghost—I will settle accounts with them!” The nurse turned quickly and looked earnestly at him: “I would not say that, sir—God forbid,” said she in an undertone, and the next moment was singing softly and blithely as she carried the children away to their morning bath. William and I looked at each other in silence. “I wish we have never come into this house, dear,” I said. “I wish from my heart that we never had, Sarah,” he responded; “but we must manage to stay the season out, at all events. It would be too absurd to run away like frightened hares, not to speak of the expense and trouble we have gone through expanding the mansion to four floors with a nine-story tower.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
“We can may get it taken off our hands with a substantial loss, perhaps,” I suggested. “See the house-agent, William.” “I have seen him, but we have one of the largest, and most expansive estates in the country. No one can afford it,” he replied. “He deeply regretted that we should have any occasion to find fault, especially after our huge investment in expanding the estate, and it is not even completed yet. The agent also said he was happy to do anything in the way of clearing up this little mystery, et cetera. Of course he was laughing at me in his sleeve.” Again, as after our previous alarms, says passed on and lengthened into weeks in undisturbed quietude. William had a good many business matters to arrange; the children looked as rosy and healthy as in their country home, from their constant walking and playing in the airy, pleasant parks. My own health was not every good; and Dr. Winchester, William’s cousin, was kindest and wisest of grave, gentlemanly doctors; so, all thing considered, we stay at the Winchester mansion we have build into a 600 room Queen Anne Victorian mansion from an 18-room farmhouse. Only on my husband’s account, I wished for any change. Something seemed to affect his health strangely, although he never complained of anything beyond the usual lassitude and want of a tone which a gay Santa Clara season might be expected to bequeath him. He was sleepless, frequently depressed, nervous, and irritable; and still he vehemently declared he was quite well, and seemed almost annoyed when I urged him to put his business aside for the present and leave town. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
He had been induced to enter into a large “Highly Finished Arms” promotion and sales of deluxe Winchesters, and had, besides, some heavy money matters to arrange, connected with his sister’s marriage settlements, which he expected would be required about Christmas. So, all things considered, he had some cause for feeling as haggard as he did. “It will be as well for William to leave Santa Clara, Mrs. Winchester, as soon as he can, said his cousin Dr. Winchester at the close of one of his pleasant “run-in” visits. “His nerves are shaky. We men get nervous nearly as often as the ladies, though we do not confess to the fact quite so openly. A little unstrung, you know—nothing more. A few weeks in sea or mountain air will quite brace him up again.” And as I dressed for dinner that evening, I determined that if wifely entreaties, and arguments, and authority, should not fail for the first time in our wedded life, William should have the sea or mountain air without another week’s delay; and, of course I determined, likewise, to back up entreaties, arguments, and authority with the prettiest dress I could put on. I cannot tell why wives, and young wives too, will neglect their personal appearance when “only one’s husband” is present. It is unpolitic, unbecoming, and unloving; and men and husbands do not like neglect—direct or implied, be sure of that, ladies—young, middle-aged, or old. “Your brown silk, ma’am?—it is rather cold this evening for that cream-coloured grenadine,” said Agnus, rustling at my wardrobe. “No, Agnus, I will not have that brown, I am tired of it,” I replied. If so happened that it was this dress which I had worn on the three occasions when I had been terrified by the strange occurrences in this house; and I had acquired a superstition aversion for this particular robe. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
So Agnus arrayed me in a particularly charming demi-toilette of pale yellow silk grenadine and white lace; and I felt myself to be a most amiable and affectionate little wife, as I went downstairs to await William’s return for dinner. I never sat in my pretty dressing-room alone. Truth to tell, I disliked the apartment secretly and intensely, and only for fear of troubling and displeasing George I would have shut it up from the first evening I spent in it. He was late for dinner, and I was quite shocked to see how thin and ill he looked by the gas-light; and, as soon as it was concluded, and that by the assistance of excellent coffee and a vast amount of petting, I had coaxed him into his usual smiles and good-humour, I began my petition—that he would leave town for his own sake. He listened to me in silence, and then said, “Very well, Sarah, we will go as soon as we can board up the east wing; I suppose you may come back here. “Oh! yes, I think so,” I replied, “maybe someone attracted these bad spirits and we need to let things cool off again. We shall spend Winter in New Haven, in our dear old house, William.” “Very well,” he said wearily, “though you must know, Sarah, I am not going on account of this one thing. I would hardly quit my house, indeed, because of ghostly or bodily sights or sounds.” He started up from the couch on which he was lying, flushed and excited as he always was when the subject was mentioned, his eyes gleaming as brightly as the flashing scabbard which hung on the wall before him. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
“Certainly not, dearest,” I said soothingly. “I wish I could solve the mystery,” he pursued, more excitedly; “I would make somebody suffer for it! One’s peace destroyed, and people terrified, and servants driven away, as if one was living in the dark ages, with some cursed necromancer next door!” “Oh! well, it is some time ago now, and the servants have got over their fright. Pray, do not distress yourself about it, dear William.” “Ah, well—you do not—never mind,” he muttered; “but I mean to have tangible evidence before ever I leave this house—I have sworn it!” He was not easily roused, and I felt both surprise and alar to see him so now, and for so inadequate a cause. I had almost fancied he had forgotten the matter, as we, by tacit consent, never alluded to it. “Do not you allow yourself to be alarmed, Sarah, that is all I care about,” he went on, pacing the floor. “I have been half mad with anxiety on your account, for fear those idiotic servants should manage to startle you to death some dark evening-cowards, every one of them; but I mean to have someone to stay here and sit up—-” He paused suddenly, and listened, then stepped noiselessly to the door, and opening it, listened again intently. “William,” I whispered. He took no heed of me; but rapidly unlocking a cabinet drawer, he drew out a thirty-shooter, loaded and capped, and with his finger on the trigger stole softly to the door and into the hall, whither I followed him. Everything was silent, and the hall and stairs lamps were burning clear and high. I could hear the throbbing of my own heart as I stood there watching. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Suddenly we both heard heavy rapid footsteps, seemingly overhead; and then confused noises, as of struggling, and quarrelling, and sobbing, mingled in a swelling clamour which sounded now near, deafeningly near, and then far, far away; now overhead, now beside us, now beneath, undistinguishable, indescribable, and unearthly. Then the rushing footsteps came nearer and nearer. And, clenching his teeth, while his face grew rigid and white in desperate resolve, William sprang up the staircase with a bound like a tiger. It has all passed in less than half the time I have taken to relate it, and while I yet stood breathless and with straining eyes, William had nearly reached the last step when I saw him stagger backwards, the thirty-shooter raised in his hand. There was a struggle, a rushing, swooping sound, two shots fired in rapid succession, a floating cloud of white smoke, through which I saw the streaming yellow hair and steel-blue eyes flash downward, and then a shriek rang out—the dreadful cry of a man in mortal terror—a crashing fall, beneath which the house trembled to its foundations, and I saw my husband’s body stretched before the conservatory door, whither he had toppled backwards—whether dead or dying I knew not. I remember dimly hearing my own voice in agonized screams, and the terror-stricken servants hurrying from the kitchens below. I remember the kind of face of my new nurse as she bravely rushed down and dispatched someone for the doctor, and made others help her to carry the senseless figure, with blood slowly dripping from the parted lips and staining the snowy linen shirt-front in great gouts and splashes, up to the chamber, where they laid him on his bed, and I, a wretched frenzied woman, knelt beside him with the sole, ceaseless prayer that brain or lips could form—“God help me!” #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
I remember the physician’s arrival, and the grave face and low clear voice of Dr. Winchester, as he made his enquiries; and then another physician summoned, and the low frightened voices, and peering frightened faces, and the lighted candles guttering away in currents of air form opening and shutting doors, and the long hours of night, and the cold grey dawning, the heart-rendering suspense, and speechless, tearless, wordless agony, and the sun rose, gloriously cloudless, smiling in radiance, as if there was not the shadow of death over the weary World beneath his rays, and I hear the verdict—“there was scarcely a hope.” However, God was merciful to me and to him, and my darling did not die. With a fevered brain and a shattered limb he lay there for weeks—lay there with the dark portals half opened to receive him; lay there, when I could no longer watch beside him, but lay prostrate and suffering in another apartment, tended by kind relatives and friends; but at length, when the mellow sunshine, and the crisp clear air of the soft shadowy October days stole into the sick room. William was able to be dressed and sit up for an hour or two amongst the pillows of his easy-chair by the window. And there he was, longing to be gone away from London. “Sarah, darling, weak or strong I must go,” he said in his trembling uncertain voice, and with a restless longing in his faded eyes, “I shall never get better in this house.” And so a few days afterwards, accompanied by the doctor and two nurses, we went down in a pleasant swift railroad journey to our dear, beautiful, peaceful home in New Haven. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
William never spoke of that night of horror but once, when Dr. Winchester told of the story connected with the original 18-room farmhouse we purchased, which morphed into a labyrinth of endless room, twisting and winding tunnels, and catacombs. Thirty years before we bought the farmhouse, the man who was both proprietor and tenant of the estate died, leaving his two daughters all he possessed. He had been a bad man, led a bad wild life, and died in a fit brough on by drunkenness; and these two daughters, grown to womanhood, inherited with his ill-gotten fold his evil nature. They were only half-sisters, and were believed to have been illegitimate also. The elder, a tall, masculine, strongly built woman, with masses of coarse fair hair, and bright, glitter blue eyes; and the younger, a plump, dark-haired rather pretty girl, but as treacherous, vain, and bold, as her elder sister was fierce, passionate, and cruel. They lived in this house, with only their servants, for several years after their father’s death, a life of quarrelling and bickering, jealousy, witchcraft, and heart-burnings, on various accounts. The elder strobe to tyrannize over the younger, who repaid it by deceit and crafty selfishness and black magic. At length a lover came, who the elder sister favoured; whom she loved as fiercely and rashly as such wild untamed natures do; and by fiercely and rashly as such wild untamed natures do; and by falsehood and deep-laid treachery the younger sister cast a love spell on the man and won his fickle fancy from the great, harsh-featured, haughty, passionate elder one. The elder woman soon perceived it, and there were dreadful scenes between the two sisters, when the younger taunted the elder, and the elder cursed the younger. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, as fate would have it, one night and at length—there had been a fiercer encounter of words than usual, and the dark-haired girl maddened her sister by insults, and the sudden information that she intended leaving the house in the morning, to stay with a relative until her marriage, which was to take place in one week from that time—the wronged woman, demon-possessed from that moment, waited in her dressing-room, until her sister entered, and then she sprang on her and screaming and struggling, they both wrested until they reached the staircase, where the younger sister, escaping for an instant, rushed wildly down, followed by her murderess, who overpowered her in spite of her frantic struggles, and with her strong, cruel, bony hands deliberately strangled her, until she lay a disfigured palpitating corpse at her feet. She had several scars that seemed as if they had been long there, and they were done by witchcraft. The officers of justice arrested the murderess a few hours afterwards. The jailers put irons on her legs (having received such a command). [It was the curious theory that chaining the prisoner would prevent her specter from afflicting anyone.] The weight of them was about eight pounds. These irons and her other afflictions soon brought her into convulsion fits so they thought she would die that night. She died by poison self-administered on the second day of her imprisonment. What is now known as the Winchester Mansion had been shut up and silent for many a year afterwards, and when, at length, and when, at length, an enterprising landlord put it in habitable order, and found tenants for it again, he only found them to lose them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Year after year passes away, its evil fame darkening with its massive masonry, for none could be found to sanctify with the sacred name and pleasures of home that dwelling blighted by an abiding curse. “I never told you, Sarah,” William said, “although I told my cousin Dr. Winchester, that from the first evening I led a haunted life in that beautiful house, and the more I struggled to disbelieve the evidence of my senses, and to keep the knowledge from you, the more unbearable it became, until I felt myself going mad. I knew I was haunted, but will that last night I had never witnessed what I dreaded day and night to see. And then, Sarah, when I fired, and I saw the devilish murderess face, with its demon eyes blazing on me, and the tall unearthly figure hurrying down to meet me, dragging the other struggling, writhing figure, with her long sinewy fingers seemingly pressed around the convulsed face, then I knew it was all over with me. If there had been a flaming furnace beside me I think I should have leaped into it to escape that awful sight.” That was over a century ago. Sarah eventually returned to the Winchester all along and made several changes to it over 38 years. It is now a 4 story, 160-room mansion, with over 25,500 square feet, sitting on four acres. It was once up to 600 rooms, likely 95,625 square with as many as 737 acres. The strange thing about witchcraft and legends is many of them are based in truth, and sometimes there are unexplainable continuity errors. Take for example An hysterical fit, from J.M. Charcot, Lectures on the Disease of the Nervous System (London, 1877). Look at the extruded tongue, reported during the seventeenth century in witchcraft cases at Gordon, Boston, Salem, and elsewhere. Notice also the legs crossed in spasm; at one time Mary Warren’s legs could not be uncrossed without breaking them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
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In a Nightmare of Supernatural Terror–Afraid to Move Hand or Foot!
The warning came too late to change that course of event. There has been time when many admitted some doubt of the validity of spectral evidence. This story I will tell to you now, as I have promised to do so, and yet I can hardly make you believe in the reluctance with which I even allow my thoughts go back to the times which I spent in my house—my first town residence after I was married. I loved so much my lovely mansion, I suppose. The wide emerald green lawns and quiet, glassy ponds and streams, bordered by luscious, blooming rhododendrons; of silent, mossy avenues, glorious with the flickering light that stole through pale green beech leaves; of rose gardens with grassy paths, jewel-sprinkled with shell-like petals of white, crimson, pink, and cream-like hues; of old-fashioned rooms with narrow, mullioned windows embowered in scarlet japonica and fragrant, starry jessamine. I supposed I possessed a deep love of them all. This was the first house we were sown in the Santa Clara, California. It was certainly a very fine house, both as o exterior and interior appearances. Large, massively built, agreeably darkened in woodwork and masonry by Time’s shading brush, in excellent repair, and the locality all that could be desire. Wide, lofty apartments, staircases, and landings; a handsome dining-room panelled in velvety dark-green “flock” and gold; a handsome drawing-room panelled in pale cream-colour and gold; airy bed-chambers and dressing-rooms—one, in particular, attached to what seemed the principal bedroom, with a vast mirror occupying the whole side of the apartment which was opposite to the door leading into the bed-chamber. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
“What a nice dressing-room! This house is perfect and expansion will be a joy.” I exclaimed, having a weakness, I confess, for large, handsome mirrors in the rooms I inhabit—William says impertinent things about my “wishing to see as much of myself as I can.” I know I am not all, in fact, rather what he should call petite, if he wished to be polite—but that is not my reason for liking a large mirror. As I spoke the words I looked about mechanically for the house—agent’s clerk who had been sent with us—a nervous-looking little man, with a pasty complexion, and orange-colored hair meekly plastered down at each side of his face. He had been untiringly trotting up and down stairs, unlocking doors, answering questions, and keeping up a harmless soliloquy of chatter about the beauties and excellencies of the “mansiond,” as he called it, ever since he entered its doors, but now he was nowhere to be seen. “What door have you open?” I said, speaking aloud to him, for suddenly a cold blast of air swept up the wide staircase and into the dressing-room door, but not entering. His face looked wither than before, and in his accents there was an almost terrified earnestness that puzzled me. The shadows of the afternoon seemed to deepen. The aspect of the suites of rooms and long silent corridors, with their doors ajar, as if unseen inhabitants were stealthily crouching behind them, drearily impressed me with a sense of dull desolation; and it was with a sudden sensation of childish fear and loneliness that I rushed after my husband, and took his arm as he hastily descended the stairs. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
“A spacious, handsome staircase, William” I remarked. “Yes; and a spacious, handsome price, you may be sure,” William responded. However, in this particular, he was exceedingly, and I agreeably, astonished. To our surprise, the house was rather affordable. William figured there must be a screw loose somewhere. He mentioned his opinion to the clerk in a more business-like expression, to the effect that the price seemed low, and that he trusted there was no—peculiar—eh? “Drains, gas, water, all right, sir—right as—a—a trivet, sir. However, the 18-room farmhouse is incomplete,” sad the clerk, looking over his shoulder oddly, as he spoke. “But chimneys, ventilators, roof, tiles—everything in the perfect repair and order, sir!” However, wonderful or not, the house seemed all that we could desire; the lowness of the price made it a decided bargain. I planned to expand the house, and make it even more lofty, and handsome; and in three weeks, huge furniture vanes, and a clever upholstered, had carpeted, curtained, and furnished our town mansion from garret to basement, and William and I, our two babies, a nurse, two maids, a cook, and a butler, were installed in what would become the Winchester Mansion. Dear William had been very generous—nay, almost extravagant—in his provisions for the comfort and pleasure of his wife and children; and my dressing-room and their nursery were fitted up so luxuriously and tastefully, that my feeling at the first inspection of them was that of self-gratulation on being such a fortunate woman, in having such a home, such babies, and such a husband. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
I arrayed myself for dinner that evening quite gleefully; standing before my splendid mirror amid the bule drapery, cushions, and couches of my charming dressing-room. I put on William’s favourite dress—a bronze-brown lustrous silk, with sparkling gold ornaments: he invariably kissed me when he saw it on, stroked my brown curls and face, and called me “Mrs. Winchester”—and was still standing before the glass smiling at myself, like the happy, foolish little woman I was, when I perceived to my discomfiture that William was standing in the doorway watching my doings, and grinning very visibly under his moustache. “Do not mind me, my dear, I beg! do not me the least. However, when you have done admiring Mrs. Winchester, perhaps you will be kind enough to let me know”—then, suddenly changing his tone, he exclaimed, “Have you the window open, Sarah, this chilly evening?” “No William,” I replied, glancing at it to make sure of the fact. “Change in the weather, then,” my husband said. “Come, Sarah, there is no use in making yourself any prettier!” He had just uttered the last words when I saw him spring aside suddenly, and look around. “What is the matter?” I said—“William, dear, what is the matter?” For his face had grown quite white, and with his back against the wall, he was staring about him wildly. “I do not know—Sarah—something”—he explained in a low tone; then recovering himself, with a laugh, he cried—“I struck myself against the door, I suppose! I declare one would think I was composed of old china, or wax, or sugar candy, I hurt and stunned me so! Come, dearest.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
He had not struck himself, for I had been watching him going out on the lobby, and I felt an uneasy conviction that he knew he had not done so, and only spoke as he did in order to deceive or satisfy me. why? Why did I think so? As I live I cannot tell why I thought so then—I know now. We had the “babies”—as William always called them—in the dessert, after the time-honoured fashion of making olives as well as olive branches of them; and then, when the lite ones had gone to bed, we sat side by side in he summer twilight, I lazily fanning myself, William bending over me the lover-husband he was. Then came the lamps, and I played for him, and we sang duet and spent as happy an evening in our new home as a married pair could wish to spend. I cannot tell why I felt so disinclined to go upstairs that night, tired as I was, too—for we had had a long journey up from the country. However as eleven struck, I routed William out of the easy chair where he had been indulging in a preliminary doze, and, ringing for my maid went up to my dressing-room. I like gas in my dressing-room, though not in my bedroom, and the globes at either side the great mirror were a blaze of light. As I entered I caught the reflection of a woman’s figure in the depths of the glass, no my maid’s. The glimpse I had was of a tall woman, strongly built, and broad-shouldered, a quantity of light hair hanging in a disordered manner on her neck, and the profile of a white, hard, masculine face, with the keen glittering eye turned watchfully towards the door. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
This may seem an elaborately detailed description for the momentary glance I obtained, but it is well known with what lightning rapidity the organs of vision will, in moments of terror and amazement, convey impressions to the startled brain, impression accurate and indelible. I had taken but one step on entering, the next step the figure had vanished, and the mirror reflected by my own terrified face, and the homely, cheerful one of my maid Agnus, as she stooped over the dressing-table opening a jewel case. I dropped down on the nearest chair, and, in answer to the girl’s alarmed questions, replied that I did not feel very well. I was sick and shuddering from head to foot. Suddenly it flashed across me that it was from a similar cause I had seen my husband’s face grow ghastly, and that strange, terrified look come into his eyes,–he, who had been a soldier and unflinchingly had fought amidst the dead and dying on bloody Indian battlefields, almost boy as he was then! What was it? What had he seen? Nonsense! was I going to believe I had seen a ghost? Nonsense, a thousand times over! I heard my husband’s cheery voice as he ascended the stairs, and, quite angry with myself for giving way to such folly, I threw on my dressing gown, and, snatching up the brush from Agnus, I pulled my hair down and brushed it quite savagely, until my head ached well—for punishment. If the bright morning light disperses sweet illusions formed overnight, as people say it does, it disperses gloomy ones as well. With the warmth and brightness of the unclouded summer’s sun streaming in through softly coloured blinds, brining out the velvety green of soft new carpets and lounges, the rainbow tints of glittering chandeliers, vases, and ornaments, the gilding on bright fresh wallpaper and the spotless folds of snowy window drapery, it was impossible for an instant to connect anything dark or dismal with the Winchester House. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Why, my dressing-room even where I had been so silly last evening, was like a woodland bower, with its deep purple-blue hangings and rose painted china flower-vases filled with bouquets from our country home. Clustering fragrant honeysuckle half-opened moss roses, drooping emerald-green fern, and masses of delicious jessamine dropping its over-blown blossoms on the white toilet cover, lace-flounced and tied with blue ribbons, as Agnus delighted to have it. “I think this such a charming room and such a charming house altogether, William!” I said; “and you have been such a dear, thoughtful old darling!” For I had perceived that the dear fellow had had his own half-length portrait hung over my writing-table. Quite a pleasant surprise for me, for I thought he intended it to be hung in the dining-room, and I delighted in having the dear pleasant brown eyes looking for a me when I was busy writing or sewing. “I am so glad you like everything, Sarah,” said he. “Why, William, do you not?” However, William had walked off whistling, and presently I heard uproarious baby-laughter, and baby-chatter, and thumping, trotting of small fat feet, as William put the tiny nursery into dire confusion by his morning game of romps with his son and heir, and red-cheeked baby-daughter. And it did seem as if I must have been dreaming or delirious, when this day and many a succeeding one passed away swiftly and pleasantly, without the slightest recurring event to remind me of my strange alarm on the night of our arrival. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
We had been in the Winchester House about a fortnight, when one morning I received a visit from Mrs. Ellen Kenna. A very pretty, lady-like person she was, and as we had some common acquaintances we chattered away very freely and pleasantly for half-an-hour or so. As she rose to go she asked suddenly if we like the house. I replied in the affirmative rather warmly. She was opposite the light, and I saw an involuntary elevation of her eye-brows and compression of her lips that puzzled me. I fancied it was because I had spoken so enthusiastically. Yet her own manner was anything but languidly fashionable, being very cordial and decided. “Yes; it is a very nice house, roomy and well-built,” she said, after a moment’s pause; “I am so glad you like it—I live down the road in Oakland.” We took the carriage to have dinner at Bertha Hass’s mansion that for the following evening, and when we returned about three days later, in spite of a yawning remonstrate from William, I tipped off softly to have a peep at my darlings, before I went to bed. The nursey was a large, pleasant room at the end of the long corridor leading from our own apartments, and, gently turning the handle and gathering my rustling silk dress around me, I opened the door and went in. There was a night-lamp burning clearly, shining softly on the tiny cribs with the sweet flushed infant faces, the long golden-brown lashes lying in dimpled apple-bloom cheeks, the waxen hands and little rounded arms thrown above the tossed golden curls, and the Heavenly calm of the little sleeping forms and pure, peaceful breathing. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
I wondered would any mother, no matter how cold and careless, have neglected doing what I did, as I bent over my treasures, and prayed God that His angels might keep watch over each cherub head on its little, soft, white pillow? I had looed at and kissed them, and turned to go, when I glanced toward the nurse’s bed. “Are you not well, Linda? What is the matter?” I said in an anxious whisper. She was a very respectable and trustworthy servant, as well as being, a kind, gentle creature with the little ones, and consequently highly valued by me, but her health was never very good, and she was subject to severe attacks of nervous headache and sleeplessness. She was sitting up in bed, her hands grasping the bedclothes, her face and lips ashy white, and her as big as saucers and staring wildly, as if they would start from their sockets. “Linda! Good Heavens! what is the matter?” I gasped. “Ma’am! Oh, ma’am—oh, mistress, I am dying!” We summoned a doctor and administered restoratives, and chafed the half-senseless girl’s damp, cold hands. I could imagine no cause for her sudden illness, and the others servants were very voluble in exclamations and laments. However, when the physician—a pale, kindly, grave-looking man arrived—after a moment’s examination, he demanded if she had been frightened? I replied in the negative, and was proceeding to describe to him the state in which I had found her, when I heard the housemaid and Agnus whispering energetically together. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
The doctor was paying tribute to the dramatic affliction of the girl, when he said, “This strikes hard upon me, that you are at this very present charged with unfamiliar spirits. This is your bodily person they speak to. They say now they see these unfamiliar sprits some to your bodily person. Now what do you say to that?” Agnus said that she saw a specter leaving Linda’s body, as she was going into hideous convulsions. The fit was far too violent to be acting. This was terribly “real” and convincing. “What is it? Speak out at once my god girl!” said the doctor sternly to the housemaid; “you know something of this.” Both servants looked apprehensively at me and at William. “Speak up at once, Bethany; the girl’s life may depend on it! Tell the truth, my girl, and do not be afraid,” said her master kindly, but firmly. “I do not know nothing, sir—indeed, no ma’am, said Angus confusedly; “but—I think, ma’am—she seen the ghost, sir!” “That what!” cried William angrily. “She have, sir!” persisted Agnus eagerly, now that her confession was made. “We are all afraid, sir; but she has been worser nor the rest of us. And she says to me only this morning, ‘Agnus,’ she says, ‘if I see it, I will die!’” “What ghost, you fool?” cried William more angrily. “A pretty set you are!—great, grown men and women, afraid of some bogie story you have heard when you were gossiping with the servants on the balcony, I suppose!” “No, indeed, sir,” said Agnus; “I was not gossippin’, sir; but the parlour-maid over the way, sir Mrs. Kenna’s parlour-maid, ma’am—she told me that there was the Devil–” #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
“I thought so!” interrupted William. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves not to have an ounce of brains among you.” “But, sir! Agnus burst out again, unheeding her master’s rather uncomplimentary phrenological verdict, “we did not mind, sir, though we was a bit frightened, until we see it, sir! The butler see it, and he ran, and cook ran.” “And you ran after them?” said William, with an indignant laugh. “I did, sir, for I saw it too—a big woman with fair hair all over her shoulders,” said Agnus, in an awestruck whisper to Harriet, who nodded her head. The doctor looked up, gravely and without a smile. The servants clustered together near the door, and muttered in undertones. William looked at me with a forced smile, which died away in an instant: “You are not so foolish as to credit any of this nonsense, Sarah?” he said. The servants all turned eagerly to hear their mistress’s opinion. I am afraid it was written in my pallid face. Was it true? Was it what I had seen? Could there be any reality in this, that here, in our pleasant, happy home, beneath the roof with out helpless little one, was a dreadful, unblessed presence—a shadowy horror; that that thing with the watchful, cruel eyes had not been a mere vision of imagination, the mere offspring of an active brain, and the unstrung nerves of an overtired frame? Is there conclusive proof that the person represented had been trafficking with the Devil? “Oh! they imagined something from the stories they heard, I dare say,” I faltered. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
The butler shook his head solemnly: “I could swear to it, ma’am.” “And so could I ma’am!” chorused the cook and housemaid. “Hush!” said the doctor, as the nurse, roused, at length, from her stupor, lay quietly, with closed eyes, from which the tears streamed down her face. “Some one must sit up with her now,” said the doctor, looking around. “I will, sir, if my mistress allows me, said Bethany. Certainly, Bethany,” she said at once. He communicated his instructions to her and took his leave, promising to call in the morning. “Did you ever hear anything like this folly, doctor,” said William, as he shook hands with him at the head of the stairs. “Oh! yes, sir, I often hear such stories,” said the doctor quietly, as he bade us both goodnight.” William! what has frightened the girl? What has she seen?” I whispered, clasping my husband’s arm. “Sarah, go to bed, and do not be a goose,” was William’s reply. “William—I saw that thing—that woman, in my dressing-room,” I said, trembling, “and oh! think if the children were to see I and be frightened like poor Mary!” “Well, Sarah,” said my husband sharply, “if you are going to listen to ignorant servants’ superstitions and run out of your house, just as we are comfortably settled in it, on account of a foolish sickly woman fainting from hearing a ghost story—I say—it is a pity you ever came into it.” He spoke very decidedly and sternly, and yet I felt in my inmost heart that the uttered what he wished me to believe, not what he believed himself. I said no more, but went to my bedroom—not into the dreaded dressing-room—and lay awake listening and fevered with nervous anxiety until the next morning dawned. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The nurse was better and able to speak the next day, though extremely weak and unnerved yet. The doctor forbade much questioning, and all that could be got from her at intervals was that something had come up the staircase and ran through the corridor, that she heard struggling and scuffling outside, and then the nursey door opened and she saw a woman’s face peering in, the eyes gleaming wickedly at her, and it had the yellow hair that “belong to the ghost.” “The woman has had a bad fit of nightmare—that is all, Sarah,” said William, rattling his paper unconcernedly, when I repeated to him the story I had just heard from poor Linda’s trembling lips. It might be so; but why were they all agreed as to what they had seen? Why did they all speak of the tangled fair hair, and the wicked gleaming eyes? Was our house haunted? Was this the mysterious cause of the exceedingly moderate price of the house and land and the house-agent’s profuse civility? The nurse did not recover strength, and being worse than useless in her present weak, hysterical condition, I sent her down to her country home for change of air, and hired another temporarily in her place. The newcomer was a stout, small, cheerful woman of about forty. I liked her face the moment I saw her; for, besides its smiling, honest expression, there was a good deal of decided character in the large firm features. “You appear to be a sensible person,” I said, when giving her her first instructions in the nursey, “and I think I can rely on you. You know my nurse is leaving because of illness, and that illness was caused by her being frightened by—a ghost-story.” I paused; but the woman remained unmoved, listening to me in respectful silence. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
“The servants downstairs have got some nonsense of the kind into their head,” I went on; “they will try to frighten you, too, and tell you they have seen—-” I could not go on. For my life I could not calmly giver her the description of that shadowy image of fear. “They cannot frighten me, ma’am, said my new nurse quietly. “I am not afraid of spirits.” I thought she spoke in jest, and smiled. “I am not indeed, ma’am,” she repeated. “I have lived where there were such things seen but they never harmed me.” “You do not mean to say you believe such nonsense?” said I, hypocritically trying to speak carelessly. “Oh yes, ma’am, I do! I could not disbelieve it,” said the nurse, opening her eyes with earnestness, “I know the story of this house, ma’am.” What story” I cried. The woman coloured and looked confused. “I beg your pardon, ma’am—I mean what people say is seen here.” “What do they say? Do not frighten me,” I said, and my voice quivered in spite of me; “I have heard nothing but what the servant said.” The nurse looked deeply concerned. “I am very stupid, ma’am; I beg your pardon for repeating such stores to you—I daresay it is only idle people’s gossip.” She went about her duties, and I went—not into my dressing-room—but down into the drawing-room, where I say by the window looking out until my husband returned. Two or three weeks more passed away. I lay down on my pet chintz-covered couch, near the window, to look at the sky and the starts. Dead silence—and the “ting, ting” of the French clock on the mantelpiece marked the half-hour after eight. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Dear me, how dark it was growing! this brooding storm I supposed, which had been making me feel so languid and restless. I wish it would come down and cool the air—not tonight, though. Dear me, how lonely it is. I wish William were home. Those women are talking very loudly—I wonder nurse would—here I got drowsy, and my eyes ached looking for the stars that had not come. In a few minutes I roused again, my maternal anxiety changing into indignation as I heard the women’s voices growing louder and shriller, and some doors opened and shut violently. What can nurse be thinking of? They will wake the children most certainly, and William was so long in falling asleep—quite fevers my own boy! I shall really reprover her very plainly. I never needed to do so before. What could she be thinking of? Dead silence again. Well, this was lonely; I was inclined to ring for lights, and turn on all the burners in the chandeliers by way of company. Then I remembered there were some wax matches in one of the drawers of a writing-tray just at hand, and thought I would light the gas myself instead of brining the servants down—yes—but I wanted company. It was so dark and dreary, and—and—I was afraid. Afraid to stir—afraid to look at the door! a numbing, chilling tide of icy fear ebbing through every vein—afraid to draw a breath—afraid to move hand or foot, in a nightmare of supernatural terror. At last, by a violent effort, I sprang at the bell-handle, and pulled it frantically, and as soon as I had done so, with a sudden revulsion of feeling, I felt thoroughly ashamed of my childish cowardice, although I could not have helped it, and it had overcome me as suddenly as unexpectedly. How William would have laughed at me! #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
There were those servants talking again, tramping about and banging the doors as before. Really, this was unbearable; cook must be in one of her fits of temper, and certainly had forgotten herself strangely. And, as the quarrelsome tones grew louder and louder—evidently in bitter recrimination, although I could not catch a word—my own anger rose proportionately, and, forgetting loneliness and darkness in my indignant anxiety lest my children should be waked by this most unseemly behaviour of the servants, I ran hastily out of the room and up the wide staircase. The dime light from the clouded evening sky, still further subdued by the gold and purple-stained glass of the conservatory door, streamed faintly down the steps from the first landing, and by it, just as I had ascended half way, I discovered the short, thick-sett figure of the nurse rushing down—of course, in answer to my ring, I supposed. Involuntarily I stepped aside to avoid coming in violent contact with her as she feld past. No, it was not the nurse; and the woman following her in headlong haste, sweeping by me so that the current of air from their floating dresses struck icily cold on my brow where the clammy dew of perspiration had started in great drops, was—was—-Merciful Heavens! What was that tall figure, with the coarse, disordered, yellow hair, the white face, and glittering, steel-blue eyes, that glinted fiendishly on me for one dreadful instant, and then vanished? Vanished as the pursed and pursuing figures had disappeared in the shadows of the wide, lofty hall, without sound of voice or footstep? #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
If you had a chance to explore areas never before seen within Sarah’s house, would you take it?
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A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
When You Can Stop Thinking of Yourself as Omnipotent, the World is a Safer Place!
Dearest son and friend of Mine, do Me a favour. Put some finality into your life. That is to say, make Me your supreme and ultimate end, and you will mingle with the Blessed. In the past, you have not always done that. More often that I like to say, your affection has centered on yourself and other creatures. So your affection will have to be cauterized. Why? Seek yourself in something, and immediately you collapse and give up. Therefore, you should refer everything to Me. I am the One who gave everything. Individual graces—consider them as drips from the Divine Tap, drops from the Heavenly Basin, and give Me full credit for them; that is to say, in the Divine Plan all things have to be recirculated to their origin. The tintinnabulous and the timid, the rich and the poor, all drink the Living Water from Me. Those who serve Me as though they were slaves—that is to say, spontaneously and freely—will, according to John, “receive grace after grace,” (1.16). Whoever wants to make hay without Me or delight in some good not known to Me will not be rooted in True Joy, nor will one’s heart expand. Rather, one’s spiritual progress will be obstructed and restricted in a multiplicity of ways. How do you get out of this mess, My poor friend? First, ascribe nothing good to yourself. Then do not attribute virtue to any other human being. Last, give God everything, without whom Humankind has nothing. So what is so hard about this? After all, I gave everything I had; I want you to do that same. And I insist—nay, I require—that you thank Me for it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
When Virtue strides into the room, Vainglory vanishes. When Heavenly Grace and True Charity sweep into the room, Virid Envy turns up her nose, High Anxiety has a fit, Particular Friendship is beside himself. We all know why. Grace and Charity have this way of clearing the floor of cranks and releasing all the warmths of the soul. If you get My drift, you will rejoice in Me alone, hope in Me alone. “No one is good,” Luke has quoted Me as saying, “except God alone,” (18.19). God must be praised above all things and blessed in all things. Agency is an eternal principle and is implicit in the test of life. We must constantly choose between opposites: good and evil. Satan sought to destroy the free agency of man, and here on Earth he is working to entangle man in sin. “Wherefore, because that Satan rebelled against me, and sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him, and also, that I should give unto him mine own power; by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be cast down; and he became Satan, yea, even the devil, the father of all lies, to deceive an to blind men (and women), and lead them captive at his will, even as many as would no hearken unto my voice,” reports Moses 4.3-4. To use our agency wisely, we need information to act upon. We need a knowledge of the laws of life, with their accompanying blessings and protective punishments. When we know the gospel, the elements of the “thou shalts” and the “thou shalt nots,” we will make better choices. I would give If only we could forget a past that we cannot change, it would give us some comfort. If we could only choose to forget the cruelest moments, we could, as time goes on, free ourselves from pain. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, the wrong sticks like a nettle in our memory. The only way to remove he nettle is with a surgical procedure called forgiveness. Christians have long believed that forgiveness lies at the heart of faith. Psychologists have recently found that forgiveness may also lie at the heart of emotional and physical well-being. For Christians, forgiveness is a familiar concept. We find God is called to “bear with each other and forgive” and see it modeled throughout Scripture—in the narrative of the prodigal son, in Jesus’ command to forgive seventy times seven, and in the parable of the unmerciful servant. Forgiveness is central to the gospel message of Christ’s death and resurrection. We encounter texts and symbols of forgiveness almost everywhere we look—in the Lord’s Prayer, in confession and the assurance of pardon, in baptism, and in the Lord’s Supper. Even though we know a lot about forgiveness and often want to forgive, we do not always know how. The Bible offers no recipe for forgiving. We can get stuck. When someone hurts us, those angry, hurt, and bitter feelings come easily. Maneuvering through the mire of hard feelings takes moral muscle. How do we do it? First, what forgiving does not mean: despite the familiar cliché “forgive and forget,” most of us find forgetting nearly impossible. Forgiveness—at least for significant offenses—does not involve a literal forgetting. We are made to remember hurts. As children need to remember the pain from a hot burner, we need to remember the hurts from people who burn us, so that we can prevent future harm. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Instead of forgetting, forgiveness involves remembering graciously. The forgiver remembers the true (though painful) parts, but without the embellishment of angry adjectives and adverbs that stir up contempt. Forgiveness also differs from ignoring, excusing, minimizing, tolerating, condoning, legally pardoning, liking, and reconciling. At times, the church has done a disservice to survivors of neglect or abuse, suggesting that they must reconcile or must reenter a hurtful relationship with their offenders. Sometimes reconciliation is inappropriate. It is wise to stay away from people who have proven themselves abusive or untrustworthy. Yet we still can forgive—a move that paradoxically frees us from the shackles of resentment and rage. Moreover, we need not wait to forgive until we receive an apology. We cannot always count on our offenders to apologize. Sometimes, we simply see the situation differently. The offender sees a minor slight, when the victim feels a major slam. If we refuse to forgive until we receive an apology, we give the key that can unlock the prison of our pain to the very person who betrayed us in the first place. Scripture does not say that we need to forgive only if the offender apologizes. Yet when we are the transgressors, Scripture is clear: we must confess our sins and repent, turning away from sin. Second, what forgiving does mean: when we forgive, we start by honestly acknowledging the hurt. Forgiving is a lot like grieving. We have lost something—a relationship, trust, or a reputation. Hurt and anger are normal. We acknowledge them. However, then we let go of grudges, bitterness, and vengeance against the person we blame for hurting us. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
As Christians, we can focus on the truth that our offender is a person, someone who bears God’s image as much as we do. We can see the hurt they caused us as evidence that they are sinful and as proof that they need grace, just as we do. And we being to see ourselves as agents who can show grace toward them. To make grace concrete, we can find even small ways to genuinely wish them well. Or we may pray for their restoration and redemption in a more ultimate sense. When we do these things—even when we do not explicitly tell the offender—we are forgiving. Our gift of forgiveness is real. And when painful memories and anger bubble up, we roll up our sleeves and flex our moral muscles again. Forgiveness takes effortful practice, and God’s redeeming grace makes our practice perfect. As I have defined them, psychotherapists are professionals who allow people to relate to them in terms of earlier dreaded or desires experiences. They may be treated as selfobjects satisfactory or unsatisfactory, as a compliant or stubborn other, as a tyrant, a terror, a feeder, attacker, protector, omniscient, omnipotent, powerless, always getting it wrong, and so on—just like a parent. Therapists let themselves be used, first as “inner objects,” and later, as the patient improves, as objects in shared reality. That is why psychotherapists deserve their pay (within limits), and why friends and family may in the long run not be the best people to help someone integrate who have gone to pieces. It is not right that they should try to put up with being the object of unrealistic phantasies for more than a little while. If they do, they deprive the sufferer of an important realistic relationship while themselves being no more than inexperienced, untrained psychotherapists. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Professional psychotherapists are needed to be the climbing-frames of the consulting-room adventure-playground, where people can discover what they are made of and what the World of the other is made of. At such time, the therapist us used in the sense of an object. It is not an easy position to occupy! The expected control over the narcissistically-cathected object and its function is closer to the concept which grownups have of the control they expect to have over their own body and mind, than of their experience of others and of their control over them. The object of such affections will feel pretty oppressed! Yet accepting that a person may need to behave in this way is the only way we know of at present, to provide enough safety to let people relax their defences and reach the sore regions. When a baby has to give up one’s imagined omnipotence and live in the World of shared reality, it can be a fortunate circumstance. The rage has the effect of establishing this World as a safe place. The subject says to the object “I destroyed you,” and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says “Hullo object! I destroyed you. I love you. You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.” The subject can now use the object that has survived. From the point of view of psychotherapy, for people to discover that the imagined effects of even the most destructive rage, and even the most chaotic confusion, in fact destroys neither them nor the therapist, may be the major repair to be done. There is no better way to bring the body under control than the way used to bring he mind under control—to put it under a daily routine of exercises and to have a fixed time for their repeated practice. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
With a vengeful World retaliating, when you can stop thinking of yourself as omnipotent, the World is a safer place. The (m)other may not have survived in a person’s phantasy—the therapist does: “C’est son metier.” How does this help? It heals splits. Once another person’s reality is safely established as independent of my confusion or rage, I become more capable of realistic acceptance of myself and others, and of ambivalence. I become saner. I can allow my model of myself-in-situation, and my map of myself-in-the-World, to carry contradictory images. I can accept that I am sometimes honest and sometimes not, and that you are sometimes kind to me and sometimes not. By contrast, when I was unsure of your independent reality, I tried to carry only one coherent internally consistent model at any time: the right one. In shared reality, I have to put up with the fact that others are to some extent exactly as I want them to be and to some extent remain stubbornly their own inconvenient selves. Very interestingly, babies whose mothers can tolerate their times of rage, soon show themselves as more sure of themselves than other babies. This must have a bearing, too on gender differences, considering our culture’s encouragement for boy to prove their assertiveness, and for girls to prove their good nature even to the point of submissiveness—even, sometimes, to the point of allowing themselves to be victimized. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Babies that have been seen through this phase well are likely to be more aggressive clinically than the ones who have not been seen through the phase well, and for whom aggression is something that cannot be encompassed, or something that can be retained only in the form of a liability to be an object of attack. It is easy to imagine that allowing a person to rage and make chaos is in itself therapeutic. In some circumstances this is so. However, in the circumstances now under consideration, it is the (m)other’s or the therapist’s ability to “survive” that is being tested and established. A person may need to get back to the bad feelings of the very early days, yes, but in my view the therapeutic experience is not just that of expressing the hurt or angry or terrified feelings. These have to be expressed in order that further healing may take place. The real healing comes also in part from being listened to and understood and recognized as a person while having these feelings. The real healing comes from being held while all this is going on, at first by another person, and later by one’s own functioning personality. In this process it may also happen that a person gets in touch with some totally unexpected good and quiet times of being. This is what must sometimes be the aim of regression and relaxation, re-integrating the good and quiet times when someone else is looking after us. In therapy, people can discover another person, the therapist who is affected by the baby (part of them) but whose fate is not under that baby’s control. Symmetrically, that baby can discover that it is part of a whole person. This starts the process of growing up, of becoming an adult who can become angry but who is not swallowed up by anger. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
The anger is integrated as a part of the whole personality, but it is not like the whole. The anger can become depersonalized. We can come distance and detach our selves from other feelings, and cease to be overwhelmed by misery, fear, or futility. The great achievement is to be able to say, “I feel terrible, but I am more than a terrible feeling.” Meaning depends on context. The context holds things together Without a context there is no meaning, only unintegrated bits. For instance, when building a house, a stud is a bit without a context. When the stud is combined with other studs and used to make a frame, it begins to make sense in the context of the cube of which it has become a part. After a good deal more work, it has become part of a house to live in. The fallacy in Christian Science theory is the pretense that problems and pains, diseases and malfunctions, cancer and crime do not exist among us here in this physical World. If we turn only to pure Spirit and leave out the World in time and space and form, then, undeniably, they do not exist. However, we may not leave them out of practical reckoning while we have to live in this body, much as some of us would like to. If the theory floats in mists of fatuous optimism, the art of Christian Science healing does in some cases bring very successful results. Why? It is never the truly spiritual healer who temporarily feels the pain or shows the symptoms of one’s patient’s disease, but only the physical-magnetic healer. Uncritical believers in so-called metaphysical healing and in faith-cure theories are sooner or later subjected to the discipline of facts. The intensity of their pains and the gravity of their ills are intended to, and do, bring them to a truer view of actualities. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Instead of blaming themselves for failure to demonstrate good health, they ought to blame these theories for having mislead them. Such failure is a change to revise imperfect beliefs, to cast out errors and start again. This surely is to the good and something to be satisfied about. The problem of bodily healing is a complicated one and often depends on more than a single factor. Those who are likely to decry this proviso are always those who tell us only of the successes of mental or “spiritual” healing, but not of its failures. The comparative figures of the two sets of results are tremendously disproportionate. To open one’s eyes to the flaunted success of this system and to shut them to its aching failures is, not the way to understand it aright. To exaggerate what it has achieved and to minimize or deny what it has been unable to achieve—as is done by its ardent partisans—represents a falling away from intellectual integrity. To take a typical example, consider the famous healing sanctuary at Lourdes, France. It was established in 1860. During recent years the attendance of sick and crippled patents has been no less than six hundred thousand annually. Yet during the first seventy years of the sanctuary’s existence, a total of only five thousand cures was reported. This should represent, on a conservative estimate, about one percent of successful treatments. The number of those pilgrim-patients who failed to benefit must therefore run into millions! We dwell on this example not to decry Lourdes, which is doing a blessed and benign work which everyone should respect, and certainly not to derogate its religious aspect, but to point out that the failures in every school of healing, whether materialists, mental, or religious, must exist. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
That the inspiration which brought Lourdes into being was truly divine and that the most amazing cures have been achieved there in a manner only to be described as miraculous, we fully accept. However, there are limitations and disappointments inherently present in this kind of healing must also be accepted. Do they not remind us of those medieval alchemists who talked glibly of transmuting brass into gold, the while their tattered sleeves and torn garments betrayed their shame-faced poverty! Facts are stern and cannot be laughed off. Exaggerated expectations are inevitably disappointing. These failures are not held against such systems. No healing system, no healer, certainly not even the most orthodox, could have a record consisting only of triumphs. However, no movement which boasts of its successes and ignores its failures has the right to call itself scientific. For only by studying its failures could it ever learn not only that there are errors mixed up with its truths, but also exactly what errors they are. There mere giving of an auto-suggestions, such as “I am perfect health,” which is belied by facts and made untrue by the body’s condition, cannot bring about a cure. Such a fictious statement can only bring about a fictitious result. To deny an illness’ existence while refraining from denying the body’s existence, is illogical. The break with long-held bad personal habits, coupled with the brining to birth of entirely new goods ones, is a difficult experience. However, this is also an immensely rewarding one. Pray for guidance in self-improvement and for help in self-purification. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Reality is always a mess. However, it is clear that we are rapidly on our way, and the transition to the electronic office has triggered an eruption of social, psychological, and economic consequences. The current wordquake is more than the result of new machines. It has restructured all the human relationships and roles in the office as well. People now send messages instantly, to places all over the World. They make video calls and correspond with their doctor over the Internet. For the most part, the functions of the secretary have been eliminated. As speech-recognition technology has grown more popular, typing, in many cases, has become obsolete. Dictation equipment is turned to the distinctive accents of each individual user and converts the sounds into written words, thus entirely by-passing the typing operation. When I delivered a speech at the International Word Processing convention, for example, I was asked if my secretary uses the machine for me. When I said I typed my own drafts and that in fact, my secretary could hardly get near my computer, cheers rang through the room. They dreamed of a day when the classified section in the newspaper may include ads like this: Wanted: Group Vice President Responsibilities include coordinating finance, marketing, product line development in several divisions. Must have demonstrated ability to apply sound management control. Report to Exec. VP, multi-line international company. TYPING REQUIRED. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Executives, by contrast, are likely to resist sullying their fingertips, just as they resist fetching their own mugs of coffee, dry-cleaning, lunch and children from daycare. And knowing that speech-recognition equipment is here, and they can dictate and have the machine do all the typing, they will resist learning how to handle a keyboard all the more. The secretary is likely to become a nanny for professional adults, which will be seen as a necessity for many corporations because it will save the executive time and allow one to deal with more pressing matters which will earn the company more revenue. Imagine all the business deals that can be closed on the golf course now. However, the unevadable fact remains that Third Wave production in the office, as it has collided with the old Second Wave systems, has produced anxiety and conflict as well as reorganization, restructuring, and—for some—rebirth into new careers and opportunities. The new system has changed all the old executive turfs, the hierarchies, the gender role divisions, the departmental barriers of the past. Al of this has raised many fears. Opinion divides sharply between those who insist that millions of jobs have vanished (and that today’s secretaries are mainly being reduced to mechanical slaves) and a more sanguine view widely held about secretaries. Secretaries are far from being reduced to mindless, repetitive processors. However, they are becoming “para-principals,” sharing in some of the professional work and decision-making from which they had once been largely excluded until now. What we are seeing is a sharp division between those white-collar workers who move up to more responsible positions and those who move down—and eventually out. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
When automation first began arriving on the scene, economist and trade unionists in many countries forecasted massive unemployment. Instead, employment in the high-technology nations expanded. As the manufacturing sector shrank, the white-collar and service sectors expanded, taking up the slack. However, if manufacturing continues to shrink, and if the office employment is to be out through wringer at the same time, where will the jobs of tomorrow come from? Nobody knows. Despite endless studies and vehement claims, the forecast and the evidence are contradictory. Attempts to relate investment in mechanization and automation to levels of manufacturing employment show what the Financial Times of London calls an “almost complete lack of correlation.” Japan once had the highest rate of investment in new technology, as a percentage of value added, of any country in a seven-nation study. It also had the highest growth in employment. Britain, whose investment in machinery was the lowest, showed the greatest loss of jobs. The American experience roughly paralleled that of Japan—technology and new jobs both increasing—while Sweden, France, Germany, and Italy all showed markedly individual patterns. It is clear that the level of employment is not merely a reflection of technological advance. It does not simply rise and fall as we automate or fail to do so. Employment is the net result of many converging policies. Pressures on the job market may well increase dramatically in the years ahead. However, it is naïve to single out the computer as their source. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
What is certain is that both the office and the factory are destined to be revolutionized in the decades ahead. The twin revolutions in the white-collar sector and in manufacture add up to nothing less than a wholly new mode of production for society—a gain step for the human race. This step carries with it indescribably complex implications. It will affect not only such things as the level of employment and the structure of industry but also the distribution of political and economic power, the size of our work units, the international division of labour, the role of women in the economy, the nature of work, and the divorce of producer from consumer; it will even later so seemingly simple a fact as the “where” of work. Hidden inside our advance to a new production system is a potential for social change so breathtaking in scope that few among us have been willing to face its meaning. For we are revolutionizing our homes as well. Apar from encouraging smaller work units, apart from permitting a decentralization and de-urbanization of production, apart from altering the actual character of work, the new production system is shifting literally millions of jobs out of offices and back into factories and homes. As more commerce is done online, less people are shopping at physical stores, so we are seeing the need for more factories to house all the products. Also, with pandemic forcing people to work at home, millions have decided they like the change and can get more done and have more time for their family because they are not spending hours communing. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Every institution we know, from the family to school and the corporation is being transformed. Watching masses of people scything a field three hundred and sixty years ago, only a madman would have dreamed that the time would soon come when the fields would be depopulated, when people would crowd into urban factories to earn their daily bread. And only a madman would have been right. Today it takes an act of courage to suggest that our biggest factories and office tower may, within our lifetimes, permanently stand half empty, reduced to use as ghostly warehouses or converted into living spaces. Yet his is precisely what we are seeing with the new mode of production—a return to cottage industry on a new higher, electronic basis, and with it a new emphasis on the home as the center of society. To suggest that millions of us will spend our time at home, or in a factory, instead of going out to an office, has unleashed an immediate shower of enlightenment. Once people used to say things like, “People do not want to work at home, even if they could. Look at all the women struggling to get out of the home and into a job!” “How can you get any work done with kids running around?” “People will not be motivated unless there is a boss watching them.” “People need face-to-face contact with each other to develop the trust and confidence necessary to work together.” “The architecture of the average home is not set up for it.” “What do you mean work at home—a small blast furnace in every basement?” “What about zoning restriction and landlords who object?” “The unions will kill the idea.” “How about the tax collector? The tax people are getting tougher on deductions clamed for working at home?” And the ultimate stopper: “What, and stay home all day with my wife (or husband)?” #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Yet there are equally, if not more compelling reasons three hundred and sixty years ago to believe people would never move out of the home field to work in factories. After all, they had laboured in their own cottages and the nearby land for 10,000 years, not a mere 360. The entire structure of family life, the process of child-rearing and personality formation, the whole system of property and power, the culture, the daily struggle for existence were all bound to the hearth and the soil by a thousand invisible chains. Yet these chains were slashed in short order as soon as a new system of production appeared. Today that is happening again, and a whole group of social and economic forces are converging to transfer the locus of work. Life is changing, so we must also change. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow not to kill. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not take what is not given. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not engage in abusive relationships. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not speak falsely or deceptively. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not harm self or others through poisonous thought or substance. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not dwell on past errors. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow not to speak of self separate from others. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not harbour ill will toward any planet, animal, or human being. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not abuse the great truth of the Three Treasures. For Thy sake, our God, do Thou save us. For Thy sake, our Creator, O save us. For Thy sake, our Redeemer, O save us. For Thy sake, O Thou who seekest us, save us, we beseech Thee. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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He Covenanted with the Devil Until He Should Arrive to the Age of Sixty Years!
He might be living, or he might be dead. There came no word of him, or from him. I was fond enough of her to be satisfied with this—he never disturbed us. While there were many individual acts of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, there was never an attempt or plot to make witchcraft a formal religion which would supplant Christianity. Yet we need not conclude that William Baker and his fellow-confessors were lying. It is probable that they, like the afflicted girls, were hysterics subject to hallucination. Certainly that is the conclusion to be drawn from Thomas Brattle’s opinion of them in his “Letter”: “my faith is strong concerning them that they are deluded, imposed upon, and under the influence of some evil spirit, and therefore unfit to be evidences either against themselves or anyone else.” Mr. Brattle wrote this in October 1692, when Massachusetts was retuning to stability. However, at the height of the excitement confessions like Mr. Baker’s seemed convincing enough. For one thing, they had a curious precision: he did not say there were about three hundred witches in the country but “about three hundred and sever”; he did not say there were about a hundred young wizards at the mustering of the Satanic militia but “about an hundred five.” However, what made these confessions most believable was that they offered a simple and comprehensive explanation for all the frightening events at Salem, at a time when explanations were not easy to discover. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
There is also some testimony which remains ambiguous even today. Samuel Wardwell, for example, at his preliminary examination confessed himself a wizard. He had begun, he said, with white magic, “with telling of fortunes which sometimes came to pass” And, he said, “he used also when any creature came into his field to bid the Devil to take it, and it may be the Devil took advantage of him by that.” Eventually he had signed a pact: “He covenanted with the Evil until he should arrive to the age of sixty years.” He had renounced this confession at his trial, saying that he had made it, but that he had belied himself. He added that it was all one: “he knew he should die for it whether he owned it or no.” Ordinarily one would simply accept his renunciation. However, there are several puzzling circumstances here. For one thing, it was not all one whether he maintained or renounced his confession. People who maintained their confessions were not being brought to trail, much less executed. For another, at least a part of his confession was true; he had dabbled in the occult for some time, telling a great many fortunes, and boasting that he could make animals come to him when he wished. Finally, Mr. Wardwell was executed. However, in 1693, when the panic had subsided and the climate of opinion totally changed, there were three people who held to their confessions. Two of them were women long thought to be “senseless and ignorant creatures.” The third was Mr. Wardwell’s wife. All of these circumstances are puzzling and some of them are suspicious. However, on the other hand, there is no evidence to support his confessions of having made a pact. The only possible conclusion, it would seem, is that in this case the truth is not obtainable. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
In a situation where the truth was so difficult to find the people of Massachusetts did what anybody else would do—they sought expert advice. In matters of witchcraft the experts were the clergy, and ultimately the advice was sought of the most distinguished clergymen in the colony. Indeed, at least one member of the trial court, Judge John Richards, asked the Reverend Cotton Mather to be present at the first trial. Reverend Mather was too ill to attend, but he did everything he could under the circumstances. He had suggested earlier (the exact date is not known) that the afflicted persons should be separated and an attempt made to cure them with prayer and fasting. He volunteered to take in as many as six of them himself. He had cured the Godwin children, and he might well have cured the Salem girls as well; certainly separation and private care would have been better treatment for hysterical fits than the excitements of a public courtroom. However, unfortunately Reverend Mather’s offer had not been accepted. Now, although he could not attend the first sitting of the court he wrote John Richards a letter offering him his opinions. In the first place, he expected that God would smile upon the labours of the court: “His people have been fasting and praying before Him for you direction, and yourselves are persons whose exemplary devotion disposeth you to such a dependence on the Wonderful Counselor, for his counsel in an affair this full of wonder, as He doth usually answers with the most favorable assistances. Yet he wanted to warn Mr. Richards. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Here is that warning: “And yet I most humbly beg you that in the management of the affair in your most worthy hands, you do not lay more stress upon pure specter testimony than it will bear. When you are satisfied or have good plain legal evidence that the Demons which molest our poor neighbours do indeed represent such and such people to the sufferers, though this be a presumption, yet I suppose you will not reckon it a conviction that the people so represented are witches to be immediately exterminated. It is very certain that the Devils have sometimes represented the shapes of persons not only innocent but very virtuous, though I believe that the just God then ordinarily provides a way for speedy vindication of the persons thus abused. Moreover, I do suspect that persons who have too much indulged themselves in malignant, envious, malicious ebullitions of their souls may unhappily expose themselves to the Judgment of being represented by Devils, of whom they never had any vision and with whom they have much less written any covenant. I would say this: if upon the bare supposal of a poor creature’s being represented by a specter too great a progress be made by the Authority in ruining a poor neighbour so represented, it may be that a door may be thereby opened for the Devils to obtain from the Courts in the Invisible World a license to proceed unto most hideous desolations upon the repute and repose of such as have yet been kept from the great transgression. If mankind have thus far once consented unto the credit of Diabolical representations, the Door is opened! Perhaps there are wise and good men that may be ready to style hum that shall advance this caution a witch advocate, but in the winding up this caution will certainly be wished for.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Reverend Mather’s third point is that although he believes that Devils have sometime afflicted men on their own initiative, without being called up by witches, in this case he thinks that witches are involved: “there is cause enough to think that it is a horrible witchcraft which hath given rise to the troubles wherewith Salem Village is at this day harassed, and he indefatigable pains that are used for the tracing this witchcraft are to be thankfully accepted and applauded among all this people of God.” Fourth, he points out that although witchcraft is a spiritual matter and therefore “very much transacted upon the stage of imagination,” its effects are “dreadfully real” and therefore criminally punishable. “Our dear neighbours are most really tormented, really murdered, and really acquainted with hidden things which are afterwards proved plainly to have been realities.” In his fifth and six section he suggests what evidence may be used for convictions. The best evidence, he says, is “a credible confession…And I say a credible confession because even confession itself is sometimes not credible.” He was confident Mr. Richards’ ability to judge such matters: “a person of a sagacity many times thirty furlongs less than yours will easily perceive what confession may be credible and what may be the result of only a delirious brain or a discontented heart.” In obtaining confessions he was “far from urging the un-English method of torture,” but he thought that “cross and swift questions” might be used, along with anything else that “hath a tendency to put the witches into confusion” and this might bring them to confession. If the suspect had made threats or boasts which seemed to require occult power and which came true, this was valid evidence. So were such concrete matters as “puppets” (for image magic) and witch marks on the body. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Reverend Mather had never seen a witch mark on anyone, but he thought a surgeon ought to be able to tell if a bodily excrescence were magical. Finally, he was willing to countenance as experiments (but not as full evidence) some witch-finding techniques which themselves partook of the occult: setting a suspect to repeating the Lord’s Prayer; trying to wound a witch through striking her specter; putting the suspect to the water ordeal. Seventh, and finally, he recommended clemency for “come of the lesser criminals.” If such persons were not executed but “only scoured with lesser punishments, and also put upon some solemn, open, public, and explicit renunciation of the Devil” he thought it might discourage the Devils from afflicting those neighbourhoods in which they had been publicly renounced. Reverend Mather’s letter was written within the context of the Puritan method for arriving at the truth, and it can be fully understood only within that context. In dealing with the American Puritans we must remember always that they had rejected the formidable hierarchies of the Medieval and Renaissance church and state, with all their authority of tradition and inherited position. They had replaced these hierarchies with bodies of ministers and magistrates which, if they were not fully democratic in the twentieth-century sense of the word, were nevertheless elected. The clergyman was called to his position by the members of the church; the magistrate was elected by his constituency. Furthermore, the church had no central administration; every congregation was a law unto itself. The state did have a central administration—a governor and lieutenant-governor and their council—but this administration had nothing even faintly resembling the authority of a royal government. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
My brother, the clergyman, looked over my shoulder before I was aware of him, and discovered that the volume which completely absorbed my attention was a collection of famous Trials, published in a new edition and in a popular form. He laid his finger on the Trial which I happened to be reading at the moment. I looked up at him; his face startled me. He had turned pale. His eyes were fixed on the open page of the book with an expression which puzzled and alarmed me. “My dear fellow,” I said, “what in the World is the matter with you?” He answered in an odd absent manner, still keeping his finger on the open page. “I had almost forgotten,” he said. “And this reminds me.” “Reminds you of what?” I asked. “You do not mean to say you know anything about the Trial?” “I know this,” he said. “The prisoner was guilty.” “Guilty?” I repeated. “Why, the man was acquitted by the jury, with full approval of the judge! What can you possibly mean?” “There are circumstances connected with that Trial,” my brother answered, “which were never communicated to the judge or the jury—which were never so much as hinted or whispered in court. I know them—of my own knowledge, by my own personal experience. They are very sad, very strange, very terrible. I have mentioned them to no mortal creature. I have done my best to forget them. You—quite innocently—have brought them back to my mind. They oppress, they distress me. I wish I had found you reading any book in your library, except that book!” Some people were opposed to prosecuting in any witchcraft case, on the grounds that witchcraft was a spiritual mater, a sin rather than a crime, and thus outside the domain of criminal law. However, the laws of every civilized nation provided the death penalty for witchcraft, and so did the Bible (Exodus xxii, 18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”). #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Another opinion Reverend Mather deals with is that the troubles at Salem were caused by Devils, but not by witches. That is, the idea had already been advanced that the afflicted girls were possessed—infested by Demons—but not bewitched; that the Devils had acted on their own initiative rather than that of witches. This is the idea that was eventually adopted by virtually all of Massachusetts to explain the events at Salem, once it was recognized that most of those executed had been innocent. The basic question, as the seventeenth century understood it, was whether God would permit the Devil to assume the shape of an innocent person. Most authorities, and especially most Protestant authorities, believed that He would, and thus held, like Hamlet, that “the Devil hath power/ to assume a pleasing shape. However, Mr. Richards would not be capable of clearing anybody if he was going to accept the appearance of a person’s specter as conclusive proof of guilt. If such infernal testimony were accepted, nobody could be safe from accusation. Reverend Mather put in forcefully enough. “If mankind have thus far once consented unto the credit of Diabolical representations, the Door is opened!” However, Reverend Mather knew there were people at Salem so committed to the validity of spectral evidence that they were willing to call anyone who challenged it, including himself, a “witch advocate.” All he could do was warn such people that when matters were finished “this caution will certainly be wished for.” And in this he could not possibly have been more right. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Do you believe that the spirits of the dead can return to Earth, and show themselves to the living? Promise me this, that you will keep what I tell you a secret as long as I live. After my death I care little what happens. Let the story of my strange experience be added to the published experience of those other men who have seen what I have seen, and who believe what I believe. The World will not be the worse, and may be the better, for knowing one day what I am now about to trust to your ear alone. On a fine summer evening, many years since, I left my chambers in the Temple to meet a fellow-student, who had proposed to me a night’s amusement in the Winchester estate. I had taken my degree at Oxford. I had sadly disappointed my father by choosing the Law as my profession, in preference to the Church. At that time, to own the truth, I had no serious intention of following any special vocation. I simply wanted an excuse for enjoying the pleasures of an American life. The study of Law supplied me with that excuse. And I chose the Law as my profession accordingly. On reaching the place at which we had arranged to meet, I found that my friend had not kept his appointment. After waiting vainly for ten minutes, my patience gave way, and I went into the gardens by myself. I took two or three turns round the mansion, without discovering my fellow-student, and without seeing any other person with whom I happened to be acquainted at that time. For some reason which I cannot now remember, I was not in my usual good spirits that evening. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
I saw a woman in the gardens, she was quiet. She invited me into the estate. Her face was saddened; her eyes were dropped to the ground, I begged her pardon. She rose to leave me. I was determined to not part with her in that way. I begged to be allowed to see the Winchester mansion. She hesitated. Then she took my arm. We went away together. A walk of half an hour brought us to the Winchester mansion, the estate was quite large. We went through the beautiful jeweled doors and took an elevator to the 4th floor. She said Mrs. Winchester had been waiting to meet me. She had been suffering from an affection of the throat; and she had a white silk handkerchief tied loosely round her neck. She wore a simple dress of black merino, with a black-silk apron over it. Her face was deadly pale; her fingers felt icily cold as they closed around my hand. “Promise me one thing,” I said, “before I go. While I live, I am your friend—if I am nothing more. If you are ever in trouble, promise me that you will let me know it.” She started, and drew back from me as if I had struck her with a sudden terror. “Strange!” she said, speaking to herself. “He feels as I feel. He is afraid of what may happen to me, in my life to come.” I attempted to reassure Mrs. Winchester. I tried to tell her what was indeed the truth—that I had only been thinking of the ordinary chances and chances of life, when I spoke. She paid no heed to me; she came back and put her hands on my shoulders, and thoughtfully and sadly looked up in my face. “My mind is not your mind in this matter,” she said. “I believe I shall die young, and die miserably. If I am right, have you interest enough still left in me to hear of it?” #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
She paused, for a moment, shuddering—and added these startling words: “You shall hear of it.” The tone of steady conviction in which she spoke alarmed and distressed me. My face showed her how deeply and how painfully I was affected. “There, there!” she said, returning to her natural manner; “don’t take what I say too seriously. A poor girl who has led a lonely life like mine thinks strangle and talks strangely—sometimes. Yes; I give you my promise. If I am ever in trouble, I will let you know it. God bless you—you have been very kind to me—goodbye!” A tear dropped on my face as she kissed me. The door closed between us. The dark gardens received me. It was raining heavily. I looked up at her window, through the drifting shower. The curtains were parted; she was standing in the gap, dimly lot by the lamp on the table behind her, waiting for our last look at each other. Slowly lifting her hand, she waved her farewell at the window, with the unsought native grace which had charmed me on the night when we first met. The curtains fell again—she disappeared—nothing was before me, nothing was round me, but the darkness and the night. In two years from that time, I had returned to the Church. My relatives exerted themselves; and my good fortune still befriended me. I was offered an opportunity of preaching in a church, made famous by the eloquence of one of the popular pulpit-orators of our time. In accepting the proposal, I felt naturally anxious to do my best, before the unusually large and unusually intelligence congregation which would be assembled to hear me. At the period of which I am now speaking, the Santa Clara Valley had been startled by the discovery of a terrible crime, perpetrated under circumstances of extreme provocation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
I chose this crime as the main subject for my sermon. Admitting that the best among us were frail mortal creatures subject to evil promptings and provocations like the worst among us, my object was to show how a Christian man may find his refuge from temptation in the safeguards of his religion. I dwelt minutely on the hardship of the Christian’s first struggle to resist the evil influence—on the help which one’s Christianity inexhaustibly held out o one in the worst relapses of the weaker and viler part of one’s nature—on the steady and certain gain which was the ultimate reward of one’s faith and one’s firmness—and on the blessed sense of peace and happiness which accompanied the final triumph. Preaching to this effect, with the fervent conviction which I really felt, I may say for myself, at least, that I did no discredit to the choice which had placed me in the pulpit. I held the attention of my congregation, from the first word to the last. On the conclusion of my sermon, my soul was literally shaken. Ordering my horse to be saddled, I rode instantly to the Winchester mansion. When I arrived, my mind was blank. I had no thoughts. I had no tears. The butler, Amon, greeted me. I guessed him to be some two or three years younger than myself. He was undeniably handsome; his manners of a gentleman—and yet, without knowing why, I felt a strong dislike to him the moment he opened the door. While waiting in the parlor, little by little, I became conscious of a chilly sensation slowly creeping through and through me to the bones. The warm balmy air of a summer night was abroad. It was the month of August. In the month of August, was it possibly that any living creature (in good health) could feel cold? It was not possible—and yet, the chilly sensation still crept through and through me to the bones. I looked up. I looked all round me. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
I looked around me again. Yes: I saw it. With my own eyes I saw it. A pillar of white mist—between five and six feet high, as well as I could judge—was moving beside me on my left hand. The white colour of it was the white colour of the fog which one might see over the ocean. And the chill which had then crept through me to the cones was that chill that was creeping through me now. I was awed rather than frightened. There was one moment, and one only, when the fear came to me that my reason might be shaken. The doctrine that the Devil could appear in any shape did come to mind. The slow utterance of these words, repeated over and over again: “Mrs. Winchester is dead. Mrs. Winchester is dead.” But my will was still my own: I was able to control myself, to impose silence on my own muttering lips. And I walked through the mansion. And the pillar of mist went quietly with me. I sat down on the stairs looking at the pillar of mist, hovering opposite to me. It lengthened slowly, until it reached to the ceiling. As it lengthened, it grew bright and luminous. A time passed, and a shadowy appearance showed itself in the center of the light. Little by little, the shadowy appearance took the outline of human form. Soft brown eyes, tender and melancholy, looked at me through the unearthly light in the mist. The dead and the rest of the face boke next slowly on my view. Then the figure gradually revealed itself, moment by moment, downward and downward to the feet. She stood before me as I had last seen her, in her black-merino dress, with the black-silk apron, with white handkerchief tied loosely round her neck. She stood before me, in the gentle beauty that I remembered so well; and looked at me as she had looked when she gave me her last kiss on the cheek—when her tears had dropped on my hand. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
I fell on my knees at the table. I stretched out my hands to her imploringly. I said, “Speak to me—O, once again speak to me, Sarah.” Her eyes rested on me with a divine compassion in them. She lifted her hand, and pointed to the photograph on the desk. It was the butler. I looked up at her again. She lifted her hand once more, and pointed to the handkerchief round her neck. As I looked at it, the fair white silk changed horribly in colour—the fair white silk became darkened and drenched in blood. A moment more—and the vision of her began to grow dim. By slow degrees, the figure, then the face, faded back into the shadowy appearance that I have first seen. The luminous inner light died out in the white mist. The mist itself dropped slowly downwards—floated a moment in airy circles on the floor—vanished. Nothing was before me but the familiar Lincrusta wallpaper, and the photograph lying face downwards on the desk. I went home. The next day, the newspapers reported the discovery of a murder in the Winchester mansion. Mrs. Winchester was the victim. She had been killed by a wound in the throat. The crime had been discovered between ten and eleven o’clock on the previous night. There is conclusive proof that the butler had been trafficking with the Devil. If spectral evidence was convincing to the magistrates, the ministers, and the people at large, it was a nightmare to the suspects. A violent quarrel took place between them. Lastly, that man, variously described by different witnesses, was seen leaving the door of her mansion on the night of the murder. The Law—advancing no further than this—may have discovered circumstances of suspicion, but no certainty. The Law, in default of direct evidence to convict the prisoner, may have rightly decided in letting him go free. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
However, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company issued a statement redacting the news report which was later destroyed: “Protecting Mrs. Winchester’s legacy is, and always will be, our focus. For decades, we have battled behind the scenes, enduring shadowy tactics of deception with unauthorized statements and projects created to tarnish. We have always been betwixted as to why there is such a tenacity in causing more pain alongside what we already have to cope with for the rest of our lives. Now, this unscrupulous endeavor to release a statement without official proof or full accounting to the estate compels our hearts to express a word—forgiveness. Although we will continue to defend ourselves and her legacy lawfully and justly, we want to preempt the inevitable attacks on our company by all the individuals who have emerged from the shadows to leech off of Mrs. Winchester’s life’s work. Ultimately, we desire closure and a modicum of peace so we can facilitate the growth of the Winchester Estate and other creative projects that embody Mrs. Winchester’s true essence, which is to inspire and get people to think critically. We welcome and accept people of all creeds, races and cultures in the Universe and beyond.” The official statement reported that Mrs. Winchester passed away peacefully in her sleep on September 5, 1922, and work on the still uncompleted house stopped. I leave you to draw your own conclusions, but just days before I saw her, she looked no older than 22 years old. My own faith in the reality of the apparition is immovable. I say, and believe Mrs. Winchester is immortal, which would explain a lot. Take up the Trial again, and look at the circumstances that were revealed during the investigation in the court. I persist in believing that the man was guilty. I declare that, he and he alone did it. And now, you know why. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
O thou wicket spirit Amon that obeyeth not, because I made a law and invoked the names of the glorious and ineffable God of Truth, the creator of all, and thou obeyest not the might sounds that I make: therefore I curse thee in the depth of Abandon to remain until the day of judgment in torment in fire and in sulphur without end, until thou appear before our will and obey my power. Come, therefore, in the 24th of a moment, before the circle in the triangle in this name and by this name of God, Adni, Great Spirit, give us hearts to understand; never to take from creation’s beauty more than we give; never to destroy wantonly for the furtherance of greed; never to deny to give our hands for the building of Earth’s beauty; never to take from her what we cannot use. Give us hearts to understand that to destroy Earth’s music is to create confusion; that to wreck her appearance is to build us to beauty; that to callously pollute her fragrance is to make a house of stench; that as we care for her she will care for us. Tzabaoth, Adonai, Amioran. Come! Come! for it is the Lord of Lords Adni, that stirreth thee up. I stir thee up, O thou fire, in him who is thy Creator and of all creatures. Torment, burn, destroy the spirit Amon always whose end cannot be, I judge thee in judgment and in extreme justice, O spirit Amon, because thou art he that obeyeth not my power and obeyth not that law which the Lord God made, and obeyeth not the Mighty Sounds and the Living Breath which I invoke, which I send: Come forth, I, who am the Servant of the Same Most High governor Lord God powerful, Iehovohe, I who am exalted in power and am might in his power above ye, O thou who comest not giving obedience and faith to him that liveth and trirumpheth. Therefore I say the judgment: I curse thee and destroy the name Amon and the seal Amon, which I have placed in this dwelling of poison, and I burn thee in fire whose end cannot be; and I cast thee down unto the seas of torment, out of which thou shalt not rise until thou come to me eyes: visit me in peace: be friendly before the circle in the triangle in the 24th of a moment in the likeness of a man not unto the terror of the sons of men the creatures or all things on the face of the Earth. Obey my power like reasoning creatures; obey the living breath, the laws which speak. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
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At His Preliminary Examination He Testified that He Has Been in the Snare of the Devil!
A weary and secretive darkness crept into her face, a distraction, as though her soul had traveled out of doors towards Heaven, and the she looked down sadly. When I came in sight of the house where John Procter live, there was a very hard blow struck on my breast which caused great pain in my stomach and amazement in my head. However, I did see no person near me, only my wife behind me on the same horse. And when I cam against said Mr. Procter’s house, according to my understanding, I did see John Procter and his wife at the said house. [They were, remember, in prison at this time.] Mr. Procter himself looked out of the window and his wife did stand just without the door. I told my wife of it, and she did look that way and could see nothing but a little maid at the door. I saw no maid there, but Mr. Procter’s wife according to my understanding did stand at the door. Afterwards, about half a mile from the aforesaid house, I was taken speechless for some short time. My wife did ask me several questions and desired me that if I could not speak I should hold up my hand, which I did. And immediately I could speak as well as ever. [Notice again that the fit was broken when the subject is able to move or speak.] And when we came to the way where Salem Road cometh into Ispwich Road, here I received another blow on my breast which caused much pain, so that I could not sit on my horse. And when I did alight off my horse, to my understanding I saw a woman coming towards us about sixteen or twenty pole from us, but did not know who it was. My wife could not see her. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
When I did get up on my horse again, to my understanding there stood a cow where I saw the woman. [Witches were thought capable of transforming their shapes.] After that we went to Boston without any further molestation, but after I came home again to Newbury I was pinched and nipped by something invisible for some time. However, now through God’s goodness to me I am well again. That was testimony from Joseph Bailey of what he and his wife encountered. Testimony like this is careful and honest, and historians have been wrong in refusing to take it seriously. Mr. Baily was quite aware that he had been ill, and that the illness had created a difference between his perceptions and those of his wife. However, the fatal distinction between his understandings of the event and ours is that his culture led him to attribute his illness to witchcraft whereas ours permits us to attribute it to his fear of witchcraft. There are many similar instances of the specters of innocent people appearing to afflict the citizenry once they were suspected of witchcraft. One of the more interesting involves John Willard, who had at first been a deputy-constable employed in arresting persons who had been complained of. According to Robert Calef, an American author who wrote a book on the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-93, he became dissatisfied after being sent to arrest persons he believed innocent, and resigned his position. This immediately brought him under suspicion, and soon the afflicted girls were crying out against him. Shortly thereafter his grandfathers, Bray Wilkins, was ready for dinner when John Willard came into the house with my son Henry Wilkins, before I sat down, and said Mr. Willard to my apprehension looked after such a sort upon me as I never before discerned in any. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
That is, Mr. Wilkins thought Mr. Willard had “overlooked” him—given him the evil eye. I did but step into the next room and I was presently taken so that I could not dine nor eat anything. I cannot express the misery I was in, for my water was suddenly stopped and I had no benefit of nature, but was like a man in a rock. And I told my wife immediately that I was afraid that Mr. Willard had done me wrong. My pain continuing and finding no relief my jealousy [id es, suspicion] continued. Mr. Lawson and others there were all amazed and knew not what to do for me. There was a woman accounted skillful [who] came hoping to help me, and after she had used means she asked me whether none of those evil persons had done me damage. I said I could not say they had but I was sore afraid they had. She answered, she did fear so too. As near as I remember I lay in this case three or four days at Boston, and afterwards, with the jeopardy of my life (as I though), I cam home. And then some of my friends coming to see me (and at this time John Willard was run away) one of the afflicted persons, Mercy Lewis, came in with them, and they asked whether she saw anything. She said, “Yes, they are looking for Jon Willard but here he is on his grandfather’s belly.” (And at that time I was in grievous pain in the small of my belly.) I continued so in grievous pain and my water much stopped till said Mr. Willard was in chains. And then as near as I can guess I have considerable ease. However, on the other hand, in the room of a stoppage I was vexed with a flowing of water so that it was hard to keep myself dry. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
On the fifth [of] July last, talking with some friends about John Willard, some pleading his innocency and myself and some others arguing the contrary, within about one-quarter of an hour after that I was taken in the sorest distress and misery, my water being turned into real blood, or of a bloody color, and the old pain returned excessively as before, which continued for about twenty-four hours together. In this testimony, we come to understand the hysterical loss of appetite which was Mr. Wilkins’ first symptom we have seen before and shall see again. The inability to urinate we have seen in Mrs. Simms as a result of Manny Redd’s curse. However, there was clearly something organic as well as psychosomatic wrong with Bray Wilkins. The blood in the urine coupled with the extreme pain of relatively short duration suggests that it may have been a kidney stone. However, whatever it was, both Mr. Wilkins and the community at large were by this time ready to attribute it to witchcraft. William Baker’s confessions provide an excellent example that the Salem Witch Trials were carried in chiefly by the complaints and accusations of the afflicted and by the confessions of the accused, condemning themselves and others. Nothing is a first sight more surprising than the number of the confessors and the character of their confessions. There were about fifty of them, and the statements which they made far exceed in color and detail the simple statements of personal guilt that were necessary to save their lives. According to Mr. Baker, at his preliminary examination he testified that he has been in the snare of the Devil three years. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
That the Devil first appeared to him like a black man, and he perceived he had a cloven foot; that the Devil demanded of him to give up himself soul and body unto him, which he promised to do. [The Devil promised in return to pay Mr. Baker’s debts and see that he lived comfortably. Mr. Baker signed the contract in blood.] Satan’s design was to set up his own worship, abolish all churches in the land (which some say politicians are currently doing), to fall next [id est, first] upon Salem and so go through the country. He saith the Devil promised that all his people should be equal, that there should be n day of resurrection or of judgment, and neither punishment nor shame for sin. That explains why people are trying to banish God and they church. They know they are bad people and believe they can avoid being held responsible for their crimes and sins by raising hell on Earth and raising the Devil. Mr. Baker said that the demonic “Grandess” had told him there were about “307 witches in the country” and he volunteered his opinion that all the persons arrested and imprisoned to date (August 29, 1692) were guilty. However, an oral confession was not enough for him. Mr. Hale prints another “which he wore himself in prison, and sent to the magistrate to confirm his former confession.” However, an oral confession was not enough for him. Mr. Hale prints another “which he wrote himself in prison, and sent to the magistrates to confirm his former confession.” Here is his testimony: God having called me to confess my sins and apostasy in that fall in giving the Devil advantage over me, appearing to me like a Black, in the evening, to set my hand to his book, as I have owned to my shame. He told me that I should not want [in] so doing. At Salem Village, there being a little off the Meeting-House about an hundred five blades [id est, young bucks], some with rapiers by their sides, which was called (and might be more for ought I know) by Bishop and Burroughs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
And the trumpet sounded, and [there was] bread and beverage which they called Sacrament, but I had none, being carried over all on a stick, never being at any other meeting. I being at carting a Saturday last, all the day of hay and English corn, the Devil brought my shape to Salem and did afflict Martha Sprague and Rose Foster by clitching my hand. And a Sabbath day my shape afflicted Abigail Martin. Elizabeth Johnson and Abigail Faulkner have been my enticers to this great abomination, as one have owned and charged her to her sister with the same. And the design was to destroy Salem Village, and to begin at the minister’s house, and to destroy the Church of God, and to set up Satan’s kingdom, and then all will be well. And now I hope God in some measure has made me something sensible of my sin and apostasy, begging pardon of God, and of the Honorable Magistrates and all God’s People, hoping and promising by the help of God to set to my heart and hand to do what in me leith to destroy such wicked worship, humbly begging the prayers of all God’s People for me [that] I may walk humbly under this great affliction and that I may procure to myself he sure mercies of David and the blessing of Abraham. Such testimony sheds light on the centuries long plot of some to remove God from America. Pray I must, my Lordly Friend, but what should I pray? Bless You, Heavenly Father, Father of my Lord Jesus Christ, for remembering me, pauper that I am? O Father of mercies and God of consolations, as Paul began his Second Letter to the Corinthians (1.3), I give You thanks, unworthy as I am of Your every consolation? #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
I bless You always, and I glorify You, with You Only Begotten Son and the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, for ever and ever? O Lord God, my Holy Loving Friend, when You come into my heart, You make my blood dance? “You are my glory,” thrummed the Psalmist (3.3) and “the exaltation of my heart” (119.111)? You are my hope and—thrumming again—“my refuge in the day of my tribulation” (59.16)? I ask again, O Lord, what should I pray? At this point in my life, I find myself not only a little long in the tooth, but also a little short in the hoof; that is to say, a little short of breath in the pursuit of Love and Virtue. I have no one to turn to. You are the only One who can help me. Do not be surprised, then, when I ask You to visit me more often. I need to know more about the holy disciplines. Will they free my body from the itch, cure my heart from the worm? Cleanse me on the inside, scrub me on the outside, and I will be ready enough to love, strong enough to suffer, stable enough to preserve. And you say that these blood drinkers are worshiped in the hills. It was the spring of 1880, I had lost my way, and could not tell how far I might be from my destination. I was very tired and had a heavy knapsack on my shoulders, packed with stones and relics from the ruins of the Old Pelasgic fortress which I had been exploring, besides a number of old coins and a lamp or two which I had purchased there. I could discern no signs of any human habitation, and the hills, covered with wood, seemed to shut me in on every side. I was beginning to think seriously of looking out for some sheltered spot under a thicket in which to pass the night. I was so excited to get back to the Winchester estate. The mansion was a large rambling place, and was tolerably comfortable within. My room was situated at the end of a long passage; there were two rooms on the right side of this passage, and a window on the left, which looked out upon the garden. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Having taken a survey of the outside of the house while getting some fresh air after dinner, when the moon was up, I remembered exactly the position of my chamber—the end room of a long narrow wing, projecting at right angles from the main building, with which it was connected only by the passage and two side rooms already mentioned. Please to bear this description carefully in mind while I proceed. Before getting into bed, I drove into the floor close to the door a small gimlet which formed part of a complicated Winchester pocket-knife which I always carried with me, so that it would be impossible for any one to enter the room without my knowledge; there was a lock to the door, but the key would not turn in it; there was also a bolt, but it would not enter the hole intended for it, the door having sunk apparently from its proper level. I satisfied, myself, however, that the door was securely fastened by my gimlet, and soon fell asleep. How can I describe the strange and horrible sensation which oppressed me as I woke out of my slumber? I had been sleeping soundly, and before I quite recovered consciousness I had instinctively risen from my pillow, and was crouching forward, my knees drawn up, my hands clasped before my face, and my whole frame quivering with horror. I saw nothing, felt nothing; but a sound was ringing in my ears which seemed to make my blood run cold. I could not have supposed it possible that any mere sound, whatever might be its nature, could have produced such a revulsion of feeling or inspired such intense horror as I then experienced. It was not a cry of terror that I heard—that would have roused me to action—nor the moaning of one in pain—that would have distressed me, and called forth sympathy rather than aversion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
True, it was like the groaning of one in anguish and despair, but not like any mortal voice: it seemed too dreadful, too intense, for human utterance. The sound had begun while I was fast asleep—close to the head of my bed—close to my very pillow; it continued after I was wide awake—a long, hollow, protracted groan, making the midnight air reverberate, and then dying gradually away until it ceased entirely. It was some minutes before I could at all recover from the terrible impression which seemed to stop my breath and paralyse my limbs. At length I began to look about me, for the night was not entirely dark, and I could discern the outlines of the room and the several pieces of furniture in it. I then got out of bed, and called aloud, “Who is there? What is the matter? Is anyone ill?” I repeated these enquiries in Italian, German, and French, but there was none that answered. Fortunately I had some matches in my pocket and was able to light my candle. I then examined every part of the room carefully, and especially the wall at the head of my bed, sounding it with my knuckles; it was firm and solid there, as in all other places. I unfastened my door, and explored the passage and the two adjoining rooms, which were unoccupied and almost destitute of furniture; they had evidently not been used for some time. Search as I would, I could gain no clue to the mystery. Returning to my room I sat down upon the bed in great perplexity, and began to turn over in my mind whether it was possible I could have been deceived—whether the sounds which caused me such distress might be the offspring of some dream or nightmare; but to that conclusion I could not bring myself at all, much as I wished it, for the groaning had continued ringing in my ears long after I was wide away and conscious. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
While I was thus reflecting, having neglected to close the door which was opposite to the side of my bed where I was sitting, I heard a soft footstep at a distance, and presently a light appeared at the further end of the passage. Then I saw the shadow of a man cast upon the opposite wall; it moved very slowly, and presently stopped. I saw the hand raised, as if making a sign to someone, an I knew from the fact of the shadow being thrown in advance that there must be a second person in the rear by whom the light was carried. After a short pause they seemed to retrace their steps, without my having had a glimpse of either of them, but only of the shadow which had come before and which followed them as they withdrew. It was then a little after one o’clock, and I concluded they were retiring late to rest, and anxious to avoid disturbing me, though I have since thought that it was the light from my room which caused their retreat. I felt half inclined to call to them, but I shrank, without knowing why, from making known what had disturbed me, and while I hesitated they were gone; so I fastened my door again, and resolved to sit up and watch a little longer by myself. However, now my candle was beginning to burn low, and I found myself in this dilemma: either I must extinguish it at once, or I should be left without the means of procuring a light in case I should be again disturbed. I regretted that I had not called for another candle while there were people yet moving in the house, but I could not do so now without making explanations; so I grasped my box of matches, put out my light, and lay down, not without a shudder, in the bed. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
For an hour more I lay awake thinking over what had occurred, and by that time I had almost persuaded myself that I had nothing but my own morbid imagination to thank for the alarm which I had suffered. “It is an outer wall,” I said to myself; “they are all outer walls, and the house 9-inch-thick walls; it is impossible that sound could be heard through such a thickness. Besides, it seemed to be in my room, close to my ear. What an idiot I must be, to be excited an alarmed about nothing; I will think no more about it.” So I turned on my side, with a smile (rather a forced one) at my own foolishness, and composed myself to sleep. At that instant I heard, with more distinctness than I ever heard any other sound in my life, a gasp, a voiceless gasp, as if someone were in agony for breath, biting at the air, or trying with desperate efforts to cry out or speak. It was repeated a second and a third time; then there was a pause; then again that horrible gasping; and then a long-drawn breath, an audible drawing up of air into the throat, such as one would make in heaving a deep sigh. Such sounds as these could not possibly have been heard unless they had been close to my ear; they seemed to come from the wall at my heard, or to rise up out of my pillow. That fearful gasping, and that drawing in of the breath, in darkness and silence of the night, seemed to make every nerve in my body thrill with dreadful expectation. Unconsciously I shrank away from it, crouching down as before, with my face upon my knees. It ceased, and immediately a moaning sound began, which lengthened out into an awful, protracted groan waxing louder and louder, as if under an increasing agony, and then dying away slowly and gradually into silence; yet painfully and distinctly audible even to the last. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
As soon as I could rouse myself from the freezing horror which seemed to penetrate even to my joints and marrow, I crept away from the bed, and in the further corner of the room lighted with shaking hand of my candle, looking anxiously about me as I did so, expecting some dreadful revelation as the light flashed up. Yet, if you will believe me, I did not feel alarmed or frightened; but rather oppressed, and penetrated wit an unnatural, overpowering, sentiment of awe. I seemed to be in the presence of some great and horrible mystery, some bottomless depth of woe, or misery, or crime. I shrank from it with a sensation of intolerable loathing and suspense. It was a feeling akin to this which prevented me from calling Mrs. Winchester. I could not bring myself to speak to her of what had passed; not knowing how nearly she might be involved in the mystery. I was only anxious to escape as quietly as possible from the room and from the house. The candle was now beginning to flicker in its socket, but the stars were shining outside, and there was space and air to breathe there, which seemed to be wanting in my room; so I hastily opened my window, tied the bedclothes together for a rope, and lowered myself silently and safely to the ground. There was a light still burning in the lower part of the house; but I crept noiselessly along, feeling my way carefully among the trees, and in due time came upon a beaten track which led me to a road, the same which I had been travelling on the previous night. I walked on, scarcely knowing whither, anxious only to increase my distance from the accursed house, until day began to break, when almost the first object I could see distinctly was a small body of men approaching me. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The men asked me what was wrong? “I was disturbed in the night. I could not sleep. I made my escape from the Winchester mansion, and here I am I cannot tell you more.” “But you must tell me more, dear sir; forgive me; you must tell me everything. I must know all that passed in that mansion. We have had in under our surveillance for a long time, and when I heard in what direction you had gone yesterday, and had not returned, I feared you had got into some mischief there, and we were even now upon our way to look for you. The mansion is so large that people seem to get lost inside and disappear.” I could not enter into particulars, but I told him I had heard strange sounds, and at his respect I went back with him to the mansion. He told me by the way that the mansion was haunted; that Mrs. Winchester e mansion, he placed his men about the premises and instituted a strict search, and Mrs. Winchester and the man who was found in the house being compelled to accompany him. The room in which I had slept was carefully examined; the wall was of plaster or cement, so that no sound could have passed through it; the walls were sound and solid, and there was nothing to be seen that could in any way account for the strange disturbance I had experienced. The room on the ground-floor underneath my bedroom was inspected; it contained a quantity of straw, hay, firewood, and lumber. It was paved with thick wooden slaps, and it was observed that the floors were uneven, as if they had been recently disturbed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
“Ply the board loose,” said the officer, “we shall find something hidden here, I reckon.” Mrs. Winchester was evidently much disturbed. “Stop,” she cried. “I will tell you what lies there; come away out of doors, and you shall know all about it.” “Dig, I say. We will find out for ourselves.” “Let the dead rest,” cried Mrs. Winchester, with a trembling voice. “For the love of Heaven come away, and hear what I shall tell you. It is the body of my son, my only son—let him rest, if rest he can. He was wounded in a quarrel, and brought home to die. I thought he would recover, but there was neither doctor nor priest at hand, an in spite of all that would could do for him he died. Let him alone now, or let a priest first be sent for; he died unconfessed and unacknowledged. No one ever knew of his existence. I had hope to spare him of the Winchester cruse that Annie and his father had succumbed to. He was buried here because I did not want to make a stir about it. Nobody knew of his death nor his existence, and we laid him down quietly; once place I thought was as good as another when once the life was out of him. We could not bare a scandal. That gasping attempt to speak, and that awful groaning—whence did they proceed? It was no living voice. Beyond that I will express no opinion on the subject. I will only say it was the means of saving my life, and at the same time putting an end to the series of bloody deeds which had been committed under my family’s name. Every year, I go to the edge of my estate and drop a pound of silver in a grave, and my prayers go up to Heaven in all sincerity!” #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
I invoke thee, and move thee, and stir thee up O Spirit Berith appear unto my eyes before the circle in the likeness of a man in the names and by the name Iah and Vau, which Adam spake and in the name of God, Agla, which Lot spake: and it was as pleasant deliverers unto him and his house and in the name Ioth which Iacob spake in the voice of the Holy ones who cast one down, and it was also as pleasant deliverers in the anger of his brother and in the name Anaphaxeton, which Aaron spake and it was as the Secret Wisdom and in the name Asher Ehyeh Oriston, which Mosheh spake, and all waters were brining forth creatures who wax strong, which lifted up unto the houses, which destroyed all things and in the name of Elion which Mosheh spake, and it was as stones from the firmament of wrath, such as was not in the ages of Time the beginning of the Earth and in the name of Adni, which Mosheh spake and there appeared creatures of Earth who destroyed what the big stones did not: and in the name Schema Amathia, which Ioshua invoked, and the Sun remained over ye, O ye hills the seats of Gibeon, and in the names Alpha and Omega which Daniel spake, and destoyed Bel and the Dragon: and in the nae Emmanuel which the sons of God sang praises in the midst of the burning plain, and flourished in conquest: and in the name Hagios, and by the Throne of Adni, and in Ischyros, Athanatos, Paracletos: and in O Theos, Ictros, Athanatos. And in these names of the secret truth, Agla, On, Tetragrammaton, do I invoke and move thee. And in these names, and all things that are the names of the God of Secret Truth who liveth for ever, the All-Powerful. I invoke and stie thee up, O’ spirit Berith. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Even by him who spake it was, to whom all creatures are obedient and in the Extreme Justice and Anger of God; and by the veil that is before the glory of God, mighty; and by the creatures of living breath before the Throne whose eyes are east and west; by the fire in the fire of just Glory of the Throne; by the Holy ones of Heaven; and by the secret wisdom of God, I, exalted in power, stir three up. Appear before this circle; obey in all things that I say; in the seal Basdathea Baldachia; and in this Name Primeumaton, which Mosheh spake and the Earth was divided, and Korah, Dathan, and Abiram fell in the depth. Therefore obey in all things, O Spirit Berith, obey thy creation. Come thou forth: appear into my eyes; visit us in peace, be friendly; come forth in the 24th of a moment; obey my power, speaking the secrets of Truth in voice and in understanding! I stir thee up, O Spirit Berith, in all things that are the names of glory and power of God the Great One who is greater than understanding, Adni Ihvh Tzabaoth, come forth in the 24th of a moment, let Thy dwelling-place be empty; apply thyself unto the secret truth and obey my power: appear unto my eyes, visit us in peace, speaking the secrets of truth in voice and understanding. I stir thee up and move thee, O spirit Berith, in all the names that I have said, and I add these one and sic names wherein Solomon, the lord of the secret wisdom, placed yourselves, spirits of wrath, in a vessel, Adonai, Preyai Tetragrammaton, Anaphaxeton Ineddenfatoal, Pathtomon and Itemon: appear before this circle; obey in all things my power. And as thou art he that obeys not and comes not I shall be in thy power, O God Most High that liveth for ever, who is the creator of all things n six days, Eie, Saraye, and in my power in the name Prieumaton that ruleth over the palaces of Heaven, Curse Thee, and destroy thy seat, joy, and power; and I bind thee in the depth of Abaddon, to remain until the day of judgment whose end cannot be. And I being thee in the fire of sulphur mingled with poison and the seas of fire and sulphur: come forth, therefore, obey my power and appear before this circle. Therefore come forth, therefore, obey my power and appear before this circle. Therefore come forth in the name of the Holy Ones Zabaoth, Adonia, Amioran. Come! For I am Adonai who stir thee up. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
The attic spaces can get quite dark, but the lights shine through those beautiful glass panes! Come see this and more on the Explore More Tour!
Explore More Tour:
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A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
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What a Lovely Day for a Bit of Mystery!
It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves. I hear your words, My dear Devout; now you hear Mine. You will find them not only suasive, but also persuasive. In fact, they exceed in wisdom all the accumulated knowledge of Philosophy since the World began. My particular words for you today are “spirit and life.” My Beloved Disciple recorded them in his Gospel (6.63), but Humanity cannot seem to make any sense out of them. Important words, they should not be exegeted smugly, if I may allude to that hoary Preacher of Ecclesiastes (9.17), but listened to respectfully. That is to say, they should be received with all humility and yet great affection. Our seventeenth-century ancestors differed from us in most ways, but in nothing did they differ more than in their attitude toward the truth. In this they were closer to the Middle Ages than to us. For them a lie—a breaking of one’s faith—was the worst of sins. Today, many do not regard lying as a serious moral wrong. If the word “morality” is mentioned we think immediately of our bodily appetites, especially of pleasures of the flesh, barbiturates, paraphernalia, liquor and contraband. If the word “morality” is mentioned we think immediately of our bodily appetites very seriously—perhaps too seriously—but we do not regard lying as a mortal sin. We are one of the few civilizations in which entire professions (TV news media, for example, and public relations) are seriously devoted to bending the truth. Dante, in his Divine Comedy, divided sins into three kinds: those of lust, those of violence, and those of fraud. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The sins of lust—those we tend to take most seriously—were those that Dante thought most trivial; the sins of fraud—which we take lightly—were for Dante the worst of all. To create a “credibility gap” as our revealing phrase has it (as though the only relevant issue is whether a statement will compel belief), to lie, was for the medieval humans to break one’s faith, and it was faith which constituted the bonds between humans and their fellow humans, between humans and the state, between humans and God. To lie was to reduce all the most valuable relationships of life to chaos. And the seventeenth-century Puritan, like Dante, was still living by his faith. Just how important the truth was to the seventeenth-century Puritan may be gathered from the fact that all of the innocent persons who were executed—and the majority of those executed were innocent—could have saved themselves by lying. After the first execution—that of Bridget Bishop—took place in June it became obvious to everyone that persons who confessed, like Tituba and Dorcas Good, were not being brought to trial. Thus any suspected person might have one’s life by confessing. Twenty people died, nineteen of them hanged and one pressed for refusing to plead. Bridget Bishop, Mammy Redd, and George Burroughs were three of these. One cannot be at all certain of the guilt or innocence of several more. However, at least a dozen now seem to be clearly innocent. Twelve people, and probably more, chose to die rather than belie themselves. It is impressive evidence of the Puritan’s attachment to the truth. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Yet it was not really so simple as that, because the truth was not easy to find in Salem in 1692. The greatest difficulty was created by the genuineness of the afflicted persons’ fits. Their sufferings were so convincing that they often shook the confidence of the accused. One example is William Hobbes, who began by stoutly denying that he had anything to do with the afflicted girls’ convulsions. When he looked at them they fell down in fits, and Hathorne accused him of overlooking them (id est, of he evil eye), yet still he denied it. Abigail Williams cried out that she saw his specter going to hunt Mercy Lewis “and immediately said Mercy fell into a fit and diverse others.” “Can you now deny it?” said Hathorne. “I can deny it to my dying day,” said William Hobbes. However, he did not. Here, after all, were people in hideous convulsions, and saying that his specter was the cause. How could this be? Hathorne suggested that the Devil might be able to use Hobbes’ specter because of Hobbes’ sins; he had not observed either public or private worship. Might not the Devil have taken advantage of that? Hobbes “was silent a considerable space—then said yes.” The girls’ fits shook not only Hobbes’ confidence in himself, but also his confidence in his daughter Abigail, the wild young girl who had boasted that she had sold herself “body and soul to the Old Boy.” Hathorne wanted to know whether Hobbes had not known for a long time that his daughter was a witch. “No, sir,” was the reply. “Do you think she is a witch now?” asked Hathorne. And all that Hobbes could say was, “I do no know.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Abigail Faulkner’s experience was similar. At her first examination, on August 11, she firmly denied that she had anything to do with the girls’ afflictions. When she looked at them they fell down in fits, and Hathorne asked her, “Do you not see?” Yes, she saw. However, she had nothing to do with it. Yet she would not doubt that the girls were suffering, and saw no reason to doubt their word that it was her specter afflicting them. Therefore the Devil must be appearing in her form: “It is the Devil does it in my shape.” However, by August 30 she was no longer so sure of her innocence. It was true, she said, that she had been angry at what people said when her cousin, Elizabeth Johnson, had been arrested. She had felt malice toward the afflicted persons then because they were the cause of her cousin’s arrest. She has wished them ill, and “her spirit being raised she did pinch her hands together.” Perhaps the Devil had taken advantage of that to pinch the girls, thus exploiting her malice. Even those whose confidence was not shaken bore testimony to the impressiveness of the fits. Mary Easty knew that has had not bewitched the girls, and she was confident as well of the innocence of her sisters, Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Cloyse. Yet she had to grant that there was something preternatural in the girls’ behaviour. “It is an evil spirit,” she said, “but whether it be witchcraft I do not know.” Even George Burroughs, who had been audacious enough to boast of occult powers, found himself stunned by the girls’ behaviour. “Being asked what he thought of these things he answered it was an amazing and humbling Providence, but he understood nothing of it.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Indeed, these courtroom fits were so convincing that most of the indictments were for witchcraft committed during the preliminary examination rather than for the offenses named in the original complain. The typical order of events in the Salem witchcraft cases was: the swearing out of a complaint for acts of witchcraft; a preliminary examination during which the afflicted persons had convulsive fits; an indictment for acts of witchcraft performed during the preliminary examination; and the trial. The direct cause of these fits, in the courtroom or out of it, was, of course, not witchcraft itself, but the afflicted person’s fear of witchcraft. If fits were occasioned by fear of someone like Bridget Bishop, who was actually practicing witchcraft, they might also be occasioned by fear of someone who was only suspected of practicing it. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law! The Winchester Estate had belonged to the family ever since the reign of George Washington, and there was a curious old wing and a cloistered quadrangle still remaining of the original edifice, and in excellent preservation. The rooms at the end of the house were ornate, and somewhat darksome and gloomy, it is true; but, though rarely used they were perfectly habitable, and were of service on great occasions when the Winchester was crowded with guests. The central portion of the Winchester had been rebuilt in the reign James K. Polk, and was of noble and palatial proportions. The southern wing, and a long music-room with thirteen tall narrow daisy-stained glass windows added on to it, were as modern as the time. Altogether, the Winchester was a very splendid mansion with 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, 6 kitchens, and even once had a nine-story tower. It was one of the chief glories of our country. All the land in the Winchester estate, and for a long way beyond its boundaries, belonged to the Winchester family. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The Winchester estate grounds actually expanded all the way down to Steven’s Creek Boulevard. The community church was once within the park walls. The former estate was actually much larger than it is today, it was composed of 500 to 600 rooms at one time, but the 1906 Earthquake brought down the nine-story tower and much of the fourth floor with it. The death of William Wirt Winchester left his son, William Wirt Winchester II, unprovided for, and he was fain to go out into the bleak unknown World, and earn his living in a position of dependence—a dreadful thing for a Winchester to be obliged to do. Out of respect for the traditions and prejudices of his race, he made it his business to seek employment abroad, where the degradation of one solitary Winchester was not so likely to inflict shame upon the ancient house to which he belonged. Happily for himself, he had been carefully educated, and had industriously cultivated the usual modern accomplishments in the calm retirement of the University of Cambridge. He was so fortunate as to obtain a situation at Vienna, in a German family of high rank; and remained there for seven years, laying aside year by year a considerable portion of his liberal salary. When his pupils had grown up, his kind mistress procured for him a still more profitable position at St. Petersburg, where he remained for five more years, at the end of which time he yielded to a yearning that had been long growing upon him—an ardent desire to see his dear old country home once more. He loved the soil from which he had sprung. In all of her letter for some time past, his mother, Mrs. Winchester begged that whenever he felt himself justified in coming home, he would pay a long visit to the Winchester Estate. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“I wish you could come home at Christmas,” she wrote, in the autumn of the year of which I am speaking. “We shall be very gay, and I expect all kinds of pleasant people at the Winchester. When he arrived there, the Old Winchester was in its glory, at about nine o’clock on a clear starlit night. A light frost whitened the broad sweeping lawns, 12,000 boxwood hedges that were winding through the garden, and the other 1,500 plants, trees and shrubs. From the music room at the end of the southern wing, to the heavily framed gothic windows of the old rooms on the north, there shone one blaze of light. The scene was reminiscent of some unusual place in a German legend; and young William half expected to see the lights fade out all in a moment, and long shingled façade wrapped in sudden darkness. The old butler, whom he remembered from his very infancy, and who did not seem to have grown a day older during his twelve years’ exile, came out of the dining-room as the footman opened the hall-door for him, and gave him a cordial welcome, nay insisted upon helping to bring in his portmanteau with his own hands, an act of unusual condescension, the full force of which was felt by his subordinates. “It is a real treat to see your pleasant face once more, William,” said this faithful retainer, as he assisted William to take off his travelling-cloak. “You have not aged a day since you used to live at the Winchester twelve year ago, and you are looking uncommon well; and, Lord love your heart, sir, how pleased they all will be to see you!” They arrived at last at a very comfortable room—a square tapes-tried chamber, with high ceiling support by a great mahogany beam. The room looked cheery enough, with a bright fire roaring in the wide chimney; but it had a somewhat ancient aspect, which the superstitiously inclined might have associated with possible ghosts. “We are in the East Wing, are we not?” young William asked. “This room seems quite strange to me. if I have ever been here before, I doubt it.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
“Very likely not, sir. Yes, this is the old East Wing that your mother once had boarded up. Your window looks out into the old stable-yard, where the kennel used to be in the time of your grandfather, when the Winchester was even a finer place than it is now. We are so full of company this winter, you see, sir, that we are obliged to make use of all these rooms. You will have no need to feel lonesome. There is Captain and Mrs. Foster in the next room to this, and the two Miss Griffins in the blue room opposite.” (Some believe that reopening the East Wing is what upset the spirits and caused the 1906 Earthquake.) Young William admired the perfect comfort of his chamber. Every modern appliance had been added to the ornate and ponderous furniture of an age gone by, and the combination produced a very pleasant effect. As he awoke in the morning and opened the door, Mrs. Winchester sailed in, looking radiant in a dark-green velvet dress richly trimmed with old point lace. Above her beauty, she had a charm of expression which was to most more rare and delightful than her beauty of feature and complexion. She put her arms around her son, and hugged him. “I have only this moment been told of your arrival, my dear William,” she said; “you look just like your father. My dear child, I have been looking forward so anxiously to your coming, and I should not have liked to see you for the first time before all those people. Welcome home. Remember, William, this house is always to be your home, whenever you have need of one.” William, being a hunting man. Had, indeed, a secret horror of the sport; for more than one scion of the house had perished untimely in the hunting-field. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The family had not been altogether a lucky one, in spite of its wealth and prosperity. It was not often that goodly heritage had descended to the Winchesters or their only son, William. Death in some form or other—on too many occasions a violent death—had come between the heir and his inheritance. And when one pondered on the dark pages in the story of the house, many wonder if Mrs. Winchester was ever troubled by morbid forebodings about her only and fondly loved son. Was there a ghost at the Winchester—that spectral visitant without which the state and plendour of a grand old house seem scarcely complete? Yes, many have heard vague hints of some shadowy presence that had been seen on rare occasions within the precincts of the Winchester mansion. Those whom were questioned were prompt to assure investigators that they had seen nothing. They had heard stories of the past—foolish legends, most likely, not worth listening to. On the property, there was once a stable-yard, a spacious quadrangle, surrounded by the closed doors of stable and dog-kennels: low massive buildings of grey stones, with the ivy creeping over them here and there, and with an ancient moss-grown look, that gave them a weird kind of interest. This range of stabling must have been disguised for a long time. The stables that were more recently used were a pile of handsome red-brick buildings at the other extremity of the house, to the rear of the music room, and forming a striking feature in the back view of the Winchester. According to legend, some believed that spectral entities, had been haunting the Winchester estate for centuries. Several large black dogs, with eyes large as saucers, or something flaming, appear and disappear, often without a trace. In many of the legends, the dogs are malevolent: assaulting guests, frightening livestock to death, attacking other dogs, and heralding death or disaster. Perhaps that is why the heirs of Winchester who have come to an untimely end have all died tragically. Oliver Winchester was killed in a dual. William Winchester I was murdered; and William Winchester II broke his back on his return home to the Winchester Estate. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The butler concealed the death of William Winchester II from Sarah, telling her simply that he was called away and said he would never return. Her heart was so broken that she wrote him out of existence, as if her had never been born. After the heartbreaking news that her only son has abandoned her, Mrs. Winchester was sitting in her blue séance room; half meditating, half dozing, mixing broken snatches of thought with brief glimpses of dreaming, when she was startled into wakefulness by a sound that was strange to her. It was a huntsman’s horn—a few low plaintive noes on a huntsman’s horn—notes which had a strange far-away sound, that was more unearthly than anything her ears ever heard. She thought of the music in Der Freischutz; but the weirdest snatch of melody Weber ever wrote had not so ghastly a sound as these few simple noes conveyed to her ear. She stood transfixed, listening to that awful music. It had grown dusk, her fire was almost out, and the room in shadow. As she listened, a light suddenly flashed on the wall before her. The light was as unearthly as the sound—a light that never shone from Earth or Sky. She ran to the window; for his ghastly shimmer flashed through the window upon the opposite wall. The great gates of the stable-yard were open, and men in scarlet coats were riding in, a pack of hounds crowding in before them, obedient to the huntsman’s whip. The whole scene was gleams of a lantern carried by one of the men. It was this lantern which had shone upon the tapestried wall. She saw the stable doors opened one after another; gentlemen and grooms alighting from their horses; the dogs driven into their kennel; the helpers hurrying to and fro; and that strange wan lantern-light glimmering hither and tither was the gathering dusk. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, there was no sound of horse’s hoof or of human voices—not one yelp or cry from the vicious looking hounds with flaming eyes. Since those faint far-away sounds of the horn had died out in the distance, the ghastly silence had been unbroken. As Mrs. Winchester stood at her window quite calmly and watched while the group of men and animals in the yard below noiselessly dispersed. There was nothing supernatural in the manner of their disappearance. The figures did not vanish nor melt into empty air. One by one she saw the horses led into their separate quarters; one by one the redcoats strolled out of the gates, and the grooms departed, some one way, some another. The scene, but for its noiselessness, was natural enough; and had she been a stranger in her own home, she might have fancied that those figures were real—those stables in full occupation. However, she knew that stable-yard and all its range of building to have been disused for more than half a century. Could she believe that, without an hour’s warning, the long-deserted quadrangle could be filled—the empty stalls tenanted? Had some hunting-party from the neighbourhood sought shelter there, glad to escape the pitiless rain? That was impossible, she thought. And yet the noiselessness, the awful sound of that horn—the strange unearthly gleam of that lantern! A cold sweat broke out on her forehead, and she trembled in every limb. Mrs. Winchester was pale as a ghost and trembling. Mrs. Winchester had kept the secret. That evening, the butler came to her. “Mrs. Winchester, there is no use in trying to hide it from you any longer. Your son was killed in the hunting-field, brought home dead one December night, an hour after his father and the rest of the party had come home to the Winchester. He was found by a labouring-man, poor lad, lying in a ditch with his back broken, and his horse beside him staked.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Shortly after Mr. Winchester Sr. never rode to hounds again, though he was passionately fond of hunting. Dogs and horses were sold, and the north quadrangle had been empty from that day. Some evil have come upon the Winchester mansion, it was not in human power to prevent its coming. Some had beheld the shadows of the dead. Sudden terror overcomes some visitors, even to this day. There are reports of an ominous danger, as people’s hearts grow cold while on tour. Staff have been startled by seeing a man, with is hat in his hand not in evening costume; a man with a pale anxious-looking face, peering cautiously into the room. Their first thought is of evil; but in the next moment than man disappears, and they see no more of him. Sometimes when flowers are placed in the house, people see the drooping moments later and lights dying out one by one in the brass sconces against the walls. It is no wonder Mrs. Winchester shut herself from the outer World, burying herself almost as completely as a hermit in its cell. While great wealth brings some people joy, there is some times a hefty fee. Be careful what you wish for, you never know who or what you might invite in your doors. I invoke and move thee, O thou Spirit Gusion and being exalted above ye in the power of the Most High, I say unto thee, Obey! in the name Beralensis, Baldachinesis, Paumachia, and Apologiae Sedes: and of the mighty ones who govern, spirits, Liachidae and ministers of the House of Death: and by the Chief Prince of the seat of Apologia in the Ninth Legion, I do invoke thee and by invoking conjure thee. And being exalted above ye in the power of the Most High, I say unto thee, Obey! in the name of him who spake and it was, to whom all creatures and things obey. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Moreover I, whom God made in the likeness of God, who is the creator according to his living breath, stir thee up in the name which is the voice of wonder of the mighty God, El, strong and unspeakable, O thou Spirit Gusion. And I say to thee obey, in the name of him who spake and it was; and in every one ye, O ye names of God! Moreover in the names Adonai, El, Elohim, Elohi, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh, Zabaoth, Elion, Iah, Tetragrammaton, Shaddai, Lord God Most High, I stir thee up; and in our strength I say Obey! O Spirit Gusion. Appear unto His servants in a moment; before the circle in the likeness of man; and visit me in peace. And in the ineffable name Tetragrammaton Iehovah, I say, Obey! whose mighty sound being exalted in power the pillars are divided, the winds of the firmament groan aloud; the sire burns not; the Earth moves in Earthquakes; and all things of the house of Heaven and Earth and the dwelling-place of darkness are as Earthquakes, and are in torment, and are confounded in thunder. Come forth, O Spirit Gusion, in a moment: let thy dwelling-place be empty, apply unto us the secrets of Truth and obey my power. Come forth, visit us in peace, appear unto my eyes; be friendly: Obey the living breath! For I stir thee up in the name of God of Truth who liveth for ever, Helioren. Obey the living breath, therefore continually unto the end as my thoughts appear to my eyes: therefore be friendly: speaking the secrets of Truth in voice and in understanding. Let it be so, Truefold, whatever ill news has come to us we will hear it together. He put is arm round his wife’s waist. Both were pale as marble, both stood in stony stillness waiting for the bow that was to fall upon them. It is said that perhaps you will see a glimpse of Mrs. Winchester and Mr. Winchester, Sr., while on tour, if you repeat the invocation thirteen times before your visit. Life is broken for her, there hah passed a glory from Earth, and that upon all pleasures and joys of this World she looks with the solemn calm of one for whom all things are dark with the shadow of a great sorrow. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
We’re one week away from Friday the 13th! Missed out on tickets for Flashlight Tours? Don’t worry, we have ghoulishly fun plans All Hallows’ Eve 👻🎃🍿🏠
All Hallows’ Eve:
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The Most Beautiful Adventures are Not those We Go to Seek!
Powerful ideas do not die with those who gave them birth, as long as those seeds are planted in their followers. At this point in history, Jesus is surrounded with flocks wherever He is, but all is not well. Sometimes one will feel that one is being led into an experience, a mood, or an idea. At other times one may feel oneself being drawn inward quite deeply as if the very roots of one’s egoic being were penetrated; more rarely as if one has been drawn beyond the ego itself. When this consciousness takes hold of a human, it takes one by surprise. Infinity is so utterly different from what one was experiencing a few minutes earlier that its wonder, its truth, its beauty, its love fills one abruptly, as if in descent from the skies. The element of surprise and the delight of novelty are present and give the Glimpse its rapturous turn. The glimpse may come to one with a suddenness which makes the surrounding circumstances quite incongruous. The glimpse takes you unawares. When the humor of a particular situation or scene, happening or idea strikes a person one may burst out into sudden laughter. It is not long-forming but explosive, not built-up like a wall brick-by-brick but flashed across the darkness like lighting. One’s mind has this possibility of an abrupt move, and unexpected leap. Just so does it still possess this same possibility with regard to the discovery of truth. Enlightenment is always “sudden” in the sense that during meditation or reverie or relaxation the preliminary thought-concentrating gustatory period usually moves through consciousness quite slowly until, at some unexpected moment, there is an abrupt deepening, followed by a slipping into another dimension, a finding oneself alive in a new atmosphere. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
A passing sign of progress in arousing latent forces and a physical indication that one is on the eve of noteworthy mystical experience may be a sudden unexpected vibratory movement in the region of the abdomen, in the solar plexus. It usually comes when one has been relaxed for a short time from the daily cares, or after retiring to bed for the night. The diaphragmatic muscle will appear to tremble violently and something will seem to surge to and fro like a snake behind the solar plexus. This bodily agitation will soon subside and be followed by a pleasant calm and out of this calm there will presently arise a sense of unusual power, of heightened control over the terrestrial nature and human self. With this there may also come a clear intuition about some truth needed at the time and a revelatory expansion of consciousness into supersensual reality. These moods descend without invitation and depart without permission. This is the crucial point when ordinary compulsive mental activity fades away and stillness supervenes, perhaps very briefly, perhaps for some minutes. For some time, one is tense with the feeling of being about to receive a new revelation. Many are happy to make the trip to the Heavenly Kingdom, but few there are who will cart and haul that cross of Jesus’s. Many enjoy the sweet sentiments He utters, but few, that tart words He sometimes has to say. Many will wolf down the food with the Famous Man, as Jesus son of Sirach put it in his Book of Wisdom (6.10), but few will join Him in the fasts. They are all there in the good times, but few will take on the tough tasks He inevitably asks. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Yes, many like to be seen breaking bread with Jesus but, as Matthew has described (20.22), they are nowhere to be found when the passion cup is passed. Many are wowed by His miracles; few are wooed by His cross. Many just love chatting with Jesus so long as He is not rude about their not embracing His rood. What is the moral? Many praise Jesus Christ and bless Him as long as the good times roll. However, when He absents Himself for a few moments or just goes off for a while to pray, they become bellicose, then lachrymose, then comatose. We should love Jesus for His own sweet sake, and not because of any magic He will do in our behalf. And so when the bad times rock, we will bless Him as though the good times had never left. Even if He will never want to give us consolation again, we will still praise Him and thank Him for what He once did. Here are some questions for us. How can the love of Jesus, pure as it is, have no particular price tag, not terrestrial taint? Can those who spend all their time hunting down consolations not be called mercenaries? Are not those who think of nothing but their own comfort and profit hoarders of stuff rather than lovers of Christ? Can anyone be found who wants to serve God without counting the cost? Some considerations. Rare is the person who is so spiritual that one is denuded oneself of every material thing! Is there anyone who is truly poor in spirit and bereft of every creaturely thing? Can any of us be discovered whose interior life is like the Proverbial “gift of great price from a foreign land” (31.10)? If a Devout gave all one’s substance, that is good, but it is not everything. If one’s penitential practices were punishing and public, that is good too, but one still has a long way to go. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
If one understands all knowledge, that is fine, but there is so much more to know. “If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angles, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or clanging cymbal,” reports 1 Corinthians 13.1. Even if one has great virtue and indeed flaming devotion, it is still a long way to Purgatory. Why? For one has one step farther to go and according to Luke 10.41-42, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed.” It is the most important step of all. What is that? That one leave behind not only all created things, but also oneself. That is to say, dump one’s selfish pride by the side of the road. Empty out one’s petty pockets. And when one has done all this, which one knows has yet to be done, then and only then will one come to the realization that of oneself one is nothing. One day we ay come to think we are rather skilled in the service of the Lord. Some of our peers may even encourage us to think we are slick. However, even if there is some truth to it, we should still describe ourselves as just another clumsy oaf. “When you have done everything that is required of you, repeat after me,” Revealed Truth has spoken in the Gospel of Luke, “we are truly the bumbling and stumbling servants,” (17.10). We have to be truly poor in body and spirit before we can say with the Psalmist, “Yes, I am a leper, and a pauper too” (25.16). Nevertheless, no one is richer or stronger than the person who knows how to leave one’s material self and all one’s trash behind and place oneself on the rutted, deeply rutted, road to Humbletown. Each glimpse is not just a repeat performance, it is a fresh new experience. Each time the glimpse comes, it is as if it had never come before, so fresh, so sparkling is its never-failing wonder. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The higher awareness comes on imperceptibly and little by little. However, as it silently gathers itself, like a cloud, it also breaks like a renovating cloud—vehement, sparkling, and splashing. The belief, which prevails in Japan, China, and other lands, in a sudden abrupt enlightenment when one thinks quietly or says aloud, “Ah! so this is IT,” has a factual basis. This satori, as the Japanese call it, may be either a temporary or a permanent glimpse. The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to see. Such is the coming of a glimpse—at the moment of arrival, unsought. Although such glimpses come mostly when a human is alone, come in quiet solitude, they need not do so. They have sometimes come to one in a crowded street or on a well-filled ship. The signs of this visitation are not always the same. It may delicately brush one with the feeling of its presence or forcefully stimulate one with the strength of its being. The beginner usually has to go through an emotional experience in order to receive a mystical experience, but the proficient is under no necessity to do so. It comes into the orb of one’s awareness as an unstruggled and unsensational happening, so easily, so smoothly, that there is no dramatic emotion. The sensitive informed and experienced person may get intimations, may feel the glimpse coming even before the actual joyous event. In tat moment one feels on the very verge of eternity, about to lose oneself in its impersonal depths. When the opportunity to gain a glimpse of one’s Overself draws near, it will be foreshadowed by certain happenings, either of an inward or an outward nature, or both. The book of life may be understood in two senses. In one sense as the inscription of those who are chosen to life; thus we now speak of the book of life. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
In another sense the inscription of those things which lead us to life ay be called the book of life; and this also is twofold, either as of things to be done; and thus the Old and New Testament are called a book of life; or of things already done, and thus that divine energy by which it happens that to each one one’s deeds will be recalled to memory, is spoken of as the book of life. Thus that also may be called the book of war, whether it contains the names inscribed of those chosen for military service; or treats of the art of warfare, or relates the deeds of soldiers. It is the custom to inscribe, not those who are rejected, but those who are chosen. Whence there is no book of death corresponding to reprobation; as the book of life to predestination. Predestination and the book of life are different aspects of the same thing. For this latter implies the knowledge of predestination. The book of life implies a conscription or a knowledge of those chosen to life. Now a human is chosen for something which does not belong to one by nature; and again that to which a human is chosen has the aspect of an end. For a soldier is not chosen or inscribed merely to put on armor, but to fight; since this is the proper duty to which military service is directed. However, the life of glory is an end exceeding human nature. Wherefore, strictly speaking, the book of life regards the life of glory. The divine life, even considered as a life of glory, is natural to God; whence in His regard there is no election, and in consequence no book of life; for we do not say that anyone is chosen to possess the power of sense, or any of those things that are consequent on nature. For there is no election, nor a book of life, as regard the life of nature. The life of grace has the aspect, no of an end, but of something directed towards an end. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Hence nobody is said to be chosen to the life of grace, except so far as the life of grace is directed to glory. For this reason those who, possessing grace, fail to obtain glory, are not said to be chosen simply, but relatively. Likewise they are not said to be written in the book of life simply, but relatively; that is to say, hat it is in the ordination and knowledge of God that they are to have some relation to eternal life, according to their participation in grace. “Let them be blotted out from the book of living,” reports Psalms 68.29. Some have said that none could be blotted out of the book of life as a matter of fact, but only in the opinion of humans. For it is customary in the Scriptures to say that something is done when it becomes known. Thus some are said to be written in the book of life, inasmuch as humans think they are written therein, on account of the present righteousness they see in them; but when it becomes evident, either in this World or in he next, that they have fallen from that state of righteousness, they are then said to be blotted out. And thus a gloss explains the passage: “Let them be blotted out of the book of the living.” However, because not to be blotted out of the book of life is placed among the rewards of the just according to the text, “One that shall overcome, shall thus be clothed in white garments, and I will not blot one’s name out of the book of life,” reports Apocalypse 3.5. And what is promised to holy humans, is not merely something in the opinion of humans, it can therefore be said that to be blotted out, and not blotted out, of the book of life is not only to be referred to the opinion of humans, but to the reality of the fact. For the book of life is not only to be referred to the opinion of humans, but to the reality of the fact. For the book of life is the inscription of those ordained to eternal life, to which one is directed from two sources; namely, from predestination, which direction never fails, and from grace; for whoever has grace, by this very fact becomes fitted for eternal life. This direction fails sometimes; because some are directed by possessing grace, to obtain eternal life, yet they fail to obtain it through moral sin. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Therefore those who are ordained to possess eternal life through divine predestination are written down in the book of life simply, because they are written therein to have eternal life in reality; such are never blotted out from the book of life. Those, however, who are ordained to eternal life, not through divine predestination, but through grace, are said to be written in the book of life not simply, but relatively, for they are written therein not to have eternal life in itself, but in its cause only. Yet though these latter can be said to be blotted out of the book of life, this blotting out must not be referred to God, as if God foreknew a thing, and afterwards knew it not; but to the thing known, namely, because God knows one is first ordained to eternal life, and afterwards not ordained when one falls from grace. The act of blotting out does not refer to the book of life as regards God’s foreknowledge, as if in God there were any change; but as regards things foreknown, which can change. Although things are immutably in God, yet in themselves they are subject to change. To this it is that the blotting out of the book of life refers. The way in which one is said to be blotted out of the book of life is that in which one is said to be written therein anew; either in the opinion of human, or because one begins again to have relation towards eternal life through grace; which also is included in the knowledge of God, although not anew. Probability is founded on the presumption of a resemblance between those objects of which we have had experience and those of which we have had none; and therefore it is impossible that this presumption can arise from probability. The argument up to date shows that miracles are possible and that there is nothing antecedently ridiculous in the stories which say that God has sometimes performed them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
This does not mean, of course, hat we are committed to believing all stories of miracles. Most stories about miraculous events are probably false: if it comes to that, most stories about natural events are false. Lies, exaggerations, misunderstandings and hearsay make up perhaps more than half of all that is said and written in the World. We must therefore find a criterion whereby to judge any particular story of the miraculous. In one sense, of course, our criterion is plain. Those stories are to be accepted for which the historical evidence is sufficiently good. However, then, as we saw at the outset, the answer to the question, “How much evidence should we require for this story,” depends on our answer to the question, “How far is this story intrinsically probable?” We must therefore find a criterion of probability. The ordinary procedure of the modern historian, even if one admits the possibility of miracle, is to admit no particular instance of it until every possibility of “natural” explanation has been tried and failed. That is, one will accept the most improbable “natural” explanations rather than say that a miracle occurred. Collective hallucinations, hypnotism of unconsenting spectators, widespread instantaneous conspiracy in lying by persons not otherwise known to be liars and not likely to gain by the lie—all these are known to be very improbably events: so improbably that, except for the special purpose of excluding a miracle, they are never suggested. However, they are preferred to be the admission of a miracle. Such a procedure is, from the purely historical point of view, sheer midsummer madness unless we start by knowing that any Miracles whatever is more improbable than the most improbable natural event. Do we know this? We must distinguish the different kinds of improbability. Since miracles are, by definition, rarer than other events, it is obviously improbable beforehand that one will occur at any given place and time. In that sense every miracle is improbable. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
It is immensely improbable beforehand that a pebble dropped from the stratosphere over London will hit any given spot, or that any one particular person will win a large lottery. However, the report that the pebble has landed outside such and such a shop or that Mr. So-and-So has won the lottery is not at all incredible. When you consider the immense number of meetings and fertile union between ancestors which were necessary in order that you should be born, you perceive that it was once immensely improbable that such a person as you should come to exist: but one you are here, the report of your existence is not in the least incredible. With probability of this kind—antecedent probability of chances—we are not there concerned. Our business is with historical probability. Ever since Hume’s famous Essay it has been believed that historical statements about miracles are the most intrinsically improbable of all historical statements. According to Hume, probability rests on what may be called the majority vote of our past experiences. The more often a thing has been known to happen, the more probable it is that it should happen again; and the less often the less probable. Now the regularity of Nature’s course, says Hume, is supported by something better than the majority vote of past experiences: it is supported by their unanimous vote, or, as Hume says, by “firm and unalterable experience.” There is, in fact, “uniform experience” against Miracle; otherwise, says Hume, it would not be a Miracle. A miracle is therefore the most improbable of all events. It is always more probable that the witnesses were lying or mistaken than that a miracle occurred. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Now of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely “uniform experience” against miracles, if in other words they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle. There is also an objection to Hume which leads us deeper into our problem. The whole idea of Probability (as Hume understands it) depends on the principle of the Uniformity of Nature. Unless Nature always goes on in the same way, the fact that a thing had happened ten million times would not make it a whit more probable that it would happen again. And how do we know the Uniformity of Nature? A moment’s thought shows that we do not know it by experience. We observe many regularities in Nature. However, of course all the observations that humans have made or will make while the race lasts cover only a minute fraction of the events that actually go on. Our observations would therefore be of no use unless we felt sure that Nature when we are no watching her behaves in the same way as when we are: in other words, unless we believed in the Uniformity of Nature. Experience therefore cannot prove uniformity, because uniformity has to be assumed before experience proves anything. And mere length of experience does not help matters. It is no good saying, “Each fresh experience confirms our belief in uniformity and therefore we reasonably expect that it will always be confirmed”; for that argument works only on the assumption of Uniformity under a new name. Can we say that Uniformity is at any rate very probable? Unfortunately not. We have just seen that all probabilities depend on it. Unless Nature is uniform, nothing is either probable or improbable. And clearly the assumption which you have to make before there is any such thing as probability cannot itself be probable. The odd thing is that no human knew this better than Hume. His Essay on Miracles is quite inconsistent with the more radical, and honourable, scepticism of his main work. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Throughout the Second Wave era the mass media grew more and more powerful. Today a startling change is taking place. As the Third Wave thunders in, the mass media, far from expanding their influence, are suddenly being forced to share it. They are being beaten back on many fronts at once by what I call the “de-massified media.” Newspapers provide the first example. The oldest of the Second Wave mass media, newspapers are losing their readers and staff. The estimated total U.S. daily newspaper circulation (print and digital combined) in 2020 was 24.3 million for weekday and 25.8 million for Sunday, each down by 6 percent from the previous year. Nor were such losses due merely to the rise of television. Each of today’s mass-circulation dailies now faces increasing competition from burgeoning flock of mini-circulation weeklies, biweeklies, and so-called “shoppers” that serve not the metropolitan mass market but specific neighbourhoods and communities within it, providing far more localized advertising and news. Having reached saturation, the big-city mass-circulation daily is in deep trouble. De-massified media are snapping at its heels. The United States of America has experienced and explosion of electronic journals and mini-magazines—thousands of them aimed at small, special-interest, regional, global, or even local markets. And it is not all bad news. Their programs focus on things their producers like. They are not really targeting an audience, but producing and sharing things they are interested and that they believe will help others, so their content is not the same as the doom and gloom of the mass media, which people find appealing because no one wants made to feel sad, fearful or anxious. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
For instance, pilots and aviation buffs today can chose among literally scores of periodicals edited just foe them. Teenagers, scuba divers, retired people, women athletes, collectors of antique camera, tennis enthusiasts, skiers, and skateboarders each have their own press. Every organization, community group, political or religious cult and cultlet today can afford to produce is own publication. Even smaller groups churn out periodicals on the Internet that have become ubiquitous in American and International offices, homes, and classrooms. The news media and magazines have lost their powerful influence in national life, especially with people trying to safe trees and also the fact people now know news is not necessarily true nor honest work. It is entertainment which is trying to compete with fictional television shows. Many people, however, have the intentions to maintain the peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to one, and prefers on every occasion the public utility to one’s own interest. Between the 1920s and the end of the second World War, the very limited amount of African American suburbanization generally took one of two forms. The first was the all-African American suburb. Almost all of these suburbs were poor, and the majority were unincorporated. In the south, it was common for non-European Americas to live in small hamlets and less-developed areas on the city’s periphery. These low-income shantytown neighbourhoods often even lacked community water and sewage and were suburban in name only. While such small communities were technically in the suburbs, socially and economically they were not of the suburbs. An example of this type of suburb was the African American suburb of Kinloch, 6 miles outside the city limits of St. Louis. Kinloch, surrounded by more affluent European America suburbs, did not become incorporated until 1948. It was typical of early African American suburbs insofar as because of a limited tax base, it had poor school, potholed roads, and minimal government services. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The roads from Ferguson, the suburb east of Kinloch, actually stopped short of Kinloch at an overgrown easement only to start up again on the Kinloch side of the border. As late as 1970 some of these African American “suburban” neighbourhoods could be seen south of Washington, D.C., across the district line. During the interwar period, some solid working class-African American suburbs also existed, such as Robbins, southwest of Chicago. At this time the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) directly supported segregated housing by refusing to make loans in other than all-one-race areas. Until 1950 FHA regulations specially prohibited making loans that would permit racial integration. The Federal Housing Administration’s official manuals cautioned against infiltration of inharmonious racial and national groups, a lower class of inhabitants, or the presence of incompatible racial elements, in the new neighbourhood. Thus, federal policies prohibited loans that would encourage the integration of neighbourhoods. During World War II, the FHA consistently refused to insure war-housing projects for African American workers. The formal regulations were not changed until the Kennedy years of the early 1960s, and the policies really did not change until the Open Housing Act of 1968 barred housing discrimination. However, the outlawing of discriminatory policies did not eliminate informal practices of racial steering, where African Americans were shown housing only in areas already having African American residents. The second form of African American suburbanization prior to World War II included small communities of African Americans found in the most elite suburbs. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
African Americans living in such suburbs were not equal-status homeowners. Some of them did not have professional jobs. The 1930s census showed, for example, that along Chicago’s prestigious North Shore, 5 percent of Glencoe’s and 4.3 percent of Kenilworth’s residents were African American. Overtime some of the African Americans without professional jobs purchased or built small homes in the less desirable sections of the community. Such African American populations contained the seeds of social change. For example, Evanston, on Chicago’s North Shore, as of 1930 listed 7.8 percent of is population as African American. Evanston as of that date already had a separate aspiring middle-class African American neighbourhood for those working on the North Shore. Overtime this nucleus would grow to be a substantial portion of the Evanston community. One reason for the new interest in human spirituality is that its source in intuition is radically different from the rational, densely factual nature of science and therefore generates feelings. New Age Spirituality—alternative and usually individualistic forms of spiritual consciousness illustrated by New Age bookstore sections—feeds off both waning of communal religion and the advance of science. In an age where many religions—and ever more—coexist, religious dogma may seem less credible. Yet science fails to answer our ultimate questions: Why are we here? How should be live? What is our ultimate destiny? If the old faith seems unbelievable and the new science seems to demystify life, then people will find mystery and meaning in new places. It has been said that when some people cease believing in Gog, they do not believe nothing, they believe anything. Nature abhors a spiritual vacuum. The quest for meaning is fundamental to our being. The human mind has a genuine desire to plumb the depths of the unspoken, to find deeper significance and truth, to reach out to another realm of existence. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
New Age “soft spirituality” is essentially irreligious. “I am not religious,” one hears, “but I am very spiritual.” This is the privatized spirituality of radical individualism, the solo spirituality of pop cultural. This is the spirituality of religion, minus the things one does not like about religion, such as the authoritative status of sacred texts and communally shared beliefs. New Age spirituality differs from biblical spirituality not only in its individualism but also in its understanding of human nature. Biblical spirituality places its most basic distinction between all of creation (both people and animals) and God who is creator. In the Old Testament book of Isaiah God declares, “I am God; there is none like me.” The Holy Spirit is given to provide us with a deeper knowledge of both God and a wisdom that goes beyond rational and scientific forms of knowing. However, biblical spirituality still maintains the distinction between God and mortal, finite humans. New Age spirituality replies that we are emanations of God: The divine is within you. You are immortal. You are a soul who inhabits your body, and thus able to travel out of body, read others’ minds, and glimpse the future. Your spirit or soul may also have inhabited another being, and may again be reincarnated in someone to come. You are undying and capable of communicating with those who, also undying, have passed to the other side, the spirit World. You do not need God to give you hope of life beyond death, because there is no death. You are already an eternal spirit. At your body’s death, you will meet a gentle being of light (which already had been experienced by those near-death survivours whose spirits temporarily vacated their bodies). #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
New Age spirituality offers other comforting messages. Angels protect us. There are no fortunate random coincidences, but rather angelic or divine interventions. Evil is not real (though some are spiritually impoverished). Fear, loneliness, and pain can be dismissed. Given positive attitudes, optimum health, serene bliss, and joy of pleasures of the flesh awaits us. And then there is the New Age elevation of intuition. IF you feel it, it is true. Truth is much less a matter of logic and verification than of personal experience and testimony. Neale Donald Walsch illustrates this radical individualism in his disdain for history and community and in his elevation of the individua self. Walsch has had “conversations with God” (so reads the title of the book he has written), and here is what God says: The wisdom of faith traditions is “not authoritative.” So “listen to your feelings. Listen to your Highest Thoughts. Listen to your experience. Whenever any one of these differ from what you have been told by your teachers, or read in your book, forget the words.” We are being held together by some kind of bonding or gluing, or held together by some central unifying force that rules the other parts and holds them together as the force of gravity does or the focus around which perspectives organize themselves—such a power, central and hierarchically organized, is postulated by Plato and has been the most generally accepted metaphor in Western thought from its beginnings. No doubt there are minds almost entirely held together in one or other of these ways. As a rule, however, which metaphor is most useful at any time depends on a number of factors: the kind of person under discussion, the kind of structures which are falling apart, and so on. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
When we think of neural connections, and when we think of the association of ideas, we tend to think of structures held together by connecting bonds. Neural connections exemplify this kind of cohesion. Sense-impressions build up into perceptions, which integrate into concepts and ever more complex structures. Variations in integration and coherence are seen to determine structure so that the very nature of structure could be defined in terms of bonds—there are more neural associations within a structure than between structures. Regions of the personality are bonded together more or less strongly depending on the number of associations between them. The number of associations determines the extent of integration. A relative absence of associations defines a gap or fissure—the fewer the associations, the wider the split. As anyone knows who has glued things, the things to be stuck together need to be held firmly in a kind of frame until the glue holds. Then the frame is no longer needed. The concepts of boundary and space are boundaries and frames of this kind. Frames provide restrictions or limitations which can be used to further the integration within. A picture must be painted on a certain canvas; a poem must be written in sonnet form. Within the frame there is space for a creative live. When there is a frame that gives space and protection, all the resonances and echoes and reverberation of an individual’s experiences have time to work themselves out. They do not get lost; they are not cut off prematurely. Ego-relatedness normally provides a frame. It provides the safety within which various experiences may come to be connected and associated, although they occurred at different times in different contexts. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Good parenting provides the frame within which psychological associations can ramify and become strong. In this way, good parenting leads to personalities which have strong and well-integrated structures. With less ego-relatedness, the individual has less space and time to get this inter-connecting process going, and so it retains more dissociated experiences. When people experience themselves as lacking a containment, something is rushing through them—a noise, a sensation, an impression—which they cannot hold on to. This sense, of something rushing through, may be how we experience unintegrated sensory streams of unprocessed uncontained stimulation. It is what falling apart sometimes feels like: what is going on does not make sense to us. Not making sense is the same as not being organized into a meaningful pattern. Or we may be unable to find a framework of meaning into which to organize what is happening. Boundaries seems to facilitate organization; insecure boundaries seem often to hinder it. There is an interesting connection between uncontained state and the autistic individual’s desperate clutching of hard objects. In some states of mind, holding one to something with firm contour might feel much like being something with firm contours. The common element would be there is something firm for holding something formless. Firm contours seem to be needed, whether they belong to the infant (in us) or they belong to whatever the individual feels held and contained by. Whether the something firm is my skin or yours seems less important than the fact that it prevents me feeling a rushing shapeless flowing away. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The function of the boundary frame are reminiscent of Pribram’s “bag of skin,” and Winnicott’s “membrane.” Our skins provide a compelling metaphor for such holding functions, more flexible and organic than the idea of a frame. The skin protects. The vulnerable skinless self and its care, means that especially when an infant, something or someone is needed to give one space and protect against impingement from without, and also from within—from loneliness, pain, rage. Failure in the holding environment, perhaps because of illness in the mother (or caregiver), can mean that the individual’s line of life is interrupted and its development hindered by the need for defence against primitive anxiety. However, it can also be seen that failure of the father to protect the mother in the crucial weeks after one’s birth can contribute to this state of affairs. If the circle made by the father, or by some person fulfilling the father’s function is broken, the mother cannot abandon herself without anxiety to her infant’s needs. The parents, who are normally the child’s holding environment, may at times be fiercely tested, especially at times when feelings are strong. Once again, we have reached a set of ideas where parallels can be perceived between what good parents do and what psychotherapists do. The reader has probably practiced at recognizing these passages by now. It is important that whoever hold the infant (of the older child or the adolescent or the adult) is strong enough to hold on to, either to prevent explosion and fragmentation, or to form the framework for such disintegration and for subsequent integration. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
The survival of the mother who does not retaliate, together with the father who comes to represent the indestructible environment, allows for freedom of the instinctual life—the source of spontaneity—within the family circle. In the earliest days, it is the caring adult whose insightful and coping skills protect, as with a shielding skin, the helpless and defenceless infant. In favourable circumstances, however, these functions will gradually be taken over by the competent developing infant. Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden, suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood. Please teach us to care and not to care. Please teach us to sit still, even among these rocks. Our peace in one’s will and even among these rocks, sister, mother, and spirit of the river, spirit of the sea. Please suffer me not to be separated and please let my cry come unto Thee. O inscribe all the children of Thy covenant for a happy life. May all the living do homage unto Thee forever and praise Thy name in truth, O God, who are our salvation and our help. Blessed be Thou, O Lord, Beneficent One, unto whom our thanks are due. Grant lasting peace unto America Thy people, for Thou art the Sovereign Lord of peace; and may it be good in Thy sight to bless Thy people America at all times with Thy peace. In this book of life, blessing, peace and ample sustenance, may we, together with all Thy people, the house of America, be remembered and inscribed before Thee for a happy life and for peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who establisest peace. In every system throughout antiquity there is an ascetic preliminary side which purifies the mind and the body and then only does meditation start. Without such purification, that is, asceticism, all the dangers of meditation—hallucination, misuse of occult powers, egotistic fancies, mediumship, and so on—are free to raise, but with it there is better protection against them. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Almost a Free Citizen–The “God Factor” is Not a Mere 5 Percent but 100 Percent!
Please bless us with a moral and spiritual restoration in the land. We give you thanks Thy sovereignty Thou has permitted us to have a momentous history. Why do you demand beauty rest—another echo from the Book of Job (5.7)—when you were born for hard labour? Set yourself up more for long-suffering than short-suffering, more for toting the cross than admiring it. If one could have them on demand, character from the secular World would not gladly accept consolations? After all, they exceed in delectation and duration all the delicacies of the World and all the pleasures of the Flesh. The former taste out of this World, but only for a while; then they begin to cloy. As for the later, trying to prolong a pleasure of the Flesh. The former taste out of this World, but only for a while; then they begin to cloy. As for the latter, trying to prolong a pleasure—is that not just about the most pitiful of human exercises? What is the moral? Truly, spiritual desserts alone are the real thing, whipped up from virtues into frosted layers of pure thoughts. But however mouth watering they are, no one can enjoy them for long. Why? Because the time for temptation is never far off. If we did not put up so many roadblocks, consolation would visit us more often. Two bumptious examples: Braggart Spirituality and Bogus Confidence. God does well by giving the grace of consolation. We do ill when we attribute the whole gracious phenomenon to our own efforts. In a situation like this, the graces cannot flow; our pipes are clogged. That is because we are ungrateful to the Fountained of All Grace, from whom we receive all these Heavenly Gifts and to whom we should return to all thanks. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
What is the moral? Grace is always available for the asking. Trouble is, not everyone asks. Sometimes, to feed the humble pigeon, God robs the proud puffin. Yes, consolation’s a good thing, but not all consolations are good. We are succored by some, but suckered by others. I do not want the sort that takes contrition away from me. And the same could be said of contemplation. I do not want the kind that leads me to pride. Is there a snare here? Of course there is. Not everything that is high is holy; nor every sweet, good; nor every desire, pure; nor every dear thing, something that tickles God’s fancy. How then can we tell the good from the good? The grace that makes me more humble, more careful, that is the True Grace, the grace that truly helps me leave my worldliness behind. Having gone to the School of Grace, then, and severed all times to worldliness, we will not have the audacity to beat on our chests like drums and trumpet our goodness abroad. Rather, we will mouth our maximas culpas and bare our poor souls at home. What is the moral? Give to God what belongs to Him, Matthew has advised (22.21), and take note of what is yours. Give thanks to God for grace. However, your faults and the punishment that is due them you will have to bear yourself. Keep placing yourself on the lowest rung—if I may be pardoned a little laddering in the Lord—and the highest rung will soon be yours. Why? Because the highest stands on the shoulders of the lowest. “When you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, one will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honoured in the presence of all the other guests,” reports Luke 14.10. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
The Saints who stand high in God’s esteem are the same blokes who lie low in their own esteem. If I may put it crudely, the more they grovel, the more they will revel. Founded and grounded in God, they cannot be proud. Full of Truth and Heavenly Glory, they lose their tastes for Earthly glory. They ascribe totally to God whatever good comes their way. They seek glory—not the kind that is from human beings, but the kind of glory that is from God alone. “How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” reports John 5.44. The moral? Devouts desire God to be praised in Himself and all His Saints above all else, and they direct all their efforts toward that very goal. We should be grateful for the small gifts, and soon we will be found worthy of larger ones. A word of advise. Unwrap the tiniest one with the same sense of glee as the humongous one. And if a truly disgusting thing is found inside, count it a special gift. Always consider the dignity of the donor, and no gift will ever seem too small, too cheap. Need I say it? It is not the largeness of the gift; it is the largesse of the giver. If God should give pain and suffering, count them as gifts too. Why? It seems to me I hear you ask. Because what He gives and what He allows are for your own salvation. Anyone who wants to keep the blessings of God coming should be grateful for the grace just given and patient for the grace yet to come. In the latter instance, you should pray that the grace may return. If you do not prostrate yourself before the Divine Tribunal toward that end, I cannot help adding, it may not return. As always, you should be open and humble. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The prayer experiments can stimulate us to clarify our understanding of prayer. To believe in and wholeheartedly engage in petitionary prayer, we must agree that prayer disturbs nature’s events in statistically verifiable ways. Job’s experience reminds us that God does not play favourites; the rain falls both on those who plead with God and on those who do not. Still, would we be wrong to presume that, other things being equal, praying parents will have 5 percent fewer stillborn or disabled babies than nonpraying parents? To suppose so is to fall victim to the natural/supernatural dichotomy. In the biblical view, the “God factor” is not a mere 5 percent but 100 percent. One does not need a manipulative conception of prayer to induce God’s involvement in the World; God is everywhere and at all times already involved. Thus when the Pharisees pressed Jesus for some criteria by which they could validate the Kingdom of God, Jesus answered, “You cannot tell by observation when the Kingdom of God comes. There will be no one saying, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ for in fact the Kingdom of God is among you.” What, then, is the Christian’s proper prayer? First of all, it is a declaration of praise and thanksgiving for God’s infinite goodness and an acknowledgement of sin and the need for forgiveness. Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven. Please give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Christ’s prayer, the model prayer for Christians, contains no attempt to manipulate God. It does not attempt to cajole a miserly god into doing what he would not have the goodwill and good sense to do anyway. It has the quality of a confessional statement, affirming God’s nature and human dependence upon God’s grace. It therefore prepares one to receive that which God by his nature is already providing. The petitions that God’s will be done and that forgiveness be given for debts seek what is intrinsic to God’s nature. The petition for daily bread serves to reinforce the sense of God as gracious Father, of humanity as dependent and anticipating children, and of our lives as daily saturated by God’s providence. The prayer of a Christian is not an attempt to force God’s hand, but a humble acknowledgment of helplessness and dependence. Prayers is not magic, but it is mystical. In quiet meditation and prayer, we sense he reality of the living God. Good speaks to us and we to God. As we do so we are changed. Sinking to our knees or bowing our heads reminds us of our humble dependence. Prayers for others makes us more aware of their needs. There is nothing that makes us love a human so much as praying for one. Prayer may also be viewed as a response, as an effect rather than a cause, as a time not of asking: “What are we to eat? What are we to drink? What shall we wear?” All these are things for the heathen to run after, no for you, because your Heavenly Father knows that you need them all. Set your mind on God’s Kingdom and His justice before everything else, and all the rest will come to you as well. Grace is divine help and strength that we receive through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Through grace, we are saved from sin and death. In addition, grace is an enabling power that strengthens us from day to day and helps us endure to the end. Effort is required on our part to receive the fulness of the Lord’s grace. “For we labour diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do,” reports 2 Nephi 25.23. The Lord is near; have no anxiety, but in everything make your requests known to God in prayer and petition with Thanksgiving. Then the peace of God, which is beyond our utmost understanding, will keep guard over your hearts and your thoughts in Jesus Christ. St. Paul urges us to petition God, and we are promised an answer: not that of scientifically provable effects, but the peace of God that satisfies the deeper cravings of our being. Jesus Christ Himself prayed that, if it be God’s will, the cup might pass. It did not, but His strength was made equal to the burden. In confessing His private longings and communing with the Father, Jesus found the grace to endure. If our Creator loves us as an all-loving parent would love a child, then we, like children, can communicate with God without ceasing. We can share even the little concerns of daily existence—anything that is worth worrying about—much as a child would do with its parents or as two intimate friends do with one another. We can surrender every corner of our lives in prayer, not with a superstitious intent of manipulating magical solutions to life’s problems, but in the confidence that petitionary prayer is a means of grace whereby we will grow and be sensitized to the presence of God. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
To ask “What is the use of petitionary prayer?” is like asking what is the use of making music, skiing, or sharing a meal with a friend; such activities, like prayer, are inherently worthwhile quite apart from any further purposes they serve. And le us not forget prayer’s multiple purposes. Through prayer we thank and praise God, we humbly confess our sin and acknowledge our dependence upon God’s grace, we express our concerns, and we seek inward peace and the strength to live as God’s people. An information bomb is exploding in our midst, showering us with a shrapnel of images and drastically changing the way each of us perceives and acts upon our private World. In shifting from Second Wave to a Third Wave info-sphere, we are transforming our own psyches. Each of us creates in one’s skull a mind-model or reality—a warehouse of images. Some of these are visual, others are auditory, even tactile. Some are only “percepts”—traces of information about our environment, like a glimpse of blue sky seen from the corner of the eye. Others are “linkages” that define relationships, like the two words “mother” and “child.” Some are simple, others complex and conceptual, like the idea that “inflation is caused by rising wages.” Together such images add up to our picture of the World—locating us in time, space, and the network of personal relationships around us. These images do not spring from nowhere. They are formed, in ways we do not understand, out of the signals or information reaching us from the environment. And as our environment convulses with change—as our jobs, homes, churches, schools, and political arrangements feel that impact of the Third Wave—the sea of information around us also changes. Before the advent of mass media, a First Wave child growing up in a slowly changing village built one’s model of reality out of images received from a tiny handful of sources—the teacher, the priest, the chief or official and, above all, the family. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
As psychologist-futurist Herbert Gerjuoy has noted: “There was no television or radio in the home to give the child a chance to meet many different kinds of strangers from many different walks of life and even from different countries…Very few people ever saw an international city….The result [was that] people had only a small number of different people to imitate or model themselves after. “Their choices were even more limited by the fact that the people they could model themselves after were themselves all of limited experience with other people.” The images of the World built up by the village child, therefore, were extremely narrow in range. The messages one received, moreover, were highly redundant in at least two senses: they came, usually, in the form of casual speech, which is normally filled with pauses and repetitions, and they came in the form of connected “strings” of ideas reinforced by various information givers. The child heard the same “thou shalt nots” in church and in school. Both reinforced the messages sent out by the family and the state. Consensus in the community, and strong pressures for conformity, acted on the child from birth to narrow still further the range of acceptable imagery and behaviour. The Second Wave multiplied the number of channels from which the individual drew one’s picture of reality. The child no longer received imagery from nature or people alone but from newspapers, mass magazines, radio and, later on, from television. For the most part, church, states, home, and school continued to speak in unison, reinforcing one another. However, not the mass media themselves became a giant loudspeaker. And their power was used across regional, ethic, tribal, and linguistic lines to standardize the images flowing in society’s mind-stream. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Certain visual images, for example, were so widely mass-distributed and were implanted in so many millions of private memories that they were transformed, in effect, into icons. The image of Xi Jinping, jaw thrust out in triumph under a swirling red flag, thus became as iconic for millions of people as the image of Jesus on the cross. The image of Aaliayh in the Queen of the Damned billboard, or Beyonce raging at Super Bowl XLVII Halftime Show, the images of fans in the bleachers stacked like waves in the ocean during a full moon, or Paris Hilton making the illuminati hand gesture, while driving her custom BMW i8 in Malibu, or Britney Spears drinking a Pepsi, of Marilyn Monroe’s skirt blown by the wind, of hundreds of media stars and thousands of different, universally recognizable commercial products—the bar of Ivory soap in the Unite States of America, the Morinaga chocolate and Wagyu beef in Japan, the bottle of Perrier in France (which Meghan, Duchess of Sussex is said to bathe in and wash her face with)—all became standard parts of a universal image-file. This centrally produced imagery, injected into the “mass mind” by the mass media, helped produce the standardization of behaviour required by the industrial production system. Today the Third Wave is drastically altering all this. As change accelerates in society, it forces a parallel acceleration within us. New information reaches us and we are forced to revise our image-file continuously at a faster and faster rate. Older images based on past reality must be replaced, for, unless we update them, our actions become divorced from reality and we become progressively less competent. We find it impossible to cope. This speed up of image processing inside us means that images grow more and more temporary. Throwaway art, one-shot sitcoms, Polaroid snapshots, Xerox copies, compact disc, Blockbuster Video Stores, Bonker’s candy, pay phones, and disposable graphics pop up and vanish. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Idea, beliefs, and attitudes skyrocket into consciousness, are challenged, defined, and suddenly fade into nowhere-ness. Scientific and psychological theories are overthrown and superseded daily. Ideologies crack. Celebrities pirouette fleetingly across our awareness. Contradictory political and moral slogans assail us. It is difficult to make sense of this swirling phantasmagoria, to understand exactly how the image-manufacturing process is changing. For the Third Wave does more than simply accelerate our information flows; it transforms the deep structure of information on which our daily actions depend. Until the twentieth century, the African American population in the United States of America was overwhelmingly rural and southern. On the even of the Civil War, the south was rural, as of 1860, only 8.6 percent of the total population living in cities. Slavery was essentially a rural institution founded on a plantation economy, and plantation owners vigorously opposed the use of people as slaves in urban manufacturing. Laws were passed in the attempt to restrict the number of enslaved people in cities, and, as a consequence, the urban African American population actually declined in most southern cities prior to the Civil War. Slaveholders feared that slaves’ relative freedom of life in the cities would undermine the south’s “peculiar institution.” In this fear they were quite justified. In urban areas the system of enslaved people being hired out or even hiring themselves out and sharing their income with their nominal owners led to a modification of the system. In effect, through such contractual agreements, the enslaved persons “purchased” some degree of freedom. According to Mr. Frederick Douglas, the major African American figure of the Civil War period, such an urban slave was “almost a free citizen.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Prior to the Civil War not all African Americans were slaves. As of 1860, roughly one of every eight Africans Americans was a “free person of colour.” The great bulk of those free persons of colour were urban, and most lived in border states. It is usually not known that when the war began, Richmond, Virginia, the Capitol of the Confederacy, counted one-fifth of its African American population as “free persons of colour.” Moreover, one-quarter of the city’s African American population, including some enslaved African Americas, owned their own modest homes. By comparison, at the outbreak of the war, the northern states had only limited populations of freed African Americans. In the north, as in the south, the only African American suburbanites were usually those living in the poor shantytowns on the city’s fringe. The initial expectation after the Civil War was that African Americans would flood out of the rural south. It did not happen. Even the extensive political and social changes wrought by Reconstruction did not change the overwhelmingly rural and southern pattern of African American residence. Social relations remained castelike, with African Americans not in competition with European Americas for jobs or status. Thus, there was no need to segregate the races in terms of housing. A common southern pattern was for European Americans to occupy the big house on the street while African Americans lived in the south, and three-quarters of all African Americas were rural. What did change African American residence patterns was the first World War. The outbreak of war in 1914 cut off the supply of European immigrant labour just as the times factories were being flooded with war orders. Humanity distinguishes itself by the ability to think and feel. But what happens when a machine has the same abilities? #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
New labour sources had to be found to replace the loss labour source. One method was increasing the use of woman workers. The second was to recruit labour from the rural south. Northern factories sent recruiters south offering one-way train ticket to those, African American as well as European American, who would sign up for factory jobs. In the early years of the twentieth century, life had been getting harder for rural African Americans with the mechanization of agriculture, the spreading destruction of cotton crops by the boll weevil, and new Jim Crow laws that brought increasing segregation and racial repression. These factors provided a strong push that, when combined with the pull for northern jobs, initiated a mass migration of rural African Americas to the urban north. The World War I decade (1910-1920) saw the five states of the deep “black belt”—Southern Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—lose over 400,000 African Americans to out-migration. The migration continued during the 1920s, with high African American growth rates for major norther cities. New York (114 percent), Chicago (113 percent), Detroit (194 percent), and Philadelphia (64 percent) showed the heaviest growth. Harlem, which was already crowded in 1920, added fives times more residents during the decade. The Depression years of the 1930s saw migration slow and then shoot up dramatically during the World War II years because of the needs of war industries and the implementation by President Roosevelt of an executive order mandating fair employment policies. The aftermath of the war saw the urban relocation of African Americas continue. By the time the migration to northern cities had substantially run is course in the late 1960s, over 5 million African Americans had left the south for norther cities. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Chicago now housed more African American than all of Mississippi, and the New York metropolitan area had more African Americans than any state of the old south. This movement to urban places provided the population for consequent African American suburbanization. Everyone is striving to be happy but the number who truly achieve that goal is limited. Who are the happy people today? Not those who forsake the Lord and devote themselves entirely to the pleasures of life and the physical things of the World. The truly happy people are those who have faith in the Lord and keep the laws of the gospel, those who forget self in their desire and effort to bless others. Our Heavenly Father loves His children. He wants us to be happy, and He has shown us the way. Many of us are fathers—fathers of mortal bodies of our children. The greatest treasures we have are our children. When they are happy and successful, we are happy. When they depart from the straight and narrow path, the hearts of the parents are saddened. Our Lord has told us by revelation through the Prophet Joseph Smith regarding the worth of souls: “Remember the worth of souls is great in the sight of God. For, behold, the Lord your Redeemer suffered death in the flesh; wherefore He suffered the pain of all humans, that all humans might repent and come unto Him. And He hath risen again from the dead, that He might bring all humans unto Him, on conditions of repentance. And how great is His joy in the soul that repenteth,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 18.10-13. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
What are the forces which prevent people from “falling apart”? “Falling apart” and “disintegrating”—ceasing to be integrated—are appropriate metaphors, suggesting that different regions of the personality lose contact with one another. Great anxiety, as well as high fevers and toxic states, can have this effect. We do not know where we are. We are “at a loss”. Many different kinds of regions and organizations makes up the personality, and people can disintegrate in different ways. We have seen that basic faults may split regions along a variety of lines, different writers tending to be interested in different lines. “Falling apart” may refer to the dissociation of simple organizations of memories—traces as they lose touch with one another and we forget what we read in a book, or auntie’s birthday, or what we had for dinner last Wednesday. It can also refer to the progressive isolation of mere complex organizations such as particular self-images or particular relationships with other people and things. Or even more central processes may cease to function. Our ego-functions may desert us. Then there is the kind of isolation of different regions of the personality for which Kohut coined the phrase “vertical split”—we do not feel we are ourselves. “I do not know what made me do it,” “It is not like me,” “It is the drink talking,” “I did not mean it.” And there is the “schizoid” feeling of disembodiment when constant attention seems to be needed to keep the too loosely organized structures from flying apart. If we choose to give birth to a thinking machine, we must prepare for the day when our progeny with demand independence. Prayer gives the body and mind a chance to regain its lost chemical balance. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
With prayer, energy is set free to cleanse the mind and body concerned. Sometimes prayer and the regime take almost instantaneous effect, but more often some time must elapse for the results to show themselves. This need to purify our thoughts and connect with God is to make our minds better and obey the spirit. The benefits are not only physical and moral but also psychological, since it enjoins patience and perseverance. The seeker may take this calmly and without anxiety. This is the way in which the subconscious forces prompted by the Overself concentrate their work of purification and renovation upon the body and feeling alone for a time, to gain the most effective result in the shortest time. Thus, those forces which would otherwise be used up in creating the desire to meditate—the atrophy of willpower and the deprivation of energy in this direction need not be fought but should be accepted as a passing and necessary phenomenon. All though the Winter months while the Book of Mormon was being printed, Joseph and Oliver were concerned about their part in the marvelous work the Lord had promised to do through them. They spent much time praying and studying both the Bible and the new Book of Mormon. God caused their minds to be enlightened so they understood the things they read. From time to time during these Winter months, the Lord gave instructions about the Church of Jesus Christ which was to be restored to the Earth. These have been grouped together as Section 17 of the Doctrine and Covenants. Some of these instructions were: The church was to be organized according to the laws of the land on April 6, 1830, with Joseph Smith as the first elder and Oliver Cowdery as the Second elder. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The duties of the officers of the church were explained. The elder is to baptize, confirm by the laying on of hands for the gift of the Holy Spirit, ordain others, serve the bread and beverages, teach, preach, and take the lead in all meetings as led by the Holy Spirit. The priest is to teach, preach, and baptize. He is to serve the bread and beverages, visit in the homes of members and teach them o pray, ordain other priests, teachers, or deacons, and assist the elders. If no elder is present, the priest should lead the meeting. The teacher is to watch over he church members, strengthening them, and see that there is no trouble or quarreling among them. He is to teach and preach, and if no elders or priests are present, he should lead the meetings. The deacon is to assist other members of the priesthood, but the teacher and deacon may not baptize, serve the Sacrament, nor lay on hands. Those who have repented and are willing to serve Jesus all their lives are to be baptized in water. Specific instructions as to the manner of baptism were given, as follows: The person who is called of God and has authority from Jesus Christ to baptize, shall go down into the water with the person who has presented oneself for baptism, and shallsay, calling one by name. Having been commissioned of Jesus Christ, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen. Then shall he immerse one in the water, and come forth again out of the water. To become members of the church, those who have been baptized are to be confirmed by the laying on of hands of the elders. Every member of the church of Chris having children, is to bring them unto the elders before the church, who are to lay their hands upon them in the name of Jesus Christ, and bless them in His name. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
No one can be received into the church of Christ unless one has arrived unto the years of accountability before God, and is capable of repentance. And the members shall manifest by a Godly walk and conversation that they are worthy of it, that there may be works and faith agreeable to the Holy Scriptures, walking in holiness before the Lord. The method of administering the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was explained and the exact prayers to be offered over he bread and beverage were given. The necessity of keeping a regular list of all the names of the memberships of the whole church was stressed. The various branches of the church were instructed to keep a record of all who untied with the church and to send this record to the conference. When a member moved from one place to another, the Lord instructed that they were to take a letter certifying they were a member of the church in good standing. In a revelation given through Joseph Smith, Jr., in March, 1830, for Martin Harris, the Lord said: Learn of me, and listen to my words; walk in meekness of my Spirit and you shall have peace in me. I am Jesus Christ; I came by the will of the Father, and I do His will. I command Thee that thou shalt pray vocally as well as in thy heart; yea, before the World as well as in secret; in public as well as in private. And thou shalt declare glad tidings…among every people that thou shalt be permitted to see. And thou shalt do it with all humility, trusting in me. Pray always and I will pour out my Spirit upon you, and great shall be your blessings; yea even more than if you should obtain treasure of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
According to instructions given them, on April 6, 1830, six men who had been baptized met together at the Whitmer home in Fayette, New York, and organized the church. These six men were Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, Hyrum Smith, Samuel Smith, and Peter Whitmer. It was not until after this organization meeting that Martin Harris and Joseph’s parents were baptized. The meeting was opened with solemn prayer. Joseph then asked the men if they would accept him and Oliver as their leaders. They all voted that they would. At this time another revelation was received. The new church was structed to keep a record of all the things they did. The members were command to listen to the words and commandments of Joseph Smith, Jr., their leaders. The Lord said: “Wherefore, meaning the church, thou shalt give heed unto all his words, and commandments, which he shall give unto you, as he recieveth them, walking in all holiness before me; for one’s word ye shall receive, as if from mine own mouth, in all patience and faith. For thus saith the Lord God, him have I inspired to move the cause of Zion in mighty power for good; and his diligence I know, and his prayers I have heard. For, behold, I will bless all those who labour in my vineyard, with a might blessing, and they shall believe on his words, which are given him through me, by the Comforter.” Joseph ordained Oliver an elder in the church, and Oliver ordained Joseph to the same office. These two newly ordained men them served the first sacrament of the Lord’s Supper in the church. They took bread, blessed it, broke it, and ate it with the others. Then Joseph and Oliver laid their hands on each member of the church that each might receive the gift of the Holy Spirit and be confirmed members of the Church of Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit was felt by them and all praised the Lord and rejoiced. As God’s spirit rested upon them, Joseph called and ordained some of the men to various priesthood. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
All wanted to serve God in His church which had been oranganzied according to the commandments and revelations given by Christ in the latter days. This was a restoration of the same church Jesus established as told of in the New Testament when he said, “I will build my church.” No idea is so strong that it should not be tested by doubt, and no man so powerful that he is infallible. When humans become so completely occupied with their own affairs that thought or feeling for others is entirely absent and the point of extreme obsession with self is reached, they are liable to go mad. It is certain that many of this type find their way into lunatic asylums or mental hospitals. The unconscious mind retreats in the end from every effort at self-expression, because the suffering and pains of consciousness causes it to return to its own primal and peaceful state. In any madhouse one may see patients sitting for hours and staring into space, a vacuous expression on their faces. Outwardly they not only have these resemblances to the self-actualized but they to live in a kind of sequestered retreat, they too have in their peculiar way renounced the World and its affairs. Most negative traits belong to the feelings of adolescence, most positive ones to those of real maturity. It is when the negative ones appear in adults that they become neurotic and must be treated as psychic sickness. Through ignorance of the World-Idea or through disobedience to their revelators and teachers, neurotics get worse and become psychotics. They are to be found in both camps—the religious or cultist believers and the sceptical materialists. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Too many of these neurotics are too full of unstable egoism to have their emotional complexes soluble by any other psychological treatment than a robust and direct attack upon these complexes. A mushy sentimentality will merely prolong the life of such a complex. Neurotics are moody, sometimes very attractive with their day and brilliant charm, but sometimes repulsive with their black despairs and criticizing tantrums. When anyone attaches immensely more important to something than it really has, there is the first sign of neuroticism. Some people become neurotic through too much strained activity, but others become neurotic through too little. All the predestined are chosen by God to possess eternal life. This conscription, therefore, of the predestined is called the book of life. A thing is said metaphorically to be written upon the mind of anyone when it is firmly held in the memory, according to Proverbs 3.3. “Forget not My Law, and let thy heart keep my commandments,” and furthers on, “Write then in the table of thy heart.” For things are written down in material books to help the memory. Whence, the knowledge of God, by which He firmly remembers that He has predestined some to eternal life, is called the book of life. For as the writing in a book is the sign of things to be done, so the knowledge of God is a sign in Him of those who are to be brought to eternal life, according to 2 Timothy 11.19: “The sure foundation of God standeth firm, having this deal; the Lord knoweth who are His.” My help is in the mountain where I take myself to heal the Earthly wounds that people give to me. I find a rock with sun on it and a stream where the waters runs gentle and the trees which one by one give me company. So I must stay for a long time until I have grown from the rock and the stream is running through me and I cannot tell myself from one tall tree. Then I know that nothing touches me nor makes me run away. My help is in the mountain that I take away with me. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Earth please cure me. Earth please receive my woe. Rock please strength me. Rock receive my weakness. Rain wash my sadness away. Rain receive my doubt. Sun make sweet my song. Sun receive the anger from my heart. We thankfully acknowledge that Thou art the Lord our God and God of our fathers, the God of all that lives, our Creator and Creator of the Universe. We offer blessings and thanksgiving to Thy great and holy name because Thou hast kept us in life and sustained us; so mayest Thou continue to keep us in life and sustain us. O gather our exiles into the courts of Thy holy sanctuary to observe Thy statutes, to do Thy will, and to serve Thee with a perfect heart. We give thanks unto Thee. Blessed be God to whom we are ever grateful. We thank Thee also for the miraculous and mighty deeds of liberation wrought by Thee, and for Thy victories in the battles our forefathers fought in days of old, at this season of the year. In the days of High Priest Mattathias, son of Johanan, of the Hasmonean family, a tyrannical power rose up against Thy people Israel to compel them to forsake Thy Torah, and to force them to transgress Thy commandments. In Thine abundant mercy Thou didst stand by them in time of distress. Thou didst rise to their defense and didst vindicate their cause. Thou didst bring retribution upon the evil doers, delivering the strong into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few, the wicked into the hands of the just, and the arrogant into the hands of those devoted to Thy Torah. Thou didst thus make Thy greatness and holiness known in Thy World, and didst bring great deliverance to America. Then Thy children came into Thy swelling place, cleansed the Temple, purified the Sanctuary, kindled lights in Thy sacred courts, and they designated these days for giving thanks and praise unto Thy great name. For all this, Thy name, O king, shall be blessed and exalted for ever and ever. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
Living at Mills Station Residence 3 might feel like you’ve stepped into your very own rom-com, 🥰 complete with a dreamy backyard garden, but it’s real life! Get ready to fall in love with your home!
Step inside through the courtyard-entry and discover Mills Station Residence 3. With nearly 2,800 square feet, this is an artfully designed two-story home for those who love an open floor plan living and a wall of windows.
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 